"The Great Dissonance" Part I: Here be Dragons?
A neo-Jungian hypothesis as weird as it is plausible
I want to share a doozy of an insight I had the other night, which I hope you’ll find enjoyable and weird. By the end, we’ll have gotten into all kinds of stuff—cosmic psycho-monsters, the nature of fear, mythological creatures, ancient gods, something I’m calling the “Ontological Uncertainty Principle,” even an end-of-the-world/apocalypse interpretation.
I’ve decided to break it into two parts, because this is my blog and I make the rules. Here in Part I, I’ll lay the groundwork for the psychotic break I seem to be careening headlong towards.
Kidding. Let’s talk about psychology.
Unconscious Complexes 101
Lately I’ve been putting a lot of attention on Carl Jung. I’m reading Murray Stein’s Jung’s Map of the Soul—it’s a comprehensive introduction to Jung’s collective works, as well as, apparently, the inspiration for the title of a two-part BTS album (sharing this in hopes it’ll inspire some optimism in you about Gen Z’s potential, as it did for me).
I’ve been especially interested in Jung’s concept of “unconscious complexes.” Complexes are these gremlin-like clumps of memories (usually of the traumatic variety) lodged deep in our psyche which rear their heads in instances of fear or pain or any other stimuli sharp enough to remind us of some aspect of our past. According to Jung, once triggered, these complexes—unconscious goblins—can overwhelm the ego and wrestle control of the body away from it, resulting in a sort of temporary “possession.” During these possessions the ego dissociates while the complex carries out some ingrained behavioral response pattern.
For example, when I get anxious and start overeating pita chips I’ll often have thoughts like “I should really stop eating these pita chips” or “I can’t stop eating these pita chips” or “fucking pita chips, dude.” Notice how these thoughts imply a lack of control? Jung would call that evidence of a dissociated ego, relegated to the sidelines during temporary possession by an unconscious complex. Here’s how Stein puts it:
“The irruption of a complex into consciousness indicates it temporarily has become more energized than the ego. Its energy flows from the complex into the ego system and may flood and possess it. Whether or not the ego can manage to contain this influx of energy is an important practical question. How can the ego channel and use what at times seems like a tremendous flood of unruly energy? The key lies with the ego [itself], which can choose, if it is strong and determined enough, to direct this influx of energy into the creation of structures, boundaries, or projects, for example. Otherwise a person may simply become emotionally overwrought and dysfunctional.”
That really resonates with me. The pita chip example is cute, but the experience of feeling unable to control myself during a period of anxiety is all-too-familiar. I often associate this feeling with the concept of having “an addictive personality,” which I guess would be akin to a chronic state of possession. That is, until the ego gets “strong and determined” enough.
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!
So this concept of temporary possession has totally transformed my inner universe—I’m now constantly wary of these unconscious complexes. I feel them, always lingering just outside my awareness, waiting to spring into action. I realize I’m making this sound awful—like I’m being stalked or something. But I genuinely enjoy this sort of self-inspection, so it’s actually been the opposite—at once empowering and expansive
Interestingly, it’s also transformed my conception of the outer universe (as in, the way I perceive the outside world). That’s because, due to what I know about the nature of consciousness (the science and philosophy of which I’m currently studying in graduate school), I now spend my life hyper-aware that every aspect of reality is constructed and experienced via my psyche. Same goes for anyone else—your entire experience of reality is generated and contained within your psyche.
Because of this, I now find it helpful to assume that these complexes exist as literal entities with physical forms, and that they lurk somewhere in the cosmos, raining energy down on us when they get activated.
Yikes. But—because they are, by their nature, psychic projections, we can also shoot energy back up at them, through doing good stuff. That means growth-affirming behavior (i.e., being productive—in my case, this especially means writing), giving/receiving love, telling a joke, or whatever. The idea I’m rolling with is that whenever I do something I perceive as good for me, or just good generally, I launch shockwaves throughout my entire psyche. Sort of like when a nice thought is accompanied by a pleasant physical response—a shiver up your spine, for instance. These shockwaves, in my mind, serve to defang the complexes (if only temporarily).
But these battles all manifest as internal processes, yes? So where’s the external component? To reiterate: because my psyche is the exclusive medium through which I experience reality, that means [at least theoretically] that anything contained within that psyche, psychic or otherwise, carries with it the potential to manifest in the objective world, at least as I perceive it. That is, I could observe it with my literal eyes and ears. This is more or less how I imagine the Greeks, Romans, Norse, etc. would’ve experienced their gods (and potentially explains how they were convinced of their literal—not metaphorical—existence). More on that subject later.
To be clear, this has not happened. I have not literally observed a gremlin made of my own mind-stuff. Yet. But I am at a point where this possibility does not feel like it’s off the table. And I have to admit, the thought kinda delights me.
And if it ever does, I’m about as prepared as I’ve ever been in my life. In addition to good deeds and their “energetic shockwaves,” I also have the weapon of stillness (in the form of either non-reactivity as a response to negative stimuli or, where possible, full-blown meditation), which can be used to reflect their attacks back at them (i.e., “reflective introspection”). And breathing. I just recently started paying more attention to my everyday breathing habits and wow am I bad at it. You wouldn’t think you could be “bad” at breathing, but here we are. It’s all good though, because the more attention I place on it, the better I get at it—and the more gadgets I have to use on my complexes. It’s like I’m putting together a sort of “Batman utility belt” of consciousness tools.
These revelations became especially interesting when I decided to start identifying and listing the different complexes (most of which, as it turns out, are tied to fears). So here’s a short list of some of my self-perceived complexes:
Fear of failure
Fear of being perceived as a “bad person”
Resistance to the responsibilities of adulthood (infantilism)
Fear of intimacy/commitment
Restlessness, obsession with variety
Fear of physical death/pain
This is where I think it gets really interesting, and has a fascinatingly wide range of implications for all of us.
Fear: The Super Complex
In a way, all of these complexes could potentially be unified into one “super complex” which I think we all share—like a great dragon lurking in our collective unconscious—and that’s the fear of the unknown. I think the evidence for the existence of such a universal super complex is significantly strengthened when you consider that the physical brain perfectly mirrors this “fear” in its role as a generator/transmitter of consciousness. If you didn’t know, our brains are in a constant state of attempting to predict the future (and thus mitigate instances of “unknowing”). It’s called “predictive processing,” and I’m completely obsessed with it. Pretty sure I’ve mentioned it in every post I’ve published so far. If you’re interested, I went into great detail on the relationship between fear and predictive processing in a recent post regarding the concept of skepticism (skip to the sub-heading “The Universality of Skepticism”).
But is fear even real?
If you think about it, all fear can be reduced to the function of prediction. Indeed it can only exist in an anticipatory state—that is, it’s always a feeling that precedes some sort of scary sounding event, or that surrounds a scary concept. In every case, it arises only in the form of an outward projection applied to one’s environment in anticipation of some incoming stimulus.
In this way, fear cannot exist in real-time, only as an a priori psychosomatic narrative—in other words, it’s always a story we tell ourselves about how something, which hasn’t happened yet, might go. It is incapable of existing in any other form.
So, theoretically, if you stop making predictions, you stop projecting expectations—and if you stop projecting expectations, you’ll find yourself in a fearless state—a state of being—wherein you can observe and accept things for how they really are, as opposed to how they could be.
Even in a super literal, visceral situation, say you’re Leo DiCaprio facing down that grizzly in The Revenant, the fear is still anticipatory in nature. You’re scared because you’re predicting the bear is going to kill you—but if you’re still alive to feel this fear, then obviously you haven’t been killed yet. Even if, God forbid, the bear does start to kill you—any fear you end up feeling during the ordeal will always be in anticipation of the next moment. You’ll certainly feel the pain in real time, but the fear will always be chopped up into a series of micro-predictions one after the other. Like rifling through a flip-book you suspect someone hid a razor blade inside.
Enough graphic examples, surely you get it by now. The point is that fear isn’t based in anything real. It never is—it can’t be. Thus, all it ever does is cloud our ability to act with clarity.
Projection Rejection
That brings us back to projection and our friend Carl Jung—particularly the concept of integration. The more aspects of yourself (whether it be your shadow, anima, animus, or any minor complexes) that you successfully integrate, the less you’ll rely on projection as a means of interacting with the world.
You don’t need to project your anima out on others if you’ve recognized and are actively cultivating healthy femininity within yourself, nor your animus if you’ve integrated healthy inner masculinity. Likewise, you don’t need to project your shadow if you genuinely respect and accept the nature of who you are. Most importantly, you don’t need to project fear out onto the world if you feel fundamentally safe*, and can welcome any outcome in any situation. When you make the unconscious conscious there’s no more darkness, and if there’s no more darkness, there’s no reason to make fearful predictions about what it conceals—you can just look at it for what it is.
(*if the concept of “fundamental safety” feels out of reach, I get it. There are genuine ways to achieve it, though. “Self-transcendence,” “individuation,” “self-actualization,” “enlightenment”…any human—especially you, since you’re reading this—can achieve this stuff in any lifetime. Will I? Who knows. But it’s possible and probably worth trying.)
Speaking of self-actualization, in class we’re currently reading One Missing Piece by Joachim Claes, a quirky book which casually (but thoroughly) presents a pathway towards global self-actualization via a technique called Transcendental Meditation (which I do, and is great). It’s a surprisingly compelling concept. But my favorite line thus far has nothing to do with his overarching thesis. Rather it was a one-off hypothesis he throws out which made me view Carl Jung’s model of the unconscious in a totally new way (and which ultimately inspired this entire post):
“When people no longer had the ability to access the deeper layers of their minds…it was as if the mind split into two parts, what psychologists now call the conscious and subconscious mind.”
What a concept. The idea that there could’ve been period(s) of history during which mankind naturally had access to deeper levels of mind is so interesting to me. Obviously our science and technology has come a long way in the last 5,000 years or so, which is great, but rarely do we really consider the costs of such things—especially when it comes to the quality and clarity of human consciousness.
Any fellow luddites out there miss the days before smart phones, and all the constant stress and distraction that comes with them? Well, imagine how few distractions you would’ve had as a farmer in ancient Greece. The mind is capable of extraordinary things when you allow yourself to be bored (which is basically just another way of describing meditation)—and that would’ve been quite a “boring” time indeed.
♫ What if Zeus was one of us? ♫
Earlier I teased the idea of a model which potentially explains how the Greek/Roman/Norse gods could’ve been experienced literally. Here it is. In a world lacking the flood of meaningless distractions we’ve grown so used to, you could argue (which I guess I’m sort of doing right now) that humanity as a collective would have had significantly more access to Jung’s so-called collective unconscious, which might naturally include all its complexes—gods, gremlins, and goblins alike.
Remember, our entire perception of reality exists inside our psyche—that’s not an opinion, it’s a universal truth. In a way it’s the only universal truth. And we all have these complexes, that much is certain. But over time we’ve repressed them out of our conscious awareness, pushing them into the darkest abyss of the mind. But if we stare into the abyss long enough…well, just ask Nietzsche.
Plus, think about this: we all accept that everything in the personal unconscious has to start off as something real, right? We don’t just invent traumas as an instinct from birth, they have to happen first. Any unconscious complex starts as something that first manifests in reality somehow, then is consumed and experienced through someone’s consciousness, and then eventually it gets repressed into their unconscious.
Obvious, right? Okay so if we accept that, then, to me, we also have to accept that everything in the collective unconscious must also have started off as real. So whatever's in there: all Jung's archetypes, the Greek gods, dragons, and let’s throw in everything from the “astral” too (which I suspect might just be a different word for the same realm Jung was describing). All of it might have been consumed directly by our ancient—and presumably terrified—consciousnesses.
If you really think about it, how else could this stuff have ended up so deeply repressed in the human psyche? These mythical archetypes aren’t just narrative devices and the subject of super old art—they’re also actively interwoven into our modern experience. They speak to us in our dreams, reverberate through our civilizational behavioral patterns and decision-making, influence our aesthetic preferences…they’re everywhere.
I feel like it’s easy to dismiss the psychospiritual aspects of Carl Jung’s theory as having been derived simply because Jung himself thought mythology was cool. But you have to realize it goes so much deeper than that—Jung was a rigorously scientific and practical person. And an excellent psychiatrist. So when the pattern of mythopoeic themes kept showing up over and over again in his psychiatric practice, he did what any great scientist (or therapist) would do: he dived into his patients’ experience, headfirst. He researched. He educated himself—thoroughly, and he allowed the evidence to take him wherever it pointed.
Most people know that Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud once worked closely with each other as friends, only to eventually split due to Jung’s theories moving in a spiritual direction, which Freud couldn’t tolerate. What I didn’t know until recently is that Jung was tortured by his decision to break from Freud (and the Freudian framework, which presented the human psyche as rooted in purely biological, instinctual urges). But he felt he had no choice. He cared more about being genuine to his scientific intuition than to appeasing his beloved colleague. To me, that’s worth something.
Besides, what happens if we consume a story which is completely fictional (and we know it’s fictional)? It just becomes a regular memory, right? It doesn't end up repressed deep beneath our conscious mind, eroding our very soul.
That is, of course, unless the storytellers themselves (i.e., ancient centralized power, like kings or pharaohs) were *ridiculously* committed to convincing you the story is real—probably in order to scare and dominate the populace. It’s a perfectly rational take if you prefer it. But in this case that'd mean these storytellers would have to be capable of putting on quite a ruse (i.e., convincingly faking shooting lightning bolts, parting seas, inventing whole species of creatures, etc.), not to mention keeping those elaborate ruses alive over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years. And on top of all that, the storytellers from all these neighboring empires would have had to have collaborated (for some reason) for their mythologies to line up so well with one another…I don’t know. Maybe.
I’ll admit, it’s probably more likely that the collective unconscious is, indeed, a non-physical and entirely metaphorical place, accessible only via the [inward-facing] psyche. But to me, this theory feels like it has the right combination of fun and rationality that it’s worth giving it the genuine time of day. Hope you agree.
Thanks for reading Part I. In Part II (whenever I actually write it) we’ll dig into a fun question: if this collective unconscious is actually a real place, with real things in it, then what relevance might it have in our lives, if any? How might it relate to the modern trajectory of scientific discovery? What connection might it have to what we call “the paradigm shift;” “the apocalypse;” “Revelations;” the “3D/5D Earth split;” or whatever other term you’ve heard used to describe the end of the postmodern world? Probably none right? No connection? I hope? John?