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Numen of the
Flesh
The
following article originally appeared in Quadrant: Journal of the C.
G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology; New York, New York. Summer
2005.
For one who has spent so much time in the Absolute,
perhaps embodiment and reconnecting with instinct and feelings
is the resurrection.
Course Participant
Overview
The numen, according to Jung, is that which offers the real healing.
Following Jung’s lead, I propose that the flesh, the materia of the body,
contains its own capacity for generating the numen, and therefore the experience
of healing. The numen arises out of the flesh as a direct result of the very
nature of matter itself. In other words, there is no split between spirit and
matter. Every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which
action is directed. The body, the materia of the flesh, is one of these natural
systems.
The Flesh
The collective unconscious contains not only the residues of human evolution
but also the residues of animal evolution. Coming to terms with the unconscious – that
is, becoming conscious – requires, therefore, a coming to terms with
one’s instinctual, animal nature. Given that one’s instinctual
nature is directly related to the body, one can propose that a new relation
to one’s body must be established for a more complete individuation.
Though Jung was deeply concerned with the question of instincts, the body
itself was and continues to be largely marginalized in psychoanalytic
practice. Wilhelm Reich, colleague of Freud and Jung at the turn of the last
century, was the only real proponent of somatic inquiry, of working directly
with, on and through the body. Unfortunately, he was rarely taken seriously.
He was often mocked and sorely excluded from the formulation of psychodynamic
understanding within the context of analysis and the unconscious. It
is to Reich that many of the body-oriented approaches to the psyche owe their
debt of existence, including Reichian therapy and bio-energetics. From
the perspective of analytical psychology, this important work still remains
in the shadows.
Considering the negative, pathological effects generated by the relative
split of body and mind, it feels important if not imperative to offer
skillful ways and means of affirming the irrevocable and harmonizing
relationship between the instinctual, animal body and the archetypal,
spiritual impulses of mind. To begin this task, I first offer a brief
discussion on the nature of numen and matter. This is followed by contributions
from participants involved in the somatic work I conduct. Finally,
I include personal observations from my own somatic experiences.
Numen
In his letter dated August 20, 1949, Jung says it is the numen which offers
"the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you
are released from the curse of pathology." (Jung, 1973, 8/20/49)
Jung refers to the numen as "a dynamic agency or effect not caused by
an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human
subject….The numinosum - whatever its cause may be - is an experience
of the subject independent of his will.…The numinosum is the influence
of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness."
(Jung, 1989, Par. 6)
In addition to the qualities listed above, the experience of the numen
carries with it a fateful sense of meaning. It is not just a random or
superficial experience but, as with the phenomenon of synchronicity,
there is an understanding that the experience carries particular and personal
meaning. One gains insight, often profound insight. Most frequently,
insight and numen are one. Both are accompanied by experiences of surprise,
shock, wonder, awe; both leave us feeling different in our skin.
Perhaps the visitation of the numen is most often understood as a descent
of the Spirit to humankind, a transpersonal visitation from “above” that
floods the body and mind with its presence. An event in which this is celebrated,
for example, is Pentecost, a commemoration of the descent of God the Holy
Spirit to the Twelve Apostles granting them the sudden and miraculous gift
of tongues.
In contradistinction - not opposition - to this view, I propose as the
main thesis of this inquiry that the numen is contained by and released
from the flesh itself; that the numen is a presence within and as the
material body. The flesh, the body, is not only the receiving vessel
of the numen but, by the nature of matter itself, the body is also the
generator for the experience of the numinosum. By addressing the body,
through the body, we can experience the "peculiar alteration of consciousness"
that is available to us when we are grounded in somatic experience and
informed by the numen of the flesh. We have the opportunity to free ourselves
from the "curse
of pathology" and to further our course of individuation through
the consciousness of the body itself.
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Mythological Reflections
on the
Nature of Intimacy
The eyes, they say, are the windows of the soul. Why do we then, spend so much time looking through these windows but not into them? Why do we so rarely connect with the soul that is there? What are we afraid of? Is it the soul itself? Or is it, rather, the starkness and intensity of psychic openness and vulnerability? How did we come to misplace our passion and courage to meet this intensity, to meet soul to soul? To dive? Or did we indeed ever do that willingly? Perhaps we are all part
Persephone, needing simply to be taken, without conscious consent. Hades never asks; it's already his due. Willingly or not, we must all eventually pass through his realm; and many more times than once. Why do we have so much difficulty surrendering to him? The grace of willing surrender is sweet; the death it brings is full of the new life that comes from the ecstasy it stirs. Why are we so afraid? We want to be present in the white heat of soul linking with soul, and yet we are turned back
by the curl of fear. We repeatedly walk away empty-handed, robbed by our demons of the opportunity to soften the shield into transparency. We continually relinquish the chance to love, without condition, simply and purely.
With the help and mercy of the gods, we dedicate our lives to the art and discipline of baring the soul.
Amen
At the Threshold of Psycho-Genesis
The Mournful Face of God
The following essay appeared in the anthology: The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine. Ed. Fred Gustafson. "At the Threshold of Psycho-Genesis/The Mournful Face of God." Nicholas-Hayes, Maine. June 2003.
The first chapter alone originally appeared in Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology; New York, New York. "At the Threshold of Psycho-Genesis." Spring 2001.
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
C. G. Jung1
I. At the Threshold of Psycho-Genesis
 The Paradox
For some of us, if not for all, meaning in life periodically finds its way through a piercing and deadly darkness. Hopelessness and despair can descend like a toxic cloud, even in the midst of a joy-filled life, a life of spiritual discipline and intent, and dedication and commitment to conscious growth. Dark moments can strike like a sudden, rending eruption from mysterious and subterranean places. Without warning, the crust of a forever-healing wound, or an old insidious trauma is torn open
unexpectedly, and we bleed again. We feel that we have entered into the abyss, body and soul. In the darkest of these times, nothing - no word, no prayer, no loving gesture, no therapeutic intervention - reaches the mark. Everything is lost, crumbled and gray, pointless - our life hopelessly flapping in the maw of a terrifying yet welcome annihilation.
How do we find our way through these darkest of spaces? Jettisoning a way out is impossibly dangerous, a too-heroic feat for this tenuous and precarious state of being. Remaining at this threshold of pain feels intolerable. And yet, given the grace of enough psychic ground, by staying with the intolerable dissonance we can once again restore our faith and experience the rare jewel of equanimity. Here, at an unfathomable but fecund threshold, something can change, something new can come forth.
Faith that arises at points of near-unbearable suffering is a faith born by sustaining absolute paradox. Those who endured the Holocaust and the devastating events of the Third Reich have been able to communicate the profound meaning and acceptance of this paradox and provide us with unprecedented teachings. Innocent suffering in the Holocaust, as in Christ’s innocent suffering, has helped to redeem humanity’s ignorance and lack of true compassion. The unparalleled gift of such understanding
shows us how to survive trauma of inexpressible dimension. In testimony, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes:
We cannot be honest without recognizing that we must live in the world "as if God did not exist." And so we recognize this - before God. God himself compels us to this recognition. So our coming of age leads us to a genuine recognition of our situation before God. God lets us know that we must live as those who get along without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us…The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God
before whom we eternally stand. Before and with God we live without God.2
Others have also offered insights, quickening to paradox as a means toward spiritual and psychic regeneration. Robert Sardello at the School of Spiritual Psychology suggests that the explosion of the first atomic bomb traumatized our consciousness as a planetary people. Considering this situation, Sardello reflects:
The explosion of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945 opened the crust of the earth and created an entry into the Underworld for all of humanity. The anxiety provoked by this event - a mythic occurrence - has profoundly disturbed ordinary consciousness. It has completely separated human beings from past spiritual meaning and brought unresolvable unrest, leading to indifference and to a pre-occupation with comfort. That is to say, since this event, ordinary consciousness has lost its meaning.
What is the soul’s response? It is the quality of stillness. The soul becomes completely quiet, for it has entered into the realm of death…there to begin the task of learning how to be awake and fully conscious. It is a test. The aim of this test is to find whether the force of love, no longer arising from attachment to things in the day-world, can be born out of the soul itself. In other words, can love arise where there is nothing to love?3
According to Sardello, our task in facing the threat of total annihilation is to find a way to regenerate our world, both inner and outer, psychic and physical, through the power of love born not of existential security but of the inescapable presence of annihilation. Here, as well as in the example of Holocaust survivors, the presence of a lethal, traumatizing condition prompts and demands the emergence of an even greater vivifying force. A traumatic condition begs a bio-psychic
genesis, an instinctive and spiritual arising of new life.
Finding new life through the profound acceptance of death is the paradoxical solution. In paradox, we stand at the threshold of life’s resurgence. Holding fast the divergent reigns of painful dissonance, we enter realms of deeper healing.
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The Inner Figure:
Synchronistic Images of the Soul
The text below is a series of excerpts from the first chapter of The Inner Figure: Synchronistic Images of the Soul (Thesis, C. G. Jung Institute-Zurich; 1997). The Inner Figure is an exploration on the nature of the psychoid or imaginal realm, especially as it applies to the creative process, synchronistic phenomena, and narcissistic wounding. The following excerpts outline,
in part, the dimensions of what Jung referred to as the psychoid.
The research for the thesis was funded by The Susan Bach Foundation of Switzerland. The Susan Bach Foundation funds projects which inquire into the relationship between psyche and soma.
As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things
by understanding them,
imaginative metaphysics show that man becomes all things by
not understanding them,
for when…he does not understand he…becomes them
by transforming himself into them.
Vico, New Science
Chapter One: The Imaginal Realm
The phenomenon of imaginal or psychoid reality presents itself in the
writings of Western alchemy which inspired much of Jung’s later formulations
on the nature of the psyche. Jung says that the term imaginatio held
particular importance in the work of the alchemists who believed that ‘the
work’ must be accomplished with ‘true imagination.’ Jung felt that the
fantasy process in alchemy was of special significance. "We have to conceive
of these processes not as immaterial phantoms we readily take fantasy-pictures
to be, but as something corporeal, a 'subtle body,' semi-spiritual in
nature." (CW 12, par. 394)
In the alchemical works exhumed by Jung there are repeated references to the use of imagination when properly performing ‘the opus’ of the alchemists. For example, in the ‘Novum Lumen,’ we find the following:
To cause things hidden in the shadows to appear, and to take away the shadow from them, this is permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God through nature…All these things happen, and the eyes of the common men do not see them, but the eyes of the understanding [intellectus] and of the imagination perceive them…with true and truest vision." (CW 12, par.350)
During the practical work certain phenomena of a visionary or hallucinatory nature appeared in the retort, visions that presented themselves in the chemical composition that was underway. For example, alchemist Raymond Lilly writes:
You should know, dear son, that the course of nature is turned about so that without invocation…and without spiritual exaltation you can see certain fugitive spirits condensed in the air in the shape of divers monsters, beasts and men, which move like the clouds hither and thither." (CW 12, par.351)
Jung considers these images projections of unconscious contents, but he explains that these phenomena were "half spiritual, half physical; a concretization such as we frequently encounter in the psychology of primitives…The alchemist related himself not only to the unconscious but directly to the very substance which he hoped to transform through the power of imagination." (ibid par.394) Jung says it is always an obscure point whether the alchemists were referring to something physical or
psychic, but that in the end there was no ‘either-or’ for that age. There was rather "an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose characteristic is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as material form." (ibid) (In the second chapter the nature of the subtle body will be discussed in more detail.)
In Fritjof Capra’s book, The Tao of Physics, he compares the field of quantum physics to the Taoist concept of ch’i, or subtle body, saying that both the field and the subtle body are conceived as a "tenuous and non-perceptible form of matter which is present throughout space and can condense into solid material objects." (Capra 1975, p.224) He goes on to quote Joseph Needham’s description of the Chinese view of physical reality: "The Chinese physical universe was perfectly
continuous…Ch’i condensed in palpable matter was not particulate in an important sense, but individual objects acted and reacted with all other objects in the world…in a wave-like or vibratory manner dependent, in the last resort, on the rhythmic alternation at all levels of the two fundamental forces, the yin and the yang. Individual objects thus had their intrinsic rhythms. And these were integrated…into the general pattern of the harmony of the world." (ibid p.225)
We spoke earlier about the particular capacity of the imaginal realm, and therefore the subtle-body, for engendering the experience of regeneration and renewal in creation myths, the work of the alchemists, and in Figen’s paintings. The same applies to particle physics. It is both a curious and awe-inspiring discovery that in the ‘field’ of quantum physics (that subtle-body ‘flux’ of spirit and matter) elements or particles spontaneously and apparently appear out of thin air:
As described above, field theories of modern physics have forced physicists to abandon the classical distinction between material particles and ‘empty space.’ This distinction finally had to be abandoned when it became evident that particles came into being spontaneously out of nowhere, or out of the ‘void,’ and then vanished again back into the ‘void.’ Below is a diagram, followed by Capra’s explanation.
"Here is a ‘vacuum diagram’ for such a process: three particles - a proton (p), an antiproton (-p) and a pion (r) - are formed out of nothing and disappear again into the vacuum. According to field theory, events of that kind happen all the time. The vacuum is far from empty. On the contrary, it contains an unlimited number of particles which come into being and vanish without end." (ibid p.222)
This event has an ancient parallel, found in the Eastern traditions. Capra uses the term ‘void’ and ‘vacuum’ synonomously. He has borrowed the term ‘void’ from Eastern texts which refer to the Absolute as the ‘Void’ or ‘Emptiness.’ This is a concept which has been mistakenly perceived by Westerners as a total absence of life or energy. But the ‘Void’ of Eastern mysticism, like the ‘physical vacuum’ in field theory, is not a state of mere nothingness. It contains, rather, the potentiality
of all forms." The ‘vacuum’ is truly a ‘living Void’ pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction." (ibid p.223) This discovery of the dynamic quality of the vacuum is considered one of the most important in particle physics and does truly seem to reflect the words of the Chinese sage, Chang Tsai when he says:
When one knows that the Great Void is full of ch’i, one realizes that there is no such thing as nothingness. (ibid p.223)
It is also a curious fact that not only do particles materialize and dematerialize from the ‘void,’ but they ‘communicate’ to each other through the ‘field,’ thus providing another instance of the infusion of spirit in matter, or rather of their inseparability. Jean Charon, a French physicist of spiritual and metaphysical proportions, explains this in his work, The Unknown Spirit. He spotlights the electron and its probable patterns and properties to illustrate this point. He describes
how electrons, examples in particle physics of the ‘building blocks’ of life, are able to exchange information with each other in the ever continuous flow of life’s evolution. The electron is a veritable micro-universe. In this micro-universe, phenomena take place with increasing negative entropy, i.e. the electrons continually increase their informational content. This is how he describes it:
"As time flows, Spirit increases its order within each electron. It has no choice in this: it consists of a space in which order cannot decrease, a non-decreasing negative entropy space…The electron does not consider this constant negative entropy increase as an aim in itself, in other words the object of evolution, but as a means of discovering the objective of evolution…Each electron is like ourselves: as it increases its memorised information, it begins to perceive a new objective
and to mould its actions accordingly…That is why we can speak of the spiritual ‘adventure’ of the universe, since Spirit is choosing to exist through constantly increasing awareness." (Charon 1977, p.167)
The electron structures its memory according to a process that Charon refers to as matrixism, which works something like this:
"We shall represent symbolically the ‘blank’ level of the electron space, the level at which it has not yet recognized anything, by a numbered chart.
This chart is a matrix. Each box represents a point of electron space at a given time. "A sign from beyond electron space…is expressed by a photon, being memorised by the electron when this photon has an action…with the electron…" (ibid p.169) This changes the informational content then so that the new state of the matrix looks, symbolically, like this:
There is now somewhere a 2 instead of a 1. 2 should not be interpreted as only 2 but as conveying both 2 and 1. "Mathematical analysis…describes perfectly the important aspect that:…state 2 contains…state 1; it does not mean that 2 takes the place of 1, but that…2 adds itself to…1." (ibid p.170) This goes on into infinity…"as a means of discovering the objective of evolution," as Charon states earlier. "In short, the electron contains the space-time of Spirit within itself,
in ‘communication’ with that of other electrons." (Charon 1977, p.64)
He believes that the electron and its properties could be the explanation for telepathic phenomena. All life, including humans, are made up of electrons, speculating this as the reason for some people’s recognition of their ability to communicate with all of nature, both animate and inanimate. It is the electron that provides the wordless link and language between all creation. "An electron feels the electrostatic influence of another electron whatever the distance between them…Similarly,
spiritual [informational] interaction between two electrons will be possible whatever the distance." (ibid p.64) The electron’s journey is our journey and physicist Charon believes that the journey goes out into infinity. We usually call this principle of infinity or eternity God. "So for the electron populating the universe, and also for us, the spiritual adventure of the universe is a search for God." (ibid p.168)
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