Tag Archives: Karl Jung

Tolle’s “Pain Body” and the Unconscious

The blog-o-sphere teaches me so much! Just several days ago I came across this quote from Eckhart Tolle which just grabbed me and shook me, even though I’ve read it before and understood the notion of the “pain body” already:

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want. Otherwise, who would want to hang on to negativity, make themselves, and others miserable, and create disease in the body? So, whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware at that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens, your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.

Relevant to this subject, I am now part of a serious reading group of the work of Karl Jung who approached a relevant issue nearly a century earlier with his focus on the unconscious. In our present reading, (“The Roots of the Psyche”) Jung shared that he had discussed the unconscious with one philosopher of his day who candidly admitted that he could not acknowledge the presence of the unconscious; for should he do so would be opening up Pandora’s box—it would mean acknowledgement of subterranean forces in his heart which were beyond his control. Likewise, when we are in the grip of this “pain body”, we resist acknowledging its power over us for to do so would mean that we are powerless in some sense in the depths of our heart and make really bad choices that we cannot help. It is like we deliberately bury our head in the sand, choosing to live in our anguish rather than break free and tippy-toe into what one poet described as our “ever lasting risk.” As is so often the case, Shakespeare nailed it centuries ago when Hamlet noted that we prefer to “cling to these ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.”

Well, how do we break free of this pain body? How do we escape the grip of the unconscious? Well, technically we don’t but with simple awareness we can lessen its tenacious grip on our heart. If we can dare to “name the demon”…so to speak…the monster that is wreaking havoc on our life will have a battle on its hand. Tolle teaches that simple awareness of this “pain body”, and acknowledgement of its influence, is the beginning of gaining freedom.

And since I began this process of honesty, I have found freedom from some of these monsters but admittedly there are more to face. And I think that is probably part of what the Apostle Paul had in mind with his admonishment for us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. emotional duress) for he saw “salvation” as a process just as people like Eckhart Tolle today present spirituality.

Now, I can’t fail to kick my own faith in the shins on this issue, my faith being Christianity. So often people use religion as a denial system, approaching it only with their head and using doctrinal creeds and dogma to insulate themselves from life, from spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical life. Instead of exploring Holy Writ and spiritual tradition to find its meaning in the warp-and-woof of their life, they have been taught to use it as a repetition compulsion which serves as a mechanism to keep their “pain body” at bay. And, of course, their “pain body” is then seen outside of themselves in other people who need their intervention, at times in the past even at the point of the sword. Now, how do I know this is true? Well, I don’t. But I do know that it has been true for me nearly all of my life AND I suspect that it does have relevance to many other Christians. There are many other writers and thinkers, Christian and otherwise, who are honing in on this issue right now, one of note being Richard Rohr.

Life is painful. But it is more painful when we don’t accept the pain when it comes, discovering that it can wash over us and not lodge in our cognitive machinery…and behavior patterns… and keep us prisoners. Scott Peck said decades ago in his very astute book, “The Road Less Traveled,” that “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Neurosis…and worse…can be viewed as maladaptive patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that we have adopted in response to painful moments in our life, overt pain and even perceived pain. But the only way to get beyond the pain is to go into it, to own it, to “embrace it” as Stephen Levine teaches and discover that its grip will begin to lesson. We have to “feel” our way out of the morass. “Thinking” alone will never suffice.

Karl Jung: Our Life is a “Flimsy”

More on Ego-Ridden Faith

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Yesterday I addressed dualistic thinking and the “saved” vs “unsaved” emphasis of some religions, portraying that emphasis as merely an expression of an “us” vs “them” approach to life. This expression of faith is very guilt-ridden and must have very rigid boundaries and often appears to be searching daily to find things “that we don’t do that others do” which “make us good, and them bad.” Looking back on my life, I realize that my tenuous identity was explicitly based on this false premise and consisted of a relentless list of “thou shalt nots” which I religiously sought to adhere to to compensate for a deep-seated self-loathing. And even though I was a professing Christian, that approach to spirituality was intrinsically antithetical to the teachings of Christ who said that He accepted us “as is.”

Now, in this “second half of life” (to borrow a Richard Rohr term), I find that spirituality is letting down some of these rigid boundaries and acknowledging some of those unsavory impulses, a process that Karl Jung described as “embracing your shadow” or “withdrawing your projections.” For, as Jung also pointed out, “What you resist, persists” and is therefore created in your outside world. To illustrate, the notion of “saved” would not have any meaning, would not even exist, without its complement of “unsaved” much like “green” would have no meaning or existence without “un-green.”

But recognizing this spiritual subtlety is antithetical to the interest of the ego who, should it recognize this ambiguity, would have its authority in jeopardy. So usually when an ego-bound person encounters teachings like this, they will respond with something like, “Of the devil” or “straight from the pits of hell” or “damn New Age stuff.” Thus the ego continues merrily on its way, smug in its faith, not listening to Shakespeare who noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

The Malady of Christian the Faith

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The unacknowledged malady of the Christian faith has surfaced again leading to tragedy. A 36 year old former mega-church pastor, Isaac Hunter, has committed suicide after a sex scandal. Another dimension of this tragedy is that his father…also a mega-church pastor…is Joel Hunter and he is a confidante of President Obama. Within the past year the son of mega-church pastor Rick Warren also committed suicide after a long-term battle with “mental illness.” Within the past year the pastor of a large, prominent evangelical church in Hammond, Indiana went to prison for having sex with a teen-age parishioner. And, from my youth on, I can recall the recurrent issue of “sex scandal” and “financial impropriety” and other misconduct surfacing in the clergy. When very young, it would usually lead to a sudden decision of the pastor that “the Lord” was leading him to pastor a different church, with the truth coming out much later. And, of course, we cannot overlook the horrible sexual-abuse scandal that the Catholic church is still dealing with.

My point here is not to point an accusing or shaming finger, or to snicker at the apparent hypocrisy but to express profound sorrow that men with deep spiritual direction in their life succumb to the lure of such poor choices that they wreck their lives and the lives of those around them. And, as in the present case, the anguish is so intense, that sometimes they even despair of living and take their own life. My concern is that these men have demonstrated that an essential element in faith has been missing in their life and that is an acknowledgement and embracing of dark impulses that are always present in all of our hearts. The problem is not in having these impulses but in refusal to acknowledge them and, when beset by them and the temptation to act on them, having no one to whom they can “unpack their heart with words.” They cannot disclose this shadow side of their heart because the Christian faith they have been taught does not permit them to acknowledge this darkness. Their faith is often a sanitized version in which “human-ness” is denied in the effort to trot out each day of their life a squeaky-clean “Christian” persona. They glibly quote Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me,” but do not fully appreciate the extent of that evil; for the real “evil” is the evil that lurks in the “thoughts and intents of the heart” which needs to find the light of day somewhere.

This most recent suicide brought to my mind the anguish that sexuality can bring in a man’s life. And, I don’t care how “spiritual” you are or how “noble” or “good” you are you will continue to be a sexual creature and that will always involve the temptation to…shall we say…err and might include impulses with which one is uncomfortable. As Woody Allen put it, “Of course sex is dirty, if you do it right!” But whatever impulses surfaces in our sexual life they are just that…impulses…and don’t have to necessarily be acted on. Someone in the position of spiritual leadership needs to have someone to talk to about them. But my central point here is that in some faith traditions, opening-up about sexual matters will not be permitted. Because the real intent of this type of faith is to provide a denial system, a facade that will allow the individual avoid reality; and that type of person will inevitably be leading his flock to live the very same kind of life.

Christian faith…or any faith…involves honesty and the first step in honesty is to admit that we are not honest. We are born with blinders on and, when we see this, we will still have blinders on. But, if we can accepted the “possibility” that we have blinders on, we can be given pause, and perhaps be a little more human and less “pious.” Yes, we will then later discover more blinders…and more, and more. But that is merely to discover that you are human. That is merely to learn that, being a mere mortal, you tend to see only what you want to see.

The Passion of Christ Caricatured Unwittingly

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This picture is a road sign outside a fundamentalist church in southwest Arkansas with the caption, “This Blood’s For You.” The quality of the photo is poor—it is a picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head and blood streaming down his face. “This blood’s for you” is a play on an old Budweiser beer jingle, “This Bud’s for you.”

This road sign illustrates the meaning of Easter for some conservative Christians, capturing so eloquently the pathos of their experience and even their very existence. When I saw this sign two years ago it just brought to my mind so vividly the caricature of the story of Jesus that I am so familiar with and which captivates so many people around the world. By calling using the term “caricature” I do not intend to diminish the story itself in the least. I am merely referring to the misplaced emphasis, the “Mel Gibson Passion of Christ blood-and-guts gore” theme that will get such wide play today in Christian churches today. This emphasis misses the point. For example, when the Apostle Paul spoke of being “crucified with Christ” and the need to “die daily”, he was making reference to an historical event but speaking of an experience in his contemporary life. And the “crucifixion of Christ” is still an historical event but if it is to have any personal value it must be interpreted in personal terms. If meaningful interpretation is not done, if hermeneutics are not employed, then the literal brutality and ugliness of the crucifixion will supersede the symbolic value of the event, and the personal value and relevance will be diminished. The over emphasis of the literal event by the clergy will allow them to get their flock’s “panties in a wad” once again but will not introduce any meaningful change in their life.

So, I guess I am espousing a notion that is really kind of boorish and even offensive to some people—be crucified with Christ! That sounds like a crazy idea in our modern world. And it is a crazy idea if you take the idea as it is often first presented to us and do not make any effort to interpret it. If you do not interpret the event in terms of your personal experience, you merely are regurgitating dogma and probably indulging in a masochistic orgy of shame, humiliation, and anguish.

But if you interpret this event in personal term, there might well be significant pain from time to time…yes even “shame, humiliation, and agony” for some…but the anguish will be personal, it will be about the accumulated impact of “those thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” that burdens hearts and lives. I am presenting here a version Karl Jung’s interpretation of the crucifixion as an archetype, a cosmic event woven into the warp-and-woof of the human heart. And this archetype emerged in the human heart, and found a notable expression in the crucifixion of Christ, because it is an intrinsically valuable, and even essential, part of the human psyche.

It is very self-indulgent to amuse oneself with the paroxysm of shame and humiliation at Easter and not allow the symbolism to evoke from the hidden regions of the heart. It is in this evocation, or”anamnesis”, that the experience of crucifixion becomes personal and allows individuals to address the issues that stymie them in daily rituals of outdated and maladaptive patterns of behavior. It allows the people of this southwest Arkansas church to remain untouched by the real message of the Cross and facilitates a personal and collective status quo. The cultural bondage in which they are enslaved will not be addressed.

Rumi, Shakespeare, and Moral Codes

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The Persion poet Rumi noted, “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” This is similar to Shakespeare’s famous observation, “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

These two quotations appear to convey moral relativism which permits basically anything under the sun, appearing to convey the absence of any moral absolute. But I do not feel this is the case at all for the teachings of these men suggest they have much more in mind than mere self-indulgent behavior. Each recognized that it was the God-given capacity to think which creates categories for the whole of human experience, including those categories of what is right and wrong. But it is only “thinking” and the capacity to think that allows this categorization to take place. They are merely noting that “thinking” and the resulting categorization of human experience can appear to be quite arbitrary. For example, not too many years ago in our country African Americans were thought of as second class citizens, and in the Deep South in particular, were second class citizens in the estimation of most white people. And having been raised in the South, due to this pervasive mind-set that my sub-culture was imbued with, I saw African Americans as second class citizens. For, as we learn to perceive, so things are. The categories formulated on the basis of our perceptual field are real, as far as we know it. And unquestioningly accepting these categories is validated day in and day out in the community. However, due to the strong arm of…may I say it…an “intrusive” Federal government our thinking regarding race has changed significantly in the past fifty years. African Americans are not viewed with the same racist mind-set by many Southerners and those who continue to subscribe to those Neanderthal beliefs are forced to treat them with more respect, albeit begrudgingly in most cases. One other example is prominent in our world history. At one point the prevailing world view was that the world was flat. That viewpoint was reality and anyone who deigned to suggest otherwise did so at the risk of ridicule or worse. The world was flat for that is how prevailing thought described it.

So, back to “wrong doing” and “right doing” or Shakespeare’s “good” or “bad.” Yes, it is only thinking that makes anything right, wrong, good, or bad. However, what these gentlemen were teaching is that we must get beyond mere categories, mere words, mere labels and learn that subscribing to a mere moral code will merely leave us trapped in the letter of the law. Sure, these moral codes will constrain our behavior and thus serve a useful social purpose. We cannot function as a society without them. But at some point we have to grow spiritually to the point that we are no longer merely constrained by the mere letter of the law but by the spirit of the law. Therefore, if I want to do something which I feel is “wrong”, I am given pause and proceed to ask myself, “Now what does this reflect about the depths of my heart? If I want to do a brother harm, what does that say about me, aside from whatever this brother might have done?

Now Rumi’s note that “I will meet you in a field that lies beyond that domain of right doing and wrong doing” is rich. A field conveys an open space, an area out beyond the narrow confines of a moral code, and this is the realm of the spirit. When we are rigidly governed merely by the letter of the law, when our heart is jam-packed with rules to which we are slavishly devoted, we can never get beyond, we can never get out side of our self, and we can never get into that Sacred Space where honesty, openness, and intimacy is found. This is the domain of the “I-Thou” relationship so eloquently described by Martin Buber.

Let me reiterate. A person who is slavishly devoted to the letter of the law, whose life consists of punctilious observation of moral, religious, and spiritual rules is trapped inside himself/herself. And if he/she finds the comfort of like-minded people, great comfort can appear to be found, but at a great price. And usually this mind-set produces a judgmentalism which has to be wielded on other people as the beasts within which this “letter of the law” carefully constrains will be projected onto the outside world. One expression of this poison is the view that the world is “going to hell in a hand basket, is inherently evil, and must be actively combatted.” Well, the world has evil present but I argue that groups with that emphasis need to pay an equal amount of attention to the evil within their own hearts. The evil outside with which they are obsessed is actually within their own hearts. This is the classic projection spoken of my Karl Jung.

Embracing Internal Contradictions

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