Kay Thomas PhD
Presented at the
WORLD DREAMING: WORLD CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY;
24-28 August 2011 Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Australia.
Abstract: How did Jung and Steiner both come to understand their own ‘dreaming’ consciousness? This is the same consciousness that Indigenous Australians describe as their ‘dreamtime’. This dreaming consciousness, which I call ‘out-of-body awareness’, was common to all our remote human ancestors prior to written history, and still plays a vital role in bringing us health, insight and enlightenment. Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner were fellow Austrians born around the same time who understood the significance of this dream-time awareness. They were mystics with a deep interest in the future wellbeing of humanity. Both left an enormous legacy that goes far beyond psychotherapy, in education, agriculture, and, above all, to our spiritual understanding. They had an understanding that dreams opened the portals of spiritual enlightenment by enabling individuals to grow in understanding of themselves and their connection to the universe. The dream-time consciousness known to Australian Indigenous people (described in “Dark Sparklers”, by Bill Yidumduma Harney and Jim Cairns, 2004) has many parallels with the dreaming consciousness described by Jung and Steiner, which we can explore further. Both Steiner and Jung showed us how we can monitor our spiritual progress in our dreams as Jung did in his description ‘On Life after Death’.
Content:
Introduction
Dreams
Learning from Ancient Awareness
Out-of-Body Awareness IS Dreamtime Awareness
How Jung and Steiner Approached the Unseen World – the Dreamtime - Differently
(1) Purpose of the Dreaming State
(2) Development of the Ego out of the Dream State
(3) The Goal of Going Within – Enlightenment
(4) Development of the Rational Soul – the Mind-Soul
(5) Therapy and Healing in the Light of these Alternative Views of Enlightenment
(6) Scientific Credibility for All Pervasive Energy
(7) Should we Interpret Dreams?
(8) Healing
(9) Suffering, Healing and Being Genuine
Conclusion
Introduction
Jung and Steiner shared a common culture from central Europe, which had a long history of delving into the mysteries of the soul in the middle ages ranging from Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Suso and other mystics leading to Angelus Silesius to Goethe to Hegel. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Jung and Steiner were writing, professional people shied away from using the term ‘soul’ because scientific thinking had developed to a point where the world was now viewed as externalised and inanimate:
Jung saw that under the personal unconscious discovered by Freud (his subconscious) there had to be a deeper layer. Jung called it the collective unconscious…for him the collective unconscious possesses god-like qualities
However…
Jung never speaks of God or of the divine (Roth, 1997).
The critical fact here is that Jung did not mention the connection between the collective unconscious and the Divine even though this lay implicit in his view that the process of self discovery which he called individuation must lead to an appreciation of cosmic religious awareness, as Einstein called it (1930).
Steiner, on the other hand, went much further than simply mentioning the soul and God. He gave us a very rich and unique description of how our modern ego developed throughout human evolution to its present status in relation to the soul and collective consciousness.
It seems to me that it is at this point of departure between Jung and Steiner, where Jung leaves off and Steiner begins, as it were, that modern depth psychology has become stuck today. Shall modern psychology proceed to an acknowledgment of the supersensible (Steiner’s term for what Jung would see as the metaphysical) and if it does, how would it proceed to interpret therapy and healing in the light of the soul?
In this paper I will first consider how Jung and Steiner saw dreams and dreaming consciousness and compare this with the original consciousness of all human beings that Indigenous people call the dreaming, and which I call out-of-body awareness. How did Jung and Steiner understand dreams in the context of personal growth towards enlightenment? What can we learn from the dreaming consciousness of Indigenous people that can contribute to an understanding of the modern psyche? I hope this exercise will throw some light on the current dilemma concerning consciousness that we need to confront in order to illuminate the current evolution in ego awareness towards a greatly expanded cosmic awareness.
Dreams
Jung and Steiner viewed dreams and dreaming consciousness quite differently. To Jung, dreams contained a symbolic representation of what was going on in the person’s waking conscious life that could sometimes also reflect aspects of the collective unconscious which represented the conflicts and challenges that humans had faced through the course of history that were common to all cultures. Steiner on the other hand saw dreams as our ability to view the spiritual world which was as real as the one we know from waking consciousness. This was our original home in spirit. When I say that, to Steiner, dreams were a real world, I mean that to him, armed with sufficient effort courage, humility and insight, one could experience dreams as waking consciousness. This was not ordinarily the case for humans today. This important stage of development ‘where consciousness is retained in the life during sleep’ is called ‘continuity of consciousness’ (Steiner, 1912). It is achieved by gradually deepening soul awareness through meditation.
To understand Steiner’s viewpoint we need to go back in time to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged.
At this time humans had a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth (Steiner, 1910).
Why is Steiner’s insight so important? There are two immediate reasons. One is that we cannot understand modern scientific findings in the realm of relativity and quantum physics without a revolution in our present understanding of the world, matter, energy and so forth. Secondly we cannot understand our own consciousness without coming to grips with the very different form of awareness that our ancestors had and which they shared with Indigenous people. Only by integrating these different forms of awareness will be able to comprehend the theories of modern physics and the riddles of the universe around us ranging from the atom to outer space.
Learning from Ancient Awareness
To gain an insight into what our original awareness, we need (as Jung did) to consult anthropology. Anthropology has suffered from the same limitations as most of modern science in that it could not really appreciate the spiritual dimension of Indigenous cultures. Today, however, we have Indigenous people still living a traditional life who are fully initiated into the spiritual life of their people, who can tell us what that spiritual dimension was. Through a unique collaboration between anthropologist Hugh Cairns, and just such a unique person, Bill Yidumduma Harney of the Wardaman people, we now know much more about the cosmology linked to the spirituality of Indigenous people. The Wardaman people saw spiritual beings and spiritual facts in the environment in a dreamlike way. Their consciousness was a clairvoyant consciousness that entailed:
spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream…(Steiner, 1910).
Bill Harney Senior was told of the significance of the stars by the Wardaman people in their Indigenous Creation Story. The song-lines relate many myths about the stars and their significance – stories that were told from spiritual beings to earthly members of the tribe. In their book “Dark Sparklers”, Bill Yidumduma Harney (son of Bill Harney Senior a bushman, who was so trusted by the Wardaman people, that he was initiated into the tribe, married a Wardaman woman and was therefore regarded as family) and Hugh Cairns present detailed maps of the sky showing that the ancient Indigenous people had an extensive knowledge of astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere. This detailed knowledge of the night sky had many practical applications, such as guides to navigation, healing, and hunting.
Believing in those stars are moving from place to place! Links from the stars down to the rock painting, and songlines continues. All links together! That way it’s connecting, whole lot of them, it’s the right way. World is spinning! (Bill Yidumduma Harney relates the importance of knowledge of the stars to Indigenous people, in Cairns and Harney, 2004, p.60).
Children in the Wardaman tribe learned much from their lessons about the night sky. Bill Yidumduma tells us that “when we were kids, we were all laying up looking, talking about the stars”. The stories about different star clusters were lessons in how to respect the Law of his people, how to hunt and trade, how to survive:
It all starts with Creation Dog and his bag of Songs! Willy-Wagtail, Bush Turkey, others, that mob trade songs, skills all that. Security Men check it’s all being done right, under the Boss’ eye --- he sees them! Then there’s Catfish my personal totem, all that Law; the place we smoke ‘em, and cutting; and the other Law places. Black Headed Python, he creates the land and waters, he’s there. And Rainbow! You can see it all in the night sky, just like the land, transforming in the spiritual way! (Cairns and Harney, 2004, p.42).
Dr Hugh Cairns approach to his research was fully respectful of what Yidumduma and his people were able to relate about their cosmology and beliefs. Together they were able to assemble the first comprehensive information about the extent and complexity of the Wardaman’s knowledge of the night sky, the movement of constellations and planets as well as the direct links between this astronomical knowledge and spiritual beliefs and ‘storylines’ embedded in the star constellations.
To call this a form of ‘knowledge’, however complex, cannot really convey the depth of feeling that accompanies the experience of communion with the totems and spiritual figures that the stars were. People who have not experienced the great canopy of the milky way in the night sky from vantage point of the southern hemisphere will have difficulty understanding this feeling of awe that envelopes anyone privileged to be a witness. I purposely do not say that the stars ‘represented’ spirits or totems because this would imply a separation between the star or planet and the spiritual being. In this dreamtime cosmology the stars and planets were fused with spiritual and totemic presences (Thomas, 2011).
However, this does not tell us the full extent of the dreaming.
Just suppose you were able to look into another world. At first your vision is a little shaky. You are not sure of what you are seeing. Images are blurred. Some figures run into each other and come quickly towards you so it is difficult to really discern their outline. Gradually your vision steadies and you begin to see something more distinctly through a haze. Suddenly a great ball like a planet hurtles towards you but veers off to the left. Strange craft full of swiftly changing lights career around each other. Then, like in the story ‘Alice in Wonderland’, you see the large face of a woman peering at you. It is a very large face of a woman with a black mole prominently situated on her chin. The message you get is that this is the Queen of the Night, as in Mozart’s famous opera The Magic Flute. The message is not spoken, but you hear it distinctly anyway. Somehow you just ‘know’ it.
It is time to get out of bed and write down this strange dream. What does it mean?
Is it possible that we really are able to see such things in the other world and that they are not our ‘imagination’. Perhaps they are a different reality. We have convinced ourselves now throughout a few hundred years that such experiences are in our ‘mind’. That is, they are contained somehow within the space of our bodies and are probably due to neurons firing haphazardly in our brains. The result is that we see images that are not connected logically in any way to each other or to our thoughts during waking hours.
Perhaps the disconnected and haziness of these images is due to our inexperience in seeing anything at all in this strange world. We still have not attained enough confidence and stability of our presence there to be able to view things as we do in our waking lives. We are really strangers when it comes to interpreting what we are seeing in this world. An example would be if we were to look through a special viewing machine at cells in a living organism without knowing beforehand anything about the machine or the context of what we are seeing.
No one has told us that this is a microscope and there is no introduction telling us that this is a level of experience that exists all the time without us being aware of it at all. The living cells simply continue to move around with all their brilliant colours – dividing, coalescing, streaming down vast alleys and across great distances of living pipeline – without any assistance from us; but nevertheless they support our very existence.
At night, when we put our heads down on the pillow and drift off into this other world, we see, through another ‘microscope’, a world of which we are completely unaware even though this world has been part of our existence since we first walked the planet. The strange thing is that this dreamtime world was better known to our distant forbears than it is to us. That is difficult to admit for proud sons and daughters of the industrial and scientific revolution.
We have been told about this world throughout the centuries. Yet we believe that it cannot really exist. Nevertheless, our feelings, intellect, creativity, arts and culture come from this source.
Out-of-Body Awareness IS Dreamtime Awareness
Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual…..He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character (Steiner,1910).
For a long time many hundreds of thousands of years humans lived as hunters and gatherers. It was necessary for early humans to have eyes everywhere – ‘eyes in the back of their heads’ - on the lookout for prey and threats. As humans roamed large distances, they needed a mental map to find their way home again. In this dream-like, clairvoyant state, people still had an accurate awareness of their surroundings. In fact, this awareness enhanced their senses and provided a stronger intuitive feeling for what might be lurking in hidden places. Early humans, like Indigenous people today, were armed with stories handed down over generations telling of the whereabouts of food, water, or prey. The myths told them of how the food had been provided originally, as well as where it might be found at certain times of the year. This heightened ability to see and hear.
The Dreamtime was a state of cosmic awareness where Aboriginal people felt themselves to be part of all the land, its animals and vegetation. It is hard to convey what is really meant by that because it requires some hint of cosmic awareness, but if you look at some of Robert’s paintings, you can see the living mystical nature of humans with nature, where they were part of the great natural landscape as far as the eye can see and beyond to the unseen world of the Dreamtime. (Roberts and Mountford, 1970). In an important sense, Steiner went much further than Jung in terms of giving the original world – the dreamtime – a reality. He was much closer to the Wardaman in understanding the way they see the world around them and their place in it.
How Jung and Steiner Approached the Unseen World – the Dreamtime - Differently
Both had a belief in the unseen world, the dreamtime that was connected to the life force – which Jung termed the animus and anima (meaning source of animation) and Steiner called etheric forces. However, although they had very similar beliefs, there were also important differences.
(1) Purpose of the Dreaming State
For Jung, the purpose of understanding better the dream world is to help us negotiate waking life. By interpreting the symbolic messages contained in our dreams we will be better able to integrate the archetypal forces into our modern alienated existence. Our dreams can help us pinpoint the source of our anxiety or depression and give us a clue as to what we can do to resolve these maladies.
For Steiner, the dream world contains the source and meaning of life itself. We go into the dreamtime or spiritual world in order to find our true self, not just to indulge in a mystical union with the Divine, but in order to cross the threshold and absorb the impulses that help us support life and each other throughout our lives. Steiner did not advocate dream analysis, as the psychoanalytical movement did. He thought that dream analysis could not reveal the soul. However, by deepening our awareness of dream states we can achieve a realization that the soul lies behind our ordinary thinking and sense perception.
If this is understood, then there remains but one step to the recognition that the dream-picturing force of the soul also lies at the basis of ordinary thinking and sense perception (Steiner, 1923).
Jung thought that a person in a weakened soul state could learn something to heal the soul by consulting their dreams. Steiner believed we need to be strong in our soul to enter into the other world. It is not something for the faint hearted. However, we can heal by becoming more aware of the impulses we receive from sleeping consciousness and this can help to restore our mind-soul. He thought that a person with a mental illness could not enter into a direct relationship with the dream world.
(2) Development of the Ego out of the Dream State
Jung shared the implicit assumption widespread in modern society, that the ego and defences had always existed in the same sense that we experience ourselves subjectively today. Steiner believed that our ego has evolved through many stages in human evolution in tune with our ability to create a distance between (i.e. objectify) ourselves and ‘objects’ around us. This has reached the point now that even the self has become objectified.
A critical juncture in human history was reached with the invention of written language in the 7th Century BC. In western culture, Plato represented the old consciousness and paved the way for the new. Plato represents the unique point in human history of the West, when the oral traditions of the preceding Homeric Greeks gave way to a new ‘objective’ consciousness.
In The Republic and other dialogues, Plato repeatedly puts forth his philosophy of the Ideas. The Ideas were, in a sense, possible only because Plato’s consciousness had been saturated by the abstract powers of the Greek version of the alphabet. Beginning in the 10th century B.C.E., when the alphabet was first introduced to the Hellenic world, this highly abstract form of communication had been slowly transforming the orientation of the Greek mind. This process eventually culminated in the uniquely abstract form of mental-egoic consciousness articulated in Plato’s philosophy of the Ideas (Poletti, 2000).
Learning a written language makes it possible for people to use abstract concepts. Illiterate people use concrete concepts that confine their thinking to a particular time and place (Luria, 1976). After just six months of learning to read and write, Russian peasants were able to use abstract concepts, thus liberating them for the first time from their restricted view of the world.
Historically, this brought about an enormous change in the way people experienced themselves, that is, in their ego organization. Thus, we cannot understand the development of the human ego without appreciating the impact of historical changes in culture. The ego did not develop in a vacuum, but was moulded in interaction with the material and cultural world around us, which we in humans changed through the changes in their capabilities, in a dialectical sense. Thus, in Steiner’s view, there is a constantly evolving dialogue between the ego, the soul and the dream world that occurs between life and death and across many incarnations leading to a quite different ego and consciousness. Steiner quite clearly believed in reincarnation.
(3) The Goal of Going Within – Enlightenment
Jungian and psychoanalysts, as a whole, have appreciated the individual development of the ego across the individual life span, but not the historical changes in the ego that have occurred throughout history.
For Carl Jung the center of the collective unconscious is the (individual) God-image. One of the most important tasks of the so-called individuation process he defined as the challenge of our life, is thus to find this inner God-image in one’s own soul and to find the right individual relationship to it (Roth, 1997).
This was Jung’s goal for individual development and it coincides closely with the goal of mystics through the middle ages.
Steiner’s goal goes a step further in the modern age where we must take into account the intellectual and consciousness soul.
If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur ….he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul (Steiner, 1910).
Steiner saw the development of the intellectual soul occurring in close communion with the development of an internalized conscience. Prior to the 6th Century BC when people still experienced the world in the clairvoyant awareness, wrongdoing and evil were also externalized in the environment around them. The deep feeling that something some action was wrong was experienced ‘out there’ and called forth dire consequences such as the punishment of the Gods. Bad deeds rose up before the human soul as the voice of some God disapproving of the action. We now take it for granted that such disapproval in within our own heart and soul.
When Dante journeyed through his underworld which he shared with spirits of dead people he had known and famous figures from the past, he came across a savage beast which blocked his path:
Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.
This beast was……
so malign and ruthless,
That never doth she glut her greedy will,
And after food is hungrier than before.
By Dante’s time, in the middle ages, people had internalized the fearful figures of evil in their waking consciousness, but they still appeared as externalized figures in the dream world. Even so, there were hundreds of years more in which evil could be seen personified in others before we became aware that we were really projecting our own experience of evil onto others. So it is true by the time we come to Jung’s era at the beginning of the 20th Century, such dream figures as Dante’s savage beast would be commonly thought of as symbolic of evil. But this was due to a long historical development of the mind-soul, whereby our intellect had become much stronger with respect to dealing with external events – both good and evil.
In 1944, following a heart attack, Jung had an out-of-body experience that he described in Memories, Dreams and Reflections. In contrast to the many dreams that he had reported on, this vision, although fantastic, was something that made sense. Like Dante, he saw places he knew such as the Temple of the Holy Tooth in Kandy, Ceylon, and met a person whom he knew in life – his treating doctor. The vision reported many truths about himself, about his soul. It did not need to be interpreted.
This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived (Jung, 1944 ).
(4) Development of the Rational Soul – the Mind-Soul
In classical medicine up until Jung’s time, the soul played an important part in healing being the expression of the life force in the individual on the one hand, and our connection to the Divine source of the life force on the other. Paracelsus, born 1493, Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim in Maria-Einsiedeln near Zurich, considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, distinguished between the Rational Soul, which is the connecting link between body and spirit and the reasoning part of man's nature and the Spiritual Soul, which does not need to reason, as it knows by intuition.
It is difficult to assess Jung's view of the intellect whether he saw it as a feature of the soul, because he was reticent to use the word ‘soul’ preferring to call it the ‘psyche’. In this respect he reflects the culture around him. Most people today do not make any connection between the soul, the mind and the intellect. The soul seems to have remained the medieval soul.
We could ask is Jung’s ‘psyche’ really the same as ‘soul’? There are at least two sides to this question:
1) the need to transform medieval terms associated with religion and the supernatural into concepts that were cleansed of these associations and palatable to modern 20th Century scientific intellects;
2) the possibility that there really is a separate playing field of the emotions in the individual subconscious which may be associated with the soul, but is nevertheless separate and the domain of the new army of mental healers – psychiatrists and psychologists, who could enter here.
In contrast to Jung’s medieval mysticism which invoked individual growth towards enlightenment by following the process of individuation, Steiner saw modern enlightenment taking place via development of the rational or intellectual soul. He agreed with Jung that there was a place for individual mysticism but warned that exclusive dependence on this inward path could lead to a ‘refined form of egotism’.
“This egotism can be overcome if the ego is constrained to pass outside itself and make its activity flow into the external world”.
He described the goal of spiritual development “On Heaven’s Way” in terms that the Wardaman people would understand:
we shall come to a spiritual realm which is coloured neither by our own inner world nor by the outer world — a realm which has the same ground as the infinite world of stars shining in on us, as the atmosphere which envelops the earth, as the green plant-cover, as the rivers flowing into the sea; while the same divine-spiritual element lives in our thinking, feeling and willing and permeates our inner and outer worlds (Steiner,1910).
Thus in the future, in Steiner’s view, if we follow the scientific path to its logical conclusion, our mind-soul will develop to a point where we will understand the Dreaming awareness of Indigenous people with our strong intellectual ego development that has occurred through science.
(5) Therapy and Healing in the Light of these Alternative Views of Enlightenment
When it comes to therapy, Jung and Steiner are worlds apart. Although Jung had a passionate interest in alchemy he did not seem to understand the life force. He seems to have bowed to the prevailing views of his time at the last minute so to speak. Everything he knew was driving him forward to an acknowledgement of the life force as the true medium of therapy as Paracelsus had taught generations of physicians. However, Jung held back until the end of his life when life experience seems to have convinced him that we do indeed have a soul that is the source of life. Perhaps he knew it all along but could not express it.
Steiner took no heed of the Newtonian ideas of reality prevalent during Victorian times and in the early 20th Century. He followed his intuitive soul. He knew that in addition to the chemical and biological forces, which he did not deny were present, there was the etheric force - the life force - that Paracelsus called the Evastraum. The life force comes directly into the human physical body as light:
What is important for you, however, at the moment is to know that this is what we mean by “light”. Now the astral body is connected with this light; that is to say, it has direct relation — not indirect through the etheric body — with all that underlies sense-perception on the earth. This is a most interesting fact. Outside lives the light in the ether, but we have also the etheric within us. The light works upon our ether body. When we wake up, we not only come into connection with the light that is within us; but, turning aside as it were from the light that is within us, we member ourselves into the light that streams through the external world (Steiner, 1924).
(6) Scientific Credibility for All Pervasive Energy
We may find as time goes on that quantum physics acknowledges the scientific credibility of this view of living vibrational waves that penetrate all things those we now consider inanimate as well as the animate. The “physical domain is interconnected with a ‘subtle energy’ domain” (Tiller, 1997).
Laboratory studies conducted over several decades demonstrate quantum entanglement and non-local influences between living subjects at the level of cells as well as between human subjects separated by significant distances or sealed chambers (Thaheld, 2007). He point out that early quantum physicists thought that non local entanglement occurred only with inanimate objects.
Examples he cites are when two subjects meditated together and were then separated in sealed Faraday chambers, the non stimulated subject showed similar evoked potentials on EEG measures as the subject being stimulated. Neither sensory signals not electromagnetic signals were involved as the subjects were in sealed chambers (Bischoff et al, 2003).
These experiments were originally conducted by Jacob Grinberg-Zylberbaum (1994) and have been replicated by Standish et al. (2003) and Thaheld (2004).
In a similar vein, experiments done by researchers at the University of Milan (Pizzi et al 2006) show that human neurons that are shielded from each other, display the same pattern of responses to lazer stimulation. Professor Pizzi and co workers (2007) have shown that neural network colonies, grown from a single cell with identical DNA, are able to communicate even when they are electromagnetically isolated from each other.
Just as much of science has struggled to come to terms with these and many other anomalous findings, psychotherapy has also struggled to breathe new life into paradigms that cannot find life having rejected it in tune with the old science – pre relativity and quantum physics. We cannot find life by dividing and dissecting dreams, yet we know dreams are important!
Our dreams reveal the life force and sometimes we even see the ‘light’ in our dreams.
I had a dream once many years ago when I was working in a geriatric hospital in Denmark. An elderly woman had had one leg amputated and the consultant was loath to tell her that the other one needed to be amputated too. She had a terrible grey colour in her cheeks. That night I had a dream where I saw the streaming light down and heard a message that ‘everything would be alright for her’. I took this to mean that she would recover from the operation, but I was greeted with the news on arriving at work that she had died during the operation.
I have long believed that much of what we do in therapy whether we think it is informed by good science or not is the result of intuition and the messages we receive during the night from the dreamtime world. This is also Steiner’s view.
(7) Should we Interpret Dreams?
Let us take a step back from the details of psychotherapy for a moment and reassess. Is Steiner right when he says that our dream life is important in that it tells us that there is ‘something else’ in the universe that we do not understand and that this ‘something else’ is our soul life, as Indigenous people believed, but we do not necessarily gain much by trying to interpret our dreams?
Steiner placed great importance on the dreaming whether we are sleeping or in a dream-like state. At these times we are in an out-of-body state where our soul is being influenced by spiritual forces that come to expression in our waking state. Our soul, which is ‘the light’, slips into our physical body when we are awake and expresses the spiritual truths through our ego what we have absorbed in the out-of-body state during sleep. Following on from what physicists are now proposing about energy, Steiner argues that:
There is no such thing as what the physicists call matter. In reality there are only forces and the forces — as, for example, gravity (there are other forces too, of course; magnetic and electric forces are all alike in this, that the ego organisation is in direct connection with each one of them and, in the normal human being, is so during the whole of waking life (Steiner, 1924).
Thus we are in direct contact with the earth in our waking life and with the spiritual life when asleep or in an out-of-body state such as meditation or trance.
Various forms of mental and physical illnesses can be explained, in Steiner’s terms, by the inability of the soul to slip perfectly into the ‘glove’ of the body in the waking state. This could be because of permanent damage to the physiology of the brain in cases of schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease or Alzheimer’s Disease for example, or could be transient problems due to lack of proper acknowledgment of the existence of a limb or congestion in the lungs or other organs.
Thus, Steiner would not recommend dream analysis for someone with these diseases, whereas in Jungian terms, serious mental disorders are caused by human failures which dreams seek to remedy (Loker, 2007).
Steiner explains serious mental illness by the inability of the soul to recognize the physical body in waking consciousness:
Let us suppose then that you have this person who is said to be suffering from grave mental illness…... He cannot get into the physical body and ether body, he remains outside them all the time; and so, being unable to make use of the physical body, he is, you see, insane (Steiner, 1924).
He suggested that the person may have been intelligent in a previous incarnation, followed by imprisonment in a subsequent incarnation. This meant that he did not have any experience of his soul interacting with the material world and therefore did not feel any ego identification within himself. Steiner thought that it was important for us to hone the soul within as it formed the ego without in interaction with the world as we grow up and develop throughout our lives. If we do not, we remain “completely outside the field of experience of the physical and the etheric body”. The person “therefore returns to incarnation in entire ignorance of the interior of the human body”.
This sounds rather odd, but Steiner believed that the ego was a product of the soul and that the ego, lays hold of the physical body (for the moment, we will leave the etheric body out of the picture), and the physical body adapts itself to gravity (Steiner, 1924).
(8) Healing
In his final interview, the eminent Jungian scholar, Edinger, talks about Jung’s monumental contribution as the ‘reality of the psyche’ which he equates with the soul, juxtaposed to the personality theories of other strands of psychoanalysis which leads to ever more drilling down into the complexities of human personality development and of “interminable theorization, intellectualization, conceptualization, and it skates above the more profound realities” (Jaffe., L, Interview with Edward F. Edinger, 1998).
Even in this interview where Edinger offer the highest accolades for Jung’s work, he acknowledges that not many people really understood Jung - a view he shared with Jung himself. The reason Edinger gives for this lack of understanding is, from his own experience as a person who had benefited from Jungian analysis, that Jung really believed in the soul and our connection with the Divine. This was Steiner’s belief, but Jung was reluctant to put it forward until very late in life. Edinger saw the benefits in Jung’s very broad understanding of the role of God in individuation (the unacknowledged God). Jung felt that God had to be approached from within as well as from without and that the psyche or soul had to be experienced directly. He really believed in the inner man as Paracelsus had taught. The inner man, the soul, could not be approached by analysis or theorization.
Jung was trying to keep religion, God and the soul at arm’s length because he had built up a whole edifice of therapy around the secularization of some core religious beliefs – such as the soul. The word ‘metaphysical’ itself is a secularization of the spiritual. It really tells the listener “I am talking about the spiritual but I want you not to use any spiritual words to describe it”. Jung used two languages – one was regarding therapy and the metaphysical world and the other the language of spirituality.
In discussing the complexes that many people develop in childhood Edinger referred to Jung’s concept of the ‘not yet transformed God’ who is the Old Testament God who punishes us in our now internalized conscience for our misdeeds. This God can be transformed by internalized forgiveness and compassion ‘the Christ incarnation as the internalized forgiving God’. Edinger’s view was that this was his experience of healing. But this was not what most personality oriented psychotherapists were aiming for or interested in.
This is in fact what Steiner would have understood as healing:
For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed.
Perhaps the reason that Jung is not understood is that most people who want to be ‘Jungian’ want to flirt with enlightenment but not identify with or absorb into their being the full impact of acknowledging the soul as real. Even Jung gave it another name, as though he could not say the word itself. Only towards the end of his life did he really grow into an understanding of his soul.
(9) Suffering, Healing and Being Genuine
At one point, Edinger says that Jung did not heal people because he had techniques, or knew how to analyse dreams or personalities in detail, but because he was a great person. “He could help people through the impact of his greatness”. By this he means he was a real person who had lived and suffered the agonies that every person must suffer to know their own soul in the depths of their inner person and come back into the world to help others on the path.
The Wardaman people knew the value of suffering in order to create a mature adult who was aware of their responsibilities to their fellow human beings, to the land and their whole spiritual environment. Initiation was accompanied by isolation from the rest of the tribe for a long period of time, together with artificially induced pain, both physical and mental. It was a disciplinary process that was necessary for the young person to give up the carefree attitude of childhood and take on the responsibilities of the adult world. These responsibilities were intimately connected to individual and collective survival, in every sense, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Steiner’s philosophy did not lead to individual psychotherapy. Nevertheless, he did have some important ideas that have resulted in a worldwide education movement. Two of his ideas could be important for individual psychotherapy:
Eurythmy is feeling the soul within. I that have already alluded to Steiner’s view that the some people do not feel ‘at one with’ the soul, either wholly, as in the case of serious mental illness, or partially. His therapy to correct partial non-alignment of the physical, etheric body and the soul he called eurythmy.
The second idea is connected to the first and arises out of his belief that in order to understand another person with an ailment of some kind, the therapist or teacher needs to develop sympathetic understanding. This requires that the teacher develop, deep within his own soul, a deep compassion with the child’s experience. As long as the teacher or therapist feel ‘on the outside looking in’, the child cannot push through with his own energy. The teacher develops this sympathetic understanding by gradually…
Eliminating in himself all subjective reaction of feeling when faced with this phenomenon in the child. By ridding himself of every trace of subjective reaction, the teacher educates his own astral body (Steiner, 1924).
Such sympathetic understanding could be said to be the primary building block of any therapy. By identifying with the person’s problems at a deeper level and accepting the blockage within himself, a therapist can remove the blockage from the other person. This is a transference that heals.
Conclusion
It is ironical that these two great men really arrived at the same conclusion about the ultimate value of the dream-time, the soul, and the role of human suffering in molding the adult ego. The details of therapy may not be important in this context. Edinger said that most of us cannot rely on greatness, but perhaps he was mistaken in thinking that it was greatness that was the healing factor in Jung’s approach. What we can rely on is being totally honest in pursuing genuine spiritual development and that we are willing to share this honestly with another person.
It is impossible to simulate wisdom. In the close relationship of healing, any simulation is evident. Is transference another word for an inauthentic, dishonest relationship? Honesty cannot be demonstrated. It is something that we all know deep in the soul.
In the dream-time world, dishonesty is impossible because the ego has not yet developed defenses that can simulate many different, and sometimes conflicting, social roles. The social masks that modern people are used to do not exist in the dream-time. Individuation is a necessary process in modern humans if they are to uncover the underlying essential self and restore the life force. To bring forth the life force, enlightenment, requires total honesty in one’s being. Indigenous people are very aware of dishonesty in social relations because in the dream-time awareness dishonesty was impossible.
Perhaps this is why the psychoanalysts looked to dreams for clues about what to do in order to heal a person, because dreams tell the truth. However, endless analysis of dreams in a person who has a weak mind-soul may not help that person ‘push through’ their soul into waking life, but cement them further in their weakness. A study of Steiner’s views really tells us that he was closer to the dream-time awareness of Indigenous people. We all share the dream-time and can arrive at a better appreciation of our true self if we open our understanding to the great mysteries of the universe.
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Presented at the
WORLD DREAMING: WORLD CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY;
24-28 August 2011 Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Australia.
Abstract: How did Jung and Steiner both come to understand their own ‘dreaming’ consciousness? This is the same consciousness that Indigenous Australians describe as their ‘dreamtime’. This dreaming consciousness, which I call ‘out-of-body awareness’, was common to all our remote human ancestors prior to written history, and still plays a vital role in bringing us health, insight and enlightenment. Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner were fellow Austrians born around the same time who understood the significance of this dream-time awareness. They were mystics with a deep interest in the future wellbeing of humanity. Both left an enormous legacy that goes far beyond psychotherapy, in education, agriculture, and, above all, to our spiritual understanding. They had an understanding that dreams opened the portals of spiritual enlightenment by enabling individuals to grow in understanding of themselves and their connection to the universe. The dream-time consciousness known to Australian Indigenous people (described in “Dark Sparklers”, by Bill Yidumduma Harney and Jim Cairns, 2004) has many parallels with the dreaming consciousness described by Jung and Steiner, which we can explore further. Both Steiner and Jung showed us how we can monitor our spiritual progress in our dreams as Jung did in his description ‘On Life after Death’.
Content:
Introduction
Dreams
Learning from Ancient Awareness
Out-of-Body Awareness IS Dreamtime Awareness
How Jung and Steiner Approached the Unseen World – the Dreamtime - Differently
(1) Purpose of the Dreaming State
(2) Development of the Ego out of the Dream State
(3) The Goal of Going Within – Enlightenment
(4) Development of the Rational Soul – the Mind-Soul
(5) Therapy and Healing in the Light of these Alternative Views of Enlightenment
(6) Scientific Credibility for All Pervasive Energy
(7) Should we Interpret Dreams?
(8) Healing
(9) Suffering, Healing and Being Genuine
Conclusion
Introduction
Jung and Steiner shared a common culture from central Europe, which had a long history of delving into the mysteries of the soul in the middle ages ranging from Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Suso and other mystics leading to Angelus Silesius to Goethe to Hegel. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Jung and Steiner were writing, professional people shied away from using the term ‘soul’ because scientific thinking had developed to a point where the world was now viewed as externalised and inanimate:
Jung saw that under the personal unconscious discovered by Freud (his subconscious) there had to be a deeper layer. Jung called it the collective unconscious…for him the collective unconscious possesses god-like qualities
However…
Jung never speaks of God or of the divine (Roth, 1997).
The critical fact here is that Jung did not mention the connection between the collective unconscious and the Divine even though this lay implicit in his view that the process of self discovery which he called individuation must lead to an appreciation of cosmic religious awareness, as Einstein called it (1930).
Steiner, on the other hand, went much further than simply mentioning the soul and God. He gave us a very rich and unique description of how our modern ego developed throughout human evolution to its present status in relation to the soul and collective consciousness.
It seems to me that it is at this point of departure between Jung and Steiner, where Jung leaves off and Steiner begins, as it were, that modern depth psychology has become stuck today. Shall modern psychology proceed to an acknowledgment of the supersensible (Steiner’s term for what Jung would see as the metaphysical) and if it does, how would it proceed to interpret therapy and healing in the light of the soul?
In this paper I will first consider how Jung and Steiner saw dreams and dreaming consciousness and compare this with the original consciousness of all human beings that Indigenous people call the dreaming, and which I call out-of-body awareness. How did Jung and Steiner understand dreams in the context of personal growth towards enlightenment? What can we learn from the dreaming consciousness of Indigenous people that can contribute to an understanding of the modern psyche? I hope this exercise will throw some light on the current dilemma concerning consciousness that we need to confront in order to illuminate the current evolution in ego awareness towards a greatly expanded cosmic awareness.
Dreams
Jung and Steiner viewed dreams and dreaming consciousness quite differently. To Jung, dreams contained a symbolic representation of what was going on in the person’s waking conscious life that could sometimes also reflect aspects of the collective unconscious which represented the conflicts and challenges that humans had faced through the course of history that were common to all cultures. Steiner on the other hand saw dreams as our ability to view the spiritual world which was as real as the one we know from waking consciousness. This was our original home in spirit. When I say that, to Steiner, dreams were a real world, I mean that to him, armed with sufficient effort courage, humility and insight, one could experience dreams as waking consciousness. This was not ordinarily the case for humans today. This important stage of development ‘where consciousness is retained in the life during sleep’ is called ‘continuity of consciousness’ (Steiner, 1912). It is achieved by gradually deepening soul awareness through meditation.
To understand Steiner’s viewpoint we need to go back in time to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged.
At this time humans had a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth (Steiner, 1910).
Why is Steiner’s insight so important? There are two immediate reasons. One is that we cannot understand modern scientific findings in the realm of relativity and quantum physics without a revolution in our present understanding of the world, matter, energy and so forth. Secondly we cannot understand our own consciousness without coming to grips with the very different form of awareness that our ancestors had and which they shared with Indigenous people. Only by integrating these different forms of awareness will be able to comprehend the theories of modern physics and the riddles of the universe around us ranging from the atom to outer space.
Learning from Ancient Awareness
To gain an insight into what our original awareness, we need (as Jung did) to consult anthropology. Anthropology has suffered from the same limitations as most of modern science in that it could not really appreciate the spiritual dimension of Indigenous cultures. Today, however, we have Indigenous people still living a traditional life who are fully initiated into the spiritual life of their people, who can tell us what that spiritual dimension was. Through a unique collaboration between anthropologist Hugh Cairns, and just such a unique person, Bill Yidumduma Harney of the Wardaman people, we now know much more about the cosmology linked to the spirituality of Indigenous people. The Wardaman people saw spiritual beings and spiritual facts in the environment in a dreamlike way. Their consciousness was a clairvoyant consciousness that entailed:
spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream…(Steiner, 1910).
Bill Harney Senior was told of the significance of the stars by the Wardaman people in their Indigenous Creation Story. The song-lines relate many myths about the stars and their significance – stories that were told from spiritual beings to earthly members of the tribe. In their book “Dark Sparklers”, Bill Yidumduma Harney (son of Bill Harney Senior a bushman, who was so trusted by the Wardaman people, that he was initiated into the tribe, married a Wardaman woman and was therefore regarded as family) and Hugh Cairns present detailed maps of the sky showing that the ancient Indigenous people had an extensive knowledge of astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere. This detailed knowledge of the night sky had many practical applications, such as guides to navigation, healing, and hunting.
Believing in those stars are moving from place to place! Links from the stars down to the rock painting, and songlines continues. All links together! That way it’s connecting, whole lot of them, it’s the right way. World is spinning! (Bill Yidumduma Harney relates the importance of knowledge of the stars to Indigenous people, in Cairns and Harney, 2004, p.60).
Children in the Wardaman tribe learned much from their lessons about the night sky. Bill Yidumduma tells us that “when we were kids, we were all laying up looking, talking about the stars”. The stories about different star clusters were lessons in how to respect the Law of his people, how to hunt and trade, how to survive:
It all starts with Creation Dog and his bag of Songs! Willy-Wagtail, Bush Turkey, others, that mob trade songs, skills all that. Security Men check it’s all being done right, under the Boss’ eye --- he sees them! Then there’s Catfish my personal totem, all that Law; the place we smoke ‘em, and cutting; and the other Law places. Black Headed Python, he creates the land and waters, he’s there. And Rainbow! You can see it all in the night sky, just like the land, transforming in the spiritual way! (Cairns and Harney, 2004, p.42).
Dr Hugh Cairns approach to his research was fully respectful of what Yidumduma and his people were able to relate about their cosmology and beliefs. Together they were able to assemble the first comprehensive information about the extent and complexity of the Wardaman’s knowledge of the night sky, the movement of constellations and planets as well as the direct links between this astronomical knowledge and spiritual beliefs and ‘storylines’ embedded in the star constellations.
To call this a form of ‘knowledge’, however complex, cannot really convey the depth of feeling that accompanies the experience of communion with the totems and spiritual figures that the stars were. People who have not experienced the great canopy of the milky way in the night sky from vantage point of the southern hemisphere will have difficulty understanding this feeling of awe that envelopes anyone privileged to be a witness. I purposely do not say that the stars ‘represented’ spirits or totems because this would imply a separation between the star or planet and the spiritual being. In this dreamtime cosmology the stars and planets were fused with spiritual and totemic presences (Thomas, 2011).
However, this does not tell us the full extent of the dreaming.
Just suppose you were able to look into another world. At first your vision is a little shaky. You are not sure of what you are seeing. Images are blurred. Some figures run into each other and come quickly towards you so it is difficult to really discern their outline. Gradually your vision steadies and you begin to see something more distinctly through a haze. Suddenly a great ball like a planet hurtles towards you but veers off to the left. Strange craft full of swiftly changing lights career around each other. Then, like in the story ‘Alice in Wonderland’, you see the large face of a woman peering at you. It is a very large face of a woman with a black mole prominently situated on her chin. The message you get is that this is the Queen of the Night, as in Mozart’s famous opera The Magic Flute. The message is not spoken, but you hear it distinctly anyway. Somehow you just ‘know’ it.
It is time to get out of bed and write down this strange dream. What does it mean?
Is it possible that we really are able to see such things in the other world and that they are not our ‘imagination’. Perhaps they are a different reality. We have convinced ourselves now throughout a few hundred years that such experiences are in our ‘mind’. That is, they are contained somehow within the space of our bodies and are probably due to neurons firing haphazardly in our brains. The result is that we see images that are not connected logically in any way to each other or to our thoughts during waking hours.
Perhaps the disconnected and haziness of these images is due to our inexperience in seeing anything at all in this strange world. We still have not attained enough confidence and stability of our presence there to be able to view things as we do in our waking lives. We are really strangers when it comes to interpreting what we are seeing in this world. An example would be if we were to look through a special viewing machine at cells in a living organism without knowing beforehand anything about the machine or the context of what we are seeing.
No one has told us that this is a microscope and there is no introduction telling us that this is a level of experience that exists all the time without us being aware of it at all. The living cells simply continue to move around with all their brilliant colours – dividing, coalescing, streaming down vast alleys and across great distances of living pipeline – without any assistance from us; but nevertheless they support our very existence.
At night, when we put our heads down on the pillow and drift off into this other world, we see, through another ‘microscope’, a world of which we are completely unaware even though this world has been part of our existence since we first walked the planet. The strange thing is that this dreamtime world was better known to our distant forbears than it is to us. That is difficult to admit for proud sons and daughters of the industrial and scientific revolution.
We have been told about this world throughout the centuries. Yet we believe that it cannot really exist. Nevertheless, our feelings, intellect, creativity, arts and culture come from this source.
Out-of-Body Awareness IS Dreamtime Awareness
Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual…..He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character (Steiner,1910).
For a long time many hundreds of thousands of years humans lived as hunters and gatherers. It was necessary for early humans to have eyes everywhere – ‘eyes in the back of their heads’ - on the lookout for prey and threats. As humans roamed large distances, they needed a mental map to find their way home again. In this dream-like, clairvoyant state, people still had an accurate awareness of their surroundings. In fact, this awareness enhanced their senses and provided a stronger intuitive feeling for what might be lurking in hidden places. Early humans, like Indigenous people today, were armed with stories handed down over generations telling of the whereabouts of food, water, or prey. The myths told them of how the food had been provided originally, as well as where it might be found at certain times of the year. This heightened ability to see and hear.
The Dreamtime was a state of cosmic awareness where Aboriginal people felt themselves to be part of all the land, its animals and vegetation. It is hard to convey what is really meant by that because it requires some hint of cosmic awareness, but if you look at some of Robert’s paintings, you can see the living mystical nature of humans with nature, where they were part of the great natural landscape as far as the eye can see and beyond to the unseen world of the Dreamtime. (Roberts and Mountford, 1970). In an important sense, Steiner went much further than Jung in terms of giving the original world – the dreamtime – a reality. He was much closer to the Wardaman in understanding the way they see the world around them and their place in it.
How Jung and Steiner Approached the Unseen World – the Dreamtime - Differently
Both had a belief in the unseen world, the dreamtime that was connected to the life force – which Jung termed the animus and anima (meaning source of animation) and Steiner called etheric forces. However, although they had very similar beliefs, there were also important differences.
(1) Purpose of the Dreaming State
For Jung, the purpose of understanding better the dream world is to help us negotiate waking life. By interpreting the symbolic messages contained in our dreams we will be better able to integrate the archetypal forces into our modern alienated existence. Our dreams can help us pinpoint the source of our anxiety or depression and give us a clue as to what we can do to resolve these maladies.
For Steiner, the dream world contains the source and meaning of life itself. We go into the dreamtime or spiritual world in order to find our true self, not just to indulge in a mystical union with the Divine, but in order to cross the threshold and absorb the impulses that help us support life and each other throughout our lives. Steiner did not advocate dream analysis, as the psychoanalytical movement did. He thought that dream analysis could not reveal the soul. However, by deepening our awareness of dream states we can achieve a realization that the soul lies behind our ordinary thinking and sense perception.
If this is understood, then there remains but one step to the recognition that the dream-picturing force of the soul also lies at the basis of ordinary thinking and sense perception (Steiner, 1923).
Jung thought that a person in a weakened soul state could learn something to heal the soul by consulting their dreams. Steiner believed we need to be strong in our soul to enter into the other world. It is not something for the faint hearted. However, we can heal by becoming more aware of the impulses we receive from sleeping consciousness and this can help to restore our mind-soul. He thought that a person with a mental illness could not enter into a direct relationship with the dream world.
(2) Development of the Ego out of the Dream State
Jung shared the implicit assumption widespread in modern society, that the ego and defences had always existed in the same sense that we experience ourselves subjectively today. Steiner believed that our ego has evolved through many stages in human evolution in tune with our ability to create a distance between (i.e. objectify) ourselves and ‘objects’ around us. This has reached the point now that even the self has become objectified.
A critical juncture in human history was reached with the invention of written language in the 7th Century BC. In western culture, Plato represented the old consciousness and paved the way for the new. Plato represents the unique point in human history of the West, when the oral traditions of the preceding Homeric Greeks gave way to a new ‘objective’ consciousness.
In The Republic and other dialogues, Plato repeatedly puts forth his philosophy of the Ideas. The Ideas were, in a sense, possible only because Plato’s consciousness had been saturated by the abstract powers of the Greek version of the alphabet. Beginning in the 10th century B.C.E., when the alphabet was first introduced to the Hellenic world, this highly abstract form of communication had been slowly transforming the orientation of the Greek mind. This process eventually culminated in the uniquely abstract form of mental-egoic consciousness articulated in Plato’s philosophy of the Ideas (Poletti, 2000).
Learning a written language makes it possible for people to use abstract concepts. Illiterate people use concrete concepts that confine their thinking to a particular time and place (Luria, 1976). After just six months of learning to read and write, Russian peasants were able to use abstract concepts, thus liberating them for the first time from their restricted view of the world.
Historically, this brought about an enormous change in the way people experienced themselves, that is, in their ego organization. Thus, we cannot understand the development of the human ego without appreciating the impact of historical changes in culture. The ego did not develop in a vacuum, but was moulded in interaction with the material and cultural world around us, which we in humans changed through the changes in their capabilities, in a dialectical sense. Thus, in Steiner’s view, there is a constantly evolving dialogue between the ego, the soul and the dream world that occurs between life and death and across many incarnations leading to a quite different ego and consciousness. Steiner quite clearly believed in reincarnation.
(3) The Goal of Going Within – Enlightenment
Jungian and psychoanalysts, as a whole, have appreciated the individual development of the ego across the individual life span, but not the historical changes in the ego that have occurred throughout history.
For Carl Jung the center of the collective unconscious is the (individual) God-image. One of the most important tasks of the so-called individuation process he defined as the challenge of our life, is thus to find this inner God-image in one’s own soul and to find the right individual relationship to it (Roth, 1997).
This was Jung’s goal for individual development and it coincides closely with the goal of mystics through the middle ages.
Steiner’s goal goes a step further in the modern age where we must take into account the intellectual and consciousness soul.
If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur ….he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul (Steiner, 1910).
Steiner saw the development of the intellectual soul occurring in close communion with the development of an internalized conscience. Prior to the 6th Century BC when people still experienced the world in the clairvoyant awareness, wrongdoing and evil were also externalized in the environment around them. The deep feeling that something some action was wrong was experienced ‘out there’ and called forth dire consequences such as the punishment of the Gods. Bad deeds rose up before the human soul as the voice of some God disapproving of the action. We now take it for granted that such disapproval in within our own heart and soul.
When Dante journeyed through his underworld which he shared with spirits of dead people he had known and famous figures from the past, he came across a savage beast which blocked his path:
Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.
This beast was……
so malign and ruthless,
That never doth she glut her greedy will,
And after food is hungrier than before.
By Dante’s time, in the middle ages, people had internalized the fearful figures of evil in their waking consciousness, but they still appeared as externalized figures in the dream world. Even so, there were hundreds of years more in which evil could be seen personified in others before we became aware that we were really projecting our own experience of evil onto others. So it is true by the time we come to Jung’s era at the beginning of the 20th Century, such dream figures as Dante’s savage beast would be commonly thought of as symbolic of evil. But this was due to a long historical development of the mind-soul, whereby our intellect had become much stronger with respect to dealing with external events – both good and evil.
In 1944, following a heart attack, Jung had an out-of-body experience that he described in Memories, Dreams and Reflections. In contrast to the many dreams that he had reported on, this vision, although fantastic, was something that made sense. Like Dante, he saw places he knew such as the Temple of the Holy Tooth in Kandy, Ceylon, and met a person whom he knew in life – his treating doctor. The vision reported many truths about himself, about his soul. It did not need to be interpreted.
This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived (Jung, 1944 ).
(4) Development of the Rational Soul – the Mind-Soul
In classical medicine up until Jung’s time, the soul played an important part in healing being the expression of the life force in the individual on the one hand, and our connection to the Divine source of the life force on the other. Paracelsus, born 1493, Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim in Maria-Einsiedeln near Zurich, considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, distinguished between the Rational Soul, which is the connecting link between body and spirit and the reasoning part of man's nature and the Spiritual Soul, which does not need to reason, as it knows by intuition.
It is difficult to assess Jung's view of the intellect whether he saw it as a feature of the soul, because he was reticent to use the word ‘soul’ preferring to call it the ‘psyche’. In this respect he reflects the culture around him. Most people today do not make any connection between the soul, the mind and the intellect. The soul seems to have remained the medieval soul.
We could ask is Jung’s ‘psyche’ really the same as ‘soul’? There are at least two sides to this question:
1) the need to transform medieval terms associated with religion and the supernatural into concepts that were cleansed of these associations and palatable to modern 20th Century scientific intellects;
2) the possibility that there really is a separate playing field of the emotions in the individual subconscious which may be associated with the soul, but is nevertheless separate and the domain of the new army of mental healers – psychiatrists and psychologists, who could enter here.
In contrast to Jung’s medieval mysticism which invoked individual growth towards enlightenment by following the process of individuation, Steiner saw modern enlightenment taking place via development of the rational or intellectual soul. He agreed with Jung that there was a place for individual mysticism but warned that exclusive dependence on this inward path could lead to a ‘refined form of egotism’.
“This egotism can be overcome if the ego is constrained to pass outside itself and make its activity flow into the external world”.
He described the goal of spiritual development “On Heaven’s Way” in terms that the Wardaman people would understand:
we shall come to a spiritual realm which is coloured neither by our own inner world nor by the outer world — a realm which has the same ground as the infinite world of stars shining in on us, as the atmosphere which envelops the earth, as the green plant-cover, as the rivers flowing into the sea; while the same divine-spiritual element lives in our thinking, feeling and willing and permeates our inner and outer worlds (Steiner,1910).
Thus in the future, in Steiner’s view, if we follow the scientific path to its logical conclusion, our mind-soul will develop to a point where we will understand the Dreaming awareness of Indigenous people with our strong intellectual ego development that has occurred through science.
(5) Therapy and Healing in the Light of these Alternative Views of Enlightenment
When it comes to therapy, Jung and Steiner are worlds apart. Although Jung had a passionate interest in alchemy he did not seem to understand the life force. He seems to have bowed to the prevailing views of his time at the last minute so to speak. Everything he knew was driving him forward to an acknowledgement of the life force as the true medium of therapy as Paracelsus had taught generations of physicians. However, Jung held back until the end of his life when life experience seems to have convinced him that we do indeed have a soul that is the source of life. Perhaps he knew it all along but could not express it.
Steiner took no heed of the Newtonian ideas of reality prevalent during Victorian times and in the early 20th Century. He followed his intuitive soul. He knew that in addition to the chemical and biological forces, which he did not deny were present, there was the etheric force - the life force - that Paracelsus called the Evastraum. The life force comes directly into the human physical body as light:
What is important for you, however, at the moment is to know that this is what we mean by “light”. Now the astral body is connected with this light; that is to say, it has direct relation — not indirect through the etheric body — with all that underlies sense-perception on the earth. This is a most interesting fact. Outside lives the light in the ether, but we have also the etheric within us. The light works upon our ether body. When we wake up, we not only come into connection with the light that is within us; but, turning aside as it were from the light that is within us, we member ourselves into the light that streams through the external world (Steiner, 1924).
(6) Scientific Credibility for All Pervasive Energy
We may find as time goes on that quantum physics acknowledges the scientific credibility of this view of living vibrational waves that penetrate all things those we now consider inanimate as well as the animate. The “physical domain is interconnected with a ‘subtle energy’ domain” (Tiller, 1997).
Laboratory studies conducted over several decades demonstrate quantum entanglement and non-local influences between living subjects at the level of cells as well as between human subjects separated by significant distances or sealed chambers (Thaheld, 2007). He point out that early quantum physicists thought that non local entanglement occurred only with inanimate objects.
Examples he cites are when two subjects meditated together and were then separated in sealed Faraday chambers, the non stimulated subject showed similar evoked potentials on EEG measures as the subject being stimulated. Neither sensory signals not electromagnetic signals were involved as the subjects were in sealed chambers (Bischoff et al, 2003).
These experiments were originally conducted by Jacob Grinberg-Zylberbaum (1994) and have been replicated by Standish et al. (2003) and Thaheld (2004).
In a similar vein, experiments done by researchers at the University of Milan (Pizzi et al 2006) show that human neurons that are shielded from each other, display the same pattern of responses to lazer stimulation. Professor Pizzi and co workers (2007) have shown that neural network colonies, grown from a single cell with identical DNA, are able to communicate even when they are electromagnetically isolated from each other.
Just as much of science has struggled to come to terms with these and many other anomalous findings, psychotherapy has also struggled to breathe new life into paradigms that cannot find life having rejected it in tune with the old science – pre relativity and quantum physics. We cannot find life by dividing and dissecting dreams, yet we know dreams are important!
Our dreams reveal the life force and sometimes we even see the ‘light’ in our dreams.
I had a dream once many years ago when I was working in a geriatric hospital in Denmark. An elderly woman had had one leg amputated and the consultant was loath to tell her that the other one needed to be amputated too. She had a terrible grey colour in her cheeks. That night I had a dream where I saw the streaming light down and heard a message that ‘everything would be alright for her’. I took this to mean that she would recover from the operation, but I was greeted with the news on arriving at work that she had died during the operation.
I have long believed that much of what we do in therapy whether we think it is informed by good science or not is the result of intuition and the messages we receive during the night from the dreamtime world. This is also Steiner’s view.
(7) Should we Interpret Dreams?
Let us take a step back from the details of psychotherapy for a moment and reassess. Is Steiner right when he says that our dream life is important in that it tells us that there is ‘something else’ in the universe that we do not understand and that this ‘something else’ is our soul life, as Indigenous people believed, but we do not necessarily gain much by trying to interpret our dreams?
Steiner placed great importance on the dreaming whether we are sleeping or in a dream-like state. At these times we are in an out-of-body state where our soul is being influenced by spiritual forces that come to expression in our waking state. Our soul, which is ‘the light’, slips into our physical body when we are awake and expresses the spiritual truths through our ego what we have absorbed in the out-of-body state during sleep. Following on from what physicists are now proposing about energy, Steiner argues that:
There is no such thing as what the physicists call matter. In reality there are only forces and the forces — as, for example, gravity (there are other forces too, of course; magnetic and electric forces are all alike in this, that the ego organisation is in direct connection with each one of them and, in the normal human being, is so during the whole of waking life (Steiner, 1924).
Thus we are in direct contact with the earth in our waking life and with the spiritual life when asleep or in an out-of-body state such as meditation or trance.
Various forms of mental and physical illnesses can be explained, in Steiner’s terms, by the inability of the soul to slip perfectly into the ‘glove’ of the body in the waking state. This could be because of permanent damage to the physiology of the brain in cases of schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease or Alzheimer’s Disease for example, or could be transient problems due to lack of proper acknowledgment of the existence of a limb or congestion in the lungs or other organs.
Thus, Steiner would not recommend dream analysis for someone with these diseases, whereas in Jungian terms, serious mental disorders are caused by human failures which dreams seek to remedy (Loker, 2007).
Steiner explains serious mental illness by the inability of the soul to recognize the physical body in waking consciousness:
Let us suppose then that you have this person who is said to be suffering from grave mental illness…... He cannot get into the physical body and ether body, he remains outside them all the time; and so, being unable to make use of the physical body, he is, you see, insane (Steiner, 1924).
He suggested that the person may have been intelligent in a previous incarnation, followed by imprisonment in a subsequent incarnation. This meant that he did not have any experience of his soul interacting with the material world and therefore did not feel any ego identification within himself. Steiner thought that it was important for us to hone the soul within as it formed the ego without in interaction with the world as we grow up and develop throughout our lives. If we do not, we remain “completely outside the field of experience of the physical and the etheric body”. The person “therefore returns to incarnation in entire ignorance of the interior of the human body”.
This sounds rather odd, but Steiner believed that the ego was a product of the soul and that the ego, lays hold of the physical body (for the moment, we will leave the etheric body out of the picture), and the physical body adapts itself to gravity (Steiner, 1924).
(8) Healing
In his final interview, the eminent Jungian scholar, Edinger, talks about Jung’s monumental contribution as the ‘reality of the psyche’ which he equates with the soul, juxtaposed to the personality theories of other strands of psychoanalysis which leads to ever more drilling down into the complexities of human personality development and of “interminable theorization, intellectualization, conceptualization, and it skates above the more profound realities” (Jaffe., L, Interview with Edward F. Edinger, 1998).
Even in this interview where Edinger offer the highest accolades for Jung’s work, he acknowledges that not many people really understood Jung - a view he shared with Jung himself. The reason Edinger gives for this lack of understanding is, from his own experience as a person who had benefited from Jungian analysis, that Jung really believed in the soul and our connection with the Divine. This was Steiner’s belief, but Jung was reluctant to put it forward until very late in life. Edinger saw the benefits in Jung’s very broad understanding of the role of God in individuation (the unacknowledged God). Jung felt that God had to be approached from within as well as from without and that the psyche or soul had to be experienced directly. He really believed in the inner man as Paracelsus had taught. The inner man, the soul, could not be approached by analysis or theorization.
Jung was trying to keep religion, God and the soul at arm’s length because he had built up a whole edifice of therapy around the secularization of some core religious beliefs – such as the soul. The word ‘metaphysical’ itself is a secularization of the spiritual. It really tells the listener “I am talking about the spiritual but I want you not to use any spiritual words to describe it”. Jung used two languages – one was regarding therapy and the metaphysical world and the other the language of spirituality.
In discussing the complexes that many people develop in childhood Edinger referred to Jung’s concept of the ‘not yet transformed God’ who is the Old Testament God who punishes us in our now internalized conscience for our misdeeds. This God can be transformed by internalized forgiveness and compassion ‘the Christ incarnation as the internalized forgiving God’. Edinger’s view was that this was his experience of healing. But this was not what most personality oriented psychotherapists were aiming for or interested in.
This is in fact what Steiner would have understood as healing:
For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed.
Perhaps the reason that Jung is not understood is that most people who want to be ‘Jungian’ want to flirt with enlightenment but not identify with or absorb into their being the full impact of acknowledging the soul as real. Even Jung gave it another name, as though he could not say the word itself. Only towards the end of his life did he really grow into an understanding of his soul.
(9) Suffering, Healing and Being Genuine
At one point, Edinger says that Jung did not heal people because he had techniques, or knew how to analyse dreams or personalities in detail, but because he was a great person. “He could help people through the impact of his greatness”. By this he means he was a real person who had lived and suffered the agonies that every person must suffer to know their own soul in the depths of their inner person and come back into the world to help others on the path.
The Wardaman people knew the value of suffering in order to create a mature adult who was aware of their responsibilities to their fellow human beings, to the land and their whole spiritual environment. Initiation was accompanied by isolation from the rest of the tribe for a long period of time, together with artificially induced pain, both physical and mental. It was a disciplinary process that was necessary for the young person to give up the carefree attitude of childhood and take on the responsibilities of the adult world. These responsibilities were intimately connected to individual and collective survival, in every sense, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Steiner’s philosophy did not lead to individual psychotherapy. Nevertheless, he did have some important ideas that have resulted in a worldwide education movement. Two of his ideas could be important for individual psychotherapy:
Eurythmy is feeling the soul within. I that have already alluded to Steiner’s view that the some people do not feel ‘at one with’ the soul, either wholly, as in the case of serious mental illness, or partially. His therapy to correct partial non-alignment of the physical, etheric body and the soul he called eurythmy.
The second idea is connected to the first and arises out of his belief that in order to understand another person with an ailment of some kind, the therapist or teacher needs to develop sympathetic understanding. This requires that the teacher develop, deep within his own soul, a deep compassion with the child’s experience. As long as the teacher or therapist feel ‘on the outside looking in’, the child cannot push through with his own energy. The teacher develops this sympathetic understanding by gradually…
Eliminating in himself all subjective reaction of feeling when faced with this phenomenon in the child. By ridding himself of every trace of subjective reaction, the teacher educates his own astral body (Steiner, 1924).
Such sympathetic understanding could be said to be the primary building block of any therapy. By identifying with the person’s problems at a deeper level and accepting the blockage within himself, a therapist can remove the blockage from the other person. This is a transference that heals.
Conclusion
It is ironical that these two great men really arrived at the same conclusion about the ultimate value of the dream-time, the soul, and the role of human suffering in molding the adult ego. The details of therapy may not be important in this context. Edinger said that most of us cannot rely on greatness, but perhaps he was mistaken in thinking that it was greatness that was the healing factor in Jung’s approach. What we can rely on is being totally honest in pursuing genuine spiritual development and that we are willing to share this honestly with another person.
It is impossible to simulate wisdom. In the close relationship of healing, any simulation is evident. Is transference another word for an inauthentic, dishonest relationship? Honesty cannot be demonstrated. It is something that we all know deep in the soul.
In the dream-time world, dishonesty is impossible because the ego has not yet developed defenses that can simulate many different, and sometimes conflicting, social roles. The social masks that modern people are used to do not exist in the dream-time. Individuation is a necessary process in modern humans if they are to uncover the underlying essential self and restore the life force. To bring forth the life force, enlightenment, requires total honesty in one’s being. Indigenous people are very aware of dishonesty in social relations because in the dream-time awareness dishonesty was impossible.
Perhaps this is why the psychoanalysts looked to dreams for clues about what to do in order to heal a person, because dreams tell the truth. However, endless analysis of dreams in a person who has a weak mind-soul may not help that person ‘push through’ their soul into waking life, but cement them further in their weakness. A study of Steiner’s views really tells us that he was closer to the dream-time awareness of Indigenous people. We all share the dream-time and can arrive at a better appreciation of our true self if we open our understanding to the great mysteries of the universe.
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