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Perhaps the key to Jung’s writings is his discovery of an objective psyche. Some mental processes he showed to not have a strictly personal etiology. He compassed off an underlying psychic stratum whose influences are felt by the Ego. An archetype is a processes, a gradient whose influence is objective in that it is universally present in all humans, is contained in a stratum therefore independent of any particular Ego’s will. The position of the Ego with respect to archetypal influences, Jung counsels, best be met by an Ego willing to bow before archetypal situational imperatives.As an example of an archetype’s will, take the story Old Yeller (film) - Wikipedia.1 Corinthians 13:11 King James Version (KJV)11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.The archetypal theme of Old Yeller is coming of age. Coming of age, occurring during adolescence, is a psychic gradient that just is. We must bow to the imperative of adapting to the world as it is in order to make our own way in the world. (Adapting to the world can also mean being active as an agent of social change.) We lose the playful days of childhood if by fortune we ever even had such days. Metaphorically, the beloved pet dog, our instinctive child’s life, has to be sacrificed in order to come of age. That sacrifice has to be made, and made by the child herself. We find the same archetypal theme in the novel The Yearling. So we find similarities in other stories and to those similar stories we respond from the depth of our soul and we are inconsolable but know a change is coming, know that the wildness of the child must be sacrificed in order for us to be effective and to regenerate our species. Felt in the depths of our soul, we weep and bow to the exigency life presents to us in that stage of life.I’ve heard science described as the search for invariants in nature. In the nature/nurture debate, Jung’s science put objective psychic invariants as elemental to human experience. Jung rooted some of his views in principles, e.g., the principle of the conservation of energy grounding his theory of psychic energy. The existence of archetypes he did not ground in scientific principles. Instead his argument for the existence of archetypal processes was inductive and his evidence can be interpreted to not support the idea of an objective psyche. However neuroscience has ‘discovered’ the objective psyche and for now at least, they call it the ‘brain’.Brain makes decisions before you even know itSo in the article linked to above, when reading it, substitute the world ‘unconscious’ for brain when appropriate. Doing so should give you a sense of what I mean by the word ‘objective’. Independent, in a category of its own, a fact, having an influence, etc. Neuroscience, in using the term brain, uses a term to identify an area of investigation we don’t much understand. Neuroscience’s terms reflect the proposition that all behavior of organisms can be explained by the behavior of atoms. Atoms are conceived as lifeless, having no will of their own. In that context, consider the following from Jung as he writes about the spirit of our age. From C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology, page 174, regarding the spirit of our age:Belief in the substantiality of the spirit yielded more and more to the obtrusive conviction that material things alone have substance, till at last, after nearly four hundred years, the leading European thinkers and investigators came to regard the mind as wholly dependent on matter and material causes.We are certainly not justified in saying that philosophy or natural science has brought about this complete volte-face…Let no one suppose that so radical a change in man’s outlook could be brought about by reasoning and reflection, for no chain of reasoning can prove or disprove the existence of either mind or matter. Both these concepts, as every intelligent man today may ascertain for himself, are mere symbols that stand for something unknown and unexplored, and this something is postulated or denied according to man’s mood and disposition or as the spirit of the age dictates. There is nothing to prevent the speculative intellect from treating psyche, on the one hand, as a complicated biochemical phenomenon, and at bottom, a mere play of electrons, or, on the other, from regarding the unpredictable behaviour of electrons as the sign of mental life in them.The fact that a metaphysics of the mind was supplanted in the nineteenth century by a metaphysics of matter, is a trick if we consider it as a question for the intellect; yet regarded from the standpoint of psychology, it is an unexampled revolution in man’s outlook upon the world. Other-worldliness is converted into matter-of-factness; empirical boundaries are set to man’s discussion of every problem, to his choice of purposes, and even to what he calls “meaning.” Intangible, inner happenings seem to have to yield place to things in the external, tangible world, and no value exists if it is not founded on a so-called fact. At least, this is how it appears to a simple mind.The spirit of our age is not new. Consider Epicureanism The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World: Catherine Nixey: 9780544800885: Amazon.com: Books Radio interview with Nixey here, about 15 minutes in: http://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk... regarding Epicureanism, where accordingly:There are no gods, we’re all made of atoms, and there’s no such thing as creation by a god, the world is just full of atoms coming together and moving apart and when you die your atoms will just move away, they’ll just go into the great space of the world and you’ll be kind of reconstituted within the universe. But I mean they don’t really go into that. They just say there is no god, we’re just atoms, we’re atoms and stuff, and they have this proto…proto-Darwinian kind of argument for how animals came about and came to be different. They say the fox is really cunning so it survived and the dog is really fast so it survived and every animal has a trait that helps it exist.We live within a culture, within time and place. Yet at the same time, we know things are really not quite that simple, know that from experiences anomalous but not contrived. Jung discusses experience in his BBC interview Face to Face:See about 22:20 in where Jung distinguishes his idea of an objective psyche from Freud’s idea of the unconscious, my transcription:Well, chiefly his [Freud’s] purely personal approach and his disregard of the historical conditions of man. You see we depend largely upon our history. We are shaped through education through the influence of the parents which are by no means always personal. They were prejudiced or they were influenced by historical ideas or what I call dominance; and that is a most decisive factor in psychology. {We are not only of} today or yesterday, we are of an immense age. {garbled}Later, about 32:40 in:Because, you know there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future, you can see around corners, such things, only ignorance denies these facts. It is quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts speak/show that the psyche in part at least is not dependent upon these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously doesn’t, then to that extent, psyche is not {subordinated} to those laws. And that may serve a practical…continuation of life of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space.That psyche has those peculiar faculties is a matter of fact and not a matter of belief, yet the fact that those faculties exist does not mean they can be subordinated to limited goals “which are not of real importance”. Such faculties are not a “personal possession.” Writes Jung :The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?That is the telling question of his life.Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost.The greatest limitation for man is the “self”; it is manifested in the experience: “I am only that!” Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious.In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other.In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination that is, ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of living space and increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge to ask man to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation.Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous.Without them, no perception of the unlimited is possible–and, consequently, no coming to consciousness either–merely a delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication with large numbers and an avidity for political power.Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world.The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~C. G. Jung in Memories Dreams and Reflections.Jung had a succinct description of the spirit of our age. It is demarked by the problem of the “rejected feminine”. For a man, the anima is a link to the infinite, and I gather that for women, the Wild Woman archetype, as described by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, is a symbolic expression of an ultimate unknowable, just as in my earlier example of Old Yeller as a motif, we can only experience our brush against something sad and loving that yet must be so. That direct experience of the infinite is mediated to us by symbol, by numinous archetypal imagery. Then, and only then, can one say with Jung “I know.” And what is known directly can’t be unlearned. It imposes upon one a moral responsibility and that is the reason that Jung stressed the moral position one must take with respect to the unconscious material that inevitably coalesces around our inferior function. In that regard Jung is offering advice to a new Buddha, saying she must return from somewhere else and be responsible in life for what she now knows.Here’s an example of an encounter with an archetype. In the movie Wild, the protagonist has an encounter with the Wild Woman archetype, the animistic spirit of knowing nature that exists both within and about us. A superficial viewing of the film might miss the protagonist’s encounter with a wild canine while on her walkabout. It looks at her, she at it, and it moves something of the ‘other’ in her, something of the infinite that is knowing nature. Summoned or not, she will arrive, it cannot be otherwise. And once met, she leaves and we must let her go, she is a wild thing. How can we know what we are except in the presence of something we are not? Again, Jung stresses our limitations as always in the mix. You can get a sense of that from Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections when he describes his dream where he and an accomplice killed Siegfried. There he writes of his identity with the hubris of Siegfried and no new aspect of soul is received except in what may feel like a defeat of the conscious position. It is. And it isn’t.An example of a fuller experience is given by Natalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down the Bones. Grace, enlightenment comes to her in the remembered image of herself as a thirteen year old feeling awful about herself as she sat in a school classroom, focused on her feelings about what she wasn’t and still wanted to be. But how can you know that what you are is enough, how can you know that nature places her bets upon the individual, places her hopes and dreams upon that which truly isn’t “enough” when considered only from the point of view of the ‘dominance’ that exists in any particular time and place? Natalie was uplifted. Jung, on the other hand, was so full of himself in the first half of his life that he had to take a great fall, he was an embarrassment of psychic riches and he let those riches define him and his ambitions. “In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” What may be true is what he doesn’t there mention, that is, that he had to climb down those earthly stairs after falling from high in the sky because of his break with Freud, and a sense of that for Jung is to be found in the writings of Laurens van der Post on Jung.