Carl Jung and the end of humanity

Peter Kingsley’s “Catafalque” and the birth of a new world

Peter Kingley’s Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (Catafalque Press, 2018) offers a fascinating and (to many rational-minded scholars and practitioners of Jungian psychology) sacrilegious glimpse into the spiritual life of Carl Jung — his “personality No. 2.” As one would expect from Kingsley, this 2-Volume set of 800+ pages (including 300+ pages of notes) is a treasure throve of invaluable insights. A case in point:

instead of leaving the sacred well alone, which would have been the wisest thing to do, we domesticated it no less effectively than we managed to domesticate everything else; trivialized and thoroughly prettified it; agreed on making it into something politically correct. But this happens to be almost the exact opposite of the ancient understanding — which is that spirituality and the sacred offer the profoundest challenge to our complacency, as well as presenting the most radical threat. The spirit is not only there to make us think deeply. It exists to take us into places where thinking becomes useless and even our cleverest ideas are left behind. [C 9–10]

This collective “we” is as old as mankind. It is what Sri Aurobindo¹ has called the “material man”:

The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born, it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature’s inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth. [SY 23]

Because the material man feels challenged and threatened by “the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life,” he assigns to him, “if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even serve as a human lightning-rod receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from the social edifice” [SY 23].

So effectively have we domesticated and trivialized the sacred that we imagine we can now do without human lightning-rods. But of course they are with us, among us, and Carl Jung appears to have been one of them. In 1926, in a letter “not published in the selections now available”,² Jung stated that he saw it as his central role to help “God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put on him by loving his own reason more than God’s secret intentions,” and declared: “There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science” [C 71].

Paul Brunton³ recalls a conversation with Jung during which Jung stated “that he kept his mystical belief and experience secret in order to preserve his scientific reputation.” And where he failed to keep them secret, “[m]any expert hands came together to smooth over and set straight what he had said; domesticate it; ‘auntify’ it by making it into something even the stuffiest of old maids would be happy to hear, and discreetly, when necessary, help it disappear” [C 78]. In another letter, dated 20 August 1945, Jung wrote:

You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. [C 118]

Anyone who has taken a few earnest steps on the path of Yoga can relate to Jung’s point about disease. (Needless to say, by “Yoga” I do not mean the domesticated and trivialized version practiced in yoga studios.)

When Jung “backed out of cooperating with the United Nations in their grand plans for world peace,” it was because he “saw the arrogance and utter futility of rushing out to correct the world’s wrongs in the firm belief that my own attitude is right and true” [C 178]. “It’s a very long step from this conviction to the conclusion: the world is wrong and therefore I am wrong too,” he wrote. Jung saw that “nothing whatsoever can be done on any human or spiritual level until each one of us recognizes our own perfect ‘complicity in the act of evil’” [C 179].

A central concept of Jungian psychology is inflation, which occurs when an individual’s conscious identity becomes merged with an archetype of the unconscious. At a certain point in Kingsley’s narrative,

Jung is steering well away from what could seem to be the manageable problem of one, or two, individual patients’ unhealthy inflation towards something far more terrifyingly real: collective inflation. And while nothing could be easier than to sit down and wisely discuss the collective inflation experienced by Germans during the lead-up to either of the first two world wars, we are never going to feel at all comfortable sitting down to confront the mass inflation of the culture we now live in — which is why a third world war is guaranteed. [C 181]

Kingsley’s mention, in close proximity, of the U.N. and of a third world war is eerily reminiscent of remarks made by Sri Aurobindo in his 1950 postscript chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity, which was written in serialized form between September 1915 and July 1918 (see this post). That such an organized endeavor as the formation of the League of Nations after World War I “should be launched at all and proceed on its way for some time without an early breakdown was,” to Sri Aurobindo, “in itself an event of capital importance and meant the initiation of a new era in world history; especially, it was an initiative which, even if it failed, could not be allowed to remain without a sequel but had to be taken up again until a successful solution has safeguarded the future of mankind.”

Fail it did, and taken up again it was. The result was the formation of the UN. But the attempt to escape from the errors of the League of Nations “was not thoroughgoing and not altogether successful. A strong surviving element of oligarchy remained in the preponderant place assigned to the five great Powers in the Security Council and was clinched by the device of the veto.” A third attempt, the substitution of a differently constituted body, may eventually have to be made, but it “could only come if this institution collapsed as the result of a new catastrophe.” That new catastrophe appears to be on hand. If a third world war does come, “it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour” (towards Human Unity).

Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done....

The catafalque of Voltaire

At the end of his life in 1961, Jung had visions “no one wants to know about” [C 418]. For the few surviving details one has to rely on his closest collaborator, Marie-Louise von Franz, and an interview she gave almost twenty years later. There she recalls that Jung tried to convey to his family something “when he was right dying,” as she put in in her rough and ready English. They couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, so he called for her, but they refused to call her. One of Jung’s daughters took notes, however, and after his death she gave them to von Franz. It contains a drawing with a line going up and down, captioned “The last fifty years of humanity,” along with some remarks about the final catastrophe lying ahead. Before bringing the interview to a close, von Franz recounts that when she saw Jung last, “he also had a vision while I was with him. But there he said, ‘I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But, thank God, it’s not the whole planet.’ So, perhaps, that is what lies ahead.”

Kingsley expresses doubts that these last words form part of what Jung actually said: “if Jung was really the one who said ‘thank God it’s not the whole planet’ — rather than von Franz letting her memory impose the comment on him — this will have been the result of her insistently questioning him, as he struggled the best he could to communicate, and dragging out of him some reassurance because that’s what she wanted to hear” [C 420]. However, this is neither here nor there:

the contrast imagined by von Franz between ultimate destruction and a destruction that “only” devastates enormous stretches of the earth ... is no real contrast at all. Traditionally it has always been understood that — in those gigantic catastrophes which wipe out virtually every last remnant of humanity — somehow and somewhere a few tiny seeds or embers will manage to survive. A part of the prophetic design, just as much for ancient Greeks as ancient Sumerians or Babylonians or Jews, is that there has to be some Noah. [C 422]

Taken literally, “the last fifty years of humanity” ended in 2011. To Kingsley, the present civilization has come to an end. “The movement has stopped. The energy behind its momentum is over; spent” [C 430]:

people keep on rushing around because they don’t want to realize anything has stopped. Just the same as those cartoon characters who race out into the void and don’t notice they are right above the abyss, we go on trying to think everything is normal. For a few unreal moments we are running above empty space although there is nothing any more, no foundation or support, to hold or take us forward. We are simply being carried by the ghostlike residue of that original movement which is nothing more, now, than the momentum of our own unconscious habits.

But even that will fizzle out: come to a stop until everything drops, which is when there is chaos. And this is the reason why all the familiar structures around us are having to crash and collapse. It’s not because of corruption, or because the wrong people got into power, or to make way for something fairer and stronger and better that we can build.

It’s because the energy needed to prop up our collective existence is exhausted — and there is the undertow, ever so imperceptible, of the opposite movement stirring. The trouble is, though, that this new direction has nothing to do with anything our minds are familiar with. It’s nothing those minds of ours can be a part of, because it’s completely contrary to whatever they think they know. [C 430–431]

We are, that is to say, in a transition between two ages. To the cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Jean Gebser,⁴ what characterizes such transitions is a mutation from one consciousness structure to another. And such a transition is tantamount to a transmutation of one world into another. When a new consciousness structure irrupts, is begins to disrupts the old ways of making sense. The old structure enters its final, deficient phase, in which it exhausts itself in a protracted struggle of resistance, doing its best to frustrate the efflorescence of the new.

Kingsley’s take on this transition, however, is a bit too dark for my taste. If “now isn’t [yet] the time for giving birth to anything truly new,” it this doesn’t mean that

our present age will ... drag on into eternity for its allocated time — a blank, an empty nothingness that counts for nothing. And whether that happens to be a time of brute barbarism or technological annihilation or technological perfection doesn’t matter at all, because in terms of humanity there will be nothing doing. [439]

Kingsley tells us to expect a “few centuries” that will be “completely fallow, static, dead.” I suppose there are people who need to hear this. And if “humanity” stands for a characteristically mental way of dealing with the world, a way that will eventually be replaced by a characteristically supramental way, then it is true that our human ways are exhausted. We are at our wit’s end. It is also true, in a sense, that there is “no need now for optimism or hope”:

we have entered a place where every hope has to be abandoned and to keep on indulging in optimism is a shameless dereliction of our duty. The one thing needed is the exact opposite of our manufactured hoping, which is the divine reality of faith because faith is the most extraordinary flower. [442–443]

This is true if “hope” and “optimism” stand for a misplaced faith in humanity’s characteristically mental abilities to get the better of its adversities. T.S. Eliot, in the second of his Four Quartets, said much the same, except he put even faith in suspended animation:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing, wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing, there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The purpose of Kingsley’s work, as he now sees it, is “to provide a catafalque for our western world” [442]. “Catafalque” comes from an old Italian word used to describe the decorated, elegantly embroidered, wooden structure that would be erected as the base on which a famous or important person’s coffin could be placed.

Just as there have to be people who consciously help to bring a culture into being, there have to be those who consciously help to bring it to an end. And this is the moment for the catafalque, when we need to be brave enough to focus on just what’s needed because the catafalque is also for us. [444]

What’s needed is to “consciously leave ourselves behind, shed absolutely everything, strip every trace of identification or attachment away.”

As for this book: you are welcome to take it seriously if that will help you not to take yourself seriously. But the worst thing would be to take it seriously only for it to trouble you or weigh you down.... It’s only by shedding everything, including ourselves, that we sow the seeds of the future. [445]

I conclude with some excerpts from three consecutive conversations the Mother had in 1957 with members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and students of the Ashram’s school.⁵

I announced to you all that this new world was born. But it has been so engulfed, as it were, in the old world that so far the difference has not been very perceptible to many people. Still, the action of the new forces has continued very regularly, very persistently, very steadily, and to a certain extent, very effectively....

[Our vision] is a divinisation of life, a transformation of the material world into a divine world.... But this could be a continuation with an improvement, a widening of the old world as it was ... but what has happened, the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled — where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed — unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, growing — until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly....

We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young, very weak — not in its essence but in its outer manifestation — not yet recognised, not even felt, denied by the majority. But it is here. It is here, making an effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result. But the road to it is a completely new road which has never before been traced out — nobody has gone there, nobody has done that! It is a beginning, a universal beginning. So, it is an absolutely unexpected and unpredictable adventure.

There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this: “I invite you to the great adventure.” It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails — a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you... well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow — I have no idea.

One must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has been constructed, and then... set off walking into the unknown. And — come what may! There....

What is indispensable in every case is the ardent will for progress, the willing and joyful renunciation of all that hampers the advance: to throw far away from oneself all that prevents one from going forward, and to set out into the unknown with the ardent faith that this is the truth of tomorrow, inevitable, which must necessarily come, which nothing, nobody, no bad will, even that of Nature, can prevent from becoming a reality — perhaps of a not too distant future — a reality which is being worked out now and which those who know how to change, how not to be weighed down by old habits, will surely have the good fortune not only to see but to realise.

People sleep, they forget, they take life easy — they forget, forget all the time.... But if we could remember ... that we are at an exceptional hour, a unique time, that we have this immense good fortune, this invaluable privilege of being present at the birth of a new world, we could easily get rid of everything that impedes and hinders our progress.

So, the most important thing, it seems, is to remember this fact; even when one doesn’t have the tangible experience, to have the certainty of it and faith in it; to remember always, to recall it constantly, to go to sleep with this idea, to wake up with this perception; to do all that one does with this great truth as the background, as a constant support, this great truth that we are witnessing the birth of a new world.

We can participate in it, we can become this new world. And truly, when one has such a marvellous opportunity, one should be ready to give up everything for its sake.

1. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1999).

2. G. Adler, Aspects of Jung’s Personality and Work, Psychological Perspectives 6, 11–21 (1975).

3. The Notebooks of Paul Brunton Vol. 8 (Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation, 1988).

4. J. Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart (DVA, 1949, 1953); The Ever-Present Origin, translated by Noel Barstad (Ohio University Press, 1985).

5. The Mother: Questions and Answers 1957–1958, pp. 150–160 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2004).