Carl Jung & Rudolf Steiner (3)

Individuation & Integration

“We must bring our original mind back to consciousness, where it never has been before and where it has never undergone critical self-reflection.” Re-acquainting ourselves with ever-present origin of consciousness is no simple task, since individuation cannot be accomplished by mental reflection alone. Jung’s method of active imagination will be explored and developed along Steiner’s spiritual science in the hopes that a possible way towards the integration of body, soul and spirit is uncovered.

For Jung the initial irruption of psychic disturbances that he later came to describe as the result of a process of “active imagination” were more traumatic than constructive. In the depth of his solitude Jung met himself. He started to educate himself to teach him a greater form of self-esteem : “Accept en learn embracing your shadow.”  This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way,”sufficient to frighten off most people.”

According to Steiner human beings long ago lost immediate contact with the spiritual world due to the emerge of the ego, which has redirected all our attentions to the physical body and the external sensory world – Kierkegaard’s lowest principle : “The esthetical Self” beneath “The ethical Self” and finally “The Religious Self” – Dabrowski’s highest level within existentionism or altruism at High Gifted children and adults.

“When our soul really attains to imagination, it senses in its life of visualizations something akin to what it feels in its life of perceptions (mainly intuitive intelligence – moì). In the latter the soul feels its direct contact with the outer world, with corporeality; in imagination it feels an indirect contact with a world that at first also appears to it as an outer world, but this is the outer world of the spirit.”

Read here (again) Kierkegaard’s religious Self or in my words the spiritual Intelligence. Remembering that Intelligence is synonymous to the Greek word “Entelecheia” meaning “Potential actualized” (see my book "Apprenti"). It does not matter which potential I mean in this quote. It’s this spectre of Intelligence, existing of physical, rhythmic, relational, mental and spiritual aspects (and perhaps some more). For Jung individuation is all that can prevent human civilization from spiralling into disorder and chaos of mass-mindness. “The change must begin with one In-Dividual.”  Nobody can afford to look around and wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

The method of active imagination  is Jung’s way of gaining access to the intelligence and transformative power of the subterranean structures of the psyche. Like Steiner he realized that modern human people had become so captivated by the ego’s ability to predict and control nature that what we have ”simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions" (remembering ESP).

~~~ end of part 3 ~~~

(re-sourcing : Matthew Segall)