Truth and the Transcendent Function

Still preparing to dive into "The Red Book," I reread Jung's essay, "The Transcendent Function," in which he describes the technique that he used for his process of self-experimentation, a method for consciously delving into the subconscious and uniting them, which was also the practice he recommended to patients in order to continue working on their subconscious materials after or outside of therapy.

The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.

I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.

One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:

"One of the greatest obstacles to psychological understanding is the inquisitive desire to know whether the psychological factor is "true" or "correct." If the description of it is not erroneous or false, then the factor is valid in itself and proves its validity by its very existence. One might just as well ask if the duck-billed platypus is a "true" or "correct" invention of the Creator's will. Equally childish is the prejudice against the role which mythological assumptions play in the life of the psyche. Since they are not "true," it is argued, they have no place in a scientific explanation. But mythologems exist, even though their statements do not coincide with our incommensurable idea of "truth."

Of course, one runs into such grasping for truth and consistency almost everywhere you turn, spying every day yet another atheistic rebuttal of belief, such as this article from Alternet on demanding evidence from religious believers (which asks: “Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?”), when the important thing about belief is that one believes without proof, to demand evidence or a truth behind beliefs is to entirely miss the point of believing (at least for me; I will never apologize or condone dogmatism of any flavor). And furthermore, as Jung seems to agree, the important thing is not whether the contents of our belief are true or false, but what those beliefs allow us to feel or do in the real world. The belief exists, and extends beyond truthiness.

I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.

It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.