I guess a lot depends on how you contextualize things. What people call supernatural, if it actually exists, I would consider natural. But I guess that depends on what we’re talking about. I think when Jung spoke about synchronicity, he definitely included the possibility of telepathy and precognition, or at least strongly hinted at them, but of course as Freud warned him, he couldn’t talk openly about that without risking his reputation as a psychologist. On the Collective Unconscious, yes, he changed the name to the Objective Unconscious, mostly because it had been co-opted by New Agers as support for all their fanciful notions, and on a superficial reading there seems to be plenty of room for that kind of interpretation. But I see no reason why anything supernatural needs to be involved there. If we all have the same inborn templates in the unconscious that predispose us to certain kinds of experiences and to dreaming about or seeing (in visions etc) certain kinds of beings or entities (whatever you want to call them), I think that covers it pretty well without any need to resort to typical notions of the supernatural.
I often use the metaphor of a cheerily-lit village in a dark jungle for the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, but here I think a better one is a tropical island surrounded by ocean. Most of us generally never go much deeper than splashing around in the shallows, except now and then when something from the deep unconscious intrudes. Keep in mind, the brain is still built around the original core - the lizard brain (and inside of that must be a fish brain or something, or would they be the same?) Then the mammal brain (limbic system) around that and finally the outermost and newest layer the neocortex, which houses most of the apparatus for the conscious mind, including everything that allows us to think in abstract terms and create things like art and math. I think when we experience what feels truly alien it’s sometimes an intrusion from those very primitive parts of the mind.
I also think some people draw a line at a certain depth in the ‘ocean’ and say anything below this line is supernatural - you know, those pulsating, glowing creatures from the Marianas Trench or something, that look like they belong on a microscope slide in a drop of stagnant water. They seem totally alien, and yet they aren’t. They’re just from such a different part of the world, where we can’t even exist without special James Cameron style deep sea equipment to protect us from the pressures. I believe this same range of extreme difference exists between the conscious and the deep unconscious, and that what comes from those depths is frequently regarded (quite rightly) with supernatural dread, which doesn’t mean they actually ARE supernatural, but that people see them that way, just because they‘re so far removed from anything we think of as human.
Maybe it’s a mistake to keep using these metaphors. Deep sea creatures really have nothing in common with the kinds of beings/entities people report. I just use it because it makes certain things easier to understand I think - the absolute weirdness and incomprehensibility of certain things we encounter. It’s just that I think those things definitely come from the deep unconscious, and in fact that whenever people have experienced what they consider magical or supernatural that’s exactly what they have encountered (the unconscious I mean).
Are there other ‘swimmers’ down there (meaning other lucid dreamers or astral travelers etc)? Well, maybe. I'm fairly open to ideas like telepathy and precognition. I’ve experienced what seem like legitimate cases of both, but there’s always also a sense that it could have just been a strange dream. Example, a few weeks ago I dreamed I was drifting high in the sky looking down onto a back alley area of an unfamiliar city and below me a helicopter was descending into a parking lot. I somehow knew my roommate was piloting the copter. When it landed a car sitting on the lot started up and slammed into it 3 times. Then in an instant dream cut I was sitting on a nearby park bench with the roomie discussing the incident, but rather than a helicopter we called it his truck. Later in that day, in waking life, his truck got hit by a car. When he told me about it I immediately remembered the dream and told him about it. Of course it's only in retrospect that it seemed prophetic or precognitive, but there’s no sense in which it could have been helpful. I had no idea it was telling me about something that would really happen, so I couldn’t warn him to be careful driving. Maybe if I had a stronger belief in precognition I might have interpreted it that way, but it didn’t occur to me until afterwards. Maybe my weak connection with it, or my lack of full belief, makes the dreams weird (his truck showing up as a helicopter for instance). But then maybe precognition isn’t really to help us plan or to warn us, but simply happens.
Maybe my re-definition of the word supernatural (at the top) is just semantics? Maybe if precognition and telepathy do exist they’re not ’supernatural’ at all (in fact by definition I guess if they're real they couldn’t be, could they?) And if we really can communicate with each other ‘ethereally’ somehow, why couldn’t there be ‘other entities’ that also interact with us, but can only do it through the medium of the psyche, showing up as dream characters or archetypes? But it raises the question - what are they? Are they completely disembodied, or do they exist physically somewhere? This last paragraph is directed at myself by the way, not you. It’s actually pretty hard, if you get deeply into Jung, not to start opening up to possibilities like this, but I still don’t see it as what’s commonly meant by supernatural. Though that might just mean I need to update my understanding of what it does mean. I think you have a much more sophisticated understanding of it than any I’ve seen elsewhere, which are often very primitive or simplistic.
|
|
Bookmarks