Dreams, Myths, Religion, God, and the Unconscious
Reviewing Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious Mind, Part 2: Tackling Jordan Peterson's Reading List
Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious is not something I can summarize in a short essay, so I decided to create bite-sized chunks of what I’m getting from it.
Myths and religion are products of our unconscious mind. Our conscious minds, now that we have developed the ability for introspection, are used to understand and explain the products of our unconscious mind. Mythology and religion grow out of our explanation not of the world as we see it, but the world inside our heads that our minds have created.
This is why Jung spends so much time writing about mythology in ancient texts and in the dreams of his clients throughout this book on the unconscious. Reading Psychology of the Unconscious is much like reading the history of mythology with ol’ Carl and listening to him explain them in psychological terms. That’s why, in part, it took me so long to read the almost 500 pages of this book. It’s a lot of ancient mythology that can slow down a read because ancient mythology is written or told with such a different frame of reference.
You cannot measure or quantify mythology. You can only gather it much like an archaeologist gathers material remnants of what our ancestors produced in order to understand them. Jung is doing the same to understand our minds. What it is our minds have produced, cross-culturally for thousands upon thousands of years, is reflective of their purpose, function and potential. This includes not just pottery and arrowheads, but also symbols, mythologies, and religions.
As humanity developed consciousness, which is an awareness of “I” and the ability for introspection, we used that newly developed ability to describe and explain the visions floating around in our minds. Cave art is a great example of this.
The animals drawn are often mistaken to be paintings of what ancient humans saw. A caveman sees a bull then draws a bull.
David Lewis-Williams, in his book The Mind in the Cave, helped me to understand that these drawings are not necessarily reflections of what early man saw on the plains, but visions that haunted their dreams. He points out that the animals often do not have feet, which is a weird thing to leave out of a painting so often. But in the context of a vision or dream, the symbol is not in contact with a ground and the need for feet wouldn’t be expressed in the vision nor the painting of that vision.
As language developed for these visions, they became stories and myths. Like the paintings in the caves, the mistake of modern minds is to assume that the paintings and mythologies were an attempt to explain the world as we see it. Instead, they were an attempt to understand and explain the world inside our minds.
Mythologies are our conscious minds creating an explanation for what our unconscious mind produces. It uses what we see in our environments to express and analogize those unconscious products, but it is not trying to explain the material world. I think we easily get tripped up on this and you can see it in arguments over creation. Creation mythologies have nothing to do with how the literal earth came into being, but they describe how the world inside our minds came into being and uses the world as we experience it to analogize that creation.
Creation of the earth, the rising and setting of the sun, the fluidity and formlessness of the seas, the origins of life coming from the unknown and always leading to death in the real world, are used as analogies for our experience of creating our internal, psychological worlds. It follows the same pathway for humanity as a whole just as we all individually experience it as children growing up(hopefully) into adults. The failure to do so is largely what Jung describes as a source of neuroticism.
Religion is the narrative of those visions which came to us through our unconscious minds.
That’s why a rejection of myth and religion is tantamount to the rejection of the unconscious. Outside of the routine unconscious operating systems that govern our physiology and basic drives and reflexes, our unconscious minds have been responsible for producing the manner in which we frame the world through mythology and religion. Rejecting mythology and religion as superstition or useless parts of our past dismisses an entire portion of our minds. A portion of our mind that we spend (hopefully) eight hours a night in. A portion of our minds that will when missing due to lack of sleep, can cause psychotic breaks.
A portion responsible for us framing morality, philosophy, the difference between good and evil, and points us in a direction that will make or break us.