Category Archives: Religion

Annunciation by Simone Martini

March 4, 2016Christianity, Culture, Myth, Painting, The ArtsAnnunciation, Simone MartiniRobert M Ellis

I’ve always been struck, even haunted, by this painting, as I have by the Annunciation theme in general. It is quite an early Renaissance painting, still showing many of the signs of the transition from statuary to painting in the gilding and the arches.

If we want to find a Middle Way reading of what it might mean to us, we need to first of all put aside any doctrinal associations that may be getting in the way. Yes, the angel is announcing to Mary that, despite being a virgin, she has conceived the son of God. You don’t have to believe that any such thing happened, or that there was a man who was the son of God, or indeed to support the restrictive notions of womanhood implied by the stress on virginity in the Christian tradition. Just put all that stuff aside, look at the painting, and see what experiences it evokes.

What I experience primarily is the sacred otherness of the angel’s message, and Mary’s uncertainty and hesitation before it. The angel seems to be bearing a message for her, as for any viewer, that the potentialities within us are startlingly bigger that we had ever thought. That utter weirdness and difficulty is emphasised by the gold, which puts us in an other-worldly ambience; by the angel’s inhuman wings; by the lilies; and by the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering above them.

Mary is quite right to be hesitant, but at the same time she seems to recognise that this strange event is not a threat. It may be strange and apparently other, but at the same time it needs to be accepted in a wider framework. Perhaps others may read a girlish lack of confidence into Mary’s posture, but I’d rather read a certain provisionality. She’s holding all this weirdness, for the moment, albeit warily. She’s going to see how things turn out.

The whole scene can thus symbolise for us the difficulties of any big new idea or prospect that takes us ‘beyond our comfort zone’, and especially the problems of creativity. Whenever we develop something new there’s an ambiguous Middle Way to be found between a fixed idea of what we want to create and its absolute value on the one hand, and an idea of the many discouraging difficulties, distractions and potential failures on the other that might lead us to feel that the thing we want to create is valueless. Giving birth to the Son of God (before we get into the big question of the significance of ‘Son of God’) is a situation where you can easily imagine both of those extremes presenting themselves to Mary. More traditionally, on the one hand she could feel proud, on the other unworthy. In between there is provisionality, riding the creative wave. And I feel that’s what the artist is trying to depict here.

The Four… Noble Truths, Tasks, Principles, or Curates?

February 19, 2016Buddhism, Middle Way Philosophy, ReligionFour Noble Truths, stephen batchelorRobert M Ellis

Reading Stephen Batchelor’s ‘After Buddhism’ has recently reminded me of the ongoing issue of the relationship of the Middle Way to ‘the Four’. Perhaps those who have encountered the Middle Way from some other direction will be quite reasonably uninterested in this question. But those coming to it via Buddhism, where the Four get so much emphasis as a starting point, may have many questions about the relationship that may be quite fruitful ones. What can we learn from ‘the Four’ – what do they have to contribute to integrative practice? Are they, in some sense, the same as the Middle Way, or are they a diversion from it? My answer, as with many such issues, is that the response to such questions depends what interpretation of ‘the Four’ you adopt.

As a quick refresher, here are the ‘Four Noble Truths’ presented in traditional Buddhism (though I expect that most people reading this will have met them before):

Dukkha: suffering, frustration, unsatisfactoriness
Samudaya: The arising of dukkha, craving, greed, reactivity as a cause of frustration
Nirodha: Cessation of dukkha through the cessation of craving
Magga: The path leading to the cessation of dukkha

The four ‘truths’ thus tend to be glossed as that suffering is a fact of existence, that suffering is caused by craving, that nirvana ends craving, and that the Buddhist path leads to the end of suffering.

However, the Four are not, and cannot possibly be, ‘truths’, in the sense of ultimate or metaphysical statements about reality. There I’m entirely in agreement with Stephen Batchelor. They don’t fail to be truths because we know them to be untrue, but because neither I nor you nor the Buddha have any capacity to know ‘truths’. We are fallible embodied creatures who can, at best, make helpful generalisations relying on acknowledged metaphors that we hopefully share sufficiently to communicate with practical benefit. If the Four are in the category of helpful generalisations (like the ones I hope I am making now), then they cannot be regarded as ‘Truths’, especially if we expect them to be compatible with a Middle Way that clearly rejects any such ‘truths’. Nor is it particularly helpful these days to describe them as ‘Noble’ or ‘Aryan’, since we no longer tend to associate insight specifically with the upper classes. If a class metaphor is required, we should probably call them ‘The Four Middle Class Truths’ – but I jest.

So, if they’re not truths, then what are they? In ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’, I suggested that they should be renamed the Four Principles, and re-ordered so that the Fourth became the First and the First, Second and Third became the Second, Third and Fourth respectively. I also argued that they all required the Middle Way for helpful interpretation. Each of them can be interpreted in a metaphysical way or an experientially fruitful way.

The First, for example, is often read as a belief about existence that we should adopt so as to come to terms with its true meaning – ‘life is suffering’. This has contributed to a pervasive popular idea that Buddhism is pessimistic – one that is not entirely undeserved, since pessimism is a dogma and the precise content of the dogma is less important than its form. The non-dogmatic way of interpreting dukkha, however, is that a recognition of a problem is needed before we can improve anything: whether you see that problem as being a pervasive one in human experience (such as ‘suffering’) or something more limited and specific. Without problematizing, there is no critical process and no wisdom. We can endlessly confirm our biases by finding evidence that appears to fit them, and never consider that our experience could be interpreted differently. An experiential interpretation of the First, then, requires us to avoid both the dogmatic belief that ‘life is suffering’ and its denial.

A similar problem applies to the Second. This is traditionally read as claiming that the whole of existence (that suffering existence) is created by craving, through the system of karma and rebirth. We are born again because, most basically, we crave existence. Even within our current lives, our suffering is said to be caused by craving. This is not only dogmatic metaphysics, but also (as Stephen Batchelor notes) contradictory: at some points ‘craving’ is a specific type of motivation, at others its totality. But neither should we jump to the reverse position and assume that the Second has no insights to communicate. For a more experiential version of this that does not merely patch it up in an ad hoc fashion, you could do worse than using Stephen Batchelor’s term ‘reactivity’ instead of craving. At least, then, we are talking more provisionally about a specific type of desire that we can experience, with negative effects that we can experience.

However, one of the several holes in Batchelor’s book is that he says little about what ‘reactivity’ is. One could be forgiven for assuming that some types of craving are reactive and others are not. Personally I am convinced that that would be a basically wrong way of understanding the experiential basis of the Second. Desire is simply energy that can be channelled in different ways, and the problem lies in the conflict and repression of desires. Desires are ‘reactive’ because they create conflict and thus distort our understanding, rather than because they are intrinsically bad. There is plenty of scope for dogma in the very way we categorise our cravings, and I can’t see any way to avoid that without a thoroughly incremental view of our desires as better or worse rather than good or bad.

The Third is traditionally seen as a final state or a perfection of the human condition – nirvana. Again, the traditional interpretation is dogmatic, because it sees the Buddha’s experience as proving absolute insights into reality, but this does not justify us in jumping to the reverse and denying the Buddha’s insights. My suggestion in ‘the Trouble with Buddhism’ is that we see this experientially as simply the recognition that progress is possible. Batchelor suggests that nirvana means ‘moments when we are not determined by reactivity’: a suggestion that I do not think is adequate because it is not incremental. We do not have to have moments pure of reactivity to make progress, only moments that are relatively free of conflict.

The Fourth, the cultivation of the path, could also be interpreted absolutely if it is taken to mean the following of certain absolute principles of action. On the whole, though, the path is the one of the Four that is most obviously experiential, because it involves constant judgements of application. We may need some general principles to prescribe any path, but these can hardly be sufficient without changing ourselves and our judgements so as to interpret them optimally.

My suggested re-ordering in ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’ was based on a recognition that we need to start practising the path in order to be able to judge the other principles of the Four and to avoid absolutising them. So the Fourth, being about the path, is needed prior to the others. Specifically, it is the Middle Way understanding of the path (or at least something functionally equivalent) that we need to practise, if we are to avoid setting off in on an absolutised path rather than a helpful one accordant with experience. Thus in I argued that the Middle Way is prior to, and more basic than, the Four. I see no reason to revise that judgement now, though ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’ was written eight years ago and I might well now express it slightly differently.

One could, of course, also argue the converse: that the Middle Way needs a problematizing stimulus, a recognition of the ‘reactive’ extremes to be avoided, a faith in the possibility of progress, and some account of the path. But the Middle Way remains a more basic idea that not only integrates the Four, but helps us interpret them and make them comprehensible. The Middle Way is useful without the Four in a way that the Four are not without the Middle Way.

Many of Stephen Batchelor’s arguments on this topic at least parallel mine in seeking to avoid dogmatic interpretations of each of the Four and developing helpful ones – which in effect means experiential ones. However, instead of the ‘Four Principles’ he talks of the ‘Four Tasks’ and relates each of them to a practice. He also sources these practices in the earliest layer of discussion of the Four in the Pali Canon. Suffering is to be comprehended, craving or reactivity is to be let go of, the ceasing of reactivity (not suffering) is to be beheld, and the path is to be cultivated. Batchelor also recognises these Four Tasks to be inter-dependent, and I imagine that he would agree with me, at least in some respects, that the path needs to be undertaken to some extent in order to start comprehending the problem. To talk of the ‘Four Tasks’ is obviously just a different emphasis, and each of them involves both theory and practice.

I will review Batchelor’s book more fully in its own right. It is a book with its heart in the right place, which will help Buddhists to re-interpret their tradition in a way that lets go of traditional absolutisations, and all that is praiseworthy. It is implicitly based on the Middle Way throughout. Yet at the same time, the total lack of explicit engagement with the Middle Way in it is also extremely puzzling. It is not as though the Middle Way was not in traditional Buddhism, not discussed explicitly in the Pali Canon, or not a central part of Batchelor’s thinking. Indeed it is the implicit basis on which, not only Batchelor’s discussion of the Four, but also many other Buddhist doctrines, are sorted and interpreted. Yet it is not even listed in the index of Batchelor’s book, and only given passing mentions in relation to other doctrines. It is as if a man were to write an autobiography about a life that has been shared with a wife who massively contributed to all his enterprises and supported his personal confidence throughout his adulthood, yet his memoir only includes a few passing references to ‘my wife’, and she is not even named, just utterly taken for granted. Batchelor is not alone amongst Buddhists in treating the Middle Way in this fashion, but it is most surprising in him.

As for the Four, then, there is little point in disputing whether they are principles or tasks – but whatever they are, I think they are possibly useful in some ways but also dispensible. There are plenty of other possible ways of understanding the role they play in the path: particularly in terms of positive and negative feedback loops, and in terms of integration. It is only the authority of Buddhist tradition that unnecessarily gives priority to the Four over these other models. For those approaching the Middle Way from a Buddhist direction, the Four are perhaps most centrally neither principles, nor tasks, but stand-ins for the Middle Way, whose credibility depends on that of the Middle Way. They are locum doctors, or curates doing the job in the vicar’s absence. If there was no role for the vicar, that of the curates would have nothing to stand in for. Similarly, without the Middle Way, the Four might well be just be another set of dogmas with little to help them stand out from many other dogmas found in religions, philosophies and ideologies throughout the world. With the Middle Way, however, they have a kind of importance that is largely borrowed, and which the application of the Middle Way could just as easily bestow on many other traditional beliefs.

Picture: seated Buddha (preaching): Walters Art Museum CCSA3.0

Jung’s Red Book 4: Embodied symbol

February 1, 2016Jung, Linguistics, Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, ReligionJung's Red BookRobert M Ellis

There are several points in the Red Book where Jung discusses meaning and symbol, all of them suggesting to me a radical understanding of meaning in which Jung was implicitly before his time. Jung recognises that meaning is experienced in our bodies, that it emerges over time, and that meaning needs to be separated from belief. These are insights that can now be more strongly supported using the findings of neuroscience (particularly the differing roles of the brain hemispheres) and the embodied meaning theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: but Jung was a pioneer who (at least as I interpret his text) implicitly understood the basis of these developments.

Perhaps the most interesting episode in the Red Book where Jung engages with issues of meaning is his conversations with Ammonius, the Anchorite. Jung encounters Ammonius as a solitary in the desert, devoting himself to endlessly reading the scriptures and finding ever new meanings in them. But typically, Jung’s relationship with Ammonius changes in the course of his two main encounters with him. Jung starts off as a disciple respectfully approaching the master, but ends up being thought of as Satan and lunged at by Ammonius. Jung, like the rest of us, can learn from his inner figures, but can also challenge them and teach them, even suffer reactions from them, as he recognises their limitations.

As Jung writes of Ammonius

He wanted to find what he needed in the outer. But you find manifold meaning only in yourself, not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings. The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. (p.262)

I take this to mean that although Ammonius sought multiple meanings in scripture, he still assumed that the meanings lay in the scripture. His solitary studies in the desert reinforced that, as he became more abstracted and ceased to relate to others. But the meanings he was looking for lay in himself. Jung especially stresses the temporal aspect of this recognition. “Meaning is not something that is given at the same time”, as it would be, not only to scripturally-obsessed believers, but also analytic philosophers and naturalistic scientists, who take meaning to consist in a relationship between words and an actual or hypothetical reality, processed in a way that takes no account of the temporal aspects of our experience of meaning. But meaning takes time, and depth of understanding comes from the linking of experiences over time to ever-richer symbols. Meaning is experienced physically, in a gestalt way, through our right brain hemispheres in a way that depends on gradually accrued experience coming together, not just abstractly and hypothetically through the left. The very metaphors we use to describe the process take time: things “sink in”, or we “get our heads around” something. By “taking part in life” we can enrich that process, as meaning depends on experience rather than only on abstraction.

At the final moment when the previously respectful Jung gets lunged at and called Satan, Ammonius switches from right hemisphere receptivity to left hemisphere suspicion. At one moment he is open to Jung’s suggestion that he might find more of the meaning he seeks by returning to human society, but the next he shuts down. Becoming confused, he blames his confusion on Jung. This can stand for any occasion when a self-sufficient absolute belief is challenged, and the problem created by the challenge is projected onto the messenger by a person who feels threatened and defensive.

Elsewhere, Jung discusses the richness of experienced meaning in relation to symbols. For him, the distinction between a sign and a symbol is important. The sign merely represents, but the symbol connects with the wider gestalt experience of meaning.

The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognises it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind. If one accepts a symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. (p.392)

Perhaps the most startling symbols are those of the kind Jung encountered in his visions (such as Ammonius himself, or the Tree of Life discussed in the previous blog), or that we otherwise encounter unexpectedly in dreams. What Jung particularly conveys throughout the Red Book is the importance of exploring the meaning of such symbols in a provisional space of meaning, held apart from any concerns about what we believe.

However, it seems that any word (or visual image, or sound) can be a symbol that evokes a range of associations, connecting more deeply to our embodied experience through the emotions. Signs, by contrast, are supposed to merely denote something within a certain model of belief: think of numbers, for example. But of course, signs are merely dried out symbols or dead metaphors that have been over-handled by the left hemisphere. They still depend on their connection to a set of embodied associations to mean anything at all for us, however clipped and controlled they may have become.

Obviously we need words, and we need both signs and symbols. the challenge is to use the words for their limited contextual purposes and then (like the Buddha’s raft once it has crossed the river) let go of them. In this final passage that I will quote, Jung directly links the balanced use of words to the Middle Way, and recognises the practical reasons for turning words into beliefs: as long as those beliefs are also provisional.

The word is the guide, the middle way which easily oscillates like the needle on the scales. The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people.. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night. (p.393)

Previous blogs in this series:

Jung’s Red Book 1: The Jungian Middle Way

Jung’s Red Book 2: The God of experience

Jung’s Red Book 3: The Tree of Life

Picture: Mandala from Jung’s Red Book by Joanna Penn (CCA 2.0)

Buddhism and Christianity

January 26, 2016Buddhism, Christianity, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, VideotraditionsRobert M Ellis

I have now produced two more short introductory videos: ‘The Middle Way and Buddhism’ and ‘The Middle Way and Christianity’. This has also led me to think about the rather different approaches I took to each religion, and to want to write up here some explanation of that difference. Before I explore the differences, though, it’s probably better if you see the videos. I will embed them here. (Also please note that if you are reading this without any prior exploration of Middle Way Philosophy, it would also be better to view the general introduction first before these).

One thing you will readily notice about the two videos is that in relation to Buddhism I emphasise the distinction between the Middle Way and Buddhism, whilst in Christianity I emphasise the relationship between the Middle Way and Christianity. This is only intended to challenge what I perceive to be the overwhelmingly common assumptions in each case: that Buddhism somehow owns the Middle Way (even that the Middle Way Philosophy is ‘really Buddhism’) on the one hand, and that Christianity has nothing to do with the Middle Way on the other. Of course, it would be equally possible to emphasise the relationship between Buddhism and the Middle Way, or the ways that the dominant interpretation of Christianity is antipathetic to the Middle Way: but treatments of both are common enough.

Of course, the cases made for both are equally dependent on a wider argument I want to make about tradition. Traditions do not have essences (or if they do, we have no way of determining them), any more than people do. (For more about tradition please see this video.) If we expect to be able to take the positive, integrable aspects of ourselves and choose to dwell on those and develop them rather than the negative, absolutizing parts of ourselves, we should extend the same courtesy both to others and to other traditions, rather than defining them absolutely in terms of things we reject. Some individuals can be psychopathic, utterly repressing all sympathy for anything other than their dominant egoistic goals, and larger groups or traditions can also sometimes exhibit such psychopathic features (think of Daesh). But we should be extremely cautious about attaching any such labels to an extremely diverse, millennia-long tradition. These traditions are part of people’s identities and need to be acknowledged and worked with, though of course they will contain both helpful and unhelpful elements.

I think it is equally important, whatever tradition one may be working with, to acknowledge the Middle Way as something separate, that stands apart from tradition, and indeed as something more important than tradition. That is not a rejection of tradition, but it is a way of avoiding being confined by it. Any Buddhists or Christians who can take this attitude are very welcome in the Middle Way Society, and one of the society’s founding values is that universality.

On the other hand, approaching both Buddhism and Christianity in terms of the Middle Way is not a vague universalism either. The aim is to be quite precise about what the Middle Way is (even though our understanding of it is of course always developing) and to use the Middle Way as a tool for resolving conflicts between traditions. Religions are not essentially all one: what is or can be one is the recognisable features of good judgement in relation to them. By agreeing about how we will judge our different traditions and situations, we can at the same time acknowledge a great diversity of specific religious symbol and practice, and yet co-operate in the wider process of understanding and practising the Middle Way. Then diversity becomes a strength, not a weakness, providing a variety of possible models for different situations. It also becomes a key way of resolving conflict. If we were to all admit that we do not have final access to God or any other absolute, and train ourselves in relying on experience, what grounds of conflict would remain? It is absolutes that collide in conflict, not experiences.

For anyone interested in more detail about the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity, here is a paper I wrote in 2008 called Should Western Buddhists be Christians? Western Buddhists were the target audience for this paper, though it might also possibly be of interest to Christians.

At present I am not intending to produce further videos for other religions. Buddhism and Christianity are both religions that I have direct experience of, but in other cases (such as Islam) my knowledge is largely academic, and it would be much better to leave it to others with more direct experience to explore their meaning in relation to the Middle Way. You can already find such material on this site about the Jewish Middle Way, written by Susan Averbach.

Picture: Buddha with hidden cross on the back: Chris 73/ Wikimedia CCSA 4.0

Jung’s Red Book 3: The Tree of Life

January 24, 2016Ethics, Jung, Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Religionevil, Jung's Red Book, Tree of LifeRobert M Ellis

He sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into Hell and whose top touches Heaven. He also no longer knows differences: who is right? What is holy? What is genuine? What is good? What is correct? He knows only one difference: the difference between above and below. For he sees that the tree of life grows from below to above, and that it has its crown at the top, clearly differentiated from the roots. To him this is unquestionable. Hence he knows the way to salvation.

To unlearn all distinctions save that concerning direction is part of your salvation. Hence you free yourself of the old curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Because you separated good from evil according to your best appraisal and aspired only to the good and denied the evil that you committed nevertheless and failed to accept, your roots no longer suckled the dark nourishment of the depths and your tree became sick and withered. (p.359-360)

Here Jung gives what for me is a brilliant summary of the basis of Middle Way ethics. A frequent theme of the Red Book is that of recognising the depths and integrating what we take to be evil. In this sense we go ‘beyond good and evil’ (to use the phrase also used by Nietzsche in his book of that name). To go beyond good and evil sounds to many like relativism or nihilism, leaving us adrift without any justifiable values. But what is required instead is a recasting of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that takes into account our degree of ignorance, recognising that much of what we reject as ‘evil’ is bound interdependently with what we accept as ‘good’. Instead of rejecting good and evil altogether, we need to understand a more genuine or integrated form of ‘good’ as lying beyond our current understanding, and ‘evil’ only as that which prevents or disrupts integration.

If we focus only on the uncertainty in our current understanding of good and evil, and take that uncertainty to be a negative thing, we will miss the positive implications that Jung brings out in his image of the Tree of Life. The crown of the tree, he tells us, is clearly differentiable from the roots. This would be the case only in terms of experience, not conceptual analysis, because the difference between the crown and the roots is incremental. Nevertheless integrative progress is part of our experience. There may be some adults who have got irredeemably stuck in one set of rigid beliefs and thus stopped growing, but this can hardly ever be the case for children: if we compare ourselves as toddlers and as adults, we have all made some sort of progress, addressing conditions better than we did then. The crown is thus differentiable from the roots, even though there is no absolute point of change in between.

It is also telling that Jung writes “To unlearn all distinctions save that concerning direction.” The new good is a direction, not an absolute, because we do not have full understanding of it and cannot pin it down just by intellectual analysis. Even God as encountered in our experience (as discussed in the previous blog) is a symbol for a direction: the direction of integration in which we only get better, not ultimately good. That also implies that we cannot deduce that direction from any account of an ultimate goal, such as the Buddhist Nirvana. There can be no final goal, for such a goal would be irrelevant to us. As Jung writes in another place:

Not that I know anything about what my distant goal might be. I see blue horizons before me: they suffice as a goal. (p. 276-7)

The roots of the Tree of Life are nourished by every aspect of our organic experience, whether by ‘good’ or ‘evil’ as normally understood. This point is also put very graphically later in the text, where Jung shows his utter disgust with the devil at the same time as a reluctant recognition that the devil is necessary. He describes the devil as having a ‘golden seed’.

He emerged from the lump of manure in which the Gods had secured their eggs. I would like to kick the garbage away from me, if the golden seed were not in the vile heart of the misshapen form. (p.424)

This passage tells us something about how difficult it is in practice to face up to the integration of the Shadow. Think of everything you most loathe: paedophiles, Daesh, Donald Trump. Then try to get your head around the way that they have gained control of things that are necessary for you. To start with, your representations of such figures are yours – take responsibility for them. It’s your inner Donald Trump that you hate, not the one out there. The energy that you’re putting into hating your inner Donald Trump is your energy: don’t let him steal it from you. You need to reclaim it from Donald Trump and put it to better use.

But if we are to integrate ‘evil’ without falling into relativism, there also still needs to be a genuine evil that we recognise. Such evil consists in whatever stops the Tree of Life from growing, whatever interferes with the integrative process. That’s where I would draw conclusions that go beyond Jung, but to me seem to be implied by Jung’s insights. That is that what blocks the integrative process is absolutisation. Absolutisation is found in our rigid beliefs, whether positive or negative, which prevents us from responding to new experience and benefitting from it. A given belief is only a part of us, so no person is wholly evil, nor is any tradition or organisation. However, metaphysical beliefs poison the Tree of Life.

This new account of evil is not wholly distinct from the old evil. I think it can be shown how existing common conceptions of evil show the features of absolutisation, and I have explored this in a previous blog as well as in my book ‘Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief’ (section 3.n). Evil is associated with power, despotism, egoism, greed, cruelty, obsession, manipulativeness, defensiveness, rigidity, impatience, pride, short-termism, literalism, despair, emotional impoverishment, and false emotion. Some of these qualities are found in Jung’s experience of evil as found in the Red Book, such as Jung’s encounter with the mocking and sardonic ‘Red One’. All of these kinds of qualities can also be associated with narrow over-dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain when we make judgements.

So it’s not that we have been wrong in our instincts about what sorts of qualities are evil – the problem is only in how we apply those instincts. We have assumed evil to be something external to us, consisting in whole people, objects or institutions, when instead it is to be found in the beliefs that poison the Tree of Life. We need to learn to separate the beliefs from the people: to stop projecting the Shadow onto others, or onto external supernatural forces, and recognise it as an archetype in ourselves.

Another implication of the image of the Tree of Life is that its growth will happen regardless (as a result of life) if it is not interfered with. As long as the roots can get their nutriment without hindrance, we do not have to make the tree grow towards good. However, preventing the hindrance to the roots may take much more deliberate action. If someone were to try to pour poison on the roots we would have to actively stop them. That’s why I think we can’t take the process of integration for granted, but rather need to be on the alert and using our critical faculties to detect and avoid absolutisations. That’s why the practice of the Middle Way, the avoidance of absolutisations on both sides, is not just a matter of innocent effort. It also takes a degree of educated cunning. We cannot just tell those who want to absolutise that they are entitled to their opinion and leave it at that, but whenever we can do so fruitfully we need to contest, not them, but their opinion. Even if we fail to convince others, we need to free ourselves of the shackles of intrinsically rigid ways of thinking.

You should be able to cast everything from you, otherwise you are a slave, even if you are the slave of a God. Life is free and choose its own way. It is limited enough, so do not pile up more limitation. Hence I cut away everything confining. I stood here, and there lay the riddlesome multifariousness of the world. (p.378)

Previous blogs in this series:

Jung’s Red Book 1: The Jungian Middle Way

Jung’s Red Book 2: The God of experience

Picture: from Jung’s Red Book (Xabier CCSABY 4.0)