If you have not already done so, you might take a walk to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of David Tacey's book How to Read Jung. Alternatively, you can spend years not really understanding Carl Jung as I did. What Tacey does is remarkable, almost as remarkable as the books by Jung himself. I heard Tacey, an Australian, explain his understandings of Carl Jung recently on Canadian radio in an interview.
Reading Tacey's book led me to reexamine the form and nature of my own reality and fantasies, quite appropriate as I develop plots within my own Wuh Lax book series further over the next few months.
What a student of 20th century history puzzles over is the question why Christian societies produced such monsters as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Carl Jung explains this as a failing in Christianity. About two years ago, I was asked the same question by a Jew of the persecution by Christians of Jews throughout history. It is not an easy question to answer. Is there something seriously absent in Christianity that those professing top be Christian perpetrate such serious crimes against humanity and neighbours.
We take an untenable position if we think that it is just Christianity that seems to be missing essential ingredients. Only two days ago, a young man from Plymouth was placing a bomb in a restaurant in Exeter, Devon, England. A recent convert to Islam, the young man was evidently missing something in his religion.
It seems to me that what Carl Jung wrote on the subject of our dark side is relevant to our understanding the nature of our future world and our being able to cope with the forces that are present in the human psyche, if only poorly understood. In trying to be scientific, our modern science logic is missing something as serious as what is missing in Christianity. It has to do with human creativity and the expression of our dark side.
As with many things, our nature individually has a lot to do with our sex, our gender. Jung shows how gender affects our perceptions, particularly those that occur below our consciousness. It is a feature of modern society that we are being told to get in touch with our other side. If we are a male, this means getting in touch with our feminine side. What Carl Jung suggests is that the extent to which we are male or female is only a matter of degree. The problem comes when we as humans do not recognize that we are both male and female at the same time. If we assume that we are only one of these two sexes, we hide the other from conscious view. Many of us do not ever see the alternative or dual component of our sexual makeup.
On a very large scale, the Christian and Muslim religions have strayed in their understanding of what we are sexually, and this absence is the mainspring of the missing component in these religions. In both Islam and Christianity, when we have lost the feminine part of our nature, the nature of every member of our religions, we have lost the truth behind these religions and enter a world of fantasy that leaves us groundless in creating the balance that society in any historical period demands. As a result, the vast majority of people in Christian and Muslim societies have be out of balance and tipping toward insanity. Not everyone, only those who have lost touch with both sexual sides of their being!
If you are one of those people who have lost touch, it is not too late to recognize that you are made up of two sexes and you need to give expression of both in your personality. Only by giving expression to both sides of your sex will you achieve balance. In a later blog, I may explain the nightmares that might result if you ignore both sexes of your nature. Alternatively, you might begin by reading Tacey's book and buy a few of the precious gems written by Carl Jung, 'the non-scientist who knew more than science'.