January 5, 2021
Dr. Carl Jung — Heroes, Alchemy, and Connection (#86) | Below The Line with James Beshara
Check out the Below The Line Podcast Page and Episode Notes
Key Takeaways
- When we can be comfortable with flawed heroes, we can start finding and treasuring heroes around us
- Myths are maps that guide our lives, directing us to satisfy our biological needs
- “The most true direction is to be useful, to provide for your community” Carl Jung
- Serve yourself and you will lack love, connection, nutrition
- Serve others, and your community will keep giving back to you
- “You become invaluable by either doing what only you can do or by doing what no one else will do” Carl Jung
- “Individuation is when an individual transcends the attachment to the individual, the lower self, and attaches fully to the collective” Carl Jung
- “Being liked is not being loving. Love thy neighbor has nothing to do with being liked or being nice. Sacrificing being liked for others’ well-being, that is love. That is kindness.” Carl Jung
Intro
- Dr. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Jung founded analytical psychology and his work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, philosophy, religion, and literature
- Host: James Beshara (@jamesbeshara)
- In this conversation, Dr. Jung discusses some of his most influential ideas in psychology, including individuation and the power of myth
Jung’s Most Influential Ideas
- Individuation
- The achievement of self-actualization by integrating the conscious and the unconscious
- You become a truly useful individual in your community
- Archetypes and archetypal images
- The Collective unconscious
- Capital S, Self
- Which governs our collective unconscious and is the unifying force between us
- The role dreams play in our lives
- Extroversion and introversion
- The Shadow
- Repressed aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to look at
- Synchronicity
Dismantling Heroes
- In this century, we’ll need heroes more than ever
- “We need heroes in the midst of flaws, strength in the midst of weakness” Carl Jung
- Yet, we are not able to find them
- In history books and in fiction, we idealize heroes
- Our idealized heroes have no flaws
- In real life, no one has no flaws and that’s why we’re incapable of finding modern-day heroes
- We wait for people to die so that we can remove their flaws and turn them into heroes
- “How many heroes living around us do we miss on? Do we not empower?” Carl Jung
- Jesus has been put on such a pedestal that we can no longer relate to him
- Our heroes should be unclothed and have their flaws revealed
- When we can be comfortable with flawed heroes, we can start finding and treasuring heroes around us
Significance of Myths
- Myths are not just entertainment stories
- They are maps that guide our lives, directing us to satisfy our biological needs
- The Myth of the Hero points us to the ideal that we can pursue to find fulfillment and satisfy our needs
- “The most true direction is to be useful, to provide for your community” Carl Jung
- Serve yourself and you will lack love, connection, nutrition
- Serve others, and your community will keep giving back to you
- The hero isn’t just a part of the community, it is an invaluable part
- “You become invaluable by either doing what only you can do or by doing what no one else will do” Carl Jung
- “The most true direction is to be useful, to provide for your community” Carl Jung
- We are constantly in search of the myths that best serve our biological needs
- Myths developed and refined over 25,000 years, they survived because they work
- In the mythological sense, “sin” is to live separate from your target, your direction in life
- In reality, we are not separate, but we feel that way
- “If you zoom out to a time horizon that begins with the Big Bang, we (everything) was connected physically. It’s less obvious, but we still are. Connected that is” Carl Jung
- The individuation process, the hero’s path all aim to help us remember our truth, that we are connected
Paradoxical Truths
- To tell if a paradox is true or not
- Zoom out and see if it unifies you and your “target” or if it separates you
- If it unifies, it is true
- Conflict is needed for harmony
- White blood cells attacking a virus allow you to live
- Nuclear explosions on the sun give us a peaceful spring day
- The main paradoxical truths are in our myths
- Does being selfless starve or serve the self?
- You can test this in your own life
- “Holy shit” is not just a colloquial myth, it is a biological truth
- When we hear something that rings true, we instinctively say “Holy shit”
- Consciously we think of shit as waste
- But unconsciously, we know that it is holy
- Dung is biological gold, the feed for all plants, the source of life
Individuation is Unification
- Individuation does not mean becoming more “individual”, or a more divided self
- On the contrary, it is a process of unification
- The process of individuation is the unification of the
- Lower Self and the higher Self
- Conscious and unconscious
- Individual and their community
- “Individuation is when an individual transcends the attachment to the individual, the lower self, and attaches fully to the collective” Carl Jung
- Transcending the self is a painful and scary process
- “The treasure you seek is in the cave you least want to enter” Joseph Campbell
- Before individuation one lives a typical life; concerned about money, prestige etc…
- After individuation, you are concerned with truth, biological truths
- “Do you choose uncertain life or do you choose certain death? Each day you have a chance, several times a day, you make a choice between those when you choose comfort over truth” – Carl Jung
- “Being liked is not being loving. Love thy neighbor has nothing to do with being liked or being nice. Sacrificing being liked for others’ well-being, that is love. That is kindness.” Carl Jung
On Freud and Divergence of Ideas
- Freud was not concerned with the latest trends or research, he was in search of Universal Truth
- His influences were the mythological truths of Shakespeare and Nietzsche
- “He wasn’t on this earth to cure an illness. He was on this earth to cure mankind. That was his mission” Sigmund Freud
- That’s what attracted Jung to him
- With time Jung recognized he would be more useful in creating his own identity
- Separation from Freud meant that Jung had to face his deepest fear, loneliness
- Where Freud and Jung started diverging
- To Freud, sexual desire was the ultimate master of our behavior
- To Jung, our unconscious was also co-created by our collective myths
Alchemy and Turning Lead Into Gold
- Jung used to discard the ideas of alchemy, but with time, as his understanding improved he started seeing the value in its implications
- Isaac Newton was also fascinated by Alchemy
- Interpretation of the idea of turning lead into gold
- Most people see lead and gold as “dead” materials
- Jung thinks that all matter is alive and continuously transforming
- What is gold was once not gold
- Time horizons for such transformations are much longer than humans’ infinitesimally small horizons
- Most people see lead and gold as “dead” materials
- To understand Alchemy, replace the desire for personal gain with the desire for Universal understanding
Additional Notes
- “Humor is the only divine quality that humans have acquired” Arthur Schopenhauer
