To demonstrate that Jung’s theories and concepts of nearly a century ago are consilient with recent developments in the biological sciences, we have been content in previous sections of this book to accept today’s dominant philosophical perspective: that psyche and brain operate in parallel because in some sense they are the same thing. While the brain is a complex physiological organ that can be studied from the outside with the instruments of science and described in third-person terms, psyche is the first-person lived experience of everyone who has a brain. Having a brain allows us to live a world, wander in dreamscape, form emotional alliances and become a “personality.”

          The brain-mind identity hypothesis has allowed us to establish the neural substrate that produces the complexes, namely the “convergence zones” of the limbic system. It also allows us to see how archetypes are both inherited with our genes and yet have their “wiring” completed through familial and cultural interactions. We have come to appreciate as well how the compelling “numinosity” of archetypal experience results from an autonomic nervous system that has been “tuned” by emotional encounters or ritual enactments. Altering ANS balance generates state-transitions in the brain which are characterized by specific altered states of consciousness, including identification with mythic figures and situations. When the two cerebral hemispheres are harmonized with the limbic system, unitive/transformative states of awareness can be brought about. These are the experiences for which Jung reserves the terms “self,” “transcendent function” and “hierosgamos.”

          Over the past 40,000 years of human history, the employment of altered states of conscious has assisted our discovery and mastery of the natural world and facilitated the hierarchical organization of societies. Shamans and their descendants have learned techniques to master trance states, and the wealthy have learned to manipulate ideology derived from myth to subjugate large segments of the population and produce immense surpluses of food and treasure. These, in turn, have led in the West to the development of an ego preoccupied with empirical discoveries, leading to modern science and technology, as well as the devaluation of “non-ordinary” conscious states as pathological or at least irrelevant for “real life.”

          On account of this cultural prejudice, Chapter 11, on shamanism and mastery, has run to some length in order to demonstrate that altered states are common and varied and that they can be managed and put to good use. If evolution means anything for us humans, it is that the talents that led our distant ancestors to paint the walls of caves and to build magnificent cathedrals are very much a part of the genetic endowment that has ensured our survival as a species. We have not so much outgrown as learned to ignore this inheritance.

Border zones. The topic of shamanism and mastery, however, has introduced reports from seemingly reliable observers that implicitly challenge the hypothesis of brain-psyche identity. Anthropologist Edith Turner, for instance, saw a tooth extracted from the back of a native sufferer. Turner was herself in an altered state at the time and did not initially identify what she saw as a tooth, but rather saw some sort of ectoplasmic projection that seemed to be forced out of the patient’s back by the shaman’s thumb. Later the captured “tooth” was displayed in an empty Vaseline jar and appeared quite ordinary. The patient was genuinely cured. Turner had no explanation to satisfy herself but remained convinced that she had witnessed something extraordinary. Similarly, Amazonian shamans inflict injuries and effect cures with “darts” that lodge in a strange sort of “phleghm” that also resembles the ectoplasm of European spiritualistic séances. Such stories imply that psyche can have effects on matter. For if ectoplasm is not a “materialization” itself, changes seem to have been made in human bodies and personalities. They have been cured or attacked.

          Amazonian vegetalistas claim that the “vine” taught them everything they know. Originally it showed them how to brew the complex psychedelic tea itself, and it continues to teach them what herbs are useful for healing and how to use them. Most impressively, it enables them to survey the physical and mental condition of the patient, showing them how to remedy what is wrong. Their claims and their cures resemble those of the North American healer and so-called prophet, Edgar Cayce — who used hypnosis rather than a psychedelic drug to alter his conscious state. In these cases, it appears as though the psyche of the healer makes a tour of the patient’s body. No doubt the shaman’s brain is functioning in some sort of rhythmically harmonized fashion. But what appears to the psyche does not arrive through the sense organs. The whole procedure seems impossible, and yet the information provided appears to be remarkably accurate. Furthermore, while an ayahuasquero like Don Manuel is making such a tour, his wife keeping watch over him says she has witnessed his other-worldly activity and been horrified by it. If we accept her story, and we have no reason to suspect her of lying, we have to wonder how her psyche-and-brain — if they are one and the same thing — can have simultaneous access to the patient’s body and her husband’s mind.

Jung’s position. This material takes us into “The Border Zones of Exact Science,” the title of Jung’s first presentation to his college student fraternity, the Zofingia Society, November, 1896. Although officially pursuing science and medicine, he was an avid student of spiritualism as well. Popular spiritualism — as it appeared in table rapping, visitations by ghosts of the departed, and serious investigations by people like William James and the members of London’s Society for Psychical Research — belonged to the “somnambulism complex” of phenomena whose psychological investigation by Janet, Binet, Flournoy, Prince, and others constituted the informal “French School” of psychology that Jung so often cited as the primary source of his psychological theories.

          As a twenty-one year-old university student in that first lecture, Jung demanded that science extend its empirical methods and analyze the data of hypnotism and spiritualism. He wanted his fraternity brothers to join him and leave the safe paths of established philosophy and science and “make our own independent raids into the realm of the unfathomable, chase the shadows of the night” (CW A: p. 23). Entering these “border zones,” therefore, implied that Jung wanted to find a middle way “between the scornfully skeptical [as the majority of scientists and citizens at that time were and today still are] and the eagerly superstitious,” a phrase that describes most parlor spiritualists of a century and more ago as well as New Agers today.[1]

          Jung never lost his interest in those border zones. He wrote his medical dissertation on mediumship and took up the theme of somnambulist (a.k.a. dissociation) empirically in his Word Association Studies. A few years later, he had an important disagreement in Freud’s study when he accurately predicted poltergeist phenomena in the master’s bookcase and Freud called it nonsense (MDR: 155). He paid close attention all his professional life to non-ordinary events and in his last decade published his theory of parapsychology in collaboration with one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Wolfgang Pauli, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (CW8: ¶816-968).

          The consequences of Jung’s “chasing the shadows of the night” are chiefly two. In the first place, Jung had to develop a broad enough conception of the psyche to include all the non-ordinary events and experiences that manifest themselves despite their alleged impossibility. His psyche more adequately accounts for what we experience; and it will require less revision to accommodate itself to a future that surely lies before us — though not so near as William James imagined it to be — the day when mainstream science overcomes its hesitations and prejudices and seriously undertakes studies in parapsychology and related phenomena. Secondly and regrettably, “the black tide of occultism,” as Freud called it (MDR: 155), has injured Jung’s reputation, leaving him vulnerable to the charge of being a “mystic,” in the derogatory sense of being a soft-headed and superstitious investigator. This fourth and last part of Evolution and Archetype will be an investigation of where Jung wanted us to go in those “raids into the realm of the unfathomable.”

The project. Part IV begins with a review of parapsychology, discovering that non-ordinary experiences like clairvoyance and telepathy are neither supernatural nor impossible. Surely they occur far more occasionally and can be produced less dependably than more familiar experiences that depend upon our five senses and public consensus. But their manifestation appears to rely on human talents that can be developed and refined in ways that closely resemble what we have already seen concerning the mastery of trance states.

          These things happen. They are real, and it is not accurate to say that they violate the laws of physics. The laws of physics can neither prove nor disprove them. What they violate are our metaphysical assumptions — but no less than do twentieth-century developments in physics. We do not have a “working metaphysics,” an adequate description of reality — a general account of the world that can make even quantum mechanics intelligible, to say nothing of parapsychology. Indeed, although no one doubts that life and consciousness also belong to the real world, we have no adequate account of them, either.

          In the process of making such raids into the realm of the unfathomable, it will become clear that: (1) psyche cannot be identical with the brain and on biological grounds alone, regardless of parapsychology; (2) effects in the real world cannot always be understood on the analogy of colliding billiard balls; (3) process, incessant change, is fundamental but neglected when we try to understand it in terms of a series of stop-action snap-shots; (4) the best analogy for the structure of reality is organism, parts integrated into a whole whose process is a higher-order of reality, transcending the sum of its constituents.

          The modest metaphysics proposed here will be in line with both the general trend in physical science over the past three or four centuries and with Jung’s appeal to Chinese metaphysics to clarify his proposal of synchronicity as a fourth principle to complete our Western description of the world. It renders parapsychology far less mysterious.

 

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1. “Between the scornfully skeptical and the eagerly superstitious”: this is how Frederic W. H. Myers described his work as an investigating member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1894 (quoted in Sheldrake, 2003: 71).