Tolle and Jung: Collective Insanity, Ego and the Human Psyche

In his insightful and liberating best-seller, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," author, Eckhart Tolle, the recipient of a sudden, profound and lasting enlightenment experience, examines the nature of the human ego and, in the following passages, warns us of the dangerous realities it poses, individually and collectively, to our very survival.

"The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable. We have created sublime works of music, literature, painting, architecture and sculpture. More recently, science and technology have brought about radical changes in the way we live and have enabled us to do and create things that would have been considered miraculous even two hundred years ago. No doubt: the human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other lifeforms, and upon humans themselves. That is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized. A further factor is that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating."

"The First World War broke out in 1914. Destructive and cruel wars, motivated by fear, greed, and the desire for power, had been common occurrences throughout human history, as had slavery, torture and widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suffered more at the hands of each other than through natural disasters. By the year 1914, however, the highly intelligent human mind had invented not only the internal combustion engine, but also bombs, machine guns, submarines, flame throwers, and poison gas. Intelligence in the service of madness! In static trench warfare in France and Belgium, millions of men perished to gain a few miles of mud. When the war was over in 1918, the survivors looked with horror and incomprehension upon the devastation left behind: ten million human beings killed and many more maimed and disfigured. Never before had human madness been so destructive in its effect, so clearly visible. Little did they know that this was only the beginning."

"By the end of the century, the number of people who died a violent death at the hand of their fellow humans would rise to more than one hundred million. They died not only through wars between nations, but also through mass exterminations and genocide, such as the murder of twenty million "class enemies, spies, and traitors" in the Soviet Union under Stalin or the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. They also died in countless smaller inner conflicts, such as the Spanish civil war or during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when a quarter of the country's population was murdered."

"We only need to watch the daily news on television to realize that the madness has not abated, that it is continuing into the twenty-first century. Another aspect of the collective dysfunction of the human mind is the unprecedented violence that humans are inflicting on other lifeforms and the planet itself - the destruction of oxygen producing forests and other plant and animal life; ill-treatment of animals in factory farms; and poisoning of rivers, oceans, and air. Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction."

"The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies" (his own unconsciousness projected outward), criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals."

"Fear, greed and the desire for power are the psychological motivating forces not only behind warfare and violence between nations, tribes, religions, and ideologies," Tolle notes, "but also the cause of incessant conflict in personal relationships. They bring about a distortion in your perception of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled."

This is not new information, our collective insanity has been brought to our attention over and over again for millennia by sages and enlightened teachers. It is just the acceleration of destructive intensity and deadly methodologies that increasingly threaten us today. Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the great enlightened teachers of the twentieth century who influenced Tolle's work, clearly pointed out that what we collectively face is "a crisis in consciousness." Meanwhile, the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, clearly warned us that the only danger we are facing is that which comes from ourselves and our unexamined human psyche.

"We are the origin of all coming evil," Jung presciently observed, in the following interview conducted shortly before his death, fifty years ago, in 1961.

Know Thyself!: The Hidden Dimension of Consciousness

"Know Thyself!" is the great admonishment behind all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, for it seems that virtually all such traditions acknowledge that there is the small "self" or "ego" which we take to be "who" we are, and a hidden, transcendental "higher Self" which, though obscured by the ego's narrative, is the very essence of our being.

"Most people," observes the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents."

"People," he points out, "measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all this is not known, which also exists."

"What is commonly called "self-knowledge"," he notes, "is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen "with us" or "in our family" or among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand, one meets with illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities whcih merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case."

"In this broad band of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control," he warns, "we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what it is that is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 14-16.]

In "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" (written with Christopher Isherwood), Swami Prabhavanada notes that "(t)he external world even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman" (or true nature of our being). In short, we need to be "in the world" but not "of the world," as great sages and philosophers have told us since time immemorial.

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda observes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 24.]

But how to know this non-conflictive and acceptive consciousness of our inner being? Through introspection, self-examination and meditation is the answer found in virtually all traditions.

"(M)editation," Prabhavananda observes, "is evolution in reverse. Meditation is a process of devolution. Beginning at the surface of life," he explains, "the meditative mind goes inward, seeking always the cause being the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 41.]

Thus, to "Know Thyself!" one must move beyond the small "self" of the ego to the transcendental "Self" of one's own inner being.

Burying the Spiritual Instincts of the Unconscious

"Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so . . . "

 -- William Shakespeare --
("Hamlet," Act 2, Scene II)

Conscious thought, that great ability of humanity, can be - as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "a prison." Lost in our cloying thoughts and judgments, we make a virtual prison out of this world's reality wholly through our thinking. A point recognized in all the world's great wisdom teachings and philosophies.

A more-or-less contemporary accounting of this universal truth was provided by Carl Jung in "The Undiscovered Self," his enlightening look at our conscious and unconscious thinking processes. In it, Jung discusses how the intellect endangers us by wholly obscuring the spiritual instinct that is buried within our very being.

"Nothing," Jung observes, "estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."

"Separation from his instinctual nature," Jung continues, "inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side."

"There is," he notes, "an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and its content. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. . . . We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious."

 "We are the origin of all coming evil," warns Jung, in the attached video. And, it is our "thinking without awareness" (as Eckhart Tolle expresses it), our reliance on conscious thought to the utter neglect of our unconscious and its spiritual instincts, which both imprisons and threatens us through a crisis in consciousness. "Nothing is either good or bad," as Hamlet notes, "but our thinking makes it so."

Facing Death and Overcoming Ego

"Whatever be the means adopted, you must at last return to the Self, so why not abide as the Self here and now?"

-- Ramana Maharshi --

Philosophers from all traditions have observed the irony that everyone has the knowledge that all things die, yet they manage to avoid an acceptance of their own mortality.

The ego does not want to face the inevitability of its death, and only in rare instances will an individual face the inevitability of death down by examining just what that means and what it will be like. The vast majority prefer to evade thinking about death's inevitability altogether, or to comfort themselves in their belief of an after-life described by their religious tradition. Yet facing death as an inevitable part of what life holds, in certain instances, may lead one to enlightenment in this lifetime.

If you ask, many people will tell you exactly where they were when they came to the realization that they too would die, and what their reaction was. In most instances, the reaction will be to avoid the fact, and to divert one's attention elsewhere. Yet, one of those rare individuals to face down the inevitability of their own death was the great Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi.

Ramana Maharshi
(1879-1950)

In the Introduction to the book, "Talks with Ramana Maharshi," we read how facing down the realization of his mortality propelled the then-teenaged "sage of Arunachala" (known, at that time, as Venkataraman) to a state of unitive consciousness which endured throughout the remainder of his life.

"After the death of his father," we read, "Venkataraman's family moved to the famous temple town of Madurai so that they could be under the watchful eye of a paternal uncle. It was here that the "Awakening" would take place, that waves of spiritual fervor would overtake him while reading the Periapuranam, the lives of sixty-three Tamil saints. From his childhood, there was a continual inner throbbing of "Arunachala, Arunachala," as if the Self - his real Being - was reminding him of his forgotten nature. Once, when a visiting relative recounted his recent pilgrimage to Tiruvannamalai (a temple town where the solitary, sacred hill Arunachala rises above the South Indian plains), young Venkataraman became astonished and overwhelmed that Arunachala was in fact a place on earth - a place one could actually go to."

"Shortly after this time, during a hot July day when Venkataraman was just sixteen," we read, "he faced his own mortality. One day, when everyone else was away from home, the young boy became completely overcome with the fear of death. Rather than panic or retreat into fear, Venkataraman had the remarkable presence of mind to face the situation, then and there. He dramatized the death occurrence to be able to help bring the experience to its ultimate conclusion, by holding his breath, stiffening his body, and allowing no sound to escape his lips."

"To die before death is to face the void; the emptiness in which the content of the mind has no ground on which to endure. It is rare for one to face the void without recoiling back into form. Venkataraman, like the Buddha, was determined to stay the course. Upon firm investigation into the nature of his "I-sense," his former self died, and the infinite Self, the Eternal "I," rose to take its place - the true resurrection."

Carl Jung
(1875-1961)

In an interview in his later life (embedded below), the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, himself a student of Ramana Maharshi's teachings, observed that: "I have treated many old people and it is quite interesting to watch what their unconscious is doing with the fact that it is apparently threatened with the complete end. It disregards it. It behaves as if it were going on."

"And, so," he suggests, "I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day as if we had to spend centuries. Then we live properly. But when he is afraid, when he doesn't look forward, he looks back. It petrifies him. He gets stiff, and he dies before his time. But when he is living on, looking forward to the great adventure which is ahead, then he lives. And that is what the unconscious is intending to do."

"Of course," he notes, "it is quite obvious that we are all going to die and this is the sad finale of everything, but nevertheless there is something in us that doesn't believe it, apparently. But this is merely a fact. Does it mean to me that it proves something? It is simply so. . . . If you think along the lines of nature," he concludes, "then you live properly."

But what, in fact are "the lines of nature," that Jung speaks of?

"Ramana taught that we exist as Supreme Self at all times," we read in the Introduction to "Talks with Ramana Maharshi," and that, "(w)e need only awaken to this reality by seeking the source of the ego, or "I-thought," and abide in the Self that we always are."

"The path of Self liberates one from the never-ending fear and disorder resulting from taking the ego to be real. By becoming free of the ego-illusion, one experiences true freedom and supreme peace. It is a path that takes one from the apparent duality of the individual and the world to the bliss of one's true nature."

And, of course - as Ramana Maharshi, himself, demonstrated - it is in facing (and facing down) the fear of mortality that the ego projects that we are freed from the small "self" and emerge into the greater consciousness and reality of the eternal Self.

Physics, Spirituality and 'the Structure of Consciousness'

Quantum Fluctuations by Kevin Moore

Arthur I. Miller's book, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession, traces the evolution of the relationship between Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Carl Jung, arguably, the West's most influential psychoanalyst. What started as a patient-therapist relationship quickly morphed into a partnership of metaphysical exploration.

The volume immediately caught my eye in my local bookshop not-so-much because of its subject matter - interesting though it may be - but, rather, because of a memorable passage from Gary Zhukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a now-classic treatise on the convergence of modern physics, metaphysics and the world's oldest wisdom traditions.

The memorable passage which had stuck with me from my first reading of the Wu Li Masters was the following passage on the fundamental nature of quantum physics that features the parallel views  Pauli and Jung held on the true nature of 'reality':

"According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

 Jung's friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world . . . 

"If these men are correct," Zhukav so memorably wrote, "then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness." [Emphasis added.]

Now why didn't high school physics start with that remarkable proposition rather than with the rote repetition of Galileo's experiments with falling bodies? That would have caught my attention!

The great theoretical physicist, Richard Freeman, reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand quantum physics. (The bongo-playing polymath also reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, you've got rocks in your head!")

The quantum world is apparently beyond (and antithetical to) our human comprehension because our language and mere existence in the 'ordinary world' of our conscious existence prohibits us from envisioning the indeterminate and radically interconnect nature of basic reality - a 'proven' reality where everything is composed of discrete 'quanta' of energy, yet where there is no such entity as a separate "thing."

Whether there is, in fact (and I believe there is), a limit beyond which our ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate the "suchness" of what "is" - to use a famous Buddhist description of fundamental reality - it is truly remarkable how the phenemona and explanations of quantum theory echo the conclusions of the world's most ancient wisdom traditions; conclusions which are themselves impossible to fully penetrate with "ordinary" consciousness. Hence, the search for "enlightenment" which has remained a fundamental concern and pursuit of humankind since we first walked out of the mists of time.

Zhukav's assertion that "physics has become the study of the structure of consciousness" is tantalizing because at once it seems to unite the three great streams of humankind's pursuit of knowledge: the sciences (which are all rooted in physics), the social sciences (that are all, in their fundamental aspects, sub-systems of psychology), and the humanities (which highest discipline is metaphysics).

Zhukav concludes his exposition of the 'New Physics' - which admittedly does not cover the most-cutting edge of quantum theory, such as "superstring theory" - by examining the profound implications of Bell's theorem and the work of quantum theorist David Bohm (who was a unique participant in the "dialogues" of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, one of the 20th-century's rare, enlightened masters).

In the closing pages of the Wu Li Masters, Zhukav, initially quoting Bohm, observes:

"Matter is a form of the implicate order as vortex is a form of the water - it is not reducible to smaller parts." Like "matter" and everything else, particles are forms of the implicate order. If this is difficult to grasp, it is because our minds demand to know, "What is the 'implicate order' the implicate order of?"

"A new instrument of thought such as is needed to understand Bohm's physics," Zhukav writes, "would radically alter the consciousness of the observer, reordering it towards the perception of the "unbroken wholeness" of which everything is a form."

The relationship of form with the formless, the reordering and submergence of ordinary human consciousness within universal consciousness, and the description of ultimate reality and our relationship to it, are the elements of all the world's great religious, spiritual and metaphysical traditions. As Zhukav notes, "all eastern religions (psychologies) are compatible in a very fundamental way with Bohm's physics and philosophy. All of them are based upon the experience of a pure, undifferentiated reality which is that which is."

In the end, as the juxtaposition of Jung and Pauli's views illustrate, just as in the beginning of human inquiry, not just physics but all explorations of  'what is' become "a study in the structure of consciousness."

Or, in the words of Rumi, the 11th-century Sufi poet and mystic (as translated by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi):

"If you have a body, where is the spirit?
 If you're spirit, where is the body?
 This is not our problem to worry about.

  Both are both. . . .

 Invisible, visible, the world
 does not work without both."