Patterns of behavior and Archetypes
We must…accustom ourselves to the thought that conscious and unconscious have no clear demarcations, the one beginning where the other leaves off.
Page 200
As a biological being he has no choice but to act in a specifically human way and fulfill his pattern of behavior. This sets narrow limits to his possible range of volition, the more narrow the more primitive he is, and the more his consciousness is dependent upon the instinctual sphere.
Although the existence of an instinctual pattern in human biology is probable, it seems very difficult to prove the existence of distinct types empirically. For the organ with which we might apprehend them – consciousness – is not only itself a transformation of the original instinctual image, but also its transformer.
Page 201
Page 203 – Paragraph that may be important in context with “A Day in the Life of….” Cards.
…the archetypes have, when they appear, a distinctly numinous character which can only be described as “spiritual”, if “magical” is too strong a word…It not infrequently happens that the archetype appears in the form of a spirit in dreams or fantasy products, or even comports itself like a ghost. There is a mystical aura about it’s numinosty, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. It mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions in the very people who deemed themselves miles above any such fits of weakness. Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, and which despite the most desperate resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a depth and fullness of meaning that was unthinkable before. I fully appreciate the resistance that all rooted convictions are bound to put up against psychological discoveries of this kind. With more foreboding than real knowledge, most people feel afraid of the menacing power that lies fettered in each of us, only waiting for the magic word to release it from the spell. This magic word, which always ends in “ism”, works most successfully with those who have the least access to their interior selves and have strayed furthest from their instinctual roots into the truly chaotic world of collective consciousness. (Robert Anton Wilsons experience with ‘Mescalito’ can be used to illustrate this).
Page 205-206
The essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal. The archetype is spirit or pseudo-spirit: what it ultimately proves to be depends on the attitude of the human mind.
Page 206
Psychic processes….behave like a scale along which consciousness “slides”. At one moment it finds itself in the vicinity of instinct, and falls under its instinct; at another, it slides along to the other end where spirit predominates and even assimilates the instinctual processes most opposed to it. These counter-positions, so fruitful of illusion, are by no means symptoms of the abnormal; on the contrary, they form the twin poles of that psychic one-sidedness which is typical of the normal man of today. Naturally this does not manifest itself only in the spirit / instinct antithesis; it assumes many other forms, as I have shown in my Psychological Types.
Page 207
There is in my opinion no tenable argument against the hypothesis that all the psychic functions which today seem conscious to us were once unconscious and yet worked as if they were conscious. We could also say that all the psychic phenomena to be found in man were already present in the natural unconscious state (“Nature” here means simply that which is, and always was, given).
( this links nicely with David Lewis-Williams’ ‘The Mind in the Cave’ comment that, “All anatomically modern people of our own time and of the Transition [from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens] have, or had, the same nervous system”. Page 130 – 131)
Page 210
Theodor Lipps has stressed, the nature of the psychic is unconscious. Anything conscious is part of the phenomenal world which – so modern physics teaches – does not supply explanations of the kind that objective reality requires.
Consequently, psychology is incapacitated from making any valid statement about unconscious states, or to put it another way, there is no hope that the validity of any statement about unconscious states or processes will ever be verified scientifically. Whatever we say about archetypes, they remain visualisations or conceretizations which pertain to the field of consciousness. …we cannot speak of the archetypes in any other way.
Page 214
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.
Page 215
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