Question to Jung : In your "Answer to Job" you state , page 463 (Collected Works, Vol 11): ' I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God or not that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of 'psychologism' far more commonly than I suspect."
You go on to say, " God is an obvious psychic and non-psychical fact, " but I feel in the end you do not actually answer the question as to whether or not you believe in the existence of God other than as an archetype. Do you?
This question is important because I should like to answer the kind of objections raised by Glover in his "Freud or Jung" , page 163: " Jung's system is fundamentally irreligious. Nobody is to care whether God exists, Jung least of all. All that is necessary is to 'experience' an 'attitude' because it ' helps one to live.'"
C.G.Jung: An archetype------ so far as we can establish it empirically ----- is an IMAGE. An image, as the very terms denotes, is a picture of something. An archetypal image is like the portrait of an unknown man in a gallery. His name, his biography, his existence in general are unknown, but we assume nevertheless that the picture portrays a once living subject, a man who was real. We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible…………….
Loganathan : Is there an ORIGINAL IMAGE of God as Jung declares there is. I doubt very much. BEING is that which presents itself -------and it is such presentations that are archetypes and which I equate here with the Indian Muurththi----- and it can present itself in infinite number of ways having itself NO DEFINITE FORM AS ITS OWN ESSENCE. These presentations can be higher or lower but there appears to be NO IMAGE that is highest. BEING can present Itself as the totally INACCESSIBLE and simultaneously as that which is WITH everything inalienably. In saying the original image is BEHIND the plethora of manifest archetypes , I believe Jung is subscribing to the notion of TEXT with its duality of Structure, the DEEP and SURFACE. The empirically established archetypes have as their DEEP structure BEING but the presence of BEING as the DEEP structure cannot be an image , a portrait-like thing. For that would mean there is another level of DEEP structure for BEING which contradicts the very meaning of BEING. For BEING is the ultimate, the absolute, that which nullifies any looking beyond itself. BEING is, God IS and that 's all we can say. We cannot say BEING is as such and such without being self contradictory.
When questions are asked beyond this, the answer is only a DEEP SILENCE that Gautama Buddha practiced when such questions were posed towards him.
C.G.Jung: ……..We know that God-images play a great role in psychology, but we cannot prove the physical existence of God. As a responsible scientist I am not going to preach my personal and subjective convictions which I cannot I add nothing to cognition or to a further improvement and extension of consciousness when I confess my personal prejudices. I simply go as far as my mind can reach, but to venture opinions beyond my mental reach would be immoral from the stand point of my intellectual ethics.
Loganathan : Here it would appear that Jung is not clear that the science he is practicing is actually Hermeneutic Science in which the notion of proof in the mathematical/logical/ scientific sense does not exist. The logic is Hermeneutic Logic and the dialectics is regulated by the notions of SHOWING and SEEING AS SHOWN. One gets an UNDERSTANDING of the presence of BEING only because BEING shows it self as thus. This understanding is that makes us believe in God, in the TRUTH of the presence of BEING. And one who has gained this can show others and LEAD them to SEE what oneself has seen. This NOT proving but rather OPENING UP THE EYES and augmenting the SEEING and also indirectly developing understanding which in turn results in augmenting consciousness. Where more of hidden is seen, there is less of the Unconscious and in the limiting situation, no unconscious at all.
This state of Unconscious-less consciousness that is called Sivanjaanam in the Tamil Saiva Siddhanta.
Loganathan @ Ullaganar
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