Page 99 - Eclipse of God

72 Chapter 5

In the place of that detachment of the whole man from the
bustle of life, Jung sets the process of “individuation,” deter-
mined by a detachment of the consciousness. In the place of
that becoming one with the Self- contained, he sets the “Self,”
which is also, as is well known, an originally mystical concept.
In Jung, however, it is no longer a genuinely mystical concept
but is transformed instead into a Gnostic one. Jung himself ex-
presses this turning toward the Gnostic. The statement quoted
above that modern consciousness turns itself to the soul is fol-
lowed by the explication, “and this . . . in the Gnostic sense.”
We have here, if only in the form of a mere allusion, the mature
expression of a tendency characteristic of Jung from the begin-
ning of his intellectual life. In a very early writing, which was
printed but was not sold to the public, it appears in direct re-
ligious language as the profession of an eminent Gnostic god,
in whom good and evil are bound together and, so to speak,
balance each other. This union of opposites in an all- embracing
total form runs since then throughout Jung’s thought. It is also
of essential significance for our consideration of his teaching
of individuation and the self.
Jung has given a most precise expression to that which is
in question here in one of his mandala- analyses. Mandalas, as
Jung has found them, not only in different religious cultures,
especially those of the Orient and of the early Christian Mid-
dle Ages, but also in the drawings of neurotics and the men-
tally disturbed, are circular symbolic images. He understands
them as representations, arising in the collective unconscious,
of a wholeness and completeness which is as such a unifica-
tion of opposites. They are supposed to be “unifying symbols”
which include the feminine as well as the masculine, evil as
well as good in their self- contained unity. Their centre, the seat
of the Godhead according to Jung’s interpretation, is in gen-
eral, he says, especially accentuated.