Regarding Jung's Idea of Culture and Consciousness Versus Instincts

I disagree, somewhat, with Carl Jung's core idea that the growth of consciousness (symbolized by the Fall of Man) causes man to turn away from or oppose the instincts, that consciousness seeks culture against instinctive drives. Consciousness grows at the prompting of the instincts. For me, this places the instincts in the proper order for trying to understand them. This way consciousness is not seen as something that grows at the expense of the instincts, which both Freud and Jung believed. I think we have not seen the real reason, the deepest reasons for the prompting of the instincts, ie, the Ideal of the Instincts is to evolve to Godhood.

Ignorance of the instincts causes man to create profane consciousness and profane cultures, but deeper knowledge of the instincts can cause man to create sacred consciousness and sacred cultures.

It is the Involutionary Inward Path of Traditional Religion, seen as an exclusive religion and an exclusive consciousness, which turns away from the instincts of the Evolutionary Outward Path. We need not blame consciousness for the death of, or burying of, the instincts. We can blame misdirected and profane consciousness and culture for the death of, or burying of, the instincts.

Traditional religion says goodbye to the instincts in the sense of saying goodbye to the Evolutionary Outward Path while keeping only the Involutionary Inward Path. When something inside of us or in culture cries out for the more certain path of nature and the instincts, this should not be thought of only as a brutal Dionysian tooth and claw dynamic, as it usually is, which greatly reduces the definition of the instincts.

In the image of the Garden of Eden, Satan does not merely offer the gift of consciousness in place of the instincts, as religion and Jung suggest, Satan offers, rather a turning away from the Ideal of the Instincts, which is the evolution to Godhood. Satan offers a transgression or perversion of the instincts away from the Ideal of the Instincts, or a devolutionary direction for the instincts, an entropy back to the Kosmic Center.

Contrary to Jung, we can go back, we are not condemned to a conscious Great Spiritual Blockade of the instincts in order to have civilization, or a great blockade of the Unconscious. The journey to the instincts is the true journey toward wholeness, but a wholeness which is not exclusively restricted to the human psyche, which defines Jung's Self. Jung's Self is a reduction of God to the human psyche (or an “inflation” of the Unconscious) whereas God is the Ideal of the Self, the Ideal of the Instincts, and we stop short of God when we journey only to the psychic Self.

(A longer essay on Jung will be comingsee #22)