The Human Soul (Lost?) in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era - Quadrant

This essay, in the Spring 2017 issue of Quadrant, examines the liminal phase of society and interiority in which we find ourselves today and poses several questions to the irrepressibly optimistic inventors of a techno-utopian future: Can we really be and feel happy if we need to be informed about it by a cellphone app? Do 93 million selfies a day replace a single moment of true reflection? How can we remain relatively integrated individuals in the transiency of the present?

The essay will be part of a forthcoming book.

From the introduction:

Jung says, “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices…,” and “In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history…” (CW15, par. 129, 127).

The image, the images of interiority, cannot exist without the soul. In soullessness, in fundamentalism and totalitarianism there are no images.The existence of the soul, that elusive, purely poetical idea of anima, whether in man or woman, cannot be bound by earthly empires, neither by imperial rules nor by imperatives, but can only be poetically imagined, for instance, as that image of a mirror that mirrors the image.

But the soul also relies on the capacity of imagelessness, in the sense of an absence of externally generated images. In their discussion centered around Neumann’s manuscript on Jacob and Esau, Jung writes that “the ‘imagelessness’ [that is, of the God-image] is exceedingly important for the free exercise of intuition that would be prejudiced by a fixed image, and thereby rendered unusable.” (Jung and Neumann, 2015, p. 56).

While images take shape within our individual psyches, the image is not only within us, but we are also within the image, as Henry Corbin says (Cheetham, 2003, p. 71). We reside within an image of the world, within the world soul, and we relate to the world according to the images, ideas and perspectives that we have developed, and to a large extent, according to the views and the spirit of our times.

When listening to the brilliant young men and women at the forefront of progress, those that hold the trigger to the chips and the apps of the future, one cannot refrain from being amazed at the firm belief and complete conviction that technology is the remedy of all ills and the foundation of all future viruses – sorry! virtues, not viruses.

This essay is an attempt to cause a slight crack in the confidence of the young, and perhaps it is merely an old man’s pathetic envy of tomorrow’s triumphant heroes, to whisper in their ears, “you are also mortals.” .....

The Human Soul in Transition
an interview with Bonnie Bright on YouTube

Quadrant, Spring 17 - Volume XLVII:1

From the Editor

— Kathryn Madden

Featured Artist

— Shaun McNiff

The Human Soul (Lost?) in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era

— Erel Shalit

Meditations on the Birth of Self: Archetypal Revelations in Whitman's 1855 "Song of Myself"

— Brandon J. O'Neil

Black Holes & The Negative Mother Complex

— Elizabeth Colistra

Living Multiplicity: A Sideways Perspective

— Roger Peasley

Book Reviews

— 
Beth Darlington, review editor. Reviews by Deborah Stewart, Mark Dean, and Chris Beach

Subscribe to Erel Shalit's Newsletter

Internet, Transparency, Transiency and the Shadow

This profound painting, The Geology of Time, by Susan Bostrom Wong, opened the article 'Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency', in The Jung Journal: Psyche and Culture.

The Internet is a dramatic manifestation of the rapid and enormous changes that humankind is experiencing in the world of today (or tomorrow, before the sentence is finished).

It is still in its very early stages, but who can imagine that less than two decades ago, practically no one had heard about that reality, however virtual, of our world.

In 2006, 18% of the world’s population had already access to the World Wide Web. Within five years it had doubled, reaching 35%.

If today there are private companies the size of countries, there are phenomena, such as Google and Facebook, that have become entire continents, in that alternative world in which we live, called the Internet.

While in many ways the expansion of the internet seems erratic, chaotic and associative, it may well be a self-regulating system, moving towards increasing similarity with what we still might call “the real world”:

The future of the Internet technological revolution will continue to be made in man's image.

Three dimensional graphics will become more sophisticated, and virtual reality interfaces such as viewers and tactile feedback systems will become more realistic. The technology will be applied to innovative ways to navigate the Internet's information universe, for hyper-realistic gaming, and for group communications. There will come a day when you will be able to have dinner with a group of friends each in a different city, almost as though you were in the same room, although you will all have to bring your own food.

Virtual reality applications will not only better and better reflect the natural world, they will also have the fluidity, flexibility, and speed of the digital world, layered on the Internet, and so will be used to create apparently magical environments of types we can only now begin to imagine. These increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences will continue to change how we understand the nature of reality, experience, art, and human relations.

Retrieved from The Future of the Internet

The assets, advances and advantages of the Internet are innumerable. Yet, everything has its shadow(s). Often the shadows that we have ignored and supposedly left behind, jump up right in front of us and obstruct our free forward movement; take for example how environmentalists of the time welcomed the automobile,

In cities and towns the noise and clatter of the streets will be reduced, priceless boon to the tired nerves of this overwrought generation. … On sanitary grounds too the banishing of horses from our city streets will be a blessing. Streets will be cleaner, jams and blockages less likely to occur and accidents less frequent, for the horse is not so manageable as a mechanical vehicle.[1]

While the car has become a crucial means of transportation in our world, we may now, a hundred years later, be more aware of its disadvantages; more than a million people are killed around the world in road accidents, and an estimated 50 million wounded per year (World Health Organization).

The speed with which we access information impedes the ability to digest it; digestion is needed to turn information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.

Much of what takes place on the Internet becomes transient – one website leads to the next, as we swiftly move on to something else that attracts our attention.

The Internet enables greater transparency, which often is desirable. But with transparency comes a certain loss of privacy, when everything can be forwarded and mass-distributed with great ease, sometimes intentionally, sometimes provocatively, and occasionally by mistake.

One recent example is an email, by mistake circulated to the students, compiled by one of the teachers at a High School in Kfar Saba, in which one student is described as “selfish,” another as “not particularly bright,” and another as “a big baby.”

In this case, what pertains to simple gossip, unworthy of being put on paper, was not only printed, thus becoming ‘a document,’ but distributed to all students, making us wonder what really keeps these teachers occupied; clearly not valuable education. Gossip – a word which interestingly comes from ‘God-siblings’ – sometimes makes aspects of everyday a bit juicier, shouldn’t be taken seriously. It shouldn’t become a document, and it shouldn’t become public. The shadow of gossip should be relegated to the secrecy of dark corners of dining-hall tables or coffee-shop chatter. But now, with the ease of pushing buttons, shadows are easily thrown out right there in front of us, penetrating the weakening filters of the ego and ego-judgment, fusing with the face of our personae.

Read more, e.g. Self, Meaning & the Transient Personality, Recollection and recollectivization, Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency here.

Technology is not only here to stay, but we would rather not do without it. However, rather than a future in which man and machine struggle against each other, with a doubtful outcome, modern technology can be combined with the mystery of life and the magic of childhood, as for instance in Gal Sasson's Make-a-Play, a finalist in the Engadget Insert Coin Competition.

[1] Appeared in Horseless Age, “a popular magazine for automobile enthusiasts” published between 1895 and 1918; from Ann Norton Greene, “Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America.”