light of nature

In southern California, where I grew up, there was a special phenomena that never ceased to fascinate me. I lived near the sea and on certain summer nights I would go down to the harbor to look at the phosphorescent algae that lit up in the water. I even gave a report on biological luminescence for my high school chemistry class. Although the Scientific American article I used for my homework explained the chemical reactions and the biological purpose, I still marveled at this living light that shone in the sea. It symbolized for me the inexpressible meaning of the mystery of life and of consciousness evolving out of matter. My fascination was not limited to biological phenomena; even inert matter[1] such as stones, seemed to contain a profound mystery[2] to me.

I have remained true to this childhood fascination in my professional work as a natural scientist, but I understand it no better. I often ask myself: Whither my avid interest in the newest research in various fields of the natural sciences? One response is that a part of me believes science will uncover the answers, hidden in nature, to the big questions such as: What is the meaning of life and death? Another possible reason, on a more personal level, is that I unconsciously imagine that the salvation of my soul lies concealed in nature. After all, ancient thinkers were also taken by a fascination with nature and they sought redemption through working with matter. The oldest (western) alchemists were:

…still fascinated by the Hyle (matter) and found the Deity and the whole secret of birth and death in mysterious matter, in dead and living bodies, in nature. It was the empirical world, which offered man in antiquity the solution of all problems and redemption.[3]

Do I imagine that one day understanding nature will somehow lead me to a better understanding of myself? I am certainly more conscious – in the sense of ego formation – than nature is. How can there be wisdom in nature that can help me to come to grips with myself and this world? I do not see how new geological understanding, for instance, is going to rid me of a depression, my character faults, or my weak relationship to the Self. The fate of my soul depends on how much I develop in my lifetime, and this development requires active participation on the part of my ego consciousness.

However, I know that character faults and weaknesses of the soul cannot be overcome at will, as several unsuccessful attempts have demonstrated to me over the years. (Perhaps I have not held out long enough!) It seems that some deep psychic complexes carry a fate stretching over generations or cultures and maybe these can only be dealt with by psychic elements that themselves span generations and cultures. Might these somehow be connected with nature or natural processes? How far is our psyche connected to natural processes? Certainly a fascination with nature alone cannot salvage my soul, but it may point out a path that leads in that direction. Jung said of the old alchemists that they assumed a divine soul lay sleeping in this prison of matter (the body, and nature).

C.G. Jung:

“This idea originated in a Gnostic myth: The Demiurge manifesting himself in matter, through his animating breath. As man is filled with the Pneuma, so matter is filled with the divine essence. Creation has, so to speak, got the Divine Being into difficulties, for he is hung up in matter, bound in her, and he suffers from this imprisonment and must therefore be freed. This shows us why the alchemist was so tremendously enthusiastic about his work, he was so to speak, in the role of the redeemer. He undertook a work of redemption in the materia, in that he set himself the divine spirit – a piece at least of the Deity – free from its prison… it is the meaningful, metaphysical task of man to undertake the divine work of freeing God from his bound condition, and to lead him back to his original perfection and incorruptible condition.

This is a very important thought, but it is a projection. It is not really to be found in the materia. If you look at a piece of pyrite you will not see anything of the kind. The alchemists stared into the dark unknown hole of the materia until their own unconscious psychical background became visible in it. This is always the case whenever man sees something which is unknown to him, he finally sees his own unconscious. It was his own psychical condition which appeared to the alchemists in the materia; he saw the divine being which lay bound in himself. But as he saw this in the materia, he worked on the materia in order to free a divine being; and therefore, but only in a projected and symbolic way, he did the thing which should really be done in himself. We assume that the old alchemist did not know this, yet texts exist where the author is by no means as näive as we think. He recognizes the character of the projection and is apparently quite aware that the work was really done on himself.“[4]

In my case, to develop out of a state of being blindly fascinated to one of doubting the validity of identifying redemption with nature should, in principle, signal the end of an unconscious identity with the object (in this case, nature) and initiate the psychological awareness of a projection.[5] But still when I look at a rock, a mountain, a butterfly, or a stream something draws me. Evidently I have not exhausted the meaning held in the fascination; I have not really gotten the point yet. Since, as M.-L. von Franz writes,

…fascination always involves projection…In general it is always the unconscious, or some aspect of it, which produces the projection. It is the Self or a god. It is always a god who produces the projection, which means that it is always an archetype, the ego complex does not do it.” [6]

It may be worthwhile to look closer at my inability to lose this nagging attraction to matter and nature. I can find four reasons for this unconscious bond.

Reason 1: The absence in my ego consciousness of a religious attitude to life is compensated by the unconscious with projections onto matter. When I wonder at something in nature that I cannot formulate, am I sensing the nearness of an inexplicable mystery, the closeness of the divine?[7] Like the alchemists before me, a part of me still participates in the unconscious archaic identity that “the Wisdom of God really [is] in matter”[8] and wonders at nature as if it demonstrates the existence of a higher power.[9] The mystery of life and natural symmetries and orderedness are so wondrous that many ancient thinkers were convinced that they must originate in, or be identical with, a greater Mind, i.e. God.[10]

For it is man’s function to contemplate the works of God; and for this purpose was he made, that he might view the universe with wondering awe, and come to know its maker.[11]

Reason 2: My wonder at nature hints at an objective wisdom in matter, a projection of the wisdom greater than my ego which belongs to the Self and the unconscious psyche. In addition, a part of me is convinced that every bit of matter has a psyhic aspect; every psychic phenomena has a material aspect, any neither can be really separated from the other. M.-L. von Franz has delved into these deep questions expressing them in better words than I. She writes that:

The unconscious seems to deliver models which can be arrived at directly from within without looking at outer facts, and which afterwards seem to fit outer reality. Is that a miracle or not? There are two possible explanations: either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter. If a wonderful idea as to how to explain gravitation comes up from within me, can I say that it is the nonmaterial unconscious giving me a wonderful idea about material reality, or should I say that the unconscious gives me such a marvelous idea of outer reality because it itself is linked with matter, it is a phenomenon of matter and matter knows matter?

…

There we touch on great mysteries, but I speak of them because it is too cheap to say that the old alchemist, i.e., the medieval natural scientist of antiquity, projected unconscious images into matter and nowadays we are enlightened and know what the unconscious is, and what matter is, but those poor fellows just did not distinguish between the two, which explains why they were so backward and fantastic and unscientific! The psyche/matter problem has not yet been solved, which is why the basic riddle of alchemy is still not solved. The answer to the question they pursued we have also not discovered. We can have projections of many things, just as they had about matter, but we prefer to speak of theirs as naive projections of the unconscious for we have outgrown those models. We can still recognize them as phenomena of the unconscious, or dream stuff, but we cannot recognize them anymore as being scientific. For instance, if someone says that lead contains a demon, we can say that he projects the shadow and demonic human qualities into lead, but we can no longer claim that lead contains a demon, for there we have outgrown the projection and have reached a different conclusion as to how and why lead is harmful to us.[12]

My personal struggle with this problem is symbolized by the luminescent algae, light from living creatures in dark waters. C. G. Jung summarizes a wealth of amplificatory material on the image of light by concluding that “light is the symbolical equivalent of consciousness, and the nature of consciousness is expressed by analogies with light.”[13] As in my youthful fascination with bioluminescence, my psyche forms images symbolizing the idea of a certain “consciousness” in nature. It is obvious that there is intelligence in the psyche (we are aware, we think), my psyche does not have to search for ways to formulate that thought. But I suspect that the idea that non-psychic matter (if there is such a thing) can possess an intelligence is hinted at in this fascination. As with the quote from von Franz, I am left to wonder: How much is my projection and how much non-ego consciousness is there in innate matter?

Reason 3: The “goal” of the fascination is not only intellectual understanding, it is also a feeling relationship to the living psychic elements, the symbols of the collective unconscious, which are bound up with the object – in this case, nature. Since this feeling relationship is missing, a fascination fills the vacuum.

Should I, therefore, consciously participate even more in the fascination? How? Go more into the rational scientific fascination, or let myself float away in irrational fantasy? Find a way to do both? Sometimes I fear that death may tap upon my shoulder before I have found out who I really am. Am I the personality I identify with who moves in time and space among buildings, rocks, and trees? Or is there something timeless, a spirit in matter, a soul in rocks? Maybe I attribute a soul to matter because I cannot realize this ageless soul in myself. Maybe I sense that God lies in nature because my everyday life is so ego-oriented that nothing shakes this inflation until I come up against a mountain millions of years old.

Reason 4: As a hopeless intuitive, empirical reality fascinates my inferior sensation. On a deeper level, my personal relationship to the unconscious lies in matter. One could also say that the “puer” in me needs down-to-earth reality to balance his airy soul and ultimately save him from sure death in the lap of the positive mother.

Personifying my split relationship to matter

These four reasons are actually tightly interrelated. In attempting to find a standpoint within their field I am confronted with an internal split, which is not a comforting realization. A compromise based on a fake harmony is no solution. If I am split, I must remain split; perhaps I need to support it even more extremely. This is not necessarily courageous. I simply hope that somehow, a genuine unification will emerge if I just hold out long enough and bear the tension of opposites.

I begin with a story. When I was about 12 my Christian Science Sunday School teacher tried to explain to us doubters why evil could not exist. She gave the example of a jar with jelly beans. The jelly beans were supposed to symbolize God (being sweet and good; unfortunately I did not have a liking for jelly beans). If you fill up the jar with jelly beans, there was no room for anything else, for instance, evil.[14] Therefore evil could not exist. This attempt to explain away evil failed miserably. I too easily  imagined all the holes between the jelly beans where the Devil could get in, and, knowing him, he would. I lost serious interest in Christian Science and began to suspect church religion in general. My parents were not convincing either. Who could I then trust? Scientists, although they did not deal with the problem of evil, at least had a duty to honestly observe and describe nature, I thought. No more of this Christian Science jelly bean type of explanations of why evil could not exist when I saw it all around me. As I grew older, I became more interested in rocks and Geiger counters than in the farce of Mary Baker Eddy. In high school I even toyed with the idea of becoming a nuclear physicist but fortunately my intelligence level severely limited any serious pursuit in this direction. However, there remained a character in me who was fascinated by physics and the natural sciences in general. To distinguish this alter ego from other parts of my personality, I will personify him as Harvey, an untypical but still very rational scientist. He probably should have been a Talmud scholar judging by the way he loves to bicker about every possible detail. He identifies with the natural scientist and later played a role in my decision to study physics at the ETH in Zürich. His philosophy resembles that of I.I. Rabi, a well-known American physicist who left an orthodox Jewish upbringing to study physics.

When I discovered physics, I realized it transcended religion. It was the higher truth. It filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, “Will it bring you nearer to God?” They always understood what I meant.[15]

There was also another boy in me; a half-human, a companion of whales and dolphins. He grew up in nature, in God’s world in the form of the natural beauty of Southern California. In this natural landscape of sea and mountains there was neither good nor evil: it was just what it was. Similar to how it must have been for the Chumash Indians, whose spirit apparently dominates the inner landscape the region, strange shapes, talking animals, and demons were as real if not more real than rocks and trees. This boy went fishing, then surfing, and then to San Francisco in 1966. The reality of the non-physical world was overwhelmingly evident and empirically but subjectively demonstrated by the drug-induced visions of the hippy subculture. When the time came to decide between a scientific and a liberal arts college this character carried the day and took me to the latter (Antioch) as a poet-musician-painter. Later he led me to Switzerland and C. G. Jung. I will call him “T.B.,” short for “Treelip Boy,” after a dream I once had of a boy with a pine tree growing out of his lip.

Let me present these parts of myself in their polarized forms:

Harvey: “The answers to the deep questions, as far as they are not metaphysical, are to be found in the scientific observation of nature. If God exist in a form comprehensible and believable to the modern man of today, that is where His presence will be demonstrated.”

T.B.: “The world of science is not the real world, which may be convincing but is only a veil. The real world is found in visions, fantasies, and dreams.”

These two are actually suffering from one-sided outlooks caused in part by the streams of the collective age in which they exist; they are actually striving to find a way to unite or to find a middle ground on which to coexist. This third thing, in its emerging form I will personify as a character called Ash” (he comes out of the ashes). His point of view can be expressed as follows:

Ash: “If you look closely and objectively into the laws of quantum physics and the mystery of nature you will discover the irrational. They must go together. In this view quantum mechanics implies that everything in the universe is somehow “entangled” (at least when you want to measure some physical property). This can only mean to me that the psyche is involved. Thus the psyche is somehow inherent in quantum mechanics, we have to interpret it and understand it in this way. The quantum mechanical “rules” are essentially psychological, they can only be used to describe nature if the irrational is taken seriously and given its deserved place. The way to underpin this paradox is through the work of C.G. Jung.”

To complete this internal zoo, there is Harriet, “the Red Woman” notorious for her quick, sharp wit, inconsistent thinking, variable standpoint, unannounced and highly-opinionated interruptions with twists of malicious glee at destroying structures created by rational men. (In short, she is animus-possessed). Occasionally she also demonstrates a good feeling reaction.

Harriet: “Harvey, you cannot demonstrate the existence of God by any rational means. Scientist are so cut off from their feelings and instincts and overrun by the mother that they run to the books. But even there they go wrong. Look. First of all you cannot underpin a paradox. A paradox is a set of irrational, just-so facts. Second, to force a harmony like Ash wants is premature. The two worlds do not fit together, they should and must be kept apart, otherwise neither will be integral. The whole view is indescribable, you will only see it anyway after your death. So what is the use of this typical mama’s boy gibberish? You have lost your way to God.”

Ash: “There is a way to bring the viewpoints together that is genuine, grounded in this life, and meaningful: constantly be aware of two planes separately but simultaneously: 1) the outer objective meaning and 2) the psychological or symbolic meaning of the scientific terminology. Thus one preserves the scientific integrity and the perception of the inherent reality of the psyche.”

Harvey: “There is a perceptual difference between the psychological viewpoint and the physical viewpoint that cannot be overlooked without damaging the integrity of both and doing the physical view injustice. Do not de-materialize matter, do not de-psyche the psychic! But what is the meaning of this difference if the ego did not create it? Is the difficulty of many scientists to accept Jung because they are stubborn, blind, scared, or still so utterly possessed by their “science”, or is the possessing archetype keeping them blinded to force them to realize with full consciousness the meaning of life?”

T.B.: “Maybe science is trying to describe the psychoid world where matter and psyche are indistinguishable.[16] They just do not know it and are projecting psychic aspects onto matter and vice versa. Maybe they must continue to experiment and theorize until they demonstrate to themselves the reality of the fantasy world.”

Ash: “As Jung and von Franz say, all of the statements scientists make can be treated as symbols expressing something about the psychoid realm even if the scientist themselves see it as only material. The translation of this “something” is a big job, but we could begin to work on it.”

****

I could continue their conversation indefinitely without – at least in my present state – much progress. (I will, however, let these characters interrupt the main discussion in the following pages. Some of their more long-winded and rational rhetorics have been relegated to Appendix IV). Alternatively I could look to see how other people dealt with these problems. Although other people cannot solve my conflicts, this site may offer a sounding board and inspiration to help catalyze a constructive development.

Recently I came across a reprint of the writings of a wild European character, Theophrastus Paracelsus, who lived in the 16th century. He expressed with eloquence, depth, and fervor his answers to questions about man’s relationship to himself, nature, and God that are similar to those touched on by my inner characters. Unlike me he seemed to have found a way to unify his own divergent voices. Thus I decided to investigate my own fascination and split by trying to understand what Paracelsus meant by “knowledge from God” and “knowledge from nature”. I single out Paracelsus over many other writers, thinkers and visionaries because he seems to have been aware of the god-like power that technology could wield and yet he expressed a differentiated attitude about the ethical responsibility involved in man’s use of the light of nature. This differentiated attitude is, to my mind, absent in modern science. My particular personal problem is that I have neither a standpoint of my own nor much religious insight. The point of this essay is to help me to develop some kind of standpoint and, hopefully, a ray of light along the dark path to more religious attitude.

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[1] I am here not differentiating between “nature,” “matter,” and “inert matter” but follow an old precedence: an ancient translator of the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek to Latin noted parenthetically that the Greek word ulh [hyle] (which he did not translate, but left as Greek in the Latin text) means “mundus natura”. These would in English be translated as “matter” and the “natural world”, see Asclepius II, A holy book of Hermes Trismegistus addressed to Asclepius in Hermetica: The ancient Greek and Latin writings which contain religious or philosophic teachings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, Edited and translated by Walter Scott, Oxford, 1924-6, 4 volumes, reprinted by Shambala Press, Boston, 1985 (hereinafter referred to as: Hermetica), vol.1, p. 313. In the Corpus Hermeticum are several attempts to differentiate nature, matter, and inert matter which I will not go into here.

[2] This fascination is a general phenomenon, for example, Agrippa said: “…a great power lies hidden in the forces of stones and herbs” Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netteshiem in De Occulta Philosophia , 2nd revised edition, 1533 (German translation as Die Magischen Werk, fourier Verlag, Poseiden Press, Wien, 1982, (first book, chapter 13) p. 39. As examples, Agrippa mentions the magnet that attracts iron, the diamond which when placed close to a magnet nullifies the magnetic force, and jasper that clots blood, etc. He reviews what the philosophers have written about the source of this power: Plato calls it “ideas”, Avicenna poses “intelligences”, Hermes reports the “stars”, Albertus Magnus, the “characteristic form”, and so forth. Agrippa himself explains that these authors are all saying in essence the same thing: “All powers come from God mediated by the world-soul”, ibid, p. 38.

[3]C.G. Jung, Alchemy, Vol. 1 and 2: The process of Individuation, Notes on lectures given at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, November 1940-July 1941, privately printed, edition 1960, p. 38. I note that today it still is the empirical world – unfortunately only the material empirical world – in which modern man finds solution to all problems.

[4]Jung, Lecture notes on Alchemy, p. 45.

[5]“Projection is based on archaic identity of the subject with the object but can be first called a projection when the necessity to dissolve the identity with the object has arisen. This necessity occurs when the identity is disturbed, that is, when the absence of the projected contents significantly disturbs adaption and the return of the projected contents into the subject becomes advantageous…the concept of projection describes a state of identity which has been made noticeable and has become an object of criticism, whether it is self-criticism by the subject or whether criticism by someone else.” C.G. Jung, Typologie, Walter Verlag, Olten and Freiburg im Bresnau, 1977, p. 161-2 (my translation from the German).

[6] M.-L. von Franz, Alchemy, An introduction to the symbolism and psychology, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1980 (hereinafter called Alchemy ), p. 117-8.

[7] Is the divine in nature, or in my awareness of something divine in nature?

[8] A thought that M.-L. von Franz credits to the author of Aurora Consurgens (a text probably written in the latter half of the 13th century), in Alchemy, p. 224.

[9] This pantheistic (and Gnostic) view “that the world is the physical manifestion of God” was, of course, rejected by the Church since “God is Spirit” and the very opposite of matter, see Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis,  Collected Works vol. 14, (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1977, hereinafter called Mysterium) p. 541.

[10] “The most divine and most beautiful object [God] seen in the murky mirror of the world”, Robert Fludd, quoted in Wolfgang Pauli, The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler, in C.G. Jung and W. Pauli The interpretation of nature and the psyche, Bollingen Foundation – Pantheon Books, New York , 1955 (hereinafter referred to as The influence ), p. 192.

[11] A discourse of Hermes to Tat: The Basin, in Scott, Hermetica, Libellvs IB, vol. 1, p. 151.

[12]M.-L. von Franz, Alchemy , p. 36-8.

[13] C. G. Jung, Commentary in: The secret of the Golden Flower, trans. by R. Wilhelm, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969. (hereinafter called The secret), p. 113.

[14] Interestingly enough, this story has an older parallel (but with the opposite sense). The Tehillim commentary on Psalm 119 says: “The Torah can be likened to a honey jug: When a quart of water is poured into a jug full of honey, a quart of honey will be displaced. Similarly, to the extent that you admit an alien culture into your heart, the words of the Torah will be forced out.” Tehillim / A new translation with a commentary anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic , and Rabbinic sources, commentary and translation by Rabbi Avrohom C. Feuer, ArtScroll Tanach Series, Mesorah Publishers, Brooklyn, 1985,  p. 1463. My Sunday School teacher might have had better luck with honey than jelly beans. But I knew that the devil would get in somehow.

[15] I. I. Rabi, quoted in  Rabi, Scientist and Citizen, by John S. Rigden, Basic Books, New York, 1987, pp. 302 , this quote is found on page 73.

[16] “Jung calls “psychoid” those areas of the unconscious where psychic phenomena fuse with or transgresss into matter.” M.-L. von Franz, “Time and synchronicity in analytical psychology” in: J. T. Fraser (editor), The Voices of Time, 2nd edition, London, p. 647.