Jung, Silicon Valley and the Monastery Within
So Silicon Valley is looking for its soul or at least the god in the last iteration of a very digital machine. And I was merely hoping for more news from the “Vanity Fair” magazine about all those sex parties in this aptly-named “Brotopia.” Alas, now the talk is of transformative technologies, a kind of consciousness hacking that builds on the fast-paced developments in neurobiology. This could be the next big thing or a high-tech version of phrenology, the science of reading the bumps on your head to detect moods, complexes and possible eruptions that was popular on the Atlantic City boardwalk late in the 19th century.
Fortunately Silicon Valley seems to have found a house of renewal within cycling distance or an electric car ride from the home office. The Esalen Institute, once home to yoga, idle nakedness and amaranth salads, is remaking itself and responding to the tsunami of anguish coming out of the valley about the shadow side of technology. Tech investors, including Sean Parker and Justin Rosenstein, have been very public about the effect of technology on children’s brains. There seems a growing consensus that creating better platforms and devices don’t necessarily make for a better world. So Esalen will offer classes in depression and technology, internet addiction, and the relationship between virtual reality and spirituality. The idea seems to be for participants to connect to their Inner-Net. It will costs a couple about $3,000 for a weekend of this fare.
Having visited a few communes back in the day, I applaud this effort to deal with the dark side of technology. The rapid advances made by the various platforms in little over a decade have changed social habits, communication, commerce and psychologies of billions of people worldwide. From a psychological or Jungian perspective, these changes are fundamental and therefore archetypal, helping to reform us in conscious and unconscious ways. On listening to the Silicon Valley executives referred to earlier, it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to call these changes “titanic” while keeping in mind the mythological Titans, those dangerous and mischievous gods responsible for so much mayhem and violence. These gods, worshipped today in the theater of video games, have now become diseases and, in Jung’s words, what we suffer.
While reading about the Silicon valley woes I was also reading Jung’s “Red Book” written a century ago and finally published in 2009. Apparently his heirs long thought that the strains of “madness” in this oversized, puzzling and medieval-looking volume would hurt Jung’s reputation. It seems to have accomplished just the opposite.
In 1913 Jung was a successful medical doctor, researcher, teacher and budding psychologist. But there was some unease. He had broken with Freud over dream interpretation and other matters. He felt he had become too much of a scientist, too dependent on ego and the heroic path. Years later, Jung told a friend that he felt he had lost his soul.
At that time, with threats of World War I in the air, Jung experienced titanic dreams, envisioning a land consumed by rivers of blood and dead bodies. At times he thought he was going out of his mind. So he turned away from most of his daylight activities and went into isolation where he could reflect on his dreams, visions and commune with characters who appeared in his underworld, his unconscious.
Jung kept a record of these inner experiences in text and drawings. The book has a kind of other-worldly feel, likely a medieval tome created by monks living in an isolated monastery above the Irish Sea. From a psychological point of view what Jung reveals are the worlds of the personal and collective unconscious full of figures, shadows, images, symbols and archetypes that he wrestled and communed with in a process he would later call “individuation,” a lifelong search for integration and wholeness. Jung envisioned this as a kind of second birth, a second coming of the Divine Child, a creative center, which now would be part of the human psyche. Psychological man and woman would be responsible for their own fates.
The “Red Book” is about Jung’s effort to become more conscious of his unconscious, and to get over his one-sidedness and develop his Eros. In his dreams and visions Jung encounters symbolic images of Eve, Helen, Maria and Sophia, representing the archetypal feminine arc from the primordial in Eve to wisdom in Sophia and undergoes a transformation of his inner feminine or anima.
Jung advises readers us to “hang exact science and put away the scholar’s gown, to say farewell to his study and wander with a human heart throughout the world.” He writes that the way forward is within all of us. “My path is not your path.”
I have been helped in my understanding of this subject by a new book, “Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions,” a collection of essays written by more than a dozen Jungian psychologists and other professionals. The authors appear to see today the same profound changes in technology, trade, weaponry, and information exchange that Jung experienced a century earlier in the run-up to World War I. They suggest that in 2018 we face a similar darkness, lack of consciousness and absence of soul that Jung struggled with in the ‘Red Book.”
The tech executives who, despite their wealth, seem to be feeling the weight of living in a flattened world unredeemed by technology, might have a look at Jung, who turned away from science for a while to find his soul. Perhaps Jung’s example is instructive. He realized science and data weren’t the path to psychological integration and understanding his soul. His journey was personal, psychological and dangerous. We carry the archetypes of the past within us. A new technology or device does not immediately wipe out what the psyche has carried for millennia. Jung lived that truth.
I’m not sure what Jung would make of the internet, a connected world and social media, though I suspect he would not be surprised. He spent a lifetime addressing the need for psychological integration and bringing to life the dark, shadowy forces that too often govern us. Jung suggested that most of us live in a sea of “feeling toned complexes,” that unconscious home of our biases, hatreds, fears and prejudices that can be crystallized by events or the look in a stranger’s eye and then erupt without warning in the public square. We see this every day in our political theater.
Social media platforms are simply an extension of this unruly psychological state. In many ways social media platforms, heralded as a path to a connected world, have become weaponized and seem a perfect way to broadcast in a largely unfiltered manner the darkest parts of the unconscious where soul, Eros and compassion are largely absent. Perhaps the platforms would profit from some kind of self-reflection. Perhaps this would be in the form of an archetypal analysis of the content to see what angels, demons and dangers lurk in the dark corners and in the billions of tweets and posts. Perhaps this research has already been done.
But I am moving too far from Jung. He reminded us often that the necessary work is always personal. Esalen can help, of course, but I must look inside myself and deal with my own demons. Jung suggested each of us write our own “Red Book.” As Jung moved beyond Christianity and the patriarchy he suggested each of us build a monastery within, a prayer, soulful, reflective place. This is the place of rebirth and regeneration; a centering of re-imaging and re-visioning our place in the universe.
Jung shows up as spirit, guide and teacher in my new novel, “Chanting the Feminine Down” that is my attempt to create the monastery within, a hint of a post-patriarchal world where the feminine divine assumes her rightful place. (www.chantingthefemininedown.com).
