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The thing about reading a lot of Nietzsche is that he regularly and without fail drops a truth bomb on you of epic proportions, the type of thing that will blow your mind and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! One such truth is that all religious followers, whether adherents, devotees or clergy are actually nihilists in disguise.
Should you take your ‘meaning of life,’ or your ‘reason for existence,’ and push it into another realm whether that’s ‘Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla,’ or even the ‘Elysium Fields,’ then you are, without realising it, admitting that there’s no meaning to be found in this life, the one that you are living right now, and that makes a Nihilist of you! This is especially true of religious extremists; they are the most nihilistic of us all. Any young man who straps Semtex to himself before detonating it in a pop concert is a Nihilist! His actions show the world that there’s nothing here for him…
The Jungian Jungle
On the flip side of this, is of course Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, for whom mind comes before matter, making it prime! At the extremities of mind is where he finds matter, for Jung an ‘experience’ is mind encountering itself at the fringes, that’s where the nominally ‘real,’ world begins and ends. All matter is dependent upon mind for its existence! Jung further posits that there’s a trinity to the mind, that it can be split into three distinct realms, that of the conscious, subconscious and collective unconscious. It’s within the subconscious that we find angels and demons, gods and monsters, God and the Devil as primordial energies present in all human beings, alive and well as bodily instincts expressed in the psychic language of symbols that, fish like, swim through the oceans of the psyche presenting themselves to us in our dreams, moments of revery or in brief, brilliant and sudden epiphany.
When and where culture changes then so do the symbols, the symbology of the Christian west within the psyche is markedly different to that of the non-Christian East, but the energies they represent are nevertheless the same, being present in all human beings. It’s these ‘Archetypes,’ Jung’s equivalent of a Platonic ‘Form,’ that direct our lives without us even knowing, not unless we delve deep into the subconscious through personal reflection, earnest enquiry, hypnosis, automatic writing, or any form of expression that gives an uninhibited voice to the subconscious. With knowing comes choice.
Nietzsche, an arch-materialist, an existential nihilist and probably, the greatest moral philosopher of all time warns us about the dangers of Nihilism, Jung, the hopeless and intuitive idealist makes believers of us all, because God and the Devil, the saints and the entire pantheon of world religions exist in symbolic form within the psyche, the products of fundamental, motivating energies that drive our behaviour without or conscious awareness, until the moment comes that we choose to look within and dive deep into the waters of the subconscious mind. The ship of body and soul is steered on autopilot, until there’s an emergency, that’s when the conscious decision-making mind kicks in, for the rest of the time it’s blissfully asleep. Self-reflection, or the process of delving into one’s own mental landscape is an attempt to wilfully steer the ship on a course of one’s own choosing!
As far as Jung is concerned, we create our own reality, and this should make us Godlike, but there’s a caveat, we’re each a smaller fragment of a much larger being, our personal unconscious merely a fragment of a much larger ‘collective unconscious,’ that maintains a consistent reality. To put it simply reality remains ‘consistent,’ because it’s the product of the ‘collective,’ psyche and not our personal one. I suppose a miracle is what happens when we convince the collective psyche to go along with our conscious wishes! Is that the definition of ‘faith?’
Does God exist? You’ll have to make your own mind up! There’s nothing physical out there that you can point at and say, ‘look there’s God,’ but he exists in the psyche whether we consciously believe or not as an archetypical energy and for Jung that makes him ‘more real than real,’ thanks to his ability to shape the world we live in through both the conscious and unconscious activities of human beings everywhere. You’ll have to decide, is the material world all that there is, or is reality one of mind first, matter second? If you choose the latter, then God exists!
