Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Read online

  Moore: Yes, that is the image of transpersonal forces that do not let evil have the last word. In that image, from the point of view of the ego, you lose, and from the ego's point of view, we do a lot of losing, we do a lot of dying. If you work with people in any depth, you know they are battle-scarred veterans. They have lost a lot of battles, but they have resources that come to their aid that are not just individual resources, but are transpersonal, trans-egoic forces. That is the whole Jungian idea behind the Self with a capital “S.” If you are cooperative, the Self with a capital “S” will see to it that you have helpers in your darkest hour. You will not get off scot-free, but in your darkest hour you will have helpers.

  Audience: In the Reformed Christian tradition we call it “Providence.”

  Moore: Providence is parallel to the Jungian concept of synchronicity, the idea that the great General of the universe will not leave anyone without reinforcements.

  Audience: This is the Holy Spirit.

  Moore: You have a transpersonal Helper available to you. It does not mean you can avoid what you have to do, but you are not in it alone. That is part of the genius of Jung, and one of the things that makes Jungian psychology such a powerful alternative to all other psychologies, for none of them work from the assumption that the ego has help from within the psyche.

  Audience: This is a theme in the Bible actually, because many times the warriors thought, “This is the battle where I am going to be defeated,” but then something happens to change the course of the battle. Or they thought, “This is a battle we cannot lose,” and then they fell on their faces.

  Moore: Right, and one of the most interesting things is the image that the outcome of the struggle is not a merely a matter of numbers, and thus not a matter of who seems to have superior force. When these archetypal things get constellated in a certain way, the weaker forces can triumph, like David against Goliath, and there are many other stories with the same theme.

  Audience: Like Jesus himself in his humble birth.

  Moore: Yes, all these stories are trying to say something to us. You could say, in Jungian terms, that as long as the personal ego does not turn itself away from the presence and guidance of the archetypal Self, that no matter how wounded or weak or imprisoned you may be, and no matter how difficult and hopeless your image of trouble may seem to you to be, there are enduring realities that come to your side and give you a chance to succeed in your struggle.

  NOTES

  1. This material was transcribed and edited from a taped lecture and discussion led by Robert L. Moore at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, Illinois, on February 10, 1988.

  2. The current most accessible presentations are probably Vermes (1995, 1997, 2000).

  3. Madeleine L'Engle (pronounced len-GAL) wrote the Time Fantasy series in four volumes. These works present love as the only effective weapon in the struggle against darkness, chaos, and evil. L'Engle's sizable body of work continues to get serious attention. See Chase (1995) and Wytenbroek (1995).

  4. On Tolkien (1892–1973), see Carpenter (1977) and Becker (1978). On C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), see Walsh (1979), Wilson (1990), and Schultz and West (1998).

  5. See 1 Corinthians, chapters 2 and 3, especially 2:1–10 and 3:1–3. Also Hebrews 5:11–14.

  6. For a fuller discussion, consult Moore and Gillette (1992).

  7. Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), is excellent on this.

  8. See my lectures, “The Courage to be Transformed,” available from the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.

  9. Morton Kelsey's book, Encounter with God (1988), discusses these cultural movements toward increasing lack of awareness of these realities, but even he does not realize how much more vulnerable moderns are to such invasions than were premodern people. You cannot fight something you cannot discern.

  CHAPTER 3

  Regulating Dragon Energies

  The Challenge of Conscious Ritualization

  MANY PEOPLE TODAY REFUSE TO LOOK AT HOW ISSUES of human spirituality relate to such larger problems as pathological tribalism, not because they consider these issues uninteresting or unimportant, but because there is so much denial today about their radical importance for the human future. Many intellectuals unfortunately seem to think that anyone who addresses issues of human spirituality, even the idea that there might be such a thing as “human spirituality,” is sort of dreamy and out of contact with reality.1

  The first thing to discuss, therefore, is why it is so important to address this topic effectively today. After a brief word on my own interest in the topic, I will sketch in broad outline what I see as the main spiritual and psychological challenges today. I will describe some new resources now available that make it possible for us to think in a more systematic and realistic way about facing these tasks. We now have the resources to begin facing the fundamental spiritual tasks of our species. This is not something, in my view, that has been the case very long.

  Let me start with a word about myself and my interest in this topic. I am a Jungian psychoanalyst, but I am also an Adlerian analyst, and my first book was a Freudian book. I have continued to study contemporary Freudian theory with the school of self psychology in the tradition of Heinz Kohut. I consider myself a neo- Jungian now, however, and am happy to make that claim, because I feel that Jung's theoretical paradigm is far and away superior to any psychology that is remotely in second place. That is not to say that it is the archetypal psychology, because I do not believe in an “archetypal psychology,” but I do believe that Jungian psychology can and should be an empirical, scientific psychology of the archetypes. I want to make it clear that I am not a Hillmanian; I am a neo-Jungian. There is a big difference between a neo-Jungian psychoanalyst and a post-Jungian “archetypal psychologist.” Theoretical assumptions really matter when it comes to the effectiveness of our integrative interpretations of interdisciplinary research.

  I am also a professor of psychology and religion at Chicago Theological Seminary where I teach psychology, religion, and spirituality to rabbis, priests, and other clergy and interested laity. I have worked in this area for a long time. In the summer of 1965, when I was still in my twenties, a professor set me off on this journey by introducing me to Alfred North Whitehead, Carl Jung, and Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, the founder and primary theoretician of General Systems Theory. The experience really blew my mind, and I have never been the same since. I have spent a ridiculous amount of money, time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears, trying to figure out the implications of these theorists for psychology and the spiritual life. I don't regret it, but it is amazing to think back on all that has happened to me as I've continued working in these areas.

  I also edit the Paulist Press series on Jung and spirituality, which provides a forum for bringing the world's spiritual traditions into dialogue by using Jungian psychoanalysis as a holding environment, a way of providing a container for in-depth discussion for people who will not dialogue any other way (Moore 1988, Moore and Meckel 1990, Meckel and Moore 1992).

  Another proposed project of the Institute for World Spirituality is the International Directory of World Religions. Even today, you still could not contact all the religious leaders in the world if you wanted to, because no one reference work tells you how to reach them, who they are, and where they are. If this project succeeds, we will for the first time in history have a reference work for contacting every religious group on earth.2

  These projects symbolize something important happening in the world today. If Teilhard de Chardin was correct that there is a burgeoning planetary consciousness, then you would assume one spin-off from that would be some improvement in communications. We may soon have much greater potential for communication among the various religious of the world.3

  Why is it so important to address these spiritual and psychological issues that others choose to deny? Because they are so basic to human existence that if we do not deal with them adequately, we may lose the opportunity to de
al with any of the other issues. The survival of our species and all our relations may hang in the balance.

  We must try to understand the psychodynamics of why people avoid discussing the relation of spirituality to such problems as pathological tribalism. There are clear psychological reasons for this avoidance that have to do with the infantile grandiosity in our psyches. It overstimulates our grandiose energies when we start looking at the large problems facing humanity. We become very anxious. It's like having a 300-pound St. Bernard jumping around in your head. Your defenses just shut it down. This is a common understanding in psychoanalytic self psychology. What happens when you start letting yourself feel grandiose enough to address some truly large human problems? This is not anything fancy, just basic self psychology, but we need to understand how it works to keep us from addressing significant human problems.

  My conviction is that we must intervene in these dynamics so we can ask and address these important questions. They require that we develop the awareness to face them and formulate some effective strategies for dealing with them.

  There is currently little interest in this most important topic because the denial is so massive on these fronts. We have such fear of being overwhelmed by our grandiosity, our messianic complexes, that we shy away from this. We would rather watch soap operas or something. It is much more self-soothing.

  It seems to me that the contemporary world faces a decisive human crisis. Contrary to what arrogant secularism would have us believe, secularism has not brought great progress in a long-term prognosis for humanity. All you have to do is get serious about the ecological problems of this planet, and look closely, not at some speculation, but at the hard data we already have, about what our species is doing to other species, and what the voracious, insatiable appetites of human narcissism are doing to this planet. We have enough information now, if the denial level were not so high, to make it clear to anyone with any interest in it that this cannot be just another academic topic, something to do if you are bored and want to do something new to cope with your boredom. This is a survival business, a radically serious survival business.

  The general failure to understand this problem is a mark of the pall of enchantment that hangs over our planet. The metaphors you need to understand what is happening in the human consciousness today are available more in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien than in many other places. Our planet lives under an enormous cloud of enchantment of consciousness, a massive denial that Ernest Becker describes in his work, The Denial of Death (1975). It is a lot more serious, however, than Becker points out, because it is not just a denial of death, but a denial of all sorts of serious and worsening problems. Our denial of the ecological situation is a central issue, yet many well meaning social critics refuse to look at the psychological nature of such problems. Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them.

  Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.

  Our task today is to turn away from what Robert Bly (1973, 1990) would call a “naive male” or “naive female” approach to the human situation. Bly irritates a lot of people by pointing out some of the horrible things going on out there in the world. In a significant way, poetry and folklore and myth have always pointed these things out to us, and it didn't matter what the ideology was. People always find a way to corrupt it for narcissistic, antisocial purposes. The pervasiveness of these problems makes psychoanalytic interpretation and Jungian reflection especially important for understanding the issues and finding potential solutions.

  Some people think we need to go back to premodern tribal cultures and forms to find solutions for our problems, but they differ on one thing: which tribe to go back to. We have people who want to go back to the Hopi, to the Mayans, to the Dagara, to the Navaho, and so on. I get letters from people in all these tribes who want to write books about their tribes for the Jung and Spirituality series. The number of different spiritual tribes out there is enormous.

  First, you have to get a feeling for what tribal culture is like. For the tribe in the premodern world, the tribe itself was the human species. Anyone outside the tribe was not human. The movie Little Big Man (1970) showed this by translating the Indian language name for tribal members as “human beings,” thus implying that people outside the tribe were not “human beings.” This is an enormously important point, because such a perspective is acceptable only as long as your tribe has no contact with other tribes. When another tribe shows up, the genocidal impulse emerges.

  Just the other night I saw the movie The Lost Horizon (1937) for the first time. Deep in the mountains of the Himalayas a little Tibetan paradise exists called Shangri-La, and you cannot get there from here. You can be kidnapped and your pilot can die, and you can crash and find yourself there, but it is surrounded by mountains and storms and snow, and you ordinarily cannot get in there from the outside world. Tribalism in Shangri-La is fine, because the people do not have to deal with anyone from the outside.

  This was the situation of many tribes for a long time. We still find tribes in the jungle that have no contact with other tribes. So they have no theological problems about it, or questions like, “What about those other people?” Like “Where did Adam and Eve's children find people to marry?”

  Increased contact between people of different tribes, however, made conflict an increasingly important and problematic issue. Note, for example, how conflicting tribal mythologies fuel violence and terrorism in the Middle East.

  The history of human warfare, however, shows that such conflicts did not always lead tribes into unlimited war and destruction. Some people may consider it bad news, or even impossible news, that all humans have the warrior archetype inside them, but it resides in the physiological hardware, not in the cultural software. Whatever the warrior sees, it either wants to fight or protect. That is what warriors do. That has always been true for humans. But premodern tribal cultures had rituals designed to limit aggression. The rituals of warfare had one purpose: to limit, contain, and control war.

  Modern warfare is far from being an improvement. The increasing technological modernization of warfare activities constantly lowers the level of consciousness about ritualization in war. You cannot go up to the War College today and find a course, “Ritualization of Warfare 301.” Nowhere in the curriculum does it say, “These are the rituals we engage in to make sure we don't kill too many of the enemy.” That is why nuclear proliferation has occurred to such a degree. We are not satisfied to kill all of our enemies once. We want to be able to kill them as many times as possible. This kind of madness is the result of an invasion by unconscious archetypal energies.

  The history of warfare and ritualization in warfare shows what an aberrant approach we have to this today. Our species is in a near psychotic state about it. In the tribal era, we could go to war with rituals that got ourselves all fired up. We knew how to make warriors. We would paint them up, get them to hollering, beating all those drums, making all those war noises, generating all that warrior energy! These indigenous tribes were not
just doing the Texas two-step. They didn't get together to dance for fun. It was a solemn ritual process designed to create the consciousness needed for the serious purpose of waging limited war.

  When they engaged the enemy, they usually were not interested in destroying the entire tribe. They usually wanted to raid and take some captives for ritual purposes. Some Native Americans called this “counting coup.” If you were a superior warrior, you might want to ride your horse over to the other side and touch the horse of the best warrior over there, and then ride back to your own side without anyone being injured. You didn't necessarily always kill your enemy.

  I want to emphasize here that the ritual software in tribal cultures put great limitations on the destructiveness of warlike impulses. They also had self-limiting ritual structures to regulate consumption. Some of you may know more about this than I do. Can you give me an example of how tribal cultures regulated consumption? Do you know any examples of that? How did they regulate materialism?

  Audience: Nature was a great regulator.

  Moore: Yes, nature in one sense is certainly the regulator of last resort, but I'm talking about cultural regulators or ritual regulators. Did you ever hear of potlatch? What is it? Can someone define it?

  Audience: Isn't that a great giveaway, where people come from all over and you give away what you have to them, to show how wealthy you are, how powerful, how generous, and so on.

  Moore: Yes, it's a significant ritual occasion. You build up some wealth, you get so many horses or pigs, or whatever, but there comes a time when you do not want to keep on accumulating, so you throw a party to give the surplus away. We still have some of that in our party giving today. To throw a good party, you need some of the primitive energy of gift giving in your psyche. We don't know enough about the ancient psychology of gift giving, but it relates to this archetypal theme. If looked at superficially, it may appear as an arrogant act, but not if you understand its ritual and archetypal foundation. It is what has to be done to create a world, create a cosmos. It manifests the generosity of the archetypal king and queen. All of this relates to the archetype of king and queen.