Carl Jung might have appreciated the last two entries. I was once in touch with him while channeling, but he seemed too self-absorbed to respond to my few inquiries. The fact remains that he was a most unusual man. In his time of spiritual crisis, that is following his break with Sigmund Freud, if I read it right he was basically up shit's creek without the paddle, like as in, walking around psychotic. It is probably to our benefit culturally that he found so much with which to be absorbed over the course of his life - Greek mythology, the I Ching, misunderstanding the physics of Wolfgang Pauli (Jung's synchronicities are an attempt by Jung to make a very unscientific concept sound respectable), and above all, alchemy. To this day I have my doubts about his varied interets in these areas being of direct benefit to psychology as a discipline, but those who came after - most notably Gaston Bachelard and James Hillman - did much with what Jung left in his wake.

However, there is one work which Jung created and about which he had the greatest misgivings; in fact if my memory is working, it was never meant for publication. This is a longish theological essay (very short book) entitled in English, "Answer to Job." Before I get going about it, if you have ever considered the "evil problem," how could a good God allow suffering, this may be to your interests. First, a little note about Jung himself. He was the son of a Protestant minister (Lutheran if I recall), and like Nietzsche before him, he could not help being molded by the father's continual preoccupation with spiritual things - or what were considered spiritual things. This included a thorough familiairity with the Bible and the theological concepts current in that day. However, as a practicing psychologist Jung was ethically bound to keep his mouth shut on religious matters. It took Freud - of all people - to break that little barrier in the late thirties, when, at the end of his life, he wrote things like "Moses and Monotheism." Be that as it may, Jung long festered over the "evil problem" and focused upon the biblical book of Job as the years went by. The name is pronounced "Joeb," one syllable, and not "job" as in "get a - " In the oldest (Hebrew) texts available (Dead Sea Scrolls), it is actually spelled "iyyob." It is not a story original to the ancient Semitic people who became the Jews, because numerous parallels to its many tales exist in the even earlier writings of the various Canaanite, Babylonian and Sumerian cultures of that remote time. "Job" tells the story of a very pious good man - Job - who suffers every concivable misfortune possible: his children are killed by invaders, his cattle are stolen, he is covered with "boils" (possibly leprosy or bubonic plague) and just generally is having a bad hair day. This happens because the Old Testament god, Yahweh (Jehovah, YHWH) points out Job to Satan, saying what a great guy he is. Satan responds by telling YHWH that Job is pious because he's got it good, that if Job were to lose everything he would curse YHWH to his face. Apparently the then-almighty could not pass up a wager and tells Satan to go fuck with Job...which Satan does, as outlined above. To Job's credit, I guess, he does not respond to all of the horrible things that happen to him by giving YHWH the old heave-ho. Instead he does what many of us would do in such a sitch...he asks "Why me?" The book is then filled with much too much material about three (four?) well-meaning friends who keep pestering Job with the idea that somewhere,somehow, Job SINNED. That is one thing about which Job is adamant, I do wrong things like everyone else, but I am not hiding jack. Finally, having worn the poor bastard to a nub, the self-righteous idiots leave, and Job is now wondering, why did this happen to me...YHWH? True to form, YHWH shows up in a whirlwind, wondering who it is that has the stones to question what he, YHWH, does with "his" creation. He spends most of the rest of the book scaring poor Job by awesome displays of power, mocking the guy's insignificance in comparison to his own splendid self. Job never gets an answer from YHWH, merely shuts up, apologizes for bothering the crotchety deity, and is forgiven. Job gets more kids, more cows...more than he had before all of this went down.

Jung - remember Jung? - caught something in the story that theologians and saints had missed for millenia. While Job is alone, pissing and moaning about his fate - this is after the self-righteous goons leave - YHWH starts talking out of the aforementioned whirlwind, and asks a very curious question: "Who is it that darkens counsel?" In modern English this could well be paraphrased, "Who is hiding the answers that Job wants?" That is a very strange thing for an omnipotent, omniscient deity to ask - surely, if anyone had the answers to Job's question - "Why me?" - it should have been YHWH. But as Jung noted, YHWH never answered Job, he just scared the bejesus out of him. Jung went on to hypothesize that YHWH did not answer Job because he - YHWH - did not know the answers. In Jung's words (from memory), it was YHWH himself who "darkened counsel."

That is a very scary thing to say if one is a member of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic religious traditions, because it basically says that the almighty isn't and is as in the dark as we puny mortals.

The fact is, for all of the nonsense with which I feel Jung wasted his and our time, it balances out with this one essay. Jung was all apologetic about it because he was not a theologian. But he was no dummy, and after a lifetime of successfully seeing psychological symbolism in much Greek and alchemical literature, I feel that he touched the heart of the matter - he accurately analyzed YHWH from a psychological viewpoint.

[As a sidebar, I have been a little rough-shod on Jung. He did, after all, give us two psycho-sexual concepts which are central to self understanding. One of these is the anima / anime concept, which says that every man has a hidden spiritual feminine side (anima), every woman has a corresponding "male self" (anime). Jung also gave us the idea of our having a "shadow," a dark negative self which, if you think about it, is a good thing. If we went about with nary a negative feeling or thought, we early on would have happied ourselves into extinction: think of a bunch of hippies stoned out of their gourds on a boat off New Orleans the day Katrina wiped out the Big Easy. Dude, man, like lookit those waves, they're like cosm - - blub - - ]

Llam had asked me to underscore the importance of Jung on this point - the "evil problem" - in helping us to understand that our spirituality is, in the eyes of the Biblical religious traditions, nothing short of atheism. Which is too fucking bad. Poor Nietzsche took this 'way too seriously in his final years. Fritz, you were right, you were right, we do not need a tyrant. We need - we have Other, neti, neti.

So where does this leave you - me - us? In writing to a new friend the other day I had mentioned that the Buddha advised not to name things, and by implication ole Gautama was especially keen on "spiritual experiences", and I gave this example. Someone says "I have experienced God." No, you have not. "I have had a spritual experience." No, you have not. "I have had an experience." Better; but like the Buddha, if you've really had the blockbuster Nirvana you think is "there," you wouldn't be writing or talking about it. It was a joke about the Buddha when he was alive because it's true. All of our words cannot, are not made to, convey what Deity may or may not be. To speak poetically, you could not ask Fire to describe Water, or a blind person to explain what light is like.

So we have decided to wholesale hijack these words, "god," "deity," "divinity" and the like, and to once and for all toss ideas like momotheism and polytheism out of the window. They presuppose too much.

It is so ironic that one writer in the demesne of the Church understood this perfectly; it is much more ironic that he did so when the Inquisition was at its height, and he could easily have been burned for saying what he really thought. I am not talking about Eckhardt or van Ruuysbroeke. Saint John of the Cross knew that every spiritual doorway which opened before him was but one more retelling to himself all of the words, all of the ideas and symbols with which he had all of his life imbued himself. In answer to my three exclamations above, he would merely have shaken his head "No," and would not even have said "better" about the third version, just "No." Because one day, John came to the Wall. The Wall of which I speak is built of our very ability to use words, it is our use of language, it is language. And he was smart enough to recognize that one limitation - as did Jung - and call it the sham and fake it is. Because one day, from beyond that Wall, came Other, reaching to him after he, John, stopped reaching. Like Aquinas before him, John afterward became as silent as the knowledge which he knew - or DID, in our terms - writing only of necessity about anything but THAT. And of THAT he had a premonition in that four-line poem by which he best is remembered. In hoc signo transit - "by this sign, move on."