Carl Jung

Ignorance is Bliss

Hexagonal Reflex

In s12 of Alchemical Studies Jung states common human instincts related to ideation and action are based on unconscious archetypal patterns. He describes these unconscious archetypal patters as "those mighty primordial images that hitherto have held our consciousness in thrall." I think it’s clear that he means ancient cultural mythologies at large that have infused themselves into every level of culture. He states that as long as our consciousness is relatively undeveloped we find a certain peace in these cultural icons, simply because everyone in our culture seems to share them in a natural fashion.

Natural however, is often a synonym for naïve. The case with growing older is that as one’s individual consciousness becomes clearer and stronger it encounters so many problems with these unconscious archetypal patterns that it seeks to emancipate itself from them and to enter into the clear light of reason. But in doing so according to Jung human consciousness loses the birth gift of collectively agreed upon images becoming to some extent uprooted and vulnerable.

This theme of collective versus individual development seems to me to be central to modern culture. It reminds me of the statement ‘ignorance is bliss,’ and how Swami Dayananda a Vedanta teacher whose lectures I attended dealt with the question. He maintained ignorance according to Vedanta is primordial and uncreated, by which I believe he meant it can have no specific prior causes, otherwise the causes would be known and it wouldn’t be ignorance. While he stated that according to Vedanta ignorance has no known cause it can and does have a definite end with true self-knowledge.

One thought experiment I came up with to better understand his statements was to consider a series of colored dials each having a very thin section of about 10 degrees cut out of the 360 degrees in the circular dial. Next we would take 100 such colored dials and place them on a rod where each dial can rotate separately, from a random starting point and at different speeds. Looking head on upon the face of the first dial we would most likely see whirling solid colors and be unable to detect the sections that were cut out. However, on rare occasions all the sections that were cut out might align revealing that the dials were not whole but were all missing sections. The hole revealed shows not only a missing piece in the topmost dial but in each remaining layer. In fact with the depth revealed we see for the first time there are many layers not just one.

While the analogy is imperfect I believe it does illustrate Jung’s critique of modern consciousness in that the world as we experience it freshly and naively appears quite definite, even though in motion and somewhat variable the pictures we discern appear in consistent ways. We learn about the world and take in its definiteness uncritically only to discover numerous unseen pitfalls as we trip into them. It’s only after careful examination of our means of knowing that we might start to see significant problems with the seeming completeness presented by the images we have of the world.

Continuing with our analogy, if we instead inverted the size of the disk holes so that each disk instead of being 350 degrees round was only a slim section of 10 degrees we would with a 100 overlaid sections still most likely see a solid wall of colors at least most of the time. But, the effect of falling through the surface images completely would be far more likely to happen. We would see what we thought to be a continuous, complete, but constantly moving picture of our world to actually be composed of incomplete parts overlaid upon each other.

Jung, I believe is arguing that the picture of the world formed by the intellect is closer to the 2nd case of our analogy, namely that the highly developed pre-frontal cortex allows for a high degree of image and symbol manipulation but the pictures it creates within itself of what the world means to it are fragmentary. These pictures we form of the world are capable of falling through at any time because the presentations they show us aren’t really what we believe them to be.

s13: "The uprooted consciousness can no longer appeal to the authority of the primordial images; it has Promethean freedom, but it also suffers from godless hybris. It soars above the earth and above mankind, but the danger of its sudden collapse is there…"

Returning to the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss,’ our Vedanta teacher confirmed ignorance is indeed bliss by providing numerous examples showing how natural animals aren’t neurotic like humans, etc. But he said there’s one catch — ignorance is bliss but only if that ignorance is total. He believed that if there’s one molecule of real knowledge involved in the topic matter, that grain of knowledge will act as an irritant on the person until they achieve total knowledge about the matter at hand. He maintained that full knowledge like complete ignorance relieves the irritation, but every stage in between is subject to the irritant of partial knowledge.

Likewise, if we consider the psychic mental representations we have of the world (which Jung calls images) to be generally similar to the picture disks in our analogy we can see why these pictures can collapse on us unexpectedly and sometimes in doing so reveal a fundamentally different arrangement of things.

s15: "Be that as it may, the fact remains that a consciousness heightened by an inevitable one-sidedness gets so far out of touch with the primordial images that a breakdown ensues."