Carl Jung

Circle Symbolism and Consciousness Part 2 – Intro

Sun Throne

In order to set the stage for my depiction of the nature of consciousness I first need to lay out two fundamentally different experiences we have as human beings.  The first is the experience of oneself as a unique subject and the second is to all objects.

Neither experience is new to us, as we live with them day in and day out.  Its only when we have to explain them, that we may become aware of difficulties in doing so.  Some of these difficulties may have to do with our taking subjective and objective experiences for granted.  For example, we may realize for the first time that we never fully sorted them out before.  Or we might suspect there are difficulties with the terms themselves.  Maybe the terms ’subject and object’ are inadequate simplifications of complex realities and just can’t do justice to the complexity of life?

Nonetheless, while the difficulties in sorting out the natures of subject and object are quite real, it’s also possible we simply haven’t yet learned how to handle the terms effectively.  I’ll be giving my take on what subject and object mean to me in my next several posts, but what I can say now is that as a subject I can encounter the world and establish my own particular take on what that reality is.  As a subject, I have my own reality or space in which I can consider my experience independently of whatever the world presents to me.  This independence from the given presentation of reality is what I call myself - the subject.

The other issue I want to mention is life.  In my view life is greater than subject and object as we normally use the terms.  I feel the omnipresent reality of life defines the normal subject and all objects.  Where I am - there is life, because as an experiencer I am someone who perceives and to some extent knows about reality.

My views above may sound like Descartes, however I’m not making thinking the only means of knowledge, because I recognize that the presentation of reality has its own content independently of me as well as being a living activity.  As far as its unpredictable side, what I’m calling life might be considered to be similar to Carl Jung’s unconscious.  But unlike Carl Jung’s unconscious, life is present in both our conscious and unconscious states.  Life then is a larger reality that holds both the conscious and the unconscious.

So what relationship does the subject have to all the objects in the world and to other subjects?  This seems to be a very crucial question to forging an approach to life that works effectively with a living reality that’s new along with what’s already been given.  And this is the question I’ll be addressing in the next series of posts.