The Secret of the Golden Flower - Summary 2
January 27, 2008 – 1:35 am
Inner Summits
The chapter ‘Modern Psychology Offers a Possibility of Understanding’ is a compressed enunciation of the fundamental problems facing human beings psychically. However, Jung’s treatment of the nature of the problem, its reality and scope is quite brief. Nonetheless, he does give the primary method for solving the difficult psychical problems human beings encounter. The method he gives is to allow the unconscious to communicate its solutions to the psychical problems one encounters in life.
All of this however, might come across as deceptively simple to the reader which makes me feel the material calls out for unraveling and elaboration. In principle by using different terms, giving new examples, and restructuring the narrative it should be possible to bring new facets to light. But in practice since this is only a blog entry and not a book I have to be content to give only a couple of clues to this unraveling, hoping the reader will add their own insights to the discussion.
Jung himself gives us an important key concept for unraveling what this section is about. He uses the term ‘a self-regulating system.’ By self-regulating system he essentially means a living being. A living-being is self-regulating while a mechanical system is externally constructed or programmed to regulate itself. A mechanical system doesn’t define its own programming whereas a living being can.
Self-regulating also implies something not necessarily self-evident. We have to ask what is being regulated. We might in the case of temperature say we want to be comfortable, but comfortable is a relative term existing only within specific contexts. Like Goldilocks we don’t want to be too hot or too cold, which means that what we’re regulating is between extremes of opposites, like very hot and very cold.
If this framing of our human psychological problems is accurate then all of a sudden the Taoist texts appear very relevant since they define The Way as flowing through the middle of extreme opposites. According to the Taoist views we find ourselves living in niches or valleys created by impassable mountains, whose unscalable peaks are clouded over and rarely seen by us.
Furthermore, as self-regulating systems who are alive we can’t be content with mechanical formulas. We often find creating harmony within the harsh extremes of life is far more complex than any mechanical solutions can offer. Solutions are frequently entirely individual because they’re relative not only to local contexts but to countless specific decisions in each individual life.
An example of this is visible in the meandering course of rivers. When rivers are misguidedly straightened from their meandering windings, their waters begin to move too quickly resulting in the destruction of their various ecosystems in the process. When a natural river is straightened artificially, flash floods bring trees, rocks and silt speeding through resulting in violent damage to the terrain and water quality, also killing fish and destroying vegetation. By contrast, the naturally meandering river builds up its course through its own processes thus creating natural brakes that regulate the movement of water allowing ecosystems to grow.
Likewise as modern human beings learning under the burdens of accumulated culture we’ve become increasingly self-conscious and dissuaded from simply following our natural instincts. But as our aims have become more abstracted from nature we’ve also become more direct in achieving them. Similar to the rivers we’ve straightened, we immediately aim to get straight to our goals, unconcerned with the means or particulars of the roads we travel.
As conscious beings we can pursue many different solutions to our problems other than the simply natural ones. But in order to do so we have had to distance ourselves from the compulsions of instincts. This has brought us a measure of freedom but it’s also created many disasters in that we’ve had to learn anew how to regulate ourselves as individuals and as nations consciously rather than naturally.
Some would seek the answers to our current social and individual problems in naturalism, becoming primitives again. Others would seek answers to our problems in short sighted engineering solutions like straightened rivers. I believe however, the solution is to observe the processes and rhythms found equally in nature externally and in our unconscious internally and to consciously channel these rhythms into infinitely creative and sustainable harmonies.