The Feast You Can Prepare For Yourself
essay
A Riff On Assumptions, Knowledge and Enlightenment (From an email response to a Jung discussion group.)
I.
(On to more practical matters!) You wrote, "I never thought of it this way but it makes sense. How could we ever see another's uniqueness if we had not yet found our own? "
Yes. And so it is too: how could we ever see another's enlightenment if we haven't found our own?
Some may bridle at any simple, facile, or painless enlightenment. One assumption that fuels this emotional response is that enlightenment itself is this one big, terminal, (what I call,) "big enchilada". (Too, often forgotten and submerged is the perennial dance between suffering/learning, and harmony/magnanimity.) However, perhaps enlightenment is an experience of immense subtlety, gradiation, "verbedness" (hat tip to Alice,) and certain uncertainty (paradox!).
We might, as an experiment, try something which is actually extremely accessible. Which is to: reflect upon what would be different in our being were we enlightened.
How easy an exercise to do! What comes up? Oh, not the big enchilada, but maybe the surprising taste will be of a chip and salsa and guac.
(Try it.)
As you suggested, a little taste of this chip, (be it the love, or, enlightenment chip,) and other people are seen quite differently.
II. (not in the actual reply)
"Nope. Not gonna do it! You can't eat that stuff that way. Noway."
Ahhh, an object lesson... Sure: enlightenment can't be purchased for small coins. (Food for thought, to rephrase Rumi, ra, 'God takes small coins as well as large.')
The attitude one may take toward any such experiment will define two approaches, one, won't do it; two, will do it.
Either approach reveals a second inquiry: why do it or not do it?
"Enlightenment is not as you say it is. That's why not."
Begs the question, (referring to the assumption about enlightenment of course,) "Why do you feel enlightenment is as you say it is?"
Here you tell me about all the assumptions your assumption about enlightenment is chained to.
To which I might respond, kindly, "Do you understand the difference between putting something to a test and holding on to that same something so as to protect it from being tested?"
"Yes. But your experiment is ridiculous and I won't do it! It has nothing to do with enlightenment and I won't pretend that it does."
(Note how decisive are the closely held connotations of words when one is in someway identified with the meaning. This is often the case for terms for which our connotations are connected to hard won insight, yet, this holding-on can become an obstacle at a later point.)
"Okay, let's figure out another test and simply plug in something other than enlightenment. Yet, let's figure out something similarly elusive but not anywhere as formidible."
(In this way, we can proceed more incrementally toward a more ambitious kind of experiment. The neat aspect of this kind of experiment is that with enough experience of the brief access of heretofor "hard-to-access" experience, inexorably the learner is eventually led to more ambitious experiments. (Technically, this kind of experiment benefits from an isomorphic match between its experiential demand and the learner's disposition, or 'readiness'.)
In a paradoxical sense, in this way the learner is newly conditioned to approach their fixed, habitual, conditioning. So, it is that a transformative approach invokes the level at which new experience may comment remarkably on seemingly fixed 'old' conditioning.
Yet, this experiment is not primarily about the personal connotation of important (to the person,) words. Because other less-freighted words could just as well do the same duty, the primary focus of the experiment is on the reflection in the mode of, "as if". As if one were enlightened, loved, joyful, healed, wise, etc.
(...more than one way to bake a burrito...)
[coda] /was part one of the original reply/
Now's the time to address your thoughtful post as the group ponders knowledge, enlightenment, individuation and intellectuality.
You've provided some touchstones in your earlier post. (Well, touchstones for me!)
"No ideology is ever complete. It's as if life is a great big building with lots of windows. We each look into this window or that window and we describe what we see. And even if we looked in all the windows, we still would end up with an incomplete understanding of everything there is to know about the inside of the building. "
My own experience confirms that the more you know the more there is to know, and, the more you know the more there is to unknow. (How handy the unconscious is.) Knowledge of a certain kind is very provisional. The word knowledge I take in its broadest connotation: that which one knows. Obviously, some knowledge refers to explicit frames of reference. So, for example, to know about analytic psychology, to have knowledge about it, is not (smartly!) divorced from its explicit frame of reference. But the frame itself is not one thing about which one can only know about the things in it. I don't think the conceptions of analytic psychology are esoteric or even difficult to have knowledge of. Not that it isn't easy to be mistaken! (For me it's a cinch!) However, the common ground of analytic psychology describes an agreement about its fundamental conceptions. This can be a starting point to swallow the whole thing without questioning, or to throw it up without questioning, or to digest it thoughtfully.
Still, like most such theories, one can agreeably discuss its conceptions with likeminded 'intellects' and still beg questions. For a simple reason: it rests on assumptions, and those assumptions rest on further assumptions just as, like many systems or coherent bodies of theorized material, it also is partial, is a work-in-progress, and can be subjected to all sorts of testing from, among many possibilities, critical-thinking, experiential, integral (in other words how it fits into implicit other 'orders',) tests.
You write, "You take in the other, then check within yourself to see what it brings up, and you move without and within, checking and rechecking as you go. "
My own experience is that awareness is predicated on a close examination of assumptions. Any supposed model, any comprehensive framework rests on a profusion of assumptions. Taken as givens, unexamined, they may well support an ideological perspective, and if one identifies with this perspective one is fixed upon something, awareness is fixated, and, in psychological terms, functioning will lends its own unequivocal support, and then, strange stuff may begin to toss -one so fixated- about. Although his conception begs many questions, Jung suggested the compensatory thrust of the unconscious effects a 'knocking of our awareness' off its apparently fixed center. He also suggests that there is an integral relation between the unconscious and the conscious.
Jung was a philosopher of uncertainty, the unknowable, the hidden, the partial, the antimonious, the subliminal, paradox and mystery. If he wasn't transpersonally-minded, he remains more 'mystery-minded' than most 'intellectual' thinkers who posit 'consciousness without an object' (and do so without questioning the assumptions upon which such views stand).
Without raising any specific questions, it will be interesting to see how analytic psychology becomes more subtle as it addresses its own assumptions; as it, in other words, becomes extended into the unknown via the known and vice versa. For one way of awareness is to rigorously know an assumption today, when yesterday it was subliminal, and only partially known, and burdened with only presumptiveness, givenness.
(December 2002)