The Unus Mundus

Last night, while sitting in my bathtub reading through the Qur'an and sipping a glass of cold Chablis (Allah forgive me), I wondered why Jung had stopped with Dorn's unus mundus. In his last big book, the well-named Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung showed that for alchemist Gerhard Dorn, the opus took a step beyond making the Stone.

Dorn postulated a union of the alchemist's spirit, body, and soul with the unus mundus, the "one world," the psychophysical background of Creation and the metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious.

To quote from Jung's book:

The creation of unity by a magical procedure meant the
possibility of effecting a union with the world - not with
the world of multiplicity as we see it but with a potential
world, the eternal Ground of all being...On the basis of
a self known by meditation and produced by alchemical
means, Dorn "hoped and expected" to be united with the
unus mundus.

Beyond this unitary concept Jung felt he couldn't go. I ask: is it possible that his ego stopped him, just as it kept him from grasping the egoless unitary states in yoga and Zen? For Jung, the ego is the "I" or "me" sense in the center of the field of awareness. No ego means no consciousness. No perceiver, no perception. Very Western. But that feeling of a perceiver is just a bundle of sensations put together by memory. As such, it's only one current in the total flow of perception.

I can find thoughts but no thinker standing apart from them - because the thinker-sensation is thought. The observer is the observed. And when the observer-sensation stops, the flow continues. Jung, I believe, confused the two. If the ego is the "I" sense, it's not the same as the total perceptual field, and therefore egoless consciousness is possible, a truth we can verify for ourselves.

Many of the Eastern contemplative traditions achieve it. The Upanishads say the Self (Atman) "burns out" the ego (also called the I-maker). Watch your thinking carefully and gaps appear, grow longer, and widen into a state free of thought. End of thinker.

The brain goes on working, of course, but the sensation of a thinker, of the "I," vanishes. End of the "ten thousand things," too. Discrimination, classification, and conceptualization depend on thought, and when thought stops, so do they. The world of multiplicity melts into pure experiencing of seamless sensory and psychological stimuli.

The best any mortal can do is purge the perceptual field of the filtering "I," or at least see it as one complex of sensations among many. The instinctually and archetypally arranged, Self-ordered play of symbolic experiences then enter awareness freely along with bodily sensations, old conflicts, and stimuli from the outer world: the maximum union possible between the conscious self and the Self. This, I believe, may be what Dorn aimed at intuitively.

This state of alchemical completion could correspond psychologically to the Chinese "Diamond Body," the Dharmakaya, Zen's "original face," Maslow's Being-cognition, Krishnamurti's meditative awareness, the piercing of the sixth chakra, the opening of the third eye, and the third stage in Hesse's theology. Peyote, fasting, the moment of orgasm, and just enough wine offer approximations. In the mystical words of Basho: "Looking carefully: The nazuna is blooming under the hedge!"

What happens, then, when Self-guided, ego-aided psychization illuminates more and more of the instincts and images emanating from the collective unconscious? Beats me. That's the trouble with intuition: it doesn't actually get you there.

In The Ending Of Time (Harper & Row), Jiddu Krishnamurti describes to physicist Dr. David Bohm inward encounters with a "pure energy" that manifests only when the artificial, conceptual divisions invented by the ego end. "Tentatively," he says, "there is something in us that is operating, there is something in us that is...much greater." He then wonders if this compassionate energy aims beyond the personal "awakening of intelligence" (individuation) he mentions in his talks. Dr. Bohm remarks, "Well, since the [universal] consciousness emerges from the ground, this activity is affecting all mankind from the ground." Krishnamurti agrees.

Because the psychoid collective unconscious also relativizes time and space perhaps one person's psychological opus somehow rejuvenates all of us. I'd think it would have to. Carried far enough, one person's individuation equips the Self with a lens that illuminates the psychological ground of the whole humanity.

A staggering hypothesis. Chuang Tzu, a student of Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, asked, "Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man?" Thousands of years passed before depth psychology confirmed the answer he probably knew already; but we've yet to see what happens to us at childhood's end, when the Dreamer awakens.

Vinum Ardens

Whatever the Self is up to, the rest of us must be content to do a little cooking, a dubious accomplishment in my case. Perhaps I shall further differentiate my sensation function and learn to make a pizza: a nice, round symbol of wholeness. Were I its only chef, the collective unconscious would probably go hungry.

When I began working on myself, I dreamed of a moon lush with vegetation, a symbol I now know to be alchemical. (Astrologically, the moon rules Cancer, my sun and rising sign.) Not long ago, I dreamed of looking up at a heavenly procession: first the moon, then the other planets approached me, then receded, one after another, a display of the Self symbol's evolution. The tenth body was the sun, and it filled most of the sky, an enormous golden ball, the "central fire" of the alchemists.

A transient being, I stand in awe of how accurately alchemy projected the opus of opening a circulatio dialog with the eternal Ground of every psyche. Which makes me wonder. Sprouting around the time of Christ, compensating for Christian otherworldliness with a mysticism of the material, Western alchemy grew from Egyptian and Gnostic roots, flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and drowned in its own obscurities--some deliberate, designed to avoid a fatal charge of heresy--in the eighteenth century. History books confide that the alchemists, those primitive folk who knew nothing about atomic nuclei, never found their Stone, never made any gold. Outwardly, I suppose, that's true, though they founded the science of chemistry, itself a sort of Lapis.

But are they the primitives? Consider the alchemical homeric chain, not only a chemical sequence of states and substances but the unending series of wise ones who, beginning with Hermes Trismegistus, worked to link heaven and earth. I suspect that, like Gerhard Dorn, who saw the prima materia as a substance inside us, a few gifted artificers stumbled intuitively onto the real Greater Magistry: that Stone = Self fragment; and although Jung broke the code of their written opus, the redemptive power of the vinum ardens they uncorked in the depths may yet remain untasted.

Craig Chalquist was born in San Diego, now lives in Santa Barbara and in his own words currently “foments Psychology 101 at Allan Hancock College and subverts Pacifica students with presentations, tutoring and other academic mayhem.” His primary interest is ecopsychology.