http://www.awakeninthedream.com/artis/AreWePossessed.html

ARE WE POSSESSED?

by Paul Levy

C. G. Jung, the great doctor of the soul and one of the most inspired psychologists of the twentieth century, had incredible insight into what is currently playing out, both individually and collectively, in our modern-day world. He writes, “If, for a moment, we look at mankind as one individual, we see that it is like a man carried away by unconscious powers.” We are a species carried away -- “possessed” by -- and acting out, the unconscious. Jung elaborates, “Possession, though old-fashioned, has by no means become obsolete; only the name has changed. Formerly they spoke of ‘evil spirits,’ now we call them ‘neurosis’ or ‘unconscious complexes.’” To condescendingly think that we, as modern-day, rational people, are too sophisticated to believe in something as primitive as demons is to have fallen under the spell of the very evil spirits we are imagining are nonexistent. What the ancients call demons are a psychic phenomena which compel us to act out behaviors contrary to our best intentions. To quote Jung, “…the psychic conditions which breed demons are as actively at work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious psychic forces.”

“Possession,” according to Jung is “a primordial psychic phenomenon” that “denotes a peculiar state of mind characterized by the fact that certain psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” Though the possessed might imagine they have free will, their freedom is an illusion. They are unwittingly being used as an instrument for some “other” energy or force to incarnate and express itself through them. Having complexes is not necessarily pathological, as everyone has them. What is pathological, however, is thinking we don’t have complexes, which is the precondition that makes us most vulnerable to possession*. Jung clarifies, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” The more complexes we have, the more we are possessed. We don’t need to get rid of our complexes, rather, we need to become consciously aware of them. What is important is what we do with our complexes.

 *Note: “The mind is evil, get rid of concepts.”

Jung reminds us that “Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilated to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such conditions is denied.” We then fall into the infinite regression and self-perpetuating feedback loop of denying we are in denial, a self-created strain of madness that I have given the name “malignant egophrenia,” or “ME disease” for short. This is a form of self-deception, dissociation and psychic blindness in which we are ultimately lying to and hiding from ourselves. At a certain point this process entrenches itself within the psyche such that it develops sufficient momentum to seemingly become its own self-generating, autonomous entity. We’ve then become a “problem” to ourselves, creating our own Frankenstein monster in the process, and it is us. We can then be said to be the incarnation of ME disease in the flesh, its revelation in human form. Similar to being possessed by a demon, being taken over by ME disease is simultaneously its own self-revelation; encoded within the apparent pathology is its own medicine.

Describing the experience of being led and taken over by the unconscious, Jung continues, “whenever a powerful content emerges from the unconscious, which we cannot yet grasp with our consciousness, there is a danger that the whole ego-consciousness will be pulled down into the unconscious and dissolved…Consciousness is completely emptied, because its contents are attracted by the unconscious as by a magnet. This process leads to a complete loss of the ego, so that the person in question becomes a mere automaton. Such a person is actually no longer there.”* How many people do we know, including at times even ourselves, who zombie-like, compulsively and mechanically enact their habitual patterns with no spontaneity or creativity, like a programmed robot?

*Note: We were actively encouraged to lose our ego, surrender to LOTU.

Jung elaborates on the process of falling under the spell of an activated archetype when he writes, “…an archetype is mobilized within him which affects him like a narcotic. That is typical; when you get into a situation where an archetype becomes constellated, you will undergo this peculiar hypnotic effect; you fall asleep rather suddenly. It has a peculiar fascination which makes you unconscious.” The image of Dorothy and friends falling asleep in the poppy field as they approach the Emerald City in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” symbolically expresses this arche-typical situation of falling under a spell as we approach the sacred.

Conflated with and inflated by the hypnotically fascinating psychic force-field of the archetype, people so possessed become mouthpieces and amplifiers for the archetype to transmit and nonlocally extend and incarnate itself throughout the field of consciousness. Jung writes, “people who constellate an archetype have such a hypnotic effect.” People who are gripped by an archetype have a gripping effect on others; when we are under the fascination of an archetype, we unwittingly have a fascinating influence on others*. Jung makes the point that “identification with an archetypal figure lend almost superhuman force to the ordinary man.” People who are possessed by their unconscious have a very magnetic, charismatic and “possessive” effect upon others’ unconscious. The part of them that is bewitched evokes the corresponding suggestible and bedeviled part of others’ psyche and hooks it, spell-binding it and entraining it into its archetypal spin. In other words, when someone is possessed by an archetype, they are literally the channel through which that archetype, both locally and nonlocally, is materializing in the field, which is to say they wield great energetic influence on their surroundings. Jung says, “But the power of the archetype is not controlled by us; we ourselves are at its mercy to an unsuspected degree…because everyone is in some degree ‘possessed’ by his specifically human preformation, he is held fast and fascinated by it and exercises the same influence on others without being conscious of what he is doing. The danger is just this unconscious identification with the archetype.” To the extent we are identified with and hence possessed by the archetype, is the extent to which we are not conscious of the corresponding influence we have on others’ unconscious. This is a dangerous situation because it is unconsciously being en-acted in such a way that guarantees that we will abuse our unresolved power issues to the extent that we stay unconscious.

*Note: Prem somehow managed to embody and project the LOTU Savior image. I don’t think he was conscious of it. He just followed in the footsteps of dad.

Jung gets right to the point when he writes, “When someone is able to perform the art of touching on the archetypal, he can play on the souls of people like on the strings of a piano.” Connecting with the archetypal is like plucking a higher-dimensional chord of our being, which immediately activates a resonance in the collective unconscious in whoever hears it. Just like the pendulum with the strongest swing entrains all the other pendulums into its swing, the person who is channeling the living power of the deeper, archetypal force can potentially en-train and en-trance others. This power can be used for the highest good – helping people to awaken – or it can be used for the deepest evil so as to manipulate, dis-empower and enslave other people. Being archetypal, this energy is fundamentally neither good nor bad, but can potentially manifest either way depending upon our intent.

Jung never tired of warning that the greatest danger that faces humanity is to unwittingly fall into our unconscious en masse such that we become instruments for a psychic epidemic to wreak havoc in the world, just like we see today (please see my article, “Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic”). Jung writes that psychic epidemics “…are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger.” We are in the midst of a collective psychosis that has become so normalized that very few people are even talking about it, which is itself an expression of our collective madness. (please see my article, “Why Don’t We See our Collective Madness"?) Jung writes, “…collective psychoses are based on a constellated archetype, though of course this fact is not taken into account at all. In this respect our attitude is still characterized by a prodigious unconsciousness.”