Do you know yourself? Do others know you?

"Know thyself." Socrates

I’m reading a number of books concurrently as is my custom. My mind stays restless and hungry for wonderfully stated ideas. I like Kierkegaard, Jung, Joseph Campbell, Brian Greene, and James Hillman right now, but my list is long and my inspirations keep wending through eclectic interests with unpredictable variety. Next week it may be mostly Hemingway and Faulkner if I need some fiction on which to rest my brain cells.

I like to vary my own writing as well, but lately the one who inspires me to write more than any of the others is Carl G. Jung, one of the most brilliant men of the twentieth century. This morning, as I sat on my patio, nourished by the pleasant South Carolina coast’s crisp but mild February air, reading Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, I actually felt like I could feel my mind growing.

In chapter 4, Jung talks about the individual’s self-understanding. He says we don’t have much of that, thus the title of the book. He says the reason we don’t is that we don’t have any other creature of similar consciousness with which we might compare ourselves. He says, “He (the individual human being) knows how to distinguish himself from the other animals in point of anatomy and physiology, but as a conscious, reflecting being, gifted with speech, he lacks all criteria for self-judgment. He is on this planet a unique phenomenon which he cannot compare with anything else. The possibility of comparison and hence of self-knowledge would arise only if he could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars.”

That perception on its own marks Jung as an uncommon thinker. In a day when the only people discussing life on other planets with seriousness were science fiction writers, he actually states a deep intellectual thought about the idea. The only way we could truly come to know ourselves, as Socrates instructed all humans to do, would be to have a creature of similar intellectual gifts with whom we might compare ourselves. The only place from which such a creature could come would be another planet, or as Jung suggested, another star system, since none of the other planets in our system show much evidence of having given rise to civilizations.

Jung does not accept the idea (espoused with religious fervor by many modern scientists) that the brain is the source of the human mind, soul, or psyche. He refers to the conclusions drawn by other students of the brain and mind that, since when the brain is damaged it creates distortions or even permanent loss of conscious thought and other mental functions the brain must be the source of consciousness and other mental functioning. He accepts their point but asks why theirs would be the only possible conclusion. He says, “The connection with the brain does not in itself prove that the psyche is an epiphenomenon, a secondary function causally dependent on biochemical processes in the physical substrate.” That has been my thinking for as far back as I can remember.

My mother was a person of keen intellect, high creativity, passionate love for the people most dear to her, and a wonderful sense of humor. She developed dementia and eventually lost all of those abilities and characteristics. Some would conclude her brain and the bio-chemical activities therein were the source of all that personality, charm and love. Why?

What if there is a soul that was the spiritual self of my mother. That soul, being a spiritual entity can only intersect and interact with material things and persons when it is connected to them during Earthly life. As long as the brain in my mother’s healthy, living body was functional, my mother’s soul could communicate herself through it. Her body was like the radio that is capable of broadcasting music, news, monologues, etc., as long as all the appropriate parts of it are functioning correctly.

We would never say that the radio’s parts are the source of the material coming through it. We know that material is coming from a radio station somewhere. The signals from that station are captured by the components in the radio or TV or smart phone, and then we can enjoy them. If the instrument broadcasts some really smart, creative, passionate things we do not say the source of those things is the instrument itself. Why is the only acceptable conclusion that a consciousness who can no longer express herself because her brain became inoperable was merely a manifestation of the brain itself?

The dogma accepted by many, maybe most, but surely not all scientists, is that any answer that relies on there being a spiritual world is a foolish answer. I don’t accept that, and fortunately, Jung did not either. He spent much of his professional life gathering data, analyzing it and writing about a spiritual component of humanity and of the universe.

Jung says, “Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche.”

I don’t suppose I need to remind anyone who reads me often that modern day physicists totally agree, and have proven in the most modern laboratories, with cutting edge scientific instruments, that “without consciousness there would be no world.” Now they need to catch up with their own scientific findings by realizing that this principle of reality leads surely to the conclusion that consciousness had to exist before there was a world to observe.

Many, many books could be written on the ideas of this one chapter in The Undiscovered Self, but I want to return to a staggering idea that Jung stated simply and then moved beyond without elaboration in order to focus on his thesis. He said, “The possibility of comparison and hence of self-knowledge would arise only if he (humankind) could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars.”

That statement, written by Jung almost 60 years ago, was far ahead of its time. Keep in mind, the science books children like me were studying in school at that time made statements about space travel that started like this, “If mankind ever advances to the technological level of being able to travel to the moon . . .” In other words, even the writers of school science books didn’t think we would make it to the moon and back in their life times.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin (of Russia) flew his Vostok rocket into space, the first human being to do so. He was in space for one hour and 48 minutes and that was enough to get him in the history books. Just a tad over eight years later, on July 25, 1969 (two years after I graduated high school), Neil Armstrong and crew landed on the moon.

America repeated that success a few times with other crews, but the very last time any Earthlings traveled the 249,162 miles to the moon was when the Apollo 17 Saturn V carried Cernan, Evans and Schmitt there three and a half years later (landing on December 13, 1972). That was 42 years ago (as of this writing first posted February, 2015).

Well, here’s the thing: the only other body (than Earth) in space where you can find an Earthling’s footprints so far is a little less than 250,000 miles away. The very closest star to Earth (other than our good old sun) is Alpha Centauri C (also known as Proxima Centauri) in the constellation Centaurus. That closest star to us is 4.2 Light Years away. It’s hard to compare that to 249,162 miles. In fact, my unscientific calculator only comes up with “ucrazy” when I plug the numbers in, so let me just tell it to you in arithmetic terms. It is 4.2 (years) times 31,536,000 (seconds in one year) times 186,000 (number of miles light travels in one second). Go on and plug that in your calculator. You won’t get past the first two factors unless you have a genuine scientific calculator. By any measure, it’s an inconceivable distance for the human mind or the typical electronic calculator to imagine—many blocks away from the moon.

By the way, while that’s the closest star to ours, there are countless stars in the universe that are over twelve BILLION Light Years away from us, so change your formula to at least 12,000,000,000 times 31,565,000 times 186,000. If you have a calculator that will do that, please send me the total number of miles. I’m pretty sure it’s at least twice as far away as the moon.

The serious point is, if we ever get to compare ourselves to sentient creatures from another star system they are going to be a lot smarter than us because they are going to be somewhere between “ucrazy” and “dk5ug539gky” gazillion miles from here. My fear is that while we are getting to know our inner selves by comparing ourselves to them, they will be caging us up to transport to their planetary zoo.

So, while we may never get to find our undiscovered selves, my hope is still that a star relatively near to us will have beings in its system who are fairly close to the same level we are—that they will make some breakthrough discoveries about how to travel through wormholes or near the speed of light, and will be nice, and not fond of eating human flesh, or needy of engaging in alien slave trade, or looking for a planet to steal because theirs is falling apart, or various other “Independence Day” motifs. Otherwise, I am content to continue being a stranger to my inner self.

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