“one way people always experience [spirituality] is through their dreams, and if they pay any kind of attention to their dream they will find in the long run their spiritual mentor on the inside…”
Dr. Jeffrey Raff
The following interview was carried out by Arianna Marchetti, a philosophy graduate with a major in political philosophy. She worked as a research assistant at the university of Leuven and Milan, and has since been researching the relationship between society and technology. This led Arianna into developing an interest in Jungian psychoanalysis, which she sees as very much rooted in the idea that the irrational and the spiritual experience are just as essential as rationality. This week, she interviews Jungian psychoanalyst and author, Dr. Jeffrey Raff.
In the past 300 years, Western societies have embarked on a path of relentless scientific discovery and technological development that led to an unprecedented increase of living standards and material wealth. Mesmerized by the fruits that a rational and scientific mindset were able to produce, modern individuals started to believe that all human problems could be successfully approached by finding the right formula. Progressively, rationalism and materialism conquered all aspects of human life, leading to an outright rejection of the irrational and any experience that eludes rationalization. However, the rejection of the irrational, and the consequential degradation of the spiritual, did not free individuals from superstitions and credulity. In fact, it made them even more disoriented in making sense of their experiences. The irrational psychic function is a necessary component that, like the rational function, helps us comprehend the world and navigate it.
Dr. Jeffrey Raff, an established Jungian psychoanalyst and author, has dedicated his life to help people explore their deeper selves and welcome spiritual experiences to their life. Drawing on Jungian psychology and ancient traditions, Dr. Raff has helped tracing the images and archetypes involved in the quest of spiritual awakening, providing important frames of reference for those willing to discover the other side of their nature. His major works, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, Healing the Wounded God, and The Practice of Ally Work are great references for anyone interested in what Jung called “the spiritual problem of modern man” and guides to approach it. In the following interview, Dr. Raff shares some of his insights on the role of spirituality in our lives and the way individuals may start approaching it.
A. Marchetti: The first question that I would like to ask is if you could clarify the role that spirituality plays in our lives and what are the costs of denying its place?
J. Raff: Imagination has been denied in our culture for a very long time and I think that one of the results of that is what is happening in the United States right now, where people are denying facts and reality. It’s a form of compensation where imagination is trying to get involved in our lives but in a very negative, hostile way, because it has been repressed for so long in our culture. The dominant materialistic outlook has completely rejected what we call the imaginal, that is the human ability to enter into a deeper connection with different realities and entities in the world, and as a consequence we are now completely shut from even the world of insects, birds, and nature as a whole precluding any possibility of relationality with it.
In terms of spirituality in our lives, one way people always experience that is through their dreams, and if they pay any kind of attention to their dream they will find in the long run their spiritual mentor on the inside, who can guide them to deeper spiritual experiences. What Jung called active imagination is another way we can experience the spirit in ordinary lives. Through it we can actually experience imaginal spirits and welcome the imagination, allowing us to access a whole different perspective of the world and reality that is richer and more nuanced.
AM: What does it take for someone to have a spiritual experience? And what are the main blockers to spiritual experience?
JR: Back in the Middle Ages and much earlier people were much more open to spirituality- alchemists definitely were, but then what happened in a certain point in history is that the imagination was rejected. There were a lot of reasons for that, the rise of science, the Churches’ hostility towards imaginal experiences, but mostly the rise of science which became a substitute for our spirituality. Until maybe today, science was incredibly materialistic, so alchemy was replaced by chemistry, and alchemical imaginary and philosophy were almost completely rejected and replaced by Newtonian ideas of cause and effect. Our culture consolidated around a highly materialistic and rationalistic outlook of human experience and in doing so it flagged any approach that would not follow the same principles as inferior, denying it any reality.
One of the things that we would have to do to open up ourselves to different experiences is to rise above the main cultural “favorites”, and start to experience non-materialistic reality, or, like the alchemists, to see spirituality in matter in our ordinary life and daily life. But rising above that is a very difficult task because, as we try to do that, people that we know, people that we love, friends, family, would be discouraging because in their perspective that would be a little bit out of touch from what they consider reality. All of those are really big blocks for people to enter the analytic process or other forms of spiritual explorations and experience. It requires a lot of courage to embark on this path, and usually, the people that come to see reality in a different way, are already very spiritual people. Finding a community of spiritual individuals definitely helps a lot since many of those open to experience spirituality often suffer from what I call the ‘orphan archetype’. People that are challenging mainstream culture feel like they cannot belong anywhere as their experience and thoughts do not align with those of the masses; they are generally alone until they can find a community of individuals sharing the same experiences.
AM: Are there any dangers in following the wrong image? How can one avoid being led astray?
JR: To prevent being led into the wrong path by an inner image, what one would need is to develop a feeling sense, what I call the ‘felt sense’. That is not feeling per se but is a different way of perceiving the inner reality and being alerted by something that seems wrong to you. If you haven’t cultivated that, it’s more likely that you can be led astray, but if you are paying attention to your dreams, your dreams will quickly tell you what things are wrong. But if you do not pay attention to your felt sense or your dreams, and maybe take a more intellectual approach, it’s very easy to get let astray. I have to say that it doesn’t happen a whole lot in my experience, but it has happened and I have seen it. For example, I had a client who was trying to work with the Great Mother, as an image that she could learn a lot from, but it got twisted. One day, when she was driving the car, the voice said to her: “if you really trust me, you will take your hands off the steering wheel.” Unfortunately she followed this voice and, of course, almost immediately, got into a car accident. So that is the case where the voice was really destructive, and the person had no filter to realize that something was wrong in what the voice was telling her. The ability to question what the inner figures are presenting you is really important when something doesn’t feel right. The other thing possible if something is going wrong during an active imagination is to get out of it and stop it and put your mind in other things.
AM: For a long time Christianity and other religions have been able to inspire people and provide guidance in their spiritual experiences. However, these older traditions do not seem able to move people any longer. Why is that the case?
JR: Essentially, the symbolism of Christianity and other traditions have lost the power to express a deeper reality to us. Originally, the Catholic church started out with very powerful symbols but gradually this symbolism got frozen. There was an orthodox way of looking at things and other interpretations and experiences were not accepted. Mystics in the Middle Ages especially were persecuted by the church because they went outside the orthodox perspective and this radical closure is what gradually led to a loss of power and meaning. So basically churches face two problems: one is that their symbolism is on the wane and they haven’t been able to energize it, and the second is that people do not like dogmatism for the most part. By not allowing any imagination they are preventing people from being fully able to explore and experience spirituality in an unfiltered way.
AM: In the hyper-rationalized society where we are living in today, how can people reconcile their spiritual experience with the dominant culture and intellectual environment?
JR: That’s pretty difficult. First of all you would have to stop withdrawing your projections onto matter and start to experience deeper reality in the world. The imaginal doesn’t just carry us in the world, it is in the world, we can experience it in dialogues with material objects, plants, animals, that can give us a lot of information at the imaginal level. Matter has the imaginal trapped within it, it’s like the alchemical perspective that the light, the savior, and what they call the philosopher’s stone is all here in this world, but we don’t see it, it’s trapped in the material covering. The spiritual seeker doesn’t need to abandon the material world, he just needs to start seeing it in a different way. To put the material and the spiritual together would not imply denying the scientific achievements but to honor them while also acknowledging a different dimension.
In terms of materialism today, neuroscience is very much invested in the idea that the brain controls everything, they don’t really talk about the psyche. They talk about the brain functions as if there was no personality. One of the big problems with it is that they don’t really have an explanation for consciousness and if they really want to account for it they would have to bring in different approaches. Consciousness is the great mystery, even for the spiritual seeker, so if we could just honor rationality and the spiritual experience it would be the beginning of the union between them. As you probably know, opposites are terribly difficult to bring together but it is possible and today quantum physicists are very interested in the Jungian world. Wolfgang Pauli was one of the pioneers in quantum physics with whom Jung corresponded and worked with trying to bring psychics and psychology together. They didn’t really achieve it but quantum physics opened this possibility because they are willing to explore mysteries.
AM: How is Jungian tradition positioned in modern day psychology? And what do you think about modern day psychology?
JR: Jung was never popular in academia. Interestingly, back in the 80s and early 90s, people studying Jung and trying to apply it were mainly English professors because they were interested in mythology and Jung gave them a way to understand mythology but that faded away too. Today academics attack Jung and alchemy by essentially saying that Jung made up the symbolism and that alchemy has nothing to do with symbolic reality. They argue that alchemy is all about materialism, so the tendency to reject or ignore June still continues. With a few exceptions, the majority of those interested in studying Jung and following its path of investigation are outside of academia.
In terms of what I think about psychology today, it is not much; I do not regard it very highly. It typically is about working with the ego and completely ignoring the possibility of the unconscious. Typically it is short term, trying to get the ego to adjust to external reality so it can function better in society and for Jung that was just the beginning of the work. Once you have an ego that is able to function properly, then you have the basis to build a whole new different perspective. For Jung, the first half of life was about building the ego and the second half of life was about transcending the ego and not be solely concerned with ego issues such as not getting along with your spouse or hating your boss; these are things that are addressed earlier so that later we can get to archetypal images, spiritual questions, and the desire to really go past the ego perspective and bring it to a wider consciousness. Generally, modern psychology doesn’t do any of those things, it stops with the first half of life issues and when they find a person has adjusted to reality, that is the end of the work. Jung considered society as a giant collective that crushes individuality, so there is that tension too and that’s why I said people doing this often feel like they do not belong to the collective any longer.
AM: During his life, Jung has studied many different traditions and traveled to different continents from Asia to Africa and America to deepen his understanding of these cultures and their approach to spirituality. However, Jung seemed to have argued that while studying different traditions helped him to see the underlying connections between different worldviews as well as important differences, he was very skeptical that someone belonging to a different cultural tradition would find his spiritual path in a different culture. Do you think that this still holds true today?
JR: Jung traveled all over the world and despite his European bias, which he definitely had, he learned a lot. I had the opportunity in New Mexico to meet the grandson of Ochwiay Biano, an elder from the Taos Pueblo with whom Jung had several discussions during his travels in New Mexico. Biano’s granddaughter showed me some letters between her grandfather and Jung that had never been published. Jung’s fascination with Native American culture is expressed very clearly, to his surprise he also found similarities to the European approach. The Hopi back then had the idea that if the sun rose, if they didn’t go out to greet the sunrise and spit on their hands the sun wouldn’t rise. That’s a mythic reality, that’s an imaginal approach, our rational minds would take it as ridiculous, but in the imaginal world it makes sense and it’s a mistake to think they meant the physical sun.
But I think Jung was right for his time, the archetypal basis of each culture is different and even before WWII he thought there was a racial psyche, these distinctions were all equally valuable but they were there. Someone born in India would have a completely different spirituality to which if a Westerner would try to adapt it would actually cause a neurosis. I think this is no longer true because the world has so come together. In the US there are some people that follow the indigenous traditions but there are a great many people that follow Buddhism and that clearly is an Eastern path.
Where I would draw the line, especially when it comes to eastern traditions and western mysticism too, is that they want to get rid of the ego, they consider the ego either an illusion or something that gets in the way of spiritual experience. The Jungian perspective, which I agree with, is that if you don’t have an ego, you can’t do this work, you need a strong ego to experience spirituality and to allow it to widen your consciousness, and in the West it’s easier to maintain the ego since it is something we have developed very much. Now, in India other traditions are beginning to agree with it and that is an interesting cross pollination that even some Buddhist traditions are starting to welcome the sense of the ego. So what happens today is that Westerners and Easterners will adopt their respective attitudes. Jung was very skeptical of people who did tantra or yoga practices although he himself did some yoga, and I think that that is misplaced. I think people in the West can do these things today. It’s better to turn to your own traditions as there is richness in there and they may be more easily accessible to you, but those are typically unknown; people that become Buddhist don’t know that Judaism has a very powerful mystical tradition in the Kabbalah and that Christianity had some great mystics. We could learn a lot from those traditions but they are not very well known at all, so there is a tendency to look to the east.
AM: As the last question for our interview I would like to ask you whether you think we can already anticipate the beginning of a new approach to spirituality or interest in it.
JR: Jung thought in 500 years we would have a totally different religion which would include spirituality and the imaginal. The only problem with it is that in order to reach it we would have to go through a terribly destructive time, the old traditions will have to be destroyed in some way to allow the new traditions to come in. I think that’s part of what’s happening to the world today, we are going through the beginning of the end so that we can get to a new beginning, but that’s not going to be a very pleasant process. If you think of some of the people following Trump, they are very afraid of losing the old traditions. They want it to be Christian and white and exclude anyone who threatens their values, but that’s inevitable, that is what’s going to happen. Jung, who studied astrology, noticed that every astrological movement from one sign to the other always carries with it destructive forces and now we are in the moment of transition from Pisces to Aquarius. Once the process will be completed we might witness a renewed approach to spirituality and life in general but we are not there yet. So I think it’s an organic natural process that can move towards opening the way to new spiritualities Would that be for the whole collective society? There I’m not so sure. Society as well as groups tend to become rigid and take the individual to their level, which is always lower than that of the individual consciousness. Would this tendency change? I’m not sure about that.
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