As we near the end of Inner Vision and Synchronicity, there are “two other items” that came up during my research that were tangential to the topic at hand.  The next installment will be the final installment of this series…

Two Other Items

There are two other items mentioned in passing in Inner Vision that warrant a few words in this discussion on account of the synchronistic link they illustrate between Fillmore and Jung: the negative manifestation of the collective unconscious, and the occult.

Jung taught that inherent in all persons were universal psychic contents, most notably the archetypes, which constituted a substantial part of the collective unconscious.  Jung said that the contents of the collective unconscious “do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind” (CW 8:589).  Fillmore, though not using that particular term, essentially taught the same thing when discussed the subconscious mind.  Jung was greatly disturbed about the potential for the negative side to become constellated in a place or a people, and in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections said:

The Christian World is now truly confronted by the principle

of evil, by naked injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery, and coercion

of conscience.  This manifestation of naked evil has assumed

apparently permanent form in the Russian nation; but its first

violent eruption came in Germany.  That outpouring of evil

revealed to what extent Christianity has been undermined in

the twentieth century (Jung, 1961, p. 328-9).

Inner Vision, though in not such detail, made a similar point:

Man’s body is the sum total of the animal world, because in

its evolution it has had experience in nearly every type of

elemental form.  These memories are part of the soul, and

they come to the surface sporadically in the unregenerate.

Sometimes whole nations seem to revert from culture to

savagery without apparent cause, but there is always a

cause.  These reversions are the result of some violent

wrenching of the soul, or a concentration, to the exclusion

of everything else, upon a line of thought out of harmony

with divine law (Inner Vision, p. 17).

The text of Inner Vision consistently maintains a positive outlook on the future under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in contradistinction to the Jung’s comment, “How we can live with it [evil] without terrible consequences cannot for the present be conceived” (Jung, 1961, p. 329).

Inner Vision seems to take for granted the existence of supernatural capabilities.  The following lines illustrate this point:

Among the disciples, Bartholomew represents imagination.

He is called Nathanael in the 1^st chapter of John, where it is

recorded that Jesus saw him under the fig tree – the inference

being that Jesus discerned Nathanael’s presence before the

latter came into visibility.  This would indicate that images

of people and things are projected into the imaging chamber

of the mind and that through giving them attention one can

understand their relation to outer things.  Mind readers,

clairvoyants, and dreamers have developed this capacity in

varying degrees (Inner Vision, p. 21).

In reflecting about his student years, Jung wrote about his introduction to spiritualism and the occult, topics that, along with theology, held lifelong interest for him on account of their relationship to psychology.  He said, “The observations of the spiritualists, weird and questionable as they seemed to me, were the first accounts I had seen of objective, psychic phenomena” (Jung, 1961, p. 99).  Ellenberger comments:

Remarkable was the tone of Jung’s absolute conviction

when speaking of the soul (a term that had disappeared

from psychology) and the way he defined it as immaterial,

transcendent, outside of time and space – and yet to be

approached scientifically.  Among the means of obtaining

cognizance of the soul were the study of somnambulism,

hypnosis, and spritistic manifestations.  Thus to Jung

spiritism was not a matter of occultism, but of unknown

psychic phenomena that needed to be investigated with

proper scientific methods (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 689).

The concept of “soul” as used by Fillmore and Jung contained some key similarities that again point to synchronistic patterns in their thinking about the divine, mankind and their relationship.  Fillmore claimed that, “the soul is the many accumulated ideas back of his [man’s] present expression.  In its original and true sense, the soul of a man is the expressed idea of man in Divine Mind [God]…and includes the conscious and subconscious minds” (Fillmore, 1959, p. 182).    Jung said, voicing a similar thought, “however we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain:  that the soul cannot be ‘nothing but.’  On the contrary it has the dignity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity” (CW 12:10).

This interconnectedness between man and divine on the level of soul had deep implications in the discourse of both men as it related to dreams.  Fillmore was quite clear in his acceptance of dreams as communications between God and mankind as the discussion above shows.  And on this point Jung was in full agreement.  He said, “We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions (CW 18:601).  He went on to say:

The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as

“distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his

Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious;

and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his

consciousness is not his total psyche, in spite of the fact

that for more than seventy years the unconscious has been

a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious

student of psychology (CW 18:601).

It is unfortunate that Jung did not know about the teaching of Charles Fillmore about dreams or else he might not have made the following comment: “I also doubt whether there is a Protestant treatise on dogmatics that would ‘stoop so low’ as to consider the possibility that the vox Dei might be perceived in a dream.  But if somebody really believes in God, by what authority does he suggest that God is unable to speak through dreams?” (CW 18:603).