The Jung Society of Port Townsend meets regularly to study the work of C.G. Jung in depth. We follow Edward F. Edinger’s way of working with Jung’s psychological concepts, anchoring and illuminating them with examples from everday life. The Society sponsors educational programs--lectures, films, discussion groups, and seminars--to make the psychological realities that Jung brought to light more accessible to the general public. We find that understanding and applying these realities can change people’s lives in ways that are of utmost importance for them personally and for the world in which we live.
“The world hangs by a thin thread, and that thin thread is the human psyche.”
C.G. Jung
“History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being.
“It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable functioning myth. Indeed, all the major world cultures are approaching, to a greater or lesser extent, the state of mythlessness. The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence... Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God). the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over.
“It is the loss of our containing myth that is the root cause of our current individual and social distress, and nothing less than the discovery of a new central myth will solve the problem for the individual and for society. Indeed, a new myth is in the making and C.G. Jung was keenly aware of that fact.
“The essential new idea is that the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness.
“The union of opposites in the vessel of the ego is the essential feature of the creation of consciousness. Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object ... out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties--out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness.
“The new myth postulates ... a vast enterprise for the creation of consciousness; that each individual is a unique experiment in that process; and that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.
“The new myth postulates that no authentic consciousness achieved by the individual is lost. Each increment augments the collective treasury. This will be the modern, more modest version of the idea of having an immortal soul.”
Edward F. Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness, pp. 1-27
