The Evolution of Three to Four

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Carl Jung, Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson

Carl Jung spent his final years fascinated by the evolution of consciousness, and more specifically by the number three moving to four. To him, the number three represented a consciousness that was time-dominated, and devoted to acting, doing, processing and accomplishing.

We live in a world, says Robert Johnson, that is dominated by the third level of consciousness, most notably because we live in an age that holds a trinitarian view of theology.

“The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is basic to the Christianity of our time,” he writes, “and the Holy Trinity is an exact model of our modern consciousness.”

The number four, on the other hand, denotes being, eternity, peace, and contemplation. It was Jung’s belief that we live in an age where the collective unconscious is devoted to the evolution from three to four.

Jung thought that nearly every modern person is drawn into this evolution and even dreams of these symbols. He claimed that our dreams involve three turning into four whether or not we have any conscious awareness of the process or of what it means.

“If our civilization is to negotiate the perilous years immediately ahead,” Johnson says, “it will be by virtue of this evolution.”

Jung believed we could make it “if enough people will make the necessary evolution within themselves.”

This, unfortunately, is an incredibly painful experience. It has been called “the dark night of the soul,” “the journey through hell and purgatory (by Dante),” and it was the forty days and forty nights in the desert for Jesus.

“For modern man,” Johnson writes, “it is midlife crisis or, worse, a nervous breakdown; or still worse, physical suicide.”

Basically, Johnson says, the process can be summed up in one sentence: it is the relocating of the center of the personality from the ego to a center greater than one’s self.

“This super personal center has been variously called the Self,” Johnson writes, “the Christ nature, the Buddha nature, superconsciousness, cosmic consciousness, satori, and samadhi.”

It is the death of the ego and the only way for the ego to die is through violent suffering, which is why very few choose to engage this process.

“The relocation of the center of the personality is a form of suicide,” Johnson says, “and it’s best done voluntarily by the ego.”

A very good example of this is found in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The Earl of Gloucester has been blinded as well as shorn of all his worldly possessions, his family and his power. Wandering miserably on the moors, his son, disguised as a peasant boy, arrives to protect him. Gloucester pleads with him to take him to the cliffs of Dover where he might hurl himself into the sea and end his life. Instead, Edgar takes him into the middle of a field, convincing Gloucester in his blindness that he is on the edge of a cliff.

Gloucester throws himself over the “edge” but only falls forward into the field. His suffering was so intense that he truly believed he had fallen. And yet, he lived. He stands, relieved of his suffering and ready to face life anew. According to Johnson, Gloucester did his “suicide” correctly.

After making his journey to the maternal depths, Faust blunders again. Instead of admiring the archetype of femininity in Helen of Troy, Faust attempts to embrace her, have a personal relationship with her. There is a huge explosion and Helen vanishes. Faust is left unconscious on the ground, burned and nearly destroyed.

As Jung put it, if you have an assimilating match with a tiger, you know who will assimilate whom. You might be able to open up the unconscious, but it is incredibly difficult to enter into a relationship with the super personal forces that will be unleashed.

Faust makes a serious mistake. Again.

“Archetypes and archetypal energy are bigger than we are,” Johnson writes. “We cannot try to embrace that energy without causing a psychological explosion.”

Mephistopheles returns to help Faust and carries him back to his study for a bit of ordinariness.

The word, ordinariness, is derived from ordered. And, ordinariness is the perfect remedy for inflation or egocentricity.

“That which is dry, pedestrian, and bookish can have a healing effect at critical moments,” Johnson explains. “An iconoclast needs to learn that a little reason and discipline are not hindrances on his way to heaven.”

Next Week: The Second Puer–The Homunculus

 

 

 

 

 

The Poisoned Rapier

In his continual inability to actually face the matter of the usurper king, Hamlet decides to get his message across by using a group of masquers who have arrived at the castle. The players portray what has happened in the form of a play,and Claudius is quick to comprehend what Hamlet is doing. He immediately begins to plot his death.

Hamlet’s friend, Laertes, is chosen by the king to kill Hamlet because by this point Hamlet has been instrumental in the death of Laertes’ sister, Ophelia, and his father, Polonius.

What is supposed to be a “friendly” fencing duel becomes a fight to the death with not just a poisoned rapier involved but a tankard of poisoned wine. It isn’t long before Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet are all dead. And all because Hamlet was afraid to face the king to begin with.

But, just a few moments before his death, Johnson says, Hamlet reaches an awareness of a consciousness beyond his neurotic split and indecision when he says:

Our deep plots do pall. And that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

“Hamlet is the man of nobility and partial consciousness who see a vision of the meaning of life,” Johnson writes. “But he is not strong enough–or complete enough–to bring that vision into focus.”

Caught between vision and practicality, he fails at both. In this, according to Johnson, he is the prototype of so many modern men who see a noble world in their imaginations but don’t have the means to accomplish it.

Faust begins where Hamlet fails, finding a solution to the problem that overwhelmed Hamlet.

Next Week: Faust

Hamlet

Johnson calls Hamlet the darkest chapter in his book. “Don Quixote,” he says, “with his roots deep in instinct and faith, is the man of courage who redeems anything that befalls him. In Hamlet, we find a man of tragedy, he who makes chaos and failure of everything he touches.”

The opposite of Don Quixote in nearly every respect, Johnson says Hamlet is the “most  profound example in all of literature of the divided man.”

To understand Hamlet, Johnson explains, is to gain insight into the emptiness and loneliness of modern existential life. As a three-dimensional man, Hamlet has neither roots in the instinctive world nor is his head yet in the heavens where he might gain enlightenment.

Modern man, in general, is at a point where he must heal the paradox of masculine and feminine,doing and being.

As Lao-tse said, “He who understand the masculine and keeps to the feminine shall become the whole world’s channel. Eternal virtue shall not part from him and he shall return to the state of an infant.”

Johnson says that Hamlet only touches this design state before making division and tragedy, rather than paradox and synthesis, of it. Because time and again, in refusing to act and make a choice, Hamlet loses the value of both.

Hamlet’s troubles begin with the murder of his father by his uncle who then marries Hamlet’s mother. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him to take revenge and thus begins the internal debate–to kill the uncle and take his rightful place as king or decide that enough blood has been shed and be at peace with what has happened.

Instead he does as Emily Dickinson put it,”wavered for us all.” Vacillation in one of the characteristics of the three-dimensional man.

“A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,” Hamlet thinks. He can see that together the four parts make for wholeness, but only three parts function for him. He cannot listen to his internal wisdom.

“There is no peace in such a man,” Johnson says. “He knows too much to be simple, but not enough to be whole.”

Because Hamlet’s need to act and his abhorrence of violence are in conflict, he descends into depression and madness, and out of this comes the most famous soliloquy in literature:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh in heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream–ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Johnson explains that this is the despair that causes conflict in every three-dimensional man–while he cannot live, he dare not die. He then begins to torture everyone around him, especially those who love him, and he makes life unbearable for himself.

As Tolstoy wrote, “He was suffering the anguish men suffer when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them–not from inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature.”

When challenged about what he is doing, Hamlet cries, “Words, words, words.” It is the cry of the three-dimensional man who is so caught up in words he cannot act.

Literary critic R.H. Blyth describes it this way: “This ‘words, words, words’ has a deeply tragic meaning in the play. It is, in fact, the secret of Hamlet’s character, the cause of the tragedy. Hamlet is the Zen-less man, whose energy, like a mouse in a wheel, goes round and round inside him and issues, not in action, but in talking.”

As Johnson says, “It is a characteristic of complex man, caught between functioning by instinct and acting by enlightenment, that he often destroys everything feminine within his grasp. . . . All feminine elements wither in the face of the three-dimensional consciousness.”

Next Week: The Poisoned Rapier