mana-personality

The Mystery Of β€œMana Personality” Part Nine

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition β€œGesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Today, I share the final part of the translation of Mana-Personality. It was full of joy for me to learn more and even better from his works because I had to read them word by word to achieve an understandable translation. I hope it was the same for you.

We often wonder why there are so many injustices, differences, and failures in human progress (decline?). Is God flawed? Dr. Jung suggests that God must be imperfect; otherwise, we cannot reach Him.

In the figure of the divine hero, God himself wrestles with his own imperfect, suffering, living creation; he even takes its suffering condition upon himself and, by this sacrificial act, accomplishes the opus magnum of salvation and victory over death.

Credit Text and Image Carl Jung Depth Psychology πŸ™

He, instead, talks about the importance of the Self and Individuality.

He personally also admits that his explanation is sensitive to experiences that some may not have practised. He emphasizes:

I am deeply aware that in this work, I have not made any ordinary demands on the understanding of my reader. I have made every effort to smooth the path to understanding. Still, I have not been able to remove one great difficulty, namely the fact that the experiences underlying my explanations are probably unknown to most people and, therefore, strange...

Still, he tries to enlighten us on the matter based on his experiences.

Image credit Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Previous

Now, let’s move on to the final chords:

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P9)

The conception of God as an autonomous, psychological content makes God a moral problem – and that is, admittedly, very uncomfortable. But if this problem does not exist, then God is not real either because he does not intervene in our lives anywhere. Then, he is a historical conceptual bogeyman or a philosophical sentimentality.

If we leave the idea of ​​a “divine” out of the equation and speak only of autonomous contents, we may remain intellectually and empirically correct, but we thereby conceal a note that psychologically cannot be missed. If we use the idea of ​​a “divine”, we are thereby aptly expressing the peculiar way in which we experience the effects of autonomous content. We can also use the term “demonic” as long as we do not imply that we have reserved a concrete God somewhere who completely corresponds to our wishes and ideas. However, our intellectual sleight of hand tricks do not help us to create a being according to our wishes in reality, just as the world does not adapt to our expectations. If we, therefore, attribute the effects of autonomous contents with the attribute “divine”, we thereby acknowledge their relative superiority. And this superior is the power that has forced a man of all ages to think of the most unthinkable things and to inflict the greatest suffering on himself in order to do justice to those effects. This power is as real as hunger and fear of death.

The Self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inside and outside. This formulation may not be a lousy fit insofar as the Self has the character of something that is a result, an achieved goal, something that has only gradually come about and has become possible through much effort. Thus, the Self is also the goal of life, for it is the complete expression of the combination of destinies that we call the individual, and not just of the individual human being, but of a whole group in which one completes the other to form the complete picture.

With the sensation of the Self as something irrational, indefinable, to which the ego is not opposed and not subject, but rather attached and around which it rotates, as the earth rotates around the sun, the goal of individuation is achieved. I use the word “sensation” to describe the perceptual character of the relationship between “I” and Self. There is nothing recognizable in this respect because we are unable to say anything about the contents of the Self. The “I” is the only content of the Self that we know. The individualized “I” perceives itself as the object of an unknown and superior subject. It seems to me that the psychological statement reaches its extreme end here because the idea of ​​a Self is in and of itself a transcendent postulate that can be justified psychologically but cannot be proven scientifically. The step beyond science is an absolute requirement of the psychological development described here because, without this postulate, I could not adequately formulate the empirically occurring psychological processes. The Self, therefore, claims at least the value of a hypothesis corresponding to that of the atomic structure. And – should we still be enclosed in an image here – then it is something overwhelmingly alive, the interpretation of which is beyond my capabilities. I do not doubt that it is an image, but one in which we are still contained.

Youri Ivanov _ DIGITAL GRAPHIC ART _ SD World 141

I am deeply aware that in this work, I have not made any ordinary demands on the understanding of my reader. I have made every effort to smooth the path to understanding. Still, I have not been able to remove one great difficulty, namely the fact that the experiences underlying my explanations are probably unknown to most people and, therefore, strange. As a result, I cannot expect my readers to follow all of my conclusions. Although every author naturally enjoys understanding their audience, interpreting my observations is less important to me than pointing out a broad area of ​​experience that has hardly been explored, which I would like to make accessible to many through this book. In this area, which has been so obscure up to now, it seems to me that the answers are recumbent to many puzzles that the psychology of consciousness has never even come close to solving. I do not wish to claim under any circumstances to have formulated these answers definitively. I am, therefore, quite content if my paper can be regarded as a tentative attempt at an answer.

I sincerely appreciate your support and interest. Thank you!πŸ€—πŸ™πŸ’–

The title image: Maiden Voyage of the Airship Falcon” by Alexei Gurl

The Mystery Of β€œMana Personality” Part Eight

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition β€œGesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

via MagicShirtsDesigns

Greeting all! Today, I share the penultimate or the second to last episode of Dr. Jung’s extensive explanation of the mystery of Mana.
This time, he speaks in a way that may simplify the meaning of Mana and its production, with examples that we might confront every day of life (indeed!) concerning religions, society, and private occurrences!

We all know how important and influential religion is in human life. There have been and still are wars caused by religions (as it is more apparent when people from the same tribe with the same roots and similar faith cruelly kill each other)! However, religions may not be the main perpetrators. The problem may lie deep in the dark corners of human nature.

Mana-Personality is one of these unknown forces that we must understand.

My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

Illustration: thecyclopssun

You might remember that I actively assist my Iranian friends as they strive for freedom. However, I am feeling very pessimistic right now as I look at the situation and intricacy progression in the Middle East and see how the lobbyists in the West (i.e., the US, no matter if the next President will be Harris or Trump) are trying to take advantage of Iran’s future. Reading Jung helps me better understand the core of this issue and learn more.

I also learned something useful from my dear friend Luisa Zambrotta. (She has an excellent Website with many brilliant sequence stories you might not miss.) instead of numbering her stories one after another, she only uses the word “Previous” to help readers jump to the latest post if they want to. So I did it, too!πŸ™

The underlying scheme, the quaternio, i.e., the psychological equation of primordial dynamis (prima causa) with gods and their mythology, time and space, is a psychological problem of the first order.

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

So, let’s continue to delve further into the topic of Mana!

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P8)

The Mana Personality is, on the one hand, a superior knower and, on the other hand, a superior wanter. By becoming aware of the content underlying this personality, we are able to deal with the fact that, on the one hand, we have learned something more than others and, on the other hand, we want something more than others. This unpleasant relationship with the gods is known to have struck poor Angelus Silesius so deeply that he returned headlong from his hyper-Protestantism, bypassing the now uncertain Lutheran stopover in the deepest womb of the black motherβ€”unfortunately to the detriment of his lyrical talent and nervous health.

And yet Christ and, after him, Paul struggled with precisely these problems, which is still clearly evident from many traces. Meister Eckhart, Goethe in Faust, and Nietzsche in Zarathustra have brought this problem closer to us again. Goethe and Nietzsche try it with the idea of ​​control, the former with the magician and ruthless man of will who takes on the devil, the latter with the master race and the superior wise man, without the devil and without God. According to Nietzsche, man stands alone, like himself, neurotic, financially supported, without God or the world. This is not an ideal possibility for a real person who has a family and has to pay taxes. Nothing can prove the reality of the world away; there is no miraculous way around it. Nothing can also prove the effect of the unconscious away. Or can the neurotic philosopher prove to us that he does not have a neurosis? He cannot even prove it to himself. Therefore, our souls stand between significant influences from within and without, and somehow, we must do justice to both. We can only do this according to our individual abilities. Therefore, we must reflect on ourselves, not on “what one should” but on what one can and what one must do. Thus, the dissolution of the Mana Personality through awareness of its contents naturally leads us back to ourselves as beings and living something that is kept between two world views and their darkness. Still, all the more clearly, it clamped in the perceived forces. This ‘something’ is alien to us and yet so close, completely our own and yet unknowable to us, a virtual centre of such a mysterious constitution that it can demand everything, kinship with animals and with gods, with crystals and stars, without surprising us, without even arousing our deformity. This something demands all of that, and we have nothing in our hands that we can reasonably oppose this demand, and it is even healing to hear this voice.

Art by Jeramondo Djeriandi (@djeriandi)

I have called this centre the Self. Intellectually, the Self is nothing but a psychological concept, a construct intended to express an entity that is unknowable to us and that we cannot grasp as such, for it is beyond our comprehension, as is clear from its definition. It might just as well be called the “God within us.” The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to spring inextricably from this point, and all the highest and final goals seem to converge towards it. This paradox is inevitable, as it always is when we attempt to characterize something that lies beyond the power of our understanding.

I hope that it has become clear enough to the attentive reader that the Self has as much to do with the “I” as the sun has to do with the Earth. The two cannot be mixed up. Nor is it a question of the deification of man or the degradation of God. What lies beyond our human understanding is, in any case, inaccessible to it. When we use the concept of a god, we are simply formulating a certain psychological fact, namely the independence and superiority of specific psychic contents, which is expressed in their ability to thwart the will, to obsess (calm) the consciousness and to influence moods and actions. One might be outraged that an inexplicable mood, a nervous disorder or even an uncontrollable vice is in some way a manifestation of God. But it would be an irreplaceable loss for religious experience if such things, even terrible things, were artificially separated from the number of autonomous psychic contents. It is an apotropaic euphemism (a good thing for a bad thing, to avert its disfavour) to dismiss such things with a “nothing but” explanation. This would only repress them and, as a rule, would only result in a false advantage, a slightly modified illusion. The personality does not become enriched by this but rather impoverishes and becomes stagnant. What appears to be evil or at least senseless and worthless to today’s experience and knowledge can appear to be a source of the best to a higher level of expertise and knowledge, whereby everything naturally depends on the use one makes of one’s devils. Declaring it meaningless requires the personality of the shadow corresponding to it, and thus, it loses its form. The ‘living figure’ needs deep shadows to appear three-dimensional. Without the shadow, it remains a flat illusion of- or a more or less well-behaved child.

With this, I am alluding to a problem that is far more significant than the few simple words seem to express: Humanity is, for the most part, still psychologically in a state of childhood – a stage that cannot be skipped. The vast majority need authority, guidance and the law. This fact must not be overlooked. The Paulistic overcoming of the law is only possible for those who know how to put the soul in place of conscience. Very few are capable of this (>Many are called, but few are chosen.<), and these few only take this path out of inner compulsion, not to say necessity, for this path is as narrow as the edge of a knife.

To be continued! πŸ€—πŸ™πŸ’–

The Mystery Of β€œMana Personality” Part Seven

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition “Gesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Here, I present another aspect of “Manaβ€”Personality,” and honestly, I’m getting more and more excited to delve deeper and deeper into the subject! (The past episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,)
In this part, Jung continues explaining the concept of Mana and its impact on our lives from childhood to adulthood. He describes our inner try of separation from our parents, the process of growing up within a religious context, and the acknowledgement of God. He also provides an excellent explanation of our attitudes and behaviours towards authority figures and those in power.

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology with thanks to Craig Nelson

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P7)

By distinguishing the “I” from the archetype of the Mana Personality, one is now compelled – just as in the case of the anima – to make conscious those unconscious contents which are specific to the Mana Personality. Historically, the Mana Personality is always in possession of the secret name or of the special knowledge or the prerogative of a special action (quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi), in a word: of Individual Distinction. Becoming aware of the content that builds up the archetype of the Mana Personality means for the man the second and true liberation from the father, for the woman from the mother and thus the first feeling of her own individuality. This part of the process corresponds precisely to the intention of the concrete primitive initiations up to baptism, namely the separation from the >carnal< (or >animal<) parents and the rebirth >in novam infantiam<, into the state of immortality and spiritual childhood, as formulated by certain ancient mystery religions, including Christianity.

One may not identify with the Mana Personality, opting to view it as an extramundane ‘Father in Heaven’ embodying Absoluteness, which many find significant; if faith is achieved, this leads to an absolute dominance of the unconscious, causing the entire world to flow toward it.

The title image and this one by G R Z A ࿐

(Absolute means “detached”. To declare God to be absolute is to place him outside of all connection with man. Man cannot act on him, and he cannot act on man. Such a God would be a completely irrelevant thing. One can, therefore, only reasonably speak of a God who is relative to humans as is to God. The Christian conception of God as a “Father in heaven” expresses the relativity of God in exquisite form. Quite apart from the fact that man can make out less about God than an ant can about the contents of the British Museum, this urge to declare God absolute arises only from the fear that God might become ‘psychological’. That would, of course, be dangerous. An absolute God, on the other hand, is of no concern to us at all, whereas a “psychological” God would be real. This God could reach man. The Church seems to be a magical instrument to protect man from this eventuality, for it is said that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”.)

The logical consequence of this is that only a miserable, inferior, useless and sin-laden bunch of people remains. As is well known, this solution has become a historical worldview. Since I am only moving on psychological ground here and have no inclination to dictate my eternal truths to the universe, I must critically note that if I push all the highest value onto the side of the unconscious and construct a summum bonum from it, I have found myself in the unpleasant position of also inventing a devil of equal weight and size who maintains the psychological balance of my summum bonum. But under no circumstances will my modesty allow me to identify myself with the devil. That would be too presumptuous and would also put me in unbearable opposition to my highest values. But I cannot afford that, given my moral deficit.

That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ β€” all these are undoubtedly great virtues.
~C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung Depth Psychology

For psychological reasons, I would, therefore, recommend not constructing a God from the archetype of the Mana Personality, that is, not making it concrete, because, in this way, I avoid projecting my values ​​and non-values ​​onto God and the devil, and, in this way I preserve my human dignity, my own specific weight, which I need so much in order not to become the unresisting plaything of unconscious powers. When you deal with the visible world, you have to be crazy to assume that you are the master of this world. Here, the principle of non-resistance to all superior factors is naturally followed up to a certain individual limit. At this point, even the most peaceful citizen becomes a bloody revolutionary. Our bowing to law and state is a recommendable model for our general attitude toward the collective unconscious. (>Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. <) Our bowing would not be difficult up to this point. But there are also factors in the world to which our conscience does not necessarily say yes, and we bow before them. Why? It is practically more beneficial than the opposite. Likewise, there are factors in the unconscious where we have to be nothing but clever. (>Do not resist evil. < >Make friends for yourselves in the huts of unjust mammon. < >The children of the world are cleverer than the children of light<, ergo: >Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. <)

To be continued! πŸ’–πŸ™πŸ€—

The Mystery Of β€œMana Personality” Part Three

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition β€œGesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Mana-personality. A personified archetypal image of a supernatural force.

The Mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, ruler of men and spirits, and the friend of God.[The Mana-Personality,” CW 7, par. 377.]

Mana is a Melanesian word referring to a bewitching or numinous quality in gods and sacred objects.

Historically, the Mana-Personality evolves into the hero and the godlike being, whose earthly form is the priest. How very much the doctor is still Mana is the whole plaint of the analyst! [Ibid., par. 389.]

Art by thecyclopssun

A Mana-Personality embodies this magical power. In individual psychology, Jung used it to describe the inflationary effect of assimilating autonomous unconscious contents, particularly those associated with anima and animus. (The text and the image are from Carl Jung’s Depth Psychology by my brilliant friend Lewis Lafontaine.)

I started with these specific sections of my friend’s website to better understand this enigmatic topic. Personally, I find Mana to be funny, attractive, amusing, intriguing, and, at the same time, very monstrous.

And now, after sharing parts one and two, I present part three, which is a short one so as not to bore you, or better to say, because of the preparations for my trip! I will be taking a two-week vacation, and the internet connection can be difficult on this trip. But after that, I promise to share a larger and more interesting part when I return!!πŸ’–

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P3)

In contrast, our pitifully limited “I”, if it possesses even a spark of self-knowledge, can only withdraw and quickly abandon any illusion of power and importance. It was an illusion: the “I” has not overcome the anima and, therefore, has not acquired its Mana. The consciousness has not become master of the unconscious, but the anima has lost its domineering presumption to the extent that the “I” has been able to come to terms with the unconscious. This conflict, however, was not a victory of consciousness over the unconscious but the establishment of a balance between the two worlds.

The ‘magician’ could only take possession of the “I” because the “I” dreamed of a victory over the anima. This was an attack, and every attack by the “I” would be followed by an attack by the unconscious.

>In a transformed figure
I exercise grim power. <
(Goethe: Faust II, Act 5, Scene 4, in Works in ten volumes, Vol. 4, 1961)

Faust surrounded by his Illustration, to Goethe’s Faust by Harry Clarke 1925

Therefore, if the “I” abandons its claim to victory, the obsession by the magician automatically ceases. But where does the Mana go? Who or what becomes Mana if even the magician can no longer perform magic? We now know that neither the conscious nor the unconscious has Mana, for it is certain that if the “I” does not claim power, then no obsession arises, which means that the unconscious has also lost its supremacy. In this state, the Mana must have fallen into the hands of Something that is conscious and unconscious, or neither conscious nor unconscious. This Something is the sought-after “centre” of the personality, that indescribable Something between the opposites, or the unifier of the opposites, or the result of the conflict, or the “achievement” of the energetic tension, the development of the personality, a most individual step forward, the next stage.

I do not expect the reader to follow the rapid overview of the whole problem in every detail. He should consider it a kind of exposition, the more detailed intellectual elaboration of which I will give in the following…

To be continued! I wish you all a great time.πŸ’–πŸ™πŸ’–πŸŒΉ

PS: As the World Wide Web chaos happened yesterday, I hope our flight stays intact!!πŸ˜πŸ˜…πŸ™

The Mystery Of β€œMana Personality” Part Two

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition β€œGesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Recently, on X (Twitter), during one of Perian’s talks titled “The Way of Democratic Talk,” someone mentioned that social morals are crucial for keeping people mindful of their behaviour towards others. I responded that social morals are relative and not constant; throughout human history, they have consistently changed after wars or revolutions. I prefer to use the word “conscience.” Another friend said she would stick with “morals” because she was tired of having a guilty conscience. I replied that conscience is based on inner awareness and individuality and, therefore, has a more substantial and profound foundation, strengthening our consciousness as individuals.

Anyway, it was a prologue to noticing that words like consciousness, ego, anima, and their influential product, Mana, are important to take seriously. Mana may sound strange and unknown, but we all have it inside us!

Jung has always attempted to clarify that good and evil exist within every human and has made significant efforts to help us realize that it all depends on us to recognize these and find the balance between them.

Illustration at the top: NIKOLAY ZAITSEV

Here, in the continuation of the first part, I share some more words from this magical Mana.

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P2)

‘Parsifal’ illustrations for Richard Wagner’s opera by Franz Stassen.

Who has now come to terms with the anima? Apparently, the conscious “I”, and therefore the “I”, has taken over the Mana. In this way, the conscious “I” becomes the Mana personality. The Mana personality, however, is a Dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of the hero, the chief, the magician, the medicine man and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of God.

This is now a male collective figure that emerges from the dark background and takes possession of the conscious personality. This psychological danger is of a subtle nature; by inflating consciousness, it can destroy everything that has been gained through the confrontation with the anima. It is, therefore, of no minor practical importance to know that in the hierarchy of the unconscious, the anima is only the lowest level and one of the possible figures and that its overcoming creates another collective figure that now takes over its Mana. In reality, it is the figure of the magician – as I will call her in short – that draws the Mana, that is, the autonomous value of the anima to itself. Only insofar as I am unconsciously identical with this figure can I imagine that I myself possess the Mana of the anima. But under these circumstances, I will do so infallibly.

SD World _ Youri Ivanov _ Jouris Kunst

The figure of the magician has a no less dangerous equivalent for women: it is a maternal, superior figure, the great mother, the all-merciful one who understands everything and forgives everything and always wanted the best, who always lived for others and never sought her own, the discoverer of great love, just as it is the herald of the ultimate truth. And just as great love is never appreciated, great wisdom is never understood either. And they can’t stand each other at all.

There must be a serious misunderstanding here because it is undoubtedly a case of inflation. The “I” has appropriated something that does not belong to it. But how did it appropriate this Mana? If it really was the ego that overcame the anima, then the Mana also belongs to it, and then the conclusion is correct: one has become significant. But why does this significance, the Mana, not affect others? That would be an essential criterion! It does not work because one has not become significant but has simply merged with an archetype, another unconscious figure. So, we must conclude that “I” has not overcome the anima and, therefore, has not acquired the Mana. It is just that a new merger has occurred, with a figure of the same sex that corresponds to the father’s imago and has perhaps even greater power.

From the power that binds all beings,
The person who overcomes himself frees himself<
(Goethe: The Mysteries. A Fragment, in. Works in ten volumes, Vol. 7, 1962)

Thus, he becomes a superman, superior to all powers, a demigod, perhaps even more. ‘I and the Father are one’, this powerful confession in all its terrible ambiguity stemming from precisely this psychological moment.

To be continued! πŸ™πŸ’–