Theos-Talk Archives (February 2004 Message tt00017)

The following from Jung's THE 
UNDISCOVERED SELF might interest 
student's of Theosophy.

<<<<<Most people confuse 
"self-knowledge" with knowl­edge of 
their conscious ego personalities. 
Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at 
all takes it for granted that he knows 
himself. But the ego knows only its own 
contents, not the unconscious and its 
contents. People measure their 
self-knowledge by what the average 
person in their social environment knows 
of himself, but not by the real psychic 
facts which are for the most part hidden 
from them. In this respect the psyche 
behaves like the body with its 
physiological and anatomical structure, 
of which the average person knows very 
little too. Although he lives in it and 
with it, most of it is totally un­known 
to the layman, and special scientific 
knowl­edge is needed to acquaint 
consciousness with what is known of the 
body, not to speak of all that is not 
known, which also exists.

What is commonly called "self-knowledge" 
is therefore a very limited knowledge, 
most of it de­pendent on social factors, 
of what goes on in the human psyche. 
Hence one is always coming up against 
the prejudice that such and such a thing 
does not happen "with us" or "in our 
family" or among our friends and 
acquaintances, and on the other hand, 
one meets with equally illusory 
assump­tions about the alleged presence 
of qualities which merely serve to cover 
up the true facts of the case. In this 
broad belt of unconsciousness, which is 
immune to conscious criticism and 
control, we stand defenseless, open to 
all kinds of influences and psy­chic 
infections. As with all dangers, we can 
guard against the risk of psychic 
infection only when we know what is 
attacking us, and how, where and when 
the attack will come. Since 
self-knowledge is a matter of getting to 
know the individual facts, theories help 
very little in this respect. For the 
more a theory lays claim to universal 
validity, the less capable it is of 
doing justice to the individual facts. 
Any theory based on experience is 
necessarily statis­tical; that is to 
say, it formululcs an ideal average 
which abolishes all exceptions at either 
end of the scale and replaces them by an 
abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, 
though it need not necessarily occur in 
reality. Despite this it figures in the 
theory as an unassailable fundamental 
fact. The exceptions at either extreme, 
though equally factual, do not ap­pear 
in the final result at all, since they 
cancel each other out. If, for instance, 
I determine the weight of each stone in 
a bed of pebbles and get an average 
weight of 145 grams, this tells me very 
little about the real nature of the 
pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the 
basis of these findings, that he could 
pick up a pebble of 145 grams at the 
first try would be in for a serious 
disappointment. Indeed, it might well 
happen that however long he searched he 
would not find a single pebble weighing 
exactly 145 grams.

The statistical method shows the facts 
in the light of the ideal average but 
does not give us a pic­ture of their 
empirical reality. While reflecting an 
indisputable aspect of reality, it can 
falsify the ac­tual truth in a most 
misleading way. This is partic­ularly 
true of theories which are based on 
statistics. The distinctive thing about 
real facts, however, is their 
individuality. Not to put too fine a 
point on it, one could say that the real 
picture consists of nothing but 
exceptions to the rule, and that, in 
consequence, absolute reality has 
predominantly the character of irregularity.

These considerations must be borne in 
mind whenever there is talk of a theory 
serving as a guide to self-knowledge. 
There is and can be no self-knowledge 
based on theoretical assumptions, for 
the object of self-knowledge is an 
individual — a rela­tive exception and 
an irregular phenomenon. Hence it is not 
the universal and the regular that 
charac­terize the individual, but rather 
the unique. He is not to be understood 
as a recurrent unit but as something 
unique and singular which in the last 
analysis can neither be known nor 
compared with anything else. At the same 
time man, as member of a species, can 
and must be described as a statistical 
unit; otherwise nothing general could be 
said about him. For this purpose he has 
to be regarded as a comparative unit. 
This results in a universally valid 
anthropology or psychology, as the case 
may be, with an abstract picture of man 
as an average unit from which all 
individual features have been removed. 
But it is precisely these features which 
are of para­mount importance for 
understanding man. If I want to 
understand an individual human being, I 
must lay aside all scientific knowledge 
of the average man and discard all 
theories in order to adopt a com­pletely 
new and unprejudiced attitude. I can 
only approach the task of understanding 
with a free and open mind, whereas 
knowledge of man, or insight into human 
character, presupposes all sorts 
of knowledge about mankind in general.

Now whether it is a question of 
understanding a fellow human being or of 
self-knowledge, I must in both cases 
leave all theoretical assumptions behind 
me. Since scientific knowledge not only 
enjoys uni­versal esteem but, in the 
eyes of modern man, counts as the only 
intellectual and spiritual authority, 
un­derstanding the individual obliges me 
to commit
lese majeste', so to speak, to turn a 
blind eye to sci­entific knowledge. This 
is a sacrifice not lightly made, for the 
scientific attitude cannot rid itself so 
easily of its sense of responsibility. 
And if the psy­chologist happens to be a 
doctor who wants not only to classify 
his patient scientifically but also to 
under­stand him as a human being, he is 
threatened with a conflict of duties 
between the two diametrically opposed 
and mutually exclusive attitudes of 
knowl­edge, on the one hand, and 
understanding, on the other. This 
conflict cannot be solved by an 
either-or but only by a kind of two-way 
thinking: doing one thing while not 
losing sight of the other.

In view of the fact that in principle, 
the positive advantages of knowledge 
work specifically to the disadvantage of 
understanding, the judgment result­ing 
therefrom is likely to be something of a 
paradox. Judged scientifically, the 
individual is nothing but a unit which 
repeats itself ad infinitum and could 
just as well be designated with a letter 
of the alpha­bet. For understanding, on 
the other hand, it is just the unique 
individual human being who, when 
stripped of all those conformities and 
regularities so dear to the heart of the 
scientist, is the supreme and only real 
object of investigation. >>>>>>