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Dear RYD Would you be kind enough to post this on the Mirror of Tomorrow. I am not yet registered there and have no time this morning to do so. I will try to register soon so I will be able to post the essay I am working on myself. Many thanks and warm regards, David

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I will finish writing something more fully on your question of Jung’s inkling of the Primordial Shadow’s creative force by this evening. It has taken me longer than I had anticipated. For now, I will note that he often referred to the difference between the Light of Revelation from above, and the alchemical scintillae as luminous points of creative intelligence and force from below, with which he was mainly concerned. Both sources of intelligence, he believed, are psychologically accessible to the consciousness of the contemporary individual. The alchemists, it can be noted, also posited the existence of the sol niger or black sun, that parallels the hidden sun of the Vedas. The beauty of Jung’s writings is that they contain profound truths and wisdom that speak sympathetically and directly to the soul and, yet, are firmly based on inner experiences, both his and those of his clients. He, however, did not leave it just at the individual experience, but found Western historical parallels in Gnosticism and alchemy, as well as from the Upanishads, the Vedas and Taoism. Early on, he turned to the Upanishads for support for his concept of the Self, the center and wholeness of being. He was particularly enamored by the fact of the immanence of the Self that he found there. His understanding, however, was essentially based on his own empirical findings, by which I mean, mainly his own highly differentiated inner felt-experiences of the Self through visions and archetypal dreams, but also those of some of his clients as well. It is significant to realize that Jung emphasized the need to become whole and, for him, it was important to bring all four functions of consciousness, thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation, and the two attitudes, extraversion and introversion, to bear in discriminating the nature of empirical inner experiences and their outer manifestation through synchronicity or meaningful coincidences - which acausally connect the inner and outer worlds. It was never a question of simple mental gymnastics, which are hopelessly one-sided. His firsthand experiential understanding that God has a Shadow, although little acknowledged and less understood, represents a major breakthrough for the modern and postmodern minds. It is a notion that is especially difficult for the Western psyche, which, through Christianity, for some two thousand plus years, has been educated to believe that God is only Good. In the extreme, this has led to widespread religious fundamentalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a naïve liberal relativism, where everything goes, very prevalent in contemporary Pop culture. This is the audience that Jung mainly addressed. Although he was always concerned with individual psychology and the need for the individual to assimilate the shadow at different levels of being, it is evident that he arrived at an important metaphysical position with practical value.