The "tapas", the libido and the victory over necessity

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di Robert Cecchetti

In the preface a History of the origins of consciousness [1] di Eric Neumann, Jung wrote that the author "thus arrived at conclusions and notions, which must be counted among the most important ever reached in this field" [2]. In that work Neumann, in the wake of Jungian teaching, went into a study of the different stages of the phylogenetic development of the ego and therefore of consciousness, expanding and in some cases correcting, some of the most important discoveries of the master.

In this sense, the recovery of the myth, with particular reference to the Egyptian and Greek tradition, is the starting point of the study on the developments of consciousness since as a universal archetypal narrative it is studied as a product of the projections of the transpersonal unconscious dynamics of the human psyche, of the so-called "eternal laws of the psyche". In the myth we are offered the various stages of the development of consciousness: the Ouroboros, the Great Mother, the separation of the parents of the world, the birth of the hero and the killing of the dragon with the conquest of the treasure.

In fact, Neumann's text, published in 1949, stands as an explicit continuation of the master's capital work CG Young, or Libido, symbols of transformation (Wandlungen and Symbol of the Libido) [3], a text that spans forty years of the author's life and that can be defined as the “book of a lifetime”, as Romano Màdera writes in his works on Jung. In the preface to the fourth edition, that of 1950, Jung wrote that:

"The myth is, as a Father of the Church said," quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur "[what is believed always, everywhere, by all], therefore he who believes he lives without myth or outside it constitutes an exception. More: he is a man who has no roots, without a true relationship with the past, with the life of his ancestors (which also continues in him) and with the human society of his time. "

And shortly after Jung here asks himself what are the myths that govern our life, what is the destiny that directs our existence:

 « I was led to ask myself in all seriousness "What is the myth you live in?" […] I did not know I was living a myth and, even if I had known, I would not have become aware of the myth which, without my knowledge, governed my life. "

Both of them, History of the origins of consciousness read in the light of Symbols of transformation, are texts of fundamental importance to understand what a rediscovery and a re-understanding of the elements of rituality and mythology can be and in which direction we can move to try a modern re-actualization of the whole immense symbolic and sapiential apparatus that belongs to the vast mythical and symbolic apparatus inherent in the tradition. Not only that, these are texts that reveal to us on the one hand the ultimate meaning of some of the most profound philosophical questions and on the other introduce us to a specific idea of ​​care as an understanding of one's own destiny and tension towards individuation.

Precisely in this sense Romano Madeira [4], proposing a cure for what are the normal pathologies of the human being through research and the encounter with the numinous dimension of meaning, he wanted to recover the importance of what is defined as a mythbiography, following the lesson of Ernst Bernhard [5]. In the constant research and perseverance of the philosophical exercise for a philosophy that increasingly becomes a life practice, Màdera teaches us that it is necessary to take into account not only the historical and social dimension in which the subject finds himself living, but also the inevitable and constant presence of mythologems and mythical themes that influence our autobiographical story, influencing our life in a more or less unconscious way.

The direction seems to be that of a conscious and autobiographical re-actualization of the myth, which makes it possible to understand the dynamic power of the symbol, to recognize the archetypes as forces that constantly exert a power, an energy on our existence, a psychic energy which, due to its unbearable power, is felt by the man like destiny, like he remain, fate, fate, fate.

It is crucial, in our view, that Neumann's work revolves almost entirely around the problem of Destiny. We could in fact synthesize the experience of salvation, that is, of the psychic care of the human being, as the experience of the interior transformation through which the light of awareness is generated.

The myth, which was preceded by the ritual action, in a temporal anteriority entirely internal to the mind, from which it is not possible to escape, would represent, as is well known, that stratification of projections that the collective unconscious, at all latitudes, has produced which narration, representation, representation of inner processes and dynamics. These transformative processes represent the way to individuation, il become yourself, or, to use Neumann's words, they lead to centroversion, that is, they convey psychic energy, the libido, as it were, towards the formation of a stable and conscious ego.

It is curious, we note it incidentally, how modern psychology is in the grip of a sort of regression for which it tends more and more to want to chase after the science of medicine, as if to want to reach the post-Enlightenment scientist ideal of the exact sciences.

This point is very interesting as regards the understanding of the myth and of the wisdom contained in it, and it speaks volumes about the contemporary bewilderment that has thrown into the shadow of the repressed, that is precisely in the unconscious, the therapeutic aspect of the myth itself and this which it inevitably represents. Index of this "satanic" inversion of things, already denounced by R. Guénon himself and then by J. Evola, comes true in a first phase as inversion of the symbol, and in a second phase, ours, through his almost total forgetfulness.

The result of all this is a kind of damnatio memoriae of the therapeutic significance of the myth, and the cancellation of the word "cure" from everything that instead represents the cure par excellence, that is la regeneration of oneself, rebirth, the authentic self-sufficient possession of one's own destiny. There is no need to dwell here on the diffidence and differences in interpretation and concept between the authors of the tradition and the authors that come from the psychoanalytic revolution. But here is a fundamental point that cannot be overlooked: what is removed does not disappear at all, but ends up dominating our lives, and dominating them as destiny [6].

If we browse through Neumann's text, we realize how central the theme of destiny is for the author. The uroboric destiny of an ego that does not yet exist, as it is totally immersed in the image of the Great Mother, the destiny of the hero who tries to get out of the adolescent state but fails like Narcissus and is killed by drowning in the aquatic element of the unconscious , the destiny of the hero capable of separating and differentiating the sky as a male element and the earth as a female place, and finally the destiny of the solar hero, the hero who kills the dragon and conquers the treasure of a liberated libidinal energy, which flies like the winged horse Pegasus towards conscious regeneration.

The theme of destiny is what more than any other question links Jungian discourse with Neumann's subsequent intuitions and developments. To fully understand this decisive passage, it would be necessary to highlight well how the problem of destiny is in reality the center of all the philosophical speculation of the West which is largely derived from the intuitions of magical thought and from the ritual attitude.

We will limit ourselves here to pointing out that already the experience of the tragic, as the same recalls Sergio Givone in its History of nothing [7], is the experience of the detachment of the entity from the being, a separation of man from the original unity, for which the destiny to which man is directed can only be a destiny of pain and death, a nefarious destiny which is the fruit of the human will of separation, fruit of that thought which separates subject and object and which thinks of itself as an in itself separate from being: better never to have been born than to suffer this suffering!

In a psychological sense, separation from being is always tragic, the fall, the exit from Eden in fact marks a painful passage, perceived as guilt, but also marks a necessary moment of tiring exit from the amniotic place of the unconscious. In philosophical and idealistic terms, the emphasis can be placed on the separation ofin itself byother than itselfThis separation precludes the dialectic of that recognition which is indispensable for returning to welcome the non-ego in the ego, the object in the subject, and proceed dialectically towards a higher stage of consciousness.

Here, remaining for a moment in the philosophical field, the central problem of philosophy has been, since its origin, the problem of the object and its knowability, that is, of its tracing back under the categories of a thought that orders and organizes the material phenomenal of reality. From this point of view we could say that every philosophy is always also a gnoseology, or a science of knowledge. A turning point in this sense occurs in the idealism heralded by the Kantian revolution.

Indeed with the great thinkers of German idealism, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, that great turning point is accomplished whereby knowing no longer presupposes the separation between the conscious self and the thing outside the self, that thing in itself Kantian unknowable. With idealism we proceed by going backwards, that is, through the dialectical movement, we recognize the original unity between subject and object, a unity that preceded the movement itself of the triadic process that goes from alienation to knowledge. [8].

In this sense we can affirm that the great turning point of idealism represents the conquest of the Logos, that is of thought, of that same magical ideal who for millennia had acted underground and had continued to think of a unity of the whole, a union between the two poles of subject and object, for which the inner action could not fail to have an effect in the macrocosm.

After this brief clarification we can groped to understand how destiny represents the true fulcrum around which philosophical thought and the same thought of psychology revolve, as Jung himself outlines it. Destiny is always connected first of all to the question of the incarnation and then to the problem of time, just think of the Platonic myth of Er, as regards the choice of destiny by souls, and of the figures who preside, in the mythology of weaving, intertwining of the plots of reality.

In fact, in Greece there were three different types of temporality: linear time as Chronos, the time of the significant moment, which one Kairos, and finally child time, cyclical time as Aion. It is precisely this temporal dimension that Jung himself will deal with.

In this perspective it is interesting to note how the theme of Aion, infantile and cyclical time, is already connected with the term in Homer psyche. This connection is usually explained by the fact that when death occurs the psychic breath escapes from the body and together with this vital breath the loss of temporality occurs. But if we consider that the term Aion since Homer was put in relation with the dimension of the soul, this suggests that the psyche itself contains in itself the totality of what is temporally unfolding in the cyclical time of the eonAnd. The reference toAion Jung's here is explicit. In fact, the psyche is not only an individual dimension in Jung, but it contains in itself the totality of the historical process, that is, the totality of time and of what manifests itself as reality over time.

The mythological question of temporality constitutes the main problem in the work of conciliation in the thought ofunus mundus as a source of mismatch between the inner will and the chronological arrangement of events that occur according to a law that is not in our possession [9]:

“What we call causality in the West is rooted in the Greek mythologues of Ananke (necessity), Dike (justice), Heimarméne (fate), and Nemesis (revenge). All these goddesses, who completely ruled the game of opposites, were revered and feared. Heraclitus also states that "every event happens according to struggle and necessity". In the Stoic philosophy Ananke, that is Heimarméne, then became a universal law that governs everything, even the gods. For the Stoics Chronos (time) was paired with Ananke (necessity). The latter she holds the universe "in inflexible chains", surrounding it like a snake, and she too is the inexorable goddess with deadly ties: she unwinds the thread of our life and in the end cuts it. In Christianity the idea of ​​necessity does not disappear, but was projected on the laws of a nature created by God, in which he could intervene through the miracle. Only with Descartes did the idea of ​​a rational determination, of an absolute validity of the laws of nature become dominant, and any possibility of a new creative influence of God was excluded. "

It is starting from the magical will to overcome the constraint of necessity that the first psychological conception of man develops, which means that its very root is magical and pertains to the very root of philosophical thought as cognitive thought, gnoseological thought, which has still and always investigated the ways of linking the inside and the outside for overcome the constraints of necessity. Therefore destiny not only as the central theme of magical thought that influences gnoseology as the fulcrum of the philosophical questioning on knowledge, but also the center of the updating of myth and its saving and therapeutic power.

The speculation on destiny, as we said, then passes from Jung to Neumann. Suffice it as an example of the fate of the young teenager who still lives in the desire of the devouring mother — question as alive and current — reported by Neumann through the analysis ofarchetype of the Great Mother [10]:

«The relationship of the loving son with the Great Mother is an archetypal situation which still operates today, the overcoming of which represents the prerequisite for every further development of the ego and consciousness. The flower-teens are not yet strong enough to defend themselves against the great power of the Great Mother or even to win it. [...]  These young people with weak self and without personality possess only a collective destiny, not a destiny of its own; they are not yet individuals and so are not they don't even have an individual existence. "

In this sense, the myth becomes a clear exemplary element for a development of consciousness, this is in fact the great task of the hero who, as a solar hero, is a clear representative of the conscious aspect of the ego.

But here is the link with Jung's text to that Neumann constantly refers to; In Symbols of transformation Jung develops two fundamental notions: that of libido and that of the liberation from necessity, from fate. The two are strongly connected. We find the point in a note in the Jungian text:

“The purpose of the mysteries was to break through the power of magic“ coercion from the stars. " The power of destiny is felt unpleasantly, only when everything proceeds in the opposite direction to our wishes, that is, when we find ourselves  in disagreement with ourselves. In accordance with this conception, antiquity has established a relationship of the heimarmene (fate, destiny, fate) with the "original light"  or "original fire", with the Stoic conception of the ultimate cause, diffused heat everywhere, that everything has created and therefore is also destiny. "

Here some points of capital importance arise. Jung is telling us that the power of destiny is actually the same internal heat that "everything has created". Let's see better what this heat is capable of generating. If we keep in mind what Jung means by the concept of libido things quickly become clearer. For Jung, in fact, the libido is not an energy linked exclusively to the sphere of sexual impulses but it is also a desiring and creative psychic power that lives in the unconscious. The real central problem of all depth psychology is actually that of discovering the eternal laws that govern the creation of reality by the unconscious.

This warming and eternally desiring creative force is none other than the Tapas, the heat known to Vedic ritualists, the ardor that reality places in ascesis. We find it in fact in Neumann's text [11]:

« When we talk about introversion, we say the same thing. P.er this in India Tapas, the internal heat and the "brooding", is the creative element by which everything is created. Self-fertilization of introversion, the fundamental experience of the spirit it generates by itself they are clear in the following passage: He, Prajapati, set himself to pray and fast, for he desired offspring, and he fertilized himself. "

Among the contemporary authors is Roberto Calaso to tell us about the Tapas and its wonderful powers [12]:

“The activity upon which the whole creation depends and descends is only mental but of a kind that immediately manifests the effectiveness of the mind on what it has it is external. And the offshoots of the outside are, for the mind, the inside of the own body. Thus an invisible combustion is produced, a warmth progressive, up to the ardor that follows from the working of the mind. And the Tapas, well known to Siberian shamans, ignored or clandestine in Western thought. Ubiquitous and sovereign, he is rarely defined in his powers, because too much evident. But sometimes the ritualist allows himself to think of them: “Indeed with the Tapas conquer the world ". "

Each of us is directed by forces, by the power of archetypes, and we tend to live absolutely unconsciously. Here, as we said, is the need to recover a myth-biographical knowledge capable of recognizing the elements of the myth still living in us. In fact, each of us constantly creates our own reality unconsciously, giving life to the most tragic, the most Pirandello's personal events. The myth comes to our aid and saves us, cures us, as Hilmann also had the opportunity to detect, through the example of those interior images projected into the stars.

The fact that our creative energy, the Tapas or the libido, whether unconscious, means that a means is needed to relate these two worlds: the conscious and the unconscious. If this does not happen we will be dominated by the insurmountable destiny that we ourselves continually generate. Only the myth, the rituality and the symbol allow a connection with the unconscious and an indirect but more conscious direction of psychic energy. What other significance do the celebrations of the solstices actually have if not the possibility for man to free himself from the circle of rebirths, to get out of cyclical time, from the crushing weight of destiny? Through the solstitial doors the initiate can exit the repetition of the same and generate the new.

The path of awareness is therefore preserved by the myth and the rite which as a gesture had to precede the myth itself. After the so-called "death of God", announced by Nietzsche, a period of profound bewilderment in nonsense opens up for modern man, in a freedom that fails to take shape, in an era in which the models of Tradition risk to no longer communicate with men absolutely destined to the total darkness of unconsciousness. The myths and rites must then be understood, updated, only in this way can they speak to us again.

There is a precise moment, as Mircea Eliade reminds us, in which the Vedic ritualists understood that the ritual gesture can be internalized, and they transferred the external gestures into acts of internal transformation. Transforming the perception of the world, as P. Hadot argues, freeing ourselves from the destiny that we ourselves have created, as Jung teaches us, reborn as the solar hero according to the example of Neumann.

Meanwhile, here in Italy there is the figure ofphilosopher analyst, who practices a type of analysis that goes by the name of "biographical analysis with a philosophical orientation"; this practice, addressing the dimension of suffering with which everyone is inevitably called to confront, wants to take into account the tradition, the historical dimension, the discoveries of depth psychology and the wisdom of the ancient philosophical schools in which one practiced to become free.

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Note:

[1] E. Neumann, History of the origins of consciousness, Astrolabe, Rome, 1949.

[2] Ibid., P. 12.

[3] CG Jung, Symbols of transformation, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2012. The first Italian edition is published with the title The libido: symbols and transformations in 1965, while the German edition dates back to 1912. In the preface of 1924 Jung wrote that: "The real intent of this book is only to elaborate as thoroughly as possible all the historical and spiritual factors that converge in the involuntary products of a individual fantasy ". In fact, it refers to the study of the material of the fantasies produced by a young American, nicknamed Miss Miller, through which Jung developed his connection with the myth starting from his famous theorization of the existence of a collective unconscious..

[4] Romano Màdera is a philosopher, university teacher and psychoanalyst with a Jungian background. Among his works we remember: The naked pleasure of living (Mondadori), The card of meaning (Raphael Cortina), Carl Gustav Jung, biography and theory (Mondadori), The visionary animal (The assayer), Philosophy as a way of life (Mondadori), A philosophy for the soul (IPOC). In an attempt to recover the wisdom and transformative and therapeutic power of philosophy, Màdera, inspired by various authors including P. Hadot, CG Jung, E. Bernhard, S.Freud, proposes a philosophy as a life practice and founded in Milan there Philo school, Higher School of Philosophical Practices where philosopher analysts are trained.

[5] E. Bernhard, Mythobiography, Adelphi, Milan 1969.

[6] The question of the repressed, central to S. Freud, represents one of those experiences in which the dialectical character emerges whereby opposites transit one into the other and coexist in the same symbol. Think of the commodity which in Marx is a concrete thing and theological mystery, or of the figure of the prostitute in Benjamin, she is a woman and what inasmuch as she exposes herself as an object. This dual character is also typical of that which, from familiar, presents itself with a disturbing connotation (unheimlich), and fearful as the re-emergence of the repressed.

[7] St. Givone, History of nothing, Laterza, Bari, 1995.

[8] To deepen these themes, we refer to the thought of Massimo Donà who intelligently investigated the links between idealism and magical thought. Think for example of the text Philosophy and magic, Bompiani, Milan, 2004.

[9] M.-L. von Franz, Psyche and matter, (1988), Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2014, p. 76.

[10] E. Neumann, History of the origins of consciousness, Astrolabe, Rome, 1949, p. 64.

[11] Ibid., P. 40.

[12] R. Calasso, The Ardore, Adelphi, Milan, 2010

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