HEALING THE WOUNDED MIND

In the 1930s, C.G. Jung was already referring to psychic epidemics in Europe, especially in relation to Nazism and its propaganda. This form of mass manipulation was systematically developed by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays in the 1920s and subsequently applied to advertising to drive the burgeoning consumerist culture, drawing us away from inner reflection to outer distraction and entertainment: you are what you have. According to the author, what he calls the wounded mind constitutes the psychosis of the modern world, which he analyses in the first part of this significant book. As he observes, the spiritual pursuit of meaning has been replaced by the material pursuit of progress that has created an inner void suffused with anxiety that constitutes a form of normalised madness, also anticipated by Erich Fromm, especially in his book The Fear of Freedom, which I read many years ago. The author draws on a number of parallels in discussing this psychosis, including the Native American 'wetiko', shamanic predators, the Jungian shadow of the collective unconscious and what Steiner calls 'Ahrimanic forces' advocating a materialistic, mechanical conception of the universe and the human being, nationalism, separatism, fundamentalism and a left hemisphere intellectual culture (p. 35).

For me, one of the most interesting chapters addresses the situation in education where many children are now diagnosed with ADHD and are taking corresponding drugs. The central issue was identified by H.L. Mencken nearly 100 years ago when he wrote that 'the aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.' (p. 53) Other contemporary books actually promoted this form of cultural hypnosis: in The Principles of Secondary Education (1918), Alexander Inglis - who ran the secondary school textbook division at Houghton Mifflin - explained that the adaptive function of education fixed habits of obedience to authority, while the integrative function required schoolchildren to conform and the directive function helped determine their social role. According to William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner for Education from 1889 to 1906, the goal of scientific education was the subsumption of the individual, i.e. social control. This entails 'a system that favours standardisation over vision and creativity' so we send children off 'to be conditioned into accepting the dominant narrative and to be instructed to conform' (p. 58). On the other hand, the author defines real education as being about 'integral perspective, contextual awareness and making connections.'

This divorce from the inner dimension is symptomatic of our hyper-modern condition characterised by loss of soul and a sense of metaphysical malaise. If we do not recognise ourselves as fundamentally spiritual beings capable of choosing freedom from within, then we are all the more susceptible to perception control through which those in power are able to manage how we think and therefore regulate our behaviour, as is only too apparent in the current pandemic crisis where competing narratives, for instance on the efficacy of vitamin C treatment, are removed from Facebook and YouTube. As compliant automatons, there is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in considering ourselves as mere machines to be enhanced and upgraded by advanced microchips; the transhuman can all too easily morph into the inhuman. Through social media, our lives become a spectacle for others and a psychosis of fear is easily spread; however, these same channels enable the dissemination of creative ideas as well, so we need to choose carefully. Tomorrow, for instance, we will be joining the early-morning global meditation along with tens of thousands of other spiritual seekers. It is now time, the author suggests, to seek the genuine self beyond the conditioned social self.

He explains how to go about this in the third part, beginning with the Gnostic vision. He quotes J.G. Bennett as saying that 'if a new world is to come, we must first create it in ourselves.' (p. 120) He characterises gnosis as spiritual knowledge arrived at intuitively, but here I felt he could have gone more deeply into this insight by explaining the three Gnostic categories of hylic, psychic and pneumatic. The hylic individual is materialistic and identifies with the physical body; the psychic level is that of the soul where we recognise that we are a part of the whole (also pistis as faith) while the pneumatic person identifies with the spirit and realises that they are the whole. Given this, they can only act for the benefit of the whole, intrinsically uniting ethics with metaphysics.

The later chapters describe the quest for the self, seeking a personal path and the transcendental connection leading to liberation and a new world where the centre is the human heart and soul and we move from the paranoia of fear towards the metanoia of love, recognising that culture is in fact an extension of our own collective consciousness and that we are all carriers and transmitters. Hence our essential task is to achieve inner freedom and spiritual rootedness so that we are no longer open to outer manipulation. In this sense, as Jung pointed out in his essay The Undiscovered Self, individual inner development is critical in terms of social progress. The author quotes Jung right at the end of his book in answer to the question what can I do: 'Become what you always been, namely the wholeness which we have lost in the midst of a civilised, conscious existence, wholeness which we always were without knowing it.' (p. 164) This means transforming the positions that 'I am what I have' and 'I am what I do' to the more essential 'I am what I am', becoming in the process a human being rather than just a human doing. This book is a timely reflection and guide to the necessary growth of consciousness for a genuine cultural renaissance.