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WD_250/ 2006
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oil pastel on paper | | Size (inches): | 30.1 x 21.3 | | Size (mm): | 765 x 542 | | Catalog #: | WD_0250 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
C G Jung - The Real and Surreal : Extract from The Structure and Function of the Psyche, CW Vol. 8
The Real and the Surreal:
I know nothing of a "super-reality." Reality contains everything I can know, for everything that acts upon me is real and actual. If it does not act upon me, then I notice nothing and can, therefore, know nothing about it. Hence I can make statements only about real things, but not about things that are unreal, or surreal, or subreal. Unless, of course, it should occur to someone to limit the concept of reality in such a way that the attribute "real" applied only to a particular segment of the world's reality. The restriction to the so-called material or concrete reality of objects perceived by the sense is a product of our particular way of thinking - the thinking that underlies "sound common sense" an our ordinary use of language. It operates on the celebrated principle "Nihil est in intellectu non an tea fuerit insensu," regardless of the fact that there are very many things in the mind which did not derive from the data of the senses. According to this view, everything is "real" which comes, or seems to come, directly or indirectly from the world revealed by the senses.
This limited picutre of the world is a reflection of the one-sideness of Western man, which is often very unjustly laid at the door of the Greek intellect. Restriction to material reality carves an exceedingly large chunk out of reality as a whole, but it neverthless remains a fragment only, and all round it is a dark penumra which one would have to call unreal or surreal. This narrow perspective is alien to the Eastern view of the world, which therefore has no need of any philosophical conception of super-reality. Our arbitrarily deliminted reality is continually meanaced by the “supersensual,” the “supernatural,” the “superhuman,” and a whole lot more besides. Eastern reality includes all this as a matter of course. For us the zone of disturbance already beings with the concept of the “psychic.” In our reality the psychic cannot be anything except an effect at third hand, produced originally by physical causes; a “secretion of the brain,” or something equally savoury. At the same time, this appendage of the material world is credited with the power to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak; and not only to fathom the secrets of the physical world, but also, in the form of “mind,” to know itself. All this, without its being granted anything more than an indirect reality.
Far, therefore, from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even "unreal" ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing "external." We may call them "imagination" or "delusion," but that does not detract in any way from their effectiveness. Indeed, there is no "real" thought that cannot, at times, be thrust aside by an "unreal" one, thus proving that the latter is stronger and more effective than the former. Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness. Our much vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of "unreal" thoughts. The world-powers that rule over mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors, and it is they that bring consciousness into being and hence create the sine qua non for the existence of any world at all. We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.
From this we can judge the magnitude of our error which our Western consciousness commits when it allows the psyche only a reality derived from the physical causes. The East is wiser, for it finds the essence of all things grounded in the psyche. Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter stands the reality of the psychic - psychic reality, the only reality we can experience immediately.
-web.ukonline.co.uk/phil.williams/real&surreal.htm
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