The Eyes in the Dark
Jung goes looking for the little lights of the unconscious in alchemy, Paracelsus, dreams and ancient visions - and discovers that people had been drawing them for centuries.
Last time we ended with a picture: the mind as a dark sea at night, with one large bright island that says "I" and many smaller lights around it.
A fair objection is that this is only a picture. Jung's reply, in the nine short paragraphs of section 6, is unexpected. He goes looking for the little lights in history, and finds that people have been drawing them for centuries without any psychology at all.
Sparks in the dark
His first witnesses are the alchemists, the men who spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries heating dark, confused matter in glass vessels in the hope of turning it into gold.
Whatever else they were doing, they looked into darkness for a living, and they kept reporting the same thing: sparks.
Heinrich Khunrath, a German physician and alchemist, wrote of "fiery sparks of the world-soul" scattered through the dark mass, which he called "the seed-plot of a world to come".
Older alchemical books, from Morienus to George Ripley, say that when the dark "sea" of the work is dried, something remains that "shines like a fish's eye": small gleams looking up out of dark water.
Gerhard Dorn added the gloss Jung liked best: the fish's eye is always open, like the eye of God.
The light of life, Dorn wrote, shines in us "dimly, as if in darkness". It is "in us, but not of us".
The language reaches back to the opening of John's Gospel and to Augustine's idea that certainty depends on a light we did not ourselves create.
None of these men was writing psychology. Yet they drew exactly Jung's picture: a dark mass full of small, separate lights.
For Jung that is no coincidence. When the mind stares into something dark and unknown, it paints its own portrait onto it.
The light of nature
The second witness is Paracelsus, the wandering Swiss physician whom the alchemists revered.
Paracelsus taught that there are two lights. One comes from above, through revelation and scripture. The other is the light of nature: a knowing that is already in the created world, in every creature, waiting to be read by someone who studies patiently.
The medieval schools already spoke of a light of grace and a natural light. What Paracelsus changed was the nature of the lower light.
For the schoolmen it was reasoning. For Paracelsus it was knowledge that lives in things themselves - the plant, the ore, the sick body - and that is acquired not simply by argument but by long observation.
"Sleep is waking for such arts." The light of nature remains active in sleep, and because it "cannot speak", it "builds shapes in sleep".
A dream, on this view, is not simply a message delivered to you. It is nature's own intelligence, unable to talk, drawing instead.
That gives the little lights a name that is neither grand nor dismissive. They are not voices from heaven, and they are not noise.
They are the natural intelligence of the organism showing itself in flashes: the hunch you could not justify, the dream that put a situation more clearly than you had managed awake, the part of you that knew before you did.
The eyes
Then the sparks become eyes.
Jung lines up a series of visions in which light does not merely shine but looks: Ezekiel's wheels "full of eyes", Zechariah's "seven eyes of the Lord", and Ignatius of Loyola's glittering thing "full of eyes, which were yet no eyes".
The alchemists' fish-eyes were already eyes.
An eye is a light that looks back, and this is the detail that turns a pretty image into a psychological claim.
The dark in us is not blind. Something in it sees.
This is the everyday experience of a dream that seems to know you better than you know yourself.
Augustine had reached a related point in a different key: even if our whole life were one continuous dream, something would remain certain - the existence of the one who dreams.
Jung's conclusion, offered as a model rather than a fact, is that the deep patterns of the mind carry a faint light of their own.
The unconscious is not simply dark. It is, in his phrase, a multiple consciousness: many small centres of awareness, none of them the "I".
The question this leaves open
Imagine a woman who has had the same dream for a month. She is in her childhood kitchen and cannot find the door.
During the same month she is sleeping badly, snapping at people and avoiding a conversation with her sister.
Her doctor might call the dream a symptom, a by-product of stress, like the irritability.
Paracelsus might call it a shape built by the light of nature - something that knows.
Ignatius himself could not decide what to make of his own many-eyed visitor. For years it consoled him, until he concluded it was the devil and drove it away.
The Bible presents the same question in the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who dreams of a great tree cut down to the stump.
Daniel reads the dream as a warning. Twelve months later the king loses his reason.
One dream, two readings, both right: the first symptom of a madness, and a truth about the man who dreamed it.
So which is it? Are the eyes in the dark the nature of our symptoms, or a truth within us?
"Symptom, or a Truth Within Us?" follows this question through two thousand years of thinking about dreams, medicine and madness before returning to Jung's answer.
Sources
Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, CW 8, paragraphs 388-396; Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, paragraph 45; Jung, "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon", CW 13; Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography; Daniel 4; Augustine, Contra Academicos and Retractationes; and Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History.
Reading Jung together
These articles follow Jung's argument slowly rather than reducing it to a list of concepts. Questions, disagreements and alternative readings are part of that process.