Film Night: Healing the Rift with Lois LeBlanc

Is it possible that all objects are alive? Are the wind, the oceans, the mountains ensouled, and if so, does humanity participate? Jung sensed the truth in this and embraced the concept of Anima Mundi, or world soul.  This soul was meant to be the intermediary between the realm of ideal forms and the physical world. Through centuries and countless cultures, philosophers were drawn to find the all-encompassing theory that explained the structures and principles of the physical world. Finally, in the 19th century, rationalism replaced intuitive inner impressions.  

Born in 1875 to a pastor father and a spiritualist mother, Jung was raised in a world of spiritual forces and religious concepts. When he graduated with his medical degree in 1902, his doctoral dissertation, ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,’ strove to find the intersection of science, psychology, and esoteric beliefs. This interest accompanied Jung throughout his life. Over time he came to feel the over-development of intellect had deprived humanity of fundamental meaning.  While he acknowledged that the modern psyche would not likely accept ancient religious beliefs and practices, he knew the human imagination produced dreams and fantasies that could reanimate modern people’s inner and outer worlds. He came to call this reviving spirit the Anima Mundi.  The search to discover the soul in matter fueled the alchemist’s imagination and experiments. For Paracelsus, it was “the spirit of the quintessence that sets everything in motion, and that is the secret hidden from the beginning of time.” Jung internalized the alchemical processes and understood that when the ego marries the imaginal spirit, or anima/us, and we accept and live in both the material world and our mythic imagination, a new kind of personality is created. The alchemists called it the Lapis. 

In modern neuroscience, psychiatrist, and author Ian McGilchrist calls it “the unity of the hemispheres” in his book ‘The Master and His Emissary.’  To reimagine that we are part of a responsive web of life is to resist the mechanistic worldview that treats nature as a lifeless object to be controlled and exploited. It reawakens a parallel universe where our material actions simultaneously appear in our inner world, not as photographs of our acts but as symbols that reveal the secret relationship between ourselves and those we influence.  The soul of the world is not something to believe in. It is a natural condition of autonomous inner response that has been interfered with. It is not suddenly calling to us; it has always been speaking. It makes no demands; it does not seek to control; it is not a risk to prosperity or flourishing. It is simply, and always, the inner correlate of our outer life filled with uncanny images and swells of feeling that naturally give us pause before we act because every action we take abides in us even as it changes those we act upon.