ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 presented evidence that Jung understood the process of individuation to entail not only a return to the unconscious as the origin of consciousness but also an immersion of the ego into the unconscious beyond all difference and differentiation. It is this side of the individuation process that aligns Jung’s psychology with the mystical experience of a loss in a formless nothingness which the mystics take to be a moment of identity with the divine. Such mystical consciousness and its relation to the nothing seem an exotic indulgence, when Jungian psychology seriously faces the question of what it has to offer current processes of humanization. On closer examination, however, the relevance of mystical consciousness becomes quickly evident as Jung’s ultimate corrective resource to the blight he consistently identified at the heart of the psyche and soul of Western society in his time and, by extension, in ours. Jung described this social and individual pathology as a consciousness reduced to “a rootless will o’the wisp” (Jung 1966a: 205) that is, a consciousness severed from that maternal nothingness from which all consciousness and its capacities are born. Such a state of mind had cut itself loose from the universal “root of the whole human race” (Jung 1966a: 202) and so from the mother of consciousness herself who creates and, having created, renews all conscious life.
