Recap of the Series so far. This is the final essay of the philosophical guide to self-development series. To recap what we’ve discussed so far, we began by looking at how the West is undergoing a crisis of meaning due to the collapse of the Aristotelian Christian worldview. We argued the Aristotelian Christian worldview collapsed because of the scientific revolution and increasingly global multiculturalism in the 21st century. We also pointed out that the dominant scientific worldview has no place for meaning, subjectivity, or consciousness. Thus modern individuals are stuck between a meaningless reductionist view of themselves as merely a ‘collection of atoms’ or an alternative decadent romanticism that denies the worldview of natural science in favour of ‘feelings’ and vague hedonic spirituality. In essay ten, we discussed the characters of these two camps as fundamentalists and nihilists: fundamentalists who cling to outdated, low-resolution pictures of the world, and nihilists attempting to embrace and live with the chaos without creating any order. In this series, I have argued both are maladaptive responses to the collapse of the dominant worldview and that the adaptive response is actually captured in the hero meta-mythology. We spent quite a long time sketching out the general pattern of the hero meta-mythology on how one confronts chaos and makes new habitual order, and why the hero meta-mythology is a narrative description of John Vervaekes relevance realisation, so we won’t go into too much in this essay (check out these ones for a recap). Like most of my work, this series is aimed at non-academics, particularly for people who have experienced alienation, despair, nihilism, meaninglessness and other existential issues to present an alternative and more viable interpretation of life. This aim presents challenges, and limitations on delving into ontology and the philosophical weeds, which I have realised as writing this, go deeper than I even thought. I hope in future works to lay out more clearly the proposed ontology, epistemology and ethics - as a more complete philosophy. But the importance of this series is a synthesis of philosophy and Myth for meaning-making in life. Our interpretation of life, ourselves and our growth and development in the world has profound consequences for one’s emotional well-being, success, and satisfaction in life. Philosophy & Myth are two ways of upgrading the sophistication of one’s interpretation of life - albeit on different levels of analysis. To discuss an interpretation of life, one has to address the existential questions at the bottom of that interpretation, questions like: who are we? What is human nature? Function and identity? Who should we be? Ethical questions of virtues and vices, desirable and undesirable characteristics and ultimately, the good life? And finally, how do we go from one to another which raises questions of individual transformation? The providence of Myth and narrative, which straddles the line between generalisable stories of transformation, universal human nature, and one’s particular, individual existence. That's where the tension lies between our individual, highly contextual lives and then these broader, intergenerational generalisable patterns of successful adaptations, which we call myths. I believe it is the work of artists and philosophers to unite the two into one. In the last three essays, we looked at Peterson’s synthesis of Rene Magritte’s ‘Son of Man’ painting as an image of the modern meaning crisis-stricken individual akin to the ‘fallen’ person in the Christian story. We discussed how this character was trapped within a narrow categorical identity and their vision blocked by the knowledge of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, with no genuine path to Transcendence. In the following essay, we argued that meaning is not an epi-phenomenon but is, in fact, the instinct that orients us to the zone of proximal development where self-transformation takes place. It is at that border of order and chaos where we experience deep meaning and where the  myths and hero stories are orienting us towards zones of significant error recognition and error-correction results in deep personal transformation. In keeping with Platonic philosophy, we argued that these personal transformations, through the cultivation of virtues, like character traits or skills, cause a general increase in wisdom which decreases self-destruction and self-deception and, therefore, illusion, connecting one to reality. In this sense, Transcendence leads to truth and reality through wisdom and meaning and is not just a psychological improvement but an epistemological improvement. The Christian Neoplatonic worldview can have a levelled ontology, and our connection to reality is driven by our ethical development which is a powerful proposition. In this final essay, we will look at a modern path to Transcendence that can exist within a naturalistic framework based on Veraveke’s work and offer a solution to Rene Magritte’s Son of Man problem with a different perspective on the old idea of humans being made in the ‘image of God’. Then finally, we will spend some time reflecting on how a modern path to Transcendence through cultivating wisdom and meaning can shift education, culture and institutions of the future of human development.A Modern Path to Transcendence. In the last essay, we looked at how meta-cognition affords us Transcendence through the internalisation of other’s perspectives on our own perspective. We discussed spiritual exercises like internalising the sage in Stoicism, which uses a person of admiration as an internal model of optimal behaviour and hence affords us self-correction and transformation. Similarly, Peterson argues that hero myths are abstracted stories from the lives of admirable people like sages or heroes. We tell stories about people who lived exceptional lives and then over time, these stories are blended together to create a generalisable pattern of action that sums up a successful human life. In this way, myths also offer us portals to Transcendence by providing examples of virtue and vice which we can model ourselves on, though in a narrative and dramatic form. We internalise the perspectives of others on our own to change our habits and patterns of seeing and these new behavioural and attentional patterns become character over time and transform the internal constraints regulating our growth and development - this is the essence of self-correction. As previously mentioned, this self-correction is not merely a psychological improvement but increases one’s ability to connect with real patterns in the world and hence has epistemological consequences. This is important because the need for a virtue tradition isn’t just ethical in some abstract sense of right and wrong but is essential for developing our ‘intellectual vision’ to see the world as we ought to see it, and has to be done through individual transformation.  The platonist levelled ontology, which is multi-levelled, involves not just deconstructing reality into its constituent parts in a reductionist manner but also observing the a priori constraints which are at play in regulating our growth and development and hence the agency we have to influence these constraints. Philosophically speaking, the ancients covered this one and didn’t fall prey to the one-sided reductionist bias of modern philosophy. The significance for the individual is that ethical transformation leads us to the truth, not just the scientific method, self-realisation connects one to reality. This philosophy, interpretation of life, justifies our connection to reality and that we can qualitatively improve our connection to reality through building wisdom and virtue tracked by meaning. In Vervaeke’s argument for strong Transcendence, the answer to the meaning of crisis is contact with what is most real. St Augustine makes a similar argument when he says each of us has a ‘god-shaped hole’ in our hearts; the hole being ‘god-shaped’ constrains what will fill that hole and Vervaeke argues that this is a connection to what is most real. Within a Neoplatonist ontology, patterns of mind and reality overlap and therefore, the more real patterns you perceive, the more real you become, you self-realise, so, therefore, there are ontological levels which you can climb in life. The reintegration of the spiritual into the modern scientific worldview can allow us to start to afford individuals genuine Transcendence and hence the ability to transform themselves, which is deeply meaningful, and promotes agency and autonomy, which is sorely missing in the increasing complexity of the modern world. The Image of God. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”Immanuel Kant Earlier in the series, I used Rene Magritte’s painting of The Son of Man as an example of the modern meaning crisis-stricken individual who is trapped within their categorical structure and incapable of genuine Transcendence (you read that here if you have not). Well, I consider this poorly photo-shopped image to be a solution to that problem. Instead of the apple in front of the face blocking vision like in the Son of Man, we have a set of interlocking (what-are-mean’t to be) wedding rings - a commitment. Soren Kierkegaard describes the ethical life as a marriage of past, present and future. Similarly, Nietzsche made ‘promise-making’ the quintessential human moral activity of the ‘Sovereign Individual’ in The Genealogy of Morals. This is because a promise is to make a certain state of affairs in the future a reality and so requires genuine agency - control over the passage of time, which we often assume we have but probably do not. The ethical individual is bound, committed - but committed to what? To a particular high-order principle? For Nietzsche, this is freedom, but for ancient philosophers, and Christians, what is also represented by the interlocking rings as The Good: the union of logos and ontos. As Vervaeke describes, the Good is: the continually held promise of the wedding of intelligibility and reality, which we can experience as true. To describe in another language we have established already is like the commitment of Socrates and the Philosophers to ‘turning one’s soul to the Good’. An ontological and ethical commitment to the pursuit of truth, humility, and gratitude and that by some miracle is possible for human beings are connected to reality. It is a journey motivated by love to experience the loving recognition of the true, the good and the beautiful, which used to be called ‘Reason’ in philosophy. The stars in the background are meant to communicate that the journey toward the Good is brought on by awe, wonder and admiration and in being so struck, we are called to imitate what we admire most. Motivation is no longer just a dreary bureaucratic day at the beachside but an awe-inspiring vision of the Good. It is in the heights that we look up to when we aspire, when we imagine, when we dream, that pulls us up into expanded existence - as Plato said, ‘philosophy begins in wonder’ which means ‘the love of wisdom’ begins with that wonder; love is the motivational force for the pursuit of wisdom. Joseph Ratzinger writes that in the Catholic view, “truth” is the middle term that reconciles the authority of God and the subjectivity of conscience: the latter, when authentically free, cannot but reveal the truth established by the former (Ratzinger 1991). Unlike Nietszche, who’s ‘sovereign individual’ creates their own values, in the Catholic view, reason alone can’t create its own values, which are instilled by God into humans’ hearts, “human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfilment precisely in the acceptance of that law of God” (John Paul II 1993: par. 35). So when practical reason is free to exercise its “participation” (John Paul II 1993: sec. 40) in the divine law, then “in the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience” (Paul VI 1965: par. 16). This is a very important point, which many philosophers like St Augustine focused on as well, that through an ‘inward turn’, by getting to the bottom of one’s own being, you reached the ground of being itself, i.e God. In observing that objective within the subjective one witnessed first-hand the origin of value and that this was what was most real. In this way, we can see through the rift between the ‘starry sky above’ and ‘the moral within’ which is so present in Kant’s philosophy, despite his idealism overcompensating, and in the Cartesian splitting of object and subject is illusory. It is the presence of the beautiful, the good and the true, that point to the true nature of reality itself.The final part of the image is the suit, which we discussed with Magritte represents a typical conservative 1950’s grey-man who wears a uniform to disappear from the world. However, this suit in the image is taken from Rene Magritte’s painting ‘The Pilgrim’ and is an attempt to dramatise the narrow market-economy identity of a mature adult into that of an awe-struck pilgrim to the Good. For Magritte, the suit represents enculturation but rather than enculturation into a mundane, stale, social-economic identity that lacks Transcendence and connection to the real. The alternative is the identity of the pilgrim-hero. The identity of the pilgrim is integral to this new way of thinking. Jonathan Pageau explains a pilgrimage is a physical enactment of going to a holy place as a symbol for the spiritual journey of getting closer to God. The notion of life as a pilgrimage decentralises religion, as is already happening in our rapidly de-institutionalising world, and provides a meta-identity that can scaffold the individual hero’s journeys that we take part in. The pilgrim identity highlights the throughline to an individual life that can join together the often disparate and irreconcilable moments that have no continuous narrative order - which is the norm for a modern meaning crisis individual. This is because in the west we have lost the throughline to our lives which is God. I encountered this problem very recently in my own life while trying to compose an autobiographical account of the first thirty years of my life. Where do you start? Generally, you’ll generally start with memories, but soon that becomes muddled, because why these memories and not others? And if you put them in chronological order, they will bore the pants off you and make no sense? It’s just a meaningless jumble of events that happened to you? What connects these incidents in life together into a meaningful whole? One quickly realises that to write an account of your life, you need a throughline to organise the whole of the disparate events - and the question is: what is the proper throughline? Is my life all about being Irish? Is it about being a man? Is it about technology and the modern world? Or drinking? I boiled over this for quite some time. But what was apparent was that whatever I chose the story to be about, would be the highest organising principle for my life and hence the lens through which I saw myself and so held tremendous power. And really what is the highest good? What is the most significant value? And the traditional answer is God, absolute value, and so it became apparent to me that there was a need for an organising principle, a throughline, to create narrative order across time, to make one’s life coherent, and that only the highest value could fill that spot, and thus I was beginning my non-consensual journey to becoming a Christian. If you ever sit down and try and create a narrative order for your life, you will realise that you need a throughline and not any throughline will do, and perhaps then you will be in the same situation I was - needing the God, which you have rejected and insulted for so long. I would suggest, rather boldly, that this poorly-photo-shopped photo is meant to be a symbol of the ‘image of god’, the image which human beings are made in and which gives us transcendent value. In Maps of Meaning, Peterson describes the hero as the ‘Son of God; “Behind every particular (that is historical) adventurer, explorer, creator, revolutionary and peacemaker lurks the image of the “son of god,” who sets his impeccable character against tyranny and the unknown”. This image is a symbolic representation of the pattern of action that categorises the hero, the abstracted and generalised pattern of successful adaption. So there’s a peculiar tripartite nature to this image, in that it’s our origin, who we really are and what makes us uniquely human, our destiny, a destination in reunion with that image in which we are made which is a kind of self-actualisation, and hence that suggests the journey between - and so the whole thing is more like a story, a meta-narrative, which is like the self itself - not a static individual identity, but more like a metaphor for life. Approaching A Modern Meta-Narrative. “Thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”James Joyce. In the beginning of this series, we started talking about attention and that: “Morality begins in paying attention to what you don't want to pay attention to but should attend too”. Perhaps we have gone the long way round to return to such a simple truth, but this is necessary because that is the point of the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is a series of deaths and rebirths, transformative learning experiences, which let go of vices, illusions, dreams and moral imperfections ‘to see as one ought to see’. The Platonic philosophers and alchemists really understood that we must not look but close our eyes and replace the faculty of vision for another, what is called the beatific vision. The ultimate goal of the quest is a better form of vision; the point of death and rebirth of transformation, updating one’s attentional value hierarchy is that it allows us to see what was once hidden right before our eyes. As Plotinus writes - No eye that has not become like the sun will see the sun, nor will anyone who is not beautiful see the beautiful. In keeping with Aristotle’s conformity theory of knowledge, we know by becoming. So we must become like the sun to see the sun, become like the beautiful to see the beautiful. The three transcendentals: the true, the good and the beautiful, point to God’s nature, the nature of ultimate reality; God is the throughline - not present in particular but organising everything we see. As the Upanishads say, ‘God is not an object of sight but that by which we see’. Like what we discussed with Plotinus and the sculpture, the sculpture has a vision of beauty and good and truth and then works to make the marble and the vision one. The same is true here of the work of self-development and self-realisation, we attain the vision and work to become like the one, and the suggestion is that because we are made in the image of the one. It is not only our natural conclusion but an ethical call to adventure which we must partake in. That is why this journey must be begun by faith. What is begun by faith, ends in vision, and so a good-faith commitment is needed first to get on the road. Faith takes us on the road, but the destination, understanding and vision, are what give meaning and value to the journey. Understanding is intellectual vision - seeing God clearly with the mind’s eye is the goal and meaning of faith. Spiritual life is about training the intellectual vision to see what it cannot see yet. The word ‘contemplation’ comes from a temple, which actually comes from the Latin word for a part of the sky that you look up to to see the signs from the gods; to contemplate is to look up towards the divine. Beauty calls us forward on a transcendent journey to encounter the Good, and the product of this adventure is truth which is a better form of vision, a better self. In summary, the image of God as our fundamental identity is shockingly egalitarian for the time, and suggests not just our origin but also our destination, a destiny, a journey in between, an awe-struck pilgrimage to the Good. The pilgrimage is everywhere now; we are all spiritual pilgrims looking for our spiritual home. I have represented the image of God (crudely) in the above image, because I think it sums up the philosophy of self-development or, probably more accurately, self-realisation, which I have been exploring, which isn’t just a static belief system but, in fact, a dynamic and meaningful spiritual way of life. A journey that is begun with faith, a faith that leads to a better vision, and a better vision is a better self. In Conclusion.This series was, in many ways, doomed to difficulty from the start. I quickly realised that each arena I skipped through was a book or an entire field of study! So I hope to make up what is missing in accuracy with generalising well. We are in a time that requires integrating science and spirituality, mind and body, and being able to to start seeing the union beyond the irreconcilable opposites. In my own way, I’ve tried to shed some light on that emerging worldview that puts meaning and wisdom rightfully at the centre of human concerns. There are many levels to the death of God and the meaning crisis, and thus, there are just as many levels to the rebirth. What seems foolish and half-baked today hopefully heralds a better future. But if this worldview is correct, there will be no saving grace; we damned, forsaken, fallen, and our atonement requires sacrifice, moral courage, wisdom, heroism, a rediscovery of those lost values which sound so sentimental to the cynical and nihilistic modern world. There’s nothing easy about any of this. There will need to be a revolution in arts and culture, education and the academy, the internet and our own hearts, new institutions and reinventions of old ones focused on wisdom and meaning. The advent of Artificial intelligence and persuasive technology have brought a definitive end to human unconsciousness, and we must know ourselves in order to survive. There has never been a more serious bottleneck than in the next hundred years, and our individual thoughts and actions will be magnified to unprecedented importance - that’s the good and bad news. So the work of the arts, humanities, and philosophy is to ‘turn our souls to the Good’ and to help us see as we ought to see. This is a treacherous journey we must embark on, but Peterson argues the great hero’s journey of our lives is ethical and that taking responsibility for that journey is the source of meaning, and somehow, that all starts with your attention, with what we value—so having said that, what should you be paying attention to that you are not? (PS Taking the usual break over August so will be back with more podcasts and essays in September). Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

An interview with Dublin South FM’s Alison Maccarvil on her show Dramatic Dublin review of my debut stage-play WAITING FOR THE OFFO, preformed in THE NEW THEATRE 2023. Directed by Conan McIvor.Starring Cillian Lenaghan, Liam Bixby, Hazel Clifford and Terry O'Neill. Thanks for reading Mahon's Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work: www.mahonmccann.com Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Igor Grossmann is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he leads the Wisdom and Culture Lab. As a cognitive/social scientist, Grossmann has been working on demystifying what makes up a “wise” judgment in the context of revolving societal and cultural changes. His chief work aims to uncover misconceptions about wisdom and societal change and to identify cultural and psychological processes that enable people to think and act wisely.In this podcast, we are discussing 1) What is wisdom? 2) How can we cultivate it? 3) Can wisdom help us address the challenges we face in the 21st century, such as AI and exponential technology?Subscribe for more essays and podcasts: https://www.mahonmccann.com/ Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Read the full essay: https://www.mahonmccann.com/In the last essay, we explored Peterson’s solution to the Meaning Crisis and how cultivating wisdom and virtue can help to orient our meaning instinct properly. We finished the last essay with the latest research on the science of wisdom and the two core conceptions of meta-cognition and moral grounding, which we will explore in this essay on how to cultivate each of these skills.  Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Read the full essay: https://www.mahonmccann.com/In the last essay, we looked at Rene Magritte’s ‘The Son of Man’ painting as an image of the fallen, meaning crisis individual. You might notice a similarity between the painting and the cover of my last book, ‘The Man with a Mirror Face’, which presents an intermediate character of the conscience that reflects our character like a mirror, which we will discuss. In this essay, we will look at Peterson’s solution to The Fall, looking at a fundamental weakness in his argument and strengthening it with Vervaeke’s framework and, finally, bringing to the fore the attitude that this existential philosophy represents with the cultivation of meta-cognition and moral grounding.  Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

The Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and hate offences Bill 2022 is currently making its way through the Dail and Seanad and is somewhat in my wheelhouse. This bill is designed to update Ireland’s 1989 Incitement to Hatred laws mainly because Social Media has outdated them. There is an increasing call for regulation on Social Media, and this is what my literature is focused on, and providing tailored recommendations for future policies like this one. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Part 9 of the Philosophical Guide To Self-Development series. We are now on the downward slope of this essay series. The last three essays will bring together what we have discussed so far and operationalise this worldview within the context of the problems for a modern individual. This essay is going to be mainly problem-formulation, focusing on Postmodernism, The Meaning Crisis, and The Fall of Man (humankind) in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

A fiery conversation with Metamodern writer Brendan Graham Dempsey on Post-modernism, Meaning, Meta-modernity and God.Find more of Brendan's work here: https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/Or subscribe to his substack: https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/Get tickets to my upcoming play in Dublin: https://thenewtheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873644249Watch the full conversation on Youtube: https://youtu.be/s9YQWcG1-o8 Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist, prominent at the turn of the last century and the creator of depth psychology. Jung is an early proponent of the hero meta-mythology, a discoverer of the collective unconscious and a psychologist who spent his life cataloguing the universal symbols of the mind through dreams and active imagination. Jung attempted to respond explicitly to the meaning crisis and the dissolution of the Western mind, which he witnessed first-hand in Germany during WW2. Jung also argued that the origins of current individual troubles started with the death of God and the loss of the Christian worldview, which had reigned for over a thousand years. However, Jung thought God would reappear again in the psyche because God had disappeared from the external world in secular society. In this essay, we will be operationalising and situating the worldview we have been expounding throughout the series in a modern context through Jungian individuation, drawing some connections with Neoplatonic ideas, and finally, using a dramatic example, we will look at Jordan Peterson’s myth of Pinocchio and how this mythologises the process of self-development and can reveal for us lots we can learn about ourselves. Thanks for reading Mahon's Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Jung’s Theory of the Psyche. Freud was Jung’s mentor, and Freud had a hydraulic and essentially mechanistic theory of the psyche, being a materialist doctor initially. Freud was a towering figure who made one of the most tremendous psychological discoveries of the turn of the century was the unconscious mind and the recognition that much of what we do happens outside our conscious mind. As Freud wrote, “We are not masters in our own house”. However, over his materialism and sexual theory dogmatism, Jung split with Freud. For Jung, the psyche is a self-regulating system like the body, which is why Veraveke calls Jung ‘The Plato of the Psyche’. Jung looked at the psyche as a pantheon of living and warring psychic organs called archetypes that strove to maintain homeostasis and aimed at development through the process of individuation. This is why Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”For Jung, the sum total of the conscious and unconscious mind, which was also the sum total of our full potential, was the self. The self was what drove us towards their process of individuation, to psychological wholeness. The self has three levels: the ego - the centre of our consciousness, sense of identity, organising thoughts and feelings, and linking the inner and outer worlds. The unconscious had two levels in Jung’s theory; a personal unconscious that contained the total of our knowledge, which was not currently being accessed, everything outside of direct attention yet to be remembered and thus is the house of all potential future development. The third part of the self is the collective unconscious, populated by universal symbols, which are the stock characters of the human mind. These stock characters of the mind are called Archetypes, which comes from the original Greek ‘arche typos’ meaning ‘pattern’ or ‘the original pattern from which all copies are made’. (In a previous essay, we discussed Plato’s forms, structural functional organisations, and the forms and archetypes are essentially the same thing.)  To understand Archetypes are images of inborn patterns of behaviour, like how a bird builds a nest by instinct. The bird doesn’t have to go to the nest-building school. For Jung, this is the ‘biological mind’ populated by universal symbols, which we see reflected in myths and stories. He came to this understanding empirically by examining thousands of his patients’ dreams and cataloguing the overlap of universal symbols. He would have secular patients with religious, Egyptian, Greek, and Christian symbols in dreams and couldn’t figure out why? Some argue he was also influenced by James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which deals with the unconscious and the so-called ‘mono-myth’, which Joesph Campbell wrote “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” about; coincidently, the book Campbell wrote before “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” was the Skeleton key on Finnegan’s Wake. Jung argues this mono-myth is essentially the structure of the unconscious, and dreams were super crucial to understanding the unconscious because they gave us an unvarnished look at what was going on in the psyche: “Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” [Collected Works Volume 10, paragraph 317]Plato also looked at dreams as communication between Gods and human beings and as a way of gleaning important insights for guidance and wisdom. So essentially, Jung believed dreams could show us things we didn’t know yet but needed to know; important self-knowledge hidden from consciousness could be reintegrated by recording and analysing dreams. Self-knowledge for Jung was knowledge of the unconscious; therefore, dreams, active imagination and free association were essential ways of getting in touch with yourself outside of consciousness. In the previous essay, number 3, we described the hero meta-mythology as a generalised narrative description of the individual process of successful creative adaptation, which was motivationally or affectively optimal. Jung thought that the problem for modern individuals was that we lacked a modern myth to live within. Myths are dramatic maps for knowing how to live well and how we act, but as modern people, we can no longer believe in them? Jung saw this inner conflict as causing all sorts of existential problems for the modern individual, exposing us to chaos and creating neuroses. Jung said: “Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be.” The way the individual comes to know the myth they are in and to change the story, so to speak, is through the journey of individuation. The Journey of Individuation. Jung appropriated the natural philosophy of alchemy to plug this mythic void in the modern world. Alchemy, on the surface, appeared to be a proto-science attempt to transmute base metals (lead) into gold. The alchemists would do this by creating a philosopher’s stone, a stone or precious gem that could turn base metal into gold and allow the owner to live forever. Jung looked at alchemy not literally but as a profound metaphor for personal transformation and that the Philosopher’s Stone was essentially the philosophy that could bring about that transformation. Pierre Grimes, a prominent Platonist in the late ’70s, argued that Jung was philosophically a Platonist. He makes this argument because Jung’s philosophy of self-formation or self-development (the process of individuation) is rooted in the Hermetic philosophy, also known as alchemy. Hermetic philosophy is attributed to the semi-mythological Hermes Trismegistus, falesly considered until the Renaissance to be a contemporary of Moses, but was discovered to have originated in the 2nd or 3rd century - the time of Middle Platonism. Why is this significant? Grimes connects Jung’s journey of individuation to the Platonic anagogic ascent (represented mythologically as the journey out of the cave), which we have also equated throughout this series with the hero meta-mythology. This convergence of two separate but inter-penetrating traditions (Platonism and neoplatonism, and the monomyth, alchemy and depth psychology), significantly increases the plausibility of the argument that we are touching on a universal and perennial path of self-development. In alchemy, the prima materia was the base metal of lead, which Jung took to be the un-formed individual. The symbol of this un-formed individual was the Ouroboros: a dragon eating its own tail to form a never-ending circle, symbolising chaos or pure potentiality. Here we can again connect with the Neoplatonic journey to the one, which also puts pure potential (matter) at the bottom of the hierarchy of being and pure actuality at the top. This is no different from alchemy, with the top spot, the philosophical gold, being an analogy for psychological wholeness; the same aim as the ‘oneness’ of Neoplatonism or becoming ‘One’. In conclusion, I think it’s fair to look at the journey of alchemy, individuation and Neoplatonism as aiming at the same thing, the integration and coordination of disparate parts of the psyche into a unity. So, how does journey of individuation work? The Shadow. There is no straightforward method for Jung’s journey of individuation, but typically the ‘apprentice-piece’ is the confrontation with the shadow. The shadow represents the rejected aspects of the psyche and hence, as that which is not encountered, holds’s transformative potential. This involves integrating aspects of yourself that are often taboo or rejected in society, like sex and aggression, or maybe even these days, order and discipline. For Jung, individuation is how one self-develops out of an undifferentiated unconsciousness by integrating the unconscious parts of the psyche into consciousness, separating pure potentiality and using inner experiences to build one’s consciousness. This was all based on Jung’s principle of enantiodromia, which he described as ‘the most marvellous psychological law’. He defined enantiodromia as the ‘emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time’. This roughly means that an opposite unconscious reaction eventually compensates if we live in an unconscious and one-sided manner - it’s a dialogical process between unconscious and conscious minds, like the Platonic anagoge. Plato also articulated this in Phaedo “everything arises in this way, opposites from their opposites.” (sect. 71a)For example, a chronic nice guy who completely rejects anger and aggression will often become resentful and possibly sadistic and cruel as a result. Their rejection of anger, which is the archetypical God of war Ares, results in possession by this archetype. It’s paradoxical, to paraphrase Joyce: you run into what you run from! Another way of thinking about enatiodromia is that instincts have much more control over us when we are unconscious of them. Obviously, self-control, by definition, is something we are aware of; we have to be consciously aware of these drives to inhibit them, otherwise they can run rampant. So when the chronic nice guy rejects aggression, this inhibits his development because anger and aggression integrated becomes independence, assertiveness, tenacity, industry, etc. A lack of independence, assertiveness etc would not be fuel for positive emotion, but rather the opposite, chronic frustration and probably resentment. A weakness of Jungian analysis is that it is often profoundly introverted and occurs within the individual mind only; however, action is also required to transform the psyche. One way for the nice guy to overcome this dilemma would be to practise being assertive and saying ‘no’ to people, and taking care of his own needs and not always everybody else’s. A chronic nice guy who breaks down from one-sidedness and then begins to integrate their shadow, aggression in this case into tenacity and leadership, is a more “individuated” person in Jungian terms; integrated, complexified, and hence "real-ised” (made real-er) by the incorporation of the opposing principle. Another example of the confrontation with the shadow comes from Peterson on the myth of the knights of the Roundtable. When the knights set off for the holy grail, a symbol of psychological wholeness, each begins their search where the’ forest looks darkest to them’, in other words, where they are most afraid to go. The idea is that the place you least want to go holds the most potential development because it is where you have not been. As it is said in Alchemy, “In sterquilinus Invenitur’ - “In filth it will be found”. This is a fundamental reorientation in life, from your comfort zone to the difficult but rewarding ‘zone of proximal development’ in Vygotski’s language or to the edge of your competence. You could argue this is the start of each of our personal hero’s journeys, entering the forest wherever is darkest to us. Unfortunately, unlike the Knights of the Roundtable, we must make this choice every day, even when we feel like shirking off and running away. Phenomenologically the shadow can be resistant to this confrontation. In the ‘War of Art’, Stephen Pressfield describes the obstacle to one’s development as ‘resistance’, a voice in your mind that tries to discourage you from taking the challenges that will help you grow. David Goggins calls this voice ”the governor”, like a car governor that controls the speed limit. The psychologist Stutz, in The Tools, describes this inner-obstacle voice as “Part X”. Whatever you want to call it - there is something in you that doesn’t want you to be your best, and it’s something you have to overcome to fulfil your potential. The is is why the confrontation with the shadow is difficult but necessary. The confrontation with the shadow is the proverbial leaving the Cave, the safety of the village, to enter the dark woods of the unknown, in the hopes of discovering the gold, a more integrated personality, self-real-isation. The confrontation with the shadow can be summed up as “face what you reject, accept what you refuse to acknowledge, and you will find the treasure the dragon guards”. The Anima & Animus. According to Jung the confrontation with the shadow and the ensuing consciousness enlargement brought one into contact with the contra-sexual element of the psyche. For women, this is a man (the Animus); for men, this is a woman (the Anima). This is a confrontation with the inner other, and similarly to the shadow example, if we do not pay homage to this inner other, then we will become ‘possessed’ by it. If the shadow is the ‘apprentice piece,’ then the Anima and Animus are the ‘masterpiece.’ For a man in Jung’s philosophy, the Anima demands success, his greatest, or she will torture him and drive him to illusion. Jung looked at the male Anima as progressing through four stages: (1) First was Eve, indistinguishable from the personal mother.(2) The second was a personification in Helen of Troy, the ideal sexual image. (3) The third was Mary, which manifests in religious feelings and a capacity for lasting relationships. (4) The fourth stage is Sophia, Wisdom. A man’s Anima functions as a guide to the inner life, mediating to consciousness the contents of the unconscious - this is a functional relationship between the unconscious and consciousness. The stages of development for the female Animus are comparable (read more here) but ultimately culminate in Hermes, which is worth mentioning, to make this less abstract. Wisdom, or Sophia, is personified in Greek Philosophy by the Goddess Athena, who was often put together with Hermes in ancient sculptures to make a Hermathena. They both frequently assist crusading heroes and are the gods of good judgement, quick wit and cunning. The Hermathenastatue was featured in Cicero’s classroom, and he thought it an appropriate emblem of ‘learning’. Jung thought that what we don’t know is projected onto the unknown in the world. The Anima and Animus stage for Jung is about overcoming projection, essentially, illusion, being able to separate illusion and reality; true discernment. Really what the anima and animus is about are attention, salience and truth. We discussed this in the first essay unconscious forces pull our attention in ways we can’t understand. Hermes is the winged messenger of the Gods; he mediates between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Interestingly, Herme’s mother mythologically was ‘Maya’, the Goddess of illusion. The Greeks knew this problem with attention, and their panoply of God’s was the sum total of unconscious forces that can act our attention. By sacrificing to God’s and negotiating with them, we gained the ability to direct our attention. The Gods try to orient you in a particular direction by making things more vivid and salient, attracting your attention; they illuminate and darken your path as they guide you. If you are possessed by the wrong unconscious forces, they may take you somewhere you don’t want to go. Integrating these unconscious forces into a functional unit manifests as an interesting pathway to follow. If this instinct is good, it will guide you to self-realisation. For Jung, the aim with the Anima is for her to become ‘depotentiated’ so we are no longer possessed by our unconscious states, driven by short-term salience, which is the flip side of becoming autonomous.Example: Pinocchio & Spiritual TransformationWe can make sense of Jung’s individuation journey using the Pinocchio myth. In his Maps of Meaning lectures, Peterson frequently used the story of Pinocchio as a metaphor for the journey of personal transformation and growth to fully fledged agency. For Peterson, we all start out like Pinocchio, created by someone else, purposeless, and puppeted by unconscious forces. Pinocchio is a puppet but has the potential to be a ‘real boy’ (if you remember, Aristotle uses wood as his key example of potential). So the story of Pinocchio tracks this journey to become ‘real’. How does it dramatically enact the path of self-realisation? The source of the potential realness is a wish by Gepetto on a star that he would become a ‘real boy’. Gepetto is the culture and tradition that created him. The Blue fairy, a positive element of the unknown, informs Pinocchio that to become a ‘real boy’, he must prove himself brave, truthful and unselfish - virtuous. In Plato, becoming virtuous is the path to the Good, which is most real! Becoming virtuous is becoming like reality, which is to be real. Pinocchio gets off to a bad start and falls in with a rough crowd. He goes through several temptations to remain sick and weak, become a false celebrity (an actor), and reside on a pleasure island, where the boy’s he goes with literally become ‘asses’, braying donkeys who are slaves to the devil. Luckily, Pinocchio has his own conscience with him, ’a bug’ called Jiminy Crickett, who bugs him to do the right thing but knows only a little more than he does, where he shouldn’t be mostly, like Socrates Daimon. Pinocchio escapes pleasure island by jumping into the sea and chaos, failing to gain autonomy, and trying to return home. This return home is a failure to launch. He tries to return home and act like he can return - but it’s not the same. God is dead, and his father is no longer at home. A golden dove comes along and drops a note in front of him: that his father is not dead but is stuck in a whale’s belly. Jiminy Cricket convinces him to go and look for his father, who, it turns out, has been swallowed by a fire-breathing whale named Monstro (of course). This sequence apes the biblical story of Jonah and the big fish, when Jonah tries to avoid God’s call to preach to his enemy city Ninevah (Isreal’s enemy) and tries to escape on a boat but gets thrown overboard and eaten by a big fish instead. Peterson describes this mythological “Belly of the Beast” as facing the dark night of the soul to activate your potential. It is the mythological motif of “rescuing your father from the underworld”, the father, who is God, culture, and tradition, is stuck in the unconscious. So in the motif, the hero must go down and rescue him, but he has to go to the deepest part of the ocean where the most terrible thing rests - the darkest part of the forest, pretty much.But, how can we make sense of this in a more naturalistic way?  In After Virtue, Mcintrye argues that our traditions provide our moral standpoint on the world. As we have already discussed, to be a cognitive agent is to have an implicit frame of value; reality is combinatorial explosive, so we have to prioritise to perceive and act. So we’re already seeing the world through a frame of value - The father is essentially the frame of value; this is the unconscious, implicit frame of value handed down inter-generationally by culture and tradition. Peterson argues culture is composed of an unending sequence of dead fathers and that individuals have to sacrifice their attention to revive this dead traditon. Peterson uses the example of the Egyptian story of Osiris, who is dismembered in the underworld by his evil brother Seth but is then revivified by his son Horus. Horus literally gives his eye (his attention) to Osiris, the dead tradition. The normativity of this story is that heroic behaviour involves sacrificing other objects of attention to revivify the dead tradition. The rescuing of the father in the underworld is a mythological motif of entering your unconscious and bringing to consciousness your implicit value system (and in the case of modern westerners, accepting it is more good than bad!), equivalent to the Socratic ‘know thyself’ (know the principles guiding your action). Peterson explains that we must grapple with our potential in relation to the expectation of the traditional ideal. This can be a bitter pill because the ideal reflects badly upon us and highlights our weakness of character, so the transformation brought on by rescuing the father from the underworld is a profound self-correction, a death of sorts. However, in this case, when Pinocchio dies after rescuing his father, he doesn’t stay dead, but is resurrected by the Blue Fairy as a real boy (an autonomous person). It is ironic that the answer to Nietzsche’s argument ‘that God is dead’ comes from this weird story about a puppet rescuing his father from the belly of the whale. The journey to rescue his father, facing the whale in the depths, and returning with his father, proved his character and thus what allows the blue fairy to turn him into a ‘real boy’. What this implies is that to become an autonomous individual, we must face the darkest part of the forest and come to rescue our implicit value system, update it, and hence grapple with the cultural and traditional ideals submerged in our unconscious; this is what it means to develop a self. What would happen if Pinocchio didn’t rescue his father from the underworld?  There is a biblical story, “The Curse of Ham,” which articulates the opposite of the rescuing of the father story. Ham was a son of Noah, and his son Canaan was cursed to be a slave for his whole life because he saw Noah in a moment of vulnerability, drunk and fallen asleep naked at the bottom of the stairs, and he judged him negatively. This might seem a harsh punishment, cursed for all eternity for judging a drunk naked guy at the bottom of the stairs badly? What Canaan’s brothers did was they didn’t look at their father, and they covered him up out of respect. So how I read this is that the father represents God, culture and tradition and is the implicit value frame guiding our actions, which is flawed in many ways and outdated, but without which we are confronted with the world’s chaos and set adrift. This is easy to do with tradition because we didn’t make our implicit frame of value and we probably don’t understand it anymore, so the values can easily seem antiquated or downright silly. Certainly this is Nietzsche’s position in his attempt to re-think the foundations of the west. So we are constantly at risk of hubris against traditional wisdom. Why does this judgement of the weakness of the father makes you into a slave? For the same reason that rescuing his father made Pinocchio not a slave i.e no longer a puppet of unconscious forces. Our executive functioning, the ability to inhibit desires (which is self-control) to pursue valenced goals (even what is considered a good goal), is bootstrapped by culture. If you think about the Nietszchian idea, without God, everything is permissible; suppose you reject tradition and refuse to rescue your father from the underworld; you reject the part of yourself that comes from the culture and the tradition. Hence you lose the inherited cultural cognitive technology that helps you regulate your behaviour and as a result, you become a slave to your desires; you stay puppetted by unconscious forces. This is hardly surprising, considering something as fundamental as language is a cultural construction. So if we reject the tradition, we lose the inherited wisdom that helps us to discern virtue and vice to become autonomous moral agents. It is a bitter conflict for modern individuals: to submit your will to the inherited tradition of the west, to rescue your father from the underworld, is in some sense lose it, but if you believe the story, it’s also the only path to true freedom. In summary, rejecting tradition and God leaves you vulnerable to the whims of powerful trans-personal evolved unconscious forces that will puppet you like fate, and therefore to take command of one’s fate, one’s future, involves this rescue of the implicit value system trapped in the unconscious, and is akin to the Socratic ‘Know Thyself’ philosophically. Plato often argued that philosophy was preparation for death, and we can see in this hero’s journey how the voluntary, sacrificial death of Pinocchio, the puppet to rescue his father, allowed him to live as a ‘real boy’, sacrificing the old self so the new self can live. In the next episode, we will look at the failures of modern philosophy, the French Existentialists, Nietzsche and the philosophical mistakes that lead us into the Meaning Crisis as obstacles to self-development and how we can leverage attention and cognition to go beyond them. Thanks for reading Mahon's Newsletter! 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Eric Orwoll is a Christian Platonist philosopher and the creator of the Understanding Platonism and Aarvoll youtube channels (check out his channel here)In this podcast, we are discussing Christian Platonist solutions to the Meaning Crisis. Subscribe here for more wisdom content:https://www.youtube.com/c/MahonMcCannPodcast?sub_confirmation=1Timestamps:0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Crisis of Meaning 5:22 - Re-entering Christianity 15:20 - Platonic Tools 25:19 - Levels of the self 27:04 - Grace 31:00 - Self-integration 35:50 - Centrality of attention 39:13 - Jungian Shadow 40:45 - Jung & Plato 44:03 - Order & Chaos 49:52 - Hierarchy of good & evil 54:13 - God as Being 56:55 - The First Principle 57:56 - Aristotle & Plato 1:00:06 - Nominalism 1:02:09 - SocratesHave you gotten your ticket for my debut stageplay, “Waiting For The Offo”, this July in Dublin?Saturday night is already sold out, so make sure to buy early so you don’t miss out 👇https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC10oqMKjGhP8KuRpLuBMSVw Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe