“For Jung, the collective unconscious are traces of experience going back in human race, however, that is not the most fruitful way to look at it”
The value of the psyche is not about understanding the psyche, it is not about collecting memories but is to rise out of the sense of the psychic world of our own, or of this collective past experience, and see the actual truth of eternity taking place in this world of images. As William Blake would have said May the daughter of memories become the daughters of inspiration!
In this conversation with Reza Shah-Kazemi, Charles talks briefly about the levels of ʿAlam Al-Mîthal (The Imaginal World) of Ibn ʿArabi and Henry Corbin then explains the basic image of the Jungian prospective “the Role of the Architype” within the collective unconscious. He then criticises it expressing how we might be able to integrate that within a more convincing metaphysical and spiritual framework.
Charles Upton, born in San Francisco in 1948 and currently lives in California, is a poet and metaphysician whose written works are in relation to mysticism and social action. Since 1966, he has written extensively on metaphysics, spiritual tradition, and peaceful activism. In the late 80s, he became involved with the “Traditionalist” or “Perennialist” school of writers of comparative religion and traditional metaphysics. Some of his major titles include What Poets Used To Know, The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age, Day and Night on the Sufi Path, and Vectors of the Counter-Initiation: The Course and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality.
