Rascal Grin of the Original Face

I am a rascal grinning at myself in a mirror. (C. Jung, Red Book, p. 241)

Speaking dichotomously, there's form, there's essence, but (speaking non-dichotomously) there's no difference between these two sides of oneness.  Essence = substrate/consciousness.  Form = configuration/informationa/material manifestation.  Form is essence objectified.  Essence is subjectivity of a given form.  When essence sees itself in the mirror of reality (which is itself!) it sees a distortion: the Original Face of Consciousness meets the Rascal Grin of Form.

Of course, none of this is ultimately expressable: as I try to untangle what feels like an intuitive understanding of this dialectic, word-forms grin at the very meaning-essence I am trying to lay out.  No biggie: mind is a leg, it itches for a stroll, so I took it out for a spin around the block (which remains uncarved).

Not Fishing for Meaning

Reading C. Jung’s newly released Red Book, I stumble upon the following pithy notion:

We create the meaning of events.  The meaning is and always was artificial.  We make it.  Events have no meaning.  The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create.  (C. Jung, Red Book, p. 239)

“Meaninglessness of meaning,”  “insignificance of significance,”  “totem of tautology,”  “epistemological event horizon,” “mind chasing its own tail” – these are but a few phrases I’ve used in an attempt to say the same.  I’ve been beating around this bush of not-knowing for years in my writing.  Alas, meaning isn’t found, it’s made.  That much seems clear.  After all, mean-ing is a gerund for a reason: mind is a leg and mean-ing is just the sound of one mind walking…

This has been one of my treasured insights.  It was nice to find such verbally precise echo of this archetypal idea in, guess where, Jung, of course.

Logotherapy, classically, is a form of therapy designed to “heal by meaning,” by helping a mind-in-need to leverage meaning.  Victor Frankl, the Doctor of the Soul, was a kind of Western bodhisattva, busy saving minds from chaos with the help of Logos/Word/Meaning-Making.  

Meaning-making (or helping clients find meaning) is not the only logotherapy as I see it.  Part of my own logotherapy style involves an element of epistemological sobriety.  Epistemologically Sober Logotherapy (ESL) is not an official school of logotherapy, it’s just an in-house phrase I use to make sense of what I am clinically doing when I am trying to help a mind not mind itself. 

How does this work? 

You’ve heard this before: you can help a man (mind) catch a fish or you can help a man (mind) to learn how to fish.  Frankl was helping minds catch the fish of meaning, helping people find meaning in meaninglessness.  But I think what’s also useful is to help a mind understand how meaning is made so as to not keep getting trapped in its meaning-nets. 

Epistemologically-Sober Logotherapy teaches a mind how to escape word-nets of meaning, how to meta-cognitively slip through the booby-traps of meaning constructions.  Epistemologically-Sober Logotherapy (ESL) approximates Buddhist Psychology of not-knowing and Syadvada epistemology tentativeness, i.e. of never minding the mind itself.  The idea is to help a mind realize that meaning is just what mind does and that we aren’t what we do, that we aren’t the meaning-nets we weave.  

The idea is to teach a mind how to stop fishing for (clinging to) meaning. 

Reference:

Somov, P.G. (2007). Meaning of Life Group: Group Application of Logotherapy for Substance Use Treatment.
Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 32 (4), 316 – 345.

C.  Jung, Red Book