A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”
It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:
Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.
But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.
The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.
Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.
If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.
One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.
Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.
Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.