Jung, the Rosary, and the Pursuit of Perfection

A one-minute thought

Since I decided God was either not real or a dick when I was 13 years old, it feels weird getting interested in religion now.

Early this spring, after a monthlong recrudescence of the typhus (yes, the delirium disease that most recently made a name for itself in WWII concentration camps, but it was also making those it didn’t kill trip their balls off way before that) that I caught in California a few years back due to being very bad at choosing roommates (long story), I realized what religion does for us:

It generates faith.

Which, among other things, is the only way to get practical lessons in statistics, at least if you’re high in trait neuroticism.

I’m not exactly a religious person; I don’t know what will happen. But I've gotten kind of good at guessing from small details what someone's religious background was, whether they believed in it as adults or not.

When CG Jung claimed that there was no meditation in Christendom prior to his work, I guessed he must have been raised Protestant, f'instance.

Because anyone who's been forced to do the Catholic Rosary and then tries meditation can feel it's the same basic technology. Especially when some yoga chick pulls out her beads to meditate and you're like, o noes, there are goddamn beads.

It put me off meditation for a long time. I did yoga to calm down and when you were supposed to meditate, I would take a nap. Till I remembered that as much as I hated starting to do the Rosary, I would finish calmer. And people stare if you do yoga in public. Meditation is a lightweight tech. If you figure out what the Rosary is, you can ditch the beads.

I have no idea whether people in majority Buddhist areas generally force their children to meditate, but it probably makes little difference. Jung didn't invent a "western" meditation, he invented a "modern" meditation.

Sure enough, I look it up: no rosary in his family, all Protestant.

Total genius, but mischaracterised his own great work because he didn’t know what the kids across the street were up to. Even total geniuses are sometimes missing a bit of information that is under their nose. Didn't stop him from inventing a modern meditation!

I guess it is kind of a lesson about perfectionism.

Yeah, that one little detail might bug up the whole program—except you aren’t exactly a computer. If anything, you’re several.

In my early professional life I developed an especially neurotic fear of typos. I still hate typos, but I must face facts: my vision has never been great, and I get the feeling it’s about to get much, much worse. Maybe I can’t see the kids across the street in twenty years. But unless something terrible happens to my mind, I will still want to think and record new thoughts.

You can’t see everything. You can’t know everything. You don’t want to be woo—which is, I think, shorthand for letting your spirituality be run by your wishful thinking—but at a certain point you have to let the mega-computer in your intuition have a few minutes away from the Texas Instruments graphing calculator of the ego.

If Jung had sat there sweating over the implications of all his conceivable missing details, many people would have never found their souls again.