"We just skip his ideals—and philosophies—?"
"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never—except intuitively, till recently—has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses—or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct—and doesn't realize it—one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself—a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results—and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition—as the semanticists claim—or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."
"I'm confused again."
"Put anybody through psychoanalysis—all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis—and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct as a pattern."
Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."
I wanted—I always want—to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct—and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both—looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes—I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.
And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."
I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that—save for individuals—present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony—an operation of the very law I learned—the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.
If you wished for the future—and were given it—you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.