Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. The conversation with Mark Vernon appeared in the 14th issue of the paper (November 2021). Here are seven highlights from this interview.
1. The fact that a very significant proportion (more than 70 percent) of the standard experiments in psychology cannot be replicated is very significant. The standard response is to do more experiments, but I think that will just prolong the replication crisis because we've got to ask what's actually being tested here?
2. The idea of collective unconscious leaves Jung open to more spiritual and religious interpretations. For if the whole environment into which you are born is affecting you from the inside that creates the possibility that gods, for example, aren't just projections. Freud would say that gods are just projections from my personal unconscious onto the world around. Whereas Jung would argue that they have an autonomy, they exist in their own right and we relate to them.
3. Plato affected me and I realised that ancient philosophy is much more like modern psychotherapy than modern philosophy. For in the ancient and in the medieval world, it was assumed that you can really only know things if you are able to resonate with them. That means developing yourself as a person.
4. The first thing that comes to mind with Dostoevsky is the famous encounter between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor from „The Brothers Karamazov“, where Christ kisses the Inquisitor. This is a moment of huge significance, largely because I think it's a very powerful comment on the modern church. The modern church is in my opinion in many respects Antichrist. By which I don't mean that it's demonic or anything, but that its call for social justice has lost the transformative heart of the gospel.
5. When Jesus says that he has not come to give peace on earth but division, I think he is saying that if you really want to follow me, you should expect things to feel like they're falling apart, at least in periods. And you know, this is this is a common perception in all mystical traditions. The Sufis talk about bewilderment, Christians about the dark night of the soul, Buddhists about the terrors of meditation. This seems to me to be a universal truth.
6. The idea that we will achieve our happiness by having more is the biggest myth of our times. This drives economic growth, the development of technology, acquisitive consumption and so on. It's very hard for a single person not to organize your life around acquiring more and more stuff, even if you feel that that's not going to deliver you happiness. It's very difficult to carve out any other way of life in the modern West. As William Blake put it: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All cannot satisfy Man.”
7. I think the goal is to know yourself enough so you can start to see more than just yourself. Then you realise that what you took to be yourself is just the tip of the iceberg, of our being. And then you start to settle into that greater being. So the stuff that happens, the suffering that happens, may well continue, but it lessens because you realise it's not the whole story at all. The spiritual traditions would tell us that suffering actually comes to an end with that. It's not to say that difficult things don't happen, but we don't react to them in the same way. And so the suffering associated with them lessens and eventually goes away.