When I was young my Christian friends would tell me that life was a constant struggle between good and evil and that our choices somehow affected the angels and demons who were even now contending on another plane. I couldn’t understand it.
“Didn’t they sort that out a long time ago and that’s why the demons are in hell and the angels are in heaven?”
“Yes.”
“But then you say they’re also fighting at all times, even like 3 AM when most of us are sleeping?”
“Yes, even then, because there are people who are awake and doing harm to themselves and others, and others who are doing good.”
“But didn’t they settle it a long time ago when they cast Satan into hell? And isn’t he busy torturing bad guys? And what happens to all those damned souls after the final battle? Isn’t eternal damnation eternal? So once the war’s over does Satan go back to torturing his souls even though he lost?
“Well…”
“And isn’t it all preordained anyhow? It says right in the Bible that the devil will lose and Jesus will come back and judge right from wrong and then it will be a thousand years of peace or something right?”
“Yes, but your own fate has yet to be decided. Good wins, but you get to decide whether to be good or bad.”
“Okay, but then where is everybody? If there’s a massive war going on at all times and Christians believe this, then why do we prescribe psych meds for the people who claim to see any of it?”
And on and on it went. Sometimes I’d give up and go atheist, or leave the door open and claim to be agnostic. And then a terrible feeling would come over me as I lay in bed. Some evil presence I was convinced came from outside my mind that I could sense but could not see, smell or hear, loomed nearby. And I’d pray to Christ to drive it away. After I’d wonder, as I do now, whether any of it was “real” or if it was all in my head.
Then I read Jung, and I believe the answer is that we don’t know. The material aspects of experience can’t fully account for the subjective. The brain chemistry, the measurable facts, the scientifically explainable parts of reality, cannot totally account for the subjective and metaphysical.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter.
Psychology and spirituality are inextricably linked. You can say that our myths and religious stories are a means of explaining what we don’t understand, but it’s even deeper than that. Sometimes they are the only way to get someone who holds competing beliefs in their heads to act. The stories don’t have to reach us logically, they just need to reach us intuitively.
On the one hand, we don’t believe there are literal angels and devils sitting on our shoulders tempting us to do right and wrong. On the other hand, we also understand on some level that there are things we enjoy that we need to stop or risk ruin and misery in our future. If we actually saw these small vices as the lures of cthonic leviathans keen on devouring our souls and identities, we might actually think twice. But we’re too jaded to believe the children’s stories. And yet, the hangovers are real. The fear is real. The doubt and anxiety are there. We know people who have been “consumed” by excess ambition, greed, lust, hatred, or resentment. We say they “lost to their demons”. And so the stories continue to work their magic whether we claim to believe them or not.
This is the case with Journey to the West, one of China’s greatest novels. It stars a talking monkey, pig, and ex-cannibal sand monster, all trying to escort a pure monk past demonic forces, animal spirits, and evil sorcerers, to obtain holy scriptures from the Buddha in India. The novel can be viewed as a kids’ story, like The Jungle Book or Aesop’s Fables, but it is also a religious text that people once used to inform their rituals and theater, like The Bhagavad Gita or The Torah. It can also be viewed as an allegory, like The Wizard of Oz. Finally, it can be viewed psychologically, with the four main characters each representing different aspects of our personality, and the various gods and demons encountered representing archetypes that resonate with all of us.
All interpretations are correct even when they might contradict each other because subjective experience allows for this. Logically, this isn’t possible, but we’re not dealing with real-life logic, we’re talking about myth or dream logic. Where a monkey can somersault from the Himalayas to Beijing in a single flip because your own mind can leap from equally distant thoughts. If you try to break it down the way sci-fi fans dissect time travel or medieval scholars sought the Garden of Eden, you’ll never get what’s going on. But if you suspend your own disbelief and absorb the story, you might very well come to a new level of understanding that puts you one step closer to enlightenment.
The entire book deals with spiritual matters, not because it contains spiritual phenomena, but because it recognizes that nearly all matters are, on some level, spiritual. Sometimes, the text shows us that this is so by presenting two chapters back to back that parallels each other. In Chapter 54, the monk receives a proposal from a beautiful queen and, too afraid to reject her, leads her on until the moment when he can escape, abandoning the royal bride at the altar. In the next chapter, the monk is kidnapped and nearly raped by a sex-crazed demoness before being saved by the crow of a rooster. You don’t need a degree in psychoanalysis to see how the latter chapter might be karmic punishment, a guilty nightmare played out in the mythopoetic realm.
And so it goes, chapter after chapter of hardship and suffering for our poor monk, who drives himself forward in spite of it all, growing and changing as best he can with each experience. The accumulated merit of his actions leading to an alchemical transformation that is meant to be there for the reader as well, if they’re able to let the symbols work their magic on his or her psyche.
Of course, books alone rarely change us completely, no matter how holy the scriptures may be. Even the monks must come down from the mountain and deal with the corruption and vulgarity of human life. Instead, we have to test ourselves against the vicissitudes of life. And so it is that we face the same problems on a smaller scale every day. Do you tell the shop clerk they forgot to charge you for a grocery item? Remain courteous in the face of a rude driver? Stand up to a bully even if you don’t know the person they’re bullying? Do your best work even if nobody’s watching? These are the choice we’re faced with every day. They exist whether divine bureaucrats are keeping tally of them or not. And you know, deep down in your gut, that these are the choices that decide one’s soul.