I'm definitely on Andrew's side of the question in the recent posts.
Mark, since you cite Schuon somewhere, I seem to remember Schuon making a sharp distinction between true spirituality & what he called "psychologism." In any mystical tradition the "unmanifested" (e.g. Eckhardt's "Godhead") is at a higher ontological level than the "manifested" or phenomenal, & the goal of mystical practice is to realize that higher level, which is nothing if not unimaginable, surely. To say that "the unimaginable" is itself an image is to play with words while disastrously missing the point (i.e., the difference in levels of being).
Jung's assertion, that the psyche "will never get beyond itself," has problems. Insofar as it means simply that the experiencer can never experience anything it is not equipped to experience, it is a meaningless tautology. Insofar as it means that the contents of the psyche's experience derive exclusively from the psyche itself, it is a nightmarish solipsism. It's like saying a finger, touching a rock, never gets beyond the finger. Is not the act of touching a way of seeing what's outside?
"nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image" is subject to the reductio ad absurdum of infinite regress. "psychic image" is a subjective impression treated as a object: one does not simply experience the image, one has the image & then "knows" it. Why the extra step? & if it is admitted, it generates the infinite regress: I know that I know that I know that I know... for each potential object of knowledge, a "psychic image" needs to be substituted.
"Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image." Here again the gratuitous extra step: not "the void" but "experience of the void." The void itself has, by definition, no images. To say that experience of the void is an image is.... a curious proposition, when you think about it. How does one imagine the experience of nothing?
Psychologism really is bad business, Mark, largely because it's so good up to a point. It works out well until it doesn't. And then...
Mind you, all this is poetry-fodder....
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