The duality of men, sir. The Megiddo.

I recognize that I am not being inductive with this one. But sometimes...SOMETIMES... I just get the itch to get my deduction on.

I told a friend that I was going to relate Jung's archetypes to the B-G and then he made a pun like, "That's so mature for something so Jung." I wanted to punch him in the mouth, but I didn't because he was my friend.

In the film, Full Metal Jacket, there's a scene where a Colonel grills a private about some headgear and its respective adornments. The officer is remarking on the soldier's helmet where the young man has scrawled, "Born to kill" and then placed a button in the shape of a peace sign on it. The Colonel says,"You'd better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you. " And then he asks the private about it. The private responds, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir." to which the Colonel says: "The What?"
Clarifying, the private says, "The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir."
After a brief pause, the Colonel says, "Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over."

The Colonel has both demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the peace sign while also giving an illustration of the Private's point: The duality of man, sir. In Kubrick's illustration of war, there is no doubt as to whether man is segmented, and in this undergraduate's opinion, the director is showing us that this segmentation is dramatically unveiled in a theater of war. I think the film is Jungian. Later, the young men are pinned down by a sniper which forces them to recognize their inner fear of brutal death (a marine's version of the 'shadow', or the repressed darkness). Taking up cover, they are slowly picked off until, in a fit of 'passion' the character "Animal Mother" charges forward with his squad, overwhelming the position and revealing the assailant. As it turns out, the sniper is a woman. This is a facing of the anima that the men did not expect and leads to an epiphany about the 'duality of men, sir'. Conflict is the ember which burns away distraction and leaves only the skeleton and structure of the world, giving those unfortunate-fortunate few a view of the reality action-- Of the Megiddo.

The Bhagavad Gita also takes place during war. Krishna unravels the fear and doubt which assails Arjuna such that Arjuna can recognize his own internal shadow. In his treaste on the nature and composition of the world, The Krishna names three things as the essential natures that must be overcome in order to achieve the divine. The three are Passion, Lucidity, and Dark Inertia. The Passion drives men. Lucidity informs of good. Dark Inertia assails the world in greed and bitterness. All three make up the material path to diffidence.

These three are the natures of nature but also of man. Within each person is the ability to perceive these structures. As perception focuses on one of them, the others are overwhelmed. They must be emptied from the soul for a person to achieve their truest form. Likewise, in analytic psychology, there are two architypes which construct the subconscious: the Anima/Animus and the Shadow. Although not perfectly parallel (with the exception of the Shadow and the Dark Inertia which seem more alike than the others, and in the case of the masculine, the unwieldy effects of the B-G's Passion and desire reflect the mainstream masculine Anima). The Shadow is the set of things which are repressed. In the above marines, the shadow consisted of fear which had been pounded out of them in the first half of the film. The Anima/Animus is the contrary gender identity that all people have. The Feminine have Masculine traits and visa-versa. To Carl Jung, these forces had to be in check at all times for ones self to be properly connected with the conscious, unconscious, and persona.

This connection of unconscious and persona and conscious is the lynch pin for my relating of these two ideas for their balance is necessary for the rational identity. The B-G is a stressing of discipline and sacrifice, of both mind and soul. If is through the balance of these forces that one achieves these goals. I say balancing because such conflicting ideas if held in balance would negate each other, like algebra.

I think, nowadays, the divine is very much an inner world. On a flesh-world level, in the modern age, we turn to our psychologists for these lessons. If there is a correlation between these two worlds: one of science and one of literature, the line between the two must be much less sparse than usually supposed?


I think the inner recognition of these forces, whether they are the Jungian ones or the Krishna ones, is a battle unto itself. We mentioned in class that the B-G's battle is a metaphor for the inner conflict of men. I think Jung just renamed these forces, giving veracity to these ideas to the skeptical or secular. The thing that gets me is the part where we have found these forces over and over among many fields. Proof is best when it is corroborated by many sources coming from differing and sometimes contradictory interests.

However, the part that makes me stop and let some awe in is the part where the conflict really is important. The end victor is irrelevant. The struggle, at least to me, is the part that matters most. The duality of man, sir is just that and can't really be reconciled so much as recognized.