I'm very pleased you found my response cordial, ruach1 (I'm not always, I regret to admit). This is such a difficult point to discuss, because you are (I mean, seem to be) appealing to a search and a corresponding realm of knowledge that is private. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a reasonable and defensible philosophy that most, if not all, religions and mystical philosophies include somewhere in their canon. The Ultimate Reality, Truth, or even just a discrete aspect of reality such as the human 'soul' might be knowable only individually by such an internal quest, meditation or whatever.
The difficulty is that here we are (a group of people reading a thread on a forum, or a whole species) trying to increase our understanding and knowledge though discussion, argument, comparison, persuasion and reasoning, and if some important aspect of reality is not amenable to such forms of collaborative education, but only privately contemplated, discussion becomes either pretty useless or just a helpful introduction and pointer towards the real, internal search (as you have pointed me to some work by Jung, and those words he wrote would be pointers, but eventually I would have to look into myself and 'do the work').
All of that was my own philosophy for many many years, but recently I have begun to doubt it. For one thing, it strikes me as rather odd that an aspect of reality (such as the soul) - even if it can only be known intuitively and non-verbally - could not be pointed to in more rigorous linguistic terms and related to the enormous edifice of scientific knowledge that we already have. If that sounds confusing, I mean that those who have seen this internal truth should still, I think, be able to say fairly clearly how it behaves in relation to outside matters, what causes it, or if it causes all else as some say, and how so.
Now, of course, that is what a great many religions do say, but each tells it completely differently from the next. This is an important indicator, in my new sceptical mindset, that what has been 'seen' internally is likely to have been imagined, i.e. scientifically approachable (non-internal) bio-physical phenomena that are translated through cultural filters into myths of spirit, soul, magic and other non-physical dimensional inventions. It is possible that each religion expresses a great unifying truth beyond their different linguistic interpretations (which is what I hoped), but we must at least consider the sadder alternative. ...and in passing, it's also worth noting that the fact that it is a sadder alternative (who wouldn't want to have secret depths of intuitive understanding at the end of a 'spiritual' quest, if not indeed a benificent ruler of the universe?) also stands in the place of motive for self-deception and (usually innocent) cultural indoctrination. Soul myths and God myths keep things sweet for us and between us. [EDIT: I mean, that is their biological function within a like-minded community - of course, between disputing factions they seem to have the opposite effect.]
So, as a concrete example, if Jung is right in proposing such things as archetypes, that is fine, but it seems that there is such an enormous amount of evidence for the evolution of human beings through all the vaguaries of chance mutations and natural selection that, as a scientist, I require archetypes to have some relationship with this physical reality. We can describe them as 'memes' (ideas), such as "Sage", and propose that we all have them because they are somehow inherited in the patterns of brain development. We can consider 'soul' in the same way - a word for an idea that has certain meanings, repeated though our evolution with such importance for survival that it becomes 'hard-wired' as it were into our brains. The idea that I am a (soul-like) person inhabiting a body, rather than a body having the idea, might be another such bio-archetypal meme. What I'm not prepared to accept is (as I understand Jung to have proposed) that these archetypes come higher in the scheme of things than human thinking about them, that they are primary patterns of reality of a 'spiritual' nature that human lives reflect. The truth of a soul or a sage or a god is, to me, memetic, an effect of human brain function.
A further problem I have personally with the Truth-is-Internal argument is that I am tired of looking within (on the advice of people who, like you, suggest they have seen something 'real' and important there) and finding no reliable way to distinguish my own imagination (illusions either deliberately induced or spontaneously arising) and 'intuitions' or 'insights'. This, really, is the single problem on which all the rest of my ignorance teeters precariously, that I do not know how to know truth...except...
There is a mode of experiencing that I would dare to say comes close to being direct apprehension, without interpretation because thought has stopped (through practising meditation). Then I am in touch with reality in a very primitive way: light and heat and pressure impact my body and I respond without thinking at all about anything. The problem is that it doesn't actually yield 'knowledge', but is merely a temporary regression to the animal state. It's wonderful, delightful, freeing for a while, but it has nothing to say about where we came from or the nature of the world, nor does it solve personal or global problems. Actually, I take that back, it has something to say about where we came from and the nature of the world, because it gives the meditator a taste of brain activity approximating that of a pre-human. If anything it ought to teach us how secondary are our 'archetypes' and other linguistic constructs. I believe that people have traditionally added mystical interpretations when they 'wake up' from samadhi rather than scientific ones. They are demonstrably filtered through their previous cultural expectations. Often the people who attain such mental states live in monasteries, and they spend as much time learning dogma by rote and working towards 'discovering it for themselves' as they do meditating.
