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Kathryn Wood Madden's Dark Light of the Soul begins with the premise that ‘a unitary reality underlies all psychological experience’ which is the ‘culmination of an encounter with the deepest layer of the collective unconscious, the psychoid, archetypal layer, in which we meet all forms of otherness’ (p. 1). Out of this encounter, a ‘star is born—a unitary reality that enables’ one to see through ‘to a pre-differentiated, universal ground’ (p. 18). For Jung this is the Self and for the 17th century mystic writer, Jacob Boehme, it is Christ (p. 1).
Madden's opening statement places her argument within a veritable tradition concerning the problem of the ‘one and the many’, debated since earliest Greek thought. It is also related to the problem of relations between universals and the particular, and between monism and pluralism. In monism the totality of things is seen ultimately to be reducible to a single entity, whether substantial, logical, physical, spiritual, psychological or moral.
Madden makes a comparative reading of Boehme and Jung's monistic views, both focusing on a ‘unitary reality, a ground of being that contains all opposites in potentiality’. explored the one-many problem metaphysically, both as a process of divine emanation and personal urges towards reintegration into the ground of being, a unitary reality behind all diversity. Jung applied it psychologically. Psychologically, the one-many problem poses the question of whether the Self is one unitary, eternal, unchanging and consistent being or is multiple, impermanent, forever in flux and changing. If change and multiplicity are acknowledged, is there still a