The Christian Church has hitherto. . . [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man.
But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. . . .
It is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him.
That is to say even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.
Showing posts with label carl jung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carl jung. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Carl Jung on Guilt
[Carl Jung on "Guilt" - Anthology]
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416
Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.
Most people need someone to confess to, otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. They do not "hear" themselves, cannot contrast themselves with something different, and so they have no outside "control." Everything flows inwards and is answered only by oneself, not by another. It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416
The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152
The act of becoming conscious happens to man in darkness. If he can grasp and handle consciousness then the fire brought from Heaven becomes a sacrificial flame, not the wrath of the gods. The acquisition of consciousness by force creates a sense of guilt. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.
Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152
The Bible says, "Whosoever shall say "Racha" to his brother is guilty of hellfire." If we substitute "shadow" for "brother" and implicate the dark brother within, we open out this biblical word into new perspectives. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.
Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440
The guilty man is eminently suitable and therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 460.
The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 530
In each of us there is a pitiless judge who makes us feel guilty even if we are not conscious of having done anything wrong. Although we do not know what it is, it is as though it were known somewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 164
The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1094.
But this does not prevent us from being continually licked round by the flames of hell. All of us have to atone, inwardly and outwardly, for this guilt of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 341-342.
To begin with I did not have the feeling at all that I was guilty of plagiarism with my [anima/animus] theory, but in the last 5 years it has become more and more uncanny as I have discovered quite suspicious traces of it also in the old alchemists, and now the mischief seems complete since it turns out that I was discovered already in the 18th century. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 248.
Guilt is also by no means the only cause of complexes, but with people who are especially sensitive on this point it is a very common complex ingredient, they have a moral complex, and it is as if they were ridden by the devil. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 132.
It is indeed no small matter to know one's own guilt and one's own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one's shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favorable position - we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves. ~Carl Jung, CW X, Para 440.
If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings towards your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
Even now I am receiving many applications from Germans who want to be treated by me. If they come from those "decent Germans" who want to foist the guilt onto a couple of men in the Gestapo, I regard the case as hopeless. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155
If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings toward your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature—how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 523
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416
Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.
Most people need someone to confess to, otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. They do not "hear" themselves, cannot contrast themselves with something different, and so they have no outside "control." Everything flows inwards and is answered only by oneself, not by another. It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416
The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152
The act of becoming conscious happens to man in darkness. If he can grasp and handle consciousness then the fire brought from Heaven becomes a sacrificial flame, not the wrath of the gods. The acquisition of consciousness by force creates a sense of guilt. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.
Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152
The Bible says, "Whosoever shall say "Racha" to his brother is guilty of hellfire." If we substitute "shadow" for "brother" and implicate the dark brother within, we open out this biblical word into new perspectives. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.
Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440
The guilty man is eminently suitable and therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 460.
The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 530
In each of us there is a pitiless judge who makes us feel guilty even if we are not conscious of having done anything wrong. Although we do not know what it is, it is as though it were known somewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 164
The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1094.
But this does not prevent us from being continually licked round by the flames of hell. All of us have to atone, inwardly and outwardly, for this guilt of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 341-342.
To begin with I did not have the feeling at all that I was guilty of plagiarism with my [anima/animus] theory, but in the last 5 years it has become more and more uncanny as I have discovered quite suspicious traces of it also in the old alchemists, and now the mischief seems complete since it turns out that I was discovered already in the 18th century. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 248.
Guilt is also by no means the only cause of complexes, but with people who are especially sensitive on this point it is a very common complex ingredient, they have a moral complex, and it is as if they were ridden by the devil. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 132.
It is indeed no small matter to know one's own guilt and one's own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one's shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favorable position - we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves. ~Carl Jung, CW X, Para 440.
If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings towards your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
Even now I am receiving many applications from Germans who want to be treated by me. If they come from those "decent Germans" who want to foist the guilt onto a couple of men in the Gestapo, I regard the case as hopeless. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155
If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings toward your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature—how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 523
Sunday, October 8, 2017
Carl Jung on Shamanism, The Mass, Osirification and Mystery Religions
via jung depth psychology
The numinous experience of the individuation process is, on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally, at the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion.
The shaman’s experience of sickness, torture, death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man in a word, of apotheosis.
The Mass is the summation and quintessence of a development which began many thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experience of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a larger group.
The underlying psychic process remained, of course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of suitable “mysteries” and “sacraments” these being reinforced by religious teachings, exercises, meditations, and acts of sacrifice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate connection with the mythic happenings.
Thus, in ancient Egypt,we see how the experience of “Osirification,” originally the prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single individual as well.
Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks, originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves initiated into foreign mysteries.
Christianity, after some hesitation, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of the mystery.
So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail to become conscious of his own transformation and of the necessary psychological conditions for this, such as confession and
repentance of sin.
The ground was prepared for the realization that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a question of magical influence as of psychological processes a
realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way by putting their opus operatum at least on a level with the ecclesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic significance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be liberated from imprisonment in matter.
As I think I have shown, the “philosophical” side of alchemy is nothing less than a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and these to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn were pretty far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century.
63 Only our intellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere “psychologizing,” i.e., annihilation, of the mystery.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen “Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life
or of matter.
At no point has he explained the mystery itself, thereby causing it to fade.
He has merely, in accordance with the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and experienceable fact.
To treat a metaphysical statement as a psychic process is not to say that it is “merely psychic,” as my critics assert in the fond belief that the word “psychic” postulates
something known.
It does not seem to have occurred to people that when we say “psyche” we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.
The ethics of the researcher require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of all wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 294-296, Para 448.
The numinous experience of the individuation process is, on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally, at the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion.
The shaman’s experience of sickness, torture, death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man in a word, of apotheosis.
The Mass is the summation and quintessence of a development which began many thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experience of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a larger group.
The underlying psychic process remained, of course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of suitable “mysteries” and “sacraments” these being reinforced by religious teachings, exercises, meditations, and acts of sacrifice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate connection with the mythic happenings.
Thus, in ancient Egypt,we see how the experience of “Osirification,” originally the prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single individual as well.
Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks, originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves initiated into foreign mysteries.
Christianity, after some hesitation, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of the mystery.
So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail to become conscious of his own transformation and of the necessary psychological conditions for this, such as confession and
repentance of sin.
The ground was prepared for the realization that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a question of magical influence as of psychological processes a
realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way by putting their opus operatum at least on a level with the ecclesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic significance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be liberated from imprisonment in matter.
As I think I have shown, the “philosophical” side of alchemy is nothing less than a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and these to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn were pretty far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century.
63 Only our intellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere “psychologizing,” i.e., annihilation, of the mystery.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen “Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life
or of matter.
At no point has he explained the mystery itself, thereby causing it to fade.
He has merely, in accordance with the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and experienceable fact.
To treat a metaphysical statement as a psychic process is not to say that it is “merely psychic,” as my critics assert in the fond belief that the word “psychic” postulates
something known.
It does not seem to have occurred to people that when we say “psyche” we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.
The ethics of the researcher require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of all wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 294-296, Para 448.
Friday, October 6, 2017
Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future
via Openculture
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four ‘court’ cards: King, Queen, Jack, and Knight.” The latter figure has “mysteriously disappeared from today’s playing cards,” though examples of Knight playing cards exist in the fossil record. The modern Jack is a survival of the Page cards in the Tarot. (See examples of Tarot court cards here from the 1910 Rider-Waite deck.) The similarities between the two types of decks are significant, yet no one but adepts seems to consider using their Gin Rummy cards to tell the future.
The eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung, however, might have done so.
As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are "really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism.
They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”
Thus far, Jung hasn't said anything many orthodox Jungian psychologists would find disagreeable, but he goes even further and claims that, indeed, “we can predict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” He called for “an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” He compared this process to the Chinese I Ching, and other such practices. As analyst Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in her book Psyche and Matter:
What he aimed at through the use of divination was to accelerate the process of “individuation,” the move toward wholeness and integrity, by means of playful combinations of archetypes. As another mystical psychologist, Alejandro Jodorowsky, puts it, "the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul." Jung perceived the Tarot, notes the blog Faena Aleph, “as an alchemical game,” which in his words, attempts “the union of opposites.” Like the I Ching, it “presents a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.”
Much later in 1960, a year before his death, Jung seemed less sanguine about Tarot and the occult, or at least downplayed their mystical, divinatory power for language more suited to the laboratory, right down to the usual complaints about staffing and funding. As he wrote in a letter about his attempts to use these methods:
As in Jung’s many other creative reappropriations of mythical, alchemical, and religious symbolism, his interpretation of the Tarot inspired those with mystical leanings to undertake their own Jungian investigations into parapsychology and the occult. Inspired by Jung’s verbal descriptions of the Tarot’s major arcana, artist and mystic Robert Wang has created a Jungian Tarot deck, and an accompanying trilogy of books, The Jungian Tarot and its Archetypal Imagery, Tarot Psychology, and Perfect Tarot Divination.
You can see images of each of Wang’s cards here. His books purport to be exhaustive studies of Jung’s Tarot theory and practice, written in consultation with Jung scholars in New York and Zurich. Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey is less voluminous and innovative—using the traditional, Pamela Coleman-Smith-illustrated, Rider-Waite deck rather than an updated original version. But for those willing to grant a relationship between systems of symbols and a collective unconscious, her book may provide some penetrating insights, if not a recipe for predicting the future.
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four ‘court’ cards: King, Queen, Jack, and Knight.” The latter figure has “mysteriously disappeared from today’s playing cards,” though examples of Knight playing cards exist in the fossil record. The modern Jack is a survival of the Page cards in the Tarot. (See examples of Tarot court cards here from the 1910 Rider-Waite deck.) The similarities between the two types of decks are significant, yet no one but adepts seems to consider using their Gin Rummy cards to tell the future.
The eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung, however, might have done so.
As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are "really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism.
They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”
Thus far, Jung hasn't said anything many orthodox Jungian psychologists would find disagreeable, but he goes even further and claims that, indeed, “we can predict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” He called for “an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” He compared this process to the Chinese I Ching, and other such practices. As analyst Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in her book Psyche and Matter:
Jung suggested… having people engage in a divinatory procedure: throwing the I Ching, laying the Tarot cards, consulting the Mexican divination calendar, having a transit horoscope or a geometric reading done.Content seemed to matter much less than form. Invoking the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences, Jung notes in his lecture, “man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious.”
What he aimed at through the use of divination was to accelerate the process of “individuation,” the move toward wholeness and integrity, by means of playful combinations of archetypes. As another mystical psychologist, Alejandro Jodorowsky, puts it, "the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul." Jung perceived the Tarot, notes the blog Faena Aleph, “as an alchemical game,” which in his words, attempts “the union of opposites.” Like the I Ching, it “presents a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.”
Much later in 1960, a year before his death, Jung seemed less sanguine about Tarot and the occult, or at least downplayed their mystical, divinatory power for language more suited to the laboratory, right down to the usual complaints about staffing and funding. As he wrote in a letter about his attempts to use these methods:
Under certain conditions it is possible to experiment with archetypes, as my ‘astrological experiment’ has shown. As a matter of fact we had begun such experiments at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, using the historically known intuitive, i.e., synchronistic methods (astrology, geomancy, Tarot cards, and the I Ching). But we had too few co-workers and too little means, so we could not go on and had to stop.Later interpreters of Jung doubted that his experiments with divination as an analytical technique would pass peer review. “To do more than ‘preach to the converted,’” wrote the authors of a 1998 article published in the Journal of Parapsychology, “this experiment or any other must be done with sufficient rigor that the larger scientific community would be satisfied with all aspects of the data taking, analysis of the data, and so forth.” Or, one could simply use Jungian methods to read the Tarot, the scientific community be damned.
As in Jung’s many other creative reappropriations of mythical, alchemical, and religious symbolism, his interpretation of the Tarot inspired those with mystical leanings to undertake their own Jungian investigations into parapsychology and the occult. Inspired by Jung’s verbal descriptions of the Tarot’s major arcana, artist and mystic Robert Wang has created a Jungian Tarot deck, and an accompanying trilogy of books, The Jungian Tarot and its Archetypal Imagery, Tarot Psychology, and Perfect Tarot Divination.
You can see images of each of Wang’s cards here. His books purport to be exhaustive studies of Jung’s Tarot theory and practice, written in consultation with Jung scholars in New York and Zurich. Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey is less voluminous and innovative—using the traditional, Pamela Coleman-Smith-illustrated, Rider-Waite deck rather than an updated original version. But for those willing to grant a relationship between systems of symbols and a collective unconscious, her book may provide some penetrating insights, if not a recipe for predicting the future.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Alan Watts: Carl Jung and Variations of the Self
"The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha." - Carl Jung
Thumbnail: Via Carl Jung's "The Red Book"
Friday, October 7, 2016
Catching the Bug of Synchronicity
via awakeninthedream
Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.
Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”
To illustrate what he meant by the word synchronicity, Jung brings up an experience he shared with a patient of his. This particular patient was very caught in her head, and the analysis was seemingly going nowhere. She was stuck, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. Jung realized there was nothing he could do. In Jung’s words, “I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort in which she had sealed herself.” She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone offered her a golden scarab – a valuable piece of jewelry. At the moment she was telling Jung the dream, there was a tapping on the office window. Jung opened up the window and a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color closely resembles that of a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle in his hand, handed it to her and said “Here is your scarab.”
The shock of recognition in the synchronistic moment, in which Jung’s patient realized her dream of the previous night was being both literally and symbolically enacted in her waking life, pierced through her resistance and cracked her defensive shell wide open. At the moment of synchronistic transmission, a fundamental shift in perception took place within her which inwardly transformed her and made her receptive in a new way. From that point on, Jung commented, “The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”
There was no conventional, linear causal link between the patient’s dream and the beetle tapping on the window the next day. But there was clearly an equivalence and meaningful connection between the two co-related events which was not based on linear causality In addition, the patient, as an active, egoic agent in space and time, didn’t cause or create the synchronicity, which was acausal and happened of its own accord. And yet, in some mysterious way, the beetle tapping on the window was intimately related to her.
To quote Jung, “Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” This quote by Jung has an interesting footnote which adds the following, “Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”
Synchronicities are cystallizations in linear time of a nonlinear, acausal, atemporal process, windows into the realm outside of time and space, a world in which we ourselves are active participants in and of “the one creative act.” Synchronicities are both timeless and temporal, which is to say they are possessed of a double nature with regard to time. Synchronicities can be deeply religious and mystical experiences, expanding our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.
Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – like with Jung’s patient, our night dreams can manifest in our waking life, but also in the sense that, just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape to through the seemingly outer world. In a night dream, the seemingly outer dreamscape is synchronistically reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer, as the dream is not separate from the inner world but is nothing other than the psyche within apparently externalized. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.
Being unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we can interpret synchronicities just like we would interpret a dream. Mythologically speaking, a scarab is an archetypal symbol which represents, as in ancient Egypt, death/rebirth and transformation. Gold symbolically represents the highest value. Being offered a golden scarab in both her night and waking dreams was a form of synchronistic notarization by the archetype, highlighting its arrival on the scene. The synchronicity was an expression of – as well as the doorway through which – Jung’s patient was personally enacting an archetypal process of the renewal of consciousness. The synchronicity bore the stamp of the excited archetype, revealing to her and making real in time that she was actually taking part in a timeless, mythic drama of death and rebirth. Catapulting her out of the limited frame of reference of the conceptual mind, the synchronistic moment helped her access a deeper part of herself, as well as re-connecting her to the universe at large in which she lived.
Synchronicities are both the vehicle through which and an expression of the fact that we are waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Being genuine wake up calls from the awakened part of ourselves, synchronicities are emanations of the part of ourselves that is waking up projected into time.
What I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” is the part of us that is the dreamer of both our night and waking dreams. Being “nonlocal,” which is to say not bound by the conventional laws of space and time, as well as being multi-dimensional, the deeper, dreaming Self can simultaneously express itself through inner experiences such as inspirations and dreams as well as by attracting events in the seemingly outer world so as to coagulate itself in embodied form.
The deeper, dreaming Self was simultaneously the dreamer of the golden scarab in the patient’s night dream, the inspiration for her to tell Jung the dream in their session, the source of the beetle which was tapping on the window at exactly the right moment, the impulse which animated Jung to open the window, catch the beetle, offer it to his patient and say what he said, as well as the patient’s inner, revelatory experience of transformation which was the result. Being multi-faceted and multi-channeled, the deeper, dreaming Self nonlocally arranged all these dimensions enfolded within the field into a singular psycho-physical experiential gestalt in which the oneness of spirit and matter became visible.
Interestingly, the synchronicity with Jung and his patient was an experience in which Jung himself played an active, participatory role. As the synchronistic moment was irrupting into time, he found himself dreamed up by his patient to pick up and play out a role in her dreaming process. At the moment of synchronicity, Jung went from passively sitting in the audience hearing about her process to being drafted into the act and stepping into a scene in the play of his patient’s mind. Not merely witnessing his patient’s synchronicity, he found himself spontaneously enacting it with her, playing his part and saying his lines perfectly, as if sent by central casting. In offering her the precious jewel of a golden scarab symbolizing death and rebirth, Jung spontaneously found himself being an open instrument for the synchronistic universe to manifest itself through him into materialized form and express itself in our world.
Jung and his patient were reciprocally collaborating in dreaming up their shared synchronistic event together. They became “quantum entangled,” interdependently and inseparably merged in the co-creation of each other’s synchronicity. The synchronicity was not monopolized by Jung’s patient, as it didn’t solely belong just to her. Participating in his patient’s synchronicity, Jung was at the same time just as much having a living experience in and of his own synchronicity. Even though the synchronicity was a reflection of his patient’s inner landscape, it was simultaneously a synchronistic reflection of a deeper process taking place within Jung, too. For Jung to be hearing a patient’s dream of a golden scarab and to have a golden scarab fly into his office was an externalized, synchronistic reflection of the archetypal process of death and rebirth which was happening inside of him. It is noteworthy that a synchronistic event can collectively reflect and be mutually shared by more than one person in both similar and singularly unique ways.
To experience a synchronistic event is to necessarily be changed at our core. No one could have convinced Jung’s patient that her synchronistic experience should be dismissed as a mere coincidence, as she had an inner knowing of its meaningfulness due to how it transformed her. She no longer lived in a dis-enchanted universe.
Synchronicities by their very nature demand our active participation, as they are not something we can just passively watch and remain unaffected by. Imbued with a deeper fragrance of meaning, a synchronistic event is a revelation which contains within it a potency to insinuate itself into our very being and alter us from within. Synchronicities can transform us on a cellular level, as they are crystallizations into and out of the space of consciousness itself that have form-ulated themselves into our dimension as an expression of the part of us that is already awakened. Synchronicities inherent revelatory nature is ultimately offering us the realization that we are playing an active, participatory and hence, co-creative role in the unfoldment of the universe.
Registering the revelation embedded in the synchronistic moment is to necessarily have an expansion of consciousness, as the lens through which we view, interpret and place meaning on the nature of our experience has broadened by and through the very synchronicity itself. Because it is rich in the nutrient of meaning, a synchronistic event affects and deepens our state of awareness and perception, which is another way of saying that synchronicities are expressions of consciousness itself. Just like symbols in a dream, synchronicities do not exist objectively, separate from our own mind.
Synchronistic moments feel like grace, as they induce in us the feeling that we are right where we are supposed to be. Being numinous, synchronicities have a strong feeling component and emotional charge, which is both an expression of while simultaneously flowing into, influencing and altering the surrounding field of consciousness. A manifestation of the field as a whole, synchronicities are a field phenomenon, and to receive their full blessing we need to relate to them as such. Synchronicities are a reflection of the deeper, underlying nonlocal field of consciousness waking up to itself through us. The gift of synchronicity cannot be realized from the point of view which imagines we exist as a separate person who is “other” than the field in which we are arising. Jung and his patient’s shared synchronistic event was a living experience of being connected to something greater than themselves. Synchronicities are acute outbreaks of the archetypal, collective mind-field crystallized into our personal sphere through the third-dimensional medium of time and space.
Synchronicities are glimpses of transcendental unity, what in Latin is called the “unus mundus,” the one world. The unus mundus is the unitary and unifying realm which underlies, pervades and contains all dimensions of our experience. The unus mundus, just like the deeper, dreaming Self, is a psycho-physical reality, a universe beyond time and outside of space in which psyche and matter are inseparably co-joined as interconnected parts of a deeper, unified field. The unus mundus is a world in which we have already woken up. It is a realm beyond duality, beyond the opposites, beyond even the concept of beyond. In the unus mundus, opposites like matter and psyche form the outer and inner aspects of the same transcendental reality. Revealing its designs through events in the outer world as well as the psychic landscape within, the unus mundus is actualizing itself in time as we divine our wholeness through the synchronistic clues encoded within the fabric of experience itself.
Paradoxically, synchronicities are a living, unmediated materialization of our unconscious, while simultaneously being a nonlocalized manifestation of the part of us that’s waking up into a more expanded consciousness. Like a genuine symbol, synchronicities are utterances of the soul, as they contain, are an expression of and unite the opposites. Synchronicities are soul-making in action.
ARCHETYPES
Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. If we are absorbed in and identified with the person-alistic perspective, we person-alize our experience, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from the space around us. We thus become entranced into a particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a true “self” fulfilling prophecy. To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation, however, we step out of a person-alistic and reductive viewpoint based on linear causality (i.e., the perspective of the illusory skin-encapsulated ego) into a more archetypal perspective in which we find ourselves playing roles in an eternal, mythic and divine drama of incarnation.
The synchronicity with Jung’s patient was revealing something not just about her inner, personal process, but was a revelation of a deep, archetypal process which exists within the collective unconscious itself. The synchronicity was simultaneously revealing a dynamic which is both personal and collective – it is at the moment of being truly deadlocked that a deeper archetypal dynamic within the psyche becomes activated and nonlocally expresses itself synchronistically in and through the canvas of the seemingly outer world, as well as within ourselves. To quote Jung, “The patient with the scarab found herself in an ‘impossible’ situation because the treatment had got stuck and there seemed to be no way out of the impasse…It is this kind of situation that constellates the archetype with the greatest regularity.” What is true individually is also true collectively – when we, as a species, find ourselves in an “impossible” situation with no exit plan, it is this very kind of dilemma which constellates the healing and revelatory archetypal realm to become synchronistically activated.
Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an “archetype” is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Jung calls archetypes “typical modes of apprehension.” An archetype is like the underlying grid-line or blue print which in-forms and structures how we perceive, interpret and respond to our experience.
The personal dimension literalizes our experiences, while the archetypal dimension symbolizes, mythologizes and dreams into our experiences with the utmost creative imagination. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
When an archetype gets activated within us, it nonlocally constellates itself outwardly in the surrounding field. Conversely, when an archetype is activated in the seemingly outer field, it simultaneously constellates and is a synchronistic reflection of the same activated archetype within ourselves. An activated archetype’s magnetic field-of-force orders and organizes the entire field to synchronistically re-arrange itself so as to embody the archetype “in form.” The archetype is thus pure inform-ation. Archetypes nonlocally exert their in-forming influence through the frictionless and super-fluid medium of the collective unconscious itself. The archetypal, synchronistic realm vaporizes illusory boundaries – revealing spirit – and builds bridges which mediate and connect the inner and the outer, the conscious and the unconscious, and dreaming and waking.
Synchronicities occur at times of deep archetypal excitation in the field, which is to say moments of crisis, transition, creative tension and dynamic intensity. The archetype that gets activated by the field precipitates itself into the field as a synchronistic expression of the very field which activated it. Periods of disturbance in our world are both a manifestation of and trigger for a corresponding archetype in the collective unconscious of humanity to draw to itself everything it needs to synchronistically render itself visible in form. Times of distress, both individually and collectively, catalyze a deeper, self-regulating and healing archetypal process to awaken within the human psyche which simultaneously expresses itself throughout the whole universe.
There is a profound and intimate synchronistic correlation between what is happening deep within the collective unconscious of humanity and what is playing out collectively on the world stage. Just like a dream, whatever we are unconscious of gets dreamed up and out-pictured in and as our waking dreamscape. What plays out in one person’s night dream is a reflection of their inner process; similarly what is getting dreamed up by all six and a half billion of us on the world stage is a reflection of a process going on deep inside of the collective unconscious of humanity.
When a formless archetype of the collective unconscious is at the point of becoming conscious and incarnating, it has an energetic charge that will seize people, get them in its grip and compel them to act itself out so as to give shape and form to itself. What we are unconscious of and don’t remember, we act out in the outside world.
Like the underlying, invisible axial system is the skeleton of an emerging crystal, the archetypes of the collective unconscious in-form, pattern and structure our unconscious itself. The inner archetypal dimension is revealing itself by influencing and animating our unconscious, causing us to act out and give shape to the archetypal realm in the world theater. This is happening both individually and collectively on the world stage.
Archetypes can possess individuals or whole nations. Archetypes bedazzle consciousness in such a way that it becomes blind to its own assumed standpoint. When an archetype takes over a person, group or nation, they can be said to be the incarnation or the revelation of the formless, transpersonal archetype in human form, as they synchronistically em-body and mirror back to us this archetypal dynamic which exists deep inside of all of us. When the archetypal realm incarnates, something of the eternal, imperishable dimension synchronistically reveals itself to us as it enters the realm of time and embodiment. Synchronicities are revelations in the nick of time. As our present moment in time indicates, whether we continue to destroy ourselves or wake ourselves up depends upon whether or not we recognize what is synchronistically being revealed to us.
What we don’t remember, we aren’t associated with. Our dis-memberment from our experience and dis-association from a part of ourselves polarizes and empowers our split-off part to project itself outside of ourselves and express itself by acting itself out in the outside world. We will either become possessed by our split-off part and unconsciously act it out in the world, or we will project it out so that we dream up the seemingly outer universe to act it out for us. This is another way of saying that our waking universe is a function of our consciousness, or lack thereof.
When an archetype synchronistically manifests itself in full-bodied form in the outside world, its full blown localized revelation in time is necessarily correlated to – and an unmediated manifestation of – a more fundamental, nonlocal condition which simultaneously exists both outside of time and inside the timeless part of ourselves. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the of being inwardly realized. The outer, synchronistic materialization of the inner, archetypal process is itself the vehicle through which the archetypal process both actualizes itself in space and time and is inwardly realized.
The spirit that animates synchronicities, if we can speak of such immaterial matters, is the same spirit which inspires our dreams at night. This spirit, the aforementioned “unus mundus” or “deeper, dreaming Self,” is dreaming our dreams at night, our life during the day, as well as ourselves. The unus mundus/deeper, dreaming Self arranges situations in our life, both micro and macrocosmically as a way of synchronizing itself, which propels us into greater alignment with the implicate field of open possibility, as we refine and re-find ourselves in each moment anew. To the extent we realize the dreamlike nature of reality, the universe becomes a continually unfolding oracle as we become a revelation to ourselves.
In a synchronicity, the conjunction of two cosmic principles, namely psyche and matter, takes place, and in the process a real exchange of attributes occurs as well. In such situations the psyche behaves as if it were material and matter behaves as if it were an expression of the psyche. Synchronicities are emanations of the sacred marriage in alchemy, where the opposites of spirit and matter reciprocally inform each other as they unite in a timeless embrace.
Instead of orienting ourselves one-sidedly just to the spiritual to the exclusion of matter, or material matters disconnected from spirit, Jung felt that the psychological/spiritual task of our unique time in history is to live and incarnate the realization of the unity of spirit and matter which synchronistic events are revealing to us. Instead of, or in addition to the spirit coming down from the heavens above, spirit’s guidance is emerging and rising up from within matter itself and is waiting to be recognized.
Subjectively, synchronistic phenomena evoke in us the feeling that we are not alone, that there is a silent partner that we share our lives with who is dreaming with us. It is as if there is an autonomous factor deep within us arranging our experiences so as to help us to wake up. Part and parcel of a synchronistic event’s numinosity is its sense of meeting the “wholly other,” whether it be within ourselves or through the medium of the outside world. Paradoxically, through synchronicities we connect with ourselves by becoming introduced to the part of ourselves which is other than who we imagine ourselves to be.
Recognizing the synchronistic matrix which patterns our experience empowers us to be creative, co-operative and active partners in our own awakening process. The more we are open for synchronicities to happen, the more they happen, for synchronicities, just like symbols in a dream, are not separate from the dreamer, which in this case is us. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our waking universe is the degree to which our life is experienced as synchronistic. Once we become lucid in our waking dream and recognize that we live in a synchronistic universe by our very nature, the universe has no choice but to shape-shift and reflect back our realization by materializing itself synchronistically.
Being initiatory rites of passage, synchronicities empower us to view life synchronistically. Seeing through synchronistic eyes has nothing to do with overlaying a fabricated interpretation upon events to make them appear as if they are synchronistic. Seeing synchronistically simply involves recognizing the underlying synchronistic web which is always weaving itself through our experience. This is analogous to how being inside of a night dream and viewing the dream as if it were a dream would have the instantaneous effect of allowing the dream to more profoundly manifest its dreamlike nature. Changing our perspective within the dream didn’t cause the dream to become a dream; the dream had always been a dream, we just hadn’t recognized it before. Similarly, we live in a synchronistic universe, and by recognizing this, we allow the universe to manifest itself more synchronistically.
Synchronicities are like “cultures” from another dimension which create and enrich culture in ours. Like a bug in the system, synchronicities are cultures which virally propagate themselves through the field of consciousness, which means that synchronistic awareness is contagious. Synchronistic awareness, the consciousness that recognizes the synchronistic nature of the universe and has become lucid in the dream of life, is something we can turn each other onto and catch from one another. Synchronistic awareness is the invocation and revelation of the “eternal presence of the one creative act” in which we are all continually sharing, partaking and participating. Synchronistic awareness activates and reproduces itself in and through the field, as it is self-generating in nature, which is to say it is birthing itself through our consciousness into the world.
Just like Jung, we can help each other catch the “bug” of synchronicity. We can co-operatively cultivate a net-work of allies who creatively collaborate in bringing forth the precious jewel of synchronicity. The archetypal field becomes greatly potentiated for synchronicities when we get “in sync” with other people who are also waking up to the synchronistic universe. A field which is lubricated for stimulating and stabilizing lucidity gets conjured up when we get in phase with each other through the shared, open heart of synchronistic awareness. Co-operatively engaged, synchronistic awareness activates our collective genius and creates true culture in that it effortlessly, endlessly, nonlocally and virally transmits and fractally reiterates itself throughout time and space. Shared synchronistic awareness magnetically draws and attracts the universe into itself, materializing itself in, as and through life itself, creating a revelatory universe in the process.
Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.
Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”
To illustrate what he meant by the word synchronicity, Jung brings up an experience he shared with a patient of his. This particular patient was very caught in her head, and the analysis was seemingly going nowhere. She was stuck, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. Jung realized there was nothing he could do. In Jung’s words, “I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort in which she had sealed herself.” She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone offered her a golden scarab – a valuable piece of jewelry. At the moment she was telling Jung the dream, there was a tapping on the office window. Jung opened up the window and a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color closely resembles that of a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle in his hand, handed it to her and said “Here is your scarab.”
The shock of recognition in the synchronistic moment, in which Jung’s patient realized her dream of the previous night was being both literally and symbolically enacted in her waking life, pierced through her resistance and cracked her defensive shell wide open. At the moment of synchronistic transmission, a fundamental shift in perception took place within her which inwardly transformed her and made her receptive in a new way. From that point on, Jung commented, “The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”
There was no conventional, linear causal link between the patient’s dream and the beetle tapping on the window the next day. But there was clearly an equivalence and meaningful connection between the two co-related events which was not based on linear causality In addition, the patient, as an active, egoic agent in space and time, didn’t cause or create the synchronicity, which was acausal and happened of its own accord. And yet, in some mysterious way, the beetle tapping on the window was intimately related to her.
To quote Jung, “Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” This quote by Jung has an interesting footnote which adds the following, “Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”
Synchronicities are cystallizations in linear time of a nonlinear, acausal, atemporal process, windows into the realm outside of time and space, a world in which we ourselves are active participants in and of “the one creative act.” Synchronicities are both timeless and temporal, which is to say they are possessed of a double nature with regard to time. Synchronicities can be deeply religious and mystical experiences, expanding our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.
Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – like with Jung’s patient, our night dreams can manifest in our waking life, but also in the sense that, just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape to through the seemingly outer world. In a night dream, the seemingly outer dreamscape is synchronistically reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer, as the dream is not separate from the inner world but is nothing other than the psyche within apparently externalized. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.
Being unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we can interpret synchronicities just like we would interpret a dream. Mythologically speaking, a scarab is an archetypal symbol which represents, as in ancient Egypt, death/rebirth and transformation. Gold symbolically represents the highest value. Being offered a golden scarab in both her night and waking dreams was a form of synchronistic notarization by the archetype, highlighting its arrival on the scene. The synchronicity was an expression of – as well as the doorway through which – Jung’s patient was personally enacting an archetypal process of the renewal of consciousness. The synchronicity bore the stamp of the excited archetype, revealing to her and making real in time that she was actually taking part in a timeless, mythic drama of death and rebirth. Catapulting her out of the limited frame of reference of the conceptual mind, the synchronistic moment helped her access a deeper part of herself, as well as re-connecting her to the universe at large in which she lived.
Synchronicities are both the vehicle through which and an expression of the fact that we are waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Being genuine wake up calls from the awakened part of ourselves, synchronicities are emanations of the part of ourselves that is waking up projected into time.
What I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” is the part of us that is the dreamer of both our night and waking dreams. Being “nonlocal,” which is to say not bound by the conventional laws of space and time, as well as being multi-dimensional, the deeper, dreaming Self can simultaneously express itself through inner experiences such as inspirations and dreams as well as by attracting events in the seemingly outer world so as to coagulate itself in embodied form.
The deeper, dreaming Self was simultaneously the dreamer of the golden scarab in the patient’s night dream, the inspiration for her to tell Jung the dream in their session, the source of the beetle which was tapping on the window at exactly the right moment, the impulse which animated Jung to open the window, catch the beetle, offer it to his patient and say what he said, as well as the patient’s inner, revelatory experience of transformation which was the result. Being multi-faceted and multi-channeled, the deeper, dreaming Self nonlocally arranged all these dimensions enfolded within the field into a singular psycho-physical experiential gestalt in which the oneness of spirit and matter became visible.
Interestingly, the synchronicity with Jung and his patient was an experience in which Jung himself played an active, participatory role. As the synchronistic moment was irrupting into time, he found himself dreamed up by his patient to pick up and play out a role in her dreaming process. At the moment of synchronicity, Jung went from passively sitting in the audience hearing about her process to being drafted into the act and stepping into a scene in the play of his patient’s mind. Not merely witnessing his patient’s synchronicity, he found himself spontaneously enacting it with her, playing his part and saying his lines perfectly, as if sent by central casting. In offering her the precious jewel of a golden scarab symbolizing death and rebirth, Jung spontaneously found himself being an open instrument for the synchronistic universe to manifest itself through him into materialized form and express itself in our world.
Jung and his patient were reciprocally collaborating in dreaming up their shared synchronistic event together. They became “quantum entangled,” interdependently and inseparably merged in the co-creation of each other’s synchronicity. The synchronicity was not monopolized by Jung’s patient, as it didn’t solely belong just to her. Participating in his patient’s synchronicity, Jung was at the same time just as much having a living experience in and of his own synchronicity. Even though the synchronicity was a reflection of his patient’s inner landscape, it was simultaneously a synchronistic reflection of a deeper process taking place within Jung, too. For Jung to be hearing a patient’s dream of a golden scarab and to have a golden scarab fly into his office was an externalized, synchronistic reflection of the archetypal process of death and rebirth which was happening inside of him. It is noteworthy that a synchronistic event can collectively reflect and be mutually shared by more than one person in both similar and singularly unique ways.
To experience a synchronistic event is to necessarily be changed at our core. No one could have convinced Jung’s patient that her synchronistic experience should be dismissed as a mere coincidence, as she had an inner knowing of its meaningfulness due to how it transformed her. She no longer lived in a dis-enchanted universe.
Synchronicities by their very nature demand our active participation, as they are not something we can just passively watch and remain unaffected by. Imbued with a deeper fragrance of meaning, a synchronistic event is a revelation which contains within it a potency to insinuate itself into our very being and alter us from within. Synchronicities can transform us on a cellular level, as they are crystallizations into and out of the space of consciousness itself that have form-ulated themselves into our dimension as an expression of the part of us that is already awakened. Synchronicities inherent revelatory nature is ultimately offering us the realization that we are playing an active, participatory and hence, co-creative role in the unfoldment of the universe.
Registering the revelation embedded in the synchronistic moment is to necessarily have an expansion of consciousness, as the lens through which we view, interpret and place meaning on the nature of our experience has broadened by and through the very synchronicity itself. Because it is rich in the nutrient of meaning, a synchronistic event affects and deepens our state of awareness and perception, which is another way of saying that synchronicities are expressions of consciousness itself. Just like symbols in a dream, synchronicities do not exist objectively, separate from our own mind.
Synchronistic moments feel like grace, as they induce in us the feeling that we are right where we are supposed to be. Being numinous, synchronicities have a strong feeling component and emotional charge, which is both an expression of while simultaneously flowing into, influencing and altering the surrounding field of consciousness. A manifestation of the field as a whole, synchronicities are a field phenomenon, and to receive their full blessing we need to relate to them as such. Synchronicities are a reflection of the deeper, underlying nonlocal field of consciousness waking up to itself through us. The gift of synchronicity cannot be realized from the point of view which imagines we exist as a separate person who is “other” than the field in which we are arising. Jung and his patient’s shared synchronistic event was a living experience of being connected to something greater than themselves. Synchronicities are acute outbreaks of the archetypal, collective mind-field crystallized into our personal sphere through the third-dimensional medium of time and space.
Synchronicities are glimpses of transcendental unity, what in Latin is called the “unus mundus,” the one world. The unus mundus is the unitary and unifying realm which underlies, pervades and contains all dimensions of our experience. The unus mundus, just like the deeper, dreaming Self, is a psycho-physical reality, a universe beyond time and outside of space in which psyche and matter are inseparably co-joined as interconnected parts of a deeper, unified field. The unus mundus is a world in which we have already woken up. It is a realm beyond duality, beyond the opposites, beyond even the concept of beyond. In the unus mundus, opposites like matter and psyche form the outer and inner aspects of the same transcendental reality. Revealing its designs through events in the outer world as well as the psychic landscape within, the unus mundus is actualizing itself in time as we divine our wholeness through the synchronistic clues encoded within the fabric of experience itself.
Paradoxically, synchronicities are a living, unmediated materialization of our unconscious, while simultaneously being a nonlocalized manifestation of the part of us that’s waking up into a more expanded consciousness. Like a genuine symbol, synchronicities are utterances of the soul, as they contain, are an expression of and unite the opposites. Synchronicities are soul-making in action.
ARCHETYPES
Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. If we are absorbed in and identified with the person-alistic perspective, we person-alize our experience, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from the space around us. We thus become entranced into a particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a true “self” fulfilling prophecy. To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation, however, we step out of a person-alistic and reductive viewpoint based on linear causality (i.e., the perspective of the illusory skin-encapsulated ego) into a more archetypal perspective in which we find ourselves playing roles in an eternal, mythic and divine drama of incarnation.
The synchronicity with Jung’s patient was revealing something not just about her inner, personal process, but was a revelation of a deep, archetypal process which exists within the collective unconscious itself. The synchronicity was simultaneously revealing a dynamic which is both personal and collective – it is at the moment of being truly deadlocked that a deeper archetypal dynamic within the psyche becomes activated and nonlocally expresses itself synchronistically in and through the canvas of the seemingly outer world, as well as within ourselves. To quote Jung, “The patient with the scarab found herself in an ‘impossible’ situation because the treatment had got stuck and there seemed to be no way out of the impasse…It is this kind of situation that constellates the archetype with the greatest regularity.” What is true individually is also true collectively – when we, as a species, find ourselves in an “impossible” situation with no exit plan, it is this very kind of dilemma which constellates the healing and revelatory archetypal realm to become synchronistically activated.
Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an “archetype” is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Jung calls archetypes “typical modes of apprehension.” An archetype is like the underlying grid-line or blue print which in-forms and structures how we perceive, interpret and respond to our experience.
The personal dimension literalizes our experiences, while the archetypal dimension symbolizes, mythologizes and dreams into our experiences with the utmost creative imagination. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
When an archetype gets activated within us, it nonlocally constellates itself outwardly in the surrounding field. Conversely, when an archetype is activated in the seemingly outer field, it simultaneously constellates and is a synchronistic reflection of the same activated archetype within ourselves. An activated archetype’s magnetic field-of-force orders and organizes the entire field to synchronistically re-arrange itself so as to embody the archetype “in form.” The archetype is thus pure inform-ation. Archetypes nonlocally exert their in-forming influence through the frictionless and super-fluid medium of the collective unconscious itself. The archetypal, synchronistic realm vaporizes illusory boundaries – revealing spirit – and builds bridges which mediate and connect the inner and the outer, the conscious and the unconscious, and dreaming and waking.
Synchronicities occur at times of deep archetypal excitation in the field, which is to say moments of crisis, transition, creative tension and dynamic intensity. The archetype that gets activated by the field precipitates itself into the field as a synchronistic expression of the very field which activated it. Periods of disturbance in our world are both a manifestation of and trigger for a corresponding archetype in the collective unconscious of humanity to draw to itself everything it needs to synchronistically render itself visible in form. Times of distress, both individually and collectively, catalyze a deeper, self-regulating and healing archetypal process to awaken within the human psyche which simultaneously expresses itself throughout the whole universe.
There is a profound and intimate synchronistic correlation between what is happening deep within the collective unconscious of humanity and what is playing out collectively on the world stage. Just like a dream, whatever we are unconscious of gets dreamed up and out-pictured in and as our waking dreamscape. What plays out in one person’s night dream is a reflection of their inner process; similarly what is getting dreamed up by all six and a half billion of us on the world stage is a reflection of a process going on deep inside of the collective unconscious of humanity.
When a formless archetype of the collective unconscious is at the point of becoming conscious and incarnating, it has an energetic charge that will seize people, get them in its grip and compel them to act itself out so as to give shape and form to itself. What we are unconscious of and don’t remember, we act out in the outside world.
Like the underlying, invisible axial system is the skeleton of an emerging crystal, the archetypes of the collective unconscious in-form, pattern and structure our unconscious itself. The inner archetypal dimension is revealing itself by influencing and animating our unconscious, causing us to act out and give shape to the archetypal realm in the world theater. This is happening both individually and collectively on the world stage.
Archetypes can possess individuals or whole nations. Archetypes bedazzle consciousness in such a way that it becomes blind to its own assumed standpoint. When an archetype takes over a person, group or nation, they can be said to be the incarnation or the revelation of the formless, transpersonal archetype in human form, as they synchronistically em-body and mirror back to us this archetypal dynamic which exists deep inside of all of us. When the archetypal realm incarnates, something of the eternal, imperishable dimension synchronistically reveals itself to us as it enters the realm of time and embodiment. Synchronicities are revelations in the nick of time. As our present moment in time indicates, whether we continue to destroy ourselves or wake ourselves up depends upon whether or not we recognize what is synchronistically being revealed to us.
What we don’t remember, we aren’t associated with. Our dis-memberment from our experience and dis-association from a part of ourselves polarizes and empowers our split-off part to project itself outside of ourselves and express itself by acting itself out in the outside world. We will either become possessed by our split-off part and unconsciously act it out in the world, or we will project it out so that we dream up the seemingly outer universe to act it out for us. This is another way of saying that our waking universe is a function of our consciousness, or lack thereof.
When an archetype synchronistically manifests itself in full-bodied form in the outside world, its full blown localized revelation in time is necessarily correlated to – and an unmediated manifestation of – a more fundamental, nonlocal condition which simultaneously exists both outside of time and inside the timeless part of ourselves. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the of being inwardly realized. The outer, synchronistic materialization of the inner, archetypal process is itself the vehicle through which the archetypal process both actualizes itself in space and time and is inwardly realized.
The spirit that animates synchronicities, if we can speak of such immaterial matters, is the same spirit which inspires our dreams at night. This spirit, the aforementioned “unus mundus” or “deeper, dreaming Self,” is dreaming our dreams at night, our life during the day, as well as ourselves. The unus mundus/deeper, dreaming Self arranges situations in our life, both micro and macrocosmically as a way of synchronizing itself, which propels us into greater alignment with the implicate field of open possibility, as we refine and re-find ourselves in each moment anew. To the extent we realize the dreamlike nature of reality, the universe becomes a continually unfolding oracle as we become a revelation to ourselves.
In a synchronicity, the conjunction of two cosmic principles, namely psyche and matter, takes place, and in the process a real exchange of attributes occurs as well. In such situations the psyche behaves as if it were material and matter behaves as if it were an expression of the psyche. Synchronicities are emanations of the sacred marriage in alchemy, where the opposites of spirit and matter reciprocally inform each other as they unite in a timeless embrace.
Instead of orienting ourselves one-sidedly just to the spiritual to the exclusion of matter, or material matters disconnected from spirit, Jung felt that the psychological/spiritual task of our unique time in history is to live and incarnate the realization of the unity of spirit and matter which synchronistic events are revealing to us. Instead of, or in addition to the spirit coming down from the heavens above, spirit’s guidance is emerging and rising up from within matter itself and is waiting to be recognized.
Subjectively, synchronistic phenomena evoke in us the feeling that we are not alone, that there is a silent partner that we share our lives with who is dreaming with us. It is as if there is an autonomous factor deep within us arranging our experiences so as to help us to wake up. Part and parcel of a synchronistic event’s numinosity is its sense of meeting the “wholly other,” whether it be within ourselves or through the medium of the outside world. Paradoxically, through synchronicities we connect with ourselves by becoming introduced to the part of ourselves which is other than who we imagine ourselves to be.
Recognizing the synchronistic matrix which patterns our experience empowers us to be creative, co-operative and active partners in our own awakening process. The more we are open for synchronicities to happen, the more they happen, for synchronicities, just like symbols in a dream, are not separate from the dreamer, which in this case is us. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our waking universe is the degree to which our life is experienced as synchronistic. Once we become lucid in our waking dream and recognize that we live in a synchronistic universe by our very nature, the universe has no choice but to shape-shift and reflect back our realization by materializing itself synchronistically.
Being initiatory rites of passage, synchronicities empower us to view life synchronistically. Seeing through synchronistic eyes has nothing to do with overlaying a fabricated interpretation upon events to make them appear as if they are synchronistic. Seeing synchronistically simply involves recognizing the underlying synchronistic web which is always weaving itself through our experience. This is analogous to how being inside of a night dream and viewing the dream as if it were a dream would have the instantaneous effect of allowing the dream to more profoundly manifest its dreamlike nature. Changing our perspective within the dream didn’t cause the dream to become a dream; the dream had always been a dream, we just hadn’t recognized it before. Similarly, we live in a synchronistic universe, and by recognizing this, we allow the universe to manifest itself more synchronistically.
Synchronicities are like “cultures” from another dimension which create and enrich culture in ours. Like a bug in the system, synchronicities are cultures which virally propagate themselves through the field of consciousness, which means that synchronistic awareness is contagious. Synchronistic awareness, the consciousness that recognizes the synchronistic nature of the universe and has become lucid in the dream of life, is something we can turn each other onto and catch from one another. Synchronistic awareness is the invocation and revelation of the “eternal presence of the one creative act” in which we are all continually sharing, partaking and participating. Synchronistic awareness activates and reproduces itself in and through the field, as it is self-generating in nature, which is to say it is birthing itself through our consciousness into the world.
Just like Jung, we can help each other catch the “bug” of synchronicity. We can co-operatively cultivate a net-work of allies who creatively collaborate in bringing forth the precious jewel of synchronicity. The archetypal field becomes greatly potentiated for synchronicities when we get “in sync” with other people who are also waking up to the synchronistic universe. A field which is lubricated for stimulating and stabilizing lucidity gets conjured up when we get in phase with each other through the shared, open heart of synchronistic awareness. Co-operatively engaged, synchronistic awareness activates our collective genius and creates true culture in that it effortlessly, endlessly, nonlocally and virally transmits and fractally reiterates itself throughout time and space. Shared synchronistic awareness magnetically draws and attracts the universe into itself, materializing itself in, as and through life itself, creating a revelatory universe in the process.
Monday, July 25, 2016
Mista'peo
via Carl Jung Depth Psychology
Marie-Louise Von Franz: Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life
This inner center is realized in exceptionally pure, unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula.
These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies.
In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along.
In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an "Inner Companion, " whom he calls "my friend" or Mista'peo, meaning "Great Man."
Mista'peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or shortly before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.
Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the Great Man.
He favors such people and sends them more and better dreams.
Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art.
Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of ones neighbors and animals attracts and give him life.
Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature.
Thel help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends.
I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Jung calls the Self.
~Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols, Pages 161-162
Marie-Louise Von Franz: Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life
This inner center is realized in exceptionally pure, unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula.
These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies.
In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along.
In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an "Inner Companion, " whom he calls "my friend" or Mista'peo, meaning "Great Man."
Mista'peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or shortly before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.
Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the Great Man.
He favors such people and sends them more and better dreams.
Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art.
Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of ones neighbors and animals attracts and give him life.
Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature.
Thel help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends.
I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Jung calls the Self.
~Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols, Pages 161-162
Monday, July 4, 2016
F. David Peat: Synchronicity, a bridge between mind and matter
Synchronicities are those mysterious and inexplicable coincidences that occasionally erupt into a life. At times we may feel that those around us are confined to a narrow world of logic and physical law, a world that admits no hint of mystery. This can give rise to a feeling of isolation within an indifferent universe and in an increasing complex society whose members are reduced to ciphers. Synchronicities, by contrast, open a doorway into a very different world: a world that also has resonances with the deep insights that have been revealed by the new sciences.
True synchronicities are more than mere chance occurrences. They are characterized by a sense of meaning and numinousness. They provide a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between our private thoughts and external, objective realities. Within a synchronicity, patterns of external events mirror an inner experience; likewise dreams and fantasies may seem to flood over into the external world. To distinguish synchronicities from mere chance occurrences Carl Jung stressed that they must always involve "meaningful coincidence" that lie beyond any explanation involving causal links and connections. They reveal to us an underlying world of patterns, forms and connections that transcend any division between the mental and the material.
The week in Pari will explore a number of connections between our subjective, internal world and the objective, external. One route will be to reflect on the metaphor of alchemy as a pathway to inner transformation. This will include an exploration of the deep links between art and alchemy. In the field of literature we will meet James Joyce's notion of an epiphany -- that moment when meaning coalesces into the world -- and the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins also wrote of inscape, the authentic and individual voice within the natural world that speaks to us directly.
An introduction to some key ideas from depth psychology will be given. Archetypes as the structuring principles of the psyche will be compared to notions of an underlying implicate order to reality as discussed by the physicist David Bohm. The therapeutic encounter will be viewed as an alchemical vessel in which "frozen accidents" to the psyche can be melted and transformed by generating psychic heat.
The spiritual dimensions of transformation and transcendence will be discussed with examples from a number of mystics including the Sufi, Ibn bin'Arabi. From the New Sciences we shall explore new notions of chance, connectedness, order out of chaos, the changing nature of matter and the notion that proto-mind may have existed from the beginning of the universe.
The course will also feature a day with Dr. Shantena Sabbadini, author and translator of the new Eranos I Ching. Sabbadini will explore the ancient Chinese notion of the significance of patterns of meaningful chance. He will explain how participants can frame a question to the Book of Changes and "read" the answer given by the I Ching.
See Synchronicity: The Speculum of Inscape and Landscape , Cosmos and Inscape , Divine Contenders: Wolfgang Pauli and the Symmetry of the World
and Wolfgang Pauli: Resurrection of spirit in the world
The course will explore:
Synchronicities, illuminations, epiphanies and the sense of connectedness as events that sum up a life or anticipate the future
The nature of consciousness and its connection to the body
Theories of Mind and Matter
The nature of the Archetypes and other structuring principles of the psyche
Laws of matter and mind. Are they a priori or do they evolve?
The role of the New Physics (chaos theory and quantum theory) and its connection to consciousness
Connections between minds, and between mind and matter
Metaphors of alchemy and the process of individuation
Wolfgang Pauli, his dreams and relationship with Carl Jung. Pauli's vision of the resurrection of spirit within the world of matter
The current state of our world and the need for values and ethics
Shantena Sabbadini, who has recently published a new translation and concordance of the I Ching will also give a workshop on Ancient Chinese views of synchronistic connections and on how to consult and interpret the I Ching.
Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind will proceed via lectures and group discussions. Participants will be encouraged to keep a journal. Participants are also encouraged to take advantage of the thermal hot springs below the village.
More info. at http://www.paricenter.com/programs/co...
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Carl Jung on being "Alone."
via Carl Jung Depth Psychology
My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
To the extent that he does live in reality the whole range of his particular life, the individual is . . . an alchemical retort, in which the elements present in the collective are melted down and refashioned to form a new synthesis, which is then offered to the collective. But the predigestion of evil which he carried out as part of the process of assimilating his shadow makes him, at the same time, an agent for the immunization of the collective. An individual's shadow is invariably bound up with the collective shadow of his group, and as he digests his own evil, a fragment of the collective evil is invariably co-digested at the same time. ~Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 130.
The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one's] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 32.
[The philosophers] called their stone animate because, at the final operations, by virtue of the power of this most noble fiery mystery, a dark red liquid, like blood, sweats out drop by drop from their material and their vessel. And for this reason they have prophesied that in the last days a most pure [or genuine] man, through whom the world will be freed, will come to earth and will sweat bloody drops of a rosy or red hue, whereby the world will be redeemed from its Fall. In like manner, too, the blood of their stone will free the leprous metals a ~and also men from their diseases. . . . and that is the reason why the stone is called animate.
For in the blood of this stone is hidden its soul. . . . For a like reason they have called it their microcosm, because it contains the similitude of all things of this word, and therefore again they say that it is animate, as Plato calls the macrocosm animate. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 381.
Since the stone represents the homo totus, it is only logical for Dorn to speak of the "putissimus homo" [most true man] when discussing the arcane substance and its bloody sweat, for this is what it is all about. He is the arcanum, and the stone and its parallel or prefiguration is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. This "most pure" or "most true'' man must be no other than what he is, just as "argentum putum" is unalloyed silver; he must be entirely man, a man who knows and possesses everything human and is not adulterated by any influence or admixture from without. This man will appear on earth only "in the last days." He cannot be Christ, for Christ by his blood has already redeemed the world from the consequences of the Fall. . . . On no account is it a question here of a future Christ and salvator microcosmi, but rather of the alchemical servator cosmi (preserver of the cosmos), representing the still unconscious idea of the whole and complete man, who shall bring about what the sacrificial death of Christ has obviously left unfinished, namely the deliverance of the world from evil. Like Christ he will sweat a redeeming blood, but . . . it is "rose-colored"; not natural or ordinary blood, but symbolic blood, a psychic substance, the manifestation of a certain kind of Eros which unifies the individual as well as the multitude in the sign of the rose and makes them whole. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 390.
As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
The Dark Side of Getting to Know Yourself
via appliedjung
Sia, an Australian singer, recently brought out a video that disturbed some people and drew a fair amount of criticism. The video is of an adult male and a young girl fighting in a cage. Sia responded to this criticism by saying that the two actors portray a single person, namely herself, and represent her two warring-self states. It is a wonderful depiction of the war between shadow and ego.
Coming to terms with your shadow is hard, unpleasant and often violent. The shadow does not wait around submissively to be seen and recognized. It screams and rages and shouts and fights and bites. And, of course, it is all you. The shadow is that which has been repressed, suffocated, abused, abandoned and neglected. It is the monkey on your back, whispering in your ear, turning your head to make you look at the things that it represents, those things that you don’t want to know about yourself.
If you are familiar with the Golden Compass series, you can liken the shadow to the dæmons that all the people are bonded to. Freud’s proverbial Id, which cannot hide its face and intentions. And to have your dæmon ripped from you is fatal. It is part of you and you cannot separate from it.
People try though. They try hard to suppress the shadow. They fear it. It scares them. It haunts their dreams. They believe that they are good and kind and sincere and nice. The bad in the world is out there, they can see it all around them and they are afraid.
Some people avoid the shadow by looking at the sun. Like Lucifer they chase enlightenment. Or they pursue knowledge and the intellect and get caught in mental masturbation, suppressing their feelings of anxiety and frustration.
Other people want to find something that will protect them from the evil. They believe that either the angels or some talisman will guard and keep them safe; or that if they ignore or pray for the evil in the world it will not affect them.
Most people focus on “what could be”, “should be”, “will be.” They think that they can control themselves and their environment. If they try harder, concentrate more, focus, think positively, it will all come right. They don’t work with what is.
But the truth is that the shadow is not under your control. It is out to get you and it will, no matter what.
There is nothing more destructive than ignoring your shadow. You lie, deceive, manipulate, and act out maliciously, which you then self-righteously justify to yourself so that you can carry on believing that you are “a nice person”. And it is so easy to justify your bad behaviour.
“They deserved it.”
“They had to be stopped.”
“Who doesn’t want to listen must feel.”
“I was only defending myself.”
“I will not be abused.”
“I was only trying to help them.”
“They had a right to know.”
“They were on the wrong path.”
“What are they so upset about?”
Of course the list is endless. And all the while you are surrounded by bad people. The world is full of evil. Everywhere you turn there is meanness, violence, hatred, selfishness and people full of wickedness. News flash! They only reflect what is inside your own heart. Acknowledging your shadow is the first and hardest step to becoming whole.
Being whole and not broken. Forgiving yourself, making friends with your shadow, accepting who you are, nurturing yourself, learning to love yourself for who you are really and not who you wish you were, these are some of the benefits you will reap from working with your shadow. It is dirty work, ongoing work, but, most importantly, also very rich and rewarding work.
Facing yourself in the mirror of the other, (which is) the world around you, is often disturbing and painful. If you dislike something or someone intensely, there is shadow content hidden in this relation. The object of your dislike contains something of your shadow in it. Deep and honest reflection will reveal it to you. Realising that you have the potential for dishonesty or being unfaithful is not easy. As is realising that you carry the pain and scarring from a devastating experience. But once in consciousness, it can be addressed and opposed or healed; whilst it remains unconscious it will wreak havoc in your life.
Similarly if you love and adore something, there are also these wonderful, exciting and surprising talents and hidden potential that remain untouched and unseen whilst in the unconscious.
By unearthing these guilts, sins, desires and hidden treasures you will liberate yourself. Suppressing desire and guilt takes an enormous amount of energy and eventually will express itself in your body as dis-ease and fatigue or depression. The biggest transformation you can experience is through the mining of your shadow. Whilst the shadow’s beliefs, desires and talents are hidden in the unconscious, it will not benefit you in the slightest. On the contrary, whilst unconscious it will thwart you at every turn. You will project these qualities onto others which does not expand or improve anyone, least of all yourself. You will shrink and become less and less until you are a petrified shallow version of yourself. Liberating the unconscious removes these projections, energizes you and expands both consciousness and personality.
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
C. G Jung
Please heed this warning though.
This work is not for the person who believes that they will work through the shadow and come out the other side an even nicer person! This is not the goal nor is it a realistic expectation. Whilst you have this attitude, you will not make any progress. You will remain in the false belief that you are at heart a nice person. You are not a nice person, you are a bitch or bastard and this work is about facing that about yourself and integrating it into consciousness. You can’t extract these things from your psyche. They are there to stay. It is how you work with it and what you do with it that counts, but that means that on a daily basis you will be confronted by your shadow. You have to accept that these things are part of you and love yourself for it. You are not a cardboard copy of a perfect person. You are a human being and being whole is about embracing your humanity. How can you have compassion with the beggar and lost souls of the world if you do not recognise and have compassion for the beggar within?
Archimedes said, give me one firm place to stand and I will move the world. This image is an almost perfect metaphor for becoming conscious and working with the shadow. The firm place that is referred to is the ego-consciousness. The ego is the centre of, and our access to consciousness. The consciousness referred to here is that of self-awareness and self-knowledge. This work is about strengthening and amplifying ego-consciousness. Only by taking the role of the ego seriously can you do shadow work. The shadow represents the opposite to the conscious ego position; it is the true other in the psyche. Only by being fully incarnated in and present to the ego can this work be done. If your approach is to dis-incarnate (transcend) your ego-consciousness in favour of a “spiritual” or “karmic” type outlook, this work is not for you. If you are part of a new age movement, where the ego is something of a dirty word, something to ignore, because you are part of “a much bigger spiritual reality”, don’t pursue this path.
This work is for people who realise that they are human and fallible. It speaks to those who recognize that they have something to do with what they are experiencing in the world. It is for the courageous and fearless. It is for people who are willing to forgive and open their hearts to themselves. It is for people who, to borrow from Jung; want to be whole, not perfect.
Sia, an Australian singer, recently brought out a video that disturbed some people and drew a fair amount of criticism. The video is of an adult male and a young girl fighting in a cage. Sia responded to this criticism by saying that the two actors portray a single person, namely herself, and represent her two warring-self states. It is a wonderful depiction of the war between shadow and ego.
Coming to terms with your shadow is hard, unpleasant and often violent. The shadow does not wait around submissively to be seen and recognized. It screams and rages and shouts and fights and bites. And, of course, it is all you. The shadow is that which has been repressed, suffocated, abused, abandoned and neglected. It is the monkey on your back, whispering in your ear, turning your head to make you look at the things that it represents, those things that you don’t want to know about yourself.
If you are familiar with the Golden Compass series, you can liken the shadow to the dæmons that all the people are bonded to. Freud’s proverbial Id, which cannot hide its face and intentions. And to have your dæmon ripped from you is fatal. It is part of you and you cannot separate from it.
People try though. They try hard to suppress the shadow. They fear it. It scares them. It haunts their dreams. They believe that they are good and kind and sincere and nice. The bad in the world is out there, they can see it all around them and they are afraid.
Some people avoid the shadow by looking at the sun. Like Lucifer they chase enlightenment. Or they pursue knowledge and the intellect and get caught in mental masturbation, suppressing their feelings of anxiety and frustration.
Other people want to find something that will protect them from the evil. They believe that either the angels or some talisman will guard and keep them safe; or that if they ignore or pray for the evil in the world it will not affect them.
Most people focus on “what could be”, “should be”, “will be.” They think that they can control themselves and their environment. If they try harder, concentrate more, focus, think positively, it will all come right. They don’t work with what is.
But the truth is that the shadow is not under your control. It is out to get you and it will, no matter what.
There is nothing more destructive than ignoring your shadow. You lie, deceive, manipulate, and act out maliciously, which you then self-righteously justify to yourself so that you can carry on believing that you are “a nice person”. And it is so easy to justify your bad behaviour.
“They deserved it.”
“They had to be stopped.”
“Who doesn’t want to listen must feel.”
“I was only defending myself.”
“I will not be abused.”
“I was only trying to help them.”
“They had a right to know.”
“They were on the wrong path.”
“What are they so upset about?”
Of course the list is endless. And all the while you are surrounded by bad people. The world is full of evil. Everywhere you turn there is meanness, violence, hatred, selfishness and people full of wickedness. News flash! They only reflect what is inside your own heart. Acknowledging your shadow is the first and hardest step to becoming whole.
Being whole and not broken. Forgiving yourself, making friends with your shadow, accepting who you are, nurturing yourself, learning to love yourself for who you are really and not who you wish you were, these are some of the benefits you will reap from working with your shadow. It is dirty work, ongoing work, but, most importantly, also very rich and rewarding work.
Facing yourself in the mirror of the other, (which is) the world around you, is often disturbing and painful. If you dislike something or someone intensely, there is shadow content hidden in this relation. The object of your dislike contains something of your shadow in it. Deep and honest reflection will reveal it to you. Realising that you have the potential for dishonesty or being unfaithful is not easy. As is realising that you carry the pain and scarring from a devastating experience. But once in consciousness, it can be addressed and opposed or healed; whilst it remains unconscious it will wreak havoc in your life.
Similarly if you love and adore something, there are also these wonderful, exciting and surprising talents and hidden potential that remain untouched and unseen whilst in the unconscious.
By unearthing these guilts, sins, desires and hidden treasures you will liberate yourself. Suppressing desire and guilt takes an enormous amount of energy and eventually will express itself in your body as dis-ease and fatigue or depression. The biggest transformation you can experience is through the mining of your shadow. Whilst the shadow’s beliefs, desires and talents are hidden in the unconscious, it will not benefit you in the slightest. On the contrary, whilst unconscious it will thwart you at every turn. You will project these qualities onto others which does not expand or improve anyone, least of all yourself. You will shrink and become less and less until you are a petrified shallow version of yourself. Liberating the unconscious removes these projections, energizes you and expands both consciousness and personality.
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
C. G Jung
Please heed this warning though.
This work is not for the person who believes that they will work through the shadow and come out the other side an even nicer person! This is not the goal nor is it a realistic expectation. Whilst you have this attitude, you will not make any progress. You will remain in the false belief that you are at heart a nice person. You are not a nice person, you are a bitch or bastard and this work is about facing that about yourself and integrating it into consciousness. You can’t extract these things from your psyche. They are there to stay. It is how you work with it and what you do with it that counts, but that means that on a daily basis you will be confronted by your shadow. You have to accept that these things are part of you and love yourself for it. You are not a cardboard copy of a perfect person. You are a human being and being whole is about embracing your humanity. How can you have compassion with the beggar and lost souls of the world if you do not recognise and have compassion for the beggar within?
Archimedes said, give me one firm place to stand and I will move the world. This image is an almost perfect metaphor for becoming conscious and working with the shadow. The firm place that is referred to is the ego-consciousness. The ego is the centre of, and our access to consciousness. The consciousness referred to here is that of self-awareness and self-knowledge. This work is about strengthening and amplifying ego-consciousness. Only by taking the role of the ego seriously can you do shadow work. The shadow represents the opposite to the conscious ego position; it is the true other in the psyche. Only by being fully incarnated in and present to the ego can this work be done. If your approach is to dis-incarnate (transcend) your ego-consciousness in favour of a “spiritual” or “karmic” type outlook, this work is not for you. If you are part of a new age movement, where the ego is something of a dirty word, something to ignore, because you are part of “a much bigger spiritual reality”, don’t pursue this path.
This work is for people who realise that they are human and fallible. It speaks to those who recognize that they have something to do with what they are experiencing in the world. It is for the courageous and fearless. It is for people who are willing to forgive and open their hearts to themselves. It is for people who, to borrow from Jung; want to be whole, not perfect.
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
The symbolism of water - Carl Jung
via jungcurrents
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.
Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Paragraph 40
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.
Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Paragraph 40
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The scream, the shadow
via jungcurrents
This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.
For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.
It is the world of water…..where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.
The archtypes and the collective unconscious p. 21
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
The automatic writings of Jung
By Phillip Coppens
Watkins’ bookstore in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London, was founded in 1891 by John Watkins, and is still London’s premier hermetic bookstore. One of its many notorious visitors was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who would, together with Freud, define the field. Watkins was later to become Jung’s publisher, bringing out the private 1925 edition of Jung’s “VII Sermones ad Mortuos”.
For a well-known psychiatrist to chose a hermetic bookstore as the publisher of a book might seem odd, and it is. The text is purportedly by “Basilides of Alexandria” and is a Gnostic text – a religious document, largely Christian in nature. Why Watkins was chosen as the publisher however becomes clear when we know that Jung had received this document via automatic writing – something most psychiatrists would push towards the lunatic fringe… but not Jung.
Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience. Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.
Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours.
Was Jung sane? He had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate: Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane. But more than 15 years later, Jung spoke to a “highly cultivated elderly Indian”, who told Jung that his experience was identical to many mystics. In his case, his “spirit guide” or guru had been a commentator on the Vedas who had died centuries ago. Rather than be mad, Jung felt that he had stepped into the same shoes as the ancient priests and others thought have experienced the divine.
Thus, in 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or “The Seven sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria”, “transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung”.
Jung stated that the start of the work was very identical to a possession. “Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another.”
With such madness about the house, Jung felt he had to act. He shouted: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the next three evenings, the book was written, and as soon as he had begun to write, “the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.”
Basilides was a real person, born in Syria, teaching in Alexandria during the years 133-155 AD. Whereas most channelled material is often nothing better than that which can be found in gossip columns, Jung’s text has been labelled a “core text in depth psychology”.
The text is intriguing for several reasons. For one, he uses the name Abraxas to describe the Supreme Being that had first generated mind (nous) and then the other mental powers. Still, Jung did not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic pleroma, where individuality was lost, but instead adhered to individuation, which maintained the fullness of human individuality. Most metaphysics today argue that both possibilities can be encountered – and are encountered in many religions: that the soul at its final stage can chose to melt with the One (the pleroma) or maintain its separate identity inside the One (individuation). The easiest parallel is with the hologram, in which each “replica” is unique, yet also the whole. If any “replica” was aware, and would at one point have to ask what it wanted, some would ask to surrender into the greater hologram, whereas other “replicas” would ask to retain their individual memories – even though they are part of the whole.
It is clear that this experience created the framework in which later the collective unconscious would take a prominent place. He described it as such: “The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.” But analysts have stated that it was not just the automatic writing, but the contents of the writings themselves, that shaped his ideas. Jung himself wrote: “These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”
As early as August, 1912, Jung had intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Of primary sources, the remarkable Pistis Sophia was one of very few available to Jung in translation, and his appreciation of this work was so great that he made a special effort to seek out the translator in London, the then aged and impecunious George R. S. Mead, to convey to him his great gratitude.
Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.” Gnosticism would remain his main dedication for the rest of his life. With the success of books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code, all which carve out a special place for the feminine, and often the Pistis Sophia itself, it is clear that Jung successfully predicted the “return of the feminine”.
Philemon and Basilides are but two of the “spirit guides” that were in contact with Jung. The list of other guides also included one “Salome”. In 1926, Jung had a remarkable dream. He felt himself transported back into the 17th century, and saw himself as an alchemist, engaged in the Great Work. Jung felt that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the Gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of “Sophia”.
For Jung, alchemy was not the search for the substance that would transform lead into gold, but the transformation of the soul on its path to perfection. Jung’s dreams in 1925-6 and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. Jung’s collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich. His work culminated in his chef d’oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy.
Jung believed that the cosmos contained the divine light or life, but this essence was enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a demiurge: Lucifer, the Bringer of the Light. He contained the light inside this reality, until a time when it would be set free. The first operation of alchemy therefore addressed itself to the dismemberment of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfilment.
Jung made it clear that his theory was not new. It is similar to the Cathar doctrine and he himself stated that he was restating the Hermetic gnosis and explaining the misunderstood central quest of alchemy. Alchemy, said Jung, stood in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. It has been “underground”, part of a secret tradition that ran throughout Christianity, but always “subconscious” – visible by its shadows and theh traces it leaves only.
He also felt that this process allowed for a better understanding of male-feminine relationships, and notions such as love. It is in this approach that he no doubt left Freud the furthest behind. In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung stated that in love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In essence, it is the “stress” that allows one to grow – to transform.
The union of opposites, the focus of the alchemist, was for Jung also the focus of the Gnostics, whom he felt had been incorrectly labelled as radical dualists, i.e. believing in the battle between good and evil – without any apparent union possible between the two. For Jung, dualism and monism were not mutually contradictory and exclusive, but complimentary aspects of reality. As such, there was no good or wrong, no order or chaos, just two opposites, who constantly created grey, and demanded of mankind to be united, transformed.
It is clear that Jung’s psychology is that of the end of the 20th century. In essence, he was the father of the New Age, giving a theoretical framework for channelling and other “New Age practices”. Still, it is clear that Jung is seldom if ever mentioned in this line. Instead, he is referred to as the “opposite” of Freud, who was fixated in trying to reduce the entire human psychology to the sexual constitution of Mankind. However, it was Jung who stated that such opposites had to be integrated…
Watkins’ bookstore in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London, was founded in 1891 by John Watkins, and is still London’s premier hermetic bookstore. One of its many notorious visitors was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who would, together with Freud, define the field. Watkins was later to become Jung’s publisher, bringing out the private 1925 edition of Jung’s “VII Sermones ad Mortuos”.
For a well-known psychiatrist to chose a hermetic bookstore as the publisher of a book might seem odd, and it is. The text is purportedly by “Basilides of Alexandria” and is a Gnostic text – a religious document, largely Christian in nature. Why Watkins was chosen as the publisher however becomes clear when we know that Jung had received this document via automatic writing – something most psychiatrists would push towards the lunatic fringe… but not Jung.
Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience. Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.
Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours.
Was Jung sane? He had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate: Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane. But more than 15 years later, Jung spoke to a “highly cultivated elderly Indian”, who told Jung that his experience was identical to many mystics. In his case, his “spirit guide” or guru had been a commentator on the Vedas who had died centuries ago. Rather than be mad, Jung felt that he had stepped into the same shoes as the ancient priests and others thought have experienced the divine.
Thus, in 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or “The Seven sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria”, “transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung”.
Jung stated that the start of the work was very identical to a possession. “Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another.”
With such madness about the house, Jung felt he had to act. He shouted: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the next three evenings, the book was written, and as soon as he had begun to write, “the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.”
Basilides was a real person, born in Syria, teaching in Alexandria during the years 133-155 AD. Whereas most channelled material is often nothing better than that which can be found in gossip columns, Jung’s text has been labelled a “core text in depth psychology”.
The text is intriguing for several reasons. For one, he uses the name Abraxas to describe the Supreme Being that had first generated mind (nous) and then the other mental powers. Still, Jung did not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic pleroma, where individuality was lost, but instead adhered to individuation, which maintained the fullness of human individuality. Most metaphysics today argue that both possibilities can be encountered – and are encountered in many religions: that the soul at its final stage can chose to melt with the One (the pleroma) or maintain its separate identity inside the One (individuation). The easiest parallel is with the hologram, in which each “replica” is unique, yet also the whole. If any “replica” was aware, and would at one point have to ask what it wanted, some would ask to surrender into the greater hologram, whereas other “replicas” would ask to retain their individual memories – even though they are part of the whole.
It is clear that this experience created the framework in which later the collective unconscious would take a prominent place. He described it as such: “The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.” But analysts have stated that it was not just the automatic writing, but the contents of the writings themselves, that shaped his ideas. Jung himself wrote: “These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”
As early as August, 1912, Jung had intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Of primary sources, the remarkable Pistis Sophia was one of very few available to Jung in translation, and his appreciation of this work was so great that he made a special effort to seek out the translator in London, the then aged and impecunious George R. S. Mead, to convey to him his great gratitude.
Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.” Gnosticism would remain his main dedication for the rest of his life. With the success of books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code, all which carve out a special place for the feminine, and often the Pistis Sophia itself, it is clear that Jung successfully predicted the “return of the feminine”.
Philemon and Basilides are but two of the “spirit guides” that were in contact with Jung. The list of other guides also included one “Salome”. In 1926, Jung had a remarkable dream. He felt himself transported back into the 17th century, and saw himself as an alchemist, engaged in the Great Work. Jung felt that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the Gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of “Sophia”.
For Jung, alchemy was not the search for the substance that would transform lead into gold, but the transformation of the soul on its path to perfection. Jung’s dreams in 1925-6 and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. Jung’s collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich. His work culminated in his chef d’oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy.
Jung believed that the cosmos contained the divine light or life, but this essence was enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a demiurge: Lucifer, the Bringer of the Light. He contained the light inside this reality, until a time when it would be set free. The first operation of alchemy therefore addressed itself to the dismemberment of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfilment.
Jung made it clear that his theory was not new. It is similar to the Cathar doctrine and he himself stated that he was restating the Hermetic gnosis and explaining the misunderstood central quest of alchemy. Alchemy, said Jung, stood in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. It has been “underground”, part of a secret tradition that ran throughout Christianity, but always “subconscious” – visible by its shadows and theh traces it leaves only.
He also felt that this process allowed for a better understanding of male-feminine relationships, and notions such as love. It is in this approach that he no doubt left Freud the furthest behind. In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung stated that in love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In essence, it is the “stress” that allows one to grow – to transform.
The union of opposites, the focus of the alchemist, was for Jung also the focus of the Gnostics, whom he felt had been incorrectly labelled as radical dualists, i.e. believing in the battle between good and evil – without any apparent union possible between the two. For Jung, dualism and monism were not mutually contradictory and exclusive, but complimentary aspects of reality. As such, there was no good or wrong, no order or chaos, just two opposites, who constantly created grey, and demanded of mankind to be united, transformed.
It is clear that Jung’s psychology is that of the end of the 20th century. In essence, he was the father of the New Age, giving a theoretical framework for channelling and other “New Age practices”. Still, it is clear that Jung is seldom if ever mentioned in this line. Instead, he is referred to as the “opposite” of Freud, who was fixated in trying to reduce the entire human psychology to the sexual constitution of Mankind. However, it was Jung who stated that such opposites had to be integrated…
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Carl Jung, a summary of his ideas
"Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide."
INDIVIDUATION. Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.
STORY. Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.
NEUROSIS. Jung had a hunch that what passed for normality often was the very force which shattered the personality of the patient. That trying to be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. In the psychiatric hospital, he wondered why psychiatrists were not interested in what their patients had to say.
MYSTERY. For Jung life was a great mystery. We know and understand very little of it. He never hesitated to say, "I don't know." Always admitted when he came to the end of his understanding.
THE UNCONSCIOUS. A basic tenet: All products of the unconscious are symbolic and can be taken as guiding messages. What is the dream or fantasy leading the person toward? The unconscious will live, and will move us, whether we like it or not.
Personal unconscious. That aspect of the psyche which does not usually inter the individual's awareness and which appears in overt behavior or in dreams. It is the source of new thoughts and creative ideals, and produces meaningful symbols.
Collective unconscious: That aspect of the unconscious which manifests inherited, universal themes which run through all human life. Inwardly, the whole history of the human race, back to the most primitive times, lives on in us.
SYMBOL. A name, term, picture which is familiar in daily life, yet has other connotations besides its conventional and obvious meaning. Implies something vague and partially unknown or hidden, and is never precisely defined. Dream symbols carry messages from the unconscious to the rational mind.
ARCHETYPES. These primordial images reflect basic patterns or universal themes common to us all which are present in the unconscious. These symbolic images exist outside space and time. Examples: Shadow, animus, anima, the old wise person, the innocent child. There also seem to be nature archetypes, like fire, ocean, river, mountain.
PERSONA. The "mask" or image we present to the world. Designed to make a particular impression on others, while concealing our true nature.
SHADOW. The side of our personality which we do not conscousnly display in public. May have positive or negative qualities. If it remains unconscious, the shadow is often projected onto other individuals or groups.
ANIMA. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious female component of the male psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "feminine."
ANIMUS. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious male component of the female psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "masculine."
DREAMS. Specific expressions of the unconscous which have a definite, purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention. The general function of dreams is to restore one's total psychic equlilibrium. They tend to play a complementary or compensatory role in our psychic makeup.
COMPLEXES: Usually unconscious and repressed emotionally-toned symbolic material that is incompatible with consciousness. "Stuck-together" agglomerations of thoughts, feelings, behavior patterns, and somatic forms of expression. Can cause constant psychological disturbances and symptoms of neurosis. With intervention, can become conscious and greatly reduced in their impact.
WORD ASSOCIATION TEST. A research technique Jung used to explore the complexes in the personal unconscious. Consisted of reading 100 words one at a time and having the person respond quickly with a word of his or her own. Delays in responding can indicate a complex.
SYNCHRONICITY. The meaningful coincidence of a psychic and a physical state or event which have no causal relationship to each other.
SELF. Archetype symbolizing the totality of the personality. It represents the striving for unity, wholeness, and integration.
MANDALA. The Sanskrit word for circle. For Jung, the mandala was a symbol of wholeness, completness, and perfection. Symbolized the self.
AMPLIFICATION. To get a larger sense of a dream, a kind of spreading-out of associations by referring to mythology, art, literature, music. ("Where have we heard this before."
ACTIVE IMAGINATION. A concept embracing a variety of techniques for activating our imaginal processes in waking life in order to tap into the unconscious meanings of our symbols.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES. People differ in certain basic ways, even though the instincts which drive us are the same. He distinguished two general attitudes--introversion and extraversion; and four functions--thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.
INDIVIDUATION. Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.
STORY. Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.
NEUROSIS. Jung had a hunch that what passed for normality often was the very force which shattered the personality of the patient. That trying to be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. In the psychiatric hospital, he wondered why psychiatrists were not interested in what their patients had to say.
MYSTERY. For Jung life was a great mystery. We know and understand very little of it. He never hesitated to say, "I don't know." Always admitted when he came to the end of his understanding.
THE UNCONSCIOUS. A basic tenet: All products of the unconscious are symbolic and can be taken as guiding messages. What is the dream or fantasy leading the person toward? The unconscious will live, and will move us, whether we like it or not.
Personal unconscious. That aspect of the psyche which does not usually inter the individual's awareness and which appears in overt behavior or in dreams. It is the source of new thoughts and creative ideals, and produces meaningful symbols.
Collective unconscious: That aspect of the unconscious which manifests inherited, universal themes which run through all human life. Inwardly, the whole history of the human race, back to the most primitive times, lives on in us.
SYMBOL. A name, term, picture which is familiar in daily life, yet has other connotations besides its conventional and obvious meaning. Implies something vague and partially unknown or hidden, and is never precisely defined. Dream symbols carry messages from the unconscious to the rational mind.
ARCHETYPES. These primordial images reflect basic patterns or universal themes common to us all which are present in the unconscious. These symbolic images exist outside space and time. Examples: Shadow, animus, anima, the old wise person, the innocent child. There also seem to be nature archetypes, like fire, ocean, river, mountain.
PERSONA. The "mask" or image we present to the world. Designed to make a particular impression on others, while concealing our true nature.
SHADOW. The side of our personality which we do not conscousnly display in public. May have positive or negative qualities. If it remains unconscious, the shadow is often projected onto other individuals or groups.
ANIMA. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious female component of the male psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "feminine."
ANIMUS. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious male component of the female psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "masculine."
DREAMS. Specific expressions of the unconscous which have a definite, purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention. The general function of dreams is to restore one's total psychic equlilibrium. They tend to play a complementary or compensatory role in our psychic makeup.
COMPLEXES: Usually unconscious and repressed emotionally-toned symbolic material that is incompatible with consciousness. "Stuck-together" agglomerations of thoughts, feelings, behavior patterns, and somatic forms of expression. Can cause constant psychological disturbances and symptoms of neurosis. With intervention, can become conscious and greatly reduced in their impact.
WORD ASSOCIATION TEST. A research technique Jung used to explore the complexes in the personal unconscious. Consisted of reading 100 words one at a time and having the person respond quickly with a word of his or her own. Delays in responding can indicate a complex.
SYNCHRONICITY. The meaningful coincidence of a psychic and a physical state or event which have no causal relationship to each other.
SELF. Archetype symbolizing the totality of the personality. It represents the striving for unity, wholeness, and integration.
MANDALA. The Sanskrit word for circle. For Jung, the mandala was a symbol of wholeness, completness, and perfection. Symbolized the self.
AMPLIFICATION. To get a larger sense of a dream, a kind of spreading-out of associations by referring to mythology, art, literature, music. ("Where have we heard this before."
ACTIVE IMAGINATION. A concept embracing a variety of techniques for activating our imaginal processes in waking life in order to tap into the unconscious meanings of our symbols.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES. People differ in certain basic ways, even though the instincts which drive us are the same. He distinguished two general attitudes--introversion and extraversion; and four functions--thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
In All Chaos There is a Cosmos – Carl Jung
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the “personal unconscious.” But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious”. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.
The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion… In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves… We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
Motherlove… is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.
Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret. Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?
The grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science… but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practible.
For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness.”
~Carl Jung~
https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/in-all-chaos-there-is-a-cosmos-carl-jung/
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Altered States and Paranormal Narratives with Jeffrey J. Kripal
from Disinformation
Like most readers, fellow Disinformation contributor Jeremy J. Johnson and I are both big fans of author Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Mutants & Mystics and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred).
We caught up with him recently to discuss Philip K. Dick’s precognition abilities, global shamanic culture, synchronicity, and a new documentary Supernature that he has in the works.
JJ/BR: Dr. Kripal, it is an honor to speak with you. Graham Hancock, Rak Razam, Jeremy D. Johnson and I have recently come up with the concept of entheodelic storytelling. It signifies the archaic revival narrative and gives definition to a new movement of art that is influenced by the usual subjects; altered states, the evolution of consciousness, entheogens, occultism, paranormal phenomena, shamanism, and metaphysics. This also seems to be entangled with what our friend Rak has called the “global shamanic resurgence.”
In recent mainstream media we have seen a more positive view of entheogens as psychedelic medicines slowly infiltrate the mainstream. In Aronofsky’s blockbuster Noah ayahuasca acts as a sacred tea that enables prophetic visions. In The Fountain, the main character Tom engages in meditation and tai-chi in addition to maintaining a healthy psilocybin regimen. In Hannibal, everyone’s favorite evil doctor of psychology administers psilocybin on national television in order to help a patient deal with blocked psychological trauma.
Psychedelic shamanism is obviously a prominent theme in Grant Morrison’s 90’s masterpiece The Invisibles, and next to Patrick Meaney’s equally excellent book Our Sentence is Up, your analysis in Mutants and Mystics is the best analysis I’ve seen on Morrison’s ouvre.
In addition to this, other authors such as the mythologist John David Ebert, have explored metaphysical and mythological analysis of comic books in Tiny Humans, Giant Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels.
Why do you think there has been such a sudden influx in mystical themes dealing with consciousness altering substances in art? What are your thoughts on the rising popularity of global shamanic culture?
JK: Well, as a historian of various metaphysical currents in American history, and particularly in the counterculture, I can tell you that none of these enthusiasms are really new. They were all robustly present in the 1960s and 70s. What is new, perhaps, is a certain sophistication or “turning of the wheel,” to use a Buddhist phrase (no doubt inappropriately). I also think that we are seeing a renewed influx in such practices and interests because of the deadening effect of scientific materialism and secular culture. It is my own view that human beings are, by nature, spiritual beings. They are not just meat puppets. This spiritual aspect of human nature is not being addressed adequately in the culture, if at all. Indeed, it is being aggressively denied. So people give up on elite public culture and go to popular culture, to comics and graphic novels, to film and to the psychedelic sacraments. Where else are they supposed to go?
The idea of synchronicity is something that is explored in two of your own books Authors of the Impossible and Mutants and Mystics. Could you talk about how synchronicity relates to altered states?
Synchronicity was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in deep conversation with Wolfgang Pauli, the great quantum theorist. A synchronicity signals a moment when an event in the physical environment corresponds eerily well to an event in the psyche, as if the two were connected or expressions of some deeper One World, which is what Jung and Pauli thought. They called this deeper substratum the unus mundus, literally the One World. Altered states of consciousness and energy, of course, are also often defined by a profound sense that everything is connected, that the mental and material worlds are the same world, that there is a deeper or occult reality behind, within or below this apparent one, that what you see is NOT what you get. In my own work, I describe synchronicities as “nondual signals,” that is, as expressions, often very playful, of a level of reality that is nondual, that is both mental and material at the same time. This level of reality cannot speak to us directly (since it is beyond language), but it can send up signals, as it were. And it does.
Right. Henry Corbin and his biographer, Tom Cheetham, have also explored the imaginal plane in some depth which is always worth re-reading from time to time. Have you heard of the Mandala Effect? What do you think the implications of overlapping multiple timelines are for artists who may become conscious of the multiverse?
No, but I am familiar with the idea from the writings of Philip K. Dick. If an artist or author has such an experience, as Dick had in abundance, the implications are massive for both the worldview and creativity of the artist or author in question. I mean, if creativity is about connecting familiar things in new ways, overlapping time-lines would be one extremely dramatic expression of this. I think precognition and memories of previous lives are somehow expressions of this as well. If my sources mean anything, time isn’t what it seems to be.
It seems that the overall thrust of storytelling influenced by metaphysics is that it is post-ironic, and that it is meta “meta-fiction”, meaning less self conscious and more informed first by altered states, rather than simply playing around with the tropes in the history of literature. I would also say that after a recent influx of post-apocalyptic narratives we are now moving more towards post-dystopia stories, or tales that tend to see the future as dominated and controlled by spirituality, and not the other way around. I think this trend is also a direct reaction to equally brilliant post-modern authors such as Thomas Pynchon and the late David Foster Wallace, at least they are some of the most well known proponents. What do you think?
I hope so. I am very tired of the dystopias and the relativizing irony and objective distance. I am reminded here of one of my intellectual heroes, Aldous Huxley. Every American high school kid reads his dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD. But no one reads his utopian novel, ISLAND, which was his last novel, which was his final spiritual testament, and which he wrote to answer BRAVE NEW WORLD point by point. Why does no one read ISLAND but everyone reads BRAVE NEW WORLD? Why are we only attracted to the dark and destructive? I tease my colleagues in the academy with a “revelation” I received a few years ago. Do you know what that was? I figured out the ultimate criterion of truth in the academy. Do you want to hear it? Here it is: “The truth must be depressing.” If you say something depressing or deconstructive, you are an intellectual. If you say something positive and constructive, you are a dilettante and a dreamer. And God forbid you say anything hopeful or ecstatic. Why is this? Oh, please do what you are doing. Please move us on.
Agree on ISLAND, definitely one of our all time favorites. Rak has done a lot of recent work with the scientist Dr. Juan on using neuroscience to validate and map the experiential charts of inner planes. You also have an interest in this. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
I have a complex relationship to neuroscience and neuroscientists. Conventional neuroscience is ideologically committed to what we call “eliminative physicalism,” basically the philosophical position that there is only matter. That is, they think that we are only tiny dead things bouncing around and forming slightly bigger things, and bigger things, until you get to “us.” They think we are biological computers, basically zombies with computers perched on top. I think that this bizarre position is more a reflection of our present fascination with computer technology and spiritual vacuousness than it is an adequate model of the brain.
But there are other neuroscientists who are breaking with this physicalism and offering other models. I am thinking of the neuroanatomical reflections around the left and right brain hemispheres of writers like Jill Bolte Taylor and Ian McGilchrist. I find their work so helpful for thinking about so many things, including how our culture privileges only left-brain cognitive styles. Still, I have a great deal of faith in neuroscience as a science (as opposed to a materialist interpretation or ideology). I also know that philosophers of mind are moving away from physicalism into the exciting new (really very old) models of panpsychism (very shamanic) and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the cosmos (very mystical).
There is kind of a doom gloom face of the global ecological crisis, which indicates that modern fictional stories simply do not matter. On the other end of the spectrum, Lewis Mehl-Madrona has suggested that everything is a story, and of course Joseph Campbell often suggested that there is a potential to be the heroes of our own narrative.
Do you believe that utilizing sacred narrative in fiction can be used as a means of combating what you call what Graham Hancock calls frankenstein civilization and the endless consumerism of predatory capitalism therein? Do you think fiction still has the potential to be subversive in that sense of de-conditioning people from the prominent mainstream view of our materialistic account of history? Or is it all a bunch of illusion and hyped up nonsense?
Our environmental crisis is partly (not completely) a function of some pretty bad stories, like materialism again. I mean, if we are only matter, why does anything really matter? Why not use up the environment? We need a new worldview, which will never stick without a new story. We desperately need new positive stories of the human spirit that can embrace all we know about the cosmos through the sciences without adopting conventional science’s anti-spiritual interpretations. This is really what MUTANTS AND MYSTICS was all about—an emerging mythology, a meta-mythology, a Super Story.
Could you tell me about the forthcoming documentary Supernature coming out? When will it be released? How did that all get started?
My friend Scott Jones is directing the film. It is an adaptation and crystallization of my history of the human potential movement, ESALEN: AMERICA AND THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION. It began with Scott’s enthusiasm for my work and the way it addressed his own existential dead-ends. “Supernature” is neither the traditional supernatural nor, certainly, the scientific nothing. Supernature is meant to signal a kind of evolutionary spirituality that sees the human as a cosmic expression of a living conscious universe, a human nature endowed with extraordinary capacities that have yet to find any adequate cultural expression. We intend this film to be one such cultural expression, as are your art and storytelling.
We are still working on the film as we try to find resources to get the technical work done.
Like most readers, fellow Disinformation contributor Jeremy J. Johnson and I are both big fans of author Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Mutants & Mystics and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred).
We caught up with him recently to discuss Philip K. Dick’s precognition abilities, global shamanic culture, synchronicity, and a new documentary Supernature that he has in the works.
JJ/BR: Dr. Kripal, it is an honor to speak with you. Graham Hancock, Rak Razam, Jeremy D. Johnson and I have recently come up with the concept of entheodelic storytelling. It signifies the archaic revival narrative and gives definition to a new movement of art that is influenced by the usual subjects; altered states, the evolution of consciousness, entheogens, occultism, paranormal phenomena, shamanism, and metaphysics. This also seems to be entangled with what our friend Rak has called the “global shamanic resurgence.”
In recent mainstream media we have seen a more positive view of entheogens as psychedelic medicines slowly infiltrate the mainstream. In Aronofsky’s blockbuster Noah ayahuasca acts as a sacred tea that enables prophetic visions. In The Fountain, the main character Tom engages in meditation and tai-chi in addition to maintaining a healthy psilocybin regimen. In Hannibal, everyone’s favorite evil doctor of psychology administers psilocybin on national television in order to help a patient deal with blocked psychological trauma.
Psychedelic shamanism is obviously a prominent theme in Grant Morrison’s 90’s masterpiece The Invisibles, and next to Patrick Meaney’s equally excellent book Our Sentence is Up, your analysis in Mutants and Mystics is the best analysis I’ve seen on Morrison’s ouvre.
In addition to this, other authors such as the mythologist John David Ebert, have explored metaphysical and mythological analysis of comic books in Tiny Humans, Giant Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels.
Why do you think there has been such a sudden influx in mystical themes dealing with consciousness altering substances in art? What are your thoughts on the rising popularity of global shamanic culture?
JK: Well, as a historian of various metaphysical currents in American history, and particularly in the counterculture, I can tell you that none of these enthusiasms are really new. They were all robustly present in the 1960s and 70s. What is new, perhaps, is a certain sophistication or “turning of the wheel,” to use a Buddhist phrase (no doubt inappropriately). I also think that we are seeing a renewed influx in such practices and interests because of the deadening effect of scientific materialism and secular culture. It is my own view that human beings are, by nature, spiritual beings. They are not just meat puppets. This spiritual aspect of human nature is not being addressed adequately in the culture, if at all. Indeed, it is being aggressively denied. So people give up on elite public culture and go to popular culture, to comics and graphic novels, to film and to the psychedelic sacraments. Where else are they supposed to go?
The idea of synchronicity is something that is explored in two of your own books Authors of the Impossible and Mutants and Mystics. Could you talk about how synchronicity relates to altered states?
Synchronicity was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in deep conversation with Wolfgang Pauli, the great quantum theorist. A synchronicity signals a moment when an event in the physical environment corresponds eerily well to an event in the psyche, as if the two were connected or expressions of some deeper One World, which is what Jung and Pauli thought. They called this deeper substratum the unus mundus, literally the One World. Altered states of consciousness and energy, of course, are also often defined by a profound sense that everything is connected, that the mental and material worlds are the same world, that there is a deeper or occult reality behind, within or below this apparent one, that what you see is NOT what you get. In my own work, I describe synchronicities as “nondual signals,” that is, as expressions, often very playful, of a level of reality that is nondual, that is both mental and material at the same time. This level of reality cannot speak to us directly (since it is beyond language), but it can send up signals, as it were. And it does.
Right. Henry Corbin and his biographer, Tom Cheetham, have also explored the imaginal plane in some depth which is always worth re-reading from time to time. Have you heard of the Mandala Effect? What do you think the implications of overlapping multiple timelines are for artists who may become conscious of the multiverse?
No, but I am familiar with the idea from the writings of Philip K. Dick. If an artist or author has such an experience, as Dick had in abundance, the implications are massive for both the worldview and creativity of the artist or author in question. I mean, if creativity is about connecting familiar things in new ways, overlapping time-lines would be one extremely dramatic expression of this. I think precognition and memories of previous lives are somehow expressions of this as well. If my sources mean anything, time isn’t what it seems to be.
It seems that the overall thrust of storytelling influenced by metaphysics is that it is post-ironic, and that it is meta “meta-fiction”, meaning less self conscious and more informed first by altered states, rather than simply playing around with the tropes in the history of literature. I would also say that after a recent influx of post-apocalyptic narratives we are now moving more towards post-dystopia stories, or tales that tend to see the future as dominated and controlled by spirituality, and not the other way around. I think this trend is also a direct reaction to equally brilliant post-modern authors such as Thomas Pynchon and the late David Foster Wallace, at least they are some of the most well known proponents. What do you think?
I hope so. I am very tired of the dystopias and the relativizing irony and objective distance. I am reminded here of one of my intellectual heroes, Aldous Huxley. Every American high school kid reads his dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD. But no one reads his utopian novel, ISLAND, which was his last novel, which was his final spiritual testament, and which he wrote to answer BRAVE NEW WORLD point by point. Why does no one read ISLAND but everyone reads BRAVE NEW WORLD? Why are we only attracted to the dark and destructive? I tease my colleagues in the academy with a “revelation” I received a few years ago. Do you know what that was? I figured out the ultimate criterion of truth in the academy. Do you want to hear it? Here it is: “The truth must be depressing.” If you say something depressing or deconstructive, you are an intellectual. If you say something positive and constructive, you are a dilettante and a dreamer. And God forbid you say anything hopeful or ecstatic. Why is this? Oh, please do what you are doing. Please move us on.
Agree on ISLAND, definitely one of our all time favorites. Rak has done a lot of recent work with the scientist Dr. Juan on using neuroscience to validate and map the experiential charts of inner planes. You also have an interest in this. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
I have a complex relationship to neuroscience and neuroscientists. Conventional neuroscience is ideologically committed to what we call “eliminative physicalism,” basically the philosophical position that there is only matter. That is, they think that we are only tiny dead things bouncing around and forming slightly bigger things, and bigger things, until you get to “us.” They think we are biological computers, basically zombies with computers perched on top. I think that this bizarre position is more a reflection of our present fascination with computer technology and spiritual vacuousness than it is an adequate model of the brain.
But there are other neuroscientists who are breaking with this physicalism and offering other models. I am thinking of the neuroanatomical reflections around the left and right brain hemispheres of writers like Jill Bolte Taylor and Ian McGilchrist. I find their work so helpful for thinking about so many things, including how our culture privileges only left-brain cognitive styles. Still, I have a great deal of faith in neuroscience as a science (as opposed to a materialist interpretation or ideology). I also know that philosophers of mind are moving away from physicalism into the exciting new (really very old) models of panpsychism (very shamanic) and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the cosmos (very mystical).
There is kind of a doom gloom face of the global ecological crisis, which indicates that modern fictional stories simply do not matter. On the other end of the spectrum, Lewis Mehl-Madrona has suggested that everything is a story, and of course Joseph Campbell often suggested that there is a potential to be the heroes of our own narrative.
Do you believe that utilizing sacred narrative in fiction can be used as a means of combating what you call what Graham Hancock calls frankenstein civilization and the endless consumerism of predatory capitalism therein? Do you think fiction still has the potential to be subversive in that sense of de-conditioning people from the prominent mainstream view of our materialistic account of history? Or is it all a bunch of illusion and hyped up nonsense?
Our environmental crisis is partly (not completely) a function of some pretty bad stories, like materialism again. I mean, if we are only matter, why does anything really matter? Why not use up the environment? We need a new worldview, which will never stick without a new story. We desperately need new positive stories of the human spirit that can embrace all we know about the cosmos through the sciences without adopting conventional science’s anti-spiritual interpretations. This is really what MUTANTS AND MYSTICS was all about—an emerging mythology, a meta-mythology, a Super Story.
Could you tell me about the forthcoming documentary Supernature coming out? When will it be released? How did that all get started?
My friend Scott Jones is directing the film. It is an adaptation and crystallization of my history of the human potential movement, ESALEN: AMERICA AND THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION. It began with Scott’s enthusiasm for my work and the way it addressed his own existential dead-ends. “Supernature” is neither the traditional supernatural nor, certainly, the scientific nothing. Supernature is meant to signal a kind of evolutionary spirituality that sees the human as a cosmic expression of a living conscious universe, a human nature endowed with extraordinary capacities that have yet to find any adequate cultural expression. We intend this film to be one such cultural expression, as are your art and storytelling.
We are still working on the film as we try to find resources to get the technical work done.
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