psychology

An Innocent Little Mistake!

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2007 The Card Trick by Jake Baddeley

As I reflect on my past life, the passing years prompt me to recall memories, and I see how I wish to revisit specific moments to alter them or improve them. I have led an adventurous life (as you may recall from my series of posts about my memories), and I acknowledge that I have made numerous mistakes, which I deeply regret. However, with guidance from great thinkers, I have learned to view these mistakes from a different perspective: The Value of Experience!

It is a prevalent issue for people around the world to avoid making mistakes. I, myself, am one of those who strive for perfection, and I recognise that it is misguided!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says, “Geschlagener Quark macht breit, nicht fest!” (Beaten curd becomes broad, not strong!)

“If we look at the problems raised by Aristotle, we are astonished at his gift of observation. What incredible eyes the Greeks had for many things! Only they committed the mistake of being overhasty, of passing straightway from the phenomenon to the explanation of it, and thereby produced specific theories that are pretty inadequate. But this is the mistake of all time, and is still made in our own day.”

From Maxims & Reflections, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Science, 559

Additionally, Carl Gustav Jung reminds us that we can make mistakes and learn from them.

Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes. For this reason, science is never made by one man but by many. The individual merely offers their contribution, and in this sense, I dare to speak only of my way of seeing things.
~Carl Jung, Modern man in Search of a Soul, p.84.

From carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/

Plato proposed that absolute knowledge can be gained through acquaintance, meaning through intellectual insight into the otherworldly Forms. Jung shared a similar notion regarding acquaintance with the archetypes of the “unus mundus” (one world), representing the primordial, unified reality from which all things originate. Nevertheless, in contrast to Plato, Jung asserted that archetypes cannot be perceived directly. Instead, we can comprehend their psychic significance, gaining at least a hint of absolute knowledge.

I believe we can make mistakes, but after each one, we should take a step back and carefully examine how and where it happened, then try to approach the experience more thoughtfully. Experience teaches us more than thousands of books ever could!

Jung inspired individuals to engage with the world and savour life, rather than rely solely on theoretical knowledge from books. He regarded the unconscious mind as a treasure trove of experiences accessible through reflection and symbolic language. Ultimately, Jung’s work emphasises that while books and knowledge are valuable, they shouldn’t overshadow the importance of direct experience and self-reflection. Genuine growth and understanding flourish when we engage with our surroundings and explore our inner lives.

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.
~ C.G. Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 179.

Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding.
~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 564

Thank you for reading; have a lovely holiday! 🙏🤗🌹💕

My (Carl Jung’s) Most Difficult Experiment [P. 1]

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Regarding foresight, few individuals possess this ability, or perhaps it exists in everyone, yet most fail to recognise it. I knew some of my relatives, and one of my aunts had mastered it. She had seen ghosts in her large, old house, conversed with them, and could perceive events (in dreams) before they occurred. My brother Al also possessed such a gift, particularly in the final years of his life when he underwent surgery on his head to remove a tumour. I do not know if it is a gift, a curse, or a blessing; nonetheless, I would treasure that.

I, myself, have a small example: I had a dream in which one of my customers, an elderly woman I had driven to the doctor for many years but could no longer assist because she needed special transport, urgently called me to ask if I could pick her up and take her to her doctor. I wondered why I had dreamt of her after all this time. Two days after my dream, while driving a guest from her neighbourhood, she told me she recognised me as the person who had driven her friend from next door for a long time and asked if I knew she had passed away. I said no and asked when it had happened. She replied it was the night before last, the same night I had dreamt of her!

Dream analysis stands or falls with [the hypothesis of the unconscious]. Without it, the dream appears to be merely a freak of nature, a meaningless conglomerate of memory fragments left over from the day’s happenings.
~Carl Jung
“Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.2, Psychology Press

Now, let us read about one of the great minds in this field: Carl Gustav Jung. He was among the most sensitive and intuitive visionaries of all time. Here, he talks about his dreams, odd and extraordinary dreams. Once, he was even afraid that he had schizophrenia.

<Although it is from The Red Book, which everyone might have or may have even read, I believe many still do not notice the fineness in the “Introduction” at the beginning of the book, as I find it fascinating.>

From Carl Jung’s “The Red Book, Liber Novus: A Reader’s Edition,” by Sonu Shamdasani. (Introduction)

In 1912, Jung had some significant dreams that he did not understand. He gave particular importance to two of these, which, as he felt, showed the limitations of Freud’s conceptions of dreams. The first follows:

I was in a southern town, on a rising street with narrow half-landings. It was twelve o’clock midday–bright sunshine. An old Austrian customs guard or someone similar passes by me, lost in thought. Someone says, “That is one who cannot die. He died already 30 – 40 years ago but has not yet managed to decompose.”

I was very surprised. Here, a striking figure came, a knight of powerful build clad in yellowish armour. He looks solid and inscrutable, and nothing impresses him. On his back, he carries a red Maltese cross. He has continued to exist since the 12th century, and he takes the same route daily between 12 and 1 o’clock midday. No one marvelled at these two apparitions, but I was extremely surprised.

I hold back my interpretive skills. As regards the old Austrian, Freud occurred to me; as regards the knight, I myself.

Inside, a voice calls, “It is all empty and disgusting.” I must bear it. (Black Book 2, pp. 25-26)

Jung found this dream oppressive and bewildering, and Freud was unable to interpret it.

(In 1925, he gave the following interpretation to this dream: “The meaning of the dream lies in the principle of the ancestral figure: not the Austrian officer – obviously he stood for the Freudian theory – but the other, the Crusader, is an archetypal figure, a Christian symbol living for the twelfth century, a symbol that does not really live today, but on the other hand in not wholly dead either. It comes out of the time of Meister Eckhart, the time of the culture of the Knights, when many ideas blossomed, only to be killed again, but they are coming to life again now. However, when I had this dream, I did not know this interpretation” (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42).

Around half a year later, Jung had another dream:

I dreamt at that time (it was shortly after Christmas 1912) that I was sitting with my children in a marvellous and richly furnished castle apartment – an open columned hall – we were sitting at a round table, whose top was a marvellous dark green stone. Suddenly, a gull or a dove flew in and sprang lightly onto the table. I admonished the children to be quiet so they would not scare away the beautiful white bird. Suddenly, this bird turned into a child of eight years, a small blond child, and ran around playing with my children in the marvellous columned colonnades. Then, the child suddenly turned into the gull or dove. She said the following to me: “Only in the first hour of the night can I become human while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.” With these words, the bird flew away, and I awoke. (Black Book 2, pp. 17-18)

In Black Book 2, Jung noted that it was this dream that made him decide to embark on a relationship with a woman he had met three years earlier (Toni Wolff, Ibid., p. 17). In 1925, he remarked that this dream “was the beginning of a conviction that the unconscious did not consist of inert material only, but that there was something living down there (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42). He added that he thought of the story of the Tabula Smaragdina (emerald tablet), the twelve apostles, the signs of the Zodiac, and so on, but that he “could make nothing out of the dream except that there was a tremendous animation of the unconscious. I knew no technique for getting to the bottom of this activity; all I could do was just wait, keep on living, and watch the fantasies.”

I include this footnote to highlight his insatiable greed and relentless pursuit to decipher the meaning behind his dream and how he developed the interpretation.

Ibid., pp. 40-41. E. A. Benner noted Jung’s comments on this dream: “At first, he thought ‘twelve dead men’ referred to the twelve days before Christmas, for that is the dark time of the year, when traditionally witches are about. To say ‘before Christmas’ is to say before the sun lives again, for Christmas day is at the turning point of the year when the sun’s birth was celebrated in the Mithraic religion… Only much later did he relate the dream to Hermes and the twelve doves” (Meeting with Jung: Conversations recorded by E.A. Brenner during the years 1946-1961 [London: Anchor Press,1982; Zürich, Daimon Verlag, 1985], p. 93). In 1951, in “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore”, Jung presented some material from Liber Novus (describing them all as part of a dream series) in an anonymous form (“case Z.”), tracing the transformations of the anima. He noted that this dream “shows the anima as a elflike, i.e., only partially human. She can just as well be a bird, which means that she may belong wholly to nature and can vanish (i.e., become unconscious) from the human sphere (i.e., consciousness)” (CW9, I, § 371). See also Memories, pp. 195-96.

These dreams led him to analyse his childhood memories, but this did not resolve anything. He realised that he needed to recover the emotional tone of childhood. He recalled that as a child, he used to like to build houses and other structures, and he took this up again.

While he was engaged in this self-analytic activity, he continued to develop his theoretical work. At the Munich Psycho-Analytical Congress in September 1913, he spoke on psychological types. He argued that there were two basic movements of the libido: extraversion, in which the subject’s interest was oriented towards the outer world, and introversion, in which the subject’s interest was directed inward. Following from this, he posited two types of people, characterised by the predominance of one of these tendencies. The psychologies of Freud and Adler were examples of the fact that psychologies often took what was true of their type as generally valid. Hence, what was required was a psychology that did justice to both of these types (“On the question of psychological types,” CW 6).

Although this captivating story continues, I will share it in parts to facilitate understanding and enjoyment. Thank you for taking the time to read!

PS: In case someone interested, I will try to write about my new condition in a separate post. 🙏💖

A Deeper Look into Our Sufferings Reflection!

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Next week, I have my surgery appointment, and before I go under the surgeon’s knife, as the Germans say, I wanted to say “a short” goodbye. Since I know most of you are doing very well, as I receive your posts every day, every hour, you can send your positive thoughts towards my surgical table in between!

There are no words to describe the suffering and pain I endured, as I understand that one must experience it oneself to truly grasp its affliction. I hope that none of you experience that!
What I can say with certainty is that I have gained invaluable insights. I learned about my weaknesses and the extent of my power. I have discovered how low one can go and where the steps are to climb up.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasure of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
~Joseph Campbell

I learned about my deep depression, where tiny fairies would converse with me. I’ve learned to remain resilient despite all challenges, echoing Ernest Hemingway’s words: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Additionally, one of his characters, Harry Morgan, states in “To Have and Have Not”: “A man alone ain’t got no chance,” yet he persistently strives to do his best! Of course, I had support from my adorable wife, son, and a few friends. Nevertheless, during my most challenging times, it was ultimately up to me to endure that pain alone. I’m very stubborn about seeking help!

As I conclude my post, I would like to acknowledge my mentor, Dr. Jung, and his perspective on suffering:

via: Carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog With heartfelt thanks to my friend and teacher, Lewis Lafontaine.

Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961

Dear Herr N., 28 April 1955

Your ideas bring you up against a general cultural problem, which is infinitely complicated.

What is true in one place is untrue in another.

“Suffering is the swiftest steed that bears you to perfection,” and the contrary is also true.

“Breaking in” can be discipline, and this is needed for the emotional chaos of man, though at the same time it can kill the living spirit, as we have seen only too often.

In my opinion, there is no magical word that could finally unravel this whole complex of questions; nor is there any method of thinking or living or acting which would eliminate suffering and unhappiness.

If a man’s life consists half of happiness and half of unhappiness, this is probably the optimum that can be reached, and it remains forever an unresolved question whether suffering is educative or demoralising.

In any case, it would be wrong to give oneself up to relativism and indifferentism.

Whatever can be bettered in a given place at a given time should certainly be done, for it would be sheer folly to do otherwise.

Man’s fate has always swung between day and night.

There is nothing we can do to change this.

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 248.

I hope everyone enjoys a tranquil and relaxing time; take care and stay healthy. 🙏💖🌹

The Unconscious Mind!

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Sorry, it’s me again! I intended to share a brief message on Facebook, and I thought, why not just do it on my site, too? So here it is: We must look deeply around us and think twice. I send you all immense gratitude and wish you a lovely weekend.😁🤗💖🙏🦋🌹

Title image; Art by Andrew Ferez

From Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology,

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology and Craig Nelson

I must recall at this point a serious misunderstanding to which my readers often succumb, and doctors most commonly.
They invariably assume, for reasons unknown, that I never write about anything except my method of treatment.
This is far from being the case. I write about psychology.
I must, therefore, expressly emphasize that my method of treatment does not consist in causing my patients to indulge in strange fantasies for
the purpose of changing their personality and other nonsense of that kind.
I merely put it on record that there are certain cases where such a development occurs, not because I force anyone to it, but because it springs from inner necessity.
For many of my patients, these things are and must remain double Dutch.
Indeed, even if it were possible for them to tread this path, it
would be a disastrously wrong turning, and I would be the first to hold them back.
The way of the transcendent function is an individual destiny.
But on no account should one imagine that this way is equivalent to the life of a psychic anchorite, to alienation from the world.
Quite the contrary, for such a way is possible and profitable only when the specific worldly tasks which these individuals set themselves are carried out in reality.
Fantasies are no substitute for living; they are fruits of the spirit which fall to him who pays his tribute to life.

By Craig Nelson


The shirker experiences nothing but his own morbid fear, and it yields him no meaning.
Nor will this way ever be known to the man who has found his way back to Mother Church.
There is no doubt that the mysterium magnum is hidden in her forms, and in these, he can live his life sensibly.
Finally, the normal man will never be burdened, either, with this knowledge, for he is everlastingly content with the little that lies within his reach.
Wherefore I entreat my reader to understand that I write about things which actually happen and am not propounding methods of treatment.
~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 223-224

The Intoxication of Mythology

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Mythology (derived from the Greek word ‘mythos’, meaning ‘story’, and ‘logos’, meaning ‘word’) studies a culture’s sacred narratives or fables, known as myths. These stories explore various aspects of the human condition: good and evil, suffering, the origins of life, place names, cultural values, and beliefs regarding life, death, and deities. Myths reflect a culture’s values and beliefs. Mythology may also concentrate on specific collections of myths, whereas history examines significant past events and real individuals. Central characters in myths include gods, demigods, and supernatural beings. The earliest myths date back over 2,700 years, particularly in the works of the Greek poets Homer and Hesiod. Scholar Joseph Campbell defines four essential functions of myth: metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical.

“The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centres dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale—as the flavour of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. Because the symbols of mythology are not manufactured, they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bear within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.”
-Joseph Campbell / From The Hero With A Thousand Faces

However, we can trace back to the ancient Assyrians, where we discover the epic of Gilgamesh (a form of the name derived from the earlier Sumerian form) and Enkidu. Honestly, whatever I know or feel passionate about that subject, I owe it to Al, my brother, who opened the mysterious gate for me to this fascinating world. We cannot overlook the allure of these stories, which not only expand our imagination but also impart a great deal of wisdom through their narratives. Thus, as Dr Jung emphasises here, possessing a myth is of considerable significance. There may even be some truth hidden within it; who knows?

(Parenthesis open) I have tried to write my usual “two posts,” though it has shown me that I do not quite fit as I usually do! I must confess that she, Resa, spurred me to work, for which I am very grateful. I also thank all my friends who attempted to support me, even if it sometimes sounded like Marie Antoinette’s supposedly quoted remark to the starving people of France: “If there is no bread, let them eat brioche!” Although there is no evidence that she actually said this. Also, I must rest. Nevertheless, I thank you all. (Parenthesis closed)!

Painting (Oil) Original Artwork by Greg Known The Abducted Europe

I have selected an intriguing excerpt from the Red Book, Liber Novus, Introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, Reader’s Edition, to share. It illustrates the significance and necessity of having a myth for every individual. I have created a summary to keep it concise!

In 1908, Jung bought land by Lake Zürich in Küsnacht and built a house where he lived for life. In 1909, he resigned from Burghölzli to focus on his practice and research. His retirement coincided with a shift in interests toward methodology, folklore, and religion, leading to a vast private library. This research culminated in “Transformations and Symbols of the Libido,” published in two parts in 1911 and 1912, marking a return to his intellectual and cultural roots. He found this mythological work thrilling; in 1925, he reflected, “It seems to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analysing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me anamnesis. (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 24). The late nineteenth century witnessed a surge in comparative religion and ethnopsychology scholarship, with primary texts being translated and examined, such as Max Müller’s “Sacred Books of the East,” which Jung owned, offering a global relativization of Christianity worldwide.

In Translations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two types of thinking: directed and fantasy thinking. The former is verbal and logical, exemplified by science, while the latter is passive, associative, and imagistic, represented by mythology. Jung argued that the ancients lacked directed thinking, a modern development. Fantasy thinking occurs when directed thinking ceases. This work extensively studies fantasy thinking and the mythological themes present in contemporary dreams and fantasies. Jung linked the prehistoric, primitive, and child, suggesting that understanding adult fantasy thinking illuminates the thoughts of children, savages, and prehistoric people. (Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious, CW B, s36. His 1952 revision clarifies this [Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, s29]. In this work, Jung synthesized 19th-century theories on memory, heredity, and the unconscious, proposing a phylogenetic layer of mythological images present in everyone. He viewed myths as symbols of libido, reflecting its movements, and used anthropology’s comparative method to analyze a wide range of myths, calling this “amplification.” He argued that typical myths correspond to ethnopsychological developments of complexes. Following Jacob Burckhardt, he referred to these as “primordial images” (Urbilder). One key myth, that of the hero, represents an individual’s journey to independence from the mother, with the incest motif symbolizing a desire to return to the mother for rebirth. Jung eventually hailed this discovery as the collective unconscious, though the term emerged later.

Myth!

The Symbologist “The Red Book_ Liber Novus” By Kathryn Harrison (via Carl Jung Depth Psychology)

In a series of articles from 1912, Jung’s friend and colleague Alphonse Maeder argued that dreams had a function other than that of wish fulfilment, which was a balancing or compensatory function. Dreams were attempts to solve the individual’s moral conflicts. As such, they did not merely point to the past but also prepared the way for the future. Maeder was developing Flournoy‘s views of the subconscious creative imagination. Jung was working along similar lines and adopted Maeder’s positions. For Jung and Maeder, this alteration of the conception of the dream brought with it an alteration of all other phenomena associated with the unconscious.

In his preface to the 1952 revision of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung wrote that the work was written in 1911 when he was thirty-six: “The time is a critical one, for it makes the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs (CW 5, p. xxvi). He added that he was conscious of the loss of his collaboration with Freud and was indebted to the support of his wife. After completing the work, he realised the significance of what it meant to live without a myth. One without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society (Ibid. p. xxix).

As he further describes it:

   “I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities, which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust … So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as a task of tasks –for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?” (Ibid.)

The study of myth had revealed to Jung his mythlessness. He then undertook to get to know his myth, his “personal equation”. (Cf. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 25) Thus, we see that Jung’s self-experimentation was, in part, a direct response to theoretical questions raised by his research, which culminated in Transformation and Symbols of the Libido.

PS: I will add a follow-up to this article in the future. 🙏💖

On the Following Night, However, I Had a Vision.

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Hi everybody. Since Wednesday, our furnace has broken down, and my plans have been disrupted! I wanted to write some posts, but my brain is almost frozen! That’s why I took an old post from my other site (I really don’t know who created it; I didn’t!), which I also took from my valued friend, Lewis Lafontaine and his blog.🙏

So, here is an extraordinary vision from Carl Jung’s remarkable book, The Red Book. I hope you will enjoy it, and I wish you all a thrilled New Year.

Title image: Angel by Samuel Bak

Sir Galahad, source: George Frederic Watts

As he came around the following night, however, I had a vision: I was with a youth in the high mountains. It was before daybreak, and the Eastern sky was already light.

Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. We knew that our mortal enemy was coming.

We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him. Then, we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead.

He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding.

As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time, and he fell slain. Thereupon, I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down.

But after this, I went through a torment unto death, and I felt certain that I must kill myself if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero.

Then the spirit of the depths came to me and spoke these words:

“The highest truth is one and the· same with the absurd.” This statement saved me, and like rain after a long, hot spell, it swept away everything in me which was too highly tensed.

From The Red Book, via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Then I had a second vision: I saw a merry garden clad in white silk, with forms walked, all covered in coloured light, some reddish, the others blueish and greenish.

I know; I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt, I have become a newborn.

We also live in our dreams; we do not live only by day. Sometimes, we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. On that night, my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin if you want to overcome him.

But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.

If God grows old, he becomes a shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, and the brightest day becomes the darkest night. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity, and absurdity requires meaning.

Day does not exist through itself; night does not exist through itself.

The reality that exists through itself is day and night.

So, the reality is meaning and absurdity.

Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day, and morning turns into day.

So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity is only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning.

Oh, the German hero, Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous!

He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride.

I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning.

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God nailed to the wood like a chicken marten.

The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves.

But their life force bade them go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.

What does Siegfried mean for the Germans! What does it tell us that the Germans suffer Siegfried’s death!

That is why I almost preferred to kill myself in order to spare him. But I wanted to go on living with a new God.

After death on the cross, Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon.

The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from God, the more surely you fall into his hand.

The rain is the great stream of tears that will come over the people; the tearful flood of released tension after the constriction of death had encumbered the people with horrific force.

It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth.

The rain is the fructifying of the earth; it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 241-242

Let’s Expand the Mind Once (or) More!

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Hello, friends!
As I mentioned in my last post two weeks ago, I decided to take a break from sharing new posts to alleviate some pressure on myself. Unfortunately, my brief explanation about this decision led to misunderstandings among many of you, while a few friends grasped my point. So, to make it clear, I am not on holiday; I am working more than usual because my boss is still in the hospital. I appreciate your understanding!

Anyway, as you can see, I have a new post yet, though not something heavy. It’s light and deep, for sure! Simply put, as I’ve been reflecting on my experiences with WordPress over the past couple of years, I’ve realized that artists need inspiration to create art. However, that inspiration isn’t always readily available. This platform provides a wonderful opportunity for us to share our thoughts and feelings naturally rather than treating it like a mandatory series production we must complete out of obligation. Consequently, I have decided to give myself time and share my thoughts when I believe they are valuable. 🤗

I’m still experiencing a tough time because of my “Standby” position (Imagine waking up each day unsure if you can work from home or need to jump out and drive around!). I find it hard to focus on anything that could calm my restless mind, and I feel like losing my creative spark. I started working on the Egypt post, but it didn’t satisfy me, so I decided to share an instructive story and some charming videos about a great and knowledgeable thinker, Alan Watts.
I hope you will enjoy it, and I can take another break!!

Let’s examine our lives and our existence. It is not so difficult; we just need to loosen the tension in every muscle in our body, especially our brains, and surf around.

Alan Watts played a significant role in popularizing Zen Buddhism in the West, paving the way for traditional teachers like Soto priest Suzuki Roshi. However, Watts did not consider himself a Zen Buddhist. In a talk animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, he clarifies, “I am not a Zen Buddhist; I am not advocating Zen Buddhism or trying to convert anyone. I have nothing to sell.” He identifies himself simply as “an entertainer.” Is he joking?

Watts was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945 and served until 1950. He was a complex character—a strict anti-dogmatist who found rigid doctrine irritating at best and profoundly oppressive and dehumanizing at worst.

Watts wasn’t a strict Zen priest but learned a lot from Japanese Buddhist concepts, which he explains in the short section of the video above. He also found similar insights about the interconnectedness of all things in Daoism. Above, you’ll see a short animation by Eddie Rosas from The Simpsons, where Watts illustrates “Daoism in perfection” through a simple parable.

In this short animated parable by Steve Agnos below, he states, “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity.” However, instead of illustrating a lesson about unity, he suggests that nature and reality are ultimately beyond our understanding. He argues that “it is really impossible to determine whether anything that occurs within it is good or bad.” Therefore, the most reasonable approach seems to avoid judging in either direction.

And how it can be easy to open our minds, honestly, to ourselves and use our brain to think over and not take the easy way to judge:

Alan Watts critiques the human tendency to make hasty judgments, as seen in this mastery “talk-animated” below by Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis of Westminster Arts & Film London. He explores personal identity and the ego’s separation from reality, emphasizing the theme of interconnectedness. Watts asserts it is “impossible to cut ourselves off from the social and natural environments; we are that.” To discover this truth, he encourages us to become “deep listeners” and to let go of embarrassment, shyness, and anxiety.

I am not selling anything, either! 😅 (unfortunately!!?), but I send my best wishes to you all. Have a lovely time and till then.🙏💖🌹

Source: OenCulture

The Mystery Of “Mana Personality” Part Nine

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition “Gesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Today, I share the final part of the translation of Mana-Personality. It was full of joy for me to learn more and even better from his works because I had to read them word by word to achieve an understandable translation. I hope it was the same for you.

We often wonder why there are so many injustices, differences, and failures in human progress (decline?). Is God flawed? Dr. Jung suggests that God must be imperfect; otherwise, we cannot reach Him.

In the figure of the divine hero, God himself wrestles with his own imperfect, suffering, living creation; he even takes its suffering condition upon himself and, by this sacrificial act, accomplishes the opus magnum of salvation and victory over death.

Credit Text and Image Carl Jung Depth Psychology 🙏

He, instead, talks about the importance of the Self and Individuality.

He personally also admits that his explanation is sensitive to experiences that some may not have practised. He emphasizes:

I am deeply aware that in this work, I have not made any ordinary demands on the understanding of my reader. I have made every effort to smooth the path to understanding. Still, I have not been able to remove one great difficulty, namely the fact that the experiences underlying my explanations are probably unknown to most people and, therefore, strange...

Still, he tries to enlighten us on the matter based on his experiences.

Image credit Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Previous

Now, let’s move on to the final chords:

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P9)

The conception of God as an autonomous, psychological content makes God a moral problem – and that is, admittedly, very uncomfortable. But if this problem does not exist, then God is not real either because he does not intervene in our lives anywhere. Then, he is a historical conceptual bogeyman or a philosophical sentimentality.

If we leave the idea of ​​a “divine” out of the equation and speak only of autonomous contents, we may remain intellectually and empirically correct, but we thereby conceal a note that psychologically cannot be missed. If we use the idea of ​​a “divine”, we are thereby aptly expressing the peculiar way in which we experience the effects of autonomous content. We can also use the term “demonic” as long as we do not imply that we have reserved a concrete God somewhere who completely corresponds to our wishes and ideas. However, our intellectual sleight of hand tricks do not help us to create a being according to our wishes in reality, just as the world does not adapt to our expectations. If we, therefore, attribute the effects of autonomous contents with the attribute “divine”, we thereby acknowledge their relative superiority. And this superior is the power that has forced a man of all ages to think of the most unthinkable things and to inflict the greatest suffering on himself in order to do justice to those effects. This power is as real as hunger and fear of death.

The Self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inside and outside. This formulation may not be a lousy fit insofar as the Self has the character of something that is a result, an achieved goal, something that has only gradually come about and has become possible through much effort. Thus, the Self is also the goal of life, for it is the complete expression of the combination of destinies that we call the individual, and not just of the individual human being, but of a whole group in which one completes the other to form the complete picture.

With the sensation of the Self as something irrational, indefinable, to which the ego is not opposed and not subject, but rather attached and around which it rotates, as the earth rotates around the sun, the goal of individuation is achieved. I use the word “sensation” to describe the perceptual character of the relationship between “I” and Self. There is nothing recognizable in this respect because we are unable to say anything about the contents of the Self. The “I” is the only content of the Self that we know. The individualized “I” perceives itself as the object of an unknown and superior subject. It seems to me that the psychological statement reaches its extreme end here because the idea of ​​a Self is in and of itself a transcendent postulate that can be justified psychologically but cannot be proven scientifically. The step beyond science is an absolute requirement of the psychological development described here because, without this postulate, I could not adequately formulate the empirically occurring psychological processes. The Self, therefore, claims at least the value of a hypothesis corresponding to that of the atomic structure. And – should we still be enclosed in an image here – then it is something overwhelmingly alive, the interpretation of which is beyond my capabilities. I do not doubt that it is an image, but one in which we are still contained.

Youri Ivanov _ DIGITAL GRAPHIC ART _ SD World 141

I am deeply aware that in this work, I have not made any ordinary demands on the understanding of my reader. I have made every effort to smooth the path to understanding. Still, I have not been able to remove one great difficulty, namely the fact that the experiences underlying my explanations are probably unknown to most people and, therefore, strange. As a result, I cannot expect my readers to follow all of my conclusions. Although every author naturally enjoys understanding their audience, interpreting my observations is less important to me than pointing out a broad area of ​​experience that has hardly been explored, which I would like to make accessible to many through this book. In this area, which has been so obscure up to now, it seems to me that the answers are recumbent to many puzzles that the psychology of consciousness has never even come close to solving. I do not wish to claim under any circumstances to have formulated these answers definitively. I am, therefore, quite content if my paper can be regarded as a tentative attempt at an answer.

I sincerely appreciate your support and interest. Thank you!🤗🙏💖

The title image: Maiden Voyage of the Airship Falcon” by Alexei Gurl

The Mystery Of “Mana Personality” Part Eight

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition “Gesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

via MagicShirtsDesigns

Greeting all! Today, I share the penultimate or the second to last episode of Dr. Jung’s extensive explanation of the mystery of Mana.
This time, he speaks in a way that may simplify the meaning of Mana and its production, with examples that we might confront every day of life (indeed!) concerning religions, society, and private occurrences!

We all know how important and influential religion is in human life. There have been and still are wars caused by religions (as it is more apparent when people from the same tribe with the same roots and similar faith cruelly kill each other)! However, religions may not be the main perpetrators. The problem may lie deep in the dark corners of human nature.

Mana-Personality is one of these unknown forces that we must understand.

My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

Illustration: thecyclopssun

You might remember that I actively assist my Iranian friends as they strive for freedom. However, I am feeling very pessimistic right now as I look at the situation and intricacy progression in the Middle East and see how the lobbyists in the West (i.e., the US, no matter if the next President will be Harris or Trump) are trying to take advantage of Iran’s future. Reading Jung helps me better understand the core of this issue and learn more.

I also learned something useful from my dear friend Luisa Zambrotta. (She has an excellent Website with many brilliant sequence stories you might not miss.) instead of numbering her stories one after another, she only uses the word “Previous” to help readers jump to the latest post if they want to. So I did it, too!🙏

The underlying scheme, the quaternio, i.e., the psychological equation of primordial dynamis (prima causa) with gods and their mythology, time and space, is a psychological problem of the first order.

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

So, let’s continue to delve further into the topic of Mana!

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P8)

The Mana Personality is, on the one hand, a superior knower and, on the other hand, a superior wanter. By becoming aware of the content underlying this personality, we are able to deal with the fact that, on the one hand, we have learned something more than others and, on the other hand, we want something more than others. This unpleasant relationship with the gods is known to have struck poor Angelus Silesius so deeply that he returned headlong from his hyper-Protestantism, bypassing the now uncertain Lutheran stopover in the deepest womb of the black mother—unfortunately to the detriment of his lyrical talent and nervous health.

And yet Christ and, after him, Paul struggled with precisely these problems, which is still clearly evident from many traces. Meister Eckhart, Goethe in Faust, and Nietzsche in Zarathustra have brought this problem closer to us again. Goethe and Nietzsche try it with the idea of ​​control, the former with the magician and ruthless man of will who takes on the devil, the latter with the master race and the superior wise man, without the devil and without God. According to Nietzsche, man stands alone, like himself, neurotic, financially supported, without God or the world. This is not an ideal possibility for a real person who has a family and has to pay taxes. Nothing can prove the reality of the world away; there is no miraculous way around it. Nothing can also prove the effect of the unconscious away. Or can the neurotic philosopher prove to us that he does not have a neurosis? He cannot even prove it to himself. Therefore, our souls stand between significant influences from within and without, and somehow, we must do justice to both. We can only do this according to our individual abilities. Therefore, we must reflect on ourselves, not on “what one should” but on what one can and what one must do. Thus, the dissolution of the Mana Personality through awareness of its contents naturally leads us back to ourselves as beings and living something that is kept between two world views and their darkness. Still, all the more clearly, it clamped in the perceived forces. This ‘something’ is alien to us and yet so close, completely our own and yet unknowable to us, a virtual centre of such a mysterious constitution that it can demand everything, kinship with animals and with gods, with crystals and stars, without surprising us, without even arousing our deformity. This something demands all of that, and we have nothing in our hands that we can reasonably oppose this demand, and it is even healing to hear this voice.

Art by Jeramondo Djeriandi (@djeriandi)

I have called this centre the Self. Intellectually, the Self is nothing but a psychological concept, a construct intended to express an entity that is unknowable to us and that we cannot grasp as such, for it is beyond our comprehension, as is clear from its definition. It might just as well be called the “God within us.” The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to spring inextricably from this point, and all the highest and final goals seem to converge towards it. This paradox is inevitable, as it always is when we attempt to characterize something that lies beyond the power of our understanding.

I hope that it has become clear enough to the attentive reader that the Self has as much to do with the “I” as the sun has to do with the Earth. The two cannot be mixed up. Nor is it a question of the deification of man or the degradation of God. What lies beyond our human understanding is, in any case, inaccessible to it. When we use the concept of a god, we are simply formulating a certain psychological fact, namely the independence and superiority of specific psychic contents, which is expressed in their ability to thwart the will, to obsess (calm) the consciousness and to influence moods and actions. One might be outraged that an inexplicable mood, a nervous disorder or even an uncontrollable vice is in some way a manifestation of God. But it would be an irreplaceable loss for religious experience if such things, even terrible things, were artificially separated from the number of autonomous psychic contents. It is an apotropaic euphemism (a good thing for a bad thing, to avert its disfavour) to dismiss such things with a “nothing but” explanation. This would only repress them and, as a rule, would only result in a false advantage, a slightly modified illusion. The personality does not become enriched by this but rather impoverishes and becomes stagnant. What appears to be evil or at least senseless and worthless to today’s experience and knowledge can appear to be a source of the best to a higher level of expertise and knowledge, whereby everything naturally depends on the use one makes of one’s devils. Declaring it meaningless requires the personality of the shadow corresponding to it, and thus, it loses its form. The ‘living figure’ needs deep shadows to appear three-dimensional. Without the shadow, it remains a flat illusion of- or a more or less well-behaved child.

With this, I am alluding to a problem that is far more significant than the few simple words seem to express: Humanity is, for the most part, still psychologically in a state of childhood – a stage that cannot be skipped. The vast majority need authority, guidance and the law. This fact must not be overlooked. The Paulistic overcoming of the law is only possible for those who know how to put the soul in place of conscience. Very few are capable of this (>Many are called, but few are chosen.<), and these few only take this path out of inner compulsion, not to say necessity, for this path is as narrow as the edge of a knife.

To be continued! 🤗🙏💖

The Mystery Of “Mana Personality” Part Seven

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Translated from volumes published by Lorenz Jung based on the edition “Gesammelte Werke” dtv.de The Symbols of Transformation (1952) and Aion (1950)

Here, I present another aspect of “Mana—Personality,” and honestly, I’m getting more and more excited to delve deeper and deeper into the subject! (The past episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,)
In this part, Jung continues explaining the concept of Mana and its impact on our lives from childhood to adulthood. He describes our inner try of separation from our parents, the process of growing up within a religious context, and the acknowledgement of God. He also provides an excellent explanation of our attitudes and behaviours towards authority figures and those in power.

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology with thanks to Craig Nelson

Individuation
The Mana Personality (P7)

By distinguishing the “I” from the archetype of the Mana Personality, one is now compelled – just as in the case of the anima – to make conscious those unconscious contents which are specific to the Mana Personality. Historically, the Mana Personality is always in possession of the secret name or of the special knowledge or the prerogative of a special action (quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi), in a word: of Individual Distinction. Becoming aware of the content that builds up the archetype of the Mana Personality means for the man the second and true liberation from the father, for the woman from the mother and thus the first feeling of her own individuality. This part of the process corresponds precisely to the intention of the concrete primitive initiations up to baptism, namely the separation from the >carnal< (or >animal<) parents and the rebirth >in novam infantiam<, into the state of immortality and spiritual childhood, as formulated by certain ancient mystery religions, including Christianity.

One may not identify with the Mana Personality, opting to view it as an extramundane ‘Father in Heaven’ embodying Absoluteness, which many find significant; if faith is achieved, this leads to an absolute dominance of the unconscious, causing the entire world to flow toward it.

The title image and this one by G R Z A ࿐

(Absolute means “detached”. To declare God to be absolute is to place him outside of all connection with man. Man cannot act on him, and he cannot act on man. Such a God would be a completely irrelevant thing. One can, therefore, only reasonably speak of a God who is relative to humans as is to God. The Christian conception of God as a “Father in heaven” expresses the relativity of God in exquisite form. Quite apart from the fact that man can make out less about God than an ant can about the contents of the British Museum, this urge to declare God absolute arises only from the fear that God might become ‘psychological’. That would, of course, be dangerous. An absolute God, on the other hand, is of no concern to us at all, whereas a “psychological” God would be real. This God could reach man. The Church seems to be a magical instrument to protect man from this eventuality, for it is said that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”.)

The logical consequence of this is that only a miserable, inferior, useless and sin-laden bunch of people remains. As is well known, this solution has become a historical worldview. Since I am only moving on psychological ground here and have no inclination to dictate my eternal truths to the universe, I must critically note that if I push all the highest value onto the side of the unconscious and construct a summum bonum from it, I have found myself in the unpleasant position of also inventing a devil of equal weight and size who maintains the psychological balance of my summum bonum. But under no circumstances will my modesty allow me to identify myself with the devil. That would be too presumptuous and would also put me in unbearable opposition to my highest values. But I cannot afford that, given my moral deficit.

That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues.
~C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung Depth Psychology

For psychological reasons, I would, therefore, recommend not constructing a God from the archetype of the Mana Personality, that is, not making it concrete, because, in this way, I avoid projecting my values ​​and non-values ​​onto God and the devil, and, in this way I preserve my human dignity, my own specific weight, which I need so much in order not to become the unresisting plaything of unconscious powers. When you deal with the visible world, you have to be crazy to assume that you are the master of this world. Here, the principle of non-resistance to all superior factors is naturally followed up to a certain individual limit. At this point, even the most peaceful citizen becomes a bloody revolutionary. Our bowing to law and state is a recommendable model for our general attitude toward the collective unconscious. (>Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. <) Our bowing would not be difficult up to this point. But there are also factors in the world to which our conscience does not necessarily say yes, and we bow before them. Why? It is practically more beneficial than the opposite. Likewise, there are factors in the unconscious where we have to be nothing but clever. (>Do not resist evil. < >Make friends for yourselves in the huts of unjust mammon. < >The children of the world are cleverer than the children of light<, ergo: >Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. <)

To be continued! 💖🙏🤗