Thread: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations

I promise I'm going somewhere with all this - it's all important, but I know sometimes it seems like I'm just meandering around. That's because of what Jung called Circumambulation. It's an important idea in psychology, especially Jungian Depth Psychology. It means you keep circling an idea - going all around it and describing it from different perspectives, and in that way eventually you end up building a more complete idea of your subject, which is kind of slippery and can be hard to pin down any other way. So here goes with part 2 of this essay:


On Truth - Myth, Story and Meaning
Scientific facts are important mostly to scientists or to manufacturers trying to create technology. Don’t get me wrong - I did say mostly, not only. I do think science is vitally important and necessary, and that it definitely needs to be taught in schools, along with critical thinking skills and the other cornerstones of rationality. Let’s not sink into complete irrationality! But I also think that in the 19th century rush toward pure rational materialism we lost something vital - something that makes us human. We’ve replaced religion and spirituality and myth - in other words meaning - with nothing but cold hard facts. Well, some people want to do that, though obviously the vast majority still love stories. Just check the Hollywood box office numbers to verify that fact. Even the scientists themselves love stories - just look at how Carl Sagan or Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson make science so appealing - by telling great stories!

Yes, we still love story - it’s the way the mind communicates. Take dreams for instance. The communication between brain hemispheres as they’ve been called, though that’s sort of a myth itself - it’s only partially true. But it is a lot cooler than listing a bunch of cold hard facts about the brain and how it operates. Again, I don’t mean to denigrate science - I definitely want science to continue to explore the brain and how it operates. But for most of us, unless we’re brain scientists or work for one, or are just a science fan, we only need to know the basics and often a myth is better than all the cold hard facts, which let’s face it can be confusing and not very helpful.

Actually I think the ideal is to understand that there is hard science, and to have a good idea of the scientific facts, but to then encapsulate those facts as nearly as possible in a good myth that doesn’t miss the mark by too much, and that is memorable and clearly understood. The myth becomes sort of a marker - a place holder, and when necessary you can refer to the science, which has probably increased in complexity since you last looked into it anyway. But most of the time you’re better off using a myth of some sort - like the idea that dreams are the hemispheres of the brain communicating with each other - with the caveat that it isn’t really that simple held in reserve.

Really this is the way myths operate anyway. Most people have always understood that they aren’t literally true, but also that they aren’t simply lies or untruths. Myths are condensed wisdom encoded in story form in a memorable way.

When I say myths in this essay, I’m referring also to fairy tales and other examples of condensed, collective wisdom told in story form. This category also includes things like Folk Tales, Nursery Rhymes, certain kinds of jokes and songs, and those pithy little statements such as “A penny saved is a penny earned” or “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”.

There are personal stories and there are collective stories. Your own personal stories involve things you’ve experienced - people you know and places you’ve been. Or things you’ve imagined, but relating to your own life in particular. They’re your memories or stories that you’ve made up. But fairy tales and myths are different. They don’t deal with individual people or things or places - they’re not about specifics, instead they’re meant to convey universal truths - profound human truths from the collective unconscious. That’s where they really come from.

And how do they come into existence? Well, I imagine people keep telling each other stories and after some time it becomes apparent that some stories have more staying power than others - they seem to be more universal. I also imagine that elements of different people’s stories - different specific instances of the same universal idea - sort of get grafted onto each other and there’s a process of winnowing down. The more personal elements get eroded away until what’s left are the universals. For instance the idea of 2 monsters with different characteristics, and the need to navigate carefully between them. That’s just about as universal as you can get!

But you still need a character to convey the myth - a story does need a protagonist. Somebody the listener can relate to and identify with, In this case a hero, since it’s a hero myth. Odysseus was one of the quintessential Greek heroes, so it become a part of his story. It seems to me that over a long period of time the stories got shuffled around and changed little by little until they eventually found their most perfect form, and certain myths were right for a particular type of hero - in this case the Trickster hero, and that was Odysseus. Certain other ideas worked better for a different type of hero, or maybe a God or a maiden - and so they evolved with a different kind of main character, who represents the boiled-down essence of that type of character.

So you see, what happened is that it began with personal stories, and people could see that there was something universal in them. The personal elements got gradually whittled away leaving only the universal. This is how the Collective Unconscious works. Myths and fairy tales are products of the Collective Unconscious. Now maybe you can see how the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious start with the personal and abstract the Universal from it.

That’s a very useful idea - Abstraction. The word isn’t used very much anymore, and it’s lost its original meaning unfortunately because of Abstract Art. It doesn’t just mean crazy and irrational and anything goes - not at all. Abstraction is something like extraction - to extract means to remove something from inside something else, like to extract the juice from an orange. But to abstract is slightly different - it’s more specific. It means to extract meaning from something - to condense out the essential idea of it. It was a word Aristotle used a lot when he laid out formal logic. To abstract from the specific or the personal means to arrive at the pure idea of a thing, divorced from specific iterations.

For instance if you take the set of all chairs - this is the example Aristotle used to explain it. Each chair is unique, or each type anyway, each different model of chair. And really each individual chair itself is unique - even if they were manufactured identically they all have their own unique history - mine might have some scuffs or marks that yours doesn’t. But from the set of all chairs you can abstract the idea of chair. This is how the term was originally used, and then in painting it came to be used in a different way. Well, not really - because actually what the painters were doing was abstracting out the formal elements of painting - removing any reference to actual objects or physicality, and leaving only the pure ideas - ideas like weight and balance, contrast, movement, composition, color, etc. The problem was people didn’t like it, and it got a really bad rap, so the word abstract became demonized.

I just want to familiarize you with the word, because it’s what the Collective Unconscious does really - it abstracts the pure meaning from a lot of personal and specific events and presents the meaning in the form of a story like a myth or a fairy tale. This is how you can recognize when a dream or a hallucination or an active imagination is Archetypal (from the Collective Unconscious) - it will have that alien sense of Otherness to it and it won’t consist of familiar things or places, but rather of universals that have been abstracted from your own personal situations. And the characters themselves will also be abstracted - possibly bits and pieces of them will look familiar, but really they’ll be universal characters - the right ones to tell that particular story. Characters like the Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman, the Old Crone or the Evil Witch (or the Good Witch) or the Young Maiden, the Hero or the Warrior or the Villain or the Village Idiot. The King or the Queen. The Wizard or the Dragon or the Monster. The Helpful Magical Creature, the Child, the Trickster. When you start having dreams with characters like that in them, they’re coming from the Collective Unconscious, projected by your Archetypes - whichever ones are required to tell the story you need to hear.

By the way - I realized that in talking about Archetypes so far I have concentrated only on the main ones - the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, and the Self, and I’ve failed to even mention the plethora of more minor ones in the realm of the Objective Psyche. But oh yes, they’re there - it’s a vast pantheon populated by a menagerie of Gods, Demons, Angels, Spirits, and all manner of other characters, including all the ones I mentioned in the preceding paragraph plus many more. Nobody knows how many, because there’s no way to study them. They just constellate when they’re needed, and there seems to be an endless plethora of different characters that can take form when needed.

Well OK - I feel like I've circumambulated my way around something here. If it isn't totally clear, just keep reading as these posts go up - eventually it should all start to settle into place and begin to make more sense.

Wow, some great posts here Darkmatters, I look forward to catching up properly after tuesday this week. Due to flu and accounts (I'm self employed), I haven't had any spare time in the last few days, but I can chill after my early week commutes are out of the way.

Glad to hear it, and I hope you're over the flu now. Guess you can't get over having to do the accounts - but then that's not a bad thing.

Thought I'd post my latest book acquisitions (the physical ones):


Bookses 01 22 18 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


Bookses 01 28 18 by Darkmatters, on Flickr

I'm not so sure about the Red Book for our Time yet - haven't got into it too far though, but all the rest are excellent! I feel like now that I have a decent basic understanding of Jung's ideas, Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Alchemy are really the heart and soul of what he was getting at, but didn't want to say out loud for fear of ruining his reputation as a scientist and psychologist. And each one of these books (the ones not written BY Jung, but at least partially ABOUT him) are exactly what I need right now. They're giving me the deeper perspective that's helping his ideas come clear for me. After all, he did say that the Gnostics and the Alchemists were early pioneers of Depth Psychology.

I've also bought these for the Kindle:


Recent Kindle Purchases by Darkmatters, on Flickr

Also all amazing!!

In several of the newer books I keep running across the idea of the opposites, and the fact that they need to be reconciled or united. What does it mean?

The opposites are polarized pairs like hot and cold, dark and light, good and bad, etc. Above and below, within and without, the one and the many. Pretty obvious so far. But where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the important opposites in your own personality, or the ones that you see in the world that reflect things inside you. And the important thing to notice about them is that we tend to assign positive qualities to one in each pair, and negative qualities to the other. Up and down, dark and light - heck, positive and negative for that matter. Above and below, within and without. In each case one is considered better than the other, sometimes clearly and sometimes more subtlely.

This is important because often the one we see as negative gets repressed into our shadow. Or more properly the one you personally see as negative gets repressed. Not always, but sometimes.

For example - within and without. This can refer to many different ideas, but let’s use it in this case to refer to the psyche and the external physical world. One inside of you and one outside of you. For many people, the physical objective world - the word without - is the only one that has any reality, and they consider the inner world of the psyche imaginary or maybe they do suspect it’s real but they fear it or repress it for other reasons. On the other hand, some people believe only the inner world has any reality, and that the outer world is there but meaningless or unimportant. But of course there are also people who give nearly equal emphasis to each.

This last state - giving equal or nearly equal emphasis to each of the pairs is ideal. It’s what you want in relation to each of the pairs of opposites. What you don’t want is to have one sticking way up high and it’s opposite sunk deep into the Shadow, never to see the light of day.

For this reason, the pairs of opposites are a valuable diagnostic tool that can help you discover some of the things repressed into your shadow.

It works like this - you spend some time listing pairs of opposites, and deciding which one is positive to you and which one is negative. Then you think about the negative ones and try to figure out if it’s something you can talk about freely - without any embarrassment or denial or weird emotions. If weird things come up and you want to stop thinking about it, then that pole is repressed in your Shadow. I think there are degrees of Shadow repression - sometimes I think we just dunk things a little bit into darkness, and sometimes way down deep where the sun don’t shine, with many levels in between.

Balance by Darkmatters, on Flickr

I did a little sketch demonstrating the idea. The water represents the unconscious. So in the illustration the negative pole is submerged partially, but still slightly above the surface. This means the ‘good’ pole is up pretty far above median level, which is also not really a good thing. What you really want is balance - and the way I drew it you can see it’s possible for them both to be just above the surface. I think this is the way it is for most pairs of opposites - a well balanced person can reflect without stress on both parts, until he gets to something where there is some repression going on.

The way I see it, we all have hundreds of these see-saws poised just at the upper limit of the unconscious. Each see-saw is a pair of opposites. You can just look at them and see where the good poles stick up too far - those things that maybe you value too much, and think about what would be its opposite.

Example, if your team winning the big game makes you really excited but if them losing makes you have a total crap week, then you’re unbalanced about that. I don’t know that this really counts as an important pair of opposites, but it definitely is a pair of opposites. I’m just using it as an example, you need to work out for yourself what your important pairs are and which ones you might be repressing. Maybe you really love attention, so much that it doesn’t matter to you if its good or bad attention, but if you can’t get it you get grouchy or depressed. Then that’s something you should take note of - you’re repressing the negative pole of it into your Shadow. You should examine it - think all around the problem. Why do you like attention so much? Is it related to something from your childhood? Is it something you should rethink? Maybe get counseling for? You could try some self-therapy - maybe try to get yourself used to not getting attention all the time. Work up to where you don’t need to be always talking to people, learn to spend some time alone reading or doing some hobbies.

Actually the Opposites represent the entire work of Individuation. All throughout, what you’re really doing is simply discovering those things that you’ve repressed into your Shadow or the things that are holding back your Anima or Animus, or that are causing a complex or a neurosis. Thinking about the opposites - making a list and thinking about which ones you can talk freely about and which ones you can’t - this is exactly what analysis is about. It’s almost a cheat - a trick to get you there faster and more efficiently. Though of course, analysis is best done with an analyst. There are some things (probably many of them really) that most people just can’t face about themselves, and that’s where an analyst comes in handy. They can see the things you will overlook or are in deep denial about.

Ok, I think that covers the idea of the opposites pretty well. It’s just a bare bones sketch of the concept, but I figure anybody who is interested will look into it deeper. That’s the way I’m approaching this, on a Word to the Wise basis.

As for the idea of the Opposites, this book goes into great detail about it:

The Archetype of the Absolute by Sanford L Drob

As I mentioned above, the idea of reconciling or uniting the opposites is in several of the books I’ve read recently (or am still working on). It shows up in many Jungian books, as it’s so important. Reconciling the opposites creates a third thing - the in-between option, the mean between the extremes. This is what Jung called the Transcendent Function, and it causes Individuation. It’s because in the unconscious, there are no opposites. It thinks holistically and sees everything in its totality - no opposites can exist there. But the conscious tends to automatically divide everything up into pairs of opposites. So in order to establish a good communion between conscious and unconscious, which is the work that creates the balanced state called Individuation, what’s required is to unite as many opposites as you can. Keep doing it - it’s the work of months if not years, and you’ll be getting frequent upgrades.

I should add - each time you pull up a repressed pole from unconscious repression, it releases the energy that's bound up with it. The psyche is what's called an energy system - energy flows through it like through an electrical device (a very complex one, with lots of circuits - like a switchboard or a computer). When something gets pushed down into the unconscious it means the energy associated with it is blocked and can no longer flow freely through the entire system the way it's supposed to. It causes a blockage. So each time you free another bit of content from the Shadow you're like a plumber unplugging a pipe. Lol ok, I know, mixed metaphor. I think you get it regardless. This unplugging or unblocking of energy is what causes the upgrades to the psyche, and when enough of it is done it causes Individuation. Like getting a tune-up for your car, or getting your computer all defragged and running fast again. What the heck - why not a few more mixed metaphors?

Also, this idea sets us up perfectly for my next post, about Active Imagination, and that’s where things start to get really interesting!

EDIT: Here's a well-written article - actually it's an excerpt from Darryl Sharp's Jung Lexicon - that covers the opposites: Opposites

It says many of the same things I tried to, but much better.

I've been looking more into the Transcendent Function, as it turns out to be the heart of Jung's method and of Individuation (which is saying the same thing really). I found a couple of things that add to my understanding somewhat. It's more involved than I thought it was, though I don't think what I wrote was wrong exactly - just incomplete. Apparently it's also about developing an attitude of Both/And rather than Either/Or, In other words, both this and that option can be true, maybe in different ways, but they don't have to be seen as opposites. It's a way of seeing everything in shades of grey or even in full color, rather than in simple binary black and white opposites. This is an attitude you should strive to have all the time, and when you find yourself thinking in binary terms shake yourself out of it. I also think I have a lot to learn about how to go about it. But the resources below point the way to a decent start. I think this will be the subject for my next wave of study.

Jung on the Transcendent Function
An article that seems to cover it in pretty good depth.

The Transcendent Function: Jung's Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue With the Unconscious by Jeffrey C. Miller
Just reading the Look Inside is very enlightening. But be warned - take a look at this customer comment: Very ambitious but a bit flawed. Pretty heavy academic reading - goes over my head, but I get the gist of it. Some stuff ain't right. I got the Kindle version anyway, and I'll be keeping this advice in mind. Hopefully the book doesn't completely mess me up!

This is awesome. I've been putting off looking at this thread.

About opposites, and also the transcendent function. These ideas bare a lot of resemblance to Nonduality.
Nonduality is a fantastic thing to incorporate into one's life.

I'll take some moments over time to look at your other posts. Thanks for doing all this!

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between wisdom all around the world - it's weird when you start looking deep enough into just about any type of life wisdom from any period, it bears striking resemblances to many of the others. Glad you're enjoying it -- or planning to!

Writing about all this stuff helps me consolidate it in my memory, otherwise I find I can forget just about everything. I think that's a hazard of reading so many books one right after the other - well actually I usually have several going at any given time. I think each one wipes out most of the previous. I actually ordered a book recently and when it came in I thought the cover looked familiar, so I dug into my Jungian shelf and I already had the exact same book! Not only that, but it was all highlighted and marked up, so I had already read it, and remembered zilch about it!! So this thread is like my external memory, and it also helps to cement ideas into the internal memory.

I've started reading the book on the Transcendent Function. I like the way the author keeps comparing and contrasting the views of Freud and Jung - it really helps you understand Jung's ideas better. I want to quickly run down the main differences in their understanding of the unconscious.

Freud discovered the personal unconscious, though he thought it was the entirety of the unconscious, and this shaped his understanding of it. Therefore he thought the unconscious was a part of the mind, a sort of junkyard where you discard unwanted parts of yourself. He believed that you could reduce the size of the unconscious by bringing its contents to conscious awareness, and that you could almost reduce it to nothing this way.


Jung went deeper and discovered the Collective Unconscious beneath the personal. He also discovered that the Shadow (Freud's junkyard) is not only negative things that you want to disown, but also contains many positive aspects of yourself that are as yet undeveloped. In his conception the unconscious is essentially another mind, one that we're unaware of but that has a compensatory relation to the conscious mind. In other words it contains everything repressed from the conscious, plus a lot more, and is always trying to help you realize your potentials, acting through intuitive and mysterious channels - such as dreams, fantasies, Active Imagination, Freudian slips, and Synchronicities. And of course you can assist this by deliberately coming into a closer relation with the unconscious and constellating the archetype of the Self.

Freud's view of the unconscious was very negative, a wasteland and an embarrassment. Jung's is magnanimous and grand - a vast and powerful helpful spirit or collection of them, that always shifts to enclose and encompass the conscious Ego. Freud's unconscious is like a small corner of the mind, whereas Jung's conscious Ego is an island in the ocean of the Unconscious. Another way to say this is that Freud believed the unconscious exists within us, while Jung believed we exist within the Unconscious.

Just touching base to say I will come back and read and catch up, january has been tough, narcissistic family members (ok, not all, 2 of them, but it's been a challenge), and the flu and accounts. I will definitely be back and engaged in this soon.

Oh man, that's tough!! Sorry to hear it - you've been going through a lot lately. Hope your life clears up again and you can get back to the fun stuff like reading about mental illness!

Looking forward to your triumphant return.

This has been swirling around in my head for a while now and I've had some new thoughts on it - just a little clarification.

Of course, the important opposites aren't things like hot and cold or up and down, unless you're taking those terms metaphorically (which you certainly can, and then they do become a lot more important, as everything does when taken metaphorically). The important ones are things like political or religious affiliation, Good and Evil, or alternately Good and Bad, positive and negative, and personality traits like Openness and Conscientiousness (for those familiar with Jordan Peterson). With these really big life opposites, one tends to be conscious and one pushed down into the unconscious.

Here's an example - just a quick sketch. Order and Chaos. These opposites define a certain dialectic in our lives. Too much chaos and you don't even know what's going on anymore - your life loses all structure and meaning and you descend into confusion, depression and madness. On the other hand, too much order and things become too strict and rigid - resulting in fascism or obsessive compulsive disorder. So it's necessary to try to find a balance point somewhere near the center. However, this isn't simple to do. Like anything organic or living, social structures and people's lives are always shifting, and can shift very powerfully one way or the other from time to time without warning. You might not even notice when it happens until it's been going on for a while and you start to wonder why everything is all messed up. It could be that your psyche, or maybe your family life, or some other aspect of your life has shifted radically toward chaos, or maybe toward excessive order. By thinking in terms of opposites, you eventually realize that you've given too much emphasis to one pole of a pair opposites. So you think about it - let's say you've become swamped in too much chaos.

So you think well, what's the opposite of chaos? It's order of course. You might use similar terms, like maybe Structure and Disorder, or Form and Formlessness. They're all very close in meaning. Heck, here's another synonym - Meaning and Meaninglessness. Jung always maintained that a life, especially beginning in the early 30's, what he calls the 2nd half of life, requires meaning and purpose or it goes off the deep end into depression and existential dread - what has been dubbed The Human Condition, or the Modern Human Condition (which is really just the unhealthy end of a pair of opposites, mental health and mental disorder - the pendulum has swung strongly toward the unhealthy end since religion and spirituality have been replaced by corporate greed and reductive materialism).

What I want to illustrate is that balance is not a simple matter of finding the precise center. There's no such thing except in abstractions like math. When you're dealing with living things such as human beings or human society, things are always in opposition and this opposition is always dynamic. I think I mentioned somewhere on this long and winding thread a ways back the idea of a juggler or circus performer balancing things - like spinning plates on long rods, or a chair on his chin. He can't just find a perfect balance point and then just keep things there - everything is always in motion one way or the other. So he has to keep constantly making minute adjustments, or sometimes much bigger and more sudden adjustments, as everything tends toward chaos until you act to bring order back.

So we're like jugglers - always leaning this way and that to compensate for things that are falling over. When something has shifted pretty far in one direction you need to overcompensate - imagine carrying a long pole across your shoulders with a heavy bucket of water hanging on each end of it. And let's say you had to make a right turn as you're walking under this burden. Momentum will keep it turning when you're ready to stop, you can't just make it stop on a dime. So you have to start slowing the turn down early, and you'll probably overshoot a bit and then have to very strongly resist to bring it back the other way. Overcompensation to find equilibrium. This is how the opposites often work.

Example - if chaos has got a strong hold on you - maybe you've been living wrong, smoking all kinds of things and gambling and just living as if nothing really matters - you're going to have to make a really strong effort for a good long time before things start to swing the opposite way. And then once you get it moving you can let off the pressure and let momentum take over until things are getting nearly balanced out again, and then you might have to exert a little pressure again to bring them to a halt where you want them.

Alright, I guess that's what I was wanting to explain. See ya next time...

Good observations man!

I've noticed before that we're sorta like jugglers. But you gotta know your own center of gravity if you wanna juggle and not fall over yourself doing it.

You're right there's no precise center. But the way I see it is, we have many, constantly shifting centers, relative to each individual. The juggling act is all about maintaining a proximity to your own centers, whilst building up a muscle memory of the juggling itself.

And indeed there seems to be a momentum involved when shifting your "weight", trying to overcompensate, etc. But this is why it is useful to find your own center of gravity, it makes it much less likely that you'll overshoot.

Sorry to go so heavy on the metaphors, it's just, it says a lot in a short space of time.

Hey thanks for weighing in Slash! Incidentally, Guns n Roses is playing as I type this - November Rain.

I want to post another example, this time showing how one pole of a polarity can sink into the unconscious, or even into the Shadow.

This will happen with those really polarizing issues like politics or religion. I'll use politics as the illustration. If a person is strongly left leaning or right leaning, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that the propaganda for your side is complete truth and that the people on the other side are the source of all problems. Someone who hasn't found a good balance will become fanatical, and then they can no longer see the untruths on their own side and the truths on the other side. This one is really difficult, because there is a strong natural divide there. But it's vitally important that you think your way through situations exactly like this - in fact I think these really polarizing issues are the most important ones, precisely because they're the ones where you've lost one of the opposites into the unconscious (probably the Shadow). It's these highly polarizing issues where people most refuse to examine themselves or see their own biases.

Also, even the most even-tempered and normally thoughtful people can lose their balance under the influence of certain conditions - including anxiety, depression, drunkenness, anger, sleep deprivation, sickness or headache, or anything that is really distracting or disorienting. The ability to maintain this precarious balance requires a tranquility that promotes peaceful thinking.

Nice one @ GnR!


I completely agree and that is very relevant to me right now.

When I became spiritual, suddenly it was like "thoughts are bad thoughts are bad thoughts are bad". But that is immensely stupid. And many people have fallen into the same trap.
There are many traps in spirituality and enlightenment. I've fallen into a hell of a lot of them, and overcome them.

Right now, what you said is relevant to me because I focused WAY too much on my right-brain. And it automatically made me sorta think, subconsciously, that left-brained people are stupid morons.

I've been finding a lot of balance recently, after our discussion in the Lucid Dreaming thread.
I don't know how many other people can do this, but I can literally feel pressure in my brain where it's working. My forehead is tingly almost all the time, like it feels like a bit of my brain is lightly squeezing itself, it's pleasurable, I've noticed the forehead sensations correspond to moments of high awareness and being centered in the now.
But recently, when I got used to the left-brain again, I could feel it squeezing and mooshing about, working away, but it's more subtle than the forehead thing. The forehead one feels more like gland secretions or something. The left/right one feels more like "activity". I feel both sides of my brain equally active when I balance myself and pay attention to it.

EDIT: Holy shit come to think of it, regarding my second major enlightening experience, the one that landed me in the loony bin.
During my experience there was a moment when I noticed half of my brain was not working. I can't explain it but best way to describe it is like half my brain was super active in sensation, but the other half was doing nothing, almost as if I didn't have half my brain there. I'll bet any money it was the left-brain that went almost dormant, just like that stroke woman. I didn't have a stroke tho, I was jumping over tall fences like a ninja and everything.

I remember very well experiencing that. But I didn't remember it when talking to the doctors. I need to tell my nurse about this next week xD

Soz for hijacking another thread

Oh man, I completely forgot to respond here Slash!! I guess this is where we started talking in PMs. Once again, I really appreciate all your input and your answering all my questions. It's amazing to be able to talk to somebody who's experienced all this.

Here's a book that's not only relevant to this thread, but also relevant to Dreamviews in general, because it's about using Lucid Dreaming to do Shadow work and achieve Individuation, also known as Spiritual Awakening or Ascension:

Dreaming Through Darkness: Shine Light into the Shadow to Live the Life of Your Dreams

This is also very similar to the posts I'm still getting ready to create, about Active Imagination, only it can be done while you're sleeping. I'm not quite ready to start posting about that just yet - need to read a little farther into the book first. But coming soon.

Just starting to set the stage for a few posts on Active Imagination. I’ve read the book Jung on Active Imagination, though that was maybe 7 or 8 months ago, and I’m starting in on Jung and the Alchemical Imagination now by Jeffrey Raff.

A lot of alchemists, if not all of them, were also gnostics. I’m specifically talking here about those alchemists who understood that they were not literally trying to transmute lead into gold, but that it was a metaphor for an internal process - to change the dross of the unawakened human spirit into the gold of the constellated Self. Though I don’t think most of them realized it was actually internal - without an understanding of the unconscious they were projecting it out onto matter, onto the metals and chemicals in the alembic, and into the transforming fire of the furnace. It would take Jung, centuries later, to really understand what was going on, but they did lay the groundwork and develop much if not all of the process of Individuation, though that isn’t what they called it of course. They called it creating the Philosopher’s Stone - a symbol of the Self.

They made a strong and clear distinction between 2 different modes of imaginal activity:

1. Fantasy, which is shallow escapism and fails to connect with anything deep in the psyche or in external reality.
2. Imagination, which runs deep and forges a strong connectedness between the inner and outer worlds.

This is the terminology Jeffrey Raff is using in his book, and that the Alchemists themselves used - at least some of them. I’m sure the words are different from place to place, from Alchemist to Alchemist. They were a loose group of rugged individualists, forged through the fires of Individuation, so they weren’t really joiners and didn’t form collectives and fall into alignment with a group identification.

Fantasy comes from the Ego, and therefore is disconnected from that vast well of creative energy and connectedness known as the unconscious.

The Ego likes to believe it is the whole being, but it’s wrong, and so it lives in shallow fantasy of its own making and believes its own lies. That is its nature. The awakening (Individuation) is really just the realization that the Ego is not the center of the whole being - that there’s a Self which is far greater and is in fact the real source of creative and transformative energy. That Self is like a giant or a God that has been dismembered and the parts scattered all throughout the diffuse realms of the undifferentiated Unconscious. It needs to be reassembled and revivified - and this is accomplished through the process of Active Imagination.

First a bit of etymology - the root word of both Magic and Imagination is Image. And as I discussed over a few posts recently, image is what the unconscious deals in. Symbols to be precise, which are a very specific kind of image - they represent very real processes in the psyche and allow for - even create transformation. So it’s clear to see why these images around which you build active imagination need to be honest and deep - otherwise they can’t strike into the heart of the psyche and reveal deep truths.

The difference between fantasy and imagination is like the difference between literature and formulaic genre fiction. The genre fiction uses well-worn tropes to actually avoid any deep connectedness, and to keep things light and avoid activating any strong negative emotions or making people think. But when you read literature - assuming it’s a type that appeals to you - it allows you to see through the surface veils and into the depths of reality and the human soul. It doesn’t shy away from the things that might frighten some people, and this is the source of its power. It’s exactly this unflinching courage to face harsh truths that allows transformation in the first place. Fear is what prevents it.

Individuation is really the Hero’s Journey, which necessitates a sojourn through the Land of the Dead — of the Spirits or the Ancestors - aka Hell. It requires unflinching courage and determination, and a willingness to face risk and sacrifice. It carries with it the always present risk of neurosis or psychosis. And as I’ve said several times on this thread and elsewhere, Individuation is also the process of growing up from immaturity. It’s like an initiation ritual, designed to forge tough and truth-facing people, not dependents who need protection. So it really isn’t for everyone.

It goes without saying that active imagination is very close to lucid dreaming. In the next post I’ll get into some specifics about how it’s done, and why I believe it sometimes actually is or becomes lucid dreaming. But all that remains for this post is a brief discussion about fantasy and imagination as they apply to lucid dreaming and active imagination.

The fantasy type of lucid dreaming is where you use lots of dream control or tricks to avoid letting things get too real. This is one of the dangers of getting really good at lucid dreaming - you develop these tricks and then you always have a way out whenever something a little scary or unnerving comes up. So rather than deal with it honesty and bravely, you teleport the monster into the sun or transform it into something silly and innocuous. Or you wake yourself up or change the entire dream into something different. There are many more ways of avoiding honesty and vulnerability in dreams, and of course there are many shades of meaning to this. Sometimes depending on how you use them, the same tricks can be used to face reality and deal with problems rather than avoiding them. There’s no really simple way to define which is which. It comes down to this — do you flee from facing something important, or do you face it and try to deal with it honestly? It would take a lot of writing to break this down and try to explain it completely - I’m going to leave it at this. The people who are ready to deal squarely with reality will already understand. If you find yourself getting angry or uncomfortable about what I’m writing, chances are you’re not ready for this yet.

I’ll also repeat something I’ve said elsewhere on the board that’s closely related - being too aggressive, passive or defensive - these are cop-outs from facing reality. What’s called for in terms of spiritual development and growth is vulnerability and openness. In other words, it’s like in waking life - it’s always best to engage in honest dialogue rather than the avoidance tactics of fight or flight, freeze or fawn. These are extreme reactions - fear driven and used to put off really dealing with an issue. They’re primitive defensive tactics. What’s called for in a more mature person is the ability to listen and respond intelligently and without seeing the other as just an adversary, but trying to honesty understand whatever point they’re trying to make. This requires vulnerability and openness rather than a hard charging, guns blasting approach or running and hiding desperately - negotiation rather than warfare. You should try to aim for dialogue rather than attack, though I think sometimes a fight is inevitable, and some figures might be too powerful and too aggressive to dialogue with at first and you might need to work your way through several encounters and whittle them down by trying to be understanding. In an active imagination session you can always and easily end it when things start to get too intense.

I should also say that this kind of work is for people in midlife - usually beginning somewhere in the 30’s. Below this age range, fantasy is perfectly fine and natural, but in midlife people start to require meaning and purpose in their lives, and this is when it becomes important to use dreaming and active imagination for self development.

Some of your contents, especially if they represent complexes or neuroses or trauma, will undoubtedly come at you guns blazing or in full attack mode. It’s probably best - well I won’t even conjecture at this point - I’m outside of my competence range now. Some people who have what’s known as weak Ego boundaries should not practice active imagination, as the flood of released unconscious material may be too overwhelming and cause serious mental issues. This is just a commonsense warning. The same is true for life itself - it can damage those with a weak Ego or other psychological problems. In other words, just like lucid dreaming itself (and life), the byword is proceed with caution and at your own risk.

Active imagination is a combining of conscious and unconscious using imagery (symbols), and it results in a third thing that appears, a symbol created by the unconscious, which unites the two. In other words, it’s the Transcendent Function. This is the whole purpose of active imagination, and it is intended to result in Individuation, also known as the constellation of the Self from the previously disorganized and scattered unconscious.

I’ve mentioned many times that neuroses and complexes are a problem - this is true in life as well as in Individuation. Here's how to deal with them - it's a good idea to do this before embarking on Individuation.

I’ve just recently put together a few of Jung’s statements concerning neuroses and how he managed to cure himself of his at an early age - and I can recommend a book to help learn about and deal with complexes.

Neuroses:
I’ll just be brief and blunt about neuroses - Jung said that what they are essentially is a way of getting out of doing things you don’t want to do.

And as for how he healed his own - as a boy he developed a neurosis of fainting every time he needed to go to school or do homework. Then one day he overheard his father talking to someone about it, and he became very embarrassed at his own immaturity and the problems he was causing the family - he wasn’t really aware of that and had been very self-centered about it.

So he simply forced himself to do those things he had been avoiding. In a very real way, the neurosis was just an excuse - a way of getting out of going to school or doing school work. He had allowed himself to get in the very bad habit of fainting in order to avoid it. At first when he would sit down and try to do his schoolwork, or start off to go to school again (they had taken him out for a time) he would begin to feel faint again, but at that point he would close the book or stop walking toward the school until it passed, and then when he was able, he would make himself get right back to it - even if only a single problem or a few steps at a time. In a very short time he was completely over it.

This is what was known in those days as the 'self-bullying cure’ - simply forcing yourself to do it, but easing off when strong symptoms start to develop. You need to find that sweet spot - find your limit and go right up to it but not beyond. In this way you get your mind used to the fact that it can’t take the easy way out anymore, and the resistance will ease off and disappear.

Complexes:
There’s a very good book about it from a Jungian perspective called The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego by Erel Shalit. Sorry, I don’t know any books about dealing with Neuroses or I would list those as well. I’ll just quickly explain the basic concept of how to deal with complexes - but if you’re interested you should definitely read the book. Much of it is done through dream work, and so could obviously be dealt with through Active Imagination or Lucid Dreaming.

Basically you need to first discover what complex or complexes you have. You can doubtless learn about the most well-known ones online - the book also lists many of them.

A complex becomes a problem mainly when it sinks into the unconscious, where it becomes inflexible and can’t be transformed through dream work or symbolism. But simply by learning what it is and opening yourself up to acceptance of it you bring it into the conscious mind where it can then be worked with.

The nice thing is - a complex is actually trying to help you work your way toward healing - it’s just that rather than pay attention to them and learn the lesson they’re trying to teach, many people push them down into the unconscious and ignore them. It takes openness, honesty and a certain kind of courage to face them and accept them as your own. I’m talking about the courage to not ignore or put off the truth even if it hurts or makes you feel ashamed or insignificant or helpless. It’s the courage of acceptance and vulnerability, rather than the courage of sheer determination or willful ignorance.

So as you can see, this is that same kind of courage needed to do Active Imagination and Lucid Shadow work - the same kind needed for psychoanalysis or therapy of any kind. Many of us learned the other kind of courage when we were young - the courage to ignore any problems and just soldier on, consequences be damned. That will work for a time, but later in life it causes problems and the other kind of courage, as well as education about the unconscious and how to deal with it, are needed.

After discovering and accepting your complex(es), you can then do dream work or Active Imagination - bring about the Transcendent Function and the resulting transformative symbols that will heal you. I would recommend doing this for any neuroses and complexes you’re aware of before getting in very deep with Individuation. The complexes and neuroses are flaws that become weak points, and the pressure of bringing up intense unconscious contents can cause you to break at the weak points - this is what causes the psychoses or neuroses I keep warning about. I know, it sounds weird - heal your neuroses so you don’t get more or make them worse, but if you think about it it does make sense.

Ok, next I'll pick up where I left off about Active Imagination, this time with a how-to. The fun stuff begins...

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

In several of the newer books I keep running across the idea of the opposites, and the fact that they need to be reconciled or united. What does it mean?

Ooo.

This whole thread is dripping with philosophical surrealism which grabs my interest but the topic of the unification of the opposites is my favorite topic of all time to talk about.

The matter of reconciling, uniting, balancing the opposites is a focal point of many religions, Taoism, Buddhism, Sufi Islam, Hermeticism, and my own Baha'i Faith. The common thread through all these traditions seems to involve taking a sharp look at two polar "opposites" and realizing the truth that they are one and the same. My favorite Taoist teacher (whose YouTube videos unfortunately are no longer on the internet) put it this way: "When you see the Yin and Yang symbol, you at first might be tempted to see it as two things, Yin and Yang, but in reality it is just one symbol, and the division you see is an imagined one."

An analogy I've heard is that when two men enter a room-temperature room, one entering from outdoors during winter, and the other entering the same room from a sauna, the former man will describe the room as "warm" and the latter man will describe it as "cold", despite both describing the same room. This analogy, then, meant to illustrate the true unity and oneness between hot and cold.

The goal is the absolute liberation of the self from suffering through unity of the opposites. The main opposites to unite are the opposites of "Good" and "Bad". If you can internally unify these concepts, you are totally free from suffering. The reason for this being thus: If you unify the concepts of Good and Bad, then the things in the world are not "good" nor "bad" anymore, they simply are. If there is no "bad" you see in the world, then there is no fault with things, and you can accept the world as it is. And if you can see no bad in the world around you, there you have it: a liberation from suffering itself.

Zhuang Tzu calls this "freeing the bond", Baha'u'llah calls this "detachment", there are many, many names for this concept of unification of the opposites throughout a myriad of cultures, religions, and traditions. I think I could literally spend forever talking about this one thing if permitted. :p It is quite literally my absolute favorite philosophical or theological topic.

Originally Posted by LabyrinthDreams

This whole thread is dripping with philosophical surrealism

Wow, I suppose you're right - I had never thought of it that way, but that's a cool observation.

Originally Posted by LabyrinthDreams

An analogy I've heard is that when two men enter a room-temperature room, one entering from outdoors during winter, and the other entering the same room from a sauna, the former man will describe the room as "warm" and the latter man will describe it as "cold", despite both describing the same room. This analogy, then, meant to illustrate the true unity and oneness between hot and cold.

This is a very good analogy - it perfectly illustrates the idea.

Originally Posted by LabyrinthDreams

If you unify the concepts of Good and Bad, then the things in the world are not "good" nor "bad" anymore, they simply are. If there is no "bad" you see in the world, then there is no fault with things, and you can accept the world as it is. And if you can see no bad in the world around you, there you have it: a liberation from suffering itself.

Zhuang Tzu calls this "freeing the bond", Baha'u'llah calls this "detachment", there are many, many names for this concept of unification of the opposites throughout a myriad of cultures, religions, and traditions.

It's also a part of the Ancient Greek/Roman practical philosophy known as Stoicism, in fact it's one of the core concepts of it. I've spent several years studying and practicing it, and it makes a huge difference in quality of life. Basically you divide everything in the world into 2 categories - things you can control and things you can't. Then you just forget about everything you can't control, and instead concentrate only on those things you do have control over - which turn out to be your own thoughts, feelings and actions. The maxim that goes along with this is 'There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so' - that's a very Stoic Shakespeare quote. And you're absolutely right - putting this into practice really does bring liberation from suffering. Somehow I failed to connect up Stoicism with the reconciliation of the opposites, but your post made me realize it, so thanks for that! I suppose this is what Jung meant when he said that in middle age a person needs to adopt a practical philosophy of life in the ancient sense.

This little exchange of posts has sparked something. Because of it I decided to crack open Archetype of the Absolute by Sanford Drob, which is an extended meditation on the reconciliation of opposites in philosophy, religion, mysticism and psychology. I just opened it randomly and started reading, and ran across a wealth of material that has changed my thinking on the subject a good deal. He gave a lot of quotes by Jung and other thinkers on the topic, and pointed out that there's a big difference between uniting the opposites and all the other ways of reconciling them, such as balancing them, bringing both poles into conscious awareness, or simply realizing that neither pole is manifestly good or bad. To unite them is, like you said Labyrinth, to have the epiphany that they aren't really opposites at all but the same thing. The others are ways of understanding they they aren't really opposites, but not of completely unifying them.

He then went on to say that not all opposites can or should be united. In fact, if a person were to succeed in merging all the opposites they would have no reason to live and no mental energy anymore, because the mind is an energic system that actually runs on the tension created by opposites, in the same way an electric motor runs on the strong polarity between positive and negative charges. Removing that tension completely would be like removing all the gas from your car's engine - it just wouldn't be able to go anywhere.

There are certain situations where it's necessary to unite some opposites, because sometimes - especially if one of them has dropped into your shadow or into the unconscious, it can cause blockage to that energy, which needs to flow throughout the system. But sometimes it might be necessary to do the opposite (heh - ironic - it does get pretty surreal talking about the opposites, doesn't it?) Sometimes a person loses all motivation and drive because they've united too many opposites and their mind no longer has enough motive energy. They would become like an enlightened Buddha, and just want to sit under a tree all day and all night and be enlightened. This might work if you live in India where there's a Buddhist religion and people can become monks and be fed for free, but in the west it would cause a real problem. In fact apparently a lot of people go see psychiatrists because they have lost all motive power, and they need to bring a few opposites up and think about their opposite-ness. I suppose it's once again a matter of balancing the conscious and unconscious, not just letting yourself be subsumed entirely into the unconscious (where there are no opposites). You must instead initiate an ongoing and dynamic dialogue between them, which is constantly seeking some kind of balance, but always needs to chase it like the juggler example I used before. Finding balance is an ongoing and dynamic activity, it isn't finding a static state and then remaining in it. Though I do think those occasional epiphanies are amazing, where you become enlightened for a while and then gradually slip back into being human.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Here's an example - just a quick sketch. Order and Chaos.

Really random comment here (from me), gonna post more later when I can read more of what I've been missing, but thought I'd share anyway.

An interesting way to view the nature of order and chaos is to understand how the two relate to the creation of meaningful and unique (meaning here, not redundant) information that can be encoded, transmitted, and decoded via another system to be understood and manipulated. This understanding of information and storing it is the linchpin of modern day computing systems, especially in regards to the compression of information (which is the process of removing all redundant information from any stored information).

Each language has certain amounts of redundant information in it. A good example of what I mean is how, in English, many times the combination of the letters "t" and "h" happen to be followed by the letter "e", or how vowels follow after a syllable whose last letter was a consonant or mostly consonants. The amount of meaningful, unique information something has, the less there exists redundant repetitious patterns. So, if there is too much order, the less informative a particular set of bits of information can be, but too much chaos and there aren't even any bits at all. There is a sort of golden ratio that exists, whereby the greatest amount of unique information can only exist provided the maximum amount of chaos and minimum amount of order possible for meaningful information to exist are reached and a balance is achieved.