Thread: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations

Yeah, people don't like when you start seeing through the veils of polite society's pleasant little illusions. It threatens the society itself. What might be good for the individual isn't always the same as what holds society together. I suppose we have to walk that tightrope and find the balance point. And sometimes that means knowing one thing but pretending to believe something else for the sake of society.

The MYSTERY of The 5th Angel Of REVELATION (Enlightenment Decoded)

Lately I’m getting this idea that if you awaken the inner Christ (spiritual awakening, constellate the Self archetype etc) you in a sense become its servant. John St. Julien, the guy who looks like Jesus in the videos I’ve been posting most recently, in his awakening suddenly decided to go to Africa and open a shelter for troubled children, and apparently it came out of the blue — not something he had ever even thought of doing before. Also he keeps saying “Have no thought for yourself”, and similar things — so he has become like a Saint. A servant of God, at His beck and call.

I’ve also heard him say that when he was living through the ego he saw himself as the most important thing in his life, but after his awakening he sees himself as more like a single cell in the body of Humanity. My thought was God is using him like a white blood cell, and has sent him to a wound in the Body of Humanity where he is expending his energy and his own health to help those children. He’s suffering several different health issues that he wouldn’t be if he wasn't living there.

This idea freaks me out quite a bit — that when you awaken the Self your personality completely changes, and I‘ve heard you can (will?) lose all your current interests and develop new ones instead, and suddenly have the urge to move and quit your job -- basically start a whole new life.

But this doesn’t seem to happen to everybody (I’ve seen a lot of Spiritual Awakening videos on YouTube). Some stay where they are and continue to do the same things they did before, but it makes me wonder — are these people not truly living up to their end of the covenant?

These ideas have been on my mind lately, and then I thought of this:

If you already have a mission — a calling as it’s been called — then I believe you can pursue that and dedicate it to Christ (or Spirit or whatever you want to call it).

But how do you make it happen that way?

Well, it seems to me the way to approach it would be to not seek to dissolve or shatter your ego and then let the chips fall where they may — that seems to be the Royal Road to serfdom under God’s dominion — letting him take charge. Instead I believe you should continue to ply your chosen profession, and in prayers dedicate that to Christ. But it must be something that helps other people — you do need to provide service to humanity. This is really just choosing what kind of service to provide.

Sort of like, if you fill out an application and don’t tick the box to choose a particular job, the company will put you where they need somebody with no particular skillset, but if you indicate that you have some skill that can serve them well — better than for instance sweeping floors — then they’ll use you in that way. This is my thinking anyway, but of course I don’t claim to know if it's right. For all I know it could be rank arrogance to presume to dictate your terms to God - or maybe he likes a negotiator, or really does want to use you where you can serve best. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it. And I’m sure if you do end up a servant of God to be used as his pawn and not according to what your puny and smug ego thinks is best, then you’ll like it in your new personality.

After all, when Carl Jung had his awakening, he didn’t move halfway around the world and give up his Psychiatry practice. But then, he was serving the world in a huge way through it, so no need to change it. He was sort of a modern Prophet. Though I do think if you’re living the wrong life then a shakeup would be the best thing.

Anyway, just some rambling thoughts that seemed worth sharing here. Anybody else who’s pondering this path might want to think about this as well.


What the Bible truly says about altered states of consciousness?

Bingo. In this video he says we all don't need to serve at the highest level – we serve in our own ways. I mean I know that, but it's right along the lines of what I was thinking. But what I'm still wondering about – if you awaken the sleeping giant within, do you become it's servant?


Atom(Adam) & Electron(Eve) Where is Eden? Why Is The East So Important?

Toward the end of this one, he talks about what the world would be like if everybody sought inside and found their higher nature, and it made me think along these lines – it doesn't happen for everybody all at once. Small groups find their kind gentle nature and turn away from sin (like monks living in a monastery for instance) and then they fall to the savage tribe next door, who are trapped firmly in the flesh.

Maybe that's why so many of the Asian monks learned martial arts? Hmmmmm?? Think about it. When people become overcivilized they become pacifists and if an entire society does that it's doomed to fall. Not necessarily to enemies from outside, but also those within, or maybe they lose the knowledge and will to fight for survival.

But as always, he's so good at explaining the mystical, metaphorical meanings of the Bible. Makes your head spin with vortices of meaning.

In reference to a question I asked a few posts back, tonight I experienced how "the garbage" comes up when the verbal mind is shut down. It's in the form of images with ideas and emotion attached, but no words. For me, each image seemed to sort of rise up like a bubble, hesitate for a moment so I could 'see' it, and then disperse as if the bubble popped, or dissolved into smoke that dissipated rapidly. Each little packet of image/idea/emotion was associated with a memory or with something I had done recently that I would consider wrong - bad behavior. Sin. Or in other words, the shadow. And yes, occasionally words would creep in, I just had to keep shutting them off again.

These may have actually been dreamlets - I was getting really sleepy and once or twice started to slip off into dreamland.

Fasting for health, rebuilding the immune system? detox...

Ok, this guy has got me really looking into fasting now, and this is amazing. Actually I have done a little - I did a detox fast followed by eating really clean food for a long time in order to heal up from a lifetime of eating toxic food, and it worked wonders. And I do intermittent fasting much of the time - almost every day in fact. A 20 hour fast with a 4 hour feeding window. Plus I've done a few periods of what's called a fasting mimicking diet, which puts you into ketosis on around the third day and allows the body to live entirely on stored fat easily.

I've considered trying a water fast, and once tried to transition from the fasting mimicking diet into one after the third day, when I could tell by the metallic taste in my mouth that I was in ketosis, but it didn't go well. But this morning, thanks to the video posted above, I looked up the book he mentioned, by Dr. Shelton:

Shelton: The Hygienic System Vol III; Fasting and Sun Bathing (PDF)

That goes directly to the full PDF - right-click and Download As to save it to your computer, or just click to open in your browser.

And here is a good website all about fasting:

All About Fasting for Health and Healing

I've come to the conclusion that fasting is the same as meditation in several important ways. They're both excellent natural ways to detox - one emotionally/mentally and the other physically. Both have also fallen into disfavor and been subject to ridicule by the medical/scientific communities in modern times. But both have always been, and in ancient times were known to be, fantastic modes of natural healing, as well as helping immensely in spiritual work.

In each case as you progress into the practice, toxins that are stored inside rise up. You need to experience them - you start feeling a little icky as they come up but it has to happen, and then they are released and your health benefits tremendously.

The thing that really surprised me about fasting is that when you switch from digesting food to using the stored nutrition sources within your body, it will begin to dissolve and digest tissues such as tumors, growths, scar tissue etc. – exactly the same way tadpoles will digest their tails when they grow legs. All you need to do is stop eating and let the body's immune system do its work, the way animals do when they're sick. They instinctively know not to eat until healing is accomplished. As humans we've been misled to believe going even a day without food is dangerous (the exact opposite of the truth). But, as John St Julien always says, be sure to do your research before you try it. Know how to break a fast, with the juice of water-bearing fruits such as grapes, watermelon, other melons, apples etc. Then gradually work up through actual fruit and things like yogurt etc. There's a list on the web page I linked to above.


Fasting.... What i owe to fasting, and going one on one with the devil and lower nature...


Cleaning the temple, and making a way for the Lord? The sacred secretion...

"Within your toxins are your demons... " Let's purge those suckers!!

He mentioned Food Combining in the last video. That's from another book by Dr. Shelton:


Food Combining Made Easy

He has several more books on holistic healing and related topics found on this page:

Catalog of The Alternative Medical Therapies Library, listing of books by Herbert M. Shelton



Fasting and meditation shut down the everyday busy-work of the body and the mind and free them up to do the deep work of transformation and healing.

I unintentionally do intermittent fasting all the time. It is currently 24 hours since my last meal, a veggie burrito, by far the spicyest thing I have ever eaten. My burrito place got a new salsa and instead of calling it extra hot they just replaced the hot salsa.

I really should gain weight. TIME TO FEAST!

Edit: I went to the kitchen to start making dinner, opened the fridge, took another snus and ended up back on the couch. I just realized my mistake...This is what ADD looks like. I'm gonna try again.

"5 senses coming in all at once, and your conscious mind can only processes linearly, one thing at a time..."

So what does it do with that sensory information overload?

This is why you need to shut off the conscious mind (the monkey mind, the ego, the small self). The unconscious can live in the moment, with all that incoming info, and integrate it because it doesn't process linearly, it processes all-at-once. I don’t want to say in parallel, as I used to say, because I don’t want to think of the mind as a computer. That’s a helpful analogy, but that’s all it is and if you go too far with it you can start to think the mind works like a computer or computer network, which is wrong. In fact using any labels at all puts limits and wrong impressions on things.

So it’s best not to even think in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, the ego and the self and all that. They're all labels. I mean they’re necessary when you’re studying, and you do need to study. I bought a lifetime supply of books to study this stuff, and I keep getting more and watching more videos. But all that study is the analytical part (opposites), and when you’ve reached a certain level of understanding then you need to switch into synthesis (no opposites), which means processing all-at-once, holistically, and with no preconceived notions of what any of it means. Really it’s wrong to even think in terms of God and Jesus etc - these are again helpful labels that allow us to process and think logically about it, and to link to the immense trove of great wisdom known as the Bible. But ultimately, when you’re deep in contemplation the logical mind is shut off, and that’s where the transformation takes place; the magic - the union. However you think of it.

Ultimately all the religions use different labels trying to point to the same underlying truths, though there are different understandings about those truths, and some religions take very different routes to them. But the idea is to strip away all the labels, all the artificial ideas we as humans need to put on the truth so we can understand it, and just learn how to experience it.

And that is by:

• Living right (reduce your sins, stop doing the things that make you weak, or that put barriers between you and spirit or god)
• Meditation (contemplation, going within, praying)
• Fasting and eating healthy ‘light’ food that doesn’t weigh you down or cause gastronomic distress and anchor your attention in the flesh/the world/the ego

Also, the video answered a question I asked recently, about how to pray in meditation. He said Jesus would pray, which is talking to God, and then he would listen, which is quiet contemplative meditation. So that makes sense. It's basically switching from analytical mode to synthesis, from conscious to unconscious mind. The first part is to clarify your intent, make your request; then the second is to receive higher wisdom or just to commune with God/Spirit. The answer may come later in a dream, a vision, or as a weird coincidental occurence in your life.


Lighrk – I appreciate your post, but have no idea how to respond to it.

Fasting is an awesome thing. As a muslim fasting never been something alien to me but after reading Arnold Ehret's Rational Fasting and his personal story, my life was improved forever, done a few times 3 days fasts, it's interesting to observe how you become less hungry at the third day than you were on the first XD)

3 days sounds like a good goal. I think I'll start with 2 though and then 3. The longest I've done so far is 30 hours. And I want to take a week or 2 of eating really clean first to prepare for it. Hey, here's a thought - maybe I'll try 3 days for Easter.

As for hunger going away, I believe that's because around the 3rd day you go into ketosis and your body switches from running on glucose to burning fat and can then raid the stored body fat supplies. Thanks for posting – you're the first person I've seen in here from Georgia.

Come to think of it - I have done several 5 day Fasting Mimicking diets - like 7 or 8 of them. I mentioned that before, but I suppose I could explain better.

I learned about it from Dr. Darren Schmidt. If you search his channel for Fasting Mimicking Diet he has several videos about it.

The way I always did it was to have only 2 eggs for breakfast, and for dinner a small salad (just lettuce, maybe a couple of cherry tomatoes) with an avocado cut up in it. The dressing is olive oil plus apple cider vinegar, which is really good for getting you into ketosis. This kind of diet kick-starts ketosis quicker than water fasting apparently. And usually on the third or maybe late in the second day I would stop being hungry and get a strong metallic taste in my mouth, which is my signal that I'm in keto. Several times though I couldn't make it through the 5 days - I'd suddenly get really weak or hungry and have to eat. Possibly it's because I was exerting myself too much - I wanted to stay busy so I went on long treks through the woods. But I wonder if it could be because I wasn't 'really' fasting?

John St Julien discusses Original Sin, and goes farther with it than Snoop and I did above. This is brilliant.

Not only that, I think this is his best statement yet about the universal 'code' found throughout all religions.



And here's his followup video. Meaning of the flood stories. They're essentially the same as the crucifixion - man builds an ark, loads on 2 of each animal and his family, and they all survive the flood that drowns the world, then they start a new world. It's the death of the old - the lower nature, and the new higher nature rising from the ashes (or the mud in this case).

So... Easter/Ishtar is really a celebration of pagan orgiastic rites?



Dirt, dust, earth always represent your lower nature (the worldly desires or earthly delights). Wash it away with water nature, which is a higher state of consciousness reached through meditation.

Lucid dreaming is a form of mysticism

Again from the Wiki page on Mysticism:

Mysticism is the practice of religious ecstasies (religious experiences during alternate states of consciousness), together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, and magic may be related to them. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.

The term “mysticism" has Ancient Greek origins with various historically determined meanings. Derived from the Greek word μυω, meaning "to conceal", mysticism referred to the biblical liturgical, spiritual, and contemplative dimensions of early and medieval Christianity. During the early modern period, the definition of mysticism grew to include a broad range of beliefs and ideologies related to “extraordinary experiences and states of mind".

(Emphasis mine)


To be more specific and move away from dictionary definitions, mysticism means to transform your state of consciousness in order to experience divinity within, as opposed to sitting in church as a pastor reads the gospels or gives a sermon. One is an inner experience that brings transformation, the other is simply a surface reading that takes the words of the Bible literally. To put it another way, one is a deep right brain experience of creativity and inspiration, and the other is simply a left brain exercise where you memorize some prayers and repeat them verbally.

What made me think about this are the similarities. Both mysticism and Lucid Dreaming are about transforming your awareness or consciousness. In fact here’s an excerpt from a post I made this morning:

Essentially what you're trying to do is transform your inner self, from believing dreams are just random or whatever, to understanding them in a whole different way. This is really a major shift of consciousness, or at least in your understanding of it. And that's very different from the way you learn things in school, which is by rote memorization. It's an experiential change, a change in your overall understanding of the world and the mind. Some people make that shift easily and some less so, but everyone can make it with sustained effort.

Another similarity - both mystics and lucid dreamers get ridiculed and shunned for their beliefs and practices, by materialists and by religious communities, who call both practices satanic. The vast majority of people never experience inner change of consciousness and are highly suspicious of it (if not terrified). The rigid left brain always seems to fear and attack the transformative and creative capabilities of the right brain.

I suppose it would be more fair to say lucid dreaming is a secular or non-religious sort of mysticism.

I've seen John St Julien refer to the states of consciousness (Earth, Water, Air and Fire in the Greek mysticism) as Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta, which are the stages of sleep. So the mystics are definitely seeking to attain the deeper brainwave states - the same ones we are in while experiencing lucidity.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

In reference to a question I asked a few posts back, tonight I experienced how "the garbage" comes up when the verbal mind is shut down. It's in the form of images with ideas and emotion attached, but no words. For me, each image seemed to sort of rise up like a bubble, hesitate for a moment so I could 'see' it, and then disperse as if the bubble popped, or dissolved into smoke that dissipated rapidly. Each little packet of image/idea/emotion was associated with a memory or with something I had done recently that I would consider wrong - bad behavior. Sin. Or in other words, the shadow. And yes, occasionally words would creep in, I just had to keep shutting them off again.

I experience the same type of phenomenon when I lay down to rest (either to sleep, or if I can't, to rest as though I were asleep/meditate/relax deeply. Since I have extensive experiences with sleep deprivation and altered states in general (LDing/hypnagogia/REM Atonia and SP/ hallucinogenic experiences/other drug experiences), some point along the way I started mentally mapping how consciousness and perception function based on the experiences themselves and the conditions under which I experience them. I've been up for 4 to 5 days before in the past, and not only noticed this garbage (as I usually do after being up for over 12 to 16 hours any time i relax with my eyes closed), but that a whole slough of newer symptoms/side effects emerge with it.

The Garbage images and the ideas and emotions attached to them begin to become minidream-like experiences. The images often are animated and can be of literally anything and almost always winds up being so vivid that not only do I see them as constant opaque images playing like a video, but if I let my vision unfocus or I focus on visualizing, I can often see these images while my eyes are open too. If I lie down to take a power-nap (not actually sleeping but resting deeply relaxed like I would if I were trying to sleep), after about the two day mark, I notice that my eyes dart around like I'm in REM when I try resting like this, usually lasting for about 10 or 15 minutes. When experiencing this, it just feels like my eyes really want to do their own thing and so I let them, and the automatic action of it feels extremely relaxing and calming to my eyes (somehow) and it's rather hypnotic to let happen. My mind becomes entirely silent, and I simply experience the act of being with only retaining a rudimentary form of conscious awareness of myself or anything that might be happening around me.

While the 10-15 minute awake REM "cycle" occurs, the visual imagery I normally see before that disappears, but in large part because I spread my awareness so thin that for all I know I could be seeing it, but not paying attention the slightest bit whatsoever and so remaining unaware of it. Depending on how many days I've been up or how particularly awake I still am while I'm resting like I'm sleeping and experiencing this little period of rapid eye movement, I either achieve near ego death/loss (more awake), or I slip into a somewhat delirious state where I believe I am in other places doing something else talking with other people. I've experienced times that I can follow that a coherent narrative is going on, but more often than not the unconscious "dreamlets" devoid of any visual imagery or other physical sensory perceptions rapidly shift from narrative to narrative every 5 to 10 seconds, and the situations or (understood, not heard) conversations in them are typically more bizarre the more sleep deprived I happen to be.

The more bizarre these dreamlets are, the more akin they are to the fever dreams you had as a child. You experience rather intense and strange sensations (there's a heavy sense of atmosphere, talking sensations like premonitions, profound realizations/deep understandings of things, poignant and highly pervasive feelings about the vibes of a situation, etc.) that can often be unpleasant, profoundly alien feeling, disturbing, sinister and evil, physically sick/ill along with body-horroresque distortions of your physical bodily perceptions like morphing into impossible shapes or experiencing simultaneous contradicting changes in your body's proportions and overall size and shape.

After the 10-15 minute awake REM cycle ends, I go back to not sleeping or wanting to sleep (sometimes, we're mostly talking about past experiences of sleep deprivation while on (my) prescribed amphetamines though). I still have lots of closed-eye visual imagery following this, but typically it's much more coherent and less sporadic or random in how it changes over time. Similarly, my short-term memory and ability to feel like I have a decent grasp on what's going on (not feeling loopy from being so tired and in a constant timeless haze) return for about 30 minutes to an hour, and typically I feel significantly refreshed.

I meant to focus more on the function of memory and its relationship with these sleep/altered state experiences, but got pretty carried away with a tangent. I'm pretty tired right now, so I'm just gonna post this anyway. I'll follow up with a new post doing more of what I originally intended after getting some sleep.

Looking forward to that followup, but that was an excellent post as is. I like when you bless us with your descriptions of sleep-related experiences, you're a good observer of them.

I've experienced many of those (symptoms? Not sure what to call them. It isn't related to sickness, so symptoms isn't the right word). But I can't really stay awake even overnight or I start to feel nauseous and get in a bad mood. Then it's hard to get to sleep - I have to lay there trying until I 'burn off the sleep fever' as I call it, which means the aggression and sick feelings run their course and then pass. At that point I'll usually feel wide awake for a while - maybe an hour or two sometimes, and suddenly get really sleepy, and then I can sleep like a baby.

Once I managed to WILD. Only once so far, but I remained aware and was able to watch as the patterns of colored light 'inside the eyelids' resolved suddenly into an image. It was a view of a landscape that at first was unmoving and looked transparent, like when you're looking out a window, and you can see both your own reflection plus what's on the other side of the glass. As I looked at it, marveling because I was aware I had just seen it form, it began to move gently, just sliding sideways at an even pace as if it or I were moving slowly. Then it went HD on me, everything suddenly switched to crisp high-resolution and full color (it had been almost black and white at first I think, or very desaturated colors). And in another sudden shift it changed from a flat image in front of me to an actual 3D terrain that I was now fully immersed in, and I saw that the reason it was moving is because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car looking out the window as it moved slowly along a street.

So that experience showed me how dreamlets turn into dreams by stages. And yeah, like you said, the dreamlets at first are motionless but can then become like little animated GIFs with limited motion and no sound, then sound can come in as well. And as it develops rapidly into full HD, full-immersion, along come ideas, false memories, and story elements to make it more like a real-life situation as opposed to just a movie, which is only a moving image on a flat screen plus sound. Dreams of course also include those elements I mentioned – false memories, ideas, and story, as well as feelings and intuitions etc. The full gamut of thought/sensation etc. Oh, and including sensory impressions - taste, smell, texture etc.

What I'm not sure about is if you're supposed to experience those kinds of things while meditating?

I suspect it happens if you meditate while sleep-deprived or extremely sleepy. And I also suspect it's not optimal. Fun, and pretty cool to experience while sitting with your head held up rather than laying in a bed, but I don't think this is what meditation is SUPPOSED to be like. Though no reason you can't do it for the heck of it. For me the sleepy meditation sessions are the really cool ones, and I like the ability to mix up states, waking with dreaming.

I said earlier that when I meditate I try to approach a sleep state as far as I can, as well as just shutting off the verbal mind. I really don't know if that's the goal, but the fact that St. Julien says the states of higher consciousness align with Alpha, Beta, Theta and Delta does seem to suggest it. For now I only do that if I'm sleepy and seem to already be in REM. I can't help it then of course, and it's fun, so why not? But when I'm more alert I can't seem to make it happen.

Lately I've been struck several times by how confusing the terminology can be surrounding states of consciousness as well as ideas about the self or the personality.

I want to address 2 of these confusions in particular, that can be extremely confounding. Not that I have a solution, I just want to talk about them briefly.



Consciousness
This one is really difficult to pin down because people use the word in completely contradictory ways.

In one sense, to be conscious means to be awake, alert, aware. And to be unconscious means to be asleep, or knocked out cold. No awareness at all. Like a boxer laid out on the canvas. Nothing but solid dense blackness and silence.

But in psychology the term unconscious means something entirely different. It refers to THE unconscious – as in the unconscious mind. And that doesn't at all mean a part of the mind that's completely dark and silent. On the contrary it's very active, even when the conscious mind is unconscious (in the sense of being asleep).

That's because in the psychological nomenclature, consciousness refers to awareness, or more properly I suppose to the threshold of awareness. The conscious mind is that part of the mind that you are consciously aware of, and the unconscious means that part that's operating but that's below the threshold of your conscious awareness. It's sort of like the NSA in that it always knows what you're doing, but it operates in total secrecy. So in that sense I guess you could say it's dark.

And in spiritual terms the words are also inverted. To speak of higher states of consciousness, at least as I now understand it from the John St Julien videos, is to speak of deeper levels of unconscious brainwave activity such as Alpha, Theta and Delta, which are levels of relaxation and sleep. And what they call the lower states of consciousness are the fully awake ones - Beta and Gamma I suppose. In other words left brain activity, or what we think of normally as the conscious mind. Weird.



Self
Another confusing term.

Generally when normies talk about the self (small s) they're referring to what Jung or Freud would call the Ego - the 'smaller self' or the part that most would consider their personality. And of course Jung coined the term Self to refer to the larger center of personality that exists in the unconscious as an archetype of wholeness. It has gone by many names, including Zeus, God, Odin, Christ and countless others.

In some circles of Buddhism there is talk of achieving No-Self or Nirvana, which is what's meant by the ego death - destruction of the small self to awaken the Big Self. So what Jung calls the Self they call no self. Very confusing.

As I said, I have no solutions, but I thought it would be fun to lay it all out.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Self
In some circles of Buddhism there is talk of achieving No-Self or Nirvana, which is what's meant by the ego death - destruction of the small self to awaken the Big Self. So what Jung calls the Self they call no self. Very confusing.

Honestly I think the seemingly contradictory nature of Jung calling it the Self and Buddhists calling it no self is one of those cases where it is possible to reconcile them as opposites. They are both the extreme ends of the poles, and when you approach the extreme polarity on either, which end of the pole you are approaching becomes extremely unclear. Suddenly, the experience of the unified whole self, without the "ego" or perception of the self existing/functioning, becomes exceedingly indistinguishable from the experience of there being no self at all.

When it comes to a single, unified whole form of existence beyond dualistic interpretation, if there is nothing else that exists, and that existence is all there is, there is no functional difference between it and nothing. Imagine an infinitely positive space filled with infinite light and energy and a negative dark space devoid of it. Energy or not, unless there's an energy differential of some kind (imperfect, divided, multi-faceted existence made up of component parts), that energy can't perform any work. That infinitely positive space/form of existence can be in any shape imagined--be it an infinitely dense singularity, or a uniform distribution of itself over the whole of... itself (existence, I mean). Indeed, it is all of the shapes and none of the shapes at all.

Now imagine again the vast void of the abyss, the "infinite" nothingness. It doesn't possess shape or substance either. They are the same in most fundamental ways. However, there is a difference between the two; that being, of course, that in one reality nothing exists, and in the other only one thing does. The emptiness of the void is filled like a container, but the container is without shape or form, making what's filling it equally as without shape or form.

I think when it comes to understanding the difference between the infinite white light and unyielding dark nothingness of the void (as well as the unified whole self and the no self--as above, so below), it has to be acknowledged that the two aren't identical, but perfectly complementary. This is how we get the idea that when opposites are reconciled, God is found within that reconciliation. The opposites do not in fact actually oppose one another, but instead rhythmically ebb and flow or "vibrate" back and forth between one another, filling in each other's imperfections and flaws.

Essentially, Buddhists are coming at the subject from the opposite side of the same coin. Jung and the West's concepts seem to reflect more of what's experienced when taking psychedelics, and Buddhism and Eastern philosophy more accurately reflect dissociative hallucinogens. When it comes to taking either kind of substance, the end result when taking higher dosages for both of them is ego death caused by a dissociative state brought on by two differing fundamental mechanisms. Dissociatives cause dissociation directly, and psychedelics cause it over time during the peak as a result of runaway excitation in specific areas of the brain. As a result of the neurons' overstimulation and the already destabilized brainwave activity resulting from impaired feedback mechanisms in the consciousness circuit, many neurons eventually fully decouple from one another and go silent.

This silencing of neuron activity is what initially leads to the ego loss/death, but the neurons don't stay decoupled for all that long. When they become active again, rather than the brainwave oscillations continuing to experience widespread decoherence like before they decoupled, the neural oscillations become hypercoherent, leading to perceptions of unity and interconnectedness between all perceptions of the outside world, the self, and one's reality. This doesn't immediately altogether end the state of ego death, though. Rather, the ego progressively reintegrates with one's perceptual experience over a period of time. For a brief window of time, the experience of ego death and the perceptual hyperconnectivity of reality overlap, and you go back and for between experiencing being nothing and everything simultaneously. You exist without ego borders and instead as part of a continuum comprised of the entirety of existence.

Now as far as I know, dissociatives don't have the same follow up state of hypercoherent neural oscillations occur after ego death because the substance itself is blocking the neurons in the brain from communicating with one another. One's perception of ego death and reality are qualitatively the opposite of what you experience from psychedelics, yet all the same conclusions and understandings about the interconnectedness of things and simultaneously existing as nothing and everything all occurs just the same. Rather than feel as though you are more fully integrated with the external universe, it feels as though there ceases to be any difference between your internal reality and external reality. It feels much more like an internal, disconnected, neutral experience, whereas with psychedelics it is an external highly sensory and very involved experienced.

That neutral, disconnected nature of dissociatives and Buddhism seem to be the Yin to the highly sensory, involved, and interconnected nature of psychedelics and Jung/Western philosophy's Yang.

I wrote this, then saw your post snoop... it's kind of related I guess.

First let me just see if I understand you correctly... You think that the buddhists found the self while observing the world, whereas jung found the world while observing the self? Each would be a good example of The fool who persisted in his folly and became wise.... haha.

On the topic of self, I recently stumbled upon a funny technique or exercise for observing the individual in relationship to environment by looking at others. It is a bit difficult to explain but it was quite fun so I'll try.

We are all familiar with those gestaltian images of simple figures on neutral backgrounds where if you change your perspective the background becomes the foreground. (Like the lamp that becomes two faces)

Something simple like that could be animated while still maintaining the "illusion" in lack of a better word. With such an animation we can change our perspective on what is taking place, or which part of the image is "doing something"

When we look at a real person, walking, they are in the foreground, they are the source of action. But try to change that perspective. So that you see the environment being the actor, moving the the person around. It's the same principle as with the images, just a bit more complex. And both are ultimately true.

In a way this technique is a way to acchieve a direct experience of what I guess you could see as some sort of determinism...

It is of course necessary to keep in mind that this is only a shift of perspective to one side of a polarity. We can also find ways to shift it all the way the other direction where we see the organism as the explanation for the environment. And that in the case of this "organism-environment polarity", as all other polarities, the two poles are not separate, but dependent on each other and a single unit.

Oh man, you guys pulling me back toward the hermeticism!! Funny thing, I was looking back into it today anyway - it exerts a strong fascination for me. I really like the Kabala and the sense of balance it has, with the pillar of mercy and the pillar of justice, then the central pillar representing the balance point in between. That reminds me of the scales of virtue and vice where both the excesses and the – ummm – opposite of excess (totally blanking here) are considered vices, and the virtues are the balancing points. Plus I'm as taken by the idea of the infinite light emerging from the void as you two seem to be.

Synchronicity put this video in my feed today:



So much relevance. My main issue with Christian mysticism is that it seems by design to transform the seeker into a meek lamb to be led to the sacrifice. I've been looking into it a lot more than just the handful of videos I post here, a lot of reading as well, and the impression I get is that you develop the heart chakra essentially, the capacity for boundless love, compassion and acceptance. But there doesn't seem to be any provision for strength, for developing the warrior aspect that's so necessary to maintain a good healthy balance.

This is another way in which I see it as becoming a slave. Because apparently what happens as you go deeper into meditation/contemplation and the inner Christ nature takes hold is you become a creature of pure love and gentle compassion, and all capacity for violence or sternness evaporates. At least that's how I understand it. Nietzsche was really right when he called Christianity a slave morality, maybe more than he knew. Though he may have been aware of the mystical aspect of it as well, I don't know. But as I mentioned earlier, monks in a monastery for instance become pacifists and unless they train in something like martial arts, they also become total pushovers unable to defend themselves. That's maybe not so bad if you live in a monastery where everyone else is the same way (or supposed to be anyway), and it's separate from the rest of the world. But what about if you're just an individual living in the world? You need to develop fully as a strong person before you can give your service totally to God I think, or you're a broken vassal (Hah! Typed that before the pun hit me).

In my case I've always been too much of a pushover. People Pleaser Syndrome is the technical term. And when I started looking into Jung and Individuation it was for psychological development - to develop myself fully as a human being – I had no idea it was going to lead to anything religious or spiritual to be honest. I'm now convinced of the need for some kind of spirituality or religion in your life, but I'm leery of this particular one, unless there are aspects of it that I haven't seen mentioned yet, that do allow for developing your warrior aspect. I believe back in Biblical times though they weren't, in the words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club "A generation of men raised by women" in a society where masculinity has come to be seen as entirely toxic (rather than there being both a toxic form and a healthy form of it).

But Jordan Peterson just pointed out that indeed Christianity can have that strength to it (his "Meek shall inherit the earth" comment for instance*). I suspect it depends on who's interpreting it or making the videos. Some people who come to it probably have the opposite issue, they might be coming from a background of excessive masculinity, or just never had a problem with being a pushover. For them it's probably a good thing to give up the warrior aspect of the self and give yourself over entirely to compassion and gentleness. That would be good balance for someone like that. But I also suspect a lot of men who haven't integrated their shadow take refuge in Christianity as Peterson suggested in the video – seeing their weakness or cowardice as morality. That would just compound the problem and turn it into a pathology.

I'll definitely keep looking into it - maybe I just need to find some different content creators or find my own way of interpreting it to fit my life.


* "the meek shall inherit the earth" – thinking about how St Julien would interpret that esoterically, the Earth represents each person's lower nature – the earth level as opposed to Water Air or Fire. Heaven/the Divine being the Fire level. So it would mean that the meek remain stuck in their lower nature, separated from God, which is Hell by definition. I could see that being true if meek refers to the cowardly or weak, but if it really does mean warriors who stay their hand until necessary, then it's a bit unclear. But then so much of esotericism is unclear – that's basically what the word means after all!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I believe back in Biblical times though they didn't face anything like Marxist feminism which led to, in the words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club "A generation of men raised by women" in a society where masculinity has come to be seen as toxic (rather than having both a toxic and a healthy/necessary side).

I agree with what you've said, and this is going to be really pedantic, but, even though it really is pretty much the case where boys/men are being raised by just their mother much more often than not, I believe it's being raised in a single-parent household itself that is more the real problem (lacking any kind of cohesive input and unity from both parents and their respective roles, most traditionally in the West with the father acting as the parent that disciplines most strictly and renders harsher judgment and the mother is more emotionally supportive, nurturing, and enabling when it comes to fostering the child's creativity).

Regarding Christianity's (alleged) slave morality, I think it's only natural given that during the times in the societies the Bible originated from, slavery was ever pervasive throughout daily life. The Quran even gets extremely technical with the procedures you have to go about when it comes to being conquered and making human transactions and whatnot. Since Islam and Christianity are both based on Judaism originally, and the Jews were an enslaved people for some time and their interpretation of God was as a jealous, vengeful omnipotent entity of supreme force to be feared, submitted to, and revered. Islam, the word itself, translates to "submit/submission", as an explicit reference to how they view going about practicing their faith because and their relationship with God.

Slavery was just part of the culture then, and society then would be considered ultra-conservative today. There were rigidc ideas of where people belonged and what their lot in life was and would forever remain to be, to know one's place, as well as there being a certain way you do things (more traditions, etc.). People were fully expected to remain in their tiny lots and the neat little boxes they were born being stuffed into by everybody else from the day they're born until the day they die. A "slave"/obedience morality emerging from/in their religious institutions and beliefs seems only natural.

I know this isn't even a main part of your point, but a generation of men raised by women refers to a lot more than just fathers being missing from the household or weakened into ineffectualness. It also refers to the way the masculine influence has been removed from schools, especially the early grades, and from pretty much every other aspect of life. As Peterson has said, mothers coddle and protect the children and fathers challenge them, which is something they need in order to grow to their full potential, to be capable of becoming strong well balanced adults. It also refers to the fact that a lot of men in today's society have been stripped of masculinity - so even households with a father present might lack any healthy masculinity.

I'm sure you know this well, just felt compelled to point it out.

Reading your comment made me suddenly see this: your comparison of mothers as compassion/agreeableness and fathers as strictness/harsh judgement aligns perfectly with the Qaballa's Left Hand of Mercy and Right Hand of Justice. This idea also exists in the Scales of Justice seen on every courthouse building as well as the Eagle on the dollar bill that carries an olive branch of peace in one talon and arrows of war in the other. These symbols all represent good healthy balance - you try to avoid going too far in either direction and when you do you know it's time to move the opposite way to re-establish balance. And our society (not just in any one country, pretty much the entire Free Western World) has become extremely unbalanced toward the female pole, and has largely cast the male pole as Toxic. And of course this supposed Compassion/Mercy is backed up by the victimhood strategy and other tricks disguising aggression under a mask of compassion.

I also want to explain better what Nietzsche meant by Slave Morality. Paganism operated under what he called a Master Morality – those cultures valued strength. But he said Christianity and the other examples of slave morality inverted that because the slaves hated the masters, so they were deeply resentful and re-framed morality to make strength seem like a bad thing and meekness (often secretly harboring resentment and aggression) seem like a good thing. And I just realized - it was essentially an attack against masculinity. And a very effective one - it took over the Roman empire and spread across much of the world.

Part 2:

I figured out how to insert a table to do this, which believe me took a lot of fumbling around! The graph is pretty self-explanatory I think:

Left Hand of Mercy (Vice of Insufficiency)	Balance (Virtue of Moderation)	Right Hand of Justice (Vice of Excess)
Agreeableness	Self-Assertion	Aggression

So Agreeableness is a lack of sufficient Self-Assertion, and Aggression is an excess of it.

It's important to know that the middle way is not ALWAYS the best way – the scale is slidable depending on the situation. At times it's best to be very agreeable, or very aggressive – even times when it's totally necessary. But you should be able to move to any position as needed. If you find it very hard to adapt readily to one of them, then you have some work to do.

I see self-assertion as refusing to let other people step on your toes, and aggression as stepping on theirs. My natural tendency is toward too much agreeableness most of the time. When my dander is up I can get pretty assertive, occasionally even aggressive, but it's pretty rare for either, and requires feeling really good and strong that day (which is why I did not make a good moderator! ). The next day most likely I'll have slid back to the left of the scale, if not later in the same day. Assertiveness usually comes with a sort of rush of energy when I'm feeling really good, and those don't last for long usually. My normal state being more low key or low energy.

Not sure why I'm sharing all this - maybe this should be for my eyes only. It's been a long time since I put my vulnerability out there on the board and shared personal stuff like this. But it could prove helpful, to me or to others.

Also, I've seen countless videos/articles etc about the Shadow, how it forms, and so on, and the ones by Peterson are probably the best in a way. Well, I should say he touches on aspects of it the others don't, probably because he doesn't cater to political correctness and aside from him just about everyone else involved in therapy or mental health etc does. That's what makes his such a welcome voice crying out in the wilderness, to borrow an Old Testament phrase.

But for all that, I have yet to find anything that even remotely explains HOW to integrate the damn shadow!

My thinking, at least in my own particular case, relating to what I'm talking about here with the graph, is I should learn to notice when I'm being too agreeable and make myself be more assertive. What Jung would call the "self-bullying cure". I suppose I need to start reading up on methods of therapy for teaching people to be more assertive. Assertiveness training. Oh, I should also re-read the book The Complex: Path of Transformation. There is undoubtedly either a complex or a neurosis at the root of this, because if the person I'm facing off against says or does certain triggering things I suddenly lose all energy and fall somewhere between fawn and freeze mode - freeze if it's really dire. That's only happened 2 or 3 times in my life, but it was weird - like I just went catatonic and couldn't talk for a while. I should look into dealing with neuroses too, that's a possibility I suppose.

Addendum to previous post:

Actually there was a time a few years back when I was pretty assertive all the time, or at least ready to step up in an instant whenever necessary. I had been lifting weights for a few years and was getting pretty strong, plus a big tree fell right next to the house (slapping the edge of the roof and denting the gutters - a few feet farther in and it would have crushed a corner of the house). Long story short I had to cut up the tree and chop it into firewood (which is still ongoing, but it should be done some time this winter). I got over my fear of chainsaws and bought myself one and then spent several hours 3 times a week (on workout days actually, after doing the workout) cutting up the tree. That consisted of switching back and forth between what I called the All-Day Deadlift and the All-Day Bench Press, because I had to forcefully push the saw into the tree for a long time to cut through the massive trunk. It's an electric, which aren't as powerful as a gas powered, so you really have to work it.


While I was doing that I got way stronger. At the same time I was also reading a book by Osho called Courage; The Art Of Living Dangerously, the premise of which is that you need to live outside of your safety zone all the time, it's a prison disguised as a safe haven. I was also deep into developing my warrior aspect (the male character archetypes are Warrior, Magician, Lover, King – you need to find balance between the first three in order for the King to manifest itself).

Those days were definitely my pinnacle of self-assertion and confidence, but when I felt like I had developed the warrior sufficiently and people around me had begun to accept that I establish boundaries now and fiercely defend them, it seemed like time to ease off a bit and let the balance return to equilibrium. I had developed the warrior quite a bit - it's necessary to overdo it for a while when it's something that's always been insufficient in your character. Now I think maybe I just let it slip all the way back into unconsciousness, while believing it was in balance. Hmmmm... just writing all that pretty much shows me exactly what I need to do!! Wow thanks DV - this therapy session has been really helpful!!

Hah! In fact I just remembered, my best motto back then was "Don't be a F***king P*ssy!"