Jung nuggets

[Caleb]

The more I read of Jung, the more astounded I am at how applicable his psychology is to our current experience. For those who care, I'm going to try to post a little quote from him, as I come across them. This one is his critique of "rationality":


"Modern man does not understand how much his 'rationalism' (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic `underworld.' He has freed himself from `superstition' (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation."

[kola]

It sounds as though he studied NA Indian history and traditions.

something old is nothing new.

Kola

[Caleb]

He studied all mythologies, which he believed was one of the most important duties of a competent psychologist.

--------

Ok, so this next nugget is very, very long. It is also very applicable. I apologize in advance for the length, but since I am the only one reading this thread anyway  I doubt it matters much how long it is. I had to choose which one I wanted to post today, because there are several others that are interesting. His analysis of the death of religion is particularly poignant, but will have to wait for another day. Some of those themes are in this quote, but the overall theme of this quote is about action: What, specifically, can we do to achieve wholeness?

-----

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.

There are no longer any gods we can invoke to help us. The great religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, and mountains, and from animals, and the god-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious. There, we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of the past. Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion. By the aid of reason, so we assure ourselves, we have `conquered nature.'

But this is a mere slogan, for the so-called conquest of nature...adds to our troubles by our psychological incapacity to make the necessary political arrangements. It remains quite natural for men to quarrel and to struggle for superiority over one another. How then have we `conquered nature'? In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our own nature. Slowly, but it appears inevitably, we are courting disaster.

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worth while for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect. Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.

I know what Buddhists would say: Things would go right if people would only follow the `noble eightfold path' of the Dharma and had true insight into the Self. The Christian tells us that if only people had faith in God, we should have a better world. The rationalist insists that if people were intelligent and reasonable, all our problems would be manageable. The trouble is that none of them manages to solves these problems himself.

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: `Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.'

This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions. The Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the facthat for more than seventy years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indespensible to any serious psychological investigation.

We can no longer afford to be so God-Almight-like as to set ourselves up as the judges of the merits or demerits of natural phenomena. We do not base our botany upon the old-fashioned division into useful and useless plants, or our zoology upon the naive distinction between harmless and dangerous animals. But we still complacently assume that consciousness is sense and the unconscious is nonsense. In science such an assumption would be laughed out of court. Do microbes, for instance, make sense or nonsense?

Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful. We cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes; in the same way, no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter. But the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.

I have spent more than a half centuray in investigating natural symbols, and I have come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols are not stupid and meaningless. On the contrary, dreams provide the most interesting information for those who take the trouble to understand their symbols. The results, it is true, have little to do with such worldly concerns as buying and selling. But the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

In a period of human history when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really complex and unfamiliar part of the mind, from which symbols are produced, is still virtually unexplored. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with it. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is often directly mistrusted and despised. `It's only psychological' too often means: It is nothing.

Where, exactly, does this immense prejudice come from? We have obviously been so busy with the question of what we think that we entirely forget to ask what the unconscious psyche thinks of us. The ideas of Sigmund Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche. Before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected; it has now become a dump for moral refuse.

[Pat K]

I stand ready to render you into the unconscious
as many times as you feel is necessary, to think
of something .

[Jacobus]

Would you cite your quotes?

Does Jung discuss the safest way to confront one's unconscious?

[Russell Kanning]

10 paragraph nuggets?

is this a complicated enough image for you?

[Caleb]

Would you cite your quotes?

Does Jung discuss the safest way to confront one's unconscious?

All quotes right now are from "Man and His Symbols", until I change books.

Yes, Jung does discuss the safest way to confront the unconscious. In fact, the only way that Jung personally recommends is through dream analysis. I happen to disagree with him for the simple reason that I don't think that is interactive enough. I do believe that, at minimum, someone who wants to confront the subconscious should keep a dream diary. You will need to write as soon as you get up, or you will forget massive amounts of your dream. Or you can do what I have been doing and buy a little $20 digital voice recorder and simply speak the dreams into it as soon as you get up, and transcribe at your leisure.  Several key points are:

a) avoid alcohol or caffeine, as both stimulants and depressants can interfere with sleep cycles.
b) do not hit your snooze button. Set your alarm for when you need to get up, and record your dream immediately, or you WILL forget them.
c) do not think that any dream is too small or trivial to record. You need volume in order to see patterns

I personally have been trying to go beyond that, with some successes and some failures. The problem is that it is very difficult to achieve the right mental state for more interactive meditative sessions without falling asleep. I have started a technique that I feel is somewhat helpful, but I'm not sure how best to proceed with it. I have discovered that if you close your eyes and start talking to your subconscious in symbols, your subconscious will start talking back to you in symbols. You will notice this because there will be a sudden break in what you were imagining and there will be new images that did not come from conscious intent. If you can manage to stay awake during this period, it will be very powerful! You will be "dreaming" while you are awake! All too often you nod off, though, and then that session is basically a loss. I don't know how to correct that problem, except to say that this technique is best tried when you are not that sleepy.

There are some more risky/hardcore techniques. You could try self hypnosis. There are books on techniques for doing that. There is also automatic writing, which I do not recommend because I have heard horror stories. There are also psychodelic drugs and plants that are effective for achieving the right mental state.

I am still learning myself. I just started this a few weeks ago. At this point, I am only trying stages one and two, but who knows how deep I will eventually want to go. I am convinced that this is where the problem lies, and I am convinced that somehow the solution also lies here, but don't know what it is yet.

Caleb

[kola]

LSD works.

and then there was the healer Ed Cayce. He was dreamer/creator dude.

Kola

[Caleb]

Since it is universally believed that man is merely what his consciousness knows of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always `the others' who do them. And when such deeds belong t the recent or remote past, they quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness, and that state of chronic woolly-mindedness returns which we describe as `normality.' In shocking contrast to this is he fact that nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the obscure misgivings are there before our eyes, if only we would see. Man has done these things; I am a man, who has his share of human nature; therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them again at any time. Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crim, we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. In reality we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be drawn into the infernal melee. None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. Whether the crime lies many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present--and one would therefore do well to possess some `imagination in evil,' for only the fool can permanently neglect the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil. Harmlessness and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patent and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil into the `other.' This strengthens the opponent's position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. -- The Undiscovered Self, pp 95-96

I think the insight here, as I understand it anyway, is that the reason evil can thrive is because most people choose to ignore it, and they choose to ignore it ostensibly because they are offended by it, but the underlying subconscious reason that people choose to ignore evil is because we all know at an instinctive level that WE are capable of evil, and this is something that the ego prefers not to deal with. Ironically, we avoid evil by convincing ourselves that evil is something that "other people" do, and hence overlook our own participation in it.

[MattLeft]

That first Jungian nugget seems to be weighing in favor of things like religion, spiritualism, faith, etc. over rational thought and logic.  If that's what he's saying, then I gotta say i wholeheartedly disagree.  In my personal opinion, the world would be a whole lot better place if more decisions were made with one's intellect rather than one's feelings.  Not attacking anyone else's values or beliefs, but I think faith   in a "higher power" is a weakness.  Conversely, faith or belief in yourself, your own abilities, your friends, etc. makes you strong.  That's, of course, assuming it's not misplaced faith.  And that's where rational thought comes in.

[Pat K]

Oh fucking please, I do not ignore evil nor do I participate in it,
except for what is forced from me.

And as little as that as I can prohibit.

Fuck Jung, and anybody else who wants to use word games
to imply other wise.

I have held off out of respect for others who are still trying to find their way.


But my patience has an end and this bull shit is it.

Suck it up and work , thats right physically work and think for
your life.

There is no free lunch  nor should there be.

You can masturbate all you want. With fancy words.

You and only you are responsible  for your life.

You will have to work for it, if you want it, what ever it is
the rest is just cry baby bull shit wishing to have what you have not
striven for.

I am not as strong nor as smart as some.

But damn, I don't try to bullshit my way threw it like this.

[kola]

Oh fucking please, I do not ignore evil nor do I participate in it,
except for what is forced from me.

And as little as that as I can prohibit.

Fuck Jung, and anybody else who wants to use word games
to imply other wise.

I have held off out of respect for others who are still trying to find their way.


But my patience has an end and this bull shit is it.

Suck it up and work , thats right physically work and think for
your life.

There is no free lunch  nor should there be.

You can masturbate all you want. With fancy words.

You and only you are responsible  for your life.

You will have to work for it, if you want it, what ever it is
the rest is just cry baby bull shit wishing to have what you have not
shrived for.

I am not as strong nor as smart as some.

But damn, I don't try to bullshit my way threw it like this.

put the cork back on er' and sleep er off. 

[Pat K]

Fuck you. You post, B.S. after B. S. on this board.

Than come up with crap like that.

If I was totally riped out of my gourd my post would
still deserve better.

But then it is KOLA  replying.

Crap I am wasting my time.

[Tom Sawyer]

Kola nuts 

[Lloyd Danforth]

Fuck you. You post, B.S. after B. S. on this board.

Than come up with crap like that.

If I was totally riped out of my gourd my post would
still deserve better.

But then it is KOLA  replying.

Crap I am wasting my time.

+1

Good Morning Pat!