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Post by Admin on Oct 16, 2020 11:27:01 GMT
Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe by Bernardo Kastrup www.barnesandnoble.com/w/decoding-jungs-metaphysics-bernardo-kastrup/1137033929Overview More than an insightful psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung was the twentieth century's greatest articulator of the primacy of mind in nature, a view whose origins vanish behind the mists of time. Underlying Jung's extraordinary body of work, and providing a foundation for it, there is a broad and sophisticated system of metaphysical thought. This system, however, is only implied in Jung's writings, so as to shield his scientific persona from accusations of philosophical speculation. The present book scrutinizes Jung’s work to distil and reveal that extraordinary, hidden metaphysical treasure: for Jung, mind and world are one and the same entity; reality is fundamentally experiential, not material; the psyche builds and maintains its body, not the other way around; and the ultimate meaning of our sacrificial lives is to serve God by providing a reflecting mirror to God’s own instinctive mentation. Embodied in this compact volume is a journey of discovery through Jungian thoughtscapes never before revealed with the depth, force and scholarly rigor you are about to encounter.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2020 12:44:02 GMT
The Alchemist has to contemplate metaphysically the laws of nature and the natural phenomena in physics and chemistry. During his meditations he is striving to experience nature and to look for analogies within himself to connect the phenomena of the outer and inner world. This happens when he becomes one with the object of his meditation, whereby he penetrates the various realms of nature, minerals, the vegetable and animal kingdom, geology, and the inner essences of terrestrial appearances. To ease the hermetical meditation the adepts compiled charts but only those who received training were able to read the hermetic symbols. _ Carl Jung
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2020 15:46:00 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2020 16:45:21 GMT
JUNG'S SYMBOLIC LIFE and MAXIMUS the CONFESSOR's MYSTAGOGY www.academia.edu/39389920/JUNGS_SYMBOLIC_LIFE_and_MAXIMUS_the_CONFESSORs_MYSTAGOGYTalk given by Rev Dr Grigorios Chysostom Tympas to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, in London 2.5.2019, in memory of Jung’s original talk on ‘The Symbolic Life’ in 1939, addressing the same Guild of Pastoral Psychology Grigorios Chrysostom TYMPAS independent.academia.edu/GRIGORIOSCHRYSOSTOMTYMPASGrigorios Chrysostom Tympas has a degree in medicine, a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex and a post-doc research degree in Theology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has published books and papers on the relationship between early psychic models and psychiatric nosology as well as on psychology of religion. He serves at the Greek Orthodox Church in London and a visiting lecturer at the University of Athens and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he teaches Theory of Archetypes and Social Psychology in master degrees.
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Post by Admin on Dec 2, 2020 21:07:23 GMT
"Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories, but your own creative individuality alone must decide.”
- Jung, C. G. (1928) Contributions to Analytical Psychology. Translated by H. G. Baynes and C. F. Baynes. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd. p. 361
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Post by Admin on Dec 18, 2020 13:12:40 GMT
What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind”, wrote Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
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Post by Admin on Dec 21, 2020 21:20:37 GMT
Pain and disappointment fill the world of Abraxas with coldness, all of your life's warmth slowly sinks into the depths of your soul, into the midpoint of man, where the far blue starlight of your one God glimmers.
~Jung’s Soul, The Black Books, Page 276
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Post by Admin on Jan 12, 2021 20:21:14 GMT
Oddly enough the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fulness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible.
C. G. Jung
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Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2021 20:52:48 GMT
You might not perhaps think that a figure as prominent and influential as Jung needs to be "defended", but as James Hillman suggests in this very compelling and thought-provoking presentation, Jung has been under repeated attack, which continues to this day. "Why is Jung today still so offensive?", he asks, before nicely adding, "thank god." "There are five areas of the attack", Hillman notes. "One comes from science: the claim that his hypotheses are unfounded and unfalsifiable, and that in fact all of psychoanalysis is unscientific; the second area is from the Christians and Christian thinkers; the third attack is from the Freudians, who still dominate the field; the fourth is the assault on Jung as a Nazi or as a Nazi-sympathiser or anti-Semite, which is the thrust of the left thinking against Jung, or the French thinking about Jung; the fifth is a personal attack on Jung’s character and biography." "Jung is still someone in need of defence", he concludes. Hillman goes through each charge both thoughtfully and with great nuance and subtlety, and I fully recommend listening to the full seven hours (!) available on this podcast - a recoding of a two-day conference on the subject in 2005. But one area that particularly stood out as having special relevance today is his discussion of the charge of "anti-Semitism" levelled against Jung, and what the weaponisation of this issue in the hands of his detractors might actually be unconsciously concealing or disguising in them (this part of the discussion can be found at 4 hours 44 mins in). The examination of this is done without minimising the evidence of Jung's evident mistakes in this area, but locating that discussion in a much wider and I think more vital psychological discussion about the use made of it, and the preoccupation of this issue with regard to Jung in particular. The implication is that the charge of anti-Semitism can be used against particular individuals at particular times as a way of discrediting or undermining other aspects of their work or thought, which is what actually lies behind the charge. To really try and understand what's going on here, psychologically, is incredibly difficult and I think Hillman does it with great tact and insight. He also, rather poignantly, asks or considers whether psychoanalysis really makes a difference, in terms of its influence in or impact on the ‘body politic’ - all these great therapists and minds, he notes, spending their lives engaging with depth psychology issues and some of the deepest problems and experiences of our times, but rarely perhaps do their insights actually "enter into the body of the culture", as he puts it. This is a sort of “tragedy” of the profession, he suggests - that not only has psychotherapy, historically, not particularly engaged with the outer world, but it has often served to drag people away from political activism. It's a point he makes with particular force in his book 'We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse' (1992). Full podcast available here: youtu.be/NVLYIVg6_50
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2021 14:00:34 GMT
i loved this book - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_(Findley_novel)Pilgrim is a novel by Timothy Findley, first published by HarperFlamingo in Canada in 1999. The first US edition was published by HarperCollins in 2000. The novel is typical of Findley's interest in Jungian psychology; in fact, Carl Jung himself is a major character. The novel's protagonist is Pilgrim, an immortal who is brought to Jung's clinic in Zürich after his latest suicide attempt. Pilgrim has lived through the ages, moving from one life to another, and claims to be tired of living. Jung takes it upon himself to cure what he sees as a delusion and to restore Pilgrim's will to live. Pilgrim was nominated for the 1999 Giller Prize.[1] Pilgrim is the inspiration for a contemporary opera, The Dream Healer, composed by Lloyd Burritt, with libretto by Christopher Allan and Don Mowatt. The premiere was March 2008 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia. It featured star mezzo-soprano Judith Forst as Lady Sybil Quartermaine, John Avey as Carl Jung, and Roelof Oostwould as Pilgrim.
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Post by Admin on Feb 16, 2021 11:29:47 GMT
Hermann Hesse and the Psychology of C.G. Jung
“It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …”
Hermann Hesse and the psychology of C.G. Jung
By Günter Baumann (paper given at the 9th International Hesse Colloquium in Calw, 1997)
"Hermann Hesse’s involvement with the psychology of C.G. Jung begins in spring of 1916 when the writer has a nervous breakdown and subsequently undergoes a course of
psychotherapy with J.B. Lang, a member of C.G. Jung’s staff. Analysis commences while the patient is still in the “Sonnmatt” sanatorium near Lucerne, yet Hesse seems to have considered it to be so fruitful that he decides, after his discharge, to travel from his home in Berne to see Lang in Lucerne once a week. It is thus that he comes to have 72 three-hour analytical sessions, i.e. two hundred hours of therapy. In autumn of 1917, Hesse meets C.G. Jung for the very first time at a hotel in Berne, and absorbs himself in a gripping discussion on the subject of Jung’s latest psychological ideas and theories. Interestingly, Hesse at the time reacted to Jung with the characteristic ambivalence that was later to increasingly become the determining feature of his relationship both to the man and to depth psychology.
After the meeting, he noted in his diary: “Yesterday, evening, Dr. Jung telephoned me from Zurich … and invited me to the hotel for dinner. I accepted, and was with him until around eleven. My opinion of him changed several times during the course of this first meeting, his confidence having appealed to me very early on but then having put me off, yet my impression on the whole was a very positive one.” At the same time, Hesse begins to read Jung’s writings and pronounces his early works, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (today: Symbols of Transformation) to be “ingenious.” The strong impression Jung made on him is no doubt the reason why Hesse sought therapeutic assistance from the master himself during the next crisis in his life, his divorce from his first wife and the writer’s block he suffered from during the writing of Siddhartha. In the summer of 1921, there thus ensued a sequence of analysis extending over a period of several weeks in Jung’s apartment in Küsnacht. Hesse’s letters from this period testify to a virtually euphoric sense of enthusiasm over both the personality and the analytical abilities of his therapist. “Here with Jung, I am currently, while going through a difficult, and often almost unbearable, period of my life, experiencing the shock of analysis … It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …. All I can say is that Dr. Jung is conducting my analysis with extraordinary skill - ingenuity, even.” And, after completing the analysis, he summarizes: “I would have liked to continue psychoanalysis with Jung. In terms of both intellect and character, he is a magnificent, lively, brilliant man. I have a lot to thank him for, and am pleased that I was able to spend a while with him.
When Hesse’s second marriage breaks up in the mid-1920s, he approaches Lang once again and meets him between December 1925 and March 1926 for analytical sessions conducted in a spirit of friendship while he was writing Steppenwolf. During this most difficult crisis in Hesse’s life - he evidently spent a long time contemplating suicide - Lang would appear to have become not only a friend and therapeutic adviser but also one of the most important poles and points of reference for Hesse during this “Steppenwolf winter.” Later, however, the roles in this relationship seem to have been reversed. From around 1927, Hesse becomes the friend and helper of the severely pathological Lang, and was able to repay a large part of the help he himself had received. In the course of his third marriage, Hesse’s life finally stabilized, obviating the need for any further recourse to psychotherapeutic assistance. Despite this, however, he and Lang remained lifelong friends.
Why was it that Hesse developed a long and close involvement with Jungian psychology? Upon closer examination of the respective lives of the writer and psychologist, one may say that, in terms of spiritual and personal relations, these two men’s paths seemed almost destined to intersect at some point. There are many reasons for this, some of them mutually interdependent. Striking in the first instance are certain biographic elements that they had in common. Both came from decidedly religious families of the Protestant persuasion: Jung was the son of a minister, Hesse the son of a missionary. Both had a strict moral and religious upbringing and training in matters of conscience, and were seriously traumatized as a result.
Hermann Hesse described his upbringing in, for example, the story Kinderseele, or the introduction to Demian, yet fails to mention that the uncomprehending parents, in their maniacal religious zeal to break the will of the unruly son at all cost, drove him so far that he ended up in a mental asylum and attempted to take his own life. Very similar, albeit not quite so dramatic, was the childhood of C.G. Jung. In his autobiography, he writes - without, amazingly, any real insight into the significance of this for his own life - the deep feelings of guilt and the inferiority complex he suffered from as a boy: “I also sensed my inferiority … I am a devil or a swine, I thought, something depraved. The greater my feelings of guilt became, the more incomprehensible God’s mercy appeared to me. I never felt certain of myself. When my mother once said ‘You are a good boy,’ I just couldn’t believe it. Me a good boy? That was something new to me. I always thought I was a dissolute and inferior being.”
The moral sense of inferiority arising from the religious and moralistic upbringing in the parental home are, in my view, what form the common foundation for the psychological development of Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung. Both of them might well have been quite literally torn asunder in this spiritual and mental torture chamber, yet it is characteristic that their will to live and assert themselves was strong enough to transform these destructive impulses into a source of creativity, enabling these to be ultimately channelled not into madness and suicide but into a highly productive mental constitution, which one could term the “German Rectory Syndrome”: the linking of a quite exceptional intelligence and moral sensitivity to deep feelings of guilt and inferiority. This, in turn, gives rise - once again, in both men - not only to the constant striving to achieve something extraordinary in life to compensate for the trauma of early childhood but also a quite remarkable receptiveness to the very same theory of redemption - to wit, the Christian teaching of original sin and forgiveness. St Paul’s anthropology and theology of humankind’s unredeemed enslavement to evil, and his “nevertheless” justification through God’s mercy becomes - for Hesse and Jung, and for many other tortured souls before and after them - the “Gateway to Paradise.”
In my book Der archetypische Heilsweg, I sought to demonstrate that Hesse and Jung, in their central life experiences also their interpretation of life, follow a basic pattern that extends from Jesus through St Paul and St Augustine to Martin Luther. In his psychological terminology, Jung later calls St Paul’s concept of “original sin” the “shadow,” a morally inferior opponent of the ego, and the redeeming experience of God’s mercy is termed the manifestation of the wholeness of the self. In my view, this teaching was, for Hesse and Jung, and for their religious forerunners from Jesus to Luther, the sole way to save their souls in spite of their hapless childhood. Naturally, this also explains why Hesse so readily embraced Jung’s teaching of the shadow and the “and yet-wholeness” of the individual, reproducing it in his work. To this one must add the psychotherapeutic aspect. In three decisive crisis situations in his life, Hesse seeks, as outlined above, comfort and succour in Jungian analysis. He would therefore appear to have been confronted with a plausible and fruitful pattern of interpretation for his psychic problems, something which is - given his biographical background - only too easy to understand. Jung’s thoughts and teachings grip Hesse to such an extent that he resolves to use them not only for his own personal healing but also in his literary work. He therefore goes on to write his three major novels Demian, Siddhartha, and Der Steppenwolf, successively written works that were closely linked to Jungian psychotherapy, and in which Hesse uses his experiences of psychotherapy, and the impression he gained from reading to give motivational and compositional structure to his own writings. If, however, one is to understand Hesse’s receptiveness to Jungian thought, there is a third factor that also has to be borne in mind, and that concerns aspects relating to the psychology of religion. In Jung’s psychology, Hesse also finds a set of instruments enabling him - in a similar way to Jung himself - to interpret the religious fundament of his life in new, contemporary and stimulating manner, and to harness this for his literary work.
Jung’s teaching furnishes him with the key to the central message of his works from Demian on: the identity of self-awareness and awareness of God. Yet Hesse would, in Jung’s psychology of religion, appear to have found merely confirmation and legitimation of his own religious experiences and awareness, rather than having obtained any new inspiration. He had been prepared for this through his own religious upbringing in the parental home, and his reading of religious classics from the Bible through to the wisdoms of Buddha and Confucius, and the Upanishads and the Tao Teh Ching. Jung’s teachings echoed his own religious views and thoughts, systematizing, legitimizing and supplementing them in fascinating manner, and thus helping him to break free of conventional religious view of the world."
“It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …”
~ demiurge23.net
Awareness, Consciousness, Esoteric, Esotericism, Gnosis, Gnosticism, Knowledge, Metaphysical, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion, Spirit, Spiritual, Spiritualism, Spirituality
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Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2021 12:58:32 GMT
In a future socialistic or even communistic state Psychotherapy will be a subversive movement, if it is going to last at all. It will share the fate of Christianity, inasmuch as it is a development on the basis of and within Christianity.
~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 28
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Post by Admin on Feb 20, 2021 10:10:43 GMT
"Acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ—all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?" - Carl Jung
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Post by Admin on Mar 3, 2021 13:13:55 GMT
Shadow
The shadow is an unconscious complex that is defined as the repressed and suppressed aspects of the conscious self. The side of our personality which we do not consciously display in public. May have positive or negative qualities. If it remains unconscious, the shadow is often projected onto other individuals or groups. The Real Bad Dude, for example, may push his friendly, nourishing sides into the shadow. Jung emphasized the importance of being aware of shadow material and incorporating it into conscious awareness, lest one project these attributes on others. The shadow in dreams is often represented by dark figures of the same gender as the dreamer.
According to Jung the human being deals with the reality of the Shadow in four ways: denial, projection, integration and/or transmutation. To know our shadow involves recognizing dark aspects of personality as present & real. Shadow wants to do all the things we do not allow ourselves to do. Persona
The “mask” or image we present to the world. Designed to make a particular impression on others, while concealing our true nature. • To a certain extent it is a figure in the unconscious–that is, we do not realize that we are wearing the mask. It prescribes conduct in accord with requirements of everyday life. It represents conscious ego with its many variations. It is the person’s adaptation to the world; the manner he or she assumes in dealing with it. Must not be mistaken for whole person. If person identifies fully with persona, this becomes a denial of the other parts of the personality, including the rest of the unconscious.
Jung: “One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not but which oneself as well as others think one is.” _Continue reading:
gnosticserpent.com/knowledge-base/analytical-psychology/
#analyticalpsychology #jungianpsychology #psychology #psyche #spirit #persona #shadow #unconscios #selfanalysis #selfhealing #gnosticserpent
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2021 9:28:57 GMT
“But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy. A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.”
C.G. Jung - The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932
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