It would take a mega-load of super-agreeableness to counterbalance the super-antagonism toward religion that dominates this forum.
I see the path of individuation with its symbolic goal of wholeness as a means of recovering a personal religion which is irrefutable because it’s grounded in the spontaneous images of one’s own mind. It’s primarily phenomenological not theoretical. It’s subjective not objective.
Archetypal imagery may or may not connect with ultimate reality. But it is most definitely and undeniably my experience.
Wholeness may or may not be the actual goal of a lifetime process of individuation. But it is an image of that. I can see it in my “mind’s eye”.
Before they were known as archetypal symbols, the images that come to us in dreams and reveries were known as gods and goddesses and the heroes of world mythology. Then they were philosophized into abstractions. Finally they were banished from the disenchanted world of modern scientism.
At night these images can still reign in the dreaming mind. By day they are the hallucinations and delusions of psychopathology.
Yet by disconnecting us from the imagery of our own minds, modernity has rendered our lives meaningless.
So for a personal anecdote about two weeks before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, I saw a visual image of me spending more time at home working on my house due to personal circumstances which I won’t disclose. Now with social distancing the new normal that’s just about all I can do and a major swath of the world’s population is mostly stuck at home as well.
Synchronicity or not, that was my experience. One that seems to be pushing me toward individuation and perhaps closer to wholeness.
Okay, religion gets a bad rap I think because questioning it, and then rejecting dogma, is probably everyone’s, or at least your common-or-garden internet philosopher’s, jumping off point. And from observation, most people never ever get beyond that. It’s like whoa, god is dead, behold ! I win philosophy !
So yeah, lotta flak. God knows I did my fair share.
Blame it on religion’s success lol. You don’t see threads with titles like “Odin is bollocks.” or “Wiccans are fools.” etc.
Bask in the glory of God’s ubiquity.
Moving on.
So, if personal individuation is partially a subjective journey into your own psychic landscape, and a bumpier, more random ride along the rollercoaster of life, presumably slightly more objective as reality will apply some quality control to our inner lives, then what is its ultimate goal, or even progressive goals…?
You can’t really judge your own “wholeness” without bias, conscious or unconscious, which would seem to leave you dependent on the judgement of others. Which again would have you tied almost wholly, to circumstance, at the mercy of the collective - external to your endevor.
In my belief that all archetypes have physical underpinnings I see the brain’s pursuit of homoeostasis of varied body parts as a metaphor for the search for wholeness. Holy means whole. “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”–Kierkegaard. That the drive to be whole has natural causes does not in any way deny its spiritual reality; it simply brings things down to Earth, to the reality all living beings experience.
I could tell you what Jung and the Jungians and the archetypal psychologists say in the books [I’ve read a bunch of them] and the videos[ I’ve watched a bunch]. But, here’s the thing about individuation is individual, and experiential. The task is to become aware of your own imagery. I studied cognitive behavioral psychotherapy which focused on awareness of the messages we tell ourselves. But, images underlie those messages. Jungian therapy is about becoming aware of them. And it’s not about interpreting them so much as it is about dialogue with them. They are autonomous sub-personalities. Thereby, you can integrate your conscious ego with your unconscious Self. They are the daemons or demons of religious mythology that inhabit our being. Last night in my dreams I was having intercourse with a girlfriend. She wasn’t really here. Could that be part of me–my anima, my feminine side, possessing me?
But underlying any symbol is a unity, that prefixes any Freudian interpretation of artifacts. This is too syncronistic to be merely be labeled as imaginary.
Stated when Freud wanted to deny the latent homosexual implications of incessantly sucking on his cigar. If one of his patients were doing that, he wouldn’t have hesitated to interpret the cigar as a symbolic dick.
Okay, sometimes dream sex with dream girlfriend is just dream sex with dream girlfriend.
I dunno, it all just seems too subjective/primitive to be of much use except for chatting up facebook girls who believe in chakras. Even if we end up being able to make some sense of our inner symbolic language, what’s it gonna say to us…? It sounds to me like these deamons are the remnants of prelinguistic times. The animal equivalent of thinking. Perhaps its the seat of Jordan Peterson’s proposed deep brain structures that resonate with some archetypal story tropes.
On the other hand however, perhaps it is also the language of the hunch. Which might be useful if you’re a pro poker player or an antiquities dealer.
Not every dream is revelatory. In this case my unconscious was telling me that this woman still has a hold on my soul.
But actually there’s more to it than that. Because of the dream comes to me in a kind of death and rebirth situation that has been created by the coronavirus the need for a quarantine and social distancing and a particular set of circumstances in which I can’t see my girlfriend. And in the first dream she was hovering over me naked like a spirit and I was looking up at her. She seemed like a heavenly being gazing down at me beatifically, a kind of mediator or a muse. And she has been that for me, the inspiration of songs and poems, etc. So on deeper reflection, the dream does have archetypal significance. The second dream was all about her vagina. Of course it was sexual, but it is also the organ of birth and, in this context, connotes rebirth. Death and rebirth is a recurring archetypal theme that is present in world mythology including Christianity.
Ok, seriously now , Doesn’t that statement ‘conotes rebirth’ etc. assume that your unconscious somehow ‘knows’ the higher metaphysic language of your conscious awareness…? And is able to use it to tell you stuff…? I thought the whole exercise of channeling your unconscious assumed that communication between these two states was difficult because of the lack of a shared set of meanings…?
My dream generating unconscious psyche is smarter than me, knows me better than I do myself, reveals things to me I didn’t know about myself, and is a consummate artist and trickster. The maker of my dreams surpasses Hitchcock, Kubrick, the Coen brothers, and Tarantino as an entertaining storyteller. And I’m not even a lucid dreamer who remembers 1/10 of what goes on once I wake.
One thing: that we are living under the archetype of death and rebirth. Here’s an anecdote from Tarnas which I think is relevant to our situation of social distancing and quarantine:
May nature speak to us in this time of isolation, social distancing, sickness and death.
The unconscious has much more stuff in it and it notices much more. It’s not not the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the part of the sea we are aware of (at any given moment) but it also is part of that sea.
I guess I sort of think of the ego as a process. And a useful one, within limits. And yes, I guess I could think of it an archetype or for me more a set of ideas, images, feelings and then a set of reactions when ‘threats’ to those ideas/images/feelings are called into question by something egodystonic.
I’ve spent a lot of time identifying with the unconscious, allowing its contents, even really rather horrifying ones, to arise, and learned to accept them. This gives a whole different relation tot he conscious mind and to the ego in relation to the unconscious. I am not threatened when enraged, sexual, terrified, violent, twisted, vengeful (etc) contents come up. I don’t act these things out, except where appropriate, but I no longer feel horrified. I don’t need to deny that this is a part of me. Even quite clearly wrong reactions. Like being enraged when I am at fault. My wife and I have an agreement that it is alright to express our anger even when we acknowledge we are at fault. This is extremely comforting, to be able to do this. To be able to say ‘Shit, you are right, and I hate that and I am still pissed that you did X.’ Even very expressively letting the anger out, even in just pure sound,w hich is best.
I find it amazing how distant most people are from their own mixed feelings and what is actually going on in the bulk of them. Teh conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg and if you cannot face egodystonic stuff, you can even be quite wrong about what you feel and believe.
Even that idea that you believe just one thing. People never seem to notice that sometimes they believe in God, sometimes not. Sometimes think women are generally X, sometimes they believe the opposite.
No, it’s all simple in there. All these totally unified people never noticing their own body language and voice and dreams and passive aggressiveness and slips of the tongue and taste in music or art and…(so on) showing that actually a lot of other stuff is going on underneath and who the think they are is actually only built on noticing a tiny portion of themselves.
There are many theories of the ego. What stands out in my mind is the self-image. Yes we are distant from ourselves. Our culture has taught us to be. Our emotions are based on images and the images come from our soul. Secularism has taught us that we don’t have a soul. And Christianity teaches that soul needs to be saved not experienced. The Jungians and archetypal psychologists direct us back to our own souls. And what is the soul if not imagination?
I guess I would say the soul is what imagines, not imagination. And that it does other things too. It is the experiencer, the one underlying what gets called the body.
More than ontology, I think it is interesting how people try to achive wholeness and then what they consider to be themselves and what they consider not to be. If you are a whole, what is that whole made of, or what parts of what one does, feels, expresses, thinks, experiences is oneself. And what is not.
If you listen to most modern people they identify with parts of themselves then disidentify suddenly. Emotions becomes things they have or even are plagued by. Thoughs are theirs, then they are invaders, memes from others. Desires are a part of them, then they are plagued by them.
Compared to most paths/identifications I am more incluslive.
