Wholeness

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?

:smiley: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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.

Morality was not created of dust.

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.

Duplicate post

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.

Death and rebirth is the archetype of our time youtube.com/watch?v=8Lqv78W13Fo

If you’d like to forward that dream to me tonight.

My dream-mail address is: tabperv@tabshead.brain.uk. And I’ll give you a critique.

Ok, seriously now :smiley: , 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.

I think you’re probably selling yourself short.

Anyway, tired Tab is tired, online teaching is a pain. I’ll have a think, but not sure really what about.

So far we’ve covered:

  1. Dreams as an interface with our unconscious inner selves/inner space and its resident deamons.
  2. Individuation achieved through intergrating/harmonizing oneself with both external reality and internal ‘reality’.
  3. Cigars and vaginas.

Did I miss anything…?

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.

Right. And the ego itself is an archetype which we know as an archetypal image, the concept being based on that image.

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.

Phenomenally we have the images. From them we can infer a soul or an experiencer. Jung did that when he talked about the “objective psyche”. Phenomenally, that is another image. So again, we come back to the images. If I call that the imagination, I refer to yhe images themselves as they appear to me.

In wholeness, opposites like order and chaos are reconciled with each other and become one. All the dualities of the personality becomes integrated and balanced. The image is that of the mandala, the sacred circle. This, it can be argued is a monistic or monotheistc image of the Self. By contrast, the soul may be expereince as a caldron of subpersonalities, gods, daemons, and heroes vying for dominance and attention. That would be a polytheistic view of the personality.

Yes. I take that to be the ego battling with the ego-dystonic part of the Self. Thus, we have the myth of the hero, battling with the forces of chaos, the emergence of consciousness from the unconscious. The significance of that myth cannot be overestimated. However, as with Christ, the hero-- the ego, is ultimately sacrificed for the sake wholeness. “Not my will, but Thy will be done”

You seem to see yourself on the path of self-transcendence. Some happy times I imagine I am too. But, the soul can be a trickster and a deceiver too. There may be demons and dragons to be overcome or defeated by.

I would say I am both polytheistic and monotheistic. There are versions of Hinduism that are like this in relation to deities. Also indigenous and pagan set ups.

I would say instead of self-transcendence it’s more like self-acceptance. The ego is transcending itself - not without occasional resistence - but the self is learningt o get out of its own way. Not transcending, in fact in some ways becoming more immanent.