If you are aggravated with the one who stole your wallet, you are really aggravated with your own self who stole your wallet… eh wait -
does Jung take this a bit, maybe, too far?
Too Christian?
If you get slapped in the face, be sure to slap your face some more. That will teach Satan…
It’s hard to take it further than Jesus did. And if one takes it as far as Jesus one will likely end up a hero, a saint and a martyr. Jung didn’t end up that way, so I don’t suppose he lived according to the principle he proposes here all the time. I think it’s more a matter of recognizing that, to your example, the thief lives in you too.
As Terence said: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
" The “collective unconscious” that constitutes the basis for shared religious mythology is in fact the behavior, the procedures, that have been generated, transmitted, imitated and modified by everyone who has ever lived, everywhere. Images of these behaviors and of the transcendent “place” where they occur (the universe of chaos and order) constitute metaphors, symbolic images. "
Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, page 93
Jordan Peterson adamantly claims the same. To me that’s gigantic hubris. To claim just because it’s in you that it must also be in all humans. Definitely not the case.
Some are more evil than others.
(I am an astrologer, I see differences of the souls inclinations every day)
What’s most absurd to me is the claim. As if one could know, based on what one is, what others are. It irritates me that people are so egocentric in their reason.
Jesus - he also brought the sword. I doubt not he could be an abrasive man if he figured someone wasn’t worth the effort of sacrifice.
But on the whole, I disagree entirely with the idea that the personal shadow is an exact copy of the shadow of everyone else.
I’ve made this point before, that some shadows are darker than others. Much darker.
We should not burden our children by expecting them to be capable of as much evil as the worst of history. I don’t think that’s true in most cases and I don’t think it is moral.
I don’t doubt there are individual differences. But I also think that we have in common an evolved human nature with particular capacities and constraints. Empathy wouldn’t be possible if not for this.
I have a personal example : I consider my ex-wife a cunt. But I doubt everyone considers their ex a cunt.
But it may be true, if I call her a cunt, I may be a cunt too. (not speaking biologically; or of the part of the female anatomy.)
Jung said, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
Imagine, living my entire life in America without ever owning a gun! I embraced non-violence as a child. When I read Ghandi and Tolstoy at age 20, I felt an immediate affinity with them that has never left me.
And yet I have had dreams of slaying crowds of people. Was I a hero like Hercules or Samson with a jaw-bone of an ass? Or was I a mass murderer? It has been my recognition of my own capacity for evil that has motivated me to choose the good.
Jung dreamed he assassinated the hero Siegfried.
Jung and Peterson agree that the potential for malevolence lives unconsciously within us all. Exactly what we ought teach our children about that, if anything, and at what stage and how, is debatable. But, naivete is not a viable option for an adult in this world. It leaves a person susceptible to victimization and blind to their own potential for evil.
A good person is one who is striving to better their self by doing good.
Sometimes I think Jung was full of it. Trees don’t grow to heaven, and their roots only grow in the ground. And hell is not “down there,” and heaven is not “up there.” Not the Christian heaven, that is.
As a young kid in Kentucky, that’s hard for me to personally imagine. Guns were as common as gardens.
So did I. But I did enjoy BB gun fights.
It was Thoreau for me.
I’m a vivid dreamer, but have never had a dream where I was violent.
Jung had a lot of crazy dreams.
It’s naive to accept Jung and Peterson without question.
And a good person can be someone just living life, without being a goody-goody-two-shoes.
Your uncomprehending dismissal based on a concrete literal reading of Jung’s metaphor is what I would expect from a fundamentalist or objectivist.
Do you remember every dream? Is it possible you repressed dreams in which you acted violently? Or do you deny the possibility you could be subject to repression?
When you don’t understand something it seems you dismiss it as “crazy” or claim the other is “full of it” as if that’s an explanation.
That’s true. Who’s doing that?
“Just living life”. What does that mean? An unexamined life?
So you think people just accidentally fall into being a good person? The “noble savage”? Could that be a naively romantic view?
Only those who live in darkness don’t cast a shadow.
Not so much fill, as traverse… I have found that they both work well together… the Cosmopolitan and the Traditional, without having to exert much effort or thought about it all… it’s not as complicated a predicament as I thought.
So you have become a “traveler” who has learned how to move adroitly between the psycho-social worlds of your mother and father. What is that like? Can you give me an example of how you make it work?
Wholeness may amount to reconciling the two births we experience. The first birth is one of expulsion from the womb, an experience which enters the mind as fear of exclusion and promise of individuation. The second birth is the realization of our connectivity, of the ecology of life, which enters the mind as empathy, in marriages and in community. Both births work together either for the good of the whole or its separations in violence and war. Wholeness must be a reconciliation of our physical experiences as portrayed in metaphor and myth.
Indeed, wholeness is often conceived of as a reconciliation or conjunction of opposites: yin and yang, female and male, unknown and known, chaos and order. In mythology this is achieved by the hero confronting the dragon of chaos.
The motif of a second birth or rebirth or being born again is often evoked as a stage in the hero’s journey. The first birth is of course physical and the second spiritual. This goes back at least to the shamanistic initiation processes of tribal cultures. It is similarly ritually symbolized in Christian baptism.
One may well ask whether the symbol of rebirth has meaning for the individual in the secular world? The transformation of an individual across their lifespan can be thought of as a series of rebirths. The child is reborn as an adolescent. The adolescent is reborn as an adult. The adult is reborn via a midlife crisis, etc.
Although in secular life these milestones may or may not be ritualized formally, they still may be represented to us as rebirth in dreams.
Okay, I’ll play.
Guilty. Use to be the former, Am now the latter. But for a metaphor to work it has to have meaning based in reality, else it’s nonsense.
Thoreau does it better concerning a pine tree : “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”
No, I don’t remember every dream. But I would certainly remember a dream such as the violent one you described. It would wake me with a panic. I wouldn’t forget it, or repress it.
Dreams are unique to each of us. We’re not all the same. Just because you have dreams where you are violent doesn’t mean everyone does.
Have you read Jung’s red book? I understand that you are a shrink by trade. And so may think of Jung as some kind of a god. But Jung was as human as all of us. And by the way, from what I read, at times, he thought he was going insane. So he would likely admit that sometimes he was full of it, like all of us, at times.
Just making sure.
What does that mean? You might be full of it too.
A dung beetle is living a myth? Yeah, right.
Referring to The Red Book Jung wrote, “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness”.
The archetypes which are the bases for mythology are rooted in instincts that structure the behavior of animals including the homo sapien. The most basic of these instincts go back several billion years to our pre-human ancestors.
Imagine the grandeur of the myth that guides the Peregrine Falcon on it’s flight from the arctic tundra to South America.
Is myth, then, a name for evolving instincts? It is true that we could not understand a dung beetle without some knowledge of what it does. Is that the beetle’s myth? And how do we share that?
I can’t make that specific connection at the moment. The dung beetle uses dung for food. So the dung ball rolling behavior is related to hard-wired behavior patterns related to food. Now biological hard-wired strategies to obtain food are ancient–billions of years old. We share some of those with other species. One such strategy is predation.
Humans are predators. Predation is food related. Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. The biological roots of predation are far more ancient than the human species. One could say that we are embedded in the predatory instinct. It is more ancient and archetypal than we are as a species. It structures our physiology and our behavior and our “psyche” unconsciously and consciously. From that point of view, is it surprising that images of predation should bubble up in our dreams, visions and the collective narratives that are mythology?
The world is too complex to perceive as it is. There’s more to everything than is possible for any organism to perceive and understand. Humans solved this problem by simplifying the world into a place in which to act. That’s what myths are. They’re not about objective phenomena. They’re embedded in values. They’re not about matter. They’re about what matters.
If matter makes myth, is not myth about matter? Unable to fathom a thing in itself, we describe the thing by what it does. The description is the myth.
The matter that matters for myth is Mater.
They are both Eastern/Western-mixed… from the same place(s), and yet still having some regional differences, so it seems that nurture, and my own personal Dharma, are factors in my traversals… reading up on both histories is currently proving helpful, and both fascinating and incredulous… at the same time.
Around my mid-teens, I realised that what worked well for them, wasn’t… for me, so I would still listen to them and their advice, but seldomly not always take it. 