Wholeness

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.

It sounds like you have a rich background for exploring the meta-myth which is a cross-cultural story embedded in our common humanity. It is , perhaps, mostly unconscious but it comes to light in our dreams, myths and arts and religions. Eastern and western culture reflects it in different ways. The Yin of Chinese culture seems to be an abstracted version of the same structure imaged by the Great Mother of ancient Western mythology for example. They both represent the unknown from which we are born and to which we ultimately return.

Sorry I can’t keep up. Hopefully I’ll make it up. But while it’s on my mind :

Reading Jung’s Red book, popping right up from my unconscious mind, I suddenly had an epiphany, and busted out laughing.

Jung is always harping on not just believing in Christ, or basically objectifying Christ as outside, not inside, but rather, Jung harps on being Christ, or becoming Christ.

And then later, he says that he reduces a giant – Izdubar – down to egg size, and puts him in his pocket. Then later he takes the egg out, cracks it open, and the giant Izdubar pops right back out into his original giant size.

And it hit me. Jung is being Christ, that he often harps on. In fact, he’s being a Super Christ, out performing Jesus Christ ; who only performed miracles, like healing the sick, and the blind, etc., walking on water, raising the dead, but not ever shrinking a giant into a pocket sized egg, and later bringing him back into the original giant sized.

Jung is being Christ, even more than the original archetype, Jesus … being bigger and more miraculous. Here’s a possible explanation for these fantastical stories told by Jung :

Like awareness, “fantasy takes up no space.”

Over time Jung came to understand Christ as an archetypal image of psychic wholeness.

Same gods, different names, same myths and legends, of the Euro, Indic, and Iranic cultures… and to a lesser extent, the Afro-Asiatic and Sinic ones… whose descendants can all be found in a War Book or two, through surnames or known origins.

So yes… a shared meta-narrative, that is generally experienced in waking-dreams and daytime visions, and not in the dormant kind of dreams where one should be sleeping, not thinking, at a time such as that/of sleep.

I think not so much just the culture of China but of the East in general, as Chinese culture and philosophy are unique only to the Chinese and other Sinic countries… but the Euro and Indic cultures share the most similarities and even surnames and place names, of which the Afro-Asiatic and Sinic Nations do not seem to… for instance, Manu, Márya, Man, Mānavá, means the archetypal man or progenitor of humanity, in the Euro, Indic, and Iranic language families.

There is a time-divide between god(s) and man… the unknown epoch and era… when god(s) left man, to look after themselves. The un-enabling separation of god(s) from man.

Well me thinks, if you will, that fantasy isn’t totally disconnected from the material world. It certainly sparks off synapses in the brain. It’s not nothing ; not just figments floating in dreamland ; a fiction connected, pressurized, by our nervous system, springing up from biology, blowing off steam in the night … or in the day, in Jung’s case.

And: “Over time Jung came to understand Christ as an archetypal image of psychic wholeness.”

“Over time” is important when speaking about Jung. That’s perchance why it’s hard to put your finger on the “whole” Jung.

I haven’t timelined it, but maybe it’s in Jung’s early days, when he was stressing being Christ, and in later years saw Christ as an archetype. I like Christ as an archetype. That way I don’t have to rack my pea brain trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to be Christ. And being an archetype is out of the question.

Not unless Wholeness is Christ, or myself in its entirety ; seen and unseen, revealed and hidden. Archetype or not I’ve certainly got that down, without trying. I’m Christ without trying. We all are.

But can we shrink a giant down into a pocket sized egg? and crack the egg and bring him back, like the Christ Jung could do?

Yes. We live in a disenchanted or desacralized world. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment

Theologian Paul Tillich had a parallel vision.

I never implied otherwise. It doesn’t change the fact that neither awareness nor fantasy take up space.

If you want to discuss how the brain produces the phenomena of experience including a sense of wholeness that’s another matter. Of course it’s not fully understood.

Show me a thinker whose thought is not evolving over time, and I’ll show you a thinker who is dead.

Sure. No problem. If you don’t mind being crucified.

Yes. Easily. In fantasy, like Jung said.

If you weren’t able to shrink a giant down into a pocket-sized egg and crack the egg and bring him back in your imagination, those words would be meaningless to you. You wouldn’t even have been able to ask the question.

In a recent dream a red devil dragged me from a schoolyard down to a subterranean space below the floor. Images of ascent and descent recur in dreams, mythology and literature. Literary theorist Northrop Frye has written at length about this archetypal theme as summarized in this book review:

Descent may be related to pathologizing which Hillman defines as the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, , and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective. (Re-visioning Psychology) It is also related to Peterson’s schema of the transition of the knower from the known territory to the unknown territory. (Maps of Meaning).

On the way to wholeness disintegration is no less significant than integration.

Aligning mind with nature doesn’t have to be understood.

And awareness and fantasy take up the space of the whole universe.

A dead thinker? That’s an idea that’s been around for a long time. Prolly as long as humans have been dreaming, and having night time visitations from deceased loved ones … who had to be somewhere in the afterlife.

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No fear. There’s no cross around here.

Nothing can be actually accomplished in fantasyland. Jung’s imagination was his playground.

True. Articulated knowledge is embedded in unarticulated knowledge. One can “align mind with nature” without knowing what either the mind or nature are. Is there is anything to be gained by understanding the neuro-science or psychology that underlies such an alignment? I think so.

How so?

And if by “fantasyland” you are referring to the imagination, nothing can be accomplished without it.

When our articulated knowledge becomes out of sync with our dream, we become dissociated internally. We think things that we don’t act out and we act out things that we don’t think. That produces a sickness of the spirit. The cure is an integrated system of belief and representation. But, many settle for a system of dogma or ideology. Others settle for cynicism or nihilism. The way is narrow and few find it.

Your response is remarkable for it’s literalism. Can one be Christ without “crucifixion” in some sense?

It seems to me you’re judging Jung solely on the basis of “The Red Book”.

Before you pass judgment on Jung, maybe you should read the 10,203 pages of his 20 volume “Collected Works”.

Apparently, the path to wholeness is to live your animal :

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.
~~Jung, C. G… The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Philemon) (pp. 341-342). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And even Jesus failed to do that :

In 1918, Jung argued that Christianity had suppressed the animal element (“On the unconscious,” CW 10, §31). He elaborated this theme in his 1923 seminars in Polzeath, Cornwall. In 1939, he argued that the “psychological sin” which Christ committed was that “he did not live the animal side of himself” (Modern Psychology 4, p. 230).
~~Jung, C. G… The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Philemon) (p. 457). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Without a doubt. The conjunction of the symbolic and the embodied self is critical to wholeness.

And this isn’t surprising. The findings of cognitive science tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. These results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday sense of what is real.

The degree to which the historical Jesus did or did not live the animal side of himself is unclear since the New Testament accounts suppress this information. There are legendary and mythological aspects to his canonical “biographies” and a large gap between his childhood and ministry and no statement about whether or not he was married, for instance.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIULfhxRb9c[/youtube]

Wholeness, lack of it, causes of this lack, in “white men” -
Jung hearkened back to animism in an abstract way, still a Colonialist of the uncharted mind, rather than a true inhabitant. But, a pioneer, without whom the new Natives of the Psyche would have had a significantly harder time.

Thanks be to Jung. But like Nietzsche, he was a prelude to our own work.