Wholeness

Aware-ness · June 14, 2020, 4:44am

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?

felix_dakat · June 14, 2020, 4:41pm

MagsJ:

felix dakat:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Theologian Paul Tillich had a parallel vision.

felix_dakat · June 14, 2020, 4:52pm

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.

felix_dakat · June 16, 2020, 2:26pm

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:

…the idea of the axis mundi – the vertical line postulated by the ancients as running through the cosmos, connecting heaven to earth and earth to hell – underlies many of Western literature’s central myths, providing writers with a wealth of metaphors and images. Those images, he[Frye] notes, tend to fall into two categories: ascent and descent. Images of ascent, which symbolize man’s longing for heavenly perfection, include Jacob’s ladder, the purgatorial mountain in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” the turning staircase in T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and the towers and spirals that recur in Yeats’s poetry.

The reverse movement – downward into death or damnation – has yielded equally powerful images. Christ’s descent to earth echoes Adam’s fall from innocence, while Adam’s expulsion from the garden is mirrored by the exile of Cain. Whereas Mr. Frye sees downward movements in Dante and Milton as “simply descents to death and hell,” he argues that they can take on more creative aspects in other writers’s work.

Proserpine’s descent every winter into the nether world is a necessary prelude to her ascent in the spring – and the earth’s renewed fertility. Prometheus is punished by Zeus for bringing fire down from heaven but is heralded as the liberator of mankind. Ahab descends into madness as he searches for the great white whale but in doing so becomes a symbol of man’s eternal quest for wisdom.

For Mr. Frye, the lower depths represent not only death or hell; they can also stand for “whatever in human nature is subordinated in the traditional structures.” In Freud, this comes to signify the unconscious promptings of the id; in Marx, the energetic strivings of the proletariat. For such revolutionary thinkers, Mr. Frye says, “the initiative comes from below” and “the response to it is normally a journey of exploration downward.” nytimes.com/1990/12/04/book … ature.html

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.

Aware-ness · June 16, 2020, 3:34pm

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.

[/quote]
No fear. There’s no cross around here.

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

felix_dakat · June 17, 2020, 7:21pm

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”.

Aware-ness · June 18, 2020, 2:52pm

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.

felix_dakat · June 18, 2020, 5:52pm

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.

Fixed_Cross · June 18, 2020, 9:43pm

[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.

felix_dakat · June 19, 2020, 1:28pm

That video is relevant to the White privilege thread.

Jung called us to accept the challenge of what he described as “immediate religious experience” by which he meant religious experience based on a direct encounter with the unconscious. Especially to those whom the rituals of established religion have lost their meaning and efficacy Jung proposed that in the individuation process itself might meet their spiritual needs in a way that the more traditional Western religious practices no longer could. He introduced what in effect was “a new form of religious ritual–a ritual involving the religious like-observation of the contents of the unconscious.” [Robert Aziz, CG Jung’s psychology of religion and synchronicity, page 221]

Aware-ness · June 22, 2020, 5:59am

Sorry for slow response. I’ve been caught up in my very own pretty large world of late. But lets carry on. There’s tons that can be discussed about Jung, even if we narrow it down to Wholeness. Many links are required to get there, if it’s even possible.

Neuro-science intrigues me. But might just turned out to be the mechanical/electrical mapping our alignings with nature, and, the “All?” I don’t know … and, we don’t know … yet. Stay tuned.

Just use your imagination. Everything takes up space, one way or other, down at atomic bottom at least, maybe electrical impulses in the brain, a pixel maybe, or it wouldn’t be a thing.

Imagination is fine. But it is just a playground if it, or they, don’t produce concrete results. Otherwise imagination can be misleading or completely wrong. I use imagination to fix things. But it often proves not to be helpful. Screw all those systems of belief, and integrations. What about what ever works?

Well in the traditional sense, I suppose. I believe in Christ’s that don’t get crucified : like perchance the twin brother of Jesus.

Isn’t the read book evidence of Jung’s schizophrenia, and his resultant dreams, visions, and the like?

Isn’t your field of work is psychology? So have you read all of Jung’s Collected Works? Seems to me I wouldn’t live long enough to do that. And unless you are a Jung acolyte isn’t there better and more important ways of spending your time?

And seems to me, this far into Jung, that, reading the collected works isn’t Jung’s path to Wholeness.

felix_dakat · June 22, 2020, 2:34pm

“The source of things is the boundless. From whence they arise, thence they must also of necessity return. For they do penance and make compensation to one another for their injustice in the order of time.”

Anaximander of Meletis

This quotation illustrates the emergence of the meta-myth that became known as philosophy.

felix_dakat · June 23, 2020, 1:52pm

Aware-ness wrote: “And seems to me, this far into Jung, that, reading the collected works isn’t Jung’s path to Wholeness.”

Wholeness, the goal of individuation, is, like all ideals, never fully achieved. It is the fully explored territory, the walled garden. But, the territory is never fully explored. There’s a serpent in every garden.

Fixed_Cross · June 23, 2020, 3:51pm

But the serpent is part of you.
You will not be whole until you understand the serpent, where it is coming from, why it exists.

Once you know this, your garden will no long require fencing and you will be whole.

felix_dakat · June 23, 2020, 4:26pm

That’s true. But it’s true paradoxically. The serpent within you is unknown–the unconscious. The serpent is ultimately the dragon of chaos, the ouroboros the self-consuming serpent who represents the union of matter and spirit, being-in-itself and nothingness, tohu and bohu, the pleroma and the possibility of transformation. It’s where everything comes from and where everything returns. To know that is to know the unknowable. Or so it seems to me.

felix_dakat · June 23, 2020, 4:27pm

duplicate

Fixed_Cross · June 23, 2020, 8:52pm

felix dakat:

Fixed Cross:

felix dakat:

Wholeness, the goal of individuation, is, like all ideals, never fully achieved. It is the fully explored territory, the walled garden. But, the territory is never fully explored. There’s a serpent in every garden.

But the serpent is part of you.
You will not be whole until you understand the serpent, where it is coming from, why it exists.

Once you know this, your garden will no long require fencing and you will be whole.

That’s true. But it’s true paradoxically. The serpent within you is unknown–the unconscious. The serpent is ultimately the dragon of chaos, the ouroboros the self-consuming serpent who represents the union of matter and spirit, being-in-itself and nothingness, tohu and bohu, the pleroma and the possibility of transformation. It’s where everything comes from and where everything returns. To know that is to know the unknowable. Or so it seems to me.

I like that answer.

It connects to what I was going to write first, lazily, to your first claim, namely that Crowley would disagree, and refer you to the concept of Ipsissimus.
Now you created an actually viable content for me to do that, by this evocative phrase; “to know the unknowable”.

So here’s the concept, or one take on it:

Ipsissimus
10° = 1□

Ipsissimus. — Is beyond all this and beyond all comprehension of those of lower degrees.

The Grade of Ipsissimus is not to be described fully; but its opening is indicated in Liber I vel Magi.
There is also an account in a certain secret document to be published when propriety permits. Here it is only said this: The Ipsissimus is wholly free from all limitations soever, existing in the nature of all things without discriminations of quantity or quality between them. He has identified Being and not-Being and Becoming, action and non-action and tendency to action, with all other such triplicities, not distinguishing between them in respect of any conditions, or between any one thing and any other thing as to whether it is with or without conditions.
He is sworn to accept this Grade in the presence of a witness, and to express its nature in word and deed, but to withdraw Himself at once within the veils of his natural manifestation as a man, and to keep silence during his human life as to the fact of his attainment, even to the other members of the Order.
The Ipsissimus is pre-eminently the Master of all modes of existence; that is, his being is entirely free from internal or external necessity. His work is to destroy all tendencies to construct or to cancel such necessities. He is the Master of the Law of Unsubstantiality (Anatta).
The Ipsissimus has no relation as such with any Being: He has no will in any direction, and no Consciousness of any kind involving duality, for in Him all is accomplished; as it is written “beyond the Word and the Fool, yea, beyond the Word and the Fool”.
[One Star in Sight sub figurâ CDLXXXIX]

tarrdaniel.com/documents/The … simus.html

In this tradition, being is seen to emerge from the boundless no-thingness, and the Ipsissimus has acquired access to that source and dwells there with a consciousness that is no longer strictly “his” - presenting all manner of paradox, of course, as enlightenment would to the not-yet-enlightened.

I do not mean for this to sway about the argument, but to point you to an interesting pocket of theory on the Self and its development. You may know Crowley as “the Beast” and related titles but really he was the closest to a prophet we’ve had in recent centuries, I find. He covers large parts of the field that Jung does not - where Jung only points towards, as Jung must remain scientist, whereas Crowley’s task was, in a sense, to simply go where no man had gone before, regardless of consequence. Jung was very conscientious, otherwise his work would have been valueless. For Crowley its the opposite, he needed to be completely rueckstichtlos. He stumbles around a great deal but also burst through seemingly solid walls and he gets truly inside the core of the psyche. Where, of course, it is rather chaotic, for lack of a better term; and what term is better than the delicious word Chaos?

Anyway. Good answer.

PS
I will link you to one of his most Chaotic book, “The Book of Lies”; You can see how he required to make such a tremendous mess of the mind, in order to cross over to the being of that Ouroboros.
sacred-texts.com/oto/lib333.htm

mr Crowley:

The Ante Primal Triad which is
NOT-GOD
Nothing is.
Nothing Becomes.
Nothing is not.

                The First Triad which is GOD
                            I AM.
                      I utter The Word.
                      I hear The Word.

                          The Abyss
               The Word is broken up.
               There is Knowledge.
               Knowledge is Relation.
               These fragments are Creation.
               The broken manifests Light.

                The Second Triad which is GOD
      GOD the Father and Mother is concealed in Genera-
          tion.
      GOD is concealed in the whirling energy of Nature.
      GOD is manifest in gathering: harmony: considera-
          tion: the Mirror of the Sun and of the Heart.

                       The Third Triad
                Bearing: preparing.
                Wavering: flowing: flashing.
                Stability: begetting.

                     The Tenth Emanation
                The world.

felix_dakat · June 24, 2020, 1:53pm

Don’t know much about Crowley. I have always seen him as an unattractive buffoon. Shrug. Doubtless he identified with chaos and wished to portray himself as pure malevolence. He succeeded in repulsing me. Lol.

Ipsissimus= Lao Tsu-the archetypal Tao master. In the latter piece you shared Crowley goes ontological.

Jung himself has a trickster/shyster side. His theory connecting the mandala to wholeness is most relevant to this thread. Yet, I still find his mandala/UFO hypothesis ludicrous.

Here is Jung as Basilides the Gnostic at his most ontological for comparison:

THE SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD
WRITTEN BY BASILIDES IN ALEXANDRIA,
THE CITY WHERE THE EAST
TOUCHETH THE WEST.
Sermo I
The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching.

Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous. Only figuratively, therefore, do I speak of created being as a part of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided, since it is nothingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not existing) in us and the boundless firmament about us. But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura; since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctiveness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Therefore man discriminateth because his nature is distinctiveness. Wherefore also he distinguisheth qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore must he speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

Fixed_Cross · June 24, 2020, 2:28pm

Hm okay.

I will spare you more unattractive buffoonery.

felix_dakat · June 24, 2020, 2:57pm

Aww. Sorry. I did not intend to offend you. I took a superficial look into Crowley 50 years ago and decided he wasn’t my cup of meat to borrow a phrase from Dylan. How thoroughly malevolent was he? Is it true he tortured a cat when he was in his early teens? Psychopath? Anyway I don’t hold my opinions to be sacrosanct. I understand he became benign in his latter years. Judge not lest ye be judged, somebody said.

What shall we do with our shadow? What do you think of the proposition that the way to set the world straight is by restraining the malevolence in our own hearts?