Wholeness

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.

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]

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.

“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.

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.

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.

duplicate

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:

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

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:

Hm okay.

I will spare you more unattractive buffoonery.

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?

Cup of meat or cup of mead?

I recommend you read a writer before you judge him Felix. Ive never in my life judged a writer based on what other writers say about him, and frankly I think that is only sane.
Yes, it offends me when people judge someone based on gossip.

I gave you a massively valuable resource to address your questions but you choose the silly gossipy ladies over the work of philosophy.

Oh fucking well, eh?

But really. A waste not to read him, an absolute, colossal waste. Crowley’s only sin was that he wasn’t a spiritual slave. He knew people would judge him as evil for not being a spiritual slave. so he pre-emptively called himself “the most wicked man alive”.
In the meantime, Christians were torturing people all over the planet. You don’t care about that though. No christian ever takes responsibility for his faith. That is what Christianity is; absolution from responsibility. Big monotheistic sects are built that way, as is a certain currently popular race-ideologist subsect of slave-morality.
People want their happiness to be handed to them buy God, or The Man, or The Government.
Crowley was no such lazy bastard.
He was the noblest man of his time without any question.
Perhaps that is a good reason to stay away from him; your faith might not be able to withstand such display of integrity.

Okay you’ve got my attention and I am looking into your links. So what was with Crowley’s claims to be the Beast and 666? It seems like that began as an oppositional defiant reaction against his childhood Plymouth Brethren indoctrination.

Good, think he will be worth your while. He gathered many paths to many treasure troves into his writings.

The story Ive heard is that his mother called him the Beast when he was small.

You could somewhat compare his stance on the Beast with Blake’s stance on Satan, though obviously they’re both too complex to take that very far. Both authors I mean.

Whatever else, Crowley stands at the threshold of a vast ancient world which comes to us mainly through him and the people around him - English aristocrats that spent their fortunes on gathering ancient magical knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. Much was gained. For true understanding of his background, look into the Order of the Golden Dawn. The works of Israel Regardie are excellent. There is also a work by Regardie on his time spent with Crowley which Ive yet to read.

In any case I very much doubt there will ever be anyone who understands the Shadow aspect better than Crowley did - serving as it does in his work always the purpose of attaining the immaculate light.

Humanity does not live on bread alone, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but also on the body of existential propositions and beliefs it gleans from the mythological universe in which it is embedded.

I am looking into your recommendations.