One of my favorite
god-monkeys is Carl Jung. His ego considered himself a psychologist.
He is a fascinating man. What I want to share today are his ideas on
dreams. I want to convince you to start paying more attention to your
dreams. If I'm lucky, I'll get you to start recording and trying to
understand your dreams.
Jung adamantly
explained that humans have not only a conscious mind and a
subconscious mind, but that there was also an unconscious mind, and
that there was a deep unconscious mind that all humans shared; The
Collective Unconscious or Universal Unconscious. He felt that this
unconscious communicated to us in dreams. The language dreams speak
is symbolic.
You've probably
heard the word Archetype. This is Jung's idea. He theorized that the
collective unconscious used a few reoccurring symbols that all
mankind could recognize. There are many. The ones that are important
to dream interpreting are the Shadow, the Animus, the Anima, and the
Self.
Jung and his
followers believed that modern man paid a heavy price for the
Scientific Revolution. With our reason and our science, we cleaned
our own mind of many of our archaic beliefs. This has brought us the
technological age we have but it as also deprived us from our animal
nature. Our tribal nature. Most importantly, we have largely lost our
spiritual nature. There are no more initiation rituals. They
believe this is the root of many of our modern psychological and
physiological health problems.
Their remedy for
this is to choose to explore your unconscious. They believe this is the only
spiritual journey left for modern man. They call this adventure
“Individualization.” How do you do it? Start recording your
dreams. Read mythology. Learn about symbols. After a year or so you
will start to see patterns in your dreams. You will start to be able
to understand what your dreams are saying.
On this journey,
they warn that the first major obstacle you'll face is what they call
your “Shadow.” This is the reflection your ego casts. It is all
the things you hate, fear, and ignore. It is important to realize
that everything you hate, fear, and ignore are actively a part of
you. The Shadow is symbolized in dreams often as another person of
the same sex as you. They are often enemies. They can be friends too.
The Shadow, like all the archetypes, can be good and bad. The first
step of Individualization is to learn about your Shadow and to accept
and assimilate it into your ego.
The next archetype
that you will confronted by is your Anima/Animus. Jung was very perceptive
when he argued that everyone has an internal psychic archetype of the
opposite sex. As a male, I have an Anima, an archetypical female. Our
Anima/Animus is largely constructed after our parent of the opposite
sex. The Anima/Animas normally appears in dreams as a person of the
opposite sex. They can be a muse or witch. Fortunately, my mother was
very warm and loving. The defining feature of this archetype is either its helping nature or sabotaging nature. How it acts is heavily affected by how your primary care taker of the opposite sex treated you.
The final archetype
that you'll come across in your dreams is the Self. This is the big
one. This is the god in you, the portal from you to the Collective
Unconscious. The Self is the totality of the psyche. It is outside
space/time. It is eternal (its obvious that this is Jung's God.) This
archetype comes into your dreams as an old man or women giving
advice, or as a precious stone or magical item. This is where the
real advice comes from. Be on the look out for this archetype.
Jung is the man who
brought the West the idea of synchronicity, meaning “meaningful
coincidence.” He believed that once we start along the path of
Individualization, our mental life starts interacting with the
physical world is weird ways. Synchronicities are some of the most
interesting things that have ever happened to me. I hope you
experience some yourself.
Jung is special to me. He was the scientific mind that led my atheistic reality tunnel to a spiritual reailty tunnel. Its hard for me to articulate proper thankfulness. Thank you.
Jung is special to me. He was the scientific mind that led my atheistic reality tunnel to a spiritual reailty tunnel. Its hard for me to articulate proper thankfulness. Thank you.
This is a very brief overview of some of Jung's ideas and they do very little service to his actual work. If this interests you, I recommend “Man and His Symbols.”
I love you. I hope
this helps. Namaste.
