Since becoming single again, I knew I’d be getting weird
again. Self-fulfilling prophecy fulfilled. Synchronicities have been dancing
around me these last couple of weeks. A part of me keeps the perspective alive
that this mental headspace I’m cultivating is a tightrope over the abyss of schizophrenia,
but I humbly slink across confident I can maintain balance.
I’ve been experimenting. I want to be a knowledgeable
psychologist. I need a mentor. I don’t have any in my time-space prison, so I’m
resurrecting one of the greatest psychologists the West as ever produced; Carl
Jung. Well, a boring materialistic rationalist would say I’m reading Carl Jung’s
collected works. A magician would say I’m resurrecting Carl Jung. I’d say, I’m
reading the works of a great thinker every day, and actively practicing trying
to talk to him via active imagination, with the hopes of, after a few months, having
a little Carl Jung program running in my consciousness that I can turn to for
advice and guidance.
I think this kind of thing is necessary if you want to reach
your highest potentials. All of us have a creative function and we owe the
world the manifestation of that gift. Somewhere in you, you know what your
creative function is. There are great men and women through history who had the
same creative function as you and used it to excel at the game of life. Find
them. Read about them. Download them into your psyche as little helpers.
However, it’s important to note; do not try to be them. Use
them as guiding lights to your unique destination. There is no one who has the
particular configuration of genetics, environment, and spirit as you. (If you
feel a part of you already attacking this statement, you have a lot of self-healing
to do. Good luck.)
Resurrection Program
So, allow me to try to turn on this new, (and still in need
of patches), program.
Carl Jung was the inventor or discoverer of what is now
called Depth Psychology. This is a school of analytic psychology that differs
from Freud in believing that the unconscious is more than only sexually
repressed fantasies. Carl Jung believed that each person had an ego, a person
unconscious, and a Collective Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious was his
big and unique idea.
The ego is the you you think of as you. Ego is your
conscious self. The personal unconscious is what most people understand as the
unconscious. It is all of your personal experiences, memories, and the like,
coupled with all sense perception that isn’t charged enough to become
conscious. (like the way your feet feel right now, before reading this, you weren’t
aware they felt at all. Now, with the flashlight of your ego, you can sense
them.) The personal unconscious is accessible.
The Collective Unconscious is never accessible. It is
inherent in every living creature. It is the place of psychic life where our
bodies know how to create a human, repair cells, digest food, harness energy
from air. Our instincts arise from this place. The energy behind adaptation and
evolution also arises from here. The Collective Unconscious is an ocean, the
submarine without lights is your personal unconscious. Your ego is the human
with the flashlight trying to maintain leaks.
Archetypes
Jung believed that the Collective Unconscious communicated
to consciousness through dreams. The CU communicates through images. These
images are what Jung called archetypes. Archetypes are images that represent instinctual
ideas that charge the body with energy. The simplest example the
fight-or-flight instinct. We also believed dreams to be compensatory in nature,
so an example illustrating all of this is as follows; yesterday you are walking
and a dog lunges at you and scares you. You instantly feel the adrenaline, then
you feel shame at being scared (dad would scold you when you acted meek.) Now
you’re angry at the dog but you walk on. That night you have a dream you’re a
knight and you fight off a wolf and return to the King for praise.
The activated archetype was the fight-or-flight response.
Your ego interprets the event in all sorts of twisted ways due to your unique
personality. Your unconscious tries to help you by offering an example of you
responding in a positive way to the situation. The actually archetype is the
motif of the knight being brave and receiving honor from the King.
Yeah, I know it’s a lot. But much of human life is archaic.
We have the same bodies we had thousands of years ago. The same energies arise
in our bodies. The same physiological processes of infanthood, puberty, adolescences,
adulthood, parenthood, and aging are still here. It appeared to Jung that our
bodies, our unconscious, has a built in guiding function. Learning to
communicate with this guiding function is what he called “individuation.”
The Transcendent Function
The way we learn to listen to this inner guide to
Individuation is a technique he called “The Transcendent Function.” He calls it
this because the process of Individuation is when the consciousness identifies
and absorbs a part of the psyche that was previously unconscious. Each time we
do this, there is a challenge or resisting because the ego kept the unconscious
unconscious for a reason. The young girl who naturally starts masturbating and
witnesses the shock and scolding of her naïve Christian parents is taught that
sexual self-pleasure is wrong, and these the natural bodily sensation has to be
removed from the ego. We all have dozens and dozens of these kinds of
repression.
TF is Jung’s way of liberating the ego. Psyche growth is a
constant identifying and absorbing. It is never completed. So, how?
First, you collect unconscious images. Record dreams.
Practice Active imagination. Read Mythology. Learn how to understand symbols.
Ideally, find a psychoanalyst (a convenient recommendation coming from a psychoanalyst
lol.)
Second, and this happens naturally, you’ll start finding
patterns in the material produced and you’ll start to try giving meaning to it.
Allow this to happen.
Third, consciously accept whatever the material is showing
you. Your dreams will constantly be alerting you on your current progress.
Self
The point of the Transcendental Function is a technique to
help in the process of Individuation. The point of Individuation is to help the
ego become more conscious of what Jung called the Self. The Self is the
totality of the individual’s psychic apparatus. Because a large part of the
individual is the Collective Unconscious, one can never know the Self in its entirety,
but, more Self-understanding is better than less. The Self is everything.
Experience
Jung has written thousands of pages. This reproduction is
more a reflection of the limited software I’m running then the actual ideas of
Jung. What I love about his approach is his emphasis on direct experience. He
was adamant that what the individual experiences is as real as anything we call
real. If you saw in your imagination you were on the moon. He believed you have
been to the moon.
So, God. God is an experience. God is a symbol that
represents your personal transcendent experience. The thing the symbol “God”
tries to represent is something completely beyond the comprehension of our
intellect. But what we do have is the experience of the divine. This is the
individual’s bridge to God.
Semantically, and philosophically, we all have a unique
individual God. It is our unique mixture of biology and psychology that will
craft the lens we interpret the feeling we get when we have a transcendent
experience. This is our God.
I hope you find a symbol system that allows you the chance
to experience your God. Fuck any symbol system that has rules in place where
there is some mediator between you and God. That deprives you of one of the
most powerful and intimately human experiences.
I love you. Namaste.