The Religious Function

The human condition is weird. We are simultaneously the shitting ape and also the consciousness that creates. The ape is our root that connects us to nature. S/he is nudged along by primordial instincts. Consciousness is our crown of choice. We are free to choose how we regulate, dissipate, and creatively express our instincts.

One of humanities instincts is the religious function. Jung argued that the pragmatic purpose of this instinct was to alleviate the paralysis consciousness creates. Our freedom of choice leaves space for the fear of acting incorrectly. For primitive man to overcome this fear, he needed some kind of reassurance, some kind of experience that validated her choices.  

This is only speculation, because the why doesn’t particularly matter here. What matters is that there is a potential within every individual to experience something which imbues the individual with the deepest sense of trust and security. What matters is this feeling, something no assemblage of words can ever convey. This event, Jung calls the religious experience.

“(The religious experience) is a rapture whose breadth and depth is the despair of prose.”

RAWism note: The experience is an instinct we all have. The metaphors and symbols we use to assimilate the experience into consciousness and to convey to others, is entirely subjective. Do not get tripped up by the metaphors and symbols. Use whatever reality tunnel helps you understand the experience. What is important is that you directly experience the manifestation of instinct.

Rationalism, Dogmatism, and Patriotism

These three reality tunnels have unique relationships to the religious function. The rationalist thinks he’s thrown the religious function out without realizing that his devotion to reason and logic is the religious function itself. He is like the man riding the donkey who exclaims to his friends how he’s gotten rid of his donkey.

The modern religious person who ascribes to a certain belief system is also confused. Jung draws a distinction between religion and creed. Religion is a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical beliefs, while a creed is a collection of beliefs which are taught and accepted. Religion is an experience, a creed is taught. Most modern religions subjugate the individual to relay on external symbols and institutions for a connection with the divine. A true religion is a system that helps the individual cultivate a genuine, personal relationship with the divine.

And now the patriots. These people are the loudest because they are the most insecure. These are the people who project the religious function onto the State, the Government, or a political party. A neurotic is an individual who has a split psyche. Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm. Our society looks like a neurotic who unwillingly but slowly is becoming aware of his neurotic consciousness.

The Individual Experience

The religious function is an instinct all humans inherit. What most of us overlook is that we are riding the donkey. The God metaphor, whatever it means to you, is a representation of some part of your Unconscious. Whatever you understand of God are qualities that exist within you. The thing the metaphor “God” tries to convey is completely incomprehensible. The most we can do is experience a slice. This slice is the unique religious experience your unique psyche can perceive.

God is within. Everything is. Whatever is without is unknowable. Don’t let any belief system (BS) keep you from your personal experience with the divine.

“The world is not governed by facts or logic. The world is governed by BS. Never believe totally in anybody else’s BS. Never believe totally in your own BS.”

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If you’ve had a religious experience, and you’re willing, please share it with me on social media in a message.

Namastay. I love you. 

For Five Friends

This one is going to be different. My ego wanted to write a post about "The Guru is within," but my Unconscious has a different post in mind.

I read "Man and his Symbols" for five hours today. The synchronicity was too much to ignore. Page after page, I kept coming across paragraph after paragraph of information that directly connected to different friends going through different stages of growth. So, instead of sending five long individual texts, I'm going to offer my perspective and advice to each of you in this post. You'll know which one is yours and I'll try to be vague enough to protect your privacy. All of this is filtered through the Jungian perspective of the psyche.

(If any of you want me to remove your section after you read it, I respect that completely and I will delete it. This comes from a place of love and I love each of you.)

1) You had a DMT experience where you were laying down and a woman lovingly poured some kind of multi-colored liquid-esque substance over you. This is an archetypical image of baptism. As a male, the bridge between your Ego and your Self is represented by a woman, called your Anima. Essentially brother, you have some deep guilt and shame about something (we all do.) Your waking dream was showing you that your Unconscious forgives you. Forgive yourself too.

A quote I like, "Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the feeling that you are unacceptable."

2) You had a DMT trip where you were on a journey and a female was guiding you. You traveled through a swamp then started ascending up some kind of hill or mountain in a circular motion. You got near the top and you no longer had your guide. You may have integrated this further, but at the moment you came back to consciousness, you were a little sad. You felt you had done something wrong. I don't think you did.

I read a passage that talked about the archetypical pilgrimage, where the hero is accompanied by a female guide. The similarities are too similar to ignore. This represents a kind of initiatory rite. The purpose is to give the Ego enough strength to move into the world as an individual, away from the womb-like security of being near mom and dad.

Your DMT trip explicitly represented your intention. It showed you that you are at the edge of your adolescent life. At the edge, the guide cannot help you over. You didn't fail anything man. This last part of the hero's journey is up to you. (The hero's journey is the oldest and most common archetype which helps the adolescent move from childhood to adulthood.) You're good.

3) You shared a dream with me where a white crocodile was in your house and kept you and your mother in your room. You were afraid of the creature but it wasn't acting aggressive, it was just there.

I tried offering my advice the day after you had it but I read a passage today that offers a better understanding of what your dream meant. The day before a dream is the primary source for the dream content. The day before your dream, you may not realize this, but you did something incredibly brave and you didn't fail. You pushed your limits, maybe not consciously, to a new edge.

In dreams, an animal that can both live on land and in water represents what Jung called, "The Transcendent function." Basically, the crocodile represented your readiness to leave childhood. Your mom in the dream represents the mother-bond you have. The dream being in your room also adds to the interpretation that the dream was essentially showing you that you have the power to go out into the world as an adult. Naturally, your ego is afraid of this power and the subsequent responsibility.

This is an important dream. Your ego is a little afraid. I predict that you are going to have many more significant dreams until you move out. Record your dreams and share them with me and I'll try helping.

4) You're life is being radically disorganized. You've been given advice from dozens of friends. This passage is for you;

"It is exactly the same in the initial crisis in the life of an individual. One is seeking something which is impossible to find...In such moments all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless. None (of the advice) helps. There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly towards the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you."

To listen, record your dreams and the apparently random images that come to you. Your dreams are going to show you what you need to see. Share them with me and I'll genuinely try to give unbiased feedback. I sincerely believe that if you listen, you'll get the answers. And a deeper part of me knows that you already have the answers and you aren't accepting them.

5) This is the heaviest one. I think I should read the entire section out loud to you. It is eerie how spot on in correlates to your life. I'll do my best to some it up.

As a woman, your Unconscious represents the connection you have with your Self, (easiest metaphor here is that this is the godly part of your psyche) as a man in your dreams. Your perception of this male, what Jung calls the Animus, is largely molded by the relationship you had with your father.

Depending on the bond you had with your father, the Animus can be a source to your creative genius, or, if the relationship was not nurturing, the Animus can be horribly destructive.

If the bond with the father is bad, the Animus shows up in dreams as a group of men. They rob, steal, or rape. The conscious expression of the negative Animus is thinking and speaking in "oughts," "should haves," and "supposed tos." The negative Animus creates unshakable and unrealistic convictions.

The negative Animus leads to the woman having thoughts like, "Nothing is good enough." "Nothing matters." "None of this is as it is suppose to be." At its extreme, it can lead to the woman killing herself.

The book says that the way to deal with this is to become conscious of the Animus. The Animus is not you. It is not your Self. It is a function of your psyche that is warped by your conscious relation to your father. Your situation is more critical than I am prepared to handle. I don't know how to help you but next time I see you I'm going to read this section to you and answer any questions you have.

There are very talented Jungian analysts in Houston. It may be something you're meant to do.

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Phew. Okay. All of this is just a perspective. It's one that clicks with me and I like to look through this reality tunnel. What matters is what belief system (BS) enriches your personal experience of life. Because all you have, ever, is your experience. Play with different BS systems and don't accept anyone's BS dogmatically.

"The world is not governed by facts or logic. The world is governed by BS. (Belief Systems). Never believe totally in anybody else's BS. Never believe totally in your own BS."

I love you. Share your dreams with me. Jung says he's interpreted 80,000. I'd like to reach that number one day. 

How I'm trying to resurrect Carl Jung

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. 

Why I have a Dream Journal

I’m a semantically-inclined domesticated primate, so finding the divine has been a journey. As a child, I charmed with the Logos. As a teen, I swung the Logos as a weapon. As a young adult, I was confined by the Logos. I found a growing mushroom near one of the walls of my Logoic prison and Cubenis helped me vault over the labyrinthine wall.

Haha, you can already see how easily I can get carried away by the Logos.

Words are seductive. With them we can read the minds of dead legends, we can telepathically communicate (I’m in your head right now), and with language we have augmented evolution with memes (not a grumpy cat meme, a meme is a cultural idea that is passed down generations through language.)

So words are tremendously powerful, but they limit. Almost my entire life, I valued the creative control dead domesticated primates displayed in regards to the Logos. I valued their symbol manipulation over my direct experience of reality. Rationalism and Logic are the deities of the Logos. I sat obediently at their feet.

Eventually I acquired the perspective that it may be possible that maybe there is more to the human experience then what can be captured and conveyed through symbols. It was a wild thought at first. I was stubborn.

My affinity for language is like an addiction. I relapse every day. If you know me, you can see me linguistically stroking my ego with monologues. I love yall for patiently allowing my indulgence.

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Researching and learning about the subconscious mind, how to interpret symbols, and recording my dreams have been a kind of nicotine patch to my linguistic addiction.

The subconscious speaks through symbols. Understanding symbols is more an intuitional practice than a conscious semantic exercise. There are symbols like MacDonald’s arches or Apple’s logo, these are not the kind of symbols I’m referring to. The kind of symbols your dreams use represent fundamental human ideas, like water signals rebirth, life, or emotions, a fire represents transformation or purification. These symbols make sense in an evolutionary, primal way.

The belief I hold, (shout out to Carl Jung), is that dreams are meaningful, dreams speak in symbols, and symbols are interpretable. So, I attempt to record my dreams, try to decode them, and try to understand them.

(An interesting epistemological investigation offers two perspectives. Maybe my belief in all this spurs my brain to create these kinds of dreams, and I’m just playing a little, board-line psychotic game with myself, or, maybe, dreams actually are meaningful, symbolic, and understandable. I don’t know. But this brings me to something I believe very passionately in; your life is yours to understand and explore. Experiment and value your personal experience more than statistics, polemics, and other people’s stories. Experience your truth.)

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So, dreams are meaningful, dreams speak in symbols, and symbols are understandable.

I have a journal and pencil near my bed, open and ready to record. Whenever I wake from a dream, I try my damndest to role my lazy bundle of flesh over and scribble down whatever I remember. Pro tip: start from the last thing you remember in the dream and work backwards. Then rewrite it chronologically. This works really well for me.

I normally doze back to sleep. When I start my day, in my daily three pages, I try to understand the dream. Most dreams aren’t saying much. Maybe that I’m excited about my day off or I’m wanting to sleep with a woman. I consider those practice. The important dreams, and you know exactly which ones are the important ones, those are feasts. Better yet, they are the raw ingredients. You have to interpret them, or prepare them, in order to digest them. (yay for food analogy.)

Learning to interpret dreams has been a journey too. A good deal of it is intuitional. A gloriously fun way to practice interpreting symbols is to play “The Cube” game with everyone you meet (at the prompting of a beautiful friend, I’m going to start posting my results of these games so yall can get a feel for how to do it, and it’s fascinating.)

Also, feel free to share your dreams with me and I’ll do my best.

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The reason I have a dream journal is because I believe in the idea of “Individualization.” It is an idea presented by Jung and it is beyond the scope of this already growing post. To sum it up, your dreams will guide you towards the full maturation of your soul. If ya don’t listen; neurosis, physical ailments, “bad luck,” and a mid-life crisis await you. His elaboration on all of this is fucking fascinating and I recommend any of his books if you’re interested. He believed that your subconscious is wise beyond comprehension and it wants to help your puny confused ego navigate life. I agree and I try to listen.

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I’ll offer a personal example of a dream and how I interpreted it.

I listened to a poem two Thursdays ago while driving back from Austin. The poem resonated with me and I cried a couple times. I realized that my expectation of how a romantic partner should be was naïve, childish, and limiting. This poem broke me up and I cried because I was thankful.

That night I had three dreams and each was intense and easy to remember.

In dream one, one of my close female friends died. She was on a plane and the plane stopped existing. Dreams don’t make logical sense, but the feeling of this important female friend dying was strong. I wept and wept and wept. You know that kind of wailing a mother cries when a child dies? It was to that intensity.

The second dream was me arriving at my first day of college at an all women college. I was led to the gym where an older man, the wrestling coach, asked me if I wanted to wrestle one of the female students. I accepted.

Instantly the dream changed and I was sitting on a back porch. I was in the suburbs, the afternoon sky was comforting and the trees were dancing. It felt nice. I was sitting with the two women I had been in love with in my life. I was talking with them explaining how I was looking for a new woman who was “more.” That was the only adjective I used. I looked down to my phone and I saw a tinder profile of an updated version of my first love. I declined and woke up.

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Okay so here is what this ish means. Or, more precisely, here is how my perspective organizes this data.

A quick background before we dive in. The Anima is an archetype Jung labeled that represents the ideal female in the subjective individual’s psyche. The Animus is an archetype that represents the ideal male. These archetypes show up in dreams. As a straight male, my Anima will show up as females around my age. My Animus will be an older male but not elderly. (You may already be starting to put the puzzle together.)

The first dream symbolized the death of my Anima (the poem scorched my childish perspective of what a woman can and should be). My friend represented my old perspective of what a female should be. The weeping was my subconscious helping me processes the emotions attached to losing a part of myself.

The second dream symbolized my Animus helping me find a new Anima. (The coach asking me if I’d like to wrestle with these woman.) I don’t know why, but smarter people then I have observed over the decades that the unconscious likes to play with language. The obvious play here is, wrestling with new perspectives. I agreed to wrestle so I got a new dream.

The third dream was my subconscious helping me process this change. The two girls represented the two stages my Anima has already passed through. I was getting a chance to talk with them about my new direction. My subconscious asked if the right direction was to go back to my first Anima and I chose no.

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I think it is beneficial to believe dreams are meaningful, to learn to understand them, and record them. 

This is all subjective. I fucking love it. I hope you will try it. Let me know how it goes. I love you. 

Jung's Dream

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. 

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.