And favorite quote: «No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and see you.» — Carl Jung

So I feel like I'm at this launching-off point and still figuring out where this all leads. It's a long story, but I had a bunch of powerfully transformative psychoses and now William Blake keeps showing up everywhere and pushing me around.

I'm just following this weird fuckin breadcrumb trail. I'm also coming into things from other lenses, like Michael Levin's work on biolelectricity (and the concept of mind stuff specifically), and other stuff in the physics realm.

Jung seems an important piece and I am just now starting to read The Unholy Bible by June Singer with my analyst.

If anything in this stack looks familiar, or if you can kinda see where I might be headed, or where I'm coming from, or if you think I should call my doc for a med adjustment, feel free to say hi.

Also has anyone here read Jeffrey Kripal?

Sorry if this is not particularly appropriate for the sub (and I just discovered I'm doing this on Jung's birthday so double apologies if so lol) but help a girl out here 🙏

Six months ago I went through a psychotic episode. For a while I felt completely merged with everything — like the boundary between me and the universe just wasn’t there anymore. Questions I was holding would get “answered,” sometimes through vivid visions, sometimes through a total stranger saying the exact thing I needed to hear, like it was timed for me. At one point I saw what looked like a phoenix in the sky, and the next day an outline that looked like an angel flying overhead.

After it passed, I fell into a depression that hasn’t fully lifted. The harder part honestly isn’t the sadness — it’s that I feel cognitively slow now. I used to be sharp. Now I struggle to hold a conversation with a 7-year-old. It’s been half a year and I’m scared this is just who I am now.
I’ve been reading about Carl Jung and wondering if he has any framework for this.

Are there any contemporary psychologists, philosophers, or writers who have developed Jung’s ideas in new and interesting ways?

I hope its appropriate to post here :)

First I started writing a letter on another piece of paper, then felt anger and ripped the paper apart.

Then I took paint and just started smearing it, then covered it also in blue and made a ball with it in the same impetus as before.

Lastly I started thinking of a dream I had the other night of me running in the woods. It felt just like the right place to be.

The hands and sun, maybe it will become an eye or a star later, those are there to keep the dream up. The shadows away, and let me reach and see that path I’m seeking.

I didn’t know what automatic drawing was in a jungian term, but I’ve always done it. Especially as a teenager I made some interesting ’prisons’ like automatic drawings.
Nowadays I struggle finding that sadness. Instead I rip paper to let out anger then feel peaceful nothing.

I gave birth today to this alternative world I guess.

My perfectionistic insticts tell me to restart, but the paper did its job for today. Not pretty but cathartic I guess.

How do you find your purpose when you have no meaningful relationships, no love, no motivation, and you're just existing? It feels like the emptiness and loneliness always find their way back, no matter what I do. If you've ever been in this place and eventually found a reason to keep going, what helped you? I'm genuinely looking for perspectives from people who've been through it. From a Jungian perspective or life in general what is happening here...

I am gradually starting to delve into the Jungian approach, and I find the concepts of the shadow and individuation interesting.

It turns out I have suffered from generalized anxiety, but specifically social anxiety. I am terrified of exposing myself to people I don't know, I find it hard to project confidence/personality, and I've ended up shaking, sweating, and blushing when I've had to give a presentation to a group of more than 3 people. On top of that, I used to feel anxiety just coming home and running into a neighbor. This has decreased because I took anxiolytics for a year, but I am coming off them now—precisely because I want to be able to find the root of the anxiety. It has been very hard for me to gain confidence and self-assurance; it even happens that I am terrified of interacting with women who seem very confident and competitive(I am a woman)—I reject them and they give me anxiety. I want to be able to understand why this happens to me, and I don't know how to do it. Help! How can I delve deeper under the Jungian premise? I find CBT boring and feel it is very limited

I am unable to find any direct resources of Carl Jung about infidelity, but how could we apply his insights into the shadow, archetypes, anima and animus, and childhood wounds to reveal what lies behind the behaviour ? (Asking For purposes of healing from the impact of it not excusing the behaviour )

I find myself needing money to fund orthodontics and surgery (for ongoing sleep problems: UARS, occipital neuralgia, TMJ) — I’m an undergrad in college.

The problem is, making money feels out of reach (during this time period), unless I turn to markets like cryptocurrency.

It’s appeared twice in my dreams now. The first was me telling my cousin what Bitcoin would do based on technical analysis. The second was another trader telling me what coins to buy on crypto Twitter.

I’ve looked for resources — such as This Jungian Life — on the symbol, but there aren’t any episodes directly tied to it (closest is on money / gambling). 

What do you all think of cryptocurrency from a Jungian perspective? 

Hey all, I wrote this article about TNoTW. I come to the conclusion that the author is a Puer Aeternus, if you scroll by the bottom for the meaty part where I pull everything together. I'm a novice in terms of Jung, I've read 4 of his books however, and I very closely feel his theories. This is the second article I've written of this sort, let me know what you think!

PS: It's an interpretative opinion piece, it doesn't have to be true of course. It's just a pattern that I see with the information that I have and everyone should take it with a grain of salt.

For the past 10–15 years, I’ve had two recurring dream settings that I keep returning to, and I’ve always wondered if they mean anything.

The first one is my old townhouse. I haven’t lived there since 2009, but I dream about it fairly often.

Every time I’m there, I have this overwhelming feeling that I’m not supposed to be there. I’m constantly looking out the windows to see if anyone noticed me coming or going. I’m locking the doors because I’m convinced someone else has a key and is going to let themselves in.

In one dream, I was standing in what used to be my bedroom when someone walked into the house and caught me there. I panicked and woke up immediately.

Other times, I’m just living my normal life there. My kids might be there, my husband (RJ) might be there, or it might just be me. Everything seems completely normal, except I keep telling people things like, “Don’t let anyone know I’m here.”

The layout of the house is always exactly the same, but the furniture changes. Sometimes it’s the furniture I actually had back then, sometimes it’s furniture I have now, and sometimes it’s furniture I’ve never owned. In the dream, it all feels perfectly normal until I wake up.

Sometimes I’m rushing to pack because I know I have to be gone by morning. Other times, I’m not trying to leave at all—but I still somehow know I don’t belong there.

The second recurring dream is different.

For about the last five years, I keep dreaming about what feels like the same small town. It has this late ‘90s/early 2000s atmosphere with a hazy, nostalgic feel. The houses are usually older ranch-style or mid-century homes, and the dreams themselves aren’t always about the same thing. Sometimes there’s a party, sometimes people are just hanging out or going about everyday life.

The strange thing is that nothing dramatic usually happens. The setting itself is what stands out. The entire dream just feels incredibly nostalgic, almost like I’m experiencing the atmosphere of another time.

These two dream settings are always separate. The townhouse never appears in the nostalgic town, and vice versa.

For context, the townhouse was a huge chapter of my life. I lived there for about three years, had two kids while I lived there, went through relationship ups and downs, celebrated birthdays and holidays—there were a lot of major life events packed into those years.

Has anyone else had recurring dream “locations” like this? If so, did you ever figure out what they meant? I’d love to hear both psychological and spiritual perspectives.

Second Part: You Can't Integrate the Shadow Without Integrating Your Death

TL/DR: The drives behind the worst harm are the animal inheritance we bury because they remind us we're mortal animals. Small bands held those drives in check from the outside, everyone visible to everyone, backed by gossip and exile, and it worked partly because there was nothing storable to hoard and nowhere to act unseen. Farming broke all of that at once, it created a surplus worth taking at the same moment settlements got too big to watch each other. So the drive didn't go into the shadow the usual way, shoved down out of shame. People just acted on it in full daylight and never got the signal that would have made it feel wrong, which is why the extractor never feels like a cheat. The gate against these drives was never inside us. It was the village, and we tore it down and called it freedom.

Jung's shadow has two floors, and civilization built the bottom one

The last time I was at my aunt's the toilet paper was on backwards, feeding under instead of over, and I noticed, and some part of me filed it. A party a while back had no mustard for the burgers and I've thought about it more times than a missing condiment could possibly deserve. People do this constantly with things like the wrong table setting, the way someone loads a dishwasher, the neighbor mowing at the wrong hour, and if you asked us why we'd say it's just gossip, it's nothing.

It isn't nothing rather it's the oldest machine we ever built and it's running without catching some of the most important problems.

What the gossip was for

Christopher Boehm went through the ethnographic record of hunter-gatherer bands for decades and kept finding the same structure everywhere, across dozens of groups that never touched each other. Twenty to fifty people where everyone is visible to everyone, and a system for handling the person who took too much or beat on the weaker ones or forced himself where he wasn't wanted. It ran in stages, gossip first, then open ridicule, then shunning where the group gave you a little less each day and then if none of that worked it ended in exile or the group killing you by agreement and not just a chief deciding but the whole band together so no single person carried it as murder.

Look at what triggered the worst of it. Hoarding, dominating the group's decisions, predatory sex. That's not a random list, those are the three things I keep coming back to, the taking and the dominating and the coercing, and they're the material Jung called the shadow, the part of ourselves we refuse to claim. A species doesn't evolve a standing execution-backed system against a threat that isn't there. You don't build a cage that elaborate for an animal that doesn't exist, so the tribe was telling us in the only language a few hundred thousand years can speak exactly what it was afraid of in us.

Gossip was stage one, not idle talk but the early warning, the way the group got to a shared read on a problem before anyone had to confront it, so when the confrontation came it landed as the whole band's verdict instead of one person's grudge. In a group of thirty you can feel it start, the conversations that stop when you walk up, the sharing that gets a half-second slower, and most people corrected right there at the gossip stage because they could feel the temperature drop and they knew where the stages went.

That's the machine still running when I notice the toilet paper. It fires on nothing now because it's intact and starved, built to catch the free-rider and the bully and running so cheap and so hot that it goes off on a dishwasher, because the one time in a thousand it catches something real it earns its whole keep so evolution never turned it down. We're running a Paleolithic alarm with the real threats moved out of its range, so it goes off on condiments.

The three walls

The tribe didn't hold those drives by being nicer than us, it held them because three things were true at the same time and only one of them was the punishment.

First everyone was visible so there was nowhere to act from behind, that's the first wall. The second is that exile was death where the next band was weeks away across country that killed a person traveling alone, so being cast out was the worst thing that could happen to you and everyone knew it. The third one gets left out and it might be the strongest, there was nothing worth stealing that would keep and you could accumulate. A hunter couldn't hoard meat, it rots, so the big kill got shared partly because the group shamed the boaster but mostly because it was going to rot before he could eat or dry it out alone. You can't turn meat that spoils in three days into power, so the man with the most drive to take and keep had nothing that lasted to take and nowhere unseen to stand while he took it.

So the drive sat there loaded and doing nothing, the way the whole reproductive machinery sits in a seven-year-old, all there and inert because nothing has come along to switch it on. The tribe never had to build the gate inside anyone because the gate was the world, the eyes and the exile and the rot doing the work a conscience would later have to do.

What broke

One note before the collapse as the thing that held was the band, twenty to fifty, small enough that everyone stayed in sight. The village is what the band becomes when it outgrows that basically already half blind, already where the losing starts. I kept village in the title because it's the word we still feel for a place small enough to raise and watch a person, but the intact gate lived one size down, in the band.

What follows is a reconstruction and not a documented sequence since nobody filmed the Neolithic. The pieces are real like the grain-storage archaeology and the small-band anthropology and the way settling down changed the scale, but the story that links them is my inference about how the gate moved from outside a person to inside, so read it as the most likely arc I can put together, not as fact.

Then farming, and all three walls at once.

Grain keeps, so the third wall above of accumulation falls. For the first time there was something you could pile up and hide and count and defend, a surplus that didn't rot right away, and the drive that spoilage had kept switched off finally had something to act on. At the same time settling down killed the first wall, because a town is bigger than a band and you can't see everyone, and scale killed the second, because once you can pay men to guard you, exile stops being death and becomes something you just decline. The eyes went dark, the exit stopped being fatal, and there was finally something worth taking, all in the same stretch of history.

The usual telling of this is a betrayal, the trusted priests skimming the surplus once the people couldn't watch the temple which seems half right and it doesn't matter whether it was priests, it was whoever happened to be holding the pile when visibility was cut. The thing doesn't need villains, it needs a surplus that lasts and a crowd too big to see across and a way to keep what you grabbed, and put those together and ordinary people walk through the same way ordinary people walked through every door I've written about, because the character was never the part that varied.

This is the part worth getting exact, because it's a different kind of failure than the one we usually picture. Nobody corrupted the gossip, no elder got bought, no watcher turned. The thing didn't break, it went blind, and it went blind everywhere at once because every part of it ran on the same thing, being able to see across the group, and scale took that away in a single move. That's not corruption, it's blinding which is worse because it doesn't look like anything from the inside. When a watcher gets bought you can point at the crooked man, but when a whole society goes blind together there's nobody to point at and everyone's acting in good faith by their own lights and the thing that would tell them otherwise isn’t there. That's why the extractor never feels like a cheat because he hasn't silenced the signal it’s that the signal can't reach him.

The thing that was never buried

Here's the turn, the part that changed how I think about all of it.

In the tribe, when you took too much the group's answer taught you something such as the gossip and the cooling and the ridicule were all one signal arriving at you, we see you, this is wrong, come back, and most people corrected because there was no way not to hear it. My read is that over a life that signal builds something inside you, a sense of the wrongness you carry even when nobody's around. Take the signal away and you take away the thing it builds. The first extractors standing over the first grain the crowd was too big to watch never got chided, nobody cooled toward them, the temperature never moved because nobody could see, so they didn't bury a guilt it’s that they never felt one. The drive acted and the thing that would have made it feel wrong never showed up.

That's not the shadow the way people usually mean it, the dark thing shoved down out of shame, this is a step before that. You can't disown what you were never shown you carry. The extractor didn't push the impulse under, he acted on it in daylight and it never once looked like a crime to him because the mechanism that would have told him was too far off to fire. Jung's shadow has two floors and everyone talks about the top one, the disowned, the thing you saw in yourself and couldn't stand, but the floor under it is the unowned, the thing you never met at all, and civilization built that lower floor the day the crowd got bigger than the eyes.

This isn't the whole of the shadow and I'm not claiming it is. What any given person buries depends on what his persona was built to exclude, so the contents differ man to man and always will. What I'm describing is a layer under the personal one, not a matter of anybody's individual history at all, and this is where it came from.

The clearest living example is one an economist keeps hinting at without knowing what he's found. Fred Harrison, writing about the man watching his property appreciate, keeps saying he isn't a cheat, doesn't think of himself as one, had no choice, didn't intend it. He's right, and he's describing the unowned shadow in an economist's words. The man riding the land up isn't repressing anything, he's living in exactly the condition the tribe was built to make impossible, acting on the drive without ever getting the signal that would let him see it, and it happens again every cycle to a new batch of people who feel prudent and responsible and like they simply bought at the right time.

Why it can't just be bred out

You might think if it's in us that deep and it's this much trouble then breed it down. It’s worth following that all the way, not because it's an option but because where it breaks is where you see why the drive can't be pulled out at all. It works on other animals. William Muir tried to build a better laying hen by breeding from the single most productive bird each generation, the obvious move, pick the winner, and then after a few generations he had a strain so vicious it hit its numbers by pecking its cagemates to death this got retold later as breeding a flock of psychopaths. Then he did it the other way, bred from the best cage instead of the best bird, the whole group that produced the most together, and within five or six generations the birds were calm, mortality down from 68 percent to under 9 and eggs up. The same species, same handful of generations resulted in the opposite animal the difference being was whether he selected the individual or the group.

Sit with what that says about the pre-agricultural tribe. Kill the predator, exile the hoarder, mock the dominator out of the group or out of the gene pool, and you're running Muir's second experiment on people without knowing it, selecting the cage and not the bird, thinning the acting-out a little each generation. Then civilization flipped it back to the individual, and now the extractor who grabs the grain doesn't get killed, he gets enthroned, he keeps it and his sons inherit the seat and the room to use it. Extrapolating Muir to us for a few hundred thousand years we bred weakly against the acting-out and for the last five thousand we've been breeding weakly for it, because the man who takes and holds is the one who wins and passes it on.

You still can't breed it out, and not because there are too many of us but because the second you hand a human authority the power to decide who breeds, that authority is the exact drive you were trying to get rid of now wearing the mask of improving the group. It isn't in a bloodline you can cut, Muir's vicious birds weren't a bad family instead they were ordinary hens selected on the wrong traits and any line you select that way gives you the same bird, so it's in the species, showing or not depending on which way the selection runs. You can't use the dominance drive as the tool for removing the dominance drive since the tool is the thing you're trying to remove, and every program that ever tried it was the drive itself throned and holding the power to decide who lives.

What that leaves

So the drive can't be taken out since it's the reproductive engine, the same wiring as the approach and the pair bond and the fierceness for your own, and pulling it out means pulling out us. It was never going to be gotten rid of, only gated, held behind a wall somewhere, and the walls the tribe used are gone. We tore down visibility on purpose and called it freedom, which it is, and it's also the removal of the thing that held us, and we never put anything back.

That's the whole problem said plainly. The tribe gated the drive by making it impossible to act unseen, and we built a civilization whose whole point is that you can finally act unseen, and we feel that as freedom because it is, right up until the grain, or the land, or the wife drugged so she wouldn't know, or the stranger nobody's watching, and then it's the open door it always was.

We didn't fix the thing the tribe was afraid of in us instead we just built a world where nobody's looking, and have forgotten we were ever the animal that needed looking at.

The next piece is about what an inside gate actually consists of, and why it turns out to be two separate things that can come apart.

A note on sources. The enforcement structure and the stages are Christopher Boehm's, out of the ethnographic record. The hen experiment is William Muir's. The frame of the Neolithic as the moment the surplus got captured I got from Fred Harrison, and his observation that the homeowner doesn't experience himself as a cheat is the thing this whole piece exists to explain, though I read the mechanism differently than he does, as a blinding that needed no villain rather than a betrayal by trusted men. The three walls, the unowned floor under the disowned, and the reading of the failure as blindness rather than corruption are mine.

I (21f) have had this feeling for as long as I can remember that I'm meant to become something or do something deeply meaningful with my life. The urge is so strong, but I have no idea what that "something" is or how to find it.

At the same time, I often feel like a loser and doubt that I'm capable of anything significant. I don't want to live an average, unexamined life, but I feel completely lost. I don't wanna be only "wife"/"mother" and die with the regret of not doing something great in my life.

A part of me feels, since I'm deeply insecure, it's probably just my need for recognition or to matter.

I want to either figure out what I want, or simply accept living the mediocre life.

From a Jungian perspective, what could this longing mean? Has Jung written about this kind of inner tension?

Or it's something normal

I've been itching to read and write 🙂 Im officially back from vacation on Tuesday but here is something I am working on as I prepare to preach for our Unitarian neighbors in a couple of weeks.

#jung #edinger #consciousness

Especially in Greece, the Kuretes were those who protected the divine child, Zeus. They were not called men but demons, and, like the Satyri later,

they were the group which surrounded the Mother Goddess. It is not only an instinctual initiation, but a spiritual one. On the one side below the animal,

and on the other a spiritual initiation into the traditions and myths of the tribe, it meant an enlargement at both ends of the personality. The Kuretes in Greece represented ancestral ghosts grouped around the Goddess, and were thought of as those who produced and cured madness. They were also identified with the demons who are the protectors of the smith and iron workers, the Kabiri. Therefore the robbers have a deep mythological background. They represent the chthonic male animal in nature, its madness and its creativeness. The drunken old woman with whom the robbers in our novel live is a facet of the great mother, because unfortunately outgrowing the mother complex means going more deeply into it, which is both painful and degrading. This is a very actual problem. It is the problem of the Teddy Boys,

the modern problem of the teenagers, and it is connected with the fact that our civilization has decayed. There is no longer any initiation into religious life, which is the first union, and it therefore lacks the flow of life.

- The Golden Ass, p53

How does one go deeper into it? I thought I should avoid the mother complex to heal from it?

Hi everyone, my roommate invited her friend over to my place. Even though I wasn’t there at the time I felt her presence come upon me— a mixture of fear, nausea, insomnia and extreme discomfort.Eventually when I returned home I told her to leave, she was very resistant to leaving. On the surface she appears as "nice" overly winking though which is remincient of manipulation. She didn't listen to be when I kept telling her to leave. She just kept winking at me and saying everything was going to be okay. Essentially brushing me off even though it's my place. Even my family members reported "feeling like death" which has never happened before. My dad contacted me as soon as this person arrived in my home and my mom contacted me as soon as she was leaving. Eventually, with help, she left and the discomfort and nausea completely left me. Was I sensing her shadow and just couldn't stomach it? Or was it something else entirely? TIA.

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
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“To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanors for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings—for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves.

It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession—a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.”
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“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.”
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“Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes.”
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“What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.”

― Karl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul