http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=magazine

one of the most important grimoires of the modern age is about to see the light of day. i for one am extremely interested in perusing the record of Dr. Jung's mystical freak-out.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

He who would understand human beings must put away his academic gown, say good-bye to the study, and wander with a human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the hospital and the asylum, in the drinking-shops, brothels, and gambling halls, in the salons of the elegant, the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals and secular ecstasies, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him.

--C.J. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

--Carl Jung

http://webhome.idirect.com/~lkeane/thesis.htm

a thesis on two of my favourite 20th century personalities. the paper compares and contrasts the lives and work of the "Great Beast 666" and the "Wizard of Zürich". both were sons of devout Christians who were at times into solitude, experienced "weirdness", produced "channeled" texts (The Book of the Law and Seven Sermons to the Dead), and generally advanced the cause of individualistic and (at least somewhat) scientific approaches toward spirituality. each man was a crucial modern link in the Western tradition (magic and alchemy). this paper points out the parallels between their systems (Magick and Analytical Psychology) in the light of how each can be seen as a Western continuation of the function of "shamanizing".

This thesis is a comparison of the works of two seemingly dichotomous individuals. The first work, Magick/Liber Aba, is by Western Esotericist (Occultist) Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]. Magick/Liber Aba sets out the major thrust of this prolific author's theories concerning Magick as a process towards spiritual attainment. The second work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, presents psychologist C.G. Jung's [1875-1961] interpretation of the alchemical tradition as a method toward individuation. These two men were individuals who were dissatisfied with the predominantly monophasic world-view of "Western" culture. Both Crowley and Jung can be seen as pioneers who attempted to foster a polyphasic world-view in which various states of consciousness such as dreams, fantasies, visions, and drug-induced experiences were not only valid but essential for the completion of the Great Work and the acquisition of ever deepening and widening gnosis in the quest to become fully human.

The "Cycle of Meaning" demonstrates how a symbol functions within a given world-view. At the top of the cycle we see the cosmology of the people or culture in question. That cosmology or ontological assumption is reflected in the culture's mythopoeia. The interpretation of the mythopoeia (such as art and ritual) is reinforced by a "shaman". That reenforcement influences the direct experience of the individual. The direct experience is then again interpreted by the shamanic agency. This interpretation then functions to reinforce the endemic cosmology. What results is a closed cycle which is perpetuated by the culture's shaman.

Not only was Jung writing from within the larger context of "Western" culture, he was also in a sense creating his own Cycle of Meaning. If a patient is being treated through the methods of Analytical Psychology then he or she can be as adopting that world-view. The analyst, as shaman,then reinforces the world-view and interprets any direct experience had by the patient, which in turn reconfirms the Analytical cosmology. In the case of Crowley and Jung we see that they both attempted to break the dominant Cycle (for Crowley it was the Western Esoteric Tradition and for Jung it was Freudian psychoanalysis) thereby creating their own Cycle of Meaning in which they themselves became the primary "initiator".

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Crowley and Jung is that they demonstrated that the human condition is far more complicated and deeper than we generally suspect. Both men encouraged every person to delve deeply into their depths and examine, at length and with courage, what rose from those depths. Each man also insisted that the true goal of human development was to become fully human, to transcend the limitations imposed by collective consciousness and its constrictive epistemologies toward a union with inner powers universal in their embrace. By attempting to become more human in this sense we begin to break down the boundaries which prevent us from gaining more insight, more gnosis not only about ourselves as individuals, but our relation to others and the universe at large.

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/08/27/synchronicity-brain-hemisphere-communication/

another great post from Boucher on symbols, synchronicity and the unconscious. this time it's from the angle of how the left and right brain hemispheres operate - the left as a more verbal, rational, or reductionist mode with the right as more of a symbolic, image-oriented one. the hypothesis is that a large part of what Jung called the "transcendental function" (the interoperation of conscious and unconscious modes of awareness) could be tied in with the differing functions of the two lobes. and how synchronicity and symbol are integral to this process.

i think this theory goes a long way towards explaining certain experiences under the influence of entheogens, which can at times seemingly bring those symbolic complexes up and manifest them more apparently concretely in perception, blurring the unconscious contents into consciousness much more dramatically than otherwise.

This to me is just about the perfect explanation of why and how the “23 phenomenon” works, or for that matter just about any synchronicity. I feel like people who subscribe to more mystical “explanations” of things of this nature may not like the hypothesis I am about to put forth. But since it is a hypothesis, the point is to test it and re-test it under different circumstances, pick it apart and break it down. Or at least that is how science works though. And honestly, I think the best types of mysticism, that’s all they are: science. Do this and this other thing happens. Very simple. It’s a cause effect truth exchange.

My theory to explain synchronicities is basically this: you become, for a time, consciously fixated on a complex of interlocking words, images, etc. During that time, you will have certain innerly held images which begin to present themselves in the world at large, as if by magic. The world becomes like a magic mirror for the contents of your mind. At times it can be so strong of an effect as to be quite overwhelming and undoubtedly the cause of many a nervous breakdown.

If that is what synchronicities really are, then that explains so much. It would seem that the time synchronicities begin happening most strongly is during times of your life with heavy symbolic content. That is, times which are rich with imagery and other non-verbal types of human communication. The “unconscious” portion of your mind is good at making associative webs; that is simply its method of file-storage, unlike the linear left brain storage system which keeps things in lines and boxes (the place where they store the Ark at the end of Raiders). It annotates things that occur according, then, to thematic webs which are operating in your perceptual realm. If you have a fairly strong system of symbols in your life (usually they take the shape of people you know and things you surround yourself with…), then your perception will naturally seek out things which match itself, filtering against things that don’t relate. Thus you will start seeing things with 23 everywhere, because your non-verbal (not unconscious) mind is trying to assert communications through to the linear-verbal part/side/whatever. I have my doubts that the *whole* thing splits down a left-right brain hemisphere explanation, but certainly a good lot of it seems to hang very heavily on that within the limited field of my own experiences.

Because that’s what filters like the number 23, or even simply being in a bad mood do: they tell the non-verbal part of your mind what you want to see more of. Its job is to mimic as best it can the intentions of the verbal instructions it receives, translating them into non-verbal images, symbols, actions, characters and events (the terms in which its vision of reality operates: the “musical performance world-view” we’ll call it for self-referential purposes). So if you can communicate to it directly in the ways that it craves: images and symbols, then you’re going to establish a better working relationship with it: it will reward your investigations with better and richer imagery and allow you to direct it towards the completion of specific tasks which begin with internal images and manifest through the bridge of the body/mind into the world via the actions we take upon it. This is why your non-verbal part of your mind is so damned important: it is functionally closer to the level of concrete existence. But if you’re treating it like a non-entity, a non-exister, “un”-conscious, then yeah you’re not going to get much from it beyond the occasional blast of bizarre coincidences. But if you can get together on good terms, well then, that’s where all the *real* fun begins...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6403624763313613569&vi_action=large

full length documentary describing the life and work of Jung.  includes several interviews with various associates of his, as well as footage of interviews with him, and some shots of mandalas and other artwork from the Red Book.  gets into psychoanalysis, religion, alchemy and even some funny anecdotes.  i didn't know that Jung, his wife, and another lady maintained an extended threesome, for example.  well worth a watch if you're into Jung.

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, the less satisfying his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.

The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination - that is, ultimately limited - we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!

--Carl Jung, On Life after Death

Those who understood art as a means for psychic survival knew the immediate nature of art and its power of not only self-transformation, but collective-transformation. By uncovering the mandala, Carl Jung was in effect the modern world’s first shamanic healer. In a time of world war, Jung was able to articulate the utility of the ancient ideas of art as magic to the rational scientific mind. He wrote volumes on the subject of alchemy, involving the union of opposites, not only in its relation to individual psychic health but also in its relation to the psychic health of mankind. Jung noted that in both religion as well as alchemy this union was personified as a rounded, androgynous Anthropos, “the original or primordial man,” which contains the opposites of “the one and the many,” male and female, matter and spirit, good and evil. [+]

this morning i've done a little bit of digging into the strange events that C.G. Jung experienced in 1913-1916, during a period of self-imposed isolation just after his well-known falling out with Freud. thorough Googling variously describes this period in his life as an "encounter with the unconscious", "skirmish with insanity", "communication with the spirit world", "descent into the underworld" and even "deification". the man himself referred to it as his "creative illness". i, of course, prefer the term "mystical freakout". the specific content of his experience involved dream encounters with mythical characters, prophetic dreams about the world drenched in blood, and other experiences. there is some debate as to whether all of the information regarding this time has come out. most notably, this guy Noll seems to think full documentation of the incident has been supressed, in order that it wont be revealed that Jung was in fact a Nietzschean neo-pagan revivalist or even an Aryan Christ.

after the events he penned his Seven Sermons to the Dead, which according to scholar of Gnosticism Stephan Hoeller expresses all of Jung's later theories in concise mythological form. Jung himself in later life said, "It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work" about the incident. in fact, he emerged from his personal encounter with new theories about the existence of archetypes, the collective unconscious, the structures of the human psyche, the different types of human personality, and the individuation process. he combined these theories with an interest in comparative mythology and dream interpretation to construct an approach to therapy that he called analytical psychology. he also emerged with the idea that many of his patients suffered from a "lack of religion" - his system resumed many of the features of Western alternative spirituality, notably with similarities to gnosticism and alchemy.

so what did his freakout mean? was it his initiation? and is his system really a new religion in disguise, as Noll would have it? who knows. but to this modern-day spiritual libertine, he seems a figure worth serious contemplation and meditation. i choose to see him as an early modern representative of the sacred perennial tradition. in the west, Jungianism picks up where shamanism, paganism, gnosticism, alchemy, and the Romantics left off. he went into his "dark night of the soul" and brought back a treasure that is hard to find: contemporary connection to ancient mysteries. guys like Noll may decry Jung and Jungians for attempting to bring back European paganism under the guise of psychology. fine. to me, his experiences and theories are eminently useful for any modern trying to find his soul or Self in a culture that endorses only the spiritual tyranny of orthodoxy and the spiritual bankruptcy of dogmatic materialism.

http://www.mythinglinks.org/magic~granrose.html

a paper on magicians as illusionists, shamans, psychoanalysists. archetypes, tricksters, fools, tarot, Hermes, Merlin, Jung, magic words, symbols, circles and rituals, etc.

We all know informally and roughly what a magician is. A magician is, of course, a person who does "magic". That is, a magician is a person who can make things happen that wouldn't happen under the normal or familiar laws of nature. Something is transformed in a mysterious way, or disappears, or appears. We know also, if we reflect on our use of the word, that a "magician" could be an entertainer (a "conjuror" or "prestidigitator") or a "real" magician (something like a "witch doctor," "medicine man," or, perhaps, "sorcerer"). Still, both conjurors and "real" magicians are assumed to have the power to transform things and make them appear or disappear, whether playing cards and silk scarves or illnesses and spirits. And such transformations take place in a way which is, literally, extra-ordinary. This thesis intends to deal with both types or senses of "magician" and to explore the possible relationships between them.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3099573935248548861&hl=en

video of Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff riffing on all kinds of stuff. psychedelics, alteration of our perceptions of reality, open source religion, myth, prophecy, the Mayan calendar, the popularization of Ayahuasca, time, church, state, currency, Jung, etc. they definitely have a few differences of opinion.

Archetypes thus can be understood and described in many ways, and much of the history of Western thought has evolved and revolved around this very issue. For our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects -- impels, structures, permeates -- the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. One can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses (or what Blake called "the Immortals"), in Platonic terms as transcendent first principles and numinous Ideas, or in Aristotelian terms as immanent universals and dynamic indwelling forms. One can approach them in a Kantian mode as a priori categories of perception and cognition, in Schopenhauerian terms as the universal essences of life embodied in great works of art, or in the Nietzschean manner as primordial principles symbolizing basic cultural tendencies and modes of being. In the twentieth-century context, one can conceive of them in Husserlian terms as essential structures of human experience, in Wittgensteinian terms as linguistic family resemblances linking disparate but overlapping particulars, in Whiteheadian terms as eternal objects and pure potentialities whose ingression informs the unfolding process of reality, or in Kuhnian terms as underlying paradigmatic structures that shape scientific understanding and research. Finally, with depth psychology, one can approach them in the Freudian mode as primordial instincts impelling and structuring biological and psychological processes, or in the Jungian manner as fundamental formal principles of the human psyche, universal expressions of a collective unconcscious and, ultimately, of the unus mundus.

--Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche
(via daoistraver et fannishly)

http://anthropik.com/2006/06/the-trickster-the-devil-and-an-ambiguous-world/

interesting piece on the transmutation of ethically ambiguous Tricksters like Loki and Coyote into figures of total darkness. the culture of absolute morality cannot abide the dark side of the trickster and therefore recasts it as embodiment of vilest evil against the highest good. it is argued that this same process occured with our own Horned God, which seems pretty reasonable to me...

It is the ambivalence of the Trickster that civilized folk find so threatening. Shamanism is a hunter's religion. It is very much grounded in the understanding that life and death exist in balance, that the world is ambivalent and ambiguous. Shamans exist to try to mediate that ambivalence and ambiguity. The Trickster sums up that enormous swath of existence as an archetypal personification of everything that is uncertain, nuanced, and equivocal.

Civilization can be understood at its base as an attempt to cheat that--to paint the world as black and white, and then to increase the white forever, and eliminate the black. Jung wrote of the effect this has on the individual psyche, and often remarked that it may produce the same for a society as a whole. Existence is defined primarily by balance, and just as a brighter light produces a darker shadow, a stronger Ego only produces a stronger Shadow. Jung suggested that the Devil is the archetype of the cosmic Shadow, and the progression from Trickster to Devil is enlightening in this regard: in our attempt to eliminate everything bad, what we do instead is to polarize the Trickster, the ambiguous, ambivalent guardian of cosmic balance, turning it into a diabolical power determined to balance our refusal to acknowledge the realities of existence. The prosecution takes to hell to balance our dreams of heaven; Coyote takes up witchcraft to tear down the unbalanced world we make; Loki schemes of gathering all the monsters and giants to march on Asgard and shatter the Rainbow Bridge forever. In our desire to make the world all good, all the time, we fall into a trap the Trickster should have taught us to avoid: what we do is create an equal and opposite, compensatory evil that waits for its chance to wreak its vengeance. The Devil, the evil Loki, and the Coyote witch are all spiritual, mythological embodiments of the compensation civilization creates: collapse.

Look at all the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world, all of which is derived from human beings and their mental condition! Look at the devilish means of destruction! They are invented by perfectly harmless gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens, being all we hope to be. And when the whole thing blows up and causes an indiscernible inferno of devastation, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply occurs, yet it is all man-made. But since every person is blindly convinced that he is nothing but his very modest and unimportant consciousness, which neatly fulfils duties and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that this whole rationally organized crowd, called a state or a nation, is run by a seemingly impersonal, imperceptible but terrific power, checked by nobody and nothing. This ghastly power is mostly explained by fear of the neighboring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent devil. As nobody is capable of recognizing where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, one simply projects one's own condition upon the neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that one is quite right. All one's neighbors are ruled by an uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by wrath or hatred.

--C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion

What is usually and generally called “religion” is to such an amazing degree a substitute that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of “religion,” which I prefer to call a creed, has not an important function in human society. The substitution has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols invested in a solidly organized dogma and ritual. The Catholic church maintains them by her indisputable authority, the Protestant church (if that term is still applicable) by insistence upon faith and evangelical message. As long as those two principles work, people are effectively defended and shielded against immediate religious experience. Even if something of the sort should happen to them, they can refer to the church, for it would know whether the experience came from God or from the devil, whether it was to be accepted or to be rejected.

--C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion

Sooner or later, nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory . . . Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible. If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts. Our present attempts may be bold, but I believe they are on the right lines.

--Carl Jung, Aion

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7042.html

a piece on the 26 year dialouge between brilliant individuals in psychology and quantum physics.

In their joint volume, Jung and Pauli presented the synchronicity principle. It presumes that indestructible energy has a dual relationship to the space-time continuum: on the one hand, there is the constant connection through effect--that is, causality; and on the other, there is an inconstant connection through contigence, equivalence, or meaning that is itself synchronicity. For a physicist, equations are not objectively accurate reflections of material reality but structurally accurate relationship-connections. For Jung, synchronicities are meaningful only when an individual experiences them. This creates another "relationship of complementarity between the occurrence or cessation of synchronistic phenomena and the relative state of unconsciousness or consciousness of the individual who experiences it."

Synchronistic events are inconstant, sporadic, and arbitrary, for they are dependent upon an excited archetypal situation in the observer. In an accidental but meaningful perception of a coming together of inner and outer events--of making or perceiving a connection between the inwardly experienced and the outwardly perceived--there is usually a felt sense of participating in "acts of creation in time." This is similar to the sensibility of religions based on individual experience of the manifest, such as the ancient Egyptian and the Native American.