(August 2, 2013 at 9:58 am)wandering soul Wrote: I love your idea of the "greater self" with different levels of conscious engagement and of purposeful agency. Have you given any thought to Jung's collective unconscious.
I've read a bit of Jung and have thought about Jung's collective unconscious. Unlike our embodied unconscious, I don't believe the collective unconscious has any direct agency. I think of it more as the common core at the base of each of our unconscious minds. The similarities in architecture account for commonalities in the meanings we find/make in life. I don't believe there is any kind of disembodied being existing apart from ourselves whose purposes account for teleological direction for our species. But then I don't understand exactly what is at the core of my own unconscious nor how it works. What I do understand is that when we figure this out through science we will never usurp the unconscious because we will never be complete by way of our conscious minds alone. The architecture of our selves, like icebergs, requires deeper moorings below the surface. It is part of how we are and I don't think we could be otherwise without substantial loss.
(August 2, 2013 at 9:58 am)wandering soul Wrote: Have you done any mental exercises to delve into your personal unconscious?
Back in the 1980s I spent a couple of years in intensive dream recording. When I turned my mind to remembering my dreams I found I was flooded with dreams all night. I found them to often be symbolic representations of the issues I was facing. And dealing with the issues in dreams affected how I dealt them when awake. In reading about the function and role of dreams I found that among other things (such as processing the information experienced during the day and sorting it into long-term and short-term memory based on emotional response, or rehearsing survival skills - in the case of humans that would mean social skills) dreams could be the working of the unconscious on the same things that the conscious mind is working on during wakefulness.
Around the same time you did your intensive dream recording. I was also recording some dreams. I don't think I was perfectly regular about it but I also found that I remembered much more this way. I've had a couple epic dreams in my life that I never forget, one in early childhood and one from the late 70's in my early adulthood. Both have meaning for me and convince me that dreams can be meaningful.
Life and duty call but for now I just want to share a little of my past and ask if you've read any of James Hillman, the American who had been the head of the Jungian Institute? I think I might of read everything he wrote with "Re-visioning Psychology" making the more lasting impression. Back when I was working as an assembler/installer of hot tubs I attended the first Institute of Archetypal Psychology held in San Francisco. Everyone else who attended had some sort of credentials. James Hillman, who had been a journalist before getting into depth psychology, presided and there were several other notable people who presented including a philosopher specializing in phenomenology. But I most impressed with Hillman and found him especially witty extemporaneously. I can't recall now if I had already begun reading him or was inspired by the conference. I also read that philosopher guy's book on phenomenology. I went back and finished lower division course work shortly after that and then went on to UC Berkeley where I majored in philosophy. However, phenomenology wasn't the inspiration for that choice of major.
While at the community college, I took a course in the philosophy of *makes room for the eye rolls* consciousness which was co-taught by a jazz piano playing psychology guy and a UCB grad philosophy guy served up with lots of woo complete with guided meditation, Alan Watts (his mentor), biofeedback, shamanism, altered states, journaling and fieldtrips to places like the Bach Dynamite and Dance Society for live music from which the lot of us went back to his house for drumming circles. At this time I was also reading and even writing a little poetry and I did a week (or a weekend?) in the woods (in cabins) with Robert Bly. I also participated in three encounter groups which I found extremely valuable for my interpersonal growth, being naturally an introverted type.
What the hell here is a poem I wrote about relationships while I was reading William Blake:
Wholest each together be.
Between the two a rainbow see.
All is seen through either eye
but depth requires two should try.
Oh what the hell, here is another which was inspired by my exploration with altered states and reading Lao Tzu.
Not doing.
Not withholding doing.
Nothing above,
no thing below.
See.
Guess we must both be a couple of old, latter day hippies .. of course the age I am isn't yet elderly by the latest revisionist definitions.
