reason vs faith vs reality

[wandering soul]

Campbell looked for patterns in mythology. Jung looked for the same in dreams.

The phenomenology of the mind is endlessly fascinating. (Truth be told, hooey is one of the important ingredients in special sauce.)

I love both Campbell and Jung.

writing my brief summary did not take a lot of time - I have a love of language and a love of ideas which causes me to write extremely long and involved stuff.... which I am told, no one wants to read through! My difficulty is not in writing a lot and fast, but in editing it down to a length that might actually be read!

I find the entire human project endlessly fascinating. A lot of my thinking was kick-started when I read Dawkins' work on the "ideosphere" (again back in the 1980s!) where ideas and thoughts evolve in mutual interactions --similar to the biological evolution and interactions of populations of plants, animals, insects, bacteria, etc. in the biosphere. The units of thought ("memes") combine in different configurations to form new conceptual structures which inhabit different populations of minds interacting with each other. Thought structures which are successful in populating a sufficient number of minds will reproduce and become more complex and developed.

In my own thought structures this became one of the foundational ideas which shapes my thinking about all the stuff of being human. I also incorporated a lot of the idea structures from biology to provide models for thinking about the evolving dynamics of being human.

I see our humanity as not a static state but an evolving dynamic interaction between all human minds comprising not merely the universes of thought and ideas but including social interactions, emotional and psychological relationships, cultures, societies, political governance, and everything else we do as humans. All of that is evolving and changing constantly. We are continuously working out what we want our humanity to be.

This whole thing is what I find endlessly fascinating - with a particular soft spot for the phenomenology of the mind ;-)

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.

yes I agree with your conception of the collective unconscious. But I think of it like a communal well - we can each draw from it and we also each contribute to it. So for the extended self, it seems the collective unconscious could provide a wider scope for engagement of thought and evaluation.

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.

most of my dreams were prosaic but a few were, like yours not only memorable but have stayed with me as touchstones of my self-conceptions.

love James Hillman - discovered him in the 1990s I think. Also one of his students who has also published some great books: Thomas Moore ("Care of the Soul").

I was introduced to the phenomenological approach to the anthropological study of religions along with a dozen other approaches (psychological, sociological, political, economic, etc. etc.) and was particularly attracted to the phenomenonlogical methodologies.

Afraid you are right about our old hippie souls. You were on the right coast for that. Wow, Alan Watts and Robert Bly. I just read them, never studied with or met them.

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.

yes, 60 is the new 40. We baby boomers are still revising definitions!


Love your poems. I also sometimes think better by making images or poems. They seem to get at more of what I see than mere descriptive sentences can.