The sacred flame

Sacred Heart (Mexico)

[Image from StardustPrintShop (Etsy)]

At this point it becomes easier to understand why Jung always required of analysts that they should ultimately work the most on continuing to make progress in their own individuation. In doing so, they take their analysands along with them on their journey, without trying to influence them directly (which would be an abuse of power). In an early letter, Jung even goes so far as to say that the therapist should only analyze the pathological aspect of the patient’s psyche. This is because intellectual understanding is destructive. Understanding (Latin comprehendere), after all, means “taking hold of,” “grasping,” and this corresponds to an exercise of power. When the patients being and destiny are at stake, one should relate to his unique mystery with wordless respect. As Jung said, “we must understand the divine in us, but not in another in so far as he is capable of getting on and understanding on his own.” Our dreamer, as we will recall, was apprehensive about his encounter with patients. His dream points him back to working on himself

~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy

I thought about the secrets I had stored up inside my body. How many times I’ve crawled out my bedroom window to get in a car. The unstoppable fire between my legs. A fire not his. I thought about vodka. Nearly drowning. By the time he sat me on the couch to tell me I was his, I was miles away from daughter. A black suitcase making shape and story in my dreams. I felt like there was a muscle between us. The muscle was my sexuality. Not his.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water


Welcome the madnesses, the stalemates, the gordian knots. Even though it's hard and painful, welcome these burdens. What you see as the Great Enemy who is trying to ruin all of your carefully laid plans is really your severe and demanding Guardian Angel, providing obstacles that will train your spiritual body into something strong and beautiful. Our madnesses are the Self trying to incarnate in us, God trying to come into the world.

The shaman is always a wounded healer. Those who can go into their own madness and come out of it whole are the only ones who are able to carry the weight of the Self into life. This is the important thing; your weakness is your strength. What is weak in outer, subjective reality is the yoke that links you with the Self. It is your way to bring the Self, or as much of it as you are able, into the world.

To understand boorishly and without care is to do violence to the soul. That desire in us - to know, to control, to make safe - diminishes that which is sacred into a “nothing but.” It turns what is glorious and beautiful and terrible into bland meaninglessness. Hindu’s greet each other with palm to palm, bowing as the God in them acknowledges the God in you. When we, or someone else, is experiencing madness, we put our hands together wordlessly, reverently, bow to this holy presence that is trying to come into the world. It’s not the places where we’re strong that matter, but where we are embarrassing, unpleasant, and inconvenient.

What is needed is a reverent attitude toward life, toward ourselves as well as others, toward all of existence. An open-hearted and open-minded attitude, an attitude of sympathy and compassion when we're in the thick of the struggle. Not everything needs to be known, or judged.... measured, or fit into “it's place.” Reverence stops us from harming ourselves and each other with our drive to put everything into safe little boxes. The thing in us which is bigger than the universe cannot be fit into a small, neat little box. By freeing our hearts and our minds we remember the Sacred that lives in and through us all.

The thing in us which is ours is ours. The thing in others which is theirs is theirs. We can - and should - clash and disagree, fight and struggle. But, at the same time, we must most of all always recognize and honor the Sacred that is laboring to birth itself into the world.

"Clean, stainless. Unbeaten."

[Image from The Goddess Garden]

Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the Self; you begin to individuate.

So in anahata individuation begins. But here again you are likely to get an inflation. Individuation is not that you become an ego – you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist.

Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Therefore nobody understands what the Self is, because the Self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the Self in a sort of loose connection. For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the Self.

Now, if anybody makes the mistake of thinking that he lives at the same time in the basement and on the fourth story, that he is the purusha himself, he is crazy. He is what the German very aptly call verrückt, carried off his feet up to somewhere else. He just sits up there and spins. We are allowed to behold only the purusha, to behold his feet up there. But we are not the purusha; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process.

The Self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective. If you function in your Self you are not yourself – that is what you feel. You have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell. Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusha.

- Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga (Carl Jung Depth Psychology)

Anahata or heart chakra is the fourth primary chakra... In Sanskrit, anahata means "unhurt, unstruck, and unbeaten". Anahata Nad refers to the Vedic concept of unstruck sound (the sound of the celestial realm). Anahata is associated with balance, calmness, and serenity.

In Sanskrit Anahata means "sound produced without touching two parts" and at the same time it means "pure" or "clean, stainless". The name of this chakra signifies the state of freshness that appears when we are able to become detached and to look at the different and apparently contradictory experiences of life with a state of openness (expansion). Normally we are not used to the effect produced by the confrontation of the two opposite forces. At the level of Anahata chakra appears the possibility to integrate the two opposite forces and obtain the effect, without the two forces being confronted. This energy is specific to cooperation and integration, which brings peace and a new perspective in a world which, up to this level was made only of a more or less conscious confrontation between opposite forces.

- Anahata (Wikipedia)


Just throwing this out there because it's very useful. One of the most impactful practices I ever developed was learning how to deal with emotions, to step back from them, and observe them and myself from a distance. We think we have our emotions but our emotions really have us; when in the grip of a passion our egos become eclipsed, possessed. It's not easy to get yourself unpossessed - I still often fail - but without space between your feelings and yourself you can't begin to discriminate "ego" from "not ego."

Years ago I developed the following practice: When I feel something painful, instead of trying to escape I lean into it. I envision the emotion as crashing waves that I move into. Each crash then becomes smaller and smaller, until they eventually die out. All passions, no matter how intense, will die out, but only if you let them have space in your mind and in your heart. Otherwise, they become a festering wound that becomes untouchable. Before teaching myself this, I would be overwhelmed with the emotion. I couldn't let myself feel and process anything because it was so overwhelming and painful; it felt like annihilation. The idea that I could actually endure the pain, and survive it, was a revelatory, an epiphany.

Marie-Louise von Franz once wrote (I forget where and I can't find it!) that the dragon - one's pain and suffering - has to burn itself out. The cure for the dragon's fire is it's own fire; you just have to let the flames cook you. But this suffering is really a true and caring friend who brings us precious gifts that allow us to grow.

There is a secret love hiding in each problem.

The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love.

- James Hillman

“Right” and “wrong”

(Image from Drake University)


In Jungian psychology there is no right or wrong, it’s always “what’s right for you?” Honesty can be a good thing for someone else, but maybe you need to learn protective deception. Being goal oriented can be a good thing but maybe you need to learn to relax and let go. Or vice versa.

Marie-Louise von Franz said that, in fairy tales, there are no consistent rules. Sometimes you must lie, and sometimes you get punished for lying. Sometimes the hard worker gets rewarded, and sometimes it’s the village idiot who does nothing but sit around scratching his butt. (There’s only one rule in fairy tales: never harm the helpful animal.)

This is a symbolic reflection of life; everyone is different so everyone needs to balance themselves in different ways. Maybe a workaholic needs to relax, but a lazy person probably needs to get to work. What’s medicine for one person is poison for another. So, what is the goal of Jungian analysis? The short answer is: individuation. That is, recovering our lost parts and integrating them into our conscious selves.

Jungian psychology says that our conscious selves, our egos, are in relation to just a small fraction of the totality of who we are. Most of “us” is actually in the unconscious, like an iceberg submerged in the ocean. Our task is to bring as much of that iceberg above the waterline as we can. So, in Jungian psychology “good” is consciousness, and “bad” is unconsciousness.

This actually gives Jungian psychology a very clear, though individualistic, parameter. If you do things that increase consciousness, you are doing the right thing. If, on the other hand, you’re doing things that increase unconsciousness you are doing “bad.” If you lash out at someone with your Demon function, or attack them with your Critic, you are increasing unconsciousness. If, on the other hand, you accept your weakness in the form of your Animus, or go into your Nemesis consciously to balance out your ego’s weakness, you increase consciousness.

If we do something that we think is “getting over someone” – passive aggressive behavior, cheating, unloading our anger on someone – we will increase unconsciousness in ourselves. This is bad for us. We’re not “getting over” anyone; the person we’re cheating, and hurting, most is us. And, at the same time, we’re also making the world a worse place, increasing unconsciousness in everyone around us, unless they are strong enough to avoid getting caught up in our bullshit. The world and everyone around us end up worse because of our existence.

This is the crux of the moral question: do I do the hard, painful, and not fun thing required of me to increase consciousness? Or do I do the easy, fun thing that increases unconsciousness? One of Marie-Louise von Franz’s analysands wanted to use active imagination to beat, stab, and kill someone she didn’t like (in her head, not IRL). MLvF immediately told her that this was a terrible idea; it wasn’t active imagination, it was black magic (misusing the unconscious for selfish and harmful purposes). It would not only have halted growth, this analysand would have gone backwards, i.e. they would have become even more neurotic, as neuroticism is basically psychology-speak for unconsciousness.

Another example is an ESFP I know who likes playing mind games with people who he feels deserve it. Unconscious ESFPs and ENFPs, thanks to their Fe Critic, have this problem where they tend to judge the people around them to be immoral. This, they feel, gives them license to be completely immoral themselves. The irony of their Fe Critic is that it can lead them to being some of the most immoral people of all the types, but every type does something similar, thanks to our hypocritical, sanctimonious Critic function. The problem is, this ESFP is hurting himself far more than he’s hurting anyone else, because he’s making himself more unconscious.

All of us have a similar tendency, all of us need to be vigilant and moral in our own lives. To do any less is cheating… and the only person we’re really cheating… is ourselves.


See also
The 8 function model

The Archimedian point

Do things happen accidentally, or do we call them to us? An easy, and true answer, is yes to both; to only believe that one is true is to become one-sided, the great sin of the psyche.

Another good, and true, answer is to say yes... but it’s not in a blaming way. If we call negative experiences to us then it’s not our conscious, not our ego (“ourselves”) that’s doing it but another part of us, one which is as alien and other as another person entirely.

The other thing, and probably most important thing, is that these opposites - “It’s all your fault if bad things happen to you!” And “How dare you say it’s someone’s fault! Are you saying an innocent child asks for bad things to happen to them?????” - these opposites are secretly united. This is why, for example, Erykah Badu’s response that even Hitler has something good about him both irritated but also failed to arouse the truly strong, almost violent, reactions that others got. The sinner and the righteous warrior of goodness and purity are two halves of the same whole. The light, by it’s very existence, calls darkness into existence. One half can never defeat its other half... or if it does it risks self-annihilation. This why we must find a dialectical solution, one which gets beyond the pair of opposites. An Archimedean point outside the battle. It’s only when you get beyond sinner and saint that a true peace can be attained.

The golden shadow

I've been thinking about the shadow, thinking of all the ways that we fail. How most people refuse to face the truth of what they've done/are doing. That is the shadow, the thing that most people are so terrified of that they can't admit that it exists (even though everyone around us is quite aware of our failings.)

The shadow isn't evil, it's just weak and stupid and selfish, helpless and incompetent. It's just human; it is, in fact the most human part of us. The heroic side of us isn't our brightness, it's our clumsy, awkward shadow. To accept our shadow - to admit that it is a part of us - is to feel our full humanity, to embrace it. To embrace our own humanity is to embrace the humanity of others. Whatever your weakness is, to embrace it is to embrace the childishness of our full humanity... the child of all humanity, the Golden Child. The Golden Child - the new God we've been waiting for - isn't a perfect hero, he's a fragile child, the weakest and least able of us. He doesn't save us by rescuing us, he saves us though our compassion. And we can only have compassion for others if we first have compassion, and acceptance, for our own weakness and frailty.

To open to, to embrace and fully accept, our shadow side is to relax into our totality. Every part of us, not just the commendable part. To seek glory and perfection is to fall into ego; it's precisely the thing we don't need. Being judgmental and perfectionistic are poison. To accept our imperfections, and those of others, is the only way out... but only by facing, accepting, and lovingly embracing our own imperfections can we do the same for others. The hero is the devil, and the devil is the savior. When we accept the devil, we finally see his true face; the Child. This is why the Child has snakes in his basket.

Our shadow is the sacred Child who lives inside each of us. The path to God - that is, wholeness - is accepting this Child.


Links:

Glossary: Inferior Function
Symbolism: Child

The anima of the animus

Whenever you have a Bluebeard, you have a witch standing behind him, and whenever you have a witch, you have a Bluebeard. A woman who is possessed by the witch, either in her persona or in her shadow, is the prisoner of the man eating troll or the evil magician, and vice versa.

It's fairly clear if a woman is possessed by the witch because of her aggressive, power-hungry behavior, but if the woman doesn’t normally express the witch (except when she “acts out of character"... but in character for the anima behind the animus), then the witch is her shadow. The man who is possessed by Bluebeard, either in his persona or in his shadow, is the captive of the evil witch. And standing behind the troll or the witch is the witch or the troll. The four characters - passive Kore/evil Witch, ineffectual Son/brutalizing Bluebeard - form a prison. So long as we simply take up one role or another, we do nothing more than send back the other half of the syzygy into the shadows of the unconscious. We remain imprisoned.

The Bluebeard animus is as much a captive of the witch as the woman is of the animus, and vice versa. That’s why women act out the witch; they’re possessed by the power-driven animus. That’s why it’s important for women to admit this about themselves - both when it starts criticizing the woman as well as making nasty judgments about others - and just let it go. But the animus wants to hold onto his grievances and his anger, just as the anima wallows in a man's black mood of self-hatred.

Maybe what Eckhart Tolle says about the pain body applies here; Tolle says the pain body, the thing that tortures us, wants to live, and since it feeds off pain it does everything it can to cause us suffering. Maybe the negative animus (and negative anima) are the similar; the animus feeds off anger, so it’s always finding things to rage about. For men, the anima cuts them down, tells them they will never amount to anything so they might as well give up. It seems as if the negative animus and anima, like Tolle’s pain body, feeds on us to perpetuate its own existence.

Women can escape the Bluebeard animus by agreeing with the animus and then leaving emotionally, just as we often humor and then deflect the Bluebeard men in our outer lives. “Yes, yes, you are absolutely right. Yes, that’s awful. I’m awful. You are absolutely right.” And then leave, let go.

The negative anima is a poisoning witch. If a man’s anima is masculine, he’s leaving to Her to act assertive, and has nothing left for himself. If a woman is aggressive, she’s leaving to the men in her life to live out her inner passivity (the negative of the anima). By refusing to feed the negative anima or animus, we free ourselves to get in touch with our strengths as women and as men. I suspect that we also free our significant others to find their strength, as well.

The Animus can torture a woman, feeding her ruminations and thoughts about failure. To step out of this internal conflict, the best way is to say to the Animus, “Ah, you are right, it is too late, I am a failure, so let’s not speak about it anymore”. This allows the energy to move forward and not to dissipate in the internal conflict and the woman is left alone to try her hand at whatever she is doing anyway.

When the Animus is arguing and criticizing, the right approach to deal with this, is to say to the Animus, “Since you are so opinionated about what is wrong with others, let’s look at my shadow”. These two opposing forces, the shadow and the Animus, results in consciousness. This consciousness allows her to discern what her own ideas and opinions really are, and the difference between her feminine ego and masculine Animus.

Animus Possession: Are you a ball busting bitch?

When the man finds himself lost in ambiguity and at a loss on what to do, he needs to act. The Anima is an expert on implanting doubt. He must step into life to get out of this trap. He needs to act in some way. He must escape the repetitive pattern of getting excited about ideas and then discussing it to death until he is totally uninspired. He needs to develop a disciplined consciousness for solutions and directions. The correct attitude is to accept that it may not work, or that it is possibly not the right thing to do, but taking action anyway. One must take action based on the knowledge and understanding available at that point in time. Overcoming the Anima is through experiencing reality and the unknown, not talking about it.

Anima Possession: Are you a spineless wimp?



Links:

When the Pain-Body Awakens, Eckhart Tolle

The missing half

I’ve been ruminating for months and months about what psychology really is. It’s treated like a science - most psychologists (including Jung!) want it to be a science. The reason Freud is still discussed in psychology classes, even though he was clearly full of shit, is because Freud shared this desire. Even Jung had some tendencies in this direction but, as a thoroughgoing empiricist, he knew when to give up this lifesaver and actually swim in the water. In fact, I think this was his whole point: his theory is based on reality... however, that reality includes spirituality! By refusing a priori to even look at the possibility that psychology has a spiritual aspect, these people are denying what is actually true, which is why they can never find out how to create deep, fundamental change in people.

What I’ve been struggling with is: how much of psychology is spiritual? This morning, as I was waking up, I realized that of course psychology is spiritual, because everything is spiritual! Psychology, even Jungian psychology, isn’t spirituality, but when you go deep enough it is. But this isn’t something unique to psychology alone. For example, go far enough into physics and again, you come to spirituality.

The thing is... everything is spiritual at its deepest place. Art, ecology, politics, farming, wood-working, cooking, everything. This is, in fact, our disease, the fact that we’ve forgotten this. Jung wrote about the “infrared” and “ultraviolet” ends of the archetypes; that is, our instincts and the spiritual archetypes that both live within us. The thing is, the entire world, all of reality and every part of it, has an infrared and an ultraviolet end. It’s just more obvious in psychology.

Until recently religion served to regulate the psyche. When religion lost its place of importance, we needed psychology to fill that gap. And the reason that modern psychology fails us over and over is that spirituality is a uniquely large and fundamental part, at every level, of the process of psychological healing, which is really actually spiritual healing. Instead, it’s techniques fail to create fundamental change in us but rather merely clean up the most shallow parts of our wounds (stick bandaids on them one might say). But what's not unique about psychology is the fact that it has a fundamental spiritual component. And how can that not be the case, since reality itself is spiritual, or ultraviolet, as well as infrared.

The illnesses of our time are caused by the lack of awareness of this spiritual side of reality. In fact, the illness of our time is at root this lack; everything else - the wars, the social and racial unrest, the looming nuclear destruction and actual ecological devastation - are just symptoms of this fundamental disease. The fact that we have forgotten this whole half of reality is the cause of everything wrong, not only in our individual lives but in the world at large. Just as our lives would fall apart if we failed to grasp the physical side, so it is falling apart because we have forgotten the spiritual side. Our world is reflecting this illness back on us. And as nothing in our individual lives will truly improve until we grasp this, so too will nothing fundamentally improve in the world until we come to understand both its halves.

Article: Ursula K. Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards; "Books aren't just commodities"

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

- Ursula K. Le Guin


Commodification is a symptom of the disease the world is suffering. Commodification is, at its root, Ego run amock, completely unmoored from the ground of the Unconscious, and the Self. This is why the spiritual is so denigrated in the world today. Or, what is considered “spiritual” is often just another attempt by Ego to “get it’s use” out of the world.

Ego is necessary. It is what allows us to survive in the world. It is also what allows us grow spiritually; without a solid ego, we wouldn’t have a boat large enough and strong enough to go out on the deep, turbulent waters of the unconscious and bring back the fish we caught. Ego is one leg, but we need both legs to walk.


Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: 'Books aren't just commodities' (The Guardian)

Anorexia Mirabilis

The head of St. Catherine of Siena

We’ve been taught so effectively to loathe fat people, and especially women who refuse to make themselves small and convenient, that not even the endless drive for profit can convince some of the world’s most enthusiastic capitalists to consider them a priority.

- Amanda Mull, "Why Aren’t Fashion ‘Disruptors’ Serving Plus-Size Customers?"



First, blog news: It’s been pretty quiet here at 2Biat, and that is because I’ve been studying for my final exam. And there's also all the holiday madness that happens every year at this time, so there’s a short hiatus happening. However, I had a little brainwave today that I wanted to share to this blog.

One of the things I’m studying about is eating disorders. This is something I have a very personal relationship with. It’s been a long time but for years I hated myself, and hated my body in particular. It took a long time to heal all those wounds. And this is, sadly, a very common problem.

We have a history of starving the body, everything from sages in the desert to the tradition of girls fasting to show how close to God they are. Modern anorexia is basically the same thing as this religious anorexia. Both are hateful towards the body, carnality, desire, and anything perceived of as “weakness,” especially moral weakness. Both are attempts to destroy the feminine within the body.

To love a large, curving, ample female body is to love the flesh. To hate the flesh is to hate the feminine Goddess that lives within the flesh, in our body. This is sharpest in anorexia but the societal obsession with small, spare, hungry bodies – bodies from which all the soft, warm animal comfort has been carved away – is in itself hatred toward the feminine because the body, the animal, is the feminine principle.

The way out of the pit of self-hatred is self-love. When we can finally acknowledge the tremendous work our bodies do, keeping us alive and bearing the burden of our abuse and contempt, then we can finally become friends with ourselves. And more, we can finally literally start to embody the missing sacred feminine back into the world, through our soft, fragile, but amazing and resilient bodies.

… And now you see more what the jewels behind the meat are. Our hero wanted the flesh and instead he fell into the jewels, the eternal or the divine. He has to realize that divine aspect of the flesh. It is not enough for instance, for a Christian who has up until now despised the flesh, to say, “now I’m going to throw my prudish prejudices overboard. I’m going to have juicy sex and enjoy it.” That would be eating the flesh. That’s nothing. If he does that he doesn’t move one inch out of the old kingdom, he’s still caught in it. He only adds the dimension of so-called sin to it. But nothing has happened. He has to realize that the flesh is a form of the divine, a divine revelation, and that sexuality is divine.

That’s what Jung fought with Freud about. He agreed completely with Freud that sex should be liberated and should be lived, not treated with prudish repression, but he wanted to say that sex is a religious experience as in Tantra. And if you live it, therefore, only with the idea, “That’s very healthy for my hormones and makes me physically better,” then you have missed the whole point. Then you have eaten dead meat, rotten meat. The redemption of the feminine means not the redemption of the flesh; it means the redemption of the divinity of the flesh, of the divine, archetypal, godlike aspect of the flesh…

- The Cat: The Virgin's shadow



Further reading:

Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls (Megan, cvltnation.com)
The Cat: Redeeming the feminine


[Image from Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls]

Introverted vs. extroverted feeling

Each turns into its opposite when unhealthy: the introverted feeler becomes judgmental and absolutist, allowing the other no freedom to live according to their own inner dictates. Here the extroverted feeler, because they naturally try to understand other people, knows that they have a good reason (or a reason that feels good to them at least) for doing what they do. On the other hand, the unhealthy extroverted feeler, because there is nothing worse to them than selfishness, has to hide their selfishness from themselves which turns it even more brutal and selfish, where an introverted thinker can see the dark side of themselves and others and accept it.

Extroverted feeling is fond of saying what they believe “people should” do; people should be selfless, people should be kind, people should be thoughtful… but they often struggle with living up to their own standards. Introverted feeling demands that the world let them live according to their own inner beat… but they often struggle to allow others the same freedom, as they are convinced that they have found the best, most beautiful values. Both extroverted and introverted feeling believes its values are, or should be, self-evident truths. This is why both can be extremely judgmental when unhealthy; this leads both to losing the things they most value. For introverted feeling, it’s individual freedom; for extroverted feeling, they destroy the harmony, love, and good feeling.

The brutality of morality

We must be kind and think of others well being. Or must we? Must we think of others first, and never ourselves first? What is it like to think of ourselves first, and not think of others?

What part of me is freed by not always thinking and doing the "right" thing all the time? What can I let go of?

Can I let go of the anger and judgment of others, when they don't live up to my standards? What do other people not allow themselves, that traps them in it's cage, and makes them judge, and cut themselves off from, others?

What is my jail? What makes my jail any better, objectively speaking, than that person who judges people based on their wealth, or that other person over there who judges people based on popularity? Or that person, who judges people based on power? How am I any different? You think your standards are more moral, and therefore you are more moral, because you respect your own values and look down on those others, but your jail is still a jail. A jail is a jail, whether it's made of shit or of gold. You're still unfree.

What is it like to simply live, without shoulds? Without preconceptions, and judgments? What is it like to accept the facts of life, and people, and their ideas, without immediately judging them? What would it be like to live completely open to this life?

The sickness of our time is tied to our excessive valuing of "right" and rejection of "wrong." The differentiation of good and evil that Christianity brought with it was a positive step forward in the development of human consciousness but it's gone on for too long, and to too great a degree. We're seeing the consequences of our excessive one-sidedness now.

To completely reject all that is weak, stupid, selfish, and ridiculous in us - in other words, to reject our own personal, little evil - is to brutalize ourselves and each other. It is inhuman, and, when taken to its logical conclusion, leads to and only can lead to the most horrific and brutal atrocities. The witch trials of Europe; the extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and leftists during the Holocaust; and the violence against immigrants and progressives in America today are all the result of this sick one-sidedness. An unconscious shadow is the weak spot where collective evil - true evil - can catch us, and no shadow is darker and more unconscious than that of the moralist. To avoid having such a dark and vulnerable shadow we must become conscious of it. Becoming conscious of ones shadow makes it less dark, but this requires of the conscious self that it give up some of it's brightness, because the darkness has to go somewhere.

Achieving peace

Yoko Ono's action for peace, like all other such actions, is beautiful but ineffective. The call for peace is the agonizing beauty of a lovely dream hovering over ugly reality. The dream of peace is real, but it's a mirage. It's not the enemy but the pointer towards the path to reach the goal. Peace is not now, but it may exist in our future if we do what is necessary for it. Political revolution is necessary, yes, but equally so is individuation.

Individuation sounds so abstract, a purely intellectual construct with nothing in reality. But it's the world of star and stone; the eternal, in comparison to the transitory world. The more people get free from possession, the more ability they have to achieve things of worth and meaning. The thing of worth and meaning for you may be simply becoming a little bit more yourself... or it may be world shaking. We each have our own task to accomplish, the failure of which is our great tragedy, the success of which adds it's incremental weight to the side of peace.


Article:
Yoko Ono Calls for Peace on the Anniversary of John Lennon's Death (Time Magazine)

The first step in integration: the auxiliary function

According to Joel Mark Witt and Antonia Dodge of Personality Hacker, one's auxiliary function is the key to personal growth. This fits in with the Jungian theory that individuation requires differentiating and integrating the four functions, beginning with the second function (assuming, of course, that you've developed the first). It seems that Jung's "first half of life" - the time where we work on success in the outer world; work, family, etc. - corresponds to the development of the first two functions. The second half of life - when one turns inward and works on spiritual growth - would correspond to working on the third and the impossible fourth function.

The first thing to work on will be the secondary, or auxiliary, function. In some ways it's easier for introverts to do this than it is for extroverts because that is the way that we extrovert. This is especially true since we live In a society that rewards extroversion and looks down on introversion. It is possible to go through life as an introvert and never really develop your second function but it's difficult and, quite honestly, sad. These are the people who find it nearly impossible to function in the world, staying alone in their room and never leaving, or never even leaving their childhood home (the proverbial anti-social person who lives in their parents' basement). Even if they do manage to live an independent life, they are painfully awkward whenever outside the safety of the known and familiar. But if introverts manage to go outside their safety zone, the part of themselves where they are strongest, they find that their world expands. For introverts to be happy and healthy, we need to go into our extroverted second function, no matter how awkward, or how scary, it may feel at first. Doing so is how we gain confidence in ourselves as paradoxical as it may seem.

Extroverts, on the other hand, may have a harder time of developing their secondary function in (large) part because it's introverted, and neither they nor the society around them value introversion. This is a negative feedback loop, as extroverts naturally tend not to value introversion, and additionally our society tells them that they're awesome as they are, and that introversion is for navel gazing loser hippies. Since extroverts are attuned to and tend to prioritize power and social status, this would probably just reinforce their aversion to going inside, to their "weak" side. For these reasons I would imagine that integrating their second function is more difficult for extroverts to do than introverts. Which isn't saying that integrating the second function isn't hard for introverts - it's damn hard! - but we have the benefit of being validated when we do, unlike extroverts.

And extroverts do suffer when they fail to develop their introverted function. The most obvious way is that not developing their second function leads to lowered effectiveness in achieving their goals. For example, an ENTJ who fails to develop their introverted intuition generally runs roughshod over all obstacles (up to and including other people). This not only makes their lives harder but, in doing so, they end up failing to inspire the people below them to put in their best work. Instead, they end up instigating passive or even overt resistance in the very people they rely upon to help them achieve their goal. This not actually efficient, the value that ENTJ's hold most dear; by prioritizing efficiency over everything else, even the wellbeing of subordinates and colleagues, the undeveloped ENTJ paradoxically undermines that very efficiency. Of course the same is true for one-sided introverts; whatever your goal is (i.e. accuracy for INTP's), you will always undermine or even destroy that goal if you fail to develop your auxiliary function.

The other negative result extroverts suffer when they don't develop their second function is that, whether they want to admit it or not, whether they even let themselves become aware of it or not, they too suffer when they don't live their softer side. Extroverts may like to think that they're super humans who are above all that mushy stuff but they are human, too, and full humanity always suffers when one side is cut off and shoved down into the shadow. It may be easier to see the suffering of one-sided introverts but the suffering of one-sided extroverts is no less real for being less visible. It may, in fact, be worse for being so unconscious. What is certain is that an extrovert who falls into neuroses is a pitiful sight, a kind of Greek tragedy, where their downfall is the result of their crippled personality. We're seeing that play performed on the national stage, as the deeply neurotic and damaged Donald Trump exposes his sickness for the entire world to see.


Link: Personality Hacker

The mystery

The reaction I've had from people when exploring their type has been very interesting; they're fascinated but, at the same time, resistant. People want to be understood... buuuuuut they also don't want to be understood. What we want is understanding. What we don't want is to be dismissed: "Ok, I know what you are now. Time to move on." People want to be special, and we are all special. At the same time, we also have a relatively few typical ways of thinking and behaving because there are only so many of perceiving and processing information. All of us - unless we're either unusually highly developed and have gained the ability to use all the functions, or we never developed any of them at all - will, therefore, fall into one or another personality type.

Typology isn't a definition; saying you're this or that type doesn't mean that you're only this or that type and that there's nothing more to you. It's also not a way to gain power over other people; if you're using a typology to bludgeon or accuse another person, or to get a secret window into what makes them tick in order to manipulate them, you're just doing it wrong and stay the fuck away from psychology. What it is is a coordinate that tells you where you are - or, more accurately, where your ego is - in the field of consciousness. The x, y, and z axes (not what you chop wood with but the plural of axis) are perception, judgment, and attitude (sensation/intuition, thinking/feeling, and introversion/extroversion). Our type is simply a dot on that map.

While there are several undeniable dangers and pitfalls to using typologies they are, at the same time, incredibly useful, even comforting. Understanding types helps us understand why we are the way we are, and others are the way they are. People of other types often confuse the hell out of us when they do the mystifying things they do. Knowing their type can help us demystify their behavior. This leads to an even more important benefit to learning typology: compassion. One of the greatest gifts of typology is how it gives us permission to be ourselves... and teaches us to give others permission to do the same. It defuses our relationships by showing us that other people aren't (usually) annoying or hurting us because they're jerks, but this is just who they are.

I'll give you an example. I'm an INTP. A dear friend of mine is a feeling type. I am BAAAAAAD at remembering important days (birthdays and such). My feeling friend, on the other hand, would never even think of not saying something nice on someone's birthday, giving them a call at the very least. It hurt him very much that I often forgot his birthday and he took it as a sign that I simply didn't value him, which couldn't be further from the truth. One year we were talking about this and the conversation was getting pretty heated, when I blurted out "I just don't think that way! I don't even remember my own birthday! How hard do you think it is for me to remember anyone else's??" And he suddenly stopped. He realized that we are so very, very different, and a behavior that would mean one thing from him means a very different thing from someone else (or doesn't mean anything at all). Now, I've also learned that I need to make a little more effort in this area of my life because I actually really do value my feeling friends and relatives but it was something that I had to deliberately and consciously work at, not something that comes naturally to me.

These are the reasons why typology is so powerful as a means of increasing our understanding and our ability to create harmony in our relationships. But simply knowing our type and the types of other people isn't enough. Types aren't static. It takes time to figure out what you are; it's usually not just a matter of taking a 5 minute test and then bam, that's it, you know everything. You may be that lucky but what's more likely is that you're going to get some false answers at first as you grope around in the dark, trying to really understand yourself or the people who are important to you. And beyond that, it doesn't just end when you finally understand what your type is; you need to develop the things you need to develop. Figuring out what your type is is great, but you need to look at it to see what steps you need to take to further develop yourself. Your weaker functions indicate areas of your life that are calling for your love and attention, and to keep growing we have to start working on those parts of ourselves.

And we must never forget that knowing our or others' types doesn't mean that you know ourselves or others at a deep level; that takes time. Many, many years of time. Jung fought hard against our tendency as a society to reduce people to safe, neat, easily digestible statistics, as "nothing but"s; "nothing but" a Latina professional from Chicago, or "nothing but" a person with a certain IQ, or "nothing but" an extrovert. Our ego may have stereotypical ways of behaving, but we each of us has a special, one of a kind uniqueness which comes from the Self. Jungian typology tells us how we take in and process information, and our resulting tendencies. These things are true and they exist, but they are not the entirety of who we are. People resist being typed because they (rightly) resist being put into a box, of having the complexity of their being reduced to a 4 letter (or whatever) stereotype. Yes we do have stereotypical ways of behaving, but this is not the whole of what we are.

Just as the persona (how we represent ourselves to the world) or even our ego (the construct we use to navigate it) are not the entirety of ourselves, neither is our type (the method our ego uses to navigate the world). We are much larger and more complex within our conscious sphere than any label or mask or method. And when we bring in the actual entirety of ourselves - when we bring in our unconscious as well as conscious selves - that largeness and complexity expands far into the realm of deep mystery. Typology is incredibly useful, but we must always take care when using it to use it as a way to further explore that mystery, not demean and diminish it.

The Feminine World

Sitting next to my co-worker A., I’ve really come to understand what Marie Louise von Franz talks about in her books when she describes a world in which the feminine principle predominates. In one book (I can’t remember where – I will look for it) she contrasts a cold, brutal, excessively male world with one in which the female is overly emphasized: the women are fat, happy, and lazy; the men are impoverished; and a kind of general intellectual stupidity reigns. I always felt this was a little excessive, maybe a bit of the self-hatred typical in who women managed to achieve intellectual success at that time.

So now I’m sitting next to A., and I’ve been thinking about her and my other co-worker B., who sits on the other side of me. A. and B. are polar opposites when it comes to work; where B. takes enormous pride (too much, really) in her work, and goes above and beyond in most of the things she does (particularly if others are watching), A. does the minimum possible… and generally sloppily and half-assed at that. At the same time, she bristles furiously if anyone makes any sort of comment about her work.

A. is a friendly middle aged woman; she loves to talk, especially about other people (B. in particular offends her, because, quite honestly, B. kisses up to superiors and often tries to make everyone else look bad in order to make herself look good.) She especially spends a lot of time on the phone with her college aged daughter, as the two of them complain about everyone in the daughter’s life - selfish boyfriends, rude coaches, mean friends – they are literally on the phone every single day. She takes everything personally… EVERYTHING. Everything is personal, whether for good or bad. Any criticism is seen as a personal attack; “real friends don’t do things like that to each other!” and “I did all of that for you and THIS is how you treat me?????” And every belittlement has to be hashed over and over again with everyone she knows, in the most emotional way possible.

A. also has serious problems with willpower; she absolutely cannot say no to herself. In the year we’ve been sitting together, she’s basically been “on a diet” the entire time… but she can’t manage to go two days without breaking her diet. And she’s not dieting for vanity, just to look better, but for health reasons. She’s pretty much incapable of doing anything that challenges her in any way. She doesn’t really seem to be bothered by this either, except in the most lukewarm way.

Everything is deeply personal with A.; the guy who always cuts her off in the cafeteria at breakfast is “scrawny and probably doesn’t have a girlfriend,” and she voted for Trump basically because she liked him better than Hillary Clinton. She is a person who almost completely operates on personal feeling; she’s pretty much completely lacking in any sort of principles or morals, in the sense of “things one does because they’re correct.”

What’s important to A. isn’t whether she’s adhering to some abstract notion of right and wrong, good and evil; what’s important are people and her relationship with them. A. may not give a fig about doing an excellent job at work, but she will always make sure that you feel welcomed and included. She’s proud of the fact that she’s raised her kids to not do anything that would make someone feel left out. She’s also vocal in her disapproval of young people who are cliquish and unkind, and of her disgust in their parents, who failed to “raise their kids right.” (At the same time, she will indulge in that very same behavior but in a hidden way, but that has more to do with her neuroticism and general unconsciousness than anything else.)

Sitting with A. has been enlightening; she’s one of the most purely “female” females I’ve met. Many women (and men) are in touch with our contrasexual side, to a greater or lesser degree. For example, while B. has a motherly aspect when she’s dealing with superiors and inferiors (or, more accurately, motherly and concerned with people she deems “valuable and worthy,” and like a regal, kindly queen with those she deems her inferiors) she’s competitive with those she considers to be at her same level. She has definite notions of right and wrong, and operates largely from a combination of pride and efficiency. A., on the other hand, operates almost completely from her feminine side; she values personal relationship above all else, and everything else, including her work, is second to that.

So... It appears that, once again, MLvF knew exactly what she was talking about! A one sided world, or personality, which is completely lacking in the masculine side is happy but pretty much lazy and lacking in any kind of rigor; moral, intellectual, or otherwise.


To sum it up, the feminine world would be characterized by:

Positively
Relationship
Connection
Feeling
Caring
Pleasure

Negatively
Laziness
Carelessness
Lack of self-control
Intellectual poverty
Over emotional


A quick contrast of the masculine world is (think something like a boy’s school…or Reddit):

Positively
High achieving
Principled
Disciplined
Impersonal

Negatively
Brutal
Cruel
Unfeeling
Impersonal (can be good or bad)

Strength in the Shadow

The shadow doesn’t just consist of all the things we reject and vilify… It also contains all the things we say we aren’t, but really are. Our shadow isn’t just the rejected parts of ourselves, it’s also partly the shadow of the very things we hold dear.

If you hotly espouse a moral code you deeply believe in… you will probably do the very thing you say you hate. Because no one can be perfect, because there will always be times that we can’t carry out our values without great pain and difficulty, we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves we don’t do it.

The more we insist on perfection… the less perfect we will be, and the less we will be capable of seeing our failures. The more we hate unkindness… the less kind we will be, and the less we will be able to face our hatefulness and selfishness. The more we hate immorality… the less moral we will be, and the less we will be able to face our human weakness.

Perfection is inflation, it’s only suitable for the Gods. Facing and integrating our shadow gives our personality weight and strength; we can’t be pushed off our center, it gives us resilience and compassion, and connects us with each other in our human fallibility.

Criticism of Hillman

A lot of what he says is true; we've spent the last few hundred years emptying the world of soul until there's nothing left but a sad, withered little husk left. Hillman is passionate in his crusade to reverse that, and reinvest the world with soul. He's the instrument of the universe in bringing balance back to the world, which is not only admirable, it's also desperately needed. But in the course of his struggle it seems that he's gone too far, raising Dionysian soulfulness not only to a principle, but the only principle. In this way he's committed the only "sin" in Jungianism; becoming too one-sided.

To categorically reject any and all analysis, in every situation, is one sided and quite frankly, impossible. Even if it was possible, it would lead to a post-modernist horror where there literally is no reality to hold onto. Of course, Hillman himself didn't fully live this way, just as no other post-modernist does; to do so would mean you literally didn't believe that jumping off a building would necessarily lead your death, or at least injury. Nor would any post-modernist let their child walk alone across a highway.

Over and over again, in fairy tales and other stories, the one true evil on a human level is becoming too one-sided. True, the inhuman, ultimate evil which is shadow side of the Self exists but that is as much beyond us mere humans as the bright, God side of the Self. When humans become evil, it's when we go too far to one side or the other. To me, this is the main problem with Hillman's ideas. It would have been one thing to suggest that sometimes we need to go to an extreme, reject all thought and simply experience. But to categorically reject any and all analysis EVER strikes me as one-sided in the extreme.

To be honest I can't say whether he's right or wrong; maybe this was exactly what his daimon required of him. Maybe he was living his life exactly as he was supposed to. The only person who can tell if you're doing what you should or going down the wrong path is, in the end, you, and that's as it should be. But I do feel that, while he had a lot of valuable insights to contribute to society, his philosophy was inadequate... although that's probably true of everything.

The greatest thing of all

Don't get puffed up; the crystal clear, thirst quenching dream interpretation isn't from you, it's from the Self.

The art or music or poetry you produce; the brilliant ideas, the perfectly written paragraph isn't from you, it's from the Self.

Your beauty, or your intelligence, your charisma or competence, or any of your abilities don't come from you, they all comes from the Self.

For your small, limited, human all too human ego to identify with any of these is to take the abilities of the Gods as your own, and that is dangerous and wrong. The only thing that is of the ego is MORALITY; it is to make the hard, difficult, and painful choice to do the work that needs to be done, even if it's boring, even if it's burdensome, even if it's humiliating. That... and to keep reminding oneself that none of the great things that we accomplish come from us, but from that mysterious larger power that works through us; we float on it, rest on it, are held and carried by it. And when we act in harmony with it, it creates things which are great and beautiful, impactful and true. But this can only happen if ego does the one thing it can do; have the discipline to do the things necessary to allow the Self to speak and act through us. And that is the greatest thing of all.

"We are all deplorables"

Walking to work, and thinking about all the people who voted for Trump but claim not to be racist... who believe his promises to bring back coal jobs (he can't) and build a wall to keep the immigrants out (he won't) and Make America Great Again (too late.) These are the same people who say that they're angry at liberals because they look down on them and think that they're stupid and uneducated... but I'm thinking that I'm not wrong in thinking that they are, in fact, so ignorant and so lacking in the ability to think critically. So what's missing??? I know it has to do with my inferior feeling function, so what is it??

Then later that day I read this article, and I felt it:

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy...

Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who hate you. “In a real sense all life is inter-related,” he wrote in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. …”

It's empathy... but it goes beyond empathy; it's a "feeling with" that accepts weakness and reality, but opens the picture, away from cold, simple facts to a fuller world and relationship. It's sympathy but goes beyond sympathy; it's not mere compassion or pity, not a looking down upon, but a taking in of another's experience, a removal of the glass that's between us to allow us to connect, as one warm human animal to another.

Link:
We Are All Deplorables, by Chris Hedges (Truthdig)

Jungianism: The eternal theory?

Jungian psychology is another such ship. Jung made a ship by creating certain hypotheses to which one can cling when one doesn't know up from down. When one is in danger of drowning in the unconscious, of having a huge inflation or something of the kind, falling into a possession or being overwhelmed by an affect, then such psychological concepts as Jung's can help.

- Marie Louise von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption


If every "ship," every religion/theory of the unconscious wears out, will Jungian psychology not also wear out and have to be replaced?

Maybe... maybe not? The ideas in the unconscious live for a long, long time. We're still finding riches in alchemy, and Greek and Egyptian myths. Maybe it's not the specific ideas which need to be replaced but the emphasis on the one side or the other, as originally we needed to get out of the Mother, and now we need to move back to Her. Certainly, as we collectively integrate more and more of our projections, and are able to see more of the world as it is, our understanding of things, including the unconscious, will change.

However, one thing won't change; the technique. The theory may evolve or even be completely replaced, but the technique of listening to the unconscious, and of the importance of relationship in overcoming psychological problems, will always be true.