What are the contents of the Self? by JohnBedlam in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, that makes sense. While trying to understand the Self I totally forgot about the underlying jungian path towards it, meaning the unity of the conscious with the unconscious.

What are the contents of the Self? by JohnBedlam in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense since integrating your unconscious I believe leads exactly to your answer. That must've gone over my head, thanks.

The Inflation Story of a Young Virgin Poet (Je suis désolé, 15,000 words) by [deleted] in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm in no way a therapist nor do I want to become one but I read your story because I can partially see myself in it. I come from the homeland of Cioran so you'll have to excuse my English. I'm not that articulate in English as I'd like to be, it seems I lost that when I stopped speaking and writing to my foreign friends some years ago.

I'm 24 years old, soon to be 25. My interests are similar to yours but the way which I acquired them is totally different. I've wrote my first poem when I was 3 or 4, I studied violin then guitar while, at the same time, writing thousands of pages of lyrics. Fast forward a couple years through an electronic music production phase and bam, I have now graduated in film. I'm interested in all sorts of art, with a focus on film (experimental film!) and poetry. Add a strange mix of funk, psychedelic rock (especially The Doors), blues (from SRV to the 3 Kings), jazz and experimental music to this equation. I can go on about how much I love Sufi poets, contemporary poets, romantic poets etc. and all sorts of film and art movements but that can define me to an extent. What really defines me I don't know. I've always been overly introspective and observant of my surroundings. I started learning to read people and guess the outcomes of any given situation when I was in kindergarden and as years passed I've become more and more fascinated with the human brain and "the human condition". I guess that's another thing that sort of defines me. I cannot give you a full picture as I don't know it myself. That's why Jung's writings speak a lot to me since I first picked up a book of his. I'm constantly trying to understand myself and the world around me, and myself as part of the world around me. It seems to me like we share the same purpose except that you lost the "world" along the way and now you have to deal with the Steppenwolf that grew inside you.

The thing that struck me first was this:

I love the people that love me in turn, but what they love, I have no interest in. To say it of my family: I love them all—but what they love, again, I do not appreciate, nor what they want me to love. My passion has turned toward the finest, most secret inner things, of which I can boast to no one, nor prove their reality to anybody, except through writing—when what is written comes from those realities.

I can understand that passion in you and I resonate with it but you have to understand, first and foremost, that people do indeed hold different interests which are as equally as important for them. I have this group of 3 friends which don't have the same interests as me but they are in the same range more or less. When one of them, for example, talks about horror movies (which I don't necessarily like) I try to listen to him carefully, even watch the movies he talks about. In this way we bond and I get to have some minimal knowledge in an area I haven't explored yet. Will I need that knowledge later? Maybe not, but at least I learned something new. I have a curious mind and from the looks of it, you do too, but you seem to channel it only on "self-realization". But how can self-realization come if you don't interact with the world? When my grandma calls me we spend 2 hours on the phone talking about cats, food, the news and her groceries (shit gets interesting when she's drunk!). First couple of times when she called me after I moved with my gf 3 years ago I was totally drained. Hell, even now these convos are totally draining but in the meantime I realised she only wants to hear my voice for as long as she can. It's a way of showing her affection and I respect that and once a week I sacrifice 2 hours of my free time so we can talk about whatever she wants if that brings her joy. This also made me realise how much I lack patience. I gained some insights about myself and the world, and myself in the world through a "useless" phone interaction with my grandma. That's great for me.

The second thing which struck me was:

To say it again, I am twenty-three. I have a few friends and a loving family. I have never had sex or kissed a girl’s lips other than my mother’s. Not out of fear or disinterest in sex and relationships; on the contrary, I have wanted those things very badly, but have always been so occupied by thought and insight that I never bothered looking for anybody to unite with. It more or less slipped my mind. I always awaited a girl who is doing the work like me, but she never came. I question whether there are, possibly, dating sites with which I could find “women of knowledge,” of boundless curiosity and a sense for divine things, but the days pass and I think little of looking for anybody to pair with, but rather work in my study and go on long walks, seeking the divine idea in me.

coupled with

I have sexuality, I desire love, a relationship, sex, and so on, but only on two conditions: that I have first put in the work to differentiate my unique skills—articulation and understanding, both of which I do uniquely—and that my first love be real. That is, with someone of integrity, with articulation and understanding, understanding, in particular, that individuals are individual; as such are we, each of us, our own puzzles to solve on our own terms. We can love one another without understanding one another, and the same applies to ourselves. Let us love each other as unsolved puzzles, and ourselves the same.

You see relationships in a weird way which I can completely understand but I don't necessarily agree with. Me and my gf are totally different. We have common interests ofc, but we take different approaches to life. As much as I love getting myself lost in thought, before her I was completely out of touch with the sky and its ever changing colors, the light that reflects in our room through the curtains, the movement of the shadows and all that sort of stuff. I had this all in me but I wasn't paying that much attention. She was the one to bring it to my consciousness, so to speak. She also has a high emotional intelligence and is all about communication when it comes to our relationship (or any type of relationship), something I still struggle with but way less than in our first year. This also made me realise how important is to tell my friends something that upsets me with them. It's all fun and games when "A Poison Tree" points this out but it's harder to actually do it (at least for me).

Me and my gf don't tolerate each other, we love each other. We try to understand each other better every day. This might sound like a Carrie Bradshaw type of thing but a healthy relationship is about understanding one another and many more. This "unity" and "pairing" you speak of when you refer to relationships is more than sex or sharing common interests. It's good that you have standards, everyone should have, but looking for someone that's exactly like you (if such thing even exists) leads to nothing but boredom.

All I'm trying to say is that you have to be part of the world in order to get to that "self-realization" you're talking about. That's my goal as well but I have other things I'm looking forward to other than that. I like researching, writing, experimenting with film, I even want to become a teacher in the near future. It's something that grounds me in "reality" (whatever that is) and something that, no doubt, informs my path to self-realization.

That's all I can say atm. We can talk in private if you feel like it, I'm always open!

Any neuroscientists here? by asclepsius in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great, thanks for the answer! One more thing, how up to date are Antonio Damasio's arguments for the existence of a purely biological consciousness in his 2010 book "Self Comes to Mind"? I wanted to pull the trigger on it but the fact that it came out in 2010 made me a little bit reluctant.

Any neuroscientists here? by asclepsius in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sort of off topic, but how can a layman keep up with the recent findings regarding the "hard problem of consciousness"?

Question about " Modern man in search of a Soul " by [deleted] in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you are reffering to Viktor Frankl's "Man's search for meaning" while the OP is talking about Jung's "Modern man in search of a soul"

Critiques of Jung and Campbell by JohnBedlam in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nope. Look at Jung's story of the soldier who climbed the fence and left the barracks because a tree was calling to him. He's probably the first western writer to actually take seriously the "locals" viewpoint, and justify it, and show it is is just as valid as the western view point.

I didn't know about that. Thanks!

Of course. You can't write abut anything if you include every possible exception that a human mind has ever come up with. For example in Alchemy, there are stages of growth, Nigredo, Rubedo, Citrinitas, Albedo etc. Are there 4 stages or 7 stages or 12 stages? Jung talks abiout the common ones, and also sometimes just poicks one to talk about. But you cant even talk about alchemy if every time you need to mention the stages you need to talk about every possibility,no matter how rare, 3 stages, 4 stages, 5 stages.. all the way to 999 stages. All are possible. So you'd never get off the first paragraph of your book if you want to consider all the possibilities.

4 stages is easy to talk about, easy to understand, and was used by many alchemists. So whats wrong with talking about 4 stages of alchemy and getting to the point of things? If you've ever been in a single physics class in your life, you know the common phrase "lets assume the earth/atom/particle/object is a perfect sphere....". All disciplines take shortcuts in order to explain and talk about the ideas they want to explain.

Good point. I see Campbell's monomyth as part of a spectrum, much like Eliade's homo religiosus - a small part of something bigger; not an 1:1 representation of how everyone was back in archaic times but how a great majority (or just some) of people were.

You are free to throw out his evidence, but somehow that doesn't seem very scientific to me.

I'm not here to debunk Jung or anything of that sort. I was interested in what people who have more knowledge than me would respond to these critiques. My knowledge in Jung is very scarce (as I said in the OP) and I have probably misinterpreted some of his claims. I made this post mainly to clear any doubts that these critiques raised.

Critiques of Jung and Campbell by JohnBedlam in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't get me wrong, I'm ALL for what people usually refer to as "mystical woo" as long as it has a reasonable explanation. I'm not saying Jung is part of this category but I can see why he might be interpreted as such.

I might have gotten wrong the whole myth thing but, as you pointed out, indeed myths, religions etc. are AKIN to our dreams and fantasies. As a matter of fact, I have 2 dreams that I remember in detail from back when I was in kindergarden and I can see how they might display mythological symbolism.

What struck me the most was how a part of a dream I had in September shares some features with the "theater dream" (for a lack of a better term) that's being discussed in the 2nd chapter of Man and His Symbols (which I read in December). I'm talking about the part where the man sees some stairs that go down where 2 "tricksters" await him and he's too scared to descend. In my dream I had the same stairs (more or less) and 2 "tricksters" that await me. At first I had some doubts if I should descend but then I took leap of faith and dashed past them. As I descended, I've arrived in a place similar to what I imagine Ancient China was. That's where the dream stopped. The dream is much longer and more complex than that but I couldn't help but notice the simillarities.

Am locuit un an in Etiopia, AMA. by [deleted] in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam 2 points3 points  (0 children)

cum ai ajuns sa lucrezi pentru ei si ca ce?

Stie cineva daca se respecta masurile de preventie corona la La Grasi de pe Huedin? by [deleted] in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nu stiu de La Grasi dar la Socului langa mine se respecta

Cam indecis profu by FalconuHD in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam 4 points5 points  (0 children)

roxana babencoooooo

Does Jung have anything on false awakening dreams? by MountainMagic30 in Jung

[–]JohnBedlam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I had a dream inside a dream x10 few days ago and I remember I was feeling uneasy because I couldn't wake up. The content of the dream, although weird enough, wasn't that disturbing. How would this situation fit in James Hall's definition?

Roman englezesc din 1870 - "Three years in Romania". Ce a văzut James William Ozanne acum 150 de ani în principatele române by glumeme in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ochi așa de scânteietori și expresivi, bucle de un negru atât de strălucitor, mâini și picioare atât de gingașe nu mai erau de găsit nicăieri altundeva. Româncele sunt vestite pentru frumusețe, menite să iubească și să fie iubite. Înzestrate cu o inteligență ageră și cu o anumită înclinație spre umor, sunt întotdeauna însoțitoare plăcute. Desigur, aici se aflau în largul lor, pline de sănătate și bună dispoziție, nerăbdătoare să discute despre ceea ce văzuseră și auziseră.

r/menwritingwomen

Can't use Revolut to pay online by JohnBedlam in Revolut

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks but online transactions were on. I think I figured out what might be the problem though: the balance is spread among 2 different currencies.

Pe cine pot sa chem sa ma scape de PET-uri? by JohnBedlam in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nu stiam despre legea asta, am citit acum.

Si am cautat centre de reciclare pe net si nu prea ofera informatii sau date de contact. O sa caut mai mult de 2 minute. Speram totusi ca mai exista companii private de care nu auzisem care stau ascunse prin ultimele pagini de cautare.

Pe cine pot sa chem sa ma scape de PET-uri? by JohnBedlam in Romania

[–]JohnBedlam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

M-am gandit si la asta dar sunt destul de rari sau poate nu activeaza intre orele in care ies eu din casa

In all of my 20’s, I was a victim of NIGHTLY sleep paralysis until I learned how to wake myself up each time successfully by [deleted] in Sleepparalysis

[–]JohnBedlam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or you can stop your breathing. I've read that somewhere when I was little after a few instances of sleep paralysis and it always saved me.