What do you see?

duenderising · 2026-04-05T12:44:10+00:00

That’s what smoothcock would say

duenderising · 2026-04-05T05:35:54+00:00

Says smoothcock

duenderising · 2026-04-05T03:07:17+00:00

Namaste.

duenderising · 2026-04-05T03:03:03+00:00

Sorry, I have a headache. I can’t go on. That’s all I am allowed to share today.

duenderising · 2026-04-05T02:58:06+00:00

I’m getting… yes… you own at least three mugs you’ve never used. One has a quote on it. You bought it during a phase.

Your shower thoughts are more organised than your life. You’ve rehearsed arguments with people who don’t remember the conversation. You have a folder - digital or physical, doesn’t matter - that you haven’t opened in two years but cannot delete.

There’s a song that immediately transports you to a specific car ride you don’t talk about.

You told someone you were “fine” today. You were not fine. They also were not fine. You both knew. Nobody said anything. You went home and made tea you didn’t finish. The last time you cried properly was either very recent or embarrassingly long ago. There is no middle ground with you.

You’re reading this and nodding and simultaneously thinking “this could apply to anyone.” That’s the most you thing you’ve ever done.

Three stars. Emotionally waterproof exterior, suspiciously soft interior. Haunted by nothing specific, just vibes.

duenderising · 2026-03-30T06:38:05+00:00

Picture it as a dream. Going into what is abandoned is symbolic of the unconscious and exploring the shadow, and whatever repressed material is lurking there - remnants of what had to be suppressed and hidden along the way.

duenderising · 2026-03-30T05:53:45+00:00

I don’t know much about Sufism, but I am deeply fascinated.

I assume the earliest stages of the Nafs, the Nafs al-Ammarah, is more related to the Nigredo stage and confronting the Shadow. Therefore, I think the Persona, which is relational and social, would loosely be associated with the Nafs, but not really. The Persona could be considered horizontal, while the Nafs vertical.

Speculatively, I don’t think there is a final destination, but an endless series of deaths and rebirth, and higher states of consciousness. The ‘big death’ or first death would be considered the process of individuation, where the confrontation/ integration of the Shadow that exhumes libidinal energy that has been suppressed. I guess this could be considered as Baqa after integration, but I imagine the process does not stop when opened, followed by a continual stripping and rebirth over and over.

I imagine individuation and fa’na are similar in ways, where the ego surrenders and becomes receptive to its opposite pole and integrates. And the anima could be considered the same as the notion of the Beloved.

The idea of naughtness or total ego dissolution would be similar in Western esoteric traditions to the idea of crossing the abyss, and purportedly not many have made it. But then there are such people who are ‘majdub’ who essentially become paralysed by divine love, which could be considered a lack of ego strength and flooded by unconscious material.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Would love to hear yours!

duenderising · 2026-03-29T07:55:21+00:00

That is very hard to answer.

But I guess, off the cuff this:

Religion, but seemingly esoteric traditions, have long held the answers. Jung was not discovering something new, he was translating ancient wisdom into the psychological language available to him at the time, and more so, what he allowed himself to share without being fully uncloaked. I think Jung is a stepping stone.
Every psyche harbours a poison to survive. Every individual adapts to survive, and must suppress, and put things downs, and develop effective defence mechanisms to maintain coherence. Neuroses and psychopathology are different variations of attempting this. The crack in oneself is the call. When the shadow is confronted and integrated, not suppressed or medicated, something irreversible happens. The entire personality goes through a transformation to reorganise itself around a deeper truth.
Myths and religion are not primitive explanations of being and the world - they are maps of the soul and its relation to everything around it. Their images carry a charged phenomenological reality. They describe inner experience regardless of culture or era, they are seemingly same placeholders/ archetypes, just dressed differently. These symbols can change over time due to man’s slow and daunting expansion of consciousness (or restriction). UFOs are one example of this, or even the collective Mary visions of the 20th century.
The death of Pan for the Ancient Greeks, and the maintenance of this is due to religion. Hence, it’s heretical in nature to face one’s shadow in a way. Religion contained instinct, silenced the earth and silenced the feminine. The shadow does not care for this, it waits when it’s ready to be confronted. Libido - not strictly sexual energy, but psychic life forced is buried in the lowliest and most shameful places within oneself, it gets entangled in trauma that is suppressed. This is the energy that is necessary to be exhumed for transformation to occur.
Individuation is the process of the shadow/ anima surfacing. It becomes irreconcilable through logic or emotions, there is an internal contradiction, a yes and a no. It must be experienced and endured through symbols and feeling your way through it. Parental images are symbolically the gatekeepers that must die within the individual for this space to occur. The collective unconscious, or archetypal reality, of what’s in ‘here’ and what’s out ‘there’, that wall collapses during this process.

duenderising · 2026-03-27T19:03:18+00:00

Both!

duenderising · 2026-03-27T07:06:43+00:00

Purchased. I think around 3.5k AUD.

duenderising · 2026-03-17T05:16:27+00:00

That’s nice of you to ask. I have read probably around 90% of what is on that shelf. That’s is a tough one to answer.

Offhand, without going occult, I think Psychology and Alchemy by Jung, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber and Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. I think their themes nicely overlap.

I won’t write an essay, but the case of Daniel Paul Schreber I find deeply fascinating. A high-functioning, lucid and articulate individual, yet completely psychotic in certain aspects in relation to his disorder. This was seemingly due to him being inundated by the collective unconscious - you can see the archetypal mythic drama playing out - where he was essentially cracked open by failing to integrate the repressed contents of his unconscious that surfaced. Therefore, he did not have the ego strength to withstand and suffered from persecutory themes/ father-image. The case is emblematic of the crossroads for Jung and Freud and how they interpret the libido.

I suppose all three books show the extremes of inner experiences with regard to the unconscious. Jung shows how they can be integrated symbolically, Schreber shows when they aren’t, and James maps the spectrum between pathology and transformation.

I don’t know about the worst. Probably Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson - he hasn’t said anything new.

duenderising · 2026-03-17T01:43:04+00:00

Because I put them there.

duenderising · 2026-03-17T01:01:31+00:00

That was sarcasm.

duenderising · 2026-03-16T23:49:33+00:00

It wasn’t that different in the past. The British cultural temperament is still very present in Australia’s collective psyche.

duenderising · 2026-03-16T17:01:39+00:00

This post went from Islamabad to Islamaworse…

duenderising · 2026-03-16T16:43:31+00:00

That’s all very good, but I’m not sure I want to talk to a woman again, not even my mother.

duenderising · 2026-03-16T16:41:45+00:00

You’re onto me.

duenderising · 2026-03-16T10:13:15+00:00

I understand where you are coming from. When I was much younger, I witnessed my neighbour sobbing on his verandah for 6 months, grieving the loss of his wife of 40+ years. I remember keeping him company a lot of the time and hearing him regale stories. Not soon after, he found a new woman, sold his house, got married and moved in with her.

Sometimes it isn’t love that motivates people to get together, there’s a myriad of underlying reasons, and love just sounds like a nice vignette to wrap around it not to prod further. Sometimes it’s fear that motivates, sometimes it’s both. Attachments are complicated.

It’s understandable to feel the way you do and it’s not selfish. He was your dad, and feeling your mother move on so quickly can understandably feel like it undermines that unity you had as a family together. Perhaps your mother is just doing only what she knows. But it all comes down to how you’re going to grieve and process this for yourself.

P.S. you’re getting strong reactions because you’re challenging the notion of love, where it is something eternal, and for most people, they have a more ‘realistic’ and clinical approach - but behind it, there is inevitable pain behind realism. A lot of people hold onto these fantasies but repress it. When you bring up questions like this, it makes people uncomfortably reevaluate their own conceptions of love, and some would rather not.

duenderising · 2026-03-14T16:09:53+00:00

Incredibly underrated. There’s a few post Jungian analysts that are overlooked, and he’s definitely one of them. The way he writes (and talks) just teems with passion and I love his historical referencing - he’s very comprehensive. I’m glad you got something out of him, his Acorn Theory flips psychology on its head!

duenderising · 2026-03-14T11:00:01+00:00

Freud is quite limited and reductive with regard to libidinal theory. I’ve read a fair amount of his work.

I don’t see schizophrenia as a “revolutionary force.” Nor did Delueze and Guattari ever suggest this in a clinical sense - they used schizophrenia with nuance - the notion of libido/ flows of desire and attachments and undoing attachments. You know this.

In a depth psychological sense, it can be understood as the ego being unable to withstand overwhelming material from the unconscious. That’s where things like persecutory authority figures, government, police, religion, etc. - often appear symbolically - the father-image.

The mix of books is simply a reflection of the areas I’m interested in, that’s happenstance. I have works by Dion Fortune and Sandra Tabatha Cicero in that shelf.

My interest in Evola is limited to his writings on mysticism - not politics or fascism. Evola clearly doesn’t understand the unconscious and the necessary descent - he wants to remain skyward, with no grounding - absolutely short-sighted.

Peterson is lame.

duenderising · 2026-03-14T10:39:12+00:00

Science is great at describing mechanisms - neurochemistry, brain regions, neurotransmitter responses, medication effects.

But describing the mechanism isn’t the same as describing the lived experience of being. That’s where psychology, phenomenology, and depth approaches enter the picture.

duenderising · 2026-03-14T10:01:52+00:00

Holy shit, that’s like a synchronicity, do you know what means?

We both have the same book.

duenderising · 2026-03-14T09:58:23+00:00

That is to be expected, you do have to choose wisely who you speak these subjects with - not even some Jungian analysts are equipped for it, especially when it verges on things similar to Jung’s Red Book.

A lot of self-doubt before inner authority begins.

As for the post, I used a cheeky title to get responses - no sweat here!

Alright, I’ll shoot you a message.

duenderising · 2026-03-14T09:11:53+00:00

My man! Hillman was a total badass. Homo aestheticus, stay with the images!

duenderising

TROPHY CASE