A bit fallacious though—you can’t prove someone is a sociopath from bones and DNA analysis. But we can deduce that a habitual liars and shit-stirrers would be excluded. Or have societies always have been ruled by dark triad personalities? I want to discuss this. I’m doing an anthropological deep dive into this. Give me your ideas and theories please!
Judging reveals what we lack in ourselves or what parts of us we are denying. Judging is how people tell on themselves. What is hidden in the shadow of one is revealed through their judgements.
Recently I was judged for being deaf and dumb because I wear a cochlear implant. This lady thought I had an accent until I told her I was actually deaf but hear with a cochlear implant. She had the oddest look on her face and leaned over and shouted “You poor thing! How are you working? Did you get the job through (blank because it would reveal where I live and work)?” but she was suggesting that I got the job as a pity hire. She was talking about an accessible program for those with mental difficulties. Ouch lol. She might as well have called me a retard.
Turns out she applied for my job as well but didn’t get it. I found out this later. Instead of saying oh well I didn’t get the job, she had to go out of her way to try to make me feel bad for being deaf. I want to pretend it wasn’t intentional but the smug look on her face. 🙄😢
And I’ve grown a lot. This time I didn’t go to the bathroom to cry and sob. I handled it like an (mostly) integrated lady! buffs nails
Anybody else want to share similar experiences in being judged or being judgemental?
I finished this painting tonight and I’d love to hear how people here might interpret it from a Jungian angle.
I didn’t start out with a specific symbolic meaning in mind. I mostly painted intuitively and let the imagery develop as I went. The horse, the figure, the moon, the alien landscape and the water all kind of emerged organically. I found myself especially drawn to the relationship between the horse and the hooded rider. The rider feels almost faceless or otherworldly, with the moon face, while the horse is grounded and instinctual. The whole scene feels like an inner landscape to me. There’s something dark and mysterious about it; it used to scare me but I’ve done so many rounds of shadow work that it now excites me. Like a journey into something unknown. It made me wonder about the horse as instinct or psychic energy (libido), the rider as a shadow/guide/psychopomp, the moon as the unconscious and the water as the depths of my psyche.
But I’m deliberately not trying to decide what it means. I’m more interested in what other people see in it. What does this painting evoke for you, from a Jungian perspective? I’m curious whether anyone else has experienced that strange thing where you create something intuitively and only afterward realize that it seems to contain symbolism you weren’t consciously intending.
Lately every time I go into a trance meditation (usually for sound healing), I’ve been spontaneously astral projecting. When it happens I just gently bring myself back down and wiggle my toes to keep myself present and grounded. But then it happens again and it is interrupting my sessions. I removed my frequency generators in case the vibrations were inducing AP. I’ve made sure that I am not too tired and prone to nodding off prior to the sessions. I’ve been pulling back and holding off trance meditations but I want to get back into them for deep healing and purging but my mind seems to want to “explore!” I am usually out for a good 20-30 minutes before I feel the whoosh and pop and the delocalization of my mind.
What do you think is happening? Does anybody have any suggestions?
Way before I got into Jung and Jungian analysis, I was a slave to my animus. I didn’t realize how much of my life was ruled by my animus until then. I was flipping through my journals and came across this poem. I wrote this after thinking about the Jungian idea of the persona, and what happens when two people become attached to the versions of themselves they present to each other. I started thinking about how we can fall in love while unconsciously projecting onto one another, only to discover that beneath the personas we may be much less familiar with each other than we thought.
This poem became a reflection on love, projection, disillusionment and the strange liberation that comes from finally seeing what was underneath the mask.
Our masks fell in love,
Dove right in,
Bright-eyed and hopeful.
The mask was just a cope.
The masks come off,
We are strangers,
Basking in each other’s light.
Until the next fight,
Between two strangers.
In due time the chasm broadens, fine at first, then dangerous.
Deep black abyss.
Where our shadows dance with each other.
I weep for you, for me, for my freedom.
I cry over my lesson that I thought was a blessing.
I wrote this almost unconsciously—automatic writing if you will—and it snapped me out of my bubble—my idea of who I thought I was and my idea of love. The masks don’t seek to connect—it storytells and entertains—to find connection I had to be vulnerable and naked. I had to unlearn who I thought I was. And thus began my process of shadow work and individuating.
I used to snub my nose at people who I thought were clinging to their egos. Then I realized it was my own ego that was making that judgement. The ego judges. The essence/soul doesn’t judge because it realizes it is the entire ocean, not a mere drop of water. 🤍
The consciousness is the ocean. We as human beings, are consciousness fragmented, into drops of water. When we exit the physical vessel, we go back to being the ocean.
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” - Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, 1928.
Journal Entry:
We gotta feel those uncomfortable feelings, it’s the only way to make them go away. I repressed my own grief because grief is HARD and UNCOMFORTABLE. Then one day I invited my grief in during a meditation session, talked to it, soothed it, told it that it was okay to feel bad and even hugged myself. I used active imagination and pretended my grief was an actual person. A person that I’ve been rejecting because it represented a uncomfortable truth. I could feel the grief rising up, white-hot pain, I cried, acknowledged it and then it flowed out of my body.
The next day I felt like a blank canvas. Who am I without my grief? My grief dictated my behaviours and patterns. Without it, I felt empty. Then the emptiness went away, because the grief was placed with something else—a resolved trauma that has been confronted and soothed—strength replaced grief. I felt strong and proud, my grief taught me so many things but it also held me back at times. I was holding onto my grief because I didn’t want to face what was underneath the grief. I thought it was something scary, what’s hiding behind grief? Another monstrous shadow that I don’t have the energy to confront? That was my belief for a while. Then I realized that underneath the grief was strength. Feeling it made me strong. It doesn’t get easier, we get stronger. Our shadows give us gifts, if only we allow ourselves to meet our shadows.
Hopefully I made sense, I’m high and I pray my post isn’t a babble of incoherent stoner musings.
Ive been practicing and I’m not perfect yet so please feel free to critique me and give me tips and advice.
Warm up first! Spend several minutes on hip rotations, hamstrings, glutes, adductors and gentle spinal movement.
Number 1, open the hips. Work on poses such as Pigeon, Half Pigeon variations, Lizard, and seated hip rotations. The ability to externally rotate the hip is crucial.
Number 2, practice from a seated position.
From a comfortable seated position, bring one leg toward the chest and gradually guide the thigh behind the corresponding shoulder. Don’t yank the foot into place. The knee should remain happy.
Number 3, work on poses such as Pigeon, Half Pigeon variations, Lizard, and seated hip rotations. The ability to externally rotate the hip is crucial.
Number 4, get comfortable with the leg behind your shoulder and neck. Once the hip allows it, work on maintaining an upright torso rather than collapsing forward. This is where the required combination of hip and spinal mobility becomes apparent!
Number 5, add the balance. From the standing leg, establish a strong, stable base. Bring the other leg behind the shoulder/neck and slowly straighten the standing leg if necessary.
Number 6, bring hands into prayer. Once balanced, bring the palms together at the chest. That makes the pose substantially harder because you’ve removed another stabilizing option.
Lastly, number 7, come out of the pose slowly.
Warming: Don’t use this pose as a flexibility test. If your hip doesn’t naturally have the range required, forcing the knee or pulling the leg behind the neck can cause injury. Build the necessary hip mobility gradually and work within a comfortable range.
The stuff we post and preach and spout to others, thinking we are teaching others, but really it is a projection of the very same advice that is meant for us. What do you guys think?
Found this in my rock garden!
Ego death can itself become an ego project. The ego discovered spirituality, nonduality, Jung, Rami Dass, meditation, psychedelics, enlightenment, whatever the current human species has decided will deliver it from itself, and then announces that it must destroy the ego.
But who exactly is making that announcement? The ego.
That is the paradox. What we call the ego isn’t some evil little entity sitting inside us that needs to be assassinated. In Jungian terms, the ego is the center of conscious identity. It has a legitimate function. The problem is identification with it, not its existence. In Advaita Vedanta, the separate ego-self is distinguished from the deeper Self. In Buddhism, anatta points toward the absence of a permanent, independent self. Christian mystics speak of self-emptying and union with God. Sufi mysticism speaks of fanā, the dissolution or passing away of the individual self, followed by baqā, abiding in God.
So when someone tells me that they have transcended their ego, I consider the possibility that what actually happened was that the ego acquired a new identity as someone who transcended the ego. Now it gets to be spiritually superior instead of merely socially superior. Same landlord, different apartment. Ego wearing ceremonial robes. I think the impulse to kill the ego arises from the ego’s inability to reconcile its own contradictions. The ego encounters parts of itself it doesn’t like such as shame, aggression, envy, sexuality, vulnerability, dependency, fear, grandiosity and grief.
Instead of integrating them, it says “this isn’t me. I need to transcend this.”
But enlightenment isn’t about annihilating the ego. It’s about putting the ego into a relationship with the larger Self. The ego becomes less tyrannical because it realizes it isn’t the whole psyche.
Maybe what mystics have discovered is not that the ego must die, but that it was never the sovereign entity it imagined itself to be. There was no ego in the first place, no I, nothing to annihilate.
This is why I avoid most mainstream media, TV, the news, doomscrolling, etc. I even avoid certain music because what we expose ourselves to, doesn’t go away, it remains in our psyche, in our subconscious mind. I try to avoid excessive mental “noise”. When I am not careful, exposing myself to mental noise creates a “hum” in my mind that wouldn’t go away until I started meditating and learned how to streamline my thoughts and watched what I exposed myself to.
“The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” - Carl Jung, CW 8, para 342, The Structure of the Psyche.
Our psyches carry an ancestral inheritance, expressed through archetypal patterns. It took me a while to reconcile with that fact.
Ugh. Some people though!
Sorry for being pessimistic but this is my mood today. I don’t like this game, I didn’t ask to play their game.
As an end-of-life doula, I’ve spent time with people as they approach death. It has made Rumi’s words feel a lot less like poetry and more of an invitation to loosen our grip on what we believe is permanent.
Perhaps that is part of what Rumi meant. Maybe we spend much of our lives asleep to what really matters, and only when the dream begins to dissolve do we recognize what was always real.
I’ve noticed that many people become less concerned with status, possessions, and old grievances as life draws to a close. What remains are love, presence, forgiveness and connection. Usually around that time they report that they see their deceased loved ones hanging around, beckoning them to come back Home, wherever that is. I’ve seen many clients reach out with their arms saying they see a loved one, and I usually feel a PRESENCE, like someone else is also in the same room as the client and I. One time I was talking to a client, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked behind me, nobody was there. Then my client points her finger behind me and said that her mom (long deceased) was there, standing behind me.
The more I work with the dying and terminally ill, the more I realize that life is but a dream and when we die, we wake up.