Jung’s early work with word associations did not rest with quantifying results; he personified them. He discovered complexes which were invested with feeling, intention, autonomy, and fragments of consciousness. They were independent entities because they behaved as such. The same complex can alter the association of words, show itself as unwanted symptoms, and appear as a person in a dream. Dream persons are complexes walking around; symptoms are the irruption of these persons into our normal lives. Our personal complexities are indeed the persons of our complexes.
Where other psychologists might have used a so-called objective and neutral language of numbers, structures, or functions to account for the same disturbances, Jung reverted courageously to the direct mode of personifying which in his day was still considered a primitive formulation.” He stood firmly by his method of naming, explicitly comparing it with the spontaneous speech of the insane and the noncivilized. What was radically courageous then we now take for granted, so easily imagining ourselves to play roles, enter into games, and be composed of different characters.
James Hillman , are-Visioning Psychology pg.21/22
“Jung’s animism is tightly tied to his notion of anima,” which is the word he uses for one’s personal and personified soul-image. The Anima Is a person and anima is a conceptual notion and anima means soul. Jung calls her “she,” and she it is who creates conflicting confusions and attractions, who brings moods and desires and neurovegetative symptoms, who kindles the peculiar fascinations of fantasy that turn one’s head, and yet also conveys a vague sense of interiority, a sense of soul.” ~James HillmanA person may converse with her, as for example, when a poet talks With his muse, a philosopher with his daimon, a mystic with his tutelary angel, or a madman with his hallucination. We find her in mythology In countless forms, and expressly as the maiden Psyche. ~ James HillmanJung’s position here states that the fundamental facts of existence are the “fantasy-images” of the psyche. All consciousness depends on these images. Everything else–ideas of the mind, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world around us, beliefs, feelings, hungers–must present themselves as images in order to become experienced. ” ‘Experience’ is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images.”‘ Should we ask: just what is psyche? What do you mean by psychic experience and psychic reality? The answer is: fantasy- images. “Image is psyche, ” says Jung. “The psyche consists essentially of images . … a “picturing’ of vital activities.” In the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. Or as Jung puts it: “The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. “ Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately , and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner” nor “outer.” Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images. I dream and experience my dreams as inside me and yet at the same time I walk around in my dreams and am inside them. James HillmanBecause our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things; To be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy. ~James Hillman
This vision cannot be enacted unless archetypal persons strike us as utterly real. To experience imaginal reality, a psychic function–the specific function of the imaginative soul–must be active. This soul person is the person of our moods, self-reflections, and reveries, of our sensuous longing beyond the sensately concrete, the spinner of fantasy who is the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves. Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry, as soul of vegetation who greens our hope or blights with symptoms, as Lady of the Beasts riding our passions. She is father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, and my sister, my soul. She is also a worrying succubus drawing off our life’s juice, a harpy with talons, a cold white wraith with mad addictions–but a nurse as well, and a serving maid, a Cinderella nymphet, vague with no history, a tabula rasa waiting for the word. And she is also the Sophia of wisdom, the Maria of compassion, the Persephone of destruction, compelling Necessity and Fate, and the Muse.
The multiplicity of her forms in fictions and lives, and the intensely personified and intensely subjectified reality of her nature, bespeak a world into which she calls and over which she rules.
Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold. But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.
Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.
As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.
So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.
Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.
Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.
The old adage ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.
Having the ability to receive and Perceive anOthers feelings/thought/somatic undulations deeply is something that definitely varies between Bodies and Awarenesses.
One who truly Sees and feels and Innerstands must find their way to a place of Intentional non-intrusion into anOthers Space on whatever level. The ability to penetrate and invade on a deep level must be Let Go Of , in a Sense. Literally….inSenses we Separate our sovereignty of Self from OthersSelves to Play with boundaries and borders and blendings and bleedings and the blessings and Blissings that come from the Kissings that are made possible from that Sacred Solutio , this naked Coagula of souls inRatio Playing with tethers and teetering on the edge of WhetherOrNots and WhatIfs and WeDids.
To Choose ….in Love….SatChitAnanda…..to Allow anOther to GenerateOperateDestroy subtleties in their own fertileField without piercing the hymen to steal the diamond of their own alchemical elixir…. Is perhaps the greatest test……of ALL.
I have been a Dreamer for as long as i can remember. For me, awareness in dreams has been my main form of meditation, if you want to call it that. My dreaming goes in cycles, as well. By journalling, you come to recognize your personal dream cycles and patterns, as well as the language of your Self.
I have catagories of dream, that i use to help determine at what level i am Dreaming. These may be different for everyone, because each person will have individual nuances to their way of working with energy and intent. Each level of dream has/is a specific frequency of vibration, and as you move thru these, it is like getting an energy tune-up. You will be unable to reach a level of awareness that your system cannot adapt to, or raise itself to............there are also very dense levels, and they can be hard to move within, and hard to keep your intent, becaseu, like this phys. plane, things are slow to take form and to manifest, and its easy to get caught up in the process, and forget you are dreaming. i liken this to our collective dreaming experience of the world in existence....we are on a quite dense level of interaction and thus we ahve forgotten we are 'dreaming'.
after working with dreams for a while, you will start to familiarize yourself with these energetic 'tones' of awareness, and soon be able to move within a vast network of channels and freqeuncies, etc, depending upon your own vibration and your intent....the more energy you can carry and transmute, and the higher and more charged your intent, the deeper you can go into the fabric that is everything. Like someone else mentioned, it can be scary and intense or too exciting when you first learn to 'wakeup' in Dreaming, and that can foil your efforts till you familiarize yourself with it. next comes learning movement within this realm, and this can take many different forms. everyone has their preference. next comes learning to maintain clarity and enhance clarity of consciousness. The above post mentioned SPINNING which is a technique i use as well; it re'collects my energy and gives me cohesion when i feel im starting to unravel and fade because i cant hold the vibration. You must be able to keep your sense of Self amid higher energies, or you can become overwhelmed. this is ok if you are seeking a healing or merging experience, etc, but to learn to navigate further and further, one must learn to bypass the desire to bask in the energy, and learn to circulate that energy thru their system in order to resonate with the 'environment' one is in. after stabilizing at that velocity, you raise yourself more. The environment and mood etc will depend upon the rate of vibration, and that is another way to track where exactly you are at and what sorta realm you are moving within. if you continue to go deeper there will come a point at which it is too painful/intense/ to hold consciousness, because your system cannot yet hold the energy you need in order to stay coherent in that specific 'tone'.
I have found that I become depleted and weak for a little while after an experience where i have stayed 'too long' at too high a rate for me to transmute.......(i hope im making sense in this post).....
These are all things that i have learned thru my experiences. The best way to start to practice is, as stated elsewhere in the thread, your intent and dedication and energy. Journals are, for me, something i couldnt do without when it comes to dreaming. Has anyone seen 'butterfly effect'... where the guy reads thru his old journals and taps into that 'moment', thats something i use my journals for, going back to a specific dreammomentvibration, becaseu it exists still, and it will go on existing, and has parallels, just like this waking consensus reality. To use your past dreams as portals into specific states is a great meditation tool as well. Once you are able to induce the Lucid Dreaming more or less at will(this will go in cycles too), you are ready to take serious study of the activities you participate in on that level. Just like when we are awake in this phys. reality and must make choices with what we want to use our energy on, the same takes place in Dreaming. you have, as paul would say, a quantitative amount of energy, and when it is 'spent' for the time being, your will be unable to hold conscious awareness......so what you do in your dream after you reach awareness is important to your developing skill. if you waste the energy in habitpattern reactions, which are just as common on the dreamplane as 'here', you lose energy. When you spread your focus too thin or get carried away by details, you can lose energy. Whenever you make a truthrealization however, you tend to get an energy boost. Learn to work with your environment and its energy and quality of energy. determine what you want to get out of the situation, and the whole practice, and devote your energy to the things that will most help you actualize what you are trying to do. Some people thrive in certain energies that others dont. find the atmosphere and experiences that resonate with you, and act according to your SelfsTruth. If you can maintain Integrity of Self you can Dream higher and deeper than you ever thought. Its all about the energy and intent, and focusing that energy in the proper channels of the moment.
I like to have variety, so sometimes i set myself a specific goal or objective, and try to fulfill that creatively in the dream...other times i just follow whatever dreamwave that i find myself in and play a very receptive role. If you want to set a task for yourself, you can try writing it down, in words that are recognizable and powerful to your subconscious, and meditating on it, then putting it under your pillow. If you can awaken then, you will remember your task and decide whether you want to engage with it.
Another thing that someone pointed out is the times at which we sleep. when you are already rested, you tend to dream mo;re lucidly, becasue your body doesnt need that extra energy to refuel itself and take care of itself physically, which means that awareness is available to your dreamingbody. try taking naps in the afternoon or whenever, and record your experiences. see whether there is a difference in quality between those dreams and your nightdreams.
Dreaming is the most natural connection we have with our own spiritual nature. It is there to be developed and used for a reason. Now that the taboo of dreams etc is lessening in our cultures, more and more people aer 're-membering' and reconnecting with that essential part of our existence.
I hope i havnt rambled incessently here, or spoken in terms that dont make sense. everyone has their own way of speakingthedream, so i hope i have been somewhat clear!
This info is solely from my experience. Im always looking for new techniques and ideas and perceptions on these processes....and thought books and the like are great for familiarizing yourself with the territoryand possibilities, they cant make your Dreampractice for you.
Ive been rereading 'Women who run with the Wolves' and one of the parts has really inspired me to begin a new project...a book of poetry and artwork called Body that chronicles my life up to this point, from the perspective of my body. I want to try and capture what i felt for example, as a child, thru my bodys eyes, and as a teen, etc, thru preg and birth and afterbirthbody...etc etc. I am very excited to start this because it really gives me a focus for creativity, which I have been trying to get fired up again lately. I know that I may not 'complete' this for a long time, but the structure of it gives me a little framework to pour my soul into. And I would like to welcome anyone else who wants to share their own creative voices of Body....
The Body theme is very important, especially now, because so many people are suffering due to the way society views and treats the body, and has done for so long....Also, from reading others' posts and blogs, especially mamas, I see how many people deal with issues related to the body, for different reasons. One way or another, Body is something we all take for granted, yet spend a huge chunk of our lives obsessing about.
Here is a passage that I found very beautiful.
"...The second awakening involved a much older woman. Her hips were, according to common standard, too pear-shaped, her bosom very tiny in comparison, and she had thin purply little veins all over her thighs, a long scar from a serious surgery going around her body from rib cage to spine in the manner in which apples are peeled. Her waist was perhaps four hands wide. It was a mystery then why the men buzzed about her as though she were honeycomb. They wanted to take a bite out of her pear thighs, they wanted to lick that scar, hold that chest, lay their cheeks upon ther spidery veins. Her smile was dazzling, her gait so beautiful, and when her eyes looked, they truly took in what they were looking at. I saw again what I had been taught to ignore, the power IN the body, The cultural power OF the body is its beauty, but power IN the body is rare, for most have chased it away with their torture or embarrassment by the flesh. It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burder, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but as a series of DOORS AND DREAMS AND POEMS thru which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us."
from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' 'Women who run with the Wolves'
I think that especially for a mother, loving Body and being Body is very important. Imagine trying to explain to your little baby or child that you dont like or appreciate the body that they adore, that they take so much delight in, and find their sense of comfort and warmth and strength? Until I had my son, my body was this abstract thing, really...I was never very connected to it, certainly wasnt EMBODIED...and actually seemed to hold in higher esteem being OUT OF BODY or OF THE SPIRIT...It took pregnancy and childbirth to fully connect me to my body and to really understand Body...as a force as well as a form. I spent years trying to get away from Body, hiding from Body, denying Body...and now it seems to me to be blasphemy...in some sense...Things that I thought I understood back then were just intellectual gropings....now I have True knowing, True Feeling, True Selfness....not a delusion of grandeur...but a participation in something that is so immense and whole and wonderful in so many ways, and that Body is here in order to take this Isness into Herself and Express it in ways that could not exist if Body Were NOT... We as a culture have degraded flesh for so long, and it has led to so many problems on many levels... People seem to believe that if you allow the Body what Body wants, you will be 'led astray'...haha...but I have yet to meet more than a few people who have actually been embodied in the full sense of the word. And there is nothing to be led astray from. Body will lead us home. Body is our ability to relate to other selves and worlds and ideas and vibrations and realitys....Body doesnt hinder us in the pursuit of 'enlightenment'....Body IS enlightenment.... Its not so much that we need to bring awareness into the body, but to allow the bodys awareness to LEAD US OUT of our preoccupation with our prison walls, which we have built around ourselves because Feeling is so damn intense and so completely overwhelming that living a half life is preferable for most. And body gets blamed for keeping us 'beastly' or 'dense and profane'...etc etc....I believe this is all backward. I think that only the truly courageous and those who dearly want to become as conscious as they can be, even attempt to understand and honor Body, because to do so would make most everything else we know seem very insignificant.
So here is to Body. In all her forms. In all her force. And with all her faces turned to the earth... because Body does not need to seek the light....the light seeks her... for it is the joy of the universe which dances in her thighs...
And here is to all the Mamas who have been thru the primordial creation thru her own body here now
🌟We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.🌟
Jean Genet
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean GenetIn space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for God to get you in a good wrestling hold and carry you off. So she danced. While walking. Everywhere.
Jean Genet“Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.”
🌟Jean Genet, Fragments of the ArtworkCertain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.
Jean GenetThe hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day…The hour in which…every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.
Jean GenetCreating is not a somewhat frivolous game. The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures. We cannot suppose a creation that does not spring from love. How can a man place before himself something as strong as himself which he will have to scorn and hate?…Every lover does likewise, hoping to be loved for his own sake.
Jean GenetA man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean GenetWould it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?
Jean GenetI had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.
Patterns patterns on the wall HumPty Splattered from the Fall Broken Shells are cloaked in veils Of masked mouths in modern sprawl Twisting tales and telling lies And pointing Fingers at the I's We build the burden of our own demise Fill the garden with Sown Reprise With complicit cowardice we cast the Die And wait for Fu(h)ror to Rise the Tide Oh sweet Souls who hide enDemic Panic Beneath the ruse of false compassion We Wove this World and Play within It Keyholes In Cells we Formed and Fashioned
Researchers have finally come up with a viable new vaccine called PAL……’Protection Against Life’. Apparently, by being exposed to the ever changing and unpredictable states of being termed, generally, Life, we are ALL at an increased risk of DEATH! In fact, 10 out of 10 people are suspected to have the dis-ease called ‘non-homeostasis’ and which seems to be apparent from the moment of birth…..actually, to be scientifically correct, it is evident even BEFORE birth. This new PAL vaccine will inhibit the ability of the body and mind, and what some term the ‘soul energy’ to remain open to and adapt to the ‘ever in flux’ environmental and physical tensions that are an inherent part of this Reality Tunnel…..thus, shielding the Human Organism from having to face or use Consciousness in a creative way in order to maneuvre in this amorphous and ambiguous Field of Experience called, nostalgically, Life. Interestingly enough, the use of this vaccination deems the host organism totally manageable and predictable, and homogenized…..and hence more easily controlled and used for any purpose that the researchers deem important or relevant .
BlissNinja 