C.G. Jung on Alchemy

I enjoyed reading ‘Jung on Alchemy’, a compilation of his various references to this subject, edited by Nathan Schwartz- Salant. What a revelation, to read that consciousness and its focal point ‘the ego’ have not been a constant for man over the ages; instead, he suggests, they have been an ongoing development. Jung saw consciousness …

Fu Xi and the eight symbols of creation

I’ve been mooching around various ‘creation’ ideas and themes recently. (Cut to the figure of a man, standing with his hands in his pockets slowly turning over a flat stone with his toe end, casually perusing the things that scuttle away) There seems to be a common thread running through these notions: ‘In the beginning’ …

On the edge

The central theme I seem magnetically drawn to has only just dawned on me. It is the ambiguous and disorientating condition of the threshold. The place that is neither here nor there. In English we call it the liminal, from the Latin limen (threshold) In previous posts I found myself interested in the infinitely varied …

Jung: The dead, it seems, do not possess great Knowledge!

I was struck by a few lines in C.G. Jung’s ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’. They reinvigorated my own growing impression that this three dimensional world, of time and space, is really at the cutting edge of ‘the spiritual endeavour.’ It seems to be where the real ‘graft’ happens. The gems are mined here to be …

Coasting along the fractal boundaries

I’ve been tootling around the fractal boundaries of the Mandelbrot Set with the XaoS viewer recently. Here’s a few of the sights i’ve come across: To think that such ‘organic’ looking complex, infinite, fractal, similar across scale, ‘as above so below’ forms can naturally arise from a simple rule repeated and fed back to itself! …

The Perennial Lure

I’m sure i’m super late to the party, but have just been watching Joseph Campbell’s, The Power of Myth on ‘netflix’. It’s from the 80s and initially appears a bit dated, but the content is powerful stuff. In the first episode he talked about the hero’s journey. It really struck a chord when he explained …

Scattering the Tarot across the table.

The cards of the tarot can be laid out as a map of forces. They would then show, in symbolic form, the process of differentiation leading from an all encompassing unity, all the way down to the completed product of manifestation. This is an ‘overlay’ that can be applied at any scale, but we can …

Jung — in under a minute

We are fragmented creatures The being that we know and think of as ourself is only the ‘conscious mind’. This is a ‘small’ island in the vast sea of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is not just a dusty storehouse of past thoughts and memories. It has its own intelligence. It is a being …

Swallowed by the whale or to slay the dragon?

The two paths of initiation mirror each other. One exalts the principle of individual initiative, of reason and will-power (Fire & Air) The other cultivates receptivity, purposefully investing in loss and the power of sacrifice. (Water & Earth) In the ‘active’ way of the Magician, theory precedes practice, whereas In the way of the mystic …

Two Brained beings: We are not fully human

“Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are]. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin — Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826 What a time to be alive! All is on the move and up for grabs. The world has become pliable …