The Never-Ending Dance
I too have suffered from despair since childhood. It began at the age of 11 when my father died. To this day there are many occasions in my daily life when I cannot get excited about something because I know it will not last and my pleasure will not last and I will die and nobody will care and nothing I have done will make any difference, and so what?
The Self: Our Portal to the Sacred Other
“[W]e must also remember the Self, this living force with us, wants to help us face our wounds and darkest moments and then—through hurt, fear, sorrow, anger, and tears—emerge and become healed and whole. “As we look further into how we can call on this part of ourselves for help, we will discover, as Jung […]
Remyth Your Story with Heart
“The vehicle of our right brain and much of our deeper Self is symbolized by what we often think of as “the heart”. Our symbolic heart is an organ of vision, a way of seeing that can help our intellect to look below the surface of things. There we can see the meaning in the […]
Ego and God-Image: Part IX
“The crux of the matter is man’s own dualism, to which he knows no answer. This abyss has suddenly yawned open before him with the latest events in world history, after mankind lived for many centuries in the comfortable belief that a unitary God had created man in his own image, as a little unity. […]
Ego and God-Image: Part VIII
“Anything conscious can be corrected. But anything that slips away into the unconscious is beyond the reach of correction and, its rank growth undisturbed, is subject to increasing degeneration. Happily, nature sees to it that the unconscious contents will irrupt into consciousness sooner or later and create the necessary confusion.” C.G. Jung, Mysterium Conjunctions, CW […]
Ego and God-Image: Part VII
Intellectually the Self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our power of comprehension, It might equally well be called the “God within us.” The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably […]
Ego and God-Image: Part VI
[T]he most important relationship of childhood, the relation to the mother, will be compensated by the mother archetype as soon as detachment from the childhood state is indicated. One such successful interpretation has been, for instance, Mother Church, but once this focus begins to show signs of age and decay, a new interpretation becomes inevitable. […]
Ego and God-Image: Part IV
[T]he individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware […]
Ego and God-Image: Part III
In the history of humankind the differentiation of man and woman belongs among the earliest and most impressive projections of opposites, and early humankind took the male and the female as the prototype of opposites in general. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness So far in this series I’ve written about three qualities […]
Ego and God-Image: Part II
“. . . man’s instinctive nature is divided between the instinct for self-preservation and the instinct for species-preservation.” Sigmund Freud “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, in Yearbook of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 6, 1914, p. 78. The repression of the unknown parts of ourselves is a third definitive feature of the Epoch II ego. As human consciousness […]
