195. Elena - November 6, 2009 [Edit]Dragon, this is all good information for the book, I hope it’s alright to post here too, to be reminded. I’m also beginning to make an archive of things worth keeping in mind.
59. dragon – November 6, 2009
it is long but very worth reading it:
it is long but very worth reading it:
Exerpt:
One of the most destructive things in the human psyche is unrealized creativity.
If the daemonic is not honored and treated religiously (i.e., carefully considered with reverence and a sense of the sacred), however, it constellates negatively and turns truly “demonic,” in the destructive sense of the word.
Jung comments, “Generally speaking the daemonic is that moment when an unconscious content of seemingly overwhelming power appears on the threshold of consciousness.
It can cross this threshold and seize hold of the personality. Then it is possession.” Before an archetype can be consciously integrated, it will always manifest itself physically, because, in Jung’s words, “…it forces the subject into its own form.”
In its negative form, which is a truly virulent form of madness, we, because of our unconsciousness, become a living conduit for the incarnation of an inhuman, malevolent, predatory, rapacious energy that only cares about feeding its own insatiable narcissism, ultimately victimizing, consuming, and cannibalizing both ourselves and others in the process.
Describing this moment of being possessed, Jung elaborates, “The beast of prey seizes hold of him and soon makes him forget that he is a human being. His animal affects hamper any reflection that might stand in the way of his infantile wish-fulfillments, filling him instead with a feeling of a new-won right to existence and intoxicating him with the lust for booty and blood.”
This in-toxic-ating energy, which is the narcissistic ego running wild as it entrances itself, is the fuel which animates any form of addiction. “Intoxication,” to quote Jung, is “that most direct and dangerous form of possession,” as unless it is reflected upon, and therefore illuminated and transformed by the light of consciousness, it inevitably leads to self-destruction.
196. Elena - November 6, 2009 [Edit]This is so interesting, I’ll make comments as I read because my eyes are too limited to read twice and find the ideas again. If you’re too busy, know that I don’t expect you to read as much as I write or post. It’s I who don’t have time to repeat the process later on and just by reading your excerpt, this article seems to have an ideal structure to grab on to.
————-
C. G. Jung, the great doctor of the soul and one of the most inspired psychologists of the twentieth century, had incredible insight into what is currently playing out, both individually and collectively, in our modern-day world. He writes, “If, for a moment, we look at mankind as one individual, we see that it is like a man carried away by unconscious powers.” We are a species carried away — “possessed” by — and acting out, the unconscious. Jung elaborates, “Possession, though old-fashioned, has by no means become obsolete; only the name has changed. Formerly they spoke of ‘evil spirits,’ now we call them ‘neurosis’ or ‘unconscious complexes.’” To condescendingly think that we, as modern-day, rational people, are too sophisticated to believe in something as primitive as demons is to have fallen under the spell of the very evil spirits we are imagining are nonexistent.
Elena: And to think they can be driven out with love!———
What the ancients call demons are a psychic phenomenon which compel us to act out behaviors contrary to our best intentions. To quote Jung, “the psychic conditions which breed demons are as actively at work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious psychic forces.”
“Possession,” according to Jung is “a primordial psychic phenomenon” that “denotes a peculiar state of mind characterized by the fact that certain psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” Though the possessed might imagine they have free will, their freedom is an illusion. They are unwittingly being used as an instrument for some “other” energy or force to incarnate and express itself through them. Having complexes is not necessarily pathological, as everyone has them. What is pathological, however, is thinking we don’t have complexes, which is the precondition that makes us most vulnerable to possession. Jung clarifies, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” The more complexes we have, the more we are possessed. We don’t need to get rid of our complexes, rather, we need to become consciously aware of them. What is important is what we do with our complexes.
“Possession,” according to Jung is “a primordial psychic phenomenon” that “denotes a peculiar state of mind characterized by the fact that certain psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” Though the possessed might imagine they have free will, their freedom is an illusion. They are unwittingly being used as an instrument for some “other” energy or force to incarnate and express itself through them. Having complexes is not necessarily pathological, as everyone has them. What is pathological, however, is thinking we don’t have complexes, which is the precondition that makes us most vulnerable to possession. Jung clarifies, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” The more complexes we have, the more we are possessed. We don’t need to get rid of our complexes, rather, we need to become consciously aware of them. What is important is what we do with our complexes.
Elena: This seems to parallel the idea that people are afraid of dealing with evil that I presented on the FOFblog. That they are not willing to deal with the Fellowship or acknowledge what happened to us and continues to happen to others.———-
Complexes are the psychic agencies which flavor and determine our psychological view of the world. To quote Jung, “The via regia [royal road] to the unconscious, however, is not the dream…but the complex, which is the author of dreams and of symptoms.” Thematically organized (such as the power-complex, savior-complex, mother-complex, inferiority complex, etc.), the complexes are the vehicles that flesh out the rich repository of contents of the underlying archetypes, giving the formless archetypes a specifically human face. Complexes are the living elemental units of the psyche, acting like the focal or nodal points of psychic life, in which the energy charge of the various archetypes of the collective unconscious are concentrated. An emotionally-charged complex acts like the epicenter of a magnetic field, attracting and potentially assimilating into itself everything that has any resonance or relevance, or is related to itself in any way. This inner process can be seen as it en-acts itself in the outer world when we come in contact with someone who has an activated complex and we find ourselves drafted into their process, picking up a role in their psyche. This is an outer reflection of how a complex can attract, co-opt and subsume other parts of the environment, both inner and outer, into itself. Complexes, when split off from consciousness, can potentially engulf and possess the whole personality.
Elena: This is wonderful! This is exactly what has been happening to all of us in the Fellowship, FOF BLOG and this blog too. In the Fellowship with Robert and on the other blogs particularly with me. In fact, it is also happening with this man’s text. Every time we connect with other people we are connecting with everything they are, complexes and qualities. What helps in a group is that we don’t all have the same complexes so we can help each other balance them out. As long as both complexes and attributes or qualities can flow in a creative process then the complex can be dealt with which is a lot of what is beginning to happen in this blog but it is impossible in the FOF because creativity is constrained to the dogma and in the FOFBlog, my complexes were “judged” “discriminated” and “separated” without love. Instead of helping me free myself they imprisoned me deeper which is what is not happening here anymore allowing me to relax and let other things in.
I’m guessing that if we place complexes with attributes, understanding by attributes the essence or innate qualities of the individual in a creative process, the individual can work out his or her complexes which is precisely what is impossible in a cult because the I of the member creating is “controlled” by the guru’s will and the dogma. One cannot call creative process what happens in cults because the I is precisely restrained, that is, the I or the member’s will is coercively restrained by the guru’s will. That creativity is the source of culture in the “alive” sense of the word, that is, the fine “energies” that allow people to feed each other’s soul and INSPIRE IT. This INSPIRATION is “spiritual” “mana”! Food for the body and soul! It is to people what water to plants. It flows naturally in people but it can also flow consciously in people when they know and understand what they are doing. (This things will probably be obvious in the future when, after being ground in the city, we return to a more natural living, no matter how technified. There is nothing wrong with technology, it’s how we humanize it what matters.)
Going back, Nigel and Dragon’s help in “parenting” me allowed me or is allowing me to deal with my complex of being abandoned, of being not worthy of love, of having extreme shame. The real difficulty with those complexes as I look at them today and the experience on the FOFblog, is that we tend to recreate the problem and if others aren’t mature enough to deal with it, we’ll be landed back into the initial trauma repeating itself over and over again until suicide or murder or whatever the process of crime takes, relieves us from the suffering. We can see that clearly about me on the FOFblog and how abusive I became at the end attracting the same result: being banned, excluded. But we can also see the inability of 99.7% of the ex-members to deal with their own complexes in relation to the tragedy we lived. Instead of being able and willing to deal with the problem, they signaled me out as the “problem” “sick beyond repair”!
Our complexes meet and intertwine with each other and that is what cults use and abuse in people. While they keep the major unconscious archetypes in people’s lives: The guru, the father, the priest, the leader and the Mother, the second in command, the balance, the relationship to those figures allows the community to live those complexes out.
This is wonderful because it is the ingredient we were missing until last week or this week when I mentioned your healing the archetype of my parental figures and allowing me to RELAX at last and reconnect to the jack of hearts and “natural” relationships to people.
I hope I am not taking this author’s ideas before I finish reading them but all the better if they are parallel to each other for I am applying them simply to our circumstances.
I should stop working now no matter how strong the compulsion to go on reading is. Wow, this is going so fast. It’s picked up again after that significant interval.
Have a great day!
No comments:
Post a Comment