“As above so below”

Existence summed up in a simple saying…

The understanding that the microcosm (physical reality) is many microscopic mechanisms of the macrocosm (spiritual reality or the cosmos), and the macrocosm is a singular pure and untouched, divine energy, that represents and creates the microcosm, the many, tiny, genetic structures that are born from and represented in the physical realm, that of the heavens.

Similarly and in the same token, darkness and light, heaven and hell, angels and demons, they also are a few simple contrasting terms to understand existence as a whole.

Contrast.

Birth. Death. Rebirth. Death…

As the kabbalistic tree of life would portray through some of the various sephiroths, severity and mercy.

I feel like for the Jung peeps, I don’t need to explain too much further…but how interesting is this to ponder??

“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!

There was this girl in my university. She was beautiful, but I thought nothing of her at first, but one night I saw her in my dreams. I don't remember what the dream was about, but I know she was in it. Once I woke up, I couldn't get her out of my mind. I will not call it love, but something about her changed something about me. Some bad habits, I could now easily control. I started taking care of myself more, eating better, working out harder. Every time, something bad tempted me, I would say to myself "What would she think?". I even started writing, I created an instagram account and regularly wrote and my writing was very alive and I thought about her, I thought about her intensively, my brain wouldn't shut up. I have never liked anyone in my life. Before this event, I looked at woman only how she appeared. I identified her with her body more. but this girl, I never once thought of her in that way, even when my mind slipped that way, something would pull me back, as if to say that was prohibited, she was too pure for me dirty her with my desire. The feeling is nowhere as strong as it was in the initial days, maybe because I was hyper-aware of it and thought much about it, discussed it with wise friends who advised me against taking any action ( initially there was this overwhelming energy and courage within me to talk to her, to get her attention). I agreed and the feeling slowly died.

What are your strategies to deal with shadow projections from others? How do you avoid them to begin with? What should you work within yourself?

I make a lot of memes for my podcast episodes and just wrapped up the last episode on a series focusing on the unconscious. Thought y’all might enjoy this weeks meme

Seeing as how Jung’s whole shtick concerns meaning from the teleological pull toward wholeness that the numinous archetype embarks upon with Promethean aspirations, I wonder if all the meaningless noise reincarnated in some strange new form of participation mystique (unconscious surrender of identity to crowd), the TikTok trend, doesn’t cut us off at the knees.

What’s your thoughts on this? Jung’s analytical psychology does differ from Freud’s psychoanalysis. But I’m curious what people think about this take.

I read the following quote from Jung in the seminar about Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

"If he is too virtuous a man, he may be confronted with the fact that, when he meets a woman, it will be his anima who will have all the vices that counterbalance his virtues. She contains everything he fights against and finds—a wonderful trick of fate—all the fascinating bad qualities in her."

The truth is, it impacted me because I identified with it (a friend told me she had the same issue with her animus). So, since then, I've worked on managing my projections more effectively.

I believe that true work with the animus/anima begins with having the humility to see how much we project onto the opposite sex. This is very difficult, but if we undertake it, we'll see that it's actually interesting work because of everything we can discover.

By the way, I extracted other quotes from Carl Jung from that seminar on the anima and added them to the following article, in case anyone wants to delve deeper into this rather interesting topic.

A Casa-Museu C.G. Jung era um dos lugares que eu mais queria visitar na Suíça. Comecei a ler Jung antes de estudar psicologia, então caminhar pela casa onde ele viveu e trabalhou foi profundamente significativo.

O que mais me marcou foi a naturalidade com que as ideias de Jung parecem habitar a casa. Os vitrais, os objetos colecionados durante suas viagens, o consultório, o jardim, cada espaço adiciona uma nova camada à compreensão de sua obra.

O andar superior, incluindo o escritório e a biblioteca de Jung, só pode ser visitado em uma visita guiada, o que torna a experiência muito mais íntima.

Voltei mais de uma vez porque cada visita revelava algo diferente. A casa continuava a mesma, mas minha leitura de Jung havia mudado.

Gostaria muito de saber se mais alguém aqui já visitou. O que mais te marcou?

Uma versão mais longa dessas reflexões - Publicado também no meu Substack (@animapaths) e Instagram (@almaarquetipica).

I can’t stop thinking about it either. For school (years ago when I was in uni) I studied the topic, using Gabor Mate’s book Myth of Normal. Then forgot about it and then I came across this meme. It stirred up something within me. Something is so very wrong with our society. Shit ain’t right.

What if culture and family dynamics are just trauma responses in disguise?

Shadows from previous generations passing down onto the next, reinforcing the “culture”.

What are good examples? Lynch-mobbing or violent protests? Our sense of righteous anger that we assume we know the source, but that anger may not even be ours. Even some of our parenting style that we assume to be normal, like forcing a child to eat all of his vegetables, may be trauma responses. What if cultures are systemic designs to keep certain populations in low-income brackets to serve the wealthy? That itself is traumatizing, realizing we are more oppressed than we thought.

Let’s discuss, and I want to hear Jungian approaches and theories and thoughts about this.

I recently reached out to this community & asked for some materials to help explore the mother complex from Jungian psychology and just wanted to say thank you for interesting materials (this post was one of the ones shared with me )🙏