Psyche – Page 16 – Psyberspace

Heard about this today /via Edward.

Jeff Raff has written about the ally (which has been called many different names in different traditions) in his books Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, Healing the Wounded God, and The Wedding of Sophia. Here, he shares with readers the techniques he has developed and taught in his workshops and lectures for achieving intimate contact with the divine. The ally is a divine being—a face of God—that is unique to every being. It appears in the imaginal realm to partner with a specific person; but it has to wait for its human partner to seek it. The person has to learn how to enter the imaginal realm to meet and relate with the ally, and to that effect, Raff has designed a progressive series of exercises. Starting with imagination-building practices, he takes you through learning how to identify your ally, learning its name, and obtaining guidance from it. Intermediate and advanced exercises teach you how to deepen your relationship with the ally and bring it into everyday life. A relationship with your ally is a two-way street in that your attention to its existence in the imaginal realm makes it manifest in the material world, while the ally helps you achieve self-realization and gnosis in the literal sense of the word.

November 3, 2009November 3, 2009

In Treatment

It has been fun, but also frustrating to watch “In Treatment” and to see the therapist, Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), not following his patients. To see him have poor supervision, have poor insight into his own life & relationships and clueless about relationship therapy. (Its only TV, and I am intrigued by the programme, I wish somone could make a movie with good therapy in it).

It shows some good moments, but sadly it misses the mark of giving accurate insight into therapy. The acting is good, but all too frequently the dynamics become ingongruent, I cease to suspend dis-belief and see the writer, and director coming through. Unfortunately the poor practice and poor supervision may be all too accurate, though I think we do better in New Zealand where personal therapy & supervision are standard practice for psychotherapists.

November 2, 2009November 8, 2011

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Following on from the last post, those words popped in to my head. From Milton, meaning of course, that standing & waiting is a service to others. (Not that you get served even if you don’t push in the que!!) And Waiting is is not just sitting there, it is related to serving, as in a waiter in a restaurant.

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

This page is useful for an exposition.

November 2, 2009November 2, 2009

The Art of Being Useless

The Art of Being Useless, just googled that, and it does not come up! Let me add “George Sweet”… It does come up: here is a reference. I got the manme wrong. The Advantage of Being Useless.

I wanted to write about the art of being useless. (I should write a companion piece for my art blog.)

I want to simply reflect (after that prelude) on these words (in no particular order):

Contained

Restrained

Constrained

Receptive

Passive

Silent

Attentive

Absorbed

Engrossed

Reflective

Mindful

Conscious

Alert

Present

Centered

Wait

Watch

Wonder

Patient

October 24, 2009

Dark Age 2009

More from Robert Firestone. His analysis of what happened to depth psychology is pretty good. I have never quite thought of this as the Dark Ages, but it names well the despair I feel at the ACC attacks on people who have been sexually abused.

The Death of Psychoanalysis and Depth Psychotherapy | Psychology Today:

Malevolent societal forces have succeeded in almost completely suppressing important knowledge concerning the widespread incidence of emotional, physical, and sexual child abuse in “normal” families and the ensuing long-term harmful effects. Currently, cultural attitudes of indifference and denial continue to exert a powerful influence on the field of psychotherapy and have, in large part, transformed it from a creative, compassionate enterprise to a weak and frightened community of mental health professionals irresponsibly dispensing drugs or other quick fixes that support the status quo.

Like other attempts that have been made throughout history to suppress knowledge and insight, these efforts were on a par with book burning and other egregious forms of censorship. When this type of revelation is stifled, in spite of all of our amazing technological advances, we are thrown back into the Dark Ages.

October 24, 2009November 1, 2009

Take constructive action when you think you are being wronged.

This is from a psych blog I quite like – rare! Robert Firestone was a mate of the anti-psychiatrist R D Laing. I was a fan of Laing in the day, but sadly his own behaviours etc did not do his cause much good. I should write more on this diagnosis stuff as it is highly relevant to todays ACC (NZ) attacks on the psyche.

I like the post except for the title. Don’t is never a useful word, and calling something people do unconsciously a Game is counter-productive, it feeds the feeling of inferiority.

Lets call it Take constructive action when you think you are being wronged. Not as catchy is it.

Don’t Play the Victim Game | Psychology Today:

Many people think they are entitled to good treatment. The truth is that they are neither entitled nor not entitled to it. The significant issues are what is going on and how do they feel about it. This woman would have been better off actively facing the facts of the situation and acknowledging her emotional reactions rather than personally judging it and feeling victimized by it.

October 18, 2009

Jung and Pauli – The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche.

Through collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, Jung intuitively sought to establish a parallelism between psychic processes and the physical world by applying emerging theoretical concepts of quantum physics to his analytical psychology. Wolfgang Pauli, a prominent co-founder of quantum physics, first met Jung in 1930, and for the following twenty-six years they corresponded with each other exploring the relationship that they believed existed between analytical psychology and quantum physics. In 1952, Jung and Pauli published their initial findings in a book entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche.

Donald H. Wolfraim Ph.D. The Unity of Psyche and World

October 18, 2009October 18, 2009

Psyberspace

The psyche, like love is not to be defined. We know a few things about it & even that is presumptuous. There is no science of soul, or love.

So poetry is one way to speak about these things.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

This passage from Blake touches on my central experience of psyche. I have often quoted it.

Little Picture <-> Big picture

This is on my mind as I reflect on the parallel process in groups and is supervision in psychotherapy. Patterns repeat within the sessions, and within the psyche. In groups we all learn as one person explores a story in depth. We learn as that story relates to our own srories and we move beyond content to process. Once the process is understood then it is as if we tune in with a law of human nature. (I shle bring in an example but they are hard to describe. I have on in my paper: The Future of Knowing. Also in my Psychodrama thesis The group and the Protagonist.

This phenomena must have been at the heart of astrology. As above so below… yet (for all the value astrology may have) this is not credible to me in the way parallel process is, which is simply experienced, known, self evident.

Plato also saw the connection between the psyche and the larger picture, he related it to our knowledge of social justice.

The Isomorphism Between Social and Psychic Justice
… to construct the definition of psychic justice, he relics on (1) the full definition of social justice he constructed earlier, and the unusual idea that (2) a just city and a just man do not differ at all with respect to justice.

Gerasimos Xenophon Santas Goodness and justice: Plato, Aristotle, and the moderns

Plato makes all sorts of strange arguments based on isoprphy, however the phrase “a just city and a just man do not differ at all with respect to justice.” with respect to process rings true. Almost tautologically. Justice is an abstract idea that know no holon so to speak.

All this is of interest after watching Tom Atlee on a TED talk.
Tom Atlee, the author of “The Tao of Democracy,” gave a TEDx talk in Warwick in England on “Collective Intelligence in a Time of Global Crisis.”

The small group process is seen as a better representation of the peoples will than individual expressions of opinion. This is central to decision making about such things as climate change etc.

It becomes interesting when we see the holons line up:

Individual psyche <-> dialogue <-> Group Process <-> social justice

Understanding & making a shift in any one of these can impact the others. None of it is mystical or automatic. Some ways of working with process are better than others. Facilitation of process is essential.

This image from the N.Y. Times is to the point.

October 16, 2009November 5, 2012

Systems thinking, Gaia and the Hot Age

I am reading James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia. I like his phrase the “Hot Age”. It may or may not come but it is more evocative than “global warming”. But that is not really what I want to raise here. His main thesis, that the earth is a living thing, an organism, that has self regulatory systems is not so much a mystical idea and a metaphor, but the basis of ecology, of systems, a science. The failure to see systemically is at the core of so much reductive scientific inability to see clearly. I see it in mental health, but here he puts it all beautifully as it relates to the planet, and science as a whole, the problem is that …

as the consequence of most American scientists, in their straightforward successful and reductionist way, seeing the Earth as something that they could improve or manage; they seemed to see it as no more than a ball of rock moistened by the oceans and sitting within a tenuous sphere of air… They do not yet see the Earth as a live planet that regulates itself.

They tail to see that because the Earth was colonized by life at least three and a half billion years ago, its temperature and surface composition have been set by the preferences of whatever organisms
made up the biosphere. This was true in the cold of the ice ages, it is true now, and will be true in the heat of the hot age soon due. Of course the physics and chemistry of the air are important in the
understanding of climate, but the manager of climates is and has always been Gaia, the Earth system of which the biosphere is a part. The disastrous mistake of twentieth century science was to assume
that all we need to know about the climate can come from modelling the physics and chemistry ofthe air in ever more powerful computers, and then assuming that the biosphere merely responds passively to
change instead of realizing it was in the driving seat. Because we acknowledged the leadership of America in science, most of the world took its mistaken view as true.

Page 14 in the 2009 penguin edition.

It is interesting that he sees computer modeling as a problem as well. It has led to us not trusting scientists. The small bits of data they can “prove” has impact means forfeiting seeing the whole.

He is thinking Earth, Gaia, but I am much more familiar with looking at systems such as groups and the psyche. Being able to see repeating patterns in the various holons is an art that is not easily proved, but the basis for the science from the inside.

September 20, 2009

The Red Book

Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious – NYTimes.com:

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious * Sign in to Recommend * Twitter * Sign In to E-Mail * Print * ShareClose o Linkedin o Digg o Facebook o Mixx o MySpace o Yahoo! Buzz o Permalink o Article Tools Sponsored By By SARA CORBETT Published: September 16, 2009 This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

Category: Psyche

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