qolelis on 29/10/2016 at 22:49

---

No, but I've heard about it before (as well as reading about the black books). I got curious, but it is pretty expensive, so now is not the time. My main interest right now is the collective unconscious and the archetypes (I'm reading Volume Nine - part 1, in his "collected works", The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (translated to English)). I'm also interested in dreams in general, which reading Jung is a part of.

What do you think about the Red Book? On which level is it to be understood? Would you recommend reading it?

qolelis on 30/10/2016 at 09:44

---

I know I'm not bringing anything new to the table here; it's just a personal reflection:
I woke up this morning with a thought in my head that I might understand why Jung is venturing into mysticism. I'm still processing this new thought, though; it's slightly more emotional than intellectual at the moment, so this is going to be a bit of a mess, but with the subconscious and the psyche being so intangible (and hard to measure), and the act of dreaming being seen as one of the more important doorways into the collective unconscious (if we take that as a basis for what Jung is teaching), with all its symbols and archetypes (built on a shared set of mythological symbols as it is(?)), and the also often intangible nature of dreams, the option of "resorting" to mysticism seems less far-fetched. I don't know if it's the right thing to do -- or the only thing -- but I think I'm getting a better grasp of how Jung means for it all to connect (and by saying that I probably prove that I don't understand anything at all :/ ).

I think the main problem with (one school of) dream analysis is its attempts at providing a universal set of rules, and even if the concept of the collective unconscious is seen as correct (it might or might not), we still have the individual unconscious acting as a filter on some level above, so a dream is nothing without its dreamer. I'm not saying that he does, but maybe Jung is putting too much emphasis on the collective (rather than the individual) unconscious? That is kind of the feeling I get when reading his dream analyses -- even if he does mention personal experiences too, but only to a small(er) degree.

I actually had a very significant dream, early this morning, about getting a tattoo, with a motif I had neither seen nor chosen myself, and when I woke up I instantly knew what it was about (it was not at all about tattoos (I don't even have any tattoos)). What would happen if we took this dream completely out of its individual context and applied only the rules of the collective unconscious when analysing it? What would happen if we completely ignored the collective unconscious (generally speaking)?

The other main problem I'm having with dream analysis is that maybe not all dreams mean anything at all, maybe they are just a random mess. What happens then if we force an explanation? Can the way we interprete something (by passing it through our individual filter) be important in itself (even if what we are intepreting is random)? Some dreams do mean something, but is that because of the collective unconscious or the individual unconscious? I want to see the former as a suggestion, and the latter as the judge of that suggestion. I realize now that I might be focusing too much on Jung's dream analysis, but it seems like it was an important part of his work.

It would also be very interesting to know what today's research is saying about Jung's theories: Do they still hold and what could replace those that don't?



It is indeed a joy to read, even if it is a slow process. Now and again I read more popularly written summaries to help me better understand the original text. I haven't read anything lately, though, but I feel like I'm getting ready for it again soon.



Aah, yes, that is a more reasonable price, although I don't think I'm all that into mysticism at the moment. I might give it a try, though.

qolelis on 31/10/2016 at 15:33

---

As far as I know -- and I'm not the teacher here, just a mere student -- Jung studied myths from all over the world, thought up by people with no contact whatsoever with each other, and he noticed many similiarites in these myths (maybe in the same way that new trends can sometimes appear at many places at once, without any clear place of origin, to give a more contemporary example), so he wondered how that could be. He then constructed the concept of the collective unconscious out of the similarities that he had found, and meant that they could be explained by saying that there is something on the most basic, deepest level in us that is shared by each and every human being. So, according to Jung, we have both an individual self and a universal self, shared by everyone and uniting us as a species.

Even if Jung might talk about the collective unconscious as a place or a state of mind, that's just the poet in him speaking; I don't at all think that he meant it as such. As a base for fiction, on the other hand, it could be considered as something that can be entered or to which we could connect in some way, and that is also where my interests mainly lie, as I think the whole concept lends itself very well to fiction -- but, at the same time, there can be no smoke without a fire, and the fire is almost as intriguing as the smoke (or at least it's slowly getting there the more I think about it).

Jung does also get into the act of dreaming, which I think he meant as a way of tapping into the collective unconscious (which sounds reasonable if we accept the idea of a dream as a state of mind where all locally cultural inhibitions subside, although I cannot say if this state of mind would turn us into universal human beings (as suggested by Jung) -- on the purest level -- or just a truer version of ourselves, with individual differences intact -- or both), which is why he considered it to be so important when talking about the possible meanings of a dream, but this might be when the mystic in him takes over, and he kind of loses me. The act of dreaming is also something that lends itself very well to fiction -- as well as many of the dreams themselves.

Jung didn't say that dreams are caused by or have their origin in the collective unconscious, but rather that they (can) act as a doorway, or maybe rather a window, into it -- at least for human beings, whose psyche is what he studied. For fictional purposes, maybe animals could also be a part of the collective unconscious -- maybe everything is, just on different levels perhaps. Again, the whole concept of the collective unconscious lends itself very well to fiction, but, as you said, it's very hard to prove or disprove any of it, so it also lends itself a lot to guessing, making it hard to study as a subject of science -- no matter how educated our guesses are.

I personally tend towards dreams being just, as you said, subsymbolic (as I understand the term), i.e. caused by external or internal stimuli (as from our senses or inner physiological processes), but the way that these stimuli are turned into images (why these particular images?), when we dream, might suggest something else being at play, for example selfawareness on some deeper level (be it individual, primitive, or even universal (as the jungians might say)). I do think meaning, on a psychological level (i.e. teaching us something about ourselves), can be drawn from dreams, like meaning can be drawn from blots of ink, through association; sometimes it's easy to see a meaning in the ink, while it at other times is not. In the former case: fine, maybe we can use it to better ourselves or our situation in the world around us -- or maybe not. In the latter case: okay, we should probably not force upon it a meaning and instead simply forget about it and move on. I don't think there is a universal language for dreams, just as there is none for inkblots; any meaning to be drawn from it is all on the individual level.

Starker on 20/11/2016 at 18:46

---

Can't go wrong with Neuromancer. And if you like it, the whole Sprawl trilogy.

Sulphur on 24/8/2017 at 13:34

---

Right. I wrapped up Murakami's 1Q84. Can't say I enjoyed my time with it; for all the magical realism that it could evoke, it's still a glacially paced non-adventure full of wordy meanderings leading from a terminal lack of focus. Philosophically, it's about motherhood along with the act of writing being an act of creation. Stylistically, it's a ponderous shaggy-dog yarn. Thematically, it's a romance story held at gunpoint by its POV abstractions. I also couldn't escape the feeling that any poetic sensibilities in the text were probably obfuscated by the translation: maybe it reads beautifully in Japanese, but in English it's plainly described mundanities existing side-by-side with the fantastical, which through some sort of linguistic osmosis renders all of it pretty unspecial.

Anyway. On to the next thing.