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bleue-flora · 4 months

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There has been a lot of discussion regarding c!Quackity, c!Tommy and c!Dream recently, a good portion stemming from the recent video circling around, where it is depicted that c!Tommy not only knew of c!Quackity’s torture but approved.

But while I could write an essay about it (ok yea I did…but) instead I want to shift the focus a bit, away from the same debates we keep having year after year. Because I think we’ve become too focused on the characters themselves over the audience's perception of them and too focused on morality, justification, and right and wrong in a story where everyone is morally questionable. Because at the end of the day it isn’t whether c!Dream or c!Tommy were actually right or justified, it is about - Who you root for and why. It is about (you) the audience's perception of the characters, not the characters’ perceptions of each other. Sure, c!Tommy himself feels justified in hurting c!Dream but do you believe he was.

With that thought in mind I found myself reading a 24 page research paper last night on a psychological study that looked at what an audience defines as the hero and villain. Why they are naturally pulled to like certain characters and hate others. What the audience’s classification of morality in regard to the characters of fiction where the conditions of morality are often not defined. One of the things shown in the data and line up to real life is that at the end of the day, heroes and villains are not defined on true purity and morality itself. If they were, action heroes and anti-heroes wouldn’t be successful and enticing. And yet, anti-heroes are some of the most beloved characters. In fact, I for one am typically drawn to violent anti-heroes, some of which are the heroes despite being perhaps sadistic murderers and torturers. But if the audience doesn’t simply define hero and villain as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ then what is pulling us toward taking one side over the other.

The answer is actually more complex than you might think. According to this paper, the first thing taken into consideration in a viewer’s appeal or unappeal of a character has to do with what the viewer considers “appropriate behavior.” Simply put, “appropriateness” is basically a social judgment which serves to approve or disapprove of a character’s behavior. This can be based on many things, such as cultural norms, societal code of conduct, your personal morals or experiences. And I think this is key, because I for one see stealing and griefing when I play Minecraft as seriously hurtful things to do (even though you can always rebuild). To the point that if you blow up the house I spent hours building or take my items it can ruin the fun for me entirely. So my definition of the appropriateness of such behavior might differ from people who take those things much more light-heartedly, causing me to disapprove of c!Tommy more than they would for that behavior.

Even further, when it comes to determining their appropriateness of behavior as in whether we tend to approve or disapprove of them we can look at moral domains, which spark our moral intuition instead of simply categorizing everything into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ since not even our subconscious brain is always so black and white. In the research I read, they looked at two sets of domains (aka sets of relating attributes used to measure and compare): The person-perception domains of Warmth (tolerant, friendly, warm, polite, gentle, trustworthy), Competence (intelligence, cleverness, opposite of stupidity, efficiency) and Duplicity (mad, tormented, violent, and tragic), which help to measure our perception of morality in characters as well as the five moral domains of MFT - harm/care (concerned with the suffering of others and empathy), fairness/reciprocity (related to justice), authority/respect (related to hierarchy and dominance), ingroup/loyalty (common good and punitiveness toward outsiders), purity/sanctity (concerned with contamination). According to the research behind these domains, we, the viewer, evaluate characters immediately and without cognitive deliberation. In other words, when characters fulfill domains it sticks with us and when they violate domains it can send out major red flags to us as soon as it happens without us thinking about it, not later in more considerate retrospect. So then, it makes sense that now as we debate we struggle to find common ground because our judgment was made ages ago and it's hard to reason with our already defined moral intuition.

As such, since I started getting into the dsmp first by watching all of the recordings of previous streams in order in this one playlist then going onto watching all of the blueberrytv videos (at the time of course), which edit the streams to allow you to see things from multiple perspectives. Therefore, I watched things from the very beginning, back when it was just c!George and c!Dream goofing off and dying in the nether. So, my intuitive judgment of c!Dream involves him building the community house, always trying to keep the peace between his friends, exploring the world so he can bring back all the types for wood for people to build with, building the prime path to connect everyone's houses together to make for easier travel, rebuilding Tubbo’s house after c!Tommy burned it down, helping c!Ponk when people kept burning down his house. These are just some of the moments I suspect helped to form my evaluation of him. Showing him as being very empathetic and caring, being loyal to his friends and accepting of new people, being a mediator and trying to keep things fair between his friends, fulfilling at least 3 (since he kinda is the authority that is hard to classify) of the moral domains. The streams also depicted the characteristics with warmth as well as competence and intelligence. So immediately my perceptive moral intuition deemed him the hero. As he fulfilled the warmth and competence domains of the one method and most of the domains of the other method without violating them in an obvious enough manner for me to remember at this moment (These are by no means the only reasons why I’d be inclined to root for c!Dream but that's beside the point).

On the other hand, my introduction to c!Tommy was him immediately breaking the three rules, by going around taking down donator’s signs, griefing, stealing, claiming things and property as his, trying to kill people until he ends up being banned. So he hurt others and causes harm, he is invited to join and have fun but fails to reciprocate that by going about and messing things up, he immediately disrespects everyone and defies authority by breaking the rules, hard to say on loyalty though (as mentioned above) him burning down c!Tubbo’s, his best friend, house doesn’t give me the impression of loyalty, concerning purity he scams and lies, is obsessed (though hardly the only one) with male genitalia (which I personally find unsavory) and is disrespectful towards women so definitely failing in the purity and sanctity domain as well. In regards to warmth, I wouldn’t say so, nor particularly competent, though certainly meeting the more violent and aggressive elements of duplicity. So in other words, in just his first few streams he has violated every moral domain, while also not meeting the warmth or competence but meeting duplicity. So immediately my impression of him is to dislike and disprove as my moral intuition labels him as a villain.

In other words, perhaps our affinity for characters and perception of their morality has less to do with actual legal or other measurements of morality but more of what our initial impression was that formed our judgment from the very start. Because at the end of the day, I feel like the discussion needs to be less about whether this character or that character is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because their motivation or trauma justifies their behavior and more about what qualities do you appreciate about the character. At the end of the day, it's fiction and you should be able to love or hate whatever character you want regardless of morality or right & wrong. It’s your opinion and I don’t see other fandoms shaming and bashing other people for liking a certain character that others dislike and/or the protagonist dislikes meaning therefore they are bad so how can you like them. But in the same way, I should also be able to hate a character without being bashed for not being empathetic to their trauma… Anyways I think the idea that we all see characters as justified and innocent in our own way is cool, especially in respect to the dsmp which is told from all angles, and that’s what I set out to learn more about and share with you. Hopefully, you have enjoyed my findings and I made sense (…..and if it didn’t, you are always welcome to ask or add on :D), sorry for the length I’m beginning to realize conciseness is not my strong suit…

I hope with this interesting angle, we can lean away from discussions on legal, moral, crime, trauma and more towards questions of preference and characteristics and personal perception - Why do you root for them? What was your introduction to the characters? How do you think that impacted your viewpoint on the story? Has your viewpoint ever changed? What do you think helped define your definition of ‘appropriateness’?… etc <3 <3

#dsmp analysis #don’t mind be doing research as a hobby lol… psychology is fascinating… apparently there is a different research paper about villians #which derived the warmth competence and duplicity domains… so I may need to read that ;)……#at somepoint I want to go through every dsmp character and define them as character types -villain hero anti-hero anti-villain…etc #I think it’d be interesting to see where the actual pieces fall based on traits versus just people declaring it doe themselves XD #c!dream #dsmp #dreblr #dream smp #dsmp dream #did someone order an essay?#nope?….oops lol XD #c!dream and c!tommy #c!tommy #dsmpblr #character analysis #(shhh… but if you want me to release the essay I wrote on c!Tommy then ya know…… I will….. >;]#this is fine

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we-are-the-memers-mr · 4 months

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the-sun-is-also-a-star · 9 months

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best part about being good at literature and psychology is that I can literally interpret my own dreams lmao

#I had a dream where i was a mermaid #but like a really scary mermaid that was captured #and experimented on and also put on show #but literally the night before this dream I had been complaining because I was sick of my school using me to make themselves look good #in front of the department of education #I even used the term “fucking show pony”#can you see what I'm getting at?#lmao #dreams #english literature #analysis #psychology #the psychology of dreams #english

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nyxshadowhawk · 8 months

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The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part One

This is going to be a long series of posts in which I interpret Carl Jung's Red Book! Jung has been a cornerstone of my mystical practice for basically as long as I've been practicing, and a major inspiration for my creative work, so imagine my surprise when I learned that Jung had his own grimoire of mystical experiences! This is maybe the most important book I've ever read.

Introduction

I owe a lot to Carl Jung. I read one page about him in a book about symbols that I received when I was about twelve, and something just clicked. In particular, the idea of the Shadow Complex really stuck with me, and has absolutely defined the last decade of my life in terms of my personal spirituality, my approach to interpreting media, and my creative writing. It’s kind of hard to overstate the impact that Jung has had on me, but despite that, I haven’t actually read that much Jung. You all know how much I care about primary sources, so I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was using Jung’s ideas as the basis of my own work without being intimately familiar with his.

I’ve made some missteps. I originally really loved the idea of interpreting gods as archetypes, and claiming that all of humanity worshipped the same gods under different names. I saw that as a beautiful uniting feature of humankind. But the concept did not hold up under scrutiny, for a long list of reasons; the short version is that I was ignoring nuances that distinguished gods from each other, dismissing some of their defining qualities as cultural quirks, as if entire human cultures were “hats” that gods put on and not the thing that makes them what they are. I didn’t start having real relationships with gods until after I started viewing them as individuals, rather than archetypes. And then there’s Joseph Campbell, and his whole “Hero’s Journey” idea, which seemed extremely profound until I actually read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and realized how flawed the Hero’s Journey framework really is. (Spencer McDaniel has a great article about that over on her site, so I recommend you check that out.) So, that was all another strike against Jungian ideas. The third strike is that people like Jordan Peterson use his ideas a lot. That in particular has made me afraid that I’ve been misinterpreting Jung this whole time.

There’s also the fact that Jung’s ideas are difficult to understand and apply, and frequently misunderstood. Clinical psychology has mostly disregarded Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes as more mystical than empirical, despite Jung’s efforts to prove his ideas empirically. Fans of Jung will sometimes downplay his mystical leanings to try to lend more scientific credibility to his ideas. But to me, Jung’s mysticism is a feature, not a bug. Turns out, Jung was a mystic. Jung had mystical visions and prophetic dreams since he was a young child, and his entire brand of psychoanalysis was developed specifically to explain said mystical experiences (which honestly explains a lot). Not only was Jung a mystic, he was basically the William Blake of his day! He chronicled his mystical experiences in what is basically a personal grimoire, written in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript, with stunning illustrations.

It’s called The Red Book, or Liber Novus, and it was published in 2009 (translated by Sonu Shamdasani). I got the really expensive version that’s about two feet tall and contains a facsimile of the actual illuminated manuscript. To call it an eye-opener would be an understatement. Reading it is infinitely more valuable to my spirituality and my writing than reading any of Jung’s psychological essays. The Red Book is the real source of most of Jung’s ideas and theories, and the purely mystical nature of them explains why the concepts themselves resonate much more for me than the psychoanalytic application of them does. Reading it is immensely validating, because it proves that I was right all along! Not only were my interpretations of Jung’s ideas spot-on, but my UPG aligns with his — though some of that alignment is undoubtedly a result of his influence on me, I’ve also come to many of the same conclusions entirely on my own.

I hope that the field of modern psychology will eventually do mysticism its due diligence using modern methodology, but until then, Jung’s attempt to ground all of this weirdness in psychology is the best we’ve got. I’m no psychoanalyst, so I’ll interpret Jung as a fellow mystic, because that is what I am most familiar with. I can compare his own experiences against my own, and hopefully get something valuable from my interpretation of them.

Disclaimer: These are mostly my notes and impressions; I’m not responding line-by-line (because that would take forever), I’m responding to what stood out to me. This is my interpretation of The Red Book based on my own mystical experiences and mystical knowledge, not based on Jung’s other writings. I’m using Jung’s name as shorthand for “the person writing this” or “the dreamer” — I don’t mean to suggest that what Jung expresses here is indicative of his personal spiritual beliefs. I know he had a complicated relationship with mysticism, science, and religion, so I won’t even touch that here. I’m going to be looking at this from a strictly mystical angle, and everything that follows is subjective.

The Way of What Is to Come

Jung began by introducing two spirits. One is “the spirit of this time,” a literal translation of zeitgeist (Jung’s manuscript is in German), which represents the conscious mind and conventional thought. It’s a reference to Goethe’s Faust: “What you the Spirit of the Ages call / Is nothing but the spirit of you all, / Wherein the Ages are reflected.” It’s called “the spirit of this time” because the times that we live in influence what and how we think, and form the foundation of our conscious faculties. I might define the Zeitgeist as the set of assumptions we make that defines our base-level interpretation of the world around us. So, when I complain about “latent Christianity,” I’m calling attention to the Zeitgeist. To put it in my own mystical terms, the Zeitgeist is the part of you that thinks like a human, instead of thinking like a god.

The opposite of the Zeitgeist is what Jung calls “the spirit of the depths,” which represents the unconscious mind. The Spirit of the Depths is both a personification of and Jung’s guide to the unconscious. It is something like a collective Shadow combined with a chthonic god, that encompasses all of the hidden and buried parts of humanity (or at least of Jung) that can be accessed through dreams and mystical visions. It operates independently from the Zeitgeist, and therefore can introduce Jung to secret information and concepts that fall outside of the Zeitgeist’s purview. A lot of what it tells Jung is harsh, but he understands that it’s necessary to listen to the Spirit of the Depths and internalize what it tells him.

Only a page in, and we’ve already got a mention of the Shadow concept. Since everything has a Shadow, God also has a Shadow. Jung defines God as “supreme meaning,” so God’s Shadow is lack of meaning — nonsense, void. The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung to notice the small things in life, which is pretty banal spiritual wisdom for most of us nowadays, but it’s very hard for Jung to accept. He writes, “It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting.” Everything has their own thing that they’re working through — I have to work through issues related to power and sexuality, and what Jung has to work through is issues relating to meaning vs. meaninglessness, greatness vs. mediocrity, sensibility/respectability vs. foolishness. The Zeitgeist of early-twentieth-century Germany insists that only great deeds, great men, and great ideas are the ones that matter. Jung was taught to think that things must be “glorious” and “heroic,” larger than life, for them to matter. The Zeitgeist encourages Jung to dismiss the little things as part of God’s shadow. The Spirit of the Depths informs him that the small things are still part of God and not God’s Shadow because they are not nonsense. The mundane is still divine, because it is not nonsense.

The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung, “all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away lie in you.” It’s a big deal to be one of the people of this time who can experience the Mystery the way the ancients did, or near enough. Actually, wait — Jung isn’t quite a person of this time. There’s a solid century between Jung and me, which is enough time for the Zeitgeist to have changed considerably, but not that much time. He’s essentially my immediate ancestor, the most recent entry in my mystical tradition. It is absolutely wild to be reading the Mystery filtered through a specific, named person who lived only a century ago, as opposed to ancient mystics of Antiquity who didn’t write everything down so I have to blindly guess at what they might have experienced or how they might have interpreted it. But there’s enough time in there that I keep wondering, am I in the time that is to come? Is Jung receiving this information so that I can be primed to receive it?

Jung says, “It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.” Yeeeeah! We’ll get back to divine madness, but I love that it’s being brought up this early. However, it’s a lot harder for Jung than it is for me to admit that these words or visions might come from a place of madness, because Jung is a person who really likes for things to make sense. On that note:

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning [God] by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

Hmm, this doesn’t sound like any god I know at all… I love that phrase “a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.” That’s Dionysian worship in a nutshell, right there.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

That checks. Mystical experiences often come as floods of insights and images, but few words, I think because words are literally processed differently by the brain (don’t quote me on that). Putting it into words literally requires a translation, and it can be very difficult to find the right words to do it justice or record every aspect of it. I’m also reading an English translation of Jung’s German, so that’s another degree of separation, but two degrees of separation is relatively little.

Jung has a vision of a sea of blood blanketing Europe, which is obviously a premonition of WWI. He also dreams that he returns to his homeland (Switzerland) from a “remote English land,” to find it covered in frost in summer; he makes wine from iced grapes, which he shares. The first part of this is a premonition — he was in Scotland when WWI broke out, and hurried home. As for the second part, “…I found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.” Not sure exactly how to interpret this, but it’s a striking image, especially to a Dionysian like me.

Reassuringly, Jung insists that he is relaying his own experiences, not mine or anyone else’s:

It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws, Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.

Thank the gods for this! It’s too common for mystics to assume that their own personal revelations apply to everyone else, because mystical experiences really do make you feel like you have all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Hearing straight from Jung himself that he is only speaking for himself, and that what he says here need not apply to me or anyone else, ironically makes his words more validating. Also, my biggest criticism of Jungian psychoanalysis is that it seems to apply the same symbols universally (the gender essentialism in the anima/animus concept comes to mind), so I assumed that Jung was extrapolating from his own mystical experiences. It seems as though he actually had the wisdom to admit that these symbols apply only to himself.

Refinding the Soul

Jung feels distanced from his soul, because surprise surprise, 20th century patriarchy is spiritually bankrupt. At the time he had the bloody-flood vision, Jung was forty years old and had accomplished everything that patriarchy says you should want in life — he had honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and happiness. He succeeded. He won the game of life. All he was left with was abject horror and the question of what to do with himself, a midlife crisis. (From a quotation in the footnotes, Jung defines the midlife crisis at the moment at which the Shadow first asserts itself: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of going down to death.” Buddy, I’ve gotten way past that and I’m not even twenty-five!)

Jung thus came to the realization that he had dedicated his life to the wrong things:

I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off, and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.

“A dead system” is a great way of putting it. It reminds me of the Fight-Club-esque dissatisfaction of having ticked all the boxes within the system and done everything you’re supposed to, and receiving absolutely no real fulfillment from it. (I bet Fight Club also owes a lot to this.) It also reminds me of my new favorite Terry Pratchett quote, from Small Gods, “People start off believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.” A structure by itself is completely hollow — what’s scaffolding for if it doesn’t support anything? I also like that second line. You exist through your soul, by means of your soul, and not the other way around… That suggests that it’s more real than you are.

Jung explains to the reader that if you seek external things – money, success, validation from other people — then you will not find your soul, and will enter midlife crisis. The soul is only found internally. So go inward, and do the work. Pretty self-explanatory at this point, but must have been earth-shattering back then because he spends a lot of time justifying it. It’s the Spirit of the Depths who tells Jung to look internally and reconnect with his soul:

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

I think it’s interesting that Jung uses feminine pronouns for his soul. That makes sense, since I use masculine pronouns for mine. I’m not sure how this relates to the anima/animus concept, whether it’s the same thing or a slightly different thing. It’s probably the same idea, because “anima” is the Latin word for “soul.” I checked, and Jung uses “seele” and not “anima,” possibly because he hadn’t developed the concept yet.

I interpret Astor as my Shadow and associate him with my repressed personality traits, but Jung would say that he was my animus, because I’m a woman and Astor is the man that exists in my mind. Jung conceived of the Shadow and anima/animus as separate figures — the repressed aspects of the personality and repressed femininity/masculinity, respectively — that need to be integrated separately. For me, they’re the same figure. The anima/animus is one of the concepts that I think hasn’t aged well, not because the concept is inherently bad (internal repressed qualities that one associates with the opposite sex) but because the way it’s presented and describes falls along strictly gender-essentialist lines. This is especially because the anima/animus is less personal and less “universal” than the Shadow, which inevitably means projecting Western gender norms (such as “women are more emotional and men are more logical,” which Jung expressed as Eros and Logos) onto everyone in the world and calling it an inherent psychological feature of humankind.

I think it’s is one of those concepts that was progressive for its time but regressive now with our more nuanced interpretation of gender. For example, the anima appears in men’s minds as a sex symbol, but the animus apparently does not appear as a similar sex symbol in women’s minds: In Man and His Symbols, Marie Louise von Franz says “…the animus does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood [as the anima does for men]; it is more apt to take the form of a hidden “sacred” conviction.” Yeah, that’s bullshit. I’m willing to bet anything that this interpretation is the result of women being sexual objects from men’s perspectives (as the “anima”) but denied any access to or expression of sexuality within their own minds. Women aren’t culturally allowed to desire men, so the animus is the unsexed voice of her father giving her very judgemental advice and rigid solutions, instead of a seductive incubus. That doesn’t check. Astor is basically a sexual fantasy with a mind of his own, and if Lestat, Rhysand, Edward Cullen, and Azhrarn exist, I’m clearly not the only woman who has a relationship with this specific archetypal lover.

Actually, I also have the “nightmare woman,” a separate entity from Astor that is a textbook example of what Jung would call a “negative anima”… if I were a man. Maybe having an opposite-sex Shadow and same-sex anima/animus is another sign of my gender identity being a bit screwy. Or maybe the reason why Jung’s soul is female is because his gender identity isn’t that straightforward, either. Either way, I think the anima/animus concept needs to be redefined to make it less cishet. It’s not universally applicable to say that your Shadow must be the same sex as you or that you have repressed femininity/masculinity. That was probably true back in the early twentieth century when anyone would repress any inclination towards cross-gender expression for fear of social disembowelment, but now? “Hey, turns out men/women have feminine/masculine traits, too” is not an archetype.

I digress. Back to The Red Book.

I came upon an interesting revelation while reading this section — if Jung’s soul is feminine and he has to “refind” her, then that’s why the hero of every fairy tale gets his princess at the end of the story. The princess is his soul, which he is given a right to by having completed the self-actualization process through the events of the story. The “half a kingdom” part of the Standard Hero Reward could represent control over part of the unconscious mind. I got a prince and half a kingdom from this process (maybe it’ll be a whole kingdom if I ever finish a version of the map that I’m happy with). It’ll quickly become apparent that this whole book chronicles Jung’s own Hero’s Journey. That means… in a manner of speaking… the the Hero’s Journey isn’t based on Jung’s ideas – Jung’s ideas are based on the Hero’s Journey. Because the Hero’s Journey is the ancient mystical process of self-actualization.

[Edit: I was getting ahead of myself here. Pretty much all of this will be addressed later when we get to Liber Secundus.

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul his poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. […] My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

I interpret this as meaning that in order to “possess” the world in full, to have our princess and half-a-kingdom, you have to have both the internal and external aspects of it. To put it in alchemical terms, unite the fixed and volatile. (Unification of opposites is going to be a big theme throughout this book.) If you don’t “nourish the soul,” then it festers like a wound and you start projecting unaddressed Shadow aspects on the external world. (We’ll get back to that, too.) Without your Shadow or your unconscious mind, you’re half gone.

#the red book #carl jung #the red book jung #symbolism #mysticism #mystical #mystical art #illuminated manuscript #dreams #jungian psychology #jungian archetypes #occult #occultism #analysis #long post #shadow work #liber novus

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tmarshconnors · 10 months

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"Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is."

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology.

Born: 26 July 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland

Died: 6 June 1961, Küsnacht, Switzerland

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therhetoricofmagic · 7 months

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The Dream Temple of Asclepius: A Portal to Healing Through Dreams

In the ancient world, dreams were not merely fleeting nocturnal experiences but were considered profound sources of wisdom and guidance. People believed that their dreams held the key to understanding their deepest desires, as well as a means of connecting with the power of the divine. Dream incubation was a revered and ritualistic practice that held a central place in the cultures of many…

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#abaton #asclepius #dream analysis #dream incubation #dream interpretation #dream tending #dreams #healing #jungian psychology #ophiuchus #psychology #serpent bearer #spirituality #subconscious #transformation

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candycoatedghoul · 1 year

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itll never not be hilarious to me that freud ‘discovered’ oedipus through his self-analysis . its so transparent . like dude , we get it . please stop .

man saw oedipus and was really like thats me for real

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sherkirti · 1 year

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Hi 😊 I saw that u were doing dream interpretations, so could u interpret one of mines as well. This was a recurring dream of mine during my childhood but as I grew older it stopped..

It was abt dreaming abt seeing a purple moon and everything around me seemed purple from the reflection of the moon.. also a specific place I would see the moon from (in my dream) was between the leaves of a tree in my frontyard.It wasn't an exact copy of the tree but seemed somewhat similar and whenever I dreamt abt things that I see in my daily life (my house, garden etc.) it would seem a bit warped so maybe that was it. So could u pls tell me something abt recurrently seeing the purple moon dream during my childhood?

Hoping that I could explain the dream and made some sense 😅

Thank u! ✨

Reoccurring dreams according to Jung, represents a point of fixation in the unconscious mind that needs to be integrated, like a life lesson, a crutch, a wound, some part of us looking to be acknowledged and worked through. Purple/moon represent the feminine, also what's hidden. Purple is also connected to higher frequencies, the third eye/crown, insight, which is the inner sight, inner knowing, a calm assurance—intuition. Your environment is permeated with this color—lens of perception, a filter or sorts which you see your landscape. Seeing the moon through a tree—tree represents your "roots," and you mentioned home. It's connected to ancestors as well, it's where you come from, where you've grown from, and that which has come before you. It's natural for thing to seem slightly different or warped but familiar. Sometimes you could have a feeling of where you are or know that it's that specific location without actually seeing it as it is in real life. Because the dream realm is unconscious and not bound my time and structure, noticing your emotions through the motions are important. The experience itself is what you want to tap into, more than the symbols itself. The symbols are good context, though and you have some beautiful imagery in your dream! I encourage you to explore what else purple is connected to for you personally, and to see what else it represents. Purple is connected to royalty, higher wisdom, and insight. It's a calm color. When you think of royalty, they are intended to be the bridge between heaven and earth. The point of connection to spirit often comes through (insight) the crown of the head (crown chakra).

The moon is the light of the unconscious. It represents your emotions, the way you move with your emotions, how you project them. It's a receptive, feminine symbol. Themes of home, roots, emotions etc. could relate to the mother and family. A light that you carry from your lineage, possibly psychic abilities.

#dream interpretation #dream interpreters #dream journal #dream analysis #jungian psychology #jung #symbolism #symbols #meaning #spiritualjourney #psychic #purple #moon #home #cancer #ancestors #magha #roots #tree

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psychewritesbs · 1 year

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dream analysis

Other than journaling, whenever you are experiencing psychoemotional turmoil in your #life, another #thing that can help you navigate your "problems” is keeping a dream journal and asking for dream advice before going to sleep.

Dreams speak the language of the unconscious. They’re like the mental gymnastics I write--non-sensical symbol analyses that reflect a deeper truth than what is seen on the surface.

Dreams are like messages in a bottle from your Self. When you work with your dreams more consciously, you can unpack these messages and enlarge your ego sense of self’s perspective on the issues that plague your mind.

According to Jungian theory, the Self is the unifying principle of the psyche. It directs all of your psychological growth and interfaces with reality from a higher and more holistic perspective than the ego mind or sense of self. This is why dreams often have important advice about the problems and struggles in your life--the Self is trying to help your ego, which is bound by its own logic and reason, to step outside its self-imposed limitations god I love Jujutsu Kaisen.

Also, there is a difference between the Self and the ego sense of self. The ego self thinks it is reality but isn’t, while the Self is reality itself and knows that it is not reality itself. This is the paradox of the 10,000 #things of the Tao.

1 + 1 = 3

So when you dream, what you are seeing is a mirror of your psychology. If you watch/read Jujutsu Kaisen, you can think of a dream as a Domain Expansion that is superimposed upon (an alternate) reality itself.

How I analyze my dreams under the cut.

1. I always like to date my dreams and give them a title that summarizes the dream in a few words.

This does a couple of things.

First, it allows you to see patterns in your psychology over a period of time. Doing this has also allowed me to notice that my dreams typically come in pairs or usually within a day or a couple of days.

Second, by naming your dreams, it allows you to distill themes from the dream into a single sentence.

Third, it conjures images from the dream you had without having to open the actual document.

Finally, it gives you a holistic look at the themes in your dreams and how they play out.

i.e.; for those who read my Jujutsu Kaisen mental gymnastics, the fact that Megumi has become a personal symbol of my own psyche is something I write about a lot.

You will notice that I titled the dream I had on 3/13/23 “the bath” because I had this dream around the time Jujutsu Kaisen’s chapter titled “the bath” came out.

In this particular dream I was in the middle of a swamp and I knew that the water was so polluted and murky that nothing could grow in it.

Water is a symbol for our emotions and emotional self, so the symbol felt very significant, not just because I encountered another soul in my dream a few days later, or because of Sukuna’s bath in JJK, but because one of the very first dreams I had in 2023 had to do with clear water. Not to mention the dream from 2/22 (right before my birthday no less) had a Satanic insignia in it (relevant to Sukuna).

Take away: this step is all about finding patterns.

2. write the dream down!

I don’t always remember my dreams, but when I do, as you can see, I make it a point to write them down. The way I see it, if I remember a dream it’s because the message within is important and is asking for attention.

So even if a dream doesn’t make sense, even if a dream feels like a figment of a memory, I write something, ANYTHING down...

i.e.; a couple of years ago I happened to have a very specific experience in waking life. For some reason that day I felt the urge to read through some dreams from the previous year. Lo and behold, as I am reading through the dreams I was basically reading a play by play of the experience I had in waking life. Premonition dreams are nothing new to me, but this was the first time I had a premonition one year out (that I know of).

Take away: Don’t discount your dreams however non-sensical they might seem! Write them down! I use Google Drive because it’s a lot faster to type the dreams than it is to write them by hand.

3. Find the relevant symbols and analyze them in relation to the context of your waking life

In last night’s dream, the most relevant symbols are my car’s brakes not working, moving backwards because of the downward slope, going in circles, and the unfamiliar neighborhood.

There’s more to this dream, but so far this is the only bit that I can understand with my conscious mind.

Upon first impression, this dream told me that I am regressing. The car itself is a symbol of movement, and the fact that it kept going backwards and that I kept moving in circles to stop it from crashing felt highly relevant because I have been struggling a lot in my life in regards to my career choices.

The fact that the brakes weren’t working and that is why I couldn’t stop the car from moving backwards was also an interesting and very prominent symbol. Since I didn’t know what to make of it, I decided to look at a dream dictionary.

Now, a word of caution about dream dictionaries. The meaning of symbols is both a highly personal experience, AND a collective experience. So always take symbol definitions with a grain of salt. Listen to your intuition for what resonates with you as you read symbol interpretations.

A spider does not mean the same thing for someone who is terrified of spiders to someone who is fascinated by them.

So after reading several interpretations about a car’s brakes not working, the interpretation that I came to was that I am not taking enough risks in my life. This actually reminded me of a dream I had only 5 days ago in which I realize that I am not living up to my full potential.

But back to today’s dream. The downhill slope felt like a symbol for the flow of life and energy moving in a specific direction, and the fact that I kept trying to apply the brakes tells me that I am trying to stop the inevitable flow of life and that in doing so I am simply moving in circles and delaying the inevitable.

Since the dream setting is an unfamiliar neighborhood, this tells me that the context of my situation is unfamiliar af. In my waking life I have no mentors or anyone telling me what to do or what to think. I am merely blindfolded and flying by the seat of my pants.

Even my dad showing up in my dream and mixing up the cables is a sign that I can’t follow his authority and that I should develop and follow my own inner-authority.

This inner authority showed herself to me as a character in the second half of the dream (not shared above)--an accomplished musician woman. I’ll write about active imagination another time.

4. What are you going to do about it?

The next thing to consider is how I will take action in my waking life.

For my own context, I know that I have passed on a lot of opportunities because of my fear of failure. If I think of this in relation to the dream titled “bath”, it makes me wonder how, as an emotion, fear is not conducive to growth.

This tells me I have to be more mindful of when I am holding myself back from jumping on opportunities because I make decisions from a place of fear.

Ok that’s that.

Thanks for reading if anyone made it this far!

#I wanted to be a depth psych author right?#so here you go #depth psychology #dream interpretation #dream analysis

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