[trowUrillioth]

Thanks to Ishtar, who is at recess, for linking me up with the following Dream Gates article about Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. The man's writings on dream interpretation was guidance to me in my early youth at a time and place far, far away.


CG Jung trimming roses with a machete

If you want to know what a true shaman of the West would be like, consider Carl Jung, as he is now revealed in his Red Book. He culled the material for the Red Book - whose fine calligraphy and vivid illustrations and decorative features make it resemble a medieval illuminated manuscript - from the journals and 'black books" he kept during the years of his "confrontation with the unconscious", when he walked the razor's edge between madness and genius. As he describes it, the "spirit of the depths" ripped him out of the comfortable, rational assumptions of the "spirit of our times" and dragged him, night after night, through the terrifying stages of Underworld initiation. The article is here. Enjoy.

[Noxassope]

"I am not a mystic, I am an empiricist!"

Ha! Wasn't he always saying that? And couldn't we all see right through him? Carl Jung was my mentor from the moment I discovered him at age 15 (of course he had been dead for several decades by then). I remember riding home from the library with Memories, Dreams, Reflections in my lap and getting all teary-eyed looking at his weathered, wrinkly face on the cover. I knew I was onto something, and boy, was I ever right!

Finding him at that age happened after I had prayed at/to an ancient maple tree, asking that my life become a quest for wisdom. That was followed by what Jung would call a "big dream", and my effort to make sense of the dream led me, naturally, straight to him.

Just this summer I donated all of my Jung books to the local library, except for his autobiography. Now your post has me regretting that a bit.