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Death as Life, Fear as Wholemaking

by Ryan on September 5, 2011

There are two sides to what is commonly known as life and the other side is death. As you likely well know, we spend half of our lives as organisms that can replenish as much if not more cells than are destroyed on a daily basis during rest; we spend the remaining half of life unable to regenerate what is lost during the time we are awake and active—the results is a state of dying or degeneration. One side elicits thoughts of happiness and joy while the other feelings of anguish and despair. At first glances, after what might be an unhealthy amount of distance, fear about one’s mortality is natural. Like many things, however, honoring the resistance and slowly coming to a consistent, steady practice of acknowledging what has until now been repressed, unconscious and/or dissociated can be a place of healing and wholeness.

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The Transformation of Desirousness

July 7, 2011
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I came across this passage in Seminar on Visions by CG Jung while reading Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy: In this transformation it is essential to take objects away from those animus or anima devils. They only become concerned with objects when you allow yourself to be self-indulgent. Concupiscentia is [...]

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Observing Resistance, Honoring Resistance

June 2, 2011
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I just watched my daughter resist her nap as she twisted, writhed and moaned into an eventual state of slumber. This was perhaps the most startling occasion for me; I gazed sympathetically at her remembering my own experience as a child thinking, “I once rubbed my eyes, yawned and lamented being awake and yet I [...]

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Know Your Hunger

May 31, 2011
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We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot [...]

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Becoming Obsolete: an Abstraction, a Concretization

May 19, 2011
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This image, this symbol, struck me as I walked past it yesterday. Dozens of times have I walked near it, in front of it, beside it…only to keep on going paying it little mind. This time there was a feeling that enveloped me and so I gave it my inner ear. Kindly enough this symbol [...]

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The Hero’s Journey

August 1, 2010
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Joseph Campbell asserted that every person has major events, as many as 17, included in the hero’s journey. I figure if David defeated the giant Goliath with a small rock, Jonah spent 3 days in the belly of a whale, Heracles had 9 labors  and Osiris was torn into 14 pieces then the journey is as mysterious [...]

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If a Prophet Made a Sound and No One Was Around…

April 23, 2010
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Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. Proverbs 29:18 The starry sky above and the moral law within. -Immanuel Kant The P word  is not just a bad word–it is worse–it is an anathema to contemporary, western culture. Yet, despite the rich, scientific bent of [...]

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Immersion

March 7, 2010
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After a spate of experiences, both awake and sleeping, in which water featured prevalently I find myself mystified. I consider the ramifications, the permutations, efficaciousness, the utility and, most of all, the power. What can hold its grip after being submerged under water for a lengthy amount of time?  This seemed to have far reaching considerations [...]

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Peter Gabriel & CG Jung

December 8, 2009
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Recently I have become consumed by the suspicion that Mr. Gabriel was heavily influenced by Jung. This is the result of spending the past several months with Peter Gabriel’s Us album on my iPod as if it were playing in repeat mode. There are four songs that particularly stand out for Jungian terminology and the [...]

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