Jung and Ghosts.

This quote (in Lament of the Dead) by Sonu Shamdasani made me sit up and re-read 6 times: "It is the ancestors" that Jung is writing about in the Red Book." This is no mere metaphor. This is no cipher for the unconscious or something like that. When he talks about the dead he means the dead. And they're present in images. They still live on". (Shamdasani). Come what now??? Yet over and over again in his career Jung would insist that the psyche couldn't make declarations like that. It could neither affirm nor deny such statements. Even in Aniela Jaffe's "Death Dreams and Ghosts" he writes approvingly in the foreword that "anyone who expects an answer of parapsychological truth will be disappointed". He also of course, discredited his own relative (Helene) on her claimed medium abilities. Yet on the other hand (in MDR) he didn't seem to mind claiming to see spirits. Did this not cross Jaffe's mind when she came to write her book on ghosts? Or did she think that Jung was maybe hallucinating? In my mind Jung was all over the place on this subject. Deliberately. Persona obsessed because he wanted to look like one thing to say, another psychiatrist, and look like another thing to say, someone who believes in such things. There's no way that he would talk to the two in the same way. Then to those in the middle, he could be open-minded. (i.e., his favoured position for most times). Sonu Shamdasani thinks he sees through this farcade and outright says that he wrote the Red Book for the dead. 

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  • Hi Paul, I read Lament of the Dead (as well as The Red Book) and I think I know what you’re asking. The archetypal dead are inhabitants of the unconscious and therefore part of everyone’s psyche, which includes these energies which we call the contents of the unconscious. I have had dreams involving the dead, as will everyone. Those who pay attention to them will gain the best rewards.

    As is depicted in The Red Book, one is to engage the inhabitants of that space; the dreamworld, an active imagination session, and learn what they have to teach. The experience happens for a reason. The point is to use the experience for growth and progression. In this specific case, it is individuation as the goal.

    This is a classic case of conscious confrontation with the unconscious. The subject (Jung) encounters projections, appearing as ghosts, or simply as the dead, though we know that all we can really say about them is that they are energies, but the point is that they are projections, or that they are projected toward him. This is not morbid and in fact is to be considered the more common experience, within everyone.

    Jung’s comment in Ms. Jaffe’s book, "anyone who expects an answer of parapsychological truth will be disappointed” means just that. This is not parapsychological truth, it is psychological, empirical truth, which is in line with the scientific perspective of that group of depth psychologists. I would say I have the same perspective about these phenomena as Jung.

    If you’re reading Lament of the Dead, you’re going to love the Red Book. As a guide to one man’s journey toward individuation, it is priceless. 

     

  • Jung was clear as mud at times that ghosts exist. So he didn't suffer your doubt. So your explanation is way out. Including that he wrote a whole book to them!!! Like I said his contradictions were deliberate, not accidental. This is precisely because this sort of thing was very familiar to him. I mean it ran in the family!! So this isn't a vague issue to Jung at all. Hence there is no answer really. It is what it is. Jung tended to speak one way to those who are scientifically inclined and another way to those of a more mystical bent. And at other times he says that as a psychologist he is unqualified to make statements that go beyond the conscious and unconscious mind (psyche). Its obvious that he hasn't forgot his only psychological policy when he later does make literal statements that go beyond his own rule.

    • To discuss whether Philemon had anything to do with a previously alive individual would in my opinion be pointless. It can as well be some transpersonal entity. This man for instance http://www.delfi.rs/knjige/9931_sedma_knjiga_-_vodic_u_buducnost_kn... has collected in his books similar conversations with these things. Some of them perhaps were alive, and some weren't. In the introduction to that book he writes (my translation): "I wasn't burdened by knowing for whom I'm writing this", meaning that a very important man will read the book. Through my phone call to a woman involved in all that, I can tell you there is something strange going on.

    • I hope this one won't be qualified as a lie, but I had as a teenager a spoon-bending experience. There was a woman on TV (I haven't seen her ever again) who invited the audience in the studio and in their homes to try to band spoons. Some people in the studio did bend and some didn't. I bent mine. Then I ran into the kitchen and bent another one. About a minute later I had a hard time to return them in their previous shape and almost succeeded (they were becoming harder and harder every second). Who bent those spoons? One thing is to hear or see a ghost and something else is when you have a conversation. You don't have to be a medium to hear a ghost if you meet one, but to have a chat... Some specific state of consciousness where you aren't fully awake is necessary and at that point is very difficult to locate the collocutor.

      http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_al... - DMT and alien abductions

  • Hi Alekandar,  I don't get your point. Taken at face-value it would be that its good to lie. But I don't think that would be your point so I don't get it.

    • Technically speaking, the story about the good Samaritan is a lie if it isn't literally how it happened. But, from the point of view of someone who lived at that time, it was absurd to ask a question whether it was real or not. Their thinking just wasn't in that "empirical" mode. Sometimes there is just a need to develop a story around a message (life on the "edge" in Castaneda's case, something that those poor women wanted to make it as real as it gets). When I talk about these things with other people (it doesn't happen very often, even though who wants to know does know that I'm into this stuff), I don't know about their experiences with trance, daydreaming, and mystical experiences. One such conversation actually was about ghosts/spirits and conversations with them. It isn't really a lie or contradiction when you have visions, experience "shape-shifting", or just have a need to say or do something weird without any clear idea what is going on to you and why. Just a few days ago my mother had a poltergeist experience while she was half-asleep. Was it a hallucination (she says it wasn't), a spirit, or some paranormal manifestation of her own mind?

  • Are you familiar with occultism, Aleister Crowley, grimoires, and stuff like that?

    Perhaps he wrote the Red Book for those who weren't (aren't) allowed to properly live? To quote myself from the Red Book discussion topic #17 (http://www.depthpsychologyalliance.com/group/community-education-de...):

    "Shadow, meadow, fire, wings, and sky are mentioned in The Red Book, but also here http://www.metrolyrics.com/heart-of-green-lyrics-deadboy-the-elepha... and here http://www.lyrics007.com/I%20Lyrics/Cursed%20We%20Are%20Lyrics.html. Those two song are a sort of soundtrack to a very personal event that I won't share here. I don't know how many books out there also mention the aforementioned words, but when I had read "meadow" in The Red Book I knew I was about to receive the full package. In order to delay a "journey to the other side" (from one of those songs), I hesitated to read the book and discussions within this group. Now I'm here."

    • I just don't know why he deliberately contradicted himself. No one else does that.

      • Who? I've mentioned two people who have deliberately contradicted themselves (Jung refused to publish Red Book): Jung and Crowley. Another example is Hesse's Demian. Someone might mention Steppenwolf, but I think that Demian was Hesse's Red Book where he was totally out of control, when images were expressing themselves. Demian near the end looks like some kind of manifesto, but it was probably weirder than that. It's one of those moments when a person has difficulties to answer the question "What do you want?" Castaneda (fabricated conversations with a shaman) also had his moments (turning in the end his female followers into sex slaves and a suicidal cult, hardly something he intended from the beginning).

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