Excerpt from a powerful new post by Jungian analyst and climate scientist, Jeffrey T. Kiehl:
“If we are stumbling into an era of dictators, Caesars, and incarnated States, we have accomplished a cycle of two thousand years and the serpent has again met with its own tail. Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries A.D., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. You know that thousands in those days
The body speaks truth. We often try to mentally escape truth only to discover that our body becomes symptomatic. We feel anxious, depressed, come down with one or another medical diagnosis. Our psyche is trying to tell us to listen to what it has to say.
Jung wrote, "Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true" (Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, Vol. II - 21 February 1934 , p.1314.)
I remember sitting in a
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.
– Leonard Cohen
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” wrote Theodore Roethke. Now we move from vote stripping (profoundly unethical, but legal) into the fetid slime of criminal, mass vote flipping. Hold your br
“Stripping and Flipping” — Voter Suppression and Computer Fraud
The Democrats were defeated because of their own insolent incompetence, because of our antiquated electoral college system and because race is still the dominant factor in American life. That said, Clinton won more than the popular vote, and by over two million. She almost certainly won the Electoral College as well.
To go deeper, we have to get apocalyptic (to lift the veil from our eyes) and understand the dark side of our electoral
It Can’t Happen Here
In pursuing what led to the Trump “victory” – yes, I’m putting that in quotes – we’re beginning to observe an ongoing conflict between two themes: Lesser of two evils vs Cognitive Dissonance. As for the first, it’s clear by now, with two astoundingly unpopular major candidates, that literally millions of people on both sides held their noses and chose the least unfavorable, the one whose promises overrode their perceived character. That’s a rational position, regardless of wh
Race and Religion; Race and Social Class
Meanwhile, four out of five white evangelicals, a quarter of the electorate, some thirty million people, voted for Trump – despite his serial adultery, his casinos, his shady deals, his narcissistic tantrums, his reality-TV clowning, his wife’s soft-porn photos, his palpable insincerity, his profoundly uncharitable threats and accusations, his obnoxious vulgarity, his disgusting misogyny and his gleeful ignorance of the Bible; despite his hinting that he’s
Thanks to Alliance member Tim Holmes, co-host of the symposium, for providing this summary.
Co-directed by Merlin CCC (in conjunction with Dr. Barry Ferst, Professor of Philosophy at Carroll College, and Tim Holmes, internationally-renowned artist) and hosted by Carroll College, “Vulnerable Humanity, Predictable Machines” was the first of three community events geared to initiate a public discussion about the human-technology relationship and the promises and perils of artificial intelligence (A
Paralysis strikes. People feel paralyzed by problems. Relationships become stuck. Dreams become those of being paralyzed, unable to move, unable to wake up. Paralysis is real in life and in dreams. It often strikes when we least expect. It's the voice of the unconscious mind trying to get through to us.
Jung wrote, "The fight against the paralysing grip of the unconscious calls forth man's creative powers. That is the source of all creativity, but it needs heroic courage to do battle with these f
Groping is a healthy thing to do. When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? – Female Trump supporter.
Race and Gender
I predicted during the Democratic primaries that
…Clinton will almost certainly win the nomination because she swept these states – none of which the Democrats have the slightest hope of winning in November. So her Southern support will prove to be crucial to her nomination but useless in the general election, where Republicans will continue to sweep the South…This bears repeati
The stunned question echoes among liberals: How could this have happened? How could this racist scumbag become president? Wasn’t it finally time for a woman?
I’m going to propose some other questions. Forget about How could he win? or How could she lose? – because she didn’t (see below). The real question should be: Why didn’t she beat this immensely unpopular bufoon by thirty points? Why was the election – even in Red states – so close?
We need to look deeper and deeper. Let’s begin by acknowledg
Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is a professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute and co- founder of the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization in the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program.
Mary has generously provided Depth Psychology Alliance with a copy of her recent article entitled "The Social and Political Life of Shame in the U.S. Presidential Election 2016"
MARY WRITES:
I have I have been tracking how shame has been operating in the current presidential election. I o
Three of four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, studies show, including a belief in ghosts, witches, or other magical entities.¹ There is a particular genre of folklore narratives called mythological legends, I recently learned, which are stories relayed as real experiences by real people, and which always involve paranormal elements such as highly unusual animals or ghosts. These specific kinds of folklore narratives are not historical, notes Evija Vestergaard, Ph.D., who resear
For over twenty years, I have been listening to life stories of many incredible people. It is part of my job. Many people might think I am listening to their problems, but I hear stories. People who come to me are brave storytellers. It is a privilege to hear a personal mythology that has never been shared before. There are times when someone’s story is a mixture of broken pieces of tragedies and losses. No matter how fragmented and tragic a person’s story, I know there is a hero somewhere in
"The underlying tension of the individual's relation to culture... is a fundamental conflict of psychic life, a catalyst for development from infancy to old age. If the individual cannot discern him/herself apart from these impersonal forces, he/she is unconsciously carried along by them, and this herding effect only magnifies the dangerous potential of mass movements. All unconscious conflicts have a dual nature: subjective and objective, personal and social, creative and destructive. Their opp
Despite my desire for zen-like calm, I've been affected by the deeply unpleasant US election and negative, hard-to-believe-this-is-the-US, stories in the news media. Sometimes I feel afraid…of nuclear war, climate change, and violence that I can't control. I worry about “what could happen.” And in addition to the national and international unrest, I have my own worries, as this past summer I had a serious health scare. I'm fine now, but it shook me.
Even though I’ve been working with the metaphor
When Jonathan Rudow goes into a community to conduct research, he is highly conscious of the fact that he arrives with a particular lens—a lens we each develop individually over the course of our lives evolving from our personal experiences, family values, and cultural conditioning. That lens never allows for the full picture, Jonathan insisted when he sat down with me recently to discuss his work with the Navajo (or the Diné people, as they refer to themselves) at Back Mesa in Arizona. The term
Sometimes (all right all the time) I'm stunned by the psyche's attunement to life and lifestyle issues. Dreams pick up and comment on diet, exercise, quality of relationships and work habits. They want to get our attention so that we can be more attuned to self, health, and consciousness.
The psyche is holistic. It strives toward wholeness in body, mind, soul. A person related a dream about being sandwiched, near death, in between to slices of white bread. They knew their diet needed attention. I
I think I’ll just let the mystery be. – Iris Dement
A nuanced approach to these subjects can be a breath of fresh air in an intellectual environment where accusations and stances of purity (“The blood of Albion flows in these veins,” boasts one stalwart) seem to be the norm. And this obsession with doing things right leads me to certain conclusions.
First, my own reading of the anthropological literature indicates that no indigenous person in his or her right mind would choose to become a “shaman.
