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updated 22d ago
updated 22d ago
Bernstein goes on to say, “to heal the one—the individual psyche—is to heal the other—the universal psyche. They are not separable from the standpoint of Navajo cosmology and medicine.”9
Developing a relationship with the historical family which is inherent in each individual, the contents of the unconscious, the mythic land of the dead and the ancestors, is the work of individuation and the way in which psyche is developed or transformed. Jung’s psychology rests on this foundation.
It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the persona
... See moreThe psychogenesis of the spirits of the dead seems to me to be more or less as follows. When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness.
For example, at the personal level the image of mother is formed out of our personal experiences of mother. At the familial level, she is the long line of mothers in our ancestral lineage. At the cultural level, she is depicted in movies, art, and literature in a variety of forms.
what Jung called the “central fire,” the pure archetypal energy that provides the patterning for all of its varied expressions through the levels.
Meade, in his book Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul, writes, “Fate is the inner
Jung concludes, “are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain knowledge.”
By the time Jung writes his autobiography, his observations have led him to conclude that the figures of the unconscious are often indistinguishable from the “spirits of the departed.”
If we accept Jung’s model of the collective unconscious, we are naturally and irrevocably connected to each other, to all of creation, in a way that transcends time and space. In its timeless nature, the collective unconscious is a remembrance of things past as they anticipate the future.