Sublime

Just as consciousness mysteriously mirrors the dual wave and particle nature of light, our own body is a realm of contradiction. Carl Jung reminds us to respect “the original animal nature of our body.” But then he continues, the body is also “connected with the highest forms of the spirit.” He insists that we can bloom only when spirit and instinc

These gods weren’t used in this way to illustrate the twin poles of human experience until some two thousand years after Socrates, but still offer a noble way of thinking of our characters, as these two forces in our nature pull us one way then the other. Dionysus is our instinctive, animal side that sits in contrast with our mediating, careful sel

Beyond the perinatal layer is a broad category of experiences that Grof termed the transpersonal or Jungian layer of the psyche, because Jung was one of the first major Western psychiatrists to integrate transpersonal themes in his understanding of the psyche. During transpersonal experiences, people have access to material normally considered beyo

I had also been stimulated by reading Montaigne’s Essays and his insistence that what he calls the soul is totally different from all one expects it to be, often being the very opposite.

Each of the stages of inner child, adult ego, soul, and God consciousness coexist at the same time in any adult person, whether or not they have been made conscious. The process of spiritual growth involves learning to anchor in the higher self while also honestly and lovingly accepting the other aspects of the psyche. For example, we may call on t

However, every so often, one may experience a figure that feels completely different. This figure feels as if it were coming from outside oneself, as if it existed in the external world, in the room in which one finds oneself, for example. One's eyes are open, and the felt sense is that one perceives a figure that does not come from within. The att

the psyche is the subject of our perceptions, the perceiver through fantasy, rather than the object of our perceptions.

What you do in your life affects your heart, alters your soul, and concerns the daimon. We make soul with our behavior, for soul doesn’t come already made in heaven. It is only imaged there, an unfulfilled project trying to grow down.