the Inner Guide in Jung.
"Philemon is communicative, knowledgeable, and wise. He gave voice to Jung's mythopoetic cosmology.
Whereas research participants pursued imaginal beings
Imaginal beings and overwhelming imagery pursued Jung relentlessly, as if the objective psyche sought to enlist him to give voice to its radical cultural imperative
to restore a symbolic sensibility lost in the shift from a religious to a scientific world view,
and reinstate humanity's place in the natural order."
"Philemon, according to Jung, represented a
force "which was not himself” personified as an autonomous being “who said things which [Jung] had not consciously thought.”
Through their dialogical interactions, the imaginal old man impressed upon Jung, his objective nature and his autonomy within Jung’s psyche. This is because, Jung asserts, in their exchanges “it was clearly . . . he who spoke, not I.”
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"bodiless gurus in the Hindu tradition, are known as
"Khecaī” or sky-travelers,
which seems to coincide meaningfully with Jung’s description of
Philemon as “a winged being sailing across the sky".
"In one of their conversations, Jung avers,
Philemon admonished him for, what he viewed to be Jung’s egoistic and unconscious assumption that he (Jung) was the creator of his thoughts.
In contradistinction, Philemon charged that thoughts are in fact,
“like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air,”
which is to say that, like all psychic productions, including ideas, images, and fantasies,
thoughts are independent of the ego’s volitional machinations."