"The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness.
The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima . . . The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness."
continue ⤵️
Jung, 1940 essay on the Child archetype
Lower down’, that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalised and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e. in chemical substances.
The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world’.
In this sense I hold Kerényi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking."
"My personal existence must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition.
There is therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.
This captive or natural spirit is my body,
not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world
but the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project."
Merleau-Ponty.
“He who prefers to think than to feel, leaves his feeling to rot in darkness. It does not grow ripe, but in moldiness produces sick tendrils that do not reach the light.
He who prefers to feel than to think leaves his thinking in darkness, where it spins its nets in gloomy places, desolate webs in which mosquitos and gnats become enmeshed. ”
Excerpt From
Carl_Gustav_Jung_The_Red_Book_Liber_Novu
“I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous,
since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own,
so that they eventually confuse them with themselves”
Excerpt From
Carl_Gustav_Jung_The_Red_Book_Liber_Novu
“yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you,
not your life, an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game,
you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life."
Jung
“Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness?
For fear of loneliness and defeat.
To live oneself means: to be one’s own task.
Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator.
If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest."
Excerpt From
Carl_Gustav_Jung_The_Red_Book_Liber_Novu
“Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize
Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals.
But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals.
Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal.
Just as I have ` freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts.”
Jung.
'it is through this body that we have access to a ‘communication with the world more ancient than thought’ (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible..
‘My body is made of the same flesh as the world . . . and moreover . . . this flesh of my body is shared by the world’
It is the ‘chiasm’: the reversible turning point at which these meet in their intertwining."
@holon42 Word.
In Women Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff (linguist) cites Rosch (psychology), who in turn cites I-forget-his-name (biologist). It's fascinating stuff IMHO.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/25487000
https://search.worldcat.org/title/811783321
i shall check that out‼️ thanks.
@holon42 Hear here.
"George Lakoff among others' thesis, that all metaphorical thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment, makes the body central to the development of even the most abstract thought."