good morning 🙏🏻✌🏽🖖
exploring Jung on Alchemy, once again from the IA:
"those who dreamed of flying and whose successors made the dream come true after all.
Nor should we underestimate the sense of satisfaction born of the enterprise, the adventure, the quaerere (seeking), and the invenire (finding).
This always lasts as long as the methods employed seem sensible. There was nothing at that time to convince the alchemist of the senselessness of his chemical operations;
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"what is more, he could look back on a long tradition which contained not a few testimonies of such as had achieved the marvellous result.?
Finally the matter was not entirely without promise, since a number of useful discoveries did occasionally emerge as by-products of his labours in the lab-oratory.
As the forerunner of chemistry alchemy had a sufficient raison d'être."
here's an image of the then current notion of the way things are meant to be.
"The demand made by the imitatio Christi
that we should follow the ideal and seek to become like it
ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man.
In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship
it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal."
good grief, CB, JUNG has diagnosed MAGA cultism‼️
"In an outward form of religion where all the emphasis is on the outward figure
(hence where we are dealing with a more or less complete projection),
the archetype is identical with externalized ideas but remains unconscious as a psychic factor.
When an unconscious content is replaced by a projected image to that extent,
it is cut off from all participation in and influence on the conscious mind."
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and, yes, this is the prognosis☠️
"At a certain point it even develops a tendency to regress to lower and more archaic levels.
a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped—unchanged in his inmost soul because he has "all God outside" and does not experience Him in the soul.
His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity, but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever."
more 😢
Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree:
it is all veneer,
but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments.
Yes, everything is to be found outside-in image and in word, in Church and Bible-but never inside.
Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old"
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@holon42 Interesting. In "Living Buddha, Living Christ", Thich Nhat Hanh brings up the gnostic texts that were thrown out as "heresy" because they taught a more personal connection to the holy spirit, and bits where he was saying if you live as Christ, you can become as him, with the divine spirit guiding your life. This removes the external, thus is a threat to the church. Since these were the earliest record of his words, when the books were ordered to be destroyed, they were hidden instead.
yes, the power grab came early on. human, all too human.☹️
@holon42 A religion or philosophy where you are supposed to receive things externally that must grow from within your own spirit and experience, puts barriers to enlightenment up, it does not tear them down.
People are taught that wisdom comes from edict, that morality is assigned, that they cannot be trusted with the weight of their own souls and decisions, and that some force outside them is the only thing that can guide them and make them pure.
It keeps you neotenous. It keeps you a child.
"that is to say the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped for lack of psychological culture and has therefore got stuck in heathenism.
Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls.
Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul;
that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a paganism which, now in a form so blatant that it can no longer
be denied
is swamping the world of so-called Christian culture."