This book is the stuff. Even for me it’s a bit hard to read.
Nirvana is unity with the subconscious. We’re divided between conscious and unconscious, but we need not be. What we don’t accept doesn’t disappear, it goes into the subconscious — and sometimes it escapes anyway. We don’t have as much control as we like to think.
Dreams are symbols. So are religions. Things beyond words have to speak in something. Free association, or just sitting with the dream itself, is one of the ways in — leads to our issues, our complexes, but also to more. One symbol has more than one meaning, context decides. Interpretation is subjective, individual, can’t have hard rules for it: my own contained dangerous side, I wasn’t ready for her yet, strolling through life having great fun, feeling hurt/disrespected by her — wanting women, before. My subconscious has always been pretty clear and amazingly powerful. Being a superman. Incredible: it can predict our failings when we can’t. Trust your dreams.
Animus, anima — the other sex within self, can degenerate if not faced. Free the anima from the mother. Myth of Beauty and the Beast is a woman changing her relation to man, father to lover, embracing the animal side — animal as a symbol of transcendence too. The myth of the hero is how we grow up in phases, sacrifice the child in us: good vs evil is ego vs shadow, the damsel is the anima, too big an ego is the risk, you need to assimilate the shadow to beat the dragon. Shadow work is this, lived rather than read.
When something slips from your mind it goes into the unconscious — those who “forget,” one way or another, can be hypnotized and suddenly know all. So memories can be found again by uniting with it. Some symbols run deeper still: origin of most myths, tendencies we evolved with, not learned. The unconscious also predicts. We can use this to change humanity — there’s a real lack of these symbols today, and that’s exactly the ground on which the world could change.
Numinosity: how a concept relates to a living individual, not an abstraction. Myths may be false, doesn’t matter, they still give meaning — god-man, original heaven. If life is adventurous, the insecure part of you seeks rest and certainty in religion; otherwise you want something else, your own identity. Important to stay open, receive the self and the unconscious, oneness — not imitate others, don’t follow religious masters blindly. The point of religion is to be one with god. Strip it all away and what’s left is god, no individual. God shows up everywhere once you look — the universe wanting us to unite with it is the same idea from a different angle.
Art is the spirit of its age — artists are somewhat contained by it, so you can look at the art of the past and deduce the culture. Paint in trance. Sex, the animal, needs to combine with reason somehow — can’t over-venerate woman as mother figure either.
Parallel between quantum and psyche: both undetermined. The subconscious determines our reality — all is energy, nothing fixed, we pull waves. Nothing is real the way we think it is either way you get there. The world is open. Jung had a lot of creative ideas. It all connects.
The hero’s stories, structurally: proof of strength, humble beginning, rapid rise to power, triumphant struggle with evil, end with sacrifice.
Myth, structurally: growing up inside an illusion of eternal fiction — immature, foundation of human culture, power to beat evil, struck by hubris.