...where the Two become the One
Originally blogged by STEPHEN PARKER, PH.D on JANUARY 26, 2011 on jungcurrents.com. The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14 Filling […] Read more »
One becomes stupid when they abdicate their will over to an ideology or collective; while they may retain their intellect, their will to think independently and autonomously, along with their ability to question their underlying beliefs, is forfeited. Stupidity is really just a willful preference for shallowness over depth of being and understanding. To gain depth, they’d need a lot more Hades in their lives. “This was taken from a […] Read more »
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ~Mark Twain “I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is […] Read more »
Do the employees of a private corporation, such as the National Football League (NFL – which holds their player’s rights), who are privileged to play American football at the professional level, have the right to free speech at their employer’s offices (stadiums)? What is the nature of rights and privileges, and what is their difference? There is an argument, such as when Facebook, YouTube, or Google censors people, that since […] Read more »
“In this lecture we examine the ideas of Socrates. We look at his exhortation to ‘care for your soul’, his conviction that knowledge of virtue is necessary to become virtuous, his belief that all evil acts are committed out of ignorance and hence involuntarily, and finally his presumption that committing an injustice is far worse than suffering an injustice.” ~Academy of Ideas Read more »
The following are excerpts from the book “The Thinkers Guide For Conscientious Citizen’s in How to Detect Media Bias & Propaganda” by Richard Paul and Linda Elder: “Objectivity” may appear in three ways. Two are genuine. One is a facade, a counterfeit of objectivity. The Objectivity of Intellectual Humility The first form of objectivity is based on the possibility of developing intellectual humility, knowledge of our ignorance. Thus, a critical consumer […] Read more »
The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our thinking. The quality of our thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of our questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking. Without questions, we have nothing to think about. Without essential questions, we often fail to focus our thinking on the significant and substantive. When we ask essential questions, we deal with what […] Read more »
“In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction. In other words, I dropped […] Read more »
The mystic and psychologist Carl Jung on free will: “Where you are not conscious, there can obviously be no freedom. Through the analysis of the unconscious, you increase the amount of freedom. A complete consciousness would mean an equally complete freedom and responsibility. If unconscious contents approaching the sphere of consciousness are not analysed and integrated, then the sphere of your freedom is even diminished through the fact that such […] Read more »
The biggest thing being overlooked by the “alternate community” is the inner process work needed to transform their shadow sides and make it an integrated aspect of their conscious lives. Websites, blogs, and teachers that make emotional integrative work available are not as attractive as the disclosure aspects (disclosing aliens, government conspiracies, etc), probably because it is esoteric vs exoteric in nature. Just as the mystical practices are esoteric compared […] Read more »
When we’re triggered, it is a clear indication that we are behaving as if an external person or circumstance is cause over our life experience, which triggers our protector (ego) to come in and rescue us from the experience with a fight, flight, freeze, or tend & befriend survival response. Our protector (ego) is merely the effect of our originating belief that the external realm is cause over our internal […] Read more »
Quite often, we give “how” answers to “why” questions, which is not a valid nor logical way to cope and deal with a “why” question. If the question is “why do I feel triggered by such and such”, the answer cannot be “then stop interacting with such and such”, as that is a “how” solution to a “why” question. It could be said that the “stop interacting” answer is the […] Read more »
We often ignore our negative feelings when pursuing a course of action, where we think, suppress, and then act, but we’re meant to think, feel, and then act. If something feels bad to us, it could actually be a poor course of action, but to understand if this is so, we must first honor our feelings as a messenger, and ask why we are feeling them. Once we fully understand why, […] Read more »
Rationality and spirituality not only mix, they are intimately tied into one another; spirituality devoid of logic is ignorant and delusional, while rationality devoid of spirit is entropic and lifeless. In order for us to experience a life filled with meaning and direction, the two must be harmoniously balanced by a third ingredient—our emotions. It is our emotional attachments that make us either too logical or too irrational, where we […] Read more »
Einstein is often quoted as having said, “education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” However, this was not his exact wording, but a paraphrasing of what he said in a letter to Thomas Edison: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The […] Read more »