Quote of the Day

“We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
—Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Jung’s Private Library

The Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung holds the books from Jung’s private library and has embarked on a project to digitize them all for research purposes.

“The main content of Jung’s private library was contemporary literature of the 19th and 20th century, mainly about medicine, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy. Additionally there are a great number of books on antique cultures, gnosis, christian symbols, eastern religion, ethnology and occultism. The library also contains a collection of about 300 rare books (printed before 1800) on alchemy, theurgy and kabbala, as well as antique literature on dreams, writings of church fathers and of the latin and greek classic.”

You can access the collection at this site—ability to read German, French, Latin would be helpful!

Larry Maze Workshop

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Little Rock invites everyone to join them Friday, Feb. 3–Saturday, Feb. 4 for a seminar titled “There is More to You Than You Think” with Bishop Larry Maze. The seminar will explore the inner spiritual journey employing Jungian spirituality to help discover parts of yourself you never knew existed. The cost for the seminar is $35 per person and includes lunch on Saturday. You may pay at the door or online. Check the website for more information. Bishop Maze retired from the Diocese of Arkansas in 2007 and is now Bishop-in-Residence at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Little Rock. He speaks on the topics of Jungian spirituality and dreamwork and how it interfaces with Christian spirituality. He has led teaching conferences in many areas of the southeast and serves on the faculty of The Haden Institute.

Quote of the Day

“You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dream come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future of myth is going to be.”
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Quote of the Day

“The hero is somebody whom you can lean on and who is going to rescue you; he is also an ideal. To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure, really. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don’t exist for us. In a traditional society—the agriculturally based city—there were relatively few life roles, and the models were there; there was a hero for each life role. But look at the past twenty years and what has come along in the way of new life possibilities and requirements. The hero-as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that’s no-path. It’s a very interesting situation.”
—Joseph Campbell, An Open Life

Rosanne Cash and the Lifting of the Veil

The radio show On Being has recently aired an interview with singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash about her spirituality, which she calls neo-folk, pagan, post-feminist, progressive, Buddhiscopalian. Their conversation covers Jungian analysis, Jung’s five big dreams, quantum physics, songwriting, her father, religion, discernment, living, and dying. You can listen to the interview online, both edited and complete, or read a transcript of it, though listening is much better so you can catch all the wonderful music included. There’s also a video of the live-streamed interview.

A Diplomat’s Dream Diary

Yesterday on NPR I heard a review of a new biography of American diplomat and Soviet scholar George F. Kennan, George F. Kennan: An American Life, written by John Lewis Gaddis. My ears perked up when I heard that the author had access to “Kennan’s diaries, even a dream diary.” Kennan lived to be 101 and requested his biography not be published until after his death—Gaddis started working with Kennan on the biography in the late 1970s.

Gaddis says about Kennan: “Well, if you had to single out one individual who probably did more than anyone else in coming up with the big idea of how the second half of the 20th century could be less dangerous than the first half was, I think Kennan would be right up there at the top of the list.”

I’m curious as to how much the author details about the dream diary in his book. Frank Costigliola, who is editing the diaries, says of the 20,000-page diary, of which the dream diary is a part: “The diary reveals in sharp detail the personal life and the political, philosophical, and spiritual concerns of America’s most famous diplomat. . . . Most of this magnificent diary focuses on Kennan’s inner life, on his critiques of societal developments, and on what he discerned with his acute senses. . . . In addition to the separate ‘dream diary’ kept from 1964–77, Kennan included in his regular journal accounts of strange and not-so-strange dreams. . . . ‘I am a teacher,’ he affirmed on several occasions. He also saw his role as ‘that of the prophet. It was for this that I was born.’”

Sounds like fascinating material for a dream researcher/writer—we don’t often hear about how dreams affect the life and work of such public figures. Kennan said the diary “might be more important in the light of posterity (assuming that there will be any posterity) than anything else I am doing these days.” We should all take this to heart, as to the importance of our own journal writings and inner work.

Quote of the Day

“The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious.”   —Carl Jung, Collected Works

“In the process of individuation, the heroic task is to assimilate unconscious contents as opposed to being overwhelmed by them.  The potential result is the release of energy that has been tied up with unconscious complexes.”   —Daryl Sharp

Quote of the Day

“Since the powers of nature in this dreamer, in that dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only differently inflected, the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world. All the gods are within: within you—within the world.”
—Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology

Persona and Facebook

From the blog “You Are Not So Smart,” promoting the book of the same name, this post is called “The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.” Author David McRaney posits self-delusional misconceptions and the truth behind those misconceptions. One example is: “I celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.” The “truth” part of the post contains a story about a socio-psychological study of two groups of boys and how their cultures naturally evolve, or devolve, and discussion of persona as relates to current culture, including how that plays out on social media like Facebook. “You are unaware of how unaware you are.”