New Website Address




This blog is soon going to resurface at:

http://www.jungcurrents.com/

For now, try:

http://www.heartcurrents.com/
Bear with me on this.
(or bear witness to it)


Do Zen Monks Surf the Web?



The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself as taught by Master Eckhart, became for me the key that opens the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche.

Carl Jung

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Before enlightenment, Chop wood
Carry water.
After enlightenment, Chop wood
Carry water.

Zen saying
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Carl Jung was instrumental in introducing Zen to the West.
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He brought Richard Wilhelm (translator of the I Ching) to the West, wrote the introduction to Wilhelm's Secret of the Golden Flower, wrote the thirty page in introduction to D.T. Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism.
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There is amazing amount of material both about Buddhism and Zen on the Web. One of the more popular ones is http://www.zenhabits.net/; it has an e-mail subscription list of over 80,000 subscribers.
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According to this website, this are twelve habits of Zen monks:
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1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Do it slowly and deliberately.
3. Do it completely.
4. Do less.
5. Put space between things
6. Develop rituals .
7. Designate time for certain things.
8. Devote time to sitting.
9. Smile and serve others.
10. Make cleaning and cooking become meditation.
11. Think about what is necessary.
12. Live simply.
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(See the website for further elaboaration.)
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I do wonder just where the Internet fits into a zen approach to life. The interntetr is frequently is associated with multi-tasking. It does not seem to simplify one's life. (It certainly can become a ritual, though.)
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For some, providing the information (like www.wikipedia.com) can be a way of helping others, although since pornography is the number one use of the web, helping others does not seem to be the primary use of the internet.
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All the humor on the web and brilliant photographs do help one smile.
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However, no matter how you parse it, being present on the Web is not quite the same as being present chopping wood.
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Perhap the new Zen internet saying could be
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.Query Google, be enlightened, query Google.
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Source of Jung quotation

C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Bollingen Series XX, Collected Works, XI, trans. R. F. C. Hull. 2d ed., rev. ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 7.
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Zenhabits
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http://zenhabits.net/2008/03/12-essential-rules-to-live-more-like-a-zen-monk/

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Looking for Jung


If the Internet acknowledges a god, that god has to be Hermes: mediator, communicator, messenger, trickster, patron of merchants, always on the move. His attributes seem as inexhaustible as does the Internet, of which he seems to be the soul.

Dolores E. Brien

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This blog originally started as an attempt to explore how Jungian thinking applies the current culture (and cultural mess) that we are now in. I have been surprised the the limited number of articles that are contemporary; most of the websites are re-hashes of Jungian theory, or sites with un-attributed quotations from Jung. I was particularly surprised that during this last recent archetypal election there was no Jungian commentary I could find, in spite of all the projectons, the shadow material, and the alchemical transformation process that were clearly present. (Can you imagine a five minute Jungian commentary at the end of a newscast? Or at least an editorial opinion in the New York Times? Where are our Jungian journalists?)
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The first website listed on a Google search for "Jung" is the Wikiepedia page on Jung; the second is for the C.G. Jung page, sponsored by the Jung Center of Houston and begun by Jungian analyst Don Williams in 1995. There are substantial resources on the website, including links to 286 articles on Analytical Psychology. However, as far as I can tell, there is no index and no way to search the site. New posts to the page occur about every month.

I was delighted today to come across a blog called the "A Jungian Notebook," by Dolores Brien, with the subtitle "Readings in Techne and Psyche: Jungian and other Sources." Perphaps there is hope yet for a greater Jungian presence on the Web, the most powerful influence in the culture.
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[Image: "Bidden or not bidden, God is present"; this was the quotation carved over the front door of Jung's house.]

Carl Jung on My Space



There are more than twenty Carl Jungs inhabiting MySpace.com. (MySpace is a social netoworking website with over 100 million accounts.) Most of these have Jung’s picture as the icon to identify them. The quotation that appeared most often was “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

The picture at the beginning of this post was from one of the people who responded to a C.J. Jung website; it seemed to capture a bit of Jungian psychology more than most of the material.
Other notable material included:
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BTW.. You’re in my top friends now, but I bet you knew that from the collective unconscious.
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Religion: Christian - Other
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Interests: Networking, serious relationships
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Music: I appeared on the cover of the Beatles album Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I am mentioned in Peter Gabriel's song "Rhythm of the Heat".I have also been mentioned by The Police, Tool and Saigon Kick.
My number one song of all times is Synchronicity by The Police.
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Television: In the television series "Northern Exposure" myself and my ideas are often mentioned. I even made an appearence in one of the characters dreams. I am also mentioned in the popular television show "Frasier" Dr. Niles Crane is Jungian psychiatrist while his brother Dr. Frasier Crane is a Freudian psychiatrist.
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Movies: My writing was introduced to Italian film maker Federico Fellini in the 1950s and had an effect on the way Fellini incorporated dreams into films after "La dolce vita". In the movie Batman Begins, the character of Jonathan Crane, aka "The Scarecrow", is a Jungian psychiatrist and at the same time personifies one of human kind's primal archetypes (the Scarecrow).
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I was expecting that Freud would have fewer profiles that Jung, since Jung seems to be so much much in current consciousness. Freud had over 100 profiles. This is not a good sign.
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Carl Jung: An Anthology of Thought



(There are a plethora of quotations by Carl Jung on the web, the vast majority of them without an source. This site, "Carl Jung -- an anthology of thought", is one of the best Jungian websites. It provides quoations, with their source, on many of the important topic areas in Jungian thought. -- sparker)
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Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect ... The archetypal images decide the fate of man.
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Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures (1935). In CW 18: (retitled) "The Tavistock Lectures" P. 183

LibraryThing and the Collective Unconsious


The internet is a bit like the Collective Unconscious. What if it came to life as some kind of intelligent being? Perhaps Google is working on it; I wouldn't be surprise.

The Web certainly helps link us to one another, a more conscious collective unconscious.

An interesting site for folks interested in Jungian books is http://www.librarything.com. There are about 500,000 people in the community who list their books, provide reviews, make recommends.
When you put it all together you get some interesting statistics:
http://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist.

This is a list of the most listed books

1984 (22,732),
The Great Gatsby (18,535),
The Kite Runner (17,280),
Jane Eyre (16,620),
Animal Farm (15,179),
Angels & Demons (15,108),
Life of Pi (14,996), Brave New World (14,808),

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Do you think Harry Potter is influencing the collective?
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One can also get an idea of the most popular books of Carl Jung:

Man and His Symbols 1425 copies, 4 reviews
Memories, Dreams, Reflections 934 copies, 7 reviews
The Portable Jung 488 copies, 1 review
The Undiscovered Self 370 copies, 2 reviews
Modern Man in Search of a Soul

or Marie Louise Von Franz:




On LibraryThing, you can find other Jungians by seeing who lists Jungian books, or add Jungiana to the weight of the LibraryThing collective unconscious.
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The Way of the Dream


Marie Louise Von Franz met Carl Jung when she was 18. He agreed to see her for analysis in exchange for her translating certain Greek and Latin alchemical tests. At the end of his life, he turned of the problem of numbers and archetype to her; out of that she wrote Number and Time. She has written over twenty books, including The Feminine in Fairy Tales and Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. She interpreted over 68,000 dreams.

Her keen intellect and deep wisdom is captured in an extraordinary ten hour film series, The Way of the Dream. This work was unavailable for almost fifteen years because of a lawsuit after the death of the producer of the film series, Fraser Boa. It is being published by the Marion Woodman Foundation. (Marion Woodman is the sister of Fraser Boa, and makes an appearance in the film series as a much younger person, in a blue dress.) The distribution on DVD is limited to 1000 copies.

This is one of the most amazing, remarkable and important films that I have ever seen.

You can order it:

It is also being shown Friday nights through Januaray at 7:00 p.m., at 415 First Avenue, if you are in the Fairbanks neighborhood.
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