Jung the Occultist
When people discuss Carl Gustav Jung, it’s generally about his famous split with Freud in 1912, or his theory of cultural archetypes.
But as I’ve been reading about him lately through his 21st Century disciples (Christopher Knowles and Christopher O’Brien..hmm..”Christophers”…), the theory of archetypes and synchronicity (note the “Christ” figures as disciples) bringing “gnosis” (knowledge..heh..another one!) is hard to ‘ignore’ (hah, another one! Okay, stop now).
Well it seems that Jung in the last years of WWII was in the throes of depression and was suffering heart ailments as well. While in a coma after suffering a fall that broke his leg, he had an “out of body experience”:
On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus pos ition. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences.
He knew that inside the temple the mystery of his existence, of his purpose in life, would be answered. He was about to cross the threshold when he saw, rising up from Europe far below, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of the King of Kos, the island site of the temple of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many were demanding his return and he, the King, was there to ferry him back. When Jung heard this, he was immensely disappointed, and almost immediately the vision ended. He experienced the reluctance to live that many who have been ‘brought back’ encounter, but what troubled him most was seeing his doctor in his archetypal form. He knew this meant that the physician had sacrificed his own life to save Jung’s. On 4 April 1944 – a date numerologists can delight in – Jung sat up in bed for the first time since his heart attack. On the same day, his doctor came down with septicæmia and took to his bed. He never left it, and died a few days later.
Jung was convinced that he hadn’t simply hallucinated, but that he had been granted a vision of reality. He had passed outside time, and the experience had had a palpable effect on him. For one thing, the depression and pessimism that overcame him during WWII vanished. But there was something more. For most of his long career, he had impressed upon his colleagues, friends, and reading public that he was, above all else, a scientist. He was not, he repeated almost like a mantra, a mystic, occultist, or visionary, terms of abuse his critics, who rejected his claims to science, had used against him. Now, having returned from the brink of death, he seemed content to let the scientist in him take a back seat for the remaining 17 years of his life.
Although Jung had always believed in the reality of the ‘other’ world, he had taken care not to speak too openly about this belief. Now, after his visions, he seemed less reticent. He’d had, it seems, a kind of conversion experience, and the interests the world-famous psychologist had hitherto kept to himself now became common knowledge. Flying saucers, astrology, parapsychology, alchemy, even predictions of a coming “new Age of Aquarius”: pronouncements on all of these dubious subjects – dubious at least from the viewpoint of modern science – flowed from his pen. If he had spent his career fending off charges of mysticism and occultism – initially triggered by his break with Freud in 1912 – by the late 1940s he seems to have decided to stop fighting. The “sage of Küsnacht” and “Hexenmeister of Zürich”, as Jung was known in the last decade of his life, had arrived.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Yet Jung’s involvement with the occult was with him from the start – literally, it was in his DNA. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Samuel Preiswerk, who learned Hebrew because he believed it was spoken in heaven, accepted the reality of spirits, and kept a chair in his study for the ghost of his deceased first wife, who often came to visit him. Jung’s mother Emilie was employed by Samuel to shoo away the dead who distracted him while he was working on his sermons.She herself developed medium istic powers in her late teens. At the age of 20, she fell into a coma for 36 hours; when her forehead was touched with a red-hot poker she awoke, speaking in tongues and prophesying. Emilie continued to enter trance states throughout her life, in which she would communicate with the dead. She also seems to have been a ‘split personality’. Jung occasionally heard her speaking to herself in a voice he soon recognised was not her own, making profound remarks expressed with an uncharacteristic authority. This ‘other’ voice had inklings of a world far stranger than the one the young Carl knew.
This ‘split’ that Jung had seen in his mother would later appear in himself. At around the age of 12, he literally became two people. There was his ordinary boyhood self, and someone else. The ‘Other,’ as Carl called him, was a figure from the 18th century, a masterful character who wore a white wig and buckled shoes, drove an impressive carriage, and held the young boy in contempt. It’s difficult to escape the impression that in some ways Jung felt he had been this character in a past life. Seeing an ancient green carriage, Jung felt that it came from his time. his later notion of the collective unconscious, that psychic reservoir of symbols and images that he believed we inherit at birth, is in a sense a form of reincarnation, and Jung himself believed in some form of an afterlife. Soon after the death of his father, in 1896 when Jung was 21, he had two dreams in which his father appeared so vividly that he considered the possibility of life after death. In another, later dream, Jung’s father asked him for marital advice, as he wanted to prepare for his wife’s arrival. Jung took this as a premonition, and his mother died soon after. And years later, when his sister Gert rude died – a decade before his own near-death experience – Jung wrote that “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”
Hmm..apparently the whole family could communicate with “spirits”, what ever spirits are.
Are they just glimpses of other dimensions, or are they projected “archetypes?”
It’s hard to say from this article, but I would conjecture that given Jung’s, and others OBE’s that what ever our core beings (consciousness) are, they exist in another reality.
And the collective subconscious is capable of projecting “archetypes” that can become real and solid.
Pretty deep.
Inexplicata: Alleged Humanoid Figure Photographed
The South American UFO blog Inexplicata reports that a recent photo of a “humanoid” was posted on another blog recently, supposedly un-retouched:
Sebastian Aranguren, writing for the July 12 2010 edition of Diario Popular, discusses an unusual photo of an “invisible humanoid” whose presence was captured only by a digital camera after the waters of Laguna del Monte were inexplicably stirred as if by an external force.
The photo was taken by an anonymous businessman from the city of Almirante Brown. Luis Burgos of the Fundación Argentina de Ovnilogía and his photo analysis team have determined that it is a “clean” image showing no signs of manipulation. “There are very few photos of humanoids in the world,” Burgos is quoted as saying, “and this case acquires major significance in national ufology.”
The photo was taken on March 14 of this year — Easter Sunday — at 15:56 hours by “Ivan” (surnames withheld) in the company of his wife and children.
Diario Popular’s blog has disabled the photo copy function. Those interested in seeing the “Laguna del Monte Humanoid” for themselves can click http://www.popularonline.com.ar/nota.php?Nota=532479# — the FAO researchers say the image shows a neckless figure wearing a sort of diving suit that sags at the knees. “The intruder appears to be standing on the water itself, looking back at the eyewitness…
I saw the photo and was unimpressed by it. Pareidolia anyone?
Then again, it resembles the grey alien archetype slightly, so who knows?
Argentina: Alleged Humanoid Figure Reported
Perennial Perceptions of UFO Archetypes
It has been noted in several blogs and articles concerning UFO sightings the ‘craft’, or whatever they are appear as saucers and elongated cucumbers.
Much has been theorized about the shapes of these sightings. Some have mentioned the shapes are influenced by cultural archetypes. Thus, the shapes of these images come from Kevin Arnold’s 1947 seminal sightings of vehicles that “skipped in the air like saucers” and the present archetype was instituted.
But 1947 was not the first time people saw anomalous figures in the air. Anomalous sightings in the present modern era (which I classify as post-American Civil War) were recorded in 1897:
[…]The alternative interpretation has always been that the reports from 1896/7 were actually sightings of extraterrestrial craft, and in a different age would be reported as UFOs or flying saucers, except that in the late 19th century they were being reported in terms familiar to people at the time. Ufologists point to the range of ‘radical misperceptions’ which generate UFO reports from mundane stimuli, and suggest that the same processes were creating the 1897 airship sightings. The ‘rumour’ hypothesis has been further refined by claims that the stories were transmitted by railroad telegraphers to while away the long night hours.
What you might think was the obvious solution to the mystery – that actual airships were flying over America at this time – seems to have been pushed to the margins by proponents of both sides of the debate. Is that such an impossible claim? We know that quite large dirigible lighter-than-air craft were operating in Europe at the time, is it possible that someone had built a viable airship in America?
Of course, here we enter the world of the mysterious eccentric secret inventor, and getting worryingly close to the fantasy aeroforms of Dellschau and the Sonora Aero Club. But is it possible that at least some, and maybe even most, of the 1897 airship sightings were just that – the sightings of a real, nuts and bolts airship?
Allen Danelek thinks so, and this book makes out an impressive, if not perhaps warertight case. He works methodically through the evidence for and against each hypothesis. The American newspapers were perhaps not quite such a haunt of ‘liars clubs’ as some historians have suggested, and much of the newspaper reporting seems to be sound. Danelek is well aware of the strengths of alternate interpretations, and accepts that many reports were indeed misinterpretations of astronomical and natural phenomena. But he claims that there are patterns in how the story developed and was reported that suggest this is not a complete explanation.
Would it be possible for an unknown airship builder (not ‘inventor’ because all the necessary technology was already known and often in use elsewhere) to have constructed and flown a vehicle which would have accounted for at least a significant proportion of the reports? Danelek goes, step-by-step through every detail of the technology he claims would be involved, and step-by-step demonstrates that such a craft could, theoretically, have been constructed and flown.
The key word, of course, is theoretically, because although each individual step is plausible enough, doubts begin to enter when you consider what would be involved in putting all these small steps together to produce the desired outcome.
Having itemised and considered the technical details with a great deal of background knowledge, Danelek attempt to tie them all together in a novel way – by writing a dramatised fictional account of how it could all work; creating characters and locations which could have come together at particular points in time, and resulted in the construction and destruction of the airship of 1897.
I can’t say I’m convinced, but this is a fascinating book which presents a viewpoint on 1897 which I do not think has been presented in such detail before. It is a stimulating and provocative thesis which deserves careful consideration.
There is one UFO shape that is carried over into the present century and that is the cigar shaped anomaly.
Is there a phallic archetype being presented here and could it be alien in nature?
And why would true aliens care about such things?
Modern archetypes, or something different?
Battlestar Galactica as an Jungian archetype?
…are we a race of people that has roots are out there, somewhere beyond the milkyway on worlds unknown, of a time long forgotten, of a people long dead? Wouldn’t our children say the same if suddenly the earth were destroyed and only a few of us made it out there, only to settle on another world, to begin anew?
I’m not gullible and I don’t take science fiction shows and add them to my reality. But I do always and often wonder where all ideas and stories begin, and the ideology behind BSG is as old as humanity itself. So, why tell the same tale over and over again in different incarnations if not to serve a purpose? What purpose would that be? To help us to remember, perhaps?
The author makes a point; who, or what, are we?
In the first psychology class I took in college 25 years ago, the professor stressed that human beings are greater than the sum of their parts.
Are we digging up images from our past and just giving them modern clothes to wear?
All of this has happened before and will probably happen again…
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Cold fusion isn’t an archetype, I think.
But that doesn’t stop the ever present pursuit for it:
A U.S. Navy researcher announced today that her lab has produced “significant” new results that indicate cold fusion-like reactions.
If the work by analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss and her colleagues is confirmed, it could open the door to a cheap, near-limitless reservoir of energy.
That’s a big if, however.
Today’s announcement at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society comes in the same location – Salt Lake City – as one of science’s most infamous episodes, the announcement 20 years ago by chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they had produced cold fusion.
Unlike nuclear energy reactors and bombs, which split atoms, the atoms in stars such as the sun fuse together to produce spectacular amounts of energy, so much so that we are warmed by a stellar furnace 93 million miles away.
Devising a fusion-based source of energy on Earth has long been a “clean-energy” holy grail of physicists.
Present day research into fusion is high-tech intense and requires a lot of energy to maintain, often more goes in than it generates. That’s why we don’t have fusion reactors dotting the country-side and along sources of water yet; it’s too inefficient.
But, if a sustainable fusion reaction can be produced without all of the supermagnets required, less energy could be put in and more energy can be produced.
Time will tell I guess.
Navy scientist announces possible cold fusion reactions
Hat tip to The Anomalist
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More on Project Aurora, from Great Britain:
One of the key themes to emerge from these papers is the curious Aurora spyplane saga. This is linked with a little-known set of colour photographs, apparently taken in the Scottish highlands, which appear to show a large diamond-shaped UFO shadowed by military jets.
From the late 1980s the British press was buzzing with rumours about a stealthy, cutting-edge aircraft that some experts believed was an advanced US ‘black project’. Codenamed Aurora, the spy plane was said to be capable of hypersonic speed. Alleged sightings frequently made headlines in UFO magazines and in aviation weeklies such as Janes’ Defence. But the US Defence Department always denied such a project existed and two decades have passed without any real evidence that it ever did.
The Eurozone nations decided last year to start disclosing information on investigated UFO sightings from the late 1940s on through to the 1980s. This has produced a wealth of documents (largely redacted) and corresponding photographs.
Except the good ol’ US of A naturally, which still remains ominously silent on all things ‘UFO-ish.’
Project Aurora was a 1980s military effort obviously and if such a thing exists (existed?), the United States Pentagon/DARPA most certainly has something even better than that now-a-days and is keeping its cards close to the vest.
You wouldn’t want a potential rival know what you have in your hand/arsenal, would you?
Hat tip to The Daily Grail
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