Tag: Jung
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Baba Yaga – The Fascination of Folklore
A Russian person, seeing this 18th century Norwegian house, would recall Baba Yaga, who lived in a house on chicken legs. Baba Yaga was an ogress with raggedy clothing, crooked teeth, a hunched back, and a long nose that touched the ceiling when she lay on her bed. Her house on legs could turn itself…
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Let There Be Light !
The Greek philosopher Thales had an idea that was right and wrong. He thought there must be one thing from which all others were made, and decided this was water. It’s one thing, yet it can be solid, liquid or gas, and it’s essential for life – dead things dry up. That was a reasonable…
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Genesis One – Order over Chaos
Let’s focus on the first three verses of Genesis 1. There is here, no absolute beginning, no sudden appearance of something from nothing. There is rather the beginning of a story, in which someone called ‘God’ already exists, as does what you and I call “the earth”, although not as we currently know it. It…
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Jung, Archetypes, Arts, Religion
Arising from recent dialogue with a friend, I’m posting this one-off to try to clarify my thinking about Carl Jung, archetypes, the arts and religion. In Jung’s view, the human psyche has three different but interacting ‘levels’, which should not be thought of as separate ‘compartments’. There is consciousness, which enables us to perceive, and…
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Rethinking ‘God’ (4) ‘A Broader Picture’
In my previous post, in the context of ‘describing God’, I said I’d look at sources other than the Bible which might be of some assistance. In his Analytical Psychology, Carl Jung outlines what he calls the archetypes of the collective unconscious, one of which is the God image. The ‘collective unconscious’ is the deepest…
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The Gospels (1) ‘Jesus as Archetypal Hero’
Recently, I began to look at the Gospels – books that should be regularly read, but in the right way. What I share here are my current views, which are as fallible and changeable as anyone else’s. My aim is not to convince you that I’m right, but to invite you to check out your…
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Wagner – Monstrous and Magnificent
How can we explain, or reconcile, the greatness of Wagner’s musical genius, with the baseness of so much of his life? He was an unsurpassed egotist. The focus of his endless monologues was entirely on himself and his self-assured opinions, to the exclusion or disparagement of others. He was a swindler who cheated people out…
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Believing in God
Do I believe in God? This question is perhaps next door to meaningless and therefore unanswerable. There are probably as many meanings for the word God, as there are people in the world. Let’s start with the fact that God is a three-letter word. Grammatically, it’s a noun and, in my schooldays at any rate,…