On 4/19/2017 at 1:22 PM, Ilya Startsev said:
Jung is more serious than Freud. Besides, I love Jung exactly because he was a mystic. Mystics have heart and soul, non-mystics don’t.
Sorry to post in an old thread, but this jumped out to me as I was searching for something unrelated, and I just can’t help myself:
“Everyone who says that I am a Mystic is just and idiot. He just doesn’t understand the first word of Psychology.” ~Carl Jung
*MOD NOTE, EIUOL* Split from another thread
9 hours ago, Nicky said:
Sorry to post in an old thread, but this jumped out to me as I was searching for something unrelated, and I just can’t help myself:
“Everyone who says that I am a Mystic is just and idiot. He just doesn’t understand the first word of Psychology.” ~Carl Jung
Thank you for the quote. This obviously shows that people like Jung and Carl Sagan took the word ‘mystic’ out of context, which is too bad for them, since, in relation to other individuals, they are obviously realists/mystics, that is, the true mysticism is always inseparable from reality: it’s like aristotelian essentialism.
By the way, here are some other quotes by Carl Jung that touch upon his mystic nature:
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People call me a mystic, but [humans] really are chock-full of mysticism; that word covers a large area of facts which we cannot understand.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 296.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism only for empirical reasons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 195.
[And here he speaks based on the false dilemma (or black-and-white error), thinking that ‘mysticism’ is idealism (they are opposite, in fact)]: I was particularly satisfied with the fact that you clearly understand that I am not a mystic but an empiricist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 237.
(link)
7 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:
Thank you for the quote. This obviously shows that
I hope the next words out of your mouth are “I was wrong”. Because that’s the only thing this obviously shows.
7 hours ago, Nicky said:
I hope the next words out of your mouth are “I was wrong”. Because that’s the only thing this obviously shows.
But he is a mystic, regardless of his denial. Are you familiar with Jung at all? I mean, his theories of personality are based on dreams, alchemy, collective unconscious… Ilya is right.
If you want to provoke controversy, say the unus mundus is grounded in reality in the Objectivist sense. That’d be interesting, and also on topic.
1 hour ago, Eiuol said:
But he is a mystic, regardless of his denial. Are you familiar with Jung at all? I mean, his theories of personality are based on dreams, alchemy, collective unconscious.
None of that is mysticism. The first two for obvious reasons (dreams are obviously a real thing, and it’s beyond clear that they’re related to reality, and alchemy is the precursor to science, practiced widely enough and for a long enough time that it very plausibly produced knowledge science is yet to reproduce…especially in the field of Psychology, which is far behind other natural science), as for the collective unconscious, if that’s mysticism, then so is tabula rasa…because neither is empirically proven fact.
And yes, I’m familiar with Jung at all, thank you for your concern. I know for instance that he never claimed “unus mundus” as his position. Not even close. He had about as much to do with unus mundus as Rand did with the question of gay deviancy. Jung wasn’t a physicist.
Dreams aren’t mysticism, but trying to extract some underlying meaning of dreams through the concept of the collective unconscious is. The collective unconscious is not a metaphor for common ideas. It’s straight up a claim about an unconscious mind, which is probably the closest thing to modern mysticism that there is. This is nothing like the claim of tabula rasa, which doesn’t try to claim additional (supernatural) structures of the mind. It’s strictly a claim about acquiring knowledge, without speculating of how this is precisely.
Alchemy is a precursor to science, in a sense, but in the early 20th century, people still new better. In the days of Jung in his youth, there was at least 50 years of good psychological research available already. Source not like it was merely an error of Jung the claim is such thing as the collective unconscious. Psychologists like James already set the groundwork of good empirical psychology. German psychologists did as well.
Psychoanalysis is more his field than psychology. In fact, I’m claiming that psychoanalysis is Western mysticism. It dresses itself up in science, but it gets pulled further into mystical practices through its notions of interpretation.
You’re right about the unus mundus, not the best choice of example. But I still stand by the concept of “persona” being mystical, as well as his other ideas about personality. I’m not aware he based this on any observations or interactions with the world, and in fact formed some theories from mystical experience (or perhaps psychosis as he wrote about in his Red Book).
14 hours ago, Nicky said:
I hope the next words out of your mouth are “I was wrong”. Because that’s the only thing this obviously shows.
You obviously took that quote out of context, as the added quotes show otherwise than what you thought.
The whole confusion here is over the definition of mysticism. Mysticism is not brain-based, nor is it reason in the rationalist sense. Mysticism is heart-based and is prior to or outside of brain-reason. Hence mysticism is an emotional way of connecting your soul with reality outside, including God. Mysticism is exemplified by the following mystics in the biblical tradition: Elijah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and John the Apostle. The opposite tradition, that of religious law-makers – or idealists – is the following: Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon.
7 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:
The whole confusion here is over the definition of mysticism. … Mysticism is heart-based and is prior to or outside of brain-reason.
There’s no confusion. That’s the definition you, I and Jung are all working with. (minus the heart part, that’s an odd metaphor to use for that which is outside of reason).
As per that definition, Jung was not a mystic. Only action he ever ascribed to his heart is pumping blood. Everything else he did with his rational brain. He may have been liberal with his logical leaps, but he wasn’t attempting to turn off his brain at any point, or take any knowledge from people who he believe did so.
Of course, many so-called mystics use reason more than you’d think, it’s just that they speak in metaphors to express it. So someone being classified a mystic doesn’t mean rational people should disregard the wisdom they might produce.
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Mysticism is not brain-based, nor is it reason in the rationalist sense.
Jung called himself an empiricist (which is neither a mystic nor a rationalist). Empiricists have major flaws, but mysticism is not one of them. Also, Jung transcended a lot of those flaws, he just didn’t have a better word than empiricist for describing himself.
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Hence mysticism is an emotional way of connecting your soul with reality outside
That inference (mysticism is outside of reason, therefor it’s the consequence of emotions) could only be valid if you first accepted that emotions are necessarily divorced from reason. Jung didn’t believe that. Not many people believe that. Certainly not on this board, but not in general either.
Emotions are only divorced from reason in totally irrational people (which is a theoretical concept, because such people couldn’t survive).
You correctly identified that mysticism is outside of reason. But that also means that it’s outside of most emotion. Mysticism is based in arbitrary propositions, and the emotions resulting from such propositions. It has nothing to do with most emotions (which result from rational thought, and possibly intrinsic archetypes, if Jung is to be believed).
The idea of the Collective Unconscious is very mystical. It is this supernatural thing of which we are aware only through manifestations of archetypes. Basically it’s like a god dispensing knowledge through personal revelations, but we can’t prove its existence, because we are unconscious of it. This orientation toward fantasy is further evidenced by Jung’s focus on religious and mythological stories, versus his lack of writing about his actual clinical practice with real people and their issues.
Reading through my Oxford Companion To The Mind (1987), I note that Jung made a very distinct appeal to the supernatural late in his career:
“In a late work, Answer to Job (1952), he pictures Job appealing to God against God, and concludes that any split in the moral nature of man must be referred back to a split in the Godhead … in a letter he wrote subsequently about the book he said, ‘I had to wrench myself free of God, so to speak, in order to find that unity in myself which God seeks through man. It is rather like that vision of Symeon, the Theologian, who sought God in vain everywhere in the world, until God rose like a little sun in his own heart.’”
And in his memoirs he admits to not only feeling apart from this world, but disconnected from his very self. “The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.” Poor guy. After all that work and thought, even his own person was a mysterious stranger. In the end, all he had left was the feeling of being a thing among things.
3 hours ago, Nicky said:
Everything else he did with his rational brain.
Seriously, he derived some ideas from when he had some kind of psychotic break. That’s not simply an accusation on my part - read about his process of writing his Red Book. That’s anything but the “rational brain”. The heart part isn’t even an odd metaphor, because a lot of what Jung got came from feeling and intuition, not any kind of scientific study or even rational study. I don’t mean to say that that’s where his inspiration came from, I’m saying that he formed his ideas with those as foundation.
If you want to define mysticism as “turning off your brain”, virtually no one is a mystic. But I think it’s clear that’s not what Ilya means. You need reason to form a coherent sentence, but it doesn’t follow that Jung was not a mystic because he could link ideas. It’s the content of those ideas and what he counts as evidence that makes him a mystic.
That doesn’t mean his ideas are worthless, or that you should necessarily ignore his ideas. You can find inspiration from zany ideas without using them as a foundation. I find Jung’s intuitions and mystical ideas interesting, and they do inspire ideas in me of what to investigate about psychology, but none of his ideas are a good -foundation- to understanding anything about psychology.
Basically, I don’t know where you’re getting your information. Was it Jordan Peterson? The important thing to point out is that Jung was not a psychologist. He was a psychoanalyst.
4 hours ago, Nicky said:
It has nothing to do with most emotions (which result from rational thought, and possibly intrinsic archetypes, if Jung is to be believed).
What do you mean? Emotions can also result from irrational thought. That’s part of why emotion is not a means of cognition. “Mysticism is an emotional way of connecting your soul with the reality outside” basically means using emotion as a means of cognition. That’s what Jung did. That’s how Rand described mysticism, at least of her “witchdoctor” variety. It’s a fitting metaphor for a psychoanalyst like Jung.
11 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:
Mysticism is heart-based
What does that even mean? I vaguely understand people mean emotions when they say something like this, but what is exactly meant by it has always eluded me. Why do people attach any concepts of thought or feeling to a biological pump?
On 2/14/2019 at 10:39 PM, EC said:
What does that even mean? I vaguely understand people mean emotions when they say something like this, but what is exactly meant by it has always eluded me. Why do people attach any concepts of thought or feeling to a biological pump?
Are you asking “what is the purpose of symbolism?”?
On 2/14/2019 at 10:14 PM, Eiuol said:
Seriously, he derived some ideas from when he had some kind of psychotic break.
Jung went through a period of severe mental illness, in his late 30s. He kept a journal through that period. He never published that journal. In fact, his heir refused to publish it too, for 37 years. The journal was only made available to the public in 2008, 37 years after his death.
Describing that state of affairs as “he derived his ideas from a psychotic break” is willfully dishonest.
P.S. The reason why Jung did not want those journals published is fairly easily explained by one of his most famous quotes: “beware of unearned wisdom”. None of his ideas came to him through “mystic” experiences, psychotic breaks or LSD trips. He just happened to have a psychotic break, midway through a hugely productive, rational life, and he documented it in his private journal. That’s all.
3 hours ago, Nicky said:
Describing that state of affairs as “he derived his ideas from a psychotic break” is willfully dishonest.
This sounds like provoking controversy. That’s fine, but saying “willfully dishonest” is pretty annoying. You can ask where I get such an idea (and I would tell you). A better way to spark conversation would be something like “that psychotic break was absolutely necessary to push his thinking to the limits”. I say this because I know for a fact that you like to provoke controversy, you said so on a thread one time.
He said he derived many of his ideas from this time period (notice that I didn’t say that he said he derived his ideas from a psychotic break; I said he derived his ideas from a time when he had something like a psychotic break)
Take this from Wikipedia on the Red Book, in his own words:
"“The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”
This is why I’m asking you where you got your information. I asked if it was Jordan Peterson, because I know he is largely a Jungian, but basically does not try to address any of Jung’s explicit irrationalities. From a counseling perspective, this is fine. After all, Jung used his ideas as a method of helping people through various struggles by interpreting or gaining inspiration from many subjective experiences such as dreams. This is the same way we can gain inspiration from mythology, literature, art, and so on - it doesn’t require any particular scientific or empirical evaluation. But when we look at the justifications Jung used, it doesn’t add up into some rational theory of overcoming struggles and psychological issues.
But anyway, his psychotic issue doesn’t itself diminish anything that came after. It takes a lot to go through something like that, and a lot of thinking to come out the other end without completely collapsing. What counts is what you do after. You could take a rational angle to all of that, talking about how it inspires creativity, greater openness to experience, the confusion that comes in personality, and how we all need some personal means of comprehending the situation (which fits in with a Nietzschean perspective that Jung had in part). But he also used those experiences as themselves evidence of his ideas. In other words, he used his emotions as a means of cognition. I’m not saying all of his ideas were that way, but the essence of his theories came from there. As much as his Red Book was private, it was his personal private notebook to develop his ideas.
I have notebooks that I don’t share for my scientific research because honestly it wouldn’t make sense to much people. I might even record dreams just because of how that can inspire more ideas. Still, I wouldn’t claim that my ideas are verified or are founded on my dreams (or psychotic break, or other strange experiences, if that did happen).
I don’t doubt he was productive. Well, that’s debatable. Productive at what? He wrote books - towards the end of subjective theories. In this sense, he was not productive at all for the development of psychology. But he was productive for the development of psychoanalysis, which I’d say detracted from progress in psychology.
If you still think I’m off base, then let’s stop talking about his biography.
Explain to me what is rational about any of these things (we can argue about if he is overall rational or mystical, but I’m looking for at least one example of a rational theory of his)
Collective unconscious
shadow archetype
Animus/anima
synchronicity
archetypes in general
individuation
I’d rather pick one to focus on for now.
(I’m going to split the thread sometime today, I just need some time to do so)
On 2/14/2019 at 7:12 PM, Nicky said:
… someone being classified a mystic doesn’t mean rational people should disregard the wisdom they might produce.
…
That inference (mysticism is outside of reason, therefor it’s the consequence of emotions) could only be valid if you first accepted that emotions are necessarily divorced from reason.
…
Emotions are only divorced from reason in totally irrational people (which is a theoretical concept, because such people couldn’t survive).
You correctly identified that mysticism is outside of reason. But that also means that it’s outside of most emotion. Mysticism is based in arbitrary propositions, and the emotions resulting from such propositions. It has nothing to do with most emotions (which result from rational thought, and possibly intrinsic archetypes, if Jung is to be believed).
…
Jung called himself an empiricist (which is neither a mystic nor a rationalist). Empiricists have major flaws, but mysticism is not one of them. Also, Jung transcended a lot of those flaws, he just didn’t have a better word than empiricist for describing himself.
Quite strange that I haven’t received an email notification of you quoting me, so sorry I’m so late here. I came to the forum to post a new thread, but only now I’ve noticed your replies!
You are correct in stating that rational people shouldn’t disregard the wisdom mystics might produce. You are incorrect, however, about the other side, and the justification, of exactly this point. The reason we shouldn’t disregard the wisdom of mysticism is the same reason for that wisdom being rationally considered as wise in itself. How is it wise? Some psychophysiologists, such as Rollin McCraty of HearthMath, have figured it out. And that proceeds from the other point you’ve tried to make that is disproved by their research, namely that, as you believe, emotions in themselves are only in irrational people and, at the same time and contradictorily, they are supposed to be arbitrary abstractions. What experiments done by the likes of McCraty show is that emotions don’t start with the brain, but with the heart. Emotions, instead, are sent by the heart into the brain, within whose limbic system emotions are processed, namely within the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and the amygdala. Here are some quotes from a more authoritative source:
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The limbic system, located just beneath the cerebrum on both sides of the thalamus, is not only responsible for our emotional lives but also many higher mental functions, such as learning and formation of memories. … The amygdala is the emotion center of the brain, while the hippocampus plays an essential role in the formation of new memories about past experiences. … The hippocampus plays a key role in the formation of emotion-laden, long-term memories based on emotional input from the amygdala. … The thalamus and hypothalamus are associated with changes in emotional reactivity. (lumenlearning)
What is gathered from all this is that brain only works as a processing unit, not the source of emotions, as you presume. Hence, emotional mysticism is literally outside the brain, as it starts in the heart and only then gets to the brain for our consciousness to integrate it, to make it into thoughts, memories, and then concepts/propositions.
Concerning Jung as an empiricist, well, you have claims of the likes of David Deutsch, who correctly presume that empiricists are more mystical and hence nearer to religious folks (as all empiricists were in fact religions and/or mystical – look at Bacon, Locke) than they are to the kind of subjective rationalists of Kantian/Deutsch variety.
20 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:
emotions don’t start with the brain, but with the heart.
Do they start in artificial hearts as well?
8 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:
Do they start in artificial hearts as well?
It’s a complex question and a problem that doesn’t have any experimental data because most people just think that the heart is a pump and can be replaced like any other organ, completely ignoring the fact that the real heart has a brain that’s independent from the brain in our head. From books such as The Heart’s Code we know that heart transplant receivers experience emotions of their heart’s donors. My guess about the artificial heart carriers is that they won’t experience the same kind of emotions as everyone else or that they won’t be able to become as deeply conscious about their emotions as everyone else. However, the definition I give to emotions is still that they are changes of heart rate. Yet that definition is too simplistic because it ignores the information encoded by the heart in our heart rhythm, which would be the cybernetic nature of emotions.
55 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:
the real heart has a brain that’s independent from the brain in our head.
That might explain the legend of the Headless Horseman. I always wondered how he could still ride through the countryside without his head-brain.
55 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:
My guess about the artificial heart carriers is that they won’t experience the same kind of emotions as everyone else or that they won’t be able to become as deeply conscious about their emotions as everyone else.
They probably experience fake emotions and become hardcore stoics.
55 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:
the definition I give to emotions is still that they are changes of heart rate. Yet that definition is too simplistic because it ignores the information encoded by the heart in our heart rhythm, which would be the cybernetic nature of emotions.
I wonder if heart rate is controlled by the medulla oblongata in our heart-brain or the one in our head-brain. Because that might be relevant to the source of emotions. If the cybernetic information travels from the head to the heart and back to the head, wouldn’t that mean the head-brain is the source of emotions? But that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. So I guess that heart rate must be controlled by the heart-medulla.