Geof Nanto

Some excellent posts here Nungali, but no, you don't understand Jung at all. If you are interested you'd have to spend much time reading as his collected works run to about 16 volumes. He is very much aware of all you say and goes much further. Incidentally, just to clear up one small understanding on Jung's concept of the Self.... What distinguishes Jungian psychology is the idea that there are two centers of the personality. The ego is the center of consciousness, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center. While the ego is a self-contained little center of the circle contained within the whole, the Self can be understood as the greater circle. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_in_Jungian_psychology for more info )

Yes, such groups have literally saved my life. Extremely important. However, I also feel the truth of Jung's perspective.... The society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organisation to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognised that it is really the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organisations, support of "isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfilment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth. It would therefore be wrong to regard this intermediary stage as a trap; on the contrary, for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever threatened by anonymity. Collective organisation is still so essential today that many consider it, with some justification, to be the final goal; whereas to call for further steps along the road to autonomy appears like arrogance or hubris, fantasticality, or simply folly. Nevertheless, it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He will go alone and be his own company. He will serve as his own group, consisting of a variety of opinions and tendencies — which need not necessarily be marching in the same direction. In fact, he will be at odds with himself, and will find great difficulty in uniting his own multiplicity for purposes of common action. Even if he is outwardly protected by the social forms of the intermediary stage, he will have no defence against his inner multiplicity. The disunion within himself may cause him to give up, to lapse into identity with his surroundings.

From The Red Book; Carl Jung’s personal diary of his inner transformation...... The Desert My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink. The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for? How eerie is this wasteland. It seems to me that the way leads so far away from mankind. I take my way step by step, and do not know how long my journey will last. Why is my self a desert? Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events? Why did I avoid my self? Was I not dear to myself? But I have avoided the place of my soul. I was my thoughts, after I was no longer events and other men. But I was not my self, confronted with my thoughts. I should also rise up above my thoughts to my own self. My journey goes there, and that is why it leads away from men and events into solitude. Is it solitude, to be with oneself? Solitude is true only when the self is a desert. Should I also make a garden out of the desert? Should I people a desolate land? Should I open the airy magic garden of the wilderness? What leads me into the desert, and what am I to do there? Is it a deception that I can no longer trust my thoughts? Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. My soul, what am I to do here? But my soul spoke to me and said, "Wait." I heard the cruel word. Torment belongs to the desert. Through giving my soul all I could give, I came to the place of the soul and found that this place was a hot desert, desolate and unfruitful. No culture of the mind is enough to make a garden out of your soul. I had cultivated my spirit, the spirit of this time in me, but not that spirit of the depths that turns to the things of the soul, the world of the soul. The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. Through the turning of my desire from things and men, I turned my self away from things and men, but that is precisely how I became the secure prey of my thoughts, yes, I wholly became my thoughts. I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned. I was overwhelmed by the endless infertility of this desert. Even if something could have thrived there, the creative power of desire was still absent. Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil's own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit. Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment, but will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on. Since then it will have been clearly proved that this man is incapable of enduring beyond things, men, and thoughts, and they will hence become his master and he will become their fool, since he cannot be without them, not until even his soul has become a fruitful field. Also he whose soul is a garden, needs things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool.

I was a Zen monk who didn’t know Zen so I chose the woods for the years I had left a robe made of patches over my body a belt of bamboo around my waist mountains and streams explain the Patriarch’s meaning flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock late cloudless nights once a month - from The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse (14th century China) translated by Red Pine.

@ Sunshine Experiences on this level are not unusual, but they are all unique and have many different aspects. No generalisations are valid. It seems to me you'll find your own way through OK. Some people have a natural sensitively, others gain it during the course of personal cultivation. In my experience it’s powered by strong emotional connection / need, and falls away as emotional needs are satisfied. It’s very much within the realm of human desire. Fortunately for me, my early experiences were pleasurable. I wanted more, not less, and I always had a sense of who it was. Here’s something I wrote about 20 years ago (with apologies for my non-existent poetic abilities)……. Closeness In stillness I sit refining emptiness I have no face I'm empty passivity The breath comes and goes Sometimes she comes and sits with me An occasional visitor My ephemeral friend, just watching She comes and goes at will Time and space don't restrain her She expresses no judgement One day she enters silently Like putting on her clothes She steps into my body She feels her way through Legs, hips, genitals, voice, consciousness Her energies throughout mine She embodies herself She flexes a little What does she feel? She expresses no judgement No she's not a goddess Just a friend who knows How to travel outside her body She changes me reveals the female from the inside With me, always there, day and night My whole being revealed My body shared Then spirit guides spoke And said she cannot stay She must leave to find herself The same for me, not easy I asked why she seems so sad They said she's a long way from home She comes from another realm Here on earth her path different from mine We cannot help each other more Her presence fades I feel a gentle longing I hope she learned something from me In the days we walked around feeling complete, in bliss, like lovers we showed each other everything

Aussie's photo of the honeyeater is actually the right way up. There's strong evidence that suggests all song birds originated in Australia...... Renowned for its unusual mammals, Australia is a land of birds that are just as unusual, just as striking, a result of the continent's tens of millions of years of isolation. Compared with birds elsewhere, ours are more likely to be intelligent, aggressive and loud, to live in complex societies, and are long-lived. They're also ecologically more powerful, exerting more influences on forests than other birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds did not keep to Australia; they spread around the globe. Australia provided the world with its songbirds and parrots, the most intelligent of all bird groups. It was thought in Darwin's time that species generated in the Southern Hemisphere could not succeed in the Northern, an idea that was proven wrong in respect of birds in the 1980s but not properly accepted by the world's scientists until 2004 - because, says Tim Low, most ornithologists live in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, few Australians are aware of the ramifications, something which prompted the writing of this book.

The Happiness of Fish Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, “The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish.” Huizi said, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?” Zhuangzi said, “You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?” Huizi said, “I am not you, to be sure, so I don’t know what it is to be you. But by the same token, since you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the happiness of fish stands intact.” Zhuangzi said, “Let’s go back to the starting point. You said, ‘Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must have known it from here, up above the Hao River.” (from Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings With Selections from Traditional Commentaries by Brook Ziporyn) I've read numerous interpretations of this, but never found any entirely satisfactory. Hence I'm interested in reading this book I've just now ordered containing 14 interpretive essays...... Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish Edited by Roger T. Ames , Edited by Takahiro Nakajima The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also (albeit incidentally) with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people.

I've been browsing Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish. I like to read books randomly rather than linearly. And this is one I'll take slowly. Continuing Dustybeijing's insight, here's a passage I like from the essay entitled Yuzhile: The Joy of Fishes, or The Play on Words, by Hans Peter Hoffmann.... In a footnote to a passage in chapter 14, "Tianyun," Burton Watson explains as follows: It should be noted that, because the words for "joy" and "music" are written with the same character, phrases translated here as "perfect music," "the music of Heaven," etc., can also be interpreted to refer to states of emotion. The phrase "perfect music" in fact appears later as the title of section 18, where I have rendered it as "perfect happiness.” Here we find another completely different approach to interpreting our anecdote —as long as we allow it to be a piece of literature and do not force it to be philosophy, and that would also mean forcing it to be unambiguous. A literary text taken as a philosophical reading is seized by a characteristic and insurmountable horror; it is the horror of ambiguity, the horror of metaphor, the horror of the loss of the shelter of definition and notion. In short, it is the horror of language . It is because of this horror that philosophical readings very often cannot deal with ambiguity. They try to transform metaphor into notion and always try to decide which meaning in an ambiguity is the right one. Normally it is impossible for philosophical interpretation of the text to take and accept a metaphor or an ambiguity as just that: a metaphor or an ambiguity. In other words, it is impossible for a philosophical interpretation of a text to take the different directions in which an ambiguity is pointing seriously as a statement, as maybe even the "real" meaning of a text. Not one direction but a variety of directions may be the answer—or, as in the Zhuangzi, the shifting sum of all of the various construals. In the Zhuangzi this is not only stated but also formed in a poetical or literary way. But this way of speaking or writing, again, is not just a quirk of the writer or the writers but is central to the philosophy of the Zhuangzi. This philosophy does not believe in fixed notions but tries to build up a literary language that is in motion and in the turn of a trope.

Daoist Sunrise by Dustybeijing From Five Immortals Temple, Wudang Mountains, China Wudang Mountains

Carl Jung was the person who most directly continued Nietzsche's Zarathustra, though not in a way I imagine you'd like..... In November 1914, Jung closely studied Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he had first read in his youth. He later recalled, "then suddenly the spirit seized me and carried me to a desert country in which I read Zarathustra." It strongly shaped the structure and style of Liber Novus [The Red Book]. Like Nietzsche in Zarathustra, Jung divided the material into a series of books comprised of short chapters. But whereas Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul. There are also indications that he read Dante's Commedia at this time, which also informs the structure of the work. Liber Novus depicts Jung's descent into Hell. But whereas Dante could utilize an established cosmology, Liber Novus is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology. The role of Philemon in Jung's work has analogies to that of Zarathustra in Nietzsche's work and Virgil in Dante's. (From The Red Book or Liber Novus, C.G. Jung. Edited and with an Introduction by Sonu Shamdasani.)

Lenticular clouds over Cape Town on November 8, 2015. This Fallstreak Hole appeared over Korumburra in Gippsland, eastern Victoria. A shelf cloud seen from Bondi Beach in Sydney. The morning glory cloud forming over Sweers Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland.

Don't forget they all had mothers..........

Rather than special foods, what are your staples? One of my favourites has to be sourdough bread. I’ve been eating it for almost 30 years and it still feels like a treat. I make it myself from scratch. I buy biodynamic wheat in 20kg bags from a local grower and grind it into flour as needed with a small stone-mill. I make a fresh loaf every 4 or 5 days or so. The bread keeps well. Sometimes I add about 20% of another grain ground into flour such as rye, brown rice, or barely, but mostly I just stick with plain wheat. I keep a starter going of fermented wheat flour, mix it into the dough as needed, knead the dough for a few minutes, leave it to rise in a warm place for about 6 to 8 hours. And then bake it for about an hour. That’s it. Easy and delicious!

Deep in the unforgiving wilds of far western Mongolia, the last remaining Kazakh eagle hunters harness a powerful force of nature. The burkitshi, as they are known in Kazakh, are proud men whose faces reveal the harshness of the beautifully barren landscape they call home. They have an extraordinary bond with the golden eagle, which to them represents the wind, the open space, the isolation and the freedom found at the edge of the world. Australian photographer Palani Mohan has spent years documenting the noble hunters, but says only 60 remain, and fears the ancient tradition could disappear within 20 years. See the full story at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-30/palani-mohan-captures-photos-of-kazakh-eagle-hunters/6890392

According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin): "Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters." (from D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism) Discussion here most often centres around the realisation the "mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters". And for me that's an important and ongoing part of my cultivation. The water-drinking sea turtle passes unnoticed, The mountain talisman burner is disliked by the demons. One grain of millet contains the whole world, In a one-quart alchemical vessel boils rivers and mountains. Lü Dongbin

Yes, you have considerably widened the scope of what was already a broad topic.

Conventional notions of us humans as a unified autonomous individuals are illusions. From the perspective of systems theory, we, and all life, consist of a hyper-complex web of system-environment processes.

Under vast arrays of stars, dazzling depths of night, I light a lone lamp among cliffs. The moon hasn’t set. It’s the unpolished jewel. Incandescence round and full, it hangs there in blackest-azure skies, my very mind. (written by the 8th century Chinese poet known simply as Cold Mountain, translated by David Hinton.)

Saudade Saudade is a word in Portuguese and Galician (from which it entered Spanish) that claims no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. A stronger form of saudade might be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died. Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one's children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling. (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade )

Thanks. Falconry has a long and well documented history in many cultures. I admire it when it's about hunting for survival as it originally was; when it's used as a sport I find it abhorrent. I'd never before heard of hunting with eagles.

There’s an ancient belief that when the moon is full the way into the realm of pure light is fully open. It’s based on the belief that the night sky is like a dark curtain hiding the true world of dazzling light. For them the starlight emanated from pin prick holes in the curtain. The moon was the major entry aperture, changing over the month from fully closed (new moon) to fully open (full moon). When I look at the night sky with this idea it’s easy to see it this way. It changes the image totally. And although it's materially incorrect, it's a powerful image to hold of our human relationship to the almost infinite vastness into which our consciousness is capable of expanding. (I read of this many years ago but cannot find the source. Does anyone know?)

Excellent! Even if it's not historically correct (which it could well be), it's totally Daoist - more so than the conventional reading of 樂 as 'happy'.

I liked those definitions so much I scanned and OCR'd the file so I could read it better....... EMOTIONS PEOPLE FEEL, BUT CAN'T EXPLAIN tai-korcza. 1. Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2. Opla: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye. which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3. Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4. Enouement: The bittersweetness of Having arrived in the future, seeing now things turn out. out not being able to tell your past self. 5. Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6. Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness o' your own Heartbeat. 7. Kenopsla: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away. even close friends who you really like. 9. Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10. Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquillity of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11. Vemodalen: The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12. Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening. 13. Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14. Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15. Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster - to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience, because people are unable to relate to it. 17. Adronitis: Frustration with now long it takes to get to know someone. 18. Ruckkohrunruha: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it facing rapidly from your awareness. 19. Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore. 20. Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21, Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22. Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you've always had - the same boring flaws and anxieties that you've been gnawing on for years. 23. Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.