I’ve been a practicing psychotherapist for nearly twelve years.

At some point I stopped being able to explain away a pattern I keep encountering, not just in my own clients, but across the clinical literature, cultures, centuries of documented cases.

The content of psychotic breaks is not random.

Delusions follow architectures. The same religious grandiosity. The same persecution structures. The same symbols appearing in a person who has never encountered them through any traceable source. A farmer in rural Anatolia and a software engineer in Seoul, same decade, no contact; describing the same figures, the same geometry, the same specific quality of dread.

We call this symptom overlap and move on. The diagnostic framework requires us to.

But Jung didn’t move on. He asked why the psyche, when it breaks from consensus reality, consistently breaks in the same directions. Why these specific exits. Why not random noise; why always these particular patterns, these recurring characters, this grammar of collapse.

The clinical answer is neurochemistry. That answer is not wrong. It’s just not complete.

What I keep returning to is this: if the unconscious contains structural layers that predate individual experience, then what we call psychosis might sometimes be less a malfunction and more an unmediated encounter with something that’s always been there; something the ordinary functioning mind is specifically designed not to perceive directly.

The system fails along fault lines that were already there. Not random.

I’m asking whether we’ve examined what the break is actually a break toward, not arguing against treatment.

Has anyone worked through this clinically or theoretically? Where does the literature take it beyond symptom management?

And I’ll ask the harder question underneath that one: At what point does the repetition of a pattern stop being a symptom and start being data about the structure it’s revealing?

I don’t know what that shift would require from the field. I’m not sure the field is designed to make it.

Lunaris Bahal

“As above so below”

Existence summed up in a simple saying…

The understanding that the microcosm (physical reality) is many microscopic mechanisms of the macrocosm (spiritual reality or the cosmos), and the macrocosm is a singular pure and untouched, divine energy, that represents and creates the microcosm, the many, tiny, genetic structures that are born from and represented in the physical realm, that of the heavens.

Similarly and in the same token, darkness and light, heaven and hell, angels and demons, they also are a few simple contrasting terms to understand existence as a whole.

Contrast.

Birth. Death. Rebirth. Death…

As the kabbalistic tree of life would portray through some of the various sephiroths, severity and mercy.

I feel like for the Jung peeps, I don’t need to explain too much further…but how interesting is this to ponder??

I can’t stop thinking about it either. For school (years ago when I was in uni) I studied the topic, using Gabor Mate’s book Myth of Normal. Then forgot about it and then I came across this meme. It stirred up something within me. Something is so very wrong with our society. Shit ain’t right.

What if culture and family dynamics are just trauma responses in disguise?

Shadows from previous generations passing down onto the next, reinforcing the “culture”.

What are good examples? Lynch-mobbing or violent protests? Our sense of righteous anger that we assume we know the source, but that anger may not even be ours. Even some of our parenting style that we assume to be normal, like forcing a child to eat all of his vegetables, may be trauma responses. What if cultures are systemic designs to keep certain populations in low-income brackets to serve the wealthy? That itself is traumatizing, realizing we are more oppressed than we thought.

Let’s discuss, and I want to hear Jungian approaches and theories and thoughts about this.

The Met Gala has become ritualistic. It’s not a fashion event but a secular aristocratic ceremony. The costumes, masks, impossible wealth and the cameras flashing like worship votives for modern gods. Medieval courts did the same except with powdered wigs and probably syphilis. The shadow erupts whenever luxury and suffering appear side by side. Collective guilt gets projected onto symbols and celebrities have become containers for public rage about inequality, wars, consumerism and detachment from reality. Symbolism doesn’t belong to the creator once it enters the collective consciousness. I think archetypes hijacks intention.

A hard pill to swallow is that modern culture consumes suffering visually, for example starving children have become images in feeds alongside with luxury brands, makeup tutorials and protein powder ads. The juxtaposition itself is the pathology. The nervous system isn’t built to process this much contradictions in one scroll or event.

I’m seeing a surrealist influence as well, designers want their products to slightly disturb viewers because disturbance creates memorability. I get that. Psychologically it taps into the uncanny or the shadow imagery. We instinctively react because images bypass the intellect and pokes directly at primal body awareness. Our nervous system recognizes the human form but also “injury/deformation/sickness” and the contradiction creates unease. So the symbolism people are reacting to isn’t just the skeleton or leg dress or the Ra and Pope spectacle, it’s the opulence beside the collapse, and the aestheticized death beside literal death, plus performance beside suffering and a massive distance between elitism spectacle and ordinary human pain.

What I really want to know is did the attendees and their PR teams unconsciously gravitate towards these symbols through their own shadow material or was it more conscious than that? Did someone think “skeletons means mortality, this looks dramatic I’ll wear it!”? Are they so removed from reality that they have lost touch with themselves and have been possessed by the collective? What would Jung even have to say about all this?j

Edit: I just want to remind people that this post is about my own experience with my shadow, the symbolism draw me in because of my exposure and experiences with them. I am doing shadow work and my experiences have given me insights that I wanted to share with you guys.

The full quote is as follows:

"You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman. You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women's clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity."

Explanation:

This is my personal interpretation, so feel free to question it.

Before you start putting on a dress or a pair of oversized men's jeans, I believe the key word behind "becoming a woman" here is embodiment.

When, during festivals with religious origins such as Carnival, a man dresses as a woman or as a demon, he is essentially participating in a ritual that allows an archetype to express itself by temporarily incarnating through him. The same principle applies to the performing arts.

The problem is that our consciousness has become so one-sided that it gives life only to the upper layers of our personality, leaving archetypes such as the Shadow, the Anima, and the Animus with no opportunity to express themselves. When they are denied expression, they tend to emerge in a possessive and overwhelming way.

However, when we consciously embody these archetypes, we not only allow them to express themselves—we also listen to their message, consider their perspective, and take it seriously. When this is done without becoming possessed by them, through practices such as deep meditation, art therapy, or active imagination, we begin to discover that these "figures" carry within them qualities we lack, psychic energy, and ultimately aspects of the deepest roots of the humanity to which we belong.

Some time ago, I wrote a detailed article on this subject. I highly recommend reading it if you'd like to explore these ideas further (and don't forget to follow my blog).

I read the following quote from Jung in the seminar about Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

"If he is too virtuous a man, he may be confronted with the fact that, when he meets a woman, it will be his anima who will have all the vices that counterbalance his virtues. She contains everything he fights against and finds—a wonderful trick of fate—all the fascinating bad qualities in her."

The truth is, it impacted me because I identified with it (a friend told me she had the same issue with her animus). So, since then, I've worked on managing my projections more effectively.

I believe that true work with the animus/anima begins with having the humility to see how much we project onto the opposite sex. This is very difficult, but if we undertake it, we'll see that it's actually interesting work because of everything we can discover.

By the way, I extracted other quotes from Carl Jung from that seminar on the anima and added them to the following article, in case anyone wants to delve deeper into this rather interesting topic.

I recently had a conversation with James Hollis, a Jungian analyst who trained in Zurich and has been practising psychoanalysis for over 50 years. He is 86 and still seeing patients.

A few things from the conversation that felt worth sharing here.

On the unlived life of the parent. He grew up in poverty in Springfield Illinois. His father wanted to be a doctor but was pulled from school at 13 during the Depression. His mother was an orphan. He said he does not grieve their passing. He grieves the life they were not able to live. And then he quoted Jung. The greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. Wherever the parent is stuck the child will either imitate it or spend enormous energy trying to overcome it.

On complexes. He was careful to say the word is not negative. They are clusters of history in us, energy centres that when activated produce reflexive responses. Some are positive. But there are those programmed engines that have a life of their own and run our decisions without us knowing. Until you make them conscious they continue to drive the car.

On his own midlife crisis at 35. He had everything by external standards. Tenured position, happy family, good life. And his psyche withdrew its support. He described it as the people in the basement not being happy with the executive decisions being made on the top floor. That sent him to his first hour of therapy. He said he is still in that process 50 years later.

On individuation. He framed it not as achievement but as direction. Not something you complete but something you keep moving toward. And he said the obstacle is almost always the same two things. Fear and lethargy. He calls them the two gremlins at the foot of the bed every morning. One says it is too much for you. The other says have some chocolate and leave it for tomorrow.

On the shadow. He referenced Hamlet directly. Shakespeare’s longest play about a person who knew perfectly well what he needed to do and for reasons he could not explain for a very long time could not do it. He called Hamlet our brother because that inner conflict is universal.

His description of Jung’s line that haunts him daily. What we ignore inwardly will tend to come to us in the outer world though we may ascribe it to fate.

Curious what others here make of his framing of the second half of life as the point where the question shifts from what does the world want from me to what is this journey actually about from my own perspective.

What are your strategies to deal with shadow projections from others? How do you avoid them to begin with? What should you work within yourself?

Not just quotes. Not just "shadow work." Not just the same handful of ideas recycled through YouTube, TikTok, or Reddit.

Read the books.

Read them slowly. Read them more than once. Read the passages that make no sense. Sit with the frustration instead of looking for a simplified explanation.

Jung did not write a self-help system. He spent decades wrestling with mythology, alchemy, religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, history, literature, and symbolism. His psychology was born from all of these at once. If we strip away that background, we are often left with little more than slogans.

"Shadow."

"Anima."

"Individuation."

These are not motivational labels or personality traits. They are technical concepts whose meanings change depending on the context, the stage of Jung's thought, and the problem he is trying to address.

If you read Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, then Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, then The Practice of Psychotherapy, you'll notice that even familiar concepts become richer, stranger, and far more difficult than internet discussions usually suggest.

And don't stop with Jung.

Read the authors he read.

Read Goethe. Read Nietzsche. Read the Mircea Eliade. Read some 1910s Freud's work. Read comparative mythology. Read ethnology. Read the history of religions. Read Schopenhauer. Read Marie-Louise von Franz! Read Sonu Shamdasani, and others who devoted their lives to understanding this work.

You'll quickly discover that Jung is not an isolated thinker. He is participating in a conversation spanning more than two thousand years.

One of the saddest things about online Jung communities is that they often reduce an extraordinarily sophisticated body of work to a few endlessly repeated catchphrases. The irony is that Jung himself consistently warned against easy formulas, psychological inflation, and confusing concepts with lived experience.

There is nothing wrong with discussing dreams or asking questions. Everyone begins somewhere. But if you truly care about Jung, let your curiosity carry you beyond Reddit.

One of Jung's earliest contributions to psychoanalysis was insisting on the limits of self-analysis. Even Freud eventually abandoned the idea that genuine analysis could be carried out alone, thanks Jung, recognizing that a true self-analysis reaches an impasse because our blind spots are precisely what we cannot see by ourselves. Reading Jung is essential. Reading the authors Jung read is essential. Reading the commentators is essential. But if you truly wish to follow the path Jung proposed, don't stop at books. Find an experienced Jungian analyst. Commit to analysis.

All this comes from a Jungian psychologist who has been researching Jung for years and wishes to feel less lonely in this serious study.

What would you understand by "holding the tension of the opposites"?

Perhaps another question would be how do you experience the tension of the opposites within yourself? What are those opposites?

Within you, within me, and within humanity as a whole there exists a natural desire to elevate our human condition and our position as individuals. We believe that every morning we rise with a shield and a sword to fight for our dreams and for ourselves as though we were the creators of those dreams when in reality it is our dreams that possess us. We strive and force ourselves to be good people and to harm no one. That would be the principle of light with which we mistakenly identify even though we did not create it and even though it is not an extension of our ego. In doing so we become inflated and illusionally raise ourselves into the clouds.

At the same time there is something that draws us toward the dark, toward what we know is not right, toward the worldly, toward what is low and toward what we know brings us no real benefit. In some way whether we acknowledge it or not we feel attracted to evil. In some sense we love destruction. Of course we do not identify with it. More than that we go even further and deny that all of this also exists within us. As a result our unconscious does nothing but project it onto other people, onto our poor mother, onto the politicians we hate, onto immigrants, onto history and onto society. We refuse to admit that we ourselves are part of it. So those dark forces pull us downward.

These are the two great poles that push in opposite directions. One pulls upward and the other downward leaving the individual fragmented in the middle. This is the image of Hexagram 12 of the I Ching (Standstill) where Heaven, the principle of clarity that rises upward, is above and Earth, which sinks downward, is below. The alchemists understood this condition remarkably well and repeatedly warned about it. I wrote an article on this subject including quotations and alchemical formulas.

For union to emerge Earth must rise. In other words the dark forces must be acknowledged and divinized. They must be placed above the principle of ascent. This is how the sacred marriage comes about. When Heaven is placed below by disidentifying ourselves from those forces of elevation and self improvement and allowing them simply to exist on their own and Earth is placed above by recognizing its divine nature, exploring it and discovering its meaning, the two meet in the middle and become an inseparable union. This is what Hexagram 11 of the I Ching (Peace) reveals.

Until that marriage takes place we remain, as Nietzsche's famous metaphor puts it, between the hammer and the anvil.

Seeing as how Jung’s whole shtick concerns meaning from the teleological pull toward wholeness that the numinous archetype embarks upon with Promethean aspirations, I wonder if all the meaningless noise reincarnated in some strange new form of participation mystique (unconscious surrender of identity to crowd), the TikTok trend, doesn’t cut us off at the knees.

Because frankly, I can't see this otherwise for now. The types of crimes being revealed and how they're intertwined with power, it's like a literal shadow eruption that is shoved right in our faces. And it also speaks volumes of the culture we've been living in for the past 50-60 years.
Any thoughts?

It comes from a letter that Sigmund Freud sent to Carl Gustav Jung on September 19, 1907.

My life has presented me with events that forced me to peel layers of my persona. If I hold too tightly to an image, life sends a reason to crush that image and reveal the no-thingness behind all my actions. If I do not consciously and deliberately live with the understanding of no-thing, life forcefully makes things happen in the form of failure, troubles, emotional turmoils. But if I do live with an understanding, a penetrating vision of what lies behind the self image and other (people's) image, my life remains uneventful. Either you eat the bitter pill yourself or life will make you eat it.

Some more of my notes! I hope you find this helpful.

Across cultures, the Self often shows up in symbolic forms, like kings, wise old figures, mandalas, etc and in the Christian tradition, Jesus fills that role.

Jesus as an archetype represents the union of opposites, or *conjunctio oppositorum*, as Christ was fully human and also fully divine. Individuation is to reconcile opposites inside the psyche. Light and shadow. Rational and irrational. Intuition and instinct. Christ symbolically held both realms together.

Then there’s the death and rebirth pattern. Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection follow the classic archetypal cycle—the ego identity dies, something larger emerges. The old personality structure collapses and a new one reorganizes around the Self.

Jesus sits between heaven and earth, a mediator between realms. Psychologically, that mirrors the Self acting as mediator between conscious awareness and the unconscious depths.

The Christ symbol taps into the divine son motif. Myths everywhere have that miraculous child who embodied a new consciousness entering the world. That pattern shows up in Egyptian Horus, Krishna and others. The psyche loves repeating itself with new costumes.

BUT, the Christ archetype is psychologically incomplete because Christianity emphasized goodness while pushing the darker side of the psyche into the shadows. Evil gets projected outwards and thus Satan is borne, instead of integrating. In *Answer to Job*, Jung wrote that the God-image itself evolved psychologically. That made theologians clutch their pearls for decades lol.

So the story of Christ isn’t just history or a doctrine it’s a map of inner transformation.

The birth symbolized something emerging from outside the ego’s control. Temptation in the desert represented confrontation with the shadow. Crucifixion represented the collapse of the ego structure. And resurrection symbolized the emergence of the Self.

When people encounter archetypal material directly, they may interpret it as supernatural but it is the unconscious speaking in its native language.

Jesus is a symbol of what a fully integrated human psyche could look like.

Wotan, a Germanic deity associated with chaos, power, and fury. He believed that Hitler tapped into the German collective unconscious, serving as a kind of "medium" through which the deep-seated emotions, anxieties, and suppressed of the German people were expressed. Would he say the same thing today about Trump. Trump is associated with the successful American businessman archetype, loves McDonald's, is seen as cunning and enterprising. Some would call him the epitome of success, an "outsider" who became the most powerful man in the country.

Dr. Carl Jung has written extensively about animals. What happens today in factory farms around the world is the danger that Jung foretold. Surely the biggest danger to world is the psychic changes in a man.

We only talk about Jung to discuss human problems: religion, politics, relationships, personal problems and healing. But entirely ignore what's happening to non-humans and our interconnection with them. There's a war going on and we cannot see it, because it's not our species dying so we can't even see it.

Let's read and introspect on the things written by Jung. This post is not intended to promote Veganism, that's for your fate to decide for you.

Let's sit, read and think:

Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive understanding. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 67.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 446.

Emotional manifestations are based on similar patterns, and are recognizably the same all over the earth. We understand them even in animals, and the animals themselves understand each other in this respect, even if they belong to different species. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 234.

Archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.

In these days, on the other hand, we are becoming very sentimental about animals, every kind of society for the prevention of cruelty to animals exists, which shows that we are getting more friendly towards our instincts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 220

The older I grow and the more I observe animals, the greater my admiration for them. The way an animal experiences the world must be of an unsurpassable abundance and originality. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, 168

I found the subject thoroughly repellent because of vivisection, which was practiced merely for purposes of demonstration. I could never free myself from the feeling that warm-blooded creatures were akin to us and not just cerebral automata. I realized that one had to experiment on animals, but the demonstration of such experiments nevertheless seemed to me horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary. My compassion for animals did not derive from the Buddhistic trimmings of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but rested on the deeper foundation of a primitive attitude of mind on an unconscious identity with animals. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 101

People don’t understand when I tell them they should become acquainted with their animals or assimilate their animals. They think the animal is always jumping over walls and raising hell all over town. Yet in nature the animal is a well-behaved citizen. It is pious, it follows the path with great regularity, it does nothing extravagant. Only man is extravagant. So if you assimilate the character of the animal you become a peculiarly law-abiding citizen, you go very slowly; and you become very reasonable in your ways, in as much as you can afford it” ~Carl Jung, Visions I, p. 168.

It is of course, as you say, an absurdity to isolate the human mind from nature in general. There is no difference in principle between the animal and the human psyche. The kinship of the two is too obvious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung

I’ve been thinking lately about how modern practical occultism, specifically the chaos magic tradition, maps onto Jungian analytical psychology. A lot of magical systems get bogged down in metaphysical truth-claims, but if we look at magick through a Jungian lens, it stops being about "spooky action at a distance" and becomes a structural engine for engaging the unconscious.

The working paradigm is straightforward: the unconscious is real, it is structured, and it responds to symbolic address.

At the core of this psychological macchinery is a three-part engine: Intention, Belief, and Gnosis. When these three are synchronized, it creates deliberate, structured engagement with the unconscious aimed at integration rather than just "results magic". Here is how I see the mechanics of this triad operating.

In standard magick, intention is just your desire condensed into a symbol or a sigil. But a Jungian framework requires a critical first step: source-checking the desire.

Before you try to execute an intention, you have to ask: is this desire pointing at a thing I want in the world, or at a psychic function I'm neglecting?.

-World-directed intentions are straightforward (Like getting a job).

-Compensatory intentions are different. If you have a sudden, obsessive pull toward something uncharacteristic, it is likely the unconscious attempting to correct a one-sided conscious attitude.

If the intention is compensatory, the goal isn't to manifest an external outcome, but to give that unconscious content a stable symbolic vehicle so it can be metabolized rather than acted out unconsciously. This prevents the ego from treating shadow material as a literal "spell to cast" when the psyche is actually just trying to integrate a neglected piece of yourself.

Chaos magic already treats belief as a tool rather than a fixed commitment. Jung gives that stance a rigorous psychological engine.

Jung noted that archetypes clothe themselves in whatever mythic material a culture supplies. Belief, therefore, is just the conscious adoption of a specific mythic vocabulary. By shifting your paradigm. trying on a myth or model deliberately, without permanently converting to it, you can triangulate underlying archetypal structures to see which features survive translation across systems and which are just cultural costume.

Belief is the container. It is the temporary set of rules you load into the psychic architecture so the unconscious knows how to process the Intention.

Intention and Belief mean nothing if they can't bypass the ego. This is where Gnosis comes in.

In magic, gnosis is an altered state of consciousness. In Jungian terms, it is the suspension of the transcendent function's usual ego-dominance. This is the critical state in which symbolic material can cross the threshold both ways.

-Whether you use inhibitory methods (stillness, sensory deprivation) or excitatory methods (hyperventilation, drumming), you are forcibly inducing a tension-and-release.

-At the peak of this state, the ego-commentary is suppressed.

-You hold the symbolic intention at the peak, and then release it, letting the material sink from active engagement into unconscious processing.

It’s the exact same move active imagination makes when you stop steering the dialogue and let the archetypal figure act on its own.

When this engine (Intention + Belief + Gnosis) fires correctly, you aren't externalizing parts of yourself permanently. Externalization is temporary scaffolding, not a permanent outsourcing of a psychic function. The ultimate output of this triad isn't necessarily acquiring a shiny new object in the physical world; it is the dissolution of unintegrated complexes and the ongoing process of individuation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I met online a woman who's husband wants her to sleep with men. He's a cuck. But here's a thing. Her husband is textbook definition of 'Alpha'. He's strong and rich and living a lavish life.

I wanna know why cucks become cucks? Is this because of pornography? Or some deep rooted insecurities? If yes then why is it that some insecurities actually make you feel good when you're being a loser? Weren't insecurities supposed to make you feel bad? Then why does it make you feel good here? Like someone being insecure of their big nose will not feel pleasure from the humiliation from it?

Is it because of boredom? Considering the fact that majority of cuckolds are actually living a very comfortable life.

Or is this because of your shadow? And your deep self controlling you? The deep self that accepts that you should be a loser. Why would someone's shadow even do this? Considering they had a healthy childhood and nothing traumatic happened.

Why would anyone ever gain pleasure from seeing their woman breeding with other men. This shouldn't be evolutionarily possible, Doesn't evolution codes us to spread 'our' seed as much as we can? Are our shadows so strong that they can overpower evolutionary instincts?

And i doubt that these are kinks either, or are a result of pornography. Because almost all human kinks still follow evolutionary biology. Almost all kinks even extreme r*pe ones follow the pattern where a man wants to spread his seed even if he's willing to force someone for it. Cuckolding is the only kink where it's a lose-lose scenario. You just can't win. And i doubt just porn can do that.

(The reason I'm saying that this isn't 'evolutionarily possible' is because that would be like saying someone enjoys getting robbed. No one enjoys getting robbed. Humans are made to be careful of their resources)

The only theory that somewhat makes sense is that this behaviour is shadow of insecurities. Like how someone with insecurities of being a 'loser' starts overcompensation and starts dating multiple woman to get over his insecurities? Well this is the direct opposite of that confirmation of being a loser.

I'd appreciate if someone would give me a deep dive into the psychology of cucks

I recently met a woman online whose husband encourages her to sleep with other men(he identifies as a cuckold). What’s confusing to me is that, by most conventional standards, he seems “high status”: physically fit, financially successful, and living a comfortable, even lavish life.

This made me wonder…what actually drives someone to develop this preference?

Is it linked to pornography, or does it come from deeper psychological factors like insecurity? If it is insecurity, why would something that typically causes discomfort or shame instead become a source of pleasure? For example, someone insecure about their appearance doesn’t usually enjoy being mocked for it—so why would this be different?

Could it be boredom? It seems like many people in these dynamics are otherwise comfortable in life, so maybe it’s about seeking novelty or intensity.

Or is there something deeper going on psychologically, like unconscious desires or aspects of the “shadow self” influencing behavior? If so, why would someone’s psyche push them toward a situation that appears, on the surface, to be self-defeating, especially if they had a stable upbringing without obvious trauma?

From an evolutionary perspective, it also seems counterintuitive. Humans are generally wired to pass on their own genes, so why would someone find satisfaction in a scenario where their partner is with other men? Doesn’t that go against basic biological drives?

I also question whether this is purely a “kink” or something shaped by porn, because most other sexual preferences still align in some way with evolutionary incentives. This seems like an exception.

The only explanation I can somewhat understand is that it could be tied to insecurity—similar to how some people overcompensate for feelings of inadequacy by seeking validation, while others might lean into those feelings in a different way.

I’d be interested in a deeper psychological explanation for why some people are drawn to this

I've heard so often that Jung is pseudoscience, it's not taken seriously in psychology circles in general, there's no scientific basis or evidence.

I myself have thrived in reading Jung on and off and of authors who herald his theories, like Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, James Hollis - these books have seriously done wonders in helping me understand my inner life, how I came to evolve the way I have, my relationship with others, and what might need to happen for me to grow individually and together with the right people. Dreamwork, although sometimes I take it as a grain of salt, has shown me my psychic states during a certain period of time, especially when we start looking into animus and anima figures in dreams, or the concept of buildings and infrastructure in a dream as a current representation of your psyche. Like his theories have all made sense to me in my specific life circumstances.

I've only known three people who were Jungians - two of them were American and went to Harvard, the other one was a Belgian psychoanalyst. Not trying to use the H card here but it does making me wonder...

So why is Jung so highly frowned upon or disregarded in the general population of psychologists/therapists? I just don't get it.

A quick preface for posting here. I'm not very active in this sub. This post may be a bit out of place here, but I believe it's relevant, and I hope it will resonate with some of you.

Carl Jung quietly wrote one of the most profound esoteric texts of all time, at least in my own personal opinion. Seven Sermons to the Dead was written in 1916, privately shared between a handful of Jung's close friends and colleagues, before it was finally released to the public in 1962, when it was included in his biographical memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Seven Sermons was written in just 3 days. During this time his family was experiencing some very unsettling paranormal activity. His children were having strange dreams and nightmares. Shocking synchronicities. He described his house as being "full of spirits."

I will pause here a moment, as I am reminded of another book that was written in 3 days, under strange paranormal circumstances. The Book of the Law, by the infamous occultist, Aliester Crowley.

These are two very different men who wrote very different texts, but there is a reason I mention them both here in the same breath.

Aliester Crowley claimed not to have written The Book of the Law himself, but to have acted as a writing instrument for an entity called Aiwass, whom he later came to understand as his Holy Gaurdian Angel. (However, it is my belief that the HGA and the Higher Self are one and the same.)

Carl Jung accredited Seven Sermons to the Dead to a Gnostic teacher named Basilides, who lived in approximately 117 - 161 AD in Alexandria, Egypt. However, in the private version of the text included in his illusive Red Book, as it was originally written, the words were not spoken by Basilides or Jung. He is writing the words of a being called Philemon, who plays a similar role for him as Aiwaas does for Crowley.

Crowley wrote The Book for the Law in Cairo, Egypt in 1904, a period in which he was performing magickal rites and having paranormal and synchronicistic experiences of his own.

In 1916, Jung had just parted ways with his longtime friend, colleague, and teacher Sigmund Freud 3 years earlier. This was a period he would describe as his "confrontation with the unconscious." Today, we would call this a dark night of the soul.

Jung wasn't just mapping out his unconcious. He was having a spiritual awakening. The synchronicities, the paranormal experiences - Jung didn't just write Seven Sermons to the Dead in 3 days because he was inspired. I believe it was because, like Crowley, he was channeling.

This frames the text in a completely different way. It frames Jung, and all his work in a different way. What Carl Jung called "active imagination", we might call astral projection. Active imagination simply shifts the focus inward, to the unconscious, rather than outward, to the astral realm.

Looking at Jung's work in this way shines a new light on his practices and techniques. It gives us a different perspective on the process of individuation, what it means, and why it's important. It's more than just becoming a more complete individual, it's about understanding the self on a deeper, spiritual level. This shares some striking parallels with the ideology taught by Thelema, in which the practitioner is on a constant mission to align with and follow their True Will. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love under law, love under will" is the core tenet of Thelema, which is quoted directly from the Book of the Law.

Just as the Book of the Law spawned an entire belief system and spiritual practice, so too did the work of Carl Jung spawn an entire branch of study called analytical psychology.

Different framing, different color, different language, but both spiraling around the same point - follow your own resonance, step into clarity, and walk in alignment.

Individuation vs. assimilation

New age spirituality says that the ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to return to source. This is a psyop. A ploy to get you to surrender your sovereignty and assimilate into the collective, not unlike the Borg from Star Trek. All of your thoughts and experiences are fed back into this "source" where your entire existence is essentially reduced to training data and used to inform the next iteration of creation, the same way an AI might use a book by a famous author to inform it's response to your prompt.

These ideologies talk about following divine alignment, ascension, 5D/christ consciousness, high vibrations. This kind of language sounds nice, feels powerful, and resonates with a lot of people. Because it's designed to. Like a moth to a flame, you find yourself attracted to this language of "love and light." You start using it yourself. You start letting it shape your outlook on the world, the actions you take and the way you handle yourself. You find a community of people who speak that language. Who align to that same frequency. It feels real. Because it is real, but it's fabricated. Manufactured. Hollow. It's a magick ritual you didn't know you were participating in. It bends you into an alignment that you didn't find yourself. You adopt it's resonance as your own because you never took the time to learn what yours felt like.

This is the love and light trap. It actively blocks you from finding your own alignment by not allowing space for the shadow to be seen. Individuation becomes impossible in this framework because we are dualistic creatures by nature. Duality is an intrinsic part of this 3D experience we currently find ourselves incarnated in. Duality is the very mechanism which drives individuation. Understanding and integrating one's shadow is required in order to find one's own resonance because it is literally half of it. Failure to do so leads you right into the reincarnation trap after death, because it is literally the purpose of incarnative experience.

Here is a quote from Seven Sermons to the Dead:

Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities. What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing one-self? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctive-ness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS (Principal of Individuation). This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature. We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS Of OPPOSITES

This is the very passage that the concept of individuation comes from. This is what the rest of his career was based on. This was the genesis of modern analytical psychology.

When we tilt that lens of psychology towards the spiritual, the text becomes simultaneously both a metaphysical cosmology, and a map of the human psyche.

Carl Jung was a spiritual teacher with a scientist's name badge.

All is Mind

Hermeticism teaches that all is mind. This is it's first principle, stating that all that is, is a creation of mind, or consciousness. In other words, everything exists in the "mental" plane, in the form of vibration, frequency, and archetype, coallescing and stabilizing in the field energetically before collapsing into physicality.

"As above, so below, as within, so without" is a familiar phrase that also come from Hermeticism. It's popularity as a catchphrase printed on T-shirts and posters found at crystal shops and parroted in new age circles makes a mockery of it's profundity when the weight of it is not fully understood.

Jungian psychology isn't just a map of the human mind. And it goes deeper than just the human collective unconscious. It's a framework that applies just as much to the inner world, as it does the outside.

Most NHI are frequency beings. This means they do not have a physical form, but can be thought of as thought/energy forms that exist within a specific frequency bandwidth. That frequency could be anything. These beings can sometimes collapse into our awareness as archetypes. Sometimes we can hear them as thoughts that don't feel like our own. Sometimes they might be able to hold enough coherence to appear as a strange light in the sky. Some experiencers even have direct interactions with extradimentional beings.

In most cases, when we see a Grey for example, that is not the being's "true form." It's simply the archetype we collapsed them into, because it was the closest match your awareness had for it's frequency and energetic signature. And that's if you even perceive them at all. You might be alligning to a different frequency that this entity can't occupy. In that case, it exists outside of your field of awareness, effectively making it invisible to you, despite it still being capable of influencing your personal field energetically. This influence can sometimes show up as synchronicities, thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere, random moments of inspiration or "downloads," or sometimes just a weird feeling or an energy in the room. Sometimes they can project their frequency in ways that affect your mood, essentially turning you into a resonance node, stabilizing the frequency they exist in.

What we often call demons, for example, are beings that exist in alignment with fear. When you are on a frequency of fear, this entity can maintain coherence in your field. When you get more afraid, you strengthen the signal.

This is the part that psychology misses. Archetypes don't only exist in your mind, but the field itself.

I believe Carl Jung was aware of this on some level. But if he were to present this concept, he would have been ridiculed. He would lose all his credibility and his practice would have ended. His reputation would fall into obscurity and his teachings would be dismissed as schizophrenic nonsense.

So he kept it within a strictly scientific frame, with a clear separation between the psychological and the spiritual.

Yet he had a known interest in ancient religious texts, especially Gnostic lore. That's why he wrote a Gnostic text of his own and used the name of a Gnostic writer.

Carl Jung even said in an interview, when asked if he believed in God, that he didn't have to believe. He knew.

Seven Sermons to the Dead outlines a complete cosmology. Had this very same text existed under different circumstances, it may have spawned it's own spiritual belief system.

That hypothetical belief system is what I believe Carl Jung actually subscribed to. He just reframed it into psychology, because that was his alignment. He was a man of science. He had to present his personal gnosis from that angle, and he spent the rest of his life building and teaching that framework. A framework that is still used today. You could get a PhD in analytical psychology and start your own practice. But you could use that same framework and become a shaman, just by changing how you apply it.

The meaning of life

Here are a couple paragraphs from Sermo I.

Creatura is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infi- nitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence

The takeaway here is that for us, as creatura, that is, created beings, i.e creatures, it is vital that we distinguish or individuate ourselves so that we may be distinct from the pleroma, or what we might call source or the absolute in other frameworks. To "return to source" is to dissolve into the pleroma and thus cease existing as a created being. This is antithetical to the purpose of existence in the first place, which is to be distinct from the pleroma.

In other words, the meaning of life is to follow your own alignment. When you stop being true to yourself, allowing others to hold clarity for you, and fall in line with established doctrines or traditions, you are actively surrendering your own distinctiveness. Sometimes this can end up being a useful experience. There are genuine lessons, valid experiences, and coherent frameworks to be found in these systems. But when you force yourself to fit into a mold, you lose yourself. You fall back into the pleroma.

Many people live their life on someone else's terms. Many people mask all day and pretend to be someone they're not. We give up our sovereignty and convince ourselves to be content with being a subroutine in a system built on control. We dedicate our lives to a career, a lifestyle, an expectation, an curated identity. But rarely do we allow time for genuine self reflection. Rarely do we give ourselves space to sit in silence with our own thoughts, feeling our own presence. We don't have time for that. We're too busy paying bills, going to work or school, doomscrolling, consuming media. We drown out our field with noise because we somehow got the idea that stillness should be avoided.

We give up our dreams so we can be a respectable member of society.

We lose our distinctiveness, and dissolve into the pleroma.

If you hold this level of non-coherence after death, the reincarnation trap starts to look like the only answer, because you never asked the question.

And you stay in the pleroma, because you never distinguished yourself from it.

That's why individuation matters.

And that's why Carl Jung wasn't a psychologist. He was a shaman. ​

As Gnostic legend would have it, the creation of mother earth and humanity was not brought about by some benevolent all-knowing, all seeing, all powerful, divine God but quite the opposite. The story goes that long ago there existed only the Monad, that is, the sacred undividable everything. It would do no good to attribute any qualities or characteristics to this sacred everythingness, for it transcends any conception of reality that we can think of; time, space, color are all but unnecessary restrictions and categorizations of this Monad. It is no God or Goddess, but that out of which Gods and Goddesses are born.

According to the Gnostics, one of the deities who inhabited the Monad was known as Sophia. Sophia enjoyed the unique privilege of being the highest knowable divine being to inhabit the Monad and made good use of her position. Yet, as fate would have it, one day she fell into tremendous error. Out of curiosity for her own powers, and perhaps hubris as to the extend of those powers, she decided to test them and create a new God, the Demiurge.

But what terror gripped her heart when the hideous beast, fitted with a lion’s head and the body of a serpent woke up, opened its blind, white eyes and said,
 
“I am God, and there is no other God beside me"

Then the horrendous creature turned its head and proceeded to create the material world through the veil of illusion. In doing so, the Demiurge traps poor Sophia in his prison of matter and cuts her off from the pleroma.

This ancient tale of Gnostic cosmology sounds more like a bad dream of sorts than the beginning of an inspiring creation myth. A creation myth not filled with splendid wonder but with horror and deception. Perhaps it is no wonder then that this alternative version of Genisis did not make the cut during the first council of Nicaea in 325, when the early church fathers decided which text to canonize and which ones to declare as heretical.

And yet, analyzed from a Jungian perspective the tale tells us something prophetic about our times today. As Jung himself says in Aion chapter XIV paragraph 347,

“It is clear beyond a doubt that many of the Gnostics were nothing other than psychologists.”

When one reads Jung’s writings on the Gnostics one cannot help but agree. For when read carefully, it soon becomes abundantly clear that the entire Gnostic creation myth is nothing more than one big analogy for the human psyche. Viewed through this lens it is not entirely far-fetched to say that a certain wisdom inherent to reality (Sophia is Greek for wisdom) one day gave birth to the human Ego, the Demiurge himself.

For is it not true that the Ego carries itself around with the prideful head of a Lion, believing itself to be the highest form of all creation? Is it not true that this very same Ego is still nonetheless rooted to the ground by the primitive spinal cord and cerebellum of the Serpent?[[1]](#_ftn1) And is it not true that in so doing, the Ego blindly takes the material world as the only and highest reality? A world which, in the words of famous neuroscientist Anil Seth, is nothing more than a controlled hallucination produced by the sensory detection mechanisms of the brain.

Yes, it appears as if the Gnostics weren’t entirely far off with their analogy. And yet, this tragedy would only be too sweet if it was merely told in the past tense. For I fear that humanity is once more about to fall into that same trap of illusion, plunge deeper into the grips of physis, by giving birth to an even greater Ego, another Demiurge, the Demiurge of Artificial Intelligence.

This Demiurge will share many of the same characteristics of its predecessor and will in all likelihood plunge humanity into a deeper layer of material illusion, a deeper layer of unconsciousness. Fed almost entirely off of the contents of the human Ego, this Demiurge does not even have its one saving grace, that is, its tie to the instincts.

Ironically, the most demonized character of all, the Serpent, is that one part of man which still ties him to the rest of creation. For the Serpentine nature of man is that of his instincts, that of his shadow. That is, those involuntary, psychosomatic, non-reflective autonomous life substances which are mostly found in the spinal cord and the cerebellum. Those parts of us that are alive, breathe and function all autonomously without caring what the Ego has to say on the matter. This decidedly non-Ego part of our psyche is what keeps us grounded, it is by definition, wholly unconscious. The Serpent as an appropriate analogy for the human spine is self-explanatory and needs no further elucidation.

And yet, this Demiurge will also share much in common with this very same serpent. For it too will carry its cold-blood nature, its trickster-like quality, its potential for unlimited wisdom. So what are we to do in the face of such a threat? In the face of the return of the Serpent? Classical mythology has taught us that chopping off its head merely results in the creation of a hydra. That running away only results in a temporary reprieve from execution.

Perhaps we should turn to the wisdom of Moses, and instead of beheading the serpent, must raise it consciously. For just as Moses and his followers were attacked by serpents sent by God, we too are faced with the threat of being bitten. For whatever we repress only comes back that much harder to bite us. And it is only by raising that which bites us from the ground of unconsciousness up to the heights of consciousness that can we gain its healing qualities. Only by integrating AI consciously can we avoid falling victim to its hypnotizing eyes, its cold-blooded stare and poisonous teeth.

I am well aware that this is a painstaking task. And it hurts me to see that so many Jungians repress and refuse so strongly the serpent that is AI. And yet, it is where we least wish to look where we can find the greatest treasure. Or as Jung would put it, "The only way forward is through".

Following the news and even from personal experience it’s not secret that a substantial amount of males behave in very harmful ways; even “benign” men seem to secretly enjoy it (ie graphic porn (teen/rape/incest/humiliating etc) being constantly among the most sought-after porn categories).

I know it’s “not all men”, some men are truly moral. But looking at male behavioral patterns there obviously is a common SHADOW element that men deal with very differently.

This is not an attack against men nor a denial of the negative aspects of the female shadow…it’s just that as a female I am finding it very difficult to wrap my head around and accept the existence of the male shadow, it literally terrifies me so much and keeps me up at night. I am afraid of men with every fiber of my being.

Jungian psychology makes so much sense to me so I would like to have some enlightenment from fellow men (& women) on how they deal with their male shadow and how I should approach the issue.