The Alchemical Body of Carl Jung

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-191
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Substance P ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Active Imagination ◽  
Kundalini Yoga ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
Quantum Revolution ◽  
Eastern Traditions

This chapter traces the subtle body concept through the work of Carl Jung, who is introduced to the idea by G. R. S. Mead’s theosophical books. After tracing Jung’s early engagement with the Orient, the chapter moves to an analysis of the subtle body concept in his work, specifically in his engagements with Eastern traditions: Daoism, Kundalini Yoga, and Tibetan Bardo Yoga. After examining Jung’s use of the subtle body concept in his translation-commentaries on Eastern texts, the chapter turns to how Jung incorporates the concept into his own psychology of individuation based on the techniques of active imagination and dream analysis. The chapter turns to Jung’s seminars on Nietzsche, where he presents the subtle body concept with a unique dose of critical reflexivity and Kantian rigor. It ends with Jung’s late-life speculation about a future where, following the quantum revolution and spitting of the atom, humans evolve into subtle body–dwelling creatures who occupy a world of psychical substance.

Theosophical Gnosis and Astral Hermeneutics

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-136
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
And Function

This chapter traces the subtle body concept through the writings of Blavatsky’s heirs, the major figures in the second generation of theosophy, zeroing in specifically on their reformulations of a mystical form of Christianity informed by the yoga of the subtle body. First, it examines the life and works of Annie Besant and her mythological subtle body interpretations of the Bible. Next, it moves on to Charles Leadbeater, his Kundalini experiences, and how these informed his own subtle body ideas drawn from Kabbalah, Hindu philosophy, and his own personal experience. Lastly, the chapter examines Blavatsky’s former secretary, G. R. S. Mead, and how the subtle body concept is formulated in his numerous books. It ends by looking at Mead’s prognostications about a future wherein the sciences, parapsychology, and humanities are brought together to answer questions about the nature and function of the subtle body.

The Body of Light in Renaissance England

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
New Form ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

This chapter engages with the first Anglophone attestations of the term “subtle body.” It appears first in the contentious correspondence between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes between whom there was some disagreement over who plagiarized the idea from whom. Most of the chapter is taken up with the Cambridge Platonists who came in their wake, who formulated complex philosophical and mythological views of the Neoplatonic vehicles of the soul, now under the English name “subtle body.” It ends with Lady Anne Conway, who fuses the Platonism of the Cambridge group with Kabbalah to create a new form of spiritual monism. This chapter is significantly about how the subtle body concept was employed by Renaissance Platonists arguing against the reductive materialism of Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

The Cakras in Transpersonal Psychotherapy

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
John Prendergast
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Experience ◽  
Personal Transformation ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Kundalini Yoga ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Indian Tradition ◽  
Transpersonal Psychotherapy ◽  
Body Sensations ◽  
Tantra Yoga

The Indian tradition of Tantra-Yoga and Kundalini-Yoga describes seven major cakras ("discs/wheels"): subtle energy centers in the body that govern different domains of human experience ranging from physical survival to spiritual illumination. After twenty years of direct personal and clinical experience with the cakras, I have come to believe that they offer a remarkable conceptual and perceptual map of the psychospiritual process and play a vital, though often unrecognized, role in psychotherapy. It appears to me that psychotherapy knowingly or unknowingly involves the cakras and that awareness of them facilitates the process of personal transformation,allowing clients to gradually open to their transpersonal depths. In this article I will demonstrate the relevance of the cakras to the practice oftranspersonal psychotherapy and offer some suggestions as to how therapists and clients can consciously work with them. Using the cakrasrequires an ability to focus on subtle body sensations and to understand their meaning, a capacity that many therapists and clients already have. Knowledge of and experience with the cakras help to bridge psychology and spirituality,enriching our understanding of transpersonal psychotherapy and helping to ground it in the body.

Oriental Origins

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Subtle Body ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
East West ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

This chapter shows how the subtle body concept as established by the Cambridge Platonists was carried forward in popular and literary domains and later used as a stock concept in the earliest English translations of Sanskrit texts. It takes the reader through the birth of Indology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the subtle body concept through early translations of yoga and Sāṃkhya philosophy, focusing on how the authors posited historical connections between Neoplatonic and Hindu philosophies, laying the groundwork for future understandings of the subtle body as a concept spanning a great East-West divide.

The Dream Analog

2016 ◽  
pp. 40-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brock Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Structure Function ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Virtual Realities ◽  
Human Perceptions ◽  
Sustainable Media ◽  
Electro Magnetic

Increasingly, human perceptions of reality are based on virtual illusions. This altered reality called the metaverse is dreamlike. If reality, the metaverse, and dreams are virtual illusions, the metaverse and dreams are real. This suggests that virtual realities may be analyzed according to Carl Jung's compensational dynamics of dream analysis. The objective of such analysis would be discovery of contextual (target group) meaning in unconscious dimensions. Such discovery could lead to the use of mediated biofeedback to engineer Earth-sustainable media content in order to promote coherent frequencies on correlated electro-magnetic scales. This chapter will emphasize the authenticity of research on the collective unconscious as projected into the metaverse. Based on fundamental correlations in structure, function, and purpose of dreams as defined by Carl Jung, drama-based video games can be understood as a genre that may serve as an unprecedented, interactive dream analog for purposes of cognitive research.

The Media-Dream Model

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-190
Author(s):  
Stephen Brock Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Cognitive Dimension ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
The Media ◽  
Psychological Dynamics

We live in a world not of science but of science fiction. Like pixel patterns from unconscious software is projected onto a monitor, unconscious archetypal quantum patterns are projected as what Carl Jung called archetypal representation (AR). Projected images are then subject to the vagaries of personal perception, so it may be stipulated that no absolute reality exists for humans. Rather, each person lives in a perceptual fiction. According to Carl G. Jung, dreams are projections from quantum-level unconscious dimensions into the cognitive dimension of “consciousness.” In the language of dream analysis, Jung would have described the science fiction genre as a prospective (future-oriented) dreamscape of archetypal representations. In the media-dream model, quantum patterns are derived from research in cognitive neuroscience and physics. Contemplated as AR, the sci-fi genre is predictive of cultural futures and formats psychological motives and morality. Sci-fi has the potential to detect the psychological dynamics at work during the paradigm shift into a dreamscape of illusion.

From Eranos to Esalen

2021 ◽  
pp. 192-208
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Martial Arts ◽  
American Culture ◽  
New Age ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Big Sur ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter traces the subtle body concept from Jung’s Kundalini seminars to the early work of one of its attendees, Frederic Spiegelberg, who would wind up becoming a professor at Stanford in the 1950s after the Nazis purged German academia of Jewish faculty and staff. Spiegelberg would go on to have a huge impact on a whole generation of Stanford graduates at the very beginning of the counterculture. This chapter focuses on Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which would go on to become a countercultural and later New Age mecca during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter focuses on the subtle body concept in the work of Spiegelberg and Murphy, zeroing in on the points of difference between the teacher and his student. It ends with the proliferation of subtle body discourses and forms of praxis that spin out of Esalen during and after the counterculture, laying the groundwork for the hyperpopularity of yoga and martial arts in 1990s American culture, which the author grew up in, leading to his interest in writing this book in the first place.

scholarly journals Bourdieu and Jung: A Thought Partnership to Explore Personal, Social, and Collective Unconscious Influences on Professional Practices

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Bologna ◽  
Franziska Trede ◽  
Narelle Patton
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
Play Therapists ◽  
Thinking Tools

This paper introduces a thought partnership between Pierre Bourdieu and Carl Jung used to explore clinical play therapists’ understanding and critical reflexivity of unconscious influences on their relational practices with parents. The partnership is situated within a broader methodological partnership between Paul Ricoeur and Jung discussed by the authors in another paper in this issue. The purpose of the Bourdieu and Jung partnership is to design a comprehensive theoretical tool kit that enables the exploration of the interrelated nature of personal, social, and collective unconscious influences on professional practices. The paper discusses seven Bourdieusian and ten Jungian thinking tools and how they were brought together within a critical imaginal hermeneutic approach drawn from the first author’s doctoral study. The application of the conceptual partnership to the study’s text sets is then discussed to provide an in-depth structural analysis of the study’s phenomenon. The results highlight how the application of the thinking tools provide a critical and systemic awareness of how personal, social, and collective unconscious influences shape professional practices. Implications for professional practice are discussed as well as the role the Bourdieusian and Jungian thinking tools can play in enhancing the fundamental aims of qualitative research, particularly critical inquiry.

The Belief Model of Sentience

2019 ◽  
pp. 20-48
Author(s):  
Stephen Brock Schafer ◽  
Brock Shafer
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Cognitive Mediation ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Dramatic Structure ◽  
The Media ◽  
Belief Model ◽  
Emergent Language

The media model called “belief” serves as the language by which humans converse with God in the scripture of redemption. Hypothetically, redemption is based on the same cognitive dynamic as healing with dream analysis established by Carl Jung. These dynamics promote coherence within a sentient-cognitive psyche (a combination of conscious/unconscious scales of sentience), universal reality based on unity/energism, and narrative/dramatic structure. Based upon these dynamics, this chapter establishes a correspondence between the cognitive language of the mediated dreamscape and the cognitive language of belief that allows for conversation between God and humanity. The key to understanding this cognitive conversation is the belief model of sentience. Conflicting belief systems are endemic to human experience. Differences in the languages of belief contribute to the most psychotic-hysterical misunderstandings and their resulting mayhem. Due to illiteracy relative to the emergent language of cognitive mediation, the portents for planetary survival are dire.

Mast cell-nerve fiber interaction: Ultrastructural studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-429
Author(s):  
E.Y. Chi ◽  
M.L. Su ◽  
Y.T. Tien ◽  
W.R. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Mast Cell ◽  
Mast Cells ◽  
Substance P ◽  
Nerve Fiber ◽  
Sensory Nerves ◽  
Ultrastructural Studies ◽  
Morphological Studies ◽  
Granulocyte Infiltration ◽  
Intracutaneous Injection ◽  
Recent Attention

Recent attention has been directed to the interaction of the nerve and immune systems. The neuropeptide substance P, a tachykinnin which is a neurotransmitter in the central and peripheral nervous systems produces tissue swelling, augemntation of intersitial fibrin deposition and leukocyte infiltration after intracutaneous injection. There is a direct correlation reported between the extent of mast cell degranulation at the sites of injection and the tissue swelling or granulocyte infiltration. It has previously been demonstrated that antidromic electrical stimulation of sensory nerves induces degranulation of cutaneous mast cells, cutaneous vasodilation and augmented vascular permeability. Morphological studies have documented a close anatiomical association between mast cells and nonmyelinated nerves, that contain substance P and other neuropeptides. However, the presence of mast cells within nerve fasicles has not been previously examined ultrastructurally. In this study, we examined ultrastructurally the distribution of mast cells in the nerve fiber bundles located in the muscular connective tissue of rat tongues (n=20).

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