Carl Jung

Simulacra and Simulations

August 3, 2010

As an undergraduate, I helped run a psychology lab for a professor where we did cognitive experiments on Psychology 101 students. My major was Cognitive Science and I spent most of my free time reading anything I could get my hand on the subject. I would read an author’s paper in a journal and flip to their references and then read those papers and flip to those references until I found what seemed to be primary sources – though largely unattributed – it was the philosophers, of course. Carl Jung was among those whose contribution to the field of cognitive science was conveniently buried under tons of footnotes and references.

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Row Your Boat

July 26, 2010

There were always those people that amazed me with their clarity of vision for their own futures. I’ve often wondered about those with such a clear vision. They always seemed to know exactly what they wanted – they always had a plan on how to achieve it. I have a sort of admiration for those that have their act together enough to have a vision and a plan to get there. I’m a little jealous.

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Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious

February 20, 2010

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

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Carl Jung In a Box

March 18, 2009

Like you, my life is very busy and I don’t always have the time I need to address my acute schizophrenia personal issues, so I often just talk to my personal therapist, Carl Jung. Sure, he may have died 40 years ago, but that doesn’t mean you can’t commune with him directly through the new Carl Jung Action Figure. If you ask Dr. Jung a question and focus very, very hard, he will actually give you a response. Sometimes you don’t even have to concentrate – he will just start speaking. Often I have to put him in a drawer or something because he’s always saying (insert Swiss accent), “For God’s sake doctor, help me get rid of this woman.” It doesn’t warn you on the package, but as we all know, “Invoked or not invoked, Jung is always present.”

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A Confederacy of Dunces

December 8, 2008

“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift

I marvel at what science has explained. But what really keeps me reading late into the night is what science has not explained. I suppose it is this fascination with the unknown that has led me to entertain novel and unconventional approaches to unsolved problems. Many of the great unsolved mysteries are in biology and consciousness. This is how I first became interested in Rupert Sheldrake. I remember when “Seven Experiments That Could Change the World” came out in 1996. It raised questions that not many scientists would speak aloud. As Sir John Maddox said, “this is heresy.” Sheldrake observed that the so-called fundamental constants (like the speed of light) were not very constant – they seemed to be evolving. He also took the experimenter effect seriously and called for more double blind experiments in the physical and biological science.

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On Life after Death

November 1, 2008

Attached is an essay from C.G. Jung on his view of life after death. His witting is always interesting and this one I enjoy in particular. Jung says, “What I have to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer to the question of the interplay between the “here” and the “hereafter.” Yet I have never written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I would like to state my ideas now.”

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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

July 22, 2008

It’s hard to believe that it has taken modern science 200 years to catch up to Lamarck. One of the common threads on Nautis Project has always been the incompleteness of a biological theory of evolution, morphology, and memory. It is these gaps in our knowledge that people like Lamarck, Darwin, Bergson, and Goethe tried to address in biology and Campbell and Jung drew attention in psychology and mythology. I’ve written about this before here:

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