Tag: unconscious
These are very personal questions: What is spiritual to you? When and where do you feel spiritual? How do these spiritual feelings get blocked or expanded?
We can carry these questions throughout our lives. Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of them.
I will focus on three specific spiritual practices: psychological relationships, meditation, and psychedelic plant medicines, including cannabis.
Spiritual practice is about psychological relationships because if our spiritual practice doesn’t improve our relationships with others, what’s the point?
The practice of psychological relationships with others and with one’s inner life is a personal experience with spiritual meaning. This involves experiences of vulnerability, hurt, and confusion that teach us the depth of human love and kindness.
Spiritual practice is not only personal but also universal and objective. We need to look at our minds as they are, our human instincts as they are, and our relationship with the natural world. We are born, go through all the developmental stages, and then die. Life is both precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully, little by little.
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The Trump Phenomenon and the Suggestibility of his Followers
Psychologically, the more unconscious a person is the more suggestible they are. This means the less aware, the less mindful, the less conscious a person, the easier it is to sell them anything, especially a lie or a partial truth. We are all vulnerable to this phenomena, some more, some less. The Trump phenomenon is…
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The Crawley Sisters and Downton Abbey as a Cultural Dream
We can think about Downton Abbey as a cultural dream because it points to what is still unconscious for individuals, families and the larger cultural family. A dream brings attention to that which is still out of balance. For many Downton Abby by PBS, not only depicts an historical time and place,1912-1923 England, but a…
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New Year’s Resolutions, Will Power and Bad Habits
Who hasn’t had a problem with will power and bad habits. We all get to points in our life where we see that our habits have turned destructive. They started out fun, exciting and very satisfying and then turned to the opposite. The negative effect begins outweighing the positive effect. The negative consequences on our…
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Materialistic Values Hidden in Spirituality
Everyone needs material things, a healthy sense of pride, and a means to personal and spiritual satisfaction. We have all experienced our materialistic attitudes out of balance. It is how we know our spirit, when we are losing it or when it is gone. That is how we come to value it and even want…
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Mania and the Manic Episode, Symptoms and their Meaning
It is important to define mania in two ways: By defining symptoms. What those symptoms mean for each individual. Many of those suffering with these symptoms only choose medication for treatment and disregard psychotherapy because the underlying suffering seems too painful or impossible to make any sense out of it. This is the reason for…
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Multiple Personality Disorder and the Lost Self
How Does Multiple Personality Disorder Develop? “Going somewhere” in the mind is a natural defense for a child when they sense danger. When a child is severely harmed their “self” often dissociates, “goes somewhere,” for protection. The self hides in the unconscious and other parts of the personality take over when there is no self…
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The Shadow
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335 How to make the “darkness conscious”…
