Dr. Carl Gustav Jung

THE most terrifying THING is to accept oneself completely

                                                                                    Carl Jung

Jung developed his own distinctive approach to the study of the human mind - which fact I became aware of whilst studying for my GCE 'O' & 'A' levels at Borehamwood Grammar School in Hertfordshire, England.  My perspective of Jung's views was established in juxtoposition to those of William L. Shirer - the journalist and historian who was hired by Ed Murrow and with him became the progenitors of broadcast journalism - as a result of reading his book - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich  - in the library during free periods. I had a lot of them because I studied Physics, Maths Pure & Maths Applied whilst regarding them ALL as one subject and doing Art on the side so to speak. It was at that time that I became aware of Hugh Everett's ideas of parallel universes - the single atom switch, as I have always thought of IT - which placed into context Jung's concept of synchronicity.  This was particularly fascinating, for me, in the further context of - the many coincidentally connected events which Shirer described in his epic -as a function of Jung's understanding that  "Spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body is the outer manifestation of the living spirit." (you need to look at More quotes .. to understand the significance of this)

In his early years when working in a Swiss hospital with schizophrenic patients and working with Sigmund Freud and the burgeoning psychoanalytic community,  Jung took a closer look at the mysterious depths of the human unconscious.  Fascinated by what he saw (and spurred on with even more passion by the experiences and questions of his personal life) he devoted his life to the exploration of the unconscious. 

According to Dictionary.com, one definition of aberration is mental irregularity or disorder, especialy of a minor or temporary nature, or a lapse from a sound mental state.

To some this has become a familiar and harmless experience. To take advantage of this and turn it into something positive would be considered an art of sorts.

This is not always possible. Sometimes you are left helplessly in control of your wandering subconscious.

Unlike many before him, Jung did not feel that experimenting using natural science was the best means to understand the soul.

For him, an empirical investigation of the world of dream, myth, and soul represented the most promising road to deeper understanding. Along with Freud's "personal unconscious",  Jung felt that he had discovered evidence for a  "collective unconscious" shared by all human beings. Self Realization is the final stage of Jung's stages of development and that within this stage there is still some room for growth and development. This process is also called individuation, which is the process of becoming an individual.

The overarching goal of Jung's work was the reconciliation of the life of the individual with the world of the supra-personal archetypes. He came to see the individual's encounter with the unconscious - and subsequently the collective uncounscious - as central to this process. The human experiences the unconscious through symbols encountered in all aspects of life: in dreams, art, religion, and the symbolic dramas we enact in our relationships and life pursuits. Essential to the encounter with the unconscious, and the reconciliation of the individual's consciousness with this broader world, is learning this symbolic language. Only through attention and openness to this world (which is quite foreign to the modern Western mind) are individuals able to harmonize their lives with these suprapersonal archetypal forces.