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My Case With Jung Sept 28 2009

• It pays to honor the Great Man, then integrate him within yourself.

When I ask myself who has been the greatest influence on my life, I easily can answer C.G. Jung of Zurich, Switzerland, who made every effort to write down his theories and experiences of his work with the unconscious.

I followed in Jung’s footsteps, but not through the orthodox Jungians who claimed first rights to be Jungians through their institutes and associations. I was not a Jungian in adopted beliefs but in using and experiencing the ‘essence concepts’ that were Jung’s discoveries of importance.

1. The archetypes
2. The collective unconscious
3. The unconscious
4. Working with dreams as the individual’s personal myth unfolding
5. The ego in relation to the Self
6. Individuation in life and personality
7. The wholeness process
8. Realizing oneself as a conscious being
9. Freeing oneself of identification with the archetypes
10. Making ones feeling partners individuate in order to relate to you
11. Manifesting ones unconscious in artifacts
12. Making choices that support the Greater Source
13. Core thinking and living purposefully
14. Forming ones own perspective on life
15. Self-analysis to clear away ‘things not you’ and focus on ‘the real you’

Call these Principles, call these Practices.

As you grow in the teen years and start out in adult life, are you not searching for the values and keys to live your own life by? I certainly was. Even today afflicted with cancer I still search for how best to live my day, not only taking care of cancer suffering but also value and purpose in my day.

I write on my use of Jung in my life because this is one great source of inspiration in how I have lived my life. Even now I am reading a biography of Jung again and enjoying the experience as an entertaining reminder of how I have lived my own life, even without Jung’s fame to attract so many followers.

I can claim that I have made certain of Jung’s ideas very much my own through using them with myself and others, and even making modifications usually towards the practical.

My own greatest contribution has been the development of a Full Dreamwork Methodology based on laying out the methods and their results in a number of books in a way others can work on their own dreams, or therapists can help people in working with their dreams.

1. The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual
2. The Elements of Dreamwork
3. Dreamwork
4. Strephon Says Blog

I have taken some of what Freud and Jung rediscovered and used in their psychologies, but have made the dream primary, and not the person the only or main focus. What followed is the collecting and the inventing of conscious and unconscious dreamwork techniques that are there for all time now for use by others so dreaming and drawn to dreamworking as central to their own individuation process.

One can’t do everything, right?

But I can point to Dreamwork Psychology as opening a whole new field of psychology for the world to use.

Why haven’t you worked with your own dreams, if they are so important?

Dreams and dreamworking them is too difficult to work with for most teachers and psychologists. It’s such a new and complex field. To train a dreamwork psychologist has taken me about three years in the past until students finally get it at a basic level so that they can move forward on their own and even teach others.

Plans are in the works by some chief students to develop dreamwork psychology as a separate branch of psychology and a movement, but I can do nothing about that except my good wishes and support.

Maybe it will be 1000 years, and not 10 years before a significant group of people practice our approach in dreamwork psychology? I helped create the basis and gave the inspiration in using the approach with myself and others. That seems to have become the work of my lifetime.

So, Jung, I have done my small part in using your discoveries and your work as the most important guiding light for how I lived my creative life in the world. I took a most significant piece of your work and developed it, California style, in individual clients, in many dream groups, and in long term trainings. I wrote books in my spare time on the process.

What more could I have done, now reaching the end of my life it seems?

The angels only gave me 75 years so far.

I have done far more significant work for humanity than most presidents who do a bad job as president of the USA. True history does not emphasize those persons who get a big name because of a big role in society.

You are only significant if you contribute real value in living to the culture, and it must be positive, needed and a step forward. You can get into history by getting a role to operate from and be recognized from, but this is not a real person when you are seen by history as a role. To be significant you must be a self-developed person creating value for yourself and others at whatever levels you naturally operate at.

As the I Ching probably says, ‘It furthers one to see the great man.’ Not the Big Man, but to develop from within you that which has the greater value you can live out and share with others.

It’s not to get into history but to live a life of value, an existence of purpose, as you are able to.

My link to Jung developed through special people living their understanding of Jung also.

Becky Earle of the Lost Angeles Jungians with whom I worked with for five years as a young man of 22 to 27. Wonderful years of change for me. And what a warm heart  she had!

Elizabeth Howes of the Guild for Psychological Studies with whom I trained for 10 years intensively, and had analysis, before breaking away and forming the Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Institute in Berkeley, California, 1977-1988. Those were glory years with many dream groups and the clients and the development of the Jungian-Senoi approach.

I added Senoi to Jungian because of a few criticizing my using Jung’s name. Of course I use Jung’s name because others were using it also to name a type of psychology, and I had every right to do so myself, being 10 years trained in Jungian psychology, and with 15 years of Jungian analysis, mostly weekly, to go with the training.

We were assigned to read all Jung’s works, and I read all of them, even when difficult reading. I read most of the books written by other Jungians, easier to read and inspiring Jungian psychology applied. My books were included in the Jung bookstores, though I did not try and be a member of any Jungian organization, though invited to do so.

I felt on could not allow any restrictions on my intellect or approach to dreamwork psychology. The price I paid for this was not having colleagues into old age. The freedom I gained was a lot more time to work on my own with my own books.

The life is a mixed life.

We need our guides, but we don’t want to be run over by them.

Do we?

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