Follow the Symptom: COVID-19 & the Breath of Life
From a physiological perspective, breathing is a matter of respiration, and shortness of breath can be a medical problem. This perspective is, of course, not only true, it is also necessary and valuable in its medical context. But that context has become the norm of what is real about the act of breathing.
COVID-19: A Shadow of the Technological Imagination?
In the 1960s, the dream of space flight became an exemplary expression of technological achievement. For the first time in human history, we could see from the moon the image of earth rising in the inky darkness of space. I remember being mesmerized by that image. I also remember being dismembered by how the paradoxical tension of that image turned upside down my taken for granted assumptions about who we are as a human species and what our place was in the cosmos.
The Myth of Development
The myth of development sits atop a larger myth—the myth of growth. Now because the word “myth” is so maligned today as meaning “untrue” or “false,” an unfortunate hangover from an older myth, the myth of facts and quantification, I hesitate to use it. But I must.
Loneliness and Desire for Belonging
Longing is a strong, persistent desire for something seeming unattainable or distant. It is related to hunger, yearning for family, partner, group, or self. Psychologically, longing relates to a primal human desire, the need and impetus to overcome the ego alienated from the unconscious, to feel inclusion, not exclusion, acceptance, not rejection, and love, not hate.
Memory as Transformation
Memory is a tricky business. The act of remembering is a backward glance and this turning toward what has been, is done by the one who is remembering now, in a present moment that has around it some sense of an imagined future, however dim that sense might be.
The Necessity to Not Forget
Memory can be a path of exploration, a backward glance which, returning one to the moment where the present started, can make one present to the present moment in another way–where one might, as Eliot notes, come to know it for the first time. Are not such returns necessary, especially in moments of change and crises?
COVID-19: Apocalypse Now?
Every day seems to bring in its wake a creeping sense of apocalypse that is haunting our individual and collective lives. Apocalypse is one of those harrowing words that seem to foretell disaster. Are we on the edge of a global catastrophe? What is in a word, and specifically such a loaded word like apocalypse?
Sixteen Psychological Reflections on COVID-19
This new series of blog articles offers psychological reflections on the COVID-19 crisis from the perspectives of depth psychology, particularly Jung’s psychology and the innovative cultural-historical psychology of Jan Hendrik van den Berg.
How Changing Your Mind Changes Your Dream Figures
“Who are you? Who are you?” At the time, it seemed a simple question, which I posed to the young woman in the lucid dream. But this simple question led to profound lessons in lucidity and taught me much about the nature of transformation in dreams, lucid dreams and waking.
Spaced Out in West Texas
Astronomy is an area of study that pulls just about everyone’s interest into its orbit; here the hope is to increase all of our understandings of the greater complexity of the created universe than was ever imagined before.
Culture and Belonging
Our existence is fundamentally interpersonal. Human beings are not isolated, free-floating objects, but subjects existing in perpetual, multiple, shifting relationships. Life is defined by these myriad interactions – by the push and pull of inter-subjectivity as well as the overt and covert social contracts. Through them we realize our incompleteness and vulnerability.
Do Lucid Dreamers Control the Dream?
Lucid dreaming is an ancient and revolutionary psychological tool for exploration, which has been scientifically confirmed in recent times. By understanding it as a relational tool, you can move deeper and deeper, achieving new and more powerful realizations. I taught myself how to lucid dream in the spring of 1975. This turns out to be the same spring that researcher Keith Hearne recorded the first ‘eye signal’ of lucid awareness in the University of Hull sleep lab from the sleeping lucid dreamer, Alan Worsley.