Jungian Individuation, or How Not to be a Space(d) Monkey

[MorganBlack]

Okay, what Jung called' Individuation' magic folks tend to call 'Initiation', even while the word has multiple meanings.

How Fight Club Turns Men Into Space Monkeys

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But the good news (and localizing some of his language for more occulty folks) Jung said LIFE ITSELF leads to Individuation. You're already in the initiation. Every crisis, every neurosis, every inexplicable attraction or repulsion — that's the unconscious (in my mythic metaphors "Hell", the Underworld ) knocking.

Jung said Individuation as something life does to us rather than something we need to initiate through specialized practices. The unconscious keeps presenting us with material, life keeps throwing us into situations that demand integration, and we're constantly being forced to reckon with parts of ourselves we'd rather ignore. That's the initiation happening, and we signed up for it when we decided to be born here on this Beautiful Late-Stage Capitalist Hellscape.

This work is messier and slower: sitting with your shadow, your wounds, you trauma, your unlived potential. Living through your contradictions rather than transcending them.

From a healing perspective never never make your past personal trauma part of your own permanent mythic narrative.

Do Mitch's '30-Day Mental Challenge' and turn down the noise from your past, your parents, the assholes who did you wrong, or 'The Burning Times' you never experienced.

 

[Wintruz]

Jung said Individuation as something life does to us rather than something we need to initiate through specialized practices. The unconscious keeps presenting us with material, life keeps throwing us into situations that demand integration, and we're constantly being forced to reckon with parts of ourselves we'd rather ignore. That's the initiation happening, and we signed up for it when we decided to be born here on this Beautiful Late-Stage Capitalist Hellscape.

This work is messier and slower: sitting with your shadow, your wounds, you trauma, your unlived potential. Living through your contradictions rather than transcending them.

Life Itself is the Initiatrix, giving us the alchemy we need to lead us to our Perfected Self. This is precisely why we should trample occult-flavoured fantasies under hoof with ruthlessness. They get in the way of real Work.

An insightful and provocative post. More of this is welcome and needed.

 

[MorganBlack]

100% agreed!

Modern occultism has needed some serious unpacking for the 10 seconds it's been around. . Shoving it all under the word 'magic' just encourages mass ontological hallucination, and nominal solutionism.

When I use the word " magic" I usually only mean for sorcery. Spiritual elevation I file under Mysticism and Mystical Theology, and I have other practices for those. Both are great , but post Reformation and post 1899, something happened to confuse the two.

I've been mapping WTF happened to "Magic" post 1899 for a few years. While some of the practices have great use, most the categories are made up modern New Age ideas .

Take MacGregor Mathers. Stephen Skinner said Mather loved and used the grimoires, but also gave us a very useful, if Neo-Theosophical, construct in the Golden Dawn, which is much closer to Chaos Magic than people realize (and I love Chaos Magic, so no slam).

Move from Crowley,. I blame much of the New Age neo-Wiccanisms on Gerald Gardner, who made up paganized New Thought by taking American Mind Mysticism and smushing it together with Victorian pastoral poetry and academic consensus hallucination to make up Wicca.

I admit I'm low-level irritated by this - he appropriated the tools of what is MY STUFF, Goetia, and used smeared it over the top of his New Thought techniques. I dislike it mostly becsue it range-limits people and makes them arrogant . It's all window dressing to jazz up flagging Brit imaginations. (Again, from a New Thought perspective, rock on! Great stuff). The addition of bottom paddling was his kink.

The "confusing the planes" happened ways back with Theosophy, but was compounded but it just gotten worse since hen . Now when someone uses the word "magic" to "explain" or categorize a complex field or phenomenon, but then indexes ideas and practices that don't actually map onto most of what historically they're trying to describe... I think, " Hmm, commercialized self-important shenanigans are afoot."

I did not care for many years, but in the past decade it gotten baaaaaad.

You can tell when they treat the word as if the very naming something constitutes understanding it or solving it - when really they've just created is a semantic illusion.

Then comes the ontological misdirection. By invoking "Magic" and or even "occultism - even more vague - " without presenting any defintions, but some obvious new halluciations, they paint a picture of a fake unity or simplicity to what's actually quite complex , with a specific lineage.

Again, I love much of the new stuff, but it's mostly stolen valor, taking Traditional Western Magic and Sorcery (nee" Witchcraft") and piggybacking on practtices their's have no real connection to. And i think they actually make it harder for newcomers.

Not that Western Magic is without it's own skeletons, but if is looks like Neo-Theosophy fundamentally , then it IS Neo-Theosophy, no matter how they dress it up, or until their clarify their terms more accurately... or even at all.

 

[Nerone]

From a healing perspective never never make your past personal trauma part of your own permanent mythic narrative.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think this is in large part why modern psychotherapy has such a miserable success rate - it reinforces and strengthens the enfeebled narrative of being a passive by-product of the past, rather than an active agent of the future.

For similar reasons, I have a polarizing love-hate relationship with astrology. I recall watching an interview with Robert Hand who mentioned he had a client once - as he was trying to explain that the soul is much more than just the natal chart, she broke down in tears; out of joy, for having relinquished the chains of the mythic narrative she had entangled herself in. What a burden to be relieved of!

On the other hand, I do find there to be an incredible value in understanding the forces that makes up ones psyche and having a language to navigate the terrain; the map is not the territory of course, but helpful nonetheless, as long as one doesn't mistake the finger for the moon.

I like the analogy that each planet is like an organ, and having a strong heart does not compensate for a weak liver - the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Naturally, we tend to utilize our strengths double time in order to compensate for our weaknesses. This also manifests itself in occultism, where one may feel a sense of superiority, this "magical elitism", being exalted over "mundane people" and "non-initiates", precisely because one feels strong here and think this strength naturally translates to other fields, or compensates for their underdevelopment.

I suspect this is a peculiar influence of Saturn, who is said to rule over Occultism in general. Having an influx of Saturnian rays naturally leads to isolation, melancholy, aloofness, detachment, an excessive concern with theological speculations and metaphysical narratives. Many ascetic traditions pride themselves on this influence, but I think if one is not made of that black cloth relinquishing the world that one needs some life giving colours to tamper it.

Mundane work is an essential part of that equation. But mundane work with style methinks.

I've always liked the idea of Plato's "Poetic Frenzy" - to get away from the graveyard of ones mind and the spectres that haunts it, that rigid, monotonous tyranny of logical thinking, and living life in a state of subtle ecstasy where the cosmos one inhabits feels alive, animated and talking back

 

[MorganBlack]

Brilliant, Nerone!

I'm going to be sitting with that all day. Thank you.

Right right! Totally agreed! The danger of a bad story is being stuck in the story. Bad things do happen , we need a way to identify them when they happen. but also get out of them, and not reinforce those patterns we've now reinforcing by paying attention to the patterns with our very Divine and Creative Imagination.

As magicians, we mythologize our iteration with the 'The Mystery' ( My name for Buddhist 'Suchness' / The Neoplatoic One / the Ain Soph / Infinite Consciousness / The Gnostic Uncreated Father), but after they get written down we often mistake the map for the territory. I did that too way back when. Occult stories are just so damn colorful.

And need these myths as tools to get useful handles on it all, for the spirits to use to take forms for our interaction with them , but then the Ape of Thoth follows the God of Magic, Thoth around, writes down enough of the Mystery to sandbag everyone permanently inside his little cage.