…and in the end

"The love you take is equal to the love you make." Lennon/McCartney These thoughts touch upon my belief about beliefs; the nature of belief, and aim at peering into what, rather than how, or why, we have and hold them, near and dear to our hearts, as endings are sometimes necessary ideas along the way. Along with …

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Alchemy Class Notes – Session Ten

The final class of the 2014 Winter semester of the Jung Platform's course, hosted by Patricia Berry and Robert Bosnak, takes us into the third chapter of James Hillman's book Alchemical Psychology, titled, The Suffering of Salt, and begins with the topic, "Toward a Substantial Psychology." Salt, although understood by Hillman as metaphorical, to the alchemists …

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Let There Be Dark

As more and more of us, in an increasingly sleep-deprived world lose touch with our dreams, I continue to wonder what it is we are losing. Dr. Rubin Naiman sees our difficulties with sleep and dreaming, driven by "unrelenting motion": "We live in a world of unrelenting motion, a world that discourages slowing and stopping, a world that has lost …

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Soul-making

Souls can be, among other things, lost, saved, non-existent, or hearty, but do we make soul? If so, what does that mean? What then, is soul? Perhaps as it should be, I have puzzled for years at James Hillman's use of the term "soul-making." Now days, ideas about soul are sometimes dismissed as archaic. So if we are to understand a …

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Class Notes – Session Eight

Session Eight of the Jung Platform's online class on James Hillman's book, "Alchemical Psychology," moves the work from forge to stove, in which the use of glass vessels for heating the material make alchemy both possible and psychological. "Glass also separates observer from observed. It is the material of distancing, separating events from life by …

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