Wednesday, May 5, 2021 Whitehead was a mathematician and then a philosopher, spending his career working with abstractions from the physical world and the conceptual world, ultimately building a cosmology. Jung was a psychiatrist and then an alchemist, spending his career working with experiences he himself had with dreams, fantasies and visions, with experiences recounted by patients and alchemists. The raw material is always experience but for Whitehead it was formulaic and logical experience, and for Jung it was mythical and poetic experience. Often the most vivid experiences came from educated but non-academic individuals. These two forms of knowing, the rational and mythical, are produced by the same Cosmos and so are sources that can be explored from entirely different perspectives by different temperaments. Indeed, the disposition required for one often precludes exploration of the other. This may be one reason why the hard sciences naturally select for individuals with temperaments unsuited for mythical ideas, and social sciences select for those with a love of narrative. Compare evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists – the former relying on observation with a concrete object of study and the latter relying upon imagination for a purely narrative construct. Of course, a myth, such as scientific materialism, is required to tell us what is important to be rational about, and rationality is required to make a narrative, such as the Archetypal Organism, have explanatory value, be self-consistent and judged adequate to our experience. … Read More
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5-5-2021 A single human thought requires the entire universe. In this sense, God and man are one. … Read More
5-5-2021 “We believe that the ‘mental-physical’ or the ‘mind-body’ split is a totally artificial one, and that to concentrate on either term in the dichotomy is to preserve neurosis, not to cure it.” Fritz Perls … Read More
5-5-2021 “Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.” Carl Jung … Read More
5-5-2021 “The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. The souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.” A.N. Whitehead … Read More
5-3-2021 “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.” A.N. Whitehead … Read More
5-3-2021 “Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.” Carl Jung … Read More
5-3-2021 Mind and matter are both sterile without soul. … Read More
5-3-2021 “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” Neils Bohr … Read More
4-26-2021 “Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.” A.N. Whitehead … Read More