Jung taught that the psyche consists of various systems including the personal unconscious with its complexes and a collective unconscious with its archetypes. Jung’s theory of a personal unconscious is quite similar to Freuds creation of a region containing a person’s repressed, forgotten or ignored experiences. However, Jung considered the personal unconscious to be a “more or less superficial layer of the unconscious.” Within the personal unconscious are what he called “feeling-toned complexes.” He said that “they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life.”³ These are feelings and perceptions organized around significant persons or events in the person’s life.

Jung believed that there was a deeper and more significant layer of the unconscious, which he called the collective unconscious, with what he identified asarchetypes, which he believed were innate, unconscious, and generally universal. Jung’s collective unconscious has been described as a “storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from man’s ancestral past, a past that includes not only the racial history of man as a separate species but his pre-human or animal ancestry as well.”⁴ Therefore, Jung’s theory incorporates Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as ancient mythology. Jung taught that this collective unconscious is shared by all people and is therefore universal. However, since it is unconscious, not all people are able to tap into it. Jung saw the collective unconscious as the foundational structure of personality on which the personal unconscious and the ego are built. Because he believed that the foundations of personality are ancestral and universal, he studied religions, mythology, rituals, symbols, dreams and visions.

He says:

“All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves. What is true of primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally hidden, and they set forth the secrets of the soul in glorious images^.5

The Age of Stress as a Precedent

The cover story of Time Magazine on June 6th, 1983 declared America “In the Age of Stress”. It depicted us as a society consumed by demands for our resources and threats to our well-being.
Since that time in 1983 when the official diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was first categorized by the Board of Medicine and Psychology there has been little effort made to define the parameters of stress, thus leaving us (the lay-person) to define ANYTHING with an overwhelming effect…. as stress.
Because stress is a natural form of physical reaction to our environment, I feel it vital to understand the nervous system, its fundamental (base) response, and its contradictions.
The word “stress” has been so overly used and emphasized, as to describe everything from marital discord to juvenile delinquency, that I find it prudent to discuss the implications of typical (physical) stress vs. the “stress scapegoat”.

Stress has now become a way to blame our fears and psychological malaise on every unpropitious occurrence. These situations could easily be handled if we understood our personal reactions and childhood traumas, and knew the difference between a natural Fight/Flight response or an overly stimulated psyche.

I really wanted to post this up, so you guys could get a close look at something very special starting to happen. We are here (in this time) for a reason… hold on to your bootstraps…. we’re going for the “Big Ride”!!

From time to time, I run across some pretty amazing (simple) practices that I for one, can appreciate. Keeping my spiritual practices simple, consistent, and SHORT….has become my way of staying connected. I like what Dan has to say here (below) and how easy it is to experience a “moment” of what some try to achieve hourly, or even worse….expect YOU to do all the time! Pressure is the worst of all experiences. Take the pressure off…and have a moment.

“Take your keys, a piece of fruit, or any handy object, and go outside. Throw the object up into the air. Staying relaxed and easy, catch it. (Be sure to catch it.) Then come back inside, and continue reading this exercise.

Consider the moment the object was in the air. At that moment you weren’t thinking of what you’d have for dinner or what you did yesterday. You weren’t thinking of anything else, either. You may have been attending to thoughts before you threw it or after you caught it, but during the throw, you were pure attention, reaching out, waiting for the object’s descent. In that same moment your emotions were open, and your body was alert and vitalized–a moment of satori.” ~ Dan Millman from Body Mind Mastery

I would like to take a moment in writing  and reflecting – to recognize – to honor… those having passed from this world, those left to grieve… and those just entering as newborns. (Two of my dear friends mothers have died, and two of my friends have had babies.)

How odd, as I sit and contemplate the meaning of “being” in this world. The way in which birth and death has no bias. The way in which this elegant cycle continues as it has since the dawn of man. The grieving of loss, the celebration of new life. The paradox, and the prodigy all tangled up like silver necklaces in a box together.

I am a fortunate soul, I am loved and I love. Those who intrust me with their darkest hour are my saviors, as they bring me to my own realizations and lighten my load by giving me theirs. We seem to grieve everything so I’ve come to see. We even grieve our electricity being shut off by a storm! And oddly enough, there those who grieve childbirth as much as the loss of a loved one.

Powerful teacher is grief and I am a good student.

But the most immersive moments of our lives is when we grieve and feel alone, for only then will we emerge to find our hands being warmed by another. Only then can you behold the miracle of your own birth.

"Focus on the Apple"