Category: Carl Jung
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Jung’s Archetypes and Jordan Peterson’s Use of Them
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Evolution & Spirituality Course at Schumacher College This Summer
If you live in the UK, or if you are traveling there this summer, I’ll be teaching for one of Schumacher College’s 3-week intensive courses Monday, June 18th through Friday, June 22nd on the topic of evolution and spirituality. The description of my week is below. Also teaching week-long modules in this course are the…
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Archetypal Panpsychism: Whitehead, Jung, & Hillman
If you happen to live near Boise, Becca and I will travel there in January to give a weekend workshop for the Idaho Friends of Jung. January 20-21, 2017 Archetypal Panpsychism: Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman A presentation by Matthew D. Segall, PhD, & Becca Tarnas, ABD Friday Lecture, 7:00 – 9:00 PM; Saturday Workshop, 10:00 AM –…
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Vegetal ontology in Jung
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot…
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Responding to Michael about Root Images in the Philosophy of Nature
Several months ago, Michael (who blogs at Archive Fire and contributes to synthetic_zero) posted a comment on a post of mine about philosophical vitalism. I’m just now getting around to responding to what for me were really helpful questions as I try to further flesh out my thoughts on etheric imagination. Michael writes: I like…
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Robert Romanyshyn’s “alchemical hermeneutics” as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism
Romanyshyn’s alchemical hermeneutics as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism Robert Romanyshyn has developed a depth psychological method informed by hermeneutic phenomenology but ultimately rooted in alchemy. In approaching my research on the etheric imagination, I’ve turned to Romanyshyn’s method of alchemical hermeneutics because it allows for the retrieval of…
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[Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – Literature review
Again, sorry for the lack of italics. I don’t know how to paste from Pages while keeping the formatting. For a PDF of the document (with italics in tact!), click: The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. Literature review This section assesses the reasons for the contemporary resurgence of scholarly interest in Schelling.…
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Notes on imagination, Poetry as Soul-making
Poetry as soul-making Strictly speaking, what I want to talk about today does not exist, or at least if it does, remains for the most part unconscious to the rational, waking ego’s daylight gaze. Nonetheless, I’m forced to call this unknown phantasm something, and the name ‘imagination’ seems to suit it fine. Imagination is that…
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The New Reformation: Whitehead on Christian Metaphysics
“…if you want to make a new start in religion, you must be content to wait a thousand years.” -Alfred North Whitehead I’ve been thinking through my recent posts on the philosophical import of religious experience, and in light of some of the concerns brought up by Jason Hills, I wanted to further unpack the…
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God and Religious Experience in Whitehead: another response to Levi Bryant
Levi Bryant has problematized my attempt to clarify Whitehead’s position on the function of divinity in the universe. He writes: “You make the claim that without God there would be chaos and no order. This is a problematic claim for two reasons. First, you have repeatedly tried to claim that God isn’t supposed to explain…
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SR/OOO and Nihilism: a response to Harman and Bryant
I’ve already posted a short response to Harman, but I wanted to re-visit the issues explored in that post concerning the difference between Homo Sapiens, as an object among objects, and the Anthropos, as an ideal toward which every object tends. I will also try to disentangle my own “cosmotheandric” position from the generic anti-nihilism…
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Uncovering the Unconscious: Towards an Integral Psychology
This paper was presented at the Jung Society of Monterey in 2019 (video below, unfortunately with poor audio):
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Power and Presence in Theology
Another response to NRG’s questions for me on Pharyngula: I have trouble conceiving of God as all-powerful because of the problem of evil and my experience of human freedom. I associated God’s omnipresence with “will” even though, for God, there is really nothing to “do.” From the “perspective” of eternity, God is already everywhere and everywhen…
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Seeing With Teilhard: Evolution and the Within of Things
Preface “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.” –Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 30 “To see and to make others see” (p. 31)—such is the mission of Teilhard’s masterwork, The Human Phenomenon. But what is it…
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On the Nature of Spirit: Masculinity, Femininity, and Human Identity
The philosopher Gregory Bateson has written that the “false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.” The rise of Western civilization, whether intentionally or not, has fostered the development of a false identity. Many have come to experience themselves as an abstraction, a disembodied ego whose…
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The Essence of Religion
Preface It has been suggested that all modern philosophy begins with doubt (JC, p. 80). When one philosophizes, they agree to take nothing for granted, and even to question themselves backward into a corner if need be. Cornering oneself in such a way becomes the goal of philosophical inquiry, as once trapped by one’s own…
