The 3lack 3ox.

I began this blog with the intention of making sense sense of what had happened to me during therapy. I listened to all my sessions - which I'd recorded - and I set about publishing the transcripts here, when the therapist - Kit - refused to acknowledge that what had happened during therapy, though no rules were broken, though he had done nothing wrong, had nevertheless left me feeling suicidal. Underlying this is my question; what makes rules that are maintained to 'protect' the client, be so damaging? In October 2023 I decided to take this a whole step further - I set out my intention to explore the role of Eros in therapy, and more importantly how therapists can navigate their own fears and sense of vulnerability when Eros becomes the third party in the therapy session. The question now turns towards power dynamics, how can a client - who already feels vulnerable, recovering from horrible life events, unsure of themselves, identity already damaged - raise their fears and...

Horn Ur Marken by THE JANITORS So far I have focused on spirit.. Soul is different... "From the intimate, inner and psychological point of view, the forest is the place of the soul's operations, of inner transformations and purification". Cirlot, Figuras del destino, 43. All I know is that during the year before I told him about my feelings,  I was haunted by the song at the top of this page -  And when I was thinking of asking for my session notes, I was haunted by another song. CRAWLER by IDLES Erik Davis explains the divide. By soul, I basically mean the creative imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm, which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal psychologist James Hill...

The process by which experience arises is the same whether we are dreaming or awake. The world is a dream, the teacher and the teaching are a dream, the result of our practice is a dream; there is no place where the dream breaks until we are liberated into pure rigpa. Until then, we continue to dream ourselves and our lives in both the dream and the physical dimension. Wangyal, Tenzin . As far as I know there isn't really much to say about spirit and soul in Tibetan Buddhism. There are many terms for mind, and one of them - probably sem - could be analogous to soul? In the Tibetan view, the body is full of channels (tsa), and mind (tigle) rides on air-currents (lhung) all through the body. So how one sits, one's posture matters, and exercises such as prostrations stretch out the channels making it easier for mind to flow through the body. In Tibetan theory, during sleep there is little or no input from the body, therefore to observe dreaming is to observe - in Jungian terms - o...

Before I head back into the subject of Eros and psychotherapy, which is the purpose of this blog. I want to investigate the confusion in meanings attributed to the concepts of soul and spirit. I find it difficult to understand, because so many writers have used the term soul for both - or spirit for both! And this is relevant because I have a hunch that it will lead me into a better understanding of Eros eventually .  We are shaped by the beliefs embedded in our language, so it is worth taking a look at the ideas underpinning our cultural baggage. So let's start where I left off in my last post. In Jungian thought, we have soul (sulphur) and spirit (Mercury). Sulphur is Soul, the seat of desire, fiery and alive, It is the ability to act. It is energy. Think of it as inner fire. Mercury is Spirit, it is changeable, communicative, reflective. It is 'the world-creating spark hidden within all matter'. Think of it as the light of enlightenment . The mode of communication create...

It is at times like this that I need Kit. You see, I don't understand the cat-mew...the CTMW, Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe and I'd like to. For one, I love the language of it: An act is a temporal process, and self-inclusion is a spatial relation.  The act of self-inclusion is thus "where time becomes space"; for the set of all sets, there can be no more fundamental process.  No matter what else happens in the evolving universe, it must be temporally embedded in this dualistic self-inclusion operation.   For two, the cat mew could be entirely mad! And a total waste of time, it pains me that I don't recognise enough of the concepts to judge!  Yet it is also possible that Kit would not be the perfect person for this.  And asking myself why he may not be, reveals another aspect of factor X. In Jungian theory, someone who defaults to an extroverted mode of Thinking accepts definitions because they are externally validated. Whilst som...

 Part 1 Jung was a very long time ago for me. When I was in my teens I read through every book written by him that I could find. And when I went to study psychology, I was interviewed for my place, by a behaviourist who said, 'Jung, a bit of a mystic!' As most of my reading at that time was about mythology, alchemy and witchcraft, Jung obviously didn't strike me as being weird on any level. He represented a different way of seeing - call it mystic if you will -  a richer, more alive way of viewing the universe/multiverse and understanding how we create reality from reality... In the 1990's I gave up all pretence of being un-mystic and set out to study Tibetan Buddhism, and on stepping backwards through time - as one does if one takes Tibetan Buddhism seriously - I shifted my thinking out of a 20th century education in science, into an 11th century view that corresponds very neatly with both contemporary esoteric concepts, and the Platonic version of perceived reality as...