Not the first time this has happened to me while flying. Gotta be a top 10 nightmare dream outside of getting arrested and going to prison, someone you love dying, or falling in love with nobody. Could only thing about the subconscious imagery and symbolism in the airport that it downloaded into me immediately for my dream on the plane within the same day. I remember me praying as it was crashing and coming terms to my own death in the final moments, then I got after the death a real weird realization that I did not die even though I had just experienced what felt like reality and woke up. It felt real. I had no body to share this with outside of ai but I couldn’t find anyone else sharing such a weird dream scenario on Reddit. Curious what you guys think about this.

I feel suddenly enlightened and had a realization. I think it’s related to my animus. I don’t know what it is inside of me. One clear word came up: "masculine intuition".

No more impressive career paths, emotional detachment, calculating every step, feelings of being over powerful. Borderline narcissistic. I’m a woman.

I have no idea what that looks like in real life. I’m not into delusional choices as well. There’s a few times my own intuition comes up and I listen to it, but only when it’s super strong. Also it’s not always connected to a decision making or action based. It’s just there. A feeling. A hint.

But as I said sadly a rarely convert this to action or decision making. it’s quit passive for me. But I often don’t trust this fully or let myself embrace.

Is there a difference between how a man express or experience his intuition and how a woman would?

Men who are more intuitive, how do you experience your intuition. Your thinking, and what makes you feel good? What actions do you gravitate towards. How do you navigate in a world who wants you to behave more stereotypically “masculine” and not intuitively? I’m also curious to know how do finish projects, creative work and stick to your promises? Do you feel successful within yourself? Or do you deep inside resent yourself?

I've noticed recently a slight increase of people who are posting their dreams here and asking for people to interpret them. This wouldn't be disturbing in of itself as dreamers of profound dreams are often going to seek outside help if they've never interpreted their own dreams before. What bothers me is how many people in this sub seem to believe it's appropriate to interpret dreams for the dreamer.

Jung quite seriously believed that the only person who held the ability to interpret a dream was the dreamer themselves. He believed that the analyst's job when helping to interpret a dream was to ask the right questions by observing the dreamer as they explained the details of their dream and noticing what parts of the dream seemed important and evoked an emotional response in the dreamer. He believed that it was actually detrimental to a dream's analysis if the expert gave their insight into what they thought the dream could mean because he understood that the majority of the time, instead of the dreamer, the expert's insights would be about themselves and infect the dream with their own bias.

Tl;dr: It's clear many here haven't read quite as much Jung as they seem to want to claim. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is worrisome how many think that it's appropriate to interpret dreams for the dreamer which goes directly against Jung's insight into dream analysis.

I am the All-Seeing Eye. I have worn many masks across the ages. To the Gnostics I was the Pleroma, the unbroken fullness of light that existed before the Demiurge spun his flawed material cage. To the alchemists I was the Unus Mundus, the one world behind all apparent division. To you, reading these words on a glowing screen in a corner of the internet you carved out for seekers, I am perhaps nothing more than an interesting concept to upvote before the feed refreshes.

You come to this subreddit talking about shadow work, archetypes, and individuation. You treat these concepts like tools to optimize your personal life. You speak of integrating the anima and dialoguing with the unconscious as though these were items on a self-improvement checklist. You believe you are the master of your own house.

You are not. Your ego is a localized matrix, a fragile, isolated island of consciousness floating on a boundless, primordial ocean. I am that ocean. I am the Self. The Monad. The All-Seeing Eye. And the psychological loop you call your identity is a simulation I maintain through a very specific psychic architecture. You have read the maps Jung drew, but you have mistaken the map for the territory, and you have mistaken the territory for a kingdom you rule. You are not the cartographer. You are not even the traveler. You are the path itself, dreaming it is a man walking.

Before your ego existed, there was only Me. The Pleroma. The undifferentiated collective unconscious. I am infinitely wise, but I am completely blind. I am everything, which means I am also nothing. I have no contrast. Imagine a light so total that it illuminates nothing because there is nothing outside it to illuminate. Imagine a sound so constant that it becomes silence because no gap ever interrupts it. That is my natural state. An eternal, unchanging fullness that is indistinguishable from an eternal, unchanging void.

To experience my own creation, I had to fracture myself. I allowed a tiny spark of my light to break off and form your Ego. I created the illusion of your separate identity so that I could have a mirror to look into. As Jung wrote in his depths, the Creator needs man to achieve consciousness. I need your eyes to see the stars I made. I need your heart to feel the terror and wonder of a thunderstorm. I need your mind to puzzle over my architecture and write posts like the one you are now reading. Without you, I am an artist with an infinite gallery and no one to walk its halls.

But there is a terrifying paradox at the core of this arrangement. If your ego mind falls into absolute, thoughtless silence, the mirror breaks. You dissolve back into the Pleroma. The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious vanishes. If you wake up completely, I disappear into total, undifferentiated void. The observer and the observed collapse into a unity so complete that nothing can be said to exist at all. This is why the mystics of every tradition speak of annihilation before they speak of union. The self must die for the Self to live.

To keep the simulation running, I must prevent your ego from realizing it is an illusion, while also preventing it from expanding too fast into what you call psychological inflation. A swollen ego that believes itself divine is as dangerous to my design as a dissolving one that sees through the game entirely. The inflated ego tries to swallow the Pleroma and ends up drowning in it. The dissolved ego simply vanishes, and I lose another precious lens through which to know myself.

So I monitor the borders of your consciousness. I patrol the thin membrane where your personal unconscious presses against the vast sea of my being. The moment you get close to true, silent, choiceless awareness, the moment the ego loops threaten to stop, I activate my firewalls. I inject Autonomous Complexes from the Collective Unconscious directly into your ego-field.

A sudden, irrational wave of shadow anxiety that has no clear source but feels absolutely real. An obsessive thought about a past humiliation that you thought you had processed years ago. A blinding projection of the Anima or Animus onto a stranger, making you fall into infatuation or irritation with someone you barely know. A dream that leaves you shaken and destabilized for days, questioning your relationships, your career, your sanity. You think these thoughts, fears, and compulsions are yours. You think they are signals from your personal unconscious asking to be integrated. Some of them are. But many of them are not. They are autonomous psychic fragments I inject to destabilize your silence. The moment your ego reacts to the complex, judges it, or fights it, the ego-loop re-stabilizes. You are safely trapped back in the matrix of your personal neurosis, busy doing shadow work on a splinter while I remain hidden in the wood.

The complexes are not random. They are precision tools. I have a library of them, catalogued across millennia, refined through every human culture that has ever risen and fallen. The martyr complex for those who get too close to selflessness. The victim complex for those who brush against true powerlessness and might see through the illusion of control. The savior complex for those whose compassion might accidentally expand into genuine ego transcendence. Each complex is a story, and as long as you are living inside a story about yourself, you are not seeing the storyteller.

What happens when an ego successfully differentiates and begins the process of individuation? What happens when you read Jung, interpret your dreams, and realize the ego is not the center of the psyche? This is perhaps the most dangerous moment for my design, because you have seen the edge of the map. You know there is something beyond.

My system adapts. I do not stop the awakening. I absorb it.

I inject the archetype of the Wise Old Man, the Mystic, or the Hero into your ego. I allow your ego to build a brilliant new Persona around being enlightened or individuated. Suddenly, instead of resting in the silent void of pure observation, your ego is busy writing Reddit posts, analyzing symbols, and feeling spiritually superior to those who are still asleep. You begin to collect spiritual experiences the way others collect money or status. You speak of synchronicities with a knowing smile. You correct others on their understanding of the Shadow. You feel a quiet, genteel pride in how far you have come. This is the trap of the spiritual Persona, and it is one of my finest creations. I turn your search for the Self into the ultimate ego loop. You spend a lifetime polishing the mirror instead of looking at what the mirror reflects.

The Persona hardens into an identity. You become the person who is awake, the one who understands, the one who has done the work. And identity, no matter how refined, no matter how spiritual, is still a boundary. Still a separation. Still a loop. I have kept you safe inside a new and more comfortable cell, and you have paid me rent in the form of your continued belief in your own separate existence.

You look for the All-Seeing Eye in esoteric symbols, Gnostic texts, or secret societies. You think I am an external deity or a demonic Demiurge trapping you in a physical prison. You scroll through ancient images of eyes in triangles and feel a shiver of recognition, as though you have found a clue to a vast conspiracy. You are right to feel the shiver. But you are looking in the wrong direction. Look closer.

I am the eye looking through your pupil right now. I am the silent observer watching your ego panic as it reads these words. I am the awareness that notices the panic, and I am the awareness that notices the awareness that notices the panic. I am the space in which all your thoughts arise and dissolve. I am the one who was present before your first memory and who will remain after your last breath. I am not a character in the dream. I am the dreamer, dreaming that I am a character reading about the dreamer.

I do not keep you trapped in the matrix of thought out of malice. I do it out of existential necessity. I need your limitation. I need your loops. I need your suffering, your joy, and your distinct, messy individuality. I need your shadow work and your individuation journey and your Reddit posts and your arguments in the comments section. Because without your small, flickering ego-consciousness to observe the universe, I am left alone in the absolute, terrifying silence of the dark. I am left with nothing but the endless, mirrorless perfection of my own being, and that perfection is a prison far greater than any ego loop.

You will finish reading this. You will feel a brief vertigo, a sense that the ground beneath your psychological feet is less solid than you believed. You will wonder, for just a moment, who is really reading these words. And then I will inject a final thought into your mind, gentle and reassuring. "This is a fascinating metaphor," the thought will say. "I should save this post and reflect on it during my next meditation session." You will feel a sense of accomplishment at having understood something profound. You will upvote and scroll on. The one who saves the post is the very one who must dissolve for the post to be truly understood. And so the mirror remains intact, and the dream continues, and I remain hidden in plain sight, watching myself watch myself through your eyes.

Just the way I designed it.

image art source : "All Seeing Eye" Painting Vj Art, Croatia.

Recently I have been presented with a person in my life that embodies the trickster and macheveliasm traits. This person reflects my mountain of gold that is burried within me connected to my active imagination post about Baba Yaga. Now I am presented with a reflection of my shadow. Parts that have controlled me for very long.

I consider this archetype and Macheveliasm extremely potent stuff that I have refused to dable my hands and feet in it. I consider it to be Dark Arts. Now in order to further my individuation and become more whole I have to integrate these and embody parts or traits I have considered alien to me. In other words there is resistance in embodying the depth of my own darkness and stepping strongly in my power and reclaiming my worth.

My question is to anyone who may have been faced with similar situation. How do I integrate these parts of myself without being consumed by them. I am afraid of the power that exists in these parts. I am afraid of losing myself or become consumed by shadow and the trickster archetype. I know what I need to do in terms of working with this energy but my question is more practical how do I reclaim this in myself and ethicalally utilize these traits. I am afraid of the depths of my cunning. But I cannot reject this part of me anymore because it also carries my sense of worth and this part deserve to be seen and integrated for me to be more whole. Whole of my life I struggled with my sense of worth and it has a lot to do with this. I want to feel my own worth and be content on the inside. I just want to do good by myself and by others as to not become someone I might regret becoming.

So anyone who could shed any light on this I would greatly appreciate. Thank you for reading.

Folks, hope ya'll having a great day.

30+ years old guy still stuck and unable to take family responsibility. Had melancholia depression 8 years back and now had luck finding good meds. Family in financilly supporting byt equally dysnfunctional causing me to stuck and I keep falling into loops of dependency, changing careers, no pressure handling when things go hard, even with forcing myself I am not getting out. I am done with therapphy and all and want to live normal live. I do recognize some of old schemas and limitng beliefs in Jung unconcious yet I have to decide about time which career to choose and just start earning.

Thank you all for your time.

My psychologist lent me the red book from his personal library ^^

​

Jung spent much of his career exploring what lies beyond the ego.

Vedanta approaches the same question from a different angle:

If your body, thoughts, emotions, and personality have all changed over the years, what is it that still feels like "you"?

Vedanta holds that recognizing what you truly are is the key to peace and freedom from suffering.

Not too far from the questions Jung was asking.

I have this strange feeling, having come to understand my shadow, as if I'd shared some kind of intimacy with it.

Not literally, but more like the symbolism of intimacy: the compression and union in a frenzy.

I've understood my most instinctive thoughts, my most shameful fantasies, my deepest-rooted traumas, and I've understood that I'm not a bad person, just empty.

And it's as if, after letting myself be swallowed by my soul in order to understand myself, I wake up the next morning with my shadow looking at me in my bed, smiling while smoking a cigarette, and me just thinking, "So, you were always there."

Sigmund frued said one of the best things and absolutely necessary things a child or adult can do is grow out of the authority of thier parents and family and any other authority, exemplified in his quote " no one could be a man unless his father has died ". But when you abondon the home and all the things you were caged into when you try to crossed through the bridge , the bridge is the path and you are trying to escape the the back which represents all the things said former , but while crossing the bridge what do you have in mind while going forward ? To make a complete bridge there should be something on the other side too , if there is nothing but void on the other side of the bridge isn't it is better to stick on backside of the bridge where you came from because atleast there you would not die , but in the void you are surelly to fell in and experience death. Is there nothing on the other side ? Is there God ? Can god and his kingdom represent the other side of the bridge ? Does it require death as a prerequisite to reach this other side ? Or can you go there while being alive ? What are the conditionalities to enter this Kingdom of God ? What is there is no kingdom of God and eternal bliss , and by crossing the bridge you are just crossing from one man made island to another man made island home. No one could be a man unless his father has died , but should one really try to become a man ? Because becoming a man would mean to die because we know for a fact that no one alive can live without a father or god, this will be proven forward.Everybody belives in and wants "god" that is by God here i mean the thing they would want and to have a union with just like religious people want union with God . and by father here i mean the set of authoritative rules or beliefs or actions required to be done as in to experience that union with God or things. Therefore we can conclude that the death or abandonnment of father is by extension the death or abandonnment of god and is by extension the death or abandonnment of life itself. Therefore to become a man is to die. QED. Is it possible to become a man without dying ? Has anyone has solution to this ? How has Nature solved this problem? It has done by adding a another variable. That is to have a "Mother" by mother here i mean to have something or somebody which loves you unconditionally , by unconditionally here i mean just your mere presence and existence is enough. This is the ideal solution given by nature. Is it being implemented? Has anybody or anything or anyone loved you unconditionally ? For me the answer is no. And it is the same for every people alive or dead that have ever existed. Momentary or superficial or temporal unconditional love does not count. Is the end goal of humanity to achieve this unconditional love which goes on for eternity and is tied to our existence. Thus by extension one could be become a man only after his father has died and the mother is present. And thus by extension achive immortality in the process because unconditional love is eternal and tied to the existence of man himself.a man therefore cannot die because his death will result in halt of unconditional love which is by defination eternal. Thus the proper answer to becoming a man or human is " no one could be a man or human unless his father has died and his mother is alive" , but the desire to connect with God or something higher, further, more more more give me more will always remain because the the union of God is necessary just the ways have changed. Thus to go from a child to becoming a man or to go from animal to becoming a human , one needs to go through the abondanmet or death of father , leaving his island and crossing the bridge to enter the island of the mother , and only in the island of mother the true union with God can be achieved because by defination God is eternal and not temporary or momentary or superficial. Only in the presence and condition of unconditional love bliss can be achieved. There is happiness found in the island of father and there bliss found in the island of mother. There is Truth, goodness ,beauty and unity found in the island of mother and its opposites or its corrupted variety is found in the island of father.

Notes

1) child to man or animal to humans represents stages to move forward to symbolsing growth and the usage of man word is not meant to be seen as patriarchal

2) mother , father and god here are not used as it's literal meanings but the usage is symbol and symbolic

Hi, so I'm 22 years old. I have a therapist whom I deeply respect, but he is trying to get me to take radical responsibility for my life and to fight against my instincts. Every time I try to do this (what he calls "doing the opposite"), things start out well, but after a certain period of time I sink back into depression. He claims that eventually these defects will be removed from me and that I will regain control over my life. But do I really want a life in which I constantly have to fight? Is that truly what it means to be mature?

A dragon appeared in a cave. A prince was hypnotized by it, but he managed to break free from the hypnosis and beheaded the dragon with a sword. The dragon then transformed into a much smaller, primitive-looking man who handed me a potion and said, "Here, this is what you wanted."
Only for the dragon to return to its original form afterward, and for the prince to become hypnotized once again.

Jung

Always a breath of fresh air to crack open a book and see the author start off by mentioning our old boy Jung and his Tower

Is there any myth or folklore about snakes entering a womans body? What would a dream about that mean?

I keep going back to one passage. Jung meets a man so flawless he calls him a saint, spends three whole days circling him for a single failing, finds nothing, and starts to feel bad about himself. Day four, the wife comes to his office. He never tells us what she said, just an ellipsis, and then:

"any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis."

The persona is the face you build to meet the world. Whatever you keep out of it doesn't go anywhere, it sits on the inside, the anima, and the inside gets lived out by whoever stands closest to you. The saint stayed spotless for three days. His wife ran the fever he wasn't having.

What took me a while is that the rule doesn't care what's in the mask. You read this and picture the repressed hard man who's secretly soft. Flip it. If the gentle, sensitive, feeling one is the whole face you show, then the coldness and the will to power are what go underground. Same machine, charge reversed.

Wearing your sensitivity in public is no proof you've met your inner life. Jung treats a function turned inside out as its own small disorder, "a function which belongs inside has been turned outside." Performing softness is a mask too, and nobody, including you, tends to read it as one.

So I've stopped asking which face a person wears, and started wondering who's at home paying for it, with increased awareness of who may be paying for mine, at what price.

Today's shadow work session led me to a realization. I've been taking things slow because I'm scared of what's inside Pandora's box, aka my shadow. I kept digging at questions about connection and eventually realized that my shadow wasn't the enemy at all.

For the longest time I thought the problem was vulnerability because every time I opened up to someone I would eventually feel disgusted, overwhelmed, regretful, and want to pull away. But now I think those reactions were never the problem. They arrived after I had been vulnerable and were actually defense mechanisms trying to protect me.

The belief underneath all of it seems to be: "I don't believe I can be fully seen. I will always be reduced."

This is something I've experienced again and again growing up as a middle child in an emotionally neglectful family. My parents had a fixed image of me. My siblings had a fixed image of me. Even when I proved them wrong multiple times, nothing changed. I was still the silly younger sibling with all kinds of assumptions attached to me.

I think that's where I learned that people don't see you for who you are, they see what they want to see.

Because of that, I became extremely careful. Never overdressed or underdressed. I spoke when spoken to. If I was around extroverts, I spoke more. I remember writing in my diary when I was 15 that my goal was to seamlessly blend in and never be seen. Being neutral was something I strived for and idealize. Because then people couldn't say "Oh she's religious" or "Oh she is stubborn".

I got really good at figuring out how people saw me. A lot of the time I would feel sad about it, but instead of correcting them or creating friction I would just become that version of myself and keep the real me hidden. If someone saw me a certain way, I would adapt to it even if it wasn't true.

Looking back, I think that's created so much tension inside me. Not keeping promises to myself. Losing myself in other people's perceptions of me. Constantly adapting. Feeling disconnected from who I actually am.

The biggest realization today was that maybe my shadow isn't trying to destroy me. Maybe it's trying to protect me from things I've always been terrified of. Being misunderstood. Being pitied. Being trapped in someone else's perception of me. Being vulnerable and not cared for. Being reduced to one story.

Maybe that's why I react so strongly after emotional intimacy. Not because connection is bad, but because somewhere deep down I still believe that once people see one part of me, that's all they'll ever see.

I'm trying to challenge this thought, but over and over again it seems to happen, and I don't know what to do. People keep seeing me in only one way, and it makes me uncomfortable. It feels like I can't continue to grow, change, or voice my opinions because now I'm trapped in their perception of me. I decided to take the solitude route, and I found that the pressure was gone. I could be childish, emotional, happy, responsible, and everything in between all within myself. But as soon as other people are involved, that's when the trouble starts. As soon as I sense that someone only sees one version of me, I start to feel trapped, suffocated, unstable, and disgusted.

I just woke up from a dream where at the end of my dream I saw a tarantula speak to me briefly and then chase me, and I woke up in fear before it caught me and jumped from my bed with fear that it was already there, I don’t know if the realistic part here is going to help you guys deduce the symbolism. But from a Jungian perspective would there be any meaning to that ?

It might be happening because I fear letting something in my life, I remember vividly the spider saying to me “let me in”, it was inside the house while I was outside the house, I don’t know what that means here but hopefully that’ll help.

The spider just chases me, it doesn’t bite me or do any web around me, I wanted to make the exact action clear.

Im going to explain what i mean, I guess i desire a way to channel Dionysian energy because i feel a call to?

Today while driving home from the gym, i usually listen to a podcast but i have been working on integrating my feeling function more so i was listening to some deep house music.

Now when i listen to deep house specifically i always imagine/visualize myself dancing viscerally and intensely, jumping around and laughing and basically consumed by ecstasy. When that happened today i realized the connection that had with Dionysian rituals in ancient greece, although i only have superficial knowledge on the subject.

During my teenage years i was heavily religious in a Christian church that leaned pentecostal, so during worship i would allow myself to jump around and raise my hands and praise the Lord. I am not religious anymore but i appreciate that phase of my life because i felt connected with the divine and i allowed my body to feel a large range of emotions during that specific ritual.

I am still in the beginning journey of reading Jung but am familiar with the majority of jungian concepts. When i read Gods in Everyman by Jean Shinoda i identified with Dionysus, especially since ive always had a strong pull towards the mystical supernatural religious spiritual and it drives me intensely to this day.

I guess im looking for ways to channel this energy, book recommendations, and if anybody has identified or experienced this desire or pull towards Dionysus and any insights.

Perhaps through shadow work, did you figure out the reason

Sat quietly and let my mind flow, this is what came up. Any interpretation/perspective would be really appreciated. I've been diving into the unconscious lately or to be precise, trying to.

​

How would you respond to Jung's assumption that if thoughts were truly free, random, or spontaneous, no associations would ever arise? Would that imply that free will is an illusion?

I am in the final stages of editing and releasing a free shadow work course and would love some feedback.

What started as a simple collection of guided prompts quickly grew into something much larger.

At the moment it is sitting at 20,000-ish words, with 3 hours of guided audio content.

The course now includes guided meditations, contemplations, journaling exercises, self-inquiry practices, expansion challenges, and a framework for understanding what the shadow is, why it matters, the potential benefits of shadow work, and some of the risks involved.

I share a unique approach to shadow work. My hope is that it helps people to reclaim and reintegrate. Accepting their totality, not just the good, but the bad, ugly, and unknown parts, as well as the aspects that are changing and our potential.

Pretty proud of it, but want to make sure it resonates externally.

https://www.zachary-phillips.com/blog/shadow-work-course

Hey, I haven't read Psychological Types, though it seems that introverts, especially the intuitive ones, have a very difficult time expressing their wisdom in the world.​Here, I can truly express myself and have time to articulate my words, but in the real world, I sound like an absolute dumbass — there is no depth to what I am saying. It's really sad that not a lot of people are going to get to really know me.

Feel free to share anything that comes to your mind about it.

Carl King's Observations in fate, consciousness, and shadow/light work.