u/Background_Cry3592

So I’ve been going through my journals and posting entries that stood out for me the most. Here’s one:

My ego used to think it was the ruler of my psyche, but it was mostly just a spokesperson reading cue cards handed to it by forces underneath consciousness. I used to love believing that I was the captain steering the ship. Meanwhile my complexes, instincts, archetypes, traumas, libido, shadow projections and ancient symbolic patterns were below deck wrestling over the steering wheel.

I think the unknown sage Nietzsche called the Self sounds like Jung’s concept of the Self as the totality of the psyche. Not the ego, not the social identity but something deeper, older and stranger. The organizing center that transcends conscious awareness.

Serpents appear across myth as symbols of transformation, instinct, wisdom, danger, libido, rebirth and the unconscious itself. The woman holding the snake felt like an image of confrontation with psychic energy rather than dominating over it. She’s not killing it but engaging with it. I relate to that meme, it is how I faced my shadows. I engaged them and got to know them and made friends with them. I even gave them names.

My individuation began when my ego stopped pretending it was the whole personality. My unconscious compensated for the conscious attitude through my dreams, symbols, projections, synchronicities, symptoms, obsessions and my relationships. But the terrifying part is that my Self was not always comfortable or morally neat. It could dismantle identities, destroy illusions and force confrontations with parts of myself I buried for survival or approval. People say they want enlightenment or self-knowledge until their psyche starts delivering (Amazon Prime) snakes to their doorstep. Then it gets too real.

But Nietzsche and Jung both understood something that modern culture resisted and it’s that consciousness is *not* sovereign. We aren’t really fully transparent to ourselves. There’s depths beneath thoughts and emotions that shape us long before we form explanations about who we are.

The Met Gala has become ritualistic. It’s not a fashion event but a secular aristocratic ceremony. The costumes, masks, impossible wealth and the cameras flashing like worship votives for modern gods. Medieval courts did the same except with powdered wigs and probably syphilis. The shadow erupts whenever luxury and suffering appear side by side. Collective guilt gets projected onto symbols and celebrities have become containers for public rage about inequality, wars, consumerism and detachment from reality. Symbolism doesn’t belong to the creator once it enters the collective consciousness. I think archetypes hijacks intention.

A hard pill to swallow is that modern culture consumes suffering visually, for example starving children have become images in feeds alongside with luxury brands, makeup tutorials and protein powder ads. The juxtaposition itself is the pathology. The nervous system isn’t built to process this much contradictions in one scroll or event.

I’m seeing a surrealist influence as well, designers want their products to slightly disturb viewers because disturbance creates memorability. I get that. Psychologically it taps into the uncanny or the shadow imagery. We instinctively react because images bypass the intellect and pokes directly at primal body awareness. Our nervous system recognizes the human form but also “injury/deformation/sickness” and the contradiction creates unease. So the symbolism people are reacting to isn’t just the skeleton or leg dress or the Ra and Pope spectacle, it’s the opulence beside the collapse, and the aestheticized death beside literal death, plus performance beside suffering and a massive distance between elitism spectacle and ordinary human pain.

What I really want to know is did the attendees and their PR teams unconsciously gravitate towards these symbols through their own shadow material or was it more conscious than that? Did someone think “skeletons means mortality, this looks dramatic I’ll wear it!”? Are they so removed from reality that they have lost touch with themselves and have been possessed by the collective? What would Jung even have to say about all this?j

Edit: I just want to remind people that this post is about my own experience with my shadow, the symbolism draw me in because of my exposure and experiences with them. I am doing shadow work and my experiences have given me insights that I wanted to share with you guys.

Too funny not to post and there’s truth in it. Jung explored the psyche like a man willingly descending into a cave full of gods, corpses, dreams, archetypes and possibly psychosis with a notebook in hand.

And there’s Jordan Peterson, standing at the edge translating fragments of that abyss into something people can digest without spontaneously combusting into existential smoke.

There aren’t any productivity hacks when it comes to the psyche. Jung wasn’t interested in self-help comfort, he was interested in confronting the unconscious which is far less marketable than just “cleaning your room”.

For my own spiritual awakening, it started off with lots of Ram Dass and Rumi and crystals and Tarot cards. As I went deeper into my psyche, I realized that I needed an anchor. To ground me. To keep one foot in hell and one foot in heaven, and that’s when I picked Carl Jung up again. Jung filled in the gaps, jumpstarted my development and growth and made sense out of the contents in my unconscious. It also made me realize that my spiritual experiences, like seeing an angel that one time, or seeing Elementals (nature spirits) were projections from my subconscious. When we cleanup our unconscious, then the outer world we project from the inner world becomes very clean, understood, and streamlined instead of being a chaotic mess full of symbols and synchronicities and apparitions we can’t understand.

I think it is important not to let the madness of current states in the world rattle us and disturb our inner peace.

It used to disturb me so much, I would lose sleep over it, but with meditation, came acceptance, and while I am saddened and frustrated by the insanity going on our beautiful planet, I’ve come to this weird state of “it is what it is”. Meditation helped me to live in the moment, and I’m telling you, it’s so much more peaceful than catastrophizing about the future of our planet. Meditation broke the emotional loop. Now I acknowledge how I feel, then let it go instead of ruminating.

How do you cope with all the insanity going on in the world, my fellow travellers?

So it’s for my friend, I promised her a painting of the lake. She is picking it up today. And stupidly of me, I decided it was a good opportunity to add some details (why? Why? I don’t know!) and now I’m thinking the first painting (without details) is looking better! I sent her a photo of the original painting (before detailing) and she LOVED it. Why I decided to add more details, I do not know.

Please tell me the second painting is better than the original! She’s picking it up soon and I’m kicking myself for adding details literally at the last minute. Ugh. *mini panic attack*

First painting is the detailed one, second painting was the original.

We underestimate both our goodness and our capacity for, ahem, let’s call it creative moral failure. People like to think they’re either good or not that bad but Freud’s (and also a Jungian school of thought) whole point is that we’re walking contradictions.

We actually do have a moral compass. Most people don’t go around doing bad things, even when they could get away with it. There’s empathy, guilt, conscience, all that inconvenient stuff that stops us from being total chaos.

But then there’s the flip side. The part people don’t like to look at. The impulses, fantasies, resentments, the things we justify or repress. It’s said that when we don’t acknowledge that darker layer, it doesn’t disappear, it just leaks out sideways. Passive aggression, projection, self-sabotage, “oops I did that again but it’s somehow not my fault.” We’re masters at embellishing our narratives.

The quote hit me because it broke the neat little story we tell ourselves—“I’m a good person, therefore I’m not capable of bad things”. But reality is closer to “I’m capable of both, depending on the situation, my awareness, and how honest I’m willing to be with myself”. The uncomfortable truth is that morality isn’t a fixed identity. It’s a balancing act between what we’re aware of and what we’re pretending not to see.

Remembering who we are requires un-remembering everything society taught us.

edit: btw I am not the creator of this meme

I hope I didn’t break any rules posting a painting instead of a photo. I hope you all like it!