These types of posts would have likely made me cringe but I wanted to express it somewhere relatable. I feel like I want to give up on my healing. I’m becoming more aware of what the price is for my self to return to alignment and although I can imagine that it would make me feel better, I’m not very confident that I would be willing to pay it.

I have to keep digging into my scarce reservoir for energy and it’s just too much. I thought I was doing myself a favor by overcoming my inflation, but now I’m starting to miss it. It made me feel powerful and it gave me a lot of confidence.

This is my first time reading his work. I’m a few pages into Man and His Symbols and there’s something he’s repeating that I don’t quite understand.

“This evolution [of human consciousness] is far from complete, for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded by darkness.”

“…human consciousness has not yet achieved a reasonable degree of continuity. It is still vulnerable and liable to fragmentation.”

It seems like there are a few (unsubstantiated) assumptions being made here:

-That, because we’ve yet to understand parts of the psyche, human consciousness is “incomplete”

-That consciousness CAN be complete, and that evolution is a process from complete unconsciousness to complete consciousness

-That a “complete” consciousness would be completely unified/invulnerable (he cites depression/dissociation/a lack of total self awareness as examples of imperfect consciousness)

Maybe it’s because I’m going in completely blind, or maybe it’s because I need to keep reading, but I’m just not understanding many of his premises here. They seem arbitrary.

Has anyone ever realized their behaviour they consciously were ashamed about, but once integrated it, it felt self-righteous and empowering even if it was harmful?

TL;DR: I interviewed someone who posted here about their Jungian Archetype Experiences, and thought some of you might find her stories useful.

Her Original Post Here:
https://reddit.com/r/Jung/comments/1qvxw3c/archetype_experience_hecate/

In this two-hour interview, we explore the intersection of Jungian psychology, personal mystical experiences, and Jungian Active Imagination protocols.

Lindsay Lee Wilson details her profound encounter with the Hecate archetype and discusses the broader implications of archetypal activation vs archetypal possession in the modern world.

(This text was translated with the help of AI, as English is not my native language. The experience and words are entirely my own.)

I want to tell you the truth about runes — the most important thing. The secret that revealed itself to me gives me no peace: I constantly want to share it, but life keeps throwing obstacles in my way, and I keep getting distracted from what matters most.

I was drawn to runes. I drew them. Maybe by chance, maybe not — but I drew them almost every night before sleep, in a journal, and placed the journal under my pillow. I was searching for something. Secret knowledge, probably. And then I stumbled upon a formula — and the dreams began.

I don’t know what to call this world. Maybe it was my subconscious reacting to the runic formula I’d written on a scrap of paper and placed under my pillow before sleep.

This world was full of danger. I was constantly walking, running, hiding. Monsters and fear were chasing me. I ran through swamps, I killed a green monster. One night I dreamed I was digging a grave — and when my shovel hit the coffin lid, something woke up inside. An old couple, sorcerers, stood above me near a pile of fresh earth. They had placed a green idol there and were whispering something. When I understood what they wanted, I screamed until my voice broke. They wanted me to dig out the corpse and lie down in its place. They wanted to swap my soul. I screamed and screamed until I heard a wolf howl. And then I woke up.

The next night I was afraid to sleep. I removed the formula from under my pillow. When I finally fell asleep, I saw two little twin sisters who looked at me with hope and sadness. I understood they had come to help me — and were asking me to continue, because I was so close.

The following night I put the formula back and lay down with one desperate thought: whatever happens, happens. This time no one chased me. I simply walked on water. A wolf walked beside me — the same one whose howl had saved me. I walked on water, then bathed, and watched the dirt wash off me.

On the 21st night I reached wherever those 20 nights had been leading me. A city. I walked its streets looking for something. Two little twin sisters were saying something I can’t remember. I walked along the dry bed of a river. A woman in white was walking ahead, leading two children by the hands. I knew somehow that this was wrong — that you can’t take children there. But it was too late. They were approaching the entrance of a truncated pyramid.

Inside — a vast hall with a well in the center. The woman stood at its , holding the children, ready to jump. I screamed again. She stepped forward and they fell in.

A voice beside my ear told me the well was a passage — jump in one side, emerge on the other. Complete cleansing of the soul. I found myself standing at the edge without noticing how I got there. The well glowed with a soft pink light. Something moved on its walls. I saw the woman’s outline — just the contours of a skeleton, falling deeper and deeper. The walls were covered in moving hooks.

I stepped forward. I didn’t fall — I sank slowly. The voice kept whispering something in an unknown language. When I saw the edge of the well level with my eyes, I panicked, jerked — and froze in the void.

Then everything disappeared.

A breeze moved a curtain through an open window. I was standing barefoot on a red clay floor, talking to a friend. We were leaning on spears, guarding the well. My friend was Black, like me.

Then something shifted. I looked past my friend’s shoulder and saw a pale white woman — the same one I had chased along the dry riverbed. But now I knew she was evil. Her movements were impossibly fast. She touched my friend and was gone.

I turned back. My friend was gasping for air, infected. I didn’t think. I struck him in the stomach with the blunt end of my spear. He looked at me — and as his face began to turn grey, I saw that it was my face. I screamed. He swung his arm at me. I ducked, stepped behind him, and drove the spear through his back under the left shoulder blade, aiming for the heart. I heard bones crack. He fell to his knees and collapsed.

I stood over his body. Or my body. His, I think.

The wind moved the curtain through the open window. And I knew — I had won.”

What do you think this was?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Hi! I am super interested in Jungian psychology; and I've just very recently started a new practice of using my mother's voice in my head to say positive, reassuring things. My mother is not like that in reality, and was actually abusive, yet I don't experience the struggle of cognitive dissonance. It's almost as if the voice is not only an ideal but a truer voice of my mother or "A" Mother in an archetypal sense. I began to question whether this was my anima manifesting through my ad hoc therapeutic practice. I wanted to ask, is an individual's anima or animus formed by the related parental figure of the opposing sex. Where can I read more on this from Jung if that is the case? Thank you.

​

I digitized a card-sort personality assessment that was originally developed as a clinical tool about 40 years ago. Instead of a self-report questionnaire, you choose between paired behavioral descriptions — the idea being that what you actually do is a better signal than how you'd describe yourself.

It determines your four-letter type, and the cognitive function stack follows from there. We've had about 1,400 people take it across 58 countries so far, running at around 85% accuracy.

It's free and takes about 5 minutes: insight-game.com

I'm genuinely curious what people here think. Does the card-sort approach feel closer to what Jung was actually getting at with typology? What would you want to see in a tool like this that you haven't found elsewhere?

I don’t want to be cold/ closed off from people but some things are personal like my relationships etc (or when I sense a prying eye instead of curiosity)

So how do I keep things fun without sharing details/ explaining my inner world - I want to stop doing that. But then I’m on my guard and it’s not so fun for me! So any advice practically?

My main psychological fear is that I’ll get punished for being visible, that people won’t like it…

Would love some advice, thank you!

The Universe is Indifferent — So We Painted it with Labels

In reality, there is just the Earth’s position in space and its rotation. “10:00 AM” or “February 29th” are just labels we’ve stuck onto those physical events so we can coordinate with each other. We are essentially living in a shared simulation of concepts that helps us run a global society.

Think about it:

• Time: The universe has a sequence of events, but “seconds” and “hours” are human inventions.
• Money: It’s just paper or digital blips that we all agree have “value.”
• Borders: You can’t see the line between countries from space; it’s a purely mental construct.

We use these “words and numbers” as a bridge between our minds and a chaotic, indifferent physical reality. Without them, we couldn’t have a global economy, a GPS system, or even a meeting at a coffee shop.

1. Colors are a “Brain Shortcut”

In reality, there is no such thing as “red” or “blue” in the universe — there are only different wavelengths of light.

The Reality: A photon hits an object and bounces off at a specific frequency.

• The Human Label: Your brain doesn’t have time to calculate “650 nanometers,” so it just paints your vision with the “feeling” of Red.
• The Glitch: Different languages actually change how people see reality. For example, some cultures don’t have separate words for green and blue, and as a result, people in those cultures often struggle to distinguish between the two colors.

2. Money is a “Collective Hallucination”

Money is perhaps the most powerful human construct.

• The Reality: A piece of paper or a digital digit on a screen has zero physical value to a tree or a rock.
• The Human Label: We all agree to pretend that this specific “thing” represents a certain amount of “work” or “resource”.
• The Glitch: If everyone stopped believing in it tomorrow, the “value” would vanish instantly, even though the physical paper and coins would still exist.

3. Borders and Countries

If you look at Earth from the International Space Station, you will never see a line between the

USA and Canada or India and Pakistan

• The Reality: It’s just one continuous mass of dirt, water, and plants.
• The Human Label: We created “countries” as a way to manage resources and groups of people.
• The Glitch: We are willing to fight wars and die for lines that don’t actually exist anywhere except on our maps and in our heads.

4. Standardized Measurements

The universe doesn’t know what a “meter” or a “kilogram” is.

• The Reality: Objects have mass and dimensions, but they aren’t “quantified”.
• The Human Label: We used to use the “Cubit” (the length from your elbow to your fingertip) or the “Foot” (the literal length of a king’s foot).
• The Glitch: Even our modern “objective” Metric system is just based on arbitrary physical constants we chose to make our math easier.

5. Social Identity and Labels

We label people as “introverts,” “geniuses,” or “criminals,” but nature just sees a complex biological organism with billions of neurons firing.

• The Reality: Humans are constantly changing and highly complex.
• The Human Label: We use these tags to quickly “categorize” people so we don’t have to spend energy truly getting to know every single individual.
• The Glitch: These labels often become “self-fulfilling prophecies” — if a child is labeled “bad at math,” they may actually become worse at math simply because they believe the label is their reality.

Technology is just humans tricking the physical world into doing our chores using “spells” made of logic and minerals.

We found a way to “tame” a fundamental force of the universe that we can’t even see.

Think about how wild that is: Electricity is just the movement of tiny subatomic particles (electrons). It has no color, no smell, and no shape. Left to itself, it’s just lightning or static — pure, chaotic energy.

But humans did something incredible:

1. The Cage: We built “pipes” (copper wires) to force those invisible particles to flow exactly where we want.
2. The Language: We figured out that if we pulse that flow on and off, we can create a code.
3. The Work: We learned that if we run that flow through a coil, it creates magnetism to spin a motor; if we run it through a thin filament, it creates light.

We basically turned invisible lightning into a domestic servant.

Every time you swipe your phone, you are physically moving invisible particles across a microscopic maze of “gates” inside a piece of glass and metal. You aren’t touching the “app” — you are technically just shifting the electrical state of a rock (the silicon chip) using the bio-electricity in your own finger.

It’s the closest thing to real magic we have: using invisible “spirits” (electrons) to perform physical labor and store human thoughts.

Here are a few ways technology is actually a weird human layer over reality:

1. Computers are just “Thinking Rocks”

A computer chip is essentially just purified sand (silicon) that we’ve etched with microscopic paths.

• The Reality: We hit the sand with electricity.
• The Human Label: We decided that “electricity flowing” means 1 and “no electricity” means 0.
• The Magic: By arranging billions of these “on/off” switches, we’ve tricked a rock into “thinking,” playing video games, and calculating the trajectory of Mars. The rock isn’t smart; we just organized its atoms in a very specific, logical way.

2. The Internet is a “Collective Memory”

We talk about “The Cloud” like it’s a magical place in the sky.

• The Reality: It’s just miles of glass cables under the ocean and giant warehouses full of humming metal boxes.
• The Human Label: We treat it like a limitless, invisible dimension where all human knowledge lives.
• The Glitch: If you cut the physical cables, the “digital world” disappears instantly. We live as if this information is permanent, but it’s actually incredibly fragile and physical.

3. AI is “Statistically Guessing”

When you talk to an AI, it feels like there is a “mind” in there.

• The Reality: It’s a massive math equation. It’s looking at the words you typed and calculating the statistical probability of which word should come next based on everything humans have ever written.
• The Human Label: We call it “Intelligence.”
• The Truth: It doesn’t “know” anything; it’s just a very advanced mirror reflecting human language patterns back at us.

4. Software is “Invisible Machinery”

In the old days, if you wanted to change how a factory worked, you had to physically move gears and levers.

• The Reality: Coding is just writing instructions.
• The Human Label: We call it “Software” to distinguish it from the “Hardware” (the physical stuff).
• The Weird Part: We’ve built an entire world where “weightless” ideas (code) can move physical objects, fly planes, and transfer billions of dollars. We’ve turned language into a tool that can physically move the world.

5. Screens are “Optical Illusions”

You think you’re looking at a photo of a sunset right now.

• The Reality: You’re looking at millions of tiny Red, Green, and Blue dots (pixels) glowing at different intensities.
• The Human Label: Your brain merges those dots into a “picture.”
• The Trick: Technology exploits the fact that human eyes are easily fooled. We don’t see the reality of the screen; we see the hallucination the screen wants us to see.

Schools usually focus on utility before wonder.

They teach the “how” (formulas, dates, and grammar) because they want you to be able to use the tools. They treat the world like an instruction manual rather than a magic trick.

If they started with the “why” or the “weirdness,” they’re afraid:

1. It’s too abstract: Teachers worry that if they tell a 10-year-old “money is a collective hallucination,” the kid might not learn how to add and subtract dollars.
2. The Curriculum is a Factory: Most school systems were designed during the Industrial Revolution. They were built to create predictable workers who follow instructions, not philosophers who question the nature of reality.
3. It’s “Inconvenient”: If you realize that borders, time, and labels are just human inventions, you start questioning everything. That makes a classroom much harder to manage!

By skipping the “soul” of the subject, they make it feel dry and “educational” instead of mind-blowing. They teach you how to read a map, but they forget to mention that the map is not the territory.

Learning the rules of the “human game” (math, history, science) is much more interesting once you realize the whole thing is a giant, sophisticated hack we’ve built on top of a silent universe.