redbook

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1

A quote from Jung on journaling the inner workings of the mind and (possibly) dreams stuck out to me:

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

Tags:

jung, dream journal, psychology

I also remembered seeing a link to a mindmap on Spiral Dynamics a couple years ago and decided to hunt it down before I immersed myself too far into the book. I found the original link via a Google search, but unfortunately discovered that the original site is no longer up (http://www.integralsingularity.com/freemindbrowser.html). Thanks to the WayBackMachine (archive.org) I was able to salvage the map. I was going to upload and view through my Mind Map Viewer, however FreeMind’s flash viewer was having problems rendering it (possibly due to the size?).

At any rate, I figured I would salvage this great bit of research and host somewhere so others could benefit (full credit goes to the original author). I’ve uploaded the map to my site(SWF/Flash format from MindManager), and provided some links to the map in other formats (FreeMind,Mind Manager,PDF, and HTML outline).

Mind Map

Outline

Other Links
FreeMind Map
MindManager Map
PDF Version

“In this excerpt from Integral Psychology, Ken Wilber honors some of the forerunners to his own model Integral theory and practice: James Mark Baldwin,  Jürgen Habermas, Aurobindo, and Abraham Maslow—intellectual giants upon whose shoulders we all stand….

Some Important Modern Pioneers: Baldwin, Habermas, Aurobindo, and Maslow
From Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber

What I would like to do in this section is introduce several modern pioneers in an integral approach, an approach that, in important ways attempts to be “all-quadrant, all-level.” What all of these pioneers have in common is that they were fully cognizant of the important differentiations of modernity, and therefore they were increasingly aware of the ways in which science could supplement (not replace) religion, spirituality, and psychology. All of them, as we will see, used modern discoveries in the Big Three to elucidate the Great Nest. (All of them, in other words, were offering important elaborations of fig. 1 [below].)

Early modern pioneers of an integral approach abound, such as Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Fechner, and James. The early pioneers increasingly had access to scientific data on evolution, and thus increasingly understood something about the Great Nest that the premodern pioneers usually did not: it shows development not just in individuals, but in the species; not just ontogenetically, but phylogenetically. In this century, although pioneers also abound-from Steiner to Whitehead to Gebser-I would like particularly to mention James Mark Baldwin, ]iirgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo, and Abraham Maslow.”

Click here to continue reading more at Integral Life.

Last year I picked up a copy of The Integral Vision by Ken Wilber.  I recently decided to re-read the book, and created a comprehensive book summary highlighting the key pieces of information in the book.  The book summary is presented in the form of mind maps for each chapter.

Why am I doing this?

I first stumbled upon Integral Philosophy a couple years ago, and quite honestly became hooked.  Since that time, I’ve read a wide variety of books and have engaged in the exciting and often daunting task of trying to build a comprehensive and well-informed worldview (or map).  There are a number of good intro books that people recommend for first diving into Ken Wilber’s work (e.g. A Brief History of Everything).  Regardless of which book you pick, the fact is for most people (myself included) this is a vast and complex topic.  Distilling a philosophy/worldview/framework into a small but useful text is difficult to say the least.

I’ve personally found The Integral Vision to be the best intro into Integral.  It’s a short, but powerfully-information packed book that definitely does justice to such an interesting and complex topic.  My hope is that others who are just getting into Integral Theory/Philosophy will benefit from the mind map summaries.  My advice would be to get the book, and use the maps as a study or reference guide to help the information sink in.

Overview

View Online (Flash) | Download Map (MindManager)

Chapter 1

View Online (Flash) | Download Map (MindManager)

Chapter 2

View Online (Flash) | Download Map (MindManager)

Chapter 3

View Online (Flash) | Download Map (MindManager)

Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Entire Book Summary

Download (2.0MB Zip)

I was at the book store the other week, saw a book on his life and works, and decided to pick it up.  While reading the book, I saw reference to one of his famous works: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.  I’ve been briefly skimming the book (thanks to Google Books) and found 2 great passages that resonated with me.  Steiner discusses the importance of patience with respect to the pursuit of knowledge (pg. 31).

“… no student should spend more time and strength upon these exercises  than he can spare with due regard to his station in life and to his duties; nor should he change anything for the time being, in the  external conditions of his life through taking this path.  Without patience no genuine results can be attained.”

AND

“When the student seeks the path leading to higher knowledge in the way described in the preceding chapter, he should not omit to fortify himself; throughout his work, with one ever present thought.  He must never cease repeating to himself that he may have made quite
considerable progress after a certain interval of time, though it may  not be apparent to him in the way he perhaps expected; otherwise he can lose heart and abandon all attempts after a short time.”

Tags:

philosophy, quotes, tips, patience

I’ve spent the last couple weeks setting up my new personal wiki.  My ultimate goal is to use a wiki, and other open source applications/tools, to act as a personal knowledge manager and learning aid.  I’ve also been evaluating a fantastic extension called Semantic MediaWiki (or SMW).  SMW essentially “upgrades” the capability of a wiki, which really is blobs of inter-related text by adding semantic meaning to various items in each page.

I figured I’d experiment and make a real-world application.  Since I was a teenager, I’ve been intrigued by dreaming, and lucid dreaming in particular.  And, starting last year, I experimented with keeping a consistent dream journal for about 4 months.  I managed to import all of the data into my semantic wiki and can now run some pretty elaborate searches on the dream actors, location, clarity/type (lucid or not), and major objects or themes in the dream.  With just 4 months of data it’s shown some interesting patterns and has started to give me insight into some of the dreams.  I’ve decided to keep up with the dream journal habit, and we’ll see what interesting things I can discover.

Now…. what’s with all the finger and toe mention?  I was searching for some lucid dream related articles a few minutes ago and came across this bizarre/interesting post on somebody who was having a lucid dream and decided to take acid (while he was in the dream, of course).

Here is an excerpt to think about:

“I can’t stop feeling like my life is a dream, that everyone I know is actually just a personality dreamt up by my own mind, that even my own self is an imagination, and that really there is nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, except for this one mind with no dimensions and no time that dreams up life to escape the horror of its utter isolation. I think I now understand the meaning of the Zen phrase “I alone am the world-honored one.”

Now I think that it must be truly horrible to be God, to be IT! Nothing else beyond you or apart from you, no help, no world, no god to pray to, no nothing except your own self. Maybe he couldn’t take it and blew himself up into fragments just so he’d have some company and something to do for a while, and that’s what our universe is. Maybe we are so frantic to live this life because we’re terrified of the truth, that we are all that is, and we are ALONE! We are fingers and toes making friends with eachother, making up stories and dramas so that we don’t have to think about the terrible eternal nothingness.”

Source: http://www.yahooka.com/forum/51459645-post1.html

Tags:

lucid, dream, journal, reflection, zen, trip, alone

“All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane made up of large numbers.  Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the  many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good.  In the clamour of the many resides the power to snatch wish-fulfillments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility.  All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer, and for all needs the necessary provision is made.  The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never things to ask who is paying for this paradise.  The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes”.

Tags:

jung, individuation, belief, self

“Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me.  In the meantime, I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble.  They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system.  They can never be solved, but only outgrown.  I therefore asked myself whether this outgrowing, this possibility of further psychic development, was not the normal thing, and whether getting stuck in a conflict was pathological.  Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and must under favourable circumstances be able to develop this potentiality.  When I examined the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrew themselves, I saw that their faces had something in common.  The new thing came to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and grew with its help.  It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within.  But the new thing never came exclusively either from within or from without.  If it came from outside, it became a profound inner experience; if it came from inside, it became an outer happening.  In no case was it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seemed to be borne along the stream of time.”

Tags:

jung, quotes, potentiality, change, growth

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

The phenomenon was rigorously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December, 1999.[1]

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, playing chess or tennis or operating a motor vehicle, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). Specifically, they hypothesized that with regard to a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

This, of course, is directly related to the commonly recognized 4 stages of competence.

In psychology, the four stages of competence relate to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill:

1. Unconscious incompetence
The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it.
See also : Dunning-Kruger effect

2. Conscious incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

3. Conscious competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

4. Unconscious competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others.

I’d also recommend a great article I came across last year:

Why smart people defend bad ideas

Positive Psychology Exercises

Research studies point out personal development directions
Maximize your personal development results and get the most benefit from your personal growth efforts by incorporating these findings from the latest research in Positive Psychology. Exercises that lead to greater happiness and life satisfaction–the good life–can help you make the most of the time and energy you devote to personal development.
Positive Psychology Studies

Positive psychology researchers study the ingredients of the good life–happiness, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Their goal is to find those activities and ways of thinking that characterize happy people. Can each of us be happier by choosing how we think and what we do? The answer, happily, is yes.
Positive Psychology Exercises

There is no lack of self help advice available at dozens of Internet sites (including this one), in hundreds of books, and through workshops presented by many present-day gurus. Though most of the advice is sound, some is based on personal anecdote and experience and may not be effective for most people. The following three personal growth exercises are validated by scientific research.

There is a strong correlation between one’s happiness and their sense of purpose or meaning in life. These exercises are designed to help you find your own personal sense of purpose and meaning. Any one of these may be sufficient, so if the first one you pick doesn’t work well for you, try another.

1. Recall instances of great satisfaction and happiness. What were you doing? What were the circumstances? What is the underlying theme, if any?

2. Recall times when you’ve been occupied with an activity and lost all track of time. Perhaps you worked through normal meal or sleep times without realizing it. What were you doing? What talents were you using?

3. Start with a blank sheet of paper or computer screen. At the top, write My Purpose in Life is… Start writing whatever comes to your mind. When you write something that evokes great emotion, perhaps even tears of joy, you’ve touched on a life purpose that is meaningful and important to you.

Personal growth and development is correlated with greater happiness. As with life purpose, try any or all of the following exercises to identify aspects of personal growth most important to you.

1. Make a list of your accomplishments over the past twelve months. Reflect on how these accomplishments have contributed to your personal growth. Can you see an underlying theme of personal development directions that is most satisfying?

2. Make a list of the opposite, those accomplishments that were drudgery and left you with little or no satisfaction other than that of completion.

Researchers find there is a strong correlation between happiness and using one’s strengths in daily activities. Use one or more of these techniques to clarify your top strengths:

1. Make a list of those things you do really well. Combine and narrow the list until you have only five or six of your top strengths. These are qualities that you have used in moments of greatest pride and satisfaction.

2. Ask people who are close to you what qualities they most admire about you.

3. Fill out the VIA questionnaire here which provides an assessment of your top five strengths. Compare these results with the above methods and look for consistent areas. Discard any that you disagree with.

Devoting time and energy to these three growth exercises, Life Purpose, Personal Growth, and Using Unique Strengths, will enrich your life and bring a sense of greater satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness.