Episode 5 - A Discussion about Carl Yung / the Collective Unconscious / Dreams. How has his influence shaped the musical and artistic landscape? (Part 1)

Hello! In episode 5 I discuss who Carl Yung was and some of his brilliant ideas on dreams and the collective unconscious. How has his influence shaped music, art and culture? Come with me as I explore this topic and more in Part 1 of this 2 Part series! Enjoy!! ☆

"Do what though wilt shall be the whole of the law" - Aleister Crowley

"Discover that which makes you shine, always and forever into infinity"

-Joseph Matthew 

Transcript

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Welcome, one and all, to the Magic Music Podcast. I'm your host, Joseph Matthew, and in this series, we will be discussing various occult and esoteric practices in music, art, and culture. So sit back, relax, and let's explore the unknown together. Enjoy. Welcome, everyone, to episode number five. So in the previous episode, we discussed dreams and how it relates to the occult and various occult symbols that you could interpret if you see them in a dream, like a snake or fire, even numbers too, or symbols. If you see pentagrams or hexagrams, it might mean something much deeper that's going on in your life. But for this episode, I thought we would just touch on Carl Jung. So Carl Jung, we've discussed in previous episodes that he was basically a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and was the founder of analytical psychology. He was born in 1875. And he passed away in 1961. So that was a very, very long life that he lived. And he was able to write many books over the course of his career. So he started out as a protege of Sigmund Freud. And Freud was a pretty influential psychiatrist as well in his time. But he broke away because he had much more... spiritual mystical and symbolic views of the human psyche than freud's more sexually focused theories like repressed sexual desires so young took psychology pretty deep he mixed it with mythology alchemy which is something we'll touch on in later episodes religion art and the big one, which is dreams. I have one of his books. Actually, I'm sorry, I have two books of his. I have Man and His Symbols and I have Synchronicity. Both were very, very inspiring and both books, they take a while to kind of digest. There's a lot of themes in there. a lot of things that he goes into. But I highly recommend reading Carl Jung or just looking up different theories that he had and studies and different patients that he met with over the years. It's very, very fascinating stuff. So what did Jung believe about dreams? He believed that dreams are messages from the unconscious. He didn't think dreams were just random... brain static he believed that dreams were meaningful messages from your unconscious mind or your inner self trying to communicate and to quote jung um he said who looks outside dreams who looks inside awakens now There's something to be said about individuals that are introspective in nature, that can see their flaws internally and attempt to correct them. You know, narcissists and psychopaths have a much more difficult time trying to look inside themselves because they think that they are perfect beings that can do no wrong. that's not the case everyone is constantly changing and evolving and adapting to their environment to different people and to different circumstances i'm not the same person that i was 10 years ago by no means i'm 29 years old so to think of joe at 19 is a little crazy the amount of stuff that i've done Good and bad, you know. Life should be a learning experience and you should be able to look into your dreams to try to take away any important messages. Because dreams can send you things. And they can be very, very insightful. So he believed that dreams reflect the psyche's need for balance. So the psyche was kind of like a self-regulating system. You know, dreams often show you what you're ignoring or suppressing in waking life, trying to balance things out. And balance is incredibly important in life. It's so important for stability. It's important for maintaining healthy relationships with friends and or family, or work colleagues, just anyone. It's very, very important to have the balance, to have the yin and have the yen, to have all sides on an equal playing field. If one side is tipping to the left or tipping to the right or skewed in so many different directions, then you might need to work on yourself a little bit And no one's perfect. Don't be afraid to branch out and try something new. It's going to be scary. It's going to be hard. But just push through and persevere. And I can guarantee you that you're going to have a net positive result at the end of it. Some things may not work out in your favor, and that's okay. Everyone is not the same. Everyone is specialized for something. I love music. love talking about music i love recording it i love listening to it it's kind of my life it's a huge a huge chunk of my life and i would not want to surrender that for anything unless for some reason i lost my hearing which would suck um but then then again you have to adapt to situations that arise in life whether it's mental issues or physical issues, you have to have a balance. So for instance, are you overly rational? You might dream of wild chaotic forces if you are overly rational, like storms or very disruptive events that may happen in those dreams. And you wake up very confused. And you're like, what the hell did I just dream about? I've had those dreams before where I can't explain what they were about. And that's okay. Because dreams are meant to be pieces of a puzzle that may or may not connect. Maybe in some way, shape, or form. But it's not really a straight arrow. The arrow can go all over the place and then you end up at this final moment before you wake up. Are you ignoring emotions? Expect watery or emotional dream symbols. That's interesting. So if you're denying that you love somebody, care about them, you might have a dream where someone just embraces you you might be uncomfortable with it or you might give them a hug back and then you wake up and you want to give someone a hug in real life it's almost as if your body is pushing you to do this thing that you were afraid to always do and there are parents that you know me being a parent myself there's no right way to parent there are parents that use a very militaristic style of parenting and others that are very carefree, don't punish their children, they don't hit their kids, or I don't believe in hitting kids, spanking, maybe sometimes if they're very, very bad. But my wife and I, we try to have a balance of parenting. We're both co-parents. We both love each other very much. So there is that balance that we try to achieve. If someone's not feeling well, we'll pick up the slack and vice versa. All right, so getting into archetypes and the collective unconscious, which we've spoken about before in the previous episodes. So he believed that we all share a collective unconscious, which is a kind of psychic inheritance filled with archetypes, which are ancient universal symbols or characters, such as the shadow, which is your dark side, your fears and your suppressed emotions. So if you have a fear of heights, you might dream that you're in a very tall building and it's really windy out and you are on a cliff, a cliff's edge or the edge of a building and then you fall off. You might have a fear of water and I think it's thalassophobia is the fear of water. just large bodies of water that are um that are open where you don't know what's underneath let's see yeah so thalassophobia is an anxiety disorder that manifests as an intense and persistent fear of deep water like lakes or oceans so you're fearful of what's actually inside of the water itself like huge fish or mammals and it's uh i'm kind of i'm pretty afraid of the ocean myself not not shallow water but you know the deeper you go out i would not want to be stranded let's see that sounds horrible in dreams it's fine but not in real life um okay so moving on the anima or animus which is the inner feminine for men or masculine for women I've always said this, you have two parents, right? You get 50% of your DNA from your mother and 50% of your DNA from your father. Now, there are certain feminine qualities that we perceive that may come out in men sometimes. And one of those qualities is caring and nurturing. I would say that I'm a pretty caring and nurturing person. I'm an empath. I enjoy seeing other people flourish. I don't get jealous of other people because I know that my path is going to take me somewhere and it's going to put me in a spot where it's going to be a different spot from somebody else. They're on their own path. And my friend, for example, he just got his first apartment. He's 30 years old. He worked his ass off. He got his college degree. And he just moved out of his parents house and has this beautiful minimalist apartment he's 10 minutes from the beach he's loving it and i'm so proud of him so proud of him shout out to nick my best friend but um he's yeah i'm so proud of him for all the work that he's done and um i can't wait to see him thrive and flourish in the future And so masculine for women is, I guess, being more aggressive or forthcoming. And I think it's something that we struggle with on a daily. If you're a masculine heterosexual man, you almost suppress that feminine side of you because in society, it's not really... Unless you're gay or bisexual or whatever you're into, as long as you're doing it for some kind of purpose where you just want love and acceptance, then that's fine. But yeah, there's a lot of suppression of that. Women, if you're a heterosexual woman and you're into men, you don't want to seem like a tomboy or something. You want to be seen as like, kind of girly and attract a lot of masculine men for reproductive purposes or just to find a mate to share your time with. So the wise old man or the hero, which is inner guides or quests. So I had a dream one time where this being of light, I feel like it was some kind of wizard, was guiding me along this road. And it's almost as if I knew who this man was. And it felt so familiar. And to hear that other people have had similar dreams or similar encounters with These older beings that are trying to tell them something. It's really, really fascinating how we all can connect to this higher dream plane that maybe one day we'll be able to map out. I was watching Joe Rogan the other day and he was discussing how that apparently they're trying to map out the DMT realm. And for those of you who don't know, dimethyltryptoline is a very, very potent psychedelic drug. People see beings and aliens and elves, and it's very bizarre. I've never taken DMT, but it's incredibly fascinating that maybe one day with AI, we'll be able to map out these different dimensions. Not just this reality that we're living in now because we only have a certain number of senses and we can only hear certain frequencies and see certain bands of light. So it's pretty fascinating that we might may be able to decode that in the future. So all of those archetypes, they often show up in dreams as characters or symbols. And you know, dreams can be prophetic or guiding. So while Jung didn't think every dream was a fortune cookie, he did believe that dreams could contain foresight, something he called prospective function. So dreams can prepare us for future psychological developments, growth, or challenges. It's almost as if your body is pre-gaming for an event to occur. And my question is, do the events that happen in dreams, is that something that has already been decided by the universe to happen? Or is it going to kind of be random? Is it predetermined? Like, is that exact scenario going to happen in the future? If so, then that means we are on a path that has already been laid down for us. Which that means anything that you do, any decision that you make in terms of your career, your family, going to the grocery store, anything down to any decision that you make. Maybe you don't have a choice. Maybe that decision has been picked for you. And even if you think you're deciding, maybe you're not. It's just a thought. I would like to think that we have... some kind of free will in this life, but I'll never know. It's just fascinating to think about. And on this podcast, we're going to be doing a lot of just deep thinking, me just rambling about things. So I do apologize. Let's see. So active imagination. Jung encouraged people to interact with dream imagery through a process called active imagination. which is talking to dream characters, drawing your dreams, or even continuing the story while awake. It wasn't just analysis for him. It was almost like dream alchemy. So interacting with your dreams, whether that's if you're having a lucid dream and you can kind of control the narrative, or yeah, just... writing down their names like the characters that you see or maybe what they look like maybe they will appear in another dream in the future or the next dream that you have the next night or the next night so personally i don't i dream sometimes i used to dream a lot when i was younger but now not so much and the dreams i do have i feel like they are pretty anxiety ridden and as someone who suffers from anxiety i guess it makes sense it's a way of trying to figure out okay like what's what's wrong here what could i do to calm myself down what are takeaways from it that i can use in my personal life to not get myself so amped up and anxious So to summarize, essentially, dreams are symbolic and not literal. You shouldn't take the dream as is. You shouldn't sit there and go, okay, all this weird stuff is going to happen to me. No, you should take certain elements of it and you can apply it to your life. So you want to look at the dream holistically and see, okay, there's different parts to it as well and how they intersect and intertwine with one another. Dreams come from the unconscious to help you grow. They should help you flourish and not hinder your abilities. Even having nightmares can open up doors for somebody, right? Having these nightmares, having these nightmares can guide you to the light. If you have a horrific dream about clowns, then maybe you should try to face your fears and go to a circus or hire a clown for your kid's birthday party. And you'll see that they're really not scary. Of course, movies like It and other clown movies throughout history have really sunken deep into the psyche of individuals. I know a few people that are terrified of clowns and balloons. There's fears for everything. And a couple of years ago, there were, it's really bizarre. There were clown sightings in this town where people would dress up as clowns. And it was during, I think during the summertime, it wasn't even close to Halloween yet, but they'd go around and they'd like look in people's windows and shit. So yeah, I mean, take what you want from that. but it just depends on what you're fearful of and if you believe that you can conquer that fear i have my fears for sure so it's it's such a normal aspect about being a human being so they reflect your whole self trying to emerge That's interesting. So maybe you're not complete as a person. Maybe you're three quarters of the way there and you haven't reached your full potential yet, or you're scared to take the leap to the next step, whether that's starting a business, starting a podcast. This is new to me. I'm excited to grow with each episode and to explore all the amazing and beautiful topics on music and the occult. and everything. So hopefully I'm trying to, you know, fit a piece of just a piece of the jigsaw puzzle into, you know, that hole that I'm missing.