It is an interesting story how a non-Psychologist and non-Psychiatrist like me ended up reading through the work of the genius Swiss Psychiatrist C.J. Jung. What is even more interesting, is the fact that the pathway that led me to eventually considering formally studying Astrology went through encountering convincing evidence to do so in his invaluable work.
But let’s get things right from up from the start. For summer reading a few years back, my wife – who happens to be a medical doctor, offered me a dated book written by Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist and a pioneer on early -and yes legal in those days, LSD treatment studies. He had performed thousands of supervised LSD treatment sessions during the sixties and seventies until the substance was legally banned even for medical usage mostly due to misguided and unfortunate political reasons.
Back to my story, having read Grof’s “Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research” and being startled by the unbelievable remarks that I found there, I kept reading more and more of his books, such as “The Way of the Psychonaut Vol. 1 and 2: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys.” Off course it could not go unnoticed from all the references and pointers to Jung’s work, that almost all the findings from the LSD studies were in alignment with Jung’s concepts and theories about the collective unconscious and even to the extend of prenatal experiences.
So, without further ado, I delved into Jung’s books starting from the “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious“. While reading it everything in my head started to make sense. After studying it, I could at least have a broad grasp of the process on how things emerge from the unconscious and under which conditions and procedures they can be assimilated into our consciousness. In a grand scale, and in close proximity to answering one of life’s fundamental questions, the work of life could now be defined as the process of integrating as much unconscious material into consciousness as one can achieve.
On a final note, I have found out as a bonus that in Jung’s work there is an underlying layer that holds everything in his theories together but is not advertised at all. One could describe it more like a framework that enables connection and interaction between all the different concepts on top of it. Alas, this framework is Astrology.
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