In some grey letters in my previous entry, I spoke of the ‘language of the Self’ without defining it. Here is an approximation:
Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche are obviously alike even in respect of the outward circumstances of their lives; they stand under the same horoscopical aspect. One and all they were hunted by an overwhelming, a so-to-say superhuman power, were hunted out of the warmth and cosiness of ordinary experience into a cyclone of devastating passion, to perish prematurely amid storms of mental disorder, and one of them by suicide.
A power greater than theirs was working within them, so that they felt themselves rushing aimlessly through the void. In their rare moments of full awareness of self, they knew that their actions were not the outcome of their own volition but that they were thralls, were possessed (in both senses of the word) by a higher power, the daimonic.
I term ‘daimonic’ the unrest that is in us all, driving each of us out of himself into the elemental. It seems as if nature had implanted into every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were interminably striving—with tense passion—to rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives…
Source: The Struggle with the Daimon. Understanding how I use the term ‘Self’ in this sense can be done by reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols. On this site I stole a page from that book: here.
One reply on “Jung-inspired term”
Mainstream psychology and psychiatry are mostly a variety of hypotheses — how wrong am i making that judgement? Therefore, choose one that best fits you, like a good shoe.
What’s my choice? At present, mine continues to evolve. Humanoids are at essence intelligent homing devices (psychocybernetics): we choose or are order to achieve something and over many attempts we train our homing devices to focus on the target and hit it as closely as we can, some of us better trained & functioning that others. Near the end of our lives is where the training of our homing devices can start giving some of us trouble in the excess of listening to our subconscious screaming its many voices at us, “No, NO, No….” A broken record. (calmdownmind.com.)
How do we quiet these voices, the error signals of our variety of homing devices warning us we’re about to make yet another mistaken choice. And a larger concert of voices in those of us who have failed more often than succeeded.
Next, classes of choices: The long term choices, the ones in which”self” chooses a long term target to focus on. The short term choices of the homing devices themselves; once focused on a target, the homdevice’s feedback loops are constantly feeding the mind error signals that were processes and choose to listen to to correct course. Now there’s a big difference between choosing a target and choosing a correction in course to the chosen target. “Self” chooses the target. Sovereignty, Consent. Self chooses to spend large blocks of one’s resources — time/ money/ energy — in the pursuit of the chosen target, over the selection of other targets that may have been successful, too. Self does this by weighing a variety of inputs.
And here is where my experience has led me to start wondering about accepted views of the “soul.” Rather than accepting that the “soul” is an internal integrated resource of each humanoid, might it not be external? Like two radios paired, one in the humanoid, and the other in the spirit world? Might “we” not be communication with our “self” that lives in that spirit world, that world flourishing with other spirit beings? Perhaps if each of us could communicate better — if at all? — with the “self” part of “us,” our choices of targets would be better.
That is what I interpreted as “the instance of Self.”
ps,
I’ve found that fasting improves communication. Fasting seems to reduce the noise on the communication link or noise in this side’s radio receiver. After 3 days on a water only fast, I start to hear clearly audible voices. Or is such the result of “tweeked” brain chemistry because of lack of healthy nutrition?