How do you experience keeping secrets from yourself or the wider “conscious”, if I may call it that? Freud spoke of the irrationality of a part of the mind he called the ID. Well… Rationality is a joke, but that’s beside my point. There is a domain of human experience that goes on all the time, impulses and instincts, spontaneous flashes of fantasy that we rapidly dismiss because supposedly they aren’t real.

Are you referring to the archetypes according to Carl Gustav Jung? Yes, and the perfect forms of Plato as well. Jung was on to something.

On a more mundane level, we often miss an object like a sign or something just because “it’s not suppose to be there” and someone will point it out and we’ll wonder where our head was at. You offer a very valid point. You don’t need special states of consciousness to experience the gaps in our perception, but there is another side to that unseen world of human experience. The world and our mind are in constant dialogue, even beyond the activities of your personal consciousness or the collective unconscious. Your inner mind understands what the world is saying to you, even if your “reality” says it’s gibberish. This is why you can see a cat stare at you and walk away, and for no rational reason deduce from that that a loved one has issues with you they mean to confront you on.

The dream state lets the world communicate to us? Yes, but what exactly gets through always depends on you as an individual.

It was more part of daily life once, but our training has cut it off from the waking state? Also true. It was the source of divinatory practices, spiritual insights that preceded modern religious institutions, really a lot of things.

What gets through depends on what I ask or where I’m looking? Exactly. This is why lucid dreaming techniques or divination can work to reveal things to you. They don’t have to have supernatural meaning by themselves. They just have to open you up. Most of what gets people confused about metaphysical/spiritual practices is what I call “fetishism”. They get fixated on the form and lose the spirit. Can’t see the spiritual world for the tarot cards or the weird dream imagery.

That’s what happened to Freud. Yes, and he even admitted it eventually. He had a good idea, but it was too shallow, too limited. Jung saw beyond it more. Jung was seen as eccentric for being so immersed in the old practices, but still also of a “scientific” mind. I say it was a mark of solid science that he embraced the experiential and his personal insights.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~