#indexmiscellany

“In the culture of my people, the Dagara, we have no word for the supernatural. The closest we come to this concept is Yielbongura, ‘the thing that knowledge can't eat.’ This word suggests that the life and power of certain things depend upon their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowledge that human beings apply to everything. In Western reality, there is a clear split between the spiritual and the material, between religious life and secular life. This concept is alien to the Dagara. For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives.”

"The anomalous nature of ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’ events, in other words, is most likely a function of our inadequate models of consciousness and energy, not a sign of these events’ final unreality or fiction. It is not that the uncanny is unreal; it is that our conceptions of the real are not uncanny enough."

“Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic."

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.”

"This issue leads us directly to touch upon a philosophic position known as 'dual-aspect monism' adopted first by Spinoza (see Ravven, 2013) as well as by Jung and Pauli many years ago (Atmanspacher, 2012), and recently re-proposed by Mark Solms and other neuro-psychoanalysts (Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000). According to such a view, the material and the subjective worlds are two complementary manifestations of a unique, albeit perhaps unknowable unitary reality, to which Jung refers with the concept of 'psychoid'. The presence of such underlying dimension has been widely underlined in Eastern cultural tradition, as well in some Western philosopher, such as A.N. Withehead (1929). In the 20th century, its existence was revealed by the study of quanto-mechanic processes in physics, and of unconscious processes in analytical psychology. Both disciplines recognized the influence of unobservable (paradoxical) phenomena within the normal flow of observable material and mental events."