Cleaning Your Room and Organizing Your Psyche
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Spring Cleaning, Hoarding, and Jung
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So imagine you’re dealing with someone who’s hoarding. People who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged, or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. But then you walk into their house, and there’s like 10,000 things in their house. There’s maybe a hundred boxes, and you open up a box, and in the box there’s some pens and some old passports, and some cheques, and their collection of silver dollars, and some hypodermic needles, and some dust, and, you know, a dead mouse, and there’s boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house. It’s absolute chaos in there. Absolute chaos. Not order. Chaos.
And then you think, “Is that their house, or is that their being? Is that their mind?” And the answer is, “There’s no difference.” There’s no difference.
I could say, “Well, if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room.” If that would be easier. Because maybe you’re a more concrete person, and you need something concrete to do. So you go clean up under your bed, and you make your bed, and you organize the papers on your desk.
And you think, well just exactly what are you organizing? Are you organizing the objective world, or are you organizing your field of being? Your field of total experience? And Jung believed that—and I think that there’s a Buddhist doctrine that’s sort of nested in there—at the highest level of psychological integration, there’s no difference between you and what you experience.
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New Podcast Re-release: The Psychology of the Flood (season 3, episode 6)
- We are re-releasing Dr. Peterson's biblical lectures, during a time when we believe it to be helpful.
- Listen to the current release: "The water that was there that we talked about in the Mesopotamian creation myth—the water that’s there at the beginning, both the salt and the fresh water—is often a symbol of precosmogonic chaos. Often people have dreams—for example, some of you have this dream, I suspect—that you’re in a house that you know well, and all of a sudden you discover a new room, or a set of new rooms, and maybe a set of rooms in the basement. And often the rooms are not well organized, and they’re full of water. Those are very common things. And what that means is that you’ve broken through the constraints of your conscious self-understanding to a new domain of possibility, but a new domain that needs a tremendous amount of work. It says, 'Well here’s a new part of you, but it’s not well developed.' It’s flooded. It’s flooded with chaos, essentially..." Listen now.
Twitter: Announcing a new grandson, Elliot Peterson
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Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries
by Mircea Eliade
About the Author
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian-born philosopher, historian of religion, fiction writer, and professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Peterson's views on myths, dreams, and religious experience have been shaped in part by the writings of this preeminent interpreter of world religion.
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