Unfortunately Mindellās Process Work never seemed to gain much traction in terms of mainstream psychology being aware of it, despite him publishing numerous books on various aspects of it. He just passed into Spirit a few weeks ago at the age of 84. There is still a training Institute in Portland, OR and a community of folks all over the world that are carrying on. But outside of this community, I rarely come across anyone who knows about it.
Some other thoughts about the difference between the Jungian approach to dreams and Tibetan dream yoga:
In Jungian thought, the dream imagery is full of symbolic meaning and is there to convey needed messages to the ego (which is limited and āone-sidedā in itās understanding). Therefore, you donāt want to just change the dream around willy nilly because it is presenting important symbolic messages. In Tibetan dream yoga, however, it seems like the emphasis is on understanding that the dream is illusion, and by extension, this waking dream world is also illusion. Therefore when becoming lucid, you can change things around, break things, etc, etc, to discover itās illusory nature. As someone coming out of a Jungian tradition, this makes me wince a bit, since we see the dream as a sacred message coming from a deeper source. Jung never referenced lucid dreaming (as far as I can tell) but his method of āactive imaginationā is very similar, except it is done in the waking state. After his break with Freud, he was inundated with inner visions and voices in the waking state, even to the point where he was afraid of becoming psychotic. He began to interact with these visions while awake by dialoging with these inner waking dream figures. He recorded this active imagination work through writing and art work in his āRed Bookā which has now been published.
I myself donāt achieve a lucid dream state that often, although I continue to work on this, but when I do, my approach is more like the Jungian approach of interacting consciously with the dream figures to understand the message. But there is also a part of me that can understand the more Buddhist approach of just changing the dream around in order to understand that itās impermanent and itās all an illusory dream. In this community, I see that both approaches are going on. There seems to be an aspect of interacting with the dream as āillusory formā but also there is an aspect that looks at what the dreams may mean as messages from some deeper place. At least, I see both of these aspects represented on this website.
yes, he did
if youād like, I can ask a Phd friend about the details.
Yes, I would be very curious to know about it. In my many years of studying Jung, I never came across it.
ok. I will ask him
āYou are not alive or dead
you are an ongoing processā
- a sticky note on Arnold Mindellās (my former teacher who created Process Work) bathroom mirror.
His wife Amy shared this at his recent memorial.
Hereās a short interview with Arnold Mindell from a few years back.
So the secondary processes are the unconsciousness(es). Is he calling for an integral approach? Sounds familiar.
You can think of it this way: Instead of thinking of fixed entities, like an āegoā and an āunconsciousā, instead there are processes which are constantly flowing and changing, Some of these processes I will identify with as āmeā and some of them I am less identified with and are happening to me. You can analyze all experiences in life and the world in this way. There is āmeā and then there is āall of the stuff that is happening to meā or is āout thereā. Even stuff going on in my body may not be identified with. āI have a headache.ā There is the āIā and then there is the headache that is happening to me. This is the primary and secondary process respectively. In dream states, there is the dream self and then all of the other stuff happening in the dream that feels āotherā - again primary and secondary. Or you turn on the TV and watch the news and feel scared about all of the crazy stuff going on in the world. There is the I who is watching the news, and then there is all of the crazy stuff going on in the world. There is the watcher of the news (primary) and all of the crazy stuff in the world (secondary). Mindell says that all of this is like a dream, but there are parts of this dream that we identify with as āIā (primary process) and the part of the dream that is happening to us (secondary). I think itās a brilliant integration of the Jungian depth psychology tradition with the more fluid perspective (itās all an ever-changing flow) found in Taosim and Buddhism.
Like those tiny strings out there/in there . . .
Like string theory?
I hadnāt thought of it that way.
Itās all a flow of experience. Some of that experience I feel is āmeā (primary process), some of it seems like ānot meā (secondary process). Perhaps in a more enlightened state there is no longer a separation between the āmeā and the ānot meā, itās just One Flow.
Maybe, itās just ā¦ Flow?
Yes, itās all just Flow!
But our egoic minds say āthis part of the flow is me, and that part of the flow is not me. I hate that other part of the flow! Itās so scary and dangerous and it pisses me off! Because it conflicts with my flow!ā And so I make my flow into a static āthingā and this is what we call āthe egoā or āmy identityā or ājust who I amā and everything else is āall the stuff that is happening to me and my ego.ā
@_Barry. A perfect illustration of what we are talking about! There is the flow of the ocean of the universe, and we arise like waves from that flow, and one wave thinks itās a different person than another wave! I love it!
Beloved @fenwizard thanks to your curiosity, I am in contact now with not one, but two friends who are scholarsā¦ and I have just found out (2 minutes ago) the text that inspired me to answer you in the way I did:
"The Gilgamesh Cantata
Curtiss Hoffman
Ashland, MA, USA
In The Red Book, Jung details a series of three nights of dreaming from mid-January of 1914, in which he encountered the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh (called at that time by him āIzdubarā due to a misreading of the cuneiform) whom he brought up to date on all that had transpired during the intervening 4,000 years. This mortally wounded the hero, and Jung felt sorry for him, so he convinced Gilgamesh that he was a fantasy. This enabled him to condense the hero to a tiny size which he put inside of an egg, which he then took to a nearby village for healing. The text then provides a series of incantations to heal the wounded hero, all from Jungās dreams."
Before having found this text I had already shared with one friend who is an independent scholar and his words were something like:
āJung was very dismissive of the idea that it is possible to control dreams. I donāt recall him using the term ālucid dreamā often. When he did it was usually to reaffirm his dislike for the idea of trying to assert control over autonomous productions of the psyche and or collective unconscious, as when he refers in 1956 in a passage in Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11 to āso-called lucid dreams, in which the dream-ego presumably knows that it is dreaming and has some control over the content of the dream [is] (a state that I have not, however, seen convincingly demonstrated).ā I assume he was familiar with the work of Frederik van Eeden, credited with coining the phrase ālucid dreamā though I donāt think that (unlike Freud) he met him. If one likes the term ālucid dreamingā and does not confine it to experiences during sleep it could be used for many of the inner adventures Jung describes the Red Book and Memories, Dream, Reflections and to some he called āactive imaginationā, but clearly he did not like the term.ā
Just a few minutes ago, I sent the text about the Gilgamesh Cantata to both of them (one of them has this book and he will take a look at it), and waiting for their comments. I would also love to read what you have to say about this. If this is not Lucid Dreaming I wonder what it isā¦
I have also found this interesting piece - APA PsycNet
and hereās the full article about the Izdubar adventure:
so interesting to notice @_Barry how he describes scienceā¦
āThe poison is so insurmountably strong that everyone, even the strongest, and even the ternal Gods, perish because of it.ā (p.279)
Is poison truth? Or is truth poison?
I have also come to find that āthe fatherā of modern lucid dreaming isā¦
apparently, his definition of Lucid Dreaming could be more aligned with Jungās experiences, ethics and depth.
āIn 1867 there appeared as an anonymous publication a book entitled Les rĆŖves et les moyens de les diriger; observations pratiques (Translation: Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations).ā
@BlessingsDeers Very interesting! Nice to learn something new about Jung after all these years. My own sense as someone coming out of a Jungian tradition is that lucidity itself is not the problem. It would be the idea of the ego trying to use lucidity to control the dream. If you can observe the dream and interact with it consciously without trying to change it or control it, then it is very much like the āactive imaginationā method that Jung loved.