“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach”
– Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
When there is light on our planet, it comes from the sky, not from earth.  Our vision knows this perfectly even though it was not until a few years ago that the psychologist Vilyanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, came up with these splendid examples.  The actual effect of the direction of the light determining whether we see shapes as concave or convex was described by David Brewster in the 1800s.
We can thank the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin for the figure above, or more correctly, the American photographer Zeke Berman’s elaboration of Rubin’s vase, a double image initially conceived by Rubin in 1915.  You can choose to see black vases-with the white faces as background.  Or you can see the faces-and then the black cases become background.  You can choose to see one as the shape, the other as the background.  But you cannot choose both of them simultaneously  You distinguish between signal and noise. Again it is not the raw data that you see; you see an interpretation and only one interpretation at a time.  Berman’s version of the Rubin vases is not a drawing. He used silhouettes of real faces.  The figure above is a drawing inspired by Berman.
– Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion
“‘It is difficult to explain to a layman that there is a problem in how we see things.  It seems so effortless,’ the eminent biologist and neuroscientist Francis Crick wrote in 1990.  ‘Yet the more we study the process, the more complex and unexpected we find it. Of one thing we can be sure: we do not see things in the way common sense says we should'”
– Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion
To be continued…
“Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude.”
– Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
Happy 4th of July to everyone from ElephantTribe.org !!!
“Our dreams are continually saying things beyond our conscious comprehension. We have intimations and intuitions from unknown sources. Fear, moods, plans, and hopes come to us with no visible causation. These concrete experiences are at the bottom of our feeling that we know ourselves very little; at the bottom, too, of the painful conjecture that we might have surprises in the store for ourselves.”
– Carl Jung
Psychotherapist and Psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology
“Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.”
– Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious
Photo from Tor Nørretranders’ Mærk Verden
The discovery of the true self is the recovery of union with our own being …. “Aum is the sound value of that union. We remember that the first sound in aum, “a,” is associated with what is called “waking consciousness.” That is the state of most of us throughout our lives. When consciousness is awake, what one sees seems to be separate from oneself — subject and object are separate from each other. On this level, Aristotelian logic prevails: a is not b. “U” is associated with dream consciousness. When you move into the level of of dream consciousness, all the laws of logic change. There, although you think you are seeing something that is not you, it is actually you that you are seeing, because the dream is simply a manifestation of your own will and energy — you created the dream and yet you are surprised by it. So the duality there is illustory. There, subject and object, though apparently separate, are the same.” The final audible sound in aum “m”, brings us to the level of deep, dreamless sleep. This is the realm out of which consciousness then will reappear.
– Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light
