Up: [[Image]] Course: New Beginnings with Ashok Bedi for Jung Platform Created: 2023-12-31 ## 1. Numinous Numinous means that the image feels sacred, touching a very deep part of you. Like a coin, there are two sides to numinous. The positive side is awesome, moving, guiding, hopeful, inspiring, motivating. The other side is called tremendum and it is dark, frightening, an abyss, awful. This is the side Jung experienced after his break with Freud. There’s nothing redundant in the psyche. Everything has a meaning. If you’re having an awesome experience, you simply follow it. If you’re having a tremendum experience, you have to make a sacrifice. Something near and dear to you has to end. There is no growth without pruning away something that is dysfunctional. See [[Sacrifice - What It Is and What It Isn't]] ## 2. Ineffable There isn’t a conscious understanding of the image. It has what is referred to as a ‘noetic’ quality, meaning that you know deep inside that there is a meaning but you can’t quite put your finger on it. [[Ashok Bedi]] related this to William James's book *Varieties of Religious Experience* which he highly recommended. ## 3. Passive Ego Ego consciousness either becomes paralyzed or needs to be deliberately made passive during the experience of the image. It’s only when the ego is passive that the unconscious can speak and guide us through images and dreams. ## 4. Transient Bedi likens the image to mist in the morning. There’s a small window for catching it. The writer Shirley Jackson uses similar words. > [!Orbit] Shirley Jackson in ‘Memory and Delusion’ in *Let Me Tell You: New stories, essays, and other writings* > … a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a **thin mist of words**, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. ## 5. Profound The image provokes a deep response, moves us profoundly. ## 6. Prescriptive If you deep dive into the image, hold on to it, harvest its guidance, it’s never going to steer you wrong. It always has the right prescription for you for that moment.