Human Assignments

Empathy With Nature: SERIES 3

Human ~ Not By Nature: Carl Jung & Rudolf Steiner On Human Nature

Session 1: Carl Jung & Rudolf Steiner

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? What ideas were put into your mind about the human, and where the human comes from? Was it done dogmatically? What pictures do you still hold from your early impressions? How have they evolved over time?

2) Artistic Exercise: Draw an image of what the world looks to you. Be intuitive. Concentrate on the feeling quality of it. Do it a few times if necessary to get closer to the essence of what you feel deeply and believe. Does it feel wonderful, or do you feel torment?

3) Ruckshau: Take a few minutes each day to review the events of your day in reverse order. View yourself from an objective, higher perspective, going through your day backwards. What do you see, what are you shown, what do you learn about yourself? This is a way to strengthen many things including mental picturing, memory, empathy and self-knowledge.

Session 2: The Origins of Earth

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? What ideas were put into your mind about the solar system? Do you have a sense of it being something alive or something lifeless and mechemical? Was it done dogmatically? Did it jive with your own thoughts? How have they evolved over time?

2) Artistic Exercise: With paper and pencil crayons, move the hand in gestures that emulate a sense of warmth. It doesn't matter what it looks like, just focus on the feel of warmth. Let it fill the page, even spill over. Feel the expansiveness of warmth, nebulous. Create warmth. Do this a few times, and see what wants to emerge out of the nebulousness. Draw in more definition and see what appears. Let your imagination go to work. Analyze it later if you must. Enjoy.

Session 3: How Did the Human Hatch?

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? What ideas were put into your mind about the origin of human? God? Stork? Ape? Slime? Cosmic Intelligence of Universe? Was an idea pressed upon you dogmatically? Did it jive with your own thoughts? How have your thoughts evolved over time? How far have you come in your own thoughtistry as a Thartist, to create pictures of human origins? How do you identify now?

2) Artistic Exercise: With paper and pencil crayons, move the hand in gestures that emulate a sense of roundness, at first like a soft ball of slime, or a mushy brain. Then let the roundness become firmer and more defined, like a enskulled head. Over time let the gesture move from roundness to straightness, something emerging out of the roundness, growing away from the centre, and moving toward the periphery. Feel the qualitative differences between the gesture of enclosed roundness and outward moving lines. Enjoy.

Session 4: Jung on Archetypes and Collective Unconscious

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? How balanced are you between left brain, analytical and logical thinking, and right brain, imaginative, intuitive cognition? Is one side stronger than the other? What side needs more strengthening and integration? How might you go about that?

2) Artistic Exercise: Repeat the Ozscope exercise. With the eyes closed, and in a meditative state, take yourself across the Rainbow Bridge and into the inner land of Oz. When you enter, see which Oz character comes, Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tinman, Lion, Wicked Witch, Not-So-Wonderful Wizard, the Good Witch. How do they look, what is their mood, what is their surrounding? What is your connection to them? is there another Oz character that wants to emerge? How are they? What is their relationship to the other Oz character?

When finished, return across the Rainbow Bridge to the outer realm of Kansas. Take time to draw and journal your experience.

Session 5: From Transgenderism to Transhumanism

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? How were you taught to identify yourself? Was it more toward a group identification, or an individual identification? How has it morphed and changed over time? How do you identify now? And how would you like to change that identification? What do you think of the way people around you identify?

2) Artistic Exercise: Using your emotional intelligence, draw a being that feels male. Then draw a being that feels female. Then draw a being that feels like a balance between male and female. Next, draw a being that feels like a balance between human & technological.

Session 6: Does a Human Decease Upon Death?

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? What were you taught about life - and death? Was it an atheistic, nihilistic, view that stated there was no life beyond what the senses could perceive? Or were you raised with a sense that the departed loved ones continued on a journey that was beyond the reach of the outer senses, but not beyond reach of the inner senses? How has the belief you were raised with changed? Is there a way you wish it to change further?

2) Artistic Exercise: With a coloured pencil crayon, starting from a centre point, work with a weaving motion to build up the centre, moving outward to create a ball of warmth. Next, with a different coloured pencil crayon, continue with the weaving motion around the ball of warmth, surrounding it, extending it. Once you have surrounded the central ball, now move inward, permeating the central ball with the new colour, weaving the two together. Lastly, use the first colour to move the central ball of warmth out to the peripheral weaving. Consider how this is an image of the weaving between those who are living on the earth sphere, with those who are living in the earth sphere, on a different level, and different level of consciousness, as One Body.

4) Read to the So-Called Dead: Read with thoughts of those on the other side. Read something uplifting and with spiritual character to it. Focus not so much on the words but the sense of the content, adding your own feelings to the meaning. Enjoy the sense of feeding others for their enrichment and upliftment. Observe how your thoughts, consciousness and dream life may change.

Session 7: Jung, Steiner and "I"

1) Thoughtistry: How Were You Raised? What were you taught about your highest nature? Were you taught a materialistic view, that your heart is a pump, your brain a computer, and your senses your only access to knowledge? Or were you raised with a sense that there is something more, that you have an eternal nature, that your heart is alive within you - within an alive Cosmos - and can help you navigate morally as a moral centre? How has the belief you were raised with changed? Is there a way in which you wish it to change further?

2) Artistic Exercise: Work with the same artistic exercise as in today's session. Start with a single point, add a second point, then a third, creating an equilateral triangle (the strongest shape in the universe). Keep adding more single points so to form more triangles. Watch the form grow into a circle. Have wonder for how what started as a singular point has arrived at a circle. Every geometric form aspires to be a circle.