Jinn

Image by KLuwak via Flickr

In Islamic folklore and religion Jinn (or genies) are supernatural beings sharing with human beings the agency of free will. They live in a world parallel to ours, and may help or hinder humanity.

coolguymuslim bashes the negative Judeo-Christian (and Hollywood) stereotypes about the Jinn by adding that

They are not necessarily bad or evil. They are another of God’s creatures who are being tested as humans are. They are made of smokeless fire as humans are of clay. There are ethnicities, religions, and other divisions amongst jinn just as there are amongst humans.¹

Although they can be disruptive to human affairs, Jinn may be harnessed for heavy labor. Solomon, for instance, used them as helpers (Qur’an 27.17). And a person at the point of dying may be converted into a Jinn.

Gordon D. Newby says that Jinn are unlike angels because of their capacity to sin. In some folkloric tales they sit on the walls of heaven to try to hear what the angels and God are talking about. And shooting stars result from angels throwing things at them, trying to drive the Jinn away.²

In the Qur’an Iblis (i.e. the devil) is said to be both a Jinn and an angel. This has lead to much commentary about  the nature of Jinn and angels among Muslim scholars.²

From a traditional Judeo-Christian point of view Jinn are often regarded as familiar spirits or demons. However, the Arabic word Jinn doesn’t appear in the Hebrew old Testament—it only appears in translations from the original Hebrew.

In Judeo-Christian tradition, the word or concept of jinn as such does not occur in the original Hebrew text of the Bible, but the Arabic word jinn is often used in several old Persian and Arabic translations.

In several verses in those Arabic and Persian translations, the words: Jinn (جن) Jann (الجان) Majnoon (مجنون) and Iblis (ابلیس) are mentioned as translations of familiar spirit or אוב (obe) for Jann and the devil or δαιμόνιον (dahee-mon’-ee-on) for Iblis.

In Van Dyck‘s Arabic translation of the Bible, these words are mentioned in Lev 19:31, Lev 20:6, 1Sa 28:3, 1Sa 28:9, 1Sa 28:7, 1Ch 10:13, Mat 4:1, Mat 12:22, Luk 4:5, Luk 8:12, Joh 8:44 and other verses as well. Also, in the apocryphal book Testament of Solomon, Solomon describes particular demons whom he enslaved to help build the temple, the questions he put to them about their deeds and how they could be thwarted, and their answers, which provide a kind of self-help manual against demonic activity.³

From a Jungian standpoint, the morally ambiguous Jinn might be comparable to the idea that the power of the archetypes is neither negative nor positive in itself. It’s the relationship to the ego that’s key.

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¹ See http://earthpages.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/jinn/#comments

² See Gordon D. Newby, A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, Oxford: 2002, pp. 86-87, 116-117 (pdf online book).

³ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn#Jinn_in_Bible

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Mercury

Image via Wikipedia

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun in our solar system.

Until recently, our knowledge of Mercury was based mostly on three flybys made by the American probe, Mariner 10¹ in 1974-75.

Another American probe, however, Messenger², did three flybys past the planet in 2008 and 2009, and is scheduled to leave the Sun’s orbit and enter Mercury’s in 2011:

One year from today, March 18, 2010 — starting at 12:45 a.m. UTC — MESSENGER will transition from orbiting the Sun to being the first spacecraft ever to orbit the planet Mercury (Source: NASA).

The planet is believed to have a dense iron core. Mercury is also the name of an element, a silver-white metal and the only metal that takes liquid form at room temperature.

This unique quality of the element mercury attracted medieval alchemists.

In Roman mythology Mercury is the god of merchants and traders and also a swift messenger somewhat akin to the Greek Hermes. From it’s mythological meaning, Merriam-Websters Dictionary notes these psychological meanings:

2 having qualities of eloquence, ingenuity, or thievishness attributed to the god Mercury or to the influence of the planet Mercury
3 characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood <a mercurial temper>

For depth psychologists like C. G. Jung, Hermes’ well-known mythic role as a spiritual escort to the afterlife for the recently dead (called a psychopomp) is translated into meaning that he’s also a vitally symbolic bridge between the archetypes of the collective unconscious and consciousness.³
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¹ http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/space_missions/mariner10.html

² http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/

³ See for instance, http://www.jungatlanta.com/hermes.html

Search Think Free » Alchemy, Gemini, General Theory of Relativity, Virgo

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Yuga

Kali Yuga

Originally uploaded by
VuduDada ArtStudio

Yuga

In Hindu Vedic and Puranic cosmology, a yuga is an extremely long time period, especially when measured on the human scale.

The Hindu conception of the yuga suggests that time itself differs for gods and humans.

In the Mahabharata an entire human year translates into a single day for the devas.

Each of the four different Yugas represent four general ages of the devas.

As with the ancient Greek and Hebraic sense of time, these ages progress from an initial, ideal Golden Age (Krita yuga) to increasingly corrupted ages.

The four Yugas and their human equivalents
are:

Yuga	Deva Years	Human Years
Krita	4800	1,728,000
Treta	3600	1,296,000
Dvapara	2400	864,000
Kali	1200	432,000
Mahayuga (Great Yuga)*	12,000	4,320,000

A single day for the god Brahma is 1,000 Mahayugas (4,320,000,000 human years). One year for Brahma is 1,555,200,000,000 human years. Brahma’s life span is 155,520,000,000,000 human years.

All this indicates that Brahma exists in an entirely different time frame than human beings.

An arguably mythical, quasi-scientific scheme like this may seem irrelevant to contemporary thinkers but it points to the notion, worth considering, that the universe contains different yet interacting regions of space-time, each region containing its own unique properties and beings. » Mahabharata, Puranas, Ragnarok, Veda
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*A Mahayuga (Great Yuga) is one complete cycle of the four Yugas.
Table condensed from Keith R. Crim (ed.) The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions. New York: Harper & Row, 1989, pp. 818-819.

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Young, Neil

Young, Neil (1945- )

The Canadian-born grandfather of grunge rock was originally a folk rocker with Steven Stills and Graham Nash in the group Buffalo Springfield (“Stop Children, what’s that sound…”).

Also a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, his solo career has influenced on a wide variety of musicians and some of his songs arguably demonstrate what might be called archetypal depth.

Watching Young perform live can be like witnessing a Toltec Elder harness the Powers That Be, especially when he performs tunes like “Cortez the Killer,” the “Halls of Montezuma,” and “Inca Queen.”

Other more intimate songs like “After the Goldrush” (in the 1970 showpiece album by the same title) reflect the noble, if drug induced, dreams and despair of the hippie generation, now revived by the media-hyped fear of Global Warming.

“Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”

Well before considered fashionable to speak of alien abductions or the possibility of mankind leaving Earth to inhabit other planets, Young related a dream in that same song where “silver spaceships” take “Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.”

Of course, it could be argued that Young was talking about the US Apollo space program. After all, man had just landed on the moon for the very first time in 1969 and the early 1970s were all about the so-called “space age.”

In the 1980s Young parodies his hippie phase by referring to an earlier Crosby, Still, Nash and Young song in “Hippie Dream” from the album Landing on Water (1986).

And the wooden ships,
were just a hippie dream…
capsized in excess
if you know what I mean

Young has epilepsy but this has not slowed him down nor deterred him from influencing other prominent rockers like David Bowie and Avril Lavigne. In fact, Young has been described as a musical workaholic. He has released seven new albums in the new millennium. » Archetypes

Image Credit:

• “Neil Young” by JD Lasica at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/115199274/, Creative Commons License.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
This popular novel by Lewis Carol is often seen as a sociological lampooning of the British aristocracy. But it has also been interpreted in psychological and mythological terms.

From a Jungian perspective, Alice’s falling into the rabbit hole seems to transport her from the conventional into the mysterious world of the collective unconscious.

The usual laws of logic and proportion no longer apply. In the so-called “summer of love” of 1967, the rock group Jefferson Airplane released a hit single, White Rabbit, likening Alice’s adventures to an LSD trip.

The writers Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Terrence Mckenna have variously advocated psychedelic stimulants as alleged doorways to the unknown recesses of the unconscious and transpersonal psyche.

Arguably more mature and responsible spiritual seekers suggest, however, that psychoactive drugs represent, at best, beginners’ aids. And most social, scientific and religious groups see illegal drugs as a hindrance to true spiritual achievement, or worse, addictive and potentially dangerous to self and others.

Interestingly, the Peyote cults of Mexico, northern Arizona, New Mexico and Utah use psychoactive drugs but some research indicates no harmful effects among Church members if peyote is taken responsibly (Source » http://www.johnhorgan.org/work18.htm).

The popular New Physics video What the Bleep Do We Know!? employs Carol’s ‘down the rabbit hole’ metaphor to point to oddities inherent in the subatomic realm.

» Underhill (Evelyn)

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