Embrace of the Daimon Quotes

“The dissolving, uniting forces combine what to us have been incompatible: attraction with repulsion, darkness with light, the erotic with the destructive.  If we can allow these opposites to meet they move our inner resonance to a higher vibratory plane, expanding consciousness into new realms.  It was exciting, through my explorations some of which I share in later chapters, to learn firsthand that the sacred marriage or coniunctio, the impulse to unite seeming opposites, does indeed seem to lie at the heart of the subtle body’s imaginal world. One important characteristic of the coniunctio is its paradoxical dual action.  The creative process of each sacred marriage, or conjoining of opposites, involves not only the unitive moment of joining together in a new creation or ‘third,’ but also, as I have mentioned, a separating or darkening moment.5 The idea that “darkness comes before dawn” captures this essential aspect of creativity.  To state an obvious truth we as a culture are just beginning to appreciate.  In alchemical language, when darkness falls, it is said to be the beginning of the inner work or the opus of transformation. The old king (ego) must die before the new reign dawns. The early alchemists called the dark, destructive side of these psychic unions the blackness or the nigredo.  Chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, depression, despair, or madness prevails during these liminal times of  “making death.” The experiences surrounding these inner experiences of darkness and dying (the most difficult aspects were called mortificatio) may constitute our culture’s ruling taboo. This taboo interferes with our moving naturally to Stage Two in the individuating process, a process that requires that we pass through a descent into the underworld of the Dark Feminine realities of birthing an erotic intensity that leads to dying. Entranced by our happily-ever-after prejudiced culture, we often do not see that in any relationship, project or creative endeavor or idea some form of death follows naturally after periods of intense involvement.  When dark experiences befall, we tend to turn away, to move as quickly as possible to something positive or at least distracting, away from the negative affects of grieving, rage, terror, rotting and loss we associate with darkness and dying. As”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Some of us will admit to a simple fascination with the inner world for its own sake, a fascination with no further goal than the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of engaging the mysterious, dark ground of our own nature.”
― Sandra Lee Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body/ Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“The Nature of Visionary Fancy or Imagination is very little Known & the Eternal nature & permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative and Generative Nature.... This World of Imagination is the World of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. . . . There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Like Corbin, Jung understands the importance of naming. He knows that unnamed experiences tend to remain unconscious. Correctly naming an experience is tremendously important. Jung says that when you give an experience a wrong name “you qualify it, you put it in prison, into a drawer or a cage, and you can no longer handle it because that name is all wrong.”30 A right name can save us from “disintegration, demons and chaos.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“There are gods and daimons and heroes in our perceptions, feelings, ideas and actions, and these fantasy persons determine how we see, feel, think and behave, all existence is structured by imagination.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“mundus imaginalis: “a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect”.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Jung, in commenting on Nietzsche, remarks that when considering unconscious phenomena one must include not only the psychological unconscious or shadow, but also the physiological unconscious: “the so called subtle body”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Even as we start to register the tremors of imaginal perception, we may face a concurrent barrage of disdain, disbelief, and even outright hostility from our usual reasoned rootedness in the five senses. As the subtle senses develop, and we start to actually see energy fields or feel the edges blur between our body and the person next to us, we may conclude we are exhausted, have eaten bad food, are becoming ill, or must be falling in love. We call these subtle openings "chemistry," a funny feeling, the flu, or a waking dream. On the other hand, if we can suspend our disbelief in invisibles long enough, we may find ourselves roaming in imaginal fields for longer and longer periods of time.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Jung called the quality of eternity or religious power associated with the imaginal numinosity, a term he revived from Rudolf Otto's original conception of religious experiences in The Idea of the Holy. Otto's term helped describe the autonomous, compelling qualities of the image that Jung encountered when the imaginal began to intrude spontaneously upon his world. In 1937, Jung described the numinosum as “a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator . . . The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness”33 Jung viewed encounters with the numinous as enigmatic, deeply impressive, and mysterious, defying explanation.34 Though not proving the existence of God, Jung described imaginal encounters as “godlike.”35 He assumed, as does Corbin, that numinous images gain their potency from their connection to a greater truth that we normally only dimly recognize, and considered an encounter with the numinosum a part of all religious, as well as psychopathological experience. Summarizing Jung's thoughts on the numinosum, Andrew Samuels concludes that a confrontation with numinous images not only compels tremendously, but has teleological implications, foretelling “a not yet disclosed, attractive, and fateful meaning.”36”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“The more vivid the image, the deeper and further away from consciousness the impulse. Possession by the devil, for instance, is explained as hatred of either parent cast into the devil image.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“The imagination, as a subset of the lesser “irrational,” has been rejected and devalued by our culture to the point that we acknowledge its existence, if at all, as a deviation from psychological health and normalcy. To get a taste of our cultural prejudice, just look at these synonyms for “irrational”—unsound, untenable, absurd, foolish, inane, silly, crazy, demented, insane, and mad. What about the wonder, awe, Eros, creative pulsing, energetic vitality, and meaning brought forth by the irrational aspects of the psych? We continue to face a poverty of language that limits our experience when we try to speak of these faculties that have been marginalized for so long.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine

“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is self. In your body he dwells, he is your body.”
― Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine