Anima

In philosophy, the soul is the immaterial part of a person. It can be synonymous with the spirit, mind, or self. In theology, the soul is often believed to live on after the person’s death, and some religions posit that God creates souls. In some cultures, non-human living things, and sometimes inanimate objects are said to have souls, a belief known as animism.

The anima, in Carl Jung 's school of analytical psychology, is the unconscious, true inner self of an individual, as opposed to the persona, or outer aspect of the personality.

Jung viewed the anima as one of the sources of creative ability. It seems that creativity and emotion are linked in a circular pattern, but perhaps such description does not adequately reflect our way of thinking.

In 1913, Jung engaged in a lengthy period of self-investigation that he termed the “confrontation with the unconscious.” As a form of psychological self-experimentation, he decided to provoke fantasies in a waking state, and thereafter to attempt to interpret their significance and integrate their contents into consciousness. He later called this method “active imagination” and made its use a part of clinical practice and analytic exploration. In retrospect, he stated that the material that emerged during this period and his attempt to shape and comprehend it formed the basis for the work of the rest of his life.

Animal Magnetism

Paracelsus' Theories

Emotion

Sheldrake's Morphic Fields

 

If you train rats to learn a new trick in Santa Barbara, then rats all over the world should be able to learn to do the same trick more quickly, just because the rats in Santa Barbara have learned it. This new pattern of learning will be, as it were, in the rat collective memory-in the morphic fields of rats, to which other rats can tune in, just because they are rats and just because they are in similar circumstances, by morphic resonance. This may seem a bit improbable, but either this sort of thing happens or it doesn't.

Among the vast number of papers in the archives of experiments on rat psychology, there are a number of examples of experiments in which people have actually monitored rates of learning over time and discovered mysterious increases. In my book, A New Science of Life, Sheldrake describes one such series of experiments which extended over a 50-year period. Begun at Harvard and then carried on in Scotland and Australia, the experiment demonstrated that rats increased their rate of learning more than tenfold. This was a huge effect-not some marginal statistically significant result. This improved rate of learning in identical learning situations occurred in these three separate locations and in all rats of the breed, not just in rats descended from trained parents. (This concept is discussed in pages 200-202 of The Calling).