Nothing spectacular going on, and nothing awful. Just a mellow sort of day, starting with sleeping 1-1/2 hours longer than I intended.

I made Chicken Korma -- well, chicken korma out of a jar (thank you, President's Choice), so with the chana masala I also made, and some rice, I've got lunches for the entire upcoming week. That's always part of my Sunday ritual, and since I was talking about Indian food with a friend last week, I got into the mood.

I've been thinking again about Robertson Davies' book, What's Bred in the Bone, which I finished reading a couple of days ago. I like that Davies wrote very much from a Jungian point of view. I've always preferred the Jungian to the Freudian, feeling that Freud pretty much took all his own personal hangups and made dogmas and doctrine out of them. I found his "In Group/Out Group hostility" theory to be very useful and to capture certain situations very well, but beyond that, I don't have much time for him.

But Jung -- his view seems to me to be pretty holistic. I remember being rather taken aback when I realized that his Archetypes were very much Platonic forms -- and in my philosophical views, I had always tended more toward Aristotle than Plato. But when I viewed the Archetypes more as ideas that arise from the structure of the mind that all humans seem to share, I was much happier. Not the Forms existing "out there" somewhere, but the Archetypes that arise from "the way humans think."

Jung's view seems to be very much about uniting parts of ourselves that seem to "jut out," into a whole. Becoming a whole person. Accepting flaws, transmuting them into something greater, and working with our entire selves, rather than working against ourselves.

This is a big difference from the much more Calvinist point of view I learned growing up, let me tell ya.

And amusingly, the Jungian world view tends to work quite well with another subject that has interested me rather a lot lately, for reasons that some people will know: alchemy. Because what Jung advocates that we do -- embracing our Shadow selves, uniting the disparate parts of ourselves to create a higher, fuller being -- is in fact spiritual alchemy.

I only realized that around mid-week last week. So now it's something that I'm trying to think about a lot more, and absorbe into my mind. I don't have anything really coherent to say about it yet, but I'm going to let it all percolate and see where it ends up going.

I have a feeling all of this stuff -- Jungianism, alchemy, personal transmutation -- could show up in my writing in a larger way eventually. After all the percolating.