Distraction Therapy – From Pleroma to Differentiation

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This Distraction Therapy music mix blog explores Carl Jung’s idea of the Pleroma and Differentiation as a creative process. Drawing on Jung’s Red Book and Seven Sermons to the Dead, it reflects on how new forms emerge from the unconscious when opposites are distinguished and given form. Using metaphors of water arising from hydrogen and oxygen, it shows how metamodern aesthetics embraces transcendence and transformation, producing art and music that is more than the sum of its parts. The post invites listeners to experience the mix as a contemplative space where inner images, symbols, and emotions emerge into form.

Carl Jung, in his visionary writings, speaks of the Pleroma—the undifferentiated fullness from which all arises. It is the ground of being, without form or measure, where all opposites coincide and dissolve. Yet from this fullness comes the necessity of differentiation. Without distinguishing light from darkness, sound from silence, self from other, nothing could come into existence. The creative act, whether in psyche or art, requires a cutting-apart of what was once boundless.

Jung puts it starkly: “Whoever wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There he would learn to know himself.”^[1] This wandering is a process of differentiation, of allowing the unconscious pleromatic sea to crystallise into symbols, feelings, and visions that can be grasped and lived.

To create from the unconscious is therefore not to impose control, but to allow form to emerge. Just as hydrogen and oxygen contain no whisper of rivers, seas, or storms, yet water arises from their union with properties irreducible to either, so too do our dreams, images, and fragments combine to produce something more than their parts. In this lies the paradox of emergence: the whole cannot be foreseen by analysing the elements, yet the whole depends on them for its being.

Metamodern aesthetics, unlike the irony-soaked reflexivity of postmodernism, embraces this dynamic of emergence. It recognises that art is not merely deconstructing or parodying fragments of culture, but an attempt to draw new constellations from them. It is an orientation toward transcendence and transformation, where music, painting, or poetry is not only reflective but generative. Each note in a mix is a fragment, each texture a molecule—but the experience that arises is more like water, flowing with qualities no single sound could predict.

In this light, the Distraction Therapy mix becomes an act of differentiation. Sounds, textures, and rhythms are drawn out from the pleromatic continuum of possibility and shaped into a stream. The listener, too, participates in this differentiation. By giving attention, by letting feelings, thoughts, and images surface, each person’s psyche mirrors the creative process itself. The unconscious offers its fullness, and through listening, something singular takes form.

To listen, then, is to enter the mystery of emergence. It is to remember that newness is possible, that what comes forth from us and into us is not reducible to its components. Music is more than notes, just as life is more than atoms. And as Jung reminds us, the soul is not found in abstractions, but in the differentiated figures and symbols that rise from the depths when we dare to let them live.

Allow this mix to be water. Let it carry you from the pleromatic vastness into moments of form, flow, and transformation. In its sounds you may glimpse how art becomes a vessel of becoming, where the infinite enters the finite and whispers of transcendence are heard.

In the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung gave mythic body to this process. He describes the white bird, “a half-celestial soul of man… a messenger of the mother,” bringing knowledge from beyond, commanding singleness and carrying our word upward. And he describes the serpent, “an earthly soul, half daimonic… forever inveigling the most evil company,” yet also necessary, for “although the serpent does not want to, she must be of use to us.”^[2] Between bird and serpent, heaven and earth, thought and desire, we discover that even the most contradictory forces, when differentiated, serve creation. The music we listen to—like the visions Jung received—is the stage upon which these forces dance. By attending, we take part in their unfolding, allowing new life to emerge from the pleroma into form.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Collins & Routledge.

[2] Jung, C. G. (1916/2009). Seven Sermons to the Dead, in The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton.