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The Odyssey: A Jungian Journey Home · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Odysseus loses everything, right? He loses all of his men
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: by the end. And he arrives back home dressed as
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: a beggar. So there is a way that we are
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: challenged continuously, or at least this myth points to the
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: way that coming home to ourselves really requires that we surrender.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Well, Deb and I are here today with our friend
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and colleague, Bob Shevely, and we're going to be talking
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: about The Odyssey. The Odyssey, of course, is an ancient
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: epic that's attributed to Homer. It was written in the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: 8th or 7th centuries B.C., And it's really considered a
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: cornerstone of world literature. And much ink has been spilt
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: interpreting it, writing about it, and even a considerable amount
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: of writing about it, what it might mean from a
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Jungian lens. It is absolutely mythic. So, you know, we're
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: going to have a lot to say about it. And
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: we're going to look at some of the major themes.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: But I think we're going to start off with a
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: poem to set the scene.
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy As you set out for Ithaca,
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: hope your road is a long one, full of adventure,
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: full of discovery. Lystrogonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon, don't be afraid
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: of them. You'll never find these things like that on
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: your body. like zygonians, cyclops, wild poseidon. You won't encounter
• 2:32
  Speaker 4: them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless
• 2:38
  Speaker 4: your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope
• 2:42
  Speaker 4: your road is a long one. May there be many
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: harbors you're seeing for the first time. May you stop
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfumes of every kind,
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: as many sensual perfumes as you can. And may you
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: from their scholars. Keep Ithaca always in your mind. Arriving
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: there is what you're destined for. But Don't hurry the
• 3:26
  Speaker 4: journey at all. Better if it lasts for years. So
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaca
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
• 3:46
  Speaker 4: Without her, you would not have set out. She has
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: nothing left to give you now. And if you find
• 3:55
  Speaker 4: her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you. Wise as you
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: will have become so full of experience, you'll have understood
• 4:05
  Speaker 4: by then what these Ithacas mean.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: It's such a beautiful poem.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: This poem always totally gets me.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: And just to set it up, Odysseus goes along with
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: the Greek army to Troy, where he fights the war there.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: And then he heads home. And the Odyssey is about
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: his homeward journey back to Ithaca, which is what that
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: poem that Bob just read is about. And it is
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: an adventure that takes 10 years. He meets all kinds
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: of mishaps and frightening encounters. He loses all of his men.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: striving and striving and striving to get back to Ithaca,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: but then he finally does. So what does it mean
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: to head out home for Ithaca? That's what we're going
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: to be talking about today.
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: Everyone knows about Bollingen, Jung's special tower that he built
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: on the banks of Lake Zurich. But very few people
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: know about the Christiana Morgan Tower on the Parker River
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: on Boston's North Shore. Christiana Morgan was one of Jung's analysands,
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: and like Jung, she had the capacity to engage in
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: a visioning process that she then rendered into paintings and
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: drawings of what she saw, validating Jung's theory, especially his
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: theory of the collective unconscious. When she returned to America
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: and helped build the Harvard Department of Psychology, she She'd
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: been inspired by Bollingen and built her own tower on
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: the marsh north of Boston. And it is well worth
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: seeing and is now open to visitors the first two
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: weekends in August, August 1st and 2nd and 8th and 9th.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: If you're within range and can come and see it,
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: by all means do. And for tickets and more information,
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: go to our website, please, thisjungianlife.com. Look for the top header, About,
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: and underneath that, find the tab saying Tower on the Marsh.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: And then just scroll down until you see Visit the
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: Tower on the Marsh, and you'll have the information for tickets.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: And of course, we'll send you directions and provide some
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: transportation from the parking lot over to the tower. So
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: if you can't Come see, we'll be glad to see you.
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: Well, I like it that the entire poem can be
• 6:48
  Speaker 4: read as this kind of heroic journey. But not just that.
• 6:55
  Speaker 4: There is, throughout the poem, this progressive correction of the
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: heroic attitude. So as we discuss the various encounters, or
• 7:07
  Speaker 4: some of the encounters, there's always a way in which
• 7:11
  Speaker 4: There's a bit of hubris that leads to further difficulty.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And the story really aptly portrays this, that after,
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: first of all, Odysseus spent 10 years fighting the Trojan War,
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: which the Greeks won. But at the end, they were victorious.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: They were filled with pride and glory, and they failed.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: to make the proper sacrifices and celebration and gratitude rituals
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: to the gods, which is one reason that Odysseus, who
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: sailed with a whole fleet of ships back, presumably to Greece,
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: why he met with so many mishaps. So it's one
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: element of the story that carries through all the time
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: is that part of it is the intersection of human
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: and divine. What do we owe the gods? What is
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: the proper kind of veneration and respect? And look what
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: happens if you don't provide it.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: You know, one of the things that I think is
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: so fascinating about this is, again, one of the kind
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: of foundational texts of Western culture is it's the second book.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: The first book is about the Trojan War, the Iliad.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: And it's a little bit more typical in a sense.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: We have heroic deeds and daring and battles and that
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: kind of thing. This is an interesting quest because it's
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: kind of an anti-quest. It's a quest to come home.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: It's not a quest to go conquer something new. And
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: you can maybe think about mapping these two epics onto
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the first half of life and the second half of life.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: I knew you were going there.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: I know, I'm so predictable.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: But they're exactly right.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So, yeah, Jung says that the first half of
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: life is about getting out in the world. It's about
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: establishing yourself, creating a family, buying a house, getting a job,
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: kind of, you know, building up an ego structure. And
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: the second half of life, when you kind of round
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the corner and head back home, you're really engaged in
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: a deeper quest of self-understanding, of kind of contributing to
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: the culture. So I think It's fascinating to me that
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: this anti-quest is the quest that we all know about.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: We have to come home. We have to come home
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: to ourselves in a way. And what does that mean?
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: And boy, is that journey ever fraught. Odysseus encounters more difficulties. problems, creatures, challenges.
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: It's enormous, the places he goes and the people he meets.
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: And we're looking at it as Jungians, the way we
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: look at fairy tales and dreams, as if this is
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: the journey of one psyche that has all of these
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: various parts of warriors and cyclops and whirlpools and goddesses,
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: all of these kinds of things that we run into
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: in our own individual homecoming to our souls. All the
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: temptations and problems.
• 10:49
  Speaker 4: I really resonate with what you're both saying, that idea
• 10:54
  Speaker 4: that the first half of life is sort of outward oriented,
• 10:58
  Speaker 4: but then that next half of life is a journey inward. And,
• 11:05
  Speaker 4: you know, as you were talking, Deb, I was just
• 11:08
  Speaker 4: kind of thinking about my own experience of my relationship
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: to home, but also how it's just such a universal experience.
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: We all carry somewhere within us some feelings of alienation
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: or how do I make it in the world? And
• 11:31
  Speaker 4: I can vividly remember, I was sort of in my
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: late 20s, I believe, when I had been involved in
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: the human potential movement. And I think engaging in that
• 11:47
  Speaker 4: material stirred up some stuff for me. And I was
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: driving around the beltway of Washington, D.C., feeling really pretty good.
• 11:56
  Speaker 4: And I had a classic peak experience. I fell for
• 12:01
  Speaker 4: the first time in my life at home in the world.
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: And it was such a profound experience, you know, that
• 12:12
  Speaker 4: the world is my oyster.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: And that happened on the D.C. Beltway?
• 12:19
  Speaker 4: I know, believe it or not.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: I don't really have very good associations with Beltway.
• 12:26
  Speaker 4: You never know when lightning will strike. You never know.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: But isn't that wonderful? That is our first task, I think,
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  Speaker 3: as young adults, is to be at home in the world.
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  Speaker 3: And oftentimes people are encouraged to travel, you know, I
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: don't know if it's still going on, but you hike
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: through Europe. You backpack through the Himalayas.
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  Speaker 1: Why?
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  Speaker 3: In order to know that you are at home in
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  Speaker 3: the world. Whatever happens, you will be okay. You can
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: venture out. It's very, very important. And it's and anxiety
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  Speaker 3: in young people. Living in New York, I've had a
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  Speaker 3: lot of clients in their first, second, or so year
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: out of college, and getting to feel at home in
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  Speaker 3: the world and have the experience that you did is
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  Speaker 3: very hard. The world is big. It's overwhelming. You're out
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: of the protected space of college and alma mater, living
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: at home, And having to make your way, am I
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  Speaker 3: going to be enough? Especially in a city like New
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  Speaker 3: York or on the Beltway. But that is a first
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  Speaker 3: half of life experience, right?
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  Speaker 4: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: Finding that you have a foothold and actually going out
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: into the world and in fact being heroic, which is
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  Speaker 1: kind of what you're describing, Bob. And then something else
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  Speaker 1: is required of us as we kind of round the
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  Speaker 1: bend and we're in the second half of life. And
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: it could be that those heroic attitudes don't serve us anymore,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: which is what we find with Odysseus. Because again and
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: again throughout the story, he's hubristic, right? Which is kind
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: of the cardinal sin in ancient mythology. That's the one thing.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: You can't take the gods lightly. If you do, you
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: will be punished. And that does happen. To Odysseus. And
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: so that's that heroic attitude that we have to let
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: go of as we start our own journey back.
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  Speaker 4: So there's a tension with that because in order to
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: make it in the world, we need to have a
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: strong ego. Yes. But it's so easy to become inflated. Yeah.
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: And that's when hubris creeps in.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. And we love Odysseus as a hero because
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: we can see that he's flawed, you know, because he
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: does have this kind of lust for life, as we're
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: going to see. And he does have this hubris. And
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: he does have Poseidon pretty pissed off at him, which
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: we're also going to talk about. But he is the
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: favor of Athena. And eventually he does make it home,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: but not without a very great cost.
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: And that cost.
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: From a Jungian perspective, if we hold consciously, is about
• 15:43
  Speaker 4: coming home to self, and in Jungian terms, learning a
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: relationship with that to relate to that which is greater
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: than ourselves, the self. So we can easily understand this
• 16:00
  Speaker 4: tale if we just look at the grand arch as
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: this movement from concern with external reality into looking at
• 16:14
  Speaker 4: ourselves relating to all that we bring along, as the
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: Cavafy poem suggests, and metabolizing that, learning to relate to it,
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: being humbled by it. And in that process, something shifts.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: One of the things that often happens in midlife, in
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: the second half of life, is you have to let
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: go of all of the achievements, accolades. Either you literally
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: have to let them go or you recognize that they
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: really are not worth what you thought they were worth.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Jung had this happen to him. He had his break
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: with Freud. He was in his late 30s. He had
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: his confrontation with the unconscious and all of these things
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: that he built up. He was kind of this famous
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: up-and-coming psychiatrist with all these theories and papers. And he
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: found himself just, you know, playing with little toys on
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: the shores of Lake Zurich, trying to keep himself from,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: you know, completely losing his mind. And he had to
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: kind of reckon with, in essence, how essentially unimportant all
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: those first half of life achievements were. And, you know,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: I think that Odysseus loses everything, right? He loses all
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of his men by the end. And he arrives back
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: home dressed as a beggar. So there is a way
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: that we are challenged continuously, or at least this myth
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: points to the way that coming home to ourselves really
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: requires that we surrender.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: What I'm thinking about is it requires letting go of
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: ego as something that is me. I am all these things.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: My accolades, my possessions, all of it. It's a great
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: image of the essential transformation from a Jungian point of
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: view that we all must make. and our individuation journey
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: is we need to realize that we are undergirded and
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: guided by something greater, a relationship to something more, to
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: the infinite, to higher power. It goes by many, many names.
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  Speaker 3: And so Odysseus getting back to Ithaca dressed as a
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: beggar is a great image of the Surrender and the
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: impoverishment of ego. Ego does not need to present itself
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: as here I am in my shining golden armor with
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: my magic weaponry and so on. It's a wonderful image
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: of not being identified with ego after all he has
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: gone through. And he's stripped of his complexes, of all
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: his adventures and misadventures. have really sort of shaved away
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: all those parts of ego represented by his whole fleet
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: of ships and huge crew of sailors. And now it's
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: just that one essential part of self landing on the
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: shore dressed in rags. But here I am.
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: Jung has a quote right from Ion that really speaks
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: to that diminution needs to happen. One does not become
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: enlightened by imagining figures of light, but By making the
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: darkness conscious. Yeah. So it's not about this adherence to
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: what is bright and shiny, but the work of bringing
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: light into the darkness. Yeah.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: And all of his battles and encounters with the Cyclops
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: and the Sirens and Scylla and Chiribdis and the Last Dragonians,
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: the giants that devour a bunch of his ships. There
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: are all great ways of imaging encounters with darkness.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Well, let's go to some of those because, I mean,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: obviously this book is really beloved because there are just
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: some incredible adventures. It's a wonderful adventure story. So let's,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: we can't talk about them all because that would require,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I think, a long series of lectures. But we can
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: sort of hit some of them.
• 21:09
  Speaker 4: I'd love to dig into the Cyclops, Polyphemus.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's start there.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: Look how enthusiastic he is.
• 21:17
  Speaker 4: It's a story everybody knows.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: Okay, help me out here. At some point, Odysseus lands
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: on an island and finds a cave. And he and
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: his men need shelter, and in they go. They don't
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: realize that this is the home of Polyphemus, the one-eyed member,
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: chief of the band of Cyclops. And they're all sheep herders.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: So he comes home that night and finds his cave
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: filled up with Odysseus' men. He herds his sheep in
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: the door. And as soon as he sees what he's
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: got here, he rolls a big rock in front of
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: the cave door. That keeps the sheep inside, and it
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: also provides him with some delicious meals. And he manages,
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: over some period of days, to devour six of Odysseus' men.
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: So this is quite a problem. Then he rolls the
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: rock back, and nobody can get out. And he's a giant,
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: so this rock is way too big for even many
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: men to move. So Odysseus is gifted with a wonderfully
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: clever strategic capability for solving problems, which is one of
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: the reasons Athena likes him so much. So he comes
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: up with a great plan, and he puts a hot
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: poker in the fire, and job one is to blind
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: the Cyclops. And that he manages to do. So now
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: the Cyclops can no longer see him or his men.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: But how are they going to get out of the cave? Well,
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: Cyclops rolls the rock away to get a sheep out
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: the door to graze. And then he rolls it back.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: But there's a little interval where you can get out
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: the door as the sheep go out the door. They're
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: big sheep. And so all his men kind of grab
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: onto the sheep. They're in the sheep's underbelly with their
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: arms around the sheep's back and their legs around it.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: And the Cyclops knows these men are there. So he
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: checks the sheep by touching their backs. Yep, no problem here. Yep,
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: no problem here. Because what he can't feel is that
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: Odysseus' men are underneath the sheep riding out by holding on. Unfortunately,
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: What Odysseus does not know, because he did not check
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: Polyphemus' family history, always a good idea to know who
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: you're really tangling with. And guess who his dad is? Poseidon,
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: the god of the sea. Poseidon loves his son, and boy,
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: is he mad at Odysseus. And Odysseus will have many
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: curses from Poseidon, to reckon with along the rest of
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: his journey.
• 24:34
  Speaker 4: And how that comes to pass, the angering of Poseidon,
• 24:41
  Speaker 4: is early on, the Cyclops, and I'll quote, Cyclops, you
• 24:48
  Speaker 4: ask my name and I will tell it. Oh, yes, yes, yes.
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: My name is no man. This is what my father
• 24:57
  Speaker 4: and mother and friends have always called me. So Polyphemus
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: knows who he has. He has no man. And when
• 25:08
  Speaker 4: he's enraged and howling from pain from being blinded, he
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: yells to the other Cyclopes and they say, well, what's
• 25:21
  Speaker 4: going on? What happened to you? And he said, nobody
• 25:25
  Speaker 4: blinded me. And since nobody... Did that, they go off
• 25:29
  Speaker 4: about their way. So that allows Odysseus and his men
• 25:34
  Speaker 4: to escape. But then the turning point, the hubris comes in.
• 25:40
  Speaker 4: And before he leaves the island, Odysseus can't hold himself
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: or help himself from telling Polyphemus, the Cyclops, his real
• 25:51
  Speaker 4: true name. And that's how Poseidon knows who to curse.
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: And the whole rest of the journey is affected because
• 26:04
  Speaker 4: of the curse of Poseidon.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: So it's interesting, and it goes along with what we've
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: been talking about as the necessary surrender of ego to
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: the self in the second half of life. And now
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: we have incident number two, where Odysseus was prideful and boastful. First,
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: he and his men don't. express gratitude to the gods
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: for winning the war against the Trojans. And second, he
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: just can't resist tacking on a little gotcha at the
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: end to Poseidon.
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: Hey, guess what? I did it.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: But, you know, Bob, I think it goes back to
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: what you said before. I just want to lift that
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: back up. You know, that Odysseus is a wonderful hero
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: because he's cunning and smart and can outwit his adversaries
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: and and he rather likes that so the same qualities
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: that make him heroic kind of give him a problem
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: on the way home because like maybe he could have
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: gotten home a whole lot faster if he hadn't pissed
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Poseidon off so you know I just want to lift
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: up that the one of the takeaway lessons is if
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: you meet a cyclops don't piss it off because you
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: could get in trouble with beside you. So just a
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: handy thing to take note of as you go about
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: your day.
• 27:34
  Speaker 4: But what might we say symbolically? What might we say
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: symbolically about a cyclops? Because I think all of the things, Deb,
• 27:43
  Speaker 4: you said are true. But the defining feature of the
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: cyclops is this giant eye.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, right.
• 27:50
  Speaker 4: Yes, it's a singular eye, but it is a big eye.
• 27:54
  Speaker 4: And so the blinding of the eye is this sin
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: against consciousness or a denial of consciousness, if we think
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: of it that way symbolically. And that always is regressive
• 28:09
  Speaker 4: and gets us into trouble.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, yeah, to be
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: serious with it for a moment, one of the things
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: about the Cyclops is, first of all, they're giants. And
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: giants are often... you know, kind of images of really
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: primitive affect. And also the fact that it's one eye.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you only had one eye, you would
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: lack depth perception. Yeah.
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: Oh, I like that.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: It would be a sort of, your way of looking
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: at the world would lack depth.
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: So there is something, I mean, if we're thinking about
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: it in a sort of, again, a kind of mythic way,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Odysseus is the carrier of consciousness here who has to
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: fight against these regressive forces.
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: And all would have been well if he could just
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: have resisted the temptation to brag about it.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: But if he could have, then he wouldn't have been Odysseus.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: I think that's the tension that Bob lifted up before.
• 29:14
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: And isn't that a huge tension that the very thing,
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: ego and getting out in the world and feeling at
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: home in the world and accomplishing things is the very
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: thing that can also work against us?
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: It's such a natural human feeling to feel good and
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: maybe even brag a little bit. about our accomplishments. But,
• 29:43
  Speaker 4: you know, the opus contra naturum, that thing that we
• 29:45
  Speaker 4: have to eventually wrestle with is there is something larger
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: than my ego at play. And it's at work in
• 29:55
  Speaker 4: my life, it's in me. And Well, that's what analysis
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: is about, I think, that the individuation journey to discover
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: who one really is, not just who I think I am.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: And, you know, the interesting thing about this story is
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: he has a good relationship with Athena, and then he's
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: kind of plagued by Poseidon. So we could look at
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: that as there are these different kind of values, different gods.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: It's like there's different kinds of let's say, transpersonal values
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: at work in our lives, and some we might be
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: in harmony with, and others we might really struggle with.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: So we have Athena, who is this very kind of
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: a solar goddess, as it were. You know, she's the
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: daughter of Zeus, and she's associated with wisdom. And then
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: there's Poseidon, who is associated with earthquakes and the ocean
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: and a more kind of elemental deeper, older kind of pantheon.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: And so we could wonder what that means about our
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: hero Odysseus, that he's in right relationship with Athena, but
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: he has a problem over here.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: I'm wondering if all of the people, forces, monsters that
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: Odysseus encounters, I mean, they're really out pictures of complexes,
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: aren't they? And, of course, all the women as anima
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: figures and the ones with whom he is aligned and
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: those with whom he's not aligned.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: Right. He has some very interesting experiences with women.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: He certainly does. And with all of it, of look
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: at all he must encounter as metaphors for internal complexes. neuroses, hang-ups,
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: and places of harmony and alliance.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: You know, I want us to go ahead and talk
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: about some of the other incidents in the epic, but
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: I did want to say one more thing about our
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: friend Polyphemus, which is that that incident shows us one
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: of Odysseus' chief characteristics, that he is a trickster. And
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: we'll see this again and again, but that is an
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: important aspect of him because, as I said earlier, it's
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: kind of the anti-quest because it's not a quest out,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: it's a quest back. And a lot of times, you know,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: typical heroes are very, you know, stoic and strong and brave.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: And Odysseus may be all of those things, but he's
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: also very tricky. So it's just, you know, if we
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: think about the archetype of the trickster and what that
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: archetype means in mythologies around the world, the fact that
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Odysseus repeatedly embodies trickster energy gives him a slightly different character.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: You know, the trickster is often kind of a culture hero.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: He's a hero that kind of brings culture with him.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: And the trickster is often kind of amoral. And so
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: I just want to throw that out there.
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: Yep. And Odysseus was kind of amoral.
• 33:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: He had sort of a dubious reputation amongst his peers
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: for being, he's often described as wily, the wily Odysseus.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: He was definitely always out for himself.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: He could be in service to others, but it was
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: always strategic, always wily. And he did not want to
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: go and fight in the Trojan War and really kind
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: of got forced into it because he was trying to
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: kind of figure his way out of it. His wiliness
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: does work for him in getting out of Polyphemus' cave.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: But he was a very self-serving kind of guy, not
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: a warrior.
• 34:18
  Speaker 4: So as you were talking, Deb, about the trickster quality
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: of Odysseus, I was thinking how it suited him as well,
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: as certainly in that first half of life journey, like
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: in the Iliad, because the Trojan horse was his creation.
• 34:39
  Speaker 4: So there is a way in which it can be
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: very adaptive, but it seems as if it's adaptive toward
• 34:46
  Speaker 4: an external orientation or can be adaptive to an external orientation,
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: but certainly not if one is a trickster to oneself.
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: That's where a rigorous honesty is required.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Wow, that is.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: Such an interesting point of real self-awareness. which Odysseus later
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: demonstrates in his confrontation with the sirens. So he's getting there.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: He realizes how powerful that's going to be.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: So let's talk some more about some of the other
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: themes and some of the other stories. So I think that,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: you know, Deb, you're talking about the sirens. One of
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: the other themes in the book that I think is
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: related to the sirens, and we'll come to them in
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: a minute, is this kind of imaging of addiction, which
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: one of those incidents is the lotus eaters. Bob, do
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: you want to tell us that story?
• 35:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty simple. Again, he comes to the land
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: of the lotus eaters, and a quote kind of captures it.
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: Those who ate of it left off caring about home
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: and did not even want to go back and say
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: what had happened to them. But we're for staying and
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: munching lotus with the lotus eaters without thinking further of
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: their return. You know, and yes, addiction, it's that the
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: way in which one of the effects of a drug
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: is that it can cause oblivion. And there is a
• 36:29
  Speaker 4: seductive quality.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: Oblivion, that's great, yeah.
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: To go to, there's a seductive quality to being conscious.
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: You know, I'd rather not do the work of consciousness.
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: It's easier just to find something external that gives me
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: a sense of detachment, a sense of bliss, or whatever
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: one's drug of choice may be.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: And of course, this could be actual drugs, but we
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: can find oblivion in lots and lots of ways.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: Ahem.
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, we could just scroll on our phone. We can,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: you know, watch too much TV. We can shove lots
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: of food in our mouths. And it, I mean, it's
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: really interesting that the incident with the lotus eaters interrupts
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: the journey home. It stops us in our tracks. We
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: don't make forward motion. And we probably all know people
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: who kind of live in that state, who anesthetize themselves
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: in any number of ways. And, and And you can
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: tell they've lost connection with themselves and they're no longer
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: on that homeward journey.
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: It's such an interesting, evokes such an interesting idea in
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: me about going home. You know, the past and the
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: present of what we were originally attached to, the family
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: we have, the particular place we grew up in, they
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: don't want to go back to the place of original being,
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: of original attachment, that desire is gone. But it's also
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: the telos, the forward trajectory of where is our true
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: home that the Odyssey is a metaphor for of our
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: connection with ourselves. So It's very powerful when people lose
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: their desire to go home, sever the connection with the past,
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: and foreclose the connection with one's own future in terms
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: of personal development.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Deb, I think that's a great example. And I
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: just want to share that I guess I'm the right
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: age to have read Percy Jackson to my kids. And
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: I thought that Rick Riordan did a beautiful job with
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: kind of modernizing the scene of the Lotus Eaters because
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: he has the kids get stuck in a casino in Vegas.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: And it's really the perfect image because if you've ever
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: spent time in a casino, there are no windows, there
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: are no clocks, you have no idea what time it is,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: and you just lose yourself in that great word that
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: you used a minute ago, Bob, you just lose yourself
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: in the casino. this kind of like dazed, stupefied oblivion.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: And it's, you know, how do we get ourselves rescued
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: from it?
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: He physically drags his men back to the ships, even
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: though they weep and protest. He locks them up. under
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: the rowing benches and orders the rest of the crew
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: to set sail immediately, which prevents anyone else from eating
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: the plant and forgetting their journey home. And then it
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: actually says, think of the lotus like a very distracting
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: video game.
• 40:02
  Speaker 4: Now, well, if we think of that, then that's a
• 40:06
  Speaker 4: good example of, to the degree that Odysseus represents the
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: striving toward consciousness, there's the struggle right there. How you
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: sometimes you just literally have to use brute force, like,
• 40:25
  Speaker 4: you know, make somebody take the phone away out of
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: your hand.
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: So so, Bob, you're talking about brute force. I think
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: that's exactly right. You know, it almost requires just a
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: real act of will sometimes to get yourself up off
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: the couch or take the phone away or, OK, I'm
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: going to dump all of the bottles out in the
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: sink and not buy anymore, you know. That is often
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: part of it. So there's this other theme that you
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: alluded to before, Deb, which is the sirens, which is
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: a wonderful scene. I love that scene. And it's related,
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: I think, to addiction because it's how do we deal
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: with incredible temptation? So, Deb, why don't you tell us
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: that story?
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: But I love how this has really put this in
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: a great context because Odysseus, by this time, is self-aware
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: enough to know that even he, he could get them
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: sprung off the island of the lotus eaters, but no
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: way could he possibly, could anyone ever withstand the seductive
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: power of the sirens.
• 41:40
  Speaker 4: Well, I just wanted to piggyback on what you're saying, Deb.
• 41:44
  Speaker 4: Because isn't that an aspect of how we relate to
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: our complexes? When we're conscious of our complexes, we understand
• 41:55
  Speaker 4: that they will get constellated.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great.
• 41:59
  Speaker 4: No matter how much work we do, given the right circumstance,
• 42:04
  Speaker 4: our complex can get constellated. And the difference is, the
• 42:09
  Speaker 4: degree to which I'm conscious, I know that this is
• 42:11
  Speaker 4: going to happen.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: And I can take precautions, right?
• 42:15
  Speaker 4: And I can take precautions, exactly.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: You know, it's a little bit like, I mean, you know,
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: sometimes I think that constellated is our wonderfully Jungian word
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: basically for being triggered. And if you know that, you know,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: when your kid, your teenager sails in the door and says,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: you know, something that that's going to make you blow
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: your top, but it's happened enough times that you know
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: it's going to happen. You can come up with a plan.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: for what you're going to do. Or if you're in recovery,
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: you know, AA is very good with this. It's like people, places,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: and things. You don't go to the bar with those
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: friends who drink because you're likely in a drink. And
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: this is a little bit what Odysseus does when he's
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: trying to avoid the song of the sirens.
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: And the sirens are imaged in a perfect way for
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: all of this. They're sort of half woman, half bird.
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: They live on some desolate, rocky, craggy, god-awful island. They're
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: really horrible, but they have these mesmerizing voices. So isn't
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: that the perfect way to represent addiction? It's really awful.
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: It's not good for you. It comes from a desolate,
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: awful place. but it can hook you and draw you
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: in to a place of self-abandonment.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: That's perfect. Yeah, because what happens when men hear the
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: siren song is they dive into the water and die
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: because they're trying to get to these sirens. So it
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: is a great image, I think, for a complex in
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: a way, because rationally, you know you shouldn't do that.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't matter. It grips you and you're compelled.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: So what does our clever Odysseus do in this instance, Deb?
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: Well, job one is, as you said, Bob, of recognizing it,
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: knowing yourself and going, whoops, I need to prepare. So
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: what he does is he has his men block their
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: ears with earwax so they will not hear the sirens.
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: But he wants to know what it's like, our curious Odysseus.
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: So he tells his men to tie him to the mast,
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: and no matter what he says or does, don't release him,
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: because he knows he will not be able to resist
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: the voices of the sirens. So he finds a way
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: to have the experience safely.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: And?
• 45:07
  Speaker 4: It really resonates with what you just said, Lisa, about
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: people's places and things. He knows that he is going
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: to be seduced and therefore doesn't go there by being tied.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: Right, right, right. But I love that you're pointing out
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: that he's curious. He wants to know. He wants to
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: have the experience. And there's maybe a little hubris in that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: You know, it would be safer if you didn't hear
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: them at all. But he, you know, he likes to
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: live on the edge a little bit, this guy.
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: It's worth exploring a little minute. I mean, why would
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: you want to have that experience? Where does that happen
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: in human life where I just need to find out?
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: It's like the curious cat, which is why they have
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: nine lives. I can't withstand the temptation. I can't forego
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: it completely.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, there are lots of people that kind
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: of live like this. These are the people that climb
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: Mount Everest because it's there. You know, they just feel
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: that challenge. They just want to have these experiences. And
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: I can relate to that to a certain extent, although
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: you will never, ever catch me trying to summit Everest.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: I can promise you that. But that sense that you
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: want to I'm going to quote Tennyson here for a second,
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: which I hope to come back to. You want to
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: drink life to the lees. You want to taste everything
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: that you can. And that's also in the Cavafy poem,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: you know. Let's just have the full experience while we're here.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: Let's not miss anything.
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: As many sensual perfumes as you can.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. So this is an incredible thing.
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: This is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. What is it like?
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: Let me have that experience, you know? And I mean,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: I think there are people that probably try drugs for
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: that reason, you know? It's like, what would it be
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: like to drop acid? I want to know, you know?
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: And if you do it wisely and safely, you might
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: be one of those people that just winds up at
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: the end of life with a very broad range of experience.
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, one thing Odysseus is not is faint of heart.
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: You know, Lisa, as you were talking, there's this tension
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: with the instinctual, and we can be possessed by it.
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: And there I'm thinking about one of the other stories,
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: which is Circe. When, you know, Odysseus washes up on
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: her shores with his men, quote, she drugged the wine
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: with wicked poisons to make them forget their homes. And
• 48:05
  Speaker 4: when they had drunk, she turned them into pigs by
• 48:09
  Speaker 4: a stroke of her wand and shut them up and
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: her pigs dies. So an example there, really, there's a
• 48:16
  Speaker 4: kind of the way consciousness is sort of animalized in
• 48:22
  Speaker 4: a very instinctual way. So that's the pull from one side.
• 48:28
  Speaker 4: You know, I would say there's a kind of counterexample
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: also in the tale. We might talk a little bit
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: about Argos, the faithful dog. Odysseus, in disguise, is finally
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: back on his island of Ithaca. He's come home, but
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: he's in disguise. And there are several encounters of people
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: there who don't recognize him initially, and he ends up
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: often being tricked into revealing his identity, even though he
• 49:03
  Speaker 4: didn't want to. The dog, very old-aged, feeble-boned, flea-ridden, immediately
• 49:11
  Speaker 4: recognizes him. And shortly thereafter, you know, wags his tails. Well,
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: he wags his tails, his ears laid. back. But then
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: shortly thereafter, he lays down and dies. So it's very poignant.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: But that sense of relatedness with something instinctual is there
• 49:36
  Speaker 4: for me. And I think that's the other side of
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: that tension with instinctuality.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:46
  Speaker 4: And for me, that's brought home by one's own developmental
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: wrestling with one's erotic self. It's very easy to be
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: carried away by Eros. Sometimes the way we deal with
• 50:05
  Speaker 4: that is by eschewing it completely. But it's much harder
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: to have a conscious relationship. Maybe that's a bit of
• 50:13
  Speaker 4: a stretch. But that dance between being carried away and
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: being related to the instincts. I mean, it even plays
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: out in something as simple as expression of affect. We
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: can be carried away by our emotions. We can dramatize anger.
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: We can be explosive. As opposed to holding it more
• 50:40
  Speaker 4: consciously and being assertive.
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: I'm thinking about loyalty, too, because that is a theme
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: that runs all the way through.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we haven't even mentioned poor Penelope. Oh, my goodness.
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: Yes, we have not. We've left poor Penelope out. Odysseus
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: has been gone for 20 years.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: Ten years fighting in Troy or... figuring out clever ways
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: to either avoid it or overcome things. And then 10
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: years coming back and I'm indulging myself in a sidebar
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: when we were all preparing for these exams. One of
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: the things we needed to do was have something from
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: a myth that we could talk about. And I thought,
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: All these myths, usually women were not portrayed in particularly
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: wonderful ways. And I settled on Penelope.
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Lovely. I didn't know that, Ted.
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: Yes, I did. She's the counterpart of Odysseus, who was
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: very strategic and very, very wily. She was loyal all
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: the way through to Odysseus. Ithaca was sort of invaded
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: after some years had passed by all these suitors from
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: Ithaca and other islands because a woman who had been,
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: in their view, the wife of the ruler, Odysseus, must
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: be a widow. I mean, he's been gone for years
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: and years and years. So now she is marriageable. Women
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: were basically property owners. even with elevated status such as
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: Penelope had. So she came up with various delaying tactics,
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: famously telling the suitors that she had to weave a
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: shroud for her deceased father-in-law, which was an honored, special,
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: necessary duty. So she wove it all day and then
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: she took it apart at night. But they were clamoring
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: for her and eating her out of house and home.
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: So she too was very wily and loyal, loyal to
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: her husband who's been gone for years. Yeah.
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: And let's face it, it was like shagging a nymph
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: for seven years too. Let's not forget about that. Yeah.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: So he got a lot of action on his way home.
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: Yes. The same rules did not apply to her As
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: to Odysseus. Yeah.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: But it's so interesting, that thing about, you know, she
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: weaves by day and then picks it apart by night.
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: You know, that sort of stasis, that being content with
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: just sort of doing something over and over again. And
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: of course, you know, especially when we have young children,
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: that does feel like the nature of our lives sometimes.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's like you do the laundry. And then
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: the next day, you have to do it again. And
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: there's something about the patience and just being in it
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: and with it and just being okay with doing the
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: same task again and again and again. And by the way,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: that's kind of how I knit because I suck at knitting.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: So I have to constantly pick it apart and do
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: it again. And then I eventually give up. But anyway, yeah.
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: I was... thinking about a kind of deeper aspect of
• 54:36
  Speaker 4: Penelope's experience, because she doesn't know whether her husband is
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: alive or dead. And there's a great tension there, you know,
• 54:49
  Speaker 4: just like, you know, spouses of somebody who's MIA. You know,
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: you can't grieve, and yet you have to hold hope.
• 55:00
  Speaker 4: And you can't move on. So there is that stasis
• 55:04
  Speaker 4: that you referred to.
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: I want to just pick up one more mythologem, if
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: that's okay. And again, there's so many great stories. We've
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: only really skimmed to the surface. So lots more here
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: to explore. But I did want to talk about this
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: important moment when, with Circe's help, Odysseus goes to the underworld.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: So he's one of the few heroes that journeys to
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: the underworld to try to get some help on What
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: do I need to know about going home? So he
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: makes this journey to the underworld, which is described by
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: a Greek word that I think I mispronounced before. What's
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: our word for it? Katabasis? Katabasis, okay. The descent, the
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: descent to the underworld. And there he meets the blind
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: prophet Tiresias, who tells him, you know, warns him again
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: about Poseidon's got it out for you. And by the way,
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: don't eat the cattle belonging to the sun god Helios,
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: which his men eventually do, and that doesn't work out
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: too well. But Tiresias also does warn him about the
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: suitors back home and that he's going to need to
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: kill them, Penelope's suitors. And then he talks about his death.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: He says, you're to travel with an oar on your shoulder.
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: And when you get to the point where no one
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: recognizes what an oar is and they mistake it for
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: a winnowing fan, at that very point, drive the well-shaped
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: oar in the ground. So there's something about the ocean
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: and the land and Odysseus being the one who symbolically
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: bridges that, those two realms. And then Tiresias says, and
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: once you sacrifice a bull, boar, which has loved sows,
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: go home again and complete holy hecatombs to the immortal
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: gods who live in the broad sky, all of them
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: in order. And then from the sea, death will come
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: to you in a gentle way, and it will kill
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: you already taken by a kind old age. Your people
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: will be prosperous around you, and I speak these things truly.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: So he goes down to the underworld. He gets this
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: great advice. He ignores some of the advice. But then
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson writes a poem sort of
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: imagining what Odysseus's final years are like. And It's a
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: great poem, so I'm going to read it. It little
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: profits that an idle king by this still hearth among
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: these barren crags matched with an aged wife, I meet
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: and dole unequal laws unto a savage race that hoard
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: and sleep and feed and know not me. I cannot
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: rest from travel. I will drink life to the lees.
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: All times I have enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: with those that loved me and alone on shore, and
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: when through scudding drifts the rainy hiates vexed the dim sea,
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: I am become a name. For always roaming with a
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: hungry heart, much have I seen and known, cities of
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: men and manners, climates, councils, governments, myself, not least, but
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: honored of them all, and drunk delight of battle with
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: my peers, far from the ringing plains of windy Troy,
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: I am a part of all that I have met,
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: yet all experience is an arch where through gleams that
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: to rust unbounded. not to shine in use, as though
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: to breathe were life, life piled on life were all
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: too little, and of one to me little remains, but
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: a bringer of new things, and vile it were, for
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: some three sons to store and hoard myself, and this
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: gray spirit yearning and desire to follow knowledge like a
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the scepter and the aisle, well loved of me, discerning
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: to fulfill this labor by slow prudence to make mild
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: of rugged people, and through soft degrees subdue them to
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centered
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: in the sphere of common duties, decent not to fail
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: in offices of tenderness, and pay meet adoration to my
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: household gods when I am gone. He works his work,
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: I mine. There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, souls that
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: have toiled and wrought and fought with me, that ever
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: were a frolic, welcome took the thunder and the sunshine,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: and opposed free hearts, free foreheads. You and I are old,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: closes all, but something ere the end. Some work of
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: noble note may yet be done, not on the unbecoming
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: from the rocks, the long day wanes, the slow moon climbs.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: The deep moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: off and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: the baths of all the western stars until I die.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: It may be we shall touch the happy isles and
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: see the great Achilles whom we knew. Though much is taken,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: much abides. And though we are not now that strength
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: which in old days moved heaven and earth, that which
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts,
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: So Tennyson has Odysseus leaving for one final to kind
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: of meet his death on the seas. And I love
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: that picture of a sort of an aged Odysseus who
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: nevertheless is going to strike out and have one final adventure.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: So maybe I just relate to that personally because I'm
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: now aged myself.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: Well, it's really very moving and very beautiful about you know,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: what can the attitude at the end be? You know,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: can we face it? Can we embrace it? That, you know,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: like the poem you read, Bob, of Ithaca, of this,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: what is the end? What is our final, final homecoming?
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: I'd like to offer an image of That's very personal
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 4: to me along those lines. I knew a man who
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 4: was dying of AIDS during the AIDS crisis. And he
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: taught me something about death. Because in his final years,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: he would always say, I'm getting ready to come home.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: You know, and the image that comes to my mind
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 4: is the ruby slippers. There's no place like home. There's
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: no place like home.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: That is the final voyage.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: Well, it's just been delightful circumambulating this with you today.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: And again, I think there's so much more, but it's
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: perhaps time to turn to a dream. Today's dream comes
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: from a 52-year-old woman who's a business owner, and she
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: calls it my octopus baby. I was in a market.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: It was cold, dreary, and uninviting. There was a baby
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: octopus presented to me, not sure how it was, but
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: it was in my possession. The baby octopus was moving,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: but only just. It was barely alive. It had tomato
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: sauce splattered on her. I feel it was female. Someone,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: I believe a woman, took the octopus and prepared her
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: in baby clothing and revitalized her to life and presented
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: her back to me fully clothed and now the size
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: of a baby. I held her in my arm and
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: carried her with me everywhere. So for context, she says,
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: right now I'm in a transitional phase in my life.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: I feel like breaking away from my past behavior of
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: people pleasing and always accommodating with everyone around me. I
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: always felt like a misfit. I was loud, bossy, and
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: opinionated when I was a very young girl, but went
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: quiet as I got older. I live in Australia in
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: a migrant Italian family that always had to be mindful
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: of how you conducted yourself, especially in front of others.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: I basically had to be a good Italian girl. I
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: went into a relationship with a man of Italian heritage
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: that I married and I'm still married to. He was
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: very domineering early in our relationship, but not so much now.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: but I think I carry some residue of his controlling
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: ways from the past. We have been married for 26 years.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: I have always been creative, having a graphic design career
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: from around 20 till around 30 when my first child
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: was born. And while I still dabbled in painting and
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: drawing and freelanced a little, I have never been able
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: to get back into a creative career. Right now, I'm
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: exploring other options of creative work, but I'm still uncertain
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: what to do. The main feelings were despair and coldness
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: in the market and joy and pride when I was
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: holding my octopus baby. She says, I think the octopus
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: speaks to my Sicilian heritage. I just want to share
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: that my husband's Sicilian and he likes octopus too, but
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: definitely not to carry around as a baby. He really
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: likes to eat it. My dad was a fisherman in
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: Sicily and loved to eat anything that swam. The sauce,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: pasta sauce, again, to my Italian heritage. And my husband
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: ran several Italian restaurants, and there was a lot of
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: sauce and a lot of issues there for me. Or
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: maybe that I cook a lot in my house. Baby,
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: I have had other dreams of babies in the past.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: Or maybe that I had three babies of my own
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: who are now young adults. And yes, I do still
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: gush when I see them today. That's great. So a
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: lot of warmth up there about the babies.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 4: But that's not where the dream starts. It's in a
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 4: wet place. cold and dreary market. And well, you know,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 4: she's a business owner with manufacturing and yet identified herself
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: as being very creative early in life. So for me,
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 4: the immediate resonance was that where she finds herself in
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 4: terms of career, not necessarily homemaker, but in terms of career, is.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 4: Kind of cold and dreary. Not alive.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: Interesting, yeah. The market. The marketplace. But then there's this
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: surprising thing.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: So of all the things that could be presented to her.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: Of all... Right. A poppy, a lamb. A book.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: Something to eat.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: A candlestick.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: It's a baby octopus. which is what dreams do, and
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: we go like, what? You know, what could that possibly
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: be about? Well, you know, what is an octopus? Well,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: they famously have eight legs. They have suction on each
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 3: of their legs. Their biology is entirely different from anything human.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 3: Entirely different.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: It's really, really other.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: It is really other. And they have intelligence.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: A very different kind of intelligence, right? Which might be
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: an image, therefore, of the unconscious.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: There is a story that I read about an octopus
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: in a tank in captivity who spit back the food.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: It was fed in a very deliberate gesture of, you know,
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: I'm not going to eat this shit. So there's consciousness.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: There's a film called My Octopus Teacher about the relationship
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: between a human diver and this octopus. that made friends
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: with him.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: So very other.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 3: Capable of relating. And it was really right on the
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 3: brink of death.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: It was just.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 3: Barely moving, barely alive. It had tomato sauce splattered on her.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: So I'm wondering about the effect that the tomato sauce
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 3: might have had on the octopus. A revitalizing, a.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: Reddening? And her associations with sauce in restaurants. So it's
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 4: very nourishing. It's a staple in Sicilian cuisine.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: But that is interesting because, you know, she says she
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: has these, well, kind of mixed associations to sauce, but
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: you're right, Deb. It's like if we look at the when-then,
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: when the sauce gets spilled on the octopus, then someone
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: takes it and revitalizes it. So somehow that sauce moment
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: is really important. And I even think the word sauce,
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: like we talk about like the secret sauce or something's
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: kind of saucy and... You know, in French cuisine, of course,
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: it's all about the sauces. You know, the sauce is
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: the thing that brings the food to life, actually.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 3: I'm thinking, too, about the context of her husband owned
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: several Italian restaurants. And what do you think they had
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: and always have in Italian restaurants? Tomato sauce.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're literally called red sauce joints, right?
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 3: Oh, really?
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a word for like a casual Italian
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: restaurant is a red sauce joint.
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: Oh, I did not know that. But, you know, despite difficulties,
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 3: and every marriage has them, there is something very homey, familiar,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: and life-oriented about this reddening and the sauce on the octopus.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: I'm just going to play with a little bit more
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: because I think another thing about tomato sauce, it's really red.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: And it kind of looks like blood, right? So that
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: might be in the mix somehow, too, that this is
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: like you saying, the reddening, it's like the life force
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: coming back.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the rubedo and alchemy where things redden and life
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: has come back.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: So I like what you're saying, Deb. It's like, is
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: it related to the husband? Is that where some of
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: the life force is? Or from her kind of familial heritage,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: is that where some of the life comes from? I mean,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: the dream sort of seems to be offering that potentially,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: that that heritage has held her back and kind of
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: turned her into a compliant people pleaser. But at the
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: same time, it seems to hold some promise for her
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: as well.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 4: And she likes to cook. So there's a way in
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 4: which it says something about nurturing, feeding, sustaining, enriching.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: I want to just go back to the octopus for
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: a second because I think you were really getting it.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: I just want to draw it out just a little
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: bit more. The octopus is, it lives in the depths.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: It's very mysterious. It has its own intelligence. It's a
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: very foreign kind of intelligence. And I think that that's
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: a pretty good image of the unconscious because the unconscious
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: has initiative, volition, autonomy, but boy, it doesn't look anything
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: like consciousness. And so this dream might be an image
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: of her developing a newly renewed relationship with the unconscious.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 4: With the depths, that which comes out of the depths.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a joining here of the human and the other,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: the octopus as a representation of other or the unconscious.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: Starting with the tomato sauce comes from the human realm.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: And then somebody, a woman, takes the octopus and prepared
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: her in baby clothing and revitalized her back to light.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: And presented her back to our dream ego. Fully clothed,
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: now the size of a baby. So we're bringing this
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: other even closer. Right.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: It's humanized a little bit.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: Exactly. It doesn't say she turned into a baby, but
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: now the size of a baby. I held her in
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: my arm and carried her with me everywhere. So the
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: dream ego has accepted and bonded with with this revitalized,
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: brought back to life, octopus baby.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: So, you know, we have Dream School, which is our
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: 12-month program where we teach you how to work with
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: your dreams, much like we work with you on the podcast.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: And one of the things that we've been doing in
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: Dream School is learning how to work with our dreams
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: visually and drawing our dreams. And I just love this
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: image of an octopus dressed in little pretty baby girl clothes.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: And I I just wonder if the, especially because she's
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: artistic and creative, I wonder if the dreamer would have
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: fun illustrating that image.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 4: Well, the octopuses are so.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: Curious.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 4: They really explore their environments. And in the nervous system
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 4: of the octopus, the brain is disseminated into the tentacles
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: so that there's a way that there's this... feeling out
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: into the world that seems to be present in the image.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: I love that. I love that.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 3: The more that we immerse ourselves in this dream, the
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: more I am moved by what a really big dream
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: this is.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're right. This is a.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: Really big dream. And how easy it is You know,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 3: we've been circumambulating it for a while. It doesn't come
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 3: across as big. It doesn't, you know, sort of show
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: up and go in your face, you know, volcanoes exploding
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 3: or whatever.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 4: All that is.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: It kind of sneaks up on you. And what has
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: happened in this dream is monumental.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: There.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 3: It's just monumental. And it is being imaged in this
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: dream as something that is happening in the dreamer of
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: this connection with other and helped by a mysterious shadow figure,
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 3: the female, who takes the octopus, dresses it up in
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 3: baby clothing, revitalizes her life, and then hands it back
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 3: to the dream ego. That is really very beautiful. This
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 3: is what dreams can be, can do, can give us
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 3: of ourselves.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:16:45
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• 1:16:50
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