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Three Jungians on Psychedelics: Is Tripping a Valid Path of Self-Discovery? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
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• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:36
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Hello, everybody. Today on This Jungian Life, we're going to
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: be talking about Jungians on psychedelics. And I'll let you
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: know that some of us have had firsthand experiences around
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: this early in our misspent youth. We're going to be
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: talking about the growing interest in psychedelics psychotherapeutically. But from
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: a Jungian standpoint, it's particularly important because sometimes psychotherapeutics Psychedelic
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: substances allow people's egos to enter into a relationship with
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: the unconscious, which is central to Jung's ideas. We're going
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: to talk a little bit about the ambivalence about using
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: this in a number of different contexts, some of the
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: positive stories, and we'll tie things up by analyzing a
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: dream from a young person who's considering going into analytic training.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: So we hope you'll hang on for that.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: So I think we've known we were going to talk
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: about this for a while, but I don't know. Now
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: it just seemed like the right time. And obviously very interesting.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: This is top of mind for many people. Lots of
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: people are very interested in this. And of course, you know.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: What is it? What is it? It's something that people
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: immediately think of Jungians when we think of, you know,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: psychedelic experience. And so we're going to do what we
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: do today and kind of circumambulate it. And I'll sort
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: of start off by just saying that two out of
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the three of us have had a personal experience, at
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: least one, with psychedelic substances. And I think all of
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: us have family, friends, and analizands also who have used psychedelics.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: And so I think we can speak to this process
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: and this experience from a really wide variety of perspectives.
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: So it's interesting that something that's been in the shamanic
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: culture for thousands and thousands of years gets suppressed like
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: a lot of ancient practices and now is coming back
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: up from the aquifer of the collective unconscious and demanding
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: its place as a healing modality now. I mean, that
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: arc alone is really interesting.
• 4:25
  Speaker 4: I know I got sort of more seriously interested in
• 4:30
  Speaker 4: psychedelic experience a few years ago when, with a friend
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: and colleague, we made a trip to Athens and Crete.
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: I came across some books by a man named Karl Ruck,
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: and you can find this on the show notes in
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: our book listings, about the Eleusinian experience, which was an
• 4:55
  Speaker 4: initiatory and kind of transcendent experience that took place outside Athens, Greece,
• 5:03
  Speaker 4: for something like 2,000 years. And the thesis in Karl
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: Ruck's book, together with Gordon Wasson, who developed LSD and,
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: or I'm sorry, it was Albert Hoffman who did that
• 5:18
  Speaker 4: and Wasson who went to Mexico. But it's a whole
• 5:22
  Speaker 4: adventure in these substances. And the hypothesis is that the
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: grain barley that was used had developed a fungus. And
• 5:33
  Speaker 4: it was actually carefully tended so that this fungus was
• 5:37
  Speaker 4: exactly right in order to give the participants who had
• 5:43
  Speaker 4: prepared for this for a year and who walked 13
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: miles from Athens to Eleusis in order to have this
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: underground special experience. And I think I had not realized
• 5:59
  Speaker 4: how ancient, how ritualized, how significant, how mythological and culturally
• 6:07
  Speaker 4: meaningful because it was a staple of ancient Greece society,
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: this kind of psychedelic experience could be.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: So the hypothesis is that the Kikion gave one a
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: psychedelic experience, the Kikion that the participants would drink.
• 6:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah. And there were theories about early Christians having psychedelic
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: experiences in the communion ceremony, etc. Now, we all know
• 6:40
  Speaker 4: today that there are indigenous communities that have been using
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: mind-altering substances for centuries and centuries and centuries.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of years, they think. In preparing for
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: this episode, I was doing some research, and there is
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: some speculation that there are some cave paintings... that show
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: that show um mushrooms.
• 7:02
  Speaker 4: Yes and that that's in carl ruck's book of there
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: are all kinds of images of mushrooms on pottery and
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: so on and so forth oh is it okay and
• 7:13
  Speaker 4: here we're back at it again finally yes.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Well and just to say a little bit more about
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: that the um of course in In South America, they
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: use peyote and ayahuasca in indigenous cultures. And actually in
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Northern European cultures, there's a whole really incredibly interesting thing
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: about the mythology of Santa Claus, and that that was
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: related to the Lapland shamans who would use red and
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: white mushrooms, that kind of classic red and white dotted mushroom,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: and then this idea about kind of flying reindeer arose
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: out of the use of psilocybin so uh it it
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: has it has roots really across the world in all
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: kinds of different cultures and it's it's uh interesting to
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: note too i think a lot of people are at
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: least somewhat aware of this that there was a lot
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: of very interesting research going on on these substances in
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the 1960s and then there was uh piece of legislation
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: that came in, I think it was 1970, that shut
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: it all down. The labs were all shuttered. This very
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: promising research was stopped. And now it's beginning to be revived.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: So it is this kind of eternal story that these
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: substances have kind of always been with us.
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: And I think part of what happened, it was really
• 8:43
  Speaker 4: during the Nixon administration that these substances became illegal. and
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: partly because use of LSD in particular, people were tripping.
• 8:57
  Speaker 4: And it was not protected by ritual and religious purpose
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  Speaker 4: the way that it had been in indigenous cultures and way,
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: way back in ancient Greece. I think the alarm bells
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: started to be rung And what happened is what often happens,
• 9:21
  Speaker 4: which is just shut it down, repress it. And it
• 9:25
  Speaker 4: went underground. We've all heard about hippie culture and all
• 9:30
  Speaker 4: the stuff that goes on there. But I think something
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: is being revived in the culture now, which is, let's
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: look again that there is something here that has a reality,
• 9:43
  Speaker 4: that has merit, that can be used for seriousness of purpose,
• 9:50
  Speaker 4: of how do we find a place that is neither
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: just sort of careless, wild tripping, nor let's never go there.
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: of where is there a more balanced, useful, purposeful, possible
• 10:06
  Speaker 4: application for some of these substances?
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: Well, let's start with people's concern. What do you think
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: people are worried about in terms of experimenting with psychedelics
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: or trying it? What's the big cautionary note?
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think there are some quite legitimate ones.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, you know, the dangers of ketamine,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: for example, I've sort of recently been in the news
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: with the death of the actor, I can't remember his name,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: but he died because of, I believe it was ketamine toxicity.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: So it's not that all of these drugs are sort
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: of equally safe and wonderful and beneficent. And also, I
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: remember Michael Pollan, who wrote that great book, How to
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Change Your Mind, which we'll also include in our book list.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: You know, he said that if you've got a really
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: firm grasp on reality, you've got a strong ego, it
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: can be very helpful to engage with these substances. But
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: if there's any question about how tethered you are, best
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: to maybe leave them aside. So I don't know what
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: the research is about psychedelics potentiating a kind of long-term
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: psychic disintegration, but I know there's at least some caution
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: about that.
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  Speaker 3: I think one of the things that I hear in
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: the community, and I'll out myself, I'm one of the
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: people that tripped my balls off through my 20s and 30s,
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: is that there was a.
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: A big difference between what they would say plant medicine
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: and then manufactured hallucinogenics. And I think that while they
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: still may create experiences that people find somewhat similar, like
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: a dramatic expansion of sensory perception, the plant medicine has
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: been experimented with for thousands of years, while the kind
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: of newer designer molecules have not. And so that's part
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: of it. Like LSD is fairly new by comparison with psilocybin.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: And ayahuasca has been around for thousands of years. They're
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: often lumped into one category. But for people who use
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: this particularly for indigenous healing ceremonies, there's a very strict
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: differentiation between the two. And particularly the archetype of the
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: plant medicine is very specific. Mm-hmm. For instance, some of
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: the shaman talk about ayahuasca as a kind of goddess.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Yes.
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  Speaker 3: That she is an archetypal entity. But I never hear
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: people talking about LSD as a kind of transpersonal personality.
• 13:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah. And they coined a new word, and I've forgotten
• 13:04
  Speaker 4: who's responsible for this, of the entheogen, that these plant
• 13:09
  Speaker 4: medicines are entheogens, which is God-creating. that honors the purpose
• 13:18
  Speaker 4: of ingesting this as a spiritual quest that requires preparation
• 13:26
  Speaker 4: and a container, a guidance and reflection. But it's an
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: interesting word, and I think you're right, Joseph, that it
• 13:35
  Speaker 4: isn't used for some of the man-made substances, although perhaps
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: it could be, but It's a lovely word that bespeaks intent.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: Well, it's intent also, but we know that the archetypes pre-exist.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: So it's interesting that our culture, at least thus far,
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: still evokes a certain kind of God image, a certain
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: archetypal dynamism around something that grows in the forest, something
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: that can be composed from vines and flowers and plants.
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: We seem to be very hesitant to assign gods to
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: man-made things, like the gods of cars. We don't do
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: it explicitly. Although everything in a sense has a kind
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: of archetypal dynamism behind it, but it takes, I think,
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: hundreds if not thousands of years for that to emerge
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: in the collective. And going to what you were saying, Deb,
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: is that the archetypal image is the mediating influence between
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: the ego and the unconscious. And so there is something,
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: just as Jungians, there is something containing and relatively protective
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: about having some kind of an archetypal reference to a
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: psychedelic experience versus something that is seen as purely empirical
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: or purely mechanical.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to take this moment in the podcast
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: to insert one thought, which is I think it's easy
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: to get caught up in a kind of false dichotomy
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: between like good drugs that are plants and bad drugs
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: that are manmade. Because of course, there are many drugs
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: for all kinds of things that are manmade that are
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: really helpful. And I don't think that something is healthy
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: for you just because it's a plant. I actually have
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: really strong feelings that I know will upset a lot
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: of people, but I'm going to say it anyway. I
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: have concerns about cannabis. And my concerns have to do
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: with the fact that it can actually, there is a
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: link between cannabis and psychosis. And there's pretty good research
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: about that. And I don't want us to wander into
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: the territory of anything that grows from the ground is
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: necessarily going to be just good for you. But yes, Joseph,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I think in general, though, with that caveat, there is
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: a way that these plants have been embedded in human culture.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And I believe that what you referred to about seeing
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: the plant itself as a kind of God or a
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: transpersonal entity, I believe that that has generated around different
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: substances in different cultures, if I'm not mistaken, which I
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: think is really interesting that it There is something sacred
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: about it.
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: But it leans into, as I was saying, it isn't
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: so much that everything that's quote-unquote natural is somehow benign. Right.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: Really what I was more saying is that because it's
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: been in human culture for thousands of years, that archetypal
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: images had time to emerge in the collective and that
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: the images themselves act as something of a mediator to,
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: in some ways, reduce... The danger of psychosis is my
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: personal theory as a Jungian.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: That's interesting.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: That the lack of archetypal imagery actually makes us more
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: vulnerable to being overwhelmed by unconscious content.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think you're right about that.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: And that goes to Jung's idea about the mythology. You know,
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: we teach the abandonment of mythology has left Westerners vulnerable
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: to all kinds of archetypal intrusions. Mm-hmm. I don't know,
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: coming back to what we were talking about before, which
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: is really a more modern application of it.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Well, but I think in a way, you know, the
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: modern application, it is the same as, you know, I mean,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: we hunger for the transpersonal. And we have it less
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: in our lives now than certainly our ancestors did. And
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: there are some people who are real proponents of using
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: kind of psychedelic assisted therapy who make this point, Jungian
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: analysts or those who are kind of Jungian adjacent, that
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: this could be a way to have access to the transpersonal.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: And it may be, as we've been talking about, a
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: way that people have always accessed the transpersonal. I guess
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: the issue is, which I think we're all kind of
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: coming back to, and Deb, you've made this point a
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: couple of times is, In traditional cultures, there is a
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: container around the experience. There's both a kind of ritual container.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: There's preparation. You're there with others. There's a guide. There's
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: a reintegration process. But there's also a kind of cosmological
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: or mythological container.
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: Yes, exactly.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: When you have these experiences, there is a kind of
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: coherent mythos that you can attach them to. And so
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: the question is that as a modern without a religious container,
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: when you have these experiences, what do you do with them?
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: I just think it's a question.
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: I think all of this is really important of what
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: you were saying, Joseph, and what you're saying now, Lisa,
• 19:19
  Speaker 4: and what I've been saying is all of these components
• 19:22
  Speaker 4: need to be present. There's a mythos, and then there
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: are human components. rituals, people, containers. And when it's used
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: today for, let's say, end-of-life therapy for people who have
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: terminal diseases, there is preparation. There is a special room
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: set aside. You are there with a guide, with a therapist, uh,
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: so that you are not alone in it. There's a
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: container and an initiation, hopefully, into something transcendent, something life-giving,
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: as the person in the room is facing his or
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: her death. So All of these factors really matter in
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: these kinds of experiences, and they matter and are determinative
• 20:18
  Speaker 4: to some extent of what kind of experience you're going
• 20:22
  Speaker 4: to have, which takes me back to I have known
• 20:27
  Speaker 4: a couple of people who've been really damaged by casual, hey,
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: let's give it a shot use of these drugs, and
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: You've already referenced the film actor who died from a
• 20:43
  Speaker 4: casual use of ketamine. So somewhere, you know, some real
• 20:49
  Speaker 4: thought needs to go into what's my purpose? How am
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: I going to do it? What am I looking for?
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: And I think people are looking for the transcendent. They're
• 20:59
  Speaker 4: looking for the numinous because we don't have cultural mythos.
• 21:05
  Speaker 4: We don't have a unity here. and other kinds of
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: religious ritual containers. And so we're seeking it in this
• 21:15
  Speaker 4: other way. If we use it as individuals, I think
• 21:20
  Speaker 4: we need to be particularly conscious of what we're doing.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: One of the things that the research is bringing forward
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: that I find interesting is that some psychedelics seem to
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: constellate a neuroplasticity that the brain had we were younger,
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: which allows a kind of fluidity of consciousness. So one
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: of the differentiations I think you're talking about, Deb, is
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: in that very fluid time period during a psychedelic experience,
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: oftentimes the unconscious is very responsive. It's responsive to what
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: we're thinking, it's responsive context and the environment, and that
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: the environment can steer what is more likely to emerge
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: in one way or another. So many of the facilitated experiences,
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: for instance, Michael Pollan's documentary, How to Change Your Mind,
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: they're highly curated experiences. And the clinicians, from what I understand,
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: are pulling little gentle threads to lead people into certain
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: lines of inquiry, to look for certain things, like you said,
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: the transcendental, or even specifically looking for healing or specifically
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: looking for insight. I think that when that kind of
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: plasticity is opened up and people are, let's say, at
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: a party or at a concert or in a park
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: or in the forest, they come in as sojourners or
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: as wanderers, and are depending then upon synchronicity to constellate
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: an experience, of course it is more uncertain. And then
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: we have stories of people having quote-unquote bad trips, or
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: people having certain vulnerabilities, neurologic vulnerabilities that they couldn't have known,
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: and then there's a rare psychotic break.
• 23:28
  Speaker 4: We do know that it can be precipitated by the
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: use of these drugs. And, you know, it's In a way,
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: it's very Jungian as a bedrock principle that you're accessing
• 23:41
  Speaker 4: the collective unconscious more than just your personal memories and
• 23:45
  Speaker 4: so on. And in order to do that, you need
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: to have a strong, flexible, well-adapted ego that is going
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: to be able to tolerate and contain the contents of
• 23:58
  Speaker 4: the collective unconscious and then make use of them, integrate
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: them into consciousness. So just jumping in without that kind
• 24:12
  Speaker 4: of preparation, readiness, assessment of personal purpose, I think can create,
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: at the very least, a bad trip, and at the
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: very worst, some long-lasting consequences.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: In a worst-case scenario, of course, yeah.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: So I just want to, I want to address some,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: first of all, this idea of the bad trip. And
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: then I want to talk more about this idea about
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: the collective unconscious, because I think that that is really
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: super interesting. So, you know, I think it's possible to
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: see quote unquote bad trips is not necessarily sort of like, oh,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: that was bad. That was a failure. But sometimes people
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: have really confrontive experiences that are hellish, but transformational. So
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: something gets, you know, there's some incredible stories in the book.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: It's called Sacred Knowledge, Psychedelics and Religious Experience. And we'll
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: put that in the show notes as well. And, you know,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: the author makes this point that sometimes people have unpleasant
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: experiences that nevertheless catalyze some needed confrontation. So just to
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: make that point. But then, you know, another thing he
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: says in that book, which I think is like, absolutely
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: world shattering is that through experimentation with psychedelics, we seem
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: to have found empirical evidence for the existence of the
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: collective unconscious. Because people who are using these substances generate
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: very similar imagery again and again and again. Now, this
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: is no surprise to us as Jungians, because we know
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: from dreams, by the way, which I actually hope we
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: can talk more about how dreams are kind of a
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: correlate to a psychedelic, I mean, dreams are like the
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: psychedelic experience you have every night, you know, and others
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: have made this point. You know, we know that dreams
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: generate very similar imagery, mythological imagery. We know that the
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: unconscious everywhere across time, across cultures will generate these same
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: kinds of images, but there they are again in people's
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: psychedelic experiences, which is super fascinating. So what I said
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: before about how, you know, if you are an indigenous
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: person in a culture, say, where ayahuasca is ritually used,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: it's connected to a whole belief system and whole cosmology.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Whereas if it's, you know, if you're a modern, you know,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: living in Philadelphia and you go do it and you're unconscious,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: you know, you have contact with the collective unconscious, which
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: is essentially what happens. What do you do? How do
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: you understand it? And I think that that is where
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Jungians are particularly apt to facilitate this experience because we
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: have a cosmology or we have a belief system about
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: the psyche that encompasses these kinds of experiences. And we
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: can say, well, there it is. There's this image from
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: the collective unconscious appearing, and we can help people make
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: sense of it. That is really, really interesting that we
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: could help connect these experiences to frameworks of meaning through
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: Jung's insights.
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: And we do that by ongoing weekly work with dreams.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yes.
• 27:34
  Speaker 4: So psyche kind of mediates, regulates, and kind of scales.
• 27:43
  Speaker 4: You know, what is it you're ready to see, to hear,
• 27:45
  Speaker 4: to learn, to be confronted by? whether it's a recurring
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: dream of being chased by a mysterious and seemingly ominous something,
• 27:57
  Speaker 4: and how do we work with that? And then you
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: could scale it up to an experience with psilocybin or
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: some other psychedelic substance. They're all different ways of having
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: an experience of and a confrontation with the unconscious.
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: I also want to say several things that I think
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: are important. One is that as Jungians, we're also interested
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: in this because the definition of neurosis is that there
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: is something that the ego should be aware of that
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: has broken off and is somewhere in the unconscious. So
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: any of the methods that allow the ego to come
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: into a conscious relationship to the unconscious has the potential,
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: it's not always determined, but has the potential for some
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: kind of a healing process. So whether it's drumming, whether
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: it's hours of chanting, whether it's psilocybin, breath work, dream work,
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: anything that allows the ego to get a glimpse into
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: the darkly splendid world, so the occultists call it, gives
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: us an opportunity to reclaim some part of ourselves that
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: we've lost touch with. And that's one of the ways
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: that we can imagine that this is very helpful. The
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: thing that's really important is that many people, particularly in
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: the modern world, have developed a particularly powerful and encapsulated
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: ego structure for any number of reasons. And so very
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: well-meaning individuals who would like to become more aware of
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: what's going on in the unconscious struggle to remember dreams
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: don't have easy access to their imagination or simply are
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: somehow blocked from that opening. And so what psychedelics sometimes
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: can do is it can thin the veil. And so
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: that even the highly defended ego or somebody's injured nervous system,
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: as in severe PTSD, that keeps the ego in a
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: constant hypervigilant state, finds that the psychedelics will melt something
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: down for at least a while, which goes to this
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: idea of plasticity. And all of a sudden, images, feelings,
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: memories become accessible and other kinds of sensations. And as
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: you were saying, Lisa, some of these the ego has
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: been defending against mightily. And so the ego can find
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: this frightening encounter like many myths. Dragons and monsters and
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: cyclopses and creatures are encountered. The preparation, as you said, Deb,
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: can also be having people be educated around the kinds
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: of experiences that they may have so that they don't
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: become overly paranoid. And they can keep some conscious understanding
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: of the different levels. It's when people get confused about
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: the levels that they get in trouble. Like if we're
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: hallucinating something and we know we're hallucinating it, we have
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: some footing. And so there's that... Quippy is saying, I
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: can't remember who to attribute it to, but the mystic
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: swims in the same waters that the psychotic drowns in.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: So this is where having orientation or wisdom before we
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: go into the unconscious, whether we're reading Jung's books or
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: we have a shaman or some other guide, to have
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: a sense of how to prepare so that we can
• 31:51
  Speaker 3: stand in the images and sensations and not get knocked
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: off our feet.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So Joseph, talking about the thinning of the veil,
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: that's what Jung referred to as the abaissement du niveau mental.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: And he was very interested in that state. And I
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: think it was one that was really relatively easy for
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: him to access. And of course, he has his confrontation
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: with the unconscious in which he's engaging with figures from
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: his dreams and from his imagination, and he's drawing them.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: And out of that comes the Red Book. And if
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: you've actually read the Red Book or looked at the drawings,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: you really get that he was having experiences very much
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: like one would have. In fact, I've heard someone suggest,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: an analyst actually, suggest that he may have been using psychedelics.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: I don't personally believe that was true, but I can
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: certainly see why. I want to read, Jung didn't write
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: much about psychedelics at all. He didn't seem to I
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: don't think he ever mentioned their kind of traditional, even
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: though he was very interested in the religious and mythological systems,
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: he didn't have, as far as we know, reference the
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: use of psychedelics in traditional cultures. But he did write
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: a couple of letters. And I'm going to read his
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: letter to Victor White about this. It's not too long,
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: but all of it, I think, is super interesting. He
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: says to White, is the LSD drug you're referring to mescaline?
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: It has indeed very curious effects of which I know
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: far too little. I don't know either what its psychotherapeutic
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: value with neurotic or psychotic patients is. I only know
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: there is no point in wishing to know more of
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuitions.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: The more you know of it, the greater and heavier
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: becomes your moral burden. because the unconscious contents transform themselves
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: become conscious. Do you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding?
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: Do you want to find more and more complications and
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: increasing responsibilities? You get enough of it. If I once
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: could say that I had done everything I knew I
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: had to do, Then perhaps I should realize a legitimate
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: need to take mescaline. If I should take it now,
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: I would not be at all sure that I had
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: not taken it out of idle curiosity. I should hate
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: the thought that I had touched on the sphere where
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: the paint is made that colors the world, where the
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: light is created that makes shine the splendors of the dawn,
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: fills the orbit. the thought that illuminates the darkness of
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: the void. There are some impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: mescaline would be a heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison, but
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: I am profoundly mistrustful of the pure gifts of the gods.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: You pay very dearly for them. This is not the
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: point at all to know of or about the unconscious,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: nor does the story end here. On the contrary, it
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: is how and where you begin the real quest. If
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: you are too unconscious, it is a great relief to
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: know a bit of the collective unconscious. But it soon
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: becomes dangerous to know more because one does not learn
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: at the same time how to balance it through a
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: conscious equivalent. That is the mistake Aldous Huxley makes. He
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: does not know that he is in the role of Zauberlehrling,
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: sorcerer's apprentice, I probably totally butchered that German word, who
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: learned from his master how to call the ghosts, but
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: did not know how to get rid of them again.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: So Jung, I think, was very cautious. I think we're
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: echoing some of his cautions, but maybe there are many poor,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: impoverished people for whom a psychedelic would be a heaven-sent gift.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: Because we don't have the connection to the collective unconscious
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: that Jung did.
• 36:05
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking about that phrase in the letter that Jung
• 36:10
  Speaker 4: wrote to Victor White about the pure gifts of the gods.
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: And how in Greek myth, you know, to see the
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: god in his or her full reality, you know, was
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: dangerous to mortals. In one famous story, the woman Semele
• 36:33
  Speaker 4: wanted to see Zeus in his full glory, and she
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: was incinerated. So there is something about a judicious attitude
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: that is all important. And Marie-Louise von Franz echoes a
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: lot of Jung's caution about how important the discovery of
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: the collective unconscious is. It's one of the most far-reaching
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: discoveries of recent times, she says, and I agree. And
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: then she says that recognition of the unconscious reality involves
• 37:10
  Speaker 4: honest self-examination and reorganization of one's life. And it takes
• 37:16
  Speaker 4: a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: to tackle the problems it raises. So that echoes what
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: you were reading, Lisa, about we can summon the ghosts,
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: but then what do we do with them? We're going
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: to have to integrate those contents from the unconscious that
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: we have summoned from the depths. And I don't think
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: this means, I feel I've been a little sort of
• 37:47
  Speaker 4: overly cautionary, and I don't want to banish These substances
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: are curiosity and very legitimate uses to which they can
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: be put. But to go about it with intent and
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: with consciousness and not out of idle curiosity.
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: So I'd like to take somewhat of a counterpoint because
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: I agree with everything that you've said. But also, millions
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: of people have taken psychedelics seriously. in very casual environments,
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: and had very casual experiences. So, in fact, disappointingly so,
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: I am among those people. So, I mean, I was
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: a real, I was a wide-eyed spiritual seeker in my
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: 20s and early 30s, and I was looking to have
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: the gods talk to me, and I was trying to
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: believe to break through into the next level. And I
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: have to say that the overwhelming majority of my experiences
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: were far, far beneath a visitation by the gods. We
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: neither want to exaggerate nor minimize what may happen with
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: any of these psychoactive substances. And not all of us
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: are blessed or cursed. with the visitation from the collective unconscious.
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: One way that I've come to frame it for myself,
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: and I'm far away now at 61, I'm far away
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: from this culture, so I think there's much going on
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: that I am naive about. But when I think back
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: on my experience, I actually think that for most people,
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: psychedelics open into their inferior function, which makes perfect sense
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: to me. And of course, at the time, I wouldn't
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: have thought that. But our inferior function, which is of
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: our four functions, thinking versus feeling, intuiting, sensing, that the
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: one that is least developed is the one that is
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: most in the unconscious and is the easiest portal through
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: which things can communicate to us. So for me, in
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: my many experiences, they were almost always sensory experiences. They
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: did not evoke powerful feelings. They did not evoke overwhelming imagery.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: But I would have these very extraordinarily intense physical sensations
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: that were even very difficult to contain in my body.
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: And then sometimes my visual sense would become marvelously enhanced
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: and the smallest of objects would appear remarkably beautiful. A
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: pile of leaves, grass, flowers, which really was an opening
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: of my sensate function. Talking with other individuals that had experiences, again,
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: that were not part of the collective unconscious, were not overwhelming.
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: Some people for whom thinking is their inferior function find
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: themselves thinking that they're taking psilocybin and they're pondering these
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: very abstract, wonderful archetypal ideas and come out feeling that
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: they've solved a secret. Some people for whom the feeling
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: function is inferior, they weep or laugh or be childlike
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: in their emotional vulnerability. But that's because that's the gate
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: into the unconscious and other people have these paranormal intuitions
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: that sometimes are shockingly correct, shockingly accurate. So that may
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: change over time. And again, this is something I come
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: to later in life, a perception. But again, from my sense,
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: from my own sense, I would close my eyes and
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: see intricate geometric patterns that were highly ordered. And I
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: was like, I'm like praying to the gods, like, come
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: and get me, man. I'm ready to go. I was 22.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: You're one of those people that doesn't need a psychedelic
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: substance to have that kind of experience. Like, I know,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: you know, I've heard enough of your stories. You have
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: sort of non-normative experience, like fairly frequently, you know, I mean,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: compared to the average person without substances.
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: But I had to earn that because the substances wouldn't
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: do it. So then there's another 30 years beyond that
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: of studying Kabbalah and learning to shift my consciousness at will.
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: And you're right. There's extraordinary things that can be cultivated.
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: It just goes to say that there's a big spectrum
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: of experiences.
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: And just to, I want to build on what you're
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: saying a little bit and then maybe talk about some
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: of the benefits. So I'm referencing a paper. I can
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: link it in the show notes. It's a, It was
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: in the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, and it's called
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: Psychedelic Drugs and Jungian Therapy. And they make the point, well,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: they quote somebody saying that the psychological effects fall into
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: four main categories, sensory, recollective psychodynamic, which I've seen. I've
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: had clients who had experiences where something from childhood really
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: got imaged, and then it could be worked with a
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: little bit more. Effective and symbolic, and there's the feeling,
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: you know. And then deep integral self-transcendence. So I think
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: that actually there we have it, sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuiting.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: So just a little bit more about the positive stuff.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: And Deb, I know you have a lot on this too.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: One of the points they make in this paper, which
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: I thought was really well taken, is that the therapeutic
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: benefit seems to come from generating new insights in the
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: user's rather than modulating neuronal stuff going on in your brain.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: So it's a very different therapeutic mechanism than say an SSRI.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: And I'll just talk for a minute. Apparently the research
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: about the benefits of this on things from, you know,
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: end of life anxiety to smoking cessation to treatment, resistant depression,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: post-traumatic stress disorder, really significant. So very, very promising. Um, and,
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: and I'll just say, um, personal story. I, this past year,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: I made a new friend, um, absolutely fabulous person. This
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: guy is great. And when we became friends, he was
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: just beginning to recover, or I suppose had, was in
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: the recovery process of just horrific trauma, just horrific trauma.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: And getting to know him, I was like, are you okay? And,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: you know, he's like, yeah, I have my hard days,
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: but I'm okay. I'm like, God, you know. No, I
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: think he's just a very resilient person as well. But,
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: you know, he said plant medicine has been really important
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: for his healing journey. And I was like, wow, that's,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: you know, not surprising, actually, and really impressive. And, you know,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: the research shows that the effects of can be long-term,
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: that there's the experience and there's kind of an afterglow,
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: but that some people kind of touch back to this
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: for weeks, months, even years. So it really is kind
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: of a shift. Now, I also happen to believe that doing,
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: for example, dream work can create a similar shift. I
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: think we're kind of doing the same thing When we
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: do regular dream work. But Jung says it's the contact
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: with the numinous that heals. And whether that numinous experience
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: comes through your dreams or through a substance, you know,
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: there it is.
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: I think that's the best case scenario is that we
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: have a visitation from the self. Yeah. Yeah. And of course,
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: I think what we're being cautionary about is that the
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: collective unconscious is a repository of many things, many of
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: which are not the self and can have a disintegrative effect.
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: But in the best case scenario, this unifying energy that
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: is intimately connected to our unfolding can draw close or
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: close enough to have powerful effect, which can still be
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: turbulent because it makes a demand for growth. I mean,
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: that would be the best, most wonderful version of that.
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: I would also like to tell a few stories of
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: friends that have had extraordinary experiences, some of which were sobering,
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: but I found remarkable. One of my friends came out
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: of Iraq and had a number of very difficult experiences,
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: but in the military there, the experience that he changed
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: him was performing his first kill. And even though these
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: experiences are sanctioned by the government, maybe even were considered
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: necessary in wartime.
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: Or heroic.
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: It changes a person to have that archetypal experience. It
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: changes their soul. That and many other things were quite challenging.
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: So individual was separated, wound up retiring, medical retirement, and
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: was deeply troubled. So found a community in Peru that
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: were doing ayahuasca work. The first thing that was interesting
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: is that when they were interviewed, and in this particular organization,
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: it was a very, very intricate interview process. And one
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: of the questions that the shamans asked is, have you
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: ever killed someone? And this person was sitting and wondering if,
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: because they didn't want to be disallowed. But in the
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: final analysis said, yes, yes, I was in the armed services.
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: And the shaman said, you can't, you can't do this.
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: You don't understand what will come back to you if
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: you were attacked. have this experience and we don't believe
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: that it would be good for you ultimately. So my
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: friend was distraught and made a good strong argument that
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: he was stout enough and he was, he was correct,
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: stout enough to have this. So the shamans consulted among
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: themselves and said that they would permit him to do
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: this but on the caveat that he would have to
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: submit to being withdrawn from the process by them at
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: their discretion if they felt that this was going to
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: a place that wasn't going to be good. And so
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: he's down in Peru. Just as you said, there's this
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: preparatory process. They made him drink this volcanic water, which
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: was this overwhelming purgative substance. So just days of purging
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: in the body. Oh, God. and nurses coming to check
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: on them, which was interesting, this mix between the experiences.
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: And then after that purgative experience, they're taken off into
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: the jungle, into a compound, a group of perhaps 10
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: of them. And there's much to say. He was wonderful
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: about recording all of this at the end of each day.
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: It was a remarkable storyline. But he was hunted in
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: his visions, literally hunted in his visions, and feeling this
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: predatory energy that each time he went into the altered
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: state was constantly coming at him and for him to
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: contain his own sense of horror over and over and
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: over again until he could finally submit himself the full
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: sensory experience of being killed which is the inverse of
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: the experience that he had participated in and because the
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: full sensory immersion in the experience it wasn't academic it
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: wasn't like a virtual reality game that he experienced it
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: in his skin experienced his heart stopping experienced the explosion
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: of organs in in a in a screaming kind of
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: psychological agony. At this point, apparently the shamans, all the
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: shamans are around him. They're chanting, they're intervening, they're doing
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: the incredible work that they could do to help contain
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: this experience. And this is very congruent with what Jung
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: said about dream work. Is it often that the self
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: will grant us the inverse experience in order to create
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: and equanimity in the ego. And that often happens in
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: very subtle ways because many of us don't live in
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: such polarities. And so he came out of the experience,
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: I think in his own words, redeemed. That he felt
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: that in some way he had suffered adequately something that
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: the individual that he had killed in wartime had suffered
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: and had still had several years of processing something so extraordinary,
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: but felt that he wasn't sure that he would submit
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: to such a thing. This was a 10-day process. Every
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: day for 10 days, they went into these states, confronted
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: over and over again by these inner images. The shamans
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: felt entities, that ayahuasca herself had come to him and
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: made him know and experience what he would not have
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: been able to access. The thing I have to say,
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: much to say, but this fellow, I mean, I enjoyed
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: him very much. He was lively and creative and really appealing.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: But when he came back, he was lovable, which is
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: very hard for me to say that there was such
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: a vulnerable spirit, that came forward that had broken free
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: in the ayahuasca experience, that there was this heart connection.
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: More of him was available.
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: Yes, I think lovable sounds like trite, but I don't
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: mean it that way, that it was possible to love
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: him and be loved by him in that agape, wonderful
• 53:29
  Speaker 3: human embrace. And I think that the wound of wartime
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: had walled him off from the goodness of even other people.
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: Now this is my words. I don't know whether he
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: would say quite the same thing, but subjectively, that's what
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: I felt. And so he went through what I suppose
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: anybody would say is a bad trip, which goes to
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: what you were saying, Lisa, but he, he chose to
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: put himself through something.
• 54:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah. That's a, really, really moving story. What I'm aware
• 54:11
  Speaker 4: of is he went to Peru with such seriousness of purpose.
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 54:22
  Speaker 4: And that when he was first told that he could
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: not do this work, he made a case for himself.
• 54:32
  Speaker 4: So he He took it very, very seriously and did
• 54:38
  Speaker 4: what I would consider just an enormous piece of personal
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: work around his experience and the trauma of having been
• 54:52
  Speaker 4: a soldier and having killed someone. And he was ready
• 54:56
  Speaker 4: to do it with help. I love the image of
• 54:59
  Speaker 4: these 10 shamans around him, chanting.
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: Just helping him as much as they could.
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: And yes, of course, he was changed in a way
• 55:14
  Speaker 4: that you could perceive, and obviously he could perceive. And
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: he was somehow ready for it. He chose it with
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: real consciousness and dedication, flying to Peru and doing all
• 55:31
  Speaker 4: of that at that in itself is a story, you know,
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: versus some of the more perhaps casual attitudes. And that
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: when we open ourselves to these archetypal realities and images,
• 55:49
  Speaker 4: we need to be ready for what we're going to
• 55:52
  Speaker 4: receive because we don't create that.
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: We are subject.
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: And Jung says that, you know, that he had, in
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: his years that he called the confrontation with the unconscious.
• 56:07
  Speaker 4: He walked up and down and he might, you know,
• 56:10
  Speaker 4: we could say, my gosh, was he really, you know,
• 56:12
  Speaker 4: on some substance? And he was not, that he had
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: the capacity consciously to engage images from the unconscious. And
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: he said he realized there are things in the psyche
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: that I do not produce, but produce themselves. And he
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: had this vision of this figure called Philemon that had
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: wings like a kingfisher. It's in the Red Book. You
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: can Google it. It's a famous image that Jung, after
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: he experienced Philemon for the first time, painted it in
• 56:47
  Speaker 4: order to really get it into consciousness and to work
• 56:50
  Speaker 4: with it and to integrate it into his awareness. And
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: he said Philemon represented superior insight. At times, it seemed
• 57:04
  Speaker 4: to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.
• 57:08
  Speaker 4: I went walking up and down in the garden with him,
• 57:12
  Speaker 4: and that he was to me what the Indians call
• 57:15
  Speaker 4: a guru. So we open ourselves to these things, and
• 57:20
  Speaker 4: Jung writes about times of having really felt that he
• 57:24
  Speaker 4: lost his grip on reality. and that he would have
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: to recite to himself, my name is Carl Jung, I
• 57:31
  Speaker 4: live at this street address. What a huge journey, and
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: how moving, but what a huge journey this man went on.
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, to find that wholeness. But Deb, you brought up
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: something that I do want to spend a moment with,
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: which is that all of us who have experienced early trauma.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: And Jung was one of those people. Find that we survive,
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: and I'm speaking also from my own trauma history, that
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: we survive by breaking into the inner world at a
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: very young age. We do this instinctively. Kalshad writes about this,
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: that we find that altered states and inner worlds to
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: retreat to to survive. Now, later on in life, if
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: we're lucky, we find mythologies or we find Jung's writings,
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: and we begin to chart these places that we retreated to,
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: and we get some facility about moving into them and
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: out of them, of course, so that we're not stuck
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: in them all the time. So Jerome Bernstein... has a book, Borderland,
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: where he talks about any of us who discovered the
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: thin places as children and still carry this exquisite, sensitivity
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: to the inner worlds. For people like Jung, sometimes there
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: is the path of stepping back into the concrete world,
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: developing a facility to be able to move through that
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: liminal state. So there's a portal in, but there's a
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: portal out. And when we read some accounts of Jung's
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: two years particularly where he was excruciatingly captured in the
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: inner worlds just night after night and the despair, the
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: feeling tones particularly that he talks about, that he was
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: having these agonizing feelings that were not connected adequately to
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: imagery or memories. that just were torturous to him. Finally,
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: of course, the dreams provided some symbolic images which gave
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: him some respite, which goes to what we were saying
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: right at the beginning of our episode, that we need
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: image and cosmology in order to contain these unconscious affects.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: But secondary to that, some of us do have access
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: through trauma, the inner places and we have to go
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: through a very similar process of mapping and understanding and
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: developing facilities so that one is not trapped on either
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: side because so much of what's happening in the western
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: world is we're trapped over here in the sensory world
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: and the world is only what my senses report and
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: the interior is just invisible to us that's a form
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: of being trapped being trapped in the liminal place where
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: I've got one foot in, one foot out. It's not
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: so fun either, if that goes on for years and years.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: And of course, being trapped on the far side and
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: all the fairy stories of being trapped in the fairy world.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: And that's bad news as well. But the wizards and
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: the shamans, the priestesses of the traditions are had this
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 3: way of coming to an understanding of how to walk
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: through and walk back. The Pythonesses of Apollo, they walked through,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: they prophesied, and then they walked back into the world.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: And that's what we must all do.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: Between the worlds.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: That's really, yeah. You know, Joseph, that's really lovely. And
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: I like your framing very much. I do, your discussion
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: of trauma, I think is just, you know, just right.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: And it could be that early life trauma, I believe
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: this absolutely actually, you know, creates that channel to the thin,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: you know, the place is thin. And that's why people
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: with early life trauma often have really kind of some
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: extraordinary abilities. And it could be that our experience with
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: psychedelics has to do in part with the nature of
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: our relationship with the unconscious. And that if you have
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: a trauma history or a terrible mother complex, let's say,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: that you're going to have one kind of experience with
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: all this. And whereas if you don't have a trauma
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: history and let's say that you have positive parental complexes,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: it might be a little different. I mean, I think
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: I just want to kind of offer a counterpoint, maybe
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: just another personal story about someone that I know, a
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: young person. that I know who, you know, I think
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: is pretty solid and kind of had good parental experiences.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: You know, he did it casually just with friends, you know,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: and I was asking him about it and he said,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: he said it was cool to see the walls melt,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: but that wasn't the main thing. I said, well, what
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: was the main thing? He said, it's ineffable.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: He said, I know they say it cures PTSD. I
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: can't speak to that, but I can tell you that
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: it cures atheism. Yeah, I thought it was a really
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: lovely way of expressing it. And he said, you know,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: I always thought of religion as being, you know, rules
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: and thou shalt and thou shalt not. He said, but
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: really religion is about pure love. And I thought, well,
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: that seems like it was worth the price of admission.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: No kidding. That's a true initiation.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but it was undertaken casually.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: And the self can slip in through any open window.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: And I mean, I think it's interesting and worth mentioning
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: that because I guarantee you a lot of our listeners
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: will have done these drugs casually, and some of them
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: will have had really amazing experiences. But maybe if you
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: have a certain psychic predisposition, you're more likely to have
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: that kind of experience. Whereas if you have a different
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: kind of psyche because of trauma, you might need more
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: of a container. I know it's a little mysterious, but
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: just maybe raising questions.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: And it also points to having a thoughtful orientation, which
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: doesn't have to be exalted or too casual, but to know,
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: and I think most people do, that we are courting
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: the extraordinary, which is, I think, the whole draw.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Ooh, I think that's our episode title.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: Courting the Extraordinary. I'll write that down.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: And I think your point, Joseph, that you made a
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 4: little while ago about feeling trapped, we're trapped.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was great.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: We're trapped in a world that venerates materialism and sensory experience.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 4: You can make your own list. But we're not in
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 4: a culture that is unified as ancient culture in Greece was,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: for example, around this ritual. It was the glue that
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: everyone knew about. Everyone was eligible for this if you
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 4: were a citizen. or if you spoke Greek, whether you
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 4: were a slave or some part of nobility, there was
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 4: a cultural container. And I think in today's world, we
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 4: long for and are courting the inevitable, the extraordinary, the transcendent,
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: the numinous. We want to know that there is something more.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: And to have an experience that's initiatory or confirming of
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 4: something greater.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. And this is at the core of all Jung's work,
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: is that human beings were meant to be egos that
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: are having experiences of the inner worlds. However, we contextualize
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: that as dream work or even just fantasy, as Jung said.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: If we just pursue our fantasies, we will find some
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: part of ourselves at the end of that road. And
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: so anything and all the things in our modern culture
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: that seem to be truncating, seem to be pushing the
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: ego away from that dialogue with the unconscious is a problem.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: And for instance, I would say, I know it sounds
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: like I'm beating a drum, but the hours and hours
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: that kids are playing with online gaming, that's someone else's fantasy.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: That's right.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: And I understand that it's fun, it's exciting, it's wonderfully crafted.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: But I have many clients who are under 30, and
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: their imaginations are populated by images of games that they've
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: spent 10 hours a day planning. And there's very little
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: room for the uncanny. There's very little room for the
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: spontaneity of the unconscious. And consequently, there is also an
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: enormous rise of interest in psychedelics because now there's even
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: another wall to have to break through in order for
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: the autonomous psyche to say hello.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: So I want to go there for a second and
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: talk about this because... and this is a big idea, but,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: and we've been walking around at some, but with the
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: loss of containing religions that offer us the experience of
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: the mystery and the transcendent and the loss of mythological
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: symbols that religion is based on that are kind of meaningful.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: This is, I'm reading, reading a little paragraph here from
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: a book called confrontation with the unconscious. And again, we'll
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: put it in the book list. But that with the
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: loss of these symbols, this is kind of a catastrophe
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: for humanity because we need this somehow. So here's this
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: is reading from the book. Those symbols form a bridge
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: to the archetypal depths of the unconscious Jung maintains. But
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: such such bridges are currently in a state of collapse.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: And no individual is personally responsible for this disaster. At
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: the same time, we need to appreciate that the individual's
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: unconscious will try to rebuild those broken connections. We need
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: to understand that is the attempts at restitution and cure
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: which nature herself is making. So what this author is
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: saying is that in dreams, but perhaps also in our
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: reaches into psychedelic experiences, you know, we're desperately trying to
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: build those bridges back. And now I'm going to, I
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: want to read something from the journal article I mentioned before.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: The door to the inner world that psychedelic drugs offer
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: may be more important and valuable now more than ever
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: before to challenge the dominance that the conscious ego has acquired.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: The spiritual hunger may be the deeper reason for the
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: renewed interest in research in psychedelic drugs, which I think, Joseph,
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: is exactly what you're saying. Our egos are so strong
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: and we're so kind of protected in some ways from
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: the incursions from the collective unconscious. Some of us have
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of trouble remembering our dreams. I think one
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: of you made that point earlier in the episode. Where
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: do we find that contact? And we need that contact
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: and we need those bridges. And perhaps this is a way.
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 4: That's really very interesting that our egos, our strong, capable
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 4: egos can trap us. And the psychedelics are a way
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 4: to finding our own interiority. which we're more and more
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 4: isolated from because of how busy we are and online
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 4: gaming and all of that kind of thing, that we
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 4: want to break through as a compensatory effort of how
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 4: distant we are. We need to do something to just
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: punch through and connect and find a different reality.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 3: And that it's not a reality we're reading about only
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: in books or conceptual, just as the whole basis of
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 3: Gestalt is that a single lived experience has so much
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 3: more impact than reading, considering, talking about. So for somebody
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 3: to have a single experience of, you know, I went
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: out into the forest and the tree was glowing when
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: I was breathing, I don't know, taking LSD. Maybe that's
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: the only thing they ever did their whole lives. And
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 3: maybe they can discount it as some kind of a
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: hallucinogenic endeavor. But somewhere in their imagination, there is a
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 3: glowing tree that they can't deny that they didn't experience,
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: even if it was induced. And then that means something,
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 3: the uncanniness of that. I've used this term before, but
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: it re-enchants the world. And the enchanting of the world
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 3: is to restore this, as you were saying, Lisa, a
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: mythic feeling. We're not saying abandon science or empirical proof.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: But while our outer world needs to deal with science
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: and facts, the inner world actually needs much more latitude. Yeah.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: That's lovely.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: The mythic feeling. And I think that's just right. And
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: I do want to say that I think it is
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: possible to re-enchant one's life with a mythic feeling by
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: reading fairy tales and attending to your dreams and cultivating
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: a relationship with the natural world and cultivating a relationship
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: with your interiority. So I'm certainly open and interested in
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: what psychedelics can add, but I don't think it's the
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: only way. And I do want to say here, here's
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: the other point that I want to make. And then
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: I think I'll have said what I want to say today.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: But my concern about the way psychedelics are being talked
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: about in the culture right now is that they are
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: being presented as the answer. And I think as a culture,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: we are very susceptible to seeing the answer in a substance.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: So it is, um, you know, it is, it can
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: be commodified. We can then be told just like anything
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: else that gets advertised to us. Think of all those
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: pharmaceutical ads that this substance is going to change your life.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: And then in the words of one of our colleagues,
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: I really liked this phrase. We want to be changed.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: without having to change. And that this kind of fits
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: into our kind of, I want to say, drug-seeking paradigm
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: in this culture. And finally, I'm reading here again from
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: that journal article, because I really like how they say this.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: The concern is that the ego will, in a subtle way,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: destroy what it feels and does not understand. Kalshed and
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: others warn of how readily the ego can trivialize spiritual
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: experiences and use a shallow search for superficial religious experiences defensively.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: We can misuse this psychologically and we can trivialize it
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: and also expect that it's somehow some kind of magical
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: answer that exists in the form of a substance that
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: we can ingest and then just be changed.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 3: And I have to say, absolutely. If tripping my balls
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: off was going to turn me into a guru, I
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 3: would be levitating right now. I mean, the amount of
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: LSD and psilocybin that this poor nervous system has ingested,
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 3: I should be transformed. And I still needed a long,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: long analysis to get my shit together. So I can
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: say with absolute confidence that just being exposed to a
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 3: holistic genetics is no guarantee of enlightenment at all. So
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 3: it goes to what you're saying is it isn't a panacea.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 3: Wish it was, wouldn't that be fantastic?
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: And we have a tendency to see that, right? Like
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: you've seen this with the decriminalization of marijuana, you know,
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: now suddenly like cannabis solves every problem. It's going to
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: make you sleep. It's going to make you calmer. It's
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: going to make you happier. It's going to, it's, It's
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: like the list of things that it's supposedly going to cure.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: It's like, really? I mean, you know, it's not that
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: I don't think there are probably beneficial uses of it,
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: but I think we're really susceptible because of our dependence
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: on drugs, basically, of various kinds. We're really susceptible to
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: thinking the answer is going to be in a substance.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 4: So what I'm aware of is the tendency to externalize.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 4: That it will be out there or it will come
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 4: from someone or something, and that ultimately, whether it's the
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 4: use that your friend made of ayahuasca and going to Peru,
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 4: of what enormous personal work he engaged in, or whether
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: we do our own dream work, through an analytic process
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 4: or lots of other things that you mentioned, Lisa. Ultimately,
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 4: this comes down to what is between you and you
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 4: and how do we relate to our own interiority? How
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 4: do we integrate contents of the personal unconscious and the
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 4: collective unconscious? There's no getting away from our having to
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 4: work with ourselves. And psychedelics can be an aid or not.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 4: And a hundred other things can be aids or not.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 4: But we have to go there to our own depths
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: and engage ourselves.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: And if we want access to those inner worlds with
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 3: regularity and control, we actually have to earn that.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. That's great. So I thought I was
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: done a minute ago, but Deb, you just, even though
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: you made a great summary statement, I just thought of
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: one more thing. You know, really, well, this is what
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: Michael Pollan says, right? That the benefit of these drugs
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: probably comes from, I think he uses the term a
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: perspectival shift. And actually lots of things can bring that about.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: Like travel can actually bring about a perspectival shift. Reading
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: really good novels can bring about a perspectival shift. And
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: what that looks like, in terms of the neurobiology, and
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: this again is one of the things that Pauline talks
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: about is these drugs, one of their effects is to
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: suppress the default mode network. And the default mode network
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: is kind of like, it's a correlate roughly to ego.
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: It's what we use for engaging a task. It has
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: to do with our sense of identity, our reverie and
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: our self-talk. So it's a really important part of the
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: brain But it can get us into problems. I mean,
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: if you think about like obsessive rumination, that's also in
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: the default mode network. And that's one of the things,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: kind of OCD type traits that these drugs can help
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: with because it kind of bumps you out of that
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: and it kind of quiets the ego, which I think
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: goes back to what you were saying, Joseph, about being
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: able to walk back and forth between the realms. And
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: it's you know it's the whole basis of union work
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: which is what is the relationship between the ego and
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: the self or the ego and the unconscious and everything
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: we do in a union process is around forging a
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: flexible relationship between the ego and the unconscious that both
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: are there it's it's perfect to what you said joseph
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: about not being trapped in one side or the other
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: so anyways Yeah, I just wanted to bring that in
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: about the default mode network. So maybe it's time to
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: go trip into a dream.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: Let's go tripping in a dream.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: And before we jump into the dream, I would like
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 3: to remind people, we haven't talked about it recently, but
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: our dream school is up and running. It's a wonderful
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: opportunity for those of you that want to enter into
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: a relationship with the inner world safely. And you can
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 3: do that. So you can go to our website, this JungianLife.com,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: click on Dream School, give you a bunch of information
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: about it. It's a self-paced course, and there are communities
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: to interact with. There's live Q & As. There's an
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 3: opportunity to interact with all three of us within these forums.
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 3: So if this conversation has been interesting to you, please
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: consider DreamWork. as another step in that direction. Today's dreamer
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 3: is a 30-year-old male who is unemployed, and here is
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 3: his dream. I'd heard about a hotel that was luxurious
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 3: and impressive, and though I knew I wouldn't be allowed in,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 3: I went anyway. I entered the lobby, which was enormous.
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 3: and where everything was a warm shade of brown or gold.
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 3: An employee approached me and politely told me to leave.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: I said I would, but then snuck on the elevator
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 3: when he wasn't looking. I pushed the button for the
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: 20th floor, but it took me to the 19th, where
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: the door opened onto another elevator, which went up one
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: last floor. I wandered the hallways for a while until
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 3: I got to the corner of the building, which was
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: a kind of open common space with couches. Off to
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: the side was a janitor cleaning who I passed on
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: my way to look out the window, but who stopped
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 3: me before I could reach it. He was a large,
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: oafish fellow like Chris Farley. He jerked and stretched his
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: body around to do his tasks, overexerting himself in a
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: way that I think was meant to be funny. When
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 3: he bent a certain way, I could see he had
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 3: on lacy pink women's underwear under his jeans. We spoke
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 3: for a while. but I don't really remember the conversation.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: At the end of it, we agreed that he'd be
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 3: better off working the same job, but in a movie theater.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 3: I left, going back down the elevator, and again it
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 3: took me to one floor before my destination, where I
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: had to enter another elevator to get to the lobby.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: I crossed the lobby and exited the building out onto
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 3: the street. For context, he writes, Incidentally, I'm considering training
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 3: as a Jungian analyst, So far, the applications are going fine,
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: but in some mysterious way, this seems to have brought
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 3: out a lot of things in my personal life. Personal conflicts,
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 3: family drama, etc. He says his main feelings in entering
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: the lobby, he felt some anxiety about being caught for
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: doing something that he shouldn't be. Otherwise, there weren't many
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: strong feelings. He was struck by how airy and light
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 3: everything was. He adds a few associations. I live in
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: a major city and I would associate the Dream Hotel
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: with one of those old upscale hotels downtown, places I
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: could never afford to stay. Chris Farley is not an
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: actor I think about very often. As a matter of fact,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: I don't find him very funny. And when I think
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: about him, I think mostly of a substance abuse and
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: anecdotes I've heard of him playing nasty pranks on people.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: I think this is one where I have a kind
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: of gestalt about it. Yeah, me too. Why don't you start, Deb?
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 4: I'm really putting all of this, you know, first of all,
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking about he's in a hotel. So nobody lives
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 4: in a hotel. It's a space where, you know, people
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 4: are between point A and point B or some such thing.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: It's luxurious and impressive. And dream ego is not... quite
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 4: sure he belongs there. He's told to leave and he
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 4: sneaks on the elevator and he goes up. So there's
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 4: a lot of elevation here. And I am tying it
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 4: to what he said in his comments about wanting to
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 4: train as a Jungian analyst. Because when he finally gets
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 4: up to the 20th floor, who does he meet? A
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 4: shadow figure. in the form of this janitor. I'm sorry
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 4: to say I don't know who Chris Farley is. I'm
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: a renegade from current cultural popular figures, I'm afraid. But
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 4: here is this man who prevents him from looking out
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 4: the window and is behaving in this peculiar way, wearing
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 4: lacy pink women's underwear. And he'd be better off working
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 4: in a movie theater. And then back down goes our
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 4: dream ego. So I'm thinking about, you know, what is
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 4: all this going up, going in the hotel, and this
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 4: encounter at an elevated space with somebody who's anything but?
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 4: You know, what kind of meaning.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 4: Do we make of that?
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: So I think you and I are thinking along the
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: same lines, but I think I have a few different
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: thoughts about it. So first of all, I think the
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: entry into this hotel, it does feel like this little
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: mythologem of the guardian at the threshold. Like, no, you're
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: not allowed. And in myths and fairy tales, it is
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: the right thing to do to go ahead anyway. So
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: it's this little bit of audacity that says, you know,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: I'm going to push through that. And I thought it
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: was really kind of a lovely thing that the first
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: elevator gets him almost all the way there, but not quite.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a kind of a two-step process. He
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: gets up there. And Chris Farley, I had to look
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: him up. But I don't know that my brief look
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: on Wikipedia helps me a whole lot. There's already stuff
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: in The Dream. He's sort of a kind of loud
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: and a little bit... It's a broad physical comedian.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: Physical comedy, yeah.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: Who died of a drug overdose, actually. So Chris Farley
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: is a shadow figure. He's also a bit of a trickster.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: And he contains this hidden feminine element. He has access
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: to the feminine because he's got these lacy pink panties on. So,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, I do think that the wisdom, the kind
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: of medicine in the dream comes from the figure of
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: the janitor, which is, you're right, Deb, that it's not
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: an exalted figure. It's someone that the dreamer needs to
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: get acquainted with in himself. What I am not sure
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: about is what it means to say, well, you're really
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: better off doing this in a movie theater, right? And
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: so I'd be curious, you know, if I had the
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: dreamer here, I'd say, what's the difference between the hotel
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: and the movie theater? Why would it be better to
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: go in the movie theater? What is that difference? I
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: don't know that I have an intuition about that.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 4: Well, I'm thinking about, you know, what does a janitor do?
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 4: Janitors take care of maintenance. Maintenance, you know, that has
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 4: to do with cleaning things and making sure everything works,
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 4: solving problems with plumbing or other mechanical features of a space.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 4: It's a very practical, literal, hands-on kind of job. And
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking the difference between a hotel and a movie
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: theater is a hotel is someplace that you stay while
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 4: you're on a trip or between two different locations. And
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 4: a movie theater is a place of fantasy. It's a
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 4: place where there are shows. So I don't have a
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 4: quick take on, oh, this means that. But that's interesting,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 4: a place where there are images and visions and stories, narratives, fantasies,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 4: versus a place where you reside, albeit a place of dreams.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 4: Whereas a hotel, you reside there, albeit temporarily.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: Well, and as you're talking, I'm thinking like the hotel
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: has status. This hotel is a kind of status place.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: Whereas a movie theater is not particularly. But I like
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: what you're saying about the movie theater is a place
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: of dreams and fantasies.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Stories.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, I really align with all the things that
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 3: you guys had said. such a wonderfully unlikely character to
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 3: come across. In one sense, I wonder if there is
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: an ordering process that's going on that Chris Farley is
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 3: a movie star. So he's in the wrong place. What
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: are you doing here in the hotel that you should
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 3: be associated with movies? So what I wonder is if
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 3: The Chris Farley figure has become, inside of him, has
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 3: become overly concretized and actually needs to be moved back
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 3: over into this entertainment character place. So there's a subtle,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 3: it's not a very dramatic, but a subtle sorting, getting
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: things in the right place that are in the wrong place.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 3: The idea of the wearing of the underwear that heterosexual
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 3: men who wear their wives' underwear, for instance, find it
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 3: sexually exciting, not because they're cross-dressing, but because of the
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 3: idea that the underwear was pressing up against their wives'
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 3: genitals or a woman's genitals, and now it's pressing up
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 3: against their genitals. So that the underwear becomes a kind
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 3: of symbolic representation of the female genitalia. So it's a
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 3: form of It's a way of maintaining a kind of
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 3: low-level sexual stimulation secretly over the course of the day. Now,
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 3: that's not true for everyone, but it is for a
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 3: number of people. So there's something about Chris Farley in
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 3: this dream being under-stimulated. Farley was obese. He was troubled.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 3: We could almost say that if this represents the shadow
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 3: of this young man, who's unemployed, although he aspires to
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 3: be an analyst, there's something very earthy. And, you know,
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 3: in the Shakespeare comedies, there are the ruffians, you know,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 3: that are... And Falstaff. Falstaff, Malvolio, they're kind of clown figures,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 3: but they play an important role. Often they are tempting
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 3: people to come down into the base level Come down
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 3: and be on the ground with us and let's get
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 3: drunk and let's play and party. And often the protagonist
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 3: needs to somehow be brought into that world and then
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 3: fight their way back up to a higher level of functioning.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: There's an irony that, just as you guys have pointed out,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 3: that he ascends into this very fancy environment. But what
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 3: the dream maker wants him to see is all of
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 3: this is maintained by something that is very earthy. Of course,
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 3: this is the reality, actually. All the fancy stuff that
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 3: people want to stay just one door away are all
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 3: the staff working really hard and scrubbing those floors and
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 3: painting those walls. These castles don't spring out of nowhere.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 3: It's all on the backs of people working really hard.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 3: So I also wonder if being an unemployed young fellow
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: And he needs a dose of his inner janitor. Like
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 3: pull up a mop and a bucket and a broom.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 3: Let's set aside any fancy notions and just start sweeping
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 3: and scrubbing and finding your relationship to the world that
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 3: you are in, which just as you were saying, Deb,
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 3: is to maintain. Let's, let's, Look at maintaining the world
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 3: around you as a place to get your feet on
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 3: the ground. Being a janitor is also a very sensate task.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 3: You're dealing with objects that are around you that are
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 3: rather concrete or repairing them or cleaning them, tending them,
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 3: picking up after other people. So there's a quiet, unassuming
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 3: energy about that. And even though Chris Farley is goofy
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 3: and silly, But still, he is the janitor. So to me,
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 3: it seems like you need a dose of the janitor stuff.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 3: There's a little bit going on here about something around
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 3: sexual excitation and the relationship to the feminine and the
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 3: difficulty in connecting to the feminine such that there's something fetishized, perhaps,
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: a little bit in the underwear. and that he's in relationship.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 3: So he and Chris Farley had a little tete-a-tete, and
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 3: they both decided, I like it that nobody gave any orders.
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 3: He said, we all agreed he'd be happier being a
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 3: janitor in a movie theater. And what I would imagine
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 3: the difference might be is there's just a lot more
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 3: engagement in a movie theater. Being a janitor in a
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 3: hotel is a pretty lonely thing. There's not a lot
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 3: of people to engage, but if you're there... With all
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 3: of the crowds of people coming in and out and
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 3: there's entertainment and energy and the dynamism of the Dionysic theater.
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 3: There's something a little more enlivening in that world. So
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 3: I think something work is being done on that very
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 3: grounded layer inside of himself.
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, to me, as you were talking, what came up
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: for me is, you know, it's sort of like the
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: trope of the young person shows up as an acolyte
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: to be initiated. And the wise old man says, you know,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: here's a bucket, you know, start polishing the car or
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: start sweeping the floor.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 3: Karate kid. Yeah.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right, right. Which I never saw, but I've heard
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: that you've described that. You know, because he's going over
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: to the window, right? You're on the 20th floor. What
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: do you do on the 20th floor is you want
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: to go see the view. But the janitor stops him.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: So it's sort of like, yeah, you know, it's a
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: little bit like when the knights of the round table
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: were going to set off on the Grail quest, they
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: were given a vision of the Grail. But then they
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: had to go and traipse through the brandles and the
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: marshes to find the Grail. So he's risen, he's ridden
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: up to this 20th floor. He's about to get a
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: view of what it's like. And it's like, no, no, no, no.
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: That's you don't get it yet. You don't get to
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: enjoy that view yet. You've got to go back down
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: and be a janitor and, and be in the imagination
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: rather in the exalted kind of status place. There's, there's
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: other work that needs to be done first. But I, I,
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: if I had to say, if you pressed me and said,
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: is this, What is this dream telling this person about training?
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it might be the right path. And
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: you're going to have to shift your attitude a little bit.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 3: Much more like janitorial work.
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 3: It's not fancy.
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 4: There's going to be a lot of sweeping up of
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 4: other people's spilled popcorn.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: And that's on a good day. There's also the sticky soda.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 3: And the gum under the seats. Jungian training is not fancy.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 2: you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,
• 1:36:23
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• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 2: We'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 2: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 2: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 2: living this Jungian life.