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How Did I Become a Statistic? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: This is a major part of this essay, and I
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: just want to jump to a quote. He says, the evil,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the dark foreboding
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: are there before our eyes. If only we would see.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Man has done these things. I am a man who
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: has his share of human nature. Therefore, I am guilty
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: the capacity and the inclination to do them again at
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: any time. Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: to the crime, we are always, thanks to our human nature,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: potential criminals. In reality, we merely lacked a suitable opportunity
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: to be drawn into the infernal melee. None of us
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. So take that on
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: board and ask, where is that in me? When we're
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: railing against politician, a friend, a family member. Like, where's
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: that in me?
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee. And I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. We
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: wanted to do something a little different today. We've done
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: this before, but we don't do it too often. We're
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: going to take a close look at a single essay
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of Jung's, and this one is called, it's known as
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: The Undiscovered Self, and it was published in 1957. It's
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: one of the last things that Jung wrote, and it was,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: touchingly enough, very concerned with the future. Jung knew himself
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: that he wasn't going to be around, but he was
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: very worried about about what was going to come next.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: And in fact, the first line of the essay is,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: what will the future bring? So that's what we're going
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: to talk about today.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: So it's a long essay. There's a lot that he
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: wants to bring forward and he wants people to understand,
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: which in some ways is a summation of many other
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: things that he's explored and we have even explored on
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: the podcast. So I thought that I would start by
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: just reading the final two paragraphs of which, as is
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: true for many authors, where they kind of summarize and
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: try to group things around their central point, and maybe
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: that's a place to start, and then we could work
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: backwards from that. So Jung writes, happiness and contentment, equability
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: of mind and meaningfulness of life, these can be experienced
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: only by the individual and not by the state. which
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: on the one hand is nothing but a convention agreed
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: to paralyze and suppress the individual. The psychiatrist is one
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: of those who know most about the conditions of the
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: soul's welfare upon which so infinitely much depends in the
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: social sum. The social sum and political circumstances of the
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance, for
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: the weal or woe of the individual, has been boundlessly
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: overestimated insofar as they are taken for the sole deciding factors.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: In this respect, all our social goals commit the error
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: of overlooking the psychology of the person for whom they
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: are intended, and very often, of promoting, only his illusion.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: And he ends with this parting message to all of us.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: I hope, therefore, that a psychiatrist who in the course
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: of a long life has devoted himself to the causes
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: and consequences of psychic disorders may be permitted to express
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: his opinions in all the modesty enjoined upon him as
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: an individual and the questions raised by the world's situation today.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: fate of the individual human being, that infinitesimal unit on
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: whom the world depends and in whom, if we read
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: the meaning of the Christian message right, even God seeks
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: his goal. So, yeah, we have a picture of Jung
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: looking at his life, looking at his world, looking at
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  Speaker 3: yet another political upheaval, having survived the whole Nazi horrors,
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: and now he's seeing what's emerging as communism is formulating
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: and taking hold of and creating the Soviet Union, Jung
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: is once again distressed and trying to talk to the
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: problem that he sees happening over and over again and
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: speak about it in a universal way.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Right. So setting the stage as you've begun to do,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: the World War II has been over, you know, about
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: 10 years. You know, I just, I watched over the weekend,
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: I watched Nuremberg I don't know that it was a
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: great film, but it does... You know, I was interested
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  Speaker 1: in it because it's like, well, how do you... Like,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: how do we... How do we deal with evil, right?
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  Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, Jung was trying to
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: do that.
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  Speaker 2: Like, what.
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  Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot in this essay that's very
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: cogent about the nature of evil and what we have
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: to do about that. It's the Cold War, so he
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: talks a lot about the Iron Curtain. And, of course, the.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: Nuclear weapons are now on the table. And he mentions
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: that too. So he's very concerned about what's going on
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: on this kind of grand scale and the split between
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: East and West and how he sees that as kind
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: of a macrocosm of the microcosm of the split within individuals.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, our own propensity for evil and
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: destruction and how that's playing out on a large scale
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: as well. To give a little background on this, it
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: was first called Present and Future. That was the original title.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: And it grew out of some conversations with Carlton Smith,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: who was the director of the National Arts Foundation. And Dr.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Smith then kind of put it in the way of
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: the Atlantic magazine. And I think an early version of
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: it appeared in the Atlantic. And we'll link to that.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: And the title of the Atlantic article is God, the
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Devil and the Human Soul. And you can still find
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: it there on their website. And then it was published
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: as a kind of, you know, short monograph book and
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: then later became part of the Collected Works. So that's
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a little bit of the history of this very pressing
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: essay that he wrote.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: I find the evolution of the titles in and of
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: themselves really interesting, that when Jung was titling it for himself,
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: it seems like, we don't know, that he wanted this
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: to be seen as an almost historical analysis of Then
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: it's published and it becomes this kind of moral, religious drama, God,
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: the devil, and the human. And then finally, when the
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: title The Undiscovered Self is used to kind of wrap
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: it and present it, it's about psychological responsibility.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm, yes.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: It may give us a sense of the way that
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: the collective even tried to find the right place for
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: these ideas.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. So I'm going to read just a little bit about, again,
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: if we're just going to look at the history of
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the work for a second and the titling. Barbara Hanna
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: writes about this in her book, Jung, His Life and Work.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: And she talks about the difficulties with the translations and
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: how frustrated Jung was with Richard Hull and the changes
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that he made. And then he actually told Barbara Hanna
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: to go down and kind of argue the case. So
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: she does. And Apparently, Hull gave out and she says
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: the work now follows the German much more exactly. And
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: she notes, I do not know when and why the
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: title was changed from the German present and future to
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: the English, the undiscovered self. But she says both titles
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: describe the content well. So I think I'll just read
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: just a little bit more about what Hannah has to
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: say because it's moving. She says, It was, it seems
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: to me, very touching that most of what Jung wrote
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  Speaker 1: in these last five years of his life was full
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: of anxious concerns. for the future of the world. Most
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: people are inclined to think that what happens after their
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: death will no longer concern them, but though he knew
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: he had only a short time to live, Jung had
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  Speaker 1: a love of humanity which made him more rather than
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  Speaker 1: less concerned with its fate after his death. We can
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  Speaker 1: find this anxious concern in all he wrote in his
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: last years, though only the undiscovered self is directly devoted
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  Speaker 1: to this theme and even begins with the question, what
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  Speaker 1: will the future bring? This short book of Jung's, which
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  Speaker 1: goes deeply and most constructively into our most urgent problems,
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  Speaker 1: is far too little known. He asks, for instance, the
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: meaning of living in an age filled with apocalyptic images
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: of universal destruction, and inquired into the significance of the
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  Speaker 1: split in humanity symbolized by the Iron Curtain. He further asked,
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  Speaker 1: what will become of our civilization and of man himself
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if
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  Speaker 1: the spiritual and moral darkness of state absolutism should spread
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: over Europe?
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  Speaker 3: So we have a sense of the life and death
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  Speaker 3: stakes that Jung is imagining here. And yes, he does.
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  Speaker 3: really want to both analyze and in some ways criticize
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  Speaker 3: this observable phenomena when certain governments are able to assume
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  Speaker 3: an extraordinary, shocking amount of power over their populace. But
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  Speaker 3: he's also, perhaps relative to our understanding of his work,
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  Speaker 3: he's asking whether or not the individual psyche can survive
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  Speaker 3: the massification of the culture without losing conscience, agency, and
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  Speaker 3: moral responsibility.
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  Speaker 1: And meaning.
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  Speaker 3: And meaning. And that is a universal challenge. And it
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  Speaker 3: is just as relevant today because we are the same humans.
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  Speaker 3: We haven't evolved that much, you know, in whatever number
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  Speaker 3: of decades. But it is something that we can only
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  Speaker 3: have hope of working with if we even know it's
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: an issue. So, while Jung is watching another iteration of
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: this kind of political problem, this large organizational issue, he
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  Speaker 3: is always coming down to the individual, which is the
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  Speaker 3: core of his psychology, individuation. He's not a social psychologist,
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  Speaker 3: but he understands that the way that the individual can
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  Speaker 3: be swallowed and become a kind of mass entity is
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: of concern because his senses, and of course, as Jungians,
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  Speaker 3: I think we're all aligned with that, that something essential
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  Speaker 3: is lost. And Jung is trying to understand it, but
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  Speaker 3: also trying to figure out what needs to be developed
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  Speaker 3: in the individual so they can withstand the incredible pressure
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  Speaker 3: to be drawn into mass consciousness without even realizing how
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: much that they've surrendered.
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  Speaker 1: And just to say a little bit more about the stakes,
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  Speaker 1: you know, there's other things that Jung says elsewhere late
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: in life. He says, we are the future of all
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  Speaker 1: coming evil. And he says, the fate of man hangs
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: by a slender thread, and that thread is the psyche
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  Speaker 1: of man. So really making the point that he makes
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  Speaker 1: in this essay that we've got to take responsibility for
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  Speaker 1: ourselves as individuals in this very kind of immediate and
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: real way and not be absorbed in the masses. And
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: I also want to say that at some point he
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  Speaker 1: told Marie-Louise von Franz, you know, he had those visions
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: of the First World War, you know, that he saw
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Europe covered in a sea of blood, blah, blah, blah. Apparently,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: and I'm sorry, this is not very cheery, but he,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: had other visions later where he saw enormous stretches of
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: the planet devastated. So he really felt like, hey, this
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: is my chance to leave something behind that might show
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: a way through this, and I'm going to give it
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: to you in this essay.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: And from that standpoint, I suppose that he is hoping
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: not only to deliver his message, which finally by the
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: end of his life is very well-developed He understands who
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: he is, what he's created. By the way, much of
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: the collected works leading up to that comes forward from
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: many different periods in his own development of concept. But
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: here we have a picture of Jung has his own
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: opus and taking a perspective. So it sounds like he
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: wants to create a sense of urgency around this issue
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: of the personal development and the personal development in very
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: specific ways so that perhaps he can rest in some fashion,
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: that he can trust something about the human spirit, which
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: he has become apparently somewhat pessimistic about. Yeah.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Well, at least concerned, you know, I think he's fighting
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: pessimism as you kind of read in those final chapters. But,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: you know, he says early on in the essay, which
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: is kind of going back to the place that you
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: really were digging into us for, the mass crushes out
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: You know, and we know, and we've talked about it
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: before on the podcast, that he really was very distrustful
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: of mass psychology. And there it is, very plainly, that
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: it's dangerous. People become dangerous when they're in masses, I
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: think Jung would say. And also they're dehumanizing. They strip
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: us of our individuality and that that's kind of the
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: key thing that allows for growth is that individual negotiation.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: And this is not a conscious decision. That's the thing
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: that is so hard for any of us to to
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: really lean into. These forces are things that human beings
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: are affected by and don't know they're affected by and
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: would swear it's not even happening because subjectively they're sure
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: that they are the same stout individualists that they were
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: before they got involved with some kind of a mass movement.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: But upon observation, and often it's family members who are
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: in the background saying, you don't remind me of you
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: any longer. I don't know what's happening here. And just
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: on a more humorous level, all of us know this
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: is true because we are influenced by fashion.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yes.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: And we might take that as a kind of benign mass-mindedness,
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: but for instance, I'm going to say something rather silly,
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: but I remember when people dyeing their hair outrageous colors
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: showed up, and we began to see pictures, and it
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: was associated with the punk rock movement over in England.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: And I thought it was very unappealing. And lo and behold,
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: I'm in the supermarket, and some lovely old lady's checking
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: me out with a big half her head's in pink,
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: and I'm looking and saying, oh, that's so cute. Like,
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: how did that happen? I know. This shift of... Of
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: values and then aligning with a certain kind of collective
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: valuation of an appearance. Should we be wearing bell bottoms
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: or slim jeans? And all of a sudden, you're just
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: buying what everybody else is.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, we're mimetic creatures, right? But the interesting thing,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: and I think this is a great example that you
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: brought up, because it's not just that you do what
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: everyone else does, but it's that you see it and
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: you're like, that looks good.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: You think it's you that made that decision.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Right. But there's like an emotional response to it.
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: We're like, oh, that, you know, some. Yeah, I'm trying
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: to think. I mean, I could think of any number
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: of things that it's like. What are those like? There's
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: these ridiculously expensive blingy tennis shoes. I can't. Are they called?
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: golden goose or something. Anyway, like I see them and
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I'm like, oh my God, those are so cute. And
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: I'm like, who decided that those are the thing? And
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: they're like, wait, I would never buy them because they're
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: like way too expensive. But it's like, yeah, I have
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: like an affective response to it. And it's like, and
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: then everyone is wearing them, you know? So it happens unconsciously, right?
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: He says in this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. And this
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: is just true, and it's true of all of us. Right.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: And so once we just admit that this is just
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: like a valve in the human psyche that just never closes,
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: it's just this constant exchange between us and the social environment,
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: And as you were saying, Lisa, there's an element of
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: emotional contagion. People have a loss of self-reflection. They kind
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: of regress to this group consciousness that Levi-Bruhl called participation mystique.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: And there are a couple of things that Jung is noting, again,
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: most of us can see, that when a group is
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: swept into an increasingly emotional intensity, that the ability to
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: think about what's happening collapses. And boy, that's true. And
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: most of us can find at least one example of that,
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: either we observed it or we were participating in it.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: The other thing that Jung is leaning into, which I
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: think is his fear particularly about the rise of communism,
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: is that the individual becomes psychologically replaceable. And this is
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: present in our culture, even in a modern American culture,
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: how easily we have accepted the term human resource. That
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: you're no longer a human being, you're a resource. And
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: we're going to manage our resources on behalf of the corporation.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: It's so common. None of us balk at it. It's
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: part of organizations. And in some ways, it's also helped
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: us because they do hold a certain way of protecting
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: the individual from abuse. But also, we have become resources.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: We have social security numbers. Now we're numbers. So Jung
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: was very concerned and observing the way that humans have
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: become units of a thing, and particularly in the Soviet Union,
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: or any of the communist revolutions, by the way, there's
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: this wiping out of the previous culture, this assignation from
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: each according to their talent, to each according to their need,
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: and the state then positions you in the beehive, so
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: to speak, of the culture and you will live out
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: your life in this prescribed fashion with really no regard
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: necessarily for your unique and perhaps very different need to
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: be in the world.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: And one of the things that I think this essay
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: does so well is really kind of show that there's
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: not a huge difference between between the way that a
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: country like the Soviet Union turns people into cogs rather
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: than individuals, and the way that that happens in large-scale structures, corporations, governments, organizations,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: even in the West.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: So once we see the pattern of it, we can
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: see how we have participated it in ourselves. As therapists,
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: we're admonished. If you submit something to an insurance company,
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: You're turning your client into a code.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: We're kind of forced to do this kind of depersonalization
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: process in order to participate in certain aspects of our culture.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: And so Jung also takes a stance against the kind
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: of empiricalization of psychology with this rise of statistically based research.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: and trying to discern what the average human should be,
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: and then create kind of Likert scales to discern where
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: deviation is and the problems with deviation from the norm,
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: and psychology then becoming a tool of normalization. And that
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: looks like a psychology of coping skills, because the most
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: important thing is your ongoing participation in the culture. You
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: don't want to go to work? all right, here's some
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: techniques to get you to work because your primary task
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: is to work on behalf of the machine around you.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: A lot of energy and research going into that.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Right. So he talks about this factor of mass-mindedness, which
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: is kind of these huge numbers and agglomerating people and
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: turning them in, like you've been saying, into facts and
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: codes and social security numbers and... The other thing that
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: he takes aim at is rationality without commensurate regard for
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: the irrational or the non-rational. So he says, apart from
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: his dignity. As a social unit, he has lost his
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: individuality and become a mere abstract number. In the Bureau
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: of Statistics, he can only play the role of an
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. Looked at rationally from the outside,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: that is exactly what he is. And from this point
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: of view, it seems positively absurd to go on talking
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: about the value or meaning of the individual. But that
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: value and that meaning can be found in that which
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: is irrational.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: Because what we would consider irrational is what is unique
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: and spurred on by our own individual condition that is
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: not tempered by the environment. There's a story that von
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: Franz tells, and I can't remember whether it was one
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: of her video lectures or she wrote it. It all
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: gets mushed together in my mind, but I know it
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: was von Franz. And she was... She was talking about
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: a really upsetting thing that she observed that I believe
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: she knew or worked with an old woman who was
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: living in a kind of diminished circumstance, but her life
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: had become caring for this enormous community of cats. And
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: that gave her purpose. And she loved the cats and
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: they loved her. And von Franz had occasion to be
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: with her in this world. and to see her as
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: a unique human being, that was finding tremendous meaning. The
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: Swiss government, ever improving their social programs, decided that it
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: would be of great benefit to build housing for people
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: that were in these marginal circumstances, and they lifted this
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: woman out of her of course, all of the cats
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: are left behind, and she was put into a rather
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: sterile but clean, very nicely appointed facility, whereupon she declined, faded, wilted,
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: and passed away fairly quickly. And from Louise von Franz's perspective,
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: it was this interference of the state in what was
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: meaningful enough that tethered that soul to life itself that
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: which again may not seem rational to people who are looking,
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: the social workers or commissioners that are sure they're saving
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: this poor person from living in squalor, let's say. But
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: there's no time to look under the surface and discern
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: that underneath the outer seeming of this is actually the
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: entire thread of this person's life that cannot be severed
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: so easily. cavalierly, even through best intentions.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great example. And I'm thinking that, you know,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: it has to do, like you said, with meaning. And
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: it also has to do, and he goes into this
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: in some real detail, with our relationship with the transpersonal.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: That's what we need, is we need a personal experience,
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: not a faith, not blind faith, but an experience of
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: the transpersonal. In other words, and he doesn't use this language,
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: but I think this is what he's saying, in order
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: for the individual life to have meaning, in order for
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: us to have an experience, an existence outside that kind
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: of mass-mindedness, requires that we cultivate a mythic sensibility.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: And I think what he's tracking is that as the
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: state becomes more efficient, and perhaps even with all good intention,
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: which I think that story of von Franz was telling,
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: you know, this is for your good, and many people say, well,
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: that does look like a better circumstance from the outside,
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: that the state takes over so that the individual becomes
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: a general abstraction, and responsibility then migrates from the individual
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: into the individual, the institutions and the individual becomes anesthetized
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: to their own sense of creating a life and creating
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: a destiny. And what you were bringing in, Lisa, which
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: is so central to Jung's work, is that without a
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: tether to something that is stronger than the mass pull
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: of We are going to go down that river. We're
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: going to get pulled off our feet. We're 10 miles
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: down the river just nodding and agreeing to whatever these
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: large organizations require of us. There was a survey done,
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: and I wish.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: I could be.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: more articulate about it, but maybe it was under the
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: Gallup poll surveys where they were looking at generational differences
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: in their relationship to technology, and they were surveying these
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: very young millennials who are now adults, but this was
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: quite a while ago, and they were asking questions Who
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: would be willing to have a computer chip inserted into
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: your body if it then made all these other things
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: much easier? And the overwhelming number of millennials that they
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: surveyed said, why, absolutely, why wouldn't you?
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: Oh, geez.
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: And us old curmudgeons up here are like.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: But, you know, so I want to say something. So,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: first of all, I do just want to say, do
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: you like my mug?
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: Your mug? is amazing. Where did you get that?
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: I got this from our merch store. It says, what
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: did you dream about last night? And I love this mug.
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: I love it.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure everyone knows that you can
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: get a mug like that and become part of our mass-mindedness.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: That's right. But seriously.
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: Our army of This Jungian Life zombies marching with mugs
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: in their hands asking, what did you dream last night?
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Shambling along with pithy, psychologically-minded sayings. But seriously, you were
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: talking about that, and I found myself thinking of some
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Pink Floyd lyrics. And in some sense, I would have
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: to go back and listen to it, but I think
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: that whole album, The Wall, is really kind of partly
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: what we're talking about here. It's like that idea of
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: just becoming comfortably numb and becoming just part of the masses.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: And how one kind of fights against that. I'm going
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: to have to go back and revisit that album. But
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: I think there's something there.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: I think it's part of that genre of music also
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: that's this kind of, you know, fight against the machine
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: and the kind of unconscious anger that's necessary to kind
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: of push back the norms that the culture is always
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: generating and pushing into its young people.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: But it is interesting that one of the ways to
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: fight against that is through music, right, which is something transcendent.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, even if you don't particularly like Pink Floyd, but.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: Through art of all kinds, yeah.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, art of all kinds, exactly. But Jung, the second
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: chapter in this essay is religion as the counterbalance to mass-mindedness.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: And this is a very, very important idea. He says
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: religion means dependence on... and submission to the irrational facts
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: of experience. So if you refuse to acknowledge that which
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: you cannot make rational sense of, you are cutting yourself
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: off from the irrational facts of experience. So that might be.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Synchronicity.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: A synchronicity, exactly. Or a dream that shook you to
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: your foundations. And he has this really interesting part in
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: here where he talks about Freud let me see if
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: I can find it in here basically that you know
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: that that Freud sort of taught us about the power
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: of the unconscious but then he himself was afraid of
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: the irrational facts of existence Freud was he was a
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Freud oh that was a Freudian slip or something.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: That was a bad dad joke, but go ahead.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's what it was. I'm flipping through here to
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: find the reference to Freud. But, you know, what Freud
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: tells him, and Jung tells that story again here, you know,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Freud says you must fight against the black tide of occultism.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: You must uphold the sexual theory, Freud's sexual theory, that
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: our neuroses are a result of sexual conflicts, basically unacknowledged,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: unconscious sexual conflicts. Because Occult phenomena made Freud very, very anxious.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: This inexplicable strangeness that happens if we're paying attention, even
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: in an ordinary life.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Yes. Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: human history. Its evident purpose is to maintain the psychic balance,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: for the natural man has an equally natural knowledge of
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: the fact that his conscious functions may at any time
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: be thwarted by uncontrollable happenings coming from inside as well
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: as outside. And then he goes on, but I think
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: I'll stop there. But the point is, he's not talking about,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: you know, sort of dogmatic faiths.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: He's not talking about organized religions of one denomination or another.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: He's right. He's not talking about denominational faith. He's talking
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: about an experience of something.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: So he's setting up his argument and he's saying first
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: that religion is an instinctive orientation towards a transcendental authority.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: We may collect evidence for that by seeing strange and
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: uncanny and irrational happenings around us of all kinds. It
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: may happen through a formal search of meditation or self-inquiry
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: or dream analysis. But the important thing is that the
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: religious connection to the transpersonal offers a standpoint that is
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: outside the collective and is not conditioned by the collective.
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: And one of the uncanny things that I've experienced and
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: maybe many of the listeners have, that if you've been
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: around somebody who is deeply connected to that center in themselves,
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: their behavior becomes unpredictable. And if someone's behavior is predictable,
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: it's because they are following a kind of mass-agreed pattern.
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: I never know what that person's going to say. And
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: it's so interesting. That's interesting. What's prompting that person so
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: that they're not just repeating stuff they listen to on Instagram?
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: So the self is responding or generating kind of direction
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: from within itself and is not trying to please the
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: collective and so one of the famous quotes that i
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: like in the in the gospels is jesus allegedly saying
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: well wait a minute i've not come to make peace
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: right i i've come to put a sword in your
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: hands to create enmity before between a father and a
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: son and a mother and a daughter and what that's
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: capturing in that beautiful religious poetry is a truth about
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: the influence of the self, that the self may not
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: be interested in your mom's plans for your career. And
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: she might not be happy about that.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, ultimately, this is a radically
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: optimistic view, right? Because he is saying there is something
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: more than what a political party promises you. There is
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: something beyond what, you know, economic advisors say might be important.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: And it's yours individually, unmediated. You don't need a priest.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: You don't need a guru. You don't need anything except
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: a relationship with your own unconscious.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: So Jung establishes, and he has on and off throughout
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: many of his writings, that his primary concern and his
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: belief in what is curative is strengthening or restoring the
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: ego-self axis, which is one way that his friend Neumann
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: had helped him find language to imagine the relationship between
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: the ego and the self, which can be interfered with
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: in lots of ways. So he sets out that this
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: is just how we're wired. This is religious instinct to
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: find and yield to the transcendent authority, and it cannot
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: be abolished. It does not disappear, but it can be
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: repressed or suppressed. It goes underground, and it reappears in
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: a distorted form. And the distorted form he's very concerned
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: about is that the state, the government, or an ideology
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: becomes a kind of substitute god.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: He says in the Sese, there's a couple of great
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: quotes to that effect. He says, you can take away
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: a man's gods only to give him others. And then
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: he also says, religion, in the sense of conscientious regard
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: for the irrational factors of the psyche and the individual fate,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: reappears evilly distorted in the deification of the state and
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: the dictator.
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: So when our images of God, our unique individual sense
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: of the divine or the transcendent is somehow interfered with,
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: then we will naturally find a substitute, whether or not
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: someone orders us to do it, that we will lean
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: into it. And so he tells us that political movements
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: actually require this, that they can't gain the power that
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: they do without consciously or unconsciously taking on this role.
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: So the political movement, he tells us, is going to
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: start evidencing rituals and moral absolutism is going to have
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: some way of declaring heresy and apostasy and is going
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: to require some form of sacrifice and purification. And if
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: we were just to ponder those kind of four categories
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: and really intimately follow any political movement, for instance, you're
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: going to see all of those elements subtly or grossly
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: present in it. and people attending to those processes with
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: the same dedication that they might have gone to church
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: on Sunday as kids.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know, David Foster Wallace, the author,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: wrote Infinite Jest. He famously said, you can't not worship.
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: Yes, that we are designed to.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: And I think he's saying exactly the same thing. And
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: what he goes on to say is pick what you
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: worship carefully because some things will have the power to
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: really devour you. And I think Jung would absolutely agree
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: with that.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: And we have vast historic examples of this melding of
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: religion and politics that go back into very ancient times.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, sure.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: So whether we're looking at the pharaohs who were the
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: political leaders and also held to be gods. to, in
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: some ways, our presidents. So one of the things that,
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: you know, when I was young, I held a bazillion
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: different little jobs for brief times, and I got this
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: gig being a tour guide in Washington, D.C., which forced
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: me to have to learn a bunch of stuff.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: That's so cool.
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: It was fun, you know. And then, of course, you know,
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: I'd get a gig acting, and then I'd have to
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: give it all up. So I had a lot of
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: little brief times and things. But I remember... one of
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: the trips to the capital, the U.S. capital, and I
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: was looking up at the art in the dome, and
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: I saw this kind of heavenly scene, almost like the
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: Sistine Chapel, and I'm looking up at this figure dressed
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: like God in the clowns, and then I'm reading the plaque,
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: and they're like, oh my God, that's George Washington.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: Up there in this God-like, elevated position, I was quite
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: young at that time, and I thought, how did that happen?
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: And they call it the aposteosis of George Washington. And
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: it is a natural instinct. It's not some evil genius,
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: by the way. There's a committee of well-meaning folks who
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: are meeting with an artist, and they're getting all these
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: bids for artwork and somebody comes up with this drawing
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: and a committee of politicians are like, whoa, I don't
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: know why, but that looks really, that looks just right.
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: So we naturally want to deify our leaders if we
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: have lost connection to other more archetypal stories, images, and
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: figures inside of ourselves and also in a way that
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: gives us a feeling for it. So the sacralization of
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: politics is actually all around us. And the sacralization of
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: other organizations is really all around us.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Turning an ism into a religion, basically. I mean, Jung
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: talks a lot about isms. And at one point, you know,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: he said, you know, we've abolished the old gods, the
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: new gods all rhyme with isms. So these are our
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: new gods, whether it's, you know, progressive-ism or MAGA-ism, you know,
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: and could come up with all kinds. And they're on
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: both sides of the political spectrum.
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: Totally.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: So, you know, it's sort of like when you become
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: part of a mass movement. And, you know, I would
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: say that I think I feel somewhat less suspect of
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: mass movements than... Jung did. I mean, I certainly think
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: a lot of what he said was true, but there
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: may also be a force for good in there somewhere, possibly,
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: I guess.
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: Yes, he had a trauma complex about how these things
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: unfolded around him and lived time, which I get.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: But there's no question he's right that they're dangerous. There's
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: no question about that. But when you find yourself part
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: of a mass movement and feel a sense of fervor
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: about your cause, you might wonder, does this feel kind
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: of like a religious fervor, whatever that cause is? Because
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: what Jung is saying is, this is an instinct. It's
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: an instinct to respond to the world this way. And
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: people will, institutions, leaders, political parties, will take advantage of
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: that instinct, sometimes, you know, manipulating us knowingly in order
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: to control us. Even if no one's consciously pulling our
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: strings that way, though, we will have a tendency to
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: respond to things in that way. We'll have a tendency
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: to look for that kind of experience. What he wants
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: us to do is have an individual religious experience. of
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: the God within, as he might say.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: And lacking that, if for whatever reason we've not had
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: the natural benefit of that, can we at least suppose
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: that it would be helpful and perhaps experiment to see
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: if it is within reach, something greater than our personality
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: that we can trust that is outside of the socioeconomic
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: systems that we're embedded in? So he's saying that we
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: have an instinct to create our own gods if we
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: don't find an experience of the transcendent within. It's going
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: to happen. There's no way it can't happen that that
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: instinct is part of what makes us human and also
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: keeps us up and running and keeps us resilient in
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: other ways. That modern societies claim to be secular, but
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: psychologically they are not. Which is, again, not a nefarious agenda.
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: It's simply the natural way that societies evolve in response
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: to unconscious demands. And one of the unconscious demands is
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: to evidence certain sacred principles within the secular organization because
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: they're not present in other places. That we need that
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: so badly that we will worship at the altar of
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: political or other organizational demands, because something inside of us
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: will not rest until we find a place to worship,
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: as you were saying, Lisa.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: And I mean, if you look at, if you read
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: the social psychologists or the evolutionary psychologists, what they say
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: is that, you know, religion may have evolved to be
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: part of our very nature. They agree with Jung on that,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: by the way, because it offers a advantages at the
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: level of group selection. So the evolutionary biologists say it's
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: not just the individual that's competing with other individuals for
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: evolutionary ascendancy, but it happens at the level of groups.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: So there's group selection that goes on. One group is
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: better bonded than another group. They may win if there's
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: an intergroup conflict. And you know, religion binds us together.
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: So it sort of acts as that kind of glue.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: You know, that's the paradox, I think, of the religious attitude,
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: is it does this thing that Jung is pointing to
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: and saying, that's a problem. And I think it is
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: a problem. I mean, that thing that binds us together,
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: that allowed our ancestors to survive, is the very thing
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: that may impel us towards self-destruction now, right? But embedded
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: in it also is this potential for awe, a potential
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: for the relativization of the ego. And Jung says very
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: movingly that our modern society calls for something like an
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: attitude of, he mentions the term caritas, kind of this
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: benevolent attitude of love for one's neighbor. So we can
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: use that tendency in the human psyche, this religious attitude,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: both to strengthen our personal relationship with something beyond us
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: and invite a benevolent attitude toward our fellow man, or
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: we can let it suck us in to this kind
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: of mass-minded attitude that inevitably becomes us against them. That's
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: the problem with it.
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: And so Jung is observing it. We can observe our
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: own participation perhaps from time to time in similar systems
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: or observe it, you know, as we're surveying the world.
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: So he's analyzing this structuring of the iron curtain, so
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: to speak, a term that's no longer so relevant, but
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: at that time in the, you know, mid to late 50s,
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: it was a powerful and frightening force. What was happening
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: with Lenin and Stalin was shocking, shocking. Children's prisons, millions
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: of people imprisoned, killed by their own government in order
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: to homogenize this kind of obedience. So evil is projected outward.
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: The West is evil or the East is evil or
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: this group's evil, that's evil. But there first has to
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: be some place that what is considered unacceptable is evacuated into.
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: The enemy becomes monstrous, demonic. There's all these absolutist terms,
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: which then allows the people that are inside of the
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: group to be morally innocent, permitting violence to protect one's innocence.
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: And all of that projection outward creates a kind of
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: fear and paranoia on the ones who are in the system,
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: then reinforcing the extremes to which one must protect oneself
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: against those terrible ones over there. And so what he's
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: bringing us back to, which is his whole evolved method,
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: that the first step in finding the transcendent is confronting shadow.
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: That it can seem rather simplified, but there is a
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: bit of a formula that Jung brought forward is when
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: you're in analysis, shadow work is the start, which is
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: reclaiming the things you once knew and found that they
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: should be hidden. The second is that anima animus stuff,
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: which are discovering the traits of your personality that are
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: held in reserve and often projected out. And when those
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: two things are kind of well-cooked, well on their way,
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: then it becomes more likely that we will catch glimpses
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: of the self that It's not that the self isn't
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: a player, isn't involved prior to that, but shadow and
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: this anima anima stuff takes up so much energy and
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: eats up so much imagery inside of us that it's
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: almost impossible to discern the action of the self in
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: the midst of this internal crowd that's constantly moving. So
• 51:54
  Speaker 3: he is talking about the problem of evil and the
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: acceptance that human beings must take into themselves that we
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: are all capable of atrocities. And he's really challenging us
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: to take an ethical pivot that as we look at
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: the thing that we want to go to war about
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: and destroy this person, organization for, to be able to
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: use the imagination and say, in what ways might I
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: be capable of that? And if not exactly that, something
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: like that. And to give up this idea that they
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: are monsters and I am soft and human and innocent
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: and other things. So this ability to at least try
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: to pull into ourselves and find the correlates that we
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: were not able to tolerate before is the first step.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: And Jung writes extensively about shadow work. So there's enormous
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: things and people can also read reference any number of
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: our previous podcasts on shadow work, but the thing that
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: we want to destroy out there is the impossible conflict
• 53:12
  Speaker 3: inside ourselves that only we can wrestle with and find
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: a way to be at peace with. And the irony
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: is that when we have a piece of shadow back
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: in our hands, At first, it may feel frightening or
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: scary or kind of burns our psychological skin, so to speak.
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: After a while, strange enough, it becomes a strength. Because
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: it gives us a kind of authority in the face
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: of that energy wherever it shows up in the future.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: That was just all great what you said. And this
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: is a major part of this essay. And I just
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: want to jump to a quote where he's basically saying,
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: saying what you've been discussing, he says, the evil, the guilt,
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: the profound unease of conscience, the dark foreboding are there
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: before our eyes, if only we would see. Man has
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: done these things. I am a man who has his
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: share of human nature. Therefore, I am guilty with the
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: and the inclination to do them again at any time.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crime,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: In reality, we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: drawn into the infernal melee. None of us stands outside
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: humanity's black collective shadow. So take that on board and ask,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: where is that in me? when we're railing against a politician,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: a friend, a family member. Like, where's that in me?
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: So he's giving us some steps that the individual isn't
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: going to be able to resist mass possession unless they
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: take on rigorous self-examination, they engage with the unconscious, they're
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: working on integrating the shadow and developing an inner authority,
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: that is not conditioned by the culture, what is not
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: going to save any of us is self-optimization, self-branding, and
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: therapeutic narcissism. Not going to save us from this. It
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: might help us in other ways, who knows. But whether
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: or not it's going to keep us connected to what
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: makes us ourselves, it is in the inner kind of quest.
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: So.
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: There's so much to be said in this. There's so
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: much power in it. But what I think I come
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: away with as I was revisiting, as I was pondering
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: this for today's discussion, is how Jung, here at the
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: end of his life, he steps away from using the
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: word the self. When Jung was having these extraordinary inner
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: experiences and he was formulating a new theory around psychology,
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: he felt that even using the word God was so
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: fraught that everybody had kind of a God complex, having
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: thousands of ideas and experiences, many of which were very ambivalent.
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: So he kind of leaned over to the east and
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: looked at the word Atvan, which is the idea of
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: the indwelling divine, which was translated and translated continues to
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: be translated as the self and apparently he thought that's
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: great because archetypally we are talking about the same thing
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: but it would help him be able to redefine the
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: concept in the european western european consciousness which he was
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: able to do successfully as he began to age and
• 57:09
  Speaker 3: as here in the last few years of his life
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: he reclaims that language, the religious language, and he becomes
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: comfortable talking about God and defining it. And that he
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: has been talking about this all along. But what he
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: means by that, I think, is far different from what
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: the average person might take for that word. But here,
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: he's out and proud and he's not mincing words.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: This is what's going on. And religion means connection to God,
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: a living experience to the divine. And that's the only
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: hope of holding your own in a world where these
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: extraordinary powerful forces are going to sweep you up. That
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: it's an inevitability they will if you don't have an
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: upward anchor.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, I like that a lot, an upward anchor. And
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: so maybe... To kind of finish, I can just read
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: off this question that he asks us in the middle
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: of the essay. He says, Here each of us must ask,
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God,
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: and hence that certainty which will keep me as an
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: individual from dissolving into the crowd?
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: Beautiful. I love that.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe something to ponder.
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: So one of the things that is totally and ever
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: individual is your dream, that you wake up every morning,
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: this is a dream, maybe it seems wacky, you had
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: dinner with a giraffe or angels or working in your
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: office or any number of fun things, but it's the
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: dream that gives you proof that something that is not
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: living and obeying your culture is interested and talking to
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: you in its symbolic language. Now, I would also like
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: to just remind people that we love to have you
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: come onto our website and share your dream. There's a
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: forum where you can share a dream or many dreams
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: that you've had and give us a little bit of information.
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: It's an incredible gift to us to receive your dreams
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: because we get to share with other people this secret
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: language of the unconscious, but also again and again teach
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: people a way to orient to dreams. When we analyze
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: a stranger's dreams, there's many things we can't know about them,
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: and we understand that. But we are trying to in vivo,
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: conduct a little master class and see this is a
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: way that you can look through the symbolic language. So
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: I really hope that many of you will jump onto
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: our site and send us a dream. So today's dreamer
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: is a 23-year-old male who works as an engineer. And
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: this is his dream. I was upstairs in my waking
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: life's home. I entered the hallway when a flying, pale,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: vampire-looking creature approached me. He started to be very aggressive
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: and we started to fight each other. After some sparring,
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: I somehow had the idea to try and take his
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: brain out of his head. Gross, I know. I was
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: able to pin him down, and attempt to take it
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 3: out and succeeded. The brain was not a brain, but
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: rather a heart, and it fit in the palm of
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: my hand and was bloody. Next thing I knew I
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: was in the basement of the same house fighting zombies.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: My basement transformed into a hellish landscape with fire and
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: blood all over the place. I fought zombies with guns
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: and with my bare hands for a while. When I
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: got tired, I tried to run, but could not do
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: it no matter how hard I tried. I somehow escaped
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: the basement and ended up in my bed and went
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: to sleep. Still dreaming, I woke up in the dream
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: and went outside to see three feet of snow surrounding
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 3: my house, and some voice said to me to turn
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: back inside. For context, he writes, I recently moved back
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: home after living on my own for 15 months. I
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: moved because I did not like where I was living.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: My home can be pretty unpredictable at times. I have
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: a much older sibling who struggles with mental illness and
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: a parent who is emotionally distant. The main feelings in
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: the dream, he says. While fighting the vampire, I felt
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: scared at first, but felt pretty confident during the process.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: Fighting the zombies, I felt way more scared. and felt
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: as if I did not have control over my situation.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: I especially became frightened when I tried to run and
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: could not. Now, he offers a bit more explanation. One
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: thing I would note is that I have had many
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: recurring dreams about fighting zombies. So we have a dreamer
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: who may very well be looking unconsciously at a very
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: similar place thing to what our topic was that if
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: we think about the zombie just we're stepping away more
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: distantly the zombie has been infected has been bitten by
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: another excuse me a vampire has been bitten by another
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: vampire and has been taken over and is being controlled
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 3: and turned into something else that doesn't even have a
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: brain and zombies have been reduced some kind of instinctive
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: horde of that don't seem to be very conscious at
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: all and are just violently consuming anything they can get
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: their hands on. And if they bite you, you're likely
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: to become a zombie as well. And here we have
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: an individual trying to figure out what to do with
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: these dynamics that are certainly inside of his psychological life,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: but also around him in ways that Jung was noting.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: So, One of the things that I like to do
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: with a dream like this is to kind of break
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: it up into scenes. So we have the first scene
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: with the vampire. Then we have the second scene with
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: the zombies. And then maybe there's like an interlude where
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: he goes to bed and then he goes outside into
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: the snow. So those are sort of the things we
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: have to deal with. I find it really poignant that
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: he manages to pin the vampire down and remove his brain. Because,
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: you know, what I'm sort of making up from that is,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: you know, the ego, the ego complex that is sort
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: of held in the dream by the image of the
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: dream ego, the I in the dream. And it must
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: be a pretty strong ego. I mean, he's an engineer,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: he's young, you know, he's like, he's, you know, he's
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: somehow figured out kind of how to get out in
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: the world in spite of maybe having a sort of
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: difficult beginning. And he's able to wrestle this vampire. But
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: the fascinating thing is, He doesn't have a brain in
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: his head. He has a heart. So I'm wondering here
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: if we're dealing with something about the feeling function. The
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: feeling function, which perhaps feels very threatening, like it might
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: drain him of his life force because he sees it
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: as a zombie, right? I'm sorry, as a vampire. I mean,
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: that's the way... That's what the ego thinks, right? And
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: it's like, if I were working with this dreamer, I'd say, well,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: what did that vampire want? Because the dream ego is
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: making an assumption that it's there to hurt him. But
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: my guess is it actually wants something very different for him.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: When he finds that heart, then he's plunged into this
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: much more terrifying fight with the zombies who, zombies don't
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: have a feeling function, right? And it's just, terrifying and
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: he can make no headway. And then he feels quite
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: paralyzed in a way. He's not able to make any
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: forward movement and he has to retire. He has to
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: go to sleep. And when he goes out into the
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: frozen landscape, which again seems to point to something about
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: the feeling function, he said he has this parent who's
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: kind of emotionally distant. The voice says, turn back inside.
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: And of.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: Does that mean to go back in the house? But
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: I think it's saying the answer might be within.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: I like that framing of the alleged vampire. And one
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: of the things we often say is that the dream
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: ego or your sense of yourself in the dream is
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: generally the least reliable narrator in the dream because the
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: dream is there to change you, to change your attitude.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: So the way that you're interpreting things in the dream
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: is inherently, being acted upon. So as you say, we
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: might ask this person, well, what's your evidence that this
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: is a vampire versus, I don't know, any number of
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: other possibilities? And often, people can't really name why they
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: thought it was a vampire. They just thought it was.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: I love this idea of this creature that is heart-driven,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: that instead of a brain, it has a heart. And
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: you're right, if it were to bite him and infect
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: him with being heart-led, that could feel very alien at
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: the very least. If he's a highly rational person, could
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: be the exact thing he needs. And he has discovered
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: something which hopefully he'll process. The thing that I thought
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: was a vampire is some other order of being that
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: has this uncanny artifact in its head. So that alone
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: is worth the whole dream. I mean, just meditating on that,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: you could work that into a novel or a thesis.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: You know, it's an incredible image. And then when we
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: see in the beginning that one-to-one, the dream ego feels efficacious.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 3: It's one creature coming at him. He's got two hands.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: The other one's got two hands. And there's a kind
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: of wrestling with the angel, so to speak. We've got this,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: you know, on the mountain, wrestling with the supernatural. But
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: when the horde is after him, the hope of one
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: person standing against the horde and feeling that the only
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 3: solution is to sleep. That's quite what we're talking about.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: We find everyone in our family getting pulled into some
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 3: political organization, It's very hard to be the voice that's fighting, saying, no,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 3: this isn't good, we shouldn't do that. It's easier to
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: go to sleep and just float along with the collective.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: Consciousness is contra naturum, which means nature works against consciousness
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: and it works on behalf of instinct, of unreasoned following, unquestioning.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: So it takes an enormous amount of psychological energy to
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: stay inside oneself and to query everything that doesn't make
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: sense to us. but here fighting the horde the solution
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: for him is just to go to sleep and that's
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: the danger for all of us that is a universal
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: situation You know, I was fighting against colored spiked hair in,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 3: you know, 1989, and then I woke up wondering if
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 3: I should dye my hair indigo in 2025. I lost,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: you know, I fell asleep, and now I've become one
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: of everyone. That may seem harmless, but sometimes it's not harmless,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: and it's a real danger. The three feet of snow
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 3: surrounding the house, and a voice says, turn back inside.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: So I'm wondering if the three feet of snow is
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: akin to the sleepiness. Because as we know, when it snows,
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: everything is kind of homogenized. It's strangely beautiful because it
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: can seem uncanny, but all the differentiation is then masked.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: It's all underneath something else. And we can even have
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: this illusion that somehow it's become more beautiful, even safer.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 3: But the truth is, as I know as a kid,
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: marching around in the backyard, then all of a sudden
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 3: you're standing on a rake and it smacks you in
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: the head because you left it out there under the snow.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: It doesn't mean there aren't things under the snow, but boy,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: we can be sure initially that it's all rather lovely
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: and it's going to be a barrel of monkeys and
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 3: a lot of fun. But also, as you were saying, Lisa,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: if he's going into the snow to escape that feeling
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: of powerlessness and exhaustion, that's not going to work. Something
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: inside of him, as you said, is saying that you've
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: got to turn back and go inside, inside ourselves.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think, you know, the confrontation with the
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: vampire who's led by his heart, as you said, is
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: so poignant, but it's almost like the dream ego is
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: not quite ready for that somehow. And so the stakes
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: kind of get upped. And then he's amid these zombies
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: who really, who really are heartless. I mean, zombies don't
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: have individual personalities. It's kind of their brand, right? So
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: there's something there about when confronted by the feeling function,
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: he really kind of goes to war with himself. And
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: I suspect, again, that the, you know, I like what
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: you said about the snow being homogenizing and it's kind
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: of beautiful, but it's also frozen. You know, and it
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: could represent, again, perhaps a desire to escape from an
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: experience of feelingness. But the command is, go back inside.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: There's not really a resolution in the dream. This dreamer
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: is like right in the middle of holy war, so
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: to speak, inside of himself. And something wiser is saying,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: don't give up. I mean, yes, you're tired. Odds look
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: like they're against you. It's kind of a Joan of
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: Arc moment. It's like, but there are forces that will
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: help you if you are fighting for the right thing
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: inside of yourself.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:12:22
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• 1:12:27
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• 1:12:30
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