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The Age of Aquarius: A Jungian View of a Changing World · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want to read a quote from Jung, and this
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: is actually from his essay on UFOs. Apparently, there are
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: changes in the constellation of psychic dominance of the archetypes
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: or gods, as they used to be called, which bring
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: about or accompany, as a cause or effect, long-lasting transformations
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: of the collective psyche. This transformation started in the historical
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: era and left its traces first in the passing of
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the Aeon of Taurus and into that of Ares, and
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: then of Ares into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: which may be expected when the spring point enters Aquarius.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: It's such a curious thing because he seems to be
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: saying that the archetypes themselves change.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: As Jung's work began to define, as he himself came
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: into a deeper understanding of the archetypal layers, as he
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: was having these extraordinary experiences that he details in the
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: black books and the red books, Jung's concept of the
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: relationship between the individual, the collective, and the collective unconscious
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: began to ripen, mature, and he was able to find
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: increasingly more differentiated language to talk about it. One of
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: the symbolic languages that he found very interesting and very
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: useful was astrology. The basis of astrology is that human
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: beings have a relationship, symbolically and perhaps otherwise, with the
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: events in the cosmos, that we are not separate, but
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: in fact one. all influenced by great and powerful archetypal changes.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: One of the things that he was very interested in
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: and fascinated by is the idea of the ending of
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: the age of Pisces and the beginning of the age
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: of Aquarius. And those of us who have ever seen
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: the play or the movie Hair, this is the dawning
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: of the age of Aquarius.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: The soundtrack of my childhood.
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. I sang it and hummed it. And all the
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: promises of wonderful things that this age of brotherhood, of humankind,
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: of equity and care for each other would then bring.
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: But what Jung was interested in, as he imagines the
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: collective as a single, unimaginably powerful intelligence, that there would
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: have to be a rather powerful dissolution of the old
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: thing and very powerful activations of new energy that would
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: force itself into the collective awareness and demand accommodation. And
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: just as that happens in our own psyches, often in
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: midlife or during a crisis, the collective psyche also goes
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: through a kind of spasm, or for lack of any
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: other word, as it tries to make room for the
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: new idea, the new attitude, the new dispensation. And Jung
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: felt that he was observing elements of that as Europe
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: was struggling to find its footing. But we could find
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: many examples of this still going on. And because we're
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: talking about a 2,000-year arc, we can imagine that there's
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: a rise, very slow by our lifespan, rise of the forces,
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: a sustaining of the forces, and then in the next process,
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: there will again be a decline, a chewing up, and
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: then an explosion of new vitality, which frankly, generally involves
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: some turbulence. So we're going to talk about Jung's ideas
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: of the movement from the age of Pisces to the
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: age of Aquarius.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And this idea of kind of the dawning of the
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: new age, in some sense, Jung was the person who
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: brought that forward in modern times and discussed it. And
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: he did so in his book, Ion, which he wrote
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: after he'd had his two heart attacks. So he was
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: concerning himself with what was coming next. And he had
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: some specific ideas about that. On Saturday, March 28th at
• 5:16
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• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Your Personal Red Book, A Dream School Taster. Many listeners
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: will know that Carl Jung created a remarkable illustrated manuscript
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: called The Red Book, in which he recorded dreams, visions,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: and fantasies that emerged during a period of intense confrontation
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: with the unconscious. In our free seminar, we'll discuss how
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: you might approach the task of creating your own personal Redbook,
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• 5:53
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• 5:57
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• 6:01
  Speaker 1: seminar attendees only. You'll have a chance at the seminar
• 6:06
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• 6:10
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• 6:15
  Speaker 1: fill up quickly, so do reserve your place soon. You'll
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: find the link to do so in the show notes
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: for this episode.
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: Just to sort of set this in context, and ion
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: equates to eons, so we're talking about 2,000-year eons. And
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: this is purportedly the end of a 2,000-year eon, although
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: these transitions and changes are anything but crisp. But I
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: am wanting to set this context that the eons go backward.
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: You know, we usually go from sort of January or Aquarius, Pisces,
• 7:02
  Speaker 4: all the astrological chart, but these eons go backward.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 7:07
  Speaker 4: And it's called a precession, the precession of the equinoxes.
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: And so I'm remembering that during my time as a
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: Jungian candidate, that somewhere I came across all these correspondences
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: with previous eons. So I'm thinking that, you know, I
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: went back as far as the age of Taurus that
• 7:33
  Speaker 4: was like, you know, 4300 BC. to 2150 or somewhere
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: in there, you know, and its symbol was the bull.
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: And its astrological equivalent, it's an earth sign. And this
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: was the age of agriculture, the famous bull dancing rituals
• 7:56
  Speaker 4: in Minoan society on Crete and other places. The bull
• 8:02
  Speaker 4: is a symbol of strength and virility. as people worked
• 8:07
  Speaker 4: the earth.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: And also, I just want to say, the bull was
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: also very important in Mithraism.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: Ah.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: So it was widespread, right?
• 8:17
  Speaker 4: And in Egypt, there was a cult, a bull cult there.
• 8:22
  Speaker 4: So I thought, well, that's interesting. And then whatever it
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: was I was working on moved into the more sort
• 8:31
  Speaker 4: of Old Testament or biblical era.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Of the ram.
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: So in the story of Isaac, he's asked to sacrifice
• 8:43
  Speaker 4: a ram. There were ram symbols everywhere. Astrologically, that's a
• 8:49
  Speaker 4: fire sign. And that age was more or less from
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: 2100 BC through the first century or so.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: And an age.
• 9:02
  Speaker 4: Where historically there's a war, empires are being built and expanded, militarization,
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: heroic ideals, and moving from earth goddesses in the Taurean
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: age and agriculture to sky gods, warrior gods, storm gods.
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: And then, as we all know from the beginning of
• 9:27
  Speaker 4: the Christian era, comes the age of Pisces, right about
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: at that time when Jesus was alive. So what do
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: we have now? We have a water sign, a fish
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: symbol of two fish swimming in the opposite directions, and
• 9:48
  Speaker 4: an era of faith that really revered devotion, belief, sacrifice, surrender,
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: and emotion emotional connection through belief and religion and faith
• 10:06
  Speaker 4: as Christianity dominated much, at least of the Western Hemisphere.
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: So now, the next 2,000 years, coming along sometime soon, Maybe.
• 10:20
  Speaker 4: To a city near you is the age of Aquarius.
• 10:25
  Speaker 4: And that is an air sign. And what will we
• 10:31
  Speaker 4: be expecting to happen? What are the images and what
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: is foretold as the age of Aquarius? Other than that
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: song and the musical hair.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: You know, I think what we're talking about is something
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: like the evolution of consciousness. And that corresponds with sort
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: of like the collective version of the development of the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: new attitude. So we talked about that on a previous podcast,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: that as we develop, we may find ourselves coming under
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the influence of a different kind of attitude. And this
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: is sort of a similar thing on a much longer
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: time scale and at a collective level.
• 11:16
  Speaker 4: I think I want to think about the word evolution.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: Which somehow implies a progression.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Fair enough.
• 11:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Tell me what you're thinking.
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: And, you know, of course, I'm contrasting it with the
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: state of the world now. And maybe it's never been
• 11:35
  Speaker 4: a whole lot better that life has always been a struggle.
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: But it is a shift. And one hopes that it
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: will be a shift in consciousness. Because that seems to
• 11:48
  Speaker 4: be what the Aquarian age promises.
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: I think Jung did see this as a kind of progression.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: And whether we call it an evolution or a progression
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: of revelations. So when he's writing an ion about the
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: progression of images of God, images of the self, he's
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: mapping or trying to create a theory of mapping. how
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: human consciousness is changing, which then allows other aspects of
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: the self to become knowable and therefore influence human culture.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: So in the most ancient times, for instance, animals were,
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: or the images of animals were held as symbols of
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: the self, and we have half human, half animals, whether
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: it's the bottom half or the top half is the
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: human or the animal, which is also significant. And eventually,
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: then we begin to have gods that look like human
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: beings but don't behave like them. And then we have
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: the image of Christ or the symbolism of Christ as
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: a human that could be your neighbor, suffering all of
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: the slings and arrows of being a human being. And
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  Speaker 3: Jung is waiting and curious for what's next. What's the
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  Speaker 3: next image? The Age of Pisces, I think for Jung,
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: and I guess most astrologers would probably agree, was important
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: in as much as it created a new idea where
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: goodness could be identified, it could be chosen, and that
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  Speaker 3: it required the suppression of certain instincts and impulses that
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: were not congruent with the idea of goodness. And one
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: might imagine in a more ancient culture, that wasn't the
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: highest priority. Maybe social order was. But the idea of
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: what is the good, which is particularly captured in the
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: Judeo-Christian idea that once we've eaten of the apple of
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: the knowledge of good and evil, then we have an
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: ethical and moral responsibility to do something about that. And
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: that's very much connected to the idea of the age
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: of Pisces. that we are expected to split and contain.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: If we think about that in terms of development, when
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: we have a young child, we're not creating moral ambivalence.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: It's like, no, bad, stove bad, no, this good, that bad.
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: And just creating these categories of don't do that and
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: do this instead, which is appropriate when one is young
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: or whether it's the spirit of humanity is young or
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: that our biological children are young and it serves life
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: to start with very specific goods and bads and so
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: we have finally in the book of revelation which is
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: the last bit which i find interesting it's the it's
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: the little thing at the end where christ and the
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: antichrist are face to face where the ultimate goodness and
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: the ultimate badness are now battling and creating this turbulence
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: in the book of Revelation, which I think informs Jung's
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: understanding of how much turbulence is going to happen in
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: the collective to make all things visible so that then
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: instead of swimming in the water of Pisces, we're holding
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: the water of consciousness because we have encountered it. So
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: all of the suppressed evil, all of the terrible persecutions
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: and death that the Spanish Inquisition inflicted, because, of course,
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: if you kill all the bad stuff, it's then gone
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: from the earth. Of course, we know that's not true.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: So now everything that the Piscean Age has banished into
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: hell in the Book of Revelation comes and says, hey,
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: I'm here. You're going to deal with me. And that,
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: in a sense, is the beginning of the next place
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: where good and evil are held in the two vases
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: of the water bearer of Aquarius. But they're held versus
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: being swum in and breathed as if they're an invisible atmosphere.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: And remember, fish were the last to discover water.
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's really great. And so I'm liking these two
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: vases of one tucked under each arm being poured out,
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: which is kind of two-ness that is very different from
• 16:54
  Speaker 4: the dualities of the Piscean Age. The good-bad, up-down, right-wrong,
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: the two fish swimming in opposite directions.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Pick one. Mm-hmm.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: Or else.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: And now we have the two being held together, which
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: signals a whole different orientation to what were previously perceived
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: as opposites. good, bad, right, wrong.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Kind of judgment. Right.
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: Bury the bad vase and walk around with the luminous
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: vase and sprinkle everybody with it.
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: Because they're both, they're two vases, and one of them
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: is not black and the other white.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: Well, and even if it looks that way, you're going
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: to have one in one hand and the other in
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: the other hand, and you're going to learn how to
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: cook with the dash of one and the dash of
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: the other. Now, on an individual level, we might decide, well,
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: Jung's been talking about that, finding your shadow, digging it
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: out of the unconscious, holding it in your hand, figuring
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: out what to do with it, which doesn't necessarily mean
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: just let it run rampant, but one knows it's in
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: the vessel. And frankly, some of the shadow stuff that
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: we have in reserve is the best thing in the
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: right moment, in the right dose, in the right proportion.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: it becomes a problem when it's in the wrong place
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: at the wrong time and the wrong proportion.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So in the Piscean Age, with these two fish
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: kind of facing each other, there's this strong emphasis on duality.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: And perhaps in this new age, we're being challenged to
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: hold both.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: So easy to say, the work of forever. And for
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: those who are consciously engaged, in self-improvement and in consciousness work,
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: then there are many different methods Jung offering his to
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: learn to hold both in one's hand and to make
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: a choice. When material is repressed, which might be to
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: the benefit of society, by the way, we don't have
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: a choice because we don't even know it exists. You
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: don't even know what you don't know when it's put
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: into the bas and buried. So what happens when The collective,
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: when it's like these vases are suddenly erupting out from
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: the earth and all your vases have suddenly shot out
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: of your backyard and they're hovering in mid-air and everyone
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: else's vases are now like burning and hovering. hovering over
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: your head you know I mean you can't run away
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: you don't know where it came from and it's demanding
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: that you hold the red hot issues and we're not
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: used to it and so Jung looking at how the
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: collective is dealing with it These eruptions of evil and
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: good and what's evil and what's good. Now, let's go
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: to war. Let's not go to war. Let's be on
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: this side. Let's be on that side. Who are we
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: going to crucify? Everybody run away. I want a bunker.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: I want to, you know, like all the what the fuckness.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: It's so relevant to this moment, isn't it?
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and has been for hundreds of years, by the way.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: But we are being asked to hold these tensions more
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: consciously instead of splitting them into good and bad. And
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking that at a personal level, this looks a
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: lot like holding the tension of the opposites and waiting
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: and soliciting the transcendent function. The place that is not
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: just sort of the meeting in the middle or the compromise,
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: but the new attitude, which you mentioned earlier, Lisa, of
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: how can we, as individuals, how can we work to
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: get the new attitude? And then as a collective, which
• 21:22
  Speaker 4: is a monumental transition, just monumental to have a new
• 21:29
  Speaker 4: attitude that is more humanitarian. And the characteristics of Aquarius
• 21:38
  Speaker 4: are a social evolution and interest in global movements, a
• 21:46
  Speaker 4: sense of we, of the human spirit, which seems to
• 21:54
  Speaker 4: portend not that some people are our allies and some
• 21:59
  Speaker 4: people are our enemies, but that there is an overarching
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: sense of community. But the transition is surely a mess.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: So I want to read a quote from Jung, and
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: this is actually from his essay on UFOs, which I
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: think goes to what you're talking about, Deb, because in
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: some sense he was kind of noodling around wondering if
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: the appearance of UFOs across the world, right? It was
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: a kind of worldwide phenomenon. I mean, more in some
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: places than others. I mean, I think a lot in
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: America because we're the craziest. That it sort of says
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: something about, you know, the global evolution, you know, maybe evolution,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: maybe not the right word, but that this development of
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: a new global attitude and awareness of a kind of
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: the collective at the human level. So he says, Apparently,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: there are changes in the constellation of psychic dominance of
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: the archetypes or gods, as they used to be called,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: which bring about or accompany, bring about or accompany as
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: a cause or effect, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: This transformation started in the historical era and left its
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: traces first in the passing of the Aeon of Taurus
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: into that of Aries and and then of Ares into Pisces,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: now nearing that great change which may be expected when
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: the spring point enters Aquarius. So what I find so
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: interesting about that is changes in the constellation of psychic
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: dominance of the archetypes or gods. So it's such a
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: curious thing because he seems to be saying that You know,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: that the archetypes themselves change. And I'm avoiding the word evolve.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: Well, we could even say rotate. Okay. Okay. Which often
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: happens in midlife. You know, the first half of my life,
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: maybe I was, the mother archetype was dominant. And maybe
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: in the second half of life, the artisan or the
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: psychopomp or some other god, so to speak, decides that
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: we are now going to carry their mark. So at
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: the very least, whether it leads to evolution or it
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: leads to the discovery of more options, optionality, either way,
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: the human being has more to choose from because they
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: are aware of options of being that they could not otherwise.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: The difficulty always is change and growth is going to happen.
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: Either we can see it, hop on the train and
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: enjoy the ride. We're going to be tied to the
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: caboose and we're going to bounce along on the tracks,
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: but either way it's going to go. So I think
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: when he's lamenting that the pain of watching evolution force
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: growth upon us, evolution inflicts enlightenment upon us and human
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: beings and life itself learns primarily through suffering. The smaller
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: number of us, which can be any of us, ebbing
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: and flowing, might learn through wisdom, might be able to
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: accept or align with change and even facilitate it and
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: find that it is less painful if we embrace it
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: and understand it, which I think goes to Jung's whole
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: mission of trying to find language, particularly language that can
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: be esoteric symbols. So, humanity needed to live in an
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: inherited religious matrix, needed to be surrounded by it, needed
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: to swim in it, needed to be told the laws
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: of God, which are God, served its purpose, pulled humanity,
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: in a sense, up out of a purely instinctive relationship
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: to each other in the environment into some form of consideration.
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: When we look at those time periods, there were an
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: enormous number of laws, if we think about the book
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: of Leviticus, or the purity laws, which are part of
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: the Hindu systems. A rule for everything, what to eat,
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: what to wear, what day, what hour, secondary to whether
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: it pleases the gods, what it does is it forces
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: people to think about everything, that nothing gets to slip
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: by unconsidered. Everything is considered, and I can imagine that
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: a thousand years of thinking about everything puts a lot
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: of awareness into the pot. And then, of course, congruence
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: with those laws, rules, etc. creates a congruence of the community,
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: which then allows people to then survive as communities. So
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: it may be that the age of Aquarius is going
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: to lead to a great big kind brotherhood, but I
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: actually don't think that's what Jung was saying. I mean,
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: the astrologers say that, but I don't think that's what
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: Jung thought.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Tell me more. What do you think Jung thought?
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: Well, if we look at his writings even on the
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: evolution of Christianity in other places and Mysterium Conjunctionis, he's
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: saying that the allegiance is actually going to leave the collective.
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: And it's going to go into the individual. And the
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: ego self-access... is going to heat up more and more
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: and more, and that the new ethic will be gaining
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: the ability to perceive how the self is responding to
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and to allow that to matter,
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: and allow it to shape what we do or don't do,
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: rather than having it be an external authority. Now, many
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: people could put this superego in the place of the self,
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: which is basically this icon of whatever the cultural norms are,
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: which Freud wrote very beautifully about, that we are colonized
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: by the thousand rules that we learned going to Catholic
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: high school. That's not the self. The self isn't the
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: law giver. The self isn't your fifth grade nun with
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: a ruler. Had its place. But the self is a
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: much more unpredictable, inspiring force that may or may not
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: make our neighbors happy with us, frankly, or the community
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: happy with us.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: It's not about compliance.
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that the result in terms of how that's going
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: to live in the community is not a certain thing necessarily.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: And so books that have become really popular right now,
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: like The Courage to be Disliked, which is an Adlerian text.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: I mean, one could take that in a lot of
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: different ways, but what I think Adler's looking at is
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: if one has identified one's center, which he calls your task,
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: your mission in life, and you are true to it
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: rather than true to the smile of your neighbor's, We're
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: going to have to make peace with the fact that
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: people are not going to agree with us. They're not
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: going to like what God has told you to do.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: The difficulty is that when we look inside and we
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: search for the self, we find reverence. of gilligan's island
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: and it takes a lot of work to like wonder
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: whether you know that's great what's going on inside of
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: us i need to move to an island you know
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: and uh.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: I have to tell you, there are a lot of
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: reruns of Gilligan's Island up here.
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: Oh, I can sing all the songs, you know. They
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: become hymns to the sacred.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: And I have to confess that I have never, ever
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: seen Gilligan's Island.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: We know what we're going to inflict on you next
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: time we're together.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: And then there's like a whole swath of our audience
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: that like, Gilligan's Island, what? You know, so it's very generational.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: But Joseph, you and I are around the same age, so.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: That was standard after school fair.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: And also very archetypal, by the way. Venus is there.
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: The dumbling is there. The genius is there. It's extremely archetypal.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: We should do an episode.
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: There's a genius in Gilligan's Island.
• 30:38
  Speaker 4: That's exactly what I was about to say. The archetype
• 30:40
  Speaker 4: of Gilligan's Island is my homework and anybody else out
• 30:45
  Speaker 4: there who wants to take it on. But what I'm
• 30:49
  Speaker 4: coming back to with the age of Aquarius is It
• 30:54
  Speaker 4: is an age of interiority rather than external authority in,
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: you know, external representations of the God image or, you know,
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: all the rules and regs about, you know, you must
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: do this and you may not do that. It's quite
• 31:16
  Speaker 4: a burden, isn't it, that is placed on us and
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: it's very much what Jung talks about. with individuation, that
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: our task is to become more conscious, more reflective, more
• 31:34
  Speaker 4: able to self-regulate, more able to hold opposites, whether they're
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: like political opposites or ideological opposites or internal conflicts. of
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: how do I make a major life decision that could
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: hurt some people either way I make it. So the
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: demand is that we grow ourselves and that we access
• 32:08
  Speaker 4: more of the self, capital S, self, and come into
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: harmony with that which is potentially within us, not without struggle.
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: And this goes to the value of dream work, that
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: if we're going to turn off TikTok and Instagram and
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: we're not going to let.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: And Gilligan's Island.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: And Gilligan's Island, not that I'm watching it regularly, but...
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: And really start recording your dreams. We take our dreams,
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: because they're so ubiquitous... Like, we're embarrassed by them. Like,
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: I'll ask people, did you dream less? And, oh, it
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: was stupid. And the reason that we tend to devalue dreams,
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: we're too busy to record them, I don't know, they're silly,
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: they're creepy, are because they are making a demand. Because
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: your dreams come from an ethical center outside of you
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: that is taking a snapshot, animating using its own AI, apparently,
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: And then feeding it back to you saying, this is
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: what I kind of see going on.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: And the dreams you dislike the most, the nightmares with
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: some thing is chasing you, are the most important dreams
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: because that's the stuff you don't want to know about.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: It's uncomfortable, scary, creepy, humiliating. And so we feel like
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: it's a monster behind us and we're running through peanut
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: butter because God is slowing us down and doesn't want
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: us to get away. And then you feel it on
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: your back and then finally you wake up and you
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: go to the shower and you don't want to think
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: about it. And then you'll have it over and over again.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: And the idea of the explosion to reveal, that's what
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: the word apocalypse means, means a revelation. The explosion that's required.
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: in order to make room for something that we just
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: didn't want to know about or felt scared about. But
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: whatever is deciding, that's the thing that you need to
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: know about. Often we're surprised. Like, that wasn't on our
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: list of stuff to do.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: We still have a very, you know, first half of life,
• 34:33
  Speaker 4: very outward orientation. And the demand, which Jung told us
• 34:42
  Speaker 4: about over and over and over, is to turn inward
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: and to prioritize that task of individuation by listening to
• 34:55
  Speaker 4: what is happening inside Allah dreams. For example, it's not
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: the only thing, but they happen every night and they
• 35:04
  Speaker 4: are accessible. And hoping not to be, you know, sort
• 35:11
  Speaker 4: of too flagrantly self-serving here, but there has been a
• 35:14
  Speaker 4: renaissance in Jungian thinking, studies, training, and may I say
• 35:24
  Speaker 4: through this Jungian Life podcast and our emphasis in dreams
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: that there is something that people are resonating to that
• 35:35
  Speaker 4: is way beyond us. that feels real, that people are
• 35:40
  Speaker 4: engaging in themselves and with themselves.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: So coming back, I think I'm knitting this all together
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: in some sense, but I want to lift something up
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: that we're talking around, but I think it'll be good
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: to just to say it. This idea of the progression
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: of the ages and with the different emphasis and the
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: different tasks that humanity has been, you know, demanded to fulfill. Joseph,
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: you were talking about sort of living in the age
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: of where the rules are all given and now we're
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: entering a new age where there's a different expectation of us,
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: there is a sense of telos. And maybe I keep
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: on circling around this idea of evolve because there is
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: a sense that it's a trajectory that has a known destination, right?
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: That there is a way that possibly consciousness is growing
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: or consciousness or the God image or humanity's relationship with
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: the God image is evolving in a direction. And, you know,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: it's interesting because there's a few places where, I think
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: it was Marie-Louise von Franz who reported that someone once
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: asked Jung, do you think that humanity will survive, you know,
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: the coming era? Because, you know, Jung was, this would
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: have been during the Cold War. And Jung said something like,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: there's a slim chance, but it will depend on how
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: many people do the psychological work of drawing shadow projections.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: You know, he had that very dramatic experience, that vision
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: preceding World War I. He had it a couple of
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: times in which he saw, you know, all of Europe
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: covered in a river of blood. Well, apparently he had
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: another vision that toward the end of his life, a
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: vast swath of the planet just kind of decimated. So,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: you know, I think he was, in his waning years,
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: he really was very concerned about the future of humanity.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: But his thinking about the coming of the new age
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: does show a sort of cautious optimism about that if
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: consciousness develops, if enough of us do the work of
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: becoming conscious, that we just might be able to squeak through.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: And that's why for Jung and for Jungians, doing the
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: individual work of consciousness, doing our own psychological work is
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: the thing that we can do to improve the fate
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: of the collective.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: So coming back to Jung's writing about the age of
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: Pisces and Aquarius and connecting to what Lisa had said,
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: that on a collective, Jung and many astrologers would say
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: that humanity had relied on religious authority in order to
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: conscribe itself and benefited from it and swam in those waters.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: That image of the God or the self is becoming exhausted.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: The archetypal discharge of energy seems to have gone down.
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: He had an energic view of things. It's like this 2,000-year-old
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: battery which then continues to pulse images, impulses that were
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: useful to humanity at a various time are now running
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: out of steam, which means All the stuff that was
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: kept in reserve by the archetype of structured religion. is
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: now rattling its cage, breaking the bars, and running around
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: in the collective's psyche, demanding to be engaged. And the culture,
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: if we're depending on collective responses, generally wants a regressive
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: restoration of the good old days, whether that's the Middle
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: Ages or 1920 or whatever it is, which is to
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: refuse engagement. Let's not engage those people. Let's put them
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: in jail. Let's put them in a different country. Let's
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: move to a better neighborhood. We can get away from
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: whatever they represent to us. Now, that doesn't mean that
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: We might not choose more ascetic neighborhoods for one reason
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: or another. But if we're making choices to move away
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: from something, that's a particular kind of motivation versus moving
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: towards something that has emerged with a substantial clarity. So
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: all of this stuff that we call, quote unquote, wrong, evil,
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: this and that, is breaking free from the attitude, of
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: the old gods. So we're seeing this spontaneous emergence of mandalas, i.e.
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: crop circles everybody was talking about a couple of decades ago.
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: Everywhere you look, there's another crop circle. I think probably
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: the boys in the neighborhood might have been making them,
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: but secondary to that We needed to see them because
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: something mysterious was happening, rising out of our cornfield. Who knew?
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: And they're sporadic. This is a generative need for an
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: image of wholeness. As you were saying, UFOs can't quite
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: cotton with angels anymore, but the aliens, they make sense
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: to me, and they're going to come in these big
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: silver ships.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: That are usually saucer-shaped?
• 41:35
  Speaker 3: Saucer-shaped.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: Round.
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: And that they're an individual discovery. Like, people are not...
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: I have friends that really live in this world. Nobody
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: is getting together out in a field expecting Jesus to
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: show up. But I have friends that will show up
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: in a field with 50 other people expecting a UFO
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: to show up. Like, no. No. But it doesn't deter them, apparently.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: That's a very interesting thing, that there's the new image.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: Images somehow carry more energy and therefore can motivate people
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: to be looking to the heavens for something different than
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: my childhood told me would be there.
• 42:25
  Speaker 4: And what do spaceships contain?
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: Aliens.
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: Aliens or angels, messengers. Angelus.
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: But an encounter with the unknown. Unknown creatures from wherever
• 42:41
  Speaker 4: they're from. It's an interesting image, isn't it? And what
• 42:46
  Speaker 4: is arriving? Of course, there are any number of science
• 42:49
  Speaker 4: fiction authors who have depicted various kinds of aliens and
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: their characteristics. But it's an interesting image of... externality. You know,
• 43:05
  Speaker 4: it's not a church. It's not an angel. They're aliens
• 43:09
  Speaker 4: in spaceships, indicating we don't know.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: You know, this is making me think of this. I
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: think it's Steven Spielberg has a new movie coming out,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: and I was trying to remember the name of it.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: I just looked it up. It's called Disclosure Day. So
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: I think I've seen the trailer, and I think it's like, okay,
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: so we, you know, there have been rumors that they're here. Well,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: now we're going to know. Disclosure. Which is a revelation.
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: And if it winds up being factually so, it's going
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: to tear a bunch of beliefs up. People are going
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: to have all their reactions.
• 43:40
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: This has also been brewing. Jung, as he's talking about this,
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: he felt that the medieval alchemical symbolism was kind of
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: like the underground, almost subversive preparation for this future process
• 44:00
  Speaker 3: that was going to happen. that it wasn't really congruent
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: with the kind of Judeo-Christian symbolism, particularly in Europe. It
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: was doing something strange and weird and fantasizing about opposites
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: coming together and people would become hermaphrodites and have wings
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: and dragons roaring inside of vessels. Not standard Christian symbolism,
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: but Right. But talking about a sequence, and it was happening, well,
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: in the Middle Ages and even earlier than that, by
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: the way, alchemical imagery is ancient in China and Persia,
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: it's all over the place. Because in those small, very
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: small numbers of people, there weren't a lot of alchemists
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: in Europe. There were handfuls of alchemists. It's amazing that
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: Their images survived because there were so few of them,
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: but it speaks to the fact that people kept staring
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: at them and wanted to protect them and didn't throw
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: them away. There was something fighting to get forward. Yes,
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: it was perhaps a scientific ethos, but more than that,
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: preparing for a totally different idea about what spirit and
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: matter is What are the new symbols that might help
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: us get there? And the alchemists themselves laying claim to
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: the legitimacy of their own imaginations. Like, oh, I looked
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: into the vessel and the green lion turned into a
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: red lizard. Well, I'll just write that little one down.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Like it's like a dream journal without being censored, without
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: thinking it's evil or wrong. There is a total audacity.
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: in the alchemical descriptions and images, and that absolute dismissal
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: of whatever people thought was normal.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and again, to your earlier point, it defied
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: the rules of the day, didn't it? It was much
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: more about that individual revelation or that individual experience.
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: There's something of the rebel in the age of Aquarius imagery, too.
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: It talks about shifts in gender role and identity. Then
• 46:20
  Speaker 4: we have all this interconnectivity through the internet, AI, social media,
• 46:27
  Speaker 4: the list goes on and on. High degree of openness
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: to things, whereas alchemy had to be sort of conducted
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: in secret, usually under the patronage of a king or
• 46:41
  Speaker 4: some kind of a ruler. but it was hidden. And
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: now all of these divergences are much more out in
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: the open. Independent thinking, intellectual curiosity, social shifts, which we're
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: certainly seeing. And the question is, can we hold all
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: of this percolating, shifting, dynamic energy of both individualism and collectivism.
• 47:18
  Speaker 4: And I'm hoping it's grounded by the symbol that comes
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: along with this age, which is the ruling planet is Saturn,
• 47:26
  Speaker 4: which is heavy and endure and seeks kind of stability,
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: a kind of, you know, elder spirit. traditional kind of
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: quality to it, sometimes associated with depression. But it may
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: be a balancing factor for what is about to pour
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: forth from those vessels in the Aquarian age.
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: I'd also like to say is that we sometimes have
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: a rather conventional vision of Saturn in Kronos. But when
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: Saturn Kronos was banished to the underworld to Tartarus, He
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: created a golden age that down in the underworld, it
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: was the perfect world.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: Everything was perfect. All needs were met. All people were
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: in a kind of Elysian joy. Works better in the
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: unconscious than it might in the family. That's great. In
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: the right place at the right time.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: The other thing about Aquarius as an astrologic sign is
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: in more modern astrology, it is granted a co-ruler. In
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: the ancient world, they only knew about Saturn. They didn't
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: know about Uranus. Okay. But in modern astrology, they'll say, I, Uranus,
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: and Saturn, both rule Aquarius, and Uranus is the world
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: of shocking, explosive, unpredictable, atomic change, radical change. innovations and
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: is again in esoteric modern astrology is associated with the
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: self so this combination of uranus and saturn the intrusion
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: of the self and its structuring, because it's not like
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: the age of Aquarius is everybody walking around and just
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: burning everything to the ground. It's, yes, opening up, putting
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: the authority into one's internal relationship, but also doing something
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: about that. creating structures, careers, new ideas into the world
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: based upon that ego-self relationship, which basically is what Jung
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: modeled for us. He had these shocking experiences over those
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: two years and maybe beyond that. He didn't know what
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: to make of them. He's drawing them. He's talking to them.
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: He turns them into a psychological theory and then applies it.
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: And then creates an institute and then trains people like us,
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: which is taking the Uranian and then working it down
• 50:17
  Speaker 3: into the structure of the first training institute.
• 50:21
  Speaker 4: But you know, that's interesting that the Uranus-Saturn pairing symbolically
• 50:29
  Speaker 4: as a duality that's connected. They're not opposites. They're connected
• 50:35
  Speaker 4: that Saturn works for the grounding, stabilizing kind of effect
• 50:44
  Speaker 4: where Uranus is popping with turbulence and ideas and all
• 50:49
  Speaker 4: kinds of things. They work together, hopefully, to complement each
• 50:55
  Speaker 4: other rather than to simply be in conflict. And I'm
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: also thinking about how This age will require us as
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: individuals to marry those things in ourselves and to find
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: the God within, starting with something as mundane as helping
• 51:22
  Speaker 4: our kids and ourselves control the number of hours they
• 51:27
  Speaker 4: spend on social media or AI or things of that nature.
• 51:34
  Speaker 4: There's no external authority that regulates that or that dictates,
• 51:41
  Speaker 4: you know, what you should or shouldn't be doing. And
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: we're being asked in the here and now to bring
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: that under our own control and model it for children
• 51:56
  Speaker 4: or regulate it for children. So it is already moving
• 52:02
  Speaker 4: into us. And in a very, very complex world, we
• 52:07
  Speaker 4: have to find our own way in many, many spheres
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: that were once sort of governed by collective or social rules, regs, structures, kingships, etc.
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: So I think that the secret, for instance, of encouraging
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: our kids to get off their phones isn't actually to
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: just make a law about not being on your phones.
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: Because that's the Piscean thing. It's unholy to be on
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: a phone for that many hours.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to tell you, it doesn't work.
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: It doesn't work. I think even, you know, Freud and
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: Jung both understood this idea about sublimation. Like, if you're
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: going to take away a certain pattern, which is a
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: certain way of managing energy, and you're going to take
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: that away, tension is going to build, and either it's
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: going to explode and then choose its own course, which
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: could be interesting. Or it's going to regress and go
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: back to the phone. But people need assistance for that
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: to flow to a higher arc, which in this conversation
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: would be, what about the self? What's going on inside me?
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: And how do I legitimately connect to that again and differentiate?
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: my reruns of Gilligan's Island and Bewitched. Bewitched really plays
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: me because I totally want to live in that world.
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: And I dream of Jeannie and the Brady, but like
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: all that stuff activates because when libido starts to rise
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: in us, it's like you've got an extra outlet to
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: plug stuff into and stuff lights up and all those
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: images that we stuffed, you know, into the hopper, they
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: kind of glow. So, How do we differentiate the 10,000
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: things our Zen friends say or the stuff in the
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: basement and the attic and find the pearl of great price,
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: the one little star in like my childhood memory? Like,
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: where is that? It's a worthy consideration. And again, this
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: is where dream work, I think for now, is superior
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: to self-reflection. Because self-reflection is just taking a catalog of
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: the basement and the attic, which is good. I mean,
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: I get it. It's not a guarantee that you're going
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: to find the gold in there, but you might get
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: some really interesting long lists.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: I want to kind of build on that a little bit, Joseph,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: which is with this, or maybe I'm building it out
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: a little bit, this idea that Jung had. He talked
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: at some point about the worldview, and he used that
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: that German word for it that I'm not going to
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: try to pronounce, but basically the world, you know, in
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: talking about kind of how do we do this differentiation,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: how do we find the thing, it's our experience of
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: our interior is shaped by the worldview that is given
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: to us by the collective. Now, we have some input
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: on shaping a different worldview. We can read about different
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: world philosophies and choose this one over this one. And
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: I think it's worthy to do that. So you can,
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: if you want, you can read about Stoicism and decide
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: that that's a worldview that describes the world that you
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: know and live in. And you can be guided by that.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: But we all have a worldview. And it may be
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: something that is not conscious. You may not be aware
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: that you have a worldview, but you do. And it's
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: much better to become conscious of what your worldview is. Otherwise,
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: it's just kind of being given to you by a
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: bunch of Gilligan's Island neurons.
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: Right. Most people's operating manual, when they find it, is
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: written in crayon. Like, it got inscribed when you were
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: two and three and five and you were in kindergarten.
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: These are the rules. Understandably, like we're all there. I
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: get it. But once you realize the reason you're doing
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: this is because your nursery school teacher told you, which
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: was appropriate when you were three or four, like totally appropriate.
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: But you've been running your life off of that axiom
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: without realizing it. And then we have some choices become available. Again,
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: the dream work intrudes upon the culture. It intrudes upon
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: your beliefs. It intrudes upon your preferences. Often it's shocking
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: because it doesn't care about propriety.
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: It doesn't really care about whether your neighbors know what
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: you're dreaming about.
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: It just talks to you in its symbolic language, which
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: in part is derived from your own lived experiences because
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: you have to kind of recognize what's in the dream.
• 57:06
  Speaker 3: And just writing it down even if you don't understand it,
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: lets you sip a little more out of each of
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: the little images. And if you take a step further,
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: we've got a book, DreamWise. We've got a dream interpretation program.
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: Other people have great resources. Right now, I'm just speaking
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: to anyone in the collective. If you can get your
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: hands on a way of moving towards the ethics of
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: your dreams, I love that. Your dreams are functioning on
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: an ethical prioritization, which is uncanny and is acceptable because
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: it's happening in some other world. So in the ethics
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: of your dream, you find yourself, you know, killing the
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: sacred cow. And then you wake up and you're crying
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: because you're a vegetarian and you would never kill a cow. Like,
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: of course, I mean, yes.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: But that's not what it's about. But it might feel
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: as transgressive as, you know, eating meat, which you don't
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: want to do, because that sacred cow represents something inside
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: of you that's got to go. And you like it,
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: and you don't want it to go. And you maybe
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: have spent your entire life taking care of that attitude, belief, axiom,
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: personality trait. But something that has an ethical perspective says, mm-mm-mm.
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: For you and me, you know, the God spark and you,
• 58:41
  Speaker 3: that thing's got to get out of there. And down
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: the road, somebody else discovers the sacred cow and it's
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: tasked with taking care of their sacred cow for the
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: rest of their life. You can't universalize it. Like, you're
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: getting what you need and it's happening whether or not
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: you like it. Like, you dreamt of killing that cow,
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: so guess what? The deed's done. You did it. You
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: killed the sacred cow. Now it's about understanding what that
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: could possibly mean. And in the moment, it can seem frightening,
• 59:15
  Speaker 3: just like a kind of internal revolution. Over time, the
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: thing that we couldn't imagine being okay becomes sometimes the
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: thing that launches us a whole new experience of life
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: that isn't based on your childhood, the culture, your religious education,
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: your academic education, your government, your trauma, all the stuff
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: that we're dragging along painfully. Maybe it's helping us even.
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: All of that. Not important to the God spark inside
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: of you. There's a whole other internal government called the
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: Holy City or the descent of the New Jerusalem in
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: the book of Revelation, or in any other symbol. There's
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: a book of Revelation, but somebody's dream, obviously. You know,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: they recorded it, and everybody's like, wow, that's amazing. Don't
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: know what it means. Let's put it in the Bible.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: You know, someone's going to unpack that letter, that dream.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: It's amazing that got into the end of the Bible.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: It's shocking, particularly after Paul is like doing all of
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: this bureaucratic structuring of the church, like we need to
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: have walls. leave it with Paul. We just can't do that.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: We can't leave it with the operating manual. We gotta
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: put the next thing that we don't even understand, but
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: we know we need to do it.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 4: In so many ways, we can see the psyche writ
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: large and writ in each one of us. And that
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: those images and dreams, no matter what they are, are
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 4: part of us. And that is the task of individuation of,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 4: oh my gosh, I'll use your example. I killed the
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: sacred cow. I can't believe I did that. I feel terrible.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 4: That was an experience. And as you said earlier, Joseph,
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 4: you know, the individuation process can be likened to a train.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: You know, basically our choice is I'm going to get
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 4: on board. or I'll be bumping along on the tracks
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 4: behind the caboose. And that's our job. It's something we
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 4: can do. Our dreams are there for us. And it
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 4: somehow really comes of age in this way, you know,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 4: just as we're entering the age of Aquarius. There's a
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 4: correspondence between Jung and Jungian work. And the new eon
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 4: that says, go within, go within.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: So here are encouraging signs. People are self-creating religions. Like,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: I went to a workshop on tarot, and then I
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: went to a workshop on crystals, and then somebody told
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: me about talking to the sea creatures. Whatever we want
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: to think about it, but people are having numinous moments,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: and they're stitching them all together, and they're like, oh,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: I'm that person. I'm the the crystal sea creature tarot person.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: And when people talk to me about that, they're not conflicted. Like,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: it makes perfect sense. It's like, why not? Like, I'm
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: going to sew my own tapestry of how to get
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: connected to something bigger than myself. That alone, like, people
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: were burned at the stake for talking like that several
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: hundred years ago. That is remarkable that you can be
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: at a restaurant and people are like, oh, yeah, my
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: crystal's talking to me. You're like, really? Casual, ordinary, not
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: a problem. That ubiquitous thing, we see it everywhere. That's
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: an emergence of separating from the stuff that was programmed
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: and at least feeling like I have the right to discover, stitch,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: decide what works, what doesn't work. And that is the
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: beginning of a revolution of self-discovery. And I think our
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: children and our children's children and beyond are going to
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: refine that. Evolution may not be the right concept to
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: discuss this because evolution is always predicated on the past.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: And it's a building on something that is working well.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: And that animals that figure out how to solve something,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: for instance, get to breed. The other ones die out.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: And that does change the species and the improvement. is
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 3: that we can adapt to the environment, extract what we need,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: and our bodies can survive. We are doing that, particularly
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: in the modern world, where there's so many ways that
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: we are mastering the environment. That's a product of evolution,
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: serves us. I think the idea of progressive revolution might
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: serve us better because it's placing the change outside of
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: the hands of humanity. There's nothing to figure out. beyond
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: what is emergent and how to understand it, how it's
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: already affecting us. We can't really decide what's coming out
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: in the collective. We just have to figure out our
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: ethical stance, our relationship to it. So Jung, I don't
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: know whether he was optimistic or pessimistic. As he was,
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: he was a phenomenologist. He's like, huh, I think I'm
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: observing this. I think it's useful to talk about my observations.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: Maybe we can make something of it and then go
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: with the telos, with the flow to the emergent thing
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: versus dragging and fighting against it. But that because the
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: age of Pisces required the idealization of one thing and
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: the demonization of other things, and it had its place,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: when all the rules are being taken away, and boy,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: we're seeing it everywhere, all the stuff that was repressed collectively,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: that was called evil, is now showing up as maybe laudable.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: Maybe it's pretty good. We used to call it bad,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: but now it's great. Who knows? And people are confused.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: And this is a term we're hearing, like, this is
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: not normal. Like, I hear commentators say that all the time,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: and I'm like, yes?
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: And?
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: And what are we going to do about the not normal,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: not Piscean, which is that demonizing it is just a
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: restoration of the Piscean story. Like, well, now the evil's
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: over there. It used to be over here, but now
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: it's over there.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: And it's time for a new ethic, as Neumann said
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: in the title of his book. Yeah.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: So, yes, we are seeing what we used to call
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 3: evil showing up everywhere, but trying to kill it, put
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: it in a box, club it to death. There's no
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: support in the system for that, and the reason you
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: can know it is the attempts to do that are failing.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: There are laws. Let's get that guy in jail, but
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: nothing seems to work. And that even when you do
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: sequester them, all of a sudden somebody else is doing
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: it over here, in another country, in your neighborhood. So
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: something else is required. And most of us are used
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: to acting on the outer environment. If I just get
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: my hammer and chisel and I keep pounding on my
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: neighbors or my politicians or my kids, then I can
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: reform them into the good old days. And it seems
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: counterintuitive to turn to your dreams for the new constitution
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: that is being written for you, by you, and this
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: is a hard thing to believe, only for you. not
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: for your kids, not for your spouse, and not for
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: your neighbors. It's you and the self in the dreams.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: And you're not responsible for explaining it unless you want,
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: but it's going to take some work to really get
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: the message, which in fact will be far more difficult,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: but far more fruitful than just trying to re-litigate some
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: you know, 12th century outrage that people are sure is
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: the right way to go. So try the new stuff.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 4: And with that, let's go to a dream. Today's dream
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 4: is from a woman who's 40 years old. and she's
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: a therapist, and she has titled her dream, I Have To.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 4: And here's the dream. I was walking in my city
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 4: and saw a mother ahead on the sidewalk with many children.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: One was screaming and crying very loudly, though I couldn't
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: tell yet which one. I then noticed it was a
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 4: very small boy, so small he had been hidden from view.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 4: He was the youngest of five or so. The mother
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: was getting frustrated and tugging on his arm. Then suddenly
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 4: he went flying into the road and landed face first.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 4: having been thrown. The other children were silent. I went
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 4: up to them and was trying to tell the mother,
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 4: I have to, but no words would come out. I
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 4: was aware that I'm a mandated reporter and was thinking
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: of my employee badge in my bag. She was also speechless,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 4: but finally said, you're not going to report this, are you?
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: And I said, I have to. All this time, no
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 4: one checked if the kid was all right. She got
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 4: him up and made a phone call warning someone about
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 4: what had happened, minimizing it, saying she just yanked on
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: his arm. I started talking to a slightly older boy.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 4: He wanted to show me his cat. And suddenly we
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 4: were in a bathroom. petting a gorgeous cat who was
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: orange and white with tiny black spots like freckles. We
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: talked about how soft it was. For context, she says,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 4: I recently changed careers and am working with youth in
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 4: a therapeutic context. I had a relationship end recently and
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 4: am still grieving. I don't have children, partly due to circumstance.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 4: but also because I worried it would be too much
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: for me to manage. I have ADD, and my own
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: mother was often dysregulated, though not abusive. The main feelings
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 4: in the dream were shock and tenderness. And she also adds,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 4: I have been doing IFF, internal family systems, and inner
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 4: child work with my therapist. I don't have a cat
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 4: but would like one. I have several young clients who
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 4: talk about their pets as supports at home. We are
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 4: doing what Jung often said he did when first presented
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: with a dream, which is to say to himself, I
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: have no idea what this dream means.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly aware of a lot of feeling,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: like just this little boy who gets thrown into the
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: road and then the mother is just... Yeah, I mean,
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: I think, so I'm definitely starting in this just kind
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: of feeling place, you know, this little boy has thrown
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: into the road and then the mother is like trying
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: to kind of cover it up or minimize it. And
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: I think it's also interesting and relevant that the dream
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: is titled, I have to, because the dream ego sounds
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: like she's going to, you know, do the mandated reporter
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: thing and we're all social workers, we're all mandated reporters,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: so we understand that. But she's relating to the incident
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: out of duty, not really pathos, not feeling out of duty.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: Not that that's necessarily wrong, but I feel it. I
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: feel it as I really kind of want to be
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: with that little boy, and the dream ego is like,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: here's my badge.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah. And that sort of echoes the mother's feeling in
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 4: the dream as a dream figure that she's got all
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 4: these children and she yanks on his arm and throws
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: him quite a distance. And then the explanation is just, hey, look,
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 4: you know, all I did was pull on his arm.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: So we have two people in the dream, so to speak,
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 4: the mother and the dream ego. And no one is
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: expressing shock and horror at what has just happened to
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 4: the smallest of the five children that the dream features.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: So here's this really young little boy who gets abused. Joseph,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 4: you look really pensive.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm just noodling the transition in her career forward.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: as a therapist working with youth, there also is just
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: a reality, particularly when you're starting with a new psychotherapeutic field.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 3: So she may be attempting to relate to the children
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 3: she's caring from, from a mother standpoint. And if one
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: is thinking that is the role, then being unconscious moving
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: a child from here to a foster home, is that
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: like throwing them into a street? Am I hurting them?
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 3: The kids are telling her very painful, provocative stories, some
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: of which may involve parental abuse. Is she ready to
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: champion them and get law enforcement involved? Does she believe them?
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 3: Have you investigate these things? What's to be done? So
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: I think the dream could be interpreted as Role confusion.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 3: And this is something, like my friends at work for CPS,
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: finding the right attitude and the right mission to kind
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: of go into very painful circumstances, diagnose from a legal
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 3: standpoint what needs to be happened, and then executing the solution.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 3: It takes a lot of discipline. A lot of things
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: have to be sequestered inside of us in order to
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 3: kind of think through the unthinkable. And that's a very
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: new process for many of us. So I think the
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: dream in part is telling her that if you think
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: you're mothering everyone, it's going to be hard to even
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: keep track of them. And it may even be an
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 3: impossible task to mother 40 kids in your caseload. But
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: if you take them one at a time and you
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: leave that collective place and you sit and talk to them,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: then you ask the kid, well, what do you want
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: to show me? my cat that's that's where the dream
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 3: lands and in part because there's confusion and perhaps even
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: an impossibility that's being presented in the beginning so the
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: movement from the public space the alienation between all the
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 3: characters to the small quiet contained place where things can change.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: In a bathroom, people can evacuate things from the psychic
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: body that need to go. They can wash. They can
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 3: learn how to take care of themselves. Many things can
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: happen in a bathroom that can't happen in a street.
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 3: The street only has one thing, which is maybe safely
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: getting across the street. Or the street is a transition
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 3: into the car or into the store. It's not a
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: place you should be spending so much time. but the
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 3: bathroom is much more like a psychological process. And then
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 3: something can be shown and something that actually is moving
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 3: to her, perhaps even beautiful. So on one level, it
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 3: may be just kind of both introducing the new attitude,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 3: which is being in the bathroom with the cat and
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 3: the boy, and also challenging, like when you're trying to
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 3: be a mother with 40 clients, it's not going to
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 3: work well and it's not going to look very good.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: And sooner or later, one of those kids, you're not
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 3: going to be able to track them. And something's going
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: to happen that you won't be able to understand. So
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 3: what's the right role in the right place? That's one position.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: So I'm really struck by the sentence, all this time,
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: no one checked if the kid was all right. So
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: if we think about that youngest boy as a part
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: of her and, you know, she's doing inner child work,
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: you know, she hasn't checked to see if he's okay.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: It's almost like my fantasy is that that is too painful.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: So there's maybe a level, if we want to be
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: like slightly more concrete about it, we could say like
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: earliest trauma, it's too painful. But there's something that's more recent, perhaps,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: the older boy, that she could start relating to. As
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: you were talking about Joseph, she can just say, you know,
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: she starts. So no one checked to see if the
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: kid was all right. And then, you know, she makes
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: the phone call and says, I just yanked on his arm.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: And then I start talking to a slightly older little boy.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: So she kind of turns away from the youngest boy,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: and the mother does too, But then she orients toward
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: this slightly older boy that I think, you know, I
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: think you're substantially right, Joseph. It's like she can just
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: be with him. And that's when this kind of beautiful,
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: this gorgeous cat can be present. So it's not a
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: terrible outcome if we look at the kind of dramatic
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: structure of the dream. Like it ends in this place
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: that is... provisionally okay, but there's this sort of hanging
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: chad of, is the little boy okay? I have a
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: couple of things.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 4: One is that I just want to unpack for listeners
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 4: who might not be familiar with it, the idea of
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 4: internal family systems as a therapeutic tool. framework in which
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 4: all of what Jungians would call complexes and much, much more,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 4: you know, really can be imaged by your own family
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 4: growing up and by internal family figures. So that those dynamics,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 4: family dynamics, are happening inside you.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: All the time.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 4: And in this dream, it's the perfect internal family systems
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 4: dream in a way that there's a mother and she
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 4: has a whole tassel of children, one of whom, the
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 4: littlest one, the little one, the little one gets lost.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 4: He's screaming and crying. He finally gets thrown. And as
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 4: you said, Lisa, all this time, no one checked if
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 4: he was all right. And I would be curious, especially
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 4: in light of IFS-oriented therapy, where that little one is
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 4: in her that got explained. You know, the mom explains
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: to somebody, the mother in the dream explains. and our
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 4: dream ego starts chatting with an older boy. And I
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 4: might also wonder, and I'm just wondering, because I'm a
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 4: little skeptical of this, of what happened at the end
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 4: of the dream, of this is a terrible situation, of
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 4: this mother basically abusing this kid, throwing him, nobody checks
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 4: on him, and then kaboom, We're in a bathroom with
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 4: an older boy who's much more self-sufficient, having a very
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 4: pleasant conversation and enjoying a beautiful cat whose fur is
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 4: soft as opposed to the hard reality that had preceded
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 4: in the dream of a child being yanked and thrown
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 4: some distance. And I think, you know, then there are
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 4: the family systems of working with youth, you know, whether
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: they're children or teenagers. I usually connote youth as being
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: teens or young adults, but we don't know.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: So taking a bit of a more archetypal lens, there
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 3: is a motif in fairy tales and dreams of the
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 3: child of destiny, Oedipus. pinned, taught, left in the forest,
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: who becomes the king. So the idea of the child
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: who is exposed, abandoned, set adrift, the vulnerable new potential
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 3: that is forced into contact with danger and with fate.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: Perseus is cast out with his mother in a chest
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: in the sea. Hera casts out Hephaestus. Oedipus, as we said,
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 3: So the dreamer's smallest boy is hidden, is cast out
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 3: upon destiny. And by that, forced into consciousness, because the
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 3: roadway is where everyone's headlights are going to see it.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: Like it's the object in the middle of the road.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: Like you see the object in the middle of the road.
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: So I think there is something is at play there,
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 3: which is, shocking if we personalize it like that would
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: be appalling to see a human mother throw their child
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: into the street but from an archetypal level something is
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 3: being enacted it is a kind of cosmic drama that
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 3: she's being introduced to and is mystified by and doesn't
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: kind of know and she's so hesitatingly like does this
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: mean i call the cops is that is that the
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: right response to the dream of course you would do
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 3: that in real life but in the dream is that
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: the right thing to do and so she's mentalizing she's
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: pondering it and even talking with the mother it's like
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: because the the mother archetype is like what will you
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: do you know basically she's not sure what's going to
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: happen the bathroom is always interesting that in slavic folklore
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: bathrooms have their own spirits ah i love that that
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 3: there's something called the bannock which is the bath spirit,
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: you know, that, and particularly, you know, we have collected bathhouses.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 3: There's a spirit that's there to take care of you
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 3: and wash you. It seems to me that it's kind
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: of like the mother. And so if we think of
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 3: the cat kind of licking a kitten inside the bathroom,
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 3: like there's a spirit in the bathroom that's kind of
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 3: rosy and warm and beautiful and very much the different
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: of the, spirit of what's happening in the street in
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 3: the collective so i i think there is an archetypal
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 3: domain hard for her to relate yeah yeah to the
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 3: child of destiny but there it is a little easier
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 3: to be with the bannock the spirit of caretaking which
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 3: is a mothering spirit by the way the cleaning of
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: the body all of that so she's being shown these
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 3: two things and We don't know where that's going to go.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 3: Like these tension of the opposites. I don't know. She's like,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: I don't know what to say. I don't know what
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: to do.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to say it feels like a
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: both and like both. There's a turning away from the
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: boy in the street. And maybe it's not good in
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: that sense. You know, not good in that sense that
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: she moves to the older boy. But but I sort
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: of get the sense like this is what this is
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: what can be done now. And it's something, you know.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 3: When I was working in the psych hospital with my
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: early social work stuff, occasionally we'd get moved around to
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: different floors to cover for other social workers. I remember
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: I was on the wildest unit where people would kind
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 3: of get taken off the street and interred, very psychotic.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 3: I did well. I could, you know, got along. Once
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 3: in a while, I would be put up in the
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 3: children's unit, which was very.
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 3: And I was new to it. So I kind of
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 3: relate to that beginning story. Like, I'm sitting down with
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 3: the kids, we're drawing art. A little boy who's four,
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 3: I don't even know what's wrong with him, but he
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 3: doesn't want to go to bed, and he's coming over,
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 3: and he wants to hold my hand.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, Joseph.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 3: And I'm like, am I a father? Am I a mother? Like,
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: am I taking care of them? And when you discharge
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 3: them after four days... It feels like somebody threw them
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 3: in the street. I'm watching it, and I don't know
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: what to do. But clearly, people that work there kind
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 3: of figure out the limits of their role. So I
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 3: remember there was this little boy, and I always had
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 3: an open-door policy, which the other social workers thought was crazy,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 3: but I just kept the door open in the unit.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 3: People would wander into the office. A little boy came in,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 3: really sweet. And the nurses are like the mothers on
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: the street. They're like, would you get that kid into
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 3: their room? It's nap time. And so I take the
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 3: kid by the hand. I bring him in. I have
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: a talk. I tuck him in. I said, listen, these
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: are the rules, buddy. Can't come out the door. So
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 3: I walk away and then I come back and the
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 3: kid's right like an inch inside the door. Like just
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: like a puppy just standing there. He's telling me the story.
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 3: And then I hear from behind me the old tough
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 3: nurses like, there goes daddy. I was like, huh, what's
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: going on? So I get the feeling of that first
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 3: part of the dream and trying to figure out what
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 3: to do with all these kids that break your heart.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: And the truth is, you're only going to have them
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: for a little while. You're going to discharge them. And
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: if you're caught in I'm the mother or I'm the dad,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 3: It feels like you're throwing these kids out into the street,
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 3: even if that's not really what's going on. But it
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 3: feels like you're being insensitive. And yet, if you do
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 3: that for 20 years, the file opens, the file closes,
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 3: and you put it away and you can't carry every
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 3: child's traumatic story. You couldn't work in the field. It
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 3: would eat you up. So that's my fantasy about dancing
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 3: in this transitional space around Working with kids, what do
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 3: you do with all of that? Can you do anything?
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 3: That's the other thing is the helplessness because insurance companies
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 3: aren't going to pay for six months of treatment. You
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 3: got med stabilization, a couple of handouts, maybe you're talking
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 3: to the parents and they're gone.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: So hard. So hard.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 3: And yet, got to figure out how to do it. Somehow,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 3: and maybe the bathroom is a good solution, like It
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 3: can change their life, but maybe you can admire the
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 3: cat-like quality in the room. Maybe you can help them
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 3: wash something off, get new clothes, learn a little something
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 3: about self-care in an environment that maybe is really, really hard.
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 3: Sometimes all you can do for a kid is help
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 3: them survive the reality that you can't take them out of.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 3: You're not given godlike powers to lift kids and put
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: them different places. People think it should be like that,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 3: but the truth is when you're working with kids, it's
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 3: not like that. So she's in that initiation of oh, God,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 3: how do I hold what I'm hearing from these kids
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 3: and what their caregivers are kind of doing about them?
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so we wish this dreamer all the best. Thanks
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisunionlife.com. If
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: you enjoyed this episode, give us five stars and a
• 1:29:23
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