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Ecstatic Transformation: Activating the Archetype of Radical Joy · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:28
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: Today, we're going to talk about a wonderful topic, ecstasy,
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: which is something that all of us have at least
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: for a moment experienced, and perhaps maybe as toddlers we
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: experienced many times, the sense of unity or oneness with
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: the universe, a dissolution of the limits of the ego,
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: experiences of intense joy and love, or sometimes Think of
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: it as self-transcendence. This topic, wonderfully, was suggested by a listener.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: And we're very appreciative for that, for ringing that bell.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: We'd love to hear from you about what you'd like
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: us to talk about. So just go to our website, thisjungianlife.com
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: slash podcast. And then click, do you have a podcast
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: topic suggestion? There's a form opens up. Just type in
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: a couple of your thoughts. We do read through them.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: And we collect them and we use them for inspiration.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: So please don't hesitate. Let us know what you'd like
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: to jump into with us. So ecstasy, jumping into ecstasy
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: with us. I'm just going to read a quick poem
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: by Rumi, who is so many of us know, the
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  Speaker 3: poet of ecstasy, like many of the ecstatic mystics throughout time.
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  Speaker 3: And this is a poem called Agony and Ecstasy. In
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: the orchard and rose garden, I long to see your face.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: In the taste of sweetness, I long to kiss your lips.
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  Speaker 3: In the shadows of passion, I long for your love. Oh,
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: supreme lover, let me leave aside my worries. The flowers
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: are blooming with the exultation of your spirit. By Allah,
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  Speaker 3: I long to escape the prison of my ego and
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: lose myself in the mountains and the desert. These sad
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  Speaker 3: and lonely people tire me. I long to revel in
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  Speaker 3: the drunken frenzy of your love and feel the strength
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  Speaker 3: of Rustam in my hands. I am sick of mortal kings.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: I long to see your light. With lamps in hand,
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: the sheiks and mullahs roam the dark alleys of these towns,
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  Speaker 3: not finding what they seek. You are the essence of essence,
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  Speaker 3: the intoxication of love. I sing your praises, but stand
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: mute with the agony of wishing in my heart.
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  Speaker 4: So evocative and so Dionysian, you know, of all the
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: references to intoxication and drunkenness. The God of Wine. All
• 3:38
  Speaker 4: of these images are so rich as to what is ecstasy.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Well, it really, and that poem really lifts it up, right?
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  Speaker 2: These something people tire me. Like, there's the ordinary world,
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: and then we have an intimation of something beyond the ordinary.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: And we want to reach that, and we want to
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: find that. I was just looking up the etymology of
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: the word ecstasy, and it comes from the Greek for
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: to place out. There's a Greek word ecstasis, which means
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: literally standing outside oneself. So when you say, you know,
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: I'm so happy I'm beside myself, you're talking about an
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: experience of ecstasy.
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  Speaker 3: So I think of that phrase of you know, what
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: breaks us out of the box. And the box being
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: the everyday, the familiar, the way we know ourselves, which
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: could be working just fine. But there is something lifeless
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: that can creep up in us that we need to
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  Speaker 3: be surprised in order to be enlivened. And if it
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: happens to be a delightful surprise and is intense, it
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: can cause this release inside of ourselves, which we think
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: of as ecstasy.
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  Speaker 2: Well, it does imply, I think, the loss of control,
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: in a sense. And therefore, it's a little frightening, right?
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  Speaker 2: It's not just, I don't know, I'm sort of casting back, like,
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  Speaker 2: what ecstatic experiences have I had recently? And I don't
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  Speaker 2: know that I've had some really lovely experiences recently, but ecstatic,
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  Speaker 2: you know, That's a different order, I think. That's not joy.
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  Speaker 2: That's not celebration. It's something really other. It's a really,
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  Speaker 2: we're really in an altered state, I want to say.
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  Speaker 2: Don't you think?
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: But I think I also want to sort of temper this,
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  Speaker 4: you know, of like, wow, you know, when have I
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  Speaker 4: had an ecstatic experience, you know, seeing the burning bush
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  Speaker 4: on the mountainside like Moses? And the answer is never. However,
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  Speaker 4: we've all had experiences of being overtaken by a kind
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  Speaker 4: of exaltation and joy. And sometimes we have that in
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  Speaker 4: the theater with something just magic. happens at a ballet
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  Speaker 4: or a theater or the opera, and all of a
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  Speaker 4: sudden something just comes in and affects us deeply. And
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  Speaker 4: there are many other examples. So there are big ways
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  Speaker 4: and smaller ways, so to speak, of being shaken out
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  Speaker 4: of that box of rationality and practicality and work and errands.
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  Speaker 2: That's interesting because here's what that brings up for me personally, Deb,
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  Speaker 2: when you were talking about sort of, you know, the theaters.
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  Speaker 2: You know, I've had some experiences, but talk about joy,
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  Speaker 2: which I think is a close cousin of ecstasy. I
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: am an unabashed Beethoven fan. And the Ninth Symphony, which
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: of course the final movement includes the chorale, the Ode
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: to Joy, so he's that chiller to music. That is
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  Speaker 2: a piece of music that I can't really listen to
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  Speaker 2: because it's too much. If I want to listen to
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  Speaker 2: that piece of music, I need to, you know, lock
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: the door and turn off the phone. And then I
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: would have a quite profound, emotional, ecstatic experience, I think.
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  Speaker 2: But it's not something that I really, you know, it's
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: like I would interrupt my whole day. I don't want
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  Speaker 2: to go to that place very often. It's a wonderful place,
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: but it pulls me out of my ordinary life. And
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  Speaker 2: I don't always want that. It's not always comfortable.
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  Speaker 3: I think that idea of breaking the limits also breaks
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: us apart. And that's why at some point we'll chat
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  Speaker 3: about Dionysus as an archetypal image and theme, because Dionysus
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: is the god of ecstasy, but is also dismembered.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 3: That his ecstasy, in essence, kind of burns him down
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: to nothing. And then he is recoagulated and reborn afterwards.
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  Speaker 3: But I also wanted to give this middle place, thinking
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: about what you just said, Ted, that I remember when
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: my little sister had her first child. Shortly after the birth,
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: she and I were talking, we're very close. And she said,
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: and as she was bubbling up with tears, she said,
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  Speaker 3: I did not know I was capable of feeling that
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  Speaker 3: much love. I didn't know my body could feel anything
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  Speaker 3: like that. Again, something that many mothers report, particularly with
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: the birth of the first child, and yet broke the box.
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  Speaker 3: It broke her into some other experience that she just
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: had never had before that was both fantastic and crushing
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  Speaker 3: at the same time.
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  Speaker 2: And it's interesting because it is biochemically mediated. Like, I
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  Speaker 2: hate to take some of the romance out of it,
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  Speaker 2: but it's like you got a lot of good, I
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: don't even know what they are, but, you know, you
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  Speaker 2: got a lot of oxytocin going on there and it
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  Speaker 2: feels really good, you know?
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  Speaker 3: There's actually some science around it. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, norepinephrine,
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  Speaker 3: but they all kind of dance together. And then people
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  Speaker 3: are talking about DMT as well, maybe a little dash
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: of that in there. But that just tells us that
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  Speaker 3: the brain goes into a state and that we can
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  Speaker 3: name what that is. But that doesn't necessarily talk about
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: the psychological. processes that trigger.
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  Speaker 5: Right.
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  Speaker 2: Or that result from.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly. So although we can explain it in the body that.
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  Speaker 2: It doesn't reduce it.
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't reduce it or actually even tell us enough
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  Speaker 3: about it to have a relationship to it.
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  Speaker 4: But I like this... inclusion of the body in all
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  Speaker 4: of this, of your sister's experience. It's a bodily, embodied experience,
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  Speaker 4: which makes the moment of our being taken over so
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  Speaker 4: much more powerful because it's all of us. It's not
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  Speaker 4: just what I think, and that was surprising, or even just, quote, emotional.
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  Speaker 4: It's also physiological, so.
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  Speaker 5: It includes our whole being of sensation and feeling and
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  Speaker 5: a whole new awareness that is the numinous.
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  Speaker 4: It's awe. And it also sort of lives right next
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  Speaker 4: door to people who seek ecstatic experiences through substances, for example.
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  Speaker 4: I want to use my physiology to hopefully ignite a
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  Speaker 4: feeling in me of, you know, getting high. And that
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  Speaker 4: choice of words is no accident.
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  Speaker 2: Right. You know, Joseph, you already invoked this several times,
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  Speaker 2: starting with your Rumi poem, you know, and Deb, you
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  Speaker 2: just leaned right into it, that there's a connection between
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  Speaker 2: between the experience of ecstasy and our relationship with the transpersonal.
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  Speaker 2: In some sense, an ecstatic experience is how we feel
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  Speaker 2: ourselves to go beyond our little, you know, ego, kind
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  Speaker 2: of break that box, be in touch with something larger
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  Speaker 2: than self. And it may be true that we have
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  Speaker 2: an aching desire to have those experiences, to know that
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  Speaker 2: we are in contact with something greater. And when we
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  Speaker 2: don't have those in our daily lives or in our
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  Speaker 2: regular lives, let's say, not implying one should expect this daily,
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  Speaker 2: but we may go looking for it in other places
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  Speaker 2: and that this can be one of the ways of
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  Speaker 2: understanding addiction.
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  Speaker 3: And part of what the unnerving aspect of ecstasy is,
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  Speaker 3: is that it's part of the soluteo. That something in
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  Speaker 3: us kind of dissolves and then we are, there's an
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  Speaker 3: opportunity to be in union with something greater than ourselves
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  Speaker 3: or at the very least something different from ourselves. So
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  Speaker 3: Robert Johnson has a lovely book called Ecstasy, Understanding the
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: Psychology of Joy. It's a great primer around this. And
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  Speaker 3: he offers an idea that some of us have a
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  Speaker 3: natural inclination to seek out ecstasy. One way we could
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  Speaker 3: think about it is some of us are sons and
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  Speaker 3: daughters of Dionysus. We're kind of marked by that archetype.
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  Speaker 3: And so early on in our lives, we may experience
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  Speaker 3: something that takes us outside of ourselves. And that could
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  Speaker 3: be the first time we get drunk. or the first
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  Speaker 3: time we try sex. Fall in love. Perhaps even fall
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  Speaker 3: in love. And it seems like it's a full ecstatic transcendence,
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  Speaker 3: but it isn't really that, but it's the closest thing
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  Speaker 3: that we have found at such a young age. And
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  Speaker 3: so often we will continue to pursue that. So we'll
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  Speaker 3: use alcohol as a common example. I've had clients who
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: have been in recovery for many years, and some of
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: them said, you know, I was 13, I had my
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  Speaker 3: first cocktail, and I had never felt anything so wonderful
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: in my life. And something activated. That incredible longing for
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: ecstasy makes itself known. Robert Johnson would call that junk
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  Speaker 3: food ecstasy, that it's as if it's real food, but
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: it's really funyun, or it's really spam. And there is
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  Speaker 3: something in it, and we are having at least a
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  Speaker 3: physiologic echo of a full ecstatic experience. The difficulty is
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  Speaker 3: that not having anything to compare it to, we think
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  Speaker 3: that that is the only way to feel the ecstatic
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  Speaker 3: thing that somehow at the center of our being is
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: demanding it from us. And much of what AA is,
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: is trying to kind of contain the junk food ecstasy,
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: but also through the disciplines of the 12 steps, create
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  Speaker 3: the possibility that one might actually have a spiritual experience
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: of transcendence.
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  Speaker 4: And Jung, of course, famously related those sort of low-grade
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  Speaker 4: experiences of ecstasy through alcohol, spirits, we call them spirits,
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: in a bottle. versus something that is truly spiritual, and
• 15:41
  Speaker 4: that he thought that people who became alcoholic were seeking spirituality,
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: they're seeking the ecstasy, but obviously looking for it in
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: the wrong place. But nevertheless, that there was that quest
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: of wanting something transpersonal, transcendent, as a genuine thing, thirst
• 16:08
  Speaker 4: for a kind of ecstatic experience.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: And I wonder if it's a good time to share
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: Jung's first ecstatic experience with alcohol. Yeah. So he was
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: 14 years old. He had been sent away for a cure.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: He was staying with adult strangers and they took outings
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: and they visited a distillery and were invited to sample
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: the wares. And so here, this is Jung from Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
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  Speaker 2: I found the little glasses so inspiring that I was
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: wafted into an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness.
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  Speaker 2: There was no longer any inside or outside, no longer
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: an I and the others. No number one and number
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  Speaker 2: two were no more. Caution and timidity were gone and
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it
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  Speaker 2: that creeps and flies, revolves, rises or falls had all
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: as if I were drowned in a sea of blissful musings,
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  Speaker 2: but because of the violent heaving of the waves had
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: objects in order to keep my balance on the swaying
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: streets and between the rocking houses and trees. Moralists, I thought,
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  Speaker 2: only unfortunately just a little too much. the experience came
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: to a rather woeful end, but it nevertheless remained a discovery.
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  Speaker 2: So you had this intimation of what a kind of
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: unitary consciousness experience might be. And Joseph, you're talking about
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: clients who maybe had this experience around the same age
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: and then continued to look for it there. And for
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: whatever reason, Jung didn't do that, you know, um, close
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: by this passage in MDR is his description of his
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: first communion, in which he was expecting an ecstatic experience,
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: and it was terribly disappointing and ordinary. But that just
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: set a question to him that he continued to cultivate,
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: let's say, and kind of live into. And I think
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: he probably had some ecstatic experiences of his own without
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: the use of substances later in his life.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: But Well, I think in the Red Book, Jung is
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: talking about these Saludio experiences, which were both ecstatic and
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: terrifying at the same time. Intimations of this show up
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: so often, I think, that we don't see them fully.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: Walt Whitman's poetry, Leaves of Grass, I mean, it's everywhere.
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  Speaker 3: You know, I sing the body electric, seeing God everywhere
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  Speaker 3: and this ecstatic feeling he has beholding his beloveds, beholding
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  Speaker 3: the natural world, going inside of himself, that there's something
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  Speaker 3: in the human soul that knows this. And I think
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: the popularity of poetry like that suggests there is something
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  Speaker 3: inside of all of us that lets us recognize it
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: in another person. So we don't just dismiss it as
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: irrelevant because it's an archetype. Let's take the lens of
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: Dionysus for a moment and just think a little bit
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: about that myth as one of many ways that as
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: archetypalists we could move into this. Dionysus was a really
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: important new kind of God. in the Greek pantheon because
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: the gods lived forever. They were eternal. They were eternally young,
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: eternally perfect, and only one thing, which is often true
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: about archetypes. You know Zeus because there's a pocket full
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: of qualities, and wherever those qualities show up. We can think, oh,
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: that's a Zeus-like phenomena or a Hera-like thing. Dionysus is
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: one of the demigods. Zeus sees Semele, falls in love
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  Speaker 3: with her, impregnates her. And as the pregnancy is developing, Hera,
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: Zeus's wife, discovers this and is outraged and tricks again. Again.
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: You know, he's out for all those bastard children that
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: she didn't bring forward. Hera comes in the form of
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: a nurse and talks to Semele, trying to help her
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: in her pregnancy, and plants the idea that she should
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: be as special as Hera. And next time Zeus shows up,
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: you should ask Zeus to come to you the way
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: he comes to Hera, because anything less than that is just,
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: you know, degrading you, and you deserve better. And then
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: Hera kind of disappears, but Semele thinks this is a
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: good idea. Zeus comes and is in adoration of Semele
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: and says, whatever you want, just ask me anything. And
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: Semele says, oh yeah, yeah, I want you to come
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: to me the same way that you come to Hera.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: And Zeus begs her not to ask for that. I'll
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: give you anything else. But Semele is sure that this
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: is the right thing to ask. And so in horror,
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: Zeus then becomes lightning and comes to her as lightning,
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: and she is immolated instantly. But in the ashes, the
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: heart of the fetus is still alive. It is the
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: divine aspect of Dionysus. It's taken. Zeus then opens his thigh,
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: inserts the heart of Dionysus into the thigh, and then
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: over nine months, Dionysus gestates in Zeus' thigh and is
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: then born again. Hera is still really angry about this
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: and then sets the Titans, which are the primordial divine
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: beings that the Olympians subdued, and orders them to trick
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: Dionysus and to kill him. So the Titans die. meet
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: Dionysus and they roll a little ball to him and
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Dionysus is ecstatic and comes and chases the ball and
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: the Titans take hold of him and cut him into
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: pieces and roast him and start devouring him but for
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: some reason the heart is not interesting and they toss
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: it aside into the bushes. Athena has been watching and
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: saves Dionysus' heart and brings it back to Zeus. Zeus
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: is furious. and he strikes the Titans, and they explode
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: into ash and steam. And from the ashes of the Titans,
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: who have consumed Dionysus, the first human being is said
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: to be made. So in that myth, we are part
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: the savagery of the Titans, and we are part the
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: child of the gods. The heart is also regenerated again
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: into a personality, This time, Hera's really angry, and so
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: she curses Dionysus with madness. And now Dionysus is roaming
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: around the world with satyrs and nymphs, and everyone's drinking alcohol,
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: and he's going through the ancient world and destroying cities
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: and creating chaos everywhere he went. The gods can't really
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: stop him, and Hera's kind of happy about it because
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: You know, she's really proven that Dionysus is a nuisance.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: And then his grandmother Rhea, who is the earth itself,
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: in compassion, guides Dionysus into one of her great caverns
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: and initiates him into the mysteries of the Great Mother.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: And he returns sane, reborn a third time psychologically, and
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: then exists in the Pantheon as the god of life,
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: the god of indestructible life. So there's so much that
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: we can make of those archetypal themes, but he is
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: in the category of all of the ancient gods who
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: died and were resurrected. Osiris has a similar story. And
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: to speak of the power of this archetype, it is
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: also similar to the archetype of Jesus Christ. who is
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: the son of God, Zeus, who then dies mortally and
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: is returned to life.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and just to expand on that a little bit, Joseph,
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: which thank you for telling that myth so beautifully, but
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: just to continue a little bit with the link between
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Christ and Dionysus, you know, they both had a divine
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: father and a mortal mother, and as you said, they
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: were both killed and resurrected. And There is something transgressive
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: about both of them, right? Like, you know, Jesus Christ
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: was encouraging his followers to break with traditions and leave
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: aside old norms. And he was hanging out with the
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: common people and with fallen women. And, you know, he
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: is the God of life, just as Dionysus is, and
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: of course they both have a connection with wine. So
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Dionysus is traditionally the god of wine who teaches people
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: how to cultivate the grape. And what happens to the
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: grape is it gets crushed and destroyed and then transformed
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: into something that delivers ecstasy. And Christ, of course, performs
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: the miracle at the wedding of Cana of turning water
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: into wine. And when we take communion, the wine is
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: the blood of Christ. So there's a lot of... They're really...
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: They're from the same mythical taproot, I think.
• 26:33
  Speaker 4: And the vine is such a potent symbol because... Vines
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: keep growing. They don't have just one root, one source.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: And they are of the earth, the vegetation that grows
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: and can be cut apart and still be regenerative, regenerate.
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: There's a famous passage in the Gospel of John of
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: Jesus saying, I am the vine and partake of me.
• 27:07
  Speaker 4: And it's a really beautiful analogy. So there really are,
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: it shows how, in a way universal, how this particular
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: archetypal theme shows up from Osiris to the Greeks and
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: in the Christian myth, and no doubt in many other
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: religious traditions worldwide.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: And there's, The mystery of death and rebirth is something
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: that's connected to the agricultural world. So if we can
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: imagine seeing the world the way a toddler sees the
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: world in this very primal way, it's amazing that the
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: trees drop their leaves or the grass dies or the
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: tulips disappear. And then they come back in the spring
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: in the exact same place. And what we make of that,
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: the infinite number of examples of life returning. And in Greece,
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: when things would green in the spring, that it was
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: literally thought of as, oh, that's Dionysus. There is Dionysus
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: in the greening of the trees. Sometimes they would call
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: it the Zoe of Dionysus. And Zoe in Greek means life.
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: It's the Zoe of Dionysus, here, here, here, and everywhere.
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: So the proof of the resurrection was in all things
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: that return new and fresh. And of course, in the
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: religious belief in reincarnation and the incredible power of it.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: And a great percentage of people on the planet do
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: believe in reincarnation, which in the Judeo-Christian world is not
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: something that's so clearly part of it, but that we
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: want to, on that archetypal level, be part of this
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: promise that we too will return in the spring.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: So there's some link then between sort of ecstasy and
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: what the Freudians would call the life drive.
• 29:26
  Speaker 4: And it was so evident in the way that people
• 29:30
  Speaker 4: lived not that long ago. You saw it every single year.
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: You saw it living close to nature. You saw it.
• 29:40
  Speaker 4: in your animals giving birth. It was everywhere, and we
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: were immersed in it in a way that in modern life,
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: we're not. We live in much more elaborate constructions with
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: We don't have to go to the well for our
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: drinking water. Even if our water comes from a well,
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: we just turn on a tap. And so it goes.
• 30:07
  Speaker 4: And so what I'm thinking about is where do we
• 30:11
  Speaker 4: get that kind of ecstatic connection of the reality of
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: the non-rational, the reality of the life force? And that
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: we often tend, I would venture more now than in
• 30:32
  Speaker 4: bygone eras, to substances and to sort of low ecstatic
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: sources to achieve something that we hope will be transcendence.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it might be substances, it might be other
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: things that bring a lot of pleasure but leave us
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: feeling when it's done that we just want more or
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: are even feeling empty. You know, it doesn't transform, right?
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: It just kind of temporarily satisfies that need for transcendence. So,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm thinking certain kinds of sex might be
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: like that.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: You know what?
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: When one of you were talking before, Deb, I think
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: it was you, I was thinking about the fairy tale,
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: The Little Match Girl.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: Because.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: So it's a Hans Christian Andersen. It's Christmas Eve. It's
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: bitterly cold. She's very poor. She's sent out by her
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: cruel father into the cold to sell matches. And she
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: has a limited number of matches to sell. And no
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: one is buying matches. And she's freezing. And she passes
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: these houses and everyone's celebrating. And, you know, families are
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: feasting inside the house. And so she thinks, well, maybe
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: to get a little bit of warmth, I'll light one match.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: And when she does, she has this glorious vision that
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: she's in a warm room eating delicious food by a
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: fire and a loving family, you know, something like that.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: But then the match goes out a second later, as
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: matches do. And she, you know, she continues on. And then, oh,
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: let me just light one more. And in the end,
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: she lights all of the matches all together. And she
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: has this wonderful vision of God and everything. And then
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: they find her frozen body in the morning. And so
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: it's those moments of ecstasy that actually deplete us. You see,
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: every match she lights is one less match she can sell.
• 32:34
  Speaker 4: And it's momentary.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: And it's fleeting. And it's actually just a fantasy that
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: assuages the suffering momentarily, but doesn't solve any problem. And
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: I think that that is an image for how many
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: of us go through life. And, you know, if we're
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: sons and daughters of Dionysus, we don't find the ecstasy
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: that sustains. And by the way, I mean, and I
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: think I hope we'll talk about this, as we've already alluded,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: ecstasy is not entirely positive. I mean, Dionysus brought a
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: divine madness, and we can talk about that. But there
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: is the divine madness that flings you forward into life,
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: a little bit like Rumi. And then there's the ecstasy
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: that leaves you empty and depleted. And maybe that's a
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: way to think about one thing rather than another.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: I really like that amplification with the little match girl.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: That is a really, really great example, a metaphor, an
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: image for the fleeting, suggestions of ecstasy and transcendence and
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: also the relief of suffering that the rapid change of
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: state from suffering to momentary pleasure is so intense that
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: it is a kind of ecstatic relief but it isn't
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: necessarily an ecstasy that changes us and then we come
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: back different.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: Right you know if you think about someone say with,
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: you know, binge eating, you know, it's like the moment,
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: you know, you know, you shouldn't really, you know, you
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: shouldn't have a donut, but there it is. And you
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: eat the donut and the whole world collapses.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: Into the donut.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: Into the donut.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: I know this feeling. I do too.
• 34:40
  Speaker 6: And all you know is the, the intense pleasure of,
• 34:45
  Speaker 6: Of the donut.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: You're not thinking about what you don't think about how
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: you're going to feel in 10 minutes. You're like, shit,
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: I just ate a donut. You're not thinking.
• 34:54
  Speaker 6: About the things you have to do. You're not thinking
• 34:56
  Speaker 6: about the fight you just had with your spouse. You're
• 34:59
  Speaker 6: just like the world like tunnels down to this single
• 35:03
  Speaker 6: point of pleasure.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: I can smell those yeasty baking smells in my brain
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: right now. I can smell driving past a Krispy Kreme donut. Oh,
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: my gosh. It's crazy.
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: We're talking here about the difference between an indulgence and
• 35:26
  Speaker 4: something that is truly ecstatic. And that's what the little
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: match girl does, too. She indulges.
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: I don't know, Deb.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: A donut can make me really ecstatic.
• 35:38
  Speaker 4: Oh, we've got to get off this donut topic. It's really,
• 35:40
  Speaker 4: I'm remembering that we have these really great things here
• 35:44
  Speaker 4: on Cave Cod called dirt bombs. And they are, I
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: would say they're not indulgences. They are truly ecstatic.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: There you go.
• 35:56
  Speaker 4: They're sort of like cinnamon donuts, but they're round. So
• 36:00
  Speaker 4: the cinnamon is all over and the inside is, really
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: moist and they're really, really good. And whenever anybody comes,
• 36:12
  Speaker 4: they ask about dirt bombs.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: But I mean, you know, we're having some fun with it,
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: but I think your point is we'll take it sort
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: of indulgence versus ecstasy.
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: Yes, it's not nutrition. It doesn't mean that you should
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: never have a donut. Better yet, a dirt bomb. But
• 36:34
  Speaker 4: we do, people do, and we all do, slip into
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: this quest for, you know, make me happy. This is
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: going to be great. My whole world collapses into the
• 36:51
  Speaker 4: donut for a while.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: What we're saying is there's an important difference between the
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: relief of tension and transformation.
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. That's great, Joseph.
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: And they can be in the realm of pleasure, which
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: we were saying can be this little basket of neurochemicals
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: tickles us for a moment. Like the thought of eating
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: the donut is so delicious. And then the actual experience
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: of it hitting the gut is an anticlimactic reality. But
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: I think experiences like the first orgasm that we've ever experienced,
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: if we just think about that for a moment, The
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: first time you realize your body could do that, that
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: it opens up an entire category of experience that could
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: be scary, is confusing. We didn't even know our bodies
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: could do something like that. I remember the first time
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: I had an orgasm. I didn't know what it was.
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: It's not like I was in health class, but nobody
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: was talking about that. I just had no category for it,
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: a whole other part of my brain. suddenly said i
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: am i'm here and you are different by virtue of
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: this the first time you fall in love i mean
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: really every cell in your body is romantically just smitten
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: by that person and you are different like that part
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: of the soul just wasn't awake and now it is
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: and you can't go back so something about the old
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: vision of ourselves is broken something is different afterwards, and
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: then we have to integrate whatever that's going to mean
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: to us going forward. And I think those are experiences
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: most of us have. But I think there are other
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: first-time experiences that are ecstatic, and then we can't unknow it,
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: and we have to find a place where that's now
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: going to live in us with some kind of an attitude.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: It's difficult, I can feel it, to talk about this
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: Because there are modern ways that we are reaching for this.
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: For instance, going to a rave. Dancing all night long.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: Taking MDMA and dancing all night long and kind of
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: howling at the moon. Finding a lover. I mean, there
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: are certain sexual partners we've had in our lives where
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: it's just this conflagration of passions. And both of you
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: are dumbstruck afterwards, whether or not other parts of the personality,
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: you know, can get along. But there's a way in
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: which you've been knocked out of your other experiences. There
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: are like we said, different kinds of substances, ayahuasca, psilocybin,
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: that we can take and certain parts of the brain
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: will wake up and we are broken open into something different. Pranayama,
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: which is certain breathing techniques, can knock us out of
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: anything that we felt before in a moment of euphoria.
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: In terms of the psychology of mysticism, I want to
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: put just one thing forward, which is highly specific, that
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: most mystical traditions promise that if we somehow can escape
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: the sense of isolation of the ego, thin those boundaries,
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: and even for just a moment be in union with
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: the self, with God, with the cosmic ocean, however it's
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: metaphorically described, all sense of limits of the personality will
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: temporarily dissolve. And then when we return to the limited
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: experience of ourselves, our personality in some ways will fall
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: apart and have to be restructured. If we think about
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: that for a moment, and why would that be so devastating?
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: if one were to have that full experience, is that
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: the foundation of the ego is when the infant, for instance,
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: moves its hand suddenly and whacks it against the side
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: of the crib. There's a moment, and I'm over here,
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: and something or other is over there that isn't me.
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: But the entire human ego is around the process of
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: me and the not-me. Which is normal, by the way.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: But what happens when we get to a certain age
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: and then we have even just a single moment where
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: we experience in a way that can't be denied something
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: totally different from that? Where I am in the mystical
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: union momentarily part of all things and then I am
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: suddenly just myself. And then it begins to unravel what
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: many mystics say is the lie, and the lie being
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: that I am separate from everything else. And the mystics
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: tell us, oh, no, no, that's not true. You're connected
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: to all things. You are connected. For some of us,
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: that's a lovely thought, but to actually experience it violates
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: how we have thought the world worked. And so sometimes
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: when Jung was listening to certain patients. He would get
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: worried that they were going to have an experience that
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: was going to crush the ego, was going to break
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: the ego. And at that time, he called it a
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: latent psychosis. Now, this is a pejorative way of thinking
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: about it. It leans into the fear of this. And
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: he had the sense that this person, if this breaks open,
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: the ego will literally fall apart. And his medicine was
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: to read them and get them to study myths and
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: fairy tales. He says, we've got to get archetypal themes
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: inside of this person. Because when the ego falls apart,
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: that the personal unconscious needs access to structures with which
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: to pull the personality back together again. In the mystical traditions,
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: often the acolyte will spend many years integrating a belief system,
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: a theology, an enormous amount of disciplined practices. So there
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: is an entire cosmology that they've learned so that if,
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: let's say, the kundalini rises in kundalini yoga and it
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: hits the pineal gland, and all of a sudden the ego,
• 44:00
  Speaker 3: there really is an ego death, which means the ego
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: is fragmented into this ecstatic experience of the divine. When
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: we come back, ideally, the cosmology becomes the building block
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: for the next version of you, which is going to
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: include this lived experience of unity. So for Jung, he
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: was seeing people whose egos would break, They lacked the
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: support of an archetypal fund. And then the analyst is
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: there trying to figure out how to help them regain
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: a sense of identity.
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: I'm also thinking in this connection with how important communal
• 44:45
  Speaker 4: experiences are of studying a mystical tradition, a religious tradition.
• 44:54
  Speaker 4: It's very structured and it takes time and you have
• 44:57
  Speaker 4: teachers and fellow seminarians or acolytes. Groups like the Shakers
• 45:06
  Speaker 4: would dance, dance. I am the Lord of the dance,
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: said he. And they would experience altered states as men
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: danced in one circle and women danced in another. One
• 45:19
  Speaker 4: circle went clockwise and the other went counterclockwise. The Sufis'
• 45:25
  Speaker 4: whirling tradition in traditional communities that use peyote or ayahuasca
• 45:33
  Speaker 4: is a communal, sacred rite with people participating beforehand. There's
• 45:40
  Speaker 4: a preparation period so that there are psychic and communal
• 45:48
  Speaker 4: and cosmological containers for the ecstatic experience that can help
• 45:56
  Speaker 4: a person really integrate it into his or her life,
• 46:00
  Speaker 4: which is very different from just getting stoned and then
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: feeling horrible the next day. And it was more along
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: the lines of the little match girl. It was there
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: and then it was gone. But there isn't anything that
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: psyche is importing as a memory and a lived experience
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: of something truly transcendent.
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: So there are terrifying experiences that tear the ego apart,
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: which is more kind of an Osirian experience. It wasn't
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: ecstatic when Seth cut him into pieces after trapping him
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: in a lead coffin. But there are experiences that are
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: beautiful when we come back from and we are not
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: the same. In this realm of ecstasy, it has something
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: to do with the other. coming into us in a
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: way that we cannot deny. I'd love for you, Deb,
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: to tell the story which is in this realm when
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: you really understood and felt that whoever was sending you
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: the dreams was actually an other that was never going
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: to go away and was with you and that you
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: were different after you realized And this other was already
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: kind of breaking in at night, giving you dreams, which
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: every time we have a dream, honestly, it is an
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: experience of something, not us, that is coming in. But
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: when you realized it, something else happened for you, Deb.
• 47:35
  Speaker 4: Well, that gives the perfect lead in to just a
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: short pitch for our book, Dreamwise.
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: And we are ecstatic about it.
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: So these ecstatic experiences can come through a dream. And
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: I'm hardly alone in having had such experiences. And I
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: remember so long ago, I was in my first analysis
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: at a really difficult time in life. And the only
• 48:12
  Speaker 4: reason that I went into analysis, which I just thought
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: was more or less like therapy, was because I was
• 48:19
  Speaker 4: trying to do anything and everything I could to improve
• 48:21
  Speaker 4: my situation. And I thought, well, you know, I guess
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: I could try this too. So my analysts, of course,
• 48:30
  Speaker 4: wanted to hear about dreams. And I'm a dreamer, so
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: I brought dreams in. one after another after another, and
• 48:39
  Speaker 4: it was interesting and it was nice. And I thought, well,
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: at least one of us has a game plan for
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: this process. And then I had a dream from which
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: I woke up with such a sense of awe. And
• 49:00
  Speaker 4: it wasn't that the dream image was of some angelic
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: presence or something like that, but It was that something
• 49:09
  Speaker 4: had happened to me in the dream. I had lived it.
• 49:15
  Speaker 4: And this was not related to any personal experience that
• 49:19
  Speaker 4: I could possibly have had, not even remotely. So these were,
• 49:27
  Speaker 4: we would say later, you know, archetypal images, mythological themes
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: that just came right in from through Psyche and the
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: Dream Maker, and hit me with a new realization that
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: something else was alive in me or coming through me
• 49:54
  Speaker 4: or who knew what, but there was more in me,
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: available to me, whatever that was, I was bigger than
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: I had been before. And that, I think, is what
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: an ecstatic experience can do and should do is make
• 50:16
  Speaker 4: a fundamental change. Could be through a dream. It could
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: be like your sister of her experience after having her
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: baby of, I never knew I could feel this. And
• 50:28
  Speaker 4: we never forget it. I mean, so many years ago,
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: and I still feel it even having not related the
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: actual dream contents. So, I think these are the transcendent
• 50:44
  Speaker 4: qualities we can use versus the flip side of just,
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: let's call it, you know, a substance abuse or an
• 50:53
  Speaker 4: escape or an indulgence.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: So I'm having a thought about maybe a common thread
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: that's coming through your experience with the dream, your sister's experience,
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: Jung's experience with alcohol. that maybe part of ecstasy is
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: discovering a new intensity of feeling or knowing something new
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: or finding something new in us or discovering like a
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: new aspect of ourselves that we didn't even know was there.
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: It seems like that's maybe common to many of these
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: experiences that we've been talking about.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: I think that sense, just as we said, of being different,
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: Which also brings us back to Jung and alchemy. I mean,
• 51:40
  Speaker 3: because the great reference to alchemy is salve et coagula,
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: which is you dissolve it, then you recoagulate it, you
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: dissolve it, you recoagulate it. And he was talking about
• 51:54
  Speaker 3: the personality, that every profound insight causes the personality to
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: have to change in order to integrate it as a
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: new building block. So Jung was looking at these symbols
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: of transformation and particularly was interested in alchemy, but there
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: are many symbols of transformation. By the way, he also
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: acknowledged that tarot card images are symbols of transformation. He
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: recognized that as well, but simply didn't choose or have
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: the time to unpack them the way he did alchemical images.
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: that he was knowing that there's something about the analytic goal,
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: which is for the ego first to go through a
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: lesser salutio by absorbing the shadow. So something has to
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: break open. Sometimes that can be ecstatic, but often it's
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: a kind of suffering experience. The next integration is integrating
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: the anima and animus. which are the latent potentials that
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: the self is holding for us, which we then project
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: onto other people. That's often an ecstatic solutio, that something
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: that's wonderful and fascinating gets added to us, which is
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: then in preparation for the announcement of the self, which
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: is this image of the full potential of who we are,
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: which is something that we can only talk about symbolically.
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: which has the capacity to save us, but make us
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: more fully ourselves than ever before. When Jung talks about
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: his creative illness in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he was
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: going through a dissolution, that the identity he had before
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: seemed to be falling apart. He was in enormous amounts
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: of agony. He was having these incredible intense emotional states
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: that were tearing him apart that had no real imagery
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: around them which was part of the problem is that
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: there was no representation of it and it just went
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: on and on and on for nights and nights it
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: drove him into despair and the thing that saved him
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: finally was a dream and in the dream he saw
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: the image of a mandala being expressed in the dream
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: and That was the appearance of the self, that he
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: wasn't alone and that something was now joining with him
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: in the restructuring of the new personality. So the dissolution
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: process can be agonizing, although today we're talking about dissolution
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: through ecstasy. Dissolution through agony, dissolution through ecstasy has the
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: similar end product, which is to make room. from more
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: unconscious material that is intimately related to you and then
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: requires you to come back together and get your feet
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: on the ground and figure out, who am I? With Deb,
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: who am I now that I know for a fact
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: that there is an other in me that's communicating with me?
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: What the heck do I do with that? Walking forward,
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: like going shopping the next day with that feeling. Jung
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: discovers the self and then he discovers all these other
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: inner characters in.
• 55:21
  Speaker 5: The Red Book.
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: And he's got to figure out who he is walking
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: forward with all this new information inside of himself. And
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: he founds a school of psychology.
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: You know, I appreciate that you brought up the dissolution
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: of agony because I do think that before we wrap up,
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: it is worth talking about kind of the dark side
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: of Dionysus. And it's probably most clearly shown in the
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: Euripides play, The Bacchae, where, well, and we could spend
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: a whole episode talking about this and we probably should
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: at some point, but Dionysus comes and he's looking for
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: everyone to worship him and King Pentheus says no, right?
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: So it's like, When we don't honor this impulse for
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: ecstasy and transcendence, we get into trouble. Because here's what
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: happens to King Pentheus is the Maenads, these women who
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: are driven mad by this divine ecstasy, this divine madness,
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: they follow Dionysus into the hills and they revel with him.
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: And they are so driven mad that they don't recognize Pentheus,
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: including his own mother. And he is ripped to pieces
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: because they mistake him for a stag or something. I
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: can't remember exactly why. But we do lose ourselves. We
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: are standing outside ourselves and we can lose ourselves. And
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: that can be destructive. We can be dismembered. We can
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: become dismembered. And as you said, Joseph, often with an
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: aim toward reconstituting along more expansive lines so that we
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: can contain more. But you know, sometimes that doesn't happen.
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: Sometimes we don't reconstitute. Sometimes we reconstitute in a faulty way.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: And sometimes we do damage to others that we didn't
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: mean to do when we were in our ecstatic state.
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: You know, so I'm thinking of drunk driving accidents.
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: Well, all of the unconscious impulses, the irrational impulses that
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: try to take us outside of ourselves, that we repress
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: in favor of an apollonic orderliness. Right. Apollo and Dionysus
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: were brothers. And in the temples of Apollo, often in
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: the month of December, the effigies of Apollo would be
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: taken down and effigies of Dionysus would be put up.
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: This is the Saturnalia. This is Mardi Gras. This is
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: that at some point, We need even a ritualized, you know,
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: where all bets are off and you get to wear
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: costumes and be whatever else you are before Lent comes
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: back on and all the rules have to be returned.
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: And if we don't do that, what you're saying is
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: then we will often have spontaneous eruptions of Dionysus. And
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: then we're suddenly drunk at the office party. We act
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: out in a way that is devastating to ourselves or
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: other people. We suddenly have an affair and a business trip,
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: although we've never, never thought that would happen. Billy Graham
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: is caught in a hotel with a prostitute. And this
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: is the Dionysus, the Dionysic impulse inside of us for
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: ecstasy will turn upon us if we don't honor it,
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: at least occasionally. We don't have the right attitude towards
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: the irrational, the wild, the ecstatic.
• 58:55
  Speaker 4: There are sort of like the Asila and Charybdis that
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: on the one hand, we can misuse and use ersatz
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: substances in a false quest for transcendentality. and Dionysian ecstasy.
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: On the other hand, we can refuse it like Pentheus
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: did and stay stuck in our rational, narrow, striving, goal-oriented,
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: orderly lives. and not make room for it at all,
• 59:31
  Speaker 4: in which case, there too, it can come to us
• 59:35
  Speaker 4: and be in its most destructive aspect. So how do
• 59:40
  Speaker 4: we make room? This is a rhetorical question. How do
• 59:44
  Speaker 4: we make room for Dionysus? How do we make room
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: for ecstatic experiences that will be our connection to the
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: life force?
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, and I love how you set that down.
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: That's the litmus test. Is this really serving my life?
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: In some ways, I think it comes down to, one,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: maybe at the end of this podcast, people coming to
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: believe that this is a nutrient. Like, you need Dionysus
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: or its equivalent. You need to cut loose. You need
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: to get out of the box in a way that
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: is intensely joyous to you, intensely ecstatic. Once in a while.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: And if we decide we need that, then we can
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: shape it aesthetically. Then we can ritualize it. You know, so,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: you know, once a year, I'm going to go to
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: this fantastic tropical island and I'm going to do these things.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: Burning Man.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: Burning Man. Oh, my God.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 4: Perfect.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. It's one week out of the year. It is.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 5: Absolutely.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: Right. Right.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: Today's dreamer comes from a 27-year-old man who works as
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: an artist, and he titles the dream The Monster. I'm
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: in a car with my mother. She's driving. It's nighttime,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: and we are going around the neighborhood where I grew up. Suddenly,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: five men appear, big, dangerous, all in black. They spray
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 2: some paralyzing substance on my mom and attempt to hijack
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: the car. I take the wheel to get us away,
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: but I remember I can't drive and get us into
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: a ditch. The men follow us. They have us cornered.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: I get out of the car, transform into an enormous
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: minotaur-like beast, and eat all five men. My mom wakes
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: up the next day seemingly happy. Here's the life context.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: I had just arrived in Spain where I was to
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: travel for a month away from my new girlfriend and
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: was feeling very lonely. And the main feelings in the
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: dream were horror and power. And here's some associations. I
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: have a mother wound from childhood I'm beginning to explore.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: I also don't have a driver's license and I haven't
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: lived in my hometown for years. Joseph, care to.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 6: Take us away?
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: Joseph, do you have some thoughts about this dream?
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: I don't know why I'm laughing. No disrespect for the dream.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: No, none at all. I think for, yes.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: But I think that The question in the dream right
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 3: from the beginning is who's the monster?
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: That the monstrous can move into many different places. Is
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: mom the monster? Is the ego the monster? Is these
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: other figures monstrous? But to me, it's a wonderful, wonderful
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: initiation dream. Here's this young guy and his mom is
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: driving his car. And what that suggests is that You know,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: the ego's personality is being driven, directed, shaped by the
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: mother complex. And that's very, very powerful. And at a
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: certain point, particularly at 27, 28, he's, you know, he's
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: really needs to step into that agentic life creating part
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: of himself. Something's got to change. Your mom can't be
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: driving the car anymore. When you're really starting out and
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: making a life, and this is true for men and women,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: by the way. So then the unconscious sends the medicine.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: Five men come to abduct you. And this is often
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: how it plays out in initiation rituals.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: The boys are with their moms in the sweet way
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: they are.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: That's great.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: The men come and grab them, and the moms, you know,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: it's a kind of theatrical engagement. The moms wail, and
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: they don't want their little boys taken, and the boys
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: are terrified. And they're dragged off into the forest, often circumcised.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: And then they come back fellow warriors, fellows in the
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: community of men. So mom's got to be paralyzed. The
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: mother complex has got to be quieted down. And wonderfully,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: we were talking earlier in the episode about Christ, and
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: we can say with the Eucharist, that he's got to
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: ingest all of these men. And then he gets a
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: little inflated, which is fine, but it makes him powerful.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 3: And then wonderfully, the dream maker says, Your mom would
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: actually be happy about that, although you thought she wouldn't be.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 3: But actually, your mom would like to see you be
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: a badass, to be big and full of your own
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: potential and strong and muscular in your life.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: It is really so lovely history.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: Marvelous.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, because, I mean, these big dangerous men who
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: come to try to hijack the car. And, of course,
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: our feelings, our big complexes can hijack our ego, hijack
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: our lives in some cases. And this is paralyzing. And
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: then he tries to drive away in the ordinary way, right?
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: He tries to react sort of as if... You know,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: he tries to take the wheel, as it were, right?
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 5: Yep.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: But that doesn't work. And it just gets him into
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: a ditch. But then this kind of magical thing happens.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: And I think it's interesting that it's a minotaur-like beast.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: The minotaur was the kind of terrible monster child of
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: Pacify and this bull.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 4: King Minos.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 4: Oh, no, the bull and the... But it was because...
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: Pasiphae is the queen of Crete. Her husband, King Minos,
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 4: had wanted, amongst three brothers, he wanted to become the king.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 4: And Poseidon helped him and gifted him with a white
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: bull that was magical and real indicator of the special
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 4: and deserving qualities that Minos had to be king. And
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: then he was supposed to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: but he'd become so fond of it, they just couldn't
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 4: bear to do that. And he sacrificed a regular old bull,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 4: at which point his wife pacifiae, I've never known how
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 4: to pronounce these names, is taken with lust for bull
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 4: out in the pasture and through a contraption built by Daedalus,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 4: the master craftsman, becomes impregnated. And that gives birth to
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 4: the minotaur that is typically depicted with the head of
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 4: a bull and body of a man and sometimes the
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 4: other way around, at least back in originally. And this
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 4: minotaur ate human beings. Seven young women and seven young
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: men from Greece had to come over every year or
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 4: every other year, and they were sacrificed to the minotaur.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 4: So it's a very... potent reference that this is a
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 4: minotaur-like beast. It's not a dinosaur. It's not something else.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 4: It's an image that combines raw, instinctual, voracious hunger with humanity.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: And it also, like the Minotaur exists because of the
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: sort of sins of the father in some sense. And
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: the mother's implicated in there too. So I think that's interesting.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 2: But the overall sense is that rather than having this
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: trip hijacked, rather than being passive and unable to do
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: anything other than get the car in the ditch, he's
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 2: able to harness some archetypal energy that allows him to
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: take control of the situation in a really surprising way.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 2: And it is worth wondering, is this an image of
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: a kind of wish fulfillment? Is this something that's in potential?
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: Is this the direction things are going? Is this the
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: way it's actually happening in the inner world? We don't
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: really know that, but it has a really surprising ending.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: Well, I think that if dreams are events and that
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 3: a dream is an artifact of a happening in the
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: inner world the night before. So in the face of
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: the mother complex being frozen, that the ego inflates and regresses.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: He has to reach into his own animal nature in
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: order to find the place that he's going to contend
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 3: with these masculine forces that he is frightened of. And
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: he finds the energy. And as I said, being able
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: to ingest them and metabolize them, which is a term
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: we often use. And then mom wakes up and actually
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: the world's good.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: Things are fine.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: The aggression has not harmed mom. And it's interesting that
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 4: the men that are later to be ingested spray some
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 4: paralyzing substance on my mom and attempt to hijack the car.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 4: So that's interesting of something paralyzing in our dreamer about
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 4: his very own mother complex.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: So we could do the one then, when the mother
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: complex is paralyzed, then I try to take the wheel
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: and drive us into a ditch. When I drive us
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: into a ditch, then I turn into a monster. So somehow,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: maybe it's that experience of like, that total, that frustratingly
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: passive experience of not being able to drive and finding
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: yourself in a ditch, somehow constellates this ability to experience
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: this very raw power in it. You know, I find
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: I have a number, I've worked with a number of
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: young men in their 20s in my practice, and dreams
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: of rampaging gorillas in particular are pretty common, right, Joseph?
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: And I always think about that as that kind of
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: raw instinctuality and sexuality that is, you know, that plays
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: such a big role in a young man's life. And
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: what I like about the Minotaur, as you were saying, Deb,
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: is it's partially humanized. And the Minotaur does this very
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: specific thing. It's not a rampage. It's he eats the
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: five guys that are attacking us. And then I think
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: his usage is that there's an ingestion of that psychic
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: energy that's sort of like to a purpose. So it's really,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: really great.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 4: There's something, you know, I'm thinking back to how this
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 4: dream affected us, how we felt about it at the beginning.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 4: Because we already... anticipated everything we've just talked about. We
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 4: intuited it.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 5: And it.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 4: Is an initiatory dream. And we were delighting in this
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 4: very normative and necessary underlying theme that's presented, as dreams
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 4: often do, with these incredibly wonderful images.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: There's a little scolding moment in the dream that I
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: think is helpful, too, is that when the mother complex
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: is around, it conjures the child. When the child is around,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: it conjures the mother because they're a pair. You can't
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: have an internal mother without a child or that it's
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: not a mother. And you can't have a child without
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: a mother somewhere because that's what.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: That's where children come from.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: What happens in the beginning of the dream is the
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: mother complex ceases to function, but he's still in the
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: child position. And children can't really drive cars very well.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: And so it goes into the ditch. So what I'd
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: like to suggest is that when does he drive the
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: car into the ditch in an attempt to conjure the mother?
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: And we will do this. What are the ways, if
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: we're really caught in the mother complex, do we fail
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 3: at something in order to conjure motherly care in other people?
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: And what I think is great is that it doesn't work.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: It doesn't wake the mother up. No one comes to
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: save him because he's kind of shot himself in the
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: foot or he failed to do something at work. or
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: some other kind of derailing, hoping that that would wake
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 3: up the mother principle in someone else, it's not going
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: to work. So then he has to regress, as I said,
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: goes back to another layer in the psyche that's more
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: instinctive in order to kind of get some muscularity inside
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: of himself. So there's also a bit of a warning here.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: moment there is, are there ways that you drive yourself
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: into a ditch, hoping that someone will mother you out
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: of it? And the dream might be saying, you don't
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: need to do that. You have other choices.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. Thanks for listening. To submit a dream,
• 1:14:22
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• 1:14:25
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