Latest / This Jungian Life Podcast / Did Jung and Tolkien visit the same psychic realms???

Transcript

Did Jung and Tolkien visit the same psychic realms??? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:13
  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.
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 0:37
  Speaker 5: Well, hello, listeners.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Today, I am recording not at my usual place, but
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: in a hotel room. So it may sound a little
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: off or look a little off, but we're making the
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: best of it. And we are so delighted to have
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: with us Becca Tarnas. And I'll just tell you that
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: I attended a webinar that she put on a few
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: months ago. And I was so excited when I got
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: the announcement about the webinar because it was about Jung
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: and Tolkien, two of my favorite subjects. And it was
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: such an inspiring webinar. And I said, we've got to
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: have you on the podcast. So she was kind enough
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: to make time for us. Becca is an assistant professor
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program at the California
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Institute of Integral Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was titled, The
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Back of Beyond, The Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: And her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy,
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: and the ecological imagination. She is the editor of Archi,
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: the journal of archetypal cosmology, and an author of the book,
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Journey to the Imaginal Realm, a reader's guide to J.R.R.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. She's currently researching and
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: writing a biography of Stanislav Grof, a co-founder of transpersonal psychology.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: So Becca, thank you so much. I'm really excited for
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: this conversation.
• 2:10
  Speaker 5: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure
• 2:12
  Speaker 5: to be here and to meet all of you. I'm
• 2:14
  Speaker 5: looking forward to our conversation.
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: Becca, I know I am an extraordinary fan of Lord
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: of the Rings, the books, the movies. It's an enormous
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: paradigm rummages around in my backwoods of my mind. And
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: of course, you did this extraordinary research that found a
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: powerful congruence between what this meant to Tolkien to write
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: the Lord of the Rings books and what it meant
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: for Jung to be at the same time working on
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: his Red Books. So set the stage for us. How
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: did this all come to you?
• 2:59
  Speaker 5: That's a great opening question. And it's something that actually
• 3:05
  Speaker 5: began to open up right in 2009 when the Red
• 3:10
  Speaker 5: Book was published, when Jung's Red Book was published. And
• 3:14
  Speaker 5: now I had been a devotee of Tolkien's work, an
• 3:18
  Speaker 5: explorer of Middle Earth since I was about nine years old.
• 3:22
  Speaker 5: I deeply loved the stories he'd written. My fourth grade
• 3:26
  Speaker 5: teacher read us The Hobbit. And I felt a deep
• 3:31
  Speaker 5: familiarity with this place, with Middle Earth, with the names.
• 3:35
  Speaker 5: It was as though I already knew these names somehow.
• 3:38
  Speaker 5: The landscapes were very familiar. And I remember going home
• 3:42
  Speaker 5: and telling my mom about it. And she said, oh,
• 3:45
  Speaker 5: we'll wait till you read The Lord of the Rings.
• 3:47
  Speaker 5: And so it was a couple years later that I
• 3:52
  Speaker 5: read The Lord of the Rings. And it was an
• 3:56
  Speaker 5: absolutely life-changing experience. I became very invested in this world
• 4:04
  Speaker 5: of Middle Earth. And it just completely filled my imagination.
• 4:10
  Speaker 5: And so I read everything I could of Tolkien's. And
• 4:14
  Speaker 5: then in 2009, when Jung's Red Book was published, the
• 4:18
  Speaker 5: first thing that stood out to me was, first of all,
• 4:23
  Speaker 5: the name The Red Book. In the context of Tolkien's
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: world of Middle Earth, there is a book that's called
• 4:32
  Speaker 5: the Red Book of Westmarch. And it's essentially the Red
• 4:35
  Speaker 5: Book of Westmarch is the story of the Hobbit and
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: the Lord of the Rings compiled in one volume. So
• 4:42
  Speaker 5: within the context of the story, there's this book that's
• 4:48
  Speaker 5: been written down and then passed from Hobbit generation to
• 4:51
  Speaker 5: Hobbit generation. And this is Tolkien's conceit of how we
• 4:56
  Speaker 5: have the book, the Lord of the Rings. in our hands.
• 5:00
  Speaker 5: So when I first came across Jung's red book, I thought, well,
• 5:06
  Speaker 5: that's interesting. There's a red book and a red book
• 5:09
  Speaker 5: and didn't think too much of it until I got
• 5:11
  Speaker 5: a copy of it. And when I saw that copy,
• 5:15
  Speaker 5: I thought, well, this looks like a book out of
• 5:18
  Speaker 5: Tolkien's world. The calligraphy, the illustrations, they had very similar
• 5:24
  Speaker 5: ways of drawing, of painting. of this kind of medieval
• 5:28
  Speaker 5: style of calligraphy. And so that sparked a kind of curiosity.
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: I thought, maybe there's something more here. And there was
• 5:37
  Speaker 5: the voice that said, that's ridiculous. Why would there be
• 5:40
  Speaker 5: something more here? And I began to explore further. And
• 5:46
  Speaker 5: one of the things that really first stood out was
• 5:50
  Speaker 5: one of timing. That when Jung began his Red Book
• 5:54
  Speaker 5: period in 1913... when he started to have these kind
• 6:00
  Speaker 5: of waking visions, these fantasies, and then, you know, the
• 6:03
  Speaker 5: practice of active imagination was opening up these imaginal experiences
• 6:08
  Speaker 5: for him. That was exactly in tandem with when the
• 6:14
  Speaker 5: young J.R.R. Tolkien, 17 years younger than Jung, was creating
• 6:19
  Speaker 5: this book of extraordinary illustrations. He called it the Book
• 6:23
  Speaker 5: of Ishness. And there were these symbolic illustrations that he
• 6:29
  Speaker 5: only gave titles to, no explanation that anyone can find,
• 6:34
  Speaker 5: might be in his diaries that are written in Elvish.
• 6:36
  Speaker 5: But other than that, there's just these amazing symbolic drawings.
• 6:42
  Speaker 5: And he was doing that exactly in tandem with the
• 6:45
  Speaker 5: beginning of Jung's Red Book period, making these illustrations. There's
• 6:48
  Speaker 5: a lot of parallels between the two. And that was
• 6:51
  Speaker 5: the period as well when he began writing the first
• 6:53
  Speaker 5: stories of Middle Earth, beginning in 1914 with a poem.
• 6:58
  Speaker 5: And then very, you know, not long after that, the
• 7:00
  Speaker 5: first stories that he called the Great Tales of Middle Earth.
• 7:04
  Speaker 5: And so the timing was there. And then I just
• 7:07
  Speaker 5: kept delving deeper and found not just dozens, probably a
• 7:11
  Speaker 5: couple hundred parallels between the two works. And the more
• 7:17
  Speaker 5: I delved into it, the more I thought, okay, this
• 7:18
  Speaker 5: is quite a research project and it ended up becoming
• 7:22
  Speaker 5: my doctoral dissertation. So that's how it, that's how it
• 7:25
  Speaker 5: got going.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: So you're a kid, you find the Lord of the Rings,
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: you enter into that world. Who did you most identify with?
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: You know, that's a good question because in some ways I,
• 7:41
  Speaker 5: I didn't identify particularly with one figure, uh, one character
• 7:46
  Speaker 5: from the Lord of the Rings, uh, but in some
• 7:49
  Speaker 5: way felt a connection to each of them, almost like
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: I was my own person in relation to them. But
• 7:55
  Speaker 5: what I did feel very strongly, which is interesting to
• 7:59
  Speaker 5: talk about now in my 30s, that my 16-year-old self
• 8:02
  Speaker 5: is probably thrilled that I still get to talk about
• 8:05
  Speaker 5: these things. I felt like with the elves, I had
• 8:08
  Speaker 5: found my people. There was this part of me as
• 8:11
  Speaker 5: a teenager that felt convinced that I didn't really belong
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: to this world of being in high school and living
• 8:19
  Speaker 5: in an urban area, although there are parts of the
• 8:22
  Speaker 5: Bay Area that definitely have their Middle Earth qualities that
• 8:26
  Speaker 5: I really sunk into. But I just felt this deep
• 8:29
  Speaker 5: cultural connection with the elves, like I just wanted to
• 8:33
  Speaker 5: go and be a part of their world and that
• 8:36
  Speaker 5: something would make sense. So I think that was the
• 8:39
  Speaker 5: strongest identification, not maybe with one character, but this culture,
• 8:45
  Speaker 5: these people who had an aesthetic and a way of
• 8:48
  Speaker 5: approaching the world.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: I can totally see you as an elf. I can
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: totally see you as an elf. You've definitely, you've got
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: the luck.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: I thought about the characters in The Lord of the Rings,
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: and if I were to put them on the kind
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: of typological spectrum, I thought all the elves are basically INFJs.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: And so I'm wondering if you're an INFJ.
• 9:13
  Speaker 5: You know, very close. I am, I would say I'm
• 9:17
  Speaker 5: more of an INTJ. So I am very much a
• 9:23
  Speaker 5: thinking type, which makes sense. I work in academia and
• 9:28
  Speaker 5: feeling is my inferior function. But fortunately, I have my
• 9:32
  Speaker 5: husband and other wonderful people in my life that remind
• 9:35
  Speaker 5: me it's important to feel.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: So I'm wondering if that's so useful that something about
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: The reading The Lord of the Rings wasn't just the
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: ideas of it, but it made you feel something because
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: feeling is so numinous when it's the fourth function. I mean,
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: just extraordinarily numinous.
• 9:56
  Speaker 5: Absolutely. Yeah.
• 9:58
  Speaker 4: I'm sure all our listeners know. that you're talking about typology,
• 10:04
  Speaker 4: which is one of Jung's discoveries, and then it got
• 10:10
  Speaker 4: converted into the very well-known Myers-Briggs personality or type inventory.
• 10:16
  Speaker 4: So that's just a little background for Anyone who might
• 10:21
  Speaker 4: need that.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: So if I may, I'm curious, Joseph and Deb, if
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: you guys had a particular character or part of the
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: book that you really resonated with.
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: The wizards, of course. I mean, like, absolutely. I'm a
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: wizard and I'm looking to take an elf as a lover.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: You know, like that's the perfect setup for me.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: You're right.
• 10:46
  Speaker 5: I can totally see it. Yeah.
• 10:50
  Speaker 4: Well, I think that leaves the realm of the hobbits
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: to me. I think I could be very happy in
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: the Shire.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Okay. I see that too.
• 10:59
  Speaker 4: Cooking things and puttering around.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: And having second breakfasts.
• 11:05
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 11:06
  Speaker 4: They have the second breakfast and then elevenses and then tea.
• 11:12
  Speaker 4: I like that a lot. But it comes up to
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: about six meals a day.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: For me, I really, really loved Lady Eowyn and felt
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: that she got cheated by not. I really felt that
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: she should have wound up with Strider, with Erebon.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: That whole Rohan thing was just heading south. I'm not
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: sure that was going to go anywhere good.
• 11:35
  Speaker 5: I don't know.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: Well. I mean, she does play an important role, right?
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: She kills the king of the Nazgul.
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: That's right.
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: I mean. She is a powerful feminist there. I am
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: no man. Gives it to him.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: In any case, yeah.
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: So swinging back to, yes, go ahead.
• 11:56
  Speaker 5: Well, I was just going to say with Eowyn, she's
• 11:59
  Speaker 5: a very interesting figure in that, maybe I'll put a
• 12:03
  Speaker 5: little defense for how Tolkien had things unfold, because I
• 12:07
  Speaker 5: think that she, when she meets Aragorn, he's such a
• 12:12
  Speaker 5: powerful solar being. figure. He's kind of the solar hero.
• 12:17
  Speaker 5: And I mean, he has an extraordinary lunar side as well,
• 12:20
  Speaker 5: which you see in the houses of healing, for example,
• 12:23
  Speaker 5: in the return of the king, that he isn't just
• 12:26
  Speaker 5: the warrior and, you know, the hero in that sense,
• 12:29
  Speaker 5: but he's also, he's a healer. So he has that
• 12:33
  Speaker 5: solar lunar kind of conjunctio in himself. But I think
• 12:35
  Speaker 5: when Eowyn meets him, she recognizes the solar in him
• 12:40
  Speaker 5: that's actually inherent in her. And I think she's a
• 12:43
  Speaker 5: really beautiful example of what we could think of as
• 12:46
  Speaker 5: the solar feminine. And that she is this autonomous, heroic
• 12:53
  Speaker 5: individual whose life circumstances, primarily because she was born as
• 12:57
  Speaker 5: a woman, don't allow her to step into that. And
• 13:02
  Speaker 5: so her love for Aragorn, I would posit, is almost
• 13:06
  Speaker 5: like a projection of her own solar potential. And it's
• 13:10
  Speaker 5: by his rejection of her that she seeks death, which
• 13:15
  Speaker 5: symbolically we can almost see as the solar journey that
• 13:18
  Speaker 5: she seeks that descent into the underworld, which the sun
• 13:22
  Speaker 5: takes every time the sun sets into the West. So
• 13:24
  Speaker 5: she seeks death and she seeks a heroic death on
• 13:28
  Speaker 5: the battlefield. And then the beautiful twist that happens when
• 13:34
  Speaker 5: she actually faces the Lord of the Nazgul is is
• 13:37
  Speaker 5: that it's the very patriarchal language that's actually defined the
• 13:42
  Speaker 5: whole story. We speak of elves and men, the men
• 13:45
  Speaker 5: of Gondor, the men of Rohan, the men of Numenor,
• 13:48
  Speaker 5: that just completely disguises, as our language has up until
• 13:53
  Speaker 5: about the 1980s, that it's not just men, it's humanity.
• 13:58
  Speaker 5: But that's what protects her and allows her then to
• 14:05
  Speaker 5: have this extraordinary turn where she is able to overcome
• 14:10
  Speaker 5: the prophecy that the Lord of the Nazgul was supposed
• 14:13
  Speaker 5: to be, you know, he couldn't be slain by any man.
• 14:17
  Speaker 5: And then her response, well, I, you know, I am
• 14:21
  Speaker 5: not a man. You look upon a woman. It's just
• 14:24
  Speaker 5: a really amazing turn that I think lets her claim
• 14:29
  Speaker 5: her solar identity that she'd projected onto Aragorn. And then
• 14:34
  Speaker 5: coming into relationship with Faramir, which I do think probably
• 14:37
  Speaker 5: could have been fleshed out a little more, but he's
• 14:40
  Speaker 5: such a lunar male. He's nurturing and caring and about,
• 14:45
  Speaker 5: he's also about, you know, healing and knowledge and so
• 14:49
  Speaker 5: forth that in some ways, I think they make more
• 14:53
  Speaker 5: of an archetypal pair that she's the sun and he's
• 14:57
  Speaker 5: the moon, which you don't see as much represented in,
• 15:02
  Speaker 5: you know, we often associate the male with the solar
• 15:04
  Speaker 5: and the female with the lunar, but I think with
• 15:06
  Speaker 5: them it's reversed. which is actually something that's in Tolkien's cosmology.
• 15:10
  Speaker 5: The sun is feminine in his mythology. The moon is masculine.
• 15:15
  Speaker 5: It's in the language that he uses. And I think
• 15:18
  Speaker 5: that it gets kind of represented at a more microcosmic
• 15:21
  Speaker 5: scale with the two of them. So Eowyn is one
• 15:24
  Speaker 5: of my favorites as well. And that's a little bit
• 15:29
  Speaker 5: of an analysis of how I've thought about what unfolded
• 15:32
  Speaker 5: for her. And just to make sense that she doesn't
• 15:34
  Speaker 5: get The romance that you think she deserves as you're
• 15:37
  Speaker 5: getting to know her.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: That's beautiful.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: So let's take a moment to talk a little bit
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: about Jung's Red Book so we can flesh that out
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: because I'm imagining that it has not yet been made
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: into a three-part miniseries, which we hope one day it might.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: So people are less familiar with the narratives of the
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: Red Book. And then as you begin to weave for
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: us this resonance, this echo between what Tolkien is experiencing
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: in his imaginal world and what Jung is experiencing in
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: his imaginal world and how uncannily those things seem to
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: echo each other.
• 16:23
  Speaker 5: Well, with Jung's Red Book, the process began spontaneously. And
• 16:28
  Speaker 5: as he describes it, the pressure had been building in
• 16:31
  Speaker 5: the unconscious for some time. And scholars point to different
• 16:36
  Speaker 5: potential causes of what led the experiences that are recorded
• 16:41
  Speaker 5: in the Red Book to come forth. Many have attributed
• 16:45
  Speaker 5: it to the break with Freud, which came on the
• 16:47
  Speaker 5: heels of him publishing the transformations and symbols of the
• 16:52
  Speaker 5: libido in 1911 and 1912. He himself has spoken about
• 16:54
  Speaker 5: the pressure building in in Europe that led to the
• 17:02
  Speaker 5: outbreak of World War I, that he was very tuned
• 17:05
  Speaker 5: into that. I think there's a number of factors, not
• 17:09
  Speaker 5: just one thing that we can point towards. The relationship
• 17:13
  Speaker 5: with Tony Wolfe also was opening up around that time.
• 17:18
  Speaker 5: And she was very much his guide, almost like his
• 17:21
  Speaker 5: Ariadne's thread that helped bring him back into this world
• 17:26
  Speaker 5: as he was undergoing those experiences. So I always like
• 17:29
  Speaker 5: to bring Tony Wolfe in just because we can sometimes
• 17:32
  Speaker 5: have this narrative of Jung doing it all by himself,
• 17:35
  Speaker 5: which isn't, you know, we need our guides and we
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: need the people who bring us back to this reality.
• 17:43
  Speaker 5: And so the arc of the Red Book, it really
• 17:46
  Speaker 5: begins with Jung recognizing that he's become disconnected from his soul.
• 17:51
  Speaker 5: He has this extraordinary connection vision um that comes two
• 17:57
  Speaker 5: weeks apart spontaneously on a train journey of seeing all
• 18:00
  Speaker 5: of europe flooded uh with this flood of blood that's
• 18:04
  Speaker 5: destructive and you know we have parallels between that and
• 18:08
  Speaker 5: uh this repeating dream that tolkien had since childhood of
• 18:12
  Speaker 5: a great kind of flood or great waves he described
• 18:15
  Speaker 5: it that he connected to a kind of drowning of
• 18:19
  Speaker 5: atlantis and he wrote about this many many times so
• 18:22
  Speaker 5: jung's red book experience begins with this two visions of
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: the flood. And then he realizes he's lost connection with
• 18:30
  Speaker 5: his soul. And so he begins this practice of night
• 18:34
  Speaker 5: after night, kind of writing and calling out to his soul,
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: my soul, my soul, where are you? And finally he
• 18:41
  Speaker 5: makes contact with her. And when she starts to speak
• 18:47
  Speaker 5: to him, she's angry, she's furious. And she really kind
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: of pushes against him and says, you know, you've tried
• 18:55
  Speaker 5: to make me into a dead system. She's charging him
• 18:59
  Speaker 5: with not just Jung, but what psychology has been doing
• 19:02
  Speaker 5: of trying to kind of scientifically confine the soul, psyche,
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: the logos of psyche, the language of psyche, which so
• 19:11
  Speaker 5: often we translate to his mind and we're forgetting that
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: psyche is soul. And so he makes this reconnection with soul.
• 19:19
  Speaker 5: And Then through his practice of active imagination, which is
• 19:24
  Speaker 5: developing at this time, he starts having these full visionary
• 19:30
  Speaker 5: experiences or what he calls fantasies, where he's now able
• 19:33
  Speaker 5: to step into the experience and dialogue with the figures.
• 19:38
  Speaker 5: And there's many, many figures who appear. Some are more
• 19:43
  Speaker 5: maybe significant than others. There's the encounter in what he
• 19:46
  Speaker 5: calls the Mysterium with the prophet Elijah. and his blind
• 19:51
  Speaker 5: daughter Salome, which of course have biblical echoes. But they're
• 19:55
  Speaker 5: also very much their own people beyond the biblical narrative.
• 20:00
  Speaker 5: And they really initiate him into this realm. They tell him,
• 20:05
  Speaker 5: we are real and we're not symbols. And he has
• 20:10
  Speaker 5: to take in what that means. He's trying to interpret
• 20:13
  Speaker 5: what's happening as these figures are a part of him,
• 20:16
  Speaker 5: maybe they're sub-personalities. But if you take them seriously, they're saying, no,
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: we're real. We have an individuality, even a kind of
• 20:27
  Speaker 5: autonomy that's real to the internal realm. And what Jung
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: comes to is recognizing that, as he says, the inner
• 20:39
  Speaker 5: world is as infinite as the outer. You look out
• 20:42
  Speaker 5: and you see the stars and the mountains and the trees,
• 20:44
  Speaker 5: and you look inward and you see the stars and
• 20:46
  Speaker 5: the mountains and the trees. And so once he's accepted this,
• 20:50
  Speaker 5: which I think Elijah and Salome really initiate him into
• 20:53
  Speaker 5: with a kind of Christ-like death rebirth experience, then he's
• 20:58
  Speaker 5: comfortably on his way. And we enter into from Liber Primus,
• 21:02
  Speaker 5: which is the first book, to Liber Secundus, the second book,
• 21:05
  Speaker 5: which Now we're in a really kind of mythological place
• 21:08
  Speaker 5: and he meets, you know, a scholar in a castle
• 21:11
  Speaker 5: and his young kind of fairy tale-like daughter. He meets
• 21:15
  Speaker 5: a man who, you know, later you can kind of
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: really understand, wow, he seems a lot like what we
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: interpret today as young Shadow, one of the lowly, as
• 21:24
  Speaker 5: he describes him. He meets the Red One, which is
• 21:27
  Speaker 5: this kind of fantastic, pagan, devil-like, joyous character who's, you know,
• 21:33
  Speaker 5: dressed in dressed in red and has red hair. He
• 21:36
  Speaker 5: meets an anchorite in the desert, Ammonius. And probably two
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: of the most important encounters, one is with the god Izdubar,
• 21:48
  Speaker 5: who is seeking immortality by traveling to the Western lands,
• 21:52
  Speaker 5: and he encounters Jung. And Jung brings his scientific worldview
• 21:58
  Speaker 5: to this god, Izdubar, and kind of shatters his mythic
• 22:04
  Speaker 5: worldview that he, you know, he's trying to reach these
• 22:08
  Speaker 5: undying lands in the West, which is something that we
• 22:10
  Speaker 5: have in Tolkien as well, the undying lands or the
• 22:12
  Speaker 5: blessed realm in the West. He's trying to reach the
• 22:15
  Speaker 5: sun there to gain immortality. And Jung says, well, you know,
• 22:18
  Speaker 5: the sun doesn't set in these lands in the West.
• 22:22
  Speaker 5: The sun is millions of miles away. And, you know,
• 22:24
  Speaker 5: the Copernican revolution happens in these experiences. And, and, that's
• 22:30
  Speaker 5: a poison to this god. And what unfolds between them
• 22:34
  Speaker 5: is a kind of death and rebirth of the god
• 22:38
  Speaker 5: where Jung recognizes that he can save his life by
• 22:42
  Speaker 5: convincing him that he's a fantasy, but he's a real fantasy.
• 22:49
  Speaker 5: So we often think of fantasy and reality as these dichotomies.
• 22:53
  Speaker 5: And what Jung is learning in the course of his
• 22:56
  Speaker 5: Red Book experiences is that those actually start standing on
• 23:00
  Speaker 5: the same side of that dividing line that fantasy has
• 23:04
  Speaker 5: its own reality and as such he's able to actually
• 23:08
  Speaker 5: save the life of this god and carry him down
• 23:11
  Speaker 5: the mountain in a beautiful parallel actually with the way
• 23:15
  Speaker 5: in the lord of the rings sam carries frodo up
• 23:17
  Speaker 5: the mountain as he's bringing the ring to the fire
• 23:21
  Speaker 5: and then the last probably most important encounter is with
• 23:25
  Speaker 5: the the magician philemon who is so similar to Gandalf.
• 23:30
  Speaker 5: It's really remarkable. These wise old men with their, you know,
• 23:34
  Speaker 5: long white gray beards and big eyebrows and their living
• 23:39
  Speaker 5: eyes who, you know, when you encounter, we encounter both
• 23:42
  Speaker 5: of them for the first time in a garden and
• 23:46
  Speaker 5: they disorient the person they're talking to as, you know,
• 23:50
  Speaker 5: they don't seem to be as powerful when you first
• 23:53
  Speaker 5: meet them as you eventually realize. with Gandalf the Grey
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: becoming Gandalf the White, with Philemon kind of really stepping
• 24:02
  Speaker 5: into not just being this magician, but this powerful spiritual
• 24:07
  Speaker 5: figure who becomes Jung's guide. So those are some of
• 24:11
  Speaker 5: the main characters of the Red Book, and there's others,
• 24:14
  Speaker 5: but it is a kind of adventure story that Jung
• 24:17
  Speaker 5: goes on throughout the course of the Red Book.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: And I'm thinking that, you know, you just did this
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: beautiful job of describing the Red Book and kind of
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: one of the primary insights that comes from it, which
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: is that the inner world has its own reality. And
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: what I'm really struck by is, you know, you've told
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: us your story of finding the Lord of the Rings,
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: and I think we each have our own. And I was,
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: I think, 11 or 12 when I started reading it.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: And I still remember where I was sitting when I
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: was reading it, and it was like realer than real.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: I think there's something about meeting it at that point
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: in your life too. But I mean, I think I
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: spend some part of every day in Middle Earth still
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: all these decades later. It's just a place I kind
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: of go to in fantasy a lot. And I'm just
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: thinking about, you know, maybe part of the reason that
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: those books have had such an impact on so many
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: people as it had on you back in on me
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: and I think on, on Devin Joseph too, is because
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: it wasn't just, it wasn't just, it wasn't just a
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: novel for Tolkien. It really was an experience, his own
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: kind of experience in this mundus imaginalis or in his
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: inner world, like you said, where you, there are the
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: stars and the trees and there's a kind of infinite
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: to it, an infinite quality to it. And, and of course,
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: you know, with his, I mean, you know, as we know,
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: he created multiple languages, you know, with their own grammar
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: and vocabulary and scripts and everything. So it wasn't, I mean,
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: not that novels aren't wonderful things, but this isn't just
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: a novel. This is a real chronicle of an inner adventure.
• 26:04
  Speaker 5: Absolutely. That's a great way of putting it. And both
• 26:08
  Speaker 5: Jung and Tolkien use similar language in that way, that
• 26:12
  Speaker 5: it's a record or a chronicle of an experience. And
• 26:16
  Speaker 5: You know, for both of them, they reworked the primary
• 26:21
  Speaker 5: experiences to give us something. Like the Lord of the
• 26:24
  Speaker 5: Rings isn't just raw from the imagination. He revised it
• 26:28
  Speaker 5: again and again, which I think is necessary to be
• 26:30
  Speaker 5: able to kind of hand the gem over to someone
• 26:33
  Speaker 5: so that we can have the kind of experience that
• 26:36
  Speaker 5: was coming to him maybe more spontaneously. And it took
• 26:41
  Speaker 5: a lot of kind of gleaning of Tolkien's letters and
• 26:44
  Speaker 5: essays and to really get a sense that, oh right,
• 26:48
  Speaker 5: he's actually intimating that this was an experience. He doesn't
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: come out and say it in the same way that
• 26:55
  Speaker 5: Jung does. You kind of have to dig to find that.
• 26:57
  Speaker 5: But when you do, what he says over and over
• 27:00
  Speaker 5: again was the sense that he wasn't inventing, he was
• 27:03
  Speaker 5: discovering something that was really there. This is the language
• 27:07
  Speaker 5: he used. It was there somewhere. He uses similar language
• 27:11
  Speaker 5: when he describes the languages that he invented, where certain
• 27:18
  Speaker 5: words would just come to him. And again, to find
• 27:22
  Speaker 5: this out, it's a little bit couched in some of
• 27:24
  Speaker 5: his fiction that was unpublished during his lifetime, fiction such
• 27:29
  Speaker 5: as The Lost Road and the Notion Club papers, which
• 27:32
  Speaker 5: anyone who wants to dig into this can find in
• 27:35
  Speaker 5: the 12-volume History of Middle Earth. It's all very kind
• 27:38
  Speaker 5: of fascinating. But in those stories, he talks about ghost
• 27:41
  Speaker 5: words coming through, and that he'd hear the words and
• 27:46
  Speaker 5: they came with set meanings and they couldn't be changed,
• 27:50
  Speaker 5: but then he could build language around them. Now he's
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: not saying that directly in say a letter or an
• 27:56
  Speaker 5: essay that he's hearing these ghost words. He's putting it
• 27:59
  Speaker 5: in fiction. But if you look at what the words are,
• 28:04
  Speaker 5: those are the exact words with the exact meanings that
• 28:07
  Speaker 5: he's putting in his lexicons all the way back in 1915.
• 28:11
  Speaker 5: So it's not hard. And those are the words that
• 28:13
  Speaker 5: last all the way through. He can't change the meaning.
• 28:16
  Speaker 5: You see them again and again, all the way, you know,
• 28:19
  Speaker 5: his writing up through 1949 when he finished The Lord
• 28:22
  Speaker 5: of the Rings. He refers to something that he calls
• 28:25
  Speaker 5: Farian dramas or Elvish dramas. And some scholars interpret this
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: as he's kind of making something up that seems a
• 28:32
  Speaker 5: little bit silly. But if you really pay attention to
• 28:35
  Speaker 5: what he's saying, it sounds like he's describing a visionary experience.
• 28:41
  Speaker 5: You know, it's really a matter of how seriously do
• 28:44
  Speaker 5: we take what Tolkien is saying about where these stories
• 28:48
  Speaker 5: come from. And if we do take them seriously, because
• 28:52
  Speaker 5: what's his incentive in just making this up when he's
• 28:56
  Speaker 5: so philosophically committed to working out exactly what's going on,
• 29:02
  Speaker 5: that one can't help at least posit the idea that
• 29:05
  Speaker 5: when he's talking about fairy and dramas, He seems to
• 29:08
  Speaker 5: be describing something that's very comparable to Jung's active imagination experiences.
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: And in a way, he really corroborates Jung's idea about
• 29:20
  Speaker 4: the collective unconscious. That's, you know, these things came to him.
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: He constructed whole languages. And I think it goes back
• 29:29
  Speaker 4: to what you were saying, Lisa, you know, you live
• 29:33
  Speaker 4: in those books. Because they have a psychic reality that
• 29:39
  Speaker 4: something is wrong. us recognizes and it gives it a
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: special power. There is a depth, there is another level
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: or aspect of reality that belongs to the Mundus Imaginalis,
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: as Henri Corbin had it. And Jung walked up and
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: down in his garden talking to these imaginal figures and
• 30:11
  Speaker 4: had conversations with them. And they told him things he
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: did not know consciously. So it calls up a lot
• 30:22
  Speaker 4: of What really is going on here? And it seems
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: wild to really seriously consider that both Jung and Tolkien
• 30:33
  Speaker 4: and a whole host of others have a knowledge of
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: this other realm, the realm of psyche.
• 30:42
  Speaker 5: And as Jung.
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: Said over and over, psyche is real, has an independent,
• 30:49
  Speaker 4: separate reality. And some of us can access it.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: And your interest in Henri Corbin and his paper on
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: the Mundus Imaginalis seems so apropos. So just a bit
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: for our listeners that Corbin was very interested in these
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: kind of 12th century Persian mystics. And one of the
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: things that struck him similar to Becca's discovery is that
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: across time, they seem to be describing things the same landscape,
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: which then creates this possibility that there is a knowable,
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: imaginal landscape that many different people and across time can
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: discover and map and find similar anchoring points within these realms.
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: And so standing there with Corbin's I don't know his certainty,
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: but certainly his inspiration, that there is a place that
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: people go that Jung and Tolkien may very well have
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: found the same world, describing it from slightly different entry points.
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: So perhaps say something about how you feel about that.
• 32:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I first encountered Corbin's work right around the time
• 32:19
  Speaker 5: that my interest in exploring these parallels was coming up.
• 32:23
  Speaker 5: And so it was a, a well-placed discovery, particularly that
• 32:28
  Speaker 5: essay he brought up the, the mundus imaginalis or the
• 32:33
  Speaker 5: imaginary and the imaginal, or it makes this differentiation between
• 32:40
  Speaker 5: those words, which are very similar. Most people in our
• 32:44
  Speaker 5: culture and the English language, you know, speak of things
• 32:46
  Speaker 5: that are imaginary and the, often what we mean by
• 32:50
  Speaker 5: that is something that's simply made up. That we just come,
• 32:56
  Speaker 5: you know, we kind of pull it out of thin
• 32:58
  Speaker 5: air and that it's not real and so forth. And
• 33:02
  Speaker 5: Corbin is differentiating that imaginary from what he describes as
• 33:07
  Speaker 5: the imaginal, which as he describes it, there's a reality
• 33:11
  Speaker 5: to it that it's perceived through imaginative perception. but that
• 33:18
  Speaker 5: it's not something we're simply making up, that we're accessing it.
• 33:23
  Speaker 5: And I would bring other language in here that comes
• 33:25
  Speaker 5: more out of transpersonal spirituality, for example, around maybe not
• 33:31
  Speaker 5: just accessing it, but we're enacting it. We're both calling
• 33:35
  Speaker 5: it forth and participating in it, that there's two agencies
• 33:40
  Speaker 5: happening here between our own human participation of the imagination
• 33:45
  Speaker 5: in what Jung would call the collective unconscious and that
• 33:48
  Speaker 5: these archetypal forms come forward as figures who we can
• 33:54
  Speaker 5: recognize and connect with, and that they come forward in
• 33:57
  Speaker 5: this middle realm of the mundus imaginalis, or the imaginal realm.
• 34:02
  Speaker 5: And you find references to this middle realm in many
• 34:07
  Speaker 5: different cultures and contexts, usually spiritual, but sometimes philosophical. Plato
• 34:12
  Speaker 5: talks about the metaxi, which is this middle realm between
• 34:16
  Speaker 5: the gods and human beings, where, you know, Daimon's shuttle
• 34:22
  Speaker 5: messages back and forth. And so there's been a lot
• 34:24
  Speaker 5: of different intimations of this middle realm. And of course,
• 34:29
  Speaker 5: probably perks our ears up a little bit that Tolkien
• 34:32
  Speaker 5: speaks of middle earth as this middle realm. And so
• 34:37
  Speaker 5: what Corbin is drawing forward based on these medieval Islamic
• 34:44
  Speaker 5: mystics is the whole topography of, of this imaginal realm
• 34:50
  Speaker 5: and how we access it. That he says we access
• 34:55
  Speaker 5: it through the organ of the imagination or that active
• 35:00
  Speaker 5: imagination itself is the mirror par excellence of the mundus imaginalis.
• 35:06
  Speaker 5: And the way he describes it, he has this beautiful
• 35:09
  Speaker 5: description where you go so far inward that you suddenly
• 35:13
  Speaker 5: go through a topographical conversion You go so far inward
• 35:17
  Speaker 5: that you suddenly find yourself on the outside again. And
• 35:22
  Speaker 5: that's when you find yourself in this other realm that
• 35:25
  Speaker 5: isn't physical, but also we can perceive it. We can
• 35:29
  Speaker 5: see it. We can smell it. We can hear, we
• 35:31
  Speaker 5: can interact with it, but it isn't physical. We can't
• 35:35
  Speaker 5: point to where it is. He says it's everywhere and
• 35:37
  Speaker 5: it's nowhere, which when you think of the imagination makes sense.
• 35:41
  Speaker 5: We can't pinpoint it in a physical part of the body.
• 35:45
  Speaker 5: And yet when you have these experiences, then you go
• 35:49
  Speaker 5: through that topographical inversion and you find yourself there. And
• 35:52
  Speaker 5: he says part of that process is you never quite
• 35:57
  Speaker 5: know the moment that you've made the shift into the
• 36:00
  Speaker 5: other realm. You can't just leave a map that makes
• 36:04
  Speaker 5: it easy to find the way there. Otherwise, you know,
• 36:07
  Speaker 5: it would be too simple to just enter in. Oh,
• 36:10
  Speaker 5: you do this, you go there and there you are.
• 36:14
  Speaker 5: that there's almost a loss of the senses as we
• 36:17
  Speaker 5: make that transition. And I've always found that interesting in
• 36:20
  Speaker 5: certain fairy tales and stories and even works of fiction,
• 36:25
  Speaker 5: where that crossing of the threshold into another realm is
• 36:29
  Speaker 5: usually defined by losing particularly the sense of sight. And
• 36:35
  Speaker 5: just to give a couple fun examples, I mean, in
• 36:38
  Speaker 5: the Chronicles of Narnia, written by C.S. Lewis, you know,
• 36:42
  Speaker 5: the first image for that story came to him in
• 36:44
  Speaker 5: a dream in 1916, same time period. And in the
• 36:49
  Speaker 5: Chronicles of Narnia, the first time little Lucy Pevensey goes
• 36:53
  Speaker 5: into the back of the wardrobe, she can't see. It's dark.
• 36:57
  Speaker 5: She feels the coats and then she suddenly becomes colder
• 37:02
  Speaker 5: and she feels the prickles of the pines as she's
• 37:07
  Speaker 5: suddenly in the forest. So sight is taken away. The
• 37:10
  Speaker 5: other senses are heightened. Or in Harry Potter, she actually
• 37:13
  Speaker 5: does this really well, that when Harry crosses through the
• 37:18
  Speaker 5: platform nine and three quarters at the train station, he
• 37:22
  Speaker 5: closes his eyes as he goes through. And you see
• 37:26
  Speaker 5: this again and again, that the senses are taken away.
• 37:29
  Speaker 5: Or even in the Lord of the Rings, when the
• 37:32
  Speaker 5: Fellowship are brought into Lothlorien, which is probably the best
• 37:38
  Speaker 5: example of fairy on earth or the imaginal realm on earth.
• 37:43
  Speaker 5: Because Tolkien was really clear. Middle earth isn't an imaginary place.
• 37:47
  Speaker 5: It is our earth, but in another time. Part of
• 37:49
  Speaker 5: why it feels so familiar, I think. But Lothlorien is
• 37:53
  Speaker 5: kind of this fairy and realm and the fellowship are
• 37:57
  Speaker 5: all blindfolded as they cross the threshold in. We don't
• 38:01
  Speaker 5: see the transition. But then when the blindfolds are finally removed,
• 38:06
  Speaker 5: the language Tolkien uses to describe their experiences of perceiving
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: Lothlorien is that it was as though they were all
• 38:15
  Speaker 5: colors that he knew, Frodo knew, but it was as
• 38:18
  Speaker 5: though he was seeing them for the first time, as
• 38:20
  Speaker 5: though they had just been freshly made and yet they
• 38:22
  Speaker 5: were eternal. And this is the kind of language mystics
• 38:26
  Speaker 5: use when they enter into these spaces and these realms.
• 38:31
  Speaker 5: It's archetypal language where you get the sense it's brand
• 38:35
  Speaker 5: new It's never been seen before, and yet it is
• 38:38
  Speaker 5: eternal and ancient at the same time. So I love
• 38:42
  Speaker 5: finding those examples in other stories where the senses are
• 38:45
  Speaker 5: taken away and then we find ourselves having crossed the threshold.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: So just to pick up on that and kind of
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: conjecture for a second, we're talking about the importance of
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: the imaginal. And you pointed out that in the way
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: we use imaginary in English, it's usually a little bit,
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: it's a little dismissive. If something's imaginary, like you said,
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: it's not real. But when you think about the imagination
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: and why we had this faculty, why we evolved this
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: ability to imagine something, I mean, what I assume is
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: that it confers an adaptive advantage, an evolutionary advantage, because
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: you can try things out in your imagination. If I
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: do this, what's likely to happen? And that, I mean,
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: that must have been like a huge leap forward to
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: be able to kind of run a scenario in your head.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: And we know that when you experience something in the imagination,
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: it has a real effect on you. So that's why
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: elite athletes will practice their craft in the imagination. They'll
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: work with a sports psychologist on just picturing doing something
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: and that that changes how your body does it the
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: next time. And we know this too from our work,
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: that when you have an experience in the imagination, something
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: real has happened. at least in the inner world, that
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: then has an effect on the outer world.
• 40:20
  Speaker 5: Absolutely.
• 40:22
  Speaker 4: I think of it that we have an extra organ.
• 40:26
  Speaker 4: You know, we have our five senses, and then our
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: sixth sense is our ability to apprehend psychic phenomena. We
• 40:37
  Speaker 4: have a psychic organ of perception. And it's not as
• 40:43
  Speaker 4: sort of distant as... We might be making it sound,
• 40:48
  Speaker 4: I mean, somebody like Tolkien or Jung, who could write
• 40:52
  Speaker 4: their incredible works, had extraordinary access to this. But many,
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: many people have had a big archetypally infused dream, and
• 41:05
  Speaker 4: they wake up and they say, nothing in me created
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: this dream. And of course, Jung contributed active imagination to
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: the world, where He writes this letter to a Mr.
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: O who must have written to him saying, just how
• 41:21
  Speaker 4: do you do this thing? And Jung writes back, just
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: imagine something like that big yellow mass in your dream
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: last week. That doesn't sound too exciting. And just hold
• 41:35
  Speaker 4: it in mind until it moves of its own accord.
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: And when I read that a long time ago, I
• 41:44
  Speaker 4: was just starting out on my Jungian journey. I thought,
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: all right, Dr. Jung, you're on. And by God, it's true.
• 41:56
  Speaker 4: The figures do take on their own independent activities, stuff
• 42:02
  Speaker 4: you wouldn't think up on your own. So I think
• 42:06
  Speaker 4: of Jung and Tolkien as, you know, they're on a
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: spectrum and they're way, at one highly developed, well-attuned end
• 42:18
  Speaker 4: of this spectrum. But it's not unknown to the.
• 42:23
  Speaker 5: Rest of us.
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: I think historically we find this in mystics and shamans
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: only in as much as the world was very difficult.
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: And if we're spending much of our life force turning
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: our senses outside to find food, to keep ourselves safe,
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: keep our families safe, how many or what small percentage
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: of people have the luxury to turn inward. I think
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: there's a term that I like, which I came across
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: a long time ago in the kind of occult world,
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: of the inner sensorum. That we have these five senses,
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: which really come from a stimulation of certain brain centers,
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: and that there are correlates, that can be and are
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: awakened and we can carry into these dream worlds, as
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: we said before, that we can turn inside and find
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: that those same sensory centers are responsive to something. What
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: you were saying, Becca, that I so resonated with is
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: that we can open the inner senses and we can
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: manufacture something, which is setting up the plan for the
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: year to try to predict something that might come forward
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: because we own, as Deb, you were saying, we have
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: access and ownership of a kind of internal landscape to
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: practice our own creative powers, which is remarkable. So that's
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: a manufacturing attitude versus a discovery that we go in
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: and We discover something and we are surprised by it.
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: Just as you were saying, you stare at that mask
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: and suddenly it said something. That's a discovery, not a
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: manufacturing moment. I think that helps people clarify a little
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: bit about what is or isn't happening internally. And in
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: many traditions, there's a great focus on lucid dreaming. And
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: as you said, Becca, there is this falling asleep moment
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: and then an opening of the eyes in the other
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: world and the recognition that we're not in Kansas anymore.
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: And I can begin to explore this landscape that I
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: have not manufactured, at least on a conscious level.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: Well, Joseph, I love that you invoked dreams because that
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: is a journey to the imaginal realm every night. And
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: we haven't manufactured it. And one of the remarkable things
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: about dreams is you think, there's no way that I
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: would have ever come up with that. And Becca, you shared.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: I think the image that C.S. Lewis had wasn't, didn't
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: he have an image of Mr. Tumnus underneath the lamppost?
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Wasn't that the image that occurred to him in his dream?
• 45:17
  Speaker 5: That was the image. Yeah. Yeah.
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: And then we know that Robert Louis Stevenson had a
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: dream that led to Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: Hyde.
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: And we are encountering something, I would say, from the
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: objective psyche in our dreams that we couldn't manufacture, but
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: we can then engage with both in active imagination and
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: even in creative endeavors later.
• 45:42
  Speaker 5: I think there's a really important differentiation that we can
• 45:46
  Speaker 5: make where Corbin does it in his way between the
• 45:50
  Speaker 5: imaginal and the imaginary. And it's not to dismiss the
• 45:53
  Speaker 5: imaginary either. There's something important about that faculty of making
• 45:57
  Speaker 5: up too. And versus the imaginal where it is more
• 46:02
  Speaker 5: like dreams where it's just coming through. An act of
• 46:05
  Speaker 5: imagination is more along the lines of holding the container
• 46:10
  Speaker 5: so that what wants to come through is able to
• 46:14
  Speaker 5: independently while we're awake. It's a waking dream. It's consciously
• 46:18
  Speaker 5: creating the space for a waking dream, which is a
• 46:20
  Speaker 5: little bit like lucid dreaming in that way, as Joseph,
• 46:24
  Speaker 5: you were bringing up. I think the person who, at
• 46:28
  Speaker 5: least I've encountered, who delineates these differences around the imagination
• 46:33
  Speaker 5: best is the romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• 46:39
  Speaker 5: He talks about not only the imagination, but he actually
• 46:43
  Speaker 5: breaks it down into what he calls the primary and
• 46:46
  Speaker 5: the secondary imagination. And then something else that he calls fancy.
• 46:51
  Speaker 5: And in terms of fancy, that's comparable to what Corbin
• 46:55
  Speaker 5: means when he talks about the imaginary. Because fancy, it's
• 46:58
  Speaker 5: actually more like a cognitive ability that you come up
• 47:02
  Speaker 5: with something, you can visualize it, you're doing it consciously,
• 47:07
  Speaker 5: but it's more cognitive, it's more thinking-based, even while it's image-based.
• 47:12
  Speaker 5: And I think, Joseph, that's a bit like what you're
• 47:14
  Speaker 5: describing in terms of manufacturing. And then there's, he delineates
• 47:19
  Speaker 5: the two forms of the imagination, which is the primary
• 47:23
  Speaker 5: and the secondary imagination. And the primary imagination, let's see
• 47:28
  Speaker 5: if I can remember this quote. This is from Coleridge's
• 47:31
  Speaker 5: Biographia Literaria. And he says, the primary imagination I hold
• 47:36
  Speaker 5: to be the living power and prime agent of all
• 47:40
  Speaker 5: human perception. And as a repetition in the finite mind,
• 47:45
  Speaker 5: of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.
• 47:48
  Speaker 5: I'm always happy when I can remember that. Because what
• 47:52
  Speaker 5: he's saying with that is the primary imagination is essentially
• 47:56
  Speaker 5: the imagination of God, the infinite I am, that is
• 48:02
  Speaker 5: creating the world we see around us, that we perceive.
• 48:07
  Speaker 5: It's the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
• 48:10
  Speaker 5: And so as human beings, we are living in in
• 48:13
  Speaker 5: the creation of God's imagination. And when we connect with that,
• 48:18
  Speaker 5: when that comes through us as creative beings, that is
• 48:23
  Speaker 5: what he calls the secondary imagination, where we then take
• 48:28
  Speaker 5: that primary imagination of the divine and we reshape it
• 48:32
  Speaker 5: and mold it and it comes through us, but it's
• 48:35
  Speaker 5: coming from beyond us. And that's what we see in
• 48:39
  Speaker 5: Jung's Red Book or in Tolkien's or any of the
• 48:42
  Speaker 5: great works of art where you get the sense that
• 48:44
  Speaker 5: it's not just being made up something's coming through and
• 48:48
  Speaker 5: you hear that over and over again from artists and
• 48:50
  Speaker 5: authors of I didn't make it up it came through
• 48:53
  Speaker 5: and then they shape it that's what the secondary imagination
• 48:56
  Speaker 5: allows us to do it's that craft of shaping it
• 49:00
  Speaker 5: of being the artist of being the channel of catching
• 49:04
  Speaker 5: it and so Coleridge gives really wonderful helpful language to
• 49:08
  Speaker 5: that I think That lets us see, well, there isn't
• 49:11
  Speaker 5: just the imagination. There's these different forms of it that
• 49:17
  Speaker 5: we participate in, and they all have a different value.
• 49:21
  Speaker 5: that we can draw on. So Coleridge is one of
• 49:24
  Speaker 5: my favorites to bring in for that reason.
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: We might amplify this in the way that Jung talks
• 49:31
  Speaker 3: about the difference between the archetype and the archetypal image.
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: That the archetypes which we have not created... but exist
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: a priori and are invisible to us, can touch the
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: human soul and inspire endless numbers of images that all
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: have a thread into this idea of the mind of God.
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: So the archetypal images are the innumerable ways which we
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: can then work on. And so we can see that
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: similitude between Philemon and Gandalf, that there is something in
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: the mind of God that is related to the wise
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: old man or the magical old man. That is not
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: something that they invented, but touches them. And then this
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: springing forth of all kinds of luxuriant variations of the
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: archetype seems that there may be a similarity between those things.
• 50:34
  Speaker 5: Absolutely. I completely agree. And I think that that's something
• 50:38
  Speaker 5: that can sometimes get lost in discourse around archetypal theory
• 50:44
  Speaker 5: is that differentiation between the archetype in and of itself
• 50:50
  Speaker 5: which in some ways is ever receding. I do think
• 50:55
  Speaker 5: we can have experiences you know in expanded states of
• 50:58
  Speaker 5: consciousness where we get closer to perceiving more of the
• 51:02
  Speaker 5: fullness of that archetype where you can see kind of
• 51:05
  Speaker 5: the full spectrum of its multivalence all at once, but
• 51:09
  Speaker 5: we can never say I fully grasped it. We can,
• 51:12
  Speaker 5: I think we can get closer. We can cross the veil,
• 51:15
  Speaker 5: but then that differentiation that, that Jung is so clear
• 51:18
  Speaker 5: about to always remind that the archetypal image is different.
• 51:22
  Speaker 5: And that can sometimes get lost in our language when
• 51:24
  Speaker 5: we refer to refer to archetypal figures as archetypes or
• 51:28
  Speaker 5: the archetypal image as archetypes. Um, so I'm glad you
• 51:31
  Speaker 5: brought that forward because it's, Those are who show up
• 51:35
  Speaker 5: in the middle realm. That's who we encounter in the
• 51:39
  Speaker 5: imaginal realm is these archetypal figures, these archetypal manifestations that
• 51:47
  Speaker 5: have something behind them. And Jung didn't invent active imagination.
• 51:52
  Speaker 5: I mean, he came up with that term for it
• 51:55
  Speaker 5: and many other terms. the picture method, the transcendent function,
• 51:59
  Speaker 5: but it has deep roots, particularly in Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.
• 52:05
  Speaker 5: In Neoplatonism, they refer to it as theurgy, as God work.
• 52:09
  Speaker 5: It's that invitation of the archetype to come forward clothed
• 52:13
  Speaker 5: in the symbolism of a God or a deity so
• 52:16
  Speaker 5: that we can have a direct encounter with them. You
• 52:18
  Speaker 5: see it in Buddhist practice, for example, as well, Yeah,
• 52:22
  Speaker 5: those lineages, I think, are really important, that human beings
• 52:25
  Speaker 5: have been doing this for a very, very long time.
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: This reminds me of something that Rudolf Steiner talks about,
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: and many others who train people to have access to
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: these extraordinary states, that when the inner sensorum awakens, that
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: the first thing that we see, which still feels very real,
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: is the subjective astral. That is, there is an imaginal
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: world that, coats us, so to speak, that is primarily
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: populated by images of our own complexes. And even though,
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: let's say, the mother complex has an archetypal root to it,
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: it is still going to show up in a sense
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: contaminated by my own personal experiences. And so part of
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: the work in many of the mystery traditions is how
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: do we purify our understanding How do we resolve these
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: knots of emotional suffering so that we can look through
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: that veil of the subjective imaginal world and begin to
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: perceive something of the objective imaginal world? And for Steiner,
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: that meant that he might be able to perceive someone
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: and diagnose an illness and have that be accurately known
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: or understood. received some psychic phenomena that is then confirmable,
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: but was accessed through this imaginal landscape. So there is
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: this process of cleaning up the representations of the archetypal
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: forces that are too subjective, too overly influenced by our
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: sensory experiences, and that that is a real process, and
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: it changes how we function on a personality level.
• 54:17
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that that's a really good point regarding the,
• 54:21
  Speaker 5: you know, it's kind of recognizing one's own complexes, one's
• 54:25
  Speaker 5: own biases, where we project. And at the same time,
• 54:29
  Speaker 5: I think that we can identify what we might call
• 54:33
  Speaker 5: a participatory epistemology here, that we are always participating in something.
• 54:42
  Speaker 5: And doing that cleaning up is essential to have a
• 54:46
  Speaker 5: clearer view, but that we may, I would posit, we
• 54:50
  Speaker 5: may never be fully perceiving in a totally objective sense,
• 54:55
  Speaker 5: which can actually be a very liberating thought. This idea
• 54:59
  Speaker 5: of a participatory epistemology is that, you know, this allows
• 55:04
  Speaker 5: us to recognize why, for example, there's so many different
• 55:08
  Speaker 5: mystical experiences. There's so many different religions around the world
• 55:13
  Speaker 5: and that it's a participatory perspective is a little different
• 55:17
  Speaker 5: than say a perennialist perspective where in perennialism we say
• 55:23
  Speaker 5: there's a kind of inner esoteric core to all religious
• 55:26
  Speaker 5: traditions and that there's maybe a hierarchy of what is
• 55:32
  Speaker 5: the actual objective reality of the divine and a participatory
• 55:38
  Speaker 5: perspective rather says these are each valid to a certain
• 55:44
  Speaker 5: extent because it's a co-creation between whether it's an individual
• 55:48
  Speaker 5: human being or an entire culture across time that's enacting
• 55:53
  Speaker 5: or invoking forth from a mysterious divine something that we
• 56:00
  Speaker 5: then can experience. And it kind of accounts for that
• 56:04
  Speaker 5: diversity of mystical or religious or psychological or imaginal experience.
• 56:10
  Speaker 5: But I think you're absolutely right that that process of
• 56:13
  Speaker 5: cleaning up the biases and projections and complexes allows us
• 56:17
  Speaker 5: a clearer view of what we are enacting, of what
• 56:21
  Speaker 5: we are co-creating in relation to this mysterious divine.
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking about, we just did this episode on near-death experiences.
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that I learned when I
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: was preparing for that episode was that one of the
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: features of many NDEs is this sense of traveling rapidly
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: over something or through space. And in Western cultures, it
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: might be, you know, traveling rapidly through a tunnel. But
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: if you are a Maori, your near-death experience might mean
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: traveling rapidly over New Zealand to the kind of edge
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: of the island. And so it's the same kind of thing, right?
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: It's like there's some kind of core architecture of the
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: inner world that we all have access to, but we
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: clothe it in our own experiences somehow. And the question,
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: the fascinating question, which I don't think has an answer is,
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: is it an actual space or is it the feature
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: of our psyche that generates the same images? Like what
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: is that? I don't know exactly, and I'm not sure
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: what Jung would say, but it's a wonderful mystery.
• 57:35
  Speaker 5: I'm very much a philosophical both-and-ist in that I wonder
• 57:43
  Speaker 5: if it's both-and. It is an actual place that we
• 57:47
  Speaker 5: access and we co-create with, and that it is a
• 57:52
  Speaker 5: realm of the psyche. But then there's this question of, well,
• 57:55
  Speaker 5: where does the psyche end? I think I align much
• 57:58
  Speaker 5: more with where Jung ends up later in his career,
• 58:02
  Speaker 5: following his integration of synchronicity, that psyche is not internal
• 58:06
  Speaker 5: to the human being, but psyche saturates the world.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and we partake in it.
• 58:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah, we're participating with the anima mundi, not just the anima.
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: It's very, very hopeful, isn't it? This is here for everybody.
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: It resides in everybody. People like Jung and Tolkien really
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: and truly inspire us. But this is, you know, a
• 58:40
  Speaker 4: bottom-up experience rather than, you know, what many of us
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: in the Western world were raised with, which was top-down.
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: You know, that there's a God up there, and here
• 58:52
  Speaker 4: is the sacred work. It's been downloaded. Versus, hey, you
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: can experience this for yourself. And it is a mystery.
• 59:06
  Speaker 4: It's available to you.
• 59:09
  Speaker 5: It's something that... that has amazed me again and again
• 59:11
  Speaker 5: when I've taught classes or workshops that I can bring
• 59:16
  Speaker 5: active imagination in as an experiential exercise. And it is
• 59:20
  Speaker 5: just right below the surface. There is very little you
• 59:24
  Speaker 5: actually have to do to open people up to having
• 59:28
  Speaker 5: their own active imagination experiences. And I remember how terrified
• 59:32
  Speaker 5: I was the first time I proposed doing a workshop
• 59:35
  Speaker 5: like this, where I thought, what if nothing happens? What
• 59:38
  Speaker 5: if this just doesn't work? And I have a group
• 59:41
  Speaker 5: of probably 40 participants. I'm the youngest person there at
• 59:45
  Speaker 5: that point. I think I was like 30 years old.
• 59:48
  Speaker 5: And it worked. I couldn't believe it. Everyone's bringing forward
• 59:53
  Speaker 5: these just extraordinary experiences and they're drawing them and they're
• 59:57
  Speaker 5: writing them and sharing them with each other. And then
• 59:59
  Speaker 5: the amazing thing is we brought it into the group
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 5: and I've seen this again and again is how many
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 5: common themes were between what came up for people. And
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 5: they're different common themes every time it happens, which, you know,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 5: whatever's in the larger collective field that's coming through many
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 5: people are tapping into and they're bringing their own material
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 5: to it. That's that kind of participatory co-creation. But that
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 5: collective piece is really fascinating. And I think that's what
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 5: we see with Jung and Tolkien, that it's pointing toward
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 5: that even when there's differentiation, it's those parallels that really
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 5: indicate there is some universal field that's shared here that
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 5: we are connecting in with through the collective unconscious. And
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 5: So I learned to trust more and more that these
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 5: experiences are accessible, that it's just a matter of democratizing
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 5: our relationship to the imagination and that this isn't something
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 5: that's exclusive to mystics or people who we deem as
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 5: special and put up on pedestals like Jung. This is
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 5: a birthright as not just human beings, I would say,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 5: but as cosmic beings. that because we are part of
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: this cosmos, imagination is our inheritance. And it's just a matter,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 5: we live in a modern world that denies the reality
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 5: of imagination. So we say things like, it was just
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 5: made up. It was only a fantasy. It was merely
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 5: a dream. We have these little disparaging words to throw
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 5: out dreams and visions and fantasies and imagination. But if
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: you take those words away, just, only, merely, And as
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: Jung was being taught in the Red Book, a core
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 5: to reality and a truth to these experiences, and we
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 5: believe that they're real, that's an extraordinary recovery of a
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 5: whole realm of human capacity that the Western modern mind
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 5: in particular has stripped us of. And yet, it's one
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 5: of our great powers that we do deserve to have
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 5: access to. And that I think everyone in different ways
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 5: does have access to, whether it's visual, for some people
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 5: it's more auditory, even for some it's more emotional or somatic.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 5: That doesn't mean it isn't imagination, that it's something we
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 5: can all connect into. You know, maybe for some it
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 5: takes a little more practice or breaking down of the
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 5: critical function and the ego. For others, it just happens
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 5: like it did with Jung. But that's just, that's a
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 5: scale of, you know, a difference in degree, not in kind.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 5: that we have that capacity.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: So to invoke the other great British fantasy writer, we've
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: already mentioned her, but in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: Harry meets Dumbledore in some other place after Dumbledore is dead.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: And Harry says, tell me one last thing. Is this
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: real or has this been happening in my head? And
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: Dumbledore says, of course it is happening inside your head, Harry.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: but why on earth should that mean that it is
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: not real? I love that quote.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 5: That's fantastic. That captures it.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that quote. Let's go back for a
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: minute because I don't want to give short shrift to
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: your incredible scholarly work in your dissertation that we all
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: three read and really enjoyed. And you found all of
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: these parallels between these two red books. What's your sort
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: of understanding of that? What are the implications of that?
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 5: Well, and one thing that I'm always trying to be
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 5: clear about is despite all these parallels, they're not the
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 5: same book. There are many differences. We can learn a
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 5: lot from their differences as well. But I think what
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 5: it implies is that these two men were afforded this experience,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 5: this opportunity of entering into an imaginal realm at relatively
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 5: the same time. It was like the doorway to that threshold,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 5: to cross that threshold opened at the same time for them,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 5: right as the First World War was breaking out. And
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 5: so a very potent time historically. And in crossing into
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 5: that realm, they encountered many of the same landscapes, figures,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 5: sometimes scenes, whether that's the encounter with the dragon or
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 5: the great worm or serpent, whether that's an encounter with
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 5: Ents in Tolkien's world. And for Jung, he actually has
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 5: an experience of becoming this tree being who speaks an
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 5: awful lot like Treebeard. They both encounter a host of
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 5: the dead, which I think is quite significant. I mean,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 5: we can even find parallels between this imaginal realm and
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 5: the land of the dead. And again, many, many other,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 5: the parallels come through. Sometimes it's really potent and clear,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 5: like Philemon and Gandalf. In others, it's more like totally
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 5: different figures, but you see the same scene unfolding. Or
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 5: you almost feel like they're peering through a window on
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 5: the same scene and maybe interpret it differently, but it
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 5: looks the same. Or they paint it the same way.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 5: Or there's the same kind of, mythic background to something
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 5: because you know sometimes they have the same there's like
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 5: a dwarf of the same name mim that's in tolkien's
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 5: unfinished tales and jung's red book but then you can
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 5: also find that there's that's connected to the nibelungen lead
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 5: which is an older you know germanic mythic story so
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 5: you know sometimes there's common mythological roots shared between them
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 5: such as the nibelungen lead obviously obviously the judeo-christian biblical
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 5: tradition is huge in terms of influence. So there's some
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 5: external influence, of course, in how they've been raised, the
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 5: milieu that they grew up in, and so forth. But
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 5: that doesn't mean they're not still direct encounters that they're having.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 5: These extraordinary female figures that show up in both Salome,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 5: or the young girl in the forest, in Jung's, who
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 5: he comes to identify as his soul. I like to
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 5: argue that it's maybe not his soul, but soul in
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 5: a larger sense, and you see in a collective sense,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 5: or in Tolkien's, we have, of course, at a certain level,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 5: like Arwen and Galadriel, but then the Elbereth Gilthoniel, who's
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 5: more like a divine goddess figure, or the queen of fairy,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 5: and these personifications, you could say, of the anima mundi herself,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 5: that invited them into into this realm. And so I
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 5: think the implications really are that this doorway opened for
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 5: them the same time and they tread, maybe not the
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 5: same path all the time, but they tread parallel paths
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 5: through that imaginal realm. And that the real gift of that,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 5: that they brought out is an affirmation of the reality
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 5: of that realm to affirm to other people that if
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 5: you've had comparable experiences, to trust that, to believe in that,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 5: to record your experiences with as much fidelity as they
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 5: did theirs. And they took different paths in how they
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 5: decided to record that. For Jung, he ultimately was more
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 5: interested in the vision-making capacity than the content of the
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 5: visions themselves, even though he recorded them so carefully. He
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 5: wanted to understand what was at the back of them.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 5: And that's why his whole project goes in the direction
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 5: of depth psychology. For Tolkien, it's different. He takes it
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 5: in the direction of an artist. And he makes it
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 5: accessible to us through story, through language. And those are
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 5: two different, equally legitimate avenues. And... I think there's other
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 5: ways that we can express such experiences as well, but
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 5: the point is taking them seriously. And I think that
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 5: for both of them, it came forward at a time,
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 5: as I was saying before, where such experiences weren't actually recognized,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 5: like given a legitimacy. Visionary experiences in late 19th century,
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 5: early 20th century psychology are seen as pathological. This is
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 5: a sign that something is wrong. A latent psychosis has
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 5: been unleashed, which is what Jung at first thought when
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 5: these experiences started. And that radically redefines if you are
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 5: having these experiences and you're able to integrate them, then
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 5: That's not so much pathology, but actually just it's another
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 5: level of human experience. And I think that's really the
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 5: gift that reading these two red books in tandem with
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 5: each other allows us to see that, oh, there's something
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 5: there that isn't just this one man is seeing it
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 5: and that's it. They're both seeing it. And we can
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 5: go further. I just chose to focus on these two
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 5: because that's what I'm interested in. And I found... you know,
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 5: the timing in particular, so compelling with them. But you
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 5: can find many other parallels to that, which Jung was
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 5: really interested in finding. He wanted to find other examples
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 5: of people who had had experiences such as his. And
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 5: we can look back in history to someone like Hildegard
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 5: von Bingen, who was having mystical experiences. Dante's Divine Comedy.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 5: Amazing parallels between both Red Books and the Divine Comedy.
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 5: and his opening up into those realms as well. Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 5: Goethe's Faust, and many, many others that we can point towards.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 5: And the more there's a consensus around imaginal reality, the
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 5: more we can affirm it as not pathological, but again,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 5: as something that's inherent to maybe not just human nature,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 5: but to the psyche as a whole. So that's some
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 5: of what I feel.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 3: What I wanted to bring up is the difference between
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: a stable imaginal landscape and events on the magical landscape
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 3: that can be perceived from multiple perspectives, which is a
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 3: really uncanny attitude that von Franz had. So for instance,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 3: sometimes she would talk about fairy tales and she would say, no, no,
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 3: this isn't personal at all. Like this, the solar hero,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 3: discovered a whole other way of being in this other realm,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: which changed how the collective unconscious functioned. And then we're
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: left with these vestigial fairy tales because they're perceived and recorded.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: And they have such power because something new has changed
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: in the collective. And this is something that also is
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: implied with your thesis. Not just that they found the
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: same landscape, but they found a similar event happening at
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: a similar time. And one of the things that we
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: all see very objectively is that sometimes there is phenomena
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: that will happen globally that could not have inspired each other.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 3: So for instance, pyramids are being built in Egypt and
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: pyramids are being built in South America. different pyramidal shapes.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: It's as if this technology, this architectural capacity is happening.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: It's an event that's happening in the collective and is
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: pressing upon those who are capable of perceiving this. Calculus
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 3: was discovered by two different mathematicians in Europe at the
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: same time. The theory of relativity was being brought forward
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 3: by two different theorists at the same time. The one
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: who we seem to have more knowledge of simply got
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: more press or attention that way. The discovery of oxygen,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 3: things like discovering a blast furnace happening in China and India,
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: which suggests that there are not just landscapes but events
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: that happen, and these events then press the field that
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: is continuing to move and evolve. And things are changing
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 3: in the collective unconscious. They are not simply structured and set.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 3: And that's another really uncanny, fun feeling. And I know
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: von Franz really wanted people to get a sense of that,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: but I think it's hard to hold onto that as
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 3: a modern person. Although I think in the ancient world,
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 3: it was accepted that Stuff's going on out there in
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: the realm of the gods. It's all set in stone.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 5: Absolutely. It's an affirmation that, you know, we have this
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 5: worry in a very individualistic culture that, you know, I
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 5: have to get my ideas out or have to say
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 5: this before somebody else does. So I get credit. And actually,
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 5: if we shifted our thinking to this more collective sense that,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 5: you know, this is just coming through. You don't own this.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 5: It's not about you. It's actually an affirmation of what's
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 5: coming through you. Oh, I articulated this and so did
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 5: somebody else. And maybe that's actually a much greater validity
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 5: than me trying to claim it all by myself and
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 5: put my name and patent on it. So we move
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 5: from a more individualistic to a collective way of understanding creativity, inspiration,
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 5: new ideas along those lines.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 2: That's great. I really like that. I wanted to pick
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: up on something that you write about in your dissertation.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: You talk about when Jung and Tony Wolfe go to
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 2: Ravenna together in 1914. Do you want to sort of
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: set that up? And then I can read a little
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 2: bit too. Why don't you explain what happened in Ravenna
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: to Tony and Jung?
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 5: This is an amazing story that Jung records in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 5: And then it's brought forward in a biography of Tony
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 5: Wolfe by Nan Savage Healy that it's called Tony Wolfe
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 5: and C.G. Young, A Collaboration, the book is. And so
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 5: the two of them went to Ravenna in Italy in 1914.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 5: And they were visiting, there's extraordinary mosaics there. I actually
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 5: intentionally went to Ravenna about five years ago to be
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 5: able to see some of these mosaics. And they went
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 5: to this particular It was a baptistry. And they saw
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 5: these panels of mosaics there together, and they depicted this
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 5: kind of series of baptism. I think it was St.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 5: Peter's baptism, perhaps. And, you know, baptism itself, as it
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 5: traditionally was brought forward, is to invoke a near-death experience
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 5: and a profound initiation, an encounter with death and you know,
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 5: how that would bring about an expanded state of consciousness
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 5: and initiation into a spiritual perspective. So they're looking at
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 5: these panels. And Jung said that, you know, there's a
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 5: kind of odd blue light in the space, but they
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 5: didn't really pay much attention to it. And they were
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 5: discussing it for a long time, really taken in by
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 5: these mosaics. And then they left and he didn't end
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 5: up getting any pictures of it. You know, he was
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 5: hoping to find if there were reproductions. of these mosaics
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 5: somewhere that they could take home these images. And so
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 5: a friend of his who was going to Ravenna later on,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 5: he asked, you know, can you please look? This is
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 5: where it is. This is the baptistry. Can you please
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 5: go find reproductions of these? Because I'd be very interested
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 5: in having copies. So the acquaintance goes to Ravenna and
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 5: brings back the report that no such mosaics exist and
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 5: that they had actually... that baptistry in some centuries before
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 5: had been destroyed by a fire that had destroyed the
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 5: particular mosaics. And Jung was just shocked because what this
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 5: affirmed was that he and Tony Wolfe had had a
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 5: shared visionary experience that they weren't even aware of. And he's,
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 5: and that that that's actually a great kind of affirmation
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 5: as well of what we've been talking about in terms of,
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 5: I remember one of the questions I was asked at
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 5: my dissertation defense was, well, how do you know a
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 5: visionary experience is real versus, you know, you're just making
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 5: it up or it is pathological or delusional. And I
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 5: do think it comes down to this shared experience, uh,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 5: that if you can affirm it, you know, if someone
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 5: else is having the same experience, which we see with synchronicity,
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 5: which we see in expanded states of consciousness at different times,
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 5: or even the practice of amplification does that, where we're
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 5: looking to other myths, religions, folklore, and so forth to ask,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 5: is there something here that isn't solo belonging to the individual?
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 5: And it's that bringing the imaginal into consensus reality that
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 5: is so important. And it can happen in different ways.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 5: We don't all get such extraordinary experiences as Jung and
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 5: Wolf and Ravenna, but it certainly makes one wonder.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 4: It all points to a context that we live in,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 4: to the degree that we know it and experience it
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 4: or not. That's mysterious, that many people have experienced, that
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 4: we can't explain in rational, cognitive, ego-oriented terms. But there
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 4: it is. It's all around us. I love Corbin's term,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 4: the mundus imaginalis, that we're part of something bigger that
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 4: is alive in its own right. And that helps us
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 4: be more alive if we let it.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: So your dissertation is a real tour de force.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: It really should be out in the world. Do you
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: have plans to publish it?
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 5: I would love to publish it. I haven't found the
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 5: right publisher for it yet, in part because there are
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 5: a lot of images in it. Some of the great
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 5: parallels are between the images from Jung's Red Book, which
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 5: are so beautiful, and images that Tolkien painted and drew
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 5: in his Book of Vishnu and his later stories. And
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 5: so I'd like to find a publisher who could actually
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 5: publish the whole thing, not just the words, but be
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 5: able to bring forward those images beautifully. And, um, you know,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 5: if that was someone like WW Norton who did the,
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 5: the red book, um, or, you know, Houghton Mifflin who publishes,
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 5: you know, uh, Tolkien's stories and his artwork, that would be,
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 5: that would be my ideal. So it's been something I've
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 5: been wanting to publish for a very long time. And, uh,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 5: cause I finished it about six years ago. And then,
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 5: of course, a new book project came into my lap
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 5: about two years ago. I'm researching and writing the biography
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 5: of Dr. Stanislav Grof, who's a pioneer in the realm
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 5: of LSD psychotherapy. So once that came in, I've just
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 5: kind of been sitting on this, but I really would
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 5: love to bring it out into the world.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 2: Well, and it would be a beautiful book to have
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 2: out there. So we'll keep our fingers crossed for you.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: That sounds like a great opportunity for someone. So I
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: have two more questions for you. One is, how is
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: your elvish?
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 5: My elvish used to be excellent.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I figured that actually.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 5: I still have a few phrases accessible to me. I
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 5: know how to properly greet an elf. To say hello,
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 5: you say, which is kind of like greetings. There's a
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 5: very beautiful phrase, which is a star shines upon the
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 5: hour of our meeting. I know how to say thank you,
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 5: or goodbye. But I've forgotten a lot since I was
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 5: a teenager. But it comes back at different points. I
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 5: love translating the names. All of the names in Tolkien's
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 5: works are not made up. They all have meanings. And
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 5: you actually can, each name is like its own little
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 5: myth of who the person is. So for example, Aragorn,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 5: his name translates as Lord of the Tree. First you think, well,
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 5: what does that mean? But the fact that when he
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 5: comes into his kingship, it isn't actually affirmed that he
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 5: can take up that lineage until he finds the little
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 5: white saplings of the white tree of Gondor that has
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 5: this whole long lineage. So he is the lord of
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 5: the tree. And you just see that again and again,
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 5: that the names mean something that tell you who the
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 5: character is and what their destiny is meant to be.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 5: So I love translating those names.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 2: And my second question is, could the four of us
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: meet in person sometime and cosplay? And Joseph can be
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: the wizard and you can be the elf and I'll
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: be Eowyn and Deb, you can be a hobbit.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 2: That'd be fun. Should we do that?
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 5: That sounds absolutely lovely.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: Yes, I'm up for it.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 2: Well, Becca, I think it's safe to say that a
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 2: star has shone on the hour of our meeting.
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. Oh, that's great.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: And so how do you say goodbye in Elvish?
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: Namari.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 5: Namari. Namari.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 2: Namari.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 5: Thank you all so much.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: So we have some exciting news this week. Our Patreon
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: has had a makeover. There is lots of new content
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 2: and a special offer if you join this month. So
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: patrons who support us at the $ 5 level and up
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: will now access Young Love. See what we did there?
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: A series of weekly bonus episodes in which the three
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 2: of us discuss dreams and questions sent in by our patrons.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 2: At the $ 10 level, there will be the chance to
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: vote on topics for podcast episodes and vote on guests
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: that we're hoping to invite. And at the $ 25 level,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 2: you'll also be able to watch behind the scenes content
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 2: and even join us for occasional live events. And if
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: you upgrade to the $ 5 level or higher during the
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: month of May, you'll also get free access to Remember
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: Your Dreams, this Jungian Life audio guide. This is our
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: brand new hour-long audio guide to dream recall, which we
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 2: will be putting on sale later this year. So if
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 2: you'd like to be a part of all of this,
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: the link to our Patreon is in the show notes.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your support, and we couldn't
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 2: do it without you.
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 4: Today's dreamer is a woman. She's 25 years old, about
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 4: to enter graduate school, and she has entitled her dream,
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 4: Sulfur Beach. And here's the dream. I was walking to
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 4: the beach with a large group of people. It felt
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 4: like a school trip, maybe. There was this pervading idea
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 4: that going to the beach would be educative, maybe in
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: some spiritual or intellectual way. We got to the beach,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 4: which was completely yellow-gray in tone, the sand, the sky,
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 4: the water. There was such a strong sulfurous smell that
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 4: I nearly vomited. I saw others walking around bobbing into
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 4: the water. The smell was too strong for me. I
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 4: turned away from the water toward a wooden plank that
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 4: was on the sand and saw many small bugs crawling
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 4: on it. Another woman around my age and I left
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 4: the beach and walked toward a cabin. We entered the
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 4: cabin and idly chatted. I forget about what, but it
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 4: was friendly and pleasant. We agreed that we wouldn't go
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 4: back to the beach. However, I did go back eventually
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 4: and with a large group walked to the shoreline and
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 4: entered the water. I ducked my head underneath. To my surprise,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 4: I could no longer smell the sulfur. I opened my
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 4: eyes underwater, expecting to be illuminated by some beautiful sight
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 4: or newfound knowledge. It was just cloudy, that same gray-yellow color.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 4: I was slightly disappointed, but not that surprised. I bobbed
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 4: my head above water and noticed the sulfur smell again,
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 4: but it was much less strong. For context, our dreamer says...
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 4: I was recently accepted to graduate school, a lifelong goal
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 4: of mine, only to realize I became depressed after my acceptance.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 4: I've also been enduring some lack of passion and ambivalence
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 4: in my relationship of seven years. I found myself extremely
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 4: attracted to another person and felt some guilt about this.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 4: The main feelings in the dream, she says, were disgust
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 4: at the sulfur smell gentle kindness and comfort with my
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 4: companion at the cabin, and satisfaction mixed with other things. So,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: with this to go on, what do we make of
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: the dream of Sulphur Beach?
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 3: Just one small thing, because in Virginia there actually is
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 3: a little resort town that's been there for well over
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 3: 100 years, Sulphur Springs.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 4: Oh, for heaven's sake.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 3: And there's this healing attribution that people bathe in sulfurous
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 3: hot springs and they receive a kind of value in that.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 3: And from a purely scientific standpoint, sulfur has antifungal and
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 3: antimicrobial benefits. So I think that certainly in the ancient world,
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 3: you have had, God knows, any number of kind of
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 3: skin disorders, and soaking in a hot sulfurous bath could
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 3: actually have healing properties in as much it could treat
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 3: some of those things. So I think there's an old
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 3: tradition of tolerating that rotten egg smell if you have
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 3: credible evidence that it's going to help you in some way.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 4: And it's a big symbol in alchemy as well, is
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 4: it not? What sulfur stands for is heat. Am I
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 4: correct about that?
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 3: Yes, I think that when sulfur burns... It has a
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 3: particularly hot flame that generates very bright, very hot, very stinky.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 3: So I don't know whether she says there's much heat there.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: I mean, I'm fantasizing because of the hot springs, but
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 3: I don't know that she says anything about warmth.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 4: No, it's the stink. It's the rotten egg stink part
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 4: for her at the beach. And it feels like maybe
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 4: a school trip. So she's just been accepted to graduate school.
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 4: And so she is on a school trip in her
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 4: waking world life as a grad student. But I can
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 4: imagine that that also takes us back to the realm
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 4: of younger years. And what is it like to be
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 4: a student again? She's 25. She's been an adult. And
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: when studentship is evoked, it calls up a certain status
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 4: of the good news is you're going to receive and
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 4: be fed, you know, knowledge and education and wisdom and
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 4: all those wonderful things. But hierarchically, you're one down because
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 4: wherever there's a student, there's a teacher. So it calls
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 4: up adult-child dynamics.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 3: And perhaps that's part of her ambivalence and the depression.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 3: It might seem inflating initially to be chosen. You fought
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 3: your way to get accepted into the grad school. It
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 3: seems wonderful. Then the other side of it is you
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 3: are subjected in a kind of parent-child way. to the system,
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 3: the teachers, the demands, the assessment process.
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 3: And that can bring up a lot of ambivalent feelings,
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 3: particularly returning to school later in life.
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 5: There is a.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 4: Real transition and a real ambiguity about having this as
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 4: a lifelong goal in whatever discipline she has chosen. but
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 4: obviously something I always wanted to get a graduate degree
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 4: in X or Y. And now that the dream is here,
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 4: it also entails a kind of regression to student status.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 4: It can look and feel very much that way. But
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 4: I want to go back to just the dream, that
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 4: this odd... odd beach, which is very murky in color.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 4: I mean, these colors, yellow and gray, you know, sound
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 4: sort of sickly, don't they? You know, and the strong
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 4: sulfurous smell, and she's at the beach. So other people
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 4: are walking around, and they're bobbing in the water. Other
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 4: people seem not to be affected by By the situation,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 4: by the setting that she's in. And then we have
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 4: the plank and the little bugs crawling on it, which
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 4: often I think multiplicities and multiplicities of things like worms
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 4: and bugs, insects, are kind of primal feelings that are diffuse.
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 4: They haven't been consolidated into a single image, but just something...
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 4: way below a level of consciousness that is hard to
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 4: connect with. She befriends a woman. They enter a cabin.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 4: She feels the kindness and comfort of having a positive
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 4: shadow figure here. And then she goes back to the beach,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 4: ducks her head underwater, could no longer smell the sulfur.
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 4: And then she says, I expected to... I think this
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 4: is really informative. I expect it to be illuminated by
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 4: some beautiful sight or newfound knowledge. But darn it, it
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 4: just was cloudy, the same gray-yellow color. And she says,
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 4: I was disappointed but not surprised.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 5: So as she.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 4: Gets into the water, the sulfur, the stink decreases. The
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 4: colors stay the same. So I wonder if the goal
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 4: of going to the beach, of getting into graduate school,
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 4: is not quite as transformative.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 4: It reminds me. I love the metaphor.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 3: People ask you, how was graduate school? It was one endless,
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 3: sulfurous beach. That is such a fabulous way i'm describing
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 3: going back to graduate school.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah yeah of that it's not absolutely transformative of you
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 4: know i was shown into a beautiful room filled with
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 4: ancient illuminated manuscripts and it's like oh okay it's gonna
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 4: be um It's going to be a walk on the
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 4: beach and.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 5: Some of it's going to.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 3: Rotten eggs for everyone.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 4: Some of it's going to stink.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. And what I think is perhaps helpful is that
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 3: there are plenty of other parts of the psyche that
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 3: are adapting. They're in the water. They seem untroubled by it.
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 3: They're coping at the very least or maybe able to
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 3: receive some benefit from the sulfurous water. I think it's
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 3: interesting that when you look deeper, you don't notice the
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 3: stinkiness quite so much. Because under it's cloudy, meaning that
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 3: there's stuff to discover. There's stuff that isn't quite clear,
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 3: but at least you're looking below the surface of things.
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 3: And there's work to be done to clear it up,
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 3: but it's not quite so rank if we go deep,
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: but on the surface, you know, it's definitely kind of stinky.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 3: The other thing that is just true about sulfurous odors
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 3: is that when protein degrades, it releases sulfur, sulfur oxide.
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 3: So globulin, which is a part of most bodies, animal bodies,
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 3: human bodies, as the body decays, the globulin molecules kind
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 3: of break open and they release various compounds of sulfur. One,
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 3: that tells us as humans, this smell is bad, I
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 3: probably should stay away from it, because disgust is a
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 3: primal emotion. Infants feel disgust, which keeps them alive, so
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 3: they know to pull away from things that could be
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 3: damaging or dangerous for them. So there's also something that
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 3: could be breaking down Again, it could be the smell
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 3: of the rotting inflation, you know? I just thought it
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 3: was going to be so glorious, and that's just rotting
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 3: right in front of me, and it smells bad.
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 4: Well, you're bringing up something I think that might be
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 4: relevant to the dreamer's life. She says she became depressed
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 4: after her acceptance.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 4: You know, we're sort of wondering, you know, could the
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 4: sulfurous beach and all the rest of it be like
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 4: the letdown after, you know, what if the dream comes true?
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 4: And then you wake up the next morning and you
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 4: still have to brush your teeth and eat breakfast. And
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 4: then she says she's been enduring some lack of passion
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 4: and ambivalence in her relationship of seven years, and she
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 4: found herself attracted to someone else. And I wonder if
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 4: that relates to what you're saying about the sulfur, that
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 4: it's an element in things breaking down.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 3: Oh, I love that. So the breaking down of the
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: old relationship. And as you said earlier, sulfur is connected
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 3: to the calcinatio in alchemy because when it's set on fire,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 3: it burns very hotly. So the sulfur could be part
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 3: of the heat of the new relationship as well as
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 3: the decay of the old. It's interesting that depending on
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 3: how it's discovered, it can be so different. And that's
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 3: true about the psyche, isn't it? That we're just so
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 3: differently affected in various ways. So I think that what's
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: good is that she tolerates it in the dream. She vomits.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 3: It's rough on her. It's not appealing. It's hard to digest, right?
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 3: Because when you vomit, you're like... tossing things out of
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 3: your belly that your body is like, I don't want
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 3: to keep this in there. But, you know, she's able
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 3: to kind of keep herself together.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 4: And the dream gives her a couple of good little
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 4: tips about what's working here Well, one thing that is
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 4: working is going back to this cabin. And she says
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 4: in the dream, idly chatted with the woman, but it
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 4: was friendly and pleasant. So I would kind of build
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 4: on that and say, get support. Go out to coffee
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 4: with a friend. Go out to dinner. Talk on the phone.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 4: Maintain those seemingly you know, sort of casual, chit-chatty kinds
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 4: of relationships. They are relationships you already have. They are
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 4: trails through an unknown and new terrain. And the other
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 4: is that things are better when she goes back to
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 4: the beach and puts her head under the water. That
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 4: when you get under the surface of things... That helps too.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 3: It's a very homey dream. There's nothing glorious about it.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 3: And I love her final just few sentences. You know,
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 3: I went into grad school expecting to be illuminated by
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: some beautiful sight and newfound knowledge. And what I found
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 3: was just kind of cloudy and grayish yellow. I'm feeling
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 3: kind of disappointed, but not surprised. And you know, then
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 3: when I resurfaced, it's not quite as bad. as I
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: thought it was going to be. And so, welcome to
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 3: grad school.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. And I dare to say, there will be illumination, too.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 4: It's been a lifelong goal. And new beginnings, beginnings are hard.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 4: Beginnings are just hard. And so are endings.
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 3: And you may find that the companionship that you discover
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 3: being back in grad school Maybe the surprising, wonderful thing,
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 3: and I know I felt that training with you and Lisa.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 4: That's true, too.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 3: You go in thinking, oh, I'll become a wizard of
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 3: a Jungian. And there's all of these life-changing relationships that
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 3: you carry away. And that is, for me, was equally
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 3: as valuable as any information I might have had. So
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 3: she might be surprised at the friendships that she carries back.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 4: So we will wish our dreamer well on this new
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 4: part of her life journey.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: Yes, we will.
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: help us produce future episodes by funding us through Patreon,
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: We'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: living this Jungian life.