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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There are natural times where the ego has to have
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: its primary guiding principles reexamined, and often later in life,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: they have to be sacrificed so that something better, more expansive,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: more reflective of the maturity that we've gained can emerge.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. Today,
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Joseph and I, as Lisa can't be here, are going
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: to discuss an important life process and one that is
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: critical in alchemy, part of our ongoing series of alchemical processes.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: And that is the process of mortificatio, or death. From
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: a psychological point of view, it's the dark turning point.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: But when we are in that process, it doesn't feel
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: like a turning point. It feels like the end. that
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: we are just in the negrito, alchemical term for the
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: blackness or depression. It's associated with shadow. It's associated with death.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: It's associated with putrefaction, dismemberment, you know, all kinds of
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: awful dark things that we don't want to face. And
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: yet we do. in the course of a life. So
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: what are the elements, psychologically speaking, that can die and
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: may need to die when we experience mortificatio? Well, the
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: first and most universal thing is it's some element of
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  Speaker 3: ego that usually has to accede to a force greater
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: than itself. as we all know from Jung and others,
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: one of the necessary conditions for humanity and being human
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: is we develop an ego, and we need to develop
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: an ego. But then it tends to arrogate to itself
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: a sense of wholeness, power, authority, as if that's all
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  Speaker 3: that we are. And then we are going to run
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: into these processes of mortificatio The ego is often represented
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: in alchemy as the king or the sun, the lion,
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: the eagle, and other such symbols. One of the things
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: that can die in the process of mortificatio is also
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  Speaker 3: our instinctual nature. when it is leading us astray, such
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: as perhaps a process of addiction, the dark primal material
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: that has perhaps not made it all the way into
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: being integrated into ego. And that can be symbolized by
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: the toad or a poisonous dragon, something that's very fleshy,
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: and material and unevolved excrement, and so on. Another thing
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  Speaker 3: that can be subjected to the process of mortificatio is
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  Speaker 3: the lesser conjunctio of two things that are joined together
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: but imperfectly. And this is often symbolized by things like marriage,
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  Speaker 3: it may be a career crisis, something we were drawn to,
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: a person we loved, and then it's not perfect. we're
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: not perfect. And that coniuntio that we projected onto a person,
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: a situation, a career, has to suffer some kind of
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: death of the original idea in order to move to
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: something else. And another thing, the last on my list
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: of all these things that can die, is the childhood
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  Speaker 3: state I think we can carry into very late years
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  Speaker 3: in life of purity or innocence or just idealism. And
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  Speaker 3: that's often symbolized by the sacrifice of something that is innocent.
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  Speaker 3: In the New Testament, Herod persecutes young children, two years
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  Speaker 3: old or younger, or the white sacrificial lamb, which is
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: an early stage of sort of whiteness, but it needs
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: to be tempered. With that as our mini framework for
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: a very big, important, and difficult life process, let's see
• 5:43
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• 6:50
  Speaker 1: We take that first position, which is that there are
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: natural times where the ego is has to have its
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: primary guiding principles re-examined, and often later in life, they
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: have to be sacrificed so that something better, more expansive,
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: more reflective of the maturity that we've gained can emerge.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: So in one of the alchemical sequences of the Splendor Solus,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: There's an image of a young prince standing on the shore,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: and then far out in the lake, there's an old
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: king that's flailing in the water and is going down
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: for the count. And one of the ways that that's
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: interpreted is that we often don't realize that we have
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  Speaker 1: a core axiom and attitude right woven into the fundamentals
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: of the personality. often it's something that came into us
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  Speaker 1: very early in childhood even, and that that becomes an
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  Speaker 1: orientation to ourselves and to life, and it takes us
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: as far as it does. But as the self begins
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: to assert and make demands on the ego, what we
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: find is that that old belief has been limiting us. Now,
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  Speaker 1: for most of us, It's very hard to put our
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  Speaker 1: hands on that kind of guiding principle that's been there
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  Speaker 1: for 50 years, let's say, but the self is keenly
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  Speaker 1: aware of the operating system that we've been running on,
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  Speaker 1: and at a certain point, it will intercede and start
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  Speaker 1: taking the life and libido away from that little nexus
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  Speaker 1: of images and beliefs starve them so to speak which
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  Speaker 1: as you had said often leads to a temporary period
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  Speaker 1: of depression or confusion and to be patient enough to
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: wait and discover what the new and more comprehensive idea
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  Speaker 1: is now talking about the death of an idea sounds
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  Speaker 1: so abstract but if we understand that the central attitudes
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: by which we perceive the world are captured as concepts
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  Speaker 1: and live inside us, that is a radical process.
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  Speaker 3: Let's really illustrate this with some examples.
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  Speaker 1: So one example that I can just toss out, because
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  Speaker 1: I just went through this with somebody I'm working with,
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  Speaker 1: is that if you're raised in a house where there's
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a lot of turbulence or trauma, Sometimes the organizing attitude
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  Speaker 1: can be very primal and it might sound like something
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  Speaker 1: like this. No!
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  Speaker 3: Just that.
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  Speaker 1: Just that little gasp of no and when that feeling
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  Speaker 1: and that word gets installed as a fundamental attitude towards
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  Speaker 1: the world we see that later in life that as
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  Speaker 1: opportunities or experiences present themselves, that the body kind of
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  Speaker 1: locks up, gasps, and initially interprets it as something that
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  Speaker 1: shouldn't be happening or that we don't want. And so
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  Speaker 1: we have a tendency to push life away. In our
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  Speaker 1: more sophisticated adult world, we're not aware of that gasp
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  Speaker 1: and that single word. But when we think about these very,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: very young moments, where a guiding principle is installed, it
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  Speaker 1: often can sound and feel that primal. And if that's
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: an attitude that's carried into the adult life, once we
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: realize that we can see how many things out of
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  Speaker 1: fear and startle and anxiety that we have rejected for
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  Speaker 1: no other reason than we have this echo from a
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  Speaker 1: very young age time. And luckily, if we're gifted the
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: moment to see that, we might notice that that needs
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: to go and something better needs to replace it. That's
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: one example I've been thinking about. What do you think, Deb?
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  Speaker 3: I want to acknowledge how incredibly painful these experiences of
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  Speaker 3: mortificatio can be. the degree of suffering and the amount
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: of time that it can take. And the example that
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: I can offer from my personal life is my first
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: career as a special ed teacher. And this is up
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  Speaker 3: for me because it came up in the context of
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: something else just last week. And we worked with adolescents.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: they were not especially cute or adorable and we, we
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  Speaker 3: loved them and kind of kicked their butts and had
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  Speaker 3: a wonderful team and wanted very, very much to support
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  Speaker 3: them in becoming and being who they were, uh, and
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  Speaker 3: taking responsibility for, for decisions and choices and, um, Needless
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  Speaker 3: to say, this program did not adhere to typical school
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  Speaker 3: rules of everyone sitting at a desk and working through
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  Speaker 3: a workbook. After four or five years, the powers that
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  Speaker 3: were decided to dismantle us. And the mortificatio was... that honestly,
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  Speaker 3: I was on a quest. I was on the call
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: to adventure a la Joseph Campbell. I was looking for
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  Speaker 3: the grail. I think all of us were as relatively
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: young people. I think I was in my probably early 30s.
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  Speaker 3: And I was devastated. I can still feel my way
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  Speaker 3: into that period of life.
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  Speaker 1: And I.
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  Speaker 3: Wandered around doing wackadoodle part-time jobs for a couple of
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  Speaker 3: years before finding my way into something else. With all
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  Speaker 3: the feelings that you might imagine of, you know, that
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  Speaker 3: it wasn't fair and so on and so forth, So
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  Speaker 3: mortificatio comes with grief and anger and a sense of injustice,
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  Speaker 3: and you can make a long list until something else emerged.
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  Speaker 3: But it is a hard time, and as I said
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  Speaker 3: at the beginning, you know, somebody can write that it's
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  Speaker 3: about the dark turning point, but Honestly, it felt much
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  Speaker 3: more like I was just lost in the forest.
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  Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. And when I think about how
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  Speaker 1: many people retire and then they fall into a great depression,
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  Speaker 1: it's ubiquitous, happens all the time.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And one way alchemy can help us is that it
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  Speaker 1: really is a kind of death of our identity or
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  Speaker 1: an aspect of our identity. And it's very... It's very complicated,
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  Speaker 1: and as you were saying, it's very painful and deserves
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  Speaker 1: a kind of grieving process, which really is the process
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  Speaker 1: of letting something go or watching it leave, frankly, and
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  Speaker 1: then waiting the way one waits in the winter and
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  Speaker 1: watching to see what's going to sprout when the weather
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  Speaker 1: turns warmer. And often we don't know what's under the ground.
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  Speaker 1: We don't know what the next chapter necessarily is. We
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  Speaker 1: could determine it. But as Jungians, we might encourage you
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  Speaker 1: to rest into the wintering, to rest into the mortificatio,
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  Speaker 1: and to wait and watch so that whatever the next
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  Speaker 1: chapter is, it feels like it rises organically from a
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  Speaker 1: deeper field.
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  Speaker 3: And I would say also that we can, in the process,
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  Speaker 3: although I didn't know this then, reflect on what exactly
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  Speaker 3: is dying. So for me, it was an idealistic, innocent
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  Speaker 3: kind of belief in helping people that needed help. And
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  Speaker 3: that all the powers in the school system were aligned
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  Speaker 3: with our particular vision for that, which they were not.
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  Speaker 3: In the case that you just mentioned, Joseph, somebody who
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  Speaker 3: could suffer a mortificatio upon retiring, it may be the identification.
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  Speaker 3: Not that all these things are not mixed up together.
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  Speaker 3: They are. But if somebody has really held a position
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  Speaker 3: of leadership, skill, all the investment of all those years
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  Speaker 3: at work, That is an ego attitude that is going
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  Speaker 3: to die. Now you're just so-and-so, and nobody knows who
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  Speaker 3: you were at work and what you could do. You're
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: going out in the world as yourself. But it helps,
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  Speaker 3: if you can, to reflect on you know, what is
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  Speaker 3: it that I have just lost? What died? What died?
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  Speaker 3: And we see this in dreams all the time, don't we?
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  Speaker 3: Of that somebody's pet died, somebody's friend dies. The list
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  Speaker 3: goes on and on and on of something dying. And
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: people can often come in and say, oh my God,
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  Speaker 3: I had the most awful dream what was being symbolized
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  Speaker 3: by this particular death?
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  Speaker 1: So another death, which again is ubiquitous, is getting a divorce.
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  Speaker 1: 50% of marriages end in divorce. Sometimes both partners are
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  Speaker 1: in agreement. They've been talking for a long time, but
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  Speaker 1: it's not uncommon for one partner to be very surprised
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and the other to feel very determined. The loss of
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  Speaker 1: a marriage is very much can feel like a death.
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  Speaker 1: And all of the mourning processes, the mourning of the fantasies,
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  Speaker 1: the breaking down of the internal image. Because if we've
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: been partnered for a long time, we have an internal
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: image of ourselves and the partner are held together as
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: a single idea. And when the partner is gone, there
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: is a melting down of an internal representation, which sounds
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: very abstract. But in the immediate sense, it is agonizing.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: We don't know who we are. We don't know what
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: to take back into our own hands. We don't know
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: whether love will ever come back and et cetera. But
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: as you were saying, what's dying? How do I sit
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: in it? How do I not avoid it? Because the
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: avoidance can look like a lot of things we're all
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: familiar with. I'm not dead. I'm driving a brand new
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: red convertible. You know, I'm not dead. I'm going to
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: put all my retirement into crypto. See what happens. Let's
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: roll the wheel. So there are ways that we will
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: try to gin up life to avoid the natural grieving process,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the withering process that must happen in order for us
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: to rest down into the mulching of the old life.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: And that, your example of a divorce or long-term relationship
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: of any kind. a bad breakup, as they say, is
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: the mortificatio of the lesser coniuntio. Yes, yes. In alchemy,
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  Speaker 3: it's two substances that each of which has not been
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: sufficiently purified. Now, that's all of us in our human condition.
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  Speaker 3: And they unite, you know, in all the feelings that
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: go with partnering and commitment until and unless those impurities,
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: speaking alchemical ease here, really interfere with the partnering, the coniuntio,
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: the joining together. It's a very difficult and sad process.
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: And it can be like all of these assaults on
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: our ego, which knows how it was, quote, supposed to be.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: It really is a job in itself to convert that
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: into mourning. Just the sadness and the loss of an idea,
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: an aspiration, a love, a purpose to simply be sad
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: at its loss, rather than going into ego and saying,
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  Speaker 3: this wasn't right. You know, I'm going to fight it.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: I'm going to litigate it. I'm going to continue to
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: protest it rather than let ourselves be sad. And As ever,
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: as someone said to me, you know, what have you
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: learned from this? My first thought was, what are you
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: talking about? But what do we extract from it? How
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: do we use it? How do we make new meaning
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: from all of these incredible hardships that life can land
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: on us?
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: This is where alchemy can be so helpful in containing
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Because when we understand the alchemical stages, what we see
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: is that these are stages. I think what happens when
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: we're in something that's very painful is that we lose
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: the arc of time and process. So, oh my gosh,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: I'm in the middle of divorce. I feel terrible. I
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: guess this is the new norm that I'm just going
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: to be feeling bad forever. We don't always think that consciously,
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: but unconsciously people can really think this is now how
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: it's going to be. But alchemy gives us some confidence
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: that this is a sequence and that we can trust
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: the sequencing. There's a wonderful alchemical phrase that I'm sure
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: I'm going to pronounce poorly. Corruptio unis generatio est altarius.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: Well, you get points for attempting it.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you. I think you're supposed to say it with
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: an Italian accent, is how I've been called. Corruptio unis
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: generatio est alterius. The corruption of one form is the
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: generation of another. And if we can wrap our hands
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: around that, or perhaps find evidence of that in previous
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: changes that perhaps have been thrust upon us, then we
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: might have some confidence that something is going to be
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: generated out of the detritus of the old, the old attitude,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: the old career, the old relationship, that that becomes a
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: kind of soil for the next thing. And if we
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: can cling to that with some confidence and perhaps find
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: evidence of it also, so it's not purely theoretical, we
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: can weather the wintering, we can weather the dying process
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: with some confidence. So, We've talked a little bit about
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: the lesser mortificatios, the death of a career, the death
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: of a marriage. Puberty, by the way, is also a mortificatio.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: You know, the death of the child, the death of
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the innocent one, and that's replaced by these kind of
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: roaring sexual demands inside of us. All very natural, in
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: a sense. The greater mortificatio which Jung talks about in
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: the Rosarium woodcuts, is when the ego is being prepared
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: to receive the influx of influence from the self, that
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: there is that transpersonal part of us that is trying
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: to marry our ego and create this new amalgam of
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: conscious and unconscious material, which Jung suggested is that the
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: barrier between the conscious and the unconscious mind thins, so
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: that there is kind of a unified spectrum between the
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: waking and the sleeping mind, or the conscious and the unconscious,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: that doesn't have such a sharp demarcation as it needs
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: to in the first half of life. That the unconscious
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: is in constant dialogue with us throughout the course of
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the day and the night. Jung suggested that he had
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: attained this, and this was one of his explanations as
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: to why he no longer dreamed in the latter years
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: of his life. He said, I'm talking to the unconscious
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: all day long. There's not a lot left to figure
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: out when I'm asleep. So my sleep is generally just
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: deep and dreamless. So there is an idea that we
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: could unify the right and left sides of the brain,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: the ego and the unconscious, the masculine and the feminine,
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: however we language the polarities, into a more unified spectrum
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: of consciousness. And that requires a melting down or a
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: mortificatio of the old way of functioning. And that's the
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: greater and the more radical mortificatio that not all of
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: us attain, actually.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: I think what you're leaning into Joseph that is really
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: important goes to these great, grand, old traditions of the
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: Asclepion or the healing chambers. There were something like 250
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: and more of these healing chambers around the Levant, around
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: the Mediterranean. ruled over by the god Asclepius. And I'm
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: just going to read a little bit that talks to
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: this greater mortificatio and its other side of the polarity
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: of its function as healing and wholeness. So it starts
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: with Greek mythology, and I'm reading from a book by
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: Edward Edinger called Anatomy of the Psyche. We'll put all
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: these in the show notes. So it says that the crow,
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: which is a symbol of mortificatio, in Greek mythology appears
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: as the birth of Asclepius. His mother was Koronis, the
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: crow maiden. who, while pregnant with Asclepius by Apollo, had
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: intercourse with Isis. This infidelity was reported to Apollo by
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: the crow, who was turned from white to black for
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: bringing bad news. Coronas, the mother, was killed for her crime,
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: but the infant Asclepius was snatched from her womb while
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: she was on the funeral pyre by Apollo. as has
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: been demonstrated from a mythology named Carigny has demonstrated, the
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: birth of healing power from the negrito, the blackness, belongs
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: to the archetype of the wounded healer. In his words,
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: the myth refers psychologically to the capacity to be at
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: home in the darkness of suffering and there to find
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment,
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: Bring forth Asclepios, the sun-like healer. So people would go
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: to these Asclepions, speak with a priest, ask for a
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: healing dream, and descend into the unconscious in a whole
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: sort of method of preparation and then having a dream interpreted.
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: to find something in that darkness of the unconscious. And
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: Peter Kingsley, again, they'll be in the show notes, I'm
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: rereading his book, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, in
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: which he talks about this process of the Asclepians as
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: a way of dying before you die.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: Of that we need to find, as the ancients did,
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: a way to sink into what Jung would call the
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: collective unconscious, to let go of of ego and to
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: surrender and to suffer. And that, I think, is the
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: huge challenge of mortificatio. Can we let go? Can we
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: let ourselves drop? Jung writes about this in Memories, Dreamers, Reflections,
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: that he wrestled and wrestled and wrestled with these terrible
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: intrusive thoughts And then one day he says, I let
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: myself drop. Do we trust the unconscious? And when these
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: hard times come upon us, either from the outside or
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: as a result of our own internal imbalance, can we
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: suffer it? Can we go through it?
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: And some suffering happens. is foisted upon us, like we said,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: an unwanted divorce, getting fired, getting a serious medical diagnosis.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's something that we choose. We decide we're going
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: to do a big change, and then maybe we're surprised
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: by how painful the change is, but we're the ones
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: who kind of took it on as a heroic determination.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: But what you're saying, Deb, is that the ability to
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: tolerate the mortificatio takes a certain kind of muscle, a
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: kind of spiritual muscularity, which Jung sometimes called a crucifixion.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: Inasmuch as we're caught between two things, we don't know
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: what the new thing is yet, and so we bear it,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: and we sit in the not knowing, the agonizing not knowing.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: I have to say, my I don't know that I
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: could ever claim that I went through any of them
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: with a kind of muscularity versus simply having to be
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: in it because it just engulfed me. And again, I
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: think I don't want to ever minimize just how hard
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: it is And it's not as if something else appears like,
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: you know, the happy ending in a fairy tale. And yet,
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: as you said before, Joseph, it is part of a process.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: It is part of a circulatio, a process that goes
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: around and in and above and on and through and
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: weaves its way with us.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: And that it is natural. That this is natural. central
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: to the way human beings are shaped, so to speak,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: which is why when Jung discovered the various alchemical writings,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: his first experience was recognition. He goes, these are familiar
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: to me. These themes, these symbols, they've been showing up
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: in the dreams of Annalise Sands. And as he began
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: to psychologize the symbolism, he began to really appreciate how
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: this was an accurate map of how we change as
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: human beings. Having the map presents a level of meaning.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: Symbols offer us ways of containing affect and also organizing
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: our suffering in a certain way and helps us lay
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: claim to the arc of change. And I think all
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: of that It helps us surrender a little bit more gracefully, maybe.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: It helps us keep a sharp eye out for what's emerging,
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: to be able to look for what's hatching and what's
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: gaining steam inside of us, and perhaps gives us the
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: confidence to rest into the dying and putrefying process. So
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: there's a dying, which is that something is broken down
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Often it's the dominant ego position that we need to outgrow.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: And then there's a rotting process, which is called the putrefactio,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: which is that breaking down of the old thing. And
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: like most other putrefactions, it releases the toxins in a thing.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: So often there might be the swift killing. My God,
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: I just got fired. And then... as that all, as
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: that churns inside of us and it breaks down, there
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: is kind of a temporary sickness that we feel, and
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: this goes to the serpent as well, that the bite
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: of the serpent is both poison and medicine at the
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: same time. And the truth, let's say, of getting fired because,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: you know, we didn't fulfill expectations is a painful, venomous
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: fact that we don't want to look at, it eats
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: away at various inappropriate attitudes that we've been harboring, and
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: it makes room for something new and better, ideally, to emerge.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: So the putrefaction to me is that brooding. We go
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: over it over and over again, and we make ourselves
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: a little sick as we think about this and brood
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: on that and shake our fists against the gods and
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: fight it and then don't fight it and then hate
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: everybody and then beg everybody for help. And all of
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: that agonizing, roiling process to me is part of that
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: breaking down process.
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I really kind of like that, Joseph, as sort
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: of odious as the process of putrefaction can be. that
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: there is that breaking down of the old attitude and
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: that the going over it and going over it and
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: going over it is part of that, that in that
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: process we're grinding things down to a more, a level
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: where they can be metabolized. That we're working through something.
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: And it can be something where it feels like we're
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: just stuck on it. Of like, oh, you know, are
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: you going to talk about this again? How unfair and
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: awful it was to be fired. All these various life
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: events that are difficult, and yet we're called to endure
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: that process of putrefaction, the breaking down of the old attitude.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: You had talked about the raven or the crow, the
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: black bird. And we associate, since ancient times, the crow
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: and the raven with death inasmuch as they are carrion-eating birds. Right.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: So yes, particularly in Europe, after the battle is fought,
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: It's the crows and the ravens that are eating the flesh. Now,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: that represents, intrapsychically, that instinctive response that something inside of us,
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: on a very primal instinctive level, knows how to eat
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: up the energy of the old thing, to pick up
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: the old attitude apart and digest it because part of
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: the putrefaction is also metabolizing. So the crow eats the
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: dead thing but also integrates it and turns it into
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: flight and laying eggs and raising babies and an ongoing
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: life that rises out of the dead thing. Yep.
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: And that goes back to that Greek myth of the
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: birth of Asclepios and these healing chambers in which something
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: dies so that something can be healed. This odd, unbelievable
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: juxtaposition of death and new life.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: Now, I'd like to go back to something that you
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: had said in the introduction, Deb, which is that there's
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: a way of being curious about instincts and the mortificatio,
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: and that, as we see, sometimes our natural instincts can
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: become trapped in a complex, and then the energy of
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: the instinct becomes co-opted by something that can be, well,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: useless sometimes, but sometimes life-threatening. As you were saying in addiction,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: that the instinct which in and of itself is clean
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: or pure or natural has been co-opted by something that
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: is dangerous like an addiction but it could look like
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: any number of other things and so the instinct then
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: has to be put into the alchemical vase it needs
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: to be corked and kept tight and then as the
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: instinct is frustrated we're not letting the genie out of
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: the bottle quite yet In some alchemical drawings, it becomes
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: a dragon and then it becomes an angel and then
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: it's red and it's green and it's roaring and then
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: it's quiet. And all of those things speak to how
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: intense it is to say no to ourselves, but then
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: also to watch with curiosity what happens in our fantasy
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: life when we restrain the improperly canalized instinct so let's
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: say that some analysts believe that addiction in and of
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: itself is an impulse towards transcendence because if we drink
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: enough there's a way in which the ego is taken
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: offline the boundaries of the ego are reduced, the unconscious
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: has a lot more free reign, and we find ourselves
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: dancing at the office party with a lampshade on our head,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: or things that are far less charming than that, by
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the way. And there's a sense of that being important,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: maybe even miraculous, that it's so wonderful to feel liberated
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: from all restraint. But doing that only with alcohol is
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: is a ritual that can eventually kill our bodies, destroy
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: our livers, create all kinds of problems. So right impulse,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: wrong ritual. And so the instinct to want to be more,
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: the instinct to want to be free, to be more
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: than I was, to be beyond the neurotic limits that
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: I experience suffocating me day to day, good impulse we
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: would need to contain the destructive expression of it long
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: enough to discover that the true impulse is to transcend
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: to be more than we were and that would need
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: to be experienced in a very real way so that
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: it's not academic and in that moment the instinct can
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: lead us to reimagine how it could be in service
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: to our growth. And in order for it to be re-imaged,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: that we would have to suffer the agony of burning
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: away the inappropriate or negative way in which it's been captured.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: And Jung talks about this when he is writing about
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: the flighted and the unflighted raven, which shows up in
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: one of the Rosarium woodcuts. And what he's suggesting is
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: that the raven that's poking its head out of the
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: ground represents the instinct when it's churning and trapped in
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: the container and it's not allowed to express itself. The
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: flighted bird that meets the unflighted bird beak to beak
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: represents the spiritualized clarity of what the instinct actually wants
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: for itself not the not the distorted thing that the
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: culture or our trauma from our childhood have limited it
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: and when the instinct and the spiritualized possibility of its
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: expression meet then all kinds of new options emerge.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: You know, I'm going back to your talking about the
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: alchemical retort, the glass container that in every high school
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: chemistry class somebody was designed to break one. Yes. Or
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: the cork would pop off because nobody followed. One kid
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: didn't follow the instructions. But The alchemical process of fermentation
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: and what can be distilled out of that, what emerges,
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: it's such a vivid image of things roiling around in
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: this container and keeping the cork in for transformation to occur.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: The alchemist talked all the time about torturing. the substances
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: with which they worked. So that this is a process
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: that is agonizing, that if it can be endured, can
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: lead to the very transcendence that may have been inappropriately
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: or wrongly sought. And I want to make a rather
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: artless segue into into the archetypal dimensions of some of this,
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: of how these opposites and how this kind of process
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: is depicted with the various dying gods of Osiris, who
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: was dismembered, Dionysus, that I know you can elaborate on, Joseph,
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: and Christ. They are... not the only ones, but illustrating
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: this process of mortificatio and that archetypally something new is born.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: And often it is the incorruptible thing that is born.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: So if we take the mythopoetic story of Jesus, and
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: I'm framing it in that way so that we don't
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: need to wonder about the historic relevance, but really taking
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: it at an archetypal level. We have this rabbi, this
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: teacher who has a divine purpose, so we think, and
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: that somehow Jesus has absorbed the full prima materia of
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: the world. All the darkness of the world has been
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: taken in by this extraordinary person and that they are
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: going to suffer the mortificatio that we can't suffer or
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: don't know how to suffer and by observing this god-like
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: man suffer that which we can't and die with it
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: that we are somehow transformed and in that transformation Christ
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: takes all of that darkness, resolves it into its spiritual components,
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: and then comes back and offers us grace. But the
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: grace is the substance of the sin that has been
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: brought into the light of unmaking, which we call forgiveness,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: and reissued in the form of grace. which shows up
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: in artwork as the Pentecost when all of the apostles
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: suddenly have these little flames suspended above their head. And
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: that is the return of the grace out of which
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: the sin has been transformed in the alchemical process.
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: You know, though, to go back to the mortificatio part
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: of that, it's so... one of the difficulties with this
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: whole topic is that we do tend not to stick
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: with the mortificatio because we are waiting for the new thing,
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: the transformation, new life, new understanding, whatever it might be.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: And yet it's a grim process. Think about being nailed
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: to a cross and Jesus says, You know, to God,
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: why hast thou forsaken me? Right. There are no guarantees here.
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: We have to simply surrender because our egos cannot do it,
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: bear it, fight it, change it. We are forced to
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: our knees. Metaphorically. speaking. And we have the stories, the
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: Christian myth, Osiris, Dionysus. So I'm thinking about, you know,
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: really going back to the very beginning where we started
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: that we surrender our egos. It's not that we don't
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: go through our day and mow the lawn and get
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: the oil change in the car and all the things
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: that we have to do. But the knowing in mortificatio is,
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: ego really is not running the show. That's just the
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: truth of it.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: And I think that integrating the idea that the ego
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: is not running the show, even when it thinks that
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: it is, is preparing us for the mortificatio, although in
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: and of itself it is not the mortificatio. That by
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: taking in wisdom, whether we're reading Jung or reading something else,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: that is a preparation so that when the self asserts,
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: and begins to pull energy away, because we can't do
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: that ourselves, that we have an understanding of the process,
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: and that understanding grants us a kind of muscularity to
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: tolerate a process. And this is something that Viktor Frankl
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: helped us understand, that we are capable of withstanding tremendous
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: amounts of suffering, mind-boggling amounts of suffering, if we understand
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: what it means, or if we can discover meaning inside
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: of it. So one of the things that Jung does
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: that's so wonderful, and alchemy offers that as well, is
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: that it is meaningful and not meaningless. And so when
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the dying happens, we have some preparation for it.
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: Well, just to say for people who might not be familiar,
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: World War II and survived to tell the tale in
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: a book called Man's Search for Meaning. So you can
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: take a look at that if you're so inclined. It'll
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: be in the show notes. I'm wrestling, honestly, Joseph, with
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: the juxtaposition of the experience of simply suffering and falling
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: into a mortificatio and a grado, a place of helplessness
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: and darkness, with your idea about muscularity and thinking about
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: it and finding the meaning and how those two things
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: work together or don't. I don't know that I can
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: claim for myself that in some of the dark places
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: that I felt very muscular, I didn't.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: And I understand that, as do we all, that we're
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: not gifted with preparation necessarily. But I think that one
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: of the reasons that we studied this kind of work
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: is that it offers something that we may not have
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: had access to when we were much younger, where we
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: were just treading water and hoping we don't drown, psychologically speaking.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: Because we didn't have a philosophy when we were 20,
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: let's say, and vicissitudes ripped the carpet out from under us.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: But there still is a process inside because the archetypes pre-exist.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: The whole alchemical sequence is stored in the collective unconscious
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: and activates of its own accord or for some mysterious
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: way that we don't understand and then carries us in
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: some regard. The difference between being carried by the archetype
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: or co-participating has to do with the acquisition of wisdom.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: It's still not a process that we have our hands
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: on totally. But over time, we may acquire a kind
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: of wisdom that helps us bear. And I think this
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: could be seen in the Gethsemane moment, where Christ goes
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: out into the wilderness and prays to God and says,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: let this cup pass me by. This is too horrible, basically.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: This is beyond me. And then there's a moment where
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: where he realizes he could step out of this, he
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: could refuse this, but he submits to the self and says,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: not my will, but thine be done. And then the
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: whole mortificatio process, putrefactio, and resurrection then occurs, but there
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: is a moment where there is a choice to submit
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: yourself to a process, which in the theological writing is
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: a process that he is aware of, although has not
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: experienced yet.
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So you're talking about the sojourn in the desert
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: and then the experience with the disciples, but the common
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: thread is the submission. And you touched on something that
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: I think can be, you know, a place where we
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: come to a good stopping place, which is the acquisition
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: of wisdom, which from what I have read is really
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: about letting go of the identification with ego, not its
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: use for our lives as sort of our life administrators.
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: but letting go of the identification with ego that can
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: be foisted upon us by external life events. And it
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: can come from within something pressures us and grows and demands.
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: But we're forfeiting ego as the primary source of our identification.
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: We are part of something bigger. We are part of
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: something that is beyond our understanding. Our egos are not
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: the sole arbiters, directors, and have the sole power over
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: how our lives will unfold. And there's a kind of
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: humility in that of, well, here I am still, and
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: that we will see where the rest of the alchemical
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: symbols and sequence unfold in our lives. I like that
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: idea of wisdom rather than something that is only intellectual.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: Or the bad advice that we might receive on how
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: to escape the change process, which Jung called the regressive
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: restoration of the persona. that in the change in the
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: death process, just like the Gethsemane moment, you may sense
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: that there's a way to flee, to flee the death
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: process and go back to the old way. Let that
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: cut pass you by. And again, having some wisdom might
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: give you the confidence to not flee. the process, and
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: that is a precious gift that Jung has given us.
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: So this may be a good time to turn to
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: the wisdom of our dream maker and see what we
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: can look into and try to understand.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: And before we jump into that, I'd like to remind
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: everybody that we have program that we've designed with you
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: in mind to put you into relationship with your dreams,
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: to be able to embrace and take in the transformative
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: medicine of your dreams. It's called Dream School. If you
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: go to our website, thisjungianlife.com, on the top banner, click
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: Dream School, and you'll receive a bunch of information about
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: how the program works. The feedback we've gotten over the
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: several years that we've been running Dream School is universally
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: positive and useful. There's a community of really wise and
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: dedicated fellow aspirants, as well as the three of us
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: who do live events so that you can have access
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: to us as well. And we would like to meet
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: you there.
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: So our dream today is a 33-year-old female.
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: She works as a yoga teacher and.
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: Grocery store clerk.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: And here is her dream. I'm in a ruined city
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: and I know that it's the apocalypse. Me, my father,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: and my two brothers are taking shelter in an abandoned
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: store and there are other people with us, maybe another family.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: It is chaos and everyone is deciding how they want
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: to die. At some point, my father gets up and
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: leaves us and we know that he has gone out
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: to shoot himself and this is how he's chosen to go.
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: I walk out of the store and down the road
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: to the hospital where my mother is dying of cancer.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: When I walk into the hospital, I meet a doctor
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: who is taking care of the patients. I ask her
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: if there is a way to go that doesn't involve
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: pain and she says yes. That this is what they're
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: giving to the patients. She gestures towards the bed and
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: I see my mother lying as if asleep. She is
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: hooked up to an IV. And then I look back
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: at the doctor and she shows me her own arm.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: She is also hooked up to an IV and has
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: also chosen this drug as a method of death. I
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: go over to my mother and for a moment I
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: see that she looks uncomfortable or in pain. But then
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: it passes and she looks completely peaceful. I sit on
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: the bed and hold her, but I know that she
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: has died. It is a very beautiful moment. My mother's
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: skin is pale and glowing, and she looks peaceful and content.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: There is light all about us. At this moment, I
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: know this is how I want to die, to take
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: this drug and to lie on the bed holding my mother,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: the two of us together. However, somehow I know that
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: now is not the right time. So I get up
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: and walk back out of the hospital. It seems like
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: time passes, and now I'm standing outside a city apartment
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: block at nighttime. The lights of the apartment block are
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: all glowing. I look different, with shorter hair. And I'm
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: talking to my mother. My mother isn't there, I know
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: she's dead. Yet I am talking to her and telling
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: her that there are still people who are alive and
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: that not everything has died. I tell her that I
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: know how I want to die and I still want
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: to be with her. but maybe I don't have to
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: leave right now. Maybe I should stay a little bit
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: longer here and try to do some of the things
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: I had wanted to do in my life before the
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: apocalypse happened. It's like I need to explain it to her.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: I think of my brothers and realize I don't know
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: what happened to them, though I imagine they both chose
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: violent ways to die. The dream ends with me standing there,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: looking at the sky. For context, she writes, my mother
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: was diagnosed with leukemia five years ago and has recently
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: been told that it's progressed and there is now little
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: that the doctors can do for her. At the time
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: of the dream, both of my brothers had come back
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: home as she was undergoing some very aggressive treatment and
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: we were told there was a risk she would not survive.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: So me, my father, and brothers were lying back at
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: the family home and going in to visit my mother
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: who was still with us, though weak and recovering in hospital.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: She says the main feelings in her dream were a
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: sense of purpose, I knew I wanted a different mode
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: of death from the other people in the city and
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: was glad when I found the doctor, sadness but also
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: relief and peace when my mother died, and then a
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: sense of curiosity and hope at the end, when I
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: realized not everyone had died, and maybe there was still
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: something I could do with my life. She gives us
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: a bit more and writes, At the end of the dream,
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: I was also reading the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: The book has a powerful effect on me, and I
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: felt it was a source of help and strength at
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: a dark time. So quite a mortificatio dream. So the
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: first thing I'd like to offer the dreamer and the
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: listeners is the word apocalypse is often misunderstood. It means revelation.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: So if we take it at its true meaning, that
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: the psyche has offered a revelation, an insight, something that
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: was hidden is now known. And the power of the
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: thing that is now revealed has deconstructed great swaths of
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: her psychology, that things that she used to believe, things
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: that she used to pursue, have been disrupted by the
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: revelation of something. And in the midst of this powerful revelation,
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: There are decisions to be made.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: What I'm thinking about here a lot is that the
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: dream actually has to do with the family complex. You know,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: of what is dying, what is being threatened, and the
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: ending that we commonly associate with the word apocalypse is,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: and then its underlying meaning of what is being revealed,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: as you have helpfully informed us. This is Grim Times,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: and it's echoed by her having been so powerfully affected
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: by the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road, which is a
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: dystopian journey of a father and son trudging, they hope,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: towards freedom after some sort of awful world event. I
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: remember having read it some years ago, and it certainly
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: is a powerful book. But here is the dream ego
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: is surrounded by death. Mother is dying. The father does die.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: Mother dies. Brothers are... She doesn't know where they are.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: And I'm thinking about whether there is a differentiation here
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: from some.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: Way of identifying, belonging, conceiving herself as part of this
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: nuclear family. And the dream ego, after all the things
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: that go on, decides that she's not going to die.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: She says, now is not the right time to die.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: Time passes. There is a way that she can still
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: communicate with her mother or her mother complex. Not everything
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: has died. Maybe I should stay a little longer here
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: on Earth and do some of the things I wanted
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: to do. So I wonder if this is an individuation
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 3: theme that is running through the family complex and differentiating
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: itself from it.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: That makes good sense and grounds it in something that's very...
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: accessible that the death of a parent is a massive
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: massive event even if we've been estranged from a parent
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: to at one point discover that you are no longer
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the child of anyone that everything about your life rolls
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: into your own hands with a new authority when the
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: parents have passed away I want to bring up an
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: uncanny bit in the dream because I'm very interested when
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: words repeat. And I'm trying to unpack this in my mind.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: I know she has died. It's a very beautiful moment.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: My mother's skin is pale and glowing. The lights of
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: the apartment block are all glowing. So there's something interesting
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: in the remnant of the mother, that the mother's life
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: force is still luminous, although the vessel of the mother
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: is inert. And then we have the image of the
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: apartment building, and apartment buildings in and of themselves are
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: inert shells, but there is a glowing light inside of
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: the inanimate thing, which is still visible and glimpsing what
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: is secretly luminous inside of the vessel gives her a
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: new attitude and makes her question, what is death? Is
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: death exclusively changes to the container, changes to the vessel?
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: And if the vessel of life changes, does that mean
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: there's no life? Or is there still a luminous reality
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: that exists separate from the vessel, even when the vessel exists?
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: has become inert. And to me, that's a very profound
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: religious experience, even though it may sound rather ordinary in
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: the telling of it. But the comparison between the mother
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: and the apartment building seemed relevant to me.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And she says, I look different with shorter hair,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: talking to my mother, even though my mother isn't there.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: Not everything has died.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: And that the outer seeming of things can change, change radically.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't mean the life force itself is gone,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: or that we no longer have any access to life.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: So the apocalyptic revelation in the beginning of the dream
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: may very well point to the news from the mother's doctor,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: which is that The prognosis is we cannot do anything
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: else to prolong the life of your mom. That is
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: a revelation that can create this massive change in our
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: psychological life. And then there's a concern that the spirit
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: of death is going to move through the entire family
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: complex or through the entire psychological life. And she is
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: seduced initially to want to follow her mother into death.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: So just to sit with that, that's probably not something
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: that the dreamer was necessarily consciously pondering. But the dream
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: maker is looking at her from the inside out and saying,
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: there is a secret attitude about following your mother into death.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: that needs to be looked at consciously. It needs to
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: be held consciously so it doesn't creep up on you
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: and trick you into doing something that is very self-destructive,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: which could hurt her. So by seeing it dramatized in
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: the dream, then she can ponder it consciously and perhaps
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: break its spell because she does come to the realization
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: that I don't need to follow my mother into death.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: And maybe the true spirit of her is still alive,
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: and she has that experience that she can talk to
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: the mother imago in her psyche, which is still a
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: vibrant set of memories, ideas, and images that are alive
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: and well in her soul, so that the fear that
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: all would be darkness, that there would be nothing left,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: if she couldn't relate to the Outer Mother, is disproved
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: in the dream.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: This is a really, it's a big dream around a
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: time in this dreamer's life that is, of course, very,
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: very sad and painful. It's apocalyptic in the sense that
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: something so big is happening, the death of one's mother.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: That's really huge, as you've acknowledged too, Joseph. And there
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: are the dream images of the glowing. I can talk
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: to her. I am different.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: The other thing which pervades the dream is the power
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: of choice. The dream is full of choices. Now, The
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: mother is subject to this terrible and devastating illness. She
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: is not given choice, although there may be some choice
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: as to how much comfort care is provided, and in
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: that way there is choice. But she can choose life
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: or not. The father can choose life or not. The doctor,
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: the brothers. There is eros and thanatos, life and relationship, love, eros,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: or death, the abdication of those things, and then the
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: retreat into whatever else is there. And the whole dream
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: is sitting with this capacity of choice, of dramatic, intense,
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: extraordinary kind of choice. And in that last bit, she
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: makes a choice. And she chooses eros. She chooses life.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: And she chooses to go on. And that is a
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: choice for all of us. Yes, there is a mortificatio
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: of the personality, but we can still choose life to
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: be alive and to believe that there is still a
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: luminous reality that is underneath the outer seeming of things.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: And to me, that is a kind of spiritual initiation,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: which I believe the dream is offering her.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisunionlife.com. If
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: you enjoyed this episode, give us five stars and a
• 1:15:05
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• 1:15:08
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• 1:15:12
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