CIIS Public Programs Podcast

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TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

This special episode features CIIS Professor Emeritus and cultural historian Richard Tarnas sharing illuminating insights into the nature of human consciousness and the cosmos. In this talk, Richard explores one of C. G. Jung’s most crucial contributions to psychology–the recognition that the unfolding of a human life is at a deep level a spiritual journey. He also explores the powerful archetypal principles and forces that deeply influence human experience and behavior. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on February 6th, 2025. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Richard Tarnas: Greetings. And thanks also to Public Programs at CIIS for their kind invitation once again to speak with you, with all of you, our special community of kindred spirits. This evening, I'm going to do something a little different than I've done in the last several years. I'd like to explore with you some aspects of the deep mystery of the human journey. I suppose that's always in the background of everything that I aspire to present on, but I want to address it a little bit more directly today. As some of you know, around this time of year, for several years now, going back to the the heart of the early depths of the pandemic 2020, I presented a kind of archetypal weather report on the state of the world, drawing on archetypal astrology to discuss the deeper trends that were at work in the collective psyche of the time. But this year, I'd like to take a look at what's basically the larger background framework of understanding that informs all those analyses that I've shared here. Now, we could do this in a number of ways. This larger framework is informed by a lot of disciplines. Basically, the fields and disciplines that make up the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program, which we call PCC for short, obviously easier to say. So we could approach discussing this framework using the terms of philosophy, which is the lens of philosophy, for example, which is from Plato to Nietzsche, Whitehead, Catherine Keller, Charles Taylor, and beyond, as many of us in PCC do in our courses. But we could also draw on evolutionary cosmology, as Brian Swimme has done so fruitfully over the decades here. But tonight, I'd like to pursue our exploration with the lens of depth psychology, which is another discipline central to PCC. And in particular, I'd like to draw on the insights of C.G. Jung as my point of departure. The human journey is a deep, many-layered mystery, as is the human psyche that undergoes that journey. Psyche, of course, is a Greek word, psuche in Greek. It means soul or inner being, among other things. Also means breath. But because of this deep connection to the meaning of soul, it has been argued in the depth psychology world, most eloquently by James Hillman, that any true psychology must be a depth psychology, dealing with the depths of soul, with the depth element that underlies consciousness. We could call it the unconscious, but even then, that's just a negative word, what it's not. And also, what's unconscious for one person isn't unconscious for another. What's unconscious for some societies or eras of life, cultures and so forth, may be much more accessible to consciousness in other eras, other cultures, other individuals. But in our time, where depth psychology is particularly a focused access to these depths, it's important to remember what, as James Hillman memorably put it, where there is a connection to soul, there is psychology. Where not, what is taking place is better called statistics, or physical anthropology, or cultural journalism, or animal breeding, thinking of BS Skinner and behaviorism. We could also add now, we could add genetics or neuroscience. Of course, Jung is one of a number of early protagonists of the depth psychology revelation of the late 19th, early 20th century, what Edward Edinger called a new dispensation. The major figures at the birth and emergence of depth psychology certainly include Nietzsche, William James, Freud and Jung. But actually, depth psychology was a strenuous effort, a joint effort by many women and men without whom it would not have been born. I'm thinking here of people like Lou Solomé, who was the remarkable deep-souled wise woman who was Nietzsche's muse in her youth, then became Rilke's lover and muse in her adult years, I'm thinking in her 40s, and then finally Freud's muse and friend when she was older, and he was much older as well. A very important part of his life. She always carried kind of like the soul element into their discussions. I'm thinking of Anna O, as she's known in the psychological literature, psychoanalytic literature, whose real name was Bertha Papenheim, the Viennese feminist who basically taught Freud's teacher, Breuer, she was a patient of his, and she taught Breuer, her therapist, much about how to dive into the deep psyche, how to bring to consciousness what had been suppressed by trauma. She called it chimney sweeping. It had a big effect on Freud. And of course, there's also Tony Wolf, Sabino Spielrein, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Freud's daughter, brilliant minds, Marie-Louise von Franz. Now, I'm beginning, I want to bring our attention at the start here to this phenomenon because it really helps us recognize that depth psychology was made possible by both women and men and by both patients and psychotherapists. In particular, all the distressed souls, often women, but also suffering men who were coming to psychiatrists' offices in Vienna and in Zurich, in Berlin, canaries in the coal mine of modernity, and carrying somehow together in this field of of soul searching and striving for healing, they brought forth in this something new a century ago that is still evolving and that we're still influenced by. It's been a remarkably seminal project, the depth psychology impulse. Freud and Jung were themselves suffering souls. They were forced by their own journey to go inward and confront their own unconscious, much as did Nietzsche and William James, or for that matter, Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf or Kafka. So tonight, using the accumulated insights of depth psychology up to our time, I want to take a look at the profound character of the human journey through that lens. And I'd like to explore the idea that the soul, and this is crucial, I'd like to explore the idea that the soul is being forged by that journey. It was 200 years ago that the great romantic poet John Keats wrote to his brother that he believed that life was the way of soul making. And then it was James Hillman back in the 70s who brought that term from Keats into the vocabulary of depth psychology. At the very beginning of revisioning psychology, which is his masterwork, he, and that was based, by the way, on his Terry lectures at Yale University in 1972, which was the same series, the Terry lectures, where Jung had given a series of lectures in the late 1930s. So it was at these lectures and then in revisioning psychology that Hillman began his call for a transformation of psychology by quoting Keats on soul making. That was his starting point. What's strange though, and what's almost never brought up, is that if you actually read Keats's letter to his brother, we can see that Hillman gave a very different meaning to soul making than Keats had originally. Hillman was a genius. He's driven by his own creative daimone, as he himself recognized in his later years how destiny is such a big part of our lives. Turning fate into destiny is a very important kind of, in a sense, part of soul forging. But when Hillman was putting his great emphasis on soul, he was doing it in a very particular way that was both more kind of postmodern in spirit and also more archaic in this sense. He wanted psychologists to cultivate the polytheistic imagination, to overcome the emphasis on what he called the modern monotheistic heroic ego, with its narrow focus on rational consciousness and the individual conquering will. Now, so his, he wanted to overcome that focus on just the mind consciousness as rational consciousness and the individual will. And he had much more, he wanted to break up in a sense that monolithic entity of the self and go into the many archetypal parts of ourselves, the polytheistic pleroma that is within us all. And recognizing that in a certain sense, a rebirth could take place through this breaking up of the monolithic and opening up to the multiplicity within us, which is where the deeper sources of life energy could and the imaginative powers of the human being could emerge. Now, I agree totally with Hillman that the imagination is a crucial aspect of soul making, but Keats actually had more than that in mind. He specifically was speaking of soul making as the journey of forging a personal identity, forging one's individual selfhood. This is a self, as Keats saw it, that is painstakingly created through a lifetime of experience where often the heart must suffer. He said, quote, we are souls till we acquire, we are not souls till we acquire identities, till each of us is purely the self, purely ourself. We can see this idea of Keats much closer to Jung's idea of the Self archetype, capital S, that deeper, higher, larger Self that our narrower self is striving to reunite with, be informed by, be grounded in. And this is closer therefore to Jung's idea of individuation, which is the long gradual flowering of one's essential personal identity, a creative identity that's capable of expressing our wholeness and our depths, not just a shallow social persona that as one might project onto social media, not just a payoff calculator, a payoff calculating ego, which is seldom the part of ourselves that we see as the most important when we approach the end of life. A self, an identity, it gives us an interior center that allows us to orient and define our lives through our moral and spiritual vision. It provides us with a frame of reference and a foundation through which we have some sense of who we are, how we should navigate our lives, where we will take a stand. Here I stand, I can do no other, as Martin Luther said in that great moment of the emergence of the autonomous self as it was taking form in the 16th century through him and many others, St. Teresa, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's many characters, he's like, he's bodying forth the complex modern self through his amazing powers of dramatic articulation. Okay, so let's now go to Jung in particular. It was C.G. Jung who fully brought the idea of life as a spiritually meaningful journey into the field of depth psychology, which was otherwise then being more shaped by Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's form of psychology was a great breakthrough opening up the unconscious to the modern mind, reconnecting with what had become repressed. But psychoanalysis was also a, particularly then, it was also a one-sided child of the rationalist enlightenment, scientifically aspiring and strenuously based within a disenchanted mechanistic modern worldview. Now it's true, Freud was also inspired by romanticism, the other half of the modern sensibility next to the enlightenment. I think of the enlightenment as like the solar and romanticism as the lunar sides of the larger whole of the modern sensibility that emerges in particularly the 18th, 19th centuries. And romanticism with its focus on dreams and visions, religion, myth, the emotions, the imagination, the extremes of human consciousness, and the unconscious. All that was inspiring for Freud to take the path that he did. And that unconscious he saw as like an iceberg below the surface. But Freud's tendency was always, as you know, to subject these phenomena to a reductionist form of modern reason, to bring these mysteries into alignment with the physical sciences of the 19th century. He was basically continuing the rationalist enlightenment project by focusing the brilliant light of modern procedural reason and turning it inward on the inner world. Now Jung took all that in, but he also took a stand beyond those limits. So Jung basically was restless with the reductionism of Freud's kind of intellectual predispositions. And of course, they had their own father-son dynamic going on as well. But Jung was able to bring about a fuller synthesis of the enlightenment and romanticism, the solar and the lunar. And of course, we all know here that the understanding of life as a spiritual journey, it's been a widely shared conviction for much of humanity over the centuries. It didn't start with depth psychology, but it took courage to assert this within the scientific and medical world of the early 20th century. And doing so allowed it to connect with the powerful scientific mind and project. And it's that tension of opposites and the creativity that can come from holding that tension fully that I think has played such a big role in depth psychology, Jungian psychology, archetypal psychology, transpersonal psychology, all these to be so influential, seminal, fertile, as they have been. So Jungian depth psychology helped bring about a shift of sensibility in the 20th century, in which the inward journey brought to light a tremendous upsurge from the depths of what had been suppressed by the mainstream enlightenment orientation. In a sense, the romantic depths pushed in, and this is largely what was causing a lot of the greater awareness of an unconscious in the later 19th century. Why that term and why things like hypnosis and the work of Charcot or William James or the patients coming in with their particular sets of symptoms became so big a deal in the late 19th century is that too much of soul was being left out by the modern mind, the modern enlightenment mentality that was very confident in many ways. And also the world that it was creating was starting to be problematic in its radical disenchantment and mechanistic character, which was starting to get actualized in the very environment that people lived in. So at this point, we're like moving beyond just executive ego functioning. We're moving beyond instrumental reason. We're moving beyond the mechanistic paradigm. And Jung is playing an important role in this. I remember the late beloved Alan Jones, some of you will remember him, the eloquent former Dean of Grace Cathedral here in San Francisco. Back in 1987 in a conference here I attended in San Francisco called Jung's Challenge to Religion. He said he began his talk by saying, we live in a post Jungian world. Now by this he meant our world is now not just post Freudian, it's post Jungian because so many fundamental Jungian ideas have entered into the sensibility of the postmodern age. Think of the importance of the collective psyche, of archetypes, of synchronicity, the importance of integrating the feminine and the masculine within all of us, of integrating and balancing thinking and feeling, intuiting and sensing, recognizing the deep unconscious as a source of wisdom, not just a bin of repressed instincts. All these ideas and values are now in common cultural circulation and that's due to Jung. So let me cite here quickly a few of the most, what I see as most essential insights that Jung brought into our cultural discourse that I want to single out as relevant for tonight. First, many of us will be familiar with how Jung in the period roughly between 1913 and 1918, just before and during the great historical trauma of World War I, Jung went through a major descent into his own depths, depths that reached far into the catastrophic turmoil of the collective European soul that had not yet erupted but he was already feeling and seeing the eruptions in the most vivid terms. And it was a really, it was an extremely challenging period experience for him. At times he didn't know if he could retain his sanity. He recorded these experiences, dreams and visions in the Red Book, as it's called, that was finally opened to the public and published in 2009. Now out of that great descent, a kind of descent into the underworld, Jung brought several crucial insights to the world. I like to think of these as they were like hard-won gifts that came to him through his descent into the underworld, rather like those boons that the the mythic hero or heroine receives in the underworld to bring back to the larger community that he or she had left during their perilous journey. So first I'm just going to state these, a few of these basic insights or gifts, boons, and then we'll unpack them. So first of all, the basic idea that the course of an individual human life is a spiritually meaningful journey of transformation. Again, that may be obvious to most of us listening here now, but it was not so regarded by most psychologists of his time, or indeed many still today, who have rather different sense of what therapy is about and what a well-adjusted human being is all about. Jung brought soul and spirit into modern psychology and he viewed these dimensions of life with the utmost seriousness. But more than that, second, he recognized that there are powerful forces or principles which he called archetypal, drawing on the the platonic term. Archetypal forces are principles that influence this spiritual journey of transformation. These can be seen as our version of the gods and goddesses that were experienced by the ancients, as when, you know, for example, a Homeric warrior is suddenly filled with great courage and strength on the battlefield because a god or a goddess has suddenly entered into them, inspired them, given them greater than the strength that they would have otherwise had. Or an athlete during a great race at the Olympic Games, or when a person falls in love through Aphrodite's intervention, like Sappho was owed to Aphrodite to get Aphrodite's help in such a love relationship. Or poets inspired by a muse to create great poetry. All these are a lot of modern people reading about those things, reading Homer or Sappho or accounts of the poets describing an Olympic athlete and so forth, like Pindar, they think that this is just being kind of metaphorical, kind of a flowery symbol or something like that. All the evidence points to the fact that the ancients felt and experienced and saw gods and goddesses as vividly as you're seeing me now, or as I am looking at this desk or this computer, and even more vividly than that. These were phenomenologically self-validating. They were very powerful and real in their experience. But today, with all the enormous psychological, spiritual consciousness transformation that has happened over the last several thousand years, which is a whole other story, we teach whole courses trying to unpack that extraordinary journey that we've all taken. Today, we may think of these archetypes as being more like the fundamental structures and forces of the human psyche. We think of them as archetypal complexes. Remember the word complexes is Jung's original word, which Freud and the psychoanalysts picked up and then used with the Oedipus complex or the Electra complex. But it was originally Jung's coming out of his association experiments at the beginning of the 20th century. So through the phenomenon of highly meaningful synchronicities also, which Jung became more and more compelled by, where he would see these synchronicities as patterning both the inner world and the outer world simultaneously with a shared archetypal patterning that or meaning that unites what doesn't have an obvious linear causal relationship. Yet it's coincidental. It has such powerful meaning because of the force of the coincidence between what's happening inside and what's happening outside that one gets a sense that something more is going on here than, well, as Dylan said in his very kind of postmodern way in It's All Over Now, Baby Blue from his great album, bringing it all back home, he said, the highway’s made for gamblers, better use your sense. Take what you have learned from coincidence. My friend Jeffrey Kreipel, many of you know his extraordinary work that he's publishing so much of these days, the great religious scholar, he said to me one day at Esalen, you know, I don't believe in anything really anymore, except I do believe in synchronicities. It's a very kind of postmodern statement of paying attention and recognizing their clues. It's like the breadcrumbs or the stones left for Hansel and Gretel to make their way home. So because of Jung's interest in synchronicities, he began to realize through that and many other observations that these archetypes can be seen as not just intra-psychic, but that they also have a larger cosmic ontological ground. This is where his astrological researches became so central to his life and to his clinical practice as well as the decades passed. And in that sense, the word archetype that Jung took from the Platonic tradition, applied it to the inner psychological world of the human being in its steps. But at this point, once you start bringing in this larger cosmic ontological ground of archetypes, we're really getting back to its original idea that they are the Platonic forms or the transcendent ideas, the fundamental cosmic structures of reality itself that one glimpses if you're graced with being able to see beyond the ordinary limited perception where you can see outside the cave of shadows. And now a third crucial insight from Jung. Our individual psyche is deeply embedded in a collective psyche. It's continuous with a collective psyche, which carries all the layered history and the archetypal domain and all the inherited drives that live within the depths of every individual psyche. And that's why Joseph Campbell would say so often at the beginning, he would say at different points when he's talking about Freud and Jung, he would say, Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale. Jung recognized the whale. I might add that those of us in this community, like Joseph Campbell himself, have the benefit of even further expansions of the unconscious that Stan Groff articulated, where in a sense, not just the whale, but the great ocean itself. There's just a lot more inside all of us than just our individual consciousness. We're getting into Whiteheadian territory there, and Steinerian and the A-field of Irvin Laszlo and so forth. I'll say more about about Stan's work later if I can get to it. So now the fourth insight I want to highlight from Jung is that the larger life and soul of the collective psyche, the history of the human community, that it is itself an unfolding psychological and spiritual process. That is, humanity as a whole is on a spiritual and moral journey. I think really nowhere is this collective journey more vividly expressed in Jung's work than in his late essay, Answer to Job, which was written when he was exactly my age, 75. He wrote it in a fever-white heat. Later, near the end of his life, he said this was the only one of all his writings that he would not now change a word. That's a lot of talking with no water, excuse me. So not only is the collective psyche important as being the ground and backdrop of our individual understanding and journey, but it is itself engaged in its own powerful journey of transformation. This journey is something that each of us is contributing to by our lives, and each of us is being influenced by. That's a crucial point. When someone like Martin Luther King speaks of the arc of the moral universe being long, but it ultimately bends towards justice, words which he drew from Theodore Parker, the great 19th century transcendentalist and abolitionist and feminist. King is referring, and Parker is referring, to just this collective, historical, spiritual journey. It's almost hard to imagine one could talk about an arc of the moral universe if you didn't have some sense of humanity being on a spiritual journey and that we are contributing to it, influenced by it. It is a larger drama that we are all crucially participating in. And perhaps more today than ever before is that participation required, needed, but also available to us in very tangible ways. The great archetypal principles and powers also inform this larger historical process. All of these factors are layered deep within each of us and they play a role in the unfolding of our lives and our sense of selfhood, of identity and personhood, our sense of being on a journey. Now that means that if we are to be lucid about ourselves and about our motivations, we need to acknowledge and strive to bring into greater consciousness all these layers that exist like archaeological levels in our own depths. It's not just our own personal history, but it's our collective history. It's all of history. It's there. It's our familial and ancestral history, the history of our society, of our culture, our civilization, of homo sapiens, the history of life, of the earth itself. All this is in our depths and lives within us. And finally, fifth, finally in terms of what we're addressing tonight, of these crucial insights that Jung is bringing to us, Jung recognized that this human life and the archetypal psyche that is on a journey of transformation, which is both individual and collective, beyond this, he recognizes that all of this is in turn deeply embedded within the larger matrix of the great cosmos itself. From this point of view, not only humanity, but the universe is ensouled. What Jung called the collective psyche seems to be ultimately embedded within the anima mundi, the soul of the universe, anima mundi. Such a beautiful Latin term, anima mundi. Even in our everyday life, those archetypally meaningful synchronicities that we're graced with, including the astral ones, as above, so below, these point to not only the amazing, continuous artistry of life, but also to the cosmos as the great sacred circle within which our spiritual lives unfold, where we touch the numinous, the sacred. So let's look more carefully at each of these ideas that informed Jung's vision and practice and that he passed on to us. What does this mean, recognizing that at a deep level the unfolding of a human life is a spiritual journey? Well, first a spiritual journey is much more than a story of making it, of personal progress. It involves experiences of loss, of descent, dark nights of the soul, such as many of us are undoubtedly going through right now. Experiences of sacrifice, experiences of joys and sorrows that go way beyond personal success in a linear upward climb. Defeats and mistakes can deeply shape us in noble ways. Tragic errors can deeply shape us in noble ways. We are endlessly thinking of our own mistakes and defeats. We're endlessly learning, self-revising, or endlessly dying to the old and being born into a new, more profound identity that carries the old within us, but now in a transformed way. But a spiritual journey is therefore also a moral journey, one that involves coming to have values, a sense of a higher good, ideals, aspirations that shape who we are. Ideals are not just something, our values are not just something as a kind of we could have them or not, or a kind of arbitrary add-on to our life. Values and ideals shape who we are, where we stand in order to make sense of our lives, how we decide how to live, how to navigate our lives, what world views and what modes of life we commit to, what we choose to cultivate, what standards we choose to live up to. Here I'm drawing especially on the brilliant work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, particularly his great book Sources of the Self, which he wrote at the time, the exact time, same years that I was writing The Passion of the Western Mind back in the 1980s. Our sense of identity is deeply dependent on the values, the goods, the high ideals that inspire us and by which we measure our lives. These allow us to to orient our lives, to ground our identity, to have a sense of direction. Even if it's not articulated or made conscious, this moral spiritual framework of values is what allows us to have a grasp on who we are and of how we can best make our way in the world. It's the horizon within which we make meaning in our lives. And if you don't have that, that is an enormous crisis of identity. A person who has a total identity crisis, who completely loses any sense of what's most important in their lives, they lose their grip in moral space, as Taylor would call it, and sometimes this can translate into even losing one's grip in physical space. Like a person who's so shocked by something that they've just learned, it's so disturbing that they have to sit down unless they completely collapse. They're just taking it in and kind of losing their balance. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut has discussed this phenomenon. Now our moral and spiritual values represent what we find of greatest meaning in our lives. To live a meaningful life and to discover what is most meaningful to us is, after air and water and food, that's the most important reality to us as human beings. And in certain heroic cases, a loyalty to that deep meaning can outweigh even food and water and air. Now the connection to meaning, to a sense of what is most important, deep, rich, most worthy of our admiration, what fills us with awe, that's ultimately a connection to the numinous, to something that is consciously or unconsciously experienced as sacred. And this is where the personal touches the transpersonal. It's where the individual touches the archetypal, where the particular touches the universal. Time touches eternity. And this is also where healing takes place, as Jung saw so clearly. Healing ultimately takes place in a direct encounter with the numinous. That's why he had those long, like those letters with Bill Wilson and the the founder of recognizing that underlying truth. To be healed from our inner divisions and exiles, to find wholeness that involves touching the numinous, being transformed and healed by some aspect of the sacred. The healing we seek never comes simply by human calculation or techniques or clever life hacks, but from somehow accessing a higher wisdom. For each of us to navigate our way in life through in this very dramatic, challenging age of human history and earth evolution, it requires sources of insight that go beyond simple strategies for just getting ahead or coping with life. But to find our way to a place where we can be open to an encounter with the numinous requires entering into a crucible of transformation, a place of great stresses and tensions. Tensions of intolerably incompatible opposites, where in some sense we must go through a dying to the shallower life and the narrower identity. So that we can enter into an encounter with depths and heights that are far beyond the parameters of our ordinary consciousness, which is for most of us shaped by a relentlessly consumerist, disenchanted modernity. Such a crucible of transformation, it can emerge in many, many ways. It can happen through powerful rituals, non-ordinary states of consciousness, a wilderness vision quest. It can happen in a sacred medicine journey, an ayahuasca ceremony, breath work, deep experiential therapy, Jungian analysis. It could be a spontaneous spiritual emergency or a near-death experience. I want to make a shout out to our own Jesse Estrin and his brother Elliot for their great work on the Coming Home series and Substack and YouTube channel, where it's called Coming Home and it where they bring the amazing testimony of many near-death experiences to the public. So it could be a near-death experience, as I said, or a spiritual emergency such as as Stan Grof developed such a helpful understanding of and ways of responding to. It could also be though a severe illness. It could be a major accident. It could be the tragic loss of a beloved. It could be a terrible life failure. All of these, the sacred medicine journeys, the powerful ritual, all of these create the possibility of a liminal passage through dying into another mode of being. The transcendent function emerges at that point and grace can occur. I wonder if I've got that wonderful letter from Jung to Olga Kapteyn. So Jung wrote this in 1945, August 20th, so he would have just turned 70 at that point, just as the Second World War is ending. He's also been through his near-death experience by this point, a very powerful one that happened the year before. It had a really big influence on him that he wrote about in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, but this letter is a powerful one. Often a lot of his best articulations are in his personal letters. Somehow freedom, somehow when he was writing for the public, with some exceptions like Answer to Job, when he was writing for the public he kind of hedged things more and became maybe even more prosaic, but sometimes when he would be writing a letter he would really deliver. So Fröbe was the person who owned Casa Eranos, where the great Eranos symposia took place each summer that Jung kind of helped oversee, and where many of his most important essays were first read, things like Synchronicity or On the Trinity and so forth, but also where many others like Carl Kareny and later Hillman, etc, were to speak. So she had written him about the conflict that she felt between her duties to her family and her responsibilities to her career and the demands of each, and he wrote this letter, “Dear Frau Fröbe, there can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female.” I would put it the solar and the lunar to de-essentialize it from gender. “In the fire of suffering and thus create that form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the reconciling third takes shape.” That's the transcendent function that can only emerge when one has held the agonizing tension kind of loyally enough, not throwing it off into one or the other. “Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you and let whatever may happen happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life,” that's an amazing sentence, the unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. “A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the beyond which is destined only for angels, but God loves human beings more than the angels. With kindest regards, yours sincerely, C.G. Jung.” This is trickster coming in there at the end about God loving human beings more than the angels, which some theosophists believe as well. I mean not putting it in that way though. So that's a path towards rebirth, a path towards moving, dying to the old identity, and then being able to encounter the kind of numinous healing of the reconciling whole emerging. But it's also not that simple because even the numinous and the sacred myths and the encounter with the archetypal, they're two-edged swords and they require discernment. As even a moment's reflection on the history of religion can make clear to us, having an experience of the sacred or of the numinous is no guarantee of moral discernment and life enhancing action. Oh man, I just watched this extraordinarily powerful six-part series on Netflix called American Primeval, not for the faint of heart, but a very powerful moral drama. Anyway, this point about just because someone is invoking God and feels filled with God's inspiration to carry their manifest destiny into realization is no guarantee of the good. As my friend Dean Juhan used to say, the closer that you get to the light doesn't mean the farther away from the darkness you're getting, which we see so often in the case of certain gurus and spiritual leaders that go wrong in one way or another filled with the divine inflation. So, and what's behind this is that it's the very nature of archetypes to compel us and their intrinsic multivalence, including this kind of moral bivalence, it puts great responsibility on us to discern and cultivate the noblest potential of the archetypal complex rather than its destructive shadow. And it can take great work on our part to become conscious of our shadow and of these powerful archetypes that move in our soul and in our lives. It can take great discernment to know how to navigate amongst these complexes that can bedazzle us as well as inspire us. This is why Hillman, when he was describing the power and the ambiguity in the nature of archetypes, he described them this way. “One thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes, their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a god. And gods, religions sometimes say, are less accessible to the senses and to the intellect than they are to the imaginative vision and emotion of the soul.” I mean just think of like when you get totally possessed by an anger that reaches to the point of rage and how filled with it and how righteous you can feel and how absolutely wrong and deserving, perhaps even evil, the person that has aroused your rage is. And think of times when you were fortunate and didn't act on it and then later after the storm, the archetypal complex has diminished and you get a little bit hold of your center again, you go, wow, I really got carried for a ride. Archetypes can carry you for a ride and that's something that requires a certain building up of a center, of a moral center, which is what this is all about that we're talking about tonight, Keats' soul making, forging of an identity, being capable of making a stand. Let me share also here a wonderful passage from the remarkable 20th century British novelist John Cooper Powys, someone who Sean Kelly has a special connection with. I love this passage where he says, “if by the time we're 60 we have not learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is”, knot is K-N-O-T, “what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the bad and the good are mingled in every action we take, we have not grown old to much purpose. I suppose the hardest of all things to learn and the thing that most distinguishes what is called a ripe old age is the knowledge that while bold uncritical action is necessary if things are to move at all, we are only heading for fresh disaster if some portion of our interior soul does not function in critical detachment while we commit ourselves to the tide, keeping a weather eye on both horizons.” I love that. That's wisdom and he's got the Jungian influence in there as well as Robertson Davies who quotes that at the beginning of a collection that he published is makes that point, the connection to Jung. So what I've been attempting here to describe is the challenge of carrying the psychological attitude while also being a person of action and I felt Powys nailed it in that respect. He managed to provide a few more metaphysical indications as well. I think this seems applicable to the unfolding of human history as well. Whole nations can get possessed by archetypal complexes and be absolutely convinced in the rightness of their cause and it's a sacred duty to serve what this very powerful impulse or leader is telling us to do and great destruction can take place from it and it takes a lot of discernment by a lot of people and a lot of courage to turn around the ship in time and so 20th century history was filled with very dramatic examples of this, above all the two world wars, but not just there and certainly U.S. history has been filled with its own cases and ours again is in our time. So I've got a few more minutes that I'd like to start to, I'm going to use a couple of diagrams here to give even a little bit more sense of the layering within our own depths of all the things that are shaping our consciousness and the larger range of influences that are acting on us from within our deep psyche. So this first diagram will be familiar to some of you who have taken courses with Stan Grof and myself over the years or seminars, workshops, but also the Psyche and Cosmos classes that are being taught at CIIS now by Becca Tarnas. You'll, or it's also, you see it in, some of Stan's books. This is a diagram that we kind of co-created. I started with the hourglass to show the relationship of the personal unconscious with the transpersonal unconscious and so here we are up at the top– I'm not going to go into what all the co-exes are and stuff like that or the BPMs. It's a more general point I want to make here. So here's us up at the top, just the very surface ordinary ego consciousness that we tend to have during the day as we go about our business. But when people do deep inner work, you know, through sacred medicine journeys, through deep psychotherapy, through all the other things that I brought up can come in through dreams, symptoms, and so forth, and you start exploring the depths, start going in deeper and deeper into one's life and earlier experiences going earlier and earlier that have shaped us, both positive emotional ones and negative ones, traumatic ones, and as one goes deeper and deeper then one eventually starts encountering experiences of encountering death and this can often be mixed up, mixed in with the experience of reliving birth, a biological birth. It doesn't have to, but this narrowing of the hourglass represents a kind of tunnel of a kind of liminal passage of birth and death and when one enters into these depths here, that's where the archetypal, it can come through in fetal perinatal memories, but it also can come through in quite powerful archetypal experiences, mythic experiences, that play a role in the death rebirth process and both mixed in with that powerful liminal passage, but also even after one has gone through that liminal passage, one then starts tapping into the much larger kind of cosmic hole, the transpersonal unconscious. Here's where things like ancestral memories, for example, mythological experiences, phylogenetic memories, like the history of homo sapiens, of mammalians, of life itself, all encoded deep within us and that we have access to inside us, but also karmic memories. This is something that Jung did not emphasize, but certainly the work from consciousness research from many different sources, including LSD therapy and hypnosis and so forth, the experience of past lives and karmic memories playing a large role in shaping our own concurrent experience and our own lives tends to come up again and again. And then collective memories of all kinds, large, like becoming all mothers who have ever given birth, all soldiers who have died on a battlefield, all people who have experienced imprisonment unjustly or who have been enslaved, these things, all these are inside us and in these liminal conditions, they can start coming into our awareness and we start to get insights into how certain depths within us that transcend this lifetime are actually shaping our current consciousness and our sense of identity and so forth. But in addition, and that's something that came to stand in me quite surprisingly, I've talked about it in this setting at other times, so I won't go into detail here, but basically the discovery that the archetypal psyche, the archetypal unconscious, the anima mundi, the cosmic soul, is archetypally associated with the heavens and with the great surrounding, well we've got them down here at the foundational, the bottom of the transpersonal, but if you were looking at this from above, this would be much bigger. You'd look at the narrower eco-consciousness here of our individual self and then you'd be getting into much bigger wholes of, you know, w-h-o-l-e, much greater realms of the ancestral unconscious and the many lives of the karmic, the phylogenetic, all of earth history, life history, etc. But, and then at the outer circumference, which this is, are the heavens, and the heavens with the sun, the moon, the planets, astonishingly seem to be systematically associated with, like gods in the heavens, the way the ancients saw them, with these great archetypal powers, or gods and goddesses. Moreover, there's something about biological birth that the moment of birth, and it's more complex than that because we bring in conception and all these kinds of things, but particularly the first breath and the moment of birth at the moment that the individual organism becomes independent biologically from the maternal womb and emerges, that where the planets are at that time, the state of the heavens at that moment in some sense is correlated with the state of the psyche of the being, being born at that time, and that's something that Jung talked about. He has that beautiful sentence in Memories, Dreams, Reflections in a chapter called Late Thoughts where he said, the very structure of the universe is set up in accord with the, or rather the structure of the psyche is set up in accord with the great structure of the universe so that the microcosm of our of ourself is in some sense embedded in and coherent with the great macrocosm and the archetypal differentiation that the long astrological tradition has helped discern, going back to the ancient Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Greeks, Egyptians, the Islamic world, and then the medieval and Renaissance Europeans, all these have carried this very powerful discerning tradition into our own time in such a way that when the depth psychology revolution came in and Jung was able to see the connections, and then we've been developing these quite a bit further in recent years, and we also have the benefit of much greater like telescopic and computer powers and ephemerades and so forth. I'm particularly wanting to emphasize is the fact that the archetypal cosmos is within us and around us, around us, and that the great, there's a great gift and grace that exists as a result of this microcosm, macrocosm, as above, so below, deeper, embeddedness of our individual soul in the cosmic soul. There's a great, great grace and gift that the cosmos has given us, opening an avenue of communication between human symbolic consciousness, which after all has been painstakingly evolved over millennia, over millions of years, and a cosmos that speaks symbolically, which every Indigenous tribal tradition and as well as the great archaic civilizations was in touch with. They they were able to read, they recognized that the universe speaks symbolically, nature speaks symbolically, the birds, the forest, the wind, the waters, the heavens, the sun and moon, their cycles, everything is connected, as Plotinus said, everything breathes together and is communicating with us if we have ears to hear, if we cultivate the capacity to discern those depths. And the universe also, this intelligent, soul-infused, gracious universe holds space for our initiatory transformations as individuals and as a species. Just as we in our communities, like the different, what I call, heroic communities that exist in our world with a higher vision of the good than the mainstream culture, we support each other as individuals to find our own paths, and that is a path that requires often quite challenging, painful transformational experiences such as Jung went through in the Red Book period. Okay, speaking of, yeah, the individuality of our journey, that's another paradox is that while we are all on this collective journey together that subsumes us and is ultimately so important and as we get older and older, I think it's more possible to tune into the importance of the generations, seven generations hence and so forth, and not just be thinking about my own or the immediate moment or the quarterly profit report, but to be thinking in the long term. Nevertheless, we are each individuals on an individual journey and each of us has a unique path and that sense of our individuality is something that in its contemporary form has only emerged after many centuries of cultural and psychological evolution. Earlier identities were much more with the tribe, with the tribal whole which is embedded in the land and filled with identified with the ancestral spirits, with the great spirits of the land and the water, and that was the primary identity and one did not do things as individuals that were not in some sense in close confluence with this whole. It's only over a long period of time that the modernity has played the crucial role, the medieval period as well, played a crucial role in constellating this individuality. In our own time, we have a profound sense of the importance of the individual journey and of our unique path. In some ways, it was the great encounter with mortality in the later Middle Ages where you not only had tremendous turmoil, the Black Death, the plague carrying away so many of the European population, the wars, the famines, etc., but you also had a particular interpretation of the Christian mythos coming out of Augustine and Ambrose and others who put a focus on a juridical penal understanding of the human being's relationship to God, that we are all going to be judged at death and that the result of that judgment would be heaven or hell. Later purgatory emerges as a somewhat, partly out of, yeah, for many, many reasons it emerged as an almost psychologically necessary intermediate zone. But if you're being taught year after year, week after week, that your fate, your eternal fate, of absolutely intolerable perdition, hell, exiled forever from God's love, suffering physically, spiritually in the most unimaginable ways, if you're being taught that that is a very likely possibility if you don't shape up, if you don't live a highly moral life, if you don't do, and that the reward for doing so is the most blissful ecstatic unity with the Godhead forever and ever, where every any pleasure you've ever had in this life pales compared with the ecstatic joy that would extend into infinity if you live a good life. Well, you can imagine how this would shape the individual interior consciousness that was emerging in the later Middle Ages in ways that would not have been necessary if you had much more of a sense that your life as you die is going into the life of the whole, into the tribal ancestral continuum, into the rest of nature, etc. No, this is a very different sense. If your eternal fate, bliss or damnation, is being determined through the judgment of the Almighty that you're going to have to face at the moment of death, well, that concentrates your mind. Like Samuel Johnson's, nothing like a hanging to concentrate a man's mind. Even, I mean, the encounter with death can certainly do that, but if you've got a belief system where what's after death has those kinds of qualities, well, then you really have, you really have a lot of reason to become very, very, very introspective and self-aware and inhibiting certain instincts, building up a conscience, a superego that helps you make decisions not according to just what the flow of the society is doing, but as an individual, because it's you by yourself that's going to be assessed at that crucial moment. So this is an enormous psychologically forging process that took place and is in the background of all of our soul experiences in modernity, particularly Westerners, and this is powerfully described in Charles Taylor's later work called A Secular Age and the first brilliant chapter there, but you can also, some of the, if you just read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the chapter three where the brilliant sermon on the nature of hell that the young artist hears at his retreat, Catholic retreat, is in 19th century Ireland, you would get a very powerful sense of what I'm talking about. The other person on the Protestant side who powerfully conveys the nature of it is Max Weber in the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, brilliant psychological and sociological examination of just what we're talking about here. But beyond these, our contemporary sense of each individual having his or her own journey to take, your path, that idea that your path is for your steps alone, that each of us has a responsibility as well as a right to find our own creative way in life that expresses our true self, to be able to bring forth our own gifts and capacities that are uniquely ours to fulfill our own destiny. We have a much more strong sense of this in our time and this emerged really out of romanticism, which in the late 18th and 19th century that really brought forth that kind of awareness and disseminated it into the modern sensibility. Both a right and a responsibility, a sacred right and a sacred responsibility you might say. There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow. That path is for your steps alone. That's the the Grateful Dead of course in 1970 from their wonderfully deep-souled album American Beauty and the lyrics of the late Robert Hunter. Now Jung is the inheritor of all this, of the ancients, of the Indigenous tribal primal traditions, of the archaic civilizations, including their astral, esoteric traditions that got planted into the continuum. He's taking in so much of Judaism, Christianity, it lives in him so strongly, the enlightenment, romanticism, modern science, he's the inheritor of all of this But Jung's sense of the individual journey, as important as it was, he had such a sense of the importance of our individuality, our sacred responsibility with respect to that individuality, that's what individuation is all about, but it is an individuation that is deeply connected to the whole, to the entire history, to the collective journey that's within us and around us and that we have a responsibility towards that collective journey and that's expressed in the famous passage from The Undiscovered Self that he wrote near the end of his life when he was, yeah he was 80 at that point, about the dramatic kairos of our time in history. You've heard me, many of you will have heard me quote this in the past or in my books, “a mood of universal diversity, a sense of the universal destruction and renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos, the right moment for a metamorphosis of the gods, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing.” I would say of the earth that is changing as well. “Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself.” I would say this generation has to, our generation and all who are alive today, have to “take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science and egotism and greed. So much is at stake and so much depends,” and here's where he comes back to the individual, after all that about the collective, here he comes back to the individual, “so much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human. Does the individual know that he or she is the make-weight that tips the scales, that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends,” the world depends on each of us as individuals to play our role in this great collective arc of the moral universe, this spiritual journey we are on. Okay on that note I will say goodbye to everybody uh I'm I'm I'm very uh grateful to all of you who who might be out there listening to me tonight um the only only problem with doing this online compared with doing it in Namaste Hall as I used to uh or in other settings is that I don't get to be right with you in the room, experience you more directly, see the looks on your faces, get inspired by how you're responding to things, um but I feel I think all of us who have been doing a lot of online lectures have gotten better and better at kind of intuitively tuning into the into the field that we are speaking um to and within and and uh being inspired by it in in that kind of less tangible way than we had available when we when we see each other in person, but until we see each other in person again um I am going to sign off now. Thank you all for being with me and I hope um I hope some of what I have said will be of of value in in your life. Thank you very much.

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