This Jungian Life Podcast &#8211; Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

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https://www.amazon.com/Tarot-Deciphered-Decoding-Esoteric-Symbolism/dp/0738764477/

If you’ve been struggling in the dark trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of ⁠⁠⁠⁠Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams⁠⁠⁠⁠ from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.

Tarot, Divination & the Symbolic Life Aug 05, 2021

Show notes

Guest T. Susan Chang is a writer, podcaster, and teacher of tarot, the most commonly recognized modern form of divination. The archetypal symbols in the tarot’s 78 card deck offer gateways to meaning and mystery. Jung says symbols act as transformers—life energy is converted from a lower to higher form by the amplification that consciousness provides. Tarot divination is intended to break from the mundane and court the numinous. It asks that we set logic aside, surrender doubt, and step unafraid into the space between realms. As with dreams, whatever arises will tell us something we don’t know and can use. Jung said that the “redeeming symbol is a highway, a way upon which life can move forward without torment and compulsion.” By opening ourselves to the inexplicable, we set forth on that highway with the intent of discovering our unique pattern for personhood and purpose in the world.

A Two-Card Tarot Reading

This week, in lieu of a dream interpretation, Susie agreed to do a two-card Tarot draw for all of us. The question we chose was dealing with uncertainty. The cards, visible on camera, were spread out face down, and she gently moved them around, picked up a few, and selected two. Turning them over revealed the Queen and Page of Wands, two court cards. As the Queen of Wands has an outgoing nature, she creates networks. This card indicated that we can seek support from others in a time of uncertainty. The youthful Page of Wands, at whom the Queen seemed to be gazing, has a quality of innocence and optimism as he looks outward. Altogether this draw indicates that we can choose our attitude toward uncertainty. The Queen of Wands suggests the possibility of connection with others, and the Page conveys a spirit of adventure.

References

www.tsusanchang.com

Books:

Tarot Deciphered

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Time & Truth About Its Use Jul 29, 2021

Show notes

Guest Oliver Burkeman states in his new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, that “outrageous brevity is life’s defining problem.” At age 80, you’ll have had a paltry 4,000 weeks. Such brevity is breathtaking, so we create defenses against the reality of finitude. We distract ourselves with the belief that fulfillment lies in the future, that plans and goals prove purpose, and that we can achieve almost any number of things by being more efficient/motivated/healthy—or just overall exceptional. Paradoxically, embracing life’s limitations can open us to what Jung called “a new attitude”—an inner pivot from the daily grind to seeing and seizing life’s possibilities. Time is not our adversary, the present is not hostage to the future, and we can choose to be alive while we’re alive.

Here’s the dream we analyze:

“Had a dream about a close friend. She had committed a murder, and there was a police detective asking her questions. She had some sort of tracker device that she was holding in her hand most of the dream. She lied to the detective and said she only had it because of her work, and she hadn’t even turned it on yet. The policeman wanted to check her tracker to confirm she wasn’t at the scene of murder. She kept making up excuses as to why she couldn’t give it to him. She kept coming and going in her car from this house that we were in sometimes with the policeman; other times it was just busy with different unknown people. My friend was terrified and turned to me for help. At one point, she was wailing and pleading with me to help her, saying, “please don’t let them take me away.” I was holding her and comforting her and saying I wouldn’t let them do that.”

REFERENCES:

www.oliverburkeman.com

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books

Burkeman, Oliver. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

Burkeman, Oliver. Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

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The Cosmic Meaning of Consciousness Jul 22, 2021

Show notes

In Answer to Job, Jung states, “Whoever knows God has an effect on him.” If, as Jung claims, individual human consciousness affects God, what we are matters monumentally. When we serve our neuroses, the gulf between ego and Self widens. Pursuing individuation not only sets our personality in right order, it permits our personal experiences to enrich the collective unconscious – who we are is added to God. When Jung visited the Navajo, they told him they helped the sun, their father, cross the sky each day, a spiritual observance that sustained the world. Jung said, “I had envied the fullness of meaning in that belief and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation, that in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world….” Human consciousness weaves meaning into the dance of life. Our psyches companion God crossing the sky each day and so participate in creation. As we confront the mystery of our lives and uncover the unique meaning unfolding in us – we become conscious co-creators.

HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZED:

“I stand up from the couch and move toward the hallway. Three older women have entered the house. They look to be in their 50s or 60s, with long, draping clothes. They look like ordinary women and do not appear threatening, but I immediately feel menacing energy. I ask them who they are and what they are doing in the house. The women brush off my questions and mock me for my concern, suggesting that I am frightening the little boy. They have pushed past the hallway and are now in the kitchen. Their forcefulness tells me that they are here with ill intent, and I fear that they are here to rob the family. I grab the little boy and take him upstairs to hide him in his room while I deal with the old women, but when I am closing the boy’s bedroom door to go back downstairs, the women are already on the second floor of the house, entering all the rooms, opening drawers and cabinets, and taking things. They seem to be everywhere, and yet their movements are not chaotic but very controlled and methodical in a way that is unsettling to me. They seem particularly intent on taking books, paper files, and personal documents. I begin to think about what the family might have that the women want, what value is here that I had not known about. I remember or realize that the father is a famous novelist, and I wonder if maybe the women are trying to steal his work. I try to stop them, but they won’t listen to me, and I wonder how I am going to explain this to the family later. After following them around for a bit, I take the boy back downstairs. I decide to call 9-1-1 and leave the house until help arrives. I am barefoot and carrying the boy on my hip as I walk away from the house. While I wait for the 9-1-1 responder to answer, I realize that I do not know the house’s address. The dream ends before I find out whether help arrives.”

REFERENCES:

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Robert Moore

Memories, Dreams, Reflections. CG Jung

Answer to Job, CG Jung

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Archetypes Jul 15, 2021

Show notes

Although the concept of archetypes has philosophical ancestors, Jung’s theory was developed over time and rested on a foundation that was scientific and empirical. Research and experiment enabled Jung to establish the autonomous activity of the unconscious.

He was then able to posit archetypes as a predisposition to form representations of universal human experiences and mythological motifs, such as marriage, the hero’s journey, and death/rebirth. For Jung, archetypes are innate psychic organs that “have a positive, favourable (sic), bright side that points upwards [and] one that points downwards…” Archetypes manifest spontaneously. In the collective, they are the driving force behind mass movements; in individuals, archetypes manifest most frequently as dream images that feel numinous and ‘other.’ Jung says, “The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own.” The power of an archetype can either possess us or inspire us.

Here’s the dream we analyze:

“Early morning dream, just before waking, and eerily similar but not the same as one I had several years ago about being shot in the heart and stomach area and killed by a stranger. This time, I was at home in my home office and heard someone entering through my back door. I may have wondered if it was my boyfriend, but he does not live with me, and I wasn’t expecting anyone. I went into the hallway to see who it was, and a man I’ve never seen before walked in. He had the energy of an intruder, and I felt scared. He looked right at me. His hair was white; his clothing was gray, his skin nearly colorless or ashen. His eyes and face were emotionless, without expression. He was oriented above me in my dream as if suddenly I had shrunk to the height of a small child looking up at him. I either asked or was about to ask who he was and what he was doing here. Without changing his blank expression, he pulled out a handgun and shot me, point-blank, in the stomach. This time, I woke up from the dream before I felt the bullet. The feeling was adrenaline-filled, fearful, angry, surprised, and confused. I had/have no idea who this man is or was, or what he represents.”

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Paying Attention: What Are You Spending It On? Jul 08, 2021

Show notes

We plainly pay attention, using the finite currency of time and energy issued in the 24-hour increments that add up to a life - well spent? We have choices and constraints about how we allocate our attention, and today’s world competes fiercely for it in unprecedented ways. No wonder, for power is the ability to command or hijack attention, even if it warps reality with untruths.

Jung particularly valued the attentional dimension of “dreaming, or fantasy-thinking” experienced in reverie, dreams, and creativity. And like mothers, lovers, and psychotherapists, we can give others the unconditional attention that brings soul into being. All we have to do is practice paying attention to what we pay attention to.

Here’s the dream we analyze:

“A large lesbian woman, Sally, has four adopted boys. Their home is the top floor of a brick industrial building (like a power station) in the shape of a square, with a quad in the middle. They are visited by Kirsty and Phil (hosts of British TV shows about property/home improvement), and the first room they visit floods with seawater as the tide rises and falls, leaving tide marks on the furniture. One of the boys (aged 9) insists that the room is not fit for purpose and tugs on the sleeves of the adults, but Sally says it is OK. The other boy runs around like he has ADHD. As they move around the building, Kirsty and Phil discover all kinds of problems. There is an industrial kitchen covered in grease and grime. The roof leaks and the home isn’t warm or protected. In the one habitable room, two boys (one black, one white) are stored in a Walls ice cream freezer. Kirsty and Phil worry that the freezer is on, but they touch it and think it is off. The boys both have their eyes open. Kirsty and Phil realize that their cheerful, anything-is-possible attitude won’t work this time. They don’t sugarcoat things for Sally, telling her that the building is condemned and they need to move. They suggest that she sell at a loss. Sally nearly argues with them: she is angry and feels betrayed, but then she comes ‘round. Sally is a life skills coach, and Kirsty and Phil ask her for a session, which she says she will provide for free, but they want to pay her in full. This will allow Sally to recoup her losses and find another property. The 9-year-old anxious boy should have been listened to.”

REFERENCES:

Marzel, Charlie, “I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age.” The New York Times, 4 February 2021 by Charlie Warzel. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opinion/michael-goldhaber-internet.html

The Social Dilemma. A docudrama filmed by Jeff Orlowski in 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma

Ian McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300245920/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_1W6M13WYQRW5X006XFHW

Daniel A. Hughes, Jonathan Baylin, and Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. Brain-Based Parenting. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393707288/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_SG8Q283NW3NSTAV3BQBP

John Gottman. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553447718/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_8XM6QBQMXNJ8M7K8X9GR

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Letting Go: When Is It Time? Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

In the first half of life, we strive to develop ego strength and achieve our dreams. To want, will, and work is worthwhile and adaptive--until a life dream, relationship, or identity fades or fails. Should we hang in and hang on - or let go? When does perseverance become pointless, or hope turn rancid in refusal to accept disappointment, defeat, or depression?

In letting go, we relinquish our hard-won, heroic “I” and yield to an encounter with the unconscious. Jung says that although “I was afraid of losing command of myself…I let myself drop.” He came to realize that “This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.” Jung discovered, as may we, that in letting go something greater can meet and sustain us.

HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:

“I’m in a dining room. It’s in an older house with rooms like boxes for different purposes. There is the requisite brown wood dining room table. I’m not sure I should be in there. It feels old and used, and the air feels stale. I look up at there is a plain dark four-blade fan. It’s motionless. But I’m awe-struck by the ancient golden raven perched on the fan blade closest to me. I immediately knew it was the ancient raven. It was looking at me. It was large and had multiple layers of ancient golden feathers. Some big. Some small. Its many golden feathered tail hung down from the fan like a peacock. We just stared at each other. I knew deep inside this ancient raven was connected to me.”

REFERENCES

C.G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Randolphe M. Nesse, M.D. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

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Threshold: Moving Between the Realms Jun 24, 2021

Show notes

In medieval times, the threshold was a plank that kept barnyard “threshings” outside the house. In the sciences a threshold is the limit of magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a definitive change to occur. In human development life stage thresholds are marked and recognized through ritual. In psychoanalytic work the symbol is the threshold—a visible but not literal representation that calls consciousness to apprehend a larger, unseen reality.

Science fiction, mythology’s modern descendant, has richly storied this process as transition into a new world. The ambiguity and disorientation of this liminal situation requires the sacrifice of old attitudes and willingness to surrender to a new reality—a space of potential enlightenment. The ultimate goal is to recross the threshold and bring the symbolic experience home to consciousness.

Here's the dream we analyze:

“It is late at night and I find myself lying in a dark alleyway at the foot of a tall building. It seems I have just got married as I am dressed as a bride, in a bejeweled white dress. A fat woman with a very round face is looking over me with mean eyes. She is pulling my bridal jewelry off me, one by one. She tears my earrings away making my ears bleed, then the big nose pin, then my neck piece and so on. The woman looks into my eyes and says that my husband is dead. As she’s tearing the jewelry off of me, my bridal dress begins to wear out. I am unable to stop her. Suddenly, I find myself in the entrance hallway of what seems like a palatial old house. It is dimly lit. I am feeling drained. My bridal dress is all rags now, I can’t feel my feet. I look down and notice that both my feet are missing, it seems that they have been wrenched off of my legs. I am floating. I can sense that I’m in a watery world. My breath is draining out through my legs. I manage to float to the edge of the grand staircase and hold onto the post at the bottom. I look up and try to call out to my sister, who I know is sleeping upstairs. My voice is stuck. I am dying.”

REFERENCES:

Arnold van Gennep. Rites of Passage. https://www.amazon.com/dp/022662949X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_10TZ7PBV2KD9PBZ14DVJ

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/0306824264/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_H4265W9BKGA44JC3WJMW

The Unspoken Wounding of Men Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

Jung’s earliest dream, at age three or four, preoccupied him all his life, “in an underground chamber, a giant phallus stood erect on a golden throne.” Majestic and luminous, it struck him with terror that intensified as his mother’s voice cried out in warning. Phallos, the central archetype of a man's psyche, was once worshipped as sacred. Its urgent, dynamic, and fertilizing power was split off with the rise of ascetic monotheism and banished to the unconscious. Misplaced and maligned, it surfaces as resentful passivity, fear of passion, confusion of values, and reluctance to take action. Phallos is neither reducible to physicality nor synonymous with the patriarchal structures that have alienated men from their vulnerabilities and locked entire cultures into rigid hierarchies. When properly understood, Phallos can revitalize a man’s spirit and set him in vigorous relationship to himself and others. When wounded, it palls his potential.

Here’s the dream we analyze:

“I’m in a taxi, on my way to an old friend’s wedding on the high street where I live. I had on a great suit which everybody loved, but I had forgotten my tie. I realized I didn’t have time to go back home, so I went into the back room of a thrift shop which only had a selection of boring ties. As I came out, the shop was filling up with wedding guests. Then I found myself in a different, very gloomy, very cluttered thrift shop with no windows or seemingly a door. In it was a blonde woman, who I asked about ties. She pointed to a corner, and I found a couple more boring ties. I picked them up and laid them on a circular, cluttered table to get a better look in the gloom. I then realized on the table was a larger pile of ties, and to my astonishment, they were ones I had once owned but must have given away to the shop years earlier, still lying there. I told the woman, but she just shrugged. I went through them and found my favorite, which was a dark background with white circles on it. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.”

REFERENCES:

Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly.

Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men by James Hollis.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Y2U9ARS/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_MX6Z6GB2933NNM78FM47

Phallos by Eugene Monick.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0919123260/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_Z2J86A205EYN5EK4T7FR

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Extroversion Jun 10, 2021

Show notes

Although Jung’s theory of typology is the foundation of various personality assessments, it is important to appreciate its profundity as Jung’s theory of consciousness. The four functions of consciousness - sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling--are governed by two attitudes, extraversion, and introversion. Jung defines extraversion as “an attitude type characterized by concentration of interest on the external object.”

Since the movement of psychic energy is outward, extroverts find gratification in social and collegial interactions. Extraverts, therefore, need to distinguish individual goals from relational expectations and cultural norms lest they sacrifice inner reality to outer influences. A vital sense of life direction and the unconstrained pursuit of goals requires differentiating outer from inner and is central to Jungian theory. Knowledge of one’s typology can enlist consciousness in psyche’s quest for balance and wholeness.

Here’s the dream we analyze:

“I am perhaps 4 or 5 months pregnant, and I am at my grandad’s house. I am miscarrying. There is blood and tissue everywhere, and I can feel it happening very viscerally. My grandad and a woman I don’t know are helping to clean it up. There is going to be a party, and I don’t want anyone to know what has happened. Family has arrived now, and I am distracted and worried about people finding out. My grandad can see this and says to me, “why don’t you go up to my room?” This is so I can hide the bucket full of blood. When I get upstairs, the bucket is almost completely clean, just some remnants, but anyone finding it wouldn’t know what had happened. Suddenly my aunt enters the room, and I kick the bucket under the bed to hide it. She talks to me urgently and intensely, I’m not sure what about, but I am distracted. Later, a miscarriage happens again, but even more intensely. This time I see a noticeable baby, small, long, pale blueish. I think I should call the hospital, but I don’t want to. I worry that it might be a medical emergency, but I am still resistant.”

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