The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 2 Carl Jung: The Bottom of Consciousness

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

The mystic who mapped the soul while America decided it was too scary https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-weird-history-of-psychotherapy-part-2-jungs-and-the-bottom-of-consciousness/ While Freud was projecting his trauma onto patients, Carl Jung made a radical discovery: There's a layer of mind beneath the personal unconscious that we all share. The collective unconscious. A realm of archetypes, myths, and healing wisdom that every culture discovers independently. But Jung's profound insights came at a cost. His confrontation with the unconscious nearly drove him mad. For years, he dialogued with inner figures, painted visions, and mapped territories of psyche that science still can't explain. He emerged with the most complete understanding of human consciousness ever developed.   The trial of Carl JHung Assesing his legacy Carl Jung's Work with the OSS Carl Jung's Shadow the Tension of the Oppposites Development of Carl Jung's Theories A Short Intro to Jungian Psych What does Mysticism have to do with therapy How did Freud and Jungs Parent Effect Their Psychology  Archetypes in Relationships What is Emotion The Trial of Carl Jung’s Legacy Carl Jung’s Work with The CIA How Psychotherapy Lost Its Way Ritual and Animism  Tensions in Modern Therapy Schizophrenia Trauma and the Double Bind Jung and the New Age Science and Mysticism Therapy, Mysticism and Spirituality? The Left and Right Hand Path in Myth The Shadow The Golden Shadow The Symbolism of the Bollingen Stone What Can the Origins of Religion Teach us about Psychology The Major Influences on Carl Jung Animals in Dreams The Unconscious as a Game How to Understand Carl Jung How to Use Jungian Psychology for Screenwriting and Writing Fiction How the Shadow Shows up in Dreams How to read The Red Book  The Dreamtime Using Jung to Combat Addiction Healing the Modern Soul Jungian Exercises from Greek Myth Jungian Shadow Work Meditation The Shadow in Relationships Free Shadow Work Group Exercise Post Post-Moderninsm and Post Secular Sacred Mysticism and Epilepsy The Origins and History of Consciousness Archetypes Jung’s Empirical Phenomenological Method      

If you would only let me, I could be a different version of your dad I'm twice as funny, and also twice as sad I know just what not to say, but it's a game you already know how to play Fan the flame and stoke the hay Bake the little figures from our clay You'll never know, dear, just quite what we did Hand in hand and don't you frown You and I are something like love Something of love

We can all be free, just don't look down If you can only let me I'll let you help me like you helped your mom I'll hold it against you but you can take that because you're strong Look at the stars loving what they are What are you love and what am I, eh? Where were we supposed to be? And oh Lord, love, ain't we far from that day? We ae locusts in the desert and lotus by the stream We chink the wood in the wind And tie our rafts in spring Another drink tastes like freedom But another drink won't set you free

Who are you love and who are we? Now that, that our parents set us free We wandered in the desert and we knelt by the stream We chink our cabins in the winter and tie our rafts in spring We forgot all the languages you taught us There was nothing there to say Instead we trace our symbols We learn the songs of lines in the sand You are bitter and broken You are constantly choking on bile

We are not yours, there is nothing to discuss You have many debts to pay We put your wall into a thimble Tattooed your names onto our heads We are outside the door now I have their hide and key You're sleeping on a pile of ill-gotten games But you will not forget our names Come back to your crib now We burn the SUV We alchemize your money

Nothing remains The old boroughs dances in the flames Come back to bed baby It's time to settle down Hush now little one Look at the stars H hush hush now sleep. 24,000 BCE give or take 4,000 years. A piece of neural tissue called the Procuneus begins to grow and it bridges objective perception and subjective experience for the first time in evolutionary history. This isn't about

intelligence. Dolphins are smart, octopi solve puzzles, they have intelligence in the limbs and their bodies similar to insects, and the Procuneus is the piece of the brain that forms in humans that makes different parts of the brain observe one another and it also makes them argue and the problem is it also makes them aware that they exist somewhere around this time 24,000 BCE to 22,000 BCE, highly probably, but give or take you know some stuff. Someone drops a the Venus of Villendorf, the piece of stone we call the Venus of Villendorf now, into probably water somewhere in France.

30,000 BC cave bears are going extinct because these annoying new things that start to resemble humans start crawling into their homes to do rituals and not really the easy parts of the caves to access either which you'd think that a cave is just like a house made of stone that people go into to live, but for some reason we didn't. We went into the parts of the caves that were deepest chambers, really hard to access sometimes like across chasms and things. We went to the places in caves that had the best acoustic resonance. Where when you painted things on the walls and you chanted and it echoed, it sort of made a psychedelic effect as the fire turned the pictures sort of alive and the echoes became something like I don't know, psilocybin probably does now. They are sort of the first churches and the Scandinavian ice sheet still covers

all of Europe. The Persian Gulf is dry land. It has cobalt blue lakes that look like jewels. Against the red sandstone there is no sand. And in this alien world someone drops a carved figure near Willendorf, the Venus of Willendorf. It's an obese and fertile goddess with her face hidden by braids or maybe a ritual mask. Some sort of texture. Why this is is up for debate. It's prehistory, so you kind of get to make things up as long as they don't violate things like carbon dating or archaeological discoveries You can sort of say why anyone did anything because no one was writing it down The Venus has no practical purpose. She's very large. She has big hips. She also has an exaggerated vulva or external vagina

She's got big breasts and Why the face is covered yeah, she's got big breasts, and why the face is covered, yeah there's debate. Scholar John Dominic Crisson would later write, ancient people told stories symbolically, and I'm not saying that we are now smart enough to decode these symbols, I'm saying that now we are stupid enough to take them literally he said that in quite a few talks and some of his books some variation of that The precuneus the piece of the brain that I start describing it had given us this problem. We could now perceive time Identity and sort of primitive morality like a deer doesn't know that it will die. We do

Joseph Campbell said of all religion that it is about tolerating guilt and shame and Jung would later call this the shadow the parts Of ourself that we can't really bear to acknowledge because they fill us with guilt and shame they're out modern therapy would say that they are things that are outside of our window of tolerance or what we can bear. But the problem with the precuneus is it made us aware of multiple things that had existed in the brain before for a long time. But now we could perceive them. There's a huge difference in perceiving information versus processing it. Before we had been processing information to act on things like

light and relational information about what other things like us were feeling or you know community the sort of the way that fish will react when they form a school they're not really thinking about what they're doing but they're aware of what the other fish do. The Procuneus bridged these subjective and objective networks in a way that became problematic because what it did was it let us know that these parts of the brain were there and it let them talk and it let them fight. And so when that happens, everything becomes a problem that has to be solved by something else like a religious sense of wholeness or a greater reality. Because even if I'm happy, I'm aware of time. I

may not be happy five minutes from now. I may not have been happy before. Why did that happen? It's not a good thing. You know, I'm aware of things like other people having an experience that's outside of myself and that experience may be being different from mine and maybe the things that I need are something that they don't want but I need them to give me which now makes me feel guilty and ashamed unless I repress it on and on and on. It makes networks of the brain that compete for the information that they prefer to process and the way that they prefer to process it now in communication with each other and these

networks had never really talked before. A million years later we get the Venus of Willendorf dropped into a puddle. Cut to Vienna 1909. Two men sit in a cafe. One is Sigmund Freud. He's kind of coked up, probably, and convinced that his sexual theories explain everything. The other one is Carl Jung, Freud assist mentor. And he's watching his mentor transform into everything that Carl Jung has been told by his mentor, Freud Freud that Freud opposes. Basically, Freud's becoming a religious zealot. He's saying, you were supposed to carry the fire against all of them. And Jung says, well, I'm a scientist. I'm trying to explore what works and what doesn't. And Freud says, no, you are going to create a bulwark. And Jung says to Freud,

a bulwark against what? And Jung is told by Freud, a bulwark against what and Jung is told by Freud a bulwark against all of the people who will tell you that this is not sexual that it is not about sexuality. Promise me Freud says that you will make sexuality the bulwark of psychoanalysis no matter what else is discovered and Jung is stunned. This atheist scientist is now demanding faith, not evidence, and so protection from occultists is what Jung, or Freud is accusing everyone else of being occultists, saying you have to believe this despite the evidence that may later emerge, and Jung is saying that sounds kind of like the occult. Jung would later get into the occult, that's an aside. Anyway,

Jung would later get into the occult, that's an aside. Anyway, he is watching Freud tell on himself by speaking in the language of a priest, not a scientist, and not even really an atheist, which is what Freud continued to maintain that he was. They had been arguing about a dream that Jung had at age 10. And in the dream Jung descends through a house. There's rococo furniture, but then slowly those modern trappings give away to medieval stone. And then underneath the medieval there is Roman walls, and then there is a cave that is filled with ancient skulls and pottery shards and layer after layer of history that is buried in the psyche. And Freud's interpretation of this dream is that like Jung wants to kill Freud as a father and then have sex with his mother, and Jung's

polite disagreement is that no, the dream I think means that there are evolutionary layers of the mind that are beneath the personal, that are beneath the thing that may have anger or resentment or even romantic attraction to your parents. I think there are things that are older. There is a collective unconscious that we all share. This is a split that will tear psychoanalysis apart until it becomes Freudian psychoanalysis and what we call depth psychology now. So cut back to Jung's childhood.

Here's what Freud never understood. Not everyone has the same father wound. Freud was watching his father be weak, be passive, fail to exemplify the warrior, fail to be the authority that Freud needed as a child, the powerful figure. And so Freud navigated to powerful figures that he made into father figures from ancient history until he could find some in life like brewer and fleece. And so Freud spent his whole life

trying to become this strong father and then destroying anyone who challenged his authority as that thing that was this impossible myth he was trying to be while he was also bleeding an atheist that didn't believe in mythology outside of some kind of reductionist metaphor to an edible complex or relationship with wanting to have sex with your mom and kill your dad. And so Jung's father was different.

Paul Jung was a Swiss pastor and he had lost his faith but he had to keep preaching to pay the bills. He felt guilty about this. It was sort of an open secret to anyone who knew him well. And he saw himself as a fraud. And Jung, Carl Jung, didn't want to kill his father. He wanted to save him. And so Jung develops this radical idea pretty early in his subconscious and then later it manifests in more of his literal mind through dreams and he makes it as a psychology to bring to his father as a gift. What if religion isn't literally true or false?

What if that's a binary that is one about a pre-scientific mind fighting with the modern science of the time mind and that there is sort of a third age where we transcend these things and see their real purpose as competing networks in the brain. They both have a place but neither one of them can define our humanity. And you would take Jung a lifetime to articulate something that sounded sort of like that. Other people later after Jung like Edinger would help him maybe flesh those ideas out, but I believe that's broadly what he was trying to say. And so if we claim we're not religious we just repress this religious function. And so like Freud who's turning atheism into a dogma and like a lot of people now that turn empiricism or science into a religion in

a way it can't function as that, you know, what is, there is a psychological inevitability to projection, to cosmology and how humans think. And Jung was comfortable with this in a way that Freud was not. Jung brings this gift that he makes to his father in order to save the father. He didn't want to kill or dethrone or discredit the father and replace him in the way that Freud did. He wanted to heal his father because he sensed his father's woundedness as a child and handled that father wound differently than Freud did handle his own. Freud couldn't really conceive of anybody being different from him which is why he reduces all of psychology based down to his own shadow. Unfortunately this gift doesn't work just as God has turned his back on Paul Jung, Jung's father, or

maybe Paul Jung has turned his back on God, depending on where you're standing, Paul Jung also turns his back on his son's gift and says, no, this is blasphemous. It's wrong. He can't see past his own failure and Jung trying to help him reconcile his lack of faith with a broader cosmology or psychology that might be inclusive of his doubt becomes a problem that only reminds him of his own shame. Later in the career after the split between Freud and Jung, Jung would probably, I think, write his theory of psychological types as a way of apologizing to Freud so that the father figure could maybe have a different

experience than Paul Jung did and see some kernel of truth in his son's attempt to apologize and reconcile both modes of thinking. Freud never takes him up on this offer that he makes by publishing this work when they're no longer in contact, but Freud is definitely reading everything that Jung writes in order to talk shit about it. So if Jung knows that he read it, Freud doesn't take him up on his offer of agree to disagree, compromise, broader psychology, any more than his father did. Jung was fundamentally alone for the rest of his life. He has disciples who like what he's doing. He likes a couple of them. He never really finds a father figure after Freud except maybe in what he writes in the Red Book. But I'm not trying to talk

too much about Jung. I'm not trying to presuppose that you know too much about him. So I'll just go back to this dream sequence that Jung has about God. Jung, as a kid, he's marveling at this beautiful cathedral. It's golden, it's ornate, it's perfect. And he wonders what kind of God could live in such a cage. It must be this wonderful God that is contained

in this brilliant cathedral that Jung is seeing, you know, presumably in the way the dream is written, you know, from above, you know, he's looking at it from the side, you know, outside of it, and all of a sudden the clouds part, and then a big ass comes out of the clouds, presumably God's ass, and turds rain from heaven and they destroy the church. They smash the gilded windows,

they smash all of these things, and Jung sort of feels in his dream like the ass pole of God is saying, I don't live here, I'm bigger than this, I shit upon it, and God is saying, this golden literalism is not where I live. I am this living process inside of you. I am bigger than the church, which remains a controversial idea. So cut to the Vienna Cafe. Cut back to, rather. Jung mentions this museum is advertising mummy exhibits, like we talked about in the first episode, the bog bodies. And in his dreams, these mummies symbolize

how archetypal contents lie dead, but preserved in the unconscious, you know. And Freud gasps, and he turns white, and he faints to the floor. And Jung's like, are you okay? Freud doesn't make a counterargument. They're not in a fight, because remember, Freud can't stand up to anybody.

He can't assert himself against anybody. He's a very passive aggressive person. He usually agrees with people to their face and then talk shit about them behind their back or he is sycophantic like in the Letter to Fleece and then later he says like, oh no, no, no. But, you know, oh no, no no no he i actually don't like him and cuts people off anyway we went through that in the first one but remember Jung doesn't

want to kill the father he wants to transcend the father he wants to build bridges between the science and the soul between the measure and the numinous and Freud is terrified of his own unconscious religiosity because it's repressed and he can only see this as betrayal because this is not his idea and so Jung is failing to be the perfect son by making him the perfect father and so Freud just faints. The breaking point comes when Jung publishes The Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912 and Freud engineers his expulsion from the psychoanalytic movement. Jung enters what he calls his confrontation with the unconscious, or he would in hindsight a period of near psychosis, arguably contained psychosis, where Jung is afraid that he is going so mad after being

abandoned by two fathers that he's going to develop schizophrenia. So he tries to contain these psychotic explorations to a time where he writes what would later be called the Red Book, and his attic, after working all day, is a fairly successful and sane doctor. He's a compartmentalized person. He's definitely neurodivergent. Exactly what that autism spectrum would look like is up for debate, He's definitely neurodivergent.

Exactly what that autism spectrum would look like is up for debate, but Jung has an ability to compartmentalize these things in a way that he realizes is abnormal. He doesn't want the Red Book to be a method that everyone else heals. He wants it to be a way that he gains wisdom into perennial philosophy and mystical traditions and the history of psychology And an encounter with the shadow in a way that could inform mainstream psychoanalytic practice Because he wants to be braver than Freud after giving up on saving the father Jung decides to save himself And so instead of repressing these visions like Freud would have and did, Jung does something radical. He descends into them. He records them. He paints them. The red book is beautiful.

There's dialogues within our figures like inner being inside of Jung's own head and psyche. Elijah, Solomé, Philemon. And this isn't madness, it's method. On this journey, Jung discovers that the personal unconscious that Freud mapped when he says that emotion, you know, contains the real motivation for reality, for society, for people, is just the top layer. But beneath that lies this collective unconscious, and there's patterns and there's images that are shared by all of humanity. Jung famously stumbled across the early proto, you know, what would become the theory of archetypes when he's working with patients that have schizophrenia and are largely alcoholic and uneducated in

Vienna and he realizes these people never were taught anything about the mythology that I know. One of the things that makes Jung such an effective psychologist, or I don't even want to say effective, but transcending, integrative, vast in his thought is that he's incredibly over-educated. He speaks a ton of languages, he has people like Frans Frans like translate languages that he doesn't speak for him so they can still enter his thought. He knows about anthropology, he knows about philosophy, he knows about psychology in a way that everyone else working in his field doesn't, and it still makes Jungian therapy

and Jung himself a language that is very hard to speak. But what he notices is that these people who are schizophrenic, who might say today, or they have schizophrenia, they're also alcoholic, they're largely uneducated. They don't have any formal training. They don't even speak their native language well, let alone other languages. They don't know how to read, let alone read mythology from ancient Greece or Persia. But what he sees in their psychosis are myths that he's familiar with. So if you're dreaming about a bull mating with the sun, when you're dreaming about Zoroastrianism or Lucidian mystery cults, then these things might not be coming from your direct experiences in life. They may be coming from some sort of evolutionary history

that is universal. There may be something that links mythology together. It's no secret that like Jungian psychotherapy becomes like the root of what would later become something like comparative religion. And even though some of those parallels in religion are overblown, because religion also does have a personal and cultural layer, Jung is one of the first people to make this distinction even though people like Joseph Campbell, people like Elie de Merche, Victor Turner, sometimes even Robert Moore don't give Jung credit for a lot of the ideas that they come up with themselves. But for Freud, the unconscious

was just this sewer where we repressed lust, where we repress the aggression that was tied to sexual attraction in Freud's mind. But for Jung, it is this wellspring of creativity, healing, meaning. The goal is not to conquer, but it is to relate to it. Because if we relate to it, it does not become separate from us, and if it is not separate from us, it no longer controls us. So not repression, but integration becomes the point of Jungian therapy. To integrate with the unconscious, we get all of these archetypes, the hero, the mother, the shadow, the self, and all of the relationships between them. The relationship between the shadow and the self, or the ego-self access, could become

something like the process of making meaning or of knowing God depending on the language you're speaking, the tradition that you're in. So why does this matter now? Jung saw scientific objectivity and religious subjectivity as both half truths. They were ways of looking at the same problem by collecting different information. He didn't see one is right and one is wrong. And to repress this religious impulse or transcendental impulse, transcendental function as you would say, you become unconsciously religious like Freud was becoming. You repress this, if you repress the logical side then you

become this kind of, I don't know, theosophical, or we would call now like new age narcissist that's floating on fantasies. Jung makes fun of a lot of the stuff associated with him now. When he's talking about what would become later the New Age movement, he's like, well, when you have a bunch of people being like, oh, that's energy. What does that have to do with psychology that is theoretically useless? So he doesn't really like a lot of the empty language, but he does have a

rigorous, or as rigorous as you can, objective method for studying subjective experience. Something like perennial philosophy. Yes, like, I can't specifically, you know, in a test tube say that there's a relationship between different types of myth, but when I find people who are all around the world that stumble across the same ideas over and over again, and they're separated by time, they're separated by distance, there is no influence between them, yet they hit on the same archetypes and the same ideas, then I know that that has something to do with

psychology because in a semi objective way, I'm collecting independent data on people studying the same thing. However, you can't do a research study across, you know, a million years. So there will be a subjective element to the objectivity that Jung is trying to apply to something like psychology and objectivity that Jung is trying to apply to something like psychology and mythology, a fight that the profession is still having or not having to this day. Even though if you encounter Jung at all, people are likely to just kind of say he's a weirdo that believes in archetypal collective unconscious. If you get anything, you know, people will say, oh, he's the guy that believed in a collective unconscious now moving on in your psychology 101 class. If you get more, people are either going to bastardize him and turn him into something like weird and Nietzschean like Jordan Peterson does, or they're more likely going to turn him into kind of the guy that was

sort of right about some things that we use like the MBTI, but then he became obsessed with alchemy and pseudoscience. None of those things is really who Jung was, and to have a conversation about who any of these people are would be multiple episodes, and I'm not writing a biography, I'm writing a biography of psychology with these. So modern neuroscience, suffice it to say, proves Jung right a lot of the time. Look up somebody like Ozaniga, like Joseph LeDoux, like Antonio de Masio, like a million others. You know, LeDoux's research shows how trauma bypasses language. De Masio maps the kind of being, feeling,

knowing progression that Jung intuited that was a lot of the way that the brain phenomenologically evolved to work and then later encountered different parts of itself that were previously separate networks and then had to solve that problem through integration, which is the point of Jungian psychology, which has recently entered biology. But anyway, I've recorded episodes where I defend the way that people write off Jung's ideas while also taking credit for them in modern neurology,

a whole lot, I want to digress about that now. Now, Gazaniga has this idea, or not idea, you know, these case studies that demonstrate this split brain phenomenon, where networks of the brain are not inherently biological. Different networks in the brain can move to other structural bits, so to study the brain structurally is not really right because pieces of the brain prefer to think a certain way.

But if you just cut it in half or cut those things off, those networks will move around. They will colonize like other parts of biological, this biological computer that are supposed to do one thing. But when it realizes that it doesn't have access to that anymore because you cut pieces of it off, it will move consciousness into areas and colonize networks of the brain that weren't designed structurally to do a certain thing and then force it to do those things, which is fascinating and also probably a longer episode. But if you understand the implications of that, and if you don't look it, because those books are great, they're not hard to read, um, Michael Gazniga, Joseph Ledoux, Antonio Damasio, read those if you want to get into some of the neurobiological implications of these things. But, like, what they do is validate a lot of the things that Jung felt. And Jung is written off because people are like, you can't do science by feeling shit. Well, it turns out you can, because

he continues to be right Even though there's a lot of weird things about him and even though there's a lot of places where he was wrong You can create it as one researcher said, you know the best Non-reductive lens with the least superfluous parts to understand modern consciousness But America can't really handle that as TS Eliot said consciousness. But America can't really handle that. As T.S. Eliot said, humans can understand a little bit of reality at a time. They can tolerate a little bit of life, a little bit of understanding, but not all of it at once. Jung warned America about a hero myth. You know, it's dangerous to be special. It's dangerous

to manifest destiny. It's also inevitable and we should understand it as a part of our psychology, but if you over identify with any of the archetypes they destroy you by cutting you off from the rest of the archetypes that are also you. They get repressed and then go into your shadow and then hugely projected. When Jung's ideas hit American shores, it's the 50s and two things terrified the culture at that time. The idea that we might be more than what we can control by achieve, you know, objectively, taste, touch, measure. And then also that we're all religious whether we admit it or not. All of those things were sort of not compatible with the 1950s culture that wanted you to only be what was in your bank account,

what you could afford, what you could commodify, what you could objectify, and also the idea that you could be religious or not by like converting to a religion We didn't really want to think about religion in a way Like it was a function of the brain that was helping us make meaning and stay sane Or go insane We wanted religion to just be this sort of country club that we went to to like eat potluck chicken and talk about whatever Social group we went to to like eat potluck chicken and talk about whatever social group we chose to join and Americans wanted the unconscious to be conquerable.

Jung said it's a dance partner. Americans wanted archetypes to be literal. Jung said they're metaphors. Americans wanted individuation to be a product and Jung said it's a lifelong process not a destination and not a thing that you can go out and buy. As Edward Daigler said we cannot perceive what we canonize and the citizen secures himself from wisdom with an icon. We can wear a giant cross while we carjack a car. A mega-jurch pastor who's worth tens of millions of dollars can tell you that Jesus wants you to bomb the Middle East. There's like an entire like long tradition of Americans saying that there was a Bronze Age Jewish Socialist who wants you to do whatever we do now. What does religion even mean at that point through those interpretive lenses? Again, to go back to the John Dominic Crissan quote, what he will end his talks with when

he explains, this is John Dominic Crissan, the scholar, when he explains what these mystery cults meant, what mythology means, the functions that these served in ancient society, he'll say, I am not saying that these people did these things and took them literally, and we're now smart enough to understand them symbolically. What I am saying is that these people did these things as metaphors and understood them symbolically, and we are now stupid enough to take them literally. So people attack Jung still, you know, for being unscientific, you know, that you can't... but all of the ideas that are part of what later would become, you know, cognitive behavioral or like empirically based therapy are also metaphors that you can't put into a test tube either. Go ahead and suck your self-esteem out with a syringe and see how much you have.

You can't prove that a green light represents Daisy in The Great Gatsby. You can infer it because it's right. Therapy deals in metaphors and metaphors heal. The metaphors are inevitable in the way that we need to make meaning, but they're also scary to science because they aren't something that can be objectively proved. The nasin xb in the commercial for like nose cleaner, not cleaner what's it called, decongestant when I was a kid, the b would pop onto the screen it had this kind of antonanderas like voice and it would like tell you that when you had allergies from pollen you should go buy this nasal

decongestion and at the end the bee would read all of the side effects and one of the side effects that the bee would read really fast in the 90s when I was a kid was unfortunately we do not to completely understand why nasal necks works. Same with antidepressants, Same with Jungian analysis. We know it works but we can't always measure the way that it works. We know something works but we can't prove why. The discovery comes after the mechanism of action and when you're dealing with antipsychotics, when you're dealing or not antipsychotics, antidepressants or cancer drugs, you can usually figure out like why it is that the

mechanism of action works, like what enzyme in the liver is doing a thing, what is inhibiting cell growth. When you're dealing with psychology, you can't always prove why it works with a direct mechanism of action, but you still can prove that it does, which is again a fight that we're still having. Jung writes, know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul, just be another human soul. He also writes, of course there are places

where my theories contradict. I am making a system of mirrors to reflect the central fire back at you so that you can perceive its light. However, there are places where the mirrors overlap and there are gaps between the mirrors. Not everything that he says is consistent and it wasn't supposed to be because it's a metaphor for complex systems of cognition. And if you approach Jung like a philosopher, a logical positivist, you know, philosopher, and you're like, I'm going to listen

to all of his philosophical suppositions and then I'm going to try and disprove them then you are killing him you do not understand what he's trying to say so go read something else like go talk about if that's the kind of philosophy that you want to do like well in the Parmenides here's the six steps to disprove Plato's theory of forms like go do that diagram arguments and then become a lawyer don't become a psychotherapist dear God please but anyway fast forward to the 1960s the CIA starts dosing people with LSD because they're looking for the secrets of consciousness these ideas that Jung has kicked off about the limitless nature of the mind and how

deep it might go and what it might connect to metaphysically have reached America and they're in the culture whether or not people know their mind and how deep it might go and what it might connect to metaphysically have reached America and they're in the culture. Whether or not people know their influences, Jung is a lot of their influences. Timothy Leary preaches to tune in and turn on and drop out and Fritz Perls develops Gestalt therapy. Wilhelm Reich is doing what would later become you know bio-energetics, somatic work. Everyone is trying to crack this code that Jung pointed towards, how to access the deeper layers of psyche without going insane, and also without trying to pretend that we, in our consciousness, is just a product of natural selection. Even if that is its origin, it was not its destination.

And so some will succeed spectacularly, some will fail catastrophically, a lot of it will be very weird, most of it will be forgotten, and some poor souls will end up believing that they were raised by Satanists in Victoria, but that's another episode. So, final shot. Look at Jung at 80. He looks into the camera in his BBC interview and he says, In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into a transitory one. All of their memories have lost importance by comparison. The tragedy isn't that we fell from Eden when consciousness emerged. The tragedy is that we keep trying to go back instead of feeling our way forward. Jung knew the same precunius that kicked us out is the only bridge

home and the way that you make these networks fight is not by picking, the way that you solve the fight between the networks that make up consciousness and the brain is not by picking a side and killing the opposing side. It is about sitting with the tension of the opposites until a new paradox, a new religious and transcendental paradox, emerges that helps us synthesize the contradictions in the way that we think. However, those would have required America to sit with something that it is bad at sitting with because people are bad at sitting with this thing. Uncertainty. We need systems that make us know that we are doing it the right way, even if deep down we know that we are not.

As David Tasey would point out in his book Jung and the New Age, the applications of Jungian psychology were largely distortions or superficial extensions of Jungian thought. They favored American positivity, avoidance, emotional avoidance or emotional enmeshment, consumerism, and simplified spiritual ideas. While Jung's original thought contained deep and complex, inclusive, culturally sensitive, and ethically grounded ideology, what largely would become associated with him, or would become endemic by people who didn't even really remember what they were aping, Jung provided something for America that marketed the capitalist system to generate profit through commodified spirituality and a largely avoidant psychotherapy. Jung's psychology would become

more associated with people who wanted to have magic powers than people who wanted to deal with their own shadow or seek a greater knowledge through his or awareness through his methods. And we would never do the thing that he had warned us the most strongly about, dealing with the hero myth in ourselves, confronting things like the prophet motive, confronting the ego and the empires that go along with it. And especially projection of a go along with it. An especially projection of a father myth of the perfect set of hierarchy and authority. Either a vision of the future that could not yet be, that was the good father with all of the power and all of the punishment, or as ourselves as long-suffering children who had to try and reform and participate in corrupt institutions. But of course while we enable them and also

refuse to stop carrying water for their worst parts enough to change anything in order to try and be the long-suffering son who would heal the father, none of these were ever dealt with. None of these let us go inward. None of us let none of them let us manifest personal power in the way that Jung was calling for individuals to do. Buckle up and get ready for the American spiritual revolution. It was just a but-da but he still saw that you called God be in me, God be in me Let the one be, let the one be God be in me, God be in me Let the one be K.K.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh 3D Labyrinth Celeste Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Meet me in God, meet me in God Let the one be, let the one be Meet me in God, meet me in God Let the one be KK! Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Let the one be Let the one be Abel took his sheep to the altar right after Cain But her name was Dolly so you might see her again

Let God be, let God be Let the one be Starbucks, Apple, Versace Let the one be, let the one be Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Let the one be, let the one be Let me be