Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?

Starting point is 00:00:00 I was blown away. Jung said, you are symbols. And they say, we are real and we are not symbols. This is Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation was about the phenomenal connection between the Red Books of Carl Jung and the lesser-known Red Books of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Starting point is 00:00:18 Tolkien is describing the Eye of Sauron, and Jung is describing what he calls the Eye of the Evil One. On this channel, I. Kurchai Mungal, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. I'm thrilled to bring you this master class in the intersection between Jung and Tolkien. It sounds insane.

Starting point is 00:00:36 We touch on archetypes, symbols, the shadow, and even psychedelic experiences, how they can feel real, but... Then we kind of dismiss it. It was just a fantasy. It was just something I made up. It's much more subtle. How do we know what to integrate something

Starting point is 00:00:51 versus let something go? Jung would say that one has to be careful because it can take you too far away from reality. Professor, what did you discover about Jung and Tolkien? Well, the story begins, in some ways the story could begin when I was nine years old and first encountered Tolkien's work. It was the Hobbit was read to me when I was in fourth grade and I was deeply captivated by this story. I was having these experiences as a child where the names in the story were bringing forward this sense of memory, but a memory of something that I didn't actually have.

Starting point is 00:01:37 So I'd hear names like Rivendell or Dale or Merkwood. I thought, this sounds so familiar. I feel like I've been here. And I was completely fascinated with Tolkien's stories. And several years later read The Lord of the Rings and had just a... a fully immersive experience in reading Tolkien's work. And as a teenager, I actually was having these experiences where I felt like, you know, I was living my normal teenage life. And at the same time, I felt overlaid in some ways with a kind of imaginable immersive experience in

Starting point is 00:02:14 Middle Earth. And I didn't think too much about it at the time. I was young enough that this was just kind of how life was unfolding. And as I got older, I tried to set Tolkien aside, not in any kind of, you know, strict way, but just thinking, you know, it's time to grow up, it's time to move on. And then in 2009, Carl Jung's Red Book was published. And I think I first encountered it in the New York Times spread that was done on the Red Book. And I thought, this looks really familiar. And there were two reasons it felt familiar. One, the title, the red book, aligned with something in Tolkien's work. And in the context of Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, the story is written down in a book that's passed on from generation to generation called the Red Book of Westmarch.

Starting point is 00:03:10 And so I thought, oh, a Red Book, a Red Book, that's quite interesting. And, And the other thing was when I actually got my hands on a copy of the red book, I felt like these illustrations look a lot like Tolkien style of illustrations. And so at first I just thought, those are some interesting parallels. There's a red book and a red book. The style of the illustrations are similar. But then I began to dive more deeply into it and realize that there were these parallels and timing between when Jung went through his red book period. started in 1913, where he began having these immersive visionary experiences, these fantasies that he started working with using the practice of active imagination. And then he started recording those experiences. And there was a parallel with the younger Tolkien's life. This was before he'd ever written any of his stories, but he had a sketchbook that he called the Book of Ishness. And there's not much explanation with the drawings in the Book of Ishness. They just have

Starting point is 00:04:16 really kind of evocative titles like silent, enormous and immense, or beyond. We'll overlay some of those images on screen for the viewers to see. Oh, perfect. That'll be wonderful. Yeah. So with those images in the Book of Ischnus, he was doing them at the same time that Young was recording his experiences. And it was out of doing those drawings. And then in the following few years, Tolkien began to write the first stories of Middle Earth. And, you know, these are precursors to what would become the Lord of the Rings, but there were all these different tales that he wrote down. And what I began to find reading Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's legendaryum of Middle Earth

Starting point is 00:05:03 in tandem with each other was more and more of these parallels came forward, parallels in not just timing and imagery, but in story pattern, in figures who were parallel between the two. And this started me down a road of wondering, well, what does this mean? What does this indicate? What does this tell us about the nature of the human psyche or the nature of the imagination? Where does this material come from? So that was the beginning of exploring the connection. And then I went on to write my doctoral dissertation on it. And which of these rhymes is most difficult to explain?

Starting point is 00:05:43 In what sense? Which is too much of a parallel for some skeptic or someone hearing that's just saying, oh, these are just coincidences. I mean, any two books have a variety of connections and disconnections. Yeah, that's a good question. I think any one of them on their own can be explained. It's the sheer volume. So when we look at the similarity in how they each drew a red eye, for example, on the one hand, Tolkien is describing the eye of Sauron, and Jung is describing what he calls the eye of the evil one in the context of the red book. And those parallels are just like, why are they talking about the eye of the evil one? Why this connection between the eye, which is so symbolic.

Starting point is 00:06:34 of many different things and evil. Now, some of this can be explained, of course, using a theory of archetypes along the lines of what Jung was doing. You know, we can see this with parallels between Tolkien's character of Gandalf, the wise old man, the wizard, and Jung's idea of psychological archetypes and the archetypal figure of the wise old man, who first came to Jung as, Philemon, this figure in the Red Book, who very much acted as a guide for Jung. He called him as guru, or he kind of made that type of connection, this inner figure who guided him. And so on the one hand, we can see, okay, well, they seem to both have this archetypal figure standing behind them of the wise old man. But then when we get into the text, there's even more parallels between them,

Starting point is 00:07:32 just in how they appear, how they talk to the figures that they're in relationship to, whether that's Philimon and Jung, or Gandalf and other characters in the Lord of the Rings or in the Hobbit. So I think for me, what became quite compelling about it, that it wasn't just mere coincidence or that they're drawing only on external sources that are inspiring to them is, again, the sheer number of parallels. And then also the way they each speak about the experiences. Because, you know, Tolkien, for example, will acknowledge the many different myths and legends and stories

Starting point is 00:08:16 that inspired him and his writing. Jung was extremely well educated in terms of mythology, religion, folklore, and so forth. So there's a lot of kind of parallel external influence on them, but they're describing their experiences as coming from within. So Jung is having these experiences through the practice of what he calls active imagination. Tolkien is not as explicit as Jung is talking about his process. Makes sense. Jung is a psychologist. He's interested in what stands behind the vision-making capacity. Tolkien is a little bit more veiled in how he talks about

Starting point is 00:09:00 it, but he often says he never felt like he was inventing his stories. He felt like they arose within him as given and that as those would come, they already existed somewhere. That's how he described it, that there was this place somewhere that they existed. And then he would write them down and as he would write them and rework the stories, the links between them would grow. So they're both speaking about something that's emerging from within them. something that's emerging internally. And that was another thing that I found quite compelling between the two of them was that not only are these parallels and images and figures and timing, but they're speaking about their experiences in a somewhat comparable way, that it's not just,

Starting point is 00:09:48 oh, I'm simply making this up, I'm coming up with a story. There's something internal happening there. And that was ultimately what I found most interesting, was compelling about it. One of the largest debates among mathematicians in the philosophy of math is whether math is being discovered, that's like Platonism, versus created by us. So are you referencing something similar when you say that it has been emerged inside, or is that a third? It's neither created nor discovered. I would say that it's a third. and this idea that the agency is neither just within the human being who is making the discovery or within what has being discovered or disclosed, but there's a kind of co-creation or a participation

Starting point is 00:10:39 between the two. So I would say that it's a third in the sense that you're describing that, you know, for example, with mathematics, which is not an area of expertise for me, but I think the way you're describing that is quite parallel to this, that there's something real there about the nature of the world that is being uncovered, but it's not being uncovered in a fully objective sense. It's being enacted. It's being called forth by the mathematician or by the author or the artist or whomever is engaging with it, that we have an agential role to play in that relationship. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Can you walk the audience through what it means to experience something within? Now, it's not so intuitive. We close our eyes and we feel something within. But as Tolkien meant it that he was discovering something within versus without. So what is that? Your eyes open versus close. Give an intuition, please, if you don't mind. Yeah, I will.

Starting point is 00:11:40 It is a tricky thing to describe. And at the same time, it's one of the most innate things as well. And actually, I will say in my study of imagination, I've learned a lot of my own biases around what I think imagination is. So the term imagination, first of all, is rooted in the word image. So we would often think of, okay, the imagination is image-based. But what I've learned over the years of teaching on imagination, on the practice of active imagination,

Starting point is 00:12:11 is that some people have what's called aphantasia. They don't see internal images. other people see them so vividly it's like being fully immersed in another world so i want to kind of keep that spectrum in mind as i'm saying this um but imagination or turning inward can it's probably easier with eyes closed we could start with that um because then you're blocking off the external stimulus that comes in through your your visual sight and for a lot of people what happens when you close your eyes and just allow your consciousness to open, kind of entering into what I would call a daydream or a reverie state, often just images will spontaneously start to come up within

Starting point is 00:13:05 ones, I don't want to say mind, because I think mind is a little bit more narrow and specific related to cognition to thinking, imagination is more broadly connected to psyche. And so you allow just something to bubble up through the psyche and observe it. And often what emerges will be what seems like random images, things that don't feel connected. For some people, it can be as simple as kind of blurry colors that might feel correlated with their emotions. For others, it might be flashes of memory. Those again might be kind of blurry. And then for others still, they might be crystal clear, as though you're watching a film within yourself. And for other, you know, such as Jung, they might be so clear and multidimensional that you can step right into the drama itself surrounding you. Jung, I think, was a little bit more rare in that totally immersive capacity. And what I've, gotten the sense of from Tolkien is that he might have been similar to. But for others, that inner experience can take the form more of something auditory. You know, you can hear inner voices or words,

Starting point is 00:14:27 not in the sense that we mean when we describe, say, you know, schizophrenia or something, I'm hearing voices that feel separate for me or commanding me to do something, but just simply a voice or a narrative. And here's the part where it's very tricky to describe and you have to be really honest with yourself is, and what I am experiencing something that I, my individual, kind of egoic self, am coming up with in the moment, or is it coming somehow from beyond me? am I aware of this not being sourced in myself? And I think that's a very tricky demarcation line to hold because our ego or mind or thoughts, they come in all the time.

Starting point is 00:15:18 It's very similar to practicing meditation of kind of learning to observe our thoughts and them wondering, well, who's the witness here? But instead of that process of emptying that we see in so many meditation practices, it's more of a process of allowing something to emerge and being present with it, allowing images to emerge or words or colors and so forth. So, but that difference I think is really important when it feels like, oh, am I cognitively coming up with something or making something up? Or is something genuinely coming through me that I've never encountered before?

Starting point is 00:15:57 And Jung would describe this, again, going to, back to Philomong, this figure within the Red Book, whom he encountered, who acted as a guide, he said, Philimon knew things that I never knew, that I couldn't know. And that's when he was able to realize this is something that is separate from him, not completely autonomous, separate in that sense, but something that is not just a sub-personality of C.G. Young. not a facet of him only, but something that he's come into relationship with internally instead of externally.

Starting point is 00:16:37 What's the relationship between this imaginable realm and lucid dreams, or just dreams? Oh, I like that parallel because I think it is a really valuable one. The parallels I would want to draw are with dreaming, we would consider kind of the regular dreams of sleep were, of course, asleep. And it seems as though the unconscious is expressing itself in that state.

Starting point is 00:17:11 But we are not engaged within it in a conscious way. We're just simply kind of carried along, witnessed to it, part of it, but not aware that we're in a dream. And I think that that's parallel in the waking state to something like daydream or reverie. You know those moments where you're lying on the couch or you're bored or you have a moment to yourself, which it feels like we have less and less of these days. And something just kind of passively moves through you. And you kind of bear witness to it. You don't really engage with it. It's kind of a fantasy that's emerging.

Starting point is 00:17:51 Well, that would be one parallel I would draw. And then the other parallel I would draw would be between lucid dreaming, where one awakens within the dream, but you're still asleep, but your consciousness is awake. You go, oh, I'm here. I'm in a dream. And a parallel between that and what Young called active imagination. So active imagination, being this practice of consciously evoking the fantasies and then entering into them, engaging with them, speaking with what or who emerges, and participating in it. That's like a waking version of lucid dreaming.

Starting point is 00:18:31 But we're awake instead of a sleep. So I think it's our level with lucid dreaming and active imagination, it's our level of consciousness and active engagement that is the key part. Whereas the other two, kind of daydream or reverie and

Starting point is 00:18:47 natural dreaming of sleep are more just the unconscious emerging through us. I prepare extensively often for months for a single podcast If you notice that we go into detail, ask questions that are in depth, or that the conversation is technical. Part of the reason is that I use 11 labs to transcribe my own notes, and then as I'm going for a walk or as I'm outdriving, I listen to my own notes back to me, read with a natural voice, so that I can prepare by hearing from different perspectives. Actually, even right now, if you click the subtitles, you'll notice the quality is increased.

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Starting point is 00:21:11 Head to Economist.com slash Toe, T-O-E, to subscribe. That's economist.com slash T-O-E for 50% off the annual subscription. When I was practicing Transcendental Meditation, after doing it for 45 minutes, it takes a long time to get to the state. I would get to a state that was much like lucid dreaming, but it's extremely difficult. I developed a technique, which I can tell you about another time, if you like, about lucid dreaming, because I can have lucid dreams relatively straightforwardly and one after the other, almost five or six in a row. Are there methods that you guide other people through to actively imagine. What is the protocol here? So I actually did develop a method of guiding others into

Starting point is 00:21:59 the practice of active imagination. And I put it together by gleaning what Jung wrote in his, there's a book actually called Young on Active Imagination that's edited by a scholar named Joan Chodoro. And it's only about, you know, probably just over half an inch thick. And it's, a, it's basically a compilation of everything that Young wrote on active imagination. So drawn from his books, some letters, some lectures. It's surprising how little he wrote on it, considering it's so central to his work, to how he worked with his patients, actually, that he would support his patience in the practice of active imagination. And so basically, basically, on everything I could find that Jung said about active imagination, I wanted to develop a way to

Starting point is 00:22:58 guide students and to guide workshop practitioners into a kind of easy, preliminary form of active imagination. I wouldn't say that this is the deepest form one can engage in in the way, again, that Jung was or that he was doing with his patients or someone who's doing this regularly. But, and the first time I brought this to a workshop, I was terrified that this wouldn't work. You know, I thought, I want to give people an experience of active imagination. I want them to have a sense of what I'm talking about with Jung and Tolkien, but I have no idea. And so it was really truly a leap of faith when I brought this practice in, guided participants first to kind of like Yoga Nidra, kind of moving through their bodies, becoming really aware of the state of their body and then letting it go, allowing themselves to physically relax.

Starting point is 00:23:52 And then I wanted something that would both be kind of like a guidepost, but not too suggestive, and would just invite them first to attune to their emotions and be present with whatever emotion was there. and then just simply to allow that emotion to transform within them. And this is something that Jung also said, if you hold an image in your inner sight, in your imagination, it will move. This is the extraordinary thing that it won't stay still. If you just allow, you could even take,

Starting point is 00:24:30 he had one patient who couldn't do active imagination at all. And he finally, he saw an image of a landscape, that was in a train station on a poster. And he thought, you know, it kind of depicted a hill with a path going around it. He thought, I want to see what's on the other side of that hill. And so just by holding that static image internally, he was then able to go up the path and behind the hill

Starting point is 00:24:56 and discover what was there. And it was the first time he'd actually been able to engage with the practice. And so sometimes I'll encourage people, start with an image that you've seen. Maybe it's an image from a dream. again, maybe it's an emotion and you allow it to take a particular visual form within you. All those are good starting places. And then I will guide people through kind of inviting that forward. What colors do you see? Is a shape emerging? Is there a landscape around? Is, you know, what does it

Starting point is 00:25:27 feel like? What does it smell like? Do you hear anything? And so I'll do it with questions. Again, try not to really lead, but to have something naturally emerge. And often for people, what will emerge is some kind of a figure, whether humanoid or animal or some other kind, and then they engage in conversation with them. And so I'll invite them, you know, to ask if this being has anything to say. They may have to lend their voice to this emerging figure. So I have that practice. It's quite short. It's probably only lasts about 15 to 20 minutes. And then I'll guide people back out again, coming back into their bodies, kind of grounding in. And then there's a multi-stage way of kind of bringing it back out. So first, I have the participants draw what they've experienced. And for a lot of people, that seems to continue the experience. If they're not talking with anyone else, they just sit down with. a big sheet of paper and, you know, oil pastels or something really simple like that, carry it further. And then I'll ask them to write it down, which is a little bit more concrete,

Starting point is 00:26:43 a little more objectified. And then I'll ask them to get into small groups, discuss it with three other people, and then finally we share it in the larger group. And as I said, the first time I did this, I thought, I have no idea if anything's going to happen. And I was blown away, it was a group of maybe 35, 40 people, every single person had an experience. Wow. And a potent experience. And some people were crying and finding resolution to things that they had been struggling with. And this just, it amazed me because clearly it wasn't me doing it. I was just holding the container. And what it felt like, and every time I've done this since with

Starting point is 00:27:26 students in my classes, with workshop participants. Again, it's the same thing where there's this sense of amazement that something even happens. You know, people aren't taking a psychedelic. They're not, you know, engaging in a really long practice. It's as though if we just create the right container and space for the psyche to speak, it wants to so badly. And if we allow that and create a way to engage it and then bring it back into this realm, there's really extraordinary gifts that can emerge. So that's the way that I developed to work with it. And I wouldn't say it's the only way. I wouldn't say it's a strict kind of Jungian way either, because again, I just kind of pieced it together based on my own experiences, based on what I read of Jung's and hoped it worked and then

Starting point is 00:28:22 have since refined it as I've worked with more people around that. what is it that separates those who experience it tremendously? You mentioned preliminary and not going deep. I'm curious about why not go deep, but we'll get to that. So what is it that separates those who actually go deep when you're trying to make it preliminary versus those who don't? Is this something like trait openness or is it just that you gave them permission? So they feel foolish, their irrational mind is trying to say, don't engage in this,

Starting point is 00:28:49 but now you've licensed this practice to them. What is it? Yeah. I think, you know, I would, that would be a really interesting study to do to kind of get in greater depth with the participants. The ones where I get the best kind of feedback around that are students who I'm working with for a whole semester because I just get to know them better. And what's interesting is one piece you brought up is really important when that critical faculty, the mind kind of keeps jutting in and saying, well, this is ridiculous. or nothing's going to happen or something's going to happen for everyone else but not for me. And I found a very interesting split between people where that's very dominant. For some of them, it does really get in the way and they struggle. And somehow for others, the ones who are most skeptical or the most like, this isn't going to work for me,

Starting point is 00:29:44 somehow it bursts through anyway. And I'm not sure why that is exactly. Maybe it's because for some of those people where the mental critical faculty is so dominant, the psyche is just kind of waiting to speak. Whereas with others, that interruption still becomes too strong. So there is a repressive effect. But I actually have found that it's for some of those people where there's that initial sense of, no, this isn't going to work for me or it's going to work for everybody else, that they, do end up having a very powerful experience, as though the psyche is saying, oh, finally, you're listening to me or you're finally giving me space. The other people who do tend to have very immersive experiences are ones who maybe already have a similar practice or who are in some way

Starting point is 00:30:40 used to entering into expanded states of consciousness. And so they go, oh, yes, this, I know how to do this. This is familiar. Yeah. You mentioned that imagination, despite it having the root image, doesn't mean visual. And it could be conceptual, it could be emotional, it could be otherwise. Now, interestingly, smell is extremely primal, more primal than vision. Now, vision's much more developed in us. So maybe that's an answer to my question here, but why is it that archetypes appear so visually and not say olfactorily? Well, you know, I think that maybe they do, because Or maybe they're interconnected, because I know exactly what you mean, that when you smell something, I am a very visual person, by the way. So I had to overcome a lot of my own biases in learning about how other people experience imagination. But if I smell something where there's a memory attached, I will be dropped into a completely immersive visual experience that might be a memory. It might just be an internal experience of, oh, I can see this. which is very, you know, I'm thinking of this scent that I smelled recently. A friend of mine

Starting point is 00:31:59 has been developing a perfumery line. And I have images connected to every single one of those scents of things that I've never necessarily seen. There's maybe a little memory mixed in there, but mostly just an image that's evoked with these scents. So maybe they're not so disconnected as we think. Maybe we can invoke an archetypal experience in an olfactory way. But why is it that we do have at least this bias of thinking of imagination or archetypal experience as being so visionary, but in an internal state? I like this question because I don't feel like I have a really clear answer on it. And I think I have to force myself to get beyond my own biases or perspective on it. Again, because the visionary experience has been so strong for me,

Starting point is 00:33:05 but I've encountered others who clearly have a rich imagination, but don't see in that sense. You know, we so often used to use that phrase, seeing is believing. It doesn't really work anymore. in terms of, you know, how easily we can generate videos and so forth where we don't know what we're seeing necessarily. But I do wonder if there is some kind of connection to that where one is experiencing an internal state, an expanded state, something that feels very real. And it's that visual component that really allows us to be aware of some other reality that's not the external. world, but is maybe what we could call an inner world.

Starting point is 00:33:54 Was there something in the inner world that was, in scare quotes, objective that Carl Jung saw and then psychologized it and Tolkien saw and mythologized it? Ooh, that's a good one. Well, let me just say what first came to mind with the question on Jung, and I might come to to thinking of a parallel that does that. But Jung, one of the most extraordinary kind of early encounters that Jung has that he records in the Red Book is this encounter with the Prophet Elijah and his daughter Salome. And this is the first time that he's really been in conversation with two figures. And they're helping him understand what's even happening here.

Starting point is 00:34:46 And he gets overwhelmed. He's quite frightened at this point. And of course, Jung himself is thinking, have I unleashed a latent psychosis? What's happening for me? So he has a lot of fear, anger, resistance as he's talking to these figures. And as they're speaking to him about certain religious themes and so on, who he is, what his role is to play here, he really pushes back and he says, you are symbols. And they say, you can call us symbols if you want in the same way that you could call your fellow human being symbols, but that doesn't make us any less real. And they say that several times, we are real and we are not symbols. And I like to take those moments quite seriously, where the figures are actually saying too young, or if we have our own experience, saying,

Starting point is 00:35:40 no, we're real. Okay, what does that mean? That there is a, a reality and ontology to these figures. They're not literal or physical, but they have a reality to them. They're effective. And Jung does take that seriously on the one hand, but on the other hand, he psychologizes them, where he identifies the prophet Elijah as what he calls forethinking, and he identifies his blind daughter Salome as pleasure or eventually as something more along the lines of emotion. The English translation of the word is pleasure in the red book. The German is de lust, so other scholars have translated it as something more like desire. But it's kind of like this, one of them is seemingly symbolizing, as they're saying, we're not symbols, symbolizing

Starting point is 00:36:32 thinking or the mind, and the other is symbolizing love or emotion or feeling. Out of that directly, Jung theorizes his psychological archetypes. and the function of thinking and the function of feeling. And then two more eventually emerged to kind of complete the quaternity of sensing and intuiting. And those are his psychological types. And he publishes on them in 1921 kind of coming out of the Red Book period. So that's an example where he did take something directly out of his experience and psychologically it, was able to kind of put it more into a conceptual formula that you lose a lot of

Starting point is 00:37:21 the kind of mythic experience of the original encounter. But psychological types is something that many people have found extremely valuable. Okay, I'm more of a dominant thinking type or I'm more of a dominant feeling type or sensing. So there really was a psychological gift that came out of that, even at the same time as these figures are saying to him, we are real and not symbols. So that was the first example that came to mind. In Tolkien's case, in terms of mythologizing something as opposed to psychologizing it, I'm not going to do an exact parallel here, but I think this is a helpful illustration. In Tolkien's, the Lord of the Rings, we have this extraordinary figure of Ghalm, who is really two personalities in one body. And so Ghal or Smeagel in the

Starting point is 00:38:23 Lord of the Rings, this is actually a character that Jungians absolutely love because they're like, oh, this is a great example of the ego and the shadow. And Ghalm is the shadow who's become so dominant that the ego of Smeagle kind of gets swallowed up, but both are clearly there. They're both still struggling to be present. So we can, from a Jungian perspective, psychologize that character, but instead for Tolkien, he just let it be a being, a very compelling figure who has captured the imagination of readers for the last several decades. And I think there is a value in the psychological interpretation, but there's a different kind of value in seeing this simply in the context of a story, of a living story.

Starting point is 00:39:18 Why were those two characters, whatever we want to call them, resistant to being called symbols, to symbolizing them, but then you can psychologize them, make them into somehow a psychological archetype instead of symbolic archetype. To me, symbolic is much more rich than just psychologizing. Or maybe that wasn't the connotation at Jung's time. Do they feel like it would demean them? Elijah would be a mere symbol or what? I think it is along those lines. There's another figure that the same thing happens with

Starting point is 00:39:50 in a later fantasy that Jung has. He encounters this young girl in a castle. And again, he's quite resistant to her. He says, oh, you're very fairy tale-like. And he doesn't like being in this fantasy because it reminds him of so many, you know, kind of fairy tales or romance novels that he is disparaging of at the time. And she also insists, she says, I'm real. Would you undercut my reality? And therefore kind of undermining her being. And I agree with you that symbol is a kind of mediation between, uh, let's say an archetypal reality and kind of being able to translate it into our lived experience. But, and that is different than psychologizing, which can sometimes really flatten things. Like, oh, this is just that. But I think with these different figures, the young girl in the castle,

Starting point is 00:40:49 Elijah Salomey and the others are saying when they're trying to make clear that they're real is something along the lines of you can't reduce us to either, something you've already encountered in the external world that we're a symbol of, and also you can't reduce us to your own individual personality. I'm not just a facet of you. I have my own agency and being that you need to come into relationship with. And when we allow for that, then something really profound can emerge. Are the archetype's real beings or patterns that then become experienced as beings? I would say that it's so tricky to define archetypes.

Starting point is 00:41:40 And, you know, when we read Jung on archetypes, it can sometimes feel like he's being inconsistent because he's describing them as these, sometimes more along the lines of beings, as something that is along the lines of a biological, instinct, something that's a mythic pattern, can kind of be like, well, what does he mean? Is it myth? Is it biology? Is it a instinct? Is it transcendent? And I think the reason it can feel so contradictory is because archetypes are all of those things, all at once. And I think that ultimately

Starting point is 00:42:17 they can be understood as beings or as agencies. But when I say beings, I don't even want to reduce that to, and this is even hardly a reduction, but I don't even want to reduce that to a personified form. So we can think of, say, the deities of all the world's mythic and religious pantheons as embodiments or personifications of archetypes. And there's something even beyond those forms that is informing them, that is shaping them,

Starting point is 00:42:55 that seems really clearly to be alive and have agency, but is so multivalent, is so kind of iridescent in its spectrum of manifesting itself, that we can't ever even quite say it's a being. It's almost beyond a being, or beyond a personified being, as it were. And so we can encounter archetypes at all these different levels, whether that's in a more myth,

Starting point is 00:43:25 deity form, whether it's in the form of more of a psychological archetype or archetypal figure that we're talking about more in this realm of imaginal experience like Jung is having. The interesting thing about encountering archetypes is that as we learn to perceive them, we can even kind of recognize them in our daily experience in the world around us. You know, for example, beauty, which Plato was so kind of committed to as one of the three great archetypal principles, you know, beauty, truth, and goodness. We can recognize that archetypal principle of beauty in anything that we find beautiful in our lives, whether that's a work of art or an exquisite landscape or someone we're in love with. we see that beauty. Those are different concrete examples,

Starting point is 00:44:24 but there's something informing them. And now some would say, well, you can just abstract that idea of beauty from these things, and it's just part of the human mind, and that's been mostly the modern approach to understanding universals. If we think of something along the line of cons, a priori categories,

Starting point is 00:44:45 it's like, okay, it's internal to the human mind, it's structuring how we see the world. This was initially how Young started off viewing things. But the more one engages with these archetypal principles, especially in expanded states of consciousness, such as active imagination or other ways of opening one's consciousness or entering into non-ordinary states, the more I think it does seem to become clear that,

Starting point is 00:45:14 oh, no, there's a profound agency here at work that is beyond something that's just in the human mind that we can abstract that's part of the world itself. So I often say that at the end of the day, I'm a Platonist in the sense that I do not just believe, but have experienced that sacred transcendent reality of archetypal principles and cannot only see them as categories of the human mind or of the human psyche even, but something of the world itself. Tell me about some of those experiences. Hmm. Well, I think the one that was most transformative for me happened, this was over a decade and a half ago now, and this was a

Starting point is 00:46:14 psychedelically mediated experience. And I had been learning about archetypes for about a year intensively at this point. But it was still something conceptual. You know, I would read someone like Jung or I would read my own father's work, Richard Tarnas's work on archetypes. And he traces out a history of archetypes in his book, The Passion of the Western Mind, from really from Plato through young and beyond to James Hillman in archetypal psychology to Stan Groff and transpersonal psychology so he kind of traces this long lineage of archetypes so I was learning this um in this was the year between when I went to um when I finished undergrad and before I started graduate school and and yet it was something like I get it conceptually but

Starting point is 00:47:13 I didn't know what the experience of it was like. I didn't know what the experience of it was like. And the best metaphor I can give for the shift is when you go from not being able to read, so when, you know, it's for many of us, we learn to read fairly young, and you look at words on a page before you can read, and they are, you know, you see the shapes, you might know the letters, but you can't necessarily, it takes some work or you may not even know at all what you're looking at. Then you learn to read and your eye just lands on something that's written and you immediately

Starting point is 00:47:57 know what it's saying to you. It was that level of shift where I was in this expanded state of consciousness and it actually actually came in the form of planetary archetypes or you could say the deities or archetypal principles that are associated with the planets as used by archetypal astrologers. And so in this state, I started to have this experience of all of these entities, energies, agencies trying to speak to me all at once. And when I say speak, I mean, there was a kind of vocal component, but it was also very visual, all internal, but kind of activating all the senses at once, even the olfactory in some ways. But it was completely chaotic. And so I said, and it was this

Starting point is 00:48:59 feeling like all the archetypes were so excited that I was ready to listen. to them, that they all wanted to tell me who they were at once. I said, please come one at a time. And this was the framework at the time that was most accessible to me, was this kind of planetary archetypal framework. And so they did. And one at a time, the archetypal principle associated with the sun and then the moon, they each one at a time presented themselves in this kind of symphony of visual, sight, sound, kind of, again, I keep using the word immersive today, this immersive experience where it was like I'd stepped to the other side of a veil, and now I could see, oh, this is what the people who are describing these archetypes as meaning

Starting point is 00:49:58 are talking about, because you could just take. in a list of words, okay, the archetypal principle of Venus relates to love, beauty, sensuality, sexuality, aesthetics, art, and so forth. And I could kind of see that as a breakdown of individual words, but all of a sudden they became unified. I was like, oh, now I see that unified principle of how beauty and love and sensuality and aesthetics and the arts and so forth all relate to each other, that it is one thing. And it was after that experience that, like reading, I suddenly started seeing them in a completely,

Starting point is 00:50:42 you could say ordinary state of consciousness, started seeing them in the world and could never unsee them from that point on, where I could suddenly recognize beauty with a capital B in a new way, or I could recognize that archetypal principle of Mars within fire and athletics and violence and anger and assertion and aggression, I could see it all at once of, oh, there's that principle. And that for me was the moment,

Starting point is 00:51:14 that shift from, okay, this isn't just something abstract. This isn't something that we can only access cognitively, but it's deeply experiential. And there's a someone behind each of these principles. So that's one of the experiences that really led to that transformation. What's an example of something that didn't have beauty before, and then after this experience, you then noticed the beauty that was always there, or it's now imbued with beauty? I remember I was in Prague, and I was looking, you know, Prague is such an exquisite city. and I think and actually I had been to Prague before this experience and then several years later I went back after this experience and the difference was it wasn't that I couldn't recognize that something was beautiful but it would just be more of a sense of like oh I like I find that beautiful or that form is lovely or I find that aesthetically pleasing it was all very in the specifics of what I was looking at whereas after this

Starting point is 00:52:23 experience, it was as though that principle of beauty was actually glowing through everything that I saw. So it's not that I could separate it from the particulars or see it as something different, but it was as though that principle of beauty was actually alive within everything that I found to be beautiful. And actually that was the moment in Prague. I remember walking down the street and seeing, you know, these beautiful buildings and the Art Nouveau style and there were flowers and the cobblestones. And the thought that went through my mind was, Plato was right, that I could perceive the living beauty coming through everything and how it wasn't just in the particulars, that it was kind of behind and saturating through all of it. But you

Starting point is 00:53:21 couldn't take any of those particulars away and then see it. It wasn't a separate reality. It was living as part of all of those things. And I felt like I could enter into almost a direct relationship through it, kind of participating with all that was beautiful around me. Now, see, I think my first question was, what did you discover between Jung and Tolkien? I used that word discover. And then throughout this, we've talked about how discovery is not so straightforward. It's not as if that thing is there and then you find it. Participation may be a third. So did you create this connection between Tolkien and Jung? Or did you participate in it? Like, help me understand that. Yeah. This was something that was so helpful that my dissertation committee actually guided me to see

Starting point is 00:54:15 where I was laying, at first I was just laying out the parallels. I was like, look, these are so interesting. And they said they are. And you are drawn to recognizing particular parallels because of who you are and because of your life experiences and interests and aesthetic sensibility and so forth. And that was a very important moment for me of realizing I was the third piece between Jung's experiences and Tolkien's experiences, because I was having experiences where I was seeing the parallels between the two. And while I wrote that dissertation just with my three committee members to reflect it to me, and I've since been able to teach on it. And I've guided students reading through Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and other parts of his legendarium in tandem. and they see things that I never saw. As soon as they point them out, I go, oh, of course, of course that makes sense. Of course there's a parallel there. But I completely missed them because it either wasn't something I was drawn to or it didn't kind of align with my own experience,

Starting point is 00:55:34 but it aligned with these students. And so we've actually started uncovering even more parallels between the two. There's plenty of parallels as well that I didn't include in when I wrote this up as my dissertation or any of the lectures I've given on it because I felt like they weren't concrete enough, but I could still see them. So my copy of Jung's Red Book, for example, is the marginalia is filled with additional parallels that probably only I can see. And so absolutely I have to take my my own perception, my own imaginal experience into account with that. And I think that that is why these parallels stood out to me because my own imagination was activated in relationship to them. So, yeah, basically to answer that question, now what's been, what has been very interesting

Starting point is 00:56:37 to observe is when I've spoken about this subject, you know, to young societies or in classes, to see where other people see it to. So it's not just me alone seeing it. And that's always the fear every time you get up and you're like, look, I found these parallels if someone's going to say, well, I don't see any of them. But that hasn't happened. It's been people also recognizing them and having that same sense of wonder and awe in relationship to it. And I think part of it is, it's just interesting to see Tolkien and Young are such giants in their fields to kind of uncover these parallels between the two is kind of fascinating. But also, I think it's because for those of us who do engage with it, it taps into something deep, like, oh, I see those things too. And I think that's

Starting point is 00:57:36 ultimately been why I've continued pursuing this work. That it's not, yes, it's about Young and Tolkien and the parallels between the Red Books, but really it's about awakening people to their own imagination, to their, or their own relationship to the inner world, to the imaginal world, saying, this is something you have access to as well. And I think that's, that's where the great joy and kind of gift has come out. of this work is allowing others to affirm their own imaginal capacity. Like, yes, this is something that you, that is your cosmic birthright in some ways. Is there a reason you say universal and not objective?

Starting point is 00:58:24 Mm. Objective to me seems to indicate a removal of the observer, where something is kind of existing. fully separate from us and I don't necessarily know if that's possible because we're always participating as witness. I do, I would say something along the lines of a consensus reality. So not objective in the sense of it's over here and it exists whether or not anyone is engaging with it because I you know what do we even mean by anyone do we mean just human beings or the cosmos itself is maybe witness to itself i mean that's that's a big claim um but i think that's why i wouldn't

Starting point is 00:59:17 necessarily say objective uh whereas i think you can recognize something like consensus of multiple did you see that did i did you have that kind of experience oh yes i did too um like intersubjective agreement yeah exactly exactly Okay, one of the reasons I was asking that is because you mentioned that you want to remove some biases. And then what I'm thinking of is, well, what is this objective becca that you measure yourself against to say that you're less biased now? Right. Yeah. What's wrong with the be Becca that's in front of me, right? Why are you trying to change yourself and be unbiased or be less like Becca to be more like a true Becca?

Starting point is 00:59:54 What is this? Oh, I like this question. I think that it's, there's not necessarily an objective. Becca, but I would like there always to be an evolving and growing Becca. And so the more I can see through my complexes, my biases, my prejudices, my assumptions, then who I am and what I can perceive in the world and what I can engage with in the world expands, that I can take in more, I can relate to more, I can empathize with more, if I can take more. I can see beyond not who I am in a complete sense, but who I have been up until this point.

Starting point is 01:00:43 And I think we can recognize that in a very simple way, too, just when we look back on, you know, decisions that we made in our teens or in our 20s or, you know, kind of looking back on different phases of life of, oh, why did I do it that way or why did I have that perspective or how did I completely missed that that was what was happening because our perspective is narrower. And as we grow, and I would say work on ourselves psychologically, emotionally, empathically, relationally, we can broaden that lens and include more of others' perspectives. And by others, I don't just mean human beings, but, you know, all earth species, kind of a cosmological perspective. So that's kind of more what I mean, that there isn't necessarily an objective, perfect Becca I'm striving for who's unbiased, but just one who's continuing to grow and to be able to see beyond what I'm, where I currently am or where I have been.

Starting point is 01:01:52 So you mean adding more perspectives? I think so. Yeah. Adding more perspectives. And adding more perspectives. and adding more perspectives in a relational sense, in a sense of being able to empathize with more and more people's beings' experiences. Does that ever make you feel like you're not enough? All the time. I think the other side of that can definitely feel like my husband, will be the first point this out. I'm terribly hard on myself. And sometimes I probably would do

Starting point is 01:02:35 better to move in a direction of not being so biased against myself, as it were. So yeah, that's something I face pretty much daily. When Jung went and had his first imagination encounter or active imagination, apologies if I'm misusing the terms. No, you're doing it beautifully. You said that he was frightened because he wasn't sure if he was experiencing psychosis or something like that. Yeah. So, gosh, there are two questions here. One is, I want to know about your cautionary tales because you've talked about a beautiful experience.

Starting point is 01:03:12 But additionally, I want to know about people who are more hard-nosed and left-brained would hear what's being said right now and just think, okay, but what's separating this from just psychosis or being hypnotized or just imagining? Like, I can imagine. I can imagine a ball. I can imagine a person. I can imagine anything I like. So in science, that's why it's important that I was wondering the word objective, which in science, the word objective has some particular meaning.

Starting point is 01:03:38 You should be able to replicate to be able to make an objective claim and have randomized trials and so on and so forth. But these aren't precisely objective claims that you're making. So there must be some other method that you use to determine whether something is a genuine connection, a genuine experience versus a spurious one. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's where the doing that deep inner work is really important. And as I said at the beginning, kind of being honest with oneself. Because when we're dealing with the inner world, when we're dealing with the psyche, so young working with psychology, it isn't as clear cut as when you're working with something that is physical and kind of in the outer world where you can have more of that objective stance. You know, even in those contexts, though, we always have to take the scientists' experience into account. But you can absolutely be more objective in a way that you just simply can't when working with imagination, with the psyche. And I will say that it's very tricky to draw that line and to say, okay, well, this is an imaginal experience. I'm using that term from Henri Corbin who says that the imaginal is where something real emerges through the imagination that's beyond the individual versus imaginary, which is, as you were saying, you know, something that's simply made up. I can just imagine whatever I want. He uses imaginal along the lines of something more like visionary experience.

Starting point is 01:05:15 And there is a subjective confirmation that comes with that where there's a overwhelming feeling of veracity to, whether it's a mystical experience or an imaginable encounter and so forth, that one feels like they can't alter it. You can't change what's emerged. it's just simply there. And in that way, there is a kind of objective quality to it. It can't be manipulated. Tolkien talked about this in his own strange way. He invented languages. He invented 14 languages, actually, but the two most developed were these beautiful

Starting point is 01:06:03 elvish languages. And he talked about what he called ghost words. And there were these words that would emerge with the sound and the meaning accompanying each other. and so he knew exactly what it meant. And as he would invent his languages, make up these languages, there would be these certain words that had emerged within him that he couldn't change. He couldn't change the sound, he couldn't change the meaning. It would feel like he was doing a kind of falsity to them. Whereas others, no problem. He could make it up, you know, arrange things. He was an extraordinary

Starting point is 01:06:38 expert at grammar and evolution of languages and so forth. But he knew that, these ghost words, he couldn't manipulate. And I think it's similar where we can have experiences where we can't change them. We just know that that's happened. And it may be quite, sometimes they may be quite uncomfortable or showing us a particular sense of truth, whether that's about ourselves or about the divine or anything in between, where we just know. I think that's where we get that term nosis, as the Gnostics speak about. We just know. And that's something that's very hard to translate to someone who hasn't necessarily had that experience or has denied that experience. Maybe that's part of why I'm so drawn to do this work is that I think a lot of people

Starting point is 01:07:31 have had experiences like this, maybe even just once or twice in their life, but their worldview forces them to deny it. Say, well, you know, I had this odd experience. but and then we kind of dismiss it. It was just a fantasy. It was just something I made up when some little part of them knows that's not necessarily true. But again, it is really hard to differentiate. I've had experiences in my life that I've made important decisions around, you know, very important decisions around and then later thought, was that true? Was that the best idea? and questioning it. And then as more time passes, I'll realize, oh, this is actually part of a much larger context

Starting point is 01:08:22 that I just couldn't understand in that middle phase. And sometimes that's not the case. Or maybe I'm still in the middle of the story, you know. I think these unfold over a lifetime. But I think that that continuous sense of doubt and skepticism is actually really, really important. to validating the truth of these kinds of experiences. So you say, is it true or is it not? Was that real or was it not? And if some inner part of you keep saying, yes, it is, keep listening, that's important to pay attention to. But there's also that part of us that's like, no, I'm just really wanting this to be true.

Starting point is 01:09:05 And that's when we have to get honest with ourselves. And those can be very heartbreaking moments too. and I've certainly been through my share of those as well. Just to add that in terms of cautionary experiences, Jung would say that one has to be careful with the practice of active imagination because it can take the patient too far away from reality. And I think that that is, you know, when he was worried about having a latent psychosis unleashed and he knew what that looked like.

Starting point is 01:09:36 He'd worked with many schizophrenic patients at the Berk-Holtzli and in his early medical practice. And so it was a very real fear and kind of over exposure to patients and so forth. I said, like, oh, this is happening to me too. And I think what he came to and what I would agree with, something along the lines of what Joseph Campbell said, just paraphrasing that the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystics swims through with delight. And it's, the waters aren't different. It's, can we swim through them?

Starting point is 01:10:18 Can we reemerge? Can we bring them back into our more objective or consensus reality or not? And that's more the risk. And I think this is why Jung was cautious with something like active imagination, that if someone was a little too porous or was a little too hard to come back, that's not a safe method because you might get stuck there or you might become overly paranoid or see symbolic images everywhere and not be able to come back to something

Starting point is 01:10:51 that's more, yeah, more objective, more kind of a shared consensus with others based in a more physical reality. Yeah. Kurt here, note that if you'd rather listen to Toe, we're on Spotify iTunes everywhere with a podcast catcher. You can just search my name or theories of everything. And also remember to hit subscribe. Is it true that Carl Jung was once asked about Nietzsche and why did Nietzsche go mad and not you, Carl? And then Carl said, well, Nietzsche spent too much time in the air. And Carl himself, he was saying, I have patience. I have obligations. I have a wife. I have this and that. And so I ground myself. And in order for you to be extremely creative, you should also be extremely grounded in other areas. Yes, he, and he did have that concern about artists too, of feeling like some artists would kind of indulge in these states in a kind of bacchanalia and then not bring something back for the community or be able to translate it. And Jung did use those relationships and obligations in his life as a way to come back.

Starting point is 01:12:05 can be grounded. And as you said, it was his patience, it was his wife, it was his family, it was his military service. And I think most importantly, it was the figure of Tony Wolfe, who was his, I would say his muse, he called her his spiritual wife. They had what at the time was referred to as a left-handed marriage. His wife, Emma Young, was quite aware of the relationship. It was difficult for her. but he had this second relationship with Tony Wolfe and she stood by him through his red book period. She was the person that he would bring his experiences to day after day.

Starting point is 01:12:46 He'd kind of enter into these states of working with active imagination at night. He'd write them down and then the next afternoon she would come to his home and they would discuss them and try and understand them and make sense of them. And she really was the, to use a mythic image, she was the Ariadne to his Theseus, she gave him the thread to come back out of the labyrinth. And interestingly, she had such a deep trust in the unconscious. She had such a deep trust in the psyche. But she was unable to do active imagination herself, which I think is so interesting. So she really offered that guidance and that support to him in a way that all those other figures did too, but she was essential and her story isn't often told. So that's why I like to

Starting point is 01:13:36 bring her into this as well. Part of the reason that I talk to you about some of the caution is because I've had my own experiences. And I often say that my wife saved me and she saved me in many, many ways. So the groundedness is definitely one. The BBC did a mini documentary on my, well, I'll just say experiences. And so I'm, see, it's, it's so tricky because, yes, there's the danger of drowning in the waters. There's also the twin danger of dehydration, of people who have no meaning at all. And so I see both of those. And my work has as such that I speak to people like you who all have different points, speaking of perspectives, all have different perspectives, and I have to take them all seriously, I don't discount them as, okay, these are foolish people. But it spins my mind.

Starting point is 01:14:30 And I'm still recovering from some events that happened many years ago. I was walking around downtown Toronto. And some people who are homeless and they were just, one guy was just saying something like, time, time, time. He was just saying time out loud. And everyone else is just walking away from him and feeling like this guy is crazy. And I'm thinking, like, I know exactly, I can put myself in your state. And I feel so horrible for you. And I don't want to, want you to trigger me because I I gosh I completely agree with you with that and I think that part of what we see with psychosis is a lack of a worldview container that can help bring those experiences back and translate them out of a purely archetypal state into one that can be

Starting point is 01:15:21 more deeply understood. And this is where what we were talking about earlier is so important of psychologizing something or putting something into a form that we can kind of more concretely understand it. And, you know, I'm hoping I'm remembering this story correctly, but I think Jung talked about a patient where she described her experience of living on Mars. And at first you would think, well, that sounds insane. She doesn't live on Mars. She's very clearly in this ward, in this mental hospital. But if you translate that into a kind of symbolic archetypal language,

Starting point is 01:16:12 Mars is whether we understand that as a planetary archetype or as a deity figure, Mars is the principle of violence, aggression, of anger. And if someone says, I live on Mars, and it sounds literal, then it sounds insane. But if we read that symbolically, I live on Mars may feel like, you know, I grew up in a home that was very violent or filled with anger or there was was a lot of aggression. And, but for whatever reason, there may not be a capacity to translate that back into, into a language where more people can understand it. And so it's, it is a very kind of tricky balance in terms of, well, where is the line and the line can be and is quite fluid and some people are just much more sensitive to entering into those states and having

Starting point is 01:17:15 trouble coming back than others. I think probably part of why I've been quite interested in this work is because it is easier for me to come back. But I've worked with students. I've worked with workshop participants where it's harder for them to come back. And so I want to be more cautious working with people like that of yes, affirming the reality of those experiences, but also trying at least to teach those methods of entering back into this realm of embodied relational, physical, more literal space as well. Gosh, one of my favorite quotes is from H.P. Lovecraft. He said something like, that one day this unfettered investigation into science may reveal such terrifying vistas of reality

Starting point is 01:18:03 and our frightful position therein that we may flee from the light into the peace and safety of the darkness. And man, many people in this space, many people, they talk about the more beautiful, the more majestic, the more, the more life-giving aspects of these experiences. But I also see the Icarus flying too close from the sun. There's another poet who said something that I resonate with so much. See, Jung was saying, the person to Jung was saying, hey, I'm real, I'm not a symbol. For me, I would be like, oh my gosh, I have to treat you like a symbol, man. I do not want you to be real. You are too real, if anything. I don't want that. the quote is,

Starting point is 01:18:40 God, please turn away for me so that I may stand. Yeah, that's beautiful. There's something inundating about the pure sun. Yeah. Yeah, there's a reason that in so many myths, we hear the gods have to veil themselves, to dim their light so that they can even relate to us. And that is, you know, without us being overwhelmed or shattered by the experience.

Starting point is 01:19:08 And I think that is where some of the participatory element comes in, too. If we're trying to relate to archetypal principles, if we're trying to be in relationship to the gods to use that term, then in evoking their presence in a way that they're clothed in a form that doesn't totally overwhelm us, psychologically, emotionally, that it doesn't shatter us is very important. And I don't necessarily have a concrete way of doing that. But when we were speaking about the practice of active imagination, this kind of guided form that I've cultivated, I called it preliminary. And that's for exactly these reasons we're talking about. It's kind of if you're in a weekend workshop,

Starting point is 01:19:58 you just want to have a little taste of this. Dip your toes. Yeah. Right. And that if it's something you're wanting to work with longer term, that's important to do in the right container, whether that's working with a very experienced Jungian therapist or guide or even in a community where everyone is holding one another accountable to that

Starting point is 01:20:18 and kind of bringing back those experiences. Now let me ask you this. As a Jungian scholar, I'm sure you're aware that Jung was asked, why don't you take psychedelics? And then he said something like, Beware of unearned wisdom. Yeah. Young didn't need them, first of all. Yeah, he did not need them. He had that capacity himself. And, you know, I know that there are multiple religious, spiritual, mystical figures, leaders, and so forth who have had that view of psychedelics, where they are opening us up into experiences,

Starting point is 01:21:03 and realities that, again, can be very hard to bring back to integrate. And I think that there's a reason that in psychedelic scholarship right now, there's been so much interest in integration, not just the experience, but, okay, how do we actually fold this into our everyday lived reality now? And so that kind of beware of unearned wisdom is an important caution. at the same time, if one is raised and educated in a very materialist culture that denies the reality of any inner experience, then something like psychedelics, which interestingly, you know, come to us in a material form. Right, right.

Starting point is 01:21:52 As Stan Groff said, he's like, Stan Groff, the pioneering LSD researcher, said that, you know, you know, maybe the avatar had to come in a material form in a chemical form in order for the message to come through, because for some people, that's the only way to enter into that kind of state of consciousness and take it seriously. So I think it depends on the context. It depends on one's worldview and what barriers do or don't need to be broken down in order to enter into these kinds of experiences. Can I ask you a foolish question? It probably isn't foolish, but please.

Starting point is 01:22:34 For Becca, for you, when will it be enough? What I mean to say is, it may be a foolish question. Like, Kirk, you should go to the gym. Are you going to ask, when do you stop brushing your teeth? Like, obviously, there's some practices you do every day, and if you don't, you start to weaken. So is it like that that you, professor, have to engage in these practices or you want to, maybe not have to, but in order to continue to feel meaning.

Starting point is 01:23:01 Or do you then, see, both of us were super, super lucky. We're super lucky that we both have jobs where we love our jobs. We both wake up probably just can't wait to get to work. We can also take our work with us that it integrates with our life so that we can shut off. But also if we're walking in the forest, I'm sure you also get ideas. You can just look at the trees and get ideas. There's some mathematicians that I speak to that I say, go to this museum or do so on. They say, other than just making their mind wander, they won't get ideas.

Starting point is 01:23:32 They can't look at a painting and then get some formula for whatever they're working on. But for myself, for yourself, we can. We can take almost all aspects of life, and it's so beautiful. Life is so worthwhile. I'm just wondering, is that something that you then live with, or is it something that like Pokemon cards, you have to keep accumulating more perspectives. You want your collection to grow, or what is it? I love that question.

Starting point is 01:24:02 Definitely not a foolish question because it really makes me reflect on it. And what I have noticed in my life, you know, it was in my early 20s that I first started doing any work with psychedelics, with expanded states of consciousness, also with holotropic breathwork, which is a way of expanding one's consciousness through breathing without taking any substances. And I had so many profound life-changing experiences. I wouldn't be where I am today without those experiences. And as the time has passed, I've been drawn to less and less extreme ways of engaging with those expanded states. And so, you know, first came in active imagination following that and realizing, oh, you know, Jung was talking about something that allows us to go into these states, but it's much more subtle, it's much simpler, and less kind of catalyzing than a psychedelic experience.

Starting point is 01:25:04 And then now I'm in a phase of my life. I have a two-year-old son. I'm currently seven months pregnant with my next child. Congrats. Thank you. And so I've been in this much more, you could say, sober, state in terms of, you know, I don't drink alcohol. I mean, obviously, I'm pregnant, so I don't, I haven't even had caffeine in a long time. But, you know, I've been very, very, kind of pure when approaching my pregnancies. And what I've noticed is that my engagement with the imaginal, it's more subtle, but it's let me simultaneously realize how much that's always there, that, oh, the images, they're just always kind of appearing no matter what. I finally had to explain to my husband. I was like, when you come in in the morning and tell me

Starting point is 01:26:01 about the intense news that's happening somewhere in the world, I'm having a fully immersive experience of that bombing or that war or that massacre. And I maybe can't handle it when I first wake up. I need that a little bit later in the day. And so he's kind of, of learned about that internal experience that I have through those kinds of conversations. So while intentionally or actively eliciting very intense or engaged expanded states of consciousness has decreased in my life as I've gotten older and oriented more toward family and so on, they've also become more just integrated in the day to day. And I will say giving birth is probably the most profound expanded state of consciousness I've ever entered into.

Starting point is 01:26:56 And I'm so grateful I had all those experiences to be able to guide me through the birthing experience. That it actually allowed me to really trust the unfolding process of the birth and to have the visual experience. experiences, the somatic experiences, know the breathing techniques by kind of allowing myself to be in that more liminal state. So when will it be enough? I think it's more of a question of how does it, how does engaging with the imaginal realm and with the archetypal align with whatever state, stage of life I'm in that's most appropriate for that time. And in a totally different way, I'm glad I have those experiences behind me when raising my child because I can see how alive his imagination is at age two and really cultivate it. It also, now I understand why they call it

Starting point is 01:28:02 babysitting. It's like sitting for someone on psychedelics, but they're an infant or a toddler. They're just experiencing the world in that same kind of porous way. But I think where, you know, what I personally have been aspiring towards, and I don't talk about this often, but I'll always be deeply inspired by Tolkien, by storytellers, by people who tell archetypal stories, who tell myth. And that's really what I'm ultimately wanting to. to tell, to create, to write our stories. And I'm currently more in an academic phase of my life.

Starting point is 01:28:47 But I think that's what I'm moving towards. And maybe that's when it'll be enough, as it were, when I've been able to finally tell those stories in the form that I want to tell them. And then we'll see what comes after. What depths have you gleaned from Harry Potter? I grew up with Harry Potter. I was 10 when the first book came out. So I've read those books over and over. And I've, you know, there's a lot of different things that I've gleaned from those books.

Starting point is 01:29:27 On the one hand, I think probably like many people, many children reading them, there's, of course, the challenge of feeling like, oh, you know, magic doesn't work the way that it's described in this, at least for me. And then much later in life, realizing that maybe something quite different is meant by magic, that we can engage with it, but it doesn't look like the wand waving in Harry Potter. It looks something like learning to align ourselves with the synchronities that unfold in our lives. But I mean, I think it's a work of very engaged and inspiring storytelling. There's some really profound patterns that she's woven in to the stories that, you know, I love how she works with language, with myth, how the names are all kind of, they encapsulate

Starting point is 01:30:29 who the person is without telling you. If you happen to know Latin or if you happen to know the mythic reference that is there, then you get a revelation of that character. So I personally, I love how it's composed and it's one that's been quite inspiring to me over the years. I don't know as much about her writing process in the way that I know about Tolkien's, where he describes that sense of something coming through versus, you know, constructing something and I think she's woven a very compelling plot across um across seven books but um it's definitely something that that shaped me from childhood on what's the difference between your worldview and bernardo castrop's idealism you know i don't know castrips work well enough to be able to answer that his name keeps coming across um my awareness

Starting point is 01:31:30 just especially within the last year. And so I feel totally inadequate to answer that, unless you want to unpack it a bit for me first. Okay, what about general idealism? Like, the view that all there is is mind and that what you are, what your friends are, are somehow avatars of this mind, almost like Eddie's in an ocean.

Starting point is 01:31:52 I like to affirm the reality of both the one and the many, of both mind and matter. You know, on the one hand, I do agree and have had experiences that seem to affirm that sense of divine oneness that we're all kind of emanations of that divine oneness or that we've forgotten our origins, and that's how we're able to be part of creation, to be individual beings.

Starting point is 01:32:24 But I don't espouse the view that this world or our individual experience is somehow just an illusion, that it is something that ultimately doesn't matter because we're really one or we're mind only. I think that affirming being embodied, being individuals, being separate in some ways is just as important as recognizing that unity and oneness. So in a very inelegant term, I consider myself of bothist where kind of try and hold both of those perspectives simultaneously because I think... Both but differentist. Yeah. Yeah. That. it's by affirming our embodied experience, our sense of separateness, our physical reality,

Starting point is 01:33:30 our psychological reality, that's how we grow too and mature and evolve and have a sense of individual responsibility and autonomy. And I think that's just as important as recognizing the ways in which were transcendent and unified and imaginable beings as well. I want to know, do you find most of the meaning seems to be created from connections. You notice that so-and-so is a parallel.

Starting point is 01:34:01 But what about disconnections? Something that I said at the end of my dissertation on Young's and Tolkien's read books was, to be very clear, these are not the same books, and that we can learn a great deal from their differences as from their parallels. And yes, I've spent this time laying out the parallels. But the differences are important because these are two different people who had radically different experiences

Starting point is 01:34:31 and made different choices about how to express them. And so those differences, those disconnections, I think that actually speaks to what I was saying a moment ago, which makes sense why this question would emerge, that it's being able to recognize our differences, our diversity, the ways we can't always see eye to eye, that then allows us to, as I was saying before, kind of expand ourselves of, oh, wow, you actually see the world so differently than I do. And I can learn from that and be challenged by it. and disagree with it or, again, I think that's part of our incarnated experience is encountering those differences in disconnections and disagreements. And then can we handle it with grace?

Starting point is 01:35:29 Can we handle it with an ability to meet that person or that idea or that disconnection somewhere that maybe won't perfectly align in the middle? Because that's kind of the point of a this connection, but that we can understand it or sympathize with it or have a sense of, I see where you're coming from. Is your husband as airy, as floaty as you are in abstract, or does he ground you? He is definitely more kaffa to my Vata and Pitta, but we do, he sees archetypes in the way that I do, which is a wonderful thing to be able to share with, with, someone. So we do spend a lot of time talking about philosophy and spirituality. I would say he's

Starting point is 01:36:19 much more, we talk about how he kind of comes more from a spiritual background. I come more from a background of psyche and imagination and we've met in the middle. But I would say he's far more grounded than I am when it comes to orienting in the geopolitical situation of the world. Interesting. Yeah. And on a very primary practical kind of day-to-day level of being able to, you know, just attend to the physical things that need to be dealt with in the house, in our lives, and so on. And that being said, he's the one who's taught me to be much more emotionally attuned and empathic. I'm much more of a thinker. He's much more of a feeler. So we each carry different sides. And I think round each other in

Starting point is 01:37:10 different ways. Yeah. So you mentioned psyche. Firstly, let's distinguish psyche from mind. You talked about that earlier in the conversation, but I want to know what truly that distinction is. That's a great question. And so psyche is, you know, it's the Greek word for soul and seems to be the capacity within us to feel, to imagine. It is the, you could say, the internal dwelling place of the archetypal place. principles. Whereas mind is a capacity that's developed, that's much more rational, cognitive, that mental faculty that is able to kind of think through something. Psychie can be, I think, both rational and irrational, and is a much harder capacity to even pin

Starting point is 01:38:14 down. And part of what's so tricky when defining psyche is that we can speak about it as, oh, we each have our own individual psyches. We have our own individual kind of soul and way of orienting to our emotions, our complexes, the way we express ourselves. But as, whether it's Young or James Hillman or others will speak of psyche in a more universal sense of now Jung talked about the objective psyche which is another way of describing the collective unconscious that psyche is kind of the interiority of the world itself there's the beautiful term anima mundi the world soul that kind of describes that as well and so we can talk about the individual soul we can or individual psyche and the collective psyche or the world soul, the anima mundi, kind of like a part and whole.

Starting point is 01:39:14 The mind, now you do get the same thing with the mind too. People will talk about the universal mind, for example, as a way of speaking of the divine. Oh, I've never heard that. It's, yeah, sometimes like the universal mind or the cosmic mind, these are terms that will either come out of, you know, mystical or religious experience. and I don't want to disagree with anyone's way of using those terms because I think it's speaking to kind of like a universal or cosmic intelligence. But coming back to our individual human level, I would say that there's an intelligence to the mind and there's an intelligence to psyche that's different. They're both ways of knowing and perceiving. But the mind, but the

Starting point is 01:40:05 mind we use in a much narrower capacity. And we, you know, our contemporary education systems really focus on honing the mind, you know, honing that thinking capacity through everything from reading, writing, mathematics, the sciences, and so on, while not always accounting for the fact that the psyche is probably informing that unconsciously. So, whether that's being, you know, unconsciously influenced by our psychological complexes or how our emotions enter into the way we think or shape our biases. They're always kind of working in tandem, but we don't train one and we really train the other. And that's why I like to differentiate them. And that's why I think that practices such as active imagination or,

Starting point is 01:41:05 or any of the arts in some ways, allow us to, or working with our intuition, allow us to train the psyche, to learn to perceive and imagine and so forth in a way that's a little bit more conscious and a little bit more rational, that it can then work in tandem with the cognitive mind. And so, you know, there's wonderful examples

Starting point is 01:41:32 of scientific breakthroughs. that have happened where the scientist has an intuition first, or they imagine something first, or even a dream, that then they go to confirm using their rational mind and kind of verifying it with physical facts or mathematics and so on. That's the two working in conjunction. But we so often leave that part out of the story, that moment of kind of getting the vision and then verifying it.

Starting point is 01:42:03 And so that's really what I'm interested in, is how do we get these two to work more in tandem rather than saying, well, this is the real one, the rational mind. This is the one we can trust. And then this is like a whole messy nonsense that I don't even know how to begin to engage with. That feels a little dangerous to me, honestly, because then you have people thinking they're making rational decisions about whether it's science, politics, or anything else, without accounting for that role of the psyche. and knowing how they're being influenced by it. What do you mean? Well, if one is making, say, a, let's say a decision that is going to affect many people without taking into account their emotions around the subject, maybe their traumas that they're carrying,

Starting point is 01:43:02 complexes that developed from early childhood or maybe even beyond that. And it's shaping why they're making this policy decision, but they're not looking at why they might be making it. That feels dangerous to me or why we would be, you know, whether it's denying certain groups of people rights or making decisions about how we treat the environment based on motivations that we're not deeply aware of, whether that's maybe it's greed

Starting point is 01:43:37 because we were undernourished as a child or something like that. I think that that's very important to actually be able to do the work of looking at those deeper psychological motivations behind our so-called rational decisions so that the two can work in tandem. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:59 Speaking of deep, psychological motivations. What is the shadow? The shadow is in Jung's definition a it's the part of our egoic consciousness so the part of us that says I am like I am Becca this is my identity this is you know how I present myself in the world the shadow is the part of that that's everything we are that we have denied or we won't look at. Um and the thing that that's very apparent about the shadow. Pretty much everyone else can see your shadow better than you can. You know, to ask one's spouse is probably the best way to get to know your shadow.

Starting point is 01:44:43 And so it's more apparent to others than to ourselves. And also often things that trigger us in other people, like, oh, that person, like, that really bothers me. is usually related to part of our shadow, which, again, is a repressed part of our identity. And so those are two kind of key indicators. If you really want to work on bringing the shadow or the repressed or forgotten or hidden parts of our sense of self or identity

Starting point is 01:45:17 to the fore integrating them, ask the people closest to you who you can trust to be honest with you of what those are, because they know. and also pay attention to those moments where you feel really bothered by someone else and be like, do I do that? Or am I so bothered by them because they're doing something that some deep primal part of me really wants to do right now? So those are kind of two key ways to get to know the shadow and why it's important to be aware of the shadow and to try and integrate it into our conscious awareness is because if we're not, if we're repressing,

Starting point is 01:45:57 it, it's still a part of our identity that's acting without our conscious awareness. And that's when we often make bad decisions that we then try and justify to ourselves or say, oh, that wasn't really me. I didn't do that. Or that's not part of who I am. And yet we're acting from that place. So the shadow isn't necessarily always a bad thing, but it's something that we haven't included in our identity that is clearly part of it. Yeah. There's a quote from one of Esop's fables.

Starting point is 01:46:32 It's, we mortal scorn what we valiantly strive for but don't obtain. So I found that motivates me often is that whenever I find that I'm deriding something, I almost invariably, almost, it's because of jealousy or envy or covetousness or something like that.

Starting point is 01:46:52 Anyhow, you know what's, Speaking of meaningful coincidences, a couple minutes before this podcast, I have two books on my desk. One of them is this, this Leonardo da Vinci notebook. Oh, beautiful. So it's all his sketches and then transcribed his writings. And I just flipped through it randomly. And I landed on something, and it said, light and shade, and this is Leonardo da Vinci's writings. Shadow partakes of the nature of universal matter. All such matters are more powerful in their beginning and grow weaker towards the end. I say at the beginning, whatever their form or condition may be, and whether their form or condition may be, and whether visible or invisible. Oh, it's beautiful.

Starting point is 01:47:30 Anyhow, I'll send this to you and I'll put this on screen. Maybe there's some, what Jungians would call, synchronicities there. Oh, that's beautiful. I, hearing Leonardo da Vinci's reflection on shadow and how many ways we can take it, as you were reading it, of course, I'm hearing it through that Jungian psychological lens, but knowing him as an artist, as someone who was so observant of the world, of shadows in the world, that it's, it's amazing to kind of hear it through all those different lenses simultaneously. As I read through it, it's incredibly philosophical. And it's so interesting because I just didn't think that someone like him would have, would speak so poetically. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:15 Darkness then is the strongest degree of shadow and light is its least. Therefore, O painter, make your shadow dark. closer to the object that it casts and make the end of it fading into light, seeming to have no end. Speaking of psychedelics, read that on psychedelics, and you'll get many, many insights. That's wonderful. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing it. Thank you so much for spending so much time with me, and congratulations again. And I've had a blast. Thank you for walking the audience through many of these insights and even some of these practices. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real honor.

Starting point is 01:48:51 to be here and I've so enjoyed this conversation and just seeing where your mind goes with these questions is very beautiful. So thank you for allowing me to come speak with you. Thank you. Take care. You too. I hope it all made sense. Your questions are so good at getting to the heart of the matter that sometimes I was like, well, I hope I'm not leaving out important preliminary material, but I know that that's part of your technique of diving deep into the subject with your guests. Hi there, Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?

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