Episode 119 - The Religious Attitude: What Do You Worship?
Release Date: 07/09/2020
VISIONS: When the Mystery Breaks Through
This Jungian Life
Carl Jung considered visions extraordinary intrusions of the unconscious into waking life, moments when hidden psychic contents press forward with striking intensity. These phenomena do not represent mere hallucinations or idle fantasies. They reflect purposeful eruptions from Psyche’s deeper strata, often evoked by personal crisis or cultural upheaval. Visions stand apart from normal mental processes because they carry a sense of autonomy; they appear spontaneously and feel real despite an absence of tangible external stimuli. Unlike psychotic hallucinations, which generally lack insight,...
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DREAM TELEPATHY: Is it real?
This Jungian Life
Jung took dream telepathy seriously and struggled to understand the underlying principles that made them possible. Archetypal activation increased their frequency. The unified field that links us all to the collective unconscious might act like a bridge between individuals. We decided to conduct our own experiment. Joseph focused on a secret image at specific times, and a large group of volunteer dreamers tried to identify it. Here’s what happened! LOOK & GROW If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy...
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SHADOWLAND: Self-Harm Cults – The Story of Sarah
This Jungian Life
*Content warning: contains references to sexual abuse, animal cruelty, self-harm, and cult exploitation* This is Shadowland, a new podcast experience from This Jungian Life that explores the lives of people who work and take refuge in the hidden places of our culture. We hope our work will bring insight, compassion, and understanding to the darker side of human experience. In that spirit, we meet Sarah, a mother whose daughter was rescued from the self-harm cult called "764." This dangerous group has been identified by the FBI, who continue to prosecute their leaders. Despite those efforts,...
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The Symbolism of Travel Inner and Outer
This Jungian Life
Travel speaks to something far deeper in us than simply going from one place to another; it’s a powerful metaphor for inner change. In our dreams or daydreams, the drive to “hit the road” or venture overseas often signals Psyche’s desire for growth and transformation. Instead of just showing us new sights, these journeys hint at unexplored parts of ourselves—regions of the unconscious that hold insight, energy, or aspects of our own personality we’ve yet to embrace. When you find yourself repeatedly dreaming about traveling or caught up in fantasies of far-off adventures, it...
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FACING REJECTION
This Jungian Life
Facing Rejection forces us to confront what we fear losing—belonging, recognition, identity. Rejection alters how we see ourselves, engage with others, and interpret the world. It shapes unconscious complexes, creates projections, and influences attachment. It appears in myths where exiled figures return transformed, in dreams where locked doors symbolize what we refuse to see, and in defenses against further pain. Healing from rejection requires engaging with its effects, not avoiding them. Some of us externalize rejection, which becomes resentment, further isolating us. Others...
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The Archetypal Brain: Jung from an Evolutionary Perspective
This Jungian Life
With Deb and Joe out this week, Lisa speaks with Gary Clark, a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide, about his book Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences. The discussion delves into the influence of indigenous cultures on understanding consciousness, the role of anthropology in Jung's work, and the implications of evolutionary development on human psychology. Humanity's ancient rituals underscore the importance of integrating the primordial emotional brain with the newer neocortex. Reconnecting to these practices in a contemporary setting can help facilitate...
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Changing the Foundation of Personality: the Secret Power of Attitudes
This Jungian Life
Revolutionize Your Nights – Join Dream School and Master Your Dreams! Transformation isn’t about muscling through change—it’s about loosening the grip on rigid perspectives so energy can move. Resist, and the unconscious will find a way forward anyway—through symptoms, dreams, and compulsions that shake up the illusion of control. Neurosis is just a traffic jam in the psyche—energy stuck where it no longer belongs. Real change isn’t an intellectual hack; it’s a shift in how we hold and release energy. The unconscious doesn’t hand out easy answers; it reveals what’s...
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What Remains When All Is Taken: Standing in the LA Wildfires
This Jungian Life
Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Dreams – Join Dream School Today! Fire strips everything away, leaving only what truly matters. In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, homes have become ash, familiar streets are unrecognizable, and life feels uncertain. But fire is not just destructive—it is also transformational. Pamela Power, a Los Angeles Jungian analyst and author, joins us in exploring the psychic tensions that arise from this experience. Fire erases yet reveals. It devastates yet clears space for renewal. Loss forces us to let go yet also asks: What endures? Though grief pulls us...
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Feet, Fashion, and Freedom: Shoes as Symbols of Identity
This Jungian Life
Shoes as Symbols connect identity, culture, and creative adaptation. Shoes reflect our movement through life and mark pivotal transitions, helping us hold the tension between vulnerability and agency. They appear in myths and stories as agents of change, signaling the emergence of a new attitude and facilitating its embodiment. The simple act of wearing shoes bridges the physical and psychological, grounding us while enabling exploration. Shoes communicate individual and collective identity, shaping and revealing roles in society. Tales, like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes and...
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Analyzing Our Childhood Dreams
This Jungian Life
What do our earliest dreams reveal about the hidden forces shaping our lives? Childhood dreams offer unmediated access to the collective unconscious, revealing symbols that shape lifelong development. These dreams often dramatize psyche's early encounters with polarities, fostering individuation through the integration of opposites. Nightmares and numinous imagery invite engagement with shadow and the sacred, acting as catalysts for growth and transformation. By revisiting childhood dreams through active imagination, individuals unlock their latent meanings. These dreams serve as both...
info_outlineThe religious instinct is as basic as the need for food or shelter. Psyche seeks and selects a central, organizing life principle whether consciously or unconsciously chosen. Secular deities range from food, money, or even science, to the gods of addiction; false gods lie behind neuroses and pathology. Traditional religions and cosmologies offer connection to large, well-ordered frameworks of myth and meaning.
Realizing one’s place in the context of larger realities has the potential to connect us to mystery and numinous experience; then we belong to something greater. For Jung the decisive question was whether a person was related to the infinite: “It seems as if it were only through the experience of a symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own ‘existence’ and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.”
Dream
It is dusk and quickly becoming night. I am hidden from view, lying on my belly in a tunnel of some sort. I am looking out onto a clearing surrounded by trees. I see a small, fluffy, grey kitten--innocent, sweet. I want to climb out to hold the kitten and take care of it. Suddenly, a large, dark-brownish black bear lumbers in, crashing through the foliage; it doesn’t see me. I watch it, and am struck by how coarse the hair of his fur is and that the claws are ivory white but thick, strong and sharp.
I stay hidden, watching. The bear moves away and as it does, turns into a wrinkled light grey elephant; it is small, but from my point of view it looks quietly significant as it treads by. I am still hidden from view and feel awestruck and numb watching all this. I look down; I appear to be lying on over-sized slate- green stepping stones--oblong, almost triangular. Then to my horror, the stones begin to slowly shift up and along the ground, undulating!
I feel a mix of awe and fear when I realize that the stones are actually the scales of an enormous serpent/snake--and my reclining body is being carried along with it. I wake with the feeling that this dream is important to remember.
References
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Amazon).