Corruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous!
This Jungian Life
In this episode, Joseph, Lisa, and Deb explain why Corruption is not only a political problem, but a human one, why Power breaks trust long before it breaks laws, and why the most dangerous people are often the most certain. They reveal the core mechanism behind Corruption and Inflation: when unconscious drives flood the ego, making someone feel exceptional, entitled, and above ordinary rules. They unpack how Corruption escalates quietly, from small rationalisations and moral distortions to full-blown abuse of entrusted Power that destroys relationships, organisations, and communities....
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How Did I Become a Statistic?
This Jungian Life
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project. When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility? If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed? What can we...
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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
This Jungian Life
If you have been through betrayal or loss, you may still be living by a terrible rule you made when in pain. It can look like hiding, overworking, numbing out, or letting people cross lines because being unseen feels safer. This episode uses the fairy tale “All-Kinds-of-Fur” to help you identify your survival pattern and take the next step out of it. When you update the rule you made when in trauma, you get your choices back. What you’ll learn Identify the “impossible promise” that keeps you stuck, and where it began. Notice your “fur cloak,” the mask of busyness,...
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Purpose as Service to a Self-Led Future
This Jungian Life
You're invited to our free Dreams for Change seminar on Sunday January 18th. . ***** Modernity promotes endless techniques to optimize goal-setting and productivity. Yet most of us race from one task to the next, telling our friends how busy we are, secretly knowing we lack direction. This conversation defines Self-led purpose as an orientation to a future beyond our ego needs. This can align our tasks with Individuation even as we face seductive collective agendas. When we look outside for purpose institutions and communities are all too ready to supply meaning, but at what cost to our inner...
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Can Angels Survive in Our Disenchanted World?
This Jungian Life
Angels persist in dreams, scripture, and art, while modern institutions psychologize them into coincidences or flatten them into greeting cards. In this episode, we explore angels as autonomous psychic facts, reimagined from age to age but always carrying meaning across the unconscious threshold to the ego’s surprise and benefit. When we learn to welcome the sacred messengers and “…fear not, for behold…” they bring tidings that can right the course of our conscious life. What is gained, and what is lost, when angels are interpreted as natural law rather than moral ideals? How does...
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Santa and Krampus: Why the “Nice List” Needs a Shadow
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Santa Claus persists as a central figure who teaches children that their desires can be understood and met, on the condition of good behavior. The Christmas morning ritual is staged to delight and mystify: Santa crosses thresholds unseen, cookies are eaten, milk is gone, gifts appear. His all-seeing mind takes a moral accounting, drafts the...
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Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moment a life-organizing identity collapses. We might call it burnout, divorce, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a terrifying medical diagnosis. The alchemists called it “death,” and Jungians understand it as part of the psychology of transformation. Read along with the dream...
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How to Work with Denial: A Jungian Guide to Facing Reality
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- People often mistake denial for stubbornness, self-deception, or moral failure. Denial is actually a primal psychological defense that attempts to regulate which aspects of reality are permitted to reach awareness. Today, we explore how denial operates within Psyche, why it activates powerfully in response to traumatic experiences and addiction,...
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Have We Ever Really Read Jung? Sonu Shamdasani on the Collected Works Crisis
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- Jung’s translator and editor for the English edition of his Collected Works took it upon himself to alter more than 60% of Jung’s ideas to make the books more marketable. Finally, this will be corrected. Sonu Shamdasani and his team at the Philemon Foundation are meticulously researching Jung’s original documents, and the results...
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Gratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with ten percent off from now until the 31st of December. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- A Jungian Look at Gratitude (and Why It Usually Arrives Late) Have you ever suddenly realized, “I never really thanked them for that,” a parent, teacher, mentor, or community that quietly carried you through a hard stretch? Gratitude is a psychological turning point: the moment you grasp that your life rests on the real, sometimes...
info_outlineKarl Kerenyi collaborated with Jung in demonstrating the psychological meaning of Greek mythology. Kerenyi found in Hermes a representation of “a third way of living life, besides the Apollonian rational and the Dionysian irrational. God of jokes and journeys, thieves and magicians, the tricky Guide of Souls” arrives as a surprise. Like the quicksilver that is his Roman name, Mercury/Hermes appears on winged sandals, heralding the new. Hermes disdains regulation and law to deliver new ideas, dissolve opposites, and provide decisive experiences. Just as he alone traversed the realms--from the heights of Mt. Olympus to the underworld of Hades--Hermes now swifts his way from the unconscious to ego awareness. Hermes is the symbol of a living reality seeking conscious acknowledgment, the agent of creativity and transformation. How we perceive his message is not his interest. He is already gone.
Here’s the dream we analyze:
“I’m on a piece of inhabited land, by the shore, with many others in a beach town. Some of the people I know, some I do not. Across the water is an island. It looks like Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but this island is lush, tropical, and Jurassic. It’s a beautiful day, close to sunset, and the view is gorgeous. All of the sudden, we all realize there are three enormous boats that look like cruise ships balancing on the edge of the top of the island. They’re huge, a third of the height of the island. One looks old, two look new. No one knows how they got there. There is a theory they went ashore when the water level was higher, but we all know that doesn’t make much sense... we would have seen them there long ago, but in this case, they just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. We all realize they’re about to fall as they’re balanced precariously. As we anticipate an enormous crash, we take shelter. I can see them fall slowly off the top of the island to the base. There is a lot of destruction - so much dust and debris, and the sky gets very hazy. But I am safe. The next morning, we wake up, and it’s a beautiful day. The shape of the island across the water is totally different. It’s been totally reconstructed by the crash of the boats (which are no longer visible). The island looks a lot less ominous in shape. I look to my left and see that some of the debris from the island has landed in the water, which allowed for a bike path to be built from our land to the island, across the water. I realize perhaps this crash has actually improved things for the better, and everything feels calm and beautiful.”
REFERENCES:
Karl Kerenyi. Hermes: Guide of Souls. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0882140949/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_FWG6RQ37RTQYF4X0MZGN
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza. Hermes and His Children. https://www.amazon.com/dp/3856307354/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_VA65WSXZ59B9ZECAREVK
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