A bit of background

My connection with Dr. Carl Jung and his work goes way back. In 1971, I had a pivotal life experience: an outpouring of Love from a photo of Meher Baba, an Indian Sage who had recently passed on, and whose obituary in The New York Times I’d had read to me (seemingly, by coincidence) by an acquaintance.

The Love seemed to solve all my problems! But things were more complicated than that. When I experienced it, I was on strong antidepressant pills due to having “done something to myself” on my relatively few psychedelic trips. At some point, months after that outpouring, I stopped taking those pills, believing “I have BABA now”—and soon found myself right back into the Black Hole I’d been in for a year before the doctor prescribed them.

I went through hell for another year and a half. Even restarting the pills didn’t help! Then, I went back to college, ordered to do so by a therapist who was something of a bully, and eventually registered for a seminar in which we read Carl Jung’s opus, Man and His Symbols, and kept dream journals. After a couple of months of this, I experienced a new awakening that brought the Love I call Meher Baba back into my conscious life, instead of it being there simply as a longing for what was so painfully absent!

Ever since, I’ve found Jungian ideas to be a creative and beautifully-compatible complement to my efforts to follow Meher Baba. Sometimes I do more of that “cross-training” consciously than other times, but always, I feel, both are right on the money. This is because Jungian work features the SELF and getting the conscious ego off its high horse, bringing it into harmony as a servant—and, you could say, “co-creator” with SELF.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had several of what Dr. Jung called “Big Dreams”: dreams that seem to embody major themes of life, perhaps to even show the dreamer the way forward. I’ve been fascinated by Jung’s injunction to a friend of his, a writer who had protested that he didn’t have time to pay attention to both his writing and his dreams. Jung said, “Your dreams are more important than your writing!”

I’ve longed to, as I put the matter to myself, “become fluent in the ‘symbolic language’ of which dreams partake.” But, in spite of a recent series of online courses with another Jungian group, I don’t feel I’ve yet been successful in realizing that aspiration, After a break from Jungian curriculum, I decided to join the Dream School of “This Jungian Life.” If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Joseph skillfully speaks of Jung’s work

In the September 16 seminar, Joseph Lee spoke extemporaneously for nearly two hours straight. His entire talk was a response to a single question that had been sent in by an attendee. Joseph explained that he’d found that particular question extremely rich in content and implication. [We’d all been invited to send in questions about dreams. I sent in two myself.]

The question had to do with, “Why are Jungians so relentlessly optimistic? Is that really warranted?” There were more nuances, but that was the essence of it.

Joseph started right in, saying [and everything I write here in quotes is a paraphrase], “I don’t feel that ‘optimism’ is really the word to describe Jungian work, including that of Jung himself. Rather, there’s another word I feel underlies the attitude of Jung and Jungians. That word is telos, a term first made popular by the philosopher Aristotle. Telos refers to the inherent purpose of each thing, the ultimate reason for each thing to be the way it is.”

Jung himself, Joseph continued, went through terrible suffering and aloneness in his thirties, after realizing that if he continued to speak his truth to his friend and mentor, Dr. Sigmund Freud, he would be “excommunicated” from the network of psychoanalysts of his time.

Nevertheless, Jung eventually did speak up, saying that he didn’t believe everything in the psyche could be reduced to the sexual drive and its various disguises and displacements. Jung believed that the psyche had a forward-looking purpose for each human being, and that making that purpose conscious and living it out is what heals a person.

As a result, Jung was excommunicated. Freud and others more or less labelled him crazy. He found himself completely alone in the world, professionally. Furthermore, for a period of several years, his psyche became the locus of an up-rush of images and energies that he refers to in his autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as a “Confrontation with the Unconscious.”

At one point, Jung himself believed he was headed toward psychosis. That was because during this period, he experienced unsettling phenomena, such as a dream he had of the entire continent of Europe, except for Switzerland, becoming submerged in a sea of blood!

After the First World War began on August 1, 1914, Jung wrote that he was “the happiest man in the world” because it became clear to him that day that his horrible dreams weren’t expressions of his personal unconscious, but rather, “transpersonal” precognitive dreams about the future of the world. They arose from what he later named the “collective unconscious,” a deeper level of the psyche than the personal.

After this “dark night of the soul” ended, Jung found that the discoveries he’d made had given him the material he needed for a lifetime of therapeutic work with clients, as well as the writings that are now available as the 18 volumes of his Collected Works. His work continues, of course, in the ever-widening network of people following in his footsteps. This matrix is one of a number of positive forces of Light contributing to the possibility of our world’s salvation and renewal.

Jung was asked, towards the end of his life, whether he believed humanity would survive. His reply was, “If there are enough people working on themselves.”

Interestingly, to me, there is an anecdote about a dream Dr. Jung had, also near the end of his life, that illustrates one of many correspondences between his work and that of Meher Baba. Baba said that a New Humanity based on Love and Intuition would emerge from the contemporary travail of the world. Dr. Jung had a dream depicting people from all cultures, races, religions and walks of life working together to erect a new Temple—not to a particular creed, but to the Universal Spirit. Colleagues asked him, “How long will it take to complete this transformation to this New Way?”

Jung, citing additional input from his own dreams and those of patients, replied, “600 years.” Similarly, Meher Baba said that the New Humanity he predicted would be well-established in 700 years.

I’ve perhaps digressed a bit from the explicit content of Joseph’s talk. He himself covered some of this background in his own way. The main thing he said was that Jung came to feel, after his own crisis, that all his mental suffering had had a purpose! That it was “teleological,” and via this telos, is leading us, if we follow it, towards deeper integration and the realization of our ultimate purpose, our ultimate good.

Pure gold

Joseph continued, saying that through this lens of regarding everything as purposeful, one is able to accept and deal with the difficulties of life, as well as the obvious joys and abundances. When our dreams, for example, show us things about ourselves we don’t like, or when life brings a period of turmoil, we can ask, “What is the telos of this?” What is its purpose? What is it showing me, and where will it take me if I accept the teachings life is bringing me—both those I find acceptable and the ones that seem to upset my apple cart?”

In this way, Joseph segued from the notion of optimism to that of purposefulness. With the help of such an attitude—I personally loved this content—it’s possible to turn the ego from its habit of aggressive separateness to a recognition of the value of the other parts of the inner psyche and the external environment. We can work in harmony with the Unconscious, instead of being at war with it and the world, as so many people are today!

The entire session was pure gold for me. I felt I was hearing not only a wonderful message, but hearing it from someone who lives what he says! I had the opportunity to express my deep appreciation to Joseph, briefly, in the final, listeners’-response part of the program. I told him: 1) that this was the first ZOOM program I’ve been to in a while in which I was so involved that I didn’t pick up and fiddle with my phone even once! and 2) Each of the long, complete sentences that poured out of Joseph’s mouth was, for me, a river of loving energy that I felt myself riding down to its very end. I also took 24 pages of notes, and enjoyed writing down many of Joseph’s elegant sentences word for word!

During this last period of the session, Joseph made an interesting comment about his speaking style. To someone who has difficulty communicating with others about her work on herself, Joseph suggested that she try to speak more directly and less intellectually. He shared that he has learned to speak spontaneously from within, beginning each new sentence with no thought at all about how it fits into what he’s already said. Yet, he told us, it always comes around to perfectly mesh with the rest.

I feel it’s important to mention before I close here, that for an important section of his talk, Joseph “left Jung,” at least explicitly, and made extensive references to Victor Frankl. Frankl named the method of healing that he brought out of his internment in the Nazi concentration camps logotherapy. Frankl, Joseph implied, survived hell and became able to help many others by following the telos to a new life—he spoke and wrote of the need to “re-discover the lost word” (or logo) instead of letting despair have its way.

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image 1: with permission of “This Jungian Life”; image 2: Max Reif; image 3: with permission of “This Jungian Life”

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