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Have I got your attention? Are there any other one-syllable words in American English that can provoke such strong – yet mixed – emotions? Some hear the word and anticipate private pleasure, immediate gratification or opportunities for male bonding, but may be unaware of shameful feelings that lie just below the surface, while others who express disgust, anger or condemnation may well be covering up a sense of titillation. It’s all so complicated…

Indeed, opinions about pornography do not break d

One way to enter into the deep symbolic language of our soul is through a fairy tale. When we write a fairy tale, the words “Once upon a time” opens up a portal to another world. We have stepped into shamanic terrain.
  
Every fairy tale is psychologically significant. The narrative and images that show up are metaphorical, not literal. These metaphorical images are powerful, because they’re working on all levels at once. They will show you perspectives and doors that you wouldn’t have seen in any

After the Tucson lecture and workshop, April 4-5, 2014, Friends of Jung, Tucson, Arizona ,
The Environmental Crisis: Birth of a New Consciousness?

Goethe:"sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God" Strasbourg Cathedral, from Wikipedia

In my story of how after nine months of some pretty intense psychotherapy my patient and I decided to end our therapeutic relationship for a more emotionally and spiritually honest coupling that leveled the playing field, even in its telling, I break a taboo. The publication of my account of what it has been like for my husband and me to live with this history for twenty-four years has elicited the predicted ire and scorn from parts of the psychological community.

The evolution of a therapy relat

I'm interested in alliance members' thoughts on the phenomena of ghosts - especially from Jungian and Groffian perspectives that are influenced by Quantum physics (I.e. post classical science). I recall somewhere that some Jungians theorise both an internal collective unconscious AND a kind of objective external imaginal dimension in which matter and mind coalesce ... the psychoid realm perhaps? Apparently Pauli the physicist and Jung discussed such issues and Jung saw the third coniunctio of tr

In September of 2020, with the pandemic, the economy, the racial violence, the election (see my essay, “A Mythologist Looks at the 2020 Election”)  and (for Californians) the forest fires on our minds, it’s easy for us to shunt thoughts of America’s post-World War Two foreign policy to the back of our minds. But when we bring them to the forefront, we remember some of the statistics that remind us of the astonishing and heartbreaking seventy-five years of waste and cruelty, including the bombing

Psychologist David Feldman writes:

…the tendency to blame the victim may be programmed into the human mind at a very basic level…(it) may originate, paradoxically, in a deep need to believe that the world is a good and just place…On some level, most of us believe that that the world is basically good, that good things happen to good people, and that we, fortunately, are good people. In other words, we believe the world is generally a just and fair place…Imagine how terrible life would seem if we

To hit on lethal aspects of mind scares the beejeezus out of people! We've all got them lurking there inside us. They're the destructive emotions that hurt people, hurt ourselves, maim or destroy one potentially healthy relationship after another. They're primitive psychic energies that we need to come to terms with or else they'll inflict themselves onto and into our lives whether we like it or not.

Today I posted on social media, "And now to move into a day of doing depth psychotherapy at full

In 2014, long before the 2020 economic collapse, a friend forwarded this BBC News article: “American Dream Breeds Shame and Blame for Job Seekers”,which cited statistics claiming that 10.5 million Americans were unemployed. But in practical terms she was quite inaccurate. This was merely the number of people who were collecting weekly unemployment compensation checks.

If we were to add in those who wanted full-time jobs but could only find part-time work (including those working more than one job

Your back is up against the wall, you're in crisis, there seems to be no way out, you need an answer ---open your mind, intuit it! When problems press hard against the psyche, it becomes white hot. Mind opens up. Answers can come in a flash, or via an unexpected encounter, or through a rip roaring dream that provides a lit up perspective on a dark dilemma that's been plaguing us.

Intuitive understanding is a natural faculty of soul. it can be honed via awareness. The more we are aware of intuitiv

Learning to give expression to our experience of illness can teach us much about ourselves. I came to this conclusion when out of desperation for a cure for what ails me, I googled the words healing and illness. During the first three years of living with a chronic illness, I’d done this many times before. Instead of finding sites on diets, cures or the latest research on RA, what came up on the first page was DH Lawrence’s poem Healing:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And i

Imagine a TV show about the collective unconscious...

A few weeks ago marked 20 years since the world was left a poorer place for the loss of Bill Hicks.

Bill was a comedian, a preacher and a prophet. A student of A Course In Miracles, he used comedy to convey his message about the need for humanity to evolve. (Consider his rallying cry of ‘not one human being excluded’ here.)

Towards the end of his life, Bill was working on a TV programme about the collective unconscious.

‘.. that summer, he and Fa

Just about the best...when something fits, you feel it, I feel it, in my body. The sensation of a permeable warmth with my mind relaxed and ready to question, probe...some might simply call it interest, but interest needs to be met in the outer world. This course is a meeting of Interest and Inner Desire. 

If you have ever had an interest in Alchemy, join this webinar. 

No question about it...life is too much! After over thirty years of treating patients in psychotherapy, I'm convinced there's a reason it's too much. It's too much because we're in the midst of a life or attitude shift. We don't want it. We want to cling to the old, tried and true, but misery making attitudes, life styles, relationships. They're what we're familiar with. So, the energy for the shift builds up, and gets to be too much!

Part Eight – Conclusion

The story of Dionysus getting Hephaestus drunk (in Part Seven) symbolizes not literal inebriation but male initiation into a psychology where the feminine is welcome and the mother complex no longer threatens the marriage bond. Dionysus, says Murray Stein, is both the “agent and the product of initiation… the integration of feminine spirit into masculine consciousness.” The male ego co-exists with the animating feminine nature it had previously suppressed. This initiation

I am really delighted to have found the DPA! I believe it likely to add real friends with an orientation towards transpersonal experience, and those to offer candid views and tolerant exchanges. Its ‘broad base’ has great appeal.

This initial post is simply to introduce a book ‘Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God’ which can be fairly easily perused on this website Involution-An Odyssey where excerpts, readings and interviews are posted as well as much of the book itself.

In brief it

Part Seven – Dionysus and Hephaestus

Dionysus

Dionysus, like Heracles, was born of Zeus and a mortal woman. Initiation motifs occur throughout his life: in his suffering, his dismemberment by the Titans, his double birth and the wound in Zeus’s thigh from which he was re-born. Like Heracles, he was persecuted and driven mad by Hera. Unlike Heracles, Dionysus was saved and protected by a series of nymphs and goddesses who became his surrogate mothers.

His human mother Semele had died and descended t

Part Six: Telemachus and Heracles

Telemachus

The story of Telemachus takes place within the broader context of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus experiences a series of initiations (all of them, curiously, by female figures) and evolves from a one-dimensional, heroic figure to a mature, archetypal king. Early on, the gods make repeated comparisons between Telemachus and his cousin Orestes. Neither had seen his father since infancy. Telemachus knew of Odysseus only through the memory of the citizens,

Don't miss this blisteringly brilliant one-minute clip of Jung speaking about man's need for myth:

“A man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth.

He must live in a world of his biological truth.

Man has always lived in the myth.

And we think we are people to be born today and to live in no myth – without history.

That is a disease.

It’s absolutely abnormal because man is not born ‘every day.’

He is once born in a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities and

Part Five

Pentheus

…nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent – Yeats

Orestes killed his mother, but Pentheus’ mother killed him. Dionysus drove the women of Thebes mad because they hadn’t respected him. His cousin, the adolescent King Pentheus, tried to imprison him and defeat the mad women, who were led by Pentheus’ mother Agave and his two aunts. In his rigidly masculine stance, the king was blind to the fact that a god (or, if you prefer, an unacknowledged part of himself) stood befor