I
Wasn't kidding about what an honor I think it is to address the young society at one point in my life
My greatest desire was to become a union
Analyst and I had the good fortune of coming upon young very young
I was about 15
when a very precocious friend of mine brought
Psychology and alchemy and the carrieth Baines translation. I think it had just been brought out and
we were stunned and we read it from cover to cover and then went on to
Mysterium kim jung-tae own ace eye on the studies and the phenomenology of the self
I said to someone yesterday. We read all the books of Jung that the young'uns never read
They seem to stop up there toward the front of the line with the archetypes of the collective unconscious and the
Personality type but to my mind it was the late stuff that was fascinating
and I
am
Slightly puzzled and we were talking about it last night at the distance between the Jungian
community and the psychedelic
Community because they seemed to me the unschooled observer to be
definitely
Sharing the same concerns and strangely enough they share much of the same history and geography
Boss'll was of course Jung's hometown. It was Albert Hoffman's
Hometown did one half of town know what the other half was doing
I'm not sure
That the relationship of young to the unconscious to the collective unconscious as its Discoverer
Has been always somewhat puzzling to me because of course if you know the history of 20th century art
you know that Dada which was the great prefigurative movement for
surrealism rose in Zurich so you know we've got
LSD the
schools of Modern Art that laid great stress on the irrational and the great schools of psychology that
extended the boundaries of the unconscious all raffling around in these little Swiss towns and
It's interesting to imagine conversations or meetings that might have taken place
When people slightly left their ordinary habits and wandered into bars
They didn't know and drank with people they never met before
Because young provided maps of
The unconscious and at 16 when we were beginning to
Experiment with this and and let me stress. This was before the great
Social waves of LSD taking of the 1960 just preceding that from about 1963
to 65 we were frantic for maps of the unconscious and
Freud was useless
I mean the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called de
residues and
repressed sexual desire stuff like didn't wash
within 10 minutes you could tell that was not a
serviceable metaphor
Young on the other hand offered a vast
Pantheon of
gods and archetypes and psychic complexes
Forgotten or abandoned? I mean I thought of young basically as I know at what I call a noetic
Archeologist someone who goes with toothbrush and not pick to dig away the detritus
from the bones of vanished idea systems and if any of you have ever
Read the complete the works of young in the in the bowl engine set
You know that the richness of it is all in the footnotes
I mean here was a man who raised the footnote to a high art and who was aware of a literature
that nobody else to my mind seemed to know about that Young's
References reach a thousand years deep into the past with great
Density of reference. I mean this is where I learned about
Macrobius and
dosa theists and Dionysus the pseudo aerial God and all those folks that you just never hear about it was
my introduction to the under to the
underbelly of Western
civilization
was through young
well
To my mind and now I'll theme this in to today's
theme I think Maria mentioned that
Young did not have a lot to say about
Shamanism, he came to it late in his life and he had already worked through the massive
The exegesis of the symbol systems of the European mind and so he was sort of content
to indicate shamanism as an area of where more work was to be done and then the great
follow-on scholar was mercy liad who then actually
studied shamanism showed what its archetypal underpinnings were in all times and places and
the combination of young and illion, I think pretty much delivered us as firm a math of the psyche as
dependable a math of the psychic geography as we can expect to have until we make the trip ourselves and
you know readjust the landscape with our own notes and
Observations
For young the great path into the unconscious was alchemy and
Alchemy is an interesting pivotal
Domain
Because I think we could in a way say it lies halfway between the concerns of an archaic
shamanism and halfway between the concerns of a quasi scientific
Psychedelic attempt to explore consciousness
Mercy liad wrote a brilliant book on alchemy called the forge and the crucible which is the bridge
To show you how you go from Jungian psychology
Into an understanding of alchemy that approximates le odd
the notion for the alchemists that Jung brought forth very strongly was the idea of
projection of psychic contents
projection of the active
imagination on to
processes and
Objects in the exterior world in the case of the alchemists. It was the swirling
chemical processes in their alembics in their our chemical vessels that they
projected
the
The great round of the archetypes on to these chemical processes they saw
crystallization
sublimation
separation as
Statements about the contents of the psyche as much as statements about the exterior world
because for them the firm
division between mind and matter
the firm ontological
Division between mind and matter that is built into Western thinking now did not exist that
comes with Rene Descartes with the invention of what's called the res extensa the
Extended world and the res variants the interior world, which has no spatial
extension
So for the alchemist mind and matter worth were to terms
Whose mutual exclusivity could be blurred?
under certain
Circumstances and the terms of one could migrate toward the other well now we as moderns
all ordinarily only experience this state when we are intoxicated by
hallucinogenic drugs or when we are in a state of
severe
psychic
Weakness when there is then?
overwhelming from the unconscious that is not
Not with the permission of the ego as happens in the psychedelic experience
Well, all of these various ways of approaching the psyche
Seem fairly
abstract and bloodless and removed from daily existence
unless the psychedelic experience is
Present and then it
vivifies
These metaphors it makes clear what these various perennial
traditions are
Talking about
