JUNG'S PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS: Why Did Strange Events Follow Him?

welcome to this yian life three good friends and yian analysts Lisa Mariano Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day I'm Lisa martiano and I'm a yian analyst in Philadelphia I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a yian analyst in Virginia Beach Virginia I'm Deborah Stewart a Yi and analyst and Cape Cod I'd like to just ask a favor of all the listeners it would be remarkably helpful if you're watching us on YouTube to press the Subscribe button and

if you're listening to us on Apple podcast please like us and leave us a review you that'll make a lot of difference to us thank you well given that next week is Halloween we thought we would do our traditional Halloween episode uh previous topics have included ghosts I think one year we did horror and another year we did witches we've probably done did we do zombies one year maybe anyway yeah I think so uh we're never going to run out of topics but this Halloween we thought we would talk about Yung and the Paranormal it

turns out that uh yung's family was uh the the Paranormal was very normal for Young's family especially on his mother's side and this really influenced him it influenced his decision to go into Psychiatry it influenced his thinking so we're going to talk just a little bit about um Paras pychology and paranormal phenomena and especially how it relates to Young and the development of his thinking so and uh before we jump into that I also wanted to ask people to take a look at our patreon profile if you go to our website thean life.com and click

on the top under the podcast you can become our Patron being a patron is really important it helps us keep the lights on very importantly it keep Us free of corporate sponsorship we don't have to read ads on the air if you keep us up and running through a patreon and we also have an opportunity to analyze the dreams of patrons you get a chance to submit them to us and for instance uh when we're done here we're going to do a special dream analysis for someone who sent us a very spooky and slightly ghoulish

Halloween dream and uh we'll analyze that and then we post it only for the patrons at the particular levels so if you come in at $10 a month we'll have a chance to look at your dream over time and uh people tell us it's really special and really meaningful so on to the Paranormal yes and you know before going further I should just mention today that I Deb wasn't feeling well so she's taking the week off but um she should be back next week so so um what we know about yung's life is that he

was raised in a slightly spooky home that um the spiritualist movement particularly had taken the United States by storm and was beginning to influence some of the kind of new age spirituality in Europe as well so we know that his grandfather for instance had a very vibrant experience of ghosts yeah he so this is his maternal grandfather he believed himself to be just kind of surrounded by spirits and apparently he would have weekly conversations with his first wife who was deceased and even kind of left a chair for her in his study absolutely and then

he would have um yung's mother stand behind him and bat away ghosts that were trying to distract him when he was writing for his business so this this is a very um ancient world intruding upon yung's in since modern world you know in ancient times spirits and their influence were just assumed and people had amulets and ways to protect themselves yeah I mean you know and in some sense yung's family they were just they were sort of uh just Swiss peasants and these kinds of experiences would have just been kind of taken for granted right

so yung's mother um had kind of strange experiences so so frequently that she actually kept a diary exclusively to document these so he's he's you know Yung was born in 1875 and on his father's side it was his father was a minister and you know his grandfather on that side was a minister he kind of come he comes from this kind of religious background on his mother's side there's this long history of um mediumship or Clairvoyance or or other such phenomena and again it's just kind of taken for granted but then also you you you

know what's going on in the outer world is a scientific worldview is becoming increasingly the norm and that's kind of replacing older beliefs and that's the moment that young enters the world and in some sense his whole Opus is about trying to square these different perspectives and they immed immediately in his in the psyche of this young man kind of present themselves as this core conflict that he feels drawn somehow to address and this leads into his later writings about experiencing himself having two personalities that one personality being part of this modern world that's familiar

with school and family and the culture that he's embedded in and then he becomes aware of personality number two that over time he begins to feel is like a monastic 12th century personality that lives in a world of mysticism and spirituality and and ancient beliefs and and we have a sense of this in the red book when he talks about the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths these two powerful perspectives that speak to each other sometimes compliment each other but often conflict with each other and and one of the important things

about Yung is he wasn't willing to just say well the you know the the the personality number two part isn't important or doesn't exist or it doesn't matter or it's it's nothing but you know he he's he's sort of like there's something there that's important and then the tasks be the task becomes Translating that into the language of Personality number one and you you see this in in the collected works when you read it he's always talking about oh I'm a scientist you know he'll he'll often say that where he's he's trying to kind of

take these phenomena and explain them in a way that doesn't explain them away right if that makes sense he's not trying to say it's oh it doesn't it's nothing but but he's trying to create a frame in which they can be understood and and by the way where he eventually goes with this of course is the theory of synchronicity um and we can probably talk about that in in a minute but let's um let's let's just go right to uh MDR and and share some of these stories if that's okay um and for those who

may be new to this MDR is memories dreams and Reflections which is uh yong's autobiography yes sorry about that okay so he's he's writing uh about um being a young man I believe this happened um maybe after his father had died so he was now kind of the head of the household and he was at this point in life where he was having to make a decision about what career he was going to go into he says during the summer holidays something happened that was destined to influenced me profoundly one day I was sitting in

my room studying my textbooks in the adjoining room the door to which stood a jar my mother was knitting that was our dining room where the round walnut dining room table stood the table had come from the dowy of my paternal grandmother and was at this time about 70 years old my mother was sitting by the window about a yard away from the table my sister was at a was at school and our maid was in the kitchen suddenly there sounded a report like a pistol shot I jumped up and rushed into the room from

which the noise of the explosion had come my mother was sitting flabbergasted in her armchair the knitting fallen out from her hands she stammered out what's happened it was right beside me and stared at the table following her eyes I saw what had happened the tabletop had split from the rim to beyond the center and not along any joint the split ran right through the solid wood I was thunderstuck how could such a thing happen a table of solid Walnut that had dried out for 70 years how could it split on a summer day in

the relatively High degree of humidity characteristic of our CLI if it had stood next to a heated stove on a cold dry winter day then it might have been conceivable what in the world could have caused such an explosion there certainly are curious accidents I thought my mother nodded Darkly yes yes she said in her number two voice that means something against my will I was impressed and annoyed with myself for not finding anything to say some 2 weeks later I came home at 6:00 in the evening and found the household my mother my 14-year-old

sister and the maid in a great state of agitation about an hour earlier that there had been another deafening report this time it was not the already damaged table the noise had come from the direction of the sideboard a heavy piece of furniture dating from the early 19 Century they had already looked all over it but had found no trace of a split I immediately began examining the sideboard and the entire surrounding area but just as fruitlessly then I began on the interior of the sideboard in the cupboard containing the Bread Basket I found a

loaf of bread and beside it the bread knife the greater part of the blade had snapped off in several pieces the handle lay in one corner of the rectangular basket and in each of the other Corners lay a piece of the blade the knife had been used shortly before at 4:00 tea and afterwards put away since then no one had gone to the sideboard the next day I took the shattered knife to one of the best cutlers in the town he examined the fractures with a magnifying glass and shook his head this knife is perfectly

sound he said there is no fault in the steel someone must have deliberately broken it piece by piece it could be done for instance by sticking the blade into the crack of the drawer and breaking off a piece at at a time or else it might have been dropped on Stone from a great height but good steel can't explode someone has been pulling your leg and young ends the story by saying I have carefully kept the pieces of the knife to this day and and this experience of uh a kind of explosive event in the

psychic atmosphere is something that Yung would continue to experience um he came to call this a catalytic exteriorization experience that something would be happening in the field of the psyche in one experience with Freud when they were um debating he had this enormous hot tension that was building in his solar plexus and at the moment when the energy released there was a loud cracking noise that came from a bookcase and then a short time after he began to feel the tension building again and he had mentioned to Freud I can feel this is about to

occur a second time the loud cracking occurred a second time and Freud was unnerved perhaps Jung was as well but his curiosity led him to want to speculate about these things led him into a great adventure so so and and we're right in this area I think where we can talk about how these occurrences kind of affected his thinking and the development of his career the the first incident that that I that I read out um that was decisive for him in choosing to go into the field of Psychiatry so he had been choosing between

that and another specialty and it was partly that experience with the table and the knife that made him decide to go into Psychiatry so it was uh you know kind of critical I also um I you know he he what I read was from memor dreams Reflections as we said before and that was written at the end of his life so he had the knife at the end of his life which makes me think that um that it must still be in the possession of the young family so that would be a fascinating artifact to

see someday maybe it will come to light um but Joseph the you know the what you're referencing with Freud I mean this is also very interesting apparently in their very first meeting you know we we we have this great story about him going to he'd been writing to Freud and then he goes to Vienna and they they sort of have this incredible like you know first date where they they talk late into the night but but one of the one of the first questions that young puts to him when they you know they they have

lunch together and then they go off into a room and Yung says I want to know what do you think of par paranormal phenomena and you know Freud says well it's just ridiculous and and we're you know we're not going to he he just sort of denies the whole thing which uh you know becomes a critical issue for for them doesn't it and then there's this you know kind of encounter that that you were talking about where uh you know young feels like no there's something here and I need you to acknowledge it that Yung

was looking for an explanation a sane reasonable explanation for himself that didn't didn't force him to have to split off his lived experience but put a model of psychology that would allow him to accept these strange phenomenon and still include them in a normal sense of self and for Freud perhaps dealing with less adaptive personalities he was more prone to want to analyze deconstruct and dismiss but he would have thought as abnormal EXP experiences I mean Yung undoubtedly was interested in the reality principle in as much as he wanted people to be adaptive but he

once famously said that the difference between somebody who is forgive the language but crazy and someone is saying is that the person who's saying knows when to not disclose their strange experiences yeah a lot of people are having extra experiences are talking about them out in the open all the time and being marginalized and Y felt you know if you had just a little more adaptive Persona you'd actually navigate the outer world with a little more Savvy without having to totally deconstruct this magical mystical dimension of the personality mhm so I think that was disappointing

undoubtedly to Yung because he was hoping that somebody would help explain these fantastically strange things that were happening or had happened in his family and and at that time you know both Freud and young were looking for the kind of the Big Ideas the big theories that were going to explain um unconscious life Freud's big idea was the sexual theory that uh you know that that kind of the life force the libido for Freud was Sexual Energy and it was what happened to this that really determined uh what was going on in the unconscious what

was going on in dreams uh where there was a blockage of energy or Neurosis it it kind of all went down to the sexual Theory and and Yung right from the beginning was not really sure that that was the case and he was wondering about these other things and uh you know there there's this point in memories dreams Reflections where Yung talks about Freud exhorting Yung to make the sexual Theory an unshakable Bull workk against the black tide of occultism so you know Freud really wanted this to be a an explicitly scientific theory he was

going to use this theory of the the sexual drive and and it's and our relationship with it to explain Psychopathology and he wanted young not to be thinking about the parapsychological and to line up behind him in favor of the sexual theory yes I think Fred was very much a rationalist in a lot of ways and in his essay um the future of an illusion where he was talking about religion and religious fantasies as a defense against existential anxiety so um he really felt that facing concrete sensate reality and the concrete objects and responsibilities around

us that that constituted healing and wholeness and anything that seemed to move people away from those very concrete relationships was highly suspicious and had to be kind of analyzed away well for Freud also that his sense of the nonconscious dimension of human personality was also difficult for Yung to understand for instance Yung thought that the ego was the point of Consciousness that it was Consciousness itself but Freud would talk about how the ego would act against its own purposes and not know that it had done it so the ego defenses um let's say like denial

were in a certain way a choice that the ego was making and then forget like the right hand wouldn't know what the left hand could do and you said well that doesn't really make sense to me that there has to be a truly unconscious Dimension to the personality that has its own personality and its own dimensions and that also was very different between Freud and Yung that there was something young was okay with The Uncanny yeah Freud seemed to be comforted by believing everything was really knowable and and Mysteries were just unsolved um erotic conflicts

which of course sometimes was true but wasn't always true yeah y y at some point has this great phrase that I've already kind of alluded to today he said why is it when you try to explain something people think you're trying to explain it away and and I I love that distinction you know cuz I think did want to understand he did want to understand but he wasn't he wasn't trying to um sort of prove that there wasn't something remarkable there you know so so then we get you know the theory of synchronicity eventually which

is you know kind of magical in a way but but uh you know he's seeking for understanding without um asserting a kind of ego dominance because you know when you're saying well look like you said said Joseph this is just a an you know an unresolved sexual tension or something that's manifesting in this way or something it's like it's like the moment in a Scooby-Doo when you rip the mask off and it's like oh it's just the bad guy there's nothing magical here right you know we can just reveal that it's some you know unresolved

sexual tension young is like no there's something there to there's something there there's something there it may be unknowable uh but there's there's there's something there so it's this fun fundamental and I think this is what you were getting at it's this fundamental um I want to say like sort of belief in the autonomy of the objective psyche right you know because because for for Yung that's where it went to and there was this tremendous respect for the unconscious well I think that um for Yung he saw cosmologies ancient and modern as um kind of

artifacts that actually were describing the relationship of the ego to the unconscious that there was something so far beyond the conscious mind that we were embedded in he felt very sure that um the ancient cultures and religions intuited this relationship and found ways to describe it imagistically but coming back to what you had said about understanding something rather than reducing it or explaining it away another way I I would think about it is Yung was interested in being contact full that that he wanted to find a way to contact as much of these mysterious Dynamics

inside himself and he understood that the image making function of the human psyche would create a bridge between his waking mind and whatever this strange and interesting inner world was and he surmised that and this was based on many ancient philosophies as well is that the image that presents to the human psyche has a greater reality which he called the archetypal world but a greater mysterious reality that was uh in a sense kind of SP spiraled backwards from the image but all we could tolerate perhaps or und understand is The Apparition that those forces present

to us in order to interact which also suggests and this is more oh I was going to say this is more me than Yung but now that we have the red book maybe we're on the same page that these transpersonal forces or non-personal forces have an interest in us even as we have an interest in them and the collected works I think he really kept away from that you know writing for his fellow clinicians not wanting to seem too spooky but then when we have access now to his more private writings he really had a

much more lively experience with these inner worlds you know um I'm listening to what you say Joseph and I'm I'm I'm thinking about how this has to do sort of with yung's whole worldview I I like what you're saying about like seeking contact because you know if you think about it what what we've been talking about about the difference between uh explaining and explaining away and how young felt about this versus how Freud felt about this it's a little akin to how they both understood dreams oh okay because you know Freud to a certain extent

did feel like the dream was like the moment in Scooby-Doo Where You RI the mask off it's like oh I've got the code now I'm going to tell you what the dream means you know and that it's sort of like it can it can be pinned down it can be um kind of dissected by Consciousness that Consciousness can uh um Can Prevail over the the the dream sensor who's trying to hide the meaning and we can sort of be smarter than the unconscious as it were whereas Yung sort of felt like no wait a minute

this this intellig that is present in dreams um is is not being sneaky and actually to follow up on your point kind of has an interest in us and wants to communicate something and we can approach it with a kind of reverence and uh and and maybe engage with it and maybe there's something to learn there but it's but it can never be fully known or fully pinned down and and and that where this goes the first further place that this goes of course is meaning I mean if you're if you're in a world where

anything that's a little bit spooky or mysterious just needs to be explained better then you're really living a kind of sawdust existence where there is no meaning be beyond what you see on the surface or or if there is it it just requires uh um a code break exactly and then you're going to be able to know it in its entirety whereas you know Yung said no there's this realm of mystery that is essentially unknowable but we can have a relationship with it and of course you know in the first instance you know if we

live that life too much we can really feel like there's there's no superordinate meaning there's there's nothing transpersonal there's nothing we can't know fully or explain whereas in Yung scenario we can have a relationship with it with that which is larger than ego and then suddenly we're living in a meaningful world and so we could sum the differentiation up between the two as Yung was interested in the encounter and Freud seemed to be used interested in deciphering ing yeah and when I think about the spirit of the encountering that brings me again very much back

to yung's upbringing that again in that spiritualist Community uh the medium would move into a highly receptive state which when we look back now is very much like active imagination um dropping into that linal state in a state of openness a kind of beckoning in that particular cosmology a beckoning for the a spirit of the deceased to come and be in consult to have an encounter with the medium and perhaps the people in the room whether or not we believe in mediumistic work is secondary but that state of openness curiosity a state of respect for

what might present itself and that attitude that the ego is having a relationship an encounter with something that's outside itself all of those principles that were demonstrated in a way that was very impressive to Yung I think continued to prepare him to be able to psychologize that in some ways and be able to to instruct other people to go in with a similar spirit and and something I think we brushed against is Yung was was so interested in this as a phenomenon that he wrote about this as his university uh doctoral dissertation that he had

been attending mediumistic sessions that his cousin had been conducting who's also part of that larger community and he was so fascinated by the way that her personality would change and how he had described it as his um waking personality it was rather plain and ordinary and not terribly inspired or terribly sophisticated and then when she would relax into this linal state this other personality would come forward that was very sophisticated very Urbane if I'm remembering this right might even have spoken more than one language um but was just so remarkable ably different he he developed

a theory of the progressed image of the ego to explain this to himself in one way that perhaps this very sophisticated feminine figure inside of her was prefiguring how this young woman would be you know decades forward but privately um and because of his upbringing there was something more uncanny and perhaps this other um female presence had its own independent existence in the unconscious and perhaps a universal dimension to it right and and uh I mean you know perhaps we'll talk more about sances and mediumistic activity in a future episode but but just to highlight

that a bit more apparently he'd been attending the seances with this cousin who by the way was a p prer I'm not sure how I'm saying I'm probably saying that wrong but in other words it was from a cousin on his mother's side this this family with all of these uh kind of uh paranormal things happening all the time he'd been attending them for a long time and then decided to write about it but I think in the dissertation he makes it sound like Oh I thought I'd study this subjectively so I started going so

he kind of hides how involved he was in this but you know the interesting thing Joseph is he does try to kind of write about it scientifically suggesting that this kind of prefigures but even there as a young man you know he's not dismissing it right he's saying like there's something legitimate about what's coming through it might not actually be a cult there's some legitimate thing happening and you know we understand today that his exploration of his cousin's mediumistic abilities in some way prefigured his notion of the self that part of us that knows more

that is greater than ego so even you know he moves it to a kind of psychological register but you know there is something mystical about the idea of the self so you was always dancing in this place where he's he's trying to um deepen understanding of these Concepts in a way that doesn't leech out the mystery which is a difficult thing to do and he wants to be in the presence of people that have developed a kind of receptivity to something that they could shift in and out of these ordinary States Of Consciousness that that

as it is for most of us highly compelling when I think now about this U meteoric rise of interest in psilocybin treatments I mean this is this is all pushing into this experience of a non-ordinary dimension and that somehow finding a way to encounter these numinous images or experiences can offer us something that has not been appreciated by this very rationalistic model that most of us have kind of lived in well and and we're we're really hungry for it and we know there's something to it right too we know there's something to it you know

you know um you were you were talking about the incident that occurred with him and Freud when Freud was like nope no there's nothing to it and then young is like there's this loud crack and then another one that he predicts and he related that to this Rising tension in his body you know his first experiences of the Paranormal they started when he was about seven so it was a period of time when his parents were sleeping apart and there was a lot of tension in the household and uh he saw coming from his mother's

door a faintly luminous this is from memories dreams reflections a faintly luminous indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it in the air like a little Moon so the interesting thing about this is that what was going on in the household right his parents must have been going through something really difficult the the little boy Carl you know kids can pick that up and then it manifests you know in this in this particular way just like there was tension in his relationship with Freud and it kind of

has this outer manifestation so it's like you know the interesting thing is something inner an emotional state has this impact on something in the outer world the other example of that famous one which we've mentioned before on the podcast is what happened after his break with Freud which was you know terribly difficult for him and uh he there was all of this tension in the household and he um uh you know the whole the whole house could sort of feel it and then there's this Bell starts ringing oh yeah yeah the the Bell that hangs

right inside it it has a pull cord on the outside if you've been to the house that that Bell is there it's a big heavy Bell and it was ringing furiously and there was no one on the other side of the door and several people witnessed this and that I think was the same day when there was just this inrushing of young of this kind of energy and he just sort of uh just wrote The Seven sermons to the dead you know which which I think begins you know we are the dead and we have

returned from jerusem where we found not what we sought right and it's almost like he was just kind of channeling you know these these voices these kind of Gnostic voices um and just to be to make it a little more impressive is it doorbell's back then weren't like the doorbells of today they were totally mechanical like you moved a little lever that pulled a string that moved a physical Bell in the home so it wasn't like a little electrical short you know happening in your uh in your modern doorbell yeah um but you were yeah

I remember when I when I when I toured the house back in 2019 I saw the bell and I remember I said we were we were being a given given the Tour by I want to say it was it was some uh was a a young woman who is of the family I can't remember now exactly what her if she was a great-granddaughter maybe or something anyway um and I just looked at the bell I said that's the Bell she goes oh you know the story yes of course I know the story I said that's

a that's quite a bell you know it's just imagining that happened but but in any case you know the interesting thing is um and this gets a little bit into ghosts but uh just to revisit this a bit you know Poltergeist phenomenon there are some well documented cases of poltergeist phenomenon that are not easily explained right Poltergeist phenomenon tends to constellate around adolescent females so and it's been hypothesized that this is because uh you know that can be a tremendously tumultuous time in a Young Person's he so there's like a lot of sort of psychological

tension in the household so I think I'm I'm trying to pick up this theme that uh there might be a way that psychological life gets exteriorized or kind of catalyzed in these really remarkable ways and then I'm I'm going to share a personal story um that again shared in an earlier version of the podcast but it's worth it's worth sharing so I must have been about seven or eight and I had experience multiple times where I woke up and I saw a man standing over the bed and it was a spectral Vision it wasn't like

didn't I didn't think there was an intruder I understood immediately that it was a ghost it was terrifying I always stood up turned on the light it went away um the last I would always call for my mom and my mom would always say well next time why don't you just ask him what he wants you know cuz my mom was a young an at heart right and I I never was brave enough to do that but I what she told me to right right exactly um but uh the last time that it happened I

was a little bit older it was a Sunday morning it was I had just woken up the blinds were still drawn but there was light in the room I could hear my parents in the Next Room they were getting ready um to go to church I think and uh um I was sitting on my bed awake and he appeared in the doorway walked over sat down next to me on the bed and I I was sitting like this um for those of you that are only listening I sort of had you know was resting my

my cheek on my hand as I sat there and he mirrored me and looked at me and I thought am I going to ask him what he wants or am I going to run yeah and I chose the ladder so then I was talking about this incident with my mom when I was an adult I think I was probably in my 20s or something and um she said oh yeah one night I woke up and there was a man standing over my bed and I just looked at him for a little while and then he

kind of dematerialized and a moment later I heard you shouting for me saying that there was a man standing over your bed and I was like what you you didn't tell me that you saw the same ghost and she said well you know it was it was really just a psychic you know psychic projection and I was like okay you know whatever you say but but you know the interesting thing is that she was interpreting it very much as Yung might have interpreted it although I think Yung was a little koi he doesn't he never

says he doesn't believe that there could be such a thing as ghosts and in fact I I rather think he did but at at least in places he said well this might be like a kind of a manifestation of a psychological phenomenon uh kind of an outer manifestation of it so I mean I think that's that's really interesting uh I haven't had many of those experiences in my adult life although I've had you know some that are difficult to explain but um you know if we think about the implications of psyche being able to affect

the material world in some way you know like with the knife the implications are really interesting and and this things um into yung's much later work with synchronicity and wolfang paully that as he's looking at Wolf Kang Paulie's dreams and they're also developing something of a collaborative relationship and Paulie was a physicist that they both get really interested in this relationship between what's happening mathematically and what might be happening um in terms of this psychological field and this old funnels to to a number of points but one of the things that Yung and Paulie both

land at is that in terms of the the Primal state of the universe there's energy there's matter and there's psyche MH that Yung posit psyche as the third substance out of which the Primal universe is constructed and from that standpoint which I think is also rather vadic that that they called it chitty or mind universal mind have having been from the beginning but that this world of psyche lives in an extension from this very subtle abstract mental possibilities all the way into matter itself and so when he's writing about UFOs and he talks about the

structural UFOs the the objects which Pilots are observing which by the way has been released by the government now you can actually see these videos that the military has released that they actually are true objects because psyche extends into the physical world and can effect physical phenomena right so a lot of times when we say that um it's psyche or it's psychological people I think assume it's some kind of a temporary hallucination that's only you're explaining it away explaining it away or just an individual has a funny little glitch in their brain but Yung is

saying something much more radical yes which is that these are objects and he thought perhaps they were even temporary objects that would be constellated literally in time and space and might also leave or or disperse much like the apparitions that your mother and you were describing MH but it is an actual object yeah yeah well and again it goes It goes to this notion of kind of the objective psyche you know that that this is that that what happens you know in the inner world has its own objetive Ive reality and and sometimes manifests in

the outer World Yung was also clearly really interested in kinetic psychic phenomena like the cracking of the table the breaking of the bread knife the ringing of the doorbell the booming sounds that came out of the bookcase and in my own um just adventures in alternative spirituality um the the phenomenologic world to me is very involved with Kundalini work because the idea of Kundalini which is a partly physical partly biological energy that also has a spiritual Dimension to it which um I know I've said this many times on the podcast but perhaps for people that

are new to it Kundalini means a serpent in s srit and in many yogic Traditions there's an observation that through various practices a certain vitality and energy that's coiled in the sacrum can begin to distribute itself through the body and then create extraordinary effects particularly with Consciousness MH but something that Kundalini practitioners have spoken to is that when those intensities get to a certain pitch strange physical phenomena can happen MH uh in the short term or the long term so I'd like to tell you a wonderfully spooky story okay great so this was actually maybe

just uh 5 years ago it's not that long ago I was doing uh a particularly intense uh cycle of spiritual work and my spiritual work which involves cabala also involves a fair amount of work with Kundalini so there's a lot of Kinetic Physical stuff as well as uh chanting and prayer and and lots of other kinds of mysticism are all all will uh come together in this container so I've been doing this pretty rigorously and I was at the end of the day and I was just moving some objects that I normally set up in

my meditation space and so there was a votive candle that actually had not been lit so it was not hot or cooling down and as I leaned over just touched the tip of the votive candle it split in two and fell into halves in a way that was just inexplicable you mean the candle the wax split into no the glass container as I just touched a split in two perfect halves um that is not something that happens with any regularity but it reminded me of uh that just a strange and uncanny state that perhaps even

the body can get into mhm where somehow um strange things can happen much like Yung having this fire in his abdomen that predicted this explosive sound so so here's my question for you about that story which you had not told me before is you know so this happens with yung in his conversation with Freud and by the way that happened the day that Freud kind of declared that Yung was going to be his Heir and his successor so it was an tremendously charged time and you know you don't you don't have to sort of Spill

the Beans you know in in a personal way but it is there a way that you make meaning out of that experience like why that happened then do you do you have an understanding of that for yourself um I don't honestly because it was I don't recall it being a particularly emot emotionally turbulent time I don't know that I was doing the spiritual work at a at a greater intensity than I had at other times and unlike um Yung I didn't have some strange internal State again beyond the intensities that I would normally experience doing

these um kinds of practices so it's it's um was particularly unexpected particularly strange mhm uh I'll uh take a picture of it I saved it of course and I'll take a picture of it we can put it up on Instagram just as a a strange occurrence perfect perfect and I wouldn't be surprised if perhaps um many of us or many of our listeners have had even just a single yes uh totally inexplicable kinetic event touching something and it breaks or um another uncanny story I just want to tell though is yeah yeah this is probably

20 years ago when I was doing some Consulting work in marville Tennessee and I befriended a clinical psychologist who was interested in um the power of visualization he wasn't he wasn't terribly mystical but he was doing some work with anxiety and visualization so we became friends and he had invited me over for dinner uh with him and his wife and I was talking about my investigations into Kundalini and this and that and so everybody's left the room and he kind of leans in and he goes okay I'm going to tell you a story that I

really would would never tell right so my son who is just in the middle of of adolescence maybe he was 15 years old he comes in and he's really worried and he sits down with Richard and he says Dad something something is going on that's not right so Richard kind of leans in and they're alone in the room and so the boy looks down at this teacup that's on the table and as he's looking at the teacup starts to vibrate and violently Rock and you know he looks at Richard and he's like something is wrong

and uh Richard who is just very salty he just leaned back and he said you know the Adolescent brain who knows and then about 6 months later this bizarre kinetic phenomena just stopped the kid was never able to do it again huh um but it was one just as was saying thatting in these um rapid strange hor hormonal growth periods neurologic periods that perhaps the brain the psyche many of the things can suddenly and temporarily align to produce as you were saying Poltergeist activity which generally is kinetic it's the door slamming the window rattling um

object affecting stuff not just um things appearing telepathy or something right yes so there is something that yeah that's fasc we know anecdotally there was a period in my life where I made a point of asking everyone have you ever had an inexplicable experience and I will tell you if you ask people that just about everyone under the right circumstances will will say well you know there was this one time when and uh so maybe we'll enourage listeners if you want to um write it into the comments section on on this episode you can share

your ownable yes an absolute invitation like okay come onto our YouTube channel okay on this episode and just tell I would love to have a hundred stories of people just telling some crazy thing that happened you know candles glasses splitting knives breaking uh stuff falling off the shelf shelf that you just can't explain that would be so exciting if people would jump on that bandwagon yeah so so just to talk maybe a little bit about Paras pychology paranor the study of paranormal experience in modern psychology it is a it's a bit of a fringe discipline

there are a few universities that have parasyn most of the activity has kind of shifted to Europe if I'm not mistaken but um you know there there's there have been some experiences you know the CIA has been interested in remote viewing and that sort of thing there's not really good evidence for it or I should say at least maybe that it's controversial one of the experiments that at least for a little while people thought oh there's really something here is known as the I think it's called The gansel Experiment or something you can you can

look that up it's g n z f l d but it it it it involves a a a receiver being in a kind of light state of um sensory deprivation so your your eyes are covered and you're listening to kind of white noise and earphones and then there's a sender who is looking at images and trying to kind of convey you the images and then there's like some kind of RA you know so then the receiver will say here's what I saw in my imagination and then someone will score it and say whether or not

it's a hit with what the sender was looking at so um there have been uh you know um gansel experiments that show you know it's like um statistically small but statistically significant hits um and then people have looked at that and said yeah there was methodological issues with it so they don't really stand right now as I understand it as sort of like we can sort of explain it away if you will however I will say that at one point um you know they've looked at people who do better who are more likely to have

hits have certain personality traits all of which I have and um at some point I was talking with my daughter about this and she was really interested I forget you she wasn't I don't know maybe she was 10 or 11 or something and she said okay well let's try it let's try it so uh and we didn't you know set it up you know under kind of uh formal uh experimental conditions but I think I was I just started flipping through a book randomly or a magazine or something and she's you know kind of got

her the blanket over her head or something and and I was looking at a giraffe and she said I see a giraffe and I was like wow so you know and and actually you know being being emotionally connected but an emotional connection between the sender and the receiver is considered to be one of the variables that predicts a higher rate of success so you know who knows maybe it was a coincidence but uh it was interesting so uh there definitely get your attention yes yes I mean it is super fun to think about all this

and I personally like leaving a little bit of room for mystery in my worldview I don't I don't want to turn it all into sawdust or explain it away and um if nothing else it's fascinating to me it's restoring the magical universe that um we we definitely need to be accommodated to reality to the limits of reality but we also need to have a feeling that the world around us is magical that that it has a kind of intelligence and because of that deserves a kind of respect that there is an Integrity in this Secret

Soulful dimension of the universe and when we lose touch with that as human beings we start acting very oddly in relationship to the world to each other to objects we can become very dangerous actually to each other to the Earth to the resources and if we can restore a feeling that the world the universe objects have at least a magical Dimension mm mhm it brings a feeling quality and a different kind of relationship to to the phenomenon of the world and a respect I think yeah yeah yeah that's lovely Joseph I really really like that

and and I think the coral are that comes up for me is that voice that says well no that can't be true it has to be you know there has to be a rational explanation that not not the sort of genuine urge to understand I'm talking about I'm talking about something that feels a little bit more pointed to me it's smells of defense that we need to defend against the possibility that there's something we don't understand and or can't control or can't control and and what if we what if we approach to that which we

don't understand or can't control with a little more curiosity and if we can get our fear out of the way maybe even just Delight you know yeah I I still don't know that I would ask my visitor sitting across the bed for me what he wanted but it's it's aspirational well it's like that moment from the movie polter guys all are welcome come into the light bringing them all in you know there's something about that welcoming voice you know May someday that'll happen right well in any case we We wish all of our listeners a

wonderfully spooky magical weird Halloween [Music] indeed before we switch to another wonderful weird mysterious magical thing which is a dream I'll just uh invite you all to investigate your dreams further with dream school we do not explain them away we do help you learn to understand your dreams uh you know with appropriate reverence um so we hope that you'll consider joining dream school um uh there's a lot of material over there a really wonderful community and three Live Events every month I do one Joseph does one and Deb does one so you get a chance

to kind of hang out out with us a little bit so um this yion life.com take a look at dream School today's dreamer is a 33-year-old male who is currently unemployed but financially secure and here's his dream I'm gathered with friends and family in an outdoor setting at our Cottage accompanying us is also a handsome fellow with long hair and his sister who I'm hoping to flirt with we're preparing food for what seems like some Festival celebration my aunt asks me to pass the cake for Preparation to which I sigh and reluctantly bring it to

her I can't help but feel that I'm being selfish but the truth is I can't wait to get out of there after bringing the cake I decide to leave as I'm passing through the community of cottages set near the lake I pass by a pack of dogs that are somewhat hyena dog hybrid is in appearance but they're clearly domesticated and I have no trouble I make my way to my bed to where I lay down in full asleep I open my eyes and it's night but I can still see clearly possibly it's a full moon

in front of me I see a bed just above the shoreline facing the lake with the dismembered body of the girl who had attended the party the white sheets are splattered in Blood and only an arm and a leg remain instantly I feel an electric Rush of fear and Terror and shame wash over my body like a tsunami as I feel I've done this to her I wake up holding my dog curled up in a ball on the bed still in the dream which is comforting and then I truly wake and he notes that two

years ago in the same month he had had a similar dream of finding bones dug up at their lake with all the same emotions experienced and for context he says I've been going through an extremely difficult period in life in the last couple of years and I'm just starting to find meaning again thanks to you guys young and diligently working towards transformation he says the the feelings in the dream were Terror deep shame and panic and he adds that he wonders if this is related to um a teenage trauma that he had experienced yeah that

that happened uh at at the location of this stream or or in a kind of similar similar place yes so there's in both of these dreams the one this one and then the one he says from a c years AG there's this moment of uh kind of recognition you know that that something horrible has happened or has or that he has done and uh these attendant emotions of Terror and shame so some there is a sense of something of a crime that's been committed that has now that is now coming to light well I'm just

going to um pluck out a few elements um so they're gathered with friends and family so we so for me that's the setting which suggests okay we're working on the family complex mhm something to do with the way that the ego experiences the family what's evoked in it and gives us a clue where he's in the family complex and he kind of can't wait to get out of there mhm there's something just really uncomfortable as it is for many of us when we're young we're trying to separate out from the family or perhaps there's just

a lot of Unfinished childhood tension so it's difficult and the problems begin when he decides to leave which seems really important to me MH so he's is not going to face something in the family and he's going to kind of separate out so once he leaves or in a sense refuses to be conscious because that's what it means for the ego to leave a relationship with something it falls out of Consciousness and he's out in the community and there is a strange instinctive hybrid which which is this dog hyena a pack so we're now in

some kind of a an unusual instinctive part of the psyche which also has intruded because he's still in the neighborhood right he's he's out of the family Cottage but he's still out and about in the periphery but um something to me that seems at least Primal and perhaps dangerous even a pack of wild dogs that had just had used been domesticated at one point if they're running around as a pack um that would get your attention you know something's on the loose mhm he says they're clearly domesticated and they don't give him a lot of

trouble but that's the first uncanny yep you're right about that that you're right about that what do you yeah where would you take it after that so I'm I'm really curious I'm not sure what to do with the stream um but I'm curious about the aunt and I'm I'm a little disappointed we don't have any association because she's sort of the named person in the dream you know this is the there's the There's the Man with a long hair and a sister the woman who winds up being murdered but we don't we don't have a

sense that those are real people in Waking Life so I'm curious about this Aunt I'm assuming he has an aunt and um and I would be really interested in the associations I'm I'm thinking about you know the cake she wants them to pass the cake and he doesn't want to but he does um it's like he doesn't want to sort of play ball but I'm really curious about um being asked to kind of play this role in this celebration you know we need you need to help me with a cake and it's something he doesn't

want to do um um so you know I I like where you're going with it that it's kind of an opting out somehow of this family but exactly how to understand that is a little bit opaque given that we don't know more we don't know more about the family we don't know more about the aunt um I agree with you about the the hyena you know which are particularly sort of um frightening danger dog yeah frightening and dangerous and they have that sort of yeah yeah yeah uh terrible chilling kind of laugh that they make

um mhm and they they certainly don't belong Because unless we you know we I don't have any sense that this is that this is a place in the world where hyenas occur naturally so it's really unusual that they that they would be showing up um and and then um he he he leaves to go to sleep right he lays down and falls asleep which goes to your point Joseph that somehow this is a kind of going unconscious and then he he wakes up and kind of sees the crime so somehow you know if the dream

ego is correct that he's done this somehow and and I think we could have an interesting conversation about that point then it did happen perhaps in between when he left the party fronted the hyena like dogs and and waking up so there there is a way that he uh perhaps was in that hyena like field and and something uh really untour happened so as you were talking I was just thinking about um the fact that and this is very abstracting but he just seems an arm and a leg nothing else of the body and then

there's a fantasy of who this girl may have been or or that it was even a girl but the act the only action he took before is I decide to leave MH and then we discover this dismembered feminine mhm so I'm wondering if the decision to leave has such uh evokes such a catastrophic feeling of shame and panic and fear the decision to not go along with the family expectations and while for some of you that may not seem all that dramatic but for some people saying no to the family expectation can feel very frightening

almost catastrophic depending on the tension or expectations in the family so I'm wondering if the the separating out the saying no to the family expectations and has a fragmenting and dismembering effect on the psyche and that perhaps the instinctive level of the psyche is activating to try to keep him together to not fragment as he's simply trying to be independent or that the Family itself is perceived as a pack of hyenas perhaps I mean I think uh there's a couple of other and we just don't know we just don't have the data we don't know

but um you know the dreamer himself felt like this might be related to a trauma so let's explore that option for a minute because that is certainly possible that somehow the dismembered feminine might be understood to be uh like an image of a kind of um disal feeling function that something's been split off that something's been dissociated that there there was something that happened this trauma that he recalls from when he was about 12 that somehow the results of it haven't been able to be fully felt so it shows up in the dream as this

kind of dissociated image um and and you know that the implication in the dream that the dreamer did it in some sense is accurate that's an image of the defense that we cut ourselves off from something so the girl would be this girl that he wants to flirt with that he wants to kind of get closer to a desire to perhaps reinvigorate the feeling function but there are these there are these emotions that have been split off because they're associated with something that was too big to be metabolized when it happened so that's another possible

way of looking at it so I'm I'm going to lean into your um your shaping of that and again there's something about the pack of hyenas and the dismembered corpse because um hyenas would attack something eat it up tear it apart I mean we watch these um naturalist um documentaries it's you know it's um striking to see how Predators will take down gazel Etc so there's there's the girl the flirting the cake I'm leaving hyenas and the dismembered girl so there's there's something about how to relate to the environment of Desire the environment of the

of the instinctive um sexual dynamism yep you know people young men flirt because you know they have a sexual curiosity and emotional curiosity and something in the flirting could could we say the if then proposition that the flirting conjures the pack of hyenas who then dismember the object the exciting object because there's there's a problem there's a problem with the ego being in a state of erotic curiosity and there's something too too Primal interfer that tears it apart squarely in Freud's territory right where the squarely in Freud's territory and it's possible you know that the

the trauma might have disrupted this young man's ability to feel okay about his sexual desire and so now any any kind of sexual tension that comes up it feels like there's a pack of hyenas inside that's going to dismember someone and that also uh tracks with his he mentioned not just Terror he mentioned shame right so that you know was it somehow shameful to feel desirous right I'm still curious about the cake because I'm not sure what to do with that but yeah so we're we're we're poking around in the dark here a little bit

but we're just sort of trying on different hypotheses and this dream was submitted fairly recently we know based on uh some of the more recent surveys that young men are also extremely anxious yes about how they can communicate their psychosexual needs in the environment the fear that if they were to ask um this is actually some research I had just come upon that um is it 75% of young men are afraid to ask a young woman out for for a drink to meet her because they fear that it will be misinterpreted and 50% of young

women say that it would be a form of sexual harassment to be asked out face to face to go out for a drink oh my God that the correct way is for the approach to be very slow through some kind of social media but for a for a young man to come physically and make an invitation has now become uh is perceived as tremendously transgressive oh wow so I could also think that there's plenty of young men that are internalizing this feeling that I'd like to flirt with a girl but my flirting is now um

characterized as a kind of pack of hyenas that's going to um cause enormous damage and and he's left with shame and panic and also with nowhere to goh with no sense of how to canaly is just natural need to want to flirt in a party so there's it's a dream for the collective Perhaps Perhaps as I know right we're we're this is really speculative today because you know it's a but but you know but it's valuable right to just you know what what might you do given that this is the information that you have um

recognizing of course that we we don't we can't pretend to know but I do want to say that um when I pick the dreams you know I I I pick from the top of the pile so usually the dreams that were hearing have been submitted you know a day or two before and most of the time they're recent dreams that the dreamer has just had and and that actually feels important to me because I you know I I want I want our interpretation perhaps to be helpful to someone in their life right now uh and

so I'm sort of assuming that this is something that the uh the the dreamer will be hearing shortly after he's had the dream but I appreciate what you're saying that it it might in some way be a dream for for the collective or or at least describing a kind of common scenario now and I also um agree that there's something about The Ant and the cake and the fact that the cake is implicitly going to be cut into pieces mhm so it may seem very abstract that's does the cape become the physical body but Eucharistic

there is this strange way that that can happen and depending on what the cake represents as an extension of the ant is complicated the way the unconscious can make these strange parallels well well what I have to say is I am I I am very unlikely to leave a party as the cake is being served I I love cake so I I have no no idea what this dreamer's relationship is with cake right but one thing I could imagine is there is a Turning Away From Desire it's like oh the cake is being prepared I'm

going to I want out of here that would that would follow on with this kind of line of thinking that you and I have been exploring which may not be may not be close to what's going on but we're both wondering about it yeah yeah and and just to be more optimistic is that dreams are medicinal and even though these images uh can seem startling and they're violent or strange the images are trying to angle the dreamer's ego into a position where it can reconsider something and sometimes the dreams will exaggerate something to get our

attention so from that standpoint there's flirtation the enticing deliciousness of the cake MH and then there's the desires turned into a pack of hyenas and then the desires exaggerated into this Carnage and sometimes something can be escalated to force the ego to pin its attention to the question of what is this um and sometimes if we have a trauma history what happens is that the traumatogenic feelings can be added into events that don't deserve them mhm because they're kind of free floating so we're just intending to flirt with someone at a party who you think

highly of becomes infused with a level of distress Terror and shame that the actual moment doesn't deserve and the dream is perhaps trying to help the dreamer understand the way these various forces um Collide and perhaps is trying to separate them out just that beginning of the process of things being different and maybe not all needing to be piled into the moment of just wanting to flirt which is harmless mhm you've been listening to this yian life from our website this yian life.com you can follow us on Twitter like us on Facebook help us produce

fut episodes by funding us through patreon and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode we'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream for today's show and hope you'll let us know what topics you'd enjoy hearing more about until next time keep living this yian [Music] life