January 19, 2023

Okay, the world is still burning. Ukraine is still fighting for its life. Several certified white supremacists have received new committee assignments in the U.S. Congress. Black men are still being murdered in cold blood by police. Iranian Quarterlifers are still being hung in public executions, while many more are being disappeared from society and tortured. Wives are still being murdered by their husbands. The unbelievable flooding in California, alongside the extreme drought in Arizona, remind us again that extreme weather is here to stay and totally our fault. And, frankly, this is really just scratching the surface of daily tragedy.

These are not easy times.

I have learned over the years the necessity of compartmentalizing some suffering in order to survive, but there are plenty of times when no amount of compartmentalizing can keep at bay the gut punches of life. There are times when I don’t know how any of us are surviving, or what the best strategies are to keep up hope.

I don’t know why I was born in these times or, perhaps, why I was born this time in these times. But I know that I am here, and I concluded years ago that the best medicine is to commit to living fully while I am here. The in-between place in which I was caught for years (decades) did not better serve humanity, my family, or myself. So I strive to make meaning from this madness while doing what I can to mitigate damage to the earth, ease suffering, and add to the love, ideas, art, and beauty of the world.

Remembering the guidance of alchemy and the gnostics, whom Jung studied faithfully, always helps me to reconnect to the winding path of existence and the necessity of transformation versus merely making-it-through.

Last night, I was moved by a lecture by novelist Lauren Groff in which (partially via exploring the ecstasy of Hildegard of Bingen and other religious women), she expressed the value of religious experience amidst—always amidst—the anguish of life. (If you need a good book, Groff’s novel Matrix is delicious.)

Of course, this tenant of the religious experience is core to an understanding of the unconscious within depth psychology. It is not religion, rules, or dogma that offer up the medicine we seek, but the numinous; the experience of numinosity.

The depth psychological attitude does not suggest that the external world is an illusion, aiding in ways to bypass the suffering of existence. Instead, the general worldview of depth psychology is one which affirms the reality of the external world and its tragic suffering and extraordinary beauty, alongside the very real link of the outer world to the inner world of us all. It’s like an infinity loop in which human beings (and likely all of life) sit squarely at the crosspoint. We are responsible for co-creating the universe for better or worse.

I frequently think about this quote from Jung. Near the end of his life, he wrote to his beloved colleague and translator, Cary Baynes, about his disappointment at what he felt was an insufficient impact of his psychology on the world at large. “Psychology like mine prepares for an end or even for the end,” he wrote. “The question is only, what are we going to kill: ourselves or our still infantile psychology and its appalling unconsciousness.”

This question and this worldview are behind each of the courses I’m teaching this spring. One of the guiding ideas in Jung’s Red Book—that “the outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition”—underlies my upcoming workshop on Sunday, January 29th, as well as all that follows. I hope you’ll join me. For me, the material itself, as well as our extraordinary community, help enormously in maintaining a connection to my own soul, and the anima mundi.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies