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