Moments of Complexity: An Interview with Dr. Joseph Cambray, CEO-President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. Part I of II

Posted by Angela Borda on May 24, 2022 12:58:29 PM

Joseph Cambray, Ph.D., has been the President and CEO of Pacifica for 5 years, and previous to that served as Provost. He will be leading the Pacifica Workshop Fielding the Unconscious: The Origins and Evolution of Field Theory on June 7, 14, and 21, 2022. As always, I am delighted to be speaking with him about his research and teaching.

Angela: In your upcoming June seminar, you will begin with the origins of the field concept in depth psychology, starting in the 19th century, from William James to Freud to C.G. Jung. In particular, you discuss the symbolic elements of the unconscious that Jung included in his clinical encounters. I will admit that I don’t know what field theory is. For any readers who might also be wondering, can you give us a quick introduction to the concepts of field theory, and the importance of Jung’s focus on the unconscious and symbolism as it relates to the emergence of depth psychology as a field?

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Posted in: The Psyche, graduate school, Pacifica Graduate Institute, world issues, The Retreat at Pacifica, unconscious

The Numinous Anima Mundi: Healing the Climate Crisis Within

Posted by Angela Borda on May 17, 2022 3:49:20 PM

The Numinous Anima Mundi: Healing the Climate Crisis Within: An Interview with Jeffrey Kiehl

At no other point in the history of humanity has ecological survival been so imminently threatened by climate crises. On June 3, Pacifica presents a half-day workshop, entitled Climate, Cosmology & Consciousness: From Chaos to Cosmos of three leading scholars and environmental activists for an emerging and inspired vision of a possible path forward as we shift from crisis to consciousness and chaos to cosmos. Of these, Jeffrey Kiehl will speak on “Climate Chaos and the Soul of the World.” I’m delighted to be speaking with him about his upcoming presentation.

“Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.” ~ C.G. Jung

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Posted in: Ecopsychology, graduate school, Pacifica Graduate Institute, world issues, The Retreat at Pacifica

Shifting from Hero to Elder and Role to Soul: An Interview with Connie Zweig, Ph.D.

Posted by Angela Borda on Oct 26, 2021 4:02:16 PM

Connie Zweig, Ph.D., an alumna of Pacifica, well-known for her books on the Shadow, has just published The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul. She will be hosting Pacifica’s symposium on The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, November 12-14, 2021.

You can find information and registration here.

Angela: I’m delighted to be speaking with you today, Connie. You’re a published author with several books to your credit, among then, Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, and Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality. From this, I take it that the shadow is central to your work. People often refer to “shadow work” as examining those parts of ourselves that we aren’t comfortable with or wish to hide. What is the shadow to you, and how does it relate to Depth Psychology?

Connie: Carl Jung coined the term “shadow” to refer to our personal unconscious. One of his many gifts was the insight that anything at all can be repressed into the shadow. For Freud, there was only dark or negative material in the unconscious. But for Jung, anything could be banished into the shadow, including our early aptitudes and gifts. So, the shadow is like a darkroom that contains our dormant images, thoughts, and fantasies. Shadow work is the process that brings them back to life. And we know now that the mind and body are functionally identical, so the shadow is not some corner in the mind that we can’t see. The shadow material is in our cells, our muscles, nerves. That shapes our responses to life, and it colors our experiences of our circumstances at every moment.

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Posted in: Pacifica Events, The Retreat at Pacifica

LSD and the Mind of the Universe: An Interview with Christopher M. Bache

Posted by Angela Borda on Apr 19, 2021 5:06:43 PM

Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D. is an accomplished teacher as well as researcher in “the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, particularly psychedelic states.” He will be the keynote speaker of the upcoming Pacifica Conference, “Accessing the ineffable: Depth Psychology, Religious Experience, and the Further Reaches of Consciousness,” on June 19, 2021. Click here for more information. I’m delighted to find out more about his research and the conference.

Angela: The title of the workshop is “Accessing the Ineffable.” And your talk will be on “LSD and the Mind of the Universe: The Challenges and Blessings of an Extreme Psychedelic Journey.” How has LSD helped you to access the ineffable, or as you say in the book, allowed you to journey “into a unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence”? How did you first get involved, and are you glad you took the trip?

Chris: Yes, I’m very glad I took this journey, though I also want to say that it was the most demanding undertaking of my life.

I began my psychedelic work in 1979 when I was 30 years old. I was just out of graduate school from Brown University where I had trained as a philosopher of religion, finishing my studies as an atheistically-inclined agnostic. I was looking for where to take my research next when I read Stan Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious. I immediately saw the relevance of his work to the core questions I had been trained to pursue as a philosopher–whether life has meaning or purpose, whether human beings survive death, and whether there is a conscious intelligence operating in the universe. I saw that with the advent of psychedelics, the deepest contributions to my discipline would be made by persons writing out of an experiential basis, not just an intellectual basis, and I felt a deep calling to do this work. (My Saturn Return marked a number of seminal transitions in my life: from student to professor, from book learning to experiential learning, from agnosticism to psychedelic initiation.)

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Posted in: Connecting Cultures, Pacifica Events, soul, depth psychology, meditation, The Retreat at Pacifica

Accessing the Ineffable with Santo Daime: An Interview of William Barnard, Ph.D.

Posted by Angela Borda on Mar 29, 2021 2:51:16 PM

Professor William Barnard, Ph.D. will be giving a talk on “The Religious Use of Psychedelics: The Santo Daime” in the upcoming Pacifica conference “Accessing the Ineffable: Depth Psychology, Religious Experience, and the Further Reaches of Consciousness” on June 19, 2021. This conference will bring together an eclectic group of scholars to investigate to mysterious elements at the foundation of Jungian depth psychology – “consciousness” and the expansive potentialities of a non-local “unconscious.” For more information on this event, please click here. [https://retreat.pacifica.edu/accessing-the-ineffable/] I was delighted to spend time talking with Bill and learning more about his research and experiences.

Angela: You are a professor of religious studies, and will be presenting a talk on the use of psychedelics in religion, in particular, the Santo Daime, which you describe as “a relatively new religion that emerged out of the Amazon rainforest region of Brazil in the middle of the twentieth century and which now has churches throughout the world; a religion in which a psychedelic brew – ayahuasca – is taken as a sacrament.” For those who are not familiar with ayahuasca, can you tell us the basics of where it comes from, what it is, and how the experience of ingesting would lead people to consider it a sacrament?

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Posted in: Connecting Cultures, Pacifica Events, soul, depth psychology, meditation, The Retreat at Pacifica