Events

Jean-François Vézina will be looking at the full spectrum of archetypical dynamics in the Star Wars series. The core of the last episode of the series contains a great expression of the archetype of the Hieros Gamos that Jung and Pauil talked about in their correspondences. Facing the dark side of fear, symbolised by the Star Wars’ character Palpatine and experienced in our times with Covid-19, we need to be courageous and imaginatives in the reconciliation of our opposites, and Star Wars offers a great path to this collective and personal individuation. Jean-François will divide his presentation into four 20-minute parts leaving plenty of time for community Q&A and discussion.

The practice of the I Ching oracle is a form of introspection bridging different dimensions, unconscious and conscious, imaginal and rational, heart and mind. The wild images from a shamanic tradition three thousand years old are framed in the rigorous system of yin and yang. And the intuitive practice of ‘rolling the words in one’s heart’ is grounded in the exact discipline of handling the forty-nine yarrow stalks or the three coins and reading one’s answer in the book.

Though the world is now in a dreadful state and popes and scientists warn of impending collapse, humanity and our fellow creatures could still be looking forward to a long and glorious future: at least a million years of peace and personal fulfilment with abundant and diverse wildlife. But to achieve this we need to re-think everything we do and take for granted from first principles—those of morality and ecology, both rooted in the all-but forgotten discipline of metaphysics which embraces both science and religion. The re-think and re-structuring amount to nothing less than a Renaissance—more far-reaching than the Renaissance that ended the European Middle Ages.

Governments rarely spell out properly what they are actually trying to achieve. They rely on slogans—as in ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘Take Back Control.’

We need to achieve the necessary turn-around not merely by Reform, or by out-and-out Revolution—but by Renaissance—re-birth: creating the world we want to see in situ, and leaving what we don’t need to wither on the vine.

All technologies are pertinent: both ‘high’—emerging from science; and ‘low,’ aka artisanal or traditional—based on craft. Above all, as E.F. Schumacher said, all technologies must be appropriate—one reason why we need to spell out what we are really trying to achieve!

Beyond doubt, though—if we truly aim to crate convivial societies while respecting our fellow creatures—the most important technologies and crafts are those of food: agriculture and cooking.

Enlightened agriculture (with corresponding cuisine)—and the grand cause of conviviality, personal fulfilment, and a flourishing biosphere—cannot come about without an appropriate, supportive infrastructure—compounded of the government, the economy, and the law. The economy is ‘the matrix of our lives.’ It is in practice the medium through which we translate our aspirations into material reality. So it is vital to have the right aspirations—and to devise an economy that really does help us to meet our needs and fulfil our dreams (insofar as our dreams are compatible with the bedrock principles of morality and ecological reality).

‘Mindset’ is the sum of all the ideas, preconceptions, prejudices, predilections and aversions in ‘the basement of our minds’ that we take for granted and rarely pull out for inspection—but inspection is at least salutary and indeed is necessary. The Great Re-Think discusses mindset under four headings: science, morality, metaphysics, and the arts. Very briefly:

In this session, we will use three films as our springboard to exploring Jung’s notion of the persona:  Wall Street (1987), The Mask (1994) and The Farewell (2019).  While each film highlights the potentially pathological relationship one can have with one’s personas, they also convey the important role played by this archetypal imperative in personality development. As with all archetypes, the persona is bipolar in nature and entering into a more integral relationship with its various qualities and characteristics is central to the project of individuation.

We find ourselves in a world in crisis. While theories abound, to some humanity is at the edge of the apocalypse. We are at a time of reckoning, a time of turning. We are both actors and spectators in the time foretold by ancient prophecy.

There has been no greater symbol of this in recent history than the global health emergency due to Covid-19. As a consequence of the virus, borders have been closed, millions of sources of livelihood have been lost, systems have been stifled, economies have suffered, and all the ills of the world have been accentuated. At the peak of the pandemic, the world was stopped in its tracks and activity—as we knew it—and was locked down. Some point out that this may just be the first such pandemic, and that it is merely a harbinger of the crises to come with climate change.