Gary Bobroff (3:26)

Nice to Be with you, Leon.

Leanne Whitney (3:29)

Now tell me how you got drawn to Jung and depth psychology. What was the draw for you and why did you continue along and go deeper into it?

Gary Bobroff (3:40)

Wow. So much, so much. It really, it's one of these things, you know, Jung really came in my life early. In grade seven, I did the MBTI for the first time. I had a really amazing grade 7 and 8 teacher. Years later, she actually introduced me to Tony Wolf's archetypes at a workshop that she did. And it just. That was really the moment of revelation for me with Jung. And just the idea that there is this architecture and the psyche, that we feel it, we know it, maybe we don't name it. We're in the process of naming it. Becoming more conscious culturally is naming things accurately. And these archetypes are there and we feel them. And I just, you know, I went to a workshop with her and it just blew my mind on that stuff. And so from the MBTI to the archetypes, and then, you know, I was drawn to Pacifica and Santa Barbara and California to study, and it seems like all roads led me in those directions and I really couldn't get away from Jung. How about you? When did you start with Jung?

Leanne Whitney (4:51)

Oh, my goodness. I had a significant event in around 2000. They call it a pure consciousness event in the religious studies literature. But my friend who was working with typology in England, after I was discussing the event with her, she's like, oh, I think you're really going to like this guy, Carl Jung. Here's a copy of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. And when I flew back from London to la, I literally devoured the book on. On the flight home. And then that was it. That was it. I. I was in.

Gary Bobroff (5:25)

Very nice. Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (5:27)

So there's a. There's a. I want to say yumminess. Jungian psychology isn't dry. It's very enchanted and sort of very. It's very alive. Right. It's not just. Yes, it's on paper and we can study the textbooks, but it's a real living psychology. And like today, in the middle of a very fragmented world and ecological crisis and cultural crisis, what political. Like, what would you say, what do you have to add, I guess, in that idea of, like, the living or the value of Jung psychology today?

Gary Bobroff (6:07)

Well, I think better than anyone else, Jung understands the psychology of the modern person, even though he's been gone 60 years. Everything he wrote about the crisis of modernity and what it means to be a modern person, he was right. I mean, I think one of the biggest things is just the whole worldview of Jung is the psyche as a part of nature. The danger in the modern is that we've lost nature, that there's a big part of our culture that operates in a sort of a human culture that is completely removed and doesn't even, you know, that thinks of children as something that they're going to tabula rasa, that they're going to create and mold and everything that that child becomes is on them. And you know, it's like, no, no, no. There's something called nature and archetypes, you know, and Jung is connected to the philosophers of nature, to Goethe, to the alchemists, to the mystics. And so he's rooted in the relationship between human and the psyche. That guy did a lot of very serious inner work on himself and was able to develop a relationship with the psyche in a different way. So for me, my view of the psyche, all of this is rooted in nature. Part of nature connected to the earth, connected to the body. I don't believe in artificial intelligence. I think that's an impossibility. I believe that consciousness has creativity and many other things that, you know, the fancy jukebox is never going to have. So and it's never going to have consciousness. So there's a whole different very, in some ways very anti modern view, but also connected to what we're feeling, connected to the pressures, to holding the tension, to, you know, how does it feel to be fractured? How does it feel to be aware of your shadow? How does it feel to be. You know, Jung gave us all this language that we have and there's a lot to unpack there.

Leanne Whitney (8:27)

Right, sure. Yeah, he lived it. He left a long trail, a legacy, sort of. Certainly academically in the literature, but also through his red book, his very personal experiences with the unconscious. And yes, we have, we live, we're in 2025. This AI advanced information processing, but it's not embodied. And when we talking about even. Yeah, some post Jungians like Marian Woodman. I do think that there were some people that came after Jung that gave us another step into what Jung was pointing to. And I would say Woodman sort of. Yeah, first on that and then we have Tom Singer now with cultural complexes. So in Von France. Oh for sure. Right, yeah, so. So it definitely continues to flower. But Jung left a really robust legacy. That's up to. To everybody who does the shadow work to understand and digest and yeah, come to the same map of the psyche or not.

Gary Bobroff (9:43)

I think it's important for people to understand that this stuff for Jung was, you know, from the very beginning. So even with his parents. So mother, father, his father and his father's brothers were all priests. His mother and his mother's father and their family were all channels. So you have the religious and the spiritual coming together. I mean, what author, what thinker do we associate more with the religious and the psychological than Jung? And so he's also sitting with those struggles. He's holding, that struggle between faith and, you know, having psychic experiences. Like he had very famously, a knife breaking in front of the whole family and these different, you know, cracks and creeks that he talks about his experience sitting with Freud where they had a psychic experience together. This stuff was part of his world. So the. The eerie. And later, what he would call synchronicity is in there pretty early, and it sticks around. So it's. He's. And then he becomes a medical doctor. So he's interested in the rational and scientific and he develops the word association test and then meets Freud and all that happens. So he's blending the two sides of the Western experience or the, you know, our. Our thinking side and our feeling side or whatever you might want to say, from the very beginning. And then he starts to develop the concepts like the shadow and the self and archetypes and all that that we'll talk about. But it's really coming out from who he is. It's his real journey. Right. Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (11:25)

I appreciate you sharing those background pieces because they are so very, very important. He was disillusioned with that patriarchal, you know, his father's lineage, right, all those pastors, and his dad, right, was a pastor. And there was a disillusionment with Jung, with those religious events that he didn't feel that they were reaching in the depths of his soul like his own dreams were. He was like, something's not alive here. This is just where everybody's doing it by rote. And then also his cousin, who was a medium, his mother a psychic, like, those things were very alive. Again, back to this sort of insouled alivement. So, yeah, thanks for. For bringing that up right at the beginning, because that's again. Yeah, he builds from that. Do we say, like, dead cold.

Gary Bobroff (12:23)

Something.

Leanne Whitney (12:23)

That'S not expanding or enchanted to w. Wow. This is. This has lots of life over here. What is it?

Gary Bobroff (12:31)

Yeah, well, and even, like, you know, in, you know, the turn of the century, last century, 19, you know, early 1900s, people are saying God is dead, right? Like, that's the, you know, Fitzgerald and lots of different People are saying at the same time, you know, that, you know, it's all that exists is the human. And that is happening even more so today. So, you know, Jung was facing that cold, dead world even then and he was having these spooky experiences that were saying, you know, one of the things, even if you have a weird, funny, little tiny synchronicity, it's kind of saying what's going on here, even if it's just a little one, you know. So I think the universe is always trying to maybe coax us a little to relationship with it. And you know, I think we can choose rationally to be like, oh, I want to have, you know, to build a relationship with the universe. But it's also something else to think, oh, it wants a relationship with me.

Leanne Whitney (13:36)

Right, yeah. Very relational. I love that word, love that. And what came to mind as you said it, it's like it tickles us like with the synchronicity or near death experiences or certainly the community that we have here on New Thinking allowed lots of people exposed to parapsychological phenomena. Right. But it's like these are very.

Gary Bobroff (14:01)

We.

Leanne Whitney (14:01)

Need to normalize it because so many people have experiences outside of this very constrained rational reality that would we say Western or Euro American culture has tried to construct post enlightenment.

Gary Bobroff (14:19)

Yeah. And it can be a curative. It's not just that these things happen, it's that they happen in a way that points to purpose, being alive in the world. And that is very obviously very meaningful. You know, so it reminds me of, you know, the most famous Jung synchronicity story with the beetle knocking at the window. Well, the Beatles knocking at the window because the patient who's suffering from an over rational defensiveness and can't connect to a bigger worldview that would give meaning has a dream of a scarab beetle necklace and then tapping at the window is a scarab beetle which Jung presents to her. And so it's like it's not just a chaotic, meaningless, random universe. There's something bigger going on. And that's not just a nice thing to say. Right.

Leanne Whitney (15:16)

It's a reality. It's happening. Meaning making. Yes. And, and again, one of the reasons why Jungian psychology remains so alive because many people are struggling for meaning in the way that culture is being presented right now. And Jungian psychology offers an antidote to that. Like, hey, you know, stay aware. So yeah, let's talk about the shadow. Let's for sure keep going into the parapsychological phenomena because they're peppered throughout Jung's whole experience in such a beautiful way. But yes. So the inner work, shadow work for people who might be just be learning about Jung. What's the basis of that?

Gary Bobroff (16:07)

The most basic idea is that there's the conscious mind and then there's other forces in the psyche. So we're not just our conscious mind, we're not just our rational self, there's other energies moving in us. And one of the ways that we discover that is in those moments when we might even say to ourselves, oh, why did I act that way? Or when you're so stirred up inside that you do something that afterwards you're like, oh, that's not like me. So those times can be powerful and we might reflect on that and go, wow, where was that energy coming from? And so Jung started talking about the concept of the shadow, which you can see in literature. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most famous exemplars of it. And that there is a often compensation for what Jung called the Persona, which is the, the mask that we wear in our social life and our relationship to other people in compensation to that forward facing Persona, which is often very shiny and very, you know, aren't I great?

Leanne Whitney (17:24)

Best foot forward.

Gary Bobroff (17:25)

Yes. There's another part of us that Jung said often contained the parts that were rejected. So that might be in our family, it might be in ourselves. We all, I believe, have an inborn character in our culture can also have an effect on it of course too. But there will be qualities that we repress. You know, you can imagine as a young child, you know, you're acting out and your parents are kind of restricting that, especially 150 years ago, maybe more forcefully. But certainly there is pressure on the early developing person to control certain elements and allow others to come forward. So the rejected parts, the values that we don't, the part, the ways that we don't think of ourselves as being, but somehow we sometimes are. There seems to be that process of compensation in the psyche. And this is one of the very many of Jung's qualities where it reflects a dynamic tension. It's saying that there is a push and pull in us sometimes. We may have rejected qualities that we really need, that we are, that would be best served to have it. So the process of, you know, either midlife or later or earlier is seeing that, owning that, knowing that. I think especially in your 20s and 30s, the Persona is so shiny and bright. I think seeing the shadow is hard. I think as you're aging process might be different for women. But as a man, I think a lot of men have talked to me about this. I think when you're getting to middle age, you're seeing a lot of shadow of your own and you're seeing parts of yourself that you're not so proud of. So there's a humbling there. There's a relativity there, maybe a deepening, hopefully. So that's what Jung's talking about with wholeness is having a relationship of these things to the extent that we can handle it.

Leanne Whitney (19:39)

So unintegrated or split off parts of the personality, parts we don't understand yet, or parts we can't see. Like the shadow.

Gary Bobroff (19:48)

Right.

Leanne Whitney (19:48)

It's like the invisible. It's what's behind and we want to bring visibility to it. And by doing that, we move into the. Towards the wholeness or towards integration, even though it's challenging to do.

Gary Bobroff (20:03)

Right.

Leanne Whitney (20:03)

Because like you said, like, you get triggered. There's a hotspot, a psychic hotspot. And yeah, maybe you could unpack for us the idea of, like Jungian complexes, these psychic hotspots, which really sort of. It's the red flag or the, hey, look over here.

Gary Bobroff (20:20)

Well, and very often the therapist is going to see it in the client before the client sees it in themselves. So if you're the analysis, you may not know what's going on. But Jung said, very often the client sits down. I know right away, but I can't share that with them at that point because they're not ready to handle it. So very often in dreams, you know, it'll be, you know, that figure that we would not identify with, that we would say, oh, you know, I'm not. Oh, whatever, I'm not like that. That figure can be occurring in dreams. And so there can be the process of it or, I mean, relationship, Right. Other people are going to say, hey, maybe I didn't like that. Or you're going to get feedback certainly as you're aging.

Leanne Whitney (21:12)

Right. Like, I see your irritability or your moodiness or a partner or child or a close friend can point out, hey, I can see, see that moodiness or that irritability in you. When maybe it's.

Gary Bobroff (21:26)

Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (21:26)

Part of the Persona trying to wield its sword or do. To maintain its power. Perhaps we could say, yeah, yeah.

Gary Bobroff (21:35)

And I think too then we start to turn, you know, from the shadow to thinking about archetypes. And Jung talked about the shadow as part of the personal collective. We have a personal shadow. There's also a collective and archetypal shadow. But the, The Next layer is this collective unconscious layer. And Jung, in his own discovery process and early in his life, he could recall having dreams going down, you know, into basements, into basements, into basements, deeper and deeper. And that's what we. The metaphor for the collective unconscious, that each of us carried something of the whole of our ancestors. And I feel like that really fits for me spiritually that we're connected to the. The biological family tree that we come from. There's both karmically and who we are, and in the. Maybe the unfinished business, but also in the sense of that there are archetypes, there are imprints. So we have the experience of the mother and father, we have the experience of the child. We have other energies that are universally part of human experience that we're connected to. I don't think the psyche is just something. I know it's not just something in my brain. Psyche is a field that we connect to. So are we connecting to it both through time and space, constantly, all the way back? Is that what the psyche is? So these archetypes are sort of the, you know, Tony Wolf called them the structural forms. So like the girders, the frame, the bed into which the water of the psyche will run as a river. So there's certain ways that we come into the world pre built to do certain things. You solve problems by smashing them or by figuring them out. Do you solve problems by, you know, personally connecting with someone or by, you know, connecting to a group? There's all these different archetypal impetuses that people can have that are different but that are universal. And then there's the whole, you know, all the mythological patterns that we see in different ways that people are repeating in their lives. That's why so much of, you know, not just Jung's psychology, but Freud's, you know, gets its names from mythological tales. These are stories we're repeating. And the sort of, I think, arrogance of. Of youth always. But I think modernity a lot today is thinking, oh, no, a whole new beast. Right.

Leanne Whitney (24:14)

As Frankenstein sort of plays Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to life. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, good mythology is great psychology. Exactly, yeah. So is there any more to share about those archetypal imprints? And maybe there's even a definition, the etymology of archetype that might be useful here because it is a. It's an excavation, in a way. It's an archaeological dig that we do with shadow work going down, if you will. Like, I don't really want to locate it, but just one Way to frame it, going down into those imprints, those deeper layers.

Gary Bobroff (24:59)

Well, like I said at the beginning, you know, my connection with Jung is also to Tony Wolf. So Tony Wolf was Young's close collaborator and worked with him, was one of the first analysts, was, you know, his sort of psychic lifeguard. When he was having his red book confrontation with the Unconscious period, Tony was there helping him survive it. And she was on a committee that Jung created for his Psychological Types book. So there was three people, Tony and two men. And they kind of came up. They looked at literature and other things and came up with the frames of extrovert, introvert, thinking, feeling, intuitive, sensation. And those are the categories that Jung then wrote Psychological types about. But Tony plays a big part in that. I think she's the reason that we have the intuitive category at all. And she also, 13 years after psychological Types came out, she'd give a lecture called Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche, where she talks about four archetypes. And that's one of the main things that I teach and write about. And so Tony, for me, and Jung are in a live conversation that continues. And really, Jungian psychology, if you really are interested in Jungian psychology, there's a lot of women in that. It's really Jung and Von Franz and a bunch of women up to Anne Ulanov today, I think, who have. And men, but a lot of women who have really built that out. And I think that's important to understand. So. But in the archetypes that Tony talks about, which are one of the main things that I teach, she gave us the Amazon as a type for women, the Mediatrix or the Media woman as a type for women, Mother and what she called he Terra, in what later we would call companion. And so a generation of teachers have adapted that. And the people who taught me that archetype system were taught by other folks. And there's sort of like a lineage that comes through to me on that material. And, you know, each of those stories then now has been developed and has a masculine and a feminine feminine title. But I think the titles are really not something to worry too much about. And I'll. I'll get into describing them a little bit. But there's also a fascinating parallel that I found, and I'm writing a book on this right now, that the Tibetan Buddha families really line up with Tony's four archetypes. And it's pretty amazing. And so, like, for example, in the Tibetan Buddha families, you have the Karma family, which are like their shadows, like being too aggressive. Well, that's the warrior that Tony was talking about. So, and I think one of the things that the archetypes give us is understanding that people are not all the same. People find identity and fulfillment in different ways. And so that's what Tony was really talking about, saying that, you know, some people, like she talked about Amelia Earhart, you know, being an Amazon, flying out there and proving for herself that she could do it. You know, it's not, people might say, oh, it's to prove men. No, no, no. She's doing. Because she wants to do it. If it was any other way, she wouldn't have the power to do it. She's doing it because she wants to do it for herself. That's the whole deal. So, and also, very interestingly to me, that the medial, the medial person, which Jung himself was certainly having medial type experiences all the time. I mean, he had an experience where, you know, a client of his that he lost who committed suicide with a gunshot to the head. When it happened, Jung had a massive headache without him knowing, obviously. So one of hundreds of examples I could give. So Jung's certainly a medial type. And, and there are people that are that way and to be that way without knowing it in a very rational world. Right. Well, that person's going to get medicated probably or something. And it's, you know, might not work out well. So it's good to know that these ways of being are part of the human family, which I think is what Tony's saying there. She also talks about mother, father, and what we call seeker companion and in the masculine names and again, those are just different ways of understanding and being. For me, the seeker companion is a combination of child and lover. And these are folks that are very playful and good in the one on one spaces and feel comfortable there and find identity and fulfillment doing with partnering, with being, you know, being the muse, taking the partner to a museum, doing these, you know, these kind of things that, that kind of space and all of these different ways of being are okay, they're fine. But different people are going to live and find their joy in different places and that's okay. And I think, you know, in the old world, in the ancient world, people would pray at different temples. Some people would pray at Mars, some people would pray at Athena and Zeus, whatever. And I think the understanding of people having different vocations, different reasons for being here, and that we're not all supposed to be one type, I think is really important. And again, but you have to get out of that rational worldview A little bit. Because I think that rational thing really wants sort of a uniformity that maybe won't be too much.

Leanne Whitney (30:52)

Right, sure. Certainly. If robotics, it seems sort of very narrowing. And what I'm hearing you say is, like, yeah, there's an oak, there's an elm tree, there's a spruce, and humans are the same, or every snowflake is different. Like, it's we. We. Even though there's these imprints.

Gary Bobroff (31:14)

The way.

Leanne Whitney (31:15)

That they appear on the front side, there's still elements of difference types, and.

Gary Bobroff (31:21)

No two journeys will be the same.

Leanne Whitney (31:23)

Right, right. And you also brought up a joy, which I really appreciate.

Gary Bobroff (31:28)

Right.

Leanne Whitney (31:28)

So affect. The value of affect. That it points us in a direction that. Yeah, it's showing us the value of some. Some experience that we're having. And in affective neuroscience, joyful play being one of the seven emotional primes. I love that you brought that up. Because psychology, Jungian psychology, we're talking about the healing of human suffering. And I think joyful play is one way for people to gain access towards. That's what we want to aim for. Like, not that suffering is bad, we know that suffering is bringing information to the soul, but yet nobody wants to live in suffering for an extended period of time. And so finding joy, I think, is a really great pointer.

Gary Bobroff (32:20)

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think enjoying life and being happy and, you know, Jung was certainly proud of his very loud laugh that he. Someone one day knocked on the door and was like, who was laughing that. Like that? I need to know. And heard them, you know, Jung laughing from far away and had to come over and find out who that was. So. Yeah, no, I think absolutely joyous. Something that we have to find. Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (32:49)

And in yoga psychology. I'm not sure this is spelled out in Jungian psychology, but perhaps it's like a spectrum from joy to grief. The suffering of grief, which is symbolic of separation, separation, distress. And so the joy sort of shows that we're bringing. We're integrating the splits and even though there's been pain and loss and illness and. Yeah, just. Just different devastations that we're able to sit deeper into this. Could we say messy experience and joy can bubble up from those depths. So I love where you're heading with your own research and Tibetan Buddhism.

Gary Bobroff (33:33)

Yeah, well, I think. Yeah, I'm working on that book and it's really fascinating and it's one of the things that I've taught that archetype work all around the world. Very powerful stuff. You know, I gotta say, like, you know, if you're talking about the warrior archetype in Germany. I didn't understand how sensitive. Sensitive a topic that was gonna be. I should have known. But, yeah, I mean, people are kind of really loaded cultural things. People can also get very loaded, particularly from their parents, loaded values about archetypes. So one of the things that I've heard from different versions from different people is particularly around an archetype like the Warrior or Amazon, is that when a parent doesn't live that out parent wanted to be a great, you know, baseball player or great, you know, pianist or whatever it is, they didn't get to do it. They can shove that onto their kids, you know, and then the kid feels so much pressure to be that which often they aren't. And in fact, that kind of tension is like, we really know it in our culture. We know these archetypes. If you look at every most popular comedy, top 10 comedy shows, it's always tension. You just put archetypal characters in a comedy situation and let them be true. And they do their thing. Like family ties from the eighties. Like, you've got Alex P. Keaton being the, like, being the warrior type Wall street guy, and then the family of, like, more liberal type. And then you have this tension and that becomes thus the comedy. And, you know, Archie Bunker and all of these things. People know these characters, but we don't have a language for them. And so what Tony's archetypes do and what the five Buddha families do is give you a language to go, hey, people are different. People have some different values. And that's okay, you know, mother and father. Like Archie Bunker is a classic sort of shadow father, you know, and that became, you know, you could see that from Archie Bunker. There's a whole bunch of TV fathers that kind of play opposite that Homer Simpson. We know these stories, we know these types. And the father would often be. And so can the mother archetype be. And this is not talking about people who just have children. This is a particular characterological identity. There might be a bit of that controlling thing. There might be the shadow. And certainly a holding to the older traditions would be common, but not necessarily all father. Mothers are that way. So you know these different characters. We actually know them. So to give people a language and a way of talking about it, for me, it's very exciting. And I think it enables us to have a different kind of discussion. It enables you to appreciate and understand, oh, I have my values, but they have their values. And here I'm talking to someone who's different from me. So I'm not going to talk about topic A. I'm going to talk about topic X that I know they're going to be more interested in. I've had people tell me that. I mean, I've done this archetype work for so long and had so many people come and do it that I keep hearing feedback and stories and people telling me their experience with it, but just accepting that people are different and that people are going to have different ways of being. And, boy, there's a lot of tension.

Leanne Whitney (37:16)

Between them culturally right now, for sure.

Gary Bobroff (37:20)

And. Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (37:21)

So relatability points. Any top tips on that? For people who are in that difficult cultural moment, A big divide. Like, I feel like people are looking at one side of a quarter and like, hey, it looks like heads and they're describing it. And like everybody, other people are on the other side saying what? I don't see that at all. I completely see the tail side of it. And, you know, they're. They can't see each other's side of it. So is that where shadow work comes in to do our own work, which pulls us into more of a collective and allows the relational aspect to begin to flourish?

Gary Bobroff (38:08)

You have to be able to say, maybe there's something I'm missing. Why, you know, how come I'm so anti this person? Or whatever. Like, the basics of shadow work is, why do I have a big overreaction to this that is above and beyond perhaps what I should have. And so looking at that. But there's not a lot of cultural container for it, right? There's not. So, you know, and every side of, you know, all the, you know, flip the archetypal map any way you want. There's shadow there. I don't think any particular archetypal quadrant has less or more. So, you know, there has to be a certain amount of humility and a certain amount of willing to be curious about yourself and a certain amount of willing to question perhaps what the group think is telling you. Because, you know, it's always going to go down. I mean, basically groups, as Jung would always say, are going to take you down to the lowest common denominator. Denominator. How could it not? Right? Because the lowest common denominator is going to have the widest understanding. You know, something that's more difficult to understand is going to have the least number of people understanding it. So, you know, the group is going to often offer, you know, comforting simplifications. But if you can break out of that and go, well, who Am I, what do I, how do I feel about this? What do I think of that person? Are there qualities of myself that I reject, that maybe they embody every day? Maybe that's what's going on. So. And everybody from every stripe can always do that. And I think, you know, if you're looking at a particular political thing, there's always the opposite, but then there's always the psychological. And you know, the psychological answer to any sort of current dilemma can always be one step deeper. You can not only look at, well, I'm angry about this, but then you can look at, well, why am I angry about this? Is it a good reason? Is it maybe not a good reason? Is it a shadow reason? So there has to be a willingness to question and to. But I think question the outer, but listen inner, you know, really listen to yourself. What is it? I mean, I'm sure you could tell folks, you know, give folks some tips on that yourself.

Leanne Whitney (40:45)

Yeah, well, the deep listening for sure. And that reminds me, I want to say it's the opening part of the Red book, but where Jung really talks about like, one of the main themes of my life is understanding.

Gary Bobroff (40:57)

And.

Leanne Whitney (41:00)

For any of us, you know, what value does understanding hold as opposed to what you're pointing out, like something somebody wants you to think. Right. And they're sort of in implanting it and instead of doing the long unraveling of really understanding that group think or what that propaganda might be.

Gary Bobroff (41:24)

Yeah, and I think too, it's like what I'm, what I'm saying sort of saying is use your feeling as a guide for yourself personally. Like, there can be so much chatter out in the world. And I, I also think too, like in every situation you could be like something can be maybe, okay, there was the right idea applied the wrong way, let's say. So you can be like kind of archetypally. Right. Literally. Maybe that wasn't so great. You know, personally for me, I feel this way about it, which could be something else. You know, like there can be, there can be different layers, levels of truth. And I think, I'm not saying that truth is relative, but I'm saying that there are different. There can be a outer truth and there can be your inner truth and your inner truth is how you feel about X. And okay, well, when you know, okay, I feel that way because, you know, it makes me mad and I want to do something about it or whatever it is, you know, it can be. When you know the truth, then. Then you're sitting from a good place but if you're just following, repeating the crowd, maybe not. Right.

Leanne Whitney (42:31)

Knowing what it is for you and again pointing to that feeling function, the value of it, like really understanding how much information are either the affective moments that we have where all of a sudden we're just taken over with some kind of affect or.

Gary Bobroff (42:53)

Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (42:53)

The joy or the grief or what it's pointing to, that there's a, there's a knowledge basis to it.

Gary Bobroff (43:01)

Yeah. And if you're, if you're moving from what's true for you, then you're probably going to be better off. You know, it might mean sitting with discomfort. I think that's another thing that, you know is word like, I don't, I'm not sure how much the culture is teaching people to sit with discomfort. You know what I mean? If you've got an iPad in front of you from day one.

Leanne Whitney (43:32)

Sure. Distraction, distraction, distraction. The attention economy. I mean, right. They've hijacked, they've. That social media is in the full throttle of hijacking people's attention.

Gary Bobroff (43:48)

So.

Leanne Whitney (43:48)

And there's an addictive component like don't sit with your discomfort. Pick up your phone.

Gary Bobroff (43:53)

Yeah. Or, or take a pill or, you know. Yeah. I, I, and I think there's an expectation that you're not supposed to. And I think like, that's, there's no shadow work without sitting with your own discomfort. Like, the whole idea is you're going to find something you don't like about yourself. So it's not how many people are really doing that. If you can't, like, just go, hold it, hold it, hold it. Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. Hold it. How do I feel? How do I feel? Maybe journal it. Keep, you know, if you let the, you know, if you've got an angry letter to write, write it, man. Write it. You know, and then it might, you might feel differently. But you have to write it in earnest. You have to write it like you're going to send it. So whatever it is, whatever that thing is, move it through you and then, and then find out, you know, what's going on in there. And I think that's kind of. And to me, again, this is all, you know, Jung's rooted in nature, nature's rooted in psyche, Psyche's root in the body. This is like, to me, all fits together in a way that I feel good about and I think will be helpful to people to continue to reflect on Jung and to go deeper and to begin to listen to their dreams. You know, that nightly testament from the unconscious. Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (45:17)

What we don't understand in the day come will. Can come to us at night for sure. I really love that you are pointing out though, building that capacity to sit with discomfort, this kind of empowerment, integration.

Gary Bobroff (45:37)

It'S.

Leanne Whitney (45:38)

I don't. I want to say hard one in, in a way that. But the first time you do it is the hardest. And then you understand, oh, there's something that reveals itself on the backside of sitting through this discomfort. And maybe for X amount of years I never wanted to admit to this thing, but the moment I can. And for me shame is like the nadir of the psyche. It's what really brings that dissociation, the. All the splits, all the wrathfulness. Because people, it's in the. It's literally somatic. Like I often think of like maggots on rotting flesh to sit in. Shame is something most people, it's so uncomfortable, they don't want to get near. But the first time you do it the most challenging. And each time being able to handle the discomfort, our window of tolerance grows, able to tolerate and. And from there we build resilience.

Gary Bobroff (46:41)

Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (46:43)

And begin to show up differently for each other. Well, that points me to ideas of individuation or the ego self axis for somebody new to young. How do you describe that individuation process? We're already sort of dancing around it for sure, but any other sort of explanations or definitions there? We haven't defined the self with a capital F. Self.

Gary Bobroff (47:05)

Yeah. Well, the first thing I think people to understand is that Jung hypothesizes this idea of the self, which we can get an idea from from the simple fact that we see evidence in variety of ways that the psyche wants us to grow, develop, mature and become more whole. One of the ways we see that is in dreams, presenting us with parts of ourselves that are shadow and thus, you know, opposite to the unconscious for the possibility of bringing them together many other ways. But the idea that there is this self, I think is just a nice relief to begin with. That there is a part of us that wants us to become mature, wants us to become more whole, wants us to become more resilient, wants us to maintain health and be healthy while growing, while integrating split off parts, while feeling less shame. Hopefully all of that. That there is this process that is bigger than the ego, that is holding the ego and the unconscious together. Very parental out of image, but a necessary one and a good one. And Jung saw that throughout nature and I think we can see it throughout nature and definitely ways. But yeah, in the psyche it's all of this. He saw even neurosis, even symptom, as moving towards health, as it's an expression of the illness so that it can be healed, you know, but certainly in the dreams, right, we see this, the moving not only between the ego and the self, up and down, but ego and the shadow. And this process is going on and being held and contained. That. I mean, for me, the synchronicities, right? Like, that's when we really get serious. We're talking about the self. Like the self is actually making things in the outer world go on, even if it's just, you know, a flying beetle at the door, which is still pretty good.

Leanne Whitney (49:08)

Oh, my God. That's a big one. So one of the most popular ones. Do you have any? I have one personal one. Do you? That I like to share because it's about Jung himself. Do you. Do you have any in your own life?

Gary Bobroff (49:20)

Let's hear yours.

Leanne Whitney (49:21)

Well, mine.

Gary Bobroff (49:21)

Okay.

Leanne Whitney (49:22)

So when I was doing my graduate degree, and I have a degree in depth psychology, doctorate in depth psychology, and one of my professors was teaching. And he shared. I want to say he was teaching ecopsychology, but I'm not 100% clear on what the course was. But Jung was threaded throughout every class. And I shared out loud to the class, well, we really can't talk about Jung without making sure we fold in ideas of instincts. And this professor actually wasn't the biggest fan of Jung's body of work and disagreed with me. And I could feel somatically like my gut. I could just feel all this energy. I'm like, wait a second. Jung says the archetype is the image of instinct, is the goal towards which all the rivers wend their way. And all of a sudden, the water cooler started bubbling. Nobody was over there getting water at all. And the water cooler started bubbling. And then as I'm standing there and like, I was standing at the time, and I'm rooting into my feet even more deeply, the professor's coffee cup fell off the table into his briefcase. He didn't touch the coffee cup, just boom, right into his briefcase. I was like, whoa. I could feel it all in my gut.

Gary Bobroff (51:09)

Do not disagree with Leanne. Take note. Take note.

Leanne Whitney (51:15)

Do you want that cup of coffee?

Gary Bobroff (51:16)

You make sure your briefcase is closed. Right? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, if folks don't know. So Jung and Freud, towards the end of their friendship, sat in Vienna, and Jung wanted to talk about psychic phenomenon. And Freud said, I don't basically want to talk about that junk. And Jung Got angrier and angrier. And he said all of a sudden he just felt moved. He said, there's going to be a loud. What he called retort, I guess is the translation. Loud sound. Loud bang. And there was this loud bang that startled them and scared all of them, including Freud. And then they kept arguing about this whole thing and Jung wanting to talk about this and Jung saying, no, it's bosh. And then Jung said, that's gonna happen again. And it happened again. And then Freud passed out. Got lots of synchronicities. I'll give you one, because I think it's about the heart. It's not mine, but somebody that I know. So someone I know had been caretaking for a family member who passed, and they were on a plane ride, and the passengers got switched around. Like, this one wanted to sit, somebody wanted to switch seats. And so people moved around. The person who ends up sitting beside her, they talk. And the other passenger had also just finished caretaking her father. And they chat and chat and chat. You know, it's a heavy experience, you know, caretaking her father to his death. And they chatted and chattered, and they had found out that both the men had been pilots and that both even had pilots in the same small town in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. And they exchanged numbers and, you know, which they normally don't do. And then a couple days later, they ran into each other on the street in a major city, and she said, you know, I was going to call you. My father knew your uncle. Wow.

Leanne Whitney (53:28)

I just got chills.

Gary Bobroff (53:33)

So, you know, what does that tell you? I mean, that's a very heavy worldview if you start taking that possibility seriously.

Leanne Whitney (53:42)

Oh, for sure. It reminds me, actually, of the brilliant teacher Carolyn Mace, who definitely has been influenced by Jung. She often says that about her workshops, like, you will not sit next to the wrong person. You're going to walk into this room, and psyche will be configurating the order of. Of events, guaranteed. Yeah.

Gary Bobroff (54:01)

Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (54:01)

Beautiful. And again, just to fold in what we were talking about earlier, that idea.

Gary Bobroff (54:08)

Of.

Leanne Whitney (54:10)

In times like ours, to understand that if somebody listening to this has lost meaning and they're looking to spark it again right there. If you can be curious and open to this idea of synchronicity and psyche guiding and moving all the pieces.

Gary Bobroff (54:33)

Yeah. And if people want to build their relationship with psyche, you know, obviously, inner work and meditation and those things are good. But also start paying attention to your dreams. You know, write your dreams down and get that practice going, too.

Leanne Whitney (54:47)

That's right. Yep. Anything to share more about the dreams, or also about dreams in themselves, but also about mandalas, like this idea of the self showing itself through dreams in all ways, really. But Jung would often point to the mandala, or he certainly drew many in his lifetime, as could we say, an organizing principle or the. The bringing forward of the organizing. The archetype of the self, that organizing principle.

Gary Bobroff (55:24)

Yeah. So Jung observed, even when he was a student at Berkolzi Institute, earlier in his career, you know, people that were really, really broken would sometimes be drawing mandalas, you know, in their free art time, I guess, at the institute, as a way. He saw it as a way of, you know, an expression for the inner wholeness, for the need for inner wholeness in them, for them to return to a state of healthy balance. And then he did. And you can go and see. There was a. There's a great traveling Jung art exhibit where I saw them, but also at the Jung House Museum, you can see them, which I highly recommend. It's amazing. Go there and check it out. You can see on Dr. Jung's stationery, he's doing, like a daily pencil mandala in a. In a certain frame of mind. Like, he's. He's not just, oh, here I go, you know, he's trying to get himself in a bit of a different. I don't want to say trance state, but something like that, a different frame of mind and then. And then moving and seeing what comes out of that and expressing that with the pen and paper. And the idea being whether it's like centered mandalas or churches or, you know, like a labyrinth walk or, you know, stained glass windows in churches or other, you know, all different kinds of religious iconography is very often centered or squared or circular. And that was the kind of image that Jung considered to be emblematic of the self, of wholeness, of something greater. And it is. You know, you can see that sometimes in dreams. Jung, certainly his Red Book period has both mandalas, you know, and then chaos at different times. So the reflection of that inner process in himself and the mandala being a big part of it is very important. Yeah. Mm.

Leanne Whitney (57:34)

Yeah. And also that idea of that period of his life, the black books to the red book, the confrontations with the unconscious. And then all of a sudden, it's not like he finished the book. I mean, it wasn't really a book that he was aiming to give to the public, as far as I understand.

Gary Bobroff (57:52)

To begin with, legally blocked from publication for a long time.

Leanne Whitney (57:56)

Yeah.

Gary Bobroff (57:57)

Didn't want it published. Right.

Leanne Whitney (57:59)

Not in his lifetime.

Gary Bobroff (58:00)

Right.

Leanne Whitney (58:02)

And he put it to the side and I think maybe dove into his practice more deeply. Or for him, it's like again, it had to now get more breath, more life out in the world. And what he was going through and working with his clients. And you know, one definition of psyche, I believe is breath, right? From the Greek, it's like psyche breath, soul breath. Yeah.

Gary Bobroff (58:28)

And he has a statue that he made called Atman Victu in the yard in his house in Kusnacht, which I saw, which was pretty amazing. That means breath of life. Yeah. So. Yeah, absolutely.

Leanne Whitney (58:44)

So anything else? Are we missing any of the key pieces? I mean, for me, the whole process of individuation, the shadow work, understanding the complexes, and again, the theory on synchronicity are some of the richest ideas. Anything else that maybe we've missed answer to?

Gary Bobroff (59:09)

Job is a very powerful short book that Jung wrote. He wrote it after having a heart attack in the hospital. Within a week, I think, maybe not within a week of the heart attack, but within a week of starting it. He finished it within a week. So in his heart, when he had his heart attack, he had a near death experience and you know, saw himself above the planet. Very classic. Nd and when he came back, he's mad at the doctor for being. But then he realized this energy that was moving in him had to do with the. That fact. Biblical figure of Job, which if people don't know the book of Job starts with God and the devil. Make a bet. Devil, of course, starts the proposition that this Job guy, he's so into you, God, it's nauseating me. I gotta, I gotta break this guy. Let's have a bet over how much it's gonna take. And so God's like, okay, you're on. And so they destroy Job's life, his family, his crops, his house is given boils. They. They, you know, really put him through the ringer good. And at the end of it all, Job, you know, looks up to God and says, God, you know what that, you know. And God turns into Behemoth and Leviathan and basically goes. And that's it. And so for Jung, he has to look at that and go, what is that about psychologically? And so he connects it with a process which begins with Abraham, he says in the Old Testament and goes straight through to Jesus in the New Testament. Where if you look at it, the human figure is the moral leader of the action. Not Yahweh, not the Hebrew God that the human figure, like he gives the example of Abraham at Sodom Gomorrah saying, like, what if there's a hundred good people? Will you not destroy it? And it gets down to 10 people. And he's sort of negotiating, trying to get God to be more merciful. And you also see that beginning in the process where Abram is asked to sacrifice his son and then at last minute changes his mind. And then there's different. You know, this goes on in different phases, but in all these different ways. It's the human figure in the Bible that's the moral leader. And so Jung looks at that and looks at Job and says, here we have a way to understand humanity playing a role in the divine consciousness, in the. In the divine order, in the. You know, Edinger writes a book about this called the Creation of Consciousness. That we're here to be the engine by which the forces of unconsciousness are transformed and become more conscious. And that our suffering, our going through that pain is part of how that happens. It happens in other ways, too. It doesn't have to be pain, but often is and legitimizes that. It says in our witnessing of this process, something is happening. In our experiencing of it, something is happening. To me, all of that discussion provides a satisfying answer to why there's evil in a way that I was a philosophy undergrad. I didn't hear any good answers to that question from them. And that why we have a moral sense, why we are innately, you know, outraged at certain, you know, at injustices in certain ways, right? What? That true moral action has a sense of an inner compass being aligned with it, you know, And I think that's a very powerful concept and one I don't hear expressed in too many other places. And it's, you know, because to me, this is not just some, you know, biblical faith and God's good and simple, you know, like, that's not, to me, doesn't really work. Personally, I get it does work for other people. That's great, but not for me. So. But this psychological answer, boy, it really does. Because now, okay, why we choose to respond to our inner compass the way we do comes from a place of something bigger than ourselves. And I think that's very important.

Leanne Whitney (64:09)

I hear that loud and clear. Loud and clear. The creation of consciousness. As somebody who's a long time studier of the yoga tradition, I prefer the word knowledge there. I don't know if that resonates with you, but it's definitely the building of knowledge, for sure. That understanding and the. Yeah, sure, yeah. Nothing can be transformed unless it Goes from the invisible to visible, comes into awareness. We can't transform anything. But I love this ending note because the power of our thoughts is something. It's like this moment, it's almost like tissue paper thin. Like we have to begin to understand the power of our thoughts or the whole system in the way that it works together. Or I don't want to be doomsdayer, but we don't know. But it does feel in me very real that this is a tissue paper thin moment of us really beginning to understand how much our thoughts play a role in this.

Gary Bobroff (65:23)

Yes. Yes. Yeah, I think. I think you're really right, you know, and I think the psyche and knowledge, awareness, knowing, understanding ourselves and the world around us is gonna. It can make the difference. And I think too, like, you know, there's so much pressure. It's nice knowing that there are other forces, you know, other than ourselves. Because, you know, we need that.

Leanne Whitney (65:53)

Yeah, right. To rest in and to listen to.

Gary Bobroff (65:56)

Yeah.

Leanne Whitney (65:57)

Beautiful. Okay. Well, boy, that's a great final thought, but I'll open it up to any other. Any other sort of sweet spots or final thoughts you'd like to share today.

Gary Bobroff (66:09)

Thank you. It's been great talking to you.

Leanne Whitney (66:11)

Oh, good. Thank you, Gary. So glad to share the time with you. And for anybody new to Jung, there's no better book than Knowledge in a nutshell. So, yeah, you did a real bang up job on that one. And so I invite anybody who, who's new here, please check it out. And thank you again for being with me, Gary, and sharing your wisdom and knowledge. And for those of you watching and listening, thank you for being with us. You're the reason that we're here in community exploring our common unity.

New Thinking Allowed Announcer (67:05)

You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org new thinking allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at CIHS.

Leanne Whitney (67:47)

Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.

Gary Bobroff (68:11)

Sam.