Monterey Friends of CG Jung

Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul
2025-12-18 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Denver) | CA

Translate This Darkness
2026-01-08 19:00 - 2026-01-10 21:00 | McGowan House Center, 381 High St, Monterey, CA, 93940, United States
Women have been in darkness for centuries.…
And when women [create], they translate this darkness…
—Marguerite Duras, “Smothered Creativity”

Tonight, we ponder the work of three women who expressed themselves artistically when women were discouraged from doing so and exercised their powers to live out their lives as they might. Hilma af Klint is regarded by some as the unrecognized founder of Abstractionism, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn created and hosted the Eranos conferences at Ascona, and Christiana Morgan’s visions were the basis of Jung’s Visions Seminar. Two were Theosophists and considered Spirit to be guiding their art. We will consider how their lives, works, and inspirations overlapped and diverged.

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
2026-01-15 19:00 - 21:00, 2026-03-26 19:00 - 21:00, 2026-04-02 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We continue our reading of this foundational work of James Hillman:

The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations (simulacra) of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is a numen. [60]

Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology
2026-01-22 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
What is projection? What happens when we become aware of our projections, individual and collective?

We will finish chapter 7, in which we look at the daimon through the lens of Hermeticism and through association with the Goddess/Mother (a projection of the anima). We will then get into chapters 8 (the return to the Self and to wholeness) and 9 (the role of reflection /mirroring between the unconscious and conscious and psyche and matter, leading to the experience of psychic energy no longer flowing outward, but being pulled inward, as waves are pulled back into the ocean).

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, UAP talk-circle
2026-01-29 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
UAP refers to objects detected in the air, sea​, and space that defy explanation. ​We will ​draw upon Jung’s ​work in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (195​8)​:
My conscience as a psychiatrist…bids me fulfill my duty to prepare those few who will hear me for coming events which are in accord with the end of an era. As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are manifestations of psychic changes…which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. / Eyewitnesses of unimpeachable honesty announce the “signs in the heavens” which they have seen “with their own eyes,” and the marvelous things they have experienced which pass human understanding. [CW10 paras 589/610]

The Earth Has a Soul: Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life
2026-02-05 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
“Not famine, not earthquakes, not cancer . . . but we are the great danger.”—CGJ
With 40 more pages to go, we are completing our discussions of this anthology of Jung’s writings.

The Wine Covenant: Wine, Meaning, and Cultural Renewal in Our Brave New World, Pt I
2026-02-12 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
A first public preview from a work in progress— with Grégory Brun
Wine once ordered time, carried memory, and shaped shared life through work, ritual, and the table. Today it circulates largely as image, category, and signal. The Wine Covenant begins with a process of deconstruction, exposing consoling narratives about sustainability, authenticity, and virtue that often function as reassurance while obscuring deeper realities of land, labor, and meaning.
During this book preview evening, we will also turn to the concept of terroir as a charged intersection of place, history, and symbolic inheritance. Religious memory, sacramental imagination, and archetypal patterns continue to inform how wine is perceived and valued, whether explicitly named or not. These layers remain present in the glass, shaping reverence, belonging, and desire beneath contemporary forms of presentation.

Declaration—A Play by Steve LaRocque
2026-02-19 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Based on actual events in 1777 when a woman printer is called upon to make new copies of the Declaration of Independence to share with the colonies. What follows is her story with the 2nd Continental Congress, who are stationed nearby, and lots of discussion/reflection on the actual meaning of the document for women at the time and in terms of how tyranny and democracy actually figure in any government, especially this one. This play is very timely for Women’s History Month, as well as for the 250th year of the anniversary of the Declaration to say nothing of its political relevance in our current circumstances. 5 actors, Ron Genauer, Richard Boynton, Pat Horsley, Susan Keenan, and Suzanne Sturn.

Original Love: The Timeless Source of Wholeness—with Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD
2026-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Original love is love from the origin, mother, or Source, and as such transcends any limitations of time or space. It is love that has always been here and always will be here, love that is timeless and whole. Glenn Aparicio Parry tells a story of how love, humanity, nature, and consciousness co-evolved. In this book, he repositions love in its rightful place: as a timeless source of wholeness.

Glenn Aparicio Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and Nautilus award winning author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again and Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the president of the think tank: Circle for Original Thinking www.originalthinking.usand the host of the Circle for Original Thinking podcast. Parry organized and participated in the groundbreaking Language of Spirit Conferences from 1999–2011 that brought together Native and Western scientists in dialogue, moderated by Leroy Little Bear.

Global Polycrisis and the New Renaissance —with Eva Rider, MA, LMFT, CHT
2026-03-05 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We are living through a polycrisis — a time when multiple global and psychological crises interact and amplify one another. The old world is dissolving. Yet historically, such breakdowns often precede rebirths — just as the European Renaissance emerged from the ashes of the medieval world.

A polycrisis is a state wherein multiple crises — ecological, economic, political, technological, psychological — become interconnected and mutually reinforcing, creating conditions no single system can solve.
Tonight, we will explore the polycrisis as both collective and psychological initiation – a contemporary nigredo, or darkening of the world soul, that precedes re-patterning and renewal. Through a Jungian lens, incorporating alchemy, astrology, and Renaissance humanism, we trace how crisis becomes a vessel for transformation; a chrysalis from which new symbolic imagination may emerge.

The Wine Covenant: Wine, Meaning, and Cultural Renewal in Our Brave New World, Pt II — with Grégory Brun
2026-03-12 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
This second evening will be devoted to myth and semiotics in contemporary wine culture. We will discuss how images, narratives, and codes generate meaning, how stories substitute for encounter, and how symbolic language is reorganized through labels, tasting rooms, prestige cues, and mediated experience.
We will expand on the problem of hyperreality, when signs circulate with diminishing reference to land, labor, or craft, and experience becomes a managed simulation of authenticity. We will examine how meaning is shaped, transferred, and thinned in this environment, and how symbolic life might remain anchored in practices capable of sustaining depth, continuity, and relation.

Freedom and Dominion in the American Experience—some psychological approaches
2026-04-09 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
From the beginning of the “European intrusion” to the present time, the “American experience” has melded the political meanings of “freedom” and “dominion.” We will take up some psychological approaches to this profound and persisting paradox.
Facts are neither favorable nor unfavorable; they are merely interesting. And the most interesting of all is that this childlike, impetuous, “naive” America has probably the most complicated psychology of all nations. —CGJ (1931)
The American unconscious is highly interesting, because it contains more varied elements and has a higher tension… The American unconscious contains an immense number of possibilities. I cannot pretend to have attained a comprehensive view of it…. —CGJ (1949)

Sources of the Self and the Making of Modern Identity—with Eileen Murphy, MD
2026-04-16 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
In the West, views about the self and personal identity first surfaced in Ancient Greece. Prior to that there were no recorded theories of self-identity. One to the earliest hints of interest in the self occured in a play written in 500 BCE Greece. A debtor decides he doesn’t need to pay back his lender. This is because the passage of time has changed the debtor sufficiently so he cannot be held responsible. Soon a solution to the riddle was provided: Beyond the ever-changing material world there reside changeless realms and therein resides the changeless essential self. The debt was paid.
In my presentation I will trace major western theories of the self from ancient Green to current times. I draw primarily on the work of Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and also the work of Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self and certain other philosophers. As usual there will be time for discussion.

Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul by Marie-Louise von Franz
2026-04-23 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We will finish chapter 7, in which we look at the daimon through the lens of Hermeticism and through association with the Goddess/Mother (a projection of the anima). We will then get into chapters 8 (the return to the Self and to wholeness) and 9 (the role of reflection /mirroring between the unconscious and conscious and psyche and matter, leading to the experience of psychic energy no longer flowing outward, but being pulled inward, as waves are pulled back into the ocean).

People Need People—with Lisa Maroski
2026-04-30 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
“We, as humans, need community, but before community we need to commune.” —Nora Bateson

With the increase in loneliness among all people, but especially among the young, and the concerns about the future of Life on Earth, it is imperative that we slow down and listen to each other, really listen. There’s nothing to fix, solve, or summarize. This week we’re conducting an online version of Nora Bateson’s Warm Data* Labs. Lisa got training in this methodology last year, so now she can put it into practice, with support from the Warm Data community. This online-only session, called People Need People, explores a question from multiple contexts. We don’t approach it from the head, however, but from the heart, through our shared stories and conversations. We wander through the deeper patterns and contexts that shape our lives and relationships.
There’s no pressure to perform, debate, or fix anything—nowhere to get to, only the opportunity to be in relationship through simple, meaningful conversation that flows.

“Who can I be when I’m with you? Who can you be when you’re with me?”— Nora Bateson

For more information about the Warm Data Approach: https://www.warmdata.life/
*Warm data refers to relational information and is therefore strikingly different from information that is acquired by taking things out of their contexts. Because warm data is alive, responsive, and in relationship to other life, it cannot be measured, deliver definitions, or produce results that are repeatable. There is no such thing as objectivity in warm data.

Fundamentalism, talk-circle
2026-05-21 19:00 - 21:00 | McGowan House Center, 381 High St, Monterey, CA, 93940, United States
The old religions with their sublime and ridiculous, their friendly and fiendish symbols did not drop from the blue, but were born of this human soul that dwells within us at this moment. All those things, their primal forms, live on in us and may at any time burst in upon us with annihilating force, in the guise of mass-suggestions against which the individual is defenseless. Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism.

>> CG Jung CW7para326

The Rapture
2026-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | McGowan House Center, 381 High St, Monterey, CA, 93940, United States
The world as we know it is coming to an end in the very near future. … Yet Edinger believed that this terrible transition in culture (what the poet Yeats called the “rough beast, its hour come round at last) will be bearable if we understand the meaning of what is going on.
>>George F. Elder, Preface, Archetype of the Apocalypse: A Jungian Study of the
Book of Revelation, by Edward F. Edinger (1999) xiii
It is not the conscious mind of John that thinks up these fantasies, they come to him in a violent “revelation.” He is a passionately religious person with an otherwise well- ordered psyche. But he must have an intensive relationship to God which lays him open to an invasion far transcending anything personal. The purpose of the apocalyptic visions is not to tell John, as an ordinary human being, how much shadow he hides beneath his luminous nature, but to open the seer’s eye to the immensity of God.
>>CG Jung CW11, Answer to Job , para730
The Apocalypse is as evocative as it is expressive. Not only does it display attitudes and feelings; it also elicits them. It creates its effect by manipulating the thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of the hearers by the use of effective symbols and a narrative plot that invites imaginative participation. This combination of effective symbols and artful plot is the key to the power of apocalyptic rhetoric.
>>Adela Yarbro Collins Crisis and Catharsis: Power of the Apocalypse p144

The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman
2026-06-11 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We continue our reading…
Images are somewhere. The fundamental language of all the underworld is that of
contained space . Look at the dream as if it were a theater program. Everything that
happens, happens there. For the underworld view, what matters is not how the story
comes out, but where it is taking place, what region of the soul is now on stage, so
that I may know “where I am at” in regard to my dream-soul.
>>James Hillman, p188>

Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul by Marie-Louise von Franz
2026-06-18 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We will finish chapter 7 and dive into chapters 8 and 9, hopefully
finishing the book by the end of the trimester. Chapter 8 is on
“Consciousness and Inner Wholeness” and Chapter 9 on “Reflection.”
Where the earlier chapters often surveyed the use of projection in various
aspects of Life, these two tie things together and go deep. Dive in with
us…

Our Dream Lives, talk-circle
2026-06-25 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature…
Dream symbols are the essential message carriers, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness…
— C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 10, para. 317; Man and His Symbols, p. 52

Inhabiting Space: Memory and the Places We Live In
2026-07-02 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We move through spaces every day without thinking much about them: a house, a hallway, a room. Yet some places stay with us, while others feel strangely empty or unsettling, even when nothing is visibly wrong. There are spaces that seem to carry something, and others that seem to resist being held onto.
This evening lingers on that experience: on the feeling that spaces are not neutral, that they can absorb traces of memory, or reflect something back to us. When we enter them, we are not empty either. We bring something with us, and at times, it begins to appear in the space itself.
Scenes from A Ghost Story by David Lowery, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the recent Backrooms by Kane Parsons will punctuate the evening, illustrating the ideas as they unfold and grounding the discussion in shared images.
You will be invited to share your own experience of places that stayed with you, or that felt difficult to understand. We will also reflect on McGowan House, a place that has hosted many gatherings over the years, and consider how certain spaces seem to hold traces of what has happened within them.

The Earth Has a Soul: Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life
2026-07-09 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
We are completing this anthology edited by Meredith Sabini:
“The way is ineffable. One cannot, one must not, betray it. It is like the way of Zen—like a sharp knife, and also twisting like a serpent. One needs faith, courage, and no end of honesty and patience.”
— C. G. Jung, p. 217
