Archive for September, 2011
Guilford Dudley’s Workshop: Down the Rabbit Hole – Descent into Wonderland
Posted by: | CommentsSeptember 17, 2011 Workshop with Guilford Dudley, Ph.D.
The workshop will explore “wonder” as a double motif in one’s inner descent: wondering what are the fundamental truths and lies permeating one’s life, and wonder as in “the wondrous, ineffable nature of inner exploration,” often guided by dreams. Images and motifs from Alice in Wonderland include swimming across the sea of tears (working through grief), and the imagery of growing and shrinking in size (inflation and depression). The workshop will also focus on the inner figures that populate our unconscious, in both their personal and archetypal forms. Participants will be encouraged to contribute efforts to integrate inner parental, mentor, and lover figures, as well as to “wonder” what we will leave to our children and intimate friends who will have to integrate us as their inner figures after we die.
Guilford Dudley is a Jungian Analyst working in Northern New Mexico. He has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and three degrees from Yale University. Guil is completing a manuscript for a memoir entitled: “A Penny for Your Truth: Confessions of a Jungian Analyst,” in which he narrates his own journey through the dark, but often amusing, sides of an aristocratic family and its mythic claims to English royalty, along with the descent into his own nether realms while living in a remote cabin in the California mountains, accessible in the winter only by dogsled. He is a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe, and the author of two books on myth, and an unpublished manuscript on the apocalyptic imagination.
Dudley-Descent into Hell:The Soul’s Other Journey
Posted by: | CommentsLecture with Guilford Dudley, Ph.D.,Descent into Hell:The Soul’s Other Journey
September 16, 2011
Unlike what we read about in most spiritual literature-the upward, heavenly ascent of the soul–Jung’s experience was that the upward movement of the soul only creates its opposite, an equally meaningful descent into subterranean realms. Jung has re-emphasized what patriarchal interpretations of the Christian message took out: the importance of nature, the feminine, and metaphorically the nether realms of the earth–not only the metals used in alchemy, but the demonic.
“If I ascend to the highest and most difficult on the one hand, and seek to eke out redemption that reaches even higher, then the true way does not lead upward, but toward the depths.” – from Jung’s Red Book
He reminds us that in the Christian mythos Christ repeats the rhythm of descent in pagan religions, such as Odysseus’ visit to the Underworld in the Odyssey and Orpheus’ descent to bring back Eurydice, but does so in a new version of suffering as the soul’s destiny and achievement of wholeness. The lecture will enlarge on Jung’s meaning of the soul’s anabasis, its earthward ‘descent into hell.’ In this descent we encounter both the dark and the treasure within the dark. We can even encounter the ancestors, including immediate family members. The burdens they leave us in their incomplete lives become our task to complete, without our realizing that we are fated to compensate for their one-sidedness. Becoming conscious of this syndrome can liberate us for fuller individuation.
Guilford Dudley is a Jungian Analyst working in Northern New Mexico. He has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and three degrees from Yale University. Guil is completing a manuscript for a memoir entitled: “A Penny for Your Truth: Confessions of a Jungian Analyst,” in which he narrates his own journey through the dark, but often amusing, sides of an aristocratic family and its mythic claims to English royalty, along with the descent into his own nether realms while living in a remote cabin in the California mountains, accessible in the winter only by dogsled. He is a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe, and the author of two books on myth, and an unpublished manuscript on the apocalyptic imagination.
