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The Crises and Conflicts of Spiritual Awakening
December 9, 2006 @ 10:00 am - 3:00 pm PST
Jung wrote, “The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” Since spiritual awakening offers a direct challenge to the primacy of ego consciousness and the myth of separation, it is no surprise that such a challenge can produce a period of confusion and unbalance. Jung himself endured such a crisis. His ego was overwhelmed by an infusion of spiritual energies, which at first he was unable to integrate. We find warnings about perils on the path in most spiritual traditions. Becoming attached to various powers or siddhis, preoccupation with inner visions, splitting between “higher” and “lower” parts of the personality, ego-inflation and deflation are examples of how spiritual awakening can go awry. We will contemplate Jung’s own crisis of spiritual emergence and discuss how to recognize and work with psychospiritual conflicts in ourselves. Psychotherapists will find this workshop pertinent to their daily work.
Related Lecture: The Coming of Light at Times of Darkness
Bryan Wittine, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he completed his training at the San Francisco C. G. Jung Institute. He lectures internationally, has published several professional papers, and is particularly interested in what the great mystics teach us about the nature of the psyche and the individuation process. He is a co-founder and former chair of the Graduate Program in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, and former Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Holistic Studies, at John F. Kennedy University (in the San Francisco Bay Area).