The Way of Kabbalah: ancient map of the psyche

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Jungian, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Psychology, Dreams, Jung, Relationships, Selfhelp, Society & Culture, Psychoanalysis

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2022

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kabbalah is an ancient Jewish mystical tradition that has captured the imaginations of people from widely diverse backgrounds, including Jung himself. Three weeks after his heart attack in 1944, Jung had an ecstatic vision, “…Everything around me also seemed enchanted…I myself was in Pardes-Rimonim, in the pomegranate garden where Tiferet and Malchut married. I also imagined myself as Rabi Shimon ben Yochai, whose mystical marriage was celebrated now. It looked exactly as the Kabbalists portrayed it. I cannot tell you how amazing it was…” Though Jung did not live long enough to explore the Kabbalah fully, his psyche was deeply affected by the images and philosophies which played an important role in his life during this crisis.

Like analysis, Kabbalistic methods cultivate an extraordinary receptivity to Self that illuminates the inner dimensions of the human soul, its unexplored potential, and our relationship to the divine. Its first written fragments surfaced in the 13th century, but the oral tradition reaches back millennia. Its primary symbol, the Tree of Life, reflects a rich cosmology that maps the progression of archetypal forces in the outer and inner world. It helps us track the flow of psychic energy as it descends from its animating source to archetypal image, thought, and finally to action. Like all images of the Self, it invokes the transcendental ordering principle that heals and facilitates individuation.

REFERENCES:

Dion Fortune. The Mystical Qabalah. https://www.amazon.com/dp/157863752X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_CNHVRG5XVEK52RWZMASB?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Erich Neumann. The Essays of Erich Neumann, Volume 3: The Place of Creation. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691603871/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_TMA84417K13TPNWG4DGV?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Meditation and Kabbalah. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0877286167/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_0HVCPYAXXW8DKHKYXMJJ

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano,
0:07.1	Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation
0:12.3	that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marchiano,
0:20.1	and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.5	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.5	I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
0:40.9	Today we're going to be talking about Kabbalah.
0:51.2	Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical tradition that's been around in written form since about the 12th century, but has a much older oral tradition. And we are fortunate that one of the
0:58.4	team here is somewhat of an expert in Kabbalah. Joseph has been studying Kabbalah since your
1:07.0	late teens. True. If I'm right, Joseph, the Kabbalah and the study of the Kabbalah has been important to Joseph for a long time
1:16.1	and is a major part of the work that he does.
1:20.1	And he is going to be sharing with us today the significance of the Kabbalah.
1:26.8	And I think for our interest here on the
1:30.8	podcast, the cabala is another way in to psyche and to psychic experience. And Jungian thought and
1:40.0	psychological explorations can be enriched by these many different roads that we can travel in order
1:49.4	to gain a perspective on the inner world.
1:53.5	So Joseph, just starting out, would you just talk to us about how you became interest in the
1:59.6	Kabbalah?
2:00.7	Back in high school, this is the late 1970s, I became interested in mysticism and New Age
2:08.7	ideas in general. Though I was raised in the relatively small village of Huntington on Long
2:15.8	Island, the culture was influenced by New York City, which was only an hour train ride away.
2:24.3	So it was a fairly culturally sophisticated area, just to give you a sense of the time.
	...

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