36th Annual Jungian Conference
Jung’s Post-Christian Spirituality:
When Religion Fails, a New God Arises
Special Guest Speaker
John Ryan Haule, PhD
link to audio file
Saturday, May 14th, 2011
9:30 AM ~ 4:30 PM
Jung had mystical experiences from around the age of eleven and a mid-life crisis around the age of thirty-eight. He developed his technique of “active imagination” out of his conviction that each of us is “living a myth,” a narrative of profound meaning, whether we know it or not. He was shocked to discover that he knew only one thing about the myth he himself was living—that it wasn’t Christian.
What he learned through his Red Book exercises became the foundation of his psychological theory and practice, but he dared not write openly about what he really thought until after the near-death experience he had in the wake of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight, after which a series of major works emerged with profound implications for living in a post-Christian world.
The Red Book shows us Jung’s struggle with what he saw as the failure of Christianity and his horror at the new God, that “son of a frog” his soul gave birth to. Thirty years later, during his “near death experience,” he participated over and over in the wedding of the gods and returned to ordinary consciousness determined to tell the world what he had learned through his alchemy books, Aion, Answer to Job, Synchronicity and others.
John Ryan Haule, PhD was trained in Zurich, is a training analyst at the Boston Jung Institute, and the author of many articles and six books, including most recently, Jung in the 21st Century: Vol. 1. Evolution & Archetype; Vol. 2. Synchronicity & Science. For an overview of his interests, seewww.jrhaule.net