Becca Segall Tarnas - Jung, Tolkien and Human Imagination

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Psychedelics Today. I'm Joe, your host. Today in the show, we have Becca Tarnas, an archetypal astrologer and PhD candidate over at CIAS in San Francisco, currently doing work with Carl Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien, drawing very interesting similarities in Jung's Red Book, which I hope many of you are familiar with. If not, we're probably going to chat about that now. Welcome to the show, Becca. Thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, can't wait to dig in. So we actually met in Claremont, California at a Alfred North Whitehead conference, and kind of just a chance meeting because I think, I don't know, there's some kind of Whitehead bridge between me and you through Lenny Gibson, me and Kyle, the co-hosts, a breathwork teacher. So it was really cool just to bump into you two and find how fascinating your work is. You actually laid it out for me to, how long, was that three years ago, two years ago? I think it was, it was in 2015, June of 2015, down in Claremont. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you had developed the idea of these two kind of giants of the Western world. Like you had this whole concept really fleshed out. And I can't even imagine what you've done over the past two years to develop that but it was just really cool to see that these two were kind of writing at a very similar time and were, well, I'll actually let you lay that out. I don't want to say, lay out your idea for you, but can you give us a general gist of what's going on there, what you're digging into with your writing? Absolutely. And it has been a fascinating journey the last several years as I've been working on this. It's the subject of my PhD dissertation. And basically what I'm looking at is these parallels between the two. And I think it's really cool to see that there's a lot of this synchronicity between Jung's Red Book and J.R.R. Tolkien's Red Book. And a lot of people say, well, I didn't know that J.R.R. Tolkien had a Red Book. And the way that I came to this subject was I've been deeply steeped in Tolkien since my childhood, since I was nine years old. And my grade school teacher read The Hobbit out loud to me. And I just felt this deep sense of familiarity with Middler. And so over my whole teenage years and into my early 20s, I would continue to return to Tolkien's stories. And in the context of his most famous story, The Lord of the Rings, he actually presents that story as a found text. He presents himself as the translator. Of this work. And it was actually written and recorded by a few hobbits, the main characters in the story. Frodo Baggins starts off as Bilbo Baggins' diary and Samwise Gamgee finishes it off. And they write down the story of The Lord of the Rings in a book called The Red Book of Westmarch. So when Jung's Red Book was published in 2009, almost a century after he began working on it, Jung started working on his Red Book. In 1913. And he worked on it really all the way up until 1930. And it's this magnificent book filled with his experiences of the collective unconscious. And he filled it with paintings and calligraphy telling these encounters that he had with imaginal figures of the collective unconscious. So when that book was finally published in 2009, edited by Sonu Shandasani, who spent 13 years of his life. Editing and compiling and helping with the translation of this remarkable text. I saw the book and I was like, oh, that's interesting. It's called The Red Book too. I know about another Red Book and it's Tolkien's Red Book of Westmarch. But then the thing that really struck me was when I opened Jung's Red Book, here were these pictures and stories that it felt like something out of Middle-earth. It felt like something out of Tolkien's world. And so I just intuitively felt this kind of symbolic resonance. Between the two. And didn't necessarily know if there would be anything more there. But then I discovered the work of a wonderful scholar named Lance Owens, who pointed out that there was this parallel in timing between Jung's Red Book period beginning in 1913 and when Tolkien started writing his first stories of Middle-earth. Right around the time just before World War I started and then only through the beginning of World War I. So then I was like, okay, now there's a resonance, a parallel in the titles, in these images, in the timing. Maybe there's more there. And so I started doing a deep study of Jung's Red Book within the context of Tolkien's Red Book and was just blown away by the parallel images that I was finding. Actual painted or drawn images of dragons, of particular trees, like the world tree illustrated. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do this in a certain way. Or the Eye of Sauron, which amazingly appears in Jung's Red Book. And then also in the text itself. And I felt like, okay, there's something there. There's something behind what these two men were writing about and painting about. So my journey since then has been really asking the questions of what lies behind the two Red Books. What does this say about the nature of imagination, of what we understand the collective unconscious to be. And it's really led me into a realm of what Henri Corbin calls the imaginal realm. And looking at this as a place of, to use language from transpersonal psychology, a place of participatory inaction. So that's. That's a great term. Yeah, that's a sketch of what I've been up to and how I've been engaging with these two Red Books. So I imagine some listeners are confused. Going, this is psychedelics today. What the hell's happening? Why is Joe having somebody talk to us about Tolkien and Jung? And honestly, the origins of this psychedelic world really have a lot to do with transpersonal psychology and Jungian psychology. Stan Grof, you know, found some serious limits with Freud, you know, really took up Jung, found Jung very functional, maybe not fully whole, but very helpful. And along with Fadiman and a number of other people helped coin this term. Yeah. Transpersonal psychology developed this field of the collective quite a bit. So when dealing with psychedelic stuff, transpersonal material does come up in holotropic breathwork and various mystical traditions. You can have very strange states. You can have very strange synchronicities. People will think they're crazy. But no, this is just how things work. You're going to bump into some really strange stuff if you're doing this kind of work. And Jung and Tolkien were deep into the imagination. And as a result, they had some very interesting coincidences. And it's cool. You've had the opportunity to really dig into that. Interesting synchronicity here is I kind of grew up in a house where we had stories read to us nightly. And Tolkien was read to us like that was the first real story that we had read to us as children in my family. And it was fantastic. And I think we probably did multiple rounds of Tolkien. Yeah. So as a result of digging into this work, you must have had some really, well, you also kind of jumped into astrology at a young age, which I hope people in the audience relax for a moment, just listen. But, you know, astrology is closely tied to transpersonal psychology and almost inextricably linked. Yeah. So you've had this. Interesting on ramp, kind of into this world and almost kind of, I bet in a sense, like rocket boosters, because you've had this kind of archetypal astrology background. And then you jump into this realm with Jung and Tolkien. So how was that for you? Like, you know, you had this whole astrological background, you jump into this kind of collective soup of these two masters. Yeah. Well, I was not, even though I was raised by an astrologer, my dad's Richard Tarnas, and he was a practicing archetypal astrologer my whole life growing up. But it was something I knew about going on in the background of my childhood. But it wasn't something that was ever forced on me. This is something you must learn. This is something you must understand. When I was interested, I was invited in to learn about it. But it wasn't something I really picked up. Yeah. Until I came to CIS for graduate school. And it was through the whole community in the philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program that is at CIS, that I really had my eyes opened to the world of archetypal astrology and to the world of psychedelic research. And so even though, in a sense, I grew up in this milieu of archetypes, depth psychology, Stan Grof's work, etc. astrology beginning when I was, I guess, 22 years old, and learning about that in conjunction with the insights that working with psychedelics can bring. And that is very much coming out of also my background and relationship to my father's work and his work with Stan Grof. So at Esalen back in the 1970s, Esalen Institute in Big Sur, my dad and Stan Grof were doing LSD psychotherapy and looking for a way to understand what kind of experience someone would have in their psychedelic session and drawing on many different diagnostic tests and various methods, trying to determine whether someone would have a difficult experience, whether they'd have a breakthrough. There wasn't anything that was giving a clear prediction of some kind. And then someone came through Esalen. And one of the workshops and suggested, hey, have you looked at transit astrology? And transit astrology is looking at the positions of the planets, where they are at the moment of a psychedelic session, looking at where they are in the sky and the relationship they're making, not only to each other, but to the birth chart of the individual in question. And Stan and my dad discovered that, in fact, this was the one thing that could give an indication whether someone would have a constricting experience, something that would be extremely challenging or an ego death or face, you know, feeling like they're in a hell realm or trap situation, or if they would have some kind of a major breakthrough and a euphoric experience. And it was transit astrology that was able to not concretely predict what that would look like, but archetypally predict it. And by archetypally predict it, I mean that each planet has associated with it, correlated with it, a particular archetypal character or quality. So, for example, the planet Saturn has correlated with it, these qualities of negation, of constraint, constriction, challenges, obstacles. It relates to death and mortality, the endings of things, time, suffering, but also strength and maturity and wisdom and structure in the sense of what holds us, contains us, brings tradition in and so forth. So you can see I'm using all these different words to describe what essentially has one archetypal core. And each planet has a different archetype associated with it that has what we call a multivalence of expressions, a multitude of expressions. And the way that those come through, of course, are going to be influenced by a variety of factors, but when bringing the astrological lens, the transit astrology lens to psychedelic work, you can really get a good sense of the different kinds of experiences that you will come up against. And because of the nature of psychedelic experience, you get to experience that range of multivalence more fully than because these transits are going on all the time. And we see them in the great challenges that we face in life or our creative periods, when we fall in love, and so forth. But it's like we get a wider range of that archetypal experience when we are in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And the first time I ran up against that idea, it was only a couple years into my kind of holotropic breathwork set of experiences. Someone said, you know, oh, you're interested in astrology? Well, why don't you check out these books? And I think people even beyond Cosmos and Psyche pointed me to Ren Butler's work. And it's, you know, really interesting that this whole field is actually kind of fleshed out already. It's like we kind of have a solid ground to stand on here. And actually many hundreds of years of tradition, if not thousands, you know, why not take advantage of that? Like I know in the rationalist world, we just want to throw away all these traditions and start new, you know, with these new truths. But really, there's plenty of stuff we have in the past that's very helpful. Yeah, there's a deep lineage there. And with astrology, and there's many different forms of astrology, of course, and different branches of it. And bringing in a depth psychological perspective to astrology can illuminate certain things. And so this is where Carl Jung's work comes into the picture very much, because he was working with archetypes in his practice that's very much kind of the center of analytic psychology. And he was encountering that. This is part of why I've been drawn to work with his Red Book, because that is a record, a beautifully illustrated literary record of his non-ordinary states engaging with archetypal figures. So he wasn't using psychedelics to access these states. He was using a technique that he called active imagination, which has a long lineage coming out of alchemy and essentially of holding an emotion or a feeling, whatever it is that's pushing to the forefront of consciousness, holding that and in a sense, consciously translating it into image. So that's why it's active imagination versus passive imagination, where we have images arising all the time that we can be in relation to in a certain way. This is having an intentional relationship to that. And then you can sustain it in a certain way where you can then enter into the field, into the imaginal realm and engage with the imagination or figures of the psyche, depending how you want to talk about it. And of course, this is a lot like what happens in certain psychedelic experiences. It's very much echoing what happens in active imagination. So Jung was engaging with this realm, the collective unconscious, through active imagination instead of psychedelics. But it opens a similar lens, similar window onto that. And he was sketching the cartography of it just in a similar way, as Stan Grof was expanding that cartography through LSD psychotherapy. This is another coincidence I haven't shared with you yet. But maybe just last week, I started Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung. And it has totally rekindled my love for Jung. I used to be somebody, you know, reading Jung all the time, like I really wanted to become a Jungian analyst, all that kind of stuff. And I just dropped it for a decade because I just went full force into the newfound love for Jung again, just in the past couple weeks. So I've been even extra excited to chat with you because of that. And reading the book, it's been interesting, because it's almost like he's constantly having non-ordinary experiences, meaningful non-ordinary experiences. And like the degree to which I would define him as a mystic, I think, is super underrepresented when we talk about Jung. It's just like you are Jung being just so steeped in this stuff. And it how do you relate to that? How do you see that? Was it always active imagination? Maybe he had a gift or something, or maybe a little bit of both? Yeah, he certainly does have a profound access to the archetypal realm. And we can actually look at his birth chart, in part to see what correlates with that he's born with son Neptune. And Neptune is the archetype of the imagination of image of the archetype of archetypes. It's the archetype of the symbolic, the enchanted, the numinous. And he has that in relation to his son, which is the center of the identity, the sense of self. Even Jung talks about the archetype of the self. And that's such a wonderful expression of that son Neptune alignment. So we can kind of get one perspective there on why he had particular access to that. And in a sense, it's a mystery, too. It's interesting, the reference to him as a mystic, because he does have those qualities. And he also very much pushed against that. He presented himself as a scientist and an empiricist. And with the experiences that came up for him, that he recorded in the Red Book, he very well could have gone down the path of declaring himself a new prophet, prophet of a new age. But he chose not to. And I find that extremely significant. He chose not to publish the Red Book. He chose to have these experiences be at the back of his psychology, not at the forefront. And that's really important. And so when we take the new knowledge that the Red Book provides to who Jung is, to where he gets his psychological theories, I find it really important to balance that with the fact that he put the psychological theories first, and he put his patients first. And I think to a certain extent, that we're not going to be able to do that relates to when he incarnated, when he was born into this world, that he really was a man of the 20th century. And taking in not only these mystical traditions of the deep past, from the Gnostics, the alchemists, and so forth, but also integrating that with the contemporary science of the modern world, and forging a bridge between those. And that's part of what I find so profound, about his work, is that he is struggling to bridge these worlds, to bring them together and allow something new to be born of that new knowledge that is actually practical and helpful and really does heal people. Yeah. There's something about accepting your personal reality beyond personal biography that is really helpful. So accepting that there's a lot about you don't know is huge. And, you know, astrology tells us that Freudian and Jungian analysis tells us that even modern therapy tells us that I think they're kind of a little too careful, maybe not telling us enough. But, you know, there's still something there that's helpful for folks. So you've been, you know, living in this world for a long time, especially at CIIS. Like CIIS seems like this hub of at sometimes you must see it as kind of like a paradox. At one point, it's amazing. And the other point, it's like, what is that person that's so decadent? What are they doing? Like, so you must see this amazingly complex landscape at CIIS. Do you feel like CIIS as a whole is really breaking a lot of ground in these worlds of kind of integrating ecology, storytelling and psychology? Like, what do you see as like a major value coming out of CIIS? It's a rich milieu to be a part of. I'm there as a student. And also, I work on staff. I'm the program coordinator for the drama therapy. And I'm also the program coordinator for the drama therapy. And I'm also the program program. So I kind of bridge the two different sides of the school and get to see the inside and the outside and various ways. There are a lot of different important edges being pushed at CIIS that are really important. And like any institution, of course, there are going to be flaws, but we hopefully are learning from those as well. And I think that's maybe part of the edge as well that's being pushed. I didn't mean to like say anything bad about it. It's more like individual students allowed to go on certain tangents because that's where they want to put their research, you know? Well, I couldn't be doing the research that I'm doing on Jung and Tolkien at pretty much any other graduate institute. I probably could do it at Pacifica Graduate Institute, but, and I'm sure there's a few other places, but I wouldn't have even had the idea come to me that I could explore Jung and Tolkien in context with each other let alone in the context of transpersonal psychology, the imaginal realm, James Hillman's work, Henri Corbin's work, and as well as work coming direct from professors at CIIS, like my dissertation chair, Jacob Sherman, his work with Jorge Ferrer on participatory theory and so forth. So there is a lot that can be explored there. Another fellow PhD student that I've been in the years is working on different forms of divination and taking it in a really serious scholarly way. And I think that's part of the edge too, of let's explore these things that have been shut out of mainstream academia, but do it in a rigorous way, do it in a scholarly fashion that allows us to develop new knowledge, discover new knowledge, and both being open to what might be there and what might not be there. And I think that's part of the edge too, of let's explore and also kind of honing those skills as researchers, as teachers, and so forth. So that's one of the things that I love that CIIS makes possible. And also that it's not a huge institution. So we're small enough that there can be a lot of cross-pollination and experimentation and so forth. And then another place that CIIS is kind of pushing the envelope, which is fantastic and very relevant to the work you're doing, is that it's a place where you're able to do a lot of research and what you're doing is the psychedelic certificate program that is connected with maps and allows for MDs and MFTs and a number of other qualified students to go through and get a certificate in psychedelic therapy. So that's another place where CIIS is really offering something that's unique and remarkable. So I feel extraordinarily blessed to be at that school and part of that community and the conversations that we get to have. Are beautiful and so eye-opening. And I wouldn't trade that for anything. It's just a constant learning environment with community. So I sat down with you for a meal or something at Claremont and you were sitting with a few other CIIS students or staffers. And yeah, the value of that conversation, it maybe only lasted 15, 20 minutes, blew my socks off. I'm saying, oh boy, I maybe perhaps should have submitted that application 10 years ago to CIIS. And I could have been having these conversations daily and I don't rule out that I'll go there someday, but it's going to be a little bit longer. Definitely come visit us for sure. Yeah, I look, I really am interested in that. So we gave Tolkien kind of too few words so far. Sure. So obviously an amazing storyteller pulled on a lot of myth that we can actually talk about, but he also seemed to really pull hard from the imaginal, this imaginal realm thing. The way I picture this is, you know, we have our, you know, ego, we have the subconscious right on the other end. And the imaginal is kind of this like layer between our personal subconscious and the collective. And it's populated with plenty of things. And in the occult stuff that I used to study, it was discussed pretty plainly. Like, this is the imaginal, there's things here. It's not necessarily part of your personal stuff, but it's part of your collective stuff. And you have access. It's just a matter of like getting out there. And it seems like Tolkien had access to that. And I'm on this edge of, you know, was he actually talking about historical stuff or, you know, to what degree was it mythic? And I have a problem with that because as rigorous as I want to sound, I feel like historians give myths a little short shrift and they're like, nope, this is the narrative we're all agreed upon. And if you violate it, like your funding's taken away. So who knows? I feel like maybe there's more reality to it than we currently understand. Yeah. Tolkien would speak about myth in the sense that it can be true, but not literal. And that's a similar way that James Hillman would approach myth as well. Something can be true. It can be real, but it doesn't have to be literal. And so often the way we approach history, we approach it in a more literal way. These are the facts. This is what happened. This is the agreed upon narrative. And of course, even that is always coming through particular situated lenses. It doesn't make it less true. True. And myth in a certain sense also carries that depth of truth. For Tolkien, he was in a sense discovering a new myth and therefore also an old myth. Myth is always ancient and always new at the same time. It's always being retold. It's always being reborn. And the way that Tolkien would describe his writing process, his creation process, was that he felt as though he was discovering something. There are a number of letters where he would write about how he didn't feel like he was inventing. He felt like he had to wait to see what really happened until that came through. So there's a reason the Lord of the Rings took 12 years to write because that discovery process takes its time. And he would meet characters, he'd meet figures that he would be just as surprised to encounter them as the other characters in his story. He did not feel like he was making it up. And I use this term, the imaginal, drawing on Henri Corbin, who I've mentioned a couple times, that he differentiates, Corbin differentiates between the imaginal and the imaginary. The imaginary is what we think of as it's just made up. It's not real. When you come up with something off the top of your head and it's not grounded in anything else. The imaginal is referring to the world of images, which we all have access to. You can close your eyes and see images that you're not conjuring. They are coming from somewhere. And it's possible to hone a relationship with those images and recognize that they have something to teach us, that they have their own reality and truth that might be a different reality than the hard physical material reality that my physical body is sitting amongst. But there's also a reality of images. Those images become a lot clearer when we're in a non-ordinary state of consciousness, when we're working with psychedelics. You can often see those images and they might even come out into the physical world and overlap with it. So I feel that part of why Tolkien's stories are so potent and they speak to so many different people. And even there's often this kind of ritual relationship that a lot of people have to Tolkien's work. You would read them, these stories out loud with your family. And in many ways, I feel like that is the way to read these stories, to experience these stories, is they have to be performed. They have to be brought forward out loud. And then those images are really given space to exist between people, between the people speaking it. And that it's also the images are so much tied to language. Tolkien was a linguist, a philologist. He spoke 19 languages of this world, and invented another 14 languages. Again, even that word invented, this is a lovely root that I discovered a few years ago. The word invented comes from the Latin invenire, which means to discover. And so when Tolkien saying that he invented a language, again, there's the sense of discovery, but it's a co-creative process. And so this is what I find very helpful to draw on the language of transpersonal psychology and particularly participatory spirituality, as articulated by Jorge Ferrer, for example, that there can be a co-creation with the imagination. That we receive images and then we can use our talents of language, of articulation. Articulation to shape them, to kind of sculpt them, perfect it. And Tolkien was a master of that. We can now go back and read the drafts of when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, and you can just see the progression where there is a core there, absolutely, that is grounded in the images, that's grounded in the language, and he's honing it all the time. You just get the sense he's aiming for something that it already exists somewhere. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. that those stories are really happening in some other realm, in what I like to refer to as the imaginal realm. As far as the overlap with the collective unconscious, I'm speculating here, but I wonder if, you know, we call it the collective unconscious, and that gives a sense that we can't quite see our way around in that realm. But what we call the imagination shines a light on it. And I wonder what the imagination allows us to do, is to actually look around within the collective unconscious, to recognize it as a realm of potentiality. And when we gaze upon it with the eye of the imagination, it takes certain form. And that certain form will be somewhat different because of who we are. And that's the participatory element. So there's a co-creation happening there. There's something really different. there in the collective unconscious. It's archetypal. It's realm of potential. And that light of the imagination, our own imagination, gives it certain form, certain shape. And that's why, on the one hand, you can get a completely unique story like Tolkien's, and yet it has a depth of connection to it, to all other myths, which also inhabit that realm of the collective unconscious and had light shed on them by different human imaginations. That's a great way of looking at it. It's cool. What was this gentleman's name? Jorge Ferrer? Jorge Ferrer. He is a professor also at CIS. He teaches in the East-West psychology program. And he wrote a book a number of years ago called Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. And he engages with Stan Grof's work and also Ken Wilber's work and really argues for an understanding of religion as a spiritual practice that demonstrates how different religious truths are co-created in relation to a divine, indefinable, indescribable mystery. Mystery with a capital M. But that one religious path compared to another, Buddhism compared to Hinduism, compared to Christianity and so forth, that there isn't a hierarchy. One isn't more right than the other, but that they're actually a culture. And so I think that's a really good way of looking at it. Or a personal participation and co-creation with this divine mystery. And so each is true in its own way. So he likes to, he's basically arguing against the idea of perennialism, that you can think of the different world religions as different paths of one mountain, and at the top of the mountain is the ultimate spiritual truth. And he's trying to democratize that. He's saying it's not a mountain with many paths. It's more like an ocean with many shores. So he's affirming pluralism and that each of these different paths, or even our own individual engagement with that divine mystery are all legitimate forms of access instead of kind of creating a hierarchy and saying, well, you know, the Judeo-Christian tradition with a personal God, that's at this level, and then non-dual religions are at this level. So he's trying to bring all that down to the same level and have that ocean. With many shores. And so I've engaged with his thoughts on that in relation actually to astrology, trying to understand to a certain degree, how astrology is possible, how it can work. And then I've also started applying it to the idea of the imagination and the collective unconscious and why we can have very similar experiences and they're still unique to each of us. Well, that's cool. I haven't heard of anybody actively kind of criticizing the way you laid it out. It sounded like criticism. So that's great. Well, awesome. Doesn't seem to like actively engage in debate and it would be lovely if he did. He's plenty smart to talk to folks, but for some reason chooses not to. I would love to have him at the table, but you know, for whatever reason he's opted out the way you phrase it to many shores, one ocean, many shores. That makes a lot of sense because the rock is different, different beaches. So the shape is going to play out very different. And I had this, I don't know yet, but Rick Strassman, you're familiar with him, DMT researcher. He wrote a book, wrote a new book recently, kind of discussing DMT States and kind of compare contrast to Jewish mystic States. So going old Testament, like old Hebrew stuff. And he was trying to make a hierarchy of like, you know, these States are absolutely more important than those States. And it was like always the ones that had explicit messages were more valuable. That's the way I saw it as opposed to like rocket ship rides through DMT hyperspace. I'm like, you know, I get where you're coming from, man, but I just don't think your argument was that great. So I feel like, you know, a lot of these people are writing books, not necessarily getting a chance to talk to folks like Jorge or people doing that kind of really serious work. It would be lovely if they could. Yeah. Jorge is a very discerning scholar. It's one thing very much appreciate about his work. And this book revisioning transpersonal theory, came out quite a few years ago. And he's actually just come out with a new one this year called participatory spirituality. So that's kind of the next iteration of these ideas. And even though in his first book, he does critique Ken Wilber and also Stan Grof, he also makes clear and I've heard him say this in person and in interviews, too, that the people that we critique are the people that we learn the most from and the tremendous amount of respect. Yeah, absolutely. For them as well. So I just want to kind of acknowledge that side of it, too, that knowledge creation really comes through not only the harmonious dialogues that we have where we're in more agreement, but when there is disagreement. And I think even Jorge's theory, Jorge Ferrer's theories make space for when there is disagreement. That's the whole point that different religions are not going to agree with each other. So instead of trying to make them to agree with each other, we instead of trying to recognize that they each are carrying a valid truth and they each have their own co-creative relationship to the divine. So this relates pretty interestingly to debates we've been having in the psychedelic world recently. So it's like you have these kind of more shamanic realms, like people doing traditional spiritual work in ayahuasca, iboga worlds, and how that relates to kind of a more, quote unquote, recreationalist, approach with like Grateful Dead fish and raves or whatever. And how much do you really want to get caught up in like, you are right? Or like, is that also valid? Is that also perhaps okay for them to do that? You don't have to agree with it. But you know, perhaps it's okay that they practice what they think is right in those other worlds. You know, ravers probably think ayahuasca shamanism is ridiculous. And, you know, not all of them. I'm sure there's quite a bit of overlap. But yeah, I think the criteria would be, I think the criteria would be that it's not doing anyone any harm, that it's in service of liberation in a certain way. And also in service of relationality of being more relational of being and becoming a better human being. And of course, that has to look different for everybody, and for different cultures, because we are all radically different from each other, even as we're radically similar to that both are simultaneously there. And so I think there have to be multiple approaches, again, those, those many shores, because it's what lies in between, I think, is really where the wisdom is, and the divinity is, and that sense of this is right, and that is wrong. Well, then you kind of get a sense that maybe neither one is that openness to possibility. And again, not that anything goes there, it needs to be a sense of rigor and container as well. You know, some people are trying to be serious with their spirituality, some people are trying to, you know, kind of make a comical ish religion. You know, they're explicitly trying to do that, what, what is that? Discordianism, or church of the subconscious, subgenius, like those kind of things. Those are, well, very cool. They're, you know, explicitly comical religions and, you know, why not? But also, you know, let's have some rigor around it. What is actually true? To what degree am I actually joking? You know, that kind of stuff, as opposed to deluding ourselves over the course of decades. So there was this line in the podcast I listened to yesterday, Feral Intercourse with you. And it was about how culture has an obsession with happiness and how it seems to be, I don't remember if it was you or the host saying this, but it was this kind of concept of us perhaps growing our shadow almost consciously saying like, okay, this is me. I'm only me when I'm happy, as opposed to like, you know, maybe we have to accept our grief and dig into that. And actually you mentioned this grief practice, like consciously setting up a space with either a sad song or in silence or whatever to just embody grief for a little bit. Like we have grief in our body that we don't necessarily right now have space to let out of ourselves unless we make the conscious decision. Like I definitely remember making space on many car drives, like putting on the saddest music possible and just going for it. And if I didn't have that, that would have played out in a really strange way, I think. I learned that from a couple of friends of mine, good friends of mine from a few years ago, when we all lived together, that that importance of a grief ritual and being able to metabolize when we experience deep loss, like the loss of a parent, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of our home or the flooding of our state. My prayers are very much with everyone in Florida right now. My husband's family is over there. And I just want to say thank you so much for being here. And I hope that you have a great day. At a certain point, it's like, okay, one way to stay awake and engaged is to grieve it. And this is really where I highly respect the work of Joanna Macy. She does the work that reconnects. She's a now profound elder in our community and has done a lot of work with ecology and philosophy and Buddhism. And she develops these workshops that allow people to feel the pain of the earth and of the earth. And I think that's a really good thing. of the earth's communities, and to grieve on behalf of that and pointing out that the fear and the grief are all because we care. It's all because we love this place. And loving this place is our birthright. And it matters that we engage in that way that we engage with our feeling and our emotion, and how we can deepen into that. And of course, there are certain practices that can make space for that even more. I definitely find that grieving for the earth has been a major theme for me when I do go into non ordinary states of consciousness, where it's even easier, easy isn't quite the right word, but more accessible, that deep well of grief that is mine, but also much bigger than me. And the importance of feeling that because it's so easy right now to try and shut it out and become become numb. And that is the last thing that this world needs. Is us to become numb and turn away. So that's definitely been my engagement with it where it's just felt like a lifeline and sanity, be able to feel what's going on. I was in this men's group a while back. And there were these serious fires in Boulder, now floods, actually. And I was sharing space with some rescue workers. And they didn't like cry at the time, because there's too much work to do. And, you know, really, I think what the kind of elder of that group said, like, just, you know, set aside even five minutes, like you don't need much time to do it. And it's just this relief valve that makes you feel human again, as opposed to this, like, productive robot. It's all about, you know, doing things in forward progress. And super helpful. I really connect with that whole grief with the world thing. That was a lot of my breathwork experiences was like, the world is burning. What the hell do we do? Are we going to live? And, who knows? You know, hope so. But it takes us recognizing it and then getting back to business, getting back to work. And, you know, your work relates to like storytelling. I really liked how there's this tie in between like storytelling and defining how humans interact with place. Like, the story almost defines how the human sees themselves, or the culture sees itself. Absolutely. Yeah, it's whether it's at a cultural level or an individual level. I mean, so much of personal therapy is, is retelling your own story so that it's one that, that makes sense, that can be a healing journey and not a journey that just ends in trauma and wounding, and a sense of victimization, but rather retelling the story so that you can be re-empowered from your wounds and from your trauma. Yeah, that's huge. And are you seeing new storytellers come to the foreground that are helpful? I know a lot of people are reading the book, but I know a lot of people are writing and doing art. But like, is there a new Tolkien? Is there, are there people that might be on that level that we can recognize now, or maybe in 10, 15 years? You know, feel free to be very creative here, however you want to put that answer. There will never be a new Tolkien, says the lifelong devotee. That's a fantastic question. And I wish I had a clear answer off the top of my head. It's probably one of those things that's going to come to me later. Have you heard of Ramez Na? Ramez Na? Ramez Na? Ramez Na? Yeah, I've heard of him in the late 90s or around 2000. But it happens that my husband and I are reading this out loud to each other right now. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series that begins with the Golden Compass. And what's been amazing about rereading it, the first time I read it was maybe 10 years ago, and we're rereading it now, is so much of what is happening in that story in the environment really eerily mirrors what's happening with climate change, with the ice caps melting and everything radically shifting very suddenly. And what that opens up, the questions it opens up. And then just the philosophical speculation that Philip Pullman goes into in that trilogy around many worlds and around the divine and so forth. He pulled so much from Christian Gnosticism. It's amazing. I was like really deep into the occult and Christian Gnostic stuff at that time. And it was so fun just seeing him like play with it. In like a kind of fresh fictional way, you know, steampunk ish and all that fun stuff. How far are you guys on the first book? We are halfway through the last book, The Amber Spyglass. So much fun. I want to go back. It's been too long. It's a good time to read it. Yeah, this is a practice that my husband Matt Siegel and I have been doing for a while now. It began reading The Lord of the Rings out loud. I was like, you have to read this story if we're going to be in a relationship. Because you will not fully understand who I am without the story. So we read that out loud together. And then we've been making our way through a number of other books. And it's a really enjoyable way to just be together and experience story and that kind of ritualistic out loud sense. So we're coming up ish on an hour, but I kind of wanted to ask you maybe any kind of, I don't know, speculation or original thoughts or anything like that. Anything you might have around like the intersection of psychedelics and astrology that that maybe are unique to you, or you haven't heard voiced enough, wherever you want to go with that. No pressure. Yeah, that's an exciting question to try and answer. So I co-edited a journal called Archive, the Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, which was originally started back in 2007 by Karen LeGrice, and a few others in the Archetypal Research Collective that formed around then. And Grant Maxwell and I took over editing that back in 2015. So that's been an amazing platform to just kind of get to explore what the philosophy behind astrology is, the meaning, as well as just demonstrating the many correlations that are absolutely fascinating to find exploring the birth charts and transits of musicians and great artists and authors and so forth. So as far as that intersection of psychedelics and astrology, psychedelics are a very powerful learning tool to be able to come into relationship with the planetary archetypes, to deepen one's understanding of how they manifest, what they mean. So one can go into a psychedelic session, having studied astrology from books, and looking at birth charts and taking in information, technical information in that way, and then using that framework, say, knowing the transits that you have as you are planning a session, and then asking, okay, what am I going to learn about this particular alignment, this particular transit that I have? And in that state, one can just deepen so much further into, oh, those are the nuances of this archetypal complex, that maybe something, I've lived with my whole life, and suddenly you can have a breakthrough on a healthier way to live that aspect, a different way to have it come through you. And it's knowledge that you can test out in the real world. That's what's so remarkable about it, of you see these correlations, you deepen them through a psychedelic practice, and then you bring them back out into the world. You can check it against other people's experiences, their charts, their transits. And maybe somewhere in the world, you can test it out in the real world. And that's what's so remarkable about it. And so that's one way that I might not have experienced an aspect in my chart before, but I've deepened into that through non-ordinary states of consciousness. And then I meet someone else who's born with that same aspect, or is going through that transit, and they can affirm for me, well, yeah, that's how that particular aspect comes through to me. And so it just broadens the wealth of information that we can take in about astrological practice. And at the same time, it goes the other way. So psychedelics are not only in service of the deepening of one's astrological knowledge, but of course, astrology can help provide structure and meaning and context to a psychedelic experience where you might go in and everything feels extremely confusing and amorphous, and what does this mean? And it's knowing the planetary alignments at the moment of that experience. You can go, oh, right, that correlates with this world transit. Oh, that correlates with my personal transit or this part of my birth chart. It's like we get like hooks to hang what we discover upon and allows us to have a framework and for it to make sense. And when something's maybe really scary or confusing, like, oh, there's a Saturn Neptune experience or really challenging, there's a Saturn Pluto experience. And it's almost like acknowledging that can release the pain of it to a certain degree. The lesson can come from just knowing you are being mirrored by the cosmos. So I find that they're extremely mutually enhancing and potent tools to you in relation to each other. That's huge. I'm reminded of like, they're not exclusive, but Kabbalah meeting astrology and a lot of Kabbalists would say like, okay, here's your whole, this is everything. Here's your Kabbalistic tree of life. And you just hang your experiences on them like Christmas tree ornaments or something like these are your, this is your framework for understanding all of these wild, things you're going through. And it, you know, those are two sides of the same coin, astrology and Kabbalah. And in a lot of ways, I don't want to, you know, be prescriptive for folks. One last kind of question. Do you know this guy, Adam Ellenbos at all? I do. That book is on my nightstand right now. Adam and I have been having some really interesting conversations since we met at the Northwest astrological conference this past May, where we were both speaking. Our talks were scheduled in the same slot. So we didn't get to talk about it. So we're going to talk about it. We had to see each other speak. So then we started talking after that. And he's also deeply into the work of James Hillman. I think he's read every single thing Hillman wrote, which I cannot claim for myself and is very much into a participatory worldview and engagement with astrology. He also has a very deep understanding of Hellenistic astrology. And so he's bridging worlds in a very interesting way. So I've been learning a lot about that. And I think that's a really good way of learning a lot in conversation with him. So a lot of what you said, I had a conversation with Adam years ago. He helped me produce ayahuasca monologues in Boston forever ago. And there was this one story he told me about having his students go through a series of meditations, which seemed very psychedelic around the planets. And they came back with like these super intense stories. And he's going, okay, I gave my students these things to do super intense. I've never done these things myself. So to stay honest, I have to go do them. So he did them and just got his ass kicked in all of the series of meditations. And these are, you know, not psychedelic meditation. So I hope people listening to the show get that non-drug experiences can be super intense to spontaneous or programmed otherwise, you know. So it's very interesting to me that there was this correlation there of your story and his from a decade ago. So that's really cool that you're tied in with him. I think he's one of the most important people in the world. And I think he's wonderful. You know, very interesting because he's explicitly Christian, explicitly involved in the ayahuasca world. And there's, I don't think too many like gringo Americans who are like ayahuasca, Christian and astrology. He's like this very special blend. And it's really cool. Yeah, he's carrying a lot of really important threads that he's weaving together in a beautiful way. I do want to just briefly comment on what you said a moment ago about the non-ordinary experiences not needing to be induced, for lack of a better word, through psychedelic medicine. And this is, I think, in large part, why one of the reasons I've been drawn to work with Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's work, because neither of them were working with psychedelics or, you know, Tolkien, you get the classic picture of him smoking a pipe of tobacco, but that's probably about it, you know. He's like a taller Frodo Baggins, right? Exactly. Yeah, tobacco and beer. And that's about it. And then a powerful imagination. And Jung, just this powerful access to the collective unconscious through directive imagination, through visionary experience. Jung actually had visions. And I find them to be very important examples because they are accessing the same material, the same realm without another medium. And that doesn't make it better or worse, but it's just another lens on this material. And the more we can recognize that there are multiple paths to access the collective unconscious, to access the imaginal realm, to access the archetypal, the more we realize that this is, to use a word I used earlier, this is also our birthright, that we have access to this numinous, beautiful, terrifying, perilous, exquisite realm. That is bigger than you can imagine. And it's. Yeah. Beauties and terrors beyond the realms of your current ability to imagine. But you will imagine it once you get there. And yeah, it's fascinating. And it's really empowering too, because we think of ourselves as so small, so powerless, and we are all our own meaningful stories embedded in a larger, more meaningful story, which to pull from the other podcast again that you did. So I guess I don't really know how to close this up. There's so much to say, but you do astrology readings for people. You're still working on your PhD. You blog. I guess maybe that's a great way to go. So what do you blog about and where can people find it? Sure. I just have a website that is my name. So beccatarnas.com. And I post different lectures that I've given or podcasts like this, or even artwork sometimes. I, for a number of years, was posting all of my graduate papers. So that's the bulk of. The writing that is on my website is all the papers that I was producing through four years of graduate coursework. And that's really been my learning process too. So it's actually kind of interesting for me to go back and see how my thought has developed on certain subjects and just kind of continuing to make that public as my engagement with this material changes. So I continue to make things available there. And I have been doing a lot of have been posting less lately because I'm writing my dissertation full time and will be graduating this upcoming spring so that's where most of my writing attention is going and that and you know getting to do some public speaking here and there for example at the end of this month I'm going to be going with a whole group of wonderful people a lot of them from the CIS graduate school to Prague for the international transpersonal conference that's being held there and really kind of centered around Stan Grof's work and all these different people that have taken it in many different directions and so I'm going to be speaking there a number of the people that I've mentioned throughout this podcast will also be speaking there it's going to be a really remarkable time I'm so excited to be doing that and then you mentioned my astrology readings I do also offer astrology readings I have a separate website for that it's archetypal prism as in that crystal that refracts light into a rainbow archetypal prism.com and I offer natal and transit astrology readings through that it's fantastic thank you for bringing us back to the conference because that was one of the major reasons why we're going to talk to you to promote that conference and it's really cool that you are able to be presenting there Kyle and I are a little upset we're not going to be there but they let us actually be media partners which is really great so we at least have our logo on their site and we're going to try to do some promotion as much as possible we can to get more and more people there to hopefully see you talk wonderful I'm really excited about that it's going to be an amazing conference and just the list of speakers just seems to keep growing and there's so many different fields of research that are all being brought together in this really beautiful synergistic way and it's also a kind of homecoming for Stan Grof back in 1992 an earlier version of the same conference happened and it's going to be I remember because I was four years old and my dad went to the conference with Stan Grof and a number of people who have been very important teachers in my life like Sean Kelly and I believe Jorge Ferrer was actually there too all gathered at that conference so here it is 15 years later am I calculating that right no it's even longer 23 years later I don't do math well on the spot so quite a few years later I'm going to be there and I'm going to be there and I'm going to be there a few years later and this kind of homecoming and honoring of Stan Grof's work and the many places that it's gone since yeah and I'm glad it's going that way he I believe he said publicly that the work that's happening right now in psychedelics is kind of boring we've done it all already and we know it's valid but there's so many cool creative you know not to downplay it's something we need to do based on government prohibition whatever else but you know there's just so many other interesting places we can go with psychedelics and transpersonal psychology not just in the world of psychedelics but in the world of psychedelics and transpersonal psychology what we're doing right now in terms of active government accepted therapies modalities and all these really great people are developing new stuff and you know even astrology like I believe we're making great strides in astrology and how it can help folks so there's a lot that's really going on yeah definitely I mean I was at the psychedelic science conference in Oakland this April and the amount of hope and energy that I felt in that conference you don't feel hope like that a lot these days and this is an edge where something is actually being done that can address so many of the world's challenges and crises right now and just to feel that sense of inspiration and hope was huge and I feel really blessed to be in connection to and friends with people that are on the ground doing this important work like the phase three MDMA and also Simon studies and so it's huge it's really big I feel really blessed to be in connection to and friends with people that are on the ground doing this work like the phase three MDMA and also Simon studies and so it's huge it's really big it's really big like we're in a time of initiation and obviously I'm speaking right now from being situated living in the United States and I live in California and so I I'm seeing through my own particular lens and have my own particular worldview as as I say this but it really does feel like we are collectively going through some kind of powerful initiation and probably at the highest level we can feel that with what's happening with the climate but also in terms of race relations and what's happening gender relations and just the complexity of the time that we're in and there's so much need for healing right now and I would just want to bring awareness to the fact that that is happening and those who have the privilege to work with psychedelics or the capacity to engage with non-ordinary states of consciousness or to do holotropic breath work that that tremendous privilege can help us to be able to do that. So I think it's really important that we can really afford an opportunity to start doing that healing with yourself your interpersonal relationships in your community in your work life and it just continues to ripple out from there and so that deep inner work is really deep outer work you can't fix yourself and then fix the world fix the world pictures it all happens at once so that's kind of where my heart and mind are at right now is being with that time of transition and change and how scary it is too and that it will probably get worse and may it get better beyond that and that's what we're doing here it is very meaningful so thank you for joining us and I hope you have a great day and I'll see you in the next video. Bye! www.youtube.com/c/BritishCast www.youtube.com/BritishCast www.youtube.com/BritishCast www.youtube.com/BritishCast