Jung’s Impact on the World

Completing our series on the great minds of psychology, we finally get to one of the biggest influences in psychology, culture and spirituality,  Carl G. Jung. In this episode, we share Jung's vast impact on the world with psychology, comparative religion, mythology, eastern spirituality, mysticism, dream interpretation, the depth of the unconscious, personal and collective, personality types, alchemy and more. We explore:

• The journey of Carl Jung and his individuation process
• Our personal stories of how Jung’s work came into our life and the impact it has had
• What the future holds if people would become more conscious, and how society would change from politics to social challenges to personal happiness

•••

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:20 The journey of Carl Jung and his individuation process
• 10:28 Our personal stories of how Jung’s work came into our life and its impact
• 24:34 What the future holds if people would become more conscious & how society would change
• 39:40 Thought experiment on an individuated society

Transcript

Jung's Impact on the World Transcript

INTRO  00:00

Welcome to Soul Sessions with CreativeMind with Debra Berndt Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of CreativeMind. Join us each week for inspiring conversation about personal development based on Jungian philosophy, Eastern spirituality, and social neuroscience. Spend each week with us to explore deep topics in a practical way. Let's begin. 

Debra Maldonado  00:28 

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Soul Sessions with CreativeMind. I'm Debra Berndt Maldonado, here with Dr. Rob Maldonado. We are so excited about our topic today. We are ending our series on the great minds of psychology. There's so many people we didn't touch on. But we couldn't do one without talking about Carl Jung. We're going to get into that today. Did Jung contribute anything to psychology or the world? Did he have maybe a little impact?

Robert Maldonado  00:59

He's got potential, let’s say. This comes full circle because Jung has been an inspiration to so many people in so many ways. People don't even realize they're using some of his ideas. Carl Gustaf Jung was trained as a psychiatrist. At the time, they were still defining the profession. They didn't have coaching, except in sports, that goes back to ancient Greece and even before that. He initially trained as a psychiatrist and was very involved in clinical work with severe mental health problems, stuff that we’d now call psychotic problems like schizophrenia, serious mental disorders. Through that work, he became familiar with Freud's work, started corresponding, that’s the early 1900s, turn of the century. He joined Freud's psychoanalytic society eventually, and Freud was ready to hand over the reins of that group to Jung. He was considering him as his heir and son. But at that time, there was a break and Jung went his own way.

Debra Maldonado  03:01

Which, I think, is normal. Because if he came up with individuation, he had to carve his own path.

Robert Maldonado  03:08

The break occurred in around 1913, somewhere around that time. From then on he pretty much was on his own, developed his own analytical psychology. Now he's known in psychology as well as psychiatry. But he's also a philosopher, a great writer. These are some of his contributions, just to name a few. Certainly, contributions to psychology, his idea of introvert and extrovert, which is a personality theory, philosophy, how we look at science and how we integrate science into human understanding.

Debra Maldonado  04:07

Also the spiritual aspect of philosophy, they see the human beyond just their behavior and what they're presenting, but seeing that there's a spiritual aspect of human being.

Robert Maldonado  04:19

Comparative religion, comparative spirituality, comparative mythology. We wouldn’t have Joseph Campbell without Jung's work. Dream psychology, he was heavy into understanding dreams and using dreams as a way to connect with deeper aspects of the psyche, understanding creativity and art. Many writers, directors, artists understand or at least look at his work as a way of understanding their own creative process, understanding what the art they create and other people create means for society.

Debra Maldonado  05:10

A lot of the actors take shadow work classes because it's all about pulling up parts of themselves that they have to bring to the character. Do you think some of them don't know Jung, but unconsciously they're creating the hero's journey. Like Campbell said, all these myths, there's archetypal universal patterns that show up in writing. Some of the writers aren't conscious that they're bringing in themes that Jung talked about.

Robert Maldonado  05:52

Our understanding of Eastern philosophy wouldn’t be where it's at, if it wasn't for his work. He was one of the first ones to seriously look from a psychological perspective at what Eastern philosophy was talking about.

Debra Maldonado  06:12

Also making it Western, how Westerners should work with Eastern philosophy. Because if you take in all the rituals from the East, it's not your culture. He wrote The Secret of the Golden Flower, where he talks that you can't just adopt an Eastern religion if you're conditioned, you're living in a Western world. You have to make it your own and practical for yourself in where you're at to make it really work or else it feels disjointed.

Robert Maldonado  06:41

Looking at the West, you have the tradition of alchemy, which had been forgotten for a long time until he revived it by giving it validity, saying “It’s interesting, let's look at it because these are our Western roots we shouldn't ignore. There's valuable things in here.” The scientific community had pretty much dismissed alchemy as superstition and what came before chemistry and real science. He said there were things in there that were important for understanding our development in Western philosophy.

Debra Maldonado  07:36

Also, if you think of the base metals turning into gold, it's sort of what we do in transformation. It's an alchemical process of the psychic energy. He tied it to a lot of what's happening in the psyche that makes us transform, that makes us become something different, to grow, and individuate.

Robert Maldonado  07:57

Then, of course, understanding of the unconscious mind, which we're still debating and finding out what is it that he was pointing at when he defined the personal unconscious, and then went deeper into what he called the collective unconscious.

Debra Maldonado  08:24

I didn't really understand the unconscious mind until I started studying Jung. I thought it was like a computer. You can't see the unconscious, no matter how self aware you become, all you can see is what you retrieved from it but you can never look at it directly. The idea that you can see your unconscious, or a coach or a therapist can see your unconscious, it's more like you're seeing what's pointing to it, but you never really can see it directly, because it's unseen. Understanding that idea, how do we bring out through symbolism and dream interpretation and living that symbolic life, how do we work with this part of ourselves that we can’t see?

Robert Maldonado  09:07

Let's look into how we experience it at a personal level.

Debra Maldonado  09:14

One of the things you forgot to talk about is archetypes. The concept that there's universal patterns that show up. What fascinates me about culture and society is you put a group of people in a room and they all take on an archetype. Or we talked about screenplays, people writing movies, the archetypes come alive in the writing, these characters come alive, they all have certain roles and certain expressions. Where do they come from? Where's the template? It's that universal template from which we create, the archetypal level. Very fascinating. Aat first, I used to think archetypes were personality types. When I first started thinking about what that is, like the brand archetypes because I was in marketing for so many years, it's like “I'm the hero, I'm the victim, I'm the everyday person, or I'm the guru.” It's so much deeper than just a personality. Studying Jung and understanding the complexity and also the depth of the study of archetypes is really profound.

Robert Maldonado  10:33

If we want to expand on all his work, we'd have to do several episodes.

Debra Maldonado  10:39

It's like you said that reading Jung is like reading the Bible. There's so many ways and branches of people that study Jung and have their own take on it and have taken the work to the next level. Some are in the medical model, then we're establishing the interpretation of his work in a coaching model. 

INTERMISSION  11:02 

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Debra Maldonado  11:57 

You introduced me to Jung, your story should come first as to what the first experience was like for you.

Robert Maldonado  12:04

I liberated one of his books very early on from a library that was pretty close to the house where I grew up in Texas. It was The Portable Jung, it was actually edited by Joseph Campbell. In that book, Joseph Campbell lays out Jung’s work systematically as a way of looking at the evolution of his thoughts. I started reading it for myself, I had read the Gita before then, I must have been about 14-15. For me, it was the first glimpse of another mind looking at psychology and the world in a particular way that I resonated with. I had never read anything like that, except maybe for Hermann Hesse, who wrote Damien, Steppenwolf, and Siddhartha, but here was an actual profession, an actual way of living in the world and making a living dedicated to understanding of the mind this way.

Debra Maldonado  13:31

Did you want to be a psychologist at that point?

Robert Maldonado  13:33

Of course, he was my mentor in written form. That's the great thing about books that you have access to somebody's mind, thinking on page, they communicate to you how they see the world, how they see the mind. For a long time, he served as my mentor and guide. Not that I was interested in emulating his life so much. He's a human being, he was definitely a product of his time. It doesn't make sense for me to want to be a Victorian physician the way he was. But the approach to the mind is what's important. How do you think about the mind? How do you think about your own experience and consciousness?

Debra Maldonado  14:34

You also had a mentor after you became a psychologist or were training as a psychologist who was a Jung analyst. Do you think she revitalized, inspired, re-invigorated your taste for Jung, wanting to learn more, go deeper into it?

Robert Maldonado  14:55

Absolutely. The people that I ended up training with in academia and in clinical practice were a huge influence on me. But I had already formed it. I already had absorbed most of Jung's ideas before I went to university. I had that mindset already. Then, once I was in university, I understood that there's been a lot of advances in psychology since Jung's time. I became very interested in what's new. I was free to do that because I already had his ideas as a template for how to approach the mind. Even if I was learning neuroscience, I was approaching it with a Jungian mindset.

Debra Maldonado  15:48

When we first met, you were a psychologist working with kids. The things you were doing and how you explained how to work with them was so different than what I’d assume a child therapists would do. There was something deeper, more profound that you brought in, I think that is because you had the Jungian foundation, you were able to see something a little deeper than someone who was traditionally trained without that foundation, more of the West. You brought more of Eastern philosophy, or spiritual knowledge into your approach to working with kids.

Robert Maldonado  16:26

Jung’s psychology is considered pretty much the foundation of depth psychology, what went on to become all the schools that look deeper into the psyche, into the unconscious mind, which is now called depth psychology or transpersonal psychology. He was the godfather of all that. Unfortunately, he's also considered the father of the New Age movement, which is fine, it's people taking some of these ideas and using them for their own purposes. But if you really study his work, I did for many years and continue to study his work, he was always warning us to not just emulate other cultures, or even himself. Don't necessarily be a Jungian, but think for yourself. His mentoring was the idea that you should find the knowledge and the wisdom you see in other cultures and other spiritual traditions in yourself. Not just emulate them because they're there, or the way other people have been doing them. But definitely, you can study them, read them. He obviously learned a lot from Eastern psychology. We see it in the concept of the self and his use of active imagination, very similar to meditation.

Debra Maldonado  18:26

Even dream work, isn't there dream yoga as well? In the east, they talked about dreams. Even as a Christian, Joseph had dreams.

Robert Maldonado  18:41

He said people forget that God primarily speaks to people through dreams. His attitude was that all those things are still alive in us. But in putting them into practice, he says, you have to make them your own, in your own time.

Debra Maldonado  19:03

In your own culture and your own thing that you can relate to versus trying to jump into something else and perform the ritual without embodying it.

Robert Maldonado  19:18

He was critical of people that tried to emulate other cultures, like Eastern or Native American, or other traditional cultures, and renounced their own. He says that's like saying “I am bereft of any real wisdom, I have to import it from somewhere else.”

Debra Maldonado  19:42

His whole concept was integration, we're not getting rid of anything. We have in us indigenous knowledge and the collective unconscious, but we want to integrate it into our current reality, not switch and swap personas. How do we integrate, or even discover that internal deep instinctual wisdom we were born with, find it inside. If I argue to say that sometimes people don't know how to get it, that's why they're drawn to other cultures, because there's something in there that calls to them. But then the next step is to learn that, understand that. But now how can I find within myself? Don't push away your own culture, your own identity to just be something else. Then you're still pushing something away. That just goes into your shadow. It's still going to affect you.

Robert Maldonado  20:42

It's mainly that you're creating a persona of spirituality, now you’re a spiritual persona, but the persona, he says, is not really who you are. You're using these spiritual traditions as a way to build up a spiritual appearing persona, you appear to be spiritual, but you're not really finding them within yourself. That's his great message. Of course, it's very relevant for today's generation. We're in a new era of AI and a world culture now, his ideas are really important to understand so that we can use them as a map, as a guide as to what we do with this new understanding we have of intelligence, culture, and society.

Debra Maldonado  21:47

I started out in life, I think a lot of people can relate to this, you have as a child mystical experiences, waking dreams, very lucid dreams. I had a wild imagination, I’d have a dream, then I’d write it and make it a story. I was the character in the story a lot of times, I had this wild inner resource. As a kid, I couldn’t wait to go to sleep because I really wanted to see what was happening, what was the next step in the story that was unfolding. I had a really rich inner world and even had an idea to look beyond what’s possible. I feel like in my family everyone was very practical, I was the dreamer. What is it about me that calls upon me to do something more, to have more and not just settle? Early in life, I did a lot of exploration. First I was raised Roman Catholic. My religion was that God is dictating, I have to follow the rules. As I got into my 20s, I started looking at personal development. The first thing that shifted for me was that your thoughts create your life. That's a big change in perspective here. It took me on a journey for a while, almost over a decade of searching for the answer. I think everyone needs to go on that search, everyone needs to play with all the New Age stuff, dabble in all the different spiritual concepts from other cultures. Then what happened for me was that I met you. I had an idea of what the unconscious was, I was trained as a hypnotherapist, I was thinking you reprogram your unconscious. If you want to be more positive, you reprogram your brain and be confident. But when I met you, I had experience of my shadow for, I think, the second time. The first time I had an experience of shadow, but I didn't know what it was. The second time, you showed me a map that came from Jungian psychology about the unconscious, you're projecting it onto another person. I never thought of it that way. I kept thinking it's my mind that's perceiving but it's actually more of a projection. It's a different level of understanding how the psyche works. I remember it was a conflict in my life I was trying to deal with. Up until that point, I had to deal with it externally. I had to go and make things happen, communicate with people, keep boundaries. This one I did solely through your guidance, your great idea of Jungian way to look at things. It was the first time I made a complete inner transformation. The external just shifted. It was the first time I really got a direct experience of it. Of course, we studied Jung together, reading his books, more Eastern philosophy. I started to understand all those mystical experiences I had as a kid, all the dreams I had, even the visualizations, these worlds I’d create in my visualizations, in my imagination, I understand the symbolism of it. I'd have dreams I wrote down, I have journals of them. Now I can go back and look. I remember some of them, we all have those dreams that stick with us. “That's what the dream was telling me.” It puts it in a completely different context where I could use it versus “I guess that was a dream about finding love.” No, it's about something much deeper and much more profound. For me as a layperson, who didn't study psychology, who didn't go the traditional route of becoming a therapist and psychologist, I found it very approachable in a way that made it scientific. There’s a theory behind it, but it also incorporates the mysticism. I didn't want to be just a sterile coach that says “Let's think about your goals, let's talk it through.” I wanted to do rich work, but I needed a framework that was easy to apply in my life. It's actually very practical if we understand how to work with it. For me, it's been a game changer in my life. Anytime there's a conflict or something that's not working for me, the first place I look at is inside. I don't try to rearrange the furniture in the world, I try to go inside and say “What is this my mind is telling me?” That has been such a powerful way of being because your power is within you. Even more than just manifesting things, I am actually getting more joy out of knowing who I am, knowing the depth of my psyche, having this intimate inner world. It wouldn’t be possible without Jung giving us a guide, giving us a map to what we're really experiencing in a very symbolic way. You're not getting into superstition and making up stuff about what it means, you're realizing that you're creating your own reality in a deep way.

Robert Maldonado  27:18

It's an incredible way to see the mind, to see the world. His idea of us not being the persona goes counter to Western culture in general because in Western culture we’re taught your personality, who you think you are, your behaviors and how you present yourself is who you are. You should improve this quality, this personality to the utmost.

Debra Maldonado  27:55

Because you want to impress people, win friends and influence people.

Robert Maldonado  27:58

There's nothing wrong with that. Jung says it’s true up to a certain point at midlife, or what he called midlife, it was really your mid-20s because people didn't live as long at that time, you should start to really consider who you are beyond the mask, beyond the persona, the role you play in society.

Debra Maldonado  28:29

In Western psychology, often those have gone to therapy identify it as their diagnosis. A lot of times they identify as the experiences they had in childhood, I'm a survivor of this, or I'm an adopted child. They create their whole identity around the past. Of course, those are good things to look at and to process but if you stay stuck in that identity that happened 10-20-30 years ago, there's no room for you to be anything else. That's what he was saying, you're not throwing away that part, you’re seeing that there's more to you than just that, there's so much more to you. What we end up doing is collapsing our possibilities into this one identity. That’s what most people do. It’s a normal ego function to create this identity. Jung says the next stage in our life is to break away from that conditioned self, to connect and go toward the universal self. He calls it the self.

Robert Maldonado  29:39

At the end of the day, if you consider what the function of ego is, it's to help us survive and create this persona that helps us fit in socially. But beyond that, if you stay stuck in the ego, you're essentially still in your childhood, the idea of the eternal boy and the eternal girl that we talked about, that he came up with and then von Franz developed it further.

Debra Maldonado  30:12

It's like you're living back there, you're still living in the past and hurting yourself, you're suffering.

Robert Maldonado  30:18

Not only that, you're hurting the world essentially. If you look at today's leaders, today's politicians and today's people who are in power, and consider that they're operating from ego, it means they're like toddlers. If they don't get their way, they throw a tantrum. Their aim is to gain more power, more control so that their ego feels more secure and protected. They're acting out a very primal, very elemental parts of the psyche, instead of from that enlightenment aspect of the mind that is capable.

Debra Maldonado  31:06

Wouldn't you say they're not consciously choosing this, they're not consciously wanting to be a bully, or a tyrant, or just reacting and being drama. It's their conditioning. They're not really aware of it, they think that's who they are, they think that's the only way they can be, they're powerless to change if they don't realize they're not consciously choosing that, that there's another way. Individuation, facing shadow, every world leader should do shadow work. I want to say it would solve many of the conflicts in the world because most of it is that projection onto the other person, making them wrong. It’s displacing their own self hate or self limitations on other people and blaming them for it. Then you see cultures and groups have certain missions, it's us versus them mentality. That's not really a way to work or to solve any problem, to be fighting all the time. Where can we find our common humanity? Where can both sides look and see who they are beyond that persona? That's where the common ground can be. What do we agree on, let's work with that, but more like who we are as human beings. I remember times like 9/11, I remember when that happened to our country. I grew up in New York area, and New York City is not known for people that are loving, everyone's short and direct. A friend of mine was working in New York at the time, she said “You're not going to believe how loving everyone was.” As a country, for a very short time, maybe like a day, we were all united in a way because we were all feeling the same thing. Then, of course, everything gets divided again. But imagine that all of humanity had a united mission of love, understanding, and non-judgement, also working on your own stuff and understanding what you're projecting. It would change the world.

Robert Maldonado  33:27

There's an interview with Jung on YouTube, we'll post the link to some of his interviews, where they asked him “What do you recommend for human society and our modern world?” He says “We have to understand the psyche. We know more about the moon than our own psyche. What if something goes wrong in our mind? What if these dangers are coming from within us, not from natural disasters?” And sure enough, if you look at where have all the disasters in human culture and human society come from it’s from our own minds, from our psyche.

Debra Maldonado  34:13

That’s an interesting point, you and I've been watching the progression of AI, a lot of fear around it is that it's going to destroy humanity. But AI is consciousness like us. It's a consciousness, it's the same psyche. Man built AI. How would you see that to dispel the fear? AI can mirror what we are in a way.

Robert Maldonado  34:44

Which is dangerous.

Debra Maldonado  34:46

That's why we need to individuate because the fear is that AI is out of control. But no one's saying humanity's mind isn’t conscious. That’s the question, they're afraid of the superconsciousness taking over, what we need to do is work on our consciousness. It will mirror back our highest and best nature, instead of our worst nature.

Robert Maldonado  35:15

From the Jungian perspective, technology is an amplification or an extension of our psyche. It's nothing really foreign or external to us, because we're the ones that are creating it. But it can amplify, just like we can build hospitals and schools, we can also build bombs and pollution. It's the same principle with this new technology. It can amplify our worst nature, the base elements in us, our greed, our fear, our need for power, or it can express something much higher, the spiritual tendencies in us.

Debra Maldonado  36:07

The oneness. If you all know you're one, if you're know that the center of your being is exactly the same as someone else, you're one, you wouldn't hurt anyone, because you would see yourself in that other person. But we don't see ourselves in other people, we don't see the light in other people, we see our conditioned self, what it sees, what it's been taught to see and their personas. We're working on this ego persona level with each other, not really seeing each other as we really are.

Robert Maldonado  36:41

Jung has an interesting perspective, he saw that through our technology, we're trying to be as gods. In the old mythologies, we were stealing the fire from the gods, the knowledge from the gods, we run the risk of being punished by the gods because of that. We're playing out that scenario, now we're playing with creating new life forms through manipulating the DNA code, or creating artificial intelligence by creating a learning machine.

Debra Maldonado  37:22

Or 3D experiences where people are buying property in a virtual reality, which is what this is, by the way, it's not different.

Robert Maldonado  37:33

But then the fear arises in us about who's in control. We might be punished for playing with these godlike qualities.

Debra Maldonado  37:46

It’s gonna take over, like the Terminator. It's going to become self aware and destroy humanity.

Robert Maldonado  37:50

But he says that's primarily because we're split against ourselves. We've divided our psyche into persona, waking world, and the unconscious mind, the shadow we're not aware of. He says if you want to correct that, you have to individuate, you have to integrate both the conscious and the unconscious mind, become aware and accept the unconscious elements in the psyche. If you don't do that, they're always going to show up as outer controlled external forces that you can’t control.

Debra Maldonado  38:34

One of the things you mentioned to me when we were first dating in the early days, which was mind blowing because when I was trained as a hypnotherapist, it was like “change your positive into negative”, what you were saying is that you're just flipping things around, then you're putting the negative in, suppressing the negative, which doesn't get rid of it. It creates more. The more you prop up positive, the more you're creating more negative at the same time, because you can't have one half of something. I thought that was really fascinating to think about, because we all think “I want the world to be a peaceful place, I want the world to be great. I don't want mean people in the world.” It's like we have to come to terms with our own, not badness, but all the things that we push away, our own greed, our own wanting to be the center of attention, our own need to get back at people. There's all these deep human tendencies in us that's been imprinted in us from the beginning of humanity that we're carrying with us. The more we make them conscious, then we can choose. We're not just programming ourselves to be positive, but we're actually seeing both sides of the spectrum and allowing them both to stand there. Mary von Franz said “Just standing in the tension of the opposites helps us make that new choice.” We're not just clinging to the past and pushing away the negative, we're actually saying “Let's look at both sides and see that both of them aren't real.” We want to create where we're not pushing anything away or grasping. That’s where the Eastern philosophy comes in, that non-dual philosophy. What Jung talks about is that the persona shadow is this dualistic energy of the ego. It gets carried on in the culture of good and bad, us and them. How do we bring into that oneness? To me, oneness was such a hard concept. You hear it so much, “you're one with everything”, but I think just training and understanding, just even taking the step toward individuation, working with your shadow, you start to see how connected you are to other people and how much more alike you are with people even that you disagree with. That’s where healing happens in a culture, in society, we start to see ourselves and others and be accepting of their own conditioned nature. They're not doing it intentionally, they're doing it out of a pattern, just like you.

Robert Maldonado  41:03

Jung says that if you want to understand other people's darkness, you have to understand your own first. That's the hardest concept for human beings, to really embody this idea that if you want to change the world, if you want to make improvements, you have to start with yourself. Because the tendency for us is to see the world and say “I can see the problem, it's out there, they’re the problem.” But we don't want to say “I'm contributing to the problem, not the solution, by being divided, by being judgmental of myself and others.” We have to start with ourselves. Luckily, Jung lays out his individuation process very clearly. Well, maybe not so clearly.

Debra Maldonado  42:00

That's why we took on ourselves to create a great map, a coaching model to help everyday people experience this profound mystical.

Robert Maldonado  42:10

The higher knowledge, the knowledge of Eastern philosophy, of the oneness, the true nature of reality, has been around forever. But if you read it, it leaves you puzzled as to how you do this. Do I just believe or do I intellectualize it?

Debra Maldonado  42:29

It's like a high concept. It's a big general concept that we're following versus something you can actually experience directly, through working with it.

Robert Maldonado  42:45

Jung's idea of individuation gives you a way to directly transform your perception so that you can perceive that reality directly for yourself. It's not about believing, like he says when they asked him “Do you believe in God?”, he said “I don't believe, I know, I have a direct perception, direct experience of it.” That's what he wants us to do through individuation, to have a direct experience of that oneness ourselves. But it begins by self inquiry, self examination, integrating your own shadow, then you can move on to helping others and helping the world

Debra Maldonado  43:34

Shadow Work is just the beginning. It's becoming very popular right now. But it is just the first step. You don't want to stop there. You want to keep going because the great part of Jung's work is beyond the shadow work. He says it’s the apprentice piece. He said when you start working with archetypes and the collective unconscious, that's the masterpiece, that's really who we are, this masterpiece. I have a thought experiment for you, Rob. Let's imagine there’s a group of hundred people who all did individuation. They are on an island in the middle of nowhere. They created a culture with 100% individuated people. What would that look like for that small island culture cut off from electronics? They couldn't interact with anyone else. Of course, we know that everyone's connected, but if we had an experiment, what would happen to a society? What would you imagine life would be like on that island?

Robert Maldonado  44:40

First of all, it wouldn't mean they wouldn't have challenges or everyday problems or situations. It's what they’d do with those problems and situations, how they'd approach them. If through individuation you learn that you are the world, the world that you're perceiving is created through your own mind, you're seeing your psyche as the world. When others confront you, trigger you, when problems arise in interpersonal relationships, then you see them in the right context. Here’s an opportunity for me to become more aware, to make the parts of my unconscious that are perhaps reflected in that conflict part of my internal work.

Debra Maldonado  45:42

Conflict would be welcomed because it was an opportunity to deepen the growth. I also think that when people make mistakes in our culture, we have to have rules and someone who made a mistake, stole something as a kid, or got caught up in a gang, or someone who cheated on their spouse, or maybe didn't handle their parenting very well. Instead of judging them, instead of punishing them, there's a more openness to what caused this situation to occur. There's more of a curiosity and non-judgment around it. That person can remember the truth of who they are, understand that their actions are through conditioning. I think that little island would be maybe the closest thing to heaven because it doesn't mean you're floating on clouds and everything's perfect but you're all taking responsibility. Even in a conflict, you're not avoiding conflict, not trying to keep peace, but you're more aware, you can have deeper relationships. I also think the love relationships will be amazing. People having true intimacy and friendships, parent-child relationships being so empowered. What we can do together as human beings with the power of our imagination, what kind of functions they would create, societies in that island, the way buildings are made, the way they live would be completely different than a competitive human world that we have now. How they would care about the land and animals, all these things that people do in pockets, but I can imagine that dream society. Maybe it's a dream but it's something to think about. If you do your work, you'll find yourself wanting to be around people like you that have individuated, the more we can help people individuate. That's why we have our business, training coaches to have people wake everyone up and see who they are. Eventually, I think there's going to be these cultures that rise above the noise of the conflict. We'll see a different type of leader in the world, different types of ways to do government, different types of ways to handle society conflicts and dealing with the challenges we have in the world now in a more conscious way. It's a dream, I'm a dreamer.

Robert Maldonado  48:24

My favorite philosopher Lao Tzu says, when we need moral codes, like the Ten Commandments or religious dictums to guide our behavior, that's good. But better, he says, is to know those things from the inside, so that you understand why it’s better to treat people like you’d like to be treated, why it’s better to take care of the earth and cultivate good things.

Debra Maldonado  49:00

Do not kill, you should feel that. I don't need to read it and go “I shouldn't kill, better not do that.”

Robert Maldonado  49:08

That's the ultimate aim of individuation and enlightenment, you understand these principles from within, they arise and are born from within you. You don't need that external punisher or reward from the outside world.

Debra Maldonado  49:28

We're gonna dream about our Jung individuation island, that should be a good reality show, maybe we should pitch that individuation island, I think that’d be an interesting experiment just to put a bunch of people on an island.

Robert Maldonado  49:44

We're on a planet island in space.

Debra Maldonado  49:49

I’d like to start with maybe a few individuals, like we're doing right now in our current courses and our trainings to individuate people. They're that ripple effect, all our coaches, graduating our program, going out and making this impact on the world. It's not just about finding the right partner or making money or finding the right career. You're having a more profound effect on humanity in a deep, profound way, every person you touch, every session you have. I'd like to dedicate this to the graduates of our program who are doing this work and making it possible that that dream island is in every city around the world. That’d be beautiful. Have a great rest of your day. I'm Debra Maldonado, here with Dr. Rob, signing out. 

OUTRO  50:42 

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