Humanity’s Rite of Passage in Perilous Times (Lecture)

Carl Jung asserted that initiation or the rite of passage is an archetype inherent in the human psyche. That is to say that something in us wants and expects engagement in the initiatory process, not only at the age of puberty, but throughout our human experience. Jung believed, that even if we do not participate in a formal rite of passage ceremony as we transition from youth to adulthood, our human journey will provide us with initiatory events for the purpose of deepening our humanity and our connection with the cosmos and something greater than the human ego. It is likely that severity of the collapse of civilization and our ecosystems will be tempered by our perception and response to them as an initiatory process. Jung believed that even though Westerners almost never experience formal rites of passage, all humans experience them symbolically. This lecture will focus on our planetary predicament as a rite of passage that we are being asked to willingly enter and be transformed by.