Chaos and Order: The Dance of Creative Forces
April 5-11, 2024 | County Limerick
Sometimes, our lives can feel chaotic, unstable, and disorienting. The outer world around us can also seem to be falling apart and in disarray. We crave order, sanity and inner peace. For change to happen, however, old patterns and ways need to be disrupted on both the personal and collective levels.
In modern chaos theory, we now realize that order and structure can be spontaneously generated out of disorder. What seems like randomness, can give way to new underlying patterns that evolve and self-organize.
In our psyches, chaos, mayhem and disorder can lead to a time of renewal, generativity, wisdom and growth that we didn’t know we had within us.It can assist us in reinventing ourselves and harnessing the creative forces within. By holding the tension of opposites—of chaos and order—what Jung calls the Transcendent Function emerges—a resolution that is neither order nor chaos, but rather a third and entirely new entity.
Join our outstanding faculty of Jungian analysts, and the erudite monks of Glenstal Abbey as we explore the dance of creative forces in chaos and order.
includes:
- Six nights’ accommodations at the Castletroy Park Hotel
- Transportation by coach to and from the hotel to Glenstal Abbey throughout the program.
- All presentations and discussions
- Full Irish breakfast daily; all breaks for coffee, tea, and scones; three lunches; and four dinners
Annual Seminar: Dreams, Divination & Synchronicity: Pathways to Healing
April 12-19, 2024 | County Galway
Throughout the ages, humanity has often turned to dreams, oracles, and omens to connect the limits of consciousness to divine omnipotence as a way to chart the course of our lives. The search continues to this day. Many of us seek out psychotherapists to help us decipher our dreams; we turn to astrologers to find out what the cosmos has in store for us, and we invest the I Ching, rune stones, angel cards, the Tarot, and even fortune cookies with mysterious powers that can somehow foresee our destiny in the messages they deliver.
Dreams have long been revered as a source of wisdom. The world’s sacred texts reveal messengers appearing in dreams to guide us, warn us, inspire us, comfort us, and even — as in the case with an angel and Jacob in the book of Genesis — wrestle with us. For Jung, dreams come from the Unconscious, the part of our psyche which transcends the ego — a message from the Self within that guides and communicates with us and offers a golden opportunity for insight.
On other levels, Jung himself explored not only dreams, but also astrology, the I Ching, and Alchemy — all methods of exploration of the Unconscious. He believed that seemingly random events were often points of contact between our conscious and unconscious. He believed that the Unconscious creates a physical manifestation of external reality which in turn creates what he terms Synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence.
Like Jung, many of us also witness and are even a part of these occurrences that seem to happen beyond all probability and we cannot deny their reality. Moreover, they can even provide a sudden breakthrough for our most entrenched dilemmas and personal issues that cannot be solved within the limits of reality or reason. Others, however, believe that nothing occurs outside the realm of chance, scientific causality, or statistical probability. Synchronicity and signs, they feel, are the language of fools, all gibberish and utter nonsense or, worse, some sort of black magic. Are they right?
Each of us is called upon to consider these questions: is the universe just a collection of arbitrary elements and random events, or is there some sort of ultimate meaning in it for our lives, and if so, how do we find it? It may be happening all around us, but what are the methods of discernment we can tap into to find this meaning without being fooled?
Through presentations and experiential workshops, during the course of this seminar we will explore the importance of these non-rational mediums as a source of divination, inner guidance, and wellspring of creativity.
includes:
- Seven nights’ accommodations at Connemara Coast Hotel
- All presentations and workshops
- Full Irish breakfast daily; all breaks for coffee, tea, and scones; three lunches; and two dinners.