This presentation is a reflection on the experience of how psychedelics can open the door to profound darkness and numinosity–fear and awe in the face of a tremendum. The experience requires both a descent and decentering, a going under that results in a defeat for the ego and a revisioning of the Self. It links the experience of ego death and rebirth, darkness and illumination, horror and ecstasy, a sacred chaos and volcanic numinosity. One major theme is the question of how to engage with numinous experiences: can they be psychologically integrated into a rational process of individuation or does the archetypal force itself transform the soul and the complexity of psychic reality?
My reflections are in part based on my early experiences at Millbrook with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, and my lifelong struggle with an understanding of the process. My talk includes a reflection on Jung’s Red Book, and extracts from a number of my own publications that struggle with this question.
Learning Objectives
This course is designed to help you:
- Recognize that some psychedelic experiences open the unconscious to profound darkness, numinosity, fear and awe in the face of a tremendum.
- Discover that instead of finding light by moving away from darkness, it can be found by moving further into its depths.
- Determine that engagement with darkness leads to the linking of darkness and light, revealing a profundity and depth of the mystery of the unknown.
Suggested Reading
- Marlan, Stanton. 2021. C.G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mystery of Psyche and Soul, Routledge:
- Chapter 7: Facing the Shadow: Turning Toward the Darkness of the Nigredo
- Chapter 8: The Black Sun
- Chapter 14: Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play of knowing and Unknowing.