Show Notes
This Halloween week, when the veil between worlds grows thin, Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins us to discuss ways in which we experience the dead communicating with the living.
In times of grief, it is common to be briefly reunited with the person we have lost in the form of deeply comforting dreams, visions or visitations. Jung himself was visited in such a dream by his deceased wife, Emma. He dreamed that Emma was in the south of France, continuing her research on the Holy Grail, and he felt comforted.
People have also sought seances and mediums to contact the dead, and Jung had a lifelong interest in these phenomena. Family members, including a teenage cousin, were deeply involved in this work. Jung was fascinated by his cousin’s ability to transform into another personality with knowledge a young woman could not have acquired. These experiences were Jung’s first encounter with what we now call the paranormal. This remained a lifelong interest and would later give rise to his theory of the collective unconscious, the deep wellspring of psychic experience shared by all humankind.
For Jungians, the appearance of the deceased loved one is not only a psychological metaphor; the possibility that such contact may be more than a reassuring fantasy is admitted into consideration. Jung’s work offers us ways to relate to mysterious phenomena that neither ask us to abandon critical thinking nor limit our understanding to rationality alone.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we also discuss Jung’s Seven Sermons of the Dead, quantum physics, dreams that predict death, and the visitations from the dead that many people experience at the end of life. We consider, too, AI’s promise of technologically reuniting us with lost loved ones.
Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.
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