 The three of us are sitting with the unfolding events of the times and thinking about the great arc of transformation that life imposes upon us. Jung thought greatly about his own process as well as the process of the culture. And if he were here today, he might say that we are all participating in a collective negrado that something is emerging that is unexpected that we weren't prepared for that demands an accommodation and that causes the death of all kinds of illusions both collectively and individually and how do we sit in that? Well maybe it seems like the first place to start is to just start with that term and define it a little bit. Negrado is a term that comes from alchemy which was kind of a medieval Jung belief sort of a spiritual practice that later became chemistry actually. But Jung was fascinated by alchemy because the incredibly figurative language, these colorful metaphors that the alchemists wrote about as they worked with materials, he felt were metaphors for psychospirical transformation. So the negrado was often referred to as a black, blacker than black. It sounds so mystical, the black, blacker than black of the darkness and that place also where there's no light but it's also associated with the incubation process. Likened to pregnancy that takes place unseen within in a blackness or a seed beginning to germinate in the blackness of soil. So it's associated with a kind of at least an opportunity for a beginning. I don't know that it's restricted to that but it often appears at the beginning of psychological work and I think we see that a lot of people come in because they're in the life crisis and the grado. What that brings to mind to me Deb is that there are times in our lives where we begin to get the sense that something very, very important is about to take place but it hasn't landed yet and there's a kind of pressure that begins to thumb in the personality sometimes even in the body, in the emotions which gives us a kind of anxious sense of something bigger than us that's arriving. Aren't we in a kind of place like that right now collectively? Of that we are in a kind of darkness where isolated, secluded, hopefully many of us anyway in our homes and yet there is that sense of anxiety and what next and where are we going? Yeah and you know I think it's important to not wander too far away from the fact that the negrado is associated with suffering. You know Jung at one point talks about it being analogous to this mystical idea of the dark night of the soul. I mean it may be where something new is germinating but boy it sure does not feel like that. It more feels like the death and the rotting away of everything that we previously clung to and that's why it's also associated with the alchemical operations of mortificatio and putrefactio. I think that there are subcategories around the negrado which by the way is just a Latin word for black and you know when we look at a piece of fruit or any kind of natural process a leaf falls from a tree and it loses its greenness and eventually rots down into the blackness of soil that it suggests that there's a kind of natural process that's occurring but there are subcategories so the negrado, the mortificatio and the putrefactio so this idea of something turning black, something beginning to die and then something beginning to rot that they're all in this category of saturnine decay but I think the negrado is thought of as the initial part of that which for Jungian work can be the confrontation with the shadow. Absolutely and there's so much about that that it's a subjectively experienced process brought about by the subject's painful growing awareness of his shadow aspects and it does I think take us by surprise just as this pandemic has taken us by surprise where did this come from how could it came out of nowhere it seems in its suddenness and it's all encompassing quality on the collective front and individually it takes us over as well. Yeah there is a sense of no stable ground isn't there and I think that that there's a way that when something so big is going on in the collective right now as with the pandemic you know just like I imagine you know a world war would feel this way too it just feels like you know everything is suddenly tossed up in the air there's no we have no stable footing we don't know what's going to happen and it brings about this well it can lend itself to a reorganization of the personality where everything kind of comes into question but I