 This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with an extraordinary man who I've been learning a great deal from over the last couple of three years. His name is Stephen Herrmann. He is a Jungian psychologist who was trained at the CG Jung Institute in San Francisco and he now is welcome back to be a teacher and trainer of Jung analysts himself. He became very interesting to me and as many in the audience know, I had a sailboat called Shaman and somebody once gave me a book called Shaman's Call and he happened to be the author of that book. He has worked very much with a man, we'll talk a lot about today and written books about him. The Shaman's Call was about a man named William Everson who is an extraordinary poet, was involved with the Catholic Church, taught at University of California, Santa Cruz where, holo and behold, our guest today was his teaching assistant. And with an eye towards our Jung scholars initiative, what Everson taught me in reading his book, Birth of a Poet, and I've learned more from Stephen, is about choice of vocation. And I see young economists coming in with all kinds of tools to learn and pressures to how to get tenure or how to build prestige, what constitutes a satisfying as opposed to a conforming career trajectory and all kinds of dilemmas that I know my Jung scholars work with. So I welcome Stephen and thank you for joining us. I'm sure you will shed light on many of the, how do I say, ways of approaching career development in particularly with the insights that you've called together in your own research and learn from William Everson. Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here speaking with you and with the Jung scholars and people who will be listening to this podcast. I am honored to be able to tell you a little bit about my background working with the poet in residence at UC Santa Cruz when I was a student. I was a Jung scholar myself then. This happened in 1980 when William Everson selected me to be his teaching assistant. And this was for a course that he called Birth of a Poet, which originally had a literary focus in the literature department, but then it broadened and opened itself up to students from all different areas of specialization at the university. And eventually there were people coming from many of the different schools, the campuses at Santa Cruz. And the aim of the course was to see if you could confirm your vocation, your calling, the calling from the inner voice, the Stimadas Enos, the inner voice as Carl Jung called it in an essay by that title, in the development of the personality. Originally it was called the inner voice. Everson had been at the Dominican Monastery in Oakland here at St. Albert's. He'd worked as a lay monk and a Catholic beat poet and a printer. And then he left the order after 18 years as a monk and then joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in the early 70s. And by the time I knew him, a decade had elapsed and this course had evolved to the point where it had opened itself up, expanded to any vocation, any charismatic vocation. And the aim was to see if you could locate in your recording of dreams throughout the course of a quarter dreams with vocational significance. In other words, dreams that activated a certain potential that's latent in the human psyche and that's based on an instinct, a basic human drive for action or a potential to have a certain career in the world. So the- Let me just interrupt for a second. My understanding that the Jungian perspective is to put it kind of simply, all of the things that affect your vocation are not self-evident and all right there on the kitchen table. So because of fear, because of blockages, sometimes it is through dreams that these things knock on your door, give you the wake up call, it urge you to make them conscious and move forward. So there's a process here that's a little bit indirect. Definitely, the conscious mind thinks it's running the show but really the unconscious plays a much larger role in the patterning of human destiny than one at first believes due to education and I think improper education because we're not trained or educated to look to our dreams for vocational guidance but that's the way I was taught by Everson as a young man of 24 and then teaching Jung's theories of dream interpretation to the students. Typically there was 100 students in each class and as you were saying, Rob, the unconscious is a lot wiser than the ego and knows more about the source of our motivation, the source of our psychic energy where our drive to being is existence in the world to be a certain somebody to find meaning in life and purpose. Well, that comes out of a foundation that's instinctual and like patterns of animal behavior where animals know where to migrate, they know which course to take, a salmon, for example, knows which stream bed to spawn up, it returns to the same water course, the same river. So too in the human psyche are there an instinctual patterns of behavior that are, as I said, instinctual and biological in their substrate, in their material substrate, in the body. And these archetypes, as Jung called them, these are portraits of instinct. They form themselves into vocational representations and this is what Everson called a vocational archetype. So the aim was to see if you could find your archetype and of course there's more than one archetype, you could be a musician and an economist and a father and many other callings to marriage or parenthood. These two are profound vocations or to a religious life. But ultimately the thing that we do in our profession such as my practice as a Jungian analyst, that becomes primary, that becomes the nuclear orienting symbol as I found in my research at John F. Kennedy University where I studied vocational dreams in early adulthood after my time with Everson at Santa Cruz. But we're gonna be talking about William Everson today and I'm just really amazed by the synchronicity, another Jungian term that Everson and I talked about quite extensively that in sending me today, Rob, that print out of the tongs of jeopardy on the Everson's meditation in 1964 on the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr., which I had never read before. It helped me understand better, not only the destiny of the nation that he talks about and the problems inherent in the nation and the national unconscious, but also my own personal destiny and how after my work with Everson I went to John F. Kennedy University. So I thank you for sending that today. It's still, it stirred my soul and I'm still reverberating from reading it this afternoon. When I read the preface to Berthelpoit, he talked about his teaching was in the form of meditation. He said, the church you have a sermon, most classrooms you have a lecture. Those are like vertical hierarchies, whereas a meditation is an interaction where the student is being asked to bring things out of themselves to the table. And they're what you might call psychic muscular power is increased through that form of teaching as distinct from the passive sitting down low and listening to on high and knowing you got to remember it because you got to pass the test to get your grade. And I really thought there was something very refreshing about the way in which Everson imparted learning, but you were there. I wasn't, is that my fantasizing or was that? Not at all, you're right on. This is one of the most challenging things about dream work is the discipline that is required to get into a habit. William James, our great American philosopher and the first real American psychologist wrote so much about not only automatic writing, which you mentioned, Rob, but also about discipline required with good habits. And when I was at Santa Cruz, I learned that I was already recording dreams at UC Santa Cruz. And even before I met Everson, I was keeping a dream journal, but because I had found young at the age of 20, but being in the course provided a structure and then going to John F. Kennedy, where I did my research, John F. Kennedy University in Arenda, was in Arenda, California then. I got into a habit where I could wake up with the alarm clock every three hours into sleep or 90-minute REM cycle, sometimes four and a half hours into sleep. I'd set my alarm clock and wake up and I would be able to record a dream. And sometimes I'd catch two or three waves of these dreams and write them in the journal. And it's amazing how much the dream content can tell us about our daily activities and what's coming ahead because dreams have a perspective significance. They point to the future. There's a teleological dimension to dreams. So oftentimes the future is forecast in dreams. And that's why it's so good to get them written down so that you can read them before you go to bed at night. And just that process reinforces the dream recall. If you spend time reading your dreams before sleep and then telling yourself that you're gonna remember your dream in the morning as a kind of a dream incubation technique. Getting back to the vocation of the sailor, the calling of being a sailor, you spoke about the fears of the unconscious rob. And that is one of the things that I think a lot of people experience. We all do to some degree because the first figure that we encounter in relationship to the unconscious, according to Jung, is the shadow. And we don't typically wanna look at what our negative characteristics are, our tendencies that maybe are upsetting to people and the qualities of character that have been reinforced and are difficult to change because of the ego. And so the dreams, what they do is they relativize the ego. They soften that outer shell, so to speak, so that what can emerge through it are these symbols. God speaks through symbols, Everson said in that Tongs of Jeopardy article. And that's true, Jung knew that and so did the ancient Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament and then the New Testament writers. But also the theologians who were writing in the medieval period who Everson read, St. Thomas Aquinas was a great teacher of Everson. So was St. Augustine, but later in 1956, Everson met the Dominican theologian Victor White who was at St. Albert's. And it was through Victor White that Everson got turned on to Jung and then started reading Jung. And when he read Jung, he read psychological types, volume six of the collected works. There's this essay by Jung on Meister Eckhart. So Everson began to read Eckhart in the order and he learned from Eckhart how to use silence as a kind of trans-like technique on platform when he read poetry. So that he would bring his audience through repose as Eckhart called it, the repose, the quiet, the silence in the soul. If you could find that still point, then you could create in the audience a kind of a suspension of the rational functions of consciousness, typically your thinking and feeling functions that tend to run the show sometimes, the rational mind to activate the irrational functions. And Everson was an intuitive type. He was an irrational type and an introvert, but on platform, he was an extrovert. He really used the platform as a way to bring out his inferior function. And he did this in a way that really spellbound the audience. And when he taught birth of a poet, he brought that same technique into the classroom. It was enforced that nobody could talk during the meditations. And these lasted for an hour and a half every Tuesday and Thursday. And the students were instructed that they were not to speak. So there's a hundred students on gym mats in a circle, seated in a circle with their shoes off typically and bare feet. This is UC Santa Cruz. This is very much in the 70s now, 1979 when I took the course and then 1980, 81 when I was a teaching assistant. And then Everson would be in the center and he would just walk around in a circle sometimes. And he wore the traditional regalia of a West Coast poet Shaman as he called himself. He wore a bear claw necklace and a buckskin vest, had little bells on his feet and you'd hear him. He sounded like you were at a Sundance or like you were at a Pueblo listening to Native Americans. He brought the spirit of the indigenous peoples into the classroom so that there was no dividing line between the nature of the psyche and the nature in the classroom. He brought nature into the classroom. And so getting back to what you said about the fear of the unconscious, he meditated on the book by Joseph Campbell. Each of the chapters during every week, he would meditate on a different chapter. And the chapter that he focused on early in the course was called the refusal of the call. Now the refusal of the call is the chapter in Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he narrates the story of Jonah and the whale. Where Jonah refuses his call out of fear. The fear of actually having to go and speak to the people of Nineveh, which he was advised to do by the word of God, is what he refused. And the men threw him over the side of the ship and he was swallowed by the great fish or the whale. And then there he eventually remembered what his vocation was and then he was able to fulfill his destiny. So Everson of course was the one who really introduced me to American poetry and I became a scholar of Herman Melville's great classic Moby Dick, where in chapter nine the sermon, and Everson often was giving sermons when he was meditating, Melville assumes the mantle or the persona of the prophet or the preacher. And he preaches to the people, the sailors. And narrates the story of Jonah and the whale. And he says there that, whosoever is true to your own inexorable self, a great, great delight will be experienced. So this idea of speaking the truth, as he says to the face of falsehood, this is what the call often asks of us. It relates to our democracy. It relates to economics. It relates to all of the vocations that have that, Bob Dylan for example, the musician on platform as well who's giving his poem through song. There's a certain kind of courage that is involved, a heroic spirit that one has to get in touch with. And often this does come during the heroic phase of life, which as Jung said lasts until at least the age of 35. So the young scholars are just at that point where they're in the hero myth. They're living out a destiny pattern. And so listening to dreams is extremely important, Rob, in being able to know whether or not you're on a true course. Whether your ship is being navigated by the North Star, for example, which would be an alignment with your destiny pattern. So there's a correlation between these dreams oftentimes when we research them at a deep enough level. And in analytic work, I experienced that sometimes in my psychotherapy work with patients where there's a correlation between an inner dream image and something that happens on the outside in the world, such as not knowing really where I was going to start today and then Rob, you're sending me that essay, The Tongues of Jeopardy, which is really a poem that's not published yet by Everson. But it reminded me of where my research in vocational dreams got centered after my time with Everson because he became a kind of a self figure. When you project the image, you know, Everson was 44 years my senior. He was like a wise old man figure. He was not just the father, the spiritual father I never had. He was like a spiritual grandfather. He was like the old Shaman figure who delivered some kind of message and confirmed for me back then, even at 24, that my calling was to be a Jungian analyst when I didn't really have full belief in myself yet. You know, when we're young, we don't always know where our confidence foundation is, where we stand in relationship to the self. But through a relationship like that, it could be to an economist. Sometimes something happens in your career where a door opens where you least expected it to open. And that's an indication that you're on the right track. And you know it by the feeling element. William James wrote so much about the varieties of religious experience. Well, being in Everson's presence was like that for me and for many of the other students, Santa Cruz, not everybody got the message from Everson. There's always resistance. And he was in some ways a very unique individual and stood outside of the average person that he, first of all, he dressed in a way that was just unheard of really at a university. And yet Santa Cruz was an experimental place where he could really be himself and express his character, his personality, his individuality. And I think that's one of the things that we have fears of enacting. You mentioned social psychology, Rob. Well, one of the outstanding leaders of the time in Jungian psychology here on the West Coast was a figure named Ira Progoth. And his first book was actually a dissertation. It was called Jung's Psychology and its Social Meaning. And he went to Zurich to talk to Jung about this manuscript. And they ended up throwing the Yi Qing together, the ancient Chinese Oracle, the Book of Changes. And when the coins landed, the Oracle gave Progoth a reading that just seemed too profound. It was called Crossing the Great Water. And he had just crossed the Great Water to go to visit Jung. But there was this sense about synchronicity that really spoke to Progoth at the time, because Jung had just written his essay on synchronicity. And so Progoth then later wrote a book called Jung's Synchronicity and Human Destiny. And this is one of the subjects that Iverson and I talked about at great length and that is in a chapter in the book, William Iverson, the Shaman's Call. And that's one that you were referring to, I think, before we started to record, Rob. So I just wanted to make that connection with social science and Progoth, because he was a very important figure. And at the same time that Iverson was developing this hypothesis that I later tested at UC Santa Cruz for validity, empirical validity, that there is a vocational archetype in the human psyche and it can be confirmed through a study of dreams. Ira Progoth in his work in depth psychology in modern men had developed this idea of dynotypes, as he called them, enacting images. So images of activity. So they were essentially speaking about an analogous subject. Iverson's was a more, you could say, religious view because he came from a Dominican background, a Catholic background and used the kind of language that Progoth was not using as a social scientist. But it's not so much the language that matters as it is the facts of experience that are being studied. And that's these portraits of instinct, a vocational instinct, we could call it, or a destiny instinct. And it's those images that have a certain kind of numinous feeling associated with them. This is a term that Carl Jung borrowed from the classical scholar Rudolf Otto who wrote a book called The Idea of the Holy or Das Heilige in German. And there he coined this term, numinous. So when we talk about archetypal experiences, one of the fears that we have in approaching the unconscious is the numinosity of the archetypes that they have an sometimes overwhelming light that can be emitted from them that can either be dark or light. There's a certain darkness to the shadow, for example, the personal shadow or the collective archetypal shadow. And one encounters both polarities when one begins to open up to the what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. The other term we were talking about earlier, Rob, was the idea of a psychoid continuum that Jung found later in life extended beyond the collective unconscious. And this includes matter that things can happen in the outside world where one can dream, for example, of a coyote and then go for a hike, and suddenly a coyote makes its appearance on the trail or a snake, for example. And that kind of thing has happened to me. In fact, it happened when I graduated from UC Santa Cruz. I had a dream about a king snake. This is a California king snake, a natural predator of the rattlesnake. And that led me to make a decision to study with Everson, to write my own individual major in depth psychology and religion, which was taking a risk in my academic career. But I followed the call. And then when I graduated from John F. Kennedy University with my master's degree in Arenda, I was driving home after the graduation and there around sunset on the road heading up to the house where I was living. I just about ran over a California king snake and scooped it up and took it home and gave it some water to drink and then let it go in the hills. But these kinds of things happen. You have a dream about a particular dream animal or a totem animal, an ally, as they're called in shamanism sometimes. And suddenly it makes its appearance in your outer physical life and how that happens is a mystery. But Jung called those encounters synchronicity. And these are a causal events. The dream doesn't cause the outer event to happen, but through the constellation of an archetype, there can be a correspondence between the psyche and nature or psyche and matter. And so Everson really tried to bring this together in Birth of a Poet by dressing like a Native American shaman with the beet look, I mean the long flowing gray hair with the long gray beard. He was I think 69 when I met him and really looked like kind of the prototypical figure of a West Coast poet prophet, poet shaman. He carried that mantle, as he would call it. Kind of a precursor to the beet generation. Yes, he was part of that. Well it's interesting as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about there are things, they may be intuitive or conscious, but my understanding from listening to you is that when you come into a classroom and he does meditations, it's almost like asking you to take off your armor. Take off your armor. It's not a request, it's not a demand, it's a softening so that you can be more impressionable without being afraid. And I think in some of the vocational stories you tell, it's how you go from can I do this to I can do this. It's you have a sense or an intuition that you're being pulled or you're being drawn in a direction, but something happens that catalyzes it brings a confidence and I think it's fascinating. Was he controversial when he came on stage at Santa Cruz with other faculty with the administration or what have you? Or was it just a beautiful time of experimentation at Santa Cruz where it just flowed? I don't think he was controversial. When he looked at you sometimes he had a piercing kind of a glance that he was not just looking at you or into your eyes, he was looking into your soul and that could be terrifying itself to really be seen by somebody at that depth. You mentioned his feeling, Rob. That was the other thing he could feel into his soul and know something about them through his intuition, because he was an intuitive feeling type. He had a very unusual characteristics that I can see could be frightening at first until you got to know him and then he was just gentle. I can't remember seeing him angry. I don't know where he contained it but he had a real awareness of his own potential for violence. You saw it in the Tongues of Jeopardy, Rob, where he said he felt like he was closer to Oswald than he was to a Kennedy because Kennedy was such an ideal political figure but he was very aware of his shadow that any of us could become an Oswald. Now this is a very Jungian idea. It's a horrifying thought, really. But he talks about this in his meditations in the power of the negative, how the shadow has the potential to capture the archetype of our vocation and lead us into the wrong path. And this could be in any calling that anyone has a potential to act out the shadow and become a shadow-dominated personality if one doesn't do one's own individual work, one's own inner work. And that's why dreams are so important because there you see the villain. There you see the murderer. You see the attacking animal. The more you look at your dreams, you see the violence of the unconscious. And you know, we're going through a time right now in the nation where the national psyche is very stirred up. There's a lot of political unrest and Iverson's portraying the conflict between Cain and Abel, the two hostile brothers in the drama of the American psyche around the death of President Lincoln. It was very interesting from the point of view of what Carl Jung has written about the hostile brother motif that we see this in the feuding between the Republican and the Democratic parties that there's a lot of animosity. There's a lot of religious envy and hatred and a lot of dark energies are flowing through the national psyche right now. And this is what Herman Melville explored so magnificently in our great American novel in Moby Dick between Ahab and Ishmael and his wife, Quique, the Polynesian harpooner in Chapter 10, a bosom friend. He brought this back from the Polynesian islands from his sailing days as a sailor. And so he brought back already the archetype you could say for same-sex marriage is right there in our great American novel in Chapter 10 of Moby Dick that he foresaw this. You see the great Shaman poet like that and the great equipment was. And like Emily Dickinson were, they have the ability to see things 100 years in advance because of their intuitive, as you mentioned, visionary consciousness. Well, you did a discussion about Shamanism with Everson for a San Francisco Jungian journal that I once read that the Shamanism to him was like trance-like being able to get into a trance so that you can open up to what's really happening and shake off the false consciousness and the, how did I say, the story that we shared before this today about the Tongues of Jeopardy and about the murder of JFK and all the dilemmas, he says, this is this man who you just described moments ago as soft and gentle and has a feminine side, et cetera. And then he says, for man thinks logically, he feels he can understand only what he can reduce to reason in its terms, but God acts symbolically confounding man's logic. He thrust upon him the most profound and disturbing significations and holds them there until the depth of implication is inerratically registered. Then the inner reality concealed in the heart of things which human logic never perceives, shakes the mind out of a dream of superficial well-being, a dream that was actually leading to disaster. When I read that, I just thought that's a false consciousness about unregulated financial markets. And we have seen whether it's financial governing officials or United States legislature, the surveys of Gallup, Richard Edelman and others about expertise and governance have collapsed since the great financial crisis. But if you go back to a man like Frank Knight, who was a person who wrote about radical uncertainty, the unknowing, you see that there were in that case famous economists who were, you might call, put it in storage, but who, and John Maynard Keynes for that matter, he wrote his dissertation on treatise on probability, and it was about the unknown and unknowable unknowns of the future. So this, I guess what I find so interesting about Erison is he maintains a softness and a constructiveness and a vehemence at the same time about how we can get off course. There's a kind of anchored conviction within him at the same time that he isn't like a charismatic promising you false certainties so that you feel comfortable until such time that he's unmasked of having been telling untruthful false certainties. And so I really find this dynamic that you're bringing forth and interesting. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was Robertson Jeffers. The book that I bought from Lime Kilm Press was called Tragedy Has Obligations, and there is the poem of that name and it made me think that Robertson Jeffers kind of his nor star in poetry he was so vehement and so intense I found the language that he brought to bear quite fierce. So there's this combination of self-confidence that's grounded but caring about others and then managing like you said through the open courses and birth of a poet nurturing other people and how he put all those together in the same package is really brilliant. It's very complicated and subtle but for instance Tragedy Has Obligations, the first passage if I'd thrown a little more boldly in the flood of fortune you'd have had England or in the slackening less boldly. You'd have not sunk your right hand in Russia. These are two ghosts they stand by the bed and make a man tear his flesh the rest is fatal. Each day a new disaster that lasts five iktis. It means this is the essence of Tragedy to have meant well and made woe and watch fate all stone approach there is a vehemence in that poem and a criticism of false certainties at the same time. It's almost like you've got to be vehemently comfortable with not knowing or not being able to get closure on knowing but it's just a very delicate but it's at odds with performing for the peer review journals or appearing at the big policy meetings and trying not to be controversial when the stakes for instance of not funding climate change in the global south can affect us all and the critiques of money and politics the standing and watching leaders in both parties becoming centa millionaires as professional legislators there's a lot going on here that is very unwholesome and is not what you might call brought onto center stage by any of the paradigms of social science well when we look at the news what's not on central stage is I think until there's a disaster and then it is on central stage but what's not being put on central stage is the uncertainty as you're saying and the unknowability about what's lurking around the corner with regards to climate change and speaking of Robinson Jeffers he wrote this is in the 1940s now Rob he wrote the polar ice caps are melting soon London and LA Los Angeles will be under water but then he goes to talk about the tower that he built out of these stones that he dredged up from point Carmel and made into a structure that he called Hawk Tower and in that poem he says that the Hawk Tower will become geological fossil permanent the water will cover the tower but it will remain and the little fish will swim by and now he's foreseeing all this 80 years ago this is the way in which a shaman poet like that can foresee things foresee developments the polar ice caps are melting he wrote a poem called Cassandra because he felt like he was a Cassandra that people weren't listening but about this tower he starts off in a poem called Rockin' Hawk I just lost you you lost a oh I see I'm not okay I wasn't hearing you I'm absolutely stunned right now because as we were talking I got an alert from Maria Popova and the headline that came up this came up onto the screen of my computer the underratedly wonderful Robertson Jeffers on moral beauty and the interconnectedness of the universe and the key to peace of mind and it's a story which I'll post with this podcast and I'll send it to you just as you were talking about him and it was just stunning it's a short little piece and Jeffers writes I'm just excerpting quickly it is sort of a tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending I'm still a little subject to the tradition and rather dislike stating my attitudes except in the course of a poem however they are simple I believe the universe is one being that all its parts are different expressions of the same energy and they're all in communication with each other influencing each other and therefore parts of one organic whole this is physics I believe as well as religion so anyway we got a message from the late Robertson Jeffers well and there you go physics as well as religion and you see what Jung described as synchronicity happening right on the screen there where she just popped up right at that moment so there you are that's what happens when things get get constellated around ideas, archetypes are ideas as well as images and so we start talking and things begin to happen sometimes this is when we touch into that psychoide depth where matter gets affected it's even affecting our computer screens as we're talking yeah I I think this kind of creativity I made a note of a quote that Kennedy made about Robert Frost about the role of the artist of the poet of the mystic etc but Kennedy was just talking about Robert Frost and he says strength takes many forms and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant the men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable especially when that questioning is disinterested for they determine whether we use power or power uses us and I thought as a tribute he was essentially saying well I was going on Robert Frost coupled poetry and power for he saw poetry as a means of saving power from itself when power leads men towards arrogance poetry reminds him of his limitations when power narrows the man's when power narrows the areas of a man's concerns poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence when power corrupts poetry cleanses for art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as a touchstone of our judgment the artist however faithful to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society in an officious state and pursuing his perceptions of reality he must often sail against the currents of his time this is not a popular role if sometimes great artists have been most critical of society it's because their sensitivity and concerns for justice which must motivate any true artist make them aware of our nation falling short of its highest potential I see little more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than to fully recognize the place of the artist that's John F. Kennedy talking from the White House that's John F. Kennedy he's talking upon the death of Robert Frost went to University of Massachusetts up in Amherst and made a speech because Frost had come to his inauguration and created poetry and read some poetry and so he went back up in honor of his life but I think what I like about the poetry and the art is it's not a weapon being used to make you afraid it's a method of illumination and that's what I learned from Everson is that he's trying to bring us all to a higher level of awareness and less afraid and therefore less clinging to false consciousness out of fear for ourselves or our own ratings of approval or disapproval by our peer groups and I think at a time like this when the fears are so high starting from the framework that you've built in your professional life and working with these pathways to challenge and illumination at times when things have been off course is the only way forward and I don't think resignation is an option constructive evolution as you said earlier finding the next North Star who right now we've had people like Joseph Henderson and Donald Sandler and others are there people now at the vanguard of the discipline along with yourself that you would mention to our viewers today and our listeners definitely I'm going to talk a little bit about Dr. Murray Stein he's a Zurich analyst now he lives in Zurich he's from Chicago but migrated to Switzerland now lives in Zurich he is the founder and the president of Zurich and I've read pretty much most of his books I would say he's writing his collected works now and I've reviewed several of his books for the San Francisco Young Institute Library Journal and he's been a great inspiration for me really is a magnificent writer and thinker and one of the leading lights in our field of Jungian or analytical psychology so I'll mention him Rob I'll put a man who's been an absolutely vital life coach for me in making transitions who also lives like you in Northern California John has written a number of books but the one that caught my attention before I met him in person is called the Paradox of Success and he was a Jungian psychologist trained by Joseph Henderson and how would I say every time I get all bottled up he's an artist but I think he's got a book called the whole enchilada about all of the different challenges in his patients and I get criticized constructively in those chapters but I think John's a very loving soul and has done a tremendous amount for many many people and I think how do I say bringing this from just personal counseling to I almost feel like the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Energy and the Securities and Exchange Commission all should have Jungian advanced degrees so that we can see what we're not seeing constructively and because there's this how do I say this realm in which you approach the challenge is a very different mindset than what we're trained in engineering or economics or other forms of social science tell me before we sign off what are you working on right now what's the next thing this audience can expect to see when they sign on for book parties or promotions in the coming months or are you making movies what's on deck right now? No movies I'm going to live my life like you said in the unknown in the unexpected right now and just see what emerges I'm working on a couple of manuscripts a few the Melville manuscript is still unpublished and I'm working on a book project that's been ongoing for over 40 years that Everson supervised at UC Santa Cruz that was my senior thesis on Meister Eckhart and Carl Jung I'm halfway through that book project and also I have a book on vocational dreams that comes from my research at John F. Kennedy University so and then as well as the chapters that I've been writing subsequent to that time in courses that I've taught at the Jung Institute and elsewhere so I've got several things going I've got a lot of unpublished poetry but I like to work in the garden and get my hands in the dirt and watch the flowers grow and welcome the hummingbirds and the flowers and bees and butterflies to try to help them survive the current time that we're going through and I just I'm so admiring Rob of how much knowledge you've assimilated since I've known you in a relatively short I could say period of time how much you've read in Jungian psychology is really remarkable and I wish more economists would follow in your footsteps and get on the Shaman boat with you and take a trip up north to find your albatross not from Coolridge's albatross around his neck but the one that curls up next to you and provides that kind of and play I liked what you said about the play instinct Shiller in his aesthetic education letters on the education of man talked about the importance of the play instinct and I get that sense about you that you really bring a lot of play into your work and maybe that comes from your music too so you just keep doing what you're doing and I love your work and I think the Institute has is the way of the future in economics I hope to validate what you project I know who knows what the future is but I hope I can stand there in five years and you'll say that was well done and we'll keep trying but the energy that you bring I'm sorry go ahead reiterate the title of your friend's book there John is very deeply Jungian he had been an executive at AT&T and other things in his own life I think he's seen the silver linings and the dark side of many things he imparts a kind of wisdom for those who he consults with and I know your spouse is involved in the Jungian world of arts and that's as you mentioned music when I met her she's got a lot to offer as well how do you say you got a team with two horses pulling the buggy I couldn't do it without her and she's Lori Goldrich my wife is a Jungian analyst at the San Francisco Jung Institute who's teaching active imagination and dream work and we loved having you at our home Rob hearing about your stories about your trips north mentioning Lori so we've got to knock on wood to keep it going anyway thank you for being with me today and exploring by the way what inspired us we did not discuss with the audience but what inspired us to get together today and now was that it's 29 years to the day yesterday when William Everson died and while we've been in lots of dialogue and teaching me how to get down the tracks we've enjoyed things like talking about the movie the whale as you're working on Melville I did want to underscore that the thing that brought us to the table today is to honor the life of William Everson who passed away 29 years ago yesterday yeah thank you Rob for remembering remembering that yeah Everson's buried at the Benisha Cemetery the Dominican Cemetery in Benisha where I've been numerous times to visit his grave and I was honored to have been one of the Paul Bearers at his funeral well how would you say he may have passed but his echoes are going to create the birth of many more poets I'm confident of that particularly with you carrying the ball well and many other vocations in addition to the poet so yeah thanks so much for having me on your show Rob this will be the first of I'm sure to be several chapters and I know my young scholars have been encouraging me to perhaps make a course with you on these vital issues because we are working with the young scholars initiative very seriously to create the leaders of the future and the leaders of the future who have a deeper sense of the nature of the challenge it can learn from people like you and the work of Everson and Robertson Jeffers and John O'Neill will be better equipped to serve society thanks again we'll talk again soon, bye bye