With this, our 211th essay, we take a moment to celebrate twenty years of activities, classes, special events and memorable moments in the life of the Jungian Center. This seems an appropriate time to look back on our founding and evaluate how far we have come, and how closely we have followed the intentions of the psyche, which brought the Center to being. Some background is necessary here.
Background
People who know me understand that for the last 42 years I have lived directed by the psyche: It occasionally sends me explicit dreams–just words–which I have come to regard as my divine “marching orders.” Early on I discovered that I cannot ignore these instructions (when I did, life got seriously unpleasant) and by 2005 I was quite familiar with surrendering my ego will to the will of the Self.[1]
The creation of the Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences began from a series of these odd “voice-over” dreams. In this case I had several of these dreams in one week in July of 2005, each dream providing more explicit details about the Center, its mission, goals, organization and values. As is common with these dreams, I felt overwhelmed at what was being asked of me, and then I had another dream reminding me that I would not have to do it all by myself: I would have expert advice and, in time, a host of others who would teach, guide and support our endeavor.
I set about researching how to create an organization and quickly faced a series of choices: profit or non-profit? which law firm to use? what CPA to work with? Experts in these areas told me that I would have to document our early endeavors thoroughly so as to provide the IRS with multiple examples of what we would be doing, and we would have to fill out the lengthy 1023 form when we applied for our tax-exempt status. All this research into lining up experts took me months, in addition to the work of creating materials like a logo, a brochure, a website, and getting people willing to serve on the Board of Directors. So it was five months later–when I had found experts (lawyer, CPA) who handled non-profits and friends willing to be on the Board–that the Center was legally incorporated as a non-profit organization. The last day of 2005 is our official birthday. Fifteen months later, the IRS determined we were a tax-exempt non-profit organization.[2]
Evaluation
How far have we come? Our first class–on dreamwork–consisted of 6 people meeting in the massage office of a friend in Burlington, Vermont. We now have multiple teachers offering many different techniques for working with dreams; our dream-related courses are the most popular courses we run and they draw participants from all over the world (in March, 2020, we had to get adept at working with time zones!). Other teachers find us via our website and offer a diverse array of courses, e.g. Jung and Shamanism, Esoteric Ethics, Fairytales, Native American Perspectives, Jungian Parenting, Finding Your Inner Partner, Soul Tending, Family Constellation Theory and the Alchemy of Colors, Yoga, and Gnosticism. To my surprise, this last has been one of our most highly subscribed courses. As we begin our twenty-first year, we have offered 225 courses to our students.
The pandemic caused a major shift in how the Center operates. Before March 2020, we ran on-site courses based where the instructor lived, or at our base in Vermont. Suddenly we had to operate via Zoom, and now 99% of our courses run in this format. Some Extraverts hope we return to in-person meetings, but when news reports in the Fall of 2020 noted the clean air in Los Angeles, and the clear water in the canals of Venice, I realized that, if we at the Center were to be true to Jung’s values,[3] we should not encourage more carbon emissions by asking students to drive to the class site.
When tech experts produced the first rendition of our website, they told me that I should keep the site “active,” meaning I was to provide “new content” on a regular basis, so as to get a high rating from the various search engines. I had no idea what this meant, but their instructions got me to writing an essay for the site every month. Our first essay appeared on January 11, 2007. With this month’s posting, we have 211 essays on our Jungian Center website, several of them having achieved an SEO rating of #1.[4]
Given my academic background and my commitment to foster scholarship related to Jung and his psychology (not an popular ambition, given the persistent bias toward scientific materialism which both Jung[5] and I have faced from the “sylvan grooves of academe”),[6] I feel that an important achievement of our Center’s website is our making all of Jung’s Collected Works readily available to anyone interested in reading Jung’s own words. This addition to our website has made teaching Jung so much easier, and it is a joy to be able to point people to his 20 volumes (plus his Letters) when they have a Jung-related query.
Numbers would suggest we are doing a good job, but quantification–numbers, sizes, ratings–were, in Jung’s opinion, a poor way to evaluate success.[7] More appropriate would be to consider just how well we have followed the intentions of the psyche, according to the dreams it sent me in July of 2005.
Have We Followed the Intentions of the Psyche? We’ll consider our mission first. Our mission statement says that the Center “is to offer participants immersion in whole-person learning that engages not only the mind but also the heart, soul and spirit, via a series of experiences designed to catalyze soul growth and foster individuation.”[8] At our tenth anniversary, we had a clipboard on a table and asked people to describe what the Center meant to them. To my surprise, 9 people took the time to write responses, which included:
- It allows me to take classes that will be the catalyst for introspection and lead me to a deeper understanding and meaning of life.
- It represents a place of learning about Jung’s concepts of archetypes, shadow, self and the collective unconscious. It also represents a place to gather with like-minded people in learning and discussing spiritual and metaphysical subjects.
- It is a place to go where there are many (usually) women of like mind. I enjoy the camaraderie, the laughter, the sharing and mostly the learning. I love the inner journey I take when I am here, the sharing of others’ stories; it’s always an “up”! Sue is a magnificent teacher and the ease-ness of her “classroom” makes it possible to open up even more. It’s also a lifeline!
- It means a place to explore psyche, dreams, soul, in community with others thoughtfully, trustingly, lovingly. It means a place to share inner journeys, study, build hope, to make us keep remembering what’s important.
- It means meeting like-minded individuals looking for answers along life’s journey.
- It offers a rare opportunity to learn and grow beyond imagination in a safe, supporting environment.
- It provides an inclusive and safe place to connect with other curious minds and kindred spirits.
- It is a place for me to learn, meet interesting people and expand my mind.
- It’s about community, growth, knowledge.[9]
Clearly, for those into introspection, personal growth, the inner journey, exploring dreams, intuitions and imagination, the Center is offering some content not widely found in our materialistic world. It serves a segment of people (now global in extent since 2020) who have few other venues in which to explore spiritual and metaphysical topics, and it provides a safe harbor for people (mostly women) to find meaning and link up with kindred spirits.[10] As I noted earlier, the Center is also serving people who want to read Jung’s works but who live far from sources which would make that easy or possible, e.g. Alaska. I have felt so pleased to get emails from such people, now that Jung is as close as their computer.
The only time in our twenty-year history that a course was poorly received–students made clear their displeasure–was, ironically, the only time we had a Jungian analyst teach. She was supposed to give a course on dreams, but it turned out that she used the class time to tell the students how they needed analysis! To my amazement, she used the course as some sort of recruiting tool for her own practice! This made for a class environment that was neither pleasant nor safe–not at all in accord with our mission or our goals.
In the original dreams in 2005, the psyche described the Center’s goals as: to encourage each person on his/her spiritual journey, to foster personal transformation, to expand awareness, change perspectives and empower individuals, to encourage intellectual discovery, beyond the limitations of academic settings, to model the process of living and working under the direction of the psyche, and to sponsor gatherings of like-minded people–all toward working for a world that works for everyone. Having been a college professor for decades, I was concerned to create a safe place–no tests, no personal evaluations, no rigid requirements.[11] We always have given homework, but with our demographic profile (busy working adults with families and numerous demands on their time) we never expect our students to do it. Providing a safe place, with like-minded people is such an important part of our work now, as public life becomes more and more bizarre.
In the 2005 dreams that laid out the Jungian Center, the organizational schema had 5 paths: the Via Contemplativa, the Via Investigativa, the Via Creativa, the Via Physica and the Via Practica. As I reflected on this I realized it was about providing ways of growth based on Jung’s concept of the functions: intuition, thinking, feeling, sensation, with Jung’s practical, empirical approach respected and included. The idea is that a person grows through identifying and working to develop his or her inferior function. That, I hypothesized, was the theory, and early on in the development of the Center I tried to fulfill it. Over the 20 years, it has proven hard to find teachers to handle some of the paths, e.g. the contemplative/meditation, physical and practical paths. We offer lots of courses that appeal to Thinking types, and help Feelers develop their Thinking function, and we have offered multiple good creative courses for Thinkers and Intuitives to hone their creative side. But we have not done equally well with the physical side of things, and few of our students have been strong Sensates. To some degree this lack may have been due to our small population in Vermont, but since 2020, with a global population to draw from, we could be doing better to widen and diversity our faculty, our course offerings and our student body.
How closely have we followed the intentions of the psyche? It is in the last c. five years that, as the deadly sins have become more pervasive in our society,[12] we have found our values being challenged.[13] The Center is not in the mainstream of American society in its values: We stress life guided by the Self (inner divine wisdom) not by the ego; we recognize and appreciate change, as the only constant in living systems; we put a premium on consciousness, diversity, individuality, integrity, authenticity, quality, person-centered learning, multiple intelligences, inclusiveness, and trust. Rather than equating “success” with bigness, we share Jung’s emphasis on “small is beautiful,”[14] and our goal is not to make money, achieve power or to do great things. Like Mother Teresa, we want to do small things with great love. People who ask us why we are not advertising on social media clearly do not understand the profound differences between our orientation and that of, e.g. Facebook or X(Twitter).[15]
Jung was clear about just how different his worldview was from the mainstream,[16] and he urged his students to stay true to the solid soul-nourishing values of the Self. As Jesus reminds us, it does not serve us to gain the whole world if it means we lose our soul.[17] The Center is not about making money, growing bigger and bigger, or becoming famous. Rather, it is about serving, supporting those persons whose values resonate with our own, and living trustfully in accord with the directions of the Self.
The Center is not a commercial operation. Its focus is not on making money or growing bigger and bigger. We must forswear the temptations of our society by ignoring the pressures to advertise, to dilute our purpose so as to become “popular.” Jung was adamant that people had to be ready, i.e. far enough along in their personal growth, to be able to understand what he was about and to work with him.[18] So it is with the Jungian Center: when the student is ready, he/she finds the Center, through our website, through a friend, or from some passing reference in a book, podcast or other source.
As we embark on our twenty-first year, this worldview and its values will continue to support our mission, help us to fulfill our goals, and encourage us to serve those like-minded people who resonate with what we are about.
Bibliography
Fisher, Max (2022), The Chaos Machine. Boston: Little Brown & Co.
Hannah, Barbara (1976), Jung: His Life and Work. New York: G.P. Putnam.
Jung (1933), Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
________ (1954), “The Development of Personality,” CW 17. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
________(1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
________ (1975), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Jung, C.G. (1977), “The Art of Living: An Interview with Gordon Young,” Jung Speaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wynn-Williams, Sarah (2025), Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. New York: Flatiron Press.
[1] In my experience, surrendering personal will becomes easier with practice, as time makes clear how doing so leads to deeper levels of fulfillment and connection with the Self, but it is never automatic, and, in some situations, it is still difficult, e.g. in times of betrayal or shocking behavior by people thought to be trustworthy.
[2] The lawyers and accountants warned me that completing the 1023 would be a major chore, and they were not exaggerating: when all the paperwork was completed it totaled more than 300 pages!
[3] Jung put a premium on Nature, both for its beauty but also for its healing potential. For most people in the modern world Nature is valued more as a “gigantic toolshed,” from which we extract “raw materials.” Jung found such materialistic plunder to be appalling. He also differed widely from our modern views in putting emphasis on things like alchemy, fantasy, imagination, miracles, myths, neuroses, the psyche, regression, symbols and history (our rootedness and heritage). See the essays “Jung on Values I & II,” archived on the Jungian Center website for more on Jung’s views on values.
[4] The first of our #1 rankings is the essay “A Beginner’s Guide to Reading Jung,” which makes sense, since many people need suggestions for where to start, as Jung is not the easiest writer! Another of our #1 rankings is the word enantiodromia (a running to the opposite), which Jung borrowed from Heraclitus. When the tech folks told me of its ranking, I was surprised, finding it hard to believe that anyone would be curious about such an obscure word.
[5] Jung taught at the ETHr (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) beginning in 1913, then paused for some years and resumed giving lectures there in 1933 until 1941; he found this very tiring (Hannah, 1976), 217. While he recognized he was himself an intellectual, he did not find the scientific materialism of contemporary academia to be congenial; see Gordon Young’s interview with him; (Jung (1977), 443-452.
[6] There’s no typo: our current system of higher education operates within silos–the different schools and departments having little or no contact with others even within the same university. Like Jung, I found this too limiting and was fortunate to be able to major in a cross-disciplinary program (medieval studies), which turned out to be a very solid preparation for working with Jung’s oeuvre.
[7] CW 10 ¶s494-495.
[8] This mission statement is in our JCSS brochure.
[9] This is a verbatim copy of the 9 statements written during our Open House.
[10] Many participants have remarked on this, a reflection perhaps of their living in a predominantly fundamentalist, misogynistic, or patriarchal environment.
[11] Jung discusses his criteria for a proper educational environment in CW 17 ¶s249-251.
[12] These are pride, green, envy, wrath, lust, sloth and gluttony; they are “deadly” in that they are contagious, insatiable and corrosive to the soul.
[13] The values that my inner voice told me were: autonomy, change, compassion, consciousness, creativity, cross-cultural perspectives, diversity, empowerment, equality, flexibility, freedom, healthful living, inclusivness, individuality, individuation, inner guidance, integrity, interdisciplinary approaches, lifelong learning, multiple intelligences, personal attention, personal growth, person-centered focus, psyche as real and in charge, quality (having high standards), responsibility, small is beautiful, trust, uniqueness, vision and visioneering, walking the talk. Some of these would need to be defined and/or explained to people, and most are now under attack by the current barbarians in power.
[14] This is the title of a book by E.F. Schumacher, but Jung agreed: he felt that big groups posed a threat to the well-being of individuals; CW 10 ¶719.
[15] For incisive exposés of social media (especially Facebook), cf. the investigative report of Max Fisher (2024) and the memoir of Sara Wynn-Williams (2025). These companies operate with value systems that are the very antithesis of Jung and of our Jungian Center.
[16] :Letter to H.G. Baynes,” 12 August 1940; Letters, I, 296.
[17] Mark 8:36.
[18] Jung (1933), 61. Most of Jung’s patients were in or past midlife and had been in some sort of psychotherapy before coming to him.
