Understanding Synchronicity and Consulting the I Ching (Satya Doyle Byock)

Listen now (65 mins) | "When he came to term the collective unconscious and archetypes and all sorts of events that he later termed synchronicity that could not be defined or explained through..."

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Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist and a great teacher of Carl Jung’s work. She wrote the book Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, which we covered together on Pulling the Thread back in 2022. Satya and I happened to grow up together in Missoula, Montana; and I was in the same teeny, tiny class as her older sister. It’s been so fun getting to know Satya in this chapter of her life.

I wanted to have her on the podcast to talk, for starters, about the I Ching, which is an ancient Taoist divination system that Satya uses as a tool to guide her life—as others might consult tarot, or astrology, or Human Design, and so on. Satya taught me how to use the I Ching, and throw coins and build a hexagram, and it’s been so fun. I love it. (Satya’s Class on How To use the I Ching.)

We ended up covering a lot more than the I Ching in this conversation. Although, in a way, as you’ll see—it’s all related. We talked about how everyone is seeking some combination of meaning and stability in their lives; a balance of the inner world and the outer world; and more harmony between rationalism and irrationalism.

I learned some new things about Carl Jung; and his theories on the unconscious, archetypes, and synchronicity. We talked about moments of meaning that can’t be fully explained. And where the instinct in our binary, polarized brains comes from to either dismiss science or the sacred.

And ultimately, we went back and forth on what a larger paradigm might look like if we made space for all of it: for expanded science, for synchronicity and meaning, for the masculine, and for the feminine.

MORE FROM SATYA DOYLE BYOCK:

Subscribe to Satya’s Substack: Self & Society

Satya’s Class on How To use the I Ching

Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood

My Q&A with Satya (with access to video of her teaching the I Ching for paid subscribers)

Satya’s on PTT for Quarterlife: “Navigating Quarterlife”

RESOURCES ON THE I CHING:

Translations to order

For virtual casting (no coins): cafeausoul.com/oracles/iching

For virtual casting (no coins): onlineclarity.co.uk/reading/free-online-i-ching/

Look up your hexagram: onlineclarity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lookup.png

Reading the Wilhelm translation: wisdomportal.com/IChing/IChing-Wilhelm.html

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Hi, it's Elise Luna and host of Pulling the Thread. Today I am talking to my childhood friend, the Jungian psychotherapist, Satcha Doyle Bok.

Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of pulling the thread on this show. We pull apart the web and which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. This is a soundbite from today's guest, Sacha Doyle Bak. Here she talks about how a text translated from Chinese and the Ying system changed Carl Young's life and ultimately shaped how we see meaning in our lives today.

SATYA:

When he came to term the collective unconscious and archetypes and all sorts of events that he later termed synchronicity that could not be defined or explained through cause and effect, he was very clear all of these things are happening that to a Western mind just can only be understood by saying they're not happening. There's no interest in explaining them. And so the Western mind in Western science just decides they're not happening. They don't fit into statistics, and he was bothered by that. He was very clear something is happening that not only creates meaning in people's lives, but returns meaning to people's lives.

ELISE:

What I really want to talk to you about are many things, but I think what's most resonant today in the context of young and everything that you are interested in, which is more than young, but we'll start. There is this access between the horizontal and the vertical world and the way that those two things come together. And I was thinking about it in the context of Quarterlife, which is such an incredible book, and we're not going to go back into it because we've already done a whole episode about quarter life for all of our quarter lifers who are listening, go back and listen. But that quest, that organizing principle of meaning versus stability feels so vertical, meaning horizontal stability and horizontal meaning the way that you show up in your everyday life and the vertical being that connection to something numinous or larger than this reality. And that seems to be what people come to you for maybe come to every yian, but definitely you how to do the two things simultaneously or to stay connected to both simultaneously, even if it's hard to do. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

SATYA:

I do. I think it's an awesome beginning too because it sparks so many thoughts for me and so many exciting bits you're talking about in some respects too, just the tension of opposites and the union of the opposites. And in my model around quarter life, which is also just adulthood, that we're all seeking some combination of stability and meaning that maps to various other things. We're all seeking some balance of the inner world and the outer world, some balance of rationalism and the irrational.

ELISE:

Some of you may be familiar with Satya, and we've done some workshops together. Now it's become an annual tradition that we need to do with more frequency. And I definitely want to talk to you about the I Ching because I know that's something that guides your life. So for people who are listening every January or sometimes the very last day of December, we've gathered and journaled together in community and ask questions of the etching and thrown coins, or for people who don't know how to build a hexagram, you can do it online and shared what we've discovered. And so this January we did this, and it's funny because I pulled the hexagram, The Abyss, and I was not alone. There were many of us on the call who also pulled The Abyss, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, not interested. This does not relate. I don't like this. And then soon after it was the Los Angeles fires and the inauguration and I was like, oh, fine, universe fine. But that wasn't my expectation going into January. I was like, I'm going to stay grounded and stay resolved, and I have so many exciting projects happening, and then literally the city went up in flames.

SATYA:

I have so much deep faith in the I Ching, which I will just say for people who are completely unfamiliar, it's a divination system. It's an ancient Taoist divination system that can very easily be thought of as something like the tarot or something like reading tea leaves. I mean, there's a million different systems worldwide throughout time where people have asked the gods or the ancestors for information through something readable in this realm of time and space. None of us really know how it works and it takes a leap of faith. But I have so much deep trust in this method, or at least my relationship to this method. I think different things work for different people, but that moment when you were the example person when you pulled the abyss or also translated it as danger, and I just felt my heart sink. I was like, oh man, I don't want to kick things off for the group. Not only with somethings hard like that, but also that I don't believe that's where Elisa's headed. I can feel where she's headed. And then when the Los Angeles fires, oh my God, started and we were texting it just what you expressed around it really clicked into place. So it's powerful.

ELISE:

It is really powerful. And the year prior I had pulled something again, so aligned, and I love the I Ching, I love tarot, I love all of these tools as well. And before we started recording, we were talking about astrology and Enneagram and Human Design, and I love a mystical system because I think it's one of the easiest ways to communicate with energy and to get something concrete that you can actually use. But it is interesting in those moments when you're like, nah, nah, not right. Return to sender. And yet unfortunately, such as life. And you started using the etching before you became a therapist. Was that how you actually came to Carl Jung was through the I Ching.

SATYA:

Well, it's funny. I mean, it turns out that my mother was a Jungian psychotherapist up. She created the Montana Friends of Jung.

ELISE:

What? Wait, so just for context, Satya and I grew up together in Missoula, Montana and went to the same hippie dippy school together that had six kids per class. I was in a class with her older sister, and I knew her parents. I spent Your house actually is in my mind when you're reading books and you go to certain places and set the scene, I love your House is one of those places for me specifically that downstairs room by the kitchen anyway.

SATYA:

Yeah, your

ELISE:

Mom, I knew she was Jeannette Rankin Peace Resource person, yes, but she was at

SATYA:

Yen. My mother had many hats, wonderful hats. So yeah, she helped co-found the Jeanette Rankin Peace Resource Center in Missoula, Montana, which still exists. Loved it. It was thriving.

And she was also a psychotherapist, and I knew her as a psychotherapist, but I had no knowledge. I was a kid, I was a teenager. I had no knowledge of what theory base she was working on or what it was that she was exploring. So then when I went off to college, she sent me to college with a copy of the I Ching, which I still have her note inscribed in it, sending me to college and just expressing this has been a really valuable tool for me as guidance. And now that you're launching on your own, I thought it might be of value to you. So she taught me initially to throw coins, and I used it in college and started developing a relationship to it then. And then I write about this scene in my book Quarter Life, but I was really confronting adult life and all the existential crises involved and practical Crises involved and reached out to her one time and she first recommended a Jungian book that was not by Carl Jung.

And then when I told her that I thought it was extraordinary, she suggested Jung's memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. What was the book before? The book before was Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul was a New York Times bestseller when I was growing up, or maybe late teens and is still a very popular book. Great book. Yeah. So I read those two books and all of my chakras exploded, whatever that looks like. It was so clear and it has remained so clear. This is core to my life path. I didn't know that this was my mother's career for all of my childhood or most of my childhood. So I come to it through Lineage. I come to the I Ching through Lineage. It's all a part of my daily life and what I teach and read and how I work with clients. And it should be said, I'm not Chinese. I don't know Chinese, I don't know really a word of the language. I can't read the ancient texts. I don't consider myself a scholar of the I Ching so much as a devoted practitioner. And I love teaching people how to use it as lay people.

ELISE:

And in the show notes, we will include a link to a number of I Ching and books which go from the incredibly accessible, the one that I learned on just the historic to the sort of shamanistic Chinese translation.

SATYA:

There's many, I mean, it's an ancient Chinese text, so there's many different translations of it over time.

ELISE:

And besides the divination tool, I mean I have a book called The Secrets of the I Ching. It's written by two doctors. I mean, it's like a vast system of wisdom and knowledge that extends beyond asking the universe how to proceed forward in a situation too. So also want to say that it's a foundational Eastern text

SATYA:

Well beyond text. Yeah, it's a school of wisdom. It's a system, but it's true that it's deeply connected to mathematics and to physics. It's very smart. I think about how I wish if I had nothing else to do, I would want to study the etching in so many different ways. And that's something that Confucius is said to have expressed at the end of his life that if he had 50 more years to live, he would devote them entirely to studying the ying.

ELISE:

Where did it come from?

SATYA:

Again, I know some of the history, but I don't want to claim total expertise on the history, but it seems as though it's a text that arose from multiple sources around 3000 years ago and has been developed and retranslated and expanded upon. There's a quality of the Torah and rabbinical knowledge that there's this ancient text that then has become a core source of wisdom and commentary for centuries, many, many centuries.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And then Carl Jung wrote the introduction to, was it the first German translation or English translation or both?

SATYA:

And the I Ching for Jung. Well, it started with this book called The Secret of the Golden Flower, which I have a copy of right here. Ultimately, Jung understood it to be an ancient Chinese alchemical text, but when this arrived to him through his friend Richard Wilhelm, who was a German missionary in China, who was a German missionary, who essentially decided that the Chinese system was more valuable to him. I don't want to put words into his mouth, but he sort of changed sides, so to speak, and he became an incredible Chinese scholar and scholar of Chinese wisdom. He sent this text, The Secret of the Golden Flower to Jung in the late 1920s, and it completely changed the course of Jung's life and work basically because he had been really on his own in a quite lonely space studying the collective unconscious, what he came to term, the collective unconscious and archetypes and all sorts of events that he later termed synchronicity that could not be defined or explained through cause and effect.

He was very clear all of these things are happening that to a western mind just can only be understood by saying they're not happening. There's no interest in explaining them. And so the Western mind and western science just decides they're not happening. They don't fit into statistics. And he was bothered by that. He was very clear something is happening that not only creates meaning in people's lives, but returns meaning to people's lives. And he was studying this quite by himself, seeing no real analogs around the world to help him progress in his own research. And when Richard Wilhelm sent him The Secret of the Golden Flower and then sent him a copy of the I Ching, it wasn't until then that he felt like, oh my gosh, here is a thread out. I can emerge now with some of the research I've been doing. There are other systems in history and human history that help explain what I've been up to.

ELISE:

It's kind of amazing that it's not the most recent history, but that's relatively recent history. So interesting, right? We think about these things as, yeah, it's a relatively recent entree into Western culture.

SATYA:

Yeah, almost exactly a hundred years ago. And yet we're litigating the exact same issues culturally, constantly. What is rational? What is irrational? What is science, what is conspiracy and continues to be extremely tricky and dangerous territory. And young was right at the intersection of that.

ELISE:

Yeah, rational or rational as you mentioned before, I would say scientism versus the sacred, but both at times these rigid senses of belief and dogmatism that doesn't quite hold all experience. And so what does it look like when we actually transcend and include, and I think about this all the time in the context of our binary polarized brains and this instinct to dismiss science or dismiss the sacred. It's like, no friends, these things belong under the same tent. We just don't quite understand or we aren't quite able to coe or explain and large enough system to contain all of this experiencing. But doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.

SATYA:

It's stupid. Exactly. Well, it's absurd,

But everything you're expressing, I was just reading a bit before we started and I want to try to read you a quote. So this is from Cary F. Baynes who was the translator of the I Ching and also of The Secret of the Golden Flower from German to English. This first version of the etching that young did the forward to is called the Wilhem Baynes translation. So Wilhelm translated it from Chinese to German, and then Baynes translated it from German to English. She's a huge person in Jungian history and brilliant. And I was just rereading this quote. So this is actually from The Secret of the Golden Flower intro. She says, “mastery of the inner world with a relative contempt for the outer must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mastery of the outer world to the exclusion of the inner delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric. Despite all outward forms of culture, the solution cannot be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality and that science must turn to the spirit for the meaning of life.”

ELISE:

Oh my God, there you have it. All right. Thanks for your time.

SATYA:

Isn't that last line, I mean because to me it's science must ultimately turn to the spirit for the meaning of life. I think we're in this constant push and pull right now. I think you and I are prime examples of this, Elise. We both have doctor, physician, parents. Both of our parents are in the medical space or met in the medical space. I don't consider myself an irrational person by any stretch, but I'm frustrated even as I deeply support science and things like vaccines. These things are not confusing to me. And yet there are things that have imbued my life with enormous meaning that I can read articles about every day that are just derisive and critical and mean-spirited, just tearing them apart. And I think how is this helping anyone to feel better about life?

ELISE:

There's this foundational mistrust in people, and I always felt this way about women and health space and the way that the attacks would come as the women are lemmings. And if left to our own devices, we will run ourselves off a cliff. And it's very patronizing way of treating people. And then at the same time, there's ample proof that as people, and I count myself in this, we're easy to manipulate and we're susceptible to propaganda and everything that's happening around us makes us feel like we can't trust each other. And yet I still want to believe that part of that is to push people into a crisis of needing to learn how to exercise both their intuition and their discernment and to stop outsourcing their decision making to other people or to understand who's credible in certain areas and not credible in others. And yes, to your point earlier about medicine similar to you, I grew up in the waiting rooms of St.

Pat's hospital and community and watched my dad, and this was before HIPAA. I used to watch colonoscopies and my dad do endoscopies, and I watched procedures all the time in the hospital. I'd sat in the nurses' stations, I worked in the hospital too. That was my first job delivering trays from the cafeteria and recognizing this is not a very healing place. This is not where people probably feel well, however, and I love western medicine and I rely on western medicine, and I am certainly vaccinated and my kids are certainly vaccinated. And these things, as you said, are not questions for me, particularly in the context of public health and herd immunity and what we do for each other, particularly for those who can't be vaccinated. Anyway, apologies for the TED talk, but it's worth saying.

SATYA:

It's almost like we have to say it in order to then speak about things like the I Ching and the irrational, because I think what happens is when the patronizing quality exists and which is so deeply connected to patriarchy, it's all ways of deriding those who are slightly outside or might be outside and might not fit in with whatever the dominant belief system is.

ELISE:

Well, and you have to imagine it's so challenging to any ego structure, and I don't say ego derisively either. Ego can be very healthy structure personality when you're saying, yeah, this all might be right, but this part might be wrong or incomplete or it needs to expand. And I think about this. I had a recent experience with my dad a year or so ago, so my dad's retired now and he thinks I'm, he is sweet about it, but he and my mom are like, why are you so, they don't understand my interest in religion or spirituality, et cetera. They're judgmental people, but they try to restrain themselves. But anyway, a year or so ago, my dad had had a surgery. It was really not feeling well, and he thought it was diverticulitis. And I had had my own experience with lymphocytic colitis after I fell off this horse and broke my neck and I was seeing a gastro and I had a colonoscopy and he was like, I don't really want to put you on steroids.

There are all these downstream effects, et cetera. But I was in a lot of trouble and very constrained by having access to bathrooms. And this was going on for months and months and months and months. And finally a friend was like, I want you to see this woman, Carla Schwisderski, who's an energy healer. And it was a John of God experience in the sense that I gave her my information on a Friday. That Saturday morning, I took my son to a surf lesson and I didn't need to use the Oceanside bathroom, which is not very pleasant as you can imagine. And I was like, this is weird. And by the time I saw her that following Wednesday, I felt fine and I asked her, I was like, what's your process? And she told me that she and her parents, she was Brazilian, had put me in the hospital on Saturday and been working on me all morning.

I've never had another issue ever. It just vanished. Anyway, so my father, my mom was really worried he was coming to visit. I was like, can I give you a distance healing session? And he was like, don't waste your money, babe. And I was like, no, no, no, it's my pleasure. I just need a photo and I need your permission. Long story short, this one morning a few days before my father came, my mom texted me and was like, your dad woke up. He's on the other side of this. He, he's fine. And I didn't know what had happened. I texted Carla and I was like, how is it going with my dad? She had told me originally it was difficult. He had a lot of armor up and she told unprompted was like, we put him in the hospital yesterday, whatever, and figured it out.

I still have some more work to do, but it should be working anyway. This is a long, long story. However, my dad, to be fair was like, okay, I feel my mind opening a little bit, and all I can say is I feel much better. I can't explain why, and I'm very relieved. I think some things are on the energetic or spiritual level, and some things are on a physical level and some things are on a mental level and some things are on all levels simultaneously, and that we need a larger paradigm. We just do.

SATYA:

Well, I think that's it. We need a larger paradigm because I think everyone has experiences not necessarily quite like that, which is extraordinary, but we all have experiences of things that make us feel better or again, bring more meaning into our lives. I mean, I'm an hour out of a energy healing session that I was in that I haven't seen this particular healer for a decade, but everything in me recently realized I needed to go see her for a session. And the whole time I was there was just so, my feeling was I'm grateful she exists and she's here doing this work because when you need something that is not just structural and not just physical, and I've just been thinking about this a lot because of so many different things happening in culture, but I think part of what's in that quote I just read is when we don't let the irrational have any space whatsoever, it becomes sort of feral. And so part of what I think is happening with the conspiracy theories and the RFK nonsense and all of the different ways that the left and right have been uniting around conspiracy theories and straight up anti-science versus expanded science, I think it's because everyone is frustrated that we don't have space to talk about experiences that we can't fully explain through pure rationalism or western science. We don't need to become anti-science as a result, but we need to have expanded conversations with less divisiveness and less fear.

ELISE:

Well, just to go to this idea of, and you mentioned the tension of the opposites are holding the tension. There aren't enough of us who are capable of saying, I believe I have faith in this and I have faith in this and that these two things are actually not mutually exclusive. I know as a fellow Jew, that ten seven was just the biggest mind screwing in part because looking around, it was like, how are we divided on this? This is atrocious. This is atrocious. This is unacceptable on both sides. This is not a, I definitely didn't feel like it warranted the polarity that it created. And it gets to the point I think, where it becomes almost such an unconscious reaction to align against the other in some way that we're not conscious of what we're doing. And so I think a lot of people who are involved in this horseshoe and culture that you're describing, where they have left rationality behind, don't realize what they're doing, don't realize how they're polarized or that they're on an extreme end of a binary and have lost the ability to hold both and say, this isn't an either or.

Nothing is really an either or, but we are definitely designed to perceive the world in that way.

SATYA:

I know, yes, in a certain respect. I think, oh my goodness, we are in territory of the two most uncomfortable spaces for me, and one is this sort of defense of the irrational when I could be taken as a person who is deep into conspiracy theories, and I really try to honor my deep relationship to the collective unconscious, to the unknown, to things like the itching, to synchronicity and very deeply believe it is an important cause in the efforts against patriarchy and white supremacy and ableism and heteronormativity to say there are other ways of thinking and being that are not inherently stupid, absurd, easily ridiculed. I really want to be a person who stands up for these things. It is scary because you immediately can get lumped into people who I really don't agree with at all, who I think are causing damage. But you're right, all of this is about opposites and the inability to hold things that seem contrary without just simply selecting one.

ELISE:

Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily American. I think it's very human to sort of resist balance too in a way, and to be comfortable in that place of nuance and complexity where it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and it's all of these things concurrently rather than the cleanly articulated position. I was thinking too about with all of these things, the presence of both shadow and light and our reluctance to own the shadowy parts of all of these things, and I was reading for an upcoming newsletter. I was trying to write about archetypes, and I know that you've written recently about archetypes of resistance, and this is obviously a very jungian concept where he was trying to order or create form and function out of the collective unconscious, and maybe it's worth describing the idea of archetypes, but I was specifically reading Toni Wolfe, who was his lover, right?

SATYA:

She was his lover for 40 years. She's really, I think of her more in common language now as being, I mean the three young and his wife, Emma and Toni were in ultimately a polyamorous relationship.

ELISE:

Yeah. Okay.

SATYA:

Well, no, because Emma and Toni did not have a relationship, but Toni was an accepted member of the family and they were together also for 40 years, but she was also his deep, deep, deep, deep, deep collaborator. And so Yung's work is heavily influenced by both Emma and Toni.

ELISE:

I love all the women in his life,

SATYA:

Just let it be said.

ELISE:

But I was reading about her four archetypes of femininity and this idea of the mother, the Amazon and the medial woman and the way that they're arranged. There's an object based or relationship based quadrant of these archetypes, and anyway, I was reading her structural forms of the feminine psyche. By the way, just so everyone understands, Sasha didn't send this to me, but I'm constantly blowing up her texts being like, what? Where can I find, who do I read?

SATYA:

I've been writing about this for a big project I'm working on, and I do want to say at the outset, I think these are deeply out of date archetypes, but I'm curious where you're going. Tell me.

ELISE:

So I am fascinated by this medial woman, particularly in the context of what we've just been talking about, which is the medial woman, from what I understand, is the one who mediates between the unconscious and the real world. We'd call her shaman or mystic or someone who's engaged in the occult. And anyway, it's just interesting reading about her because Toni is very clear too that there's this major shadow spectrum to attending to the unconscious in this way without, I don't know if she would say being balanced and the exterior world, but I don't know. What do you think about the medial woman?

SATYA:

I think what you just expressed is exactly right, and that's core to the Jungian world, which is that the unconscious exists, the inner world exists. I mean, there's a lot of talk of the reality of psyche. It exists, and if you go there without staying grounded and rooted in the physical world, in the external world and the world of relationships, it's very clear relationships and actually conscious relationships, communicative relationships, which really is deeply modeled between Jung and Emma and Jung and Toni and Toni and Emma. Part of their understanding was they were both hugely influential to the work that Jung was doing in the world, and so they both understood that and they came to a place of accepting that this was part of their existence to all be in this larger project together, living their individual lives, doing their individual work. Both Emma and Toni became analysts.

They saw patients, they wrote, they did research, but that they were in genuine conversation and communication with each other. In no way was it perfect. I don't think anyone's going to say it's perfect, but they were in a relationship, and so it's this quality, as you say, of mediating the inner world and the outer world. I sometimes think of it as your rock climbing. You and I both grew up going rock climbing with our school, et cetera, that you need somebody who's on belay. You need somebody who's holding the rope, and if there's nobody holding the rope, you can get in danger going down too far, going up too high. And so there's this quality of needing to stay connected to the outer world If you're doing in our work, especially if you're going to spaces like the deep unconscious where there might be, as you were talking about elements of prophecy, elements of the unknown that could be quite scary and overwhelming if you're not able to integrate that back into consciousness in the physical world. So the whole thing is it's about consciousness and the unconscious being in relationship. It's not about one being better than the other.

ELISE:

There's so many directions that I want to theoretically go, but because I feel like on a global stage what we're witnessing, and this might be my own little peccadillo and fascination, but I feel like one of the things that feels very present in the collective is the ascendancy, and I'm curious if you have a perspective on this. The ascendancy of psychedelics for which I am a proponent when done in the right context and with care and a lot of integration and everyone is kept very safe, and I see people in the culture rising in prominence, particularly in the world of tech where there's a huge amount of burning man culture, ayahuasca, ketamine and so forth, really intense drugs. I feel like we're seeing the birth of these Messiah complexes across tech and what actually feels like unmediated unconsciousness and or people who have had some sort of big archetypal experience, whether they're touching sort of archetypal evil, which I would say is an amoral, I'm not talking about meeting the devil, but that we're seeing people whose minds have been almost radiated or corrupted or twisted by going way too far into the unconscious and very unsafe ways, and that there's an unmooring happening.

Does that sound wild?

SATYA:

No, it's absolutely true. It's happening. It's happening a lot. It's another source of concern.

ELISE:

How do we counter that? What is the antidote for that? What would Carl Jung say about that?

SATYA:

Carl Jung did not use psychedelics, and really I think his position was that you should not basically blow, don't use dynamite to get to the unconscious. For young, there were methods of supporting the ego to move at its own pace down kind of dissent. I always think of it, as descending down into the darkness and into the unconscious, which is terrifying for most of us. In other words, it should be terrifying. There's people who run gleefully there, they don't know the danger they're heading into, and so there's a kind of youthfulness of their ego that's not actually prepared to hold what arises. So I think generally speaking, Young's work was all done to connect to the archetypal unconscious and the collective unconscious through natural personal crisis or collective crisis. He also saw them as deeply connected that when there's collective crisis, people become much more permeable to individual crisis and more vulnerable to individual crisis.

That psyche itself becomes thinner when the world is in a place of shattering. I've very much personally experienced that over the last two years. I experienced it before the start of the Iraq war and during the Iraq war that this moment in history and that moment in history for me personally felt both collectively and personally very thin and tenuous, and there was a lot of rapid growth happening again, both for myself and I think for culture. So what Jung would say, I think is be very, very careful and that there is an infantile quality to rushing too close and too far into that work. Just as you express in the right settings with the right people, with the right support. I think psychedelics can be a really valuable assistance or assist, especially when culture is so absent, the sacred and so absent, meaning that it's inevitable we're all going to be searching where we can find it to gain some of that back.

But in terms of the antidote, I mean, I think there's many, many things we could say. I think that in some way the feminine is the antidote to all of this. Even if we can't fully define what the feminine is, we know that which is not fully represented by patriarchal white supremacist dominant culture is also the antidote because it's run amuck, it's out of control. Young spoke about this at very great length. I consider him for all of his foibles to be a huge feminist pioneer because he was actually expressing, oh my goodness, this culture is wildly lopsided and it's deeply lopsided because so much of what has been repressed from Christianity, from most global religions, from science, from western thinking, from rationalism is the feminine, and we have to bring her back from the unconscious and restore her

ELISE:

Actually thinking about this and the way that I think that psychedelics have been modulating tech leaders' minds, et cetera. I think that what we're actually experiencing, and we're talking right now about the feminine, we're talking about archetype. Lee is masculine and feminine, and we each have both qualities. I have a lot of masculine. I'm very comfortable in my masculine. I think in light of the toxic masculinity that we're seeing, and again, this is dissociated from certain people, this is more about energies in the world and women can behave in very toxically masculine ways too. We are seeing almost this resurgence of toxic femininity and okay, just stay with me for a second, but as we see the environment whip up as we see measles outbreaks, as we see what happens, I think when these men, and I'm sure women have gone far too deeply into the unconscious in an unprotected way and are now wreaking havoc on culture, the chaos that we are starting to experience I think is toxic femininity. That's going to, in some ways, I think force a reset of the clock because what we need is a balance masculinity and a balanced femininity in each of us, and we need all these men to let their feminine come up. And women I think are already more inclined towards balance.

SATYA:

Well, because women were raised in patriarchy, we were all raised in patriarchy. And so part of the difficulty, and it's a huge sore spot in Young's work too, is I think what you just described, it's also rationalism, run amok, which then creates irrationalism running amok. And that's part of what I think we've been speaking to this whole time is you can also reframe it as the feminine. It's tricky because some very alt-right broy thinkers have used very similar language to then equate women with chaos, which is absurd, and to create men with order, which is absurd. The point is, in fact, in nature, death and life are simultaneous events. They both exist. They're both part of nature. Order and chaos are part of nature at its fundamental roots. And if all you are functioning as what fascism requires is order, order only, order always, and what extreme rationalism requires order only.

Anything that doesn't fit in with the system, we simply ignore and we reject my own experience of this. What happens is that the feminine goes into a rage, and I think of this as Kali energy, but I also think of it as sort of turning feral, that when she is so deeply profoundly neglected and disregarded and disrespected over and over and over, at some point she runs amok and she loses her mind. This happens. Know this happens in relationship. We know this happens with animals. It happens, and I think it's happening in the unconscious that we have to find ways to create space for the other without ridicule so that it in fact does not have to go to extreme means in order to create chaos and disrupt the extreme order, disrupt the strangling suffocating order.

ELISE:

But I think it's a cautionary tale for the fact that it will not be contained and it won't be stamped out or tamped down. And if you want to talk about sort of a weaker energy, watch out, and again, I don't want to reduce these to gender, and I see that point, and yet if you think about divine masculine as structure, order truth, some sort of linearity, and you think of divine femininity, again, these are energies that we all possess regardless of gender. Divine feminine is creativity, nurturance love and abundance, everything that grows its life in many ways. And then you think about the toxic variation of that, and we're seeing toxic masculinity, we are going to see an equal amount of toxic femininity to balance it out and ultimately at our own peril. And so I think when people say femininity, it's weak and whatever, it's like, oh, no, friends, it is collie. It is life and death. It is terrifying. I think for most of us,

SATYA:

Yes, I'm with you. I would define it in slightly different ways because I experienced the toxic feminine as more being extreme passive aggressivity. It's highly passive, highly irrational. Everything is decided through divination versus actually using your rational mind to make a decision. Everything is left up to chance, rejecting science, God will provide, et cetera. The other is we can control everything. We are human nature and rejecting the idea that there are forces beyond our conscious understanding, like say the divine. That might show up both for better or worse at different times. Part of how I define these things is that the masculine in any of us is part of what helps us separate in childhood. It helps us launch into the world and create an individual identity. It's part of the warrior stories and the hero's journey stories. I think hero's journey stories apply for all genders, but it's often gendered.

The hero is gendered as a man often because the masculine is that which is often reaching out and pursuing something in the world. The feminine is alternately both what we come from. It's the collective unconscious, it's the great mother, it's the everything. It's the connection, and it's what we're trying to get back to in the end. It's what is calling us back in terms of connection, relationship, this idea of oneness, but not oneness that swallows us all up, but oneness that allows for this incredible bounty of a bunch of individuals who know themselves. And that's the goal. That's the goal of individuation, is you actually can become yourself and be an exquisite part of community. That's nature, that's biodiversity. It's what we're missing and what we don't understand of what would it be if we could all become ourselves in order to serve the larger story.

ELISE:

And I would say too, it's going out and getting the antidote and bringing it back for everyone, but that because we're so stuck on men, masculine, women feminine, and we just don't understand these archetypal energies. That's why it is so scary for so many women to individuate and sort of leave the herd. And conversely, why it's so difficult for men to come home. It's the fear of the feminine, the fear of the masculine. You see it all over culture as these edicts

SATYA:

And constant ridicule of both constant ridicule of stepping out of line of their gender story, constant ridicule. It's a reinforcing toxic culture,

ELISE:

And it's so reductive and so silly, and I think that we need women so desperately, not because we need to prioritize the feminine over the masculine. Again, I'm all about a balance. It's because I think women, as you mentioned, because we have existed in this culture for thousands of years, have an understanding of both that's much more comfortable and easily held than men and their own femininity still. I think most women, if you were to break it down and say, this is your masculine energy and this is your feminine energy, they'd say, oh yeah, I've got a lot of both. But for men, I think recognizing their feminine energy and that desire to create nurture, love, hold, contain is difficult.

SATYA:

Reconnect step into friendship. Yes, I agree with you. And yet I also think we may be at a point where women's bodies and physical and personal autonomy are under extreme attack, obviously constantly, but men's, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally are also under such extreme attack culturally that to be in search of meaning, to be seeking deep relationship and connection with anyone, again, it's stepping out of line. It's not being tough. It's not being an individual in the way that toxic masculinity tells them. So I'm also, I am, if anything, pretty much right now, I'm desperately hoping for a men's movement that can hold this because I think it's the thing we need more than anything right now.

ELISE:

I agree, agree, agree. I know I'm with you. It feels weird to say that, but I am most definitely. I think actually most people would agree, most concerned about what's happening with boys and men.

SATYA:

Yeah, there's not leaders. I mean, I have a 14-year-old stepson. I have two nephews. They're the closest children in my life, and I am constantly aware of what they're consuming or on the brink of consuming and how few male leaders there are that both feel deeply imbued with love and care and concern and have very strong, clear sense of self as well. Those men, we know who they are in the world, but I wish they would all get together and form a massive movement to support each other because we need it more than almost anything.

ELISE:

Meaning and stability, meaning both meaning and stability.

I know we sort of ventured away from the etching, but as mentioned, we'll include the link so that people can start playing. And I'll include a link to this video from our first ever workshop where people can watch Satya explain how to use it. But let's talk before we go.

SATYA:

I will also say, I think that we both ventured away from the ich and the ICH is 100% Taoist. It is about the balance of the masculine and feminine. Every single, there's six lines in each throw, and they're either yin or yang lines. And so it's really the same conversation is this question of trying to understand how to ride these waves and be present with the tension of opposites.

ELISE:

Yeah. So synchronicity, we talked about it briefly, but can you just give people an understanding of why this was such a Jungian, this idea that you're thinking about someone and they call you, you think about a book and someone sends it to you, whatever. There are a million examples of synchronicity in our lives, but can you talk about that in the context of Jung?

SATYA:

Absolutely. So this is a term that originates with Jung, the idea of synchronicity. And what he's expressing is something is happening in observable life that is not cause and effect, but that is, he calls it synchronous and meaning. So this is from J's book Synchronicity, which both has wonderful, wonderful, valuable readable pieces and some stuff you can gloss over if anyone chooses to pick up this book. But this is paragraph nine 16 in the book Synchronicity. And he says, the causality principle asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one. The synchronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by simultaneity and meaning.

And what he's expressing is, for instance, if you think of someone and five minutes later you get a phone call from them, that's maybe a very small moment of synchronicity. It's probably going to make somebody think, oh, that's wild. Or you might tell the person that's wild. It's not going to blow your mind or change your life, but there's no reason for us to assume that your thinking of that person made them call you. And if that's your belief, western science is not going to back that up. There's no way that that is provable. But there's a sense of simultaneity. Something in that moment between those two events also included, meaning there's something about that relationship that's meaningful. So Jung has many, many examples. I think we all individually have examples, and I actually can say that the examples in my life that express this most profoundly are also very sacred to me.

I notice I don't want to actually share them publicly because they're so profound, and they shook my sense of existence in incredibly beautiful ways that I hold onto them as sacred events. And what Jung expresses is if we hold those up to science, western science, they would simply tell us it didn't exist or it didn't occur, or the fact that you maybe think it occurred is sort of irrelevant and useless and not really meaningful. So there's this sense that something of profound meaning to an individual life gets eroded and corroded by rationalism such that it just has to kind of get thrown into the pile. And he really was devoted to studying this as an observable scientific phenomenon, just not one that could be fit within the idea of cause and effect.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and I'm glad that you don't share them because there is nothing, it's not even a bubble bursting when you have that felt experience. And again, I think it's more of a feeling than a logical experience. And then someone spends a lot of energy trying to convince you that you're an idiot. That's a quick way to scrub your life of meaning.

SATYA:

It's remarkable. I mean, it's such a part of our culture to just denigrate things that other people experience as sacred, and that can only have a negative effect. It can only have blowback if there's no space for that

ELISE:

Similar to you. And now I'd say in the last, I don't know, 10 years if that, as I've become more and more alive and awake to the sacred, these moments of synchronicity signs just coincidental, interesting immersion, it happens so frequently that it's hard to even catalog it, but it adds so much richness to my life. Well, what is life if not a lineage of these incredibly meaningful, surprising?

SATYA:

I think of it as sort of turning life. So many of us, I think grew up feeling like life was kind of black and white. It's like this. And I write about this in my book again, this just quality of this is what we're all doing. There's so little sacredness in most of our worlds. Certainly dominant culture has scrubbed the sacred completely out. And so we are all desperate for something. And as you express, this is what creates color and vibrancy in my life. It allows me to have deeper relationships with other people. It allows me to have deeper relationships with nature and the divine and all of it. It's profound, it's transformative.

ELISE:

And I would also say that, and as you know, I'm writing this book on polarity and shadow, but to not address the unconscious, to not address our own shadow material, which is everything that falls outside of our perception of ourselves really, or what we want to believe about who we are, is also very dangerous because the shadow is present. It needs to be integrated, it needs to be metabolized, it needs to be alchemized. Choose your verb. And when we just deny that it's there, similar to what we're seeing in the wider culture, it goes somewhere. I don't want to ascribe negative intention to it. It's not moral, but it needs to be experienced and felt and moved. And if you don't, it's an explosion. And that's what we're seeing everywhere.

SATYA:

Absolutely. And I see those things as being utterly compatible versus mutually exclusive, that any work with the unconscious brings it more deeply integrated into the conscious space. It's the inner marriage. Again, we're talking about the masculine and feminine on some level, but all of this is what we are seeking is a deeper relationship between the unconscious and the conscious. And that means integrating unconscious contents, and it means acknowledging the reality of sometimes irrational events that we can't fully understand. It's creating a bigger container. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but it's really expanding our ability to hold things and having a bigger container for information and for reality, for what is reality.

ELISE:

And I would also say that I know a lot of us are having a hard time right now, and I count myself somewhat amongst that group of people. And then I also would say that the development of faith irrationally chosen has been the biggest balm. And I would say faith is very different than belief. Because belief, as Alan Watts would say, is what you would like to happen. And it is more doctrine and causal and cause and effect. Whereas faith is just this opening to the unknown and recognizing that this is larger than our own conception, larger than my conception. And as much certainty as you can get from trying to figure things out and know what everyone's up to and understand the bigger picture and know what's going to happen, that's not going to happen. And that faith in some larger construct is a really good security blank. It's the best that we have. And it doesn't mean it's about bypassing, it doesn't mean it's about not being present with everything that's unfolding. But I would say that my relationship with the irrational with faith is one of the only things that I comfort in and my kids,

SATYA:

I'm with you, Elise. I think of Richard Rohr, I think of Gandhi. Richard Rohr talks about contemplation and action, right?

ELISE:

Yeah. Action first because you have to take action before you have anything to contemplate.

SATYA:

So, right, and Gandhi, who was one of my great teachers spiritually, not while he was alive, et cetera, but that he spoke about truth in action, and this is really what I hold. It's yes to prayer, yes to protesting. I think we can hold all of this simultaneously. Again, we have this idea of simultaneity, but how do we hold the inner and the outer? How do we hold the irrational and rational? How do we hold faith and action? For me, you can't really have one without the other. If you want to either personally survive on a spiritual level or if we want society, democracy to survive, we need to be doing both.

ELISE:

Beautiful. Thank you. And thank you for your beautiful mind. Thanks for sticking with us throughout that conversation. That was really fun for me. I was saying to Satcha, we stopped recording that one. I recognize that this audience really enjoys learning about the metaphysical, and so I hope we satisfied that thirst today. And also that I want to start doing more conversations with friends where there's no book involved so that there's less of an onus on all of you to feel like you need to read. Although I know many of you like to read, and that's a big part of this podcast, and obviously I love supporting authors as they bring their books into the world because it is such a hard thing to do. But I want to start integrating more conversations like this. You can find in the show notes links to all the etching books that Satya recommends.

There's a wide variety, including ones that are really accessible. For those of you who just want to start doing a very simple exercise where you build your own hexagram and consult the book. I'll also include a link to the video from one of our workshops. We do them with some frequency on Substack for paid subscribers. Her Substack is called

Self & Society

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And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can email me at admin [@] eliseloehnen.com.