Crisp air, golden leaves, and good company—what could be better? This fall, we’re bringing back one of our favorite traditions: an afternoon gathering filled with community, conversation, and seasonal spirit.

We’ll begin with a lecture from John Hayes, who recently shared this topic at IAAP Congress program in Zurich, celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Carl Jung. Afterwards, stay for a festive reception featuring wine, warm apple cider, pumpkin chocolate chip bread, and other autumn-inspired desserts. It’s the perfect chance to relax, mingle, and savor the season!

We’re also bringing back our raffle, this time with some new and exclusive items and offerings you won’t want to miss. And we will have some books on offer for donation. Along with treats and prizes, you’ll have the opportunity to connect with fellow community members, analysts, and some of our fan-favorite speakers.

We’ve hosted this gathering before—last fall and again this past spring—and each time has reminded us just how meaningful it is to be together in person. We can’t wait to share the afternoon with you again!

ABOUT THE LECTURE

Experiences of the numinous are not exceptional and are hardly restricted to saints, monks, and mystics. Indeed, they occur in various degrees in the experience of ordinary folks. Not unlike dreams, numinous experiences need to be received and empathically understood for their transformative potency to be realized. These experiences intimate to ego consciousness the presence and power of the Self. After a point in life, the ego comes to instinctively know the Self, recognizing its presence and remembering other such encounters. Some numinous experiences are intense moments of encounter with the Self that re-mind the ego of its relativity and its origin in Self.

Although such moments have great affective charge and are potentially transformative, they are part of an ongoing dialectic, what Jung calls a “circular opus,” or moments in a “step-by-step development of self from an unconscious state to a conscious state.” The work towards individuation, towards wholeness, towards full realization of one’s Self is the aspirational work of a lifetime, always elusive and never fully realized.

Jung also recognized the dangers of the numinous, both individually and collectively. While optimally the numinous is a catalyst for individuation, it also holds the potential for psychic possession and even psychosis. The numinous can hold group psychology in its thrall with dangerous and terrible consequences as recent collective history bears witness. Rene Girard’s writings on the scapegoat mechanism in group psychology amplify Jung’s concerns for the destructive power of the dark numinous. Both Jung and Girard indicate the fateful and critical urgency for an upgrade in consciousness as the way forward to an authentic human future.