Author: Timothy Lyons

 Approaching the Numinous in Psychotherapy

An Evening with Tim Lyons: August 5, 2022

Exploring our deepest secrets has the potential to generate precognitive and synchronistic revelations leading to numinous experiences. Jung stated: “… the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology.” How can we use psychotherapy as a container to embody the healing energy of these experiences is the goal of tonight’s discussion.   

The numinous is the experience of a higher dimension of human existence, an archetype of our own deepest nature. Paradoxically, the source of its power, is its mystery. This most profound level of consciousness generates an initiation into the numinous world that can help us dissolve the mundane alienating conceptions we may have about ourselves. Then, as Jung noted, “even the very disease takes on a numinous character.” Secrets hold seeds of our greatest potentials in the same way a dragon hoards a treasure. But the dragon cannot utilize the riches, it just guards them. It takes a hero to slay the dragon to actually unlock the premonitory energy and higher purpose of the secret in order to be nourished by its liberated riches.

We are bound to secrets through collective, cultural and religious taboos. Our inner voices whisper, or demand, to not to be seen for fear we will be shunned or damned. The old adage “we are only as sick as our secrets,” applies especially to the intergenerational family secrets tied up with procreation and death, physical and sexual abuse, passion and addiction. Some pain identity secrets involve low self-esteem that may bind us to chronic dissatisfaction, neuroses, compulsions, and phobias. Shameful object relations secrets include codependence, affairs and unrequited love, non-conforming gender orientations, and the resulting unlived lives. There are the secrets we are aware we are keeping and those we are not aware of that may emerge within the psychotherapeutic container. 

The more we become familiar with the secrets of our inner reality, the more we can become aware of manifestations of precognition and synchronicity. These exciting dynamics can optimize the therapeutic alliance. The numinous becomes the catalyst to motivate our individuation and fulfill our unique potentials.

Evolving Body Consciousness within an Autoimmune Culture

An Evening with Tim Lyons: March 24, 2023 

 The often chaotic, unhealthy experience of living within our present inflammatory, autoimmune culture may be inducing a healing crisis that could open us to the highest levels of embodied health and individuation. In tonight’s program, we will explore how dreams, visions, and psychedelics, used adeptly, might be some of the best mediums through which we, as psychonauts, can embark on an odyssey to free ourselves from the attachment to the bad-object bio-psycho-social stressors. In 1925 Jung recalled the nature of his own psychic voyage when he wrote, “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.” Now a century later, if we embarked on such a quest, we would encounter an even greater variety of non-conforming identities, and for some, the spirits of plant medicines and pharmaceuticals.

Today we have an ever-expanding array of meditational healing practices available to us with the potential, guided by intentional awareness, to help us sail past our own shadowy Scylla and Charybdis. We may even be able to ride the currents of our oft-traumatized neural pathways to the roots of energetic awareness itself. Jung, by means of his prophetic visionary talents, opened the doors of numinous perception, accessed the archetypal worlds, and brought its denizens vividly to life without drugs. In a letter to Father Victor White in 1954, Jung showed how keenly aware he was of the use of psychedelics in shamanic rituals and how skeptical of new psychedelic research. Jung expressed concern that modern man could “pay very dearly” for this “Trojan Horse” sent by the Gods. Quoting Goethe’s poem, “I cannot get rid/of the spirits I bid,” he pointed to the danger of unwittingly playing the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice. But then Jung also wrote: “I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvelous effect.” These marvelous effects excited a new generation of doctors who had tested and fed themselves psychedelics while pioneering research in the 1950’s. This resulted in revelations of the vast potential for healing and misuse that escalated experimentation within and outside the lab.

In the same letter, Jung warned: “It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.” With this wisdom in mind, we can better prepare to set off on our own unique therapeutic journey of initiation by the collective unconscious. This could lead us to an experience of unconditional healing within the life force itself. If we can attain even a touch of this embodiment of our true essence, it can inoculate the immune system of our entire body consciousness. Then we can meet our own revitalized holistic capacity for openness mirrored in our intimate and collective relationships in the outer world.      

Coniunctio in the Black Vas

Thinking the Float Tank Conference, West Den Haag: August 25, 2023

The Pretiosissimum Donum Dei, “the most precious gift of God,” a vital 17th century alchemical work, contains an illustration called the “Coniunctio in the Black Vas.” The illustration depicts an entirely black, hermetically sealed vessel resembling a chemistry lab beaker. Lying down within the vas, “married” together and immersed in the “black, blacker than black” agua, is the naked sacred royal couple. The alchemical concept represented here corresponds to the individuation process, the foundation of Carl Jung’s depth psychology. The ultimate goal of alchemy is the sacred marriage, the coniunctio. In order to attain the highest degree of conjunction, the prima materia — what Jung calls “the unknown substance that carries the projection of the autonomous psychic content”— must be extracted from the sacred bath. Jung says of this procedure: “in the unconscious are hidden those ‘sparks of light’ (scintillae), the archetypes, from which a higher meaning can be extracted. The magnet that attracts the hidden thing is the Self.”

In 1953, the psychoanalyst John Lilly began research in neurophysiology that led him to the creation of the float tank. It was designed to allow the occupants to experience sensory isolation in absolute darkness, floating in a bath of warm salt water in a sound proof tank that eliminated external stimuli. Lilly commented, “It has been called sensory deprivation, but I have never found any depriving effect in this at all…from womb to tomb kind of thing…but you quickly find that you continue breathing and when you are in the womb you didn’t breathe, you were fed through the navel.”

In this presentation, through the lens of depth psychology and neurophysiology, we will examine how the black vas is an alchemical precursor to the float tank and how they both function as vessels of rebirth. We will consider the plasma-like nature of thought as it navigates the bloodstream to send its psycho-neuro-endo-immunological metabolic message to different parts of the alchemical vessel we call our body. If the message from these ego identity derived thoughts is infused with the energy of the primordial, unconditioned awareness of the prima materia, and pumped through our blood in a chemical marriage with the Self, it can promote embodied conscious individuation, physical health, and ultimately, liberation.

For lecture descriptions, click on the links:

AWAKENING THROUGH DREAMS: Fall Retreat & Serenity Ridge Dialogues: Dream Yoga & Lucid Dreaming, October 17-22,2023

SINKING INTO THE PRIMA MATERIA: Coniunctio in the Black Vas, August 25, 2023

Continue reading “Courses and Lectures”

Jung used alchemy as the cornerstone of his psychology.  Not until Jung was first introduced to the Taoist treatise The Secret of The Golden Flower could he begin to make sense of many of the obscure alchemical texts with which he had struggled for years.  The analogies he found between these texts and his psychology of individuation opened up a new frontier for his work.

This course will focus on how the development of many of Jung’s theories are rooted in Eastern practices such as Tibetan Buddhism, Kundalini Yoga and the I-Ching, and how ancient concepts such as acupuncture and Tibetan Dream Yoga are relevant to Jungian healing processes.  We will also explore how this synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas led to the evolution of contemporary mind-body healing techniques and such concepts as the subtle body and embodied dream work.  Participants are encouraged to share their related experiences.  Reading materials will be supplied.