Whitehead and Jung: Meeting the Divine in Our Dreams
Live Session Info
Dates: March 8, 2022 – April 12, 2022
Meeting Times: Tuesdays, 4:30 PM Pacific / 7:30 PM Eastern
Zoom Info: Click on the session links below to access.
Course Summary
In this six-session course, Dr. Sheri D. Kling will draw from the ideas of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead as well as recent brain science to guide participants through an exploration into the dreaming body-mind and religious experience.
Course Description
Modern people seem to be in trouble. We’re split from each other societally, huge swaths of us are lonelier than ever before, and we are fragmented within – sometimes even at war within ourselves. The cultural story we are immersed in, the dominant Western worldview, sadly fosters our fragmentation.
How can we hope to come to a place of wholeness? How can we change our relationships with each other and with the very earth that we depend upon?
We must find a new story and new practices that foster embodied experiences of wholeness to experience for ourselves the value, relationality, and transformation that Whitehead and Jung show us is true at all levels of reality. When we understand this at a deep level, and experience that reality for ourselves through practices like dream work that foster sacred encounter, we learn that we matter, we belong, and we can experience positive change.
In this course, we’ll look at the fragmentation that ails us, the healing power of numinous experience, a wider view of perception, the power of spiritual dream work, and a possible role of the vagus nerve in dreaming to reflect on how dreams can be understood as both embodied and as the kind of religious experience that can transform lives. Whitehead tells us that “Expression is the one fundamental sacrament.” If we understand his word “expression” as meaning the same as what Jung means by “symbolism,” then we might better understand the profound capacity of dreams for engendering healing in the psyche. We might argue, then, that dreams are a fundamental sacrament, or, as Jung himself said about our experience of dreaming, “Every night a Eucharist.”
