Description

A Jungian Wisdom School of the Heart Presents – Earth, Cosmos, Psyche: Navigating Planetary Initiation

Individuation in the Gaianthropocene: Planetary Wisdom for the Second Axial Age

The entire Earth community, with humans at the head, has been plunged into the fires of initiation and is being drawn into a kind of planetary Near Death Experience. A new identity is struggling to emerge, even as the old one seeks to entrench its power.

In this presentation, Sean Kelly will reflect upon the nature of this new identity, drawing from Jung’s insights into the archetype of the Self and the process of individuation. In doing so, he will explore how one can, and must, reimagine the Self and individuation in the age of the Anthropocene, or Gaianthropocene, as he prefers to call it. He will be assisted in this reimagining by bringing Jung into dialogue with Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s vision of cosmogenesis, Joanna Macy’s understanding of the Great Turning, and his own proposals regarding a second Axial Age and a planetary Wisdom by which this age might be guided.

Sean Kelly, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). He is the author of Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation; Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era; and Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path toward Wholeness; co-editor (with Richard Tarnas) of Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof; (with Donald Rothberg) of Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers; and (with Sam Mickey and Adam Robbert) of The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era. Along with his more academic pursuits, Sean has trained intensively in the Chinese internal arts (taiji, bagua, and xingyi) and has been teaching taiji since 1990. He has also worked closely with Joanna Macy and is a trained facilitator in The Work that Reconnects.