At a glance
In 1913 Carl Jung began the sequence of visionary experiences he would record, illustrate and bind in red leather as Liber Novus, the Red Book. In the same years a young J.R.R. Tolkien, not yet the author of anything, was filling a sketchbook he called the Book of Ishness with images captioned Silent, Enormous and Immense, Beyond, and then beginning to write the first tales of Middle-earth, a legendarium whose in-world source is a manuscript called the Red Book of Westmarch. Neither man read the other. Jung's Red Book was not published until 2009.
Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the parallels between those two red books, and this conversation with Curt Jaimungal is the long-form version of that research. The parallels are not vague. Jung records a red eye of the evil one; Tolkien gives Sauron a red Eye. Jung is guided by a winged old sage named Philemon; Tolkien gives the world Gandalf. The illustration styles rhyme. The timing rhymes. And both men, in their different registers, insisted the material was found rather than invented: Tolkien said the stories "already existed somewhere" and he was writing them down, Jung said Philemon "knew things that I never knew."
From that puzzle the interview opens outward into the machinery underneath it. What the imaginal realm actually is, and how it differs from a daydream. How active imagination differs from lucid dreaming. The exact protocol Tarnas uses to walk a room of forty people into it, and what happened the first time she tried. Whether archetypes are patterns the mind imposes or agencies the world contains, and why the figures in the Red Book keep insisting to Jung, "We are real and we are not symbols." Where gnosis ends and psychosis begins, why Joseph Campbell said the psychotic drowns in the waters the mystic swims through with delight, and what kept Jung afloat. It ends somewhere neither of them planned: motherhood as an expanded state, birth as the most profound one Tarnas has entered, and a page of Leonardo da Vinci on light and shade that Jaimungal happened to open, at random, minutes before recording.
This page rebuilds the whole conversation, in its order, at length.
The deep explanation
0:00 Two red books, and a child who recognized names she had never heard
The conversation opens with Jaimungal's framing of the guest: Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, whose dissertation was on "the phenomenal connection between the red books of Carl Jung and the lesser known red books of J.R.R. Tolkien." Then the first question, which is the whole subject: Professor, what did you discover about Jung and Tolkien?
Tarnas does not begin with Jung. She begins with herself at nine years old.
The Hobbit was read to her in fourth grade and she was, in her word, captivated. But the captivation had a strange quality she remembers precisely. The names in the story produced a sense of memory, "but a memory of something that I didn't actually have." She would hear Rivendell, or Dale, or Mirkwood, and think: this sounds so familiar, I feel like I've been here. Several years later she read The Lord of the Rings and had what she calls a fully immersive experience of it. As a teenager the immersion took on a doubled quality. She was living an ordinary teenage life and at the same time felt it "overlaid in some ways with a kind of imaginal immersive experience in Middle-earth." At the time she did not analyze it. She was young enough that this was simply how life was unfolding.
Then she tried to set Tolkien aside. Not strictly, not as a rejection, just the ordinary adult verdict: it's time to grow up, it's time to move on.
And then 2009 happened. Jung's Red Book was published, and Tarnas first encountered it in the New York Times Magazine spread that ran alongside it. Her reaction was that this looks really familiar, for two reasons.
The first was the title. A red book. In The Lord of the Rings, the story is written down in a book passed from generation to generation, the Red Book of Westmarch. "And so I thought, oh, a red book, a red book, that's quite interesting."
The second reason arrived when she got her hands on an actual copy. The illustrations, she felt, looked a lot like Tolkien's style of illustration.
At first that was all it was: two curiosities, a shared title and a shared visual manner. Then she went deeper and found the parallel that is harder to shrug off, which is chronological. Jung's Red Book period began in 1913, when he started having the immersive visionary experiences and fantasies that he then worked with through the practice of active imagination and recorded. In the same window, the young Tolkien, before he had written any of his stories, was keeping a sketchbook he called the Book of Ishness. The drawings in it come with almost no explanation, just evocative titles: Silent, Enormous and Immense, Beyond. Jaimungal offers to overlay the images on screen for viewers, and Tarnas is delighted.
The sequence matters. Tolkien was making those images at the same time Jung was recording his experiences, and it was out of making those drawings that, over the following few years, Tolkien began writing the first stories of Middle-earth: precursors to The Lord of the Rings, the different tales he wrote down and kept reworking.
Reading Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's legendarium in tandem, Tarnas kept finding more. Parallels not only in timing and imagery but "in story pattern, in figures who were parallel between the two." Which started her down the road of the actual question: what does this mean? What does it indicate about the nature of the human psyche, or the nature of imagination? Where does this material come from?
That question became the dissertation.
5:42 Which parallel is hardest to explain away
Jaimungal presses on the obvious objection before Tarnas can build any more of a case. Which of these rhymes is most difficult to explain? Meaning: which one is too much of a parallel for the skeptic who says these are just coincidences, because any two books have a variety of connections and disconnections.
Her answer is that no single one of them survives that objection. "I think any one of them on their own can be explained. It's the sheer volume."
Then she gives the one that most unsettles her. Both men drew a red eye. Tolkien is describing the Eye of Sauron; Jung, in the Red Book, is describing what he calls the eye of the evil one. Her reaction is not that this proves anything. It is the specific strangeness of it: why are they talking about the eye of the evil one, why this connection between the eye, an image already symbolic of many different things, and evil.
Some of it can be accounted for with a theory of archetypes along the lines Jung himself was developing. Take Tolkien's Gandalf, the wise old man, the wizard, and set him beside Jung's archetypal figure of the wise old man, who first came to Jung as Philemon, the figure in the Red Book who acted as a guide. Jung called Philemon his guru, or made that type of connection: an inner figure who guided him. So the first-pass explanation is available. Both men had the archetypal figure of the wise old man standing behind them.
But then, Tarnas says, you get into the text. And the parallels multiply past the level a shared archetype comfortably explains. Not just that both have a wise old guide, but how the two figures appear, how they talk, how they relate to the characters around them, whether that is Philemon with Jung or Gandalf with the others in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
There is a second reason she does not think this is coincidence or simple borrowing, and it is the one she keeps returning to for the rest of the interview: the way each man described the experience.
Tolkien freely acknowledged the many myths, legends and stories that inspired his writing. Jung was extremely well educated in mythology, religion, folklore. So there is a real body of parallel external influence available to both of them. And yet what each of them said about the source of the material was that it came from within.
Jung is explicit, because Jung is a psychologist and is professionally interested in what stands behind the vision-making capacity: the experiences come through the practice of active imagination. Tolkien is more veiled about his process, but he said repeatedly that he never felt he was inventing his stories. He felt they arose within him as given, and that as they came, it was as though they already existed somewhere. That is how he described it. There was a place, somewhere, where they existed. He would write them down, and as he wrote and reworked the stories, the links between them would grow.
So both are speaking about something emerging from within. Not "I am making this up, I am coming up with a story," but something internal happening. That, Tarnas says, is what she found most compelling: not only the parallels in images, figures and timing, but the fact that the two men described the arrival of the material in comparable terms.
The Platonism question: discovered, invented, or a third thing
Jaimungal reaches for a comparison from a completely different discipline, which turns out to be the pivot of the entire conversation. One of the largest debates among mathematicians in the philosophy of mathematics is whether mathematics is discovered, which is Platonism, or created by us. When you say the material emerged from inside, are you referencing something similar, or is it a third thing, neither created nor discovered?
Tarnas takes the third option, and names the mechanism.
"I would say that it's a third," she says, and the reason is agency. The agency is not located only in the human being making the discovery, and not located only in what is being discovered or disclosed. There is "a kind of co-creation, or a participation between the two."
She maps it back onto the mathematics case, with the disclaimer that mathematics is not her field. There is something real there about the nature of the world that is being uncovered, but it is not being uncovered in a fully objective sense. "It's being enacted, it's being called forth" by the mathematician, or the author, or the artist, or whoever is engaging with it. We have an agential role to play in that relationship.
Hold onto that word, participation. It comes back at 51:34 in the most personal way possible, when Jaimungal turns it on Tarnas herself and asks whether she discovered the Jung and Tolkien parallels or created them.
11:26 What "within" actually means, and why imagination is not the same as pictures
Jaimungal asks for the intuition. It is not obvious what it means to experience something within. We close our eyes and feel something within, fine. But Tolkien meant he was discovering something within rather than without. What is that? Eyes open or closed? Give an intuition.
Tarnas grants that it is a tricky thing to describe and simultaneously one of the most innate. Then she immediately flags her own bias, which is one of the more useful moments in the interview.
The word imagination is rooted in image. So the default assumption is that imagination is image-based. But from years of teaching imagination and the practice of active imagination she has learned otherwise. Some people have aphantasia and see no internal images at all. Others see them so vividly it is like being fully immersed in another world. She wants that whole spectrum held in mind before she describes anything.
The practical entry point, she says, is probably easier with eyes closed, because you are blocking the external stimulus that comes in through sight. Close your eyes, allow your consciousness to open, enter what she would call a daydream or reverie state, and for a lot of people images spontaneously start to come up.
Here she makes a distinction she will formalize much later at 1:40:56, but introduces now almost in passing, because she cannot say the sentence without it. She does not want to say the images come up in the mind. "I think mind is a little bit more narrow and specific, related to cognition, to thinking. Imagination is more broadly connected to psyche." So: you allow something to bubble up through the psyche, and observe it.
What emerges varies enormously across people:
- Seemingly random images, things that do not feel connected.
- Blurry colors that might feel correlated with the person's emotions.
- Flashes of memory, again often blurry.
- Crystal clear imagery, "as though you're watching a film within yourself."
- Total immersion, so clear and multi-dimensional that you can step right into the drama and have it surround you. Jung, she thinks, was rare in that capacity, and her sense is that Tolkien may have been similar.
- Purely auditory experience: inner voices or words.
On that last one she draws a careful boundary. This is not what we mean by hearing voices in schizophrenia, voices that feel separate from you or command you to do something. It is simply a voice, or a narrative.
And then the part she says is very tricky to describe and requires real honesty with yourself: is what I am experiencing something that my individual egoic self is producing moment to moment, or is it coming somehow from beyond me? Am I aware of this not being sourced in myself?
That demarcation line is hard to hold, because ego, mind and thoughts come in constantly. She compares the discipline to meditation: learning to observe thoughts and then wondering who the witness is. But where most meditation practice is a process of emptying, this is a process of allowing something to emerge and being present with it. Images, words, colors.
The distinction matters enormously in practice. Am I cognitively coming up with something, making something up? Or is something genuinely coming through me that I have never encountered before?
Jung's own criterion, from the Red Book, is Philemon. Jung said Philemon knew things that he never knew, that he could not know. That was when Jung was able to conclude this is something separate from him. Not completely autonomous, Tarnas is careful to say, separate in that sense: not just a subpersonality of C.G. Jung, not merely a facet of him, but something he had come into relationship with internally instead of externally.
16:38 The two-by-two: dreaming, reverie, lucid dreaming, active imagination
Jaimungal asks about the relationship between this imaginal realm and lucid dreams, or just dreams. Tarnas likes the parallel and builds it out into what is effectively a clean two-by-two.
Start with ordinary sleeping dreams. You are asleep, and it seems as though the unconscious is expressing itself, but you are not engaged with it in a conscious way. You are carried along, witness to it, part of it, but not aware you are in a dream. The waking-state equivalent of that is daydream or reverie: lying on the couch, or bored, or having a moment to yourself, which she notes we seem to have less and less of. Something passively moves through you, you bear witness, you do not really engage. A fantasy is emerging and you are watching.
Now the other pair. Lucid dreaming is when one awakens within the dream. You are still asleep, but your consciousness is awake, and you go: oh, I'm here, I'm in a dream. The waking-state equivalent of that is active imagination, which she defines here as "this practice of consciously evoking the fantasies and then entering into them, engaging with them, speaking with what or who emerges, and participating in it."
"That's like a waking version of lucid dreaming, but we're awake instead of asleep."
The organizing variable is stated explicitly. With lucid dreaming and active imagination, it is the level of consciousness and active engagement that is the key part. Daydream, reverie and natural dreaming are more just the unconscious emerging through us.
| Unconscious emerging through you | You awake and engaging | |
|---|---|---|
| Asleep | Ordinary dreaming. The unconscious expresses itself. You are carried along, part of it, not aware you are in a dream. | Lucid dreaming. Still asleep, but consciousness wakes inside the dream. "Oh, I'm here, I'm in a dream." |
| Awake | Daydream or reverie. On the couch, bored, a moment to yourself. Something moves through you passively and you witness it. | Active imagination. Consciously evoke the fantasy, enter it, speak with who emerges, participate. The waking version of lucid dreaming. |
The sponsor reads sit here in the video (an ElevenLabs segment on how Jaimungal transcribes and replays his own prep notes before an interview, and an Economist segment referencing their Elon Musk interview and their coverage of evidence that dark energy may be weakening with time). The conversation resumes on the other side of them.
22:00 The protocol: how to actually walk a room into active imagination
Jaimungal opens this stretch with his own data. When he was practicing transcendental meditation, after roughly 45 minutes, which is how long it took him to get to the state, he would reach something much like lucid dreaming, though it was extremely difficult. He also mentions, and offers to explain another time, that he developed a technique for lucid dreaming that lets him have them relatively straightforwardly, "one after the other, almost five or six in a row."
Then the question that produces the most practically useful ten minutes of the interview: are there methods you guide other people through to actively imagine? What is the protocol?
Tarnas did develop one, and she is specific about how she built it.
Where the method came from. She assembled it by gleaning what Jung wrote, primarily from Jung on Active Imagination, the volume edited by the scholar Joan Chodorow. She notes its physical size, which is itself the point: "it's only about, you know, probably just over half an inch thick." It is a compilation of everything Jung wrote on active imagination, drawn from his books, some letters, some lectures. She finds it surprising how little he wrote on it, considering how central it was to his work and to how he treated his patients, whom he would support in the practice.
She is also careful to bound what she built. This is an easy preliminary form, for students and workshop participants. It is not the deepest form one can engage in, not the way Jung was doing it or doing it with patients, not what a person practicing regularly would recognize as the full article. That caveat comes back with force at 1:15:00, when she explains exactly why she keeps it preliminary.
The protocol itself, in the order she runs it:
- Settle the body. Something like yoga nidra: move through the body, become really aware of its state, then let it go and allow physical relaxation.
- Attune to emotion. She wanted a guidepost that was not too suggestive, so the first invitation is simply to be present with whatever emotion is there, and then to allow that emotion to transform within you.
- Let the image move. This is Jung's own observation and the engine of the whole practice: if you hold an image in your inner sight, in your imagination, it will move. "This is the extraordinary thing, that it won't stay still. If you just allow." She illustrates with Jung's patient who could not do active imagination at all, until he saw a landscape on a poster in a train station depicting a hill with a path going around it, and thought: I want to see what's on the other side of that hill. Simply by holding that static image internally he was able to go up the path, around behind the hill, and discover what was there. It was the first time he had managed to engage with the practice.
- Pick a starting place if you need one. An image you have actually seen. An image from a dream. An emotion you allow to take a visual form. All good starting places.
- Ask questions, do not lead. She guides with questions rather than instructions. What colors do you see? Is a shape emerging? Is there a landscape around? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? Do you hear anything? Trying not to lead, trying to let something emerge naturally.
- Meet whoever shows up. For many people what emerges is a figure, humanoid or animal or some other kind. She then invites them into conversation with it: ask if this being has anything to say. Participants may have to lend their own voice to the emerging figure.
- Come back out. The whole practice is short, roughly 15 to 20 minutes, and then she guides people back into their bodies and grounds them.
And then the multi-stage return, which she treats as part of the practice rather than as debriefing, and which moves the material by degrees from raw experience toward shared language:
- Draw it first. A big sheet of paper, oil pastels, something really simple. For a lot of people, drawing seems to continue the experience rather than end it, precisely because they are not yet talking to anyone.
- Then write it down. A little more concrete, a little more objectified.
- Then small groups. Discuss it with three other people.
- Then the whole room. Share it in the larger group.
The first time she brought this to a workshop, she was terrified it would not work. She wanted to give people an experience of active imagination, wanted them to have a sense of what she was talking about with Jung and Tolkien, and had no idea whether anything would happen. It was, she says, truly a leap of faith.
The room held maybe 35 or 40 people. Every single person had an experience. And a potent one. Some people were crying, and finding resolution to things they had been struggling with.
What amazed her was that it clearly was not her doing it. "I was just holding the container." And every time she has done it since, with students in her classes, with workshop participants, the same thing happens, along with the same sense of amazement that anything happens at all. People are not taking a psychedelic. They are not engaging in a long practice.
Her reading of why it works is the sentence that lands hardest in this section: "It's as though, if we just create the right container and space for the psyche to speak, it wants to so badly." Create a way to engage it and a way to bring it back into this realm, and extraordinary gifts emerge.
She adds the honest disclaimer. It is not the only way, and it is not a strict Jungian way. She pieced it together from her own experiences and from what she read of Jung's, hoped it worked, and has refined it since with more people.
27:00 Why the skeptics in the room often go deepest
Jaimungal wants to know what separates the people who go deep from the people who do not, especially given she is deliberately keeping it preliminary. Is it something like trait openness? Or is it that she gave them permission, so they no longer feel foolish, because the rational mind is saying don't engage in this and now she has licensed the practice to them?
Tarnas says it would be a genuinely interesting study to run, and that her best feedback comes from students she works with for a whole semester, simply because she gets to know them better.
Then she confirms that the critical faculty is the live variable, and reports a result she finds counterintuitive.
When the mind keeps jutting in and saying this is ridiculous, or nothing's going to happen, or something will happen for everyone else but not for me, she has found a very interesting split. For some people that voice really does get in the way and they struggle. But for others, and specifically for the most skeptical, the ones most convinced this will not work for them, "somehow it bursts through anyway."
She is not sure why. Her hypothesis is that for some of those people, where the mental critical faculty is so dominant, the psyche has simply been waiting to speak. As though it is saying: finally you're listening to me, finally you're giving me space. For others the interruption is still too strong and there is a genuine repressive effect.
The other group that reliably has immersive experiences is the one you would predict: people who already have a similar practice, or who are used to entering expanded states of consciousness, and who arrive going oh yes, this, I know how to do this, this is familiar.
Why archetypes arrive as pictures and not as smells
Jaimungal picks up her earlier point that imagination, despite its root in image, does not mean visual: it could be conceptual, emotional, otherwise. Then he presses on an asymmetry. Smell is extremely primal, more primal than vision, though vision is much more developed in us. So why do archetypes appear so visually and not, say, olfactorily?
Tarnas likes the question well enough to admit she does not have a clean answer, which makes the answer better.
Her first move is to question the premise: maybe they are not so separable. She is a very visual person, she says, and had to overcome a lot of her own biases in learning how other people experience imagination. But if she smells something with a memory attached, she is dropped into a completely immersive visual experience. She gives a live example: a friend has been developing a perfumery line, and Tarnas has images connected to every single one of those scents, images of things she has never necessarily seen. Maybe a little memory mixed in, but mostly an image evoked by the scent.
So perhaps we can invoke an archetypal experience olfactorily after all, and the two channels are less disconnected than we assume.
But why do we carry the bias that imagination and archetypal experience are so visionary? She sits in the question rather than answering it, saying she has to force herself past her own perspective, since the visionary mode has been so strong for her while she has encountered plenty of people with rich imaginations who do not see in that sense.
Her tentative answer arrives with an aside that has aged into the present tense. We used to say seeing is believing, and she notes that "doesn't really work anymore in terms of how easily we can generate videos and so forth, where we don't know what we're seeing necessarily." Still, she wonders whether the visual component is what makes an inner state legible to us as another reality, something that is not the external world but is an inner world. Sight may be how we recognize that we have gone somewhere.
33:57 "We are real and we are not symbols"
Jaimungal sharpens the original thesis into a testable shape: was there something in the inner world that was, in scare quotes, objective, that Jung saw and then psychologized, and Tolkien saw and then mythologized?
Tarnas answers by going to what she calls one of the most extraordinary early encounters Jung records in the Red Book: the meeting with the prophet Elijah and his blind daughter Salome.
It is the first time Jung is really in conversation with two figures, and they are helping him understand what is even happening. He gets overwhelmed. He is frightened. And Jung himself is thinking: have I unleashed a latent psychosis? What's happening to me? So he arrives at the encounter carrying fear, anger and resistance.
As they speak to him about religious themes, about who he is and what his role is to play, he pushes back with the reduction available to a psychologist. "You are symbols."
And they refuse it. "You can call us symbols if you want, in the same way that you could call your fellow human beings symbols, but that doesn't make us any less real." They say it several times. We are real and we are not symbols.
Tarnas says she likes to take those moments seriously, both in Jung's text and in one's own experience, when the figures insist they are real. What does that mean? "That there is a reality, an ontology, to these figures. They're not literal or physical, but they have a reality to them. They're effective."
And then the twist, which is the actual answer to Jaimungal's question. Jung takes the insistence seriously on one hand, and on the other hand he psychologizes them anyway. He identifies Elijah as forethinking, and identifies the blind Salome as pleasure, which is how the word is rendered in the English translation of the Red Book. Tarnas notes the German is Lust, so other scholars have translated it as something more like desire.
So the pair break down as: one of them symbolizing thinking, or mind, and the other symbolizing love, or emotion, or feeling. Which is precisely, and directly, the origin of Jung's function of thinking and function of feeling. Two more eventually emerge to complete the quaternity, sensing and intuiting, and those become his psychological types, published in Psychological Types in 1921, coming out of the Red Book period.
Tarnas holds both halves of this at once, and it is the most balanced moment in the interview. On one side, something is lost: "you lose a lot of the mythic experience of the original encounter" when you convert it into a conceptual formula. On the other side, psychological types is something many people have found extremely valuable, a genuine psychological gift that came directly out of the experience. All while the figures themselves were saying, in the text, we are real and not symbols.
For Tolkien and mythologizing, she declines to force an exact parallel and offers an illustration instead: Gollum. Two personalities in one body. Gollum and Sméagol, a character Jungians "absolutely love," because it is such a clean example of the ego and the shadow: Gollum is the shadow become so dominant that the ego of Sméagol is nearly swallowed, yet both are clearly still there, still struggling to be present.
We can psychologize that character from a Jungian perspective. Tolkien instead just let it be a being, a compelling figure who has held readers' imaginations for decades. Tarnas says there is value in the psychological interpretation, and a different kind of value in seeing it simply in the context of a story, of a living story.
| The rhyme | Jung, in the Red Book | Tolkien, in the legendarium |
|---|---|---|
| The book itself | Liber Novus, hand illustrated, bound in red, begun 1913, published 2009 | The Red Book of Westmarch, the in-world manuscript the whole story is passed down in |
| The wise old guide | Philemon, whom Jung called his guru, who "knew things that I never knew" | Gandalf, the wise old man, the wizard |
| The red eye | The eye of the evil one | The Eye of Sauron |
| The early images | Visionary fantasies recorded and painted from 1913 on | The Book of Ishness sketches: Silent, Enormous and Immense, Beyond |
| Stated source | From within. Encountered through active imagination; the figures insist they are real | From within. "He never felt like he was inventing his stories"; they already existed somewhere |
| What he did with it | Psychologized it. Elijah and Salome become the thinking and feeling functions, then the four psychological types | Mythologized it. Gollum stays Gollum, a living figure in a story, never reduced to ego and shadow |
| How explicit about process | Fully. He is a psychologist, professionally interested in what stands behind the vision-making capacity | Veiled. He describes the arrival of material, rarely the method |
39:03 Why the figures object to being called symbols
Jaimungal keeps pulling at the thread. Why were those two characters, or whatever we want to call them, resistant to being called symbols, and yet you can psychologize them, make them a psychological archetype instead of a symbolic one? To him, symbolic is much richer than psychologizing. Or maybe that was not the connotation in Jung's time. Did it feel like it would demean them, that Elijah would be a mere symbol?
Tarnas thinks it is along those lines, and produces a second instance from a later Jung fantasy, which strengthens the case that this is a pattern rather than a one-off.
Jung encounters a young girl in a castle. He is again resistant to her. He tells her she is very fairy-tale-like, and he does not like being in this fantasy because it reminds him of the fairy tales and romance novels he was disparaging at the time. And she also insists on her reality. Her line, as Tarnas quotes it: "I'm real. Would you undercut my reality?" Undercutting it would undermine her being.
Tarnas agrees with Jaimungal about the value of symbol: it is a kind of mediation between an archetypal reality and our lived experience, a way of translating one into the other. That is different from psychologizing, which "can sometimes really flatten things, like, oh, this is just that."
But what she thinks these figures are actually defending, the young girl and Elijah and Salome and the others, is a two-sided claim:
- You cannot reduce us to something you have already met in the external world, of which we would then be a symbol.
- You cannot reduce us to your own individual personality. "I'm not just a facet of you. I have my own agency and being that you need to come into relationship with."
And when we allow for that, she says, something really profound can emerge.
Are archetypes beings, or patterns that get experienced as beings?
Jaimungal asks the ontological question directly. Tarnas begins by admitting how slippery archetypes are to define, and diagnoses why Jung reads as inconsistent on the subject.
Read Jung on archetypes and he sometimes describes them as something like beings, sometimes as something like a biological instinct, sometimes as a mythic pattern. You end up asking: is it myth, is it biology, is it instinct, is it transcendent? Her resolution is that it feels contradictory "because archetypes are all of those things all at once."
Ultimately she thinks they can be understood as beings, or as agencies. But she immediately guards the word. When she says beings she does not want to reduce them to a personified form, and she notes that even personification is hardly a reduction. We can think of the deities of the world's mythic and religious pantheons as embodiments or personifications of archetypes. But there is something beyond even those forms, informing them, shaping them, that seems clearly to be alive and to have agency, and yet is so multivalent, "so kind of iridescent in its spectrum of manifesting itself," that we can never quite say it is a being. It is almost beyond a being, beyond a personified being.
So archetypes can be met at many levels: in mythic deity form, in the form of a psychological archetype or archetypal figure of the kind Jung meets in imaginal experience, and, once we learn to perceive them, in daily life.
Her example is beauty, which Plato held as one of the three great archetypal principles alongside truth and goodness. We can recognize the archetypal principle of beauty in anything we find beautiful: a work of art, an exquisite landscape, someone we are in love with. Those are different concrete examples, but something is informing all of them.
The modern counterargument is that you simply abstract the idea of beauty from those instances, and the abstraction is a feature of the human mind. That has been the dominant modern approach to universals, and it is where you land with something like Kant's a priori categories: internal to the human mind, structuring how we see the world. Tarnas notes this is also how Jung initially viewed things.
But the more one engages with archetypal principles, she argues, "especially in expanded states of consciousness such as active imagination, or other ways of opening one's consciousness, or entering into non-ordinary states," the more it seems clear that there is a profound agency at work that is beyond something merely in the human mind to be abstracted. It is part of the world itself.
Then she puts her cards on the table, and this is the closest thing the interview has to a thesis statement from the guest: "At the end of the day I'm a Platonist, in the sense that I do not just believe but have experienced that sacred transcendent reality of archetypal principles, and cannot only see them as categories of the human mind, or of the human psyche even, but something of the world itself."
45:57 The night the archetypes lined up and introduced themselves
Jaimungal, sensibly, asks her to describe those experiences.
The one she calls most transformative happened over a decade and a half ago and was psychedelically mediated. The setup matters as much as the event. She had been learning about archetypes intensively for about a year, in the gap between finishing undergrad and starting graduate school, reading Jung and reading her own father's work, Richard Tarnas, who in The Passion of the Western Mind traces the history of archetypes from Plato through Jung and on to James Hillman and archetypal psychology and Stanislav Grof in transpersonal psychology.
So she had the whole lineage. And it was still conceptual. "I get it conceptually, but I didn't know what the experience of it was like."
Her metaphor for the shift that followed is the best image in the interview. It is the difference between not being able to read and being able to read. Before, you look at words on a page, you see shapes, you might know the letters, but it takes work or you may not know at all what you are looking at. Then you learn to read, and your eye simply lands on something written and you immediately know what it is saying to you.
That was the level of the shift. In the expanded state, it came in the form of planetary archetypes: the deities or archetypal principles associated with the planets as used by archetypal astrologers.
What happened first was chaos. She started experiencing all of these entities, energies, agencies trying to speak to her at once. When she says speak she means there was a vocal component, but it was also very visual, all internal, activating all the senses at once, even, in some ways, the olfactory. It felt like all the archetypes were so excited that she was finally ready to listen that they all wanted to tell her who they were simultaneously.
So she asked them to queue. "Please come one at a time."
And they did. One at a time, the archetypal principle associated with the Sun, then the Moon, each presenting itself in what she calls a symphony of sight and sound, immersive, "like I'd stepped to the other side of a veil."
The specific epistemic content of the experience is what makes it worth reporting. Before, she could take in a list of words: the archetypal principle of Venus relates to love, beauty, sensuality, sexuality, aesthetics, art. She could hold that as a breakdown of individual words. In the experience, "all of a sudden they became unified. I was like, oh, now I see that unified principle of how beauty and love and sensuality and aesthetics and the arts all relate to each other. That it is one thing."
And, exactly like reading, it did not switch off. Afterward, in a completely ordinary state of consciousness, she started seeing them in the world "and could never unsee them from that point on." She could recognize beauty with a capital B in a new way. She could recognize the archetypal principle of Mars within fire and athletics and violence and anger and assertion and aggression, all at once, as one principle. That was the moment it stopped being abstract, stopped being something accessible only cognitively, and became deeply experiential, with, in her phrase, "someone behind each of these principles."
51:34 Prague, before and after
Jaimungal asks the right follow-up: what is an example of something that had no beauty before, and after this experience you noticed the beauty that was always there, or that is now imbued with beauty?
Her answer is Prague, which she had visited both before and several years after.
The difference is not that she could not previously recognize something as beautiful. It is that before, recognition was local and particular: oh, I find that beautiful, that form is lovely, I find that aesthetically pleasing. All of it in the specifics of the thing she was looking at.
After, "it was as though that principle of beauty was actually glowing through everything that I saw." Not separable from the particulars, not a different thing behind them, but alive within everything she found beautiful.
She remembers the moment precisely. Walking down a street in Prague, seeing the buildings, the art nouveau style, flowers, cobblestones. And the thought that went through her mind was: Plato was right.
She perceived the living beauty coming through everything, not just in the particulars, behind and saturating all of it, and yet you could not take the particulars away and still see it. It was not a separate reality. It was living as part of all of those things. And she felt she could enter into almost a direct relationship through it, participating with all that was beautiful around her.
Did you discover the parallels, or participate in them?
Jaimungal now turns the whole conversation back on itself, and it is the best question in the interview. His first question was what did you discover between Jung and Tolkien. He used the word discover. And throughout, they have established that discovery is not straightforward, that participation may be a third thing. So: did you create this connection between Tolkien and Jung, or did you participate in it?
Tarnas says this was exactly what her dissertation committee guided her to see. At first she was simply laying out the parallels: look, these are so interesting. The committee agreed they were. And then they told her the thing that reframed the project: you are drawn to recognizing particular parallels because of who you are, because of your life experiences and interests and aesthetic sensibility.
That was the moment she realized she was the third piece between Jung's experiences and Tolkien's experiences, because she was having experiences in which she saw the parallels between the two.
The evidence that this is not merely a modest disclaimer is what happened when she started teaching it. She has guided students reading Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's work in tandem, and they see things she never saw. As soon as they point them out she thinks: of course, of course that makes sense, of course there is a parallel there. But she had completely missed them, either because they were not something she was drawn to or because they did not align with her own experience, while they aligned with the students'. Together they have gone on uncovering more parallels.
There is also a shadow archive. Plenty of parallels never made it into the dissertation or any of her lectures because she felt they were not concrete enough, though she could still see them. Her copy of Jung's Red Book has marginalia filled with additional parallels "that probably only I can see."
Which brings her back to the participatory answer: she has to take her own perception, her own imaginal experience, into account. These parallels stood out to her because her own imagination was activated in relationship to them.
And the check on solipsism is the audience. Every time she has presented this to Jungian societies or in classes, the fear is that someone will say I don't see any of them. That has not happened. People recognize them too, with the same sense of wonder and awe.
She thinks part of the appeal is simple fascination, because Tolkien and Jung are giants in their fields and uncovering parallels between them is inherently interesting. But the deeper reason she has kept pursuing the work is that it taps into something in the people who engage with it. "Yes, it's about Jung and Tolkien and the parallels between the red books, but really it's about awakening people to their own imagination, to their own relationship to the inner world, to the imaginal world, saying this is something you have access to as well."
The gift of the work, she says, is allowing others to affirm their own imaginal capacity. "This is something that is your cosmic birthright in some ways."
58:23 Universal, not objective
Jaimungal notices a word choice and asks about it. Is there a reason you say universal and not objective?
Tarnas's answer is that objective seems to indicate a removal of the observer, something existing fully separate from us, and she does not know whether that is possible, "because we're always participating as witness."
What she will accept instead is something along the lines of a consensus reality. Not objective in the sense of it is over here and it exists whether or not anyone is engaging with it, partly because the word anyone immediately gets complicated. Do we mean only human beings, or is the cosmos itself witness to itself? She flags that as a big claim rather than making it.
What she thinks you can legitimately recognize is consensus among multiple observers. Did you see that? Did you have that kind of experience? Oh yes, I did too. Jaimungal supplies the philosophical term, intersubjective agreement, and she agrees: exactly.
Then he uses the distinction to spring a genuinely sharp personal question. She had said she wants to remove some of her biases. So what is this objective Becca that she measures herself against to say she is less biased now? What is wrong with the Becca sitting in front of him? Why try to be less like Becca in order to be more like a true Becca?
She likes the question, and her answer reframes the goal entirely. There is not necessarily an objective Becca. But she would like there always to be an evolving and growing Becca. The more she can see through her complexes, biases, prejudices and assumptions, the more who she is and what she can perceive and engage with in the world expands. She can take in more, relate to more, empathize with more, if she can see beyond not who she is in a complete sense but who she has been up until this point.
She grounds it in an ordinary experience anyone can check. Look back on decisions made in your teens or twenties and ask why did I do it that way, why did I have that perspective, how did I completely miss what was happening. Because the perspective was narrower. As we grow, and as we work on ourselves psychologically, emotionally, empathically, relationally, we broaden the lens and can include more of others' perspectives. And by others she does not mean only human beings, but all earth species, a cosmological perspective.
Jaimungal compresses it: so you mean adding more perspectives. Yes, she says, and adding them in a relational sense, a sense of being able to empathize with more and more people's beings and experiences.
Then he asks whether that ever makes her feel like she is not enough.
"All the time."
Her husband, she says, would be the first to point out that she is terribly hard on herself, and she would probably do better to move in the direction of not being so biased against herself. It is something she faces pretty much daily.
1:04:00 What separates gnosis from psychosis
This is the section the whole first hour has been building toward, and Jaimungal sets it up with both barrels. Jung himself was frightened at his first active imagination encounter, unsure whether he was experiencing psychosis. So, two questions. First, what are your cautionary tales, since you have described a beautiful experience. Second, what would a hard-nosed, left-brained listener say to all of this? What separates it from psychosis, or from being hypnotized, or from just imagining, since I can imagine a ball, I can imagine a person, I can imagine anything I like?
He then names the epistemics precisely. In science, objective has a particular meaning: you should be able to replicate, run randomized trials, and so on. These are not precisely objective claims. So there must be some other method you use to determine whether something is a genuine connection or a spurious one.
Tarnas does not dodge the asymmetry. She grants that when you work with something physical and in the outer world, you can be far more objective than you ever can when working with imagination and psyche, while noting that even in physical science we always have to take the scientist's experience into account. She says plainly that it is very tricky to draw the line.
Then she gives the vocabulary that does the real work, and it is not Jung's. It is Henry Corbin's, from his essay on the mundus imaginalis:
- Imaginary: something simply made up. I can just imagine whatever I want.
- Imaginal: where something real emerges through the imagination that is beyond the individual. Closer to visionary experience.
And she offers a test for telling them apart, which is the most concrete criterion in the interview. There is a subjective confirmation that comes with the imaginal, an overwhelming feeling of veracity, whether in a mystical experience or an imaginal encounter. And it has a specific, checkable property: one feels like they can't alter it. You cannot change what has emerged. It is simply there. "And in that way there is a kind of objective quality to it. It can't be manipulated."
Then she reaches for Tolkien to illustrate it, and this is the single best piece of evidence she brings for her whole thesis.
Tolkien invented languages. Fourteen of them, she says, of which the two most developed were the Elvish languages. And he talked about what he called ghost words. These were words that emerged with the sound and the meaning already accompanying each other, so he knew exactly what each one meant. As he invented his languages, certain words arrived that he could not change. He could not change the sound. He could not change the meaning. Altering them would have felt like doing a falsity to them.
Everything else he could construct freely, and he was an extraordinary expert on grammar and the evolution of languages. But the ghost words he could not manipulate. That is the imaginal, in a man who was otherwise the most deliberate world-builder in English literature.
Tarnas thinks the same holds generally: we can have experiences we cannot change, that we simply know happened. They may be quite uncomfortable, and may show us a particular truth about ourselves, or about the divine, or anything in between. And she thinks that is where the Gnostics' term gnosis comes from. We just know.
Which is very hard to translate to someone who has not had such an experience, or who has denied one. That, she says, is part of why she is drawn to this work. She thinks a lot of people have had experiences like this, maybe once or twice in a life, but their worldview forces them to deny it. I had this odd experience, but. "And then we kind of dismiss it. It was just a fantasy. It was just something I made up," when some little part of them knows that is not necessarily true.
She is not triumphalist about it. She has made important decisions in her life around such experiences and later wondered: was that true, was that the best idea. Sometimes more time passes and she realizes it was part of a much larger context she could not understand in the middle phase. Sometimes not, or sometimes she is still in the middle of the story. "I think these unfold over a lifetime."
And then the criterion that keeps the whole thing honest: doubt is not the enemy of this, it is part of the method. "That continuous sense of doubt and skepticism is actually really, really important to validating the truth of these kinds of experiences." You ask, is it true or is it not, was that real or was it not. If some inner part of you keeps saying yes, keep listening, that is important to pay attention to. But there is also the part of us saying no, I'm just really wanting this to be true, and that is when we have to get honest with ourselves. Those can be very heartbreaking moments, and she says she has been through her share.
1:09:00 Grounding: patients, a wife, military service, and Toni Wolff
Tarnas turns to the cautionary side, which she says was Jung's own concern about active imagination: it can take the patient too far away from reality. When Jung worried about unleashing a latent psychosis, he knew exactly what he was worried about. He had worked with many schizophrenic patients at the Burghölzli in his early medical practice. It was a very real fear, sharpened by heavy exposure to patients: this is happening to me too.
What Jung arrived at, and what Tarnas endorses, she gives via Joseph Campbell, paraphrased: the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims through with delight. The crucial part is the next sentence. The waters are not different. The question is: can we swim through them? Can we re-emerge? Can we bring them back into our more objective or consensus reality?
That is why Jung was cautious with active imagination. If someone was a little too porous, or found it a little too hard to come back, it is not a safe method, because you might get stuck there, or become overly paranoid, or see symbolic images everywhere and be unable to return to something more shared, more consensual, more physically grounded.
Jaimungal brings in the story about Jung and Nietzsche: Jung was asked why Nietzsche went mad and he did not, and answered that Nietzsche spent too much time in the air, while Jung had patients, obligations, a wife, this and that, and so he grounded himself. Jaimungal draws the moral: to be extremely creative, you should also be extremely grounded in other areas.
Tarnas confirms it, and extends the concern to artists. Jung worried that some artists would indulge in these states in a kind of bacchanalia and then not bring anything back for the community, or be unable to translate it.
Then she lists what actually held Jung: his patients, his wife, his family, his military service. And then she names the person she thinks mattered most, and whose story, she says, is not often told.
Toni Wolff. Jaimungal offers muse; Tarnas notes Jung called her his spiritual wife. They had what at the time was called a left-handed marriage. Jung's wife, Emma Jung, was quite aware of the relationship, and it was difficult for her.
Wolff stood by Jung through the entire Red Book period, and the working arrangement is remarkable as a matter of method. Jung would enter these states of active imagination at night and write them down. The next afternoon Wolff would come to his home, and they would discuss the material together and try to understand it and make sense of it. Day after day.
Tarnas gives her a mythic image: she was the Ariadne to his Theseus. She gave him the thread to come back out of the labyrinth.
And the detail that makes it stranger and better: Wolff had an extremely deep trust in the unconscious and in the psyche, and yet she was unable to do active imagination herself. Tarnas finds that fascinating. Wolff offered guidance and support of a kind that all those other figures did too, but she was essential.
1:15:00 The symbolic language of madness, and the twin danger of dehydration
Jaimungal explains why he keeps asking about caution: because he has had his own experiences. He says his wife saved him, in many ways, and that groundedness is definitely one of them. He notes the BBC made a mini documentary about, as he puts it, his experiences.
Then he names the symmetry that the mystical-experience genre almost always leaves out. Yes, there is the danger of drowning in the waters. "There's also the twin danger of dehydration, of people who have no meaning at all." He sees both. And his work has him speaking to people with wildly different perspectives, all of whom he takes seriously rather than discounting as foolish, and it spins his mind.
He then tells a story he is visibly still carrying. He was walking around downtown Toronto, and there was a homeless man saying one word out loud: time. Time. Everyone else walking away from him, thinking this guy is crazy. And Jaimungal thinking: I know exactly. I can put myself in your state. I feel so horrible for you. And, in the same breath, I don't want you to trigger me. He says he is still recovering from events that happened many years ago.
Tarnas completely agrees, and gives the diagnosis that this section turns on. Part of what we see in psychosis is a lack of a worldview container that can help bring those experiences back and translate them out of a purely archetypal state into something that can be more deeply understood. Which is exactly why psychologizing, the thing that flattens the mythic encounter, also has enormous value: it puts something into a form we can concretely understand.
Her illustration, hedged with the admission that she hopes she is remembering the story correctly, is a Jung patient who described her experience of living on Mars.
Taken literally, that sounds insane. She does not live on Mars. She is very clearly in a ward, in a mental hospital.
But translate it into symbolic archetypal language. Mars, whether as planetary archetype or as deity figure, is the principle of violence, aggression, anger. I live on Mars, heard literally, sounds insane. Heard symbolically it may mean: I grew up in a home that was very violent, or filled with anger, or full of aggression. The content is not nonsense. What is missing is the capacity to translate it back into a language other people can understand.
So the line is genuinely tricky, and Tarnas insists it is fluid rather than fixed, with some people far more sensitive to entering those states and having trouble coming back. Part of why she has been able to pursue this work, she says, is that it is easier for her to come back. She has worked with students and workshop participants for whom it is harder, and with those people she wants to be more cautious: affirming the reality of the experiences, while trying to teach the methods of re-entering the embodied, relational, physical, more literal world.
Jaimungal answers with H.P. Lovecraft, one of his favorite quotes, paraphrased: that one day this unfettered investigation into science may reveal such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we may flee from the light into the peace and safety of the darkness. Many people in this space talk about the more beautiful, more majestic, more life-giving aspects of these experiences. He also sees the Icarus flying too close to the sun.
And then he inverts Jung's exchange with the figures in a way that is genuinely startling. Jung was told I'm real, I'm not a symbol. Jaimungal's reaction would be the opposite: "Oh my gosh, I have to treat you like a symbol, man. I do not want you to be real. You are too real. If anything, I don't want that." He gives the line he has kept: "God, please turn away from me so that I may stand." There is something inundating about the pure Sun.
Tarnas takes it and gives it its mythic home. There is a reason that in so many myths the gods have to veil themselves, to dim their light, so that they can relate to us at all without our being overwhelmed or shattered. And she thinks that is where part of the participatory element comes in. If we are trying to relate to archetypal principles, to be in relationship to the gods, then evoking their presence clothed in a form that does not psychologically and emotionally overwhelm us is very important.
She does not claim a concrete method for doing that. But it is the reason her guided active imagination practice is deliberately preliminary: it is for a weekend workshop, for a taste, for dipping your toes. If it is something you want to work with long term, that needs the right container, whether an experienced Jungian therapist or guide, or a community where everyone holds one another accountable and brings the experiences back.
1:21:00 "Beware of unearned wisdom"
Jaimungal raises the line every Jungian gets asked about. Jung was asked why he did not take psychedelics, and said something like: beware of unearned wisdom.
Tarnas's first response is blunt and, on reflection, obvious. "Jung didn't need them." He had that capacity himself.
She then broadens it. Many religious, spiritual and mystical figures have held that view of psychedelics, because psychedelics open us into experiences and realities that can be very hard to bring back and integrate. She points at where the field has landed as evidence: there is a reason that psychedelic scholarship right now is so interested in integration, not just the experience but the question of how you actually fold this into everyday lived reality. So "beware of unearned wisdom" is an important caution.
And then the counterweight, which is the argument she actually holds. If a person is raised and educated in a very materialist culture that denies the reality of any inner experience, then something like psychedelics, which she notes come to us in a material form, may be the only door available.
Jaimungal supplies the supporting line from Stanislav Grof, the pioneering LSD researcher: maybe the avatar had to come in a material form, in a chemical form, in order for the message to come through, because for some people that is the only way to enter that kind of state of consciousness and take it seriously.
Tarnas's conclusion is contextual rather than doctrinal. It depends on the context, on one's worldview, and on what barriers do or do not need to be broken down in order to enter these kinds of experiences.
"When will it be enough?"
Jaimungal asks what he calls a foolish question, and it is one of the two or three best in the interview. For you, when will it be enough?
He unpacks it with real generosity. Maybe it is a foolish question in the way that asking when you stop brushing your teeth is foolish, because some practices you simply do every day and if you stop you weaken. So is it like that: something the professor has to engage in, or wants to, in order to keep feeling meaning? Or is it that both of them are extremely lucky to have jobs they love, jobs that integrate with life so they can also switch off, so that walking in a forest yields ideas? He contrasts this with mathematicians he speaks to who say that going to a museum does nothing for them beyond letting the mind wander, that they cannot look at a painting and get a formula. But he and she can take almost all aspects of life this way, "and it's so beautiful, and life is so worthwhile." So is it something you live with, or is it like Pokémon cards, where you keep accumulating more perspectives and want the collection to grow?
1:26:30 Motherhood, birth, and the drift toward the subtle
Tarnas loves the question, and her answer is an arc across her own life rather than a position.
It was in her early twenties that she first did any work with psychedelics and expanded states, including holotropic breathwork, a way of expanding consciousness through breathing without taking any substance. She had many profound, life-changing experiences and says plainly that she would not be where she is today without them.
And as time has passed, she has been drawn to less and less extreme ways of engaging those states. First came active imagination, and the realization that Jung was describing something that gets us into these states but is much more subtle, much simpler, less catalyzing than a psychedelic experience.
Now she is somewhere else again. She has a two-year-old son and is, at the time of recording, seven months pregnant with her next child. Jaimungal congratulates her. So she has been in what she calls a much more sober state: she does not drink alcohol, has not had caffeine in a long time, has been very pure in approaching her pregnancies.
What she has noticed is that her engagement with the imaginal has become more subtle, and that this has let her realize how much of it is always there. The images just appear, no matter what.
The example she gives is domestic and slightly harrowing. She finally had to explain to her husband: when you come in in the morning and tell me about the intense news happening somewhere in the world, I am having a fully immersive experience of that bombing, or that war, or that massacre, and I maybe can't handle it when I first wake up. I need it a little later in the day. Through conversations like that, he has learned about the internal experience she has.
So intentionally eliciting intense expanded states has decreased as she has grown older and oriented toward family, and at the same time those states have become more integrated into the day to day.
Then the claim that reframes the entire genre: "Giving birth is probably the most profound expanded state of consciousness I've ever entered into." And she is grateful she had all the previous experiences to guide her through the birthing experience, because they allowed her to really trust the unfolding process of the birth, to have the visual experiences, the somatic experiences, to know the breathing techniques, by allowing herself to be in that more liminal state.
So, when will it be enough? She converts the question into a better one: how does engaging with the imaginal and the archetypal align with whatever stage of life I am in, in the way most appropriate for that time?
She adds two codas. First, she is glad to have those experiences behind her while raising her child, because she can see how alive his imagination is at age two and can cultivate it. Which produces the best joke in the interview: "Now I understand why they call it babysitting. It's like sitting for someone on psychedelics, but they're an infant, or a toddler. They're just experiencing the world in that same kind of porous way."
Second, and she says she does not talk about this often, what she is actually aspiring toward. She will always be deeply inspired by Tolkien, by storytellers, by people who tell archetypal stories, who tell myth. "That's really what I'm ultimately wanting to tell, to create, to write: stories." She is currently in a more academic phase of her life, but she thinks that is what she is moving toward, and maybe that is when it will be enough, when she has finally told those stories in the form she wants to tell them. And then we will see what comes after.
What she took from Harry Potter
Jaimungal asks what depth she has gleaned from Harry Potter. She grew up with it; she was ten when the first book came out, and has read the books over and over.
Her first answer is the disappointment, which she suspects many children shared: the challenge of feeling that magic does not work the way it is described, at least not for her. And then, much later in life, realizing that maybe something quite different is meant by magic. "We can engage with it, but it doesn't look like the wand waving in Harry Potter. It looks something like learning to align ourselves with the synchronicities that unfold in our lives."
Her second answer is craft. She admires how J.K. Rowling works with language and myth, and especially how the names encapsulate who a person is without telling you: if you happen to know Latin, or happen to know the mythic reference, you get a revelation of that character. She calls it very engaged and inspiring storytelling with some really profound patterns woven in, and a compelling plot sustained across seven books.
But she draws the contrast that keeps the interview's thesis intact. She does not know as much about Rowling's writing process as she does about Tolkien's, where he describes that sense of something coming through, versus constructing something.
1:33:57 A "bothist" on idealism, and what disconnection is for
Jaimungal asks about the difference between her worldview and Bernardo Kastrup's idealism. Tarnas declines cleanly: she does not know his work well enough to answer, his name has been crossing her awareness especially in the last year, and she feels inadequate to answer unless he unpacks it first. It is a small moment and a creditable one on a channel where guests are usually happy to have an opinion.
So he generalizes it: what about general idealism, the view that all there is is mind, and that you and your friends are somehow avatars of that mind, almost like eddies in an ocean?
Her answer is to refuse the halving. "I like to affirm the reality of both the one and the many, of both mind and matter."
On one hand she agrees with, and says she has had experiences affirming, a sense of divine oneness, that we are emanations of it, or that we have forgotten our origins and that this is how we are able to be part of creation, to be individual beings. But she does not espouse the view that this world or our individual experience is somehow just an illusion, something that ultimately does not matter because we are really one, or mind only. Affirming being embodied, being individuals, being separate in some ways, is just as important as recognizing the unity.
She names her position with a shrug at her own terminology: "In a very inelegant term, I consider myself a bothist." Jaimungal counters with "both but differentist," which she accepts.
The reason it matters is ethical rather than metaphysical. By affirming embodied experience, separateness, physical and psychological reality, "that's how we grow too, and mature and evolve, and have a sense of individual responsibility and autonomy." Just as important as recognizing the ways in which we are transcendent and unified and imaginal beings.
Jaimungal then asks the question that turns the whole method inside out. Most of the meaning here seems to be created from connections, from noticing that this is a parallel to that. What about disconnections?
Tarnas says this was in fact the closing note of her dissertation. She was very clear at the end: these are not the same books, and we can learn a great deal from their differences as from their parallels. Yes, she has spent this whole conversation laying out the parallels. But the differences matter, because these were two different people who had radically different experiences and made different choices about how to express them.
And that connects back to what she said about the evolving Becca at 58:23. Being able to recognize our differences, our diversity, the ways we cannot always see eye to eye, is what allows us to expand. Oh, wow, you actually see the world so differently than I do, and I can learn from that and be challenged by it and disagree with it. She thinks that is part of our incarnated experience: encountering differences, disconnections, disagreements. And then the question is whether we can handle it with grace, meeting the person or the idea somewhere that will not perfectly align in the middle, "because that's kind of the point of a disconnection," while still understanding it or sympathizing with it or being able to say I see where you're coming from.
Jaimungal asks whether her husband is as airy and floaty and abstract as she is, or whether he grounds her. She answers first in Ayurvedic terms, that he is more kapha to her vata and pitta, and then more usefully. He sees archetypes the way she does, which she calls a wonderful thing to share with someone, and they spend a lot of time on philosophy and spirituality. He comes more from a spiritual background, she comes more from a background of psyche and imagination, and they have met in the middle. He is far more grounded in orienting to the geopolitical situation of the world, and on the practical day-to-day level of attending to the physical things that need to be dealt with in the house. And he is the one who has taught her to be much more emotionally attuned and empathic. She is much more of a thinker, he is much more of a feeler. They ground each other in different ways.
1:40:56 Psyche is not mind, and why that is a political problem
Jaimungal returns to a distinction Tarnas made in passing near the start and asks her to make it properly. What truly is the difference between psyche and mind?
Psyche is the Greek word for soul. She describes it as the capacity within us to feel and to imagine, and, in a phrase worth keeping, "the internal dwelling place of the archetypal principles." The psyche can be both rational and irrational, and it is a much harder capacity to pin down.
Mind is a developed capacity, much more rational and cognitive, the mental faculty able to think something through.
Part of what makes psyche slippery is that it works at two scales at once. We can speak of individual psyches: our own soul, our own way of orienting to emotions, complexes, self-expression. But Jung, James Hillman and others also speak of psyche universally. Jung's term is the objective psyche, which is another way of describing the collective unconscious: the psyche as the interiority of the world itself. And there is the older and more beautiful term, anima mundi, the world soul. Individual and collective, part and whole.
Jaimungal notes that mind gets the same treatment, and she agrees: people speak of the universal mind or the cosmic mind as a way of speaking of the divine, terms that tend to come out of mystical or religious experience. He says he has never heard that. She is careful not to disagree with anyone's use of those terms, since they are pointing at a universal or cosmic intelligence.
Back at the individual human level, her claim is that there is an intelligence to the mind and a different intelligence to psyche. Both are ways of knowing and perceiving. But we use the mind in a much narrower capacity, and our contemporary education systems focus almost entirely on honing it, through reading, writing, mathematics, the sciences, while not always accounting for the fact that the psyche is informing all of it unconsciously: through our psychological complexes, through how our emotions enter into the way we think and shape our biases. They are always working in tandem, but we train one and not the other.
Which is why she thinks practices like active imagination, or any of the arts, or working with intuition, matter: they train the psyche to perceive and imagine in a way that is a little more conscious and a little more rational, so it can work in tandem with the cognitive mind.
Her evidence is from science itself. There are wonderful examples of scientific breakthroughs where the scientist has an intuition first, or imagines something first, or even dreams it, and then goes to confirm it with the rational mind, verifying it with physical facts or mathematics. That is the two working in conjunction. "But we so often leave that part out of the story," the moment of getting the vision, keeping only the verification.
And then the sharp turn, where a psychology of imagination becomes an argument about power. The alternative, treating the rational mind as the real one, the one we can trust, and the psyche as "a whole messy nonsense that I don't even know how to begin to engage with," feels dangerous to her. Because then you have people who believe they are making rational decisions about science, politics or anything else without accounting for the role of the psyche, and without knowing how they are being influenced by it.
Jaimungal asks what she means. Her example is a policy decision that will affect many people, made without taking into account the decider's emotions around the subject, the traumas they carry, the complexes that developed in early childhood or beyond, all of which are shaping why they are making this decision while they are not looking at why they might be making it. Whether that is denying groups of people rights, or making decisions about how we treat the environment, based on motivations we are not deeply aware of. "Maybe it's greed because we were undernourished as a child, or something like that." It is important, she argues, to do the work of looking at the deeper psychological motivations behind our so-called rational decisions, so the two can work in tandem.
| Mind | Psyche | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A developed capacity: rational, cognitive, the faculty that thinks something through | Greek for soul. The capacity to feel and to imagine, "the internal dwelling place of the archetypal principles" |
| Rationality | Rational by definition | Both rational and irrational, and much harder to pin down |
| At the collective scale | Universal mind, cosmic mind, usually a term for the divine out of mystical or religious experience | The objective psyche, another name for the collective unconscious; anima mundi, the world soul |
| How we train it | Relentlessly. Reading, writing, mathematics, the sciences, the whole education system | Barely at all. Active imagination, the arts, working with intuition |
| What happens if you ignore it | You cannot verify the vision | Complexes, traumas and emotions shape "rational" decisions while you believe they are not there |
What the shadow is, and the two ways to find yours
Jaimungal follows the thread from deeper psychological motivations to the term itself: what is the shadow?
In Jung's definition, Tarnas says, it is part of our egoic consciousness. The part of us that says I am, that says I am Becca, this is my identity, this is how I present myself in the world. The shadow is everything we are within that which we have denied, or will not look at.
And the very apparent thing about it: pretty much everyone else can see your shadow better than you can. "To ask one's spouse is probably the best way to get to know your shadow." It is more apparent to others than to ourselves.
She gives the two practical handles:
- Ask the people closest to you whom you trust to be honest. They know.
- Watch what triggers you. When someone really bothers you, ask do I do that? Or, more uncomfortably: am I so bothered by them because they're doing something that some deep primal part of me really wants to do right now?
Why it matters to integrate it: if we repress the shadow, it is still part of our identity acting without our conscious awareness. That is when we often make bad decisions and then try to justify them to ourselves, or say that wasn't really me, I didn't do that, or that's not part of who I am, while acting from exactly that place. So the shadow is not necessarily a bad thing. It is something we have not included in our identity, that is clearly part of it.
Jaimungal answers with a line from one of Aesop's fables: we mortals scorn what we valiantly strive for but don't obtain. He says it motivates him often, because whenever he finds he is deriding something, it is almost invariably because of jealousy or envy or covetousness.
1:46:55 Leonardo on light and shade, which arrived uninvited
And then the interview closes on a coincidence Jaimungal cannot resist reporting, and which he explicitly labels as such: speaking of meaningful coincidences.
A couple of minutes before the podcast, he had two books on his desk. One was a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, all the sketches with the writings transcribed. He flipped through it randomly, landed on a page, and the page was headed light and shade. Minutes before an interview whose last topic turned out to be the shadow.
He reads it out:
Shadow partakes of the nature of universal matter. All such matters are more powerful in their beginning and grow weaker towards the end. I say at the beginning, whatever their form or condition may be, and whether visible or invisible.
Tarnas's response is about lenses rather than about the content. She says it is amazing to hear Leonardo's reflection on shadow through all those different lenses simultaneously: of course she is hearing it through the Jungian psychological lens, and at the same time knowing him as an artist, as someone who was so observant of the world, of shadows in the actual world.
Jaimungal says he finds it incredibly philosophical, and that he had not expected someone like Leonardo to speak so poetically. Then he reads the second passage:
Darkness then is the strongest degree of shadow and light is its least. Therefore, O painter, make your shadow darkest closer to the object that it casts, and make the end of it fading into light, seeming to have no end.
His comment: read that on psychedelics and you'll get many, many insights.
The two of them thank each other. Tarnas says it has been a real honor, that she has enjoyed the conversation and enjoyed seeing where his mind goes with these questions. And she signs off with a line that doubles as a fair description of the whole episode: "Your questions are so good at getting to the heart of the matter that sometimes I was like, well, I hope I'm not leaving out important preliminary material, but I know that that's part of your technique of diving deep into the subject with your guests."
Where it stands
Everything above is the conversation rebuilt. This section is the part that is not in the video.
What is solid. The historical parallels are checkable, and they are the strongest thing here. Jung's Red Book period did begin in 1913 and the manuscript was not published until 2009. Tolkien's Book of Ishness is real, dates from the same period, and carries those captions. The Red Book of Westmarch is genuinely the in-world source of The Lord of the Rings. Jung's psychological types did come out of the Red Book period and were published in 1921. Toni Wolff's role is documented. Those are matters of record, and the biographical coincidence of timing is real and genuinely striking.
What is interpretation. The claim that the parallels indicate a shared source rather than a shared culture is exactly where the argument becomes a reading rather than a finding, and Tarnas is unusually straight about this. She concedes at 5:42 that any single parallel can be explained away and rests her case on volume, which is an argument that cannot be made rigorous: nobody has counted the parallels between Jung's Red Book and a randomly chosen contemporary's notebooks as a baseline. Both men were steeped in the same European mythological and folkloric material, in the same decade, in the shadow of the same war. A skeptic's account, that two well-read Northern European men working from a shared symbolic inheritance produced overlapping imagery, costs nothing and explains a lot. Tarnas never pretends otherwise; she simply finds it insufficient given the volume and given the way each man described the arrival of the material.
Where it leaves the map. The Platonism she affirms at 39:03, that archetypes are agencies belonging to the world rather than categories of the mind, is a metaphysical position, not a result. It is a respectable one with a long lineage, and it is not testable in the sense Jaimungal names at 1:04:00 when he brings up replication and randomized trials. To her credit, she does not claim it is. Her substitute criteria are intersubjective agreement and the unalterability test, both of which are real and both of which are weaker than replication. The planetary archetype framework she describes at 45:57 comes out of archetypal astrology, which has no evidential standing in psychology or astronomy, and the section is best read as a phenomenological report of what a specific framework felt like from inside rather than a claim that the framework is true.
What survives regardless of your metaphysics. The practical material is the durable part of this episode. The four-state map at 16:38 is a clean piece of phenomenology. The active imagination protocol at 22:00 is specific enough to try. The observation that held images move on their own is the kind of claim anyone can check in ten minutes. Campbell's swimming and drowning, and Jaimungal's addition of dehydration as the twin failure, is a better frame for the risks of this territory than most of what gets written about it. And the psyche-versus-mind argument at 1:40:56, that we train one faculty exhaustively and the other not at all while both are always operating, does not require you to believe archetypes are alive.
Key takeaways
- Jung and Tolkien began their red books in the same years, independently, and neither read the other. Jung's Red Book period started in 1913; Tolkien's Book of Ishness sketchbook is contemporaneous, and the Middle-earth tales followed from it. Jung's Red Book was not published until 2009.
- The parallels are specific, not vague. A wise old guide (Philemon, Gandalf), a red eye of evil (the eye of the evil one, the Eye of Sauron), rhyming illustration styles, and both men insisting the material was found rather than invented.
- No single parallel survives the coincidence objection. Tarnas concedes this immediately and rests her case on volume plus the way both men described the source.
- Neither discovered nor invented: participated. Tarnas's third option is co-creation, where the agency lies neither purely in the knower nor purely in the known. She applies it to herself as ruthlessly as to her subjects: her dissertation committee made her see she was the third piece.
- Active imagination is to lucid dreaming what daydreaming is to dreaming. The axis that matters is not sleep, it is whether consciousness is merely present or actively engaged.
- Held images move. Jung's core observation, and the engine of the protocol: an image held in the inner sight will not stay still.
- Every person in a room of forty had an experience the first time Tarnas ran her workshop protocol. Her reading: "If we just create the right container and space for the psyche to speak, it wants to so badly."
- The most skeptical participants often go deepest. For some the critical faculty represses; for others the psyche bursts through anyway, "as though the psyche is saying, finally you're listening to me."
- The figures in the Red Book refuse to be called symbols. "We are real and we are not symbols." Their objection is two-sided: you cannot reduce us to something external of which we are a symbol, and you cannot reduce us to a facet of your own personality.
- Jung psychologized what he met; Tolkien mythologized it. Elijah and Salome became the thinking and feeling functions and then Psychological Types in 1921. Gollum stayed Gollum.
- The imaginal is not the imaginary. Corbin's distinction, with Tarnas's test: imaginal content arrives with its own veracity and cannot be altered. Tolkien's ghost words, whose sound and meaning he could not change, are the cleanest example.
- Doubt is part of the method, not the enemy of it. "That continuous sense of doubt and skepticism is actually really, really important to validating the truth of these kinds of experiences."
- The waters are the same; the question is whether you can swim. Campbell's line, Jung's caution, and Jaimungal's crucial addition of the twin danger: dehydration, meaning no meaning at all.
- Psychosis may be a translation failure rather than a content failure. Jung's patient who lived on Mars was speaking archetypal language about violence and anger without a container to translate it back.
- Toni Wolff was the thread out of the labyrinth. Jung wrote at night, and she came the next afternoon to help him understand it, day after day, through the whole Red Book period. She could not do active imagination herself.
- Psyche is not mind. We train the cognitive faculty exhaustively and the imaginative one barely at all, while both are always operating, which is how unexamined complexes end up inside decisions we call rational.
- The shadow is best found in other people's reports of you, and in what triggers you. Ask your spouse. Then ask why that person bothers you so much.
- Giving birth was the most profound expanded state Tarnas has entered. The arc of her life has run from psychedelics and holotropic breathwork in her twenties toward subtler engagement, and toward wanting to write stories rather than analyze them.
Chapters
- 0:00 Jung and Tolkien's Red Books
- 5:42 Archetypal Rhymes and Parallels
- 11:26 Defining the Imaginal Realm
- 16:38 Active Imagination vs. Dreaming
- 22:00 Active Imagination Protocol
- 27:00 Psyche's Spontaneous Expression
- 33:57 Ontology of Imaginal Figures
- 39:03 Psychologizing vs. Mythologizing
- 45:57 Planetary Archetypes Experience
- 51:34 Perceiving Universal Beauty
- 58:23 Universal vs. Objective Reality
- 1:04:00 Psychosis vs. Gnosis
- 1:09:00 Grounding the Visionary
- 1:15:00 Symbolic Language of Madness
- 1:21:00 Unearned Wisdom and Psychedelics
- 1:26:30 Motherhood as Expanded State
- 1:33:57 Meaning in Disconnection
- 1:40:56 Intuition in Science
- 1:46:55 Leonardo's Light and Shade
Notable quotes
"I think any one of them on their own can be explained. It's the sheer volume." — Becca Tarnas, on why the Jung and Tolkien parallels are hard to dismiss, 6:38
"He often says he never felt like he was inventing his stories. He felt like they arose within him as given, and that as those would come, like they already existed somewhere." — Becca Tarnas, on Tolkien's account of where the legendarium came from, 9:26
"There's something real there about the nature of the world that is being uncovered, but it's not being uncovered in a fully objective sense. It's being enacted, it's being called forth by the mathematician, or by the author, or the artist." — Becca Tarnas, choosing a third option over discovery and invention, 11:38
"Philemon knew things that I never knew, that I couldn't know." — Carl Jung on his inner guide, quoted by Becca Tarnas, 16:36
"That's like a waking version of lucid dreaming, but we're awake instead of asleep." — Becca Tarnas, defining active imagination, 18:50
"If you hold an image in your inner sight, in your imagination, it will move. This is the extraordinary thing, that it won't stay still. If you just allow." — Becca Tarnas, on Jung's central practical observation, 25:08
"And I was blown away. It was a group of maybe 35, 40 people. Every single person had an experience." — Becca Tarnas, on the first time she ran her guided active imagination workshop, 27:56
"It's as though, if we just create the right container and space for the psyche to speak, it wants to so badly." — Becca Tarnas, 28:42
"You can call us symbols if you want, in the same way that you could call your fellow human beings symbols, but that doesn't make us any less real. We are real and we are not symbols." — the figures of Elijah and Salome answering Jung in the Red Book, quoted by Becca Tarnas, 36:20
"I'm real. Would you undercut my reality?" — the young girl in the castle, from a later Jung fantasy, quoted by Becca Tarnas, 41:14
"At the end of the day I'm a Platonist, in the sense that I do not just believe but have experienced that sacred transcendent reality of archetypal principles." — Becca Tarnas, 46:12
"Please come one at a time." — Becca Tarnas, to the archetypes arriving all at once, 48:30
"The thought that went through my mind was, Plato was right." — Becca Tarnas, walking through Prague after the experience, 53:24
"I was the third piece between Jung's experiences and Tolkien's experiences, because I was having experiences where I was seeing the parallels between the two." — Becca Tarnas, on what her dissertation committee made her see, 55:05
"This is something that is your cosmic birthright in some ways." — Becca Tarnas, on why the work is really about the reader's own imagination, 58:26
"Does that ever make you feel like you're not enough?" "All the time." — Curt Jaimungal and Becca Tarnas, 1:02:20
"He couldn't change the sound. He couldn't change the meaning. It would feel like he was doing a kind of falsity to them." — Becca Tarnas, on Tolkien's ghost words, 1:06:48
"The psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims through with delight. And the waters aren't different. It's, can we swim through them? Can we re-emerge?" — Joseph Campbell, paraphrased by Becca Tarnas, 1:10:33
"She was the Ariadne to his Theseus. She gave him the thread to come back out of the labyrinth." — Becca Tarnas on Toni Wolff, 1:13:32
"There's also the twin danger of dehydration, of people who have no meaning at all." — Curt Jaimungal, adding the failure mode nobody names, 1:14:34
"God, please turn away from me so that I may stand." — Curt Jaimungal, quoting a line he has kept, 1:19:05
"Jung didn't need them. He had that capacity himself." — Becca Tarnas, on why Jung warned against unearned wisdom, 1:21:09
"Giving birth is probably the most profound expanded state of consciousness I've ever entered into." — Becca Tarnas, 1:27:19
"Now I understand why they call it babysitting. It's like sitting for someone on psychedelics, but they're an infant, or a toddler." — Becca Tarnas, 1:28:24
"In a very inelegant term, I consider myself a bothist." — Becca Tarnas, refusing to choose between the one and the many, 1:33:08
"These are not the same books, and we can learn a great deal from their differences as from their parallels." — Becca Tarnas, on the closing note of her dissertation, 1:34:13
"Psyche is the Greek word for soul. You could say the internal dwelling place of the archetypal principles." — Becca Tarnas, 1:37:35
"Pretty much everyone else can see your shadow better than you can. To ask one's spouse is probably the best way to get to know your shadow." — Becca Tarnas, 1:44:05
"Shadow partakes of the nature of universal matter. All such matters are more powerful in their beginning and grow weaker towards the end." — Leonardo da Vinci, read aloud by Curt Jaimungal from the notebook he opened at random before the interview, 1:46:48
"Darkness then is the strongest degree of shadow and light is its least. Therefore, O painter, make your shadow darkest closer to the object that it casts, and make the end of it fading into light, seeming to have no end." — Leonardo da Vinci, read aloud by Curt Jaimungal, 1:48:00
Resources mentioned
The guest and her work
- Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the guest for this episode
- Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Tarnas's book
- Jung's Participatory Imagination, her lecture on the participatory reading of Jung
- Becca Tarnas's PhD defense, the dissertation on the two red books, defended in full
Jung
- Carl Jung
- The Red Book (Liber Novus), begun 1913, published 2009
- The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, the New York Times Magazine piece that introduced Tarnas to the Red Book
- Jung on Active Imagination, edited by Joan Chodorow; the source Tarnas built her protocol from
- Jung on active imagination: features, methods and warnings, a working overview of the practice
- Psychological Types, 1921, the four functions that came out of the Red Book period
- The shadow, the IAAP's short article on the concept
- The collective unconscious, what Jung also called the objective psyche
- Jungian archetypes
- Synchronicity
- Toni Wolff, Jung's collaborator through the Red Book period
- Emma Jung
- The Burghölzli, the Zurich clinic where Jung worked with schizophrenic patients
Tolkien
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Hobbit, read to Tarnas in fourth grade
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Red Book of Westmarch, the in-world manuscript of the legendarium
- Gandalf, Sauron and Gollum
- Tolkien's constructed languages, the fourteen languages, and the ghost words he could not alter
Philosophy and psychology referenced
- Henry Corbin and Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, the source of the imaginary versus imaginal distinction
- Richard Tarnas and The Passion of the Western Mind, the history of archetypes from Plato to Grof
- James Hillman, archetypal psychology
- Stanislav Grof, transpersonal psychology, and the line about the avatar arriving in chemical form
- Holotropic breathwork
- Joseph Campbell, the mystic who swims and the psychotic who drowns
- Plato and Platonism in mathematics
- Kant's categories, the modern account of universals Tarnas is arguing against
- Anima mundi, the world soul
- Gnosis
- Aphantasia
- Lucid dreaming and yoga nidra
- Bernardo Kastrup and idealism, raised, and honestly declined
- Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in Jung's account, spent too much time in the air
Culture and the closing coincidence
- Leonardo da Vinci and his notebooks, the light and shade passage
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, the terrifying vistas of reality
- Aesop's fables, we mortals scorn what we valiantly strive for but do not obtain
- Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling
Curt Jaimungal and Theories of Everything
- Theories of Everything on YouTube
- The Theories of Everything Substack
- BBC interview with Curt Jaimungal, the documentary he refers to at 1:15:00
- Related episodes he points at: Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Leo Gura, Iain McGilchrist, Greg Kondrak, John Vervaeke, Bernardo Kastrup and Susan Blackmore, and the Consciousness Iceberg
