Jeannet Weurman – Navigating Turbulent Times: Jung, Psyche, and Our Collective Future. 24 September 2025

Jeannet Weurman gives a comprehensive presentation, detailing her personal journey and drawing parallels between the turbulent times Jung lived through—with particular reference to The Red Book and Answer to Job—and the divisiveness and authoritarianism we are experiencing in 2025.

Her lecture is beautifully illustrated. Citing Jung’s comment ‘the wealth of the soul exists in images’, image 135 from The Red Book depicts flames rising from the home of the fire gods in Norse mythology to grasp the tree of life, while new creatures arise from smoke and ashes, all of them contained within the cycle of the world egg. This aptly sets the scene for a talk which covers psychedelics, kundalini, daimons, complexes, trauma, individuation and gnosis. Fire imagery, expressing energy, risk, dynamism, and numinosity, is an ongoing theme, with brilliant illustrations by Ted Wallace and some illuminating diagrams by Jeannet.

She begins by exploring these expanded states of consciousness, how they feel and impact on our senses. Then she asks whether theory can help us understand our own experiences, concluding that it can offer a useful framework at some level. Next she explores the potential dangers of opening up to deeper levels of awareness, the powers and  shadows of the Dionysian journey. Finally, she addresses our collective culture, its materialism and one-sidedness. Drawing on the work of Cynthia Bourgeault and the Akashic field of Ervin Laszlo, she concludes that, although more people are awakening, our Western culture is reluctant to welcome transcendent experiences.

Report written by Sue Lewis

A Note from Jeannet Weurman

Thank you again so much for inviting me to speak and for your comments and questions afterwards. I wished we could have had longer for everyone to share their experiences and understandings, as we can all learn from one another.

I also wish I had been able to answer some of the questions more clearly (hard to formulate answers on the spot!) so I wanted to add something here.

It relates to one of the core questions from my presentation – whether there is something that ‘listens back’ – something we can experience as co-creating with us the forms and experiences that arise.

I guess that is what keeps me going – the longing to feel whatever that is, engage me and, in my inner world, constellate something through me.

I don’t know whether that really makes a difference to anything at the level of our everyday lives. Maybe it doesn’t, or maybe it’s just showing us glimpses of a deeper, underlying reality that is always there already, and we just don’t see it – unless we really pay attention in the moment, as Richard suggested.

When it happens, though, for me it feels like it matters deeply. That something vital and beautiful is channelled into our world – something beyond our comprehension, but with the qualities of infinite Love, Light, Wisdom and Compassion – an outpouring of exuberant Joy – so hard to come by in today’s world. I hope that maybe, as more of us open ourselves up to channel this creative force, something will shift in our collective psyche.

That is what Chris Bache saw – that even archetypes can change (on a much longer timescale than our own) and that the cumulative pressures of our times are bringing about a tectonic shift in our collective psyche to create the new emergence of a Future Human.