E34: Science, Enchantment and Interconnection with Dr Joseph Cambray
Episode 34 of We are Open Circle’s Beyond Listening Podcast saw Joseph Cambray come onto the show to discuss his journey as an academic on the cutting edge of Science, Psychology and enchantment. For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
How Joseph balances his scientific background with his experiences of enchantment.
How he was transformed at different stages of his life by experiences of enchantment, coincidence and disruption.
How he got hooked by Jungian dreams, the unconscious field and synchronicity.
Joseph Cambray is a Jungian Analyst, and past President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. Recently finishing a long and impactful tenure as President and CEO of Pacifica University, his publications include Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe and Jung, science, and his legacy.
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
Joseph describes the feeling of his own enchantment as ‘animation’, believing that focusing too closely on scientific methods inhibits this response.
”The more we become objectively focused and reductive, scientifically-oriented in our thinking and our cosmology, what have you... it gives us great precision, but at the cost of a kind of aliveness. I'm very interested in the use of language and communication more broadly for these kind of states of animation because I think that's really what the enchanted world was and is about - what makes things come alive? Otherwise we have a lot of ghosts on our hands.”
Everything is interconnected. The rhizomatic reality keeps manifesting itself in some remarkable ways...
“Somebody at MIT published a comparison of a mouse brain, a slice through a mouse brain, and the shape of the universe. And without scale, you couldn't tell the difference. You don't know which is which. They're fundamentally identical. Does that mean the universe is an intelligent brain? Well, that's beyond our capacity to say, but is that morphology part of the nature of life and part of the nature of the universe? Absolutely.”
The Western world is on a path of rediscovery and re-enchantment.
”To many indigenous populations, they saw and knew this. I mean, this isn't new, we're rediscovering. We've taken a journey through separating the subjective from the objective and kind of treating the subjective as mostly superstitious and of little or no value. And now there's a kind of recovery and bringing it back and in that recovery process, I think that's where the possibility of re-enchantment starts to occur.”
