When
Sunday, February 11, 2018 at 10:30 AM EST-to-
Sunday, February 18, 2018 at 12:30 PM EST
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Where
This is an online event.Contact
Gifts CompassGifts Compass Inc
419-494-4144
info@giftscompass.com
Jung and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation
Two Webinars on Sunday February 11 and 18, 2018
In 1939 Jung wrote a “Psychological Commentary” to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Jung’s essay is a characteristic mixture of deep, imaginative interpretation and bold reflections on the difference between East and West. The book itself can be read as a companion volume to the much better known Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published twenty-seven years earlier.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation is made up of selections from three different Tibetan source texts by different sets of translators. The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation continues to fascinate as a powerful work of spiritual fiction among the earliest intellectual encounters of East and West.
Written at the height of National Socialism, Jung’s commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation is an eloquent and provocative meditation on the crisis of the West—a meditation that remains relevant to the 21st century.
In the first of our two seminars we will focus on the first two books of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation and attempt to understand the text for ourselves; and then in the second seminar we will be studying Jung’s commentary. This is an opportunity to “read alongside Jung” and watch an ever resourceful and penetrating reader make compelling sense out of a strange, difficult book.
Text: W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, with a new foreword by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Psychological Commentary by C.G.Jung, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Seminar 1: Books 1-2 (pp.104-240) Seminar 2: Jung’s Psychological Commentary, pp.xxix-lxiv
Dates/Times: Sunday February 11 and Sunday February 18, 2018; 10:30 A.M. to 12:30 PM Eastern North America; 16:30 to 18:30 Central European Time; 3:30 to 5:30 PM Lisbon; 1:30 to 3:30 PM São Paulo
Tuition: $78 (includes both seminars) .
Your Seminar Leader, Krishnan Venkatesh
Born in Malaysia in 1960 to a South Indian Brahmin father and a Hakka Chinese mother, Venkatesh was brought up in England and studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he obtained First Class honors. He subsequently did postdoctoral work for over four years on Shakespeare at the University of Muenster, Germany, as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter for the great Shakespeare scholar Marvin Spevack. From 1986-89 he taught literature and philosophy at Shanxi University, People’s Republic of China. Both his personal and academic background make him well suited to being a “bridge” between various traditions.
Since 1989 he has taught at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, both in the two Western Great Books programs (for which the college is most famous) and was one of the founders of the unique Eastern Classics Master’s program, in which he has taught for 20 years. The program involves close study of the classics of China, India and Japan, as well as rigorous immersion in Classical Chinese or Sanskrit for the sake of greater intimacy with the texts. Venkatesh has taught in all areas of the program, including Chinese and Sanskrit. From 2003-2008 he was the dean of graduate studies at the college.
With Socrates in the Phaedrus, he is skeptical of the value of publication and believes strongly in conversation as the most powerful mode of learning—the “writing in the heart.” St. John’s College has been an ideal academic home for him because of the shared belief in the power of discussion within a sincere community of learning.
In the last decade he has spent a total of about two years in India. His recent areas of work have included the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the Japanese philosopher Dogen, and the mathematical books of Johannes Kepler.
Krishnan leads a most engaging discussion .. . and brings deep learning and experience to bear. The seminar opens the text in new and unfamiliar ways, and also leads to a much greater appreciation of Jung’s brilliant commentary. A very worthwhile and enjoyable experience!
Murray Stein, Jungian analyst