Alchemy and the Reflective Process: An Interview with Robert Bosnak

Starting November 5th, 2015, Robert Bosnak will teach a 10-week course via JungPlatform.com based on James Hillman’s Silver and the White Earth. Sign up before October 11th for an Early Bird Discount here. Jung Society staff writer Pamela Thompson sat down with Robert Bosnak to discuss the reflective process and the content of the upcoming course.

We will focus on the central part of James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology, working on the chapter “Silver and the White Earth.”  Prominent will be the art of reflection often central to people’s lives. How do you reflect and how does reflection affect you? How does it affect you physically? Also, central to my work on embodied imagination, we will discuss the moon and how the moon is related to imagination.

You will find that we often think and reflect on things in habitual ways. Once you take alchemy as a model, an opening can happen for new ways of seeing. And that’s more important than new theories or new ideas. Once you see the world through a new lens, your world changes. The intention of the course is for you to have a less conventional way of looking at the world when you come out of it.

I don’t think that there is one single essence. There are many essences. Because (Hillman) finds many different nuggets, he also finds many different veins of Silver. I think the most important thing I have taken away from his work is the complete upheaval of the way I used to look at the world. Now I look at the world in a way that makes me feel much more in my body: More alive, quickened and connected.

Our relationships to each other are based on what we think about ourselves and what we think about others. If you start to reflect in an unusual mirror, say you’ve always been looking in a mirror that is bulging in a particular way, you will have a particular self-image. Once you change the mirror you will see a different person in the mirror and you will see a different reflection. As you see a different reflection of yourself you will also see a different reflection of others. You become no longer sure who you are and who others are. New possibilities for relationships flourish.

If you have been stuck in a particular groove, get out of it! Part of the work is that you no longer feel groovy! Frequently feeling groovy shows that you are very much in the flow of something that you’ve always been in the flow of. There is a moment in the course where there is an upheaval and you don’t really know what groove you are in. It is then you can move into a different orbit. So what the course wants to do is to make a quantum leap–a leap into a different orbit.

I’ve been working with alchemy for 45 years and I am in constant transformation. I see the world differently all the time. Alchemy is like the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl. It’s always a bit grating, and it’s always throwing you off. For a while you think you understand it, and then you don’t understand anything anymore and you have to start all over again. This gives us an opening, a disintegration in order for something new to come. Such a creative state keeps me at the edge of my possibilities.