With dangerously elevated risks of nuclear war and global warming, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the “Doomsday Clock” to 89 seconds before midnight—the closest our species has ever come to annihilation and extinction. The clock is meant to scare us—and it should. What’s most alarming is that we lack the knowledge, understanding, and agency needed to prevent humanity from burning down its own home. War is becoming more prevalent, not less. And climate change has us aboard a planetary Titanic, steaming full speed toward catastrophe.

This essay explores the basis for a nonbinary “third” position between depth psychology and Dzogchen psychology, one that resolves the duality between depth psychology’s view of individuation as gradual stages in time, and Dzogchen psychology’s view of individuation as immediate and beyond time. The trans-binary view recognizes temporality and non-temporality as interdependent elements of different dimensions of mind. It also recognizes psychology and spirituality as interdependent. A collaboration between individuation psychology and Dzogchen psychology holds great promise.

On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation

By Murray Stein

In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: “It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology.