The psychology behind Nostos

The power of our Nostos Institute program arises from the marriage of our long lineage of Western philosophy and spirituality to the perspectives and practices provided by contemporary Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychology. We believe that depth psychology provides an excellent foundation for a grounded spiritual practice, because wisdom is born from the depths. It’s born from an ability to discern what lies beneath and beyond the surface of consciousness – and also of the material world. In this approach, wisdom comes from curiosity, from embracing creativity, from working with myth, dreams and the rich symbolic languages that saturate our surroundings and reveal the world of meaning that seems always to lie just out of reach.

Depth psychology as we practice it centres the imagination, above all – and so our unique curriculum offers up a highly practical wisdom to live by: a mythopoetic, contemplative, mystical wisdom, rooted in nature and the wild beauty of the sacred cosmos. Depth psychology offers us a soul-centred way of perceiving and understanding the world, and encourages us to listen for the hidden stories that, when they reveal themselves, shape transformation. This offers us a sacred calling that embraces imagination, meaning, and the deep interconnectedness of the mysterious cosmos.

The mythopoetic, creative and imagination-based practices we’ll study show us how we might learn to see in the dark: to perceive glimmers of myth, synchronicity and moments of grace in the midst of the everyday. They illuminate our path to the sacred, revealing the meaning embedded in all things.

Carl Jung believed that we might free ourselves from the excesses of materialism and rationalism by illuminating what lies buried in our unconscious, and reconnecting with the numinous through dreams, myth, imagination, creativity and ritual. Our program also leans heavily on the work of James Hillman, founder of a post-Jungian field of depth psychology known as Archetypal Psychology, which was profoundly influenced by Neoplatonism. Hillman viewed imagination as the primary reality of the soul, and advocated for an animistic, image-centric perspective on the world and our place in it.

Another key influence on Archetypal Psychology was Henry Corbin, a twentieth-century French theologian and philosopher who carried out extensive research into ancient Sufi traditions. He used the term mundus imaginalis (the ‘imaginal world’) to describe a particular order of reality which is referred to in Sufi texts, and which has many similarities to the Neoplatonic realm of the World Soul. These texts tell us that, between the physico-sensory world of the body and the world of intellect or consciousness, lies another world: the world of the image. For James Hillman, this was the world of psyche, of soul. Soul-making, he argued, is primarily an act of imagining, tapping into `the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy.’ And, as Jung wrote, the task of individuation – of self-realisation – is, in effect, to increasingly identify ourselves with the soul of the world.

The mythopoetic and depth psychology practices we offer at the Nostos Institute show us how to cultivate our mythic imagination, and so to approach the imaginal world in all its transformative complexity.