or How I Ended Up 10,000 Feet Under the Ground

It turned out that I would have many confirming dreams about training, applying for training, and about Jung himself. Early on, however, my road to Jung was paved not by initiatory dreams or visions (at least, I do not recall any), but by a sequence of pivotal events in my life.

Gary S. Toub, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Denver, Colorado, USA

It turned out that I would have many confirming dreams about training, applying for training, and about Jung himself. Early on, however, my road to Jung was paved not by initiatory dreams or visions (at least, I do not recall any), but by a sequence of pivotal events in my life. These events have had for me a feeling of fate about them, as if I had been led or called in a specific direction, one for which I unconsciously yearned. It was as if I had been guided through a dense fog without knowing it at the time until much later, when I would be able to identify and choose the path more consciously.

As background, I must first say that I was clearly on a spiritual search throughout my college years. Never initiated or grounded in the religious tradition of my parents, Judaism, I was left on my own to explore the answers to the perennial questions about life. Most of my early interests were in Eastern philosophy and practices, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism—or at least the Western versions of them taught by Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Stephen, and others.

At the same time, I was drawn to the study of psychology and pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the field, particularly clinical, or applied, psychology. For a long time, these two interests—spirituality and psychology— ran parallel in my life, rarely touching one another (one exception I recall was a class at Long Beach State University called "Yoga and Psychology"). Generally, I studied psychology in school and spiritual disciplines in my personal life. When I was accepted for doctoral studies in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, I requested permission to minor in religious studies, but was denied. My advisor matter-of-factly informed me that my area of study, clinical psychology, was already the "softest" specialty in psychology. Religious studies were simply out of the question. He said I needed to pick a "hard" scientific area in which to minor, like statistics or experimental psychology. So I ended up selecting something I could live with, developmental psychology.