When the Mountain Looks Back: On Wonder, Reflection, and Co-Individuation
with Mary Duffy
In this lecture, Mary Duffy explores the movement from wonder to reflection and from reflection to participatory knowing through the lens of Jungian psychology, philosophy, and lived experience.
Beginning with a profound encounter during a performance of Mountain by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the talk traces the moment when the natural world ceases to feel merely observed and instead seems to “look back” at us — awakening a deeper sense of relation between psyche and world.
Drawing on the work of Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the lecture explores:
wonder as an opening of consciousness,
reflection as the deepening of awareness,
participation as reciprocal relationship between self and world,
and co-individuation as the mutual awakening of human consciousness and the living cosmos.
Moving between image, psychology, spirituality, and symbol, the talk invites listeners to consider consciousness not as something separate from reality, but as one of the ways reality comes to know itself.
At its heart, this is a meditation on relationship:
between inner and outer,
matter and spirit,
humanity and the more-than-human world.
The lecture concludes by asking what it means to return from moments of insight back into ordinary life — and how reflection, when fully lived, becomes ethical responsiveness and participation in the unfinished work of creation.
Mary Duffy is an artist with a Post Graduate Diploma in Art Therapy. She was President of Jung Society Melbourne for some years and has presented Courses on ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, The Red Book (twice), Answer to Job, and as well talks on the Shadow and Evil, Illness Symptom and Individuation, Divinity and AI and when Meaning is Not Enough; From Interpretation to Meaning.