The Spirit of the Depths does not announce itself. It waits. It waits for you to stop long enough to hear it. It waits for a container — a held space, a daily rhythm, a genuine commitment to going inward rather than outward.
Forty days is that container.
The desert fathers understood tapas — the heat generated by genuine solitude, by the willingness to sit with the unlived life. To grow like a tree that does not know its law.
Jung spent nights in the desert of his own unconscious. No sound, no answer. Impatience tore him apart. The soul animated in its own time — in response to genuine bearing. The willingness to stay in the silence. To let psychic events happen of their own accord. To open the door to the way and then wait.
Aim past the light.
The path opened when he let go of himself. When incubation replaced intention.
There is a voice that will meet this work at the door.
Jung named it precisely: the scorn of the Spirit of the Times. The clever mind that holds itself above wisdom. The ego that mistakes its own commentary for knowledge, its own busyness for depth, its own sophistication for understanding.
"I did not know that I am your vessel, brimming over with you." — Jung, Black Books
The Gnosis lives inside oneself. It has always lived there. And on the other side of the scorn, on the other side of the desert nights and the silence: reunion. Of mind and body. Surface and depth. Mixing, as they must, so that something genuinely new can live.
Jung's Black Books were not a diary. They were not analysis. They were a daily practice of dialogue — between the conscious mind and everything that lived beneath it.
From the first day of this container, you will keep your own Black Book. A dedicated journal built letter by letter, dream by dream, excavation by excavation. Not a record of what happened. A living document of what has never been written.
Something you will hold in your hands when forty days are over and recognize as the most important thing you have ever made.
Forty days of daily letters woven in the tradition of every P40 container — depth psychology, Vedic and Western astrology, somatic practice, Tarot, art medicine, journaling — all of it moving through the singular lens of the Black Books and the Spirit of the Depths.
Every P40 is a subject immersion. A different threshold, a different lens for a different territory of the inner life. This one enters through the Black Books — Jung's own record of his descent — and uses it as a living map.
The architecture is never the point. The container is the point. The forty days of genuine commitment to going inward rather than outward.
"Imitate yourself." — C.G. Jung
At the same time Jung was filling his Black Books, a Swedish painter named Hilma af Klint was doing something no one in the art world knew about.
She gathered weekly with four other women. They entered trance states, let their hands move freely across paper, allowed images to emerge from somewhere beneath conscious control. She called what came through her "transmissions." She painted over a thousand works in this way — a visual language of the depths, decades ahead of its time.
She stipulated that nothing be shown until twenty years after her death. She understood, as Jung did, that this work was not for the spirit of the times. It was for something slower. Something that required the world to be ready.
Your Black Book is both of these things at once. Written, like Jung's. Visual, like af Klint's. A daily record of what emerges when you stop directing the hand.
✦ Opening Ceremony
A threshold crossing before the forty days begin
✦ Daily Real-Time Love Letters
Depth psychology, astrology, somatic practice, tarot, art medicine, and journaling moving through the lens of the Black Books
Included each day:
✧ A depth psychology transmission moving through the lens of the Black Books
✧ Jungian reflection and journaling prompts for your Black Book
✧ Somatic or ritual practice to bring the insight into the body
✧ Astrological and archetypal framing for the territory we are entering
✧ Audio or poetic invocation on select days
✦ Your Black Book
A dedicated journal built alongside the letters from day one
✦ Live Expert Panels
A Jungian specialist, an author and screenwriter, and an artist, each bringing their discipline into the container
✦ Recordings of All Live Calls
Every live session will be recorded and made available inside the container. Nothing is lost. The work remains accessible for the full duration of the program.
✦ Private Community
A dedicated, private space for those in this container — for reflection, for response to the daily letters, for the kind of conversation that only becomes possible when we decide to stop performing and start telling the truth together.
✦ Padlet Gallery — Creative Sanctuary
A shared creative space where we can bring the inner work into form — image, writing, collage, art, expression. The psyche does not only heal through words. The Padlet Gallery is the visual altar of this container — a living document of forty days of descent, dialogue, and the unlived life made visible.
You have a sense that there is a life running parallel to the life you are living — and you are finally ready to stop moving past it
You have done the outer work and something essential still remains unwritten
You are drawn to Jung's work and want to experience it as a living daily practice, not a concept
You want to write — really write — in a container that treats it as sacred
You are moving through a threshold: a loss, a transition, a dream that will not leave you
You have never kept a journal that felt like it mattered. You want to change that.
The unlived life presses against you. You are ready to open the door.
Sherene Vismaya, M.A. is a Jungian psychoanalyst, astrologer, and author who specializes in the intersection of depth psychology and astrology. She is the founder of Project 40, an online community devoted to Jungian Alchemy and the Path of Individuation, and the author of several books, including Speculation Now; Transpersonal Astrology: Explorations at the Frontier, & Surviving Saturn's Return (McGraw-Hill), Dog Stars (Penguin) and Fate of your Date (Chronicle Books). She holds a Master's Degree from New York University in Clinical Psychology, a Master's in Developmental Psychology from Pace University, and has completed post-graduate work in psychoanalytic studies at The New School and ISAP in Zurich. She was the Resident astrologer for Elle UK from 2005 to 2020.
Her work explores how astrology can be used as a tool for growth, self-discovery, and healing. She specializes in depression, addiction, creative blocks, and anxiety. She draws upon the principles of Jungian psychology, somatic healing, and Eastern spirituality to help individuals connect with their authentic selves to achieve a greater sense of wholeness. She has been a psychoanalyst and practitioner of astrology for twenty-five years, lecturing and teaching at conferences and institutes worldwide. Her work has been featured in various publications, including The Mountain Astrologer, Elle UK, Bust, Time Out New York, Psychology Today, Vera List at the New School, and Teen Vogue. She is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on Jungian astrology.
Sherene has been in private practice in New York City and San Francisco for the past 27 years, consulting, writing, and teaching. She currently resides in India, where she is deepening her studies in Vedic astrology and Eastern spirituality.
The P40 Podcast is devoted to furthering the conversation on Jungian psychology, astrology, art and alchemy.
New and Full Moon forecasts plus other significant astrological updates and Jungian Psychology themed discussions.
