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by Paul Levy
The art of alchemy itself is an expression that hidden in the darkness is light. The alchemists, Jung says, “discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends” In contrast to a light that, as the Bible says, “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,” the lumen naturae, the light of lights, is a light that the darkness intimately recognizes as its own nature. The lumen naturae is the luminosity within the darkness recognizing itself as it illumines its own darkness…more>>
Recent Articles
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Israel Is Outgassing Its Unhealed Trauma
In Gaza, a role reversal has taken place – the Jewish people, the victim of unresolved trauma that they suffered not only during the Second World War, but throughout their history, have now become the perpetrators. One of the things unique about trauma is that in the process of integrating and healing from trauma, we are compelled to unconsciously act out the role of the abuser. Israel, to the extent it hasn’t dealt with its own trauma, has split-off from and at the same time internalized the abuser, while unconsciously identifying with its original aggression, which is a common characteristic of the traumatized soul. To dissociate from and be unconsciously identified with the sadistic aggressor who perpetrated the original trauma is to become possessed by this figure, to be lethally compelled to act out its violence in a terrorizing, malevolent and life-destroying way. In an appalling reversal of the golden rule, Israel is doing unto others what was done unto it. In the open-air death camp by the sea which is Gaza, the Jewish people have re-created their experience in World War II, with the Palestinians playing the roles that the Jews played in the Warsaw ghetto.
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The Sacred Art of Alchemy
Much to his astonishment, C. G. Jung discovered that the ancient art of alchemy was describing, in symbolic language, the journey that all of us must take towards embodying our own intrinsic wholeness, what he called the process of “individuation.” The alchemists, over the course of centuries, had generated a wide range of symbolic images which directly corresponded to the anatomy of the unconscious which Jung had been mapping through his painstaking work with thousands of patients. Jung, in illuminating a psychology of the unconscious, can himself be considered a modern-day alchemist…The alchemists had little or nothing to contribute to the field of chemistry, least of all the secret of gold-making. Only our overly one-sided, rational and intellectualized age could miss the point so entirely and see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry. On the contrary, to the alchemists, chemistry represented a degradation and a “Fall,” because it meant the secularization and commercialization of a sacred science. Jung makes the point, “The alchemical operations were real, only this reality was not physical but psychological. Alchemy represents the projection of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus magnum [“great work”] had two aims: the rescue of the human soul, and the salvation of the cosmos.” The alchemists were dreaming big....
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We Are All Shamans-in-Training
In 1981 I spontaneously went into such an ecstatic state that I was hospitalized by what I call the "anti-bliss patrol." The authorities had become alerted because I was simply unable to restrain my enthusiasm at the "good news" that was beginning to reveal itself to me about the nature of reality.
- The Artist as Healer of the World
The artist allows themselves to get "dreamed up" by the field to become the "medium" through which the spirit of the age moves and inspires them to creatively express itself. Speaking about this process, Jung said, "At such moments we are no longer individuals, but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us."
- The Wounded Healer, Part I
An encounter with something greater than our limited ego, what Jung calls the Self, is always a wounding experience for the ego. The event of our wounding is initiatory, as our wounding originated in and potentially introduces us to "something greater than ourselves."
- The Wounded Healer, Part II
Any one of us accessing the healing power hidden in our wound could be, in Jung’s words, "the makeweight that tips the scales," precipitating an evolutionary quantum leap in human consciousness, which literally can change everything.
- The War on Consciousness
We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds.
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George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual dis-ease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times in which we live. It is an illness that has been with us since time immemorial.