Intro to Paul’s new book “Wetiko”:
Close Encounters of the Wetiko Kind
To place my new book Wetiko: The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity in its proper context, I’m not writing as a scholar, but rather, as someone who has had a deeply personal and wounding experience with reference to what I am writing about. I only have the author-ity to write about this vampiric disease of the soul so intimately because I have, due to the designs of fate and/or karma, become intimately familiar with it in my own life. This wound has introduced me to something healing in myself, as if, like all of us, I am a ‘wounded-healer-in-training.’ I was introduced to this virulent entity when it unexpectedly introduced itself to me in the course of events in my life. Like Jacob encountering the angel of God at the ford of Jabbok, I was forced to contend and wrestle with the spirit of wetiko, or this more powerful, transpersonal energy would have literally killed me. In wrestling with this daemonic energy, I was preventing a murder─my own. Everyone in their own way goes through the archetypal experience of Jacob wrestling with the angel. I feel as if I am coming out of the closet when I write that I have had ‘close encounters of the wetiko kind’ which have entailed direct experiences of what the word ‘evil’ is attempting to name. These living experiences of the virulence of the psychic wetiko virus have disfigured, re-formed and changed me. These experiences have been truly shattering. As a result of the encounter I am no longer who I was, while at the same time never being more myself. This book, in which I share the insights I have gained from this ordeal, is the crystallization in form of this on-going process… Read more »
I remember the moment like no other. I was seven years old, in second grade. The teacher, Mrs. Sherman, wrote the letters e-n-v-e-l-o-p-e on the blackboard, and asked who knew what it spelled. I enthusiastically raised my hand, as I knew what word those letters made, and I was excited to share my realization with everyone. The teacher called on me, and as I was about to answer her question, my world changed forever. Read more »
When I was first introduced to the world of psychiatry in May of 1981 at 24 years of age, I experienced a particularly unique synchronistic event that rocked my world and changed my life forever. I burst onto the scene of psychiatry in a dramatic way, as a life-transforming event happened within the very first minute of my being admitted to my very first psychiatric hospital.Read more »
I am a survivor of severe psychiatric abuse. There was a year or so in the early 1980’s when I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals at least four times. During my visits to the hospital I was in… Read more
What we don’t remember and make conscious, we often act out, even evoking and dreaming up the seemingly external field around us to collude with us so as to give living shape and form to our inner process. Whatever we repress, deny, or split-off from, we tend to unconsciously and compulsively re-enact in the present, as if we are unknowingly trying to complete an incomplete process. Read more »
C. G. Jung, the great doctor of the soul and one of the most inspired psychologists of the twentieth century, had incredible insight into what is currently playing out, both individually and collectively, in our modern-day world. He writes, “If,… Read more
There is an age-old imagination that there exists a miraculous substance that enlightens the universe, which is exemplified in the alchemists’ idea of the philosophers’ stone. This imagination does not come from the personal unconscious, but is transpersonal in origin,… Read more
In my previous article “The Sacred Art of Alchemy,” I contemplate how the unconscious part of ourselves becomes the raw material, the prima materia, out of which the alchemical gold, the philosophers’ stone, which is none other than… Read more
A little while ago, someone forwarded me an interesting email response to an article I had written about the collective madness which has befallen our species (The article, called The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective… Read more
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.”… Read more
As a human being of Jewish heritage, I feel deeply ashamed by what Israel is acting out in Gaza. I feel so shocked by the horror of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians that it has literally taken me… Read more
Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world.… Read more
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… Read more
In my last two articles The Wounded Healer, Part 1 and Part 2, I point out the importance of consciously stepping into the archetypal figure of the “wounded healer” for the healing of our planetary situation.… Read more
In my last article, The Wounded Healer, Part I, I contemplated how the wounded healer is one of the major underlying, archetypal processes giving shape to and in-forming events in our world today, both individually and collectively. I… Read more
One of the deeper, underlying archetypal patterns which is being constellated in the human psyche that is playing itself out collectively on the world stage is the archetype of the “wounded healer.” To quote Kerenyi, a colleague of Jung who… Read more
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… Read more
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At… Read more
RSS Subscribe