During the question and answer period for the book release of my new book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, someone asked what was I going to write about next. Without having to blink, I responded “Kabbalah,” which is considered to be one of the most profound spiritual and intellectual movements in all of human history. Soon after the publication of my book I had discovered, much to my surprise, that the Kabbalah had a similarly radical view on many of the things I had written about, particularly the nature and role of evil in the cosmic drama. In my book, I contemplate how the wisdom traditions of alchemy, Gnosticism, shamanism, Buddhism, mystical Christianity and the depth psychology of Jung were pointing at and could help us to deepen our understanding of what the Native Americans call “wetiko” (which, simply put, refers to the spirit of evil), but I hadn’t written about the Kabbalah because I hadn’t realized that it was pointing at wetiko in a particularly unique and creative way.[i] In Dispelling Wetiko, I point out, in as many ways as I can imagine, that encoded in the deepest evil of wetiko, which is the evil that inspires humanity’s inhumanity to itself, is actually a blessing in a very convincing disguise to the contrary, such that if we recognize what it is revealing to us about ourselves, it can help us to wake up. In essence, the Lurianic Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534-1572) says the same thing, i.e., that evil, which by definition is diametrically opposed to good, is, paradoxically, at the same time its very source. … [more]

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of innocent, beautiful children and their heroic adult protectors has touched something really deep within the sacred heart of humanity; it feels as if a tipping point has been reached. I live in Portland, Oregon, where days before the Newtown massacre there was a shooting in the local mall in which two people were killed. My first reaction upon hearing about the shooting of so many defenseless woman and children was a combination of horror while at the same time I found myself not surprised, as I had the thought, “This is what happens in the midst of a collective psychosis.” Our society, as well as our species, is suffering from a psychic epidemic of titanic proportions. This collective madness pervades the global body politic in such a way that it is hard to recognize because our madness is so obvious and has become so normalized that we don’t even notice it anymore, a blindness which itself is an expression of how advanced our madness has become. What happened in Newtown, in what has been called “the safest town in America,” is a symptom and expression of an underlying web of pathology that pervades not only our society, but the world at large. It is as if our civilization is having a collective nervous breakdown, in which the underlying dysfunctional structures that are holding together (while at the same time obscuring) the deeper collective madness are de-constructing, dis-integrating, and coming apart at the seams. It is as if “darker powers” are materializing and becoming visible in our daily world, emerging through the cracks in the façade, as if our species is making a shamanic descent en masse into the underworld. And in the archetypal descent of the shaman, it is never simply … [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. [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. [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 the midst of a spiritual awakening that I was struggling to contain that was triggered and complicated by extreme psychological abuse at the hands of my father, who was a very sick man. I was suffering so deeply from the psychic violence perpetrated upon my mother and me by my father that it was making me “sick.” One of the … [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. [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, for a moment, we look at mankind as one individual, we see that it is like a man carried away by unconscious powers.” We are a species carried away -- “possessed” by -- and acting out, the unconscious. Jung elaborates, “Possession, though old-fashioned, has by no means become obsolete; only the name has changed. Formerly they spoke of ‘evil spirits,’ … [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. The wounded healer receives the gifts encoded in their ordeal when they are able to alchemically transform the seemingly obscuring energies of their wound into fuel for their fire of realization. Wounded healers access their gifts when they realize that their wound is itself the source of divine creativity, as well as the portal through which the highest, most individualized form of this creativity can manifest. … [more]