One of Jung’s greatest discoveries is what he called “the reality of the psyche,” by which he means that the psyche exists in its own right, in its own open-ended sphere of seemingly unlimited influence. The discovery of the living reality of the psyche was a precious gift that the new field of psychology had to offer to the world, and yet, it has mostly gone unappreciated and unrecognized. The discovery of the ‘reality’ of the psyche, what Jung calls the “most important achievement of modern psychology,” is something that most people still don’t even know about. Modern, behaviorist psychology, in Jung’s words, “reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and thus we achieve a psychology without the psyche.” A subject worthy of our most devoted contemplation and veneration, the psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. “I am of the opinion,” writes Jung, “that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.” The psyche is the underlying matrix, the infinite emptiness that is over-flowingly full, the maternal womb out of which world events are born… Read more »
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Author Archives: Paul
THE WORLD IS PSYCHE
AN EYE-OPENING SYNCHRONICITY
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 »
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PSYCHIATRY ALMOST DROVE ME CRAZY
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 most difficult parts of my ordeal in the hospitals was not being listened to by the psychiatrists, either about the abuse by my father or the spiritual awakening.… Read more
EVOLUTION IS HOW WE DREAM IT
What would we do, I find myself imagining, as we awaken to the fact that we are having a mass, shared dream? I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly want to connect with fellow dream characters who are also becoming lucid in the dream of life. We could then conspire to co-inspire each other, I imagine, to greater heights of lucidity. The Evolver Social Movement/Reality Sandwich is like a switchboard of the “turned on” global brain, one that not only connects different parts of ourselves with each other, but further activates the very awakening of which it itself is a living expression.… Read more
HIDDEN TREASURES
I’ve always loved finding hidden treasures, particularly when it feels like a wide-ranging co-incidence of factors have conspired behind the scenes to help me stumble upon them. The ecstasy and draw towards uncovering a hidden treasure feels like a deep, archetypal experience that is built into everyone’s psyche. Discovering something precious, of great value, hidden in the phenomenal world can momentarily lift me out of my temporal, earth-bound self, making me feel connected to a deeper, more expansive, abundant, and multi-dimensional part of myself.… Read more
ARE WE POSSESSED?
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.… Read more
THE ARTIST AS HEALER OF THE WORLD
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.… Read more
GOD THE IMAGINATION
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, as it arises out of the collective unconscious of humanity itself. This imagination has a numinous, archetypal quality to it, which is to say it is an expression of something beyond ourselves. This imagination of a substance which liberates the universe is a symbolic out-picturing of a transformative potential that exists within all of us and which is the goal of the alchemical opus.… Read more
THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 2
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 point out how our wounding is a numinous event that can potentially introduce and initiate us into a deeper level of our being. 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.… Read more
THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 1
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 elucidated this archetype, the wounded healer refers psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepius, the sunlike healer.” The archetype of the wounded healer reveals to us that it is only by being willing to face, consciously experience and go through our wound do we receive its blessing.… Read more
THE LIGHT OF DARKNESS
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 the enlightened mind, is refined and revealed. The art of alchemy has nothing to do with turning base metals into gold, and everything to do with transmuting our lower, primitive, instinctual selves into a more purified state. The goal of the spiritual art of alchemy is to unite the opposites — to integrate the conscious and the unconscious, to unlock the light encoded and imprisoned within the darkness.… Read more
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH: A REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS
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 any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.… Read more
UNLIVED LIVES
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 Psychosis, is the first chapter in my book of the same name). The response was from well-known author Alice Miller, author of the classic book The Drama of the Gifted Child. I was most happy that such an esteemed psychiatrist would take the time to read my work.… Read more
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.” As Jung wrote, “I had very soon seen that analytical psychology [the psychology Jung developed] coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists, were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery.… Read more
A FAMILY CURSE
A number of years ago, a father brought to me his adult son who had suffered, due to an overwhelming psychological trauma a few years before, a psychotic break. As I worked with the son, I noticed that there were two distinct parts of him. On the one hand, due to his inability to metabolize the trauma, he had dissociated and developed a fantasy-based identity which had little relation to what we would call day-to-day reality. As I got to know the son, however, I realized that another part of him was perfectly reasonable, very awake, aware and healthy.… Read more
ISRAEL IS OUTGASSING ITS UNHEALED TRAUMA
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 a few weeks to sufficiently integrate the trauma which has gotten triggered within me so that I could begin to find words. I feel as if I am sitting in the audience watching a family member who I love perform on stage, and because of my intimate connection and identification with my beloved family member, I am completely mortified by what I see them unconsciously acting out in the world theater.… Read more
ONE GREAT DREAM OF A SINGLE DREAMER
The Buddha, which literally means “the awakened one,” said “My form appeared like a dream to sentient beings who are like a dream. I taught them dreamlike teaching to attain dreamlike enlightenment.” When we begin to awaken to the dreamlike nature of reality, we realize we are all characters in each other’s dream. Like reflections in a mirror, we are all interconnected aspects of each other’s being. To recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation is to recognize that we don’t exist as isolated entities separate from the universe, but rather, as relational beings who only exist relative to each other.… Read more
CATCHING THE BUG OF SYNCHRONICITY
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. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.… Read more