Category Archives: Featured Articles

The Kabbalah’s Remarkable Idea

Posted on April 4, 2013 by bret • 6 Comments

by Paul Levy

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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.… Read more

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AN EYE-OPENING SYNCHRONICITY

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Paul • 25 Comments

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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THE BIRTH OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Paul • 17 Comments

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 »… Continue Reading

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PSYCHIATRY ALMOST DROVE ME CRAZY

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Paul • 23 Comments

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

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SHAMANIC TRANSFERENCE

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Paul • 19 Comments

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 »… Continue Reading

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ARE WE POSSESSED?

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Paul • 7 Comments

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

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Filed Under: Featured Articles, Our Collective Madness

THE ARTIST AS HEALER OF THE WORLD

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Paul • 2 Comments

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

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GOD THE IMAGINATION

Posted on August 15, 2009 by Paul • 1 Comment

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

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Filed Under: Featured Articles, Healing

THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 2

Posted on August 15, 2009 by Paul • 3 Comments

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

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THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 1

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Paul • 7 Comments

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

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THE LIGHT OF DARKNESS

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Paul • 1 Comment

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

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THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH: A REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Paul • 18 Comments

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

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Filed Under: Bush's Madness is Our Own, Featured Articles

UNLIVED LIVES

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Paul • 5 Comments

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

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Filed Under: Featured Articles, Illuminating the Darkness

THE SACRED ART Of ALCHEMY

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Paul • 1 Comment

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

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ISRAEL IS OUTGASSING ITS UNHEALED TRAUMA

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Paul • 6 Comments

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

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Filed Under: Featured Articles, Our Collective Madness

CATCHING THE BUG OF SYNCHRONICITY

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Paul • 3 Comments

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

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Filed Under: Dreaming and Spirituality, Featured Articles

WE ARE ALL SHAMANS-IN-TRAINING

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Paul • 6 Comments

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. Stepping out of my usual way of trying to control my experience, during that next year I was thrown in mental hospitals a number of times and (mis)diagnosed as having manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness.… Read more

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THE WAR ON CONSCIOUSNESS

Posted on April 15, 2007 by Paul • 6 Comments

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. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself.… Read more

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