I’ve been dreaming about this book you now hold in your hands since my first book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis [i] came out in 2006. I’ve been wanting to elaborate and deepen my inquiry and articulation of the psychological disease that I wrote about in that book, but without having to reference or think about George W. Bush (what a relief!). There is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul whose origin is within ourselves that has the potential either to destroy our species or wake us up, depending upon whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us. In Wetiko: The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity, I pay homage to and appreciate how Native American traditions have been tracking the very same psychic [ii] virus which I am pointing at. The indigenous art-iculation of the disease is truly inspired and helps all of us to see and get in focus this elusive, nonlocal (see glossary) parasite of the mind even more clearly. In this book, I contemplate how the Native tradition’s expression of this disease of the soul, combined with my articulation of this same malady based on my own personal experience, help to bring each other’s vision into sharper clarity and focus. I look forward to many others adding their insights to the mix so as to deepen our understanding and flesh out our course of action in relation to this psychic plague even more clearly.

Writing this book has helped me stay sane in a world gone mad. Our species is clearly in the middle of a mass psychic epidemic, [iii] which in my book I call malignant egophrenia and Native Americans call wetiko psychosis. Whichever name we use, we are in the midst of a collective psychosis of titanic proportions, and one of its most stunning features is that very few people are even talking about it. This seems extremely crazy to me. Our madness has truly become normalized, to the point that we don’t even notice it. This book is attempting to illumine and articulate both the madness, as well as the source of the madness, which is ourselves.

To place this book 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. [iv] 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 (see glossary) 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.

Pencil drawing by Paul Levy, “Self Portrait after being introduced to Wetiko,” 9¼” x 13¼” – 1979

Click on image for larger version.

A NONLOCAL PROTECTION RACKET

In light of the present discussion, my personal story [v] is un-important, other than to serve as the outer garment which reveals the underlying ‘archetypal’ (see glossary), structural dynamics that set the stage upon which these events got dreamed up in my life in the first place. Through experiences of wounding, trauma and abuse─almost being killed─that I suffered at the nonlocal hands of this malevolent entity, a deeper, archetypal process was playing out through my very personal situation in life, a process that is happening in all of our lives. What was most eye-opening for me was that when I began connecting the dots and noticing the deeper pattern that was playing out in my life, it became clear that my life, like all of ours, is a particularized microcosm, a personalized iteration of a collectivized macrocosmic fractal. It was as if my personal situation with its individual intra/inter-personal dramas was contained in and an expression of a deeper cosmic process that was enfolded throughout the underlying field.

I began to recognize that the diabolical [vi] energy that was nonlocally playing out throughout the entire field of consciousness was giving shape to and in-forming the field in such a way so as to hide itself. Uncannily, at the very moment that the abuse was going to be illumined, oftentimes out of ‘no-where,’ something seemingly unrelated would happen, what is called an ‘edge phenomenon’ that would serve as a distraction, diverting attention from what was just about to be revealed. At the same time, in this very process of something being veiled, a deeper process was revealing itself for all who have eyes to see. As if waking up in a sci-fi movie, it was like a higher-dimensional intelligence was orchestrating and nonlocally configuring not only people’s reactions, perceptions, and behavior, but the natural world itself, so as to seemingly protect the figure of the abuser, thus keeping the darkness from being illumined. I was beginning to realize that there is a deeper order inherent in this nonlocal ‘protection racket’ that is arranging and configuring the field so as to hide the abuser, while simultaneously expressing and revealing itself.

Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to reveal its dreamlike nature to us. Once I began to notice the deeper pattern that was emerging, it became clear that people routinely got hooked through their unconscious blind spots and acted as unwitting conduits and agents of obfuscation through which the nonlocal disease could replicate itself. Everyone is unwittingly protecting the abuser in their own way, as well as protecting themselves. At the same time, all of us, when seen together, are being in-formed by and are potentially revealing a deeper pattern of unconscious, human behavior that is always operating in the shadows of the human psyche. We all instinctively assume certain poses and postures relative to each other, like aspects of a deeper, fluidly, shape-shifting emerging process that is revealing itself through our energetic inter-changes. Our trans-actions are an externalized reflection of the same shadow dynamics taking place within and between the different parts of our own psyche. From the dreaming point of view─which sees the seemingly outer, objective world as a dream which is speaking in symbols reflecting something within the subject, i.e., ourselves─the dynamic of ‘protecting the abuser’ is an expression of the aspect of ourselves that is hiding from the light and resisting the growth of consciousness. This is the part of us that is complicit with and participating in our own abuse. It is a reflection of the aspect of ourselves that is keeping us in the dark about what we are doing to ourselves. This book is meant to contribute to the critically important effort of blowing the cover off of this nonlocal protection racket.

Hidden in the evil of wetiko is its own medicine. Encoded in the darkness is the revelation of the light. Seeing darkness is a form of illumination. Like C. G. Jung, the great doctor of the soul reminds us, we become enlightened by making the darkness conscious. Protecting the abuser, though seemingly in the service of the powers of darkness, is, paradoxically, at the same time, potentially revealing the darkness, and hence, ultimately an expression of the light. Jung writes, “Light has need of darkness─otherwise how could it appear as light?” [vii] Seeing how the field nonlocally protects the abuser is a doorway through which we are introduced to the underlying unified and unifying field of consciousness where light and darkness are both expressions of a single non-dual sentient presence. Seeing the field-like aspect of protecting the abuser is to see the field in its nonlocal glory, which is to be in a glorified, i.e., more lucid state ourselves.

Seeing the field in its nonlinear and nonlocal dis-play magically empowers us with the visionary tools we need in order to navigate safely through to the other side of our experience, from a world of seemingly meaningless, random, separate material events to a world in which life is infused with meaning and we are fully rooted in our seamless connectedness with the biosphere, each other, and within ourselves. Seeing the field─a place where we are all inter-connected─is the portal through which we plug into the living plenum, the infinite reservoir of zero-point energy that fills all of the space in the universe. This is the place of leverage, our point of power where we can co-operatively help each other to step into the dream and put our lucidity together as one so as to intervene and creatively transform the waking dream in a way that changes everything.

DREAMING OF DRACULA

In light of our present discussion, a few of my own dreams come to mind: In the first dream, I am hanging out with Dracula in his apartment. His true identity as an evil vampire with malevolent intentions is ‘cloaked’ by his charisma and charm. We are very friendly with each other. I notice, however, that his eyes are beginning to glow in the dark in a ‘spooky’ sort of way. When I see the luminous, radiant light emanating from his eyes, I spontaneously begin making animal noises, like nature’s creatures do when confronted with an unfamiliar, other-worldly and dangerous energy. I begin barking, grunting, squealing and squawking. Dracula is not pleased that I have noticed his out-of-this-world, preternatural radiance. He didn’t know his supernatural nature was showing and it is clear that he didn’t want me to see through his disguise of ordinariness. In the dream, as if coming to my senses and snapping out of a spell, I realize that I am in extreme danger and that I have to leave. Immediately. I wake up.

Fairy tales and mythologies the world over symbolically represent, in various forms, humanity’s encounter with evil. If a person’s psychological/spiritual development isn’t sufficiently evolved, they might need to take flight and avoid the evil demon, lest they get overwhelmed by the monster’s power and be destroyed. In the dream it felt like I would have been way over my head, totally out of my league, if I had chosen to stay and have it out with Dracula. It was all I could do to escape and get myself out of the precarious and soul-threatening situation in which I found myself. It is interesting that it wasn’t my mind, but my bodily, animal instincts that initially sensed the danger I was in.

Vampires, and vampiric entities like wetiko, don’t like it when their covert operations are seen. Just like Dracula in my dream, the last thing the vampiric entity of wetiko wants is for us to be ‘onto it.’ Because it gets its power from operating covertly in the shadows and out of sight, seeing a demon takes away its seeming autonomy and omnipotence. For when we see the nonlocal, transpersonal nature of the vampire, not only do we take away its power over us, but it can also no longer see us. By seeing ‘it,’ we render ourselves invisible to the vampire, who cannot self-reflectively speculate upon the mirrored reflection of itself which we are holding up to it.

The vampiric, wetiko bug is a most elusive creature that is very hard to nail down. Because of my close encounters, I’ve always wanted to write something about vampires that would map my experience in a way that was helpful for others. In the introduction to my first book I tell a dream I had where I was seeing Dracula, and kept on trying to point him out to the other people in the dream, but no one else could see him. That dream has continued to incarnate and transform itself as time unfolds, yet it has been doing so in real waking life. This book is an ‘out’-ing (i.e., an unmasking) of the vampire in the field of our human world, and I feel that over time, as my creative fluency deepens, more and more people are seeing what I am pointing at. It is as if in writing this book I am actually en-acting my dream, and am changing the ending, as if doing living active imagination. [viii] How the waking dream unfolds from here on is truly up to us.

I’ve been creating new art-iculations, such as these very words, to get across and share with others how I am seeing the world. The purpose of this book is to flood light on the insidious workings of this malevolent, vampiric figure that operates under the cover of darkness within the human psyche. As I’ve been progressively illuminating this malevolent entity both out in the world, as well as within myself, it has become apparent that something deeper is revealing itself to me in and through the process. My personal encounter with wetiko has taught me something about the nature of evil─both human and supra-human─that I evidently could not have learned any other way. In coming to terms with evil, I’ve had to see my own stake in it. In seeing my own complicity in the darkness that is playing out in my life, I’ve had to confront my own capacity for evil. This has forced me to reckon with my own conscience, as well as to open my heart.

In another dream that felt so real that it didn’t feel like a dream at all, I am lying in bed next to Dracula, who I clearly recognize as a very dangerous vampire. Unlike the previous dreams, he is not trying to disguise himself at all. We both know what he wants. He’s salivating, simply thirsting for me. We both know that he’s not allowed to ‘have’ me unless I somehow let him. It feels like we are in a battle of wills and of minds, as if my very soul is at stake. Similar to the archetypal myth of Jacob wrestling with the angel, I know I just have to make it to sunrise and then I will be O.K. It feels like it is going to be a long and difficult night; the sun can’t come up soon enough. Then, as if remembering something, I have an idea: I start chanting the mantra of PadmaSambhava, [ix] who is the deity I invoke, pray to and honor in my daily Buddhist practice. PadmaSambhava, considered the Buddha of this very age, is my guru, teacher, ally and protector, my celestial guiding spirit and all-around cosmic super-hero. Ultimately, PadmaSambhava is my own true nature, my intrinsic wholeness, the part of me that’s always connected to what Jung calls the Self. Symbolically speaking, PadmaSambhava is the supreme exorcist and alchemist; the greater the negativity, the greater his power of transmutation. By ‘calling in’ the archetypal figure of the exorcist, I am simultaneously ‘calling out’ the devil. I am trembling and quaking in fear as I begin to chant PadmaSambhava’s twelve syllable mantra out loud in spoken word, waking up my girlfriend, who is sleeping next to me, by the sound of my voice (she then got to listen to the rest of the dream’s soundtrack in real time. It was interesting for me to hear upon awakening how the dream sounded from the perspective of someone outside the dream; she reflected that I sounded absolutely terrified). It’s always interesting to me when I have a dream in which the two seemingly separate worlds, the dream-world and the seemingly ‘real’ world, intersect.

Pencil Drawing by Paul Levy, “PadmaSambhava,” 17″ x 25½” – 1992

Click on image for larger version.

Chanting the sacred syllables, my words are quivering with unbridled terror. As I continue shaking, I keep on repeating the mantra, the sound of which Dracula seems to absolutely hate. The vibration of the sound greatly affects him, as if hearing the mantra is painful for him. Like Kryptonite to Superman, the very energetic presence of the mantra appears to be divesting him of his occult-like super-powers. Saying the twelve syllables is like holding up a crucifix or pouring holy water on the vampire, in that it repulses and repels him. Invoking PadmaSambhava is tantamount to connecting with my intrinsic wholeness, the very state in which I’m protected from the deadly vampire. It is like the vampire has revulsion and disgust for me when I am connected with my true nature, for then it has no power over me.

And then, just like that, the mantra transforms. I spontaneously begin chanting OM MANI PEME HUNG [x] ─the six syllable mantra of compassion─the archetypal quality of compassion embodied in the form of sound. As I continue chanting the six syllables, my fear begins to dissipate, my shaking lessens and I feel more empowered. My attention shifts from solely focusing on the seemingly external figure of Dracula to connecting with my own heart.  Slowly stepping out of the fear of being possessed by the evil vampire, I more and more experience being self-possessed, in possession of my self. Other people are now around, and the sense is that we are all taking part in a ritual preparing for Dracula’s demise. At one point, Dracula’s mouth opens incredibly wide like a lion yawning, and I instinctively thrust something into his mouth to block it from shutting. One of the people around Dracula is a very attractive woman, who for a moment catches my eye, as well as my attention. I quickly bring myself back to chanting the six syllables, however, having the realization that she might be a nonlocal emanation of Dracula himself meant to distract me from my task. I continue chanting the six syllables, which appear to be ever-so slowly pulling the plug from Dracula, who looks truly down for the count. It reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the West melting in The Wizard of Oz. Before my operation is fully accomplished, however, I wake up. I look forward to seeing what happens as I actively imagine and dream this dream to completion in my waking dream, which, at least in my imagination, is what this book is about.

In the dream, the figure of Dracula was the materialization of the vampiric wetiko pathogen in personified form. The incarnation of the bug of wetiko in full drag, Dracula was at the same time the revelation of this pathology in full-bodied form. Being in-formed by wetiko disease, the Dracula figure was encoded with information; he himself was a cipher of information (in need of being de-ciphered). This is to say that through Dracula’s appearance in my bed, something was being shown to me. The dream was a reflection of a process happening deep within the psyche─my personal psyche as well as the collective psyche─in which I was struggling both with my own inner vampire, as well as the archetypal figure of the vampire itself that exists in potential throughout the whole field. I was literally being forced to come to terms with evil. Or else.

In the first part of the dream, I needed to relate and come to terms with the relative, dualistic level of reality, a realm where there is very definitely good and evil. In the figure of PadmaSambhava, I am invoking the supreme exorcist to alchemically transmute and subdue these dark, destructive forces. Unlike the first dream, in this dream it wouldn’t have been right for me to run away; it was clear that I needed to have it out with the vampire. I was at the place of initiation, my situation couldn’t be postponed. The evil figure couldn’t be wished or visualized out of existence. We were in a fight to the death. If I had tried to prematurely cultivate compassion at this early point in the dream, it would have been a ‘spiritual by-pass’ (something I see many well-intentioned spiritual practitioners doing), a strategy to evade responsibly dealing with the evil that was right in front of me. This pre-fabricated compassion, what Buddhism calls ‘idiot compassion,’ would not have had the all-embracing quality of genuine compassion, but rather, it would have had an underlying, fear-based agenda─let me send this monster compassion so that he would go away. I imagine if I had done this in the dream, Dracula would have mocked me for my transparent, superficial pretense of being a good spiritual practitioner. To not avoid the confrontation with the very evil that I was ‘in bed with,’ I was forced to look at my own complicity in evil. There was no getting around this. Going through and into my fear of confronting the very thing I’m afraid of─my own fear and darkness─and not letting it stop me was a portal which allowed me to enter a more expansive and grace-filled realm. It’s interesting to note that the very presence of evil in my dream was related to my becoming lucid. I wonder how the same process is operative in our shared waking dream.

The six syllables are an expression of a lucid compassion which knows no separation. Once I began chanting OM MANI PEME HUNG, my lucidity─the awareness that I was dreaming─more and more kicked in. As my lucidity stabilized, I began to recognize that there was no external vampire, that the whole experience was taking place inside of my own mind. There was no Dracula separate from myself. As if going through an initiation, this dream was helping me to realize the figure of Dracula in myself─a part within all of us in potential─that, energetically speaking, can be like a vampire. Seeing myself in the mirror of the vampire is what this seemingly external dream figure came to show me.

Instead of staying stuck and being fixated on something seemingly outside of myself that I am afraid of, as the dream unfolded, the point of reference within myself through which I relate to who I am had shifted. Over the course of the dream, the whole focus of my attention had changed; in Castaneda’s language, my assemblage point had shifted. Snapping out of inhabiting a dream in which I existed as a separate self who was vulnerable and needed protection, I stepped into a more expansive dream as I stepped through and out of my fear. At a certain point in the dream I entered the safety of the open heart of compassion, the ultimate refuge and protection.

I first became intimately acquainted and connected with the mantra of compassion when I spontaneously began chanting it the very first time I became lucid in a dream many years ago; or rather, it was as if the mantra began chanting me. Chanting OM MANI PEME HUNG is what I do in my dreams when I know I’m dreaming. When I recognize the dreamlike nature of the situation I am in, I concurrently recognize that all beings in the dream are ‘dream characters,’ seemingly embodied, reflective aspects of myself. And what better thing to do upon recognizing this than to send all the different parts of myself compassion? Lucidity and compassion simultaneously co-arise, which is to say that the natural, effortless, energetic expression of recognizing the dreamlike nature of reality is compassion. Chanting the mantra of compassion is both an expression of lucidity, while simultaneously being a prompt and reminder of lucidity, what I call a ‘lucidity stimulator.’ What this means is simple: the way to deepen our lucidity is to cultivate compassion. OM MANI PEME HUNG. These very words, or anything for that matter, can be seen as a lucidity stimulator, reminders and expressions of the dreamlike nature of this very moment. Getting to the heart of the matter, cultivating such fierce compassion that we’re even willing to confront our deepest fears is the very act that puts a literal stake through the heart of the archetypal figure of the vampire.

Let us begin our investigation and get down to business. We all have a stake in the vampiric business of wetiko. Let’s use it to our advantage.

OM MANI PEME HUNG…

>> INFO ON BOOK <<

Jung states, “For our only reality is psyche, there is no other reality.”[v] The psyche is a mysterious, substance-less substance through which spirit and matter work out their seeming differences and intermingle so as to reveal their unity. To quote Jung, “Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter stands the reality of the psychic – psychic reality, the only reality we can experience immediately.”[vi] We never have an experience, of either the world or ourselves, except within the psyche (please see my article It’s All in the Psyche). Jung writes, “The realm of psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit.”[vii] 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. We should not forget that, to quote Jung, “when we say ‘psyche’ we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.”[viii] The psyche is a true mystery that is impossible to pin down. Jung comments, “In reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same.”[ix] The world is the living psyche. Because the psyche is not separate from the farthest corners of the whole universe, Jung writes that “The psyche reflects, and knows, the whole of existence.”[x]

The psyche is inseparable from the whole materialized universe, while at the same time being a “no-thing” that is other than and transcendent to the physical universe. The psyche is indistinguishable from and expresses itself as and through its manifestations, yet is independent from and other than its forms. Jung comments, “matter is a thin skin around an enormous cosmos of psychical realities, really the illusory fringe around the real experience, which is psychical.”[xi] This is what the Eastern sages are pointing at when they talk about the world being an illusion, as the phenomenal world is not separate from, as well as being a revelation of, the more fundamental reality which is the psyche itself. To quote Jung, “The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence.”[xii] The whole materialized universe is moment by moment the display of and emerging out of the spacious, radiant and effulgently over-flowing ground of the psyche. Jung continues, “The psyche is therefore all-important; it is…the Buddha-essence, it is the Buddha-Mind, the One…All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it.[xiii] The forms of this universe are not separate from the spacious emptiness out of which they are arising. As the Heart Sutra of Buddhism succinctly expresses: “Form is Emptiness. Emptiness is form.” Emptiness itself is appearing in the form of form. Form and emptiness are not two separate entities; the universe is non-dual. The psyche, which is the bridge between the inner and the outer dimensions, has a “sacred” (from sacren – to consecrate and make holy, whole, and unified) nature, which is a reflection of our own divinity. Jung continues, “The Buddha is really nothing other than the activating psyche of the yogi – the meditator himself. It is not only that the image of the Buddha is produced out of ‘one’s own mind and thought,’ but the psyche which produces these thought-forms is the Buddha himself.”[xiv]

Jung writes, “The psyche creates reality every day.”[xv] It is as if the psyche extends its tentacles out into the world and arranges, configures, and organizes the world so that the world becomes the very medium through which the psyche is simultaneously expressing, em-bodying and revealing itself. Being nonlocal, the psyche is “located” both within our heads (i.e., in the subjective domain of mind) and synchronistically out in the world at the same time, as time and space become relativized within the all-embracing realm of the psyche (please see my article Catching the Bug of Synchronicity). Jung points out that “it is clear that timeless and spaceless perceptions are possible only because the perceiving psyche is similarly constituted.”[xvi] The nonlocal psyche is not bound by either the rules of third dimensional space and time, nor by the laws of man. Because of the psyche’s nonlocality, “we have every reason to suppose,” Jung says, “that there is only one world, where matter and psyche are the same thing.”[xvii] For psyche and matter to be inseparably united is just like being in a dream, where the apparent matter of the dream is a direct reflection of the psyche that is dreaming. Jung writes, “‘At bottom’ the psyche is simply world.”[xviii] The psyche animates and gives rise to the world, while at the same time, the world reciprocally generates and in-forms the psyche. The psyche is not just a reflection of the world, however, but to quote Jung, “The psyche does not merely react, it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it.”[xix]

Endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, the psyche has a pre-eminent place in the natural order of things. The life of the psyche arises out of organic life, while at the same time transcending it through its own self-creation. The psyche has the unique quality of creating itself through its own activity. A product of cosmic evolution, the conscious psyche is a relatively recent emergence out of the womb of nature itself. The psyche, what Jung calls “the greatest of all cosmic wonders”[xx] is a natural phenomenon, emerging out of and being nothing other than pure nature itself. Jung writes, “And just as life fills the whole earth with plant and animal forms, so the psyche creates an even vaster world, namely consciousness, which is the self-cognition of the universe.”[xxi]

Many people have been conditioned to devalue the psyche, thinking of the contents of the psyche as mere nothings, empty fabrications. Realizing the reality of the psyche is to recognize, that quite to the contrary, its contents have a living reality. If many people have a belief that a river runs backwards, for example, this is not a physical fact (i.e., the river doesn’t run backwards), but the fact that many people believe this irrational idea is a psychic fact that has its own category of existence per se. Jung comments, “A psychic process is something that really exists, and a psychic content is as real as a plant or animal.”[xxii] Though psychic contents aren’t quantifiable, don’t occupy space nor have a location, and don’t have a physical mass, they have a reality all their own. Jung even suggests that if “we wished to form a vivid picture of a non-spatial being of the fourth dimension, we should do well to take thought, as a being, for our model.”[xxiii]

Jung writes, “We could well point to the idea of psychic reality as the most important achievement of modern psychology if it were recognized as such.”[xxiv] 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. Jung was so far ahead of his time when he realized the living, autonomous reality of the nonlocal psyche that few people understood what he was talking about. The discovery of the ‘reality’ of the psyche, 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.”[xxv] The psyche itself is truly a subject worthy of our contemplation and veneration. Jung opines, “It is my conviction that the investigation of the psyche is the science of the future.”[xxvi] The psyche is the subject of all knowledge, being the womb in and out of which both art and science are born.

“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. Jung calls the psyche “the mother of all human facts, of civilization and of its destroyer, war. All this is at first psychic and invisible.”[xxvii] What is currently playing out in the collective body politic is a process that has been gestating in the depths of the human psyche over millennia (please see my article Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War). There has been a preparatory process going on within the human psyche over the history of our species that has unleashed the very forces that are at work today in the world. Jung writes, “what the unconscious really contains are the great collective events of the time. In the collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself.”[xxviii] World events are being cooked up in the crucible of the collective unconscious of humanity into living experiences.

Jung elucidates, “What future developments are being prepared in the unconscious of modern man…It depends on us whether we help coming events to birth by understanding them, and reinforce their healing effect, or whether we repress them with our prejudices, narrow-mindedness and ignorance, thus turning their effect into its opposite, into poison and destruction.”[xxix] We are potential spiritual midwives, who by ‘understanding’ the psychic nature of ‘future developments,’ ‘reinforce their healing effect’ and birth ‘coming events’ into incarnation through the womb of the psyche. The psyche, which is pregnant with open-ended possibilities, is the very cipher in which the history of humanity is being written. Jung writes, “The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”[xxx]

The psyche is historical, in the sense that its development can only be understood in the context of its personal and collective past. History, which is the psyche’s revelation of itself, is not only being given birth to within the psyche; the psyche itself is the very force which in-forms and gives shape to history. The psyche is simultaneously historical and trans-historical, however, which is to say that the psyche atemporally abides outside of linear time yet simultaneously generates events experienced by humans as historical time. Though within its very structure is written the whole history of humanity, the psyche is at the same time teleological, in that it is purposeful, seeking its own actualization. Jung writes, “Anything psychic is Janus-faced: it looks both backwards and forwards.”[xxxi] The psyche is like a pivot through which, both on the individual and collective levels, we choose either to look backwards and re-create the unhealed past, or step into consciously participating in our own creative future evolution in the present.

The psyche doesn’t solely belong to a self-contained, particular person, but is related to the collective, which is to say everyone, as the psyche exists in and as an underlying, all-pervasive field which in-forms and gives shape to all of life. To quote Jung, “the psyche is not only a personal but a world problem.”[xxxii] The psyche is like an omnipresent atmo“sphere” that exists in all times and throughout all space. The psyche expresses itself like a fractal, in that it uses synchronistic iterations of itself to express itself in multiple dimensions simultaneously – within ourselves, in relationship with each other, and throughout the collective organism of humanity. Jung comments, “the psyche of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the psyche of an individual. Moreover, has not a poet spoken of the ‘nations of his soul?’ And quite correctly, it seems to me, for in one of its aspects the psyche is not individual, but is derived from the nation, from the collectivity, from humanity even. In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche.”[xxxiii] In his own researches, both with his patients and within himself, Jung had tapped into a supra-personal psyche that he called the collective unconscious, a dimension of reality in which we are all contained through our infinitely intricate interconnectedness. Pointing at the nonlocality of the psyche, Jung writes, “the psyche does not exist wholly in time and space…For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them.”[xxxiv] Commenting on a collective evolutionary process that is taking place within the psyche of humanity, Jung writes, “Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is one, with one psyche.”[xxxv] We are beginning to wake up, due to evolutionary necessity, to the fact that we are indivisibly interdependent, only existing in relation to each other. We are, by our very nature, one human family. Just like when one family member changes it propels the whole system to reconfigure itself, each single person waking up to the fact that ‘humanity is one’ changes the whole world’s psyche, the soul of the World. When one person in this moment realizes the reality of the psyche, which is to become lucid in the waking dream called life, this particular person’s realization nonlocally registers throughout space in no time whatsoever, changing everything.

Jung could just as well have been talking about our current war(s) when, speaking about World War I, he says, “The whole war was a psychical phenomenon…It was simply the time when that thing had to happen from unknown psychical reasons. Any great movement of man has always started from psychical reasons.”[xxxvi] The source of any great transformative collective movement of humanity throughout history, be it constructive or destructive, is the human psyche. Jung comments, “I can see no sense in our blaming the war for things that have happened to us. Each of us carried within himself the elements that brought on the war.”[xxxvii] Most people don’t realize that wars are themselves full-bodied expressions of inner psychic processes being played out in the world theater (please see my article Archetypal Dimensions of World Events). Commenting on the Second World War, Jung said that it “was recognized as an unmitigated psychic disaster only by the few. Rather than do this, people prefer the most preposterous political and economic theories.”[xxxviii]

Just like a dream supplies all the evidence we need to confirm the seemingly objective truth of the viewpoint we are holding within it, once the sociopolitical insanity plays itself out in the form of war, we have all the proof we need that the conflict is outside of ourselves. It is then nearly impossible to convince anyone that the source of the conflict lies within the psyche of every individual. The psyche becomes exteriorized, as an internal psychic conflict then takes place on the plane of projection outside in the world in living flesh and blood in the form of war. To quote Jung, “In the same way that the atom bomb is an unparalleled means of physical mass destruction, so the misguided development of the soul must lead to psychic mass destruction.”[xxxix]

As if an iteration of the same, underlying fractal, the psychic forces that animated the totalitarian psychosis (what I call “malignant egophrenia”) that inspired the two world wars of the previous century are actively at work creating war in our current day and age. Being Janus-faced, however, hidden in this psychic dis-ease is a profound potential blessing. Jung points out that “the totalitarian psychosis with its frightful consequences and the intolerable disturbance of human relationships are forcing us to pay attention to the psyche and our abysmal unconsciousness of it. Never before has mankind as a whole experienced the numen of the psychological factor on so vast a scale.”[xl] Jung is articulating that the psyche, in its full-blown numinosity, is manifesting in, as and through our world crisis as if the psyche is a higher power. Just like the unconscious compensates a one-sidedness through the dreams it sends our way, the totalitarian psychosis that is playing out in the world today is the very compensatory form through which the psyche is trying to get our attention about the psyche’s profound importance. The totalitarian psychosis running rampant throughout the world today is the psyche’s way of revealing to us that we are forgetting the very role the psyche plays in creating our experience. Marginalizing our own authorship and authority, we then dream up totalitarian forces to limit our freedom and create our experience for us. A true conjunction of opposites, the totalitarian psychosis is both a horror, as well as a potential revelation showing us how we have disconnected from our own creative power. A quantum phenomenon, how the madness plays itself out depends upon whether we recognize what it is revealing to us about ourselves.

It is high time for us to pay attention to the psyche’s role in human affairs. Paradoxically, both the origin as well as the potential re-solution to our world crisis are to be found within the subtle organ of the psyche (please see my article Shadow Projection is its own Medicine). To quote Jung, “a complete spiritual renewal in needed. And this cannot be given gratis, each man must strive to achieve it for himself. Neither can old formulas which once had a value be brought into force again. The eternal truths cannot be transmitted mechanically, in every epoch they must be born anew from the human psyche.”[xli] What is born anew from the human psyche is the awareness of the reality of the psyche, as we become the instruments through which the psyche becomes aware of itself. Jung writes, “It is our own psyche, constantly at work creating new spiritual forms and spiritual forces which may help us to subdue the boundless lust for prey of Aryan man.”[xlii] The potential re-solution to our world crisis is emerging out of, into, and through the human psyche itself within each person. Since there are no absolute boundaries between an individual’s psyche and any other part of creation, none of us are separate from the cosmic creative principle itself; in fact, we are that principle incarnated in human form. This is to say that each of us is ultimately identical with the divine source of creation itself.

Jung writes “no explanation of the psychic can be anything other than the living process of the psyche itself.”[xliii] This means that these very words about the psyche are the “living process” of the psyche reflecting upon itself. Jung reminds us that “We should not forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.”[xliv] Not just in these words, but in everything, at every moment. The universe is an oracle, an instantaneous feedback loop that is a living revelation of itself, and it is speaking symbolically, just like a dream. Literally.

The psyche is the means by which we observe the psyche; it is in the peculiar position of being simultaneously subject and object of its own contemplation. In the domain of the psyche, the observer is truly the observed. Jung writes, “there is no knowledge about the psyche, but only in the psyche.”[xlv] Instead of the psyche being within our brains, just like a dream, we are inside the psyche. Jung comments, “the psychical is no longer a content in us, but we become contents of it.”[xlvi] We are indeed ‘such stuff as dreams are made.’ To quote Jung, “Far, therefore, from being a material world, this is a psychic world”[xlvii] (please see my article One Great Dream of a Single Dreamer). Recognizing the psychic nature of reality is to recognize that, just like in a dream, the inner is the outer. Recognizing the mysterious co-relation between what is occurring in the world and what is happening within our own minds empowers us to become dynamic transformative agents in our world. Instead of unconsciously reacting to our projections as they appear out in the world, our relationship to our projections and our world radically changes. Recognizing ourselves in the world, we become en-abled to play with our projections in a way that serves the whole field, ourselves included.

Jung over and over reiterates in his writings that the greatest danger which threatens humanity comes from our own psyche. Millions of us can fall into our unconscious together and reinforce each other’s madness, feeding a contagious psychic epidemic in which we unwittingly become complicit in supporting the insanity of endless wars (please see my article Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic). Unconscious psychic forces are the active world powers which rule over humanity. “The powers of the psyche” are so unimaginably vast that, in Jung’s opinion, they “are far mightier than all the Great Powers of the earth.”[xlviii] The psyche is an active power that can’t be form-fitted into a limited, materialistic world view that sees the world as separate from itself. Hidden within the psyche, like a treasure in encoded form waiting to be discovered, is an incalculable meta-nuclear power which, as history shows, can transform entire civilizations in unforeseeable ways. Jung says, “the investigation of the deeper levels of the psyche brings to light much that we, on the surface, can at most dream about.”[xlix]

What would happen, I find myself imagining, when more people investigate and more fully realize, not intellectually, but experientially, the living reality of the psyche? What would it ‘bring to light?’ Being that recognizing the psychic nature of reality simultaneously transforms both the psyche as well as our experience of ‘reality,’ how would the psyche, and the world, reflect back this realization? How would the human dynamic of our present day world change, I wonder, if the psyche was realized to be the ground and origin of all that occurs in our world? How would we, as individuals, be different than we are right now? The psyche itself is an always-available, living portal through which we can both transform ourselves and re-create the world in which we live. It is our greatest gift. Being that this gift is a passageway to the healing and evolution of our species, what if we more fully open it?

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

[ii] Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 69.

[iii] Jung, Psychology and Religion: East and West, CW 11, par. 16.

[iv] Ibid, par. 836.

[v] Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 2, p. 986.

[vi] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 748.

[vii] Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 71.

[viii] Jung, Psychology and Religion: East and West, CW 11, par. 448.

[ix] Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 1, p. 396.

[x] Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 203.

[xi] Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 47.

[xii] Jung, Psychology and Religion: East and West, CW 11, par. 770.

[xiii] Ibid, par. 771.

[xiv] Ibid, 931.

[xv] Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, par. 78.

[xvi] Jung, Letters, vol. 1, p. 117.

[xvii] Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 342.

[xviii] Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 291.

[xix] Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, par. 665.

[xx] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 357.

[xxi] Jung, The Development of Personality, CW 17, par. 165.

[xxii] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 651.

[xxiii] Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 213.

[xxiv] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 683.

[xxv] Ibid, par. 658.

[xxvi] Jung, Psychological Reflections, p. 14.

[xxvii] Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 206.

[xxviii] Jung, The Symbolic Life, CW 18, par. 371.

[xxix] Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 731.

[xxx] Jung, Psychological Reflections, p. 14.

[xxxi] Jung, Psychological Reflections, p. 15.

[xxxii] Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 132.

[xxxiii] Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 175.

[xxxiv] Jung, Letters, vol. 1, p. 256.

[xxxv] Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 779.

[xxxvi] Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 46.

[xxxvii] Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar given in 1925, p. 85.

[xxxviii] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 424.

[xxxix] Ibid, 428.

[xl] Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 442.

[xli] Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 443.

[xlii] Ibid, par. 190.

[xliii] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 429.

[xliv] Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 483.

[xlv] Jung, The Development of Personality, CW 17, par. 161.

[xlvi] Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 57.

[xlvii] Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 747.

[xlviii] Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 326.

[xlix] Ibid, par. 330.

Though it happened almost half a century ago, I can still feel the residue of that experience in this moment, a reverberation in time of that event. At the moment that I was about to utter the word “envelope,” my consciousness split in two, and a part of me watched it happen. Instead of residing solely within my own self, at that moment I had the shocking experience of feeling that half of my consciousness existed outside of myself, looking at me. Objectifying myself, I remember my consciousness projecting itself outside of myself into the teacher and my classmates, and I was experiencing myself how I imagined they saw me, as compared to experiencing myself through my own eyes. For the first time in my life I was having the full realization that there were apparently “others” who were separate and seemed alien from whom I was experiencing myself to be, or so I imagined. Introduced to the apparently separate self without a moment’s notice, I had become self-conscious.

Why I remember this moment so vividly was what happened next. Because of my novel experience of my new “self” as apparently being an object separate from the subject of both others and another part of myself, I felt like the odd man out, out of sorts with myself. I no longer felt at one with myself, feeling inwardly divided, no longer at home inside my own mind. It felt like I had all of a sudden gotten introduced to an “other” within myself (please see my article Meeting the Other Within). Strangely, my reaction to my moment of acute self-consciousness was that I began struggling to do something that the moment before was effortless. I began “trying” to say the word “envelope” that prior to that moment would have easily rolled off of my tongue. Tongue-tied, the harder I strained to pronounce “envelope,” the more I couldn’t get the word out of my mouth. I felt a pressure to perform that hadn’t been there the moment before, as if I had been overcome with performance anxiety or stage fright. Frozen in fear, I was the proverbial deer in the headlights, only in my case there were about thirty pairs of headlights staring at me. Split in two, I felt inwardly seized up, contracted and fighting against myself. Tying myself up in a knot of my own making, the harder I tried to say the word “envelope,” the more I couldn’t say it. I was en-acting the existential double-bind of “trying” to let go, which was fundamentally a disguised form of holding on, thereby insuring that my efforts would have the opposite effect of my desired intention. As if something had come over me, instead of feeling in possession of myself, I felt possessed by something other than myself. It was as if I had fallen into an infinite regression, a self-created double-bind with seemingly no exit strategy. For the very first time in my young life, I began to stutter and was literally unable to talk.

Interestingly, at that point in my life 47 years ago, the main way I was creatively expressing myself was to draw, which I did hours every day. I have some of my drawings from this exact period in my life, and my drawings went from free, uninhibited, joyful, and spontaneous pictures, to images that were extremely self-conscious, tentative, and inhibited. It was as if I had been unexpectedly kicked out of the mythic Garden of Eden. I had been rudely awakened into the shock and trauma of self-consciousness. Developmental psychologists say that it is right around the age of seven that the typical child develops a self-conscious ego, and I certainly am in no position to argue. Come to think of it, Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden and becoming self-conscious was ultimately in the service of the birth, differentiation, and expansion of consciousness itself. Could the birth pangs of feeling “self-conscious” potentially be the mirrored reflection and forerunner of the emergence of the “conscious self,” or am I just imagining?

In that moment in that second grade classroom when I became unable to express myself, I felt helpless and out of control, both unable to influence my environment, as well as be in control of myself. I felt powerless to alter my situation, while at the same time being deeply altered by it. As if something had taken me over, I was making a spectacle of myself for all to see. In the grips of something other than myself, it was as if I was speaking in (alien) tongues. More than being beside myself in fear, I was in abject terror. Compounding the trauma, within a few seconds, all of my fellow second-graders burst into laughter, laughing at, not with, me. I remember the moment of feeling drenched in shame and embarrassment, as I became the object of my schoolmates’ entertainment. I remember feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed with humiliation, as a tidal wave of shame went right through me, imprinting and stamping itself on the exposed and vulnerable core of my being. I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide, to cover-up myself, as the shame felt like the very last thing in the world that I would ever want to experience and have others see.

Shame is not an emotion that we can fully experience by our lonesome, isolated selves, as it is fundamentally relational in nature, in that full-blown shame always involves being seen by the gaze of an “other.” This place of shame is where I feel most judgmental about myself, where I secretly fear that something is wrong with me. This is the part of me that I hide from others, as well as from myself. Hiding from myself so as to avoid experiencing my shame, I find myself in the absurd situation of trying to fool myself so as to try and make my illusion real. This shame is where I evidently lack the requisite love for myself, the place where I am the object of my own self-contempt. During that moment in that second grade classroom many years ago, the convergence of fear, shame, self-judgment and helplessness resulted in my feeling mortified beyond belief, as if a part of me had died. My report cards for the rest of second grade said I had now developed a stutter.

The stutter went away later that year, but occasionally that familiar sense of self-consciousness that was born in that moment many years ago will get re-activated and rear its head. As if a trip-wire has gone off, at these moments it is as if I am having a “flashback,” and am being transported back in time so as to re-experience the core of that very moment, at least in my imagination. It’s not the particular personal content of that moment in second grade that I’m re-experiencing, but rather, the more universal experience of feeling my consciousness “split” (which means both to leave and to divide in two), and then to feel terrified, not in charge of myself, just like I felt almost 50 years ago. When I step through the personal into this timeless, archetypal, experience in these moments, I am once again actively participating in the creation of the birth of my own self-consciousness. Though on one hand, the birth of my self-conscious self took place in 1963, on the other hand, the birth of my self-consciousness is an event that is taking place right now, in this moment.

The fact that this primal moment of trauma occasionally re-visits in the present moment in crystallized, condensed form makes me imagine that I am once again being given an opportunity to re-dream the dream and heal the trauma of my own self-consciousness. What if I recognize in the moment of my self-conscious contraction arising that, rather than being an obstacle to my expression of myself, it is an expression and revelation of something within myself? This involves stepping into an entirely new point of reference towards myself, where instead of identifying with any particular content, I experience myself to be the spacious context which precedes and in which all content, including the contraction, arises. This is to dis-identify from the contraction, to stop identifying myself as being the one who is contracting. This doesn’t involve doing anything, it involves stopping doing something. Instead of resisting the self-conscious contraction – which itself is the act which generates the very thing resisted in a self-generating feedback loop – what if, upon its very moment of arising I recognize and embrace this energy as my own, lean into it, breathe, and let it flow back into myself instead of fighting it? What then? When the moment of self-consciousness presents itself, encoded in the event is both the re-creation of its potentially traumatic aspect as well as, at the same time, its potential resolution and liberation. The arising of self-consciousness is the revelation in form of a truly quantum moment in time, in that how this moment manifests depends upon nothing other than how we dream it. Something is being shown to us in the process.

During these self-conscious moments of inwardly re-enacting the primordial moment of apparently being a problem to myself, I am at the same time being shown an unconscious part of myself. Seemingly caught in the ever-oscillating trauma of my own limited and limiting self-consciousness, I am at the same time being introduced to the part of my self that, symbolically speaking, is imprisoned in a hell-realm. Recognizing this part of myself, it is as if I have found a long-lost and rejected aspect of myself. I have then stepped into the archetypal role of a shaman who is journeying back in time so as to re-collect and recover a stuck and dis-associated part of myself. Alchemically speaking, when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience, the archetypal figure of the shaman is liberating not only the part of ourselves which is bound and captive in the underworld of the unconscious, but at the same time we are freeing the universal, living eternal spirit that is seemingly trapped in matter. The mythology of the shaman always symbolically re-presents that we are able to retrieve split-off parts of our lost soul and bring them back to the world of consciousness, where they can be integrated into and feed our intrinsic wholeness. This process of re-membering creates light that helps everyone see. We are our own shamans.

A deeper psycho-spiritual dynamic stammered its way through my awareness in that second grade classroom, as if the actual event in time was the medium through which a deeper, timeless process re-presented itself in embodied form and sound. The personal shell of the complex – my becoming overly self-conscious and stuttering – was the form in which the eternal, mythological motif, the emergence of the self-conscious, separate self, clothed itself as it incarnated. Whereas the personal shell of the complex can be, through cause and effect, reductively traced back to an actual, historical past trauma that occurred in 1963, the deeper, mythological, archetypal core of the complex is neither historical, causal, linear, nor existing in time. It is through fully entering into and going through the personal dimension of our experience, however, that we access the deeper mythological source. The archetypal, mythological core of the complex is the doorway to the healing waters of the psyche, in which the transformation of the complex itself is to be found.

This experience in second grade was a doorway through which I became introduced to a deeper, archetypal realm of human experience, as if this particular experience was a portal through which I fell into another world. This experience in second grade became the catapult which has thrust a part of me outside of time (which is both dis-associating, while connecting me with a deeper, atemporal part of myself at the same time). That particular experience in second grade has awakened an analogous inner experience that seems from another time and place. When I take off the personalistic garb of what happened in second grade, I drop down and step into a deeper, more universal process in which we are all taking part. When I access the archetypal dimension which underlies the merely personal, it feels like I am having a deeper memory and re-experiencing something that happened “once upon a time,” in the mythic dimension outside of time. This feeling-toned memory feels like it happened to a deep part of my being, but doesn’t feel like it happened in this lifetime. I don’t know if my feeling this way means that I am tapping into an experience that happened in another lifetime, and/or if I am accessing my imagination’s expression of a deeper, archetypal experience which exists in the timeless collective unconscious itself, or maybe I am just dreaming. In any case, that experience in second grade opens up to something that feels like it is not just from my personal inventory of experiences, but rather, seems to come from the repository of the archetypal experiences of our species. It feels like, at least in my imagination, that my unique experience in that classroom was a reflection of, and hence connected me with, the more universal experience of the trauma of the birth of the seemingly separate, self-conscious self being born in our species.

Since that point in time almost 50 years ago, the moments of self-consciousness in my life that have followed seem to be causally related to and an extension in time of that very moment. That very moment way back when has in-formed my life in a fundamental way. But what was the origin of that moment? Where did it come from? What caused it? The moment before I was in an open, innocent state. Where did that seemingly toxic shame come from? It suddenly and mysteriously arose, or more accurately, irrupted, with incredible intensity, out of seemingly nowhere but the core of my being, a spontaneous reflex of the shock of self-conscious awareness. As fate would have it, an outer circumstance simultaneously constellated in my life that corresponded to the shame’s inner logic so that it could fully manifest and actualize itself.

Over the years I began to notice something about those moments in time when the primal trauma becomes constellated within myself. I will be effortlessly talking, and then have the fearful thought “I hope I don’t stutter,” and after that thought would always emerge the very stutter I was hoping I wasn’t going to have. The anticipatory fear that I might stutter seemed in some way to help to create the very stutter that didn’t exist the moment before. Did my having the fear of stuttering evoke the stutter, and/or was my fear of stuttering a nonlocal, precognitive intuition of an event in the future that was about to happen? From the atemporal point of view (a perspective which views things from a vantage point “outside of time”), the event of the stutter had already happened in the archetypal realm of pure potentiality, but hadn’t yet undergone the formality of actually occurring as a third dimensional event. As if a future event is influencing the present moment by reverse, backward causality, this future event is attracting and materializing a third-dimensional scenario into itself through which it can manifest in form and time. Similar to how when an object approaches us, sometimes we’ll see the shadow of the object as the harbinger of its arrival before the actual object fully materializes, was my fearful thought the nonlocal “shadow” of the approaching stutter? Was my thought the nonlocal emanation and reflection of an event that had already happened in the “plenum” (the atemporal fullness and unmanifested field of infinite possibilities that comprises the collective unconscious), and besides being a “precognition” of the event, was an intrinsic aspect of the event’s unfolding?

The stutter doesn’t actually exist objectively; it seems to be the sort of phenomenon that if I think it exists, it exists, but if I don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist. Was this showing me something? The stutter fundamentally wasn’t a physical thing, it was an expression of something happening within my mind. Speech was just the channel through which this deeper perturbance in mind was making itself known in my life. This process manifests in a different form in everyone’s life. Other people, for example, might not be able to think, i.e., become mentally frozen, when they become self-conscious. At the genesis of my particular process seems to be my fear of stuttering, and hence, not wanting to experience the toxic shame associated with it, which somehow translates itself into stuttering, as I paradoxically create the very thing I don’t want to happen. This is the crazy place within myself where I dream up my worst nightmares.

The phenomenon of the stutter is the outer voice, in the form of sound, of the part of me that’s inwardly grasping. This grasping is a lack of ease, an effort-ing that is an expression of feeling that I am not enough, that I lack something. It is an ultimately futile attempt to fill up a void of seemingly infinite depth. At the core of this experience seems to be an insecure part of myself, a seemingly isolated fragment of the universal Self, which is grasping onto something that isn’t able to be held onto. My act of grasping is the very activity which endlessly generates and justifies itself, which is to say that my grasping creates the particular situation to which grasping is the seemingly only logical response. When I am grasping onto an (imagined) sense of self, I am relating to and defining myself as if I am an independent, encapsulated, egoic agent, separate from the whole. Suffering a case of mistaken identity, the me that I am imagining I am, which I protect at all costs, is a self-created fiction that doesn’t even exist in the way I am imagining. The stutter is a remnant, an outer sound-residue, of my inner clinging to an illusory image of myself as a discrete entity isolated from the world, an embodied and “enworlded” identity pattern bound in time. This fragment is an expression of the place deep within myself where I am creating separation and division where there was none the moment before, as I actively, and unwittingly, create my own problem. I then react by trying to solve the seeming problem I’ve created, not recognizing that I am unconsciously creating the very thing against which I am reacting. My effort to solve the apparent problem invests an undeserved, seemingly substantial reality to the problem, as I unknowingly create my own dilemma, whose ultimate source, and potential resolution, is within myself. It should not go unmentioned that this very process is at the root of the collective insanity that is playing itself out en masse in living flesh and blood on the global stage (please see my article, It’s All in the Psyche). What is going on deep inside of us as individuals is reflected, both literally and symbolically, in the macrocosm of the greater body politic of the world.

During those moments of the primal trauma being re-constellated, it is like I am having a “moment” in which time has bent, and I am re-experiencing, so as to potentially transform and liberate, an event that took place in the past – in the present. It is as if a past, incomplete moment that is locked back and encapsulated in time is trying to complete itself in the present moment. During these moments, it is as if time has collapsed into the singularity of the present moment, and I have fallen through a hole in time. At these moments I am “time-traveling,” as I am in multiple time zones (the past, the present, and feeling the influence of probable futures) at the same time, in a twilight zone between worlds. These “moments” are like ripples in time coming from the past, magnetically pulled by the gravity of the future, giving shape to and in-forming the shoreline of this present moment right now. These “moments” are like shockwaves felt in this moment of the eternal, timeless moment of the self becoming conscious of itself, in my particular case channeled through my lived-through memory of that traumatic moment of initiation into self/other-consciousness almost fifty years ago. In my particular situation, it is an archetypal moment of fear, of feeling not safe, of not trusting, both the world out there, as well as myself. If I identify with the fear, I then live and act out of the place of not feeling safe within myself, which “in no time whatsoever” calls forth an unsafe universe as convincing evidence to confirm my point of view in a self-validating feedback loop of which I am both the author, as well as my own victim.

When I tap into the core of this archetypal moment of becoming self-conscious, there is always fear of some “other.” A sense of separate self/others and fear simultaneously co-arise and reciprocally condition each other; one is never found without the other. As it says in the Bhagavad Gita, “As soon as there is an ‘other,’ fear arises.” When this self-conscious self emerges which experiences the world as separate from itself, it feels like I am individually participating in a timeless, archetypal moment – a moment of terror, which is the traumatic birth of the fear-based separate self. The self-contraction that pulsates through me during these moments simultaneously generates, while being an expression of, the part of me that is seemingly bound in linear time, frozen in trauma, and feeling absolute terror. This self-reinforcing dynamic of the self-conscious, separate self generating its worst nightmares, appears to be the origin, source, and genesis of the very experience of terror itself, as it is a literal and symbolic revelation of how we terrorize ourselves.

In addition to being the source of the archetypal experience of terror, encoded in this moment of the birth of the self-conscious, separate self is its own self-liberation. This moment is the revelation of itself, which is to say that simply by seeing the part of ourselves that is grasping, we are lessening our grasp. We can only see the part of us that is grasping in an objective way, outside of ourselves, if we step into the part of ourselves as subject that is not grasping. As if designed by an awakened software engineer of the mind, the moment of self-consciousness, though apparently an obscuration, is potentially a self-liberating revelation when recognized as such. Bound up in the energy that’s animating our self-conscious contraction is the creative spirit. When we stop contracting against our own inner, open-ended radiance, we can’t help but to express ourselves creatively. Paradoxically, is the moment of self-consciousness the very portal through which we can potentially step out of and let go of ourselves? Could the part of us that’s grasping, rather than obscuring our true nature, be an expression of it? Is it just as simple as a change in viewpoint? Instead of identifying with and being taken over by the terror, we can simply recognize within ourselves the part of us which feels terrified, an essential change in our stance towards ourselves which is in the service of the birth of compassion.

In essence, in my case this moment of self-consciousness is potentially the place where I have given away my intrinsic power and authority, divesting myself of being the author of my own experience. For at the moment of self-consciousness, I am seeing myself not through my own eyes, nor how others are actually seeing me, but rather, how I imagine others see me, as I imagine who they are. I then react to my own imagination of how others see me as if my projections are real and “objectively” exist in the minds of others outside of me, separate from myself. I have then created an imagination of who I am, at least in my own mind, relative to an imagined other, a process in which I am separating myself from simply being myself. Like a kitten endlessly reacting to her reflected image in a mirror, I then become apparently caught in a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop of my own making. When deeply contemplated, the whole experience of self-consciousness reveals itself to be a process that is fundamentally taking place in our own imagination. The phenomenon of self-consciousness, though on one hand the seeming problem if there ever was one, when sufficiently unfolded is itself ultimately pointing us to the primacy of the creative imagination in creating our experience of ourselves. Imagine that!

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

It feels like the right time to share this, as it feels like it’s not just my story. On the one hand, this synchronistic experience was tailor-made just for me, while on the other hand, it wasn’t just my experience, a circumstance meant solely for my personal consumption. It feels like it is a revelatory experience that contains gifts for all of us. It feels more right to share it now because it has taken me this many years to digest it, and to integrate the meaning of what was being shown to me so that I’d be able to share the story without identifying with the role. It also feels like the time is right to share this miraculous-seeming event because I’ve developed the psychological fluency so that I can now describe what my experience was in a way that I imagine will be received and taken in, instead of judged. Being archetypal, my synchronistic encounter is a self-reflection for all of us, revealing a process that exists deep within each one of us.

THE STORY

To place this event in context, a couple of years before this experience, I had suffered terrible abuse from the psychic hands of my father. The specific content is unimportant to the story I want to tell here. The salient feature is that I felt psychologically violated to my very core. The emotional abuse was so toxic that I literally woke up the day after one particularly bad incident with a fever, which from that day onwards lasted on and off, for a year. I went to doctors and hospitals, and no one could find anything physically wrong with me. Over the years I’ve realized that the fever was my mind-body’s way of attempting to integrate the overwhelming and shattering nature of the emotional trauma I had endured. This abuse changed the trajectory of my whole life. After the fever subsided, I was never even remotely the same, never to return to the seemingly normal life I had been living. It created enormous suffering for me, and yet, at the same time, it’s what inspired me to find my calling.

The only refuge that I had found that made me feel any better from the overwhelming trauma was to step out of trying to figure my way out of the suffering with my mind, and instead, to simply watch what was happening inside of me, which is what meditation is. For about a year and a half I began doing very serious meditation practice called “vipassana,” known as “insight meditation,” or the practice of mindfulness, as a way of dealing with my troubles. One day I was sitting in meditation and all of a sudden, out of the blue, in one nano-second, a bolt of lightning ignited in my brain. The lightning bolt didn’t come from outside of myself, but originated from within the inner sky of my own mind-body. At the time I had no idea that being struck by a bolt of lightning, as with Zeus and his thunderbolts, symbolizes in mythologies the world over the initiation of a spiritual process.  

Within hours of being struck by that flash of lightning, I began merging with the spontaneity of the present moment, and entered into an ec-static (beyond stasis) state. The next day I began acting so unlike my ordinary, conditioned and repressed self that a close friend thought I was going crazy and had me brought, by ambulance, to Highland Hospital in Oakland, California (please see my article, “We are all Shamans-in-Training”). I had so “let go” that I was just following the process and going along for the ride. I was stepping out of myself in such a way that every moment was synchronistically and effortlessly creative and full in a way I had hardly even imagined was possible previously. I had become unself-conscious, at one with myself, as if I had stepped out of all restraints. It was as if I was released from any social conditioning, in that my actions were no longer a reaction to what I thought others thought. As if snapping out of a double-bind, I wasn’t limiting myself anymore. I wasn’t contracting against myself but simply getting out of my own way to let my light shine, as if I went from being a 75 watt light-bulb to being a million watt bulb. This was a dangerous situation, however, as at the time I certainly hadn’t yet developed the container within myself to channel this energy in a way that was socially acceptable. I had so surrendered to what was happening, which was the only thing that made sense to do, and the only thing that I could do, that I had stopped trying to control the situation. Little did I realize that upon entering the hallowed halls of psychiatry, my life would be changed forever.  

In the very first room I was brought to in that hospital, some sort of lounge for psychiatric patients, I saw among the group of patients a blind woman, whom I immediately approached. Her eyes were a blind person’s eyes, opaque, with no color or radiance at all. Without any thought on my part, I went right up to her and found myself staring at her eyes, saying over and over the following words: “All you have to do to see is open your eyes and look.” These words were literally coming through me, having fallen into my head, as if I was channeling them. I kept on getting closer and closer to her as I repeated these words, looking into her eyes all the while. What happened next, over the course of less than a minute, I will never forget. In front of my very eyes, her eyes began regaining their color and luminosity, going from the dead, diseased eyes of a blind person to normal, healthy, seeing eyes. She had regained her sight.

At that moment, as if divinely choreographed, a beautiful woman doctor came into the room, gave me some pills to swallow, and brought me into another room. The attendants then strapped me on to a bed, where I was bound hand and foot. And there I spent the night. I remember lying there knowing I was going through a profound spiritual experience. It was hard not to realize this, after just having had the exchange with the now ex-blind woman. My encounter with her helped me to inwardly know that I wasn’t going crazy, but rather, was evidently going through some sort of spiritual awakening process. There is a correlation between abuse and spiritual awakening: The seeming miraculousness of what had happened with the blind woman feels inversely proportional to the horror of abuse that I was passing through via my relationship with my father, as if they were inverted mirror images of each other. While tied up, I remember feeling that whomever I would think of I was in some way connecting to and “bringing along” on my awakening, so I kept on expanding my imagination of whom I could bring along until I began thinking of everyone I had ever known and then some. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly get a normal night’s sleep that evening.

The next morning, after I was unstrapped, I was brought to a room and the only other person in the room, sitting across a table from me, was, coincidentally, that same ex-blind woman.  She’s looking at me and lovingly smiling from ear to ear, not having said one word to me as of yet. All of a sudden, it was as if a closed fist in my heart completely opened. It was perfectly clear to me that this was my heart chakra blossoming. This is described in spiritual literature as the opening of a thousand-petaled lotus, and though I had never had this happen to me before, it was an experience that I immediately recognized. I then had the spontaneous realization of what had happened between us the day before. I intuitively understood that her eyes had been physically fine, it was just that she was not letting herself open her (inner) eyes and look, which was “causing” her blindness. It was like she was keeping her inner, psychological eyes closed, was choosing not to look, and this was reflected through her apparent physical blindness. And the day before I somehow “saw” this, as if a clairvoyant part of myself had announced itself in a most eye-opening way. In addition, I somehow knew just what to say and do, as if I had become a conduit for some deeper, healing force to play itself out in form. It was also clear to me that it was no accident that she and I had come together.  It was clearly a synchronistic meeting, one in which we were both playing roles in a deeper drama. As if we were telepathically connected, within a few moments she says to me “Aren’t you going to answer the phone call from Roy?” (my father’s name).  These were, literally, the first words she spoke to me. Moments later the nurse came into the room and said my father was on the phone. Word had evidently reached my parents that their only child had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

STEPPING THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

While in the hospital I found myself in an absurd situation: I’m in the midst of a full-blown, life-changing spiritual awakening (see my article “Spiritual Emergence”) and the doctors are interviewing me about my grasp on reality to see if I am crazy. In my “enthusiastic” (en-theos means to be filled with spirit) sharing with them about the revelatory experience I was having, I can only imagine how this certified in their minds that I was crazy. When this event happened with the blind woman, I couldn’t possibly have been prepared for the energies that this synchronicity helped to unleash, both within myself and in the field around me. Not having had time to integrate the overwhelming mystical experience that I was having, I was “crazy” not to realize that I shouldn’t be talking about my religious experience with people who were still entrained in consensus reality.

I was let out of the hospital after three days, however, once I realized that if I simply appeared normal and talked about my problems, I could leave. When I got released from the hospital, whereas all of my friends and family thought I had suffered a psychotic break from reality, I knew something very important had happened. I intuitively sensed I needed to find someone to talk to who would understand what had occurred. I found out that there was a Burmese Buddhist monk named U Silananda, who was living across the bay in San Francisco. I went to see him and told him what had happened. He said that I was in luck, that one of the most spiritually developed practitioners of the twentieth century in his tradition had just arrived in the Bay Area, and that I should go and get his blessings. Within the week I was sitting at the feet of and being blessed by The Most Venerable Taungpulu Sayadaw, at 85 years old considered to be the greatest living Buddhist master of all of Burma. When I told him what had happened with the blind woman, he didn’t think I was crazy, but recognized that I was in the midst of a spiritual unfoldment.

Over the next 16 months, I continued to have a series of over-the-top “non-consensus reality” experiences. Some of the experiences so defied the conventional laws of third dimensional time and space that they seemed physically impossible, as if they could only happen in a dream. Because I was still in the process of metabolizing what was happening to me, I was still learning how to express my experiences in a way that didn’t upset the applecart of consensus reality. As a result I was hospitalized at least three other times, as I tried to contain, understand and assimilate the deeper process that was happening both within me and in my outer life circumstances. Concretized by the psychiatric system as being mentally ill, the psychiatrists “hoped to one day make me a functioning member of society” (please see my article “Psychiatry Almost Drove Me Crazy”). The event with the blind woman was also a demarcation point in my relationship with my family, who bought in hook, line and sinker to my psychiatric diagnosis. From that moment on it was as if we were living in two very different universes. Over the course of time my relationship with my family deteriorated, became more and more fractured, dis-connected, and estranged, until now, where I have no “blood” family left. But I have a huge spiritual family, which only continues to grow.

My whole life changed from this synchronistic experience, as if I had given birth to a new part of myself. I was no longer living in the same universe that I was in the moment before this experience. From that moment on, I was inhabiting a world of expanded possibilities, where even the seemingly impossible now seemed possible. It was as if I had fallen through a rabbit hole, stepped through the looking glass, or passed through a portal, and found myself playing a role in a cosmic, visionary drama that certainly had my highest attention.  

DREAMWORK

Even though the situation with that blind woman actually happened in waking life, it is quite profound to contemplate what happened symbolically, as if it were a dream. To see our life in this way is to view the events in our life as if they are a dream that a deeper part of us, what I call the “deeper, dreaming Self” is dreaming into materialized form in and as our life itself. Just like doing dreamwork on a night dream, we can then ask ourselves, what is the meaning of this dream (i.e., our daily life experience)? How would I interpret it? What parts of myself are embodied in the different dream characters that I meet as my life unfolds?

The encounter with the blind woman was a waking dream that the two of us were collaboratively dreaming up together. Being a mutually shared dream, we can look at what got dreamed up between us from either of our point’s of view (what dream character was I in her dream, and what part of myself was she?). Who was I in her dream, but a visionary part of herself that she was split-off from, and hence projected out and dreamed up into and as an in-sight-ful (dream) figure in her (waking) dream.  As if waiting for me to arrive, it was as if I had become drawn in and drafted into her dreaming process. It was as if I was sent by central casting because I was open and sensitive enough at that moment to simply pick up a role that was being dreamed up in the field, waiting for someone to give it full-embodied, incarnate form. Just like I was the living re-present-ative of a part of herself, at the same time, she was an embodied reflection of a blind part of myself. She symbolized the part of me that was refusing to look at something within myself. In healing her own blindness, she also stood for the part of myself that was now stepping into and embodying a new level of seeing, as if the blind part of myself was regaining its sight.

It was as if the blind woman was ready to heal her blindness, and just needed a little reminder of what to do. Upon entering the scene I said my lines perfectly, with genuine aplomb, as if I knew the script, as if I had practiced for lifetimes. We stepped into each other’s waking dreams in such a way that our interaction was a re-presentation of what was going on inside of both of our psyches. At the same time that I was being dreamed up by her to help her heal, she was being dreamed up to pick up a (third) eye-opening role in my unconscious. We were collaboratively dreaming each other up, reciprocally co-arising relative to each other, as if we were both contained within and expressions of a higher-dimensional process. This experience between us was an epiphany in materialized form, a revelation in time encoded with catalytic information.

 The two of us were engaged in a mutual synchronicity that we were sharing, not just as passive witnesses sitting in the audience, but rather, we ourselves were the act-ive participants in our own living revelation. Though this experience seemed like a miracle, with Biblical associations, it was actually a synchronistic, auspicious co-incidence of factors, a synergistic convergence of two beings coming together in a moment of time, revealing a deeper, more fundamental creative process at play. At that moment my relationship with that blind woman was the medium through which a more grace-filled order of reality emerged and incarnated into the third dimension. She and I were just the actors through which the deeper process clothed, in-formed, and revealed itself. Not being able to heal by ourselves, the two of us were collaboratively helping each other to dream up our own healing. The archetype of the wounded healer had been constellated in the field between us. The relationship between the two of us is a prototype, a microcosmic iteration of a fractal, of what is available to us en masse, as a species. Just like the blind woman and I, we can come together and co-operatively help each other to heal and awaken.

Through this experience, a deeper order of reality was revealing itself while at the same time I was being used by it as one of its instruments of revelation. In other words, this deeper dimension wasn’t something separate from myself that I could objectively contemplate, but rather, I was participating in its revelation of itself. I was enlisted in the service of being an instrument for something deeper to happen in the field. I am very clear that I didn’t do anything special, but rather, that a miraculous-seeming event made itself apparent through a synchronistic encounter I had with another human being. “I” didn’t do anything, other than to just be myself. There was no “I” healing anyone other than just being spontaneously present to what arose in front of me. There was no “I” in that in that moment, “I” was empty, an opening, simply allowing the universe to move through me so that healing could happen in the field.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that what happened between the two of us, when contemplated symbolically, as if it were a dream, was revealing what is happening all of the time, with everyone. With the majority of people, however, this dreaming process between us – in which people are simultaneously dreaming each other up while being dreamed up by each other – is happening unconsciously in a way which usually just continually reinforces each other’s limited, wounded identities. We are all co-dreaming with each other all the time, as we are interconnected and interdependent in such a way that we only ultimately exist in relation to each other, which is to say there is no separation. In a nonlinear, acausal process that happens outside of time, we are all dreaming each other up to play roles in each other’s waking lives. We can help each other to recognize this in a way which helps everyone. We are all dreaming up the deeper field as well as, concurrently, being dreamed up by it, a process that Buddhism calls interdependent co-origination. Every part of the universe is evoking, while simultaneously being evoked by, every other part. The event with the blind woman was a materialized crystallization in form revealing, literally and symbolically, how we dream up our world, what I call “the dreaming up process.” Encoded in what happened between the blind woman and me is a revelation of the dreamlike nature of our universe. Contemplating the experience with the blind woman symbolically, as if it were a dream, was the key which helped me to extract the blessing of what this situation was revealing, becoming the seeds which later helped me to articulate and develop my life’s work. 

“All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look.” This is in essence what I always find myself coming back to in one way or another in all of my writings. I notice that when I am working with people, this is exactly what I am trying to get across – for us to simply open our eyes, so to speak, and see, i.e.,  to recognize the dreamlike, and hence, creative nature of both ourselves and our situation. It brings to mind the saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas, “The Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth and people don’t see it.” All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look. We teach what we need to learn. I am in essence talking to myself. In finding the words I am helping myself heal my own blindness.

 A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

In not listening to what I was saying about the abuse being perpetrated by my father, and pathologizing me instead, psychiatry was unwittingly protecting my father. It was as if the field of psychiatry had become subsumed into unknowingly becoming an instrument for a deeper, archetypal process of “protecting the abuser” to play itself out in form and in real time. Having my father be care-taken by those in a position of potential authority over him, combined with my being solidified as being sick by those in authority over me was a doubly sickening experience. It was only years later, long after I had left the psychiatric community, that it began to come out in my family that my father was both criminally and morally insane, a genuine psycho-sociopath who was truly a danger to others (note – in trying to decide whether to use the word “psychopath” or “sociopath,” I’ve decided to create a new term – “psycho-sociopath” to describe my father’s condition. It “sounds” right). In not listening to me or recognizing the reality of my father’s virulent pathology, the psychiatrists were complicit in the abuse.

One example to illustrate my point about the extent of my father’s illness should suffice – A few years before they both died, my aunt Helen, my father’s only sibling, during the one and only conversation in which I ever received validation from any family member about the abuse from my father, asked me if I knew who Hannibal Lechtor is (from the movie “The Silence of the Lambs”). After I answered in the affirmative, she then responded, chillingly, by saying, “That is the sort of person your father is.” By breaking the vow of silence in the family system that typically surrounds and protects the figure of the abuser, my aunt, my father’s sister, was not only letting me know and warning me about the type of figure with whom I was dealing with in her brother, she was giving me a gift. By blowing the whistle, she was putting words on what I was non-verbally experiencing first-hand in my relationship with my father. She was helping me to name my experience, to language the extreme challenge of what it was like to have been this figure’s son. Thirty years ago, as is typical during early stages of abuse, I hadn’t yet developed the psychological fluency I have now to articulate my experience. I wasn’t at all surprised by what my aunt had said, and immediately recognized what she was pointing at. The abuse from my father wasn’t obvious physical or sexual abuse, but was more hidden and covert, a psychological rape of the soul, a true mind-fuck, that only someone as psychically close as a parent can perpetrate. At that moment when my aunt spilled the beans, my experience was that she had become a channel for the voice of the unconscious, what I call “the dreaming,” to come through. She was acting as an oracle who had spoken the magic words that helped me to get a handle on what was happening within myself.

During my hospitalizations I was trying my best, giving every signal in the book, to get across and communicate about my experience with my father to the psychiatrists. As if invisible, I was neither heard, seen, nor understood, however, within the walls of psychiatry. I was continually telling the psychiatrists about the abuse that was going on, and yet, as if I was speaking in an alien tongue, the psychiatrists never had any clue that there was abuse going on. My perceptions were deleted from having any validity whatsoever. Being concretized as mentally ilI, I was being treated as a mental “in-valid.” The longer I was under the psychiatrist’s care, not surprisingly, the sicker I got. As time passed under their watch, the spiritual awakening component of my experience faded into the background, and the abuse came to the fore, front and center. Then, in a crazy-making double-bind, the fact that I wanted to talk about the abuse with my father became the very thing for which I was pathologized. Crazier still, in a seemingly never-ending game without end, my attempts at meta-communicating about the nature of the double-bind I found myself in was itself pathologized. The psychiatrists weren’t just not hearing me, they were actually perpetrating a hard to pin down form of psychological abuse. It was as if I had fallen into a hell-realm, was calling out for help, and no one, least of all within the hallowed halls of psychiatry, could hear my cry.

A dreamlike image comes to mind that actually happened to me that speaks louder than words. I’m locked up in a mental hospital in the midst of having a full-blown spiritual awakening. I’m sitting in my room in the hospital meditating. I am, moment by moment, watching my thoughts arise and in their very arising naturally dissolve back into the spacious emptiness from which they arise. I am dis-identifying from my thoughts, and more and more recognizing that I can just rest in the spacious emptiness which is our true nature. In addition to freeing my consciousness from the limitations of the conceptual mind, meditation is the one thing I’ve found which is healing the abuse from my father. Into the room comes the psychiatric ward attendant, who surreally happens to be one of the big high school basketball stars in the city in which I grew up, and he is stopping me from meditating. I am not allowed to meditate. He has it in his notes that meditation caused my illness. From the point of view of seeing the dreamlike nature of what was happening, he was my own inner obscuration manifesting, both literally and symbolically, in living, breathing color in front of my eyes. It was as if I was having a dream, where my inner process was manifesting as my seemingly outer reality.

While under their “care,” the psychiatric system wanted me to sign on the dotted line, making it financially worth my while if I agreed to take on their idea of who I was. In a truly insane logic, the fact that I refused was more proof to the psychiatrists of how crazy I was. While I was under their power, it was a waking nightmare – The more I was solidified in the role of being the sick one, the sicker I got, which, in a diabolically self-perpetuating negative feedback loop, only confirmed to those in authority how sick I truly was. In my “treatment,” I was energetically beaten within an inch of my psychological life, as if I was continually getting hit over the head with psychic baseball bats. The extent of dis-service and mis-treatment that I received from the “mental health” (sic) community has been so traumatic and overwhelming that it has taken me almost thirty years to even begin to wrap my mind around the horror of what played out. The abuse I suffered at the hands of the psychiatric community, which was true psychological violence in the flesh, is so beyond my comprehension that I’m now just beginning to even find the words. I struggle because the abuse was truly “unspeakable,” a form of torture. Tragically, both of my parents died convinced, with the psychiatric community’s blessing, that their only child was mentally ill. I have no family left.

Another dreamlike image from my experiences: A psychiatrist who I’ve been seeing every week for a number of months has so little idea what to do with me that he sends me to a supposedly cutting-edge and brilliant psychiatrist at Cornell Medical Center in New York who will surely know what the problem is. During our one and only session, I, as best as I can, describe the abuse from my father and how deeply it is affecting me. At the end of our time together, this alleged expert, as if giving me a prophecy, proclaims, “You have the same illness as Freud’s Rat Man, and you will need three years of intensive psychotherapy to be cured.” At the time I didn’t know anything about Freud’s infamous Rat Man, but I immediately sensed that it didn’t sound good, that I wasn’t in the best of company. Even though I had no idea what she was saying, I intuitively knew she had no idea what she was talking about. I was stunned by how not seen I felt. I couldn’t believe the trip she was laying on me after only one hour of knowing me. I was being set in stone, psychiatrically pigeon-holed, concretized for eternity. I felt like I was dealing with a total idiot. Symbolically, this psychiatrist was an embodiment of an ignorant, arrogant, and bewitched part of myself. She might have had the best of intentions, but she was apparently unaware of the self-created, self-fulfilling and potentially destructive spell she was casting. It was as if the inner part of me that entrances and pathologizes myself was incarnating itself, just like a dream, in the person or dream figure of the psychiatrist.

The universe is speaking symbolically, which is the language of dreams (i.e., “dreamspeak”), and the symbols that it is speaking in are tailor-fitted just for us. When I was hospitalized, the suit of clothes I was given to wear, though ultimately “perfect,” felt a bit too “tight,” however. I don’t think I was ever in an actual, physical straitjacket, but my time in the hospitals did feel like I was in an energetic, psychological, and emotional straitjacket. While I was having a peak experience during my initial visit to my very first hospital, for example, I spent the night strapped down to a bed in restraints. The accommodations were a bit on the “might makes right” side. During my stay in the hospitals my creative expression was forcibly shut down, as if the State, Big Brother, or the powers-that-be were exerting control over me and making their dominance known. It felt like I had been captured and become a prisoner. Living on a locked ward, I felt trapped by the system, caged in like a dangerous animal. To say it felt oppressive is a euphemism. It was abuse, pure and simple, disguised as our mental health system. It is the shadow side of psychiatry.

My saving grace was never falling into and “buying” the viewpoint of the doctors that was literally being “sold” to me as it was forced down my throat. It couldn’t have been more obvious from my vantage point inside myself that I was having a spiritual awakening. Fortunately, I never lost sight of this, even during the darkest of times, which allowed me to trust the process which was unfolding within myself. After getting out of the last psychiatric hospital in 1982, I felt ashamed, and mortified at now having the stigma of being labeled, for the rest of my life, an “ex-mental patient.” As I’ve healed over the course of time, however, I now “advertise” that I was locked up in psych-wards so as to get the word out, as “I am not the only one.” There are many other people who have suffered and are presently suffering through similar waking-nightmares with the psychiatric system.

Not only did the psychiatrists offer me no help in dealing with the underlying emotional issues resulting from the abuse with my father, they didn’t even recognize that there was severe abuse being played out in my family system in the first place. The degree to which my reports about the abuse with my father were dismissed is staggering. I simply wasn’t listened to nor believed. In discounting my own experience, the psychiatrists were fundamentally invalidating my perceptions, which was truly maddening. In addition, the psychiatrists didn’t recognize that I was suffering from a form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as a result of the emotional abuse from my father, and as time unfolded, from themselves as well.

Instead of help for my problems with my father, the psychiatric system, on the other hand, unwittingly colluded with, supported, and protected my father in his role of abuser. Like many psycho-sociopaths, my father was brilliant and could be very charismatic, and due to his “charm,” could easily put people under the spell he was casting. He was very skilled at presenting himself to the world as “normal.” Because of his uncanny ability to shape-shift and hide in the shadows of the unconscious, he went his whole life undiagnosed (My father’s virulent, but unrecognized illness inspired me to create an entirely new diagnosis which sheds light on his sickness, what I call “malignant egophrenia,” or ME disease for short). My father bamboozled and hoodwinked all the psychiatrists he interacted with, convincingly presenting himself as a loving, concerned parent, and always casting me in the role of the sick one. The psychiatric community got “into bed” with my parents (my mother was under my father’s spell), aligning with them “against” me, in the sense that, being the one identified as sick, I was seen as the member of the family who both had a problem and was the problem. Though the sickness was fundamentally nonlocal in nature, as it pervaded the whole family system (which now included psychiatry), it was being “localized” as if existing only in me. Being conjured up in the role of the identified patient, I was “carrying,” as if in the role of the archetypal scapegoat, both my family’s, as well as the psychiatric community’s, unacknowledged, split-off, and unconscious shadow of madness.

Not only did the psychiatrists fail to recognize the deeper process of spiritual awakening that had become activated within me as a result of the abuse, their ignorance insured that they didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with me other than to pathologize me, which is their default setting. People who are in extreme states, and are having non-ordinary experiences, or who see things differently than the agreed-upon, consensus reality are (arche)typically pathologized by those in positions of power. Psychiatry’s un-reflected upon propensity to see only illness is an expression of psychiatry’s own pathology. To put my experiences in context, they happened years before “religious or spiritual problem” was accepted as a new diagnostic category in the DSM-IV. When I was going through these experiences, although it was only thirty years ago, it was like I had time travelled and was living in the Dark Ages. In the early eighties, the very concept or possibility of a spiritual awakening was precluded and excluded from the worldview of psychiatry.

In a spiritual awakening, the boundary between the inner process that is happening within the psyche, and outer events that are happening out in the world, become synchronistically intermingled and co-related such that our experience reveals itself to be of the same fundamental structure as a dream (where the inner process of the dreamer is expressing itself in, as, and through the forms of the dream). Oftentimes, when the archetypal process of spiritual awakening is first activated within us, our constructs about the nature of reality de-construct such that we can appear, from the mainstream reality point of view, a little “crazy.” As we awaken, we are, in fact, stepping “out of our (conceptual) minds.” Cultures based on wisdom have the capacity to discern and recognize an individual who is potentially going through a process of spiritual awakening. Such wisdom-based cultures especially value such individuals and recognize that these people are being called by spirit to potentially become a shaman or healer who in the future might greatly benefit the community. Usually, all these would-be shamans or healers need is some time and a safe container for their process to naturally integrate into the emerging wholeness of their psyche.

When someone is first beginning to have a spiritual awakening, however, they are in an extremely open, vulnerable, and delicate state. During this initial stage of my awakening, I wasn’t integrated nor grounded enough to realize that it wasn’t wise for me to honestly reveal to the psychiatrists the magical inner and outer synchronistic experiences that I was having in my awakening, which were truly off their radar. In Biblical terms, in innocently sharing my sacred experiences with the psychiatrists, I was “casting my pearls before swine.” Many years later, my friend, the late Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack once shared with me his definition of being crazy – “It’s not knowing who to tell, or not to tell, what you’re experiencing.” From his perspective, I was out of my mind to share my mystical experiences with his colleagues, and in retrospect, I fully agree. In essence, the more I authentically expressed my experience, the more I was convincing the doctors I was crazy. This reminds me of a line from an email that I received a few years back where the person literally writes, “When I told my psychiatrist that I thought my mission in this world was to spread the message of love, she prescribed me an anti-psychotic.” Contrary to supporting the healthy part of me that was awakening, the psychiatrists pathologized, mis-diagnosed and medicated me (with “anti-creative” medication), temporarily aborting my mind-expanding spiritual emergence, traumatizing me even further. I am truly outraged at the outrage of it all. It feels crazy not to be. I am outraged both for myself and for the innumerable fellow sufferers of this profound betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath, whose deeper meaning is to do no harm.

In a similar dynamic that played out with my father, psychiatry, instead of protecting me, was what I needed protection from. Instead of helping me to heal, my psychiatric experience was something from which I’ve been in recovery from and needed to heal. My intimate relationship with psychiatry created quite an overwhelming cocktail of abuse for me to digest (please see my article “We are all Shamans-in-Training”). I felt totally violated, branded, humiliated, and dehumanized as a result of my treatment with the psychiatric system, a pill-pushing club “med.” During this time in my life, my mid-twenties, most of my friends were in graduate school getting degrees for their future professions. I became “certified” in a different way; little did I realize, however, that I was being trained in my future profession, too. Many of my childhood and college friends dropped out of my life as this process unfolded, as I imagine what I was going through (not exactly the “American Dream”) was uncomfortable for many of them. It was only years later that I had built up a strong enough sense of self to re-frame my encounter with the primitive, stone-age, and draconian field of psychiatry as an aspect of my spiritual awakening, as if it was a shamanic descent into the underworld, into the depths of a modern-day Hades.

A further dreamlike image: An extremely arrogant psychiatrist is telling me that if I don’t start making inroads into getting a job in the burgeoning computer field by the next time I see him, he wouldn’t see me anymore. I’m horrified and disgusted at the manipulation he’s using, all supposedly for my own good. Like a dream, my inner father process was materializing itself in my waking life in the psychiatrist’s office, as if the underlying, mythic figure of the negative father was using this psychiatrist as a local emanation of a nonlocal archetype. Just like my father, this psychiatrist was not relating to me as an autonomous agent with my own intuitive wisdom, but was trying to shape and form-fit me into his version of who he thought I was. He was literally playing out my unresolved father process (and his, too) with me, as he was picking up the role of the archetypal abusive, unconscious, and power-tripping father figure. Keep in mind that computers were the last thing I was interested in; I was an artist who was having a spiritual awakening. And it just so happened that my father, who this psychiatrist was all too intimately in touch with, wanted me to go into the field of computers, or whatever field would bring in the most money. I think to myself, “Who do you say you’re working for?” Needless to say, I never came back to this not-so-undercover agent of my father’s.

Don’t get me wrong – There are plenty of well-intentioned psychiatrists, including the ones with whom I worked. I am not talking about individual psychiatrists, I am talking about the underlying psychiatric system as a whole. There is a certain consensual agreement with reference to behaviors that are considered “normal,” the nature of health and sickness, as well as fundamental ideas of who we are, that all representatives of the “academy” have to accept in order for them to be considered a card-carrying member. There is an axiomatic set, a way of looking, that has been drilled into psychiatrists heads during their “training” in medical school, for them to take on in order to be a true initiate. Built into the very institution of psychiatry, into the very organ-ization of the field, to the extent that self-reflection is not part of its practice, is the hidden abuse of power. It takes more than good intentions for a psychiatrist to not unwittingly become an instrument for “the system” to play out its unconscious, destructive aspect. The traditional psychiatric community is set up to be a set-up, in that built into the system is the unconscious set of assumptions of materialistic science, not the least of which is that we exist as encapsulated, separate selves apart from the underlying field. In fact, for most psychiatrists, there is no concept of an underlying field of consciousness at all. Consciousness is understood purely as something that arises from matter and thus can be manipulated by material, i.e., electro-chemical means (via psychiatric drugs, for example). It takes an exceptional practitioner of the art of psychiatry, a true doctor of the soul, to see through the implicit materialist in-doctrine-ation they have received as part and parcel of their very conditioning and upbringing into the field of psychiatry. A true healer knows that they are meeting themselves time and time again in their patients.

A final dreamlike image, where the madness in the hospital nonlocally spills outside of its walls: In one mental hospital there is a meeting that I am having in front of all the doctors who have been studying my case. In presenting me with their findings, they are all in complete agreement that I have a mental illness, manic-depression, and that I am going to have this illness for the rest of my life, and need to be medicated till I take my last breath (It should be noted that I haven’t taken any psychiatric medication for over a quarter of a century, with no “episodes,” which, from the psychiatric point of view, is impossible if I truly had what is now called bi-polar illness). I stood up to what felt like a board of (mis)directors and told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about, which only confirmed to them how crazy I was. In consulting their hallowed diagnostic manual (the DSM), it was like they were reading from a “grimoire” (a manual for invoking and casting magic spells), and were trying to match what little they understood of my experience to something somebody wrote in a book. Feeling both objectified and marginalized in my own treatment, the doctors weren’t interested in consulting with me. They didn’t have much of an idea of where or who I was in this whole process, and, frighteningly, they were in the position of making decisions which might greatly affect the rest of my life. I felt like a guinea pig who had become drafted into a sinister science experiment, and it felt get-me-out-out-here crazy. We were en-acting in that conference room a deep, archetypal process of abuse of power that gets acted out in the non-level playing field of psychiatry (as well as within traumatized psychiatric patient’s heads) innumerable times every day.

The dreamlike scene continues: The next day, one of the doctors, an intern who was at the meeting the day before, is giving me a physical exam. During the checkup, he praises me for what I did the day before – standing for my own experience and speaking truth to power. He expresses that he thought I did great under trying circumstances, and that he really appreciated the courage it took for me to challenge his colleagues (of course, it would have been nice if he would’ve said this during the previous day’s meeting, but I don’t push my luck). It felt wonderful connecting with someone who “understood,” particularly someone who was in the role of an authority figure. We so connected during our meeting that we decided to get together when I got out of the hospital. The next week or so we did get together, and we went out with some friends of his to a bar to hear a rock band. Over the course of the evening I discovered that the rock band was a group of musicians who love Jesus, and this doctor was a born-again Christian who, seeing me as a potential catch, wanted to help me save my soul. I remember him talking about how my teachers, some of the genuinely enlightened practitioners in Buddhism, were possessed by the Devil because they weren’t Christian. I couldn’t believe it. Just when I thought I had found an ally, I realized I was once again in another crazy-making, mind-warping situation, as if there was no getting away from the craziness. It felt so sci-fi, like I was living in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As if iterations of a fractal, both during my time in the mental hospital and at the bar I found myself in situations where a crazy, cult-like organization was trying to enlist me to become one of its members. For me, this process is symbolic of the undercurrent in our waking dream that is constantly entrancing us into falling asleep, becoming brainwashed and hypnotized by those in power to take on the agreed upon collective viewpoint of the herd. Upon reflection, what played out in my life is an externalized reflection of an archetypal process that is happening both in the greater body politic as well as deep inside of all of us.

Through numerous dreamlike experiences like these, I was being introduced to the nonlocal field of consciousness that synchronistically in-forms our world, a burgeoning insight which years later would form the foundation for my work. This underlying, all-pervasive field drafts people into being its instruments and unwitting operatives, choreographing events in the world so as to materialize itself. This seamlessly interconnected field ceaselessly animates innumerable nonlocal “hands” to set the “stage,” arranging the scene in the play of our waking dream so as to simultaneously veil and reveal itself, entrancing or potentially liberating us at each and every moment. A deeper process shaping the manifestation of so-called reality was being shown to me through all that was playing out in my crazy life, as if the events in my life were parts of an initiation. A more fundamental aspect of my being was making itself known to me, and was using my experiences in the world – in my family, the psychiatric system, and the world of rock and roll, as its canvas. The psychiatric system turned out to be one of the crucibles for my awakening. My harrowing ordeal with psychiatry was a “close encounter” that almost killed me, a “near death experience,” of the psychiatric kind. If it doesn’t kill you, however, it makes you stronger. I have survived.

The very insight that I was beginning to realize in my awakening – the non-objective, dreamlike, and symbolic nature of reality – which was ironically one of the things for which I was pathologized by psychiatry for attempting to articulate, was the very insight that redeemed my experiences with both the psychiatric system as well as my father and literally saved my life. Whereas psychiatry wanted to make me a productive member of consensus reality, I was more interested in deepening my contemplation of how what we call “reality” is an arbitrary product of our consensus. Instead of being “out of touch” with reality, I was awakening to that, just like a dream, there is no objective reality with which to get in touch. Years later I was greatly encouraged to discover that this same fundamental, transformative insight for which I was being pathologized by the psychiatric system is in fact the very same insight which is the pith essence of the great esoteric spiritual wisdom traditions from around the world. Needless to say, I was happy to find myself in such good company, though I wasn’t overly thrilled at being left on my own to deal with the psychological clean-up operation resulting from the traumatic aftershocks and aftermath of a most unnatural, and unnecessary, psychiatric disaster. Realizing that my own personal process of awakening was yet another unique instance of an insight into the dreamlike nature of the universe that has been discovered by countless human beings throughout history has been enormously validating and healing for me (for a deeper articulation of this essential truth, please see my article “As Viewed, So Appears”). Seeing my own personal experience of awakening framed in the context of the perennial, spiritual wisdom traditions has only amplified my awareness of the tragic and egregious lack of this kind of insight into the nature of the mind that pervades our modern, medical psychiatric profession.

The symbolic events that were literally transpiring in my life, as is true for all of us, were a synchronistic reflection and revelation of a living process deep within myself. It was as if everything that was playing out with my father, in the field of psychiatry, and for that matter, every aspect of my life, was communicating to me through the symbolic dimension of my awareness, which is the same part of me that dreams my dreams at night. I was beginning to realize that the same deeper, dreaming Self that dreams our dreams at night is dreaming our lives. Though my close call with psychiatry almost drove me crazy and nearly killed me, I have learned something through my ordeal, an insight so profound that it can’t be repeated often enough. How things turn out depends upon how we dream it. I am my own living proof.

NOTE – To create context for those of you who have read my recent article “Shamanic Transference,” it was about a year or so after my last hospitalization that I connected with the one psychiatrist with whom I worked for a number of years. Going back to the psychiatric system might have been similar to the magical thinking involved in repeatedly going back to the abusive parent and expecting a different result, but I obviously still had something to learn. Clearly, in going back to a psychiatrist after my earlier experiences with psychiatry, my head needed to be examined.

ONE MORE NOTE – A friend from out of town came to visit me right as I was finishing this article, and not knowing what I was writing about, synchronistically brought the movie “The Changeling” (directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie), feeling strongly that I had to see it. Much to my astonishment, the film, a true story, graphically illustrates in images the exact same archetypal pattern of abuse of power, psychiatric and otherwise, that I’m trying to describe in words. Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

At a certain point in our work together, however, I began to notice what I experienced to be her unconscious blind-spots, which were the places, at least in my perception, where she unconsciously acted out her shadow and unknowingly abused her position of power and authority. We all have these unconscious blind-spots, as well as a shadow, so from my point of view, it was not necessarily problematic that she had unconscious parts, as who doesn’t? I was beginning to more consciously track and experience, however, how her unconscious shadow was being acted out in the field between us in a way that seemed to be hampering our work together. I had become very sensitive to these unconscious, shadow areas in people because of similar scenarios that got acted out in my family. Something increasingly didn’t feel right.

As soon as I began giving voice to my experience of what felt like her unconscious shadow, however, something very interesting happened. Up until then, our relationship had been very warm, supportive, loving – we had a really good rapport. But once I gave voice to my experience of what felt like her unconscious, she immediately got defensive and stepped into the role of being the authority figure who knew better. Her spontaneous reaction was to go on the offense and say, “I’m the doctor and you’re the patient. Coming here to tell me where I’m unconscious is a waste of time. I’m the healthy one and you’re the sick one.” I was shocked by her response. When I challenged her on this, she then proclaimed, as if dismissing the validity of my perceptions, “Well, none of my other patients express this to me,” to which I responded by saying, “Well, it seems that none of your other patients are tuned in in the way that I am.”

In her re-action, the psychiatrist was doing the very thing – unconsciously abusing her position of power – at which I was pointing. Synchronistically, in our interaction we had managed to re-create, in both literal and symbolic form, a self-similar iteration of the very abuse that I had come to her trying to heal. In our session together I had somehow dreamed her up to organically pick up a key role in the very unresolved psychodrama I was trying to work out with my father. Our work had transformed from me “telling her about” the abuse with my father, to her actively participating in playing a role in en-acting the very abuse she was supposed to be helping me to resolve.

Without getting into the story, the conflict with my father could be essentialized as follows: At a certain point in my life, as I was actively stepping into the process of separation from my family and individuation within myself by finding my own unique voice, my father would re-act by not only suppressing, but also trying to destroy my creative self-expression, abusing his position of power in the process. Whether he would go into murderous rages during which I was afraid of being killed, or have pseudo-heart attacks telling me that I was killing him, he seemed threatened beyond belief at the thought of me stepping into myself. He justified his actions by claiming that what he was doing was because he “loved” me so much, that he was acting this way “for my own good.” What my father played out in our relationship was an expression of his madness, while at the same time being truly crazy-making for me.

On the surface, the two scenarios with the psychiatrist and my father were quite different. In a certain fundamental way, however, they were similar – as me expressing my own unique voice separate from their point of view resulted in both of them abusing their position of power unconsciously, simply because they could. From one point of view, it was amazingly brilliant that the psychiatrist picked up this role in my process, as if she was helping me to more deeply access my unresolved issue with my father by playing it out with me. It didn’t take me long to figure out, however, much to my horror, that she was acting out this role unconsciously. She had not developed or didn’t have access to what is called a “meta-communicator,” the part of her that could step out of the role she was playing and both contemplate and communicate about it. Due to her unwillingness and inability to self-reflect, she was unable to step out of her unconscious identification with the role of authority figure, holding on to her rank with all her might as a defense against what I was attempting to point out. In retrospect, I realize now that her reaction was an expression of fear.

She was hiding behind the persona of the doctor, unconsciously identified with and attached to her position of power and privilege. She was monopolizing the role of the healthy one, casting me in the role of the sick one, because she’s the doctor and she says so! Synchronistically, the sick one, the identified patient, was the very role I played in my family system. Just like in my family, my experience was that I was seeing and pointing out the unconscious shadow, and then being told I was the one who was crazy. Of course, this raises the question, what inside of me has drawn this experience to me? What unconscious part of me is getting revealed through this process? In a dreaming process, when a situation or a symbol re-occurs more than once, like with my father, and then with the psychiatrist, something is being shown to me, as if in my recurring dream something is trying to get my attention.

In my interaction with the psychiatrist, I was left with the feeling of being concretized and not seen, which is a deep wound in myself whose origin (at least in this lifetime) was not being seen by my parents. When I feel not seen, I know from experience that the other person is either seeing my blind spot, or they are not seeing me, as they are seeing through their own blind spot. The psychiatrist wasn’t seeing my blind spot when she was telling me I was the sick one, she was revealing her own. My experience was that a deep unconscious wound within her was activated by our interaction, which acted as the lens or filter through which she related to me. It was like she wasn’t talking to “me,” but to some inner figure whom I seemed to represent in her mind. It was as if a figure inside of her head had become externalized as me, as if I had become a living dream figure (an aspect of herself) inside of her mind, and she in mine. As best as I could tell, she appeared to experience me as a threat to her power, authority, and overly positive image of herself. We were collaboratively dreaming each other up to play something out in the ritually created, shared space of the therapy.

During this incident with the psychiatrist, instead of the positive, healthy, awake, and growing parts of myself being seen and mirrored back to me through our interaction, in a power-play seemingly designed to protect her own unconscious shadow as well as keep me in my place, I had in no time become yet again the sick one. To quote Jung, “Just as it is the duty of parents and educators not to keep children on the infantile level but to lead them beyond it, so it is incumbent on the analyst not to treat patients as chronic invalids but to recognize them, in accordance with their spiritual development and insight, as more or less equal partners in the dialogue, with the same rights as himself.” Similar to my family, the psychiatrist was invalid-ating my experience, infantilizing me in the process. She was relating to me as if I were a mere child whose perceptions didn’t have merit, which is an abuse of power if there ever was one. From my point of view, she was projecting out her own unconscious madness, and had entranced herself, literally convinced of the objectivity of her projections. In our exchange, she wanted me to compliantly take on her idea of who I was, i.e., that I was sick, which from her point of view would be considered a successful “treatment.” There was something wrong with this picture.

No matter how skillfully I tried to point out to her the deeper, dreaming process which we were collaboratively creating, she didn’t seem to get nor appreciate what I was trying so desperately to help her understand. She was resistant to all my attempts at shedding light on the deeper, dreaming process that was unfolding between us, instead interpreting my interest in what was going on between us as a distraction and resistance to working on myself, which was ultimately crazy-making. Up until this incident, we could talk about anything. From this point on, however, just like with my father, there was stuff we couldn’t talk about, a “don’t go there zone.” Jung comments, “An analyst who cannot risk his authority will be sure to lose it.” Our conflict never came to resolution, and this led me to ultimately stop my work with her and leave.

TRANSFERENCE

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. We will project outside of ourselves and “transfer” onto others unconscious parts of ourselves, dreaming them up to play certain roles, so as to help us to actually recreate and act out our inner, unconscious process in full-bodied form as an unconscious way of seeking resolution. Paradoxically, these enactments are simultaneously the “problem” as well as our attempt to solve it. Speaking about what happens in the analytic vessel of psychotherapy, Freud writes, “The decisive part of the work is achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the doctor – in the ‘transference’ – new editions of the old conflicts.” In the transference, the patient is given the opportunity to work through these “new editions of the old conflicts” with the doctor, both parties participating in potentially creating a container to house a corrective emotional experience such that the unresolved psychological energy that was bound up in the compulsion to endlessly re-create the patient’s psychic dis-ease is liberated in the service of creativity and healing. The transference is a channel for the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul to unwind itself through the vehicle of relationship.

The psychological process of transference is a specific form of the more general process of projection that happens in the analytic vessel of therapy. “Projection,” to quote Jung, “does not depend upon his will; it is simply a phenomenon that produces itself. Projection is an automatic, spontaneous fact. It is simply there; you do not know how it happens. You just find it there. And this rule, which holds good for projection in general, is also true of transference. Transference is something which is just there. If it exists at all, it is there a priori.” [Please note: due to the numerous Jung quotations that follow in which he uses the masculine pronoun for both doctor and patient, for the sake of clarity and consistency, unless referring specifically to my old psychiatrist, I will do the same]. The transference is an underlying, deeper pattern of relationship which, being a priori, already exists in a dimension outside of time. It magnetically draws people together and configures their relationships so as to incarnate itself in time in ever-novel, and yet ever-the-same ways. Speaking of the doctor’s role in the transference, Jung comments, “Often it is in full swing before he has even opened his mouth.” Being a priori, the transference is pre-existent, waiting for the right people to come together and be “coupled,” so that it can play itself out in form.

Transference is the vehicle of the process of individuation in the relationship channel. It is something which happens between two individuals which typically takes the form of an emotional connection, bonding and entangling them together in a compulsive way. The intensity of the transference is always equivalent to the nature and importance of the projected content. In the transference, a deeper emotion literally comes through the patient and affects and in-forms his perceptions of the doctor. To quote Jung, “the emotion of the projected content always forms a link, a sort of dynamic relationship between the subject and the object – and that is the transference. Naturally, this emotional link or bridge or elastic string can be positive or negative, as you know.” The transference forcibly ties the subject, the source of the projection, to the object, the recipient, in a way that tends to fascinate, and fasten together, both of their psyches, in an unconscious identity.

The problem of the transference is, to quote Jung, “a phenomenon that may be regarded as the crux, or at any rate the crucial experience, in any thorough-going analysis.” Jung writes, “The enormous importance that Freud attached to the transference phenomenon became clear to me at our first personal meeting in 1907. After a conversation lasting many hours there came a pause. Suddenly he asked me out of the blue, ‘And what do you think about the transference?’ I replied with the deepest conviction that it was the alpha and omega of the analytical method, whereupon he said, ‘Then you have grasped the main thing.’” Whereas Freud was more concerned about the cause of the transference, however, Jung was more interested in its purpose, as he sensed that hidden within the phenomenon of transference were the seeds of further development. According to Jung, the skillful handling of the transference was the very thing which determined the success, or lack thereof, of the therapeutic work between doctor and patient.

Transference in psychotherapy is just a special case of a universal phenomenon that happens in varying degrees between everyone, 24/7. We are all constantly transferring a condition which originates within our psyches onto the world around us, and to the extent we are not aware of this dynamic, we will react to our externalized projections as if they objectively exist outside of ourselves. Jung comments, “The transference itself is a perfectly natural phenomenon which does not by any means happen only in the consulting room – it can be seen everywhere and may lead to all sorts of nonsense, like all unrecognized projections.” The key difference is that the analytic vessel is a container, a ritually maintained time and space, to consciously engage with and unfold the transference. Speaking about the ubiquity of the transference phenomenon, Jung says, “Indeed, in any human relationship that is at all intimate, certain transference phenomena will almost always operate as helpful or disturbing factors.” The phenomenon of transference is revealing something to us about the nature of relationship itself.

Transference isn’t some sort of esoteric and elitist psychological theory. It is a phenomenon that happens universally and continuously when people come together. In a fundamental yet oftentimes unrecognized dynamic inherent in all human interpersonal interactions, mutual projections and counter-projections are naturally constellated in the intermediate space – the field – between us. We are deeply sensitive beings whose psyches are always touching and intermingling with each other. How we relate to, and dream up, one another deeply affects each other, our perception of the world and our experience of ourselves. This reciprocal exchange is simply the interactive and inter-activating nature of every human relationship. To deny our participatory role in this mutually creative process is both ignorant and a form of madness (please see my article “Delusions of Separation”). We are inherently relational beings, in that deep down we don’t exist as discrete, separate entities, but rather, at a fundamental level, are indivisible expressions of a deeper, underlying interconnected field. The psychiatrist, however, treated me as if I existed as an isolated, solidified entity who had an “illness” that wasn’t related to the family in which I was contained. Her compartmentalized view of me was totally inconsistent with the very nature of reality. She didn’t recognize that my “sickness” was an expression of my pathological family system, a system in which she was now unwittingly playing a role.

COUNTERTRANSFERENCE

Transference always reflex-ively evokes a “countertransference” re-action from the doctor. Jung writes, “The patient, by bringing an activated unconscious content to bear upon the doctor, constellates the corresponding unconscious material in him, owing to the inductive effect which always emanates from projections in greater or lesser degree. Doctor and patient thus find themselves in a relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness.” Being in their unconscious together, it is as if doctor and patient are creating a shared dream in the time and space of the analytic vessel. Both transference and the corresponding countertransference are co-related, mirror-like, and complementary parts of one and the same deeper process, mutually conditioning each other and reciprocally co-arising together. One is never found without the other. Inseparable aspects of a deeper whole, transference and countertransference are expressions of an all-inclusive, acausal, unified, and potentially unifying field. Speaking about the role of the doctor, Jung comments, “he is a fellow participant who finds himself involved in the dialectical process [an engagement between two people based on reciprocal give and take] just as deeply as the so-called patient.”

Jung continues, “By no device can the treatment be anything but the product of mutual influence, in which the whole being of the doctor as well as that of his patient plays its part. In the treatment there is an encounter between two irrational factors [the unconscious of both doctor and patient]…For two personalities to meet is like mixing two different chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. In any effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the patient; but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal influence on the doctor. You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smoke-screen of fatherly and professional authority. By so doing he only denies himself the use of a highly important organ of information.” The “whole being” – the unconscious and the conscious, the shadow and the light parts, of both doctor and patient are dynamically engaged in and by the work. “Art totum requirit hominem,” is an alchemical saying that means “the art requires the whole man,” words that are just as relevant for the “art” of psychotherapy as for alchemy.

For the doctor, a highly important “organ of information” is to bring awareness to how he himself gets dreamed up relative to the patient’s process. In other words, consciously reflecting upon the role he picks up in his own countertransference reactions actually helps him more understand both himself and the patient, as well as simultaneously, and nonlocally, helping the patient. The doctor is then able to follow, instead of trying to control, what I call “the dreaming” between them. The doctor allows himself to get dreamed up by the patient, so as to actively participate with and in the patient’s process and help it unfold to its natural liberation. This involves empowering the patient to step into his power, which might even involve touching the doctor’s wound. The accomplished doctor develops the ability to discriminate between when he is compulsively acting out his unconscious wounds with the patient, which only serves to re-create the patient’s trauma, compared to when he is able to develop a relationship with his own unconscious and metabolize his wounds in such a way that empowers him to be able to help the patient unfold his process. As if consciously dreaming together with the patient leading, the doctor can engage with the patient in a fully embodied form of living, and lived-through active imagination. Dreaming their shared process through to completion in the relationship channel is a truly embodied alchemical “coniunctio,” a coming together of the opposites, an incarnation of the Self, in real time and space.

I refer to this process of how projections constellate counter-projections as “the dreaming.” The dreaming is the shared, interactive space between us which in-forms us. The dreaming is the deeper, underlying dynamic which shapes our reactions and configures our relation to each other. I am dreaming you up, but you are dreaming me up to dream you up, ad infinitum and vice versa at the same time. The dreaming is the space between us in which our relationship happens. The dreaming is a whole, self-perfected, and self-contained universe, a living entity, a mutually shared dream that is clothing itself in our form as it reveals itself in ever new guises. The dreaming takes “two to tango,” so to speak, in that it is created by being in relationship with each other. We have conjured up the dreaming through our collaborative inter-action, and there is a way of “following the dreaming” that can awaken us to a deeper level of freedom and healing.

Jung writes that “the doctor is as much ‘in the analysis’ as the patient. He is equally a part of the psychic process of treatment and therefore equally exposed to the transforming influences. Indeed, to the extent that the doctor shows himself impervious to this influence, he forfeits influence over the patient; and if he is influenced only unconsciously, there is a gap in his field of consciousness which makes it impossible for him to see the patient in true perspective. In either case, the result of the treatment is compromised…The doctor is therefore faced with the same task which he wants his patient to face” To the extent there is a “gap,” a blind spot, in the “field of consciousness” of the doctor, making it “impossible” for him to “see the patient in true perspective,” this will invariably activate and recreate the archetypal wound in the patient of feeling not seen. It certainly did in my case. The doctor finds himself in the role of modeling and embodying what he wants the patient to do, i.e., add consciousness to what is triggered within himself and self-reflect (in Buddhism, this is called “the lion’s gaze”). The doctor is only able to help the patient as far as he himself has integrated his unconscious and consciously evolved and awakened.

If we are privileged enough to see another’s blind spots and want them to see where they currently cannot, we have to be willing to see our own blind spots. Being nonlocal, when we see the unconscious in others, we can be sure that this experience constellates the unconscious within ourselves. I’m sure when I saw the psychiatrist’s unconscious, it activated my own, just as seeing my unconscious must have activated hers. We can’t say her unconsciousness “caused” mine, or that mine “caused” hers, as our mutual process was acausal and nonlinear, without a beginning in time, reciprocally co-arising together. We were both in our unconscious together, as if we were collaboratively dreaming up a shared dream into materialization in the ritually created shared space of the therapeutic vessel.

We access and unlock the deeper places in us that are stuck, frozen in time, as if in trauma, by dreaming up actual situations in em-bodied form to play out within a “container” (interestingly, the word “contain” means both to “include,” as well as “restrain”). A safe and sealed container is a sacred space in which to consciously give form to, en-act, and liberate these deeper habitual patterns which don’t serve us. This is the underlying teleology (purpose or goal) of the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul, who is trying to complete an incomplete process as he continually enacts and recreates his wound. This dreamlike and fluid universe does not exist in a solidified state, and yet, sometimes we have to solidify the waking dream, concretizing the other for a moment in time in order to work something out. We need someone in solid-seeming form to push up against, to have it out with, so as to be able to unlock, unwind and dis-charge our unconsciously held-in trauma.

In our mutual interaction, instead of the psychiatrist being the one who was conscious, thereby helping to provide the psychic container for transformation, in a role switch, I was being dreamed up to be the one who was the carrier of awareness of something that the psychiatrist was unable to see in the relational dynamic between the two of us. Like déjà vu all over again, this is the same scenario that I played out within my own family. I was ultimately being dreamed up in my interaction with the psychiatrist of having to choose between either stepping more fully into my power by staying connected to and standing for my experience, or in taking on her version of the way things are, I’d be giving away my power, dissociating from myself, and falling into self-deception, which is to be complicit in my own victimization and become my own abuser. I was being dreamed up right to my edge, where I was asked to make a choice. I was invited to potentially liberate my habitual pattern of not being able to fully express myself and give voice to my experience; I was being offered the opportunity to re-create myself anew, to consciously incarnate in the flesh, to change the dream I was having.

Paradoxically, I was both seeing the psychiatrist and not seeing her simultaneously. On the one hand, my subjective experience was very clear: I was seeing her unconscious blind-spot. But on the other hand, I was projecting onto the psychiatrist, transferring my unhealed wounds with my father onto her, as if she had gotten drafted into playing a role in my activated dreaming process. I was in an unusual, but very significant, state of heightened awareness – I was seeing the unconscious in the field, while at the same time, as if I was dreaming, I was living out my unconscious. Because of our (hopefully) shared intention to transduce light and illuminate the unconscious, the psychiatrist and I had evoked the spirit of the unconscious to play itself out between us.

When the unconscious is activated within us, it always nonlocally constellates the corresponding unconscious material in whomever we come in touch with. Potentially having either a positive or negative effect, the spirit of the unconscious will either diabolically divide and separate us, or if we can “contain” it by joint reflection, this spirit can inspire us to greater consciousness and deeper connection. As soon as any of us come together, we mutually dream up the field to play out our unconscious; or to say it differently – the unconscious spirit of the field dreams us up to act it out. Something is always being revealed to us in the process.

The vignette with the psychiatrist was a synchronistic, embodied reflection of an unconscious process within my own mind, as if I was dreaming up my unconscious in living, externalized form so as to potentially wake myself up. What I was playing out with the psychiatrist was a reflection of my internal process of how I not only give away, but abuse, my own power. I had dreamed up the psychiatrist to literally embody and symbolize this asleep part of myself. Not recognizing the mutuality of our shared dreaming, she didn’t realize that what was happening between us was a co-creative, reflective process. Her resistance to taking any responsibility for the mutuality of our shared experience left me to carry the whole burden of the activated unconscious in the field. Seemingly bewitched by her own unconscious, it was as if she was both under a self-created spell and casting a spell at the same time.

Like my father, the psychiatrist was embodying the “mad” part of myself, as if the inner, mad part of me that pathologizes and entrances myself was appearing outside of myself in the living form of the psychiatrist. To the extent we are not fully awake, we all have a mad part. The part of us that thinks we don’t have a mad part is itself our mad part! Just like my father, the psychiatrist projected her own madness outside of herself, which itself was an expression of her madness. In a truly maddening situation, the psychiatrist, with the full authority of the state behind her, unconsciously acted out her madness in the analytic vessel, insisting that I was the one who was mad. In un-reflectingly projecting out her shadow of unconscious madness, which is a true abuse of power, the psychiatrist was unknowingly acting out the deeper, underlying archetypal process that is making us all sick in the first place. Just like any little piece of a hologram is an expression of the whole hologram, the psychiatrist was reflecting and playing out an unconscious dynamic existing within the field of psychiatry as a whole, not to mention an archetypal process that is playing out collectively on the world stage, as well as within ourselves.

MUTUAL DREAMING

In a process that happens in, over and outside of time, when two or more people come together, projections activate counter-projections and create a mutually shared dream of relationship. For example, say I have an unhealed wound in my psyche. If I go to sleep tonight and dream, my unhealed wound will be sure to show up in my dreams, as my night dreams are a projection or reflection of my inner process. In a similar way, I will unconsciously connect the dots and give meaning to the inkblot called waking life, just like I did with the psychiatrist, so as to dream up into materialization my inner process that needs resolution. I will unconsciously dream up and attract to myself someone in the outer world with whom to play out my unhealed, inner process. All it takes is the slightest “hook” in the other upon which I can hang my projection. The hook is like a piece of velcro where my projection becomes lodged, as it is where the other buys into (and secretly agrees with) my projection. Even though this part of him that has a resonance with my projection might be 1% of who he is, my attention will tend to focus on this 1% of him as being all of who he is. Jung comments, “The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully catches one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole.” My focusing on and relating to only one part of the other will amplify this particular quality in him, making it more likely that he will step into and embody this very quality, providing all the evidence I need to prove to myself even more that this is who he actually is, further entrenching me in my viewpoint of seeing him this way, which only serves to further draw this quality out of him, in a self-confirming and self-perpetuating feedback loop which becomes a mutually created self-fulfilling prophecy.

And of course, like a marriage made in heaven (or potentially, hell), in a mirrored template that fits like a lock and a key, the other is reciprocally dreaming me up to play out their unconscious process in a similar way. In a mutually created, shared dream, we are dreaming each other up to play out roles in each other’s process. When this mutual dreaming process fully emerges and bodies forth, like it did with the psychiatrist and I playing the leading roles, each person becomes a fully embodied dream character, an incarnation of a living figure inside of the other’s mind. As if co-creating a shared dream-space to inhabit together, at this point we are as much in the psyche as the psyche is within us. Something deeper is revealing itself through our synchronistic interplay. To recognize this in oneself is to become lucid in the waking dream. When both people involved in the transference recognize this and become co-operatively lucid together, they can collaboratively play with and transform the shared waking dream they are having, which is evolution in action. This is a reflection in the microcosm, an iteration of a fractal on the small scale of individual relationship, of what is available to us, macrocosmically speaking, as a species.

We are always dreaming others up while at the same time being dreamed up by them. I imagine we have all experienced, consciously or otherwise, what it feels like to be dreamed up by someone else into their process. With certain people, we find parts of ourselves that we usually don’t manifest getting drawn out of us, as if the other for some reason needs someone to play this particular role for them. As we watch and participate in how we get drafted into the other person’s inner process, we discover that synchronistically, the role we are cast in is not just showing us something about them, but at the same time is revealing a previously unconscious part of ourselves as well.

PERSONAL TRANSFERENCE

Jung writes, “Now, it is a regular observation that when you talk to an individual and he gives you insight into his inner preoccupations, interests, emotions – in other words, hands over his personal complexes – you gradually get into position of authority whether you like it or not.…They hand out a big emotional value, as if they were handing over a large sum, as if they were trusting you with the administration of their estate, and they are entirely in your hands….Now that, you see, creates an emotional relationship to the analyst, and that is what Freud called the transference….It is just as if these people had handed over their whole existence, and that can have very peculiar effects upon the individual. Either they hate you for it, or they love you for it, but you are never indifferent to them….So in handing over your infantile memories about the father or about the mother, you also hand over the image of father and mother. Then it is just as if the analyst had taken the place of the father, or even of the mother…. So the patients hand themselves over in the hope that I can swallow that stuff and digest it for them.” Patients are in essence asking for help with their psyche, with their very soul. When “patients hand themselves over” and share their hidden, emotional vulnerabilities and secrets with the analyst, the analyst truly becomes a significant other.

Built into the very system of going to a doctor “for help” is an asymmetrical power imbalance. Because of the doctor being cast in the role of the authority, this inherent power inequality will set the stage for whatever unhealed power and control issues, both in the doctor and the patient, to unconsciously “play” out in the “field” of their relationship. To the extent the patient is in a dis-empowered state, not in touch with his intrinsic power, he will project out his own unconscious power onto the doctor and literally dream up the doctor to carry and embody this power. The doctor then becomes a figure with whom the patient will be fascinated, repelled by, identify with, etc. The patient is reacting to the unconscious, split-off part of himself that he has projected out, put into, and dreamed up in the living form of the doctor, a process called “projective identification.” The doctor then “carries” these unconscious contents for the patient. To the extent the doctor has an unconscious, unresolved power-complex, however, he will unconsciously identify with this power invested in him by the patient and become inflated by the underlying archetype. His unconscious identification with the archetype feeds into and animates the shadow to destructively play itself out in the therapeutic vessel.

What is activated in the doctor via his engagement with the patient is an inseparable amalgam of the doctor’s unconscious contents combined with the psychic material of the patient (the reverse is also true for what is activated in the patient). To quote Jung, “in the same measure as the doctor assimilates the intimate psychic contents of the patient into himself, he is in turn assimilated as a figure into the patient’s psyche. I say ‘as a figure,’ because I mean that the patient sees him not as he really is, but as one of those persons who figured so significantly in his previous history…as though he were charged with the power of those memory images.” If the doctor is open to receiving the patient and finding the analogous resonances within himself, the patient, through an act of introjection, reciprocally takes the doctor into his own psychic landscape. Through the transference, the doctor becomes the re-presentation of the original figure, as if the doctor is fully invested with the “power of those memory images,” carrying the same influence, meaning and authority in the patient’s head as did the original cast member.

ARCHETYPAL TRANSFERENCE

The transference is not just a carry over of unresolved personal issues with our family, however, but is also transpersonal in nature, which means that at a deeper level it is in-formed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Paradoxically, the archetypal dimension of the transference is accessed by fully entering into and playing out the seemingly personal process between the doctor and patient. Both doctor and patient are merely playing roles in a deeper, mythic, archetypal process that has enacted itself in endless variations throughout human history and which is revealing itself to them through their own uniquely personal interaction. The interactive field in-between them is not only dreamed up by the unconscious parts of both of them, but is the intersection of the collective unconscious and each individual’s personal, subjective process. As doctor and patient become conscious of this underlying field in which they are contained, they become aware of the “linking structure” that determines the nature and form of their interactions. Because of their growing meta-awareness, which is a genuine expansion of consciousness, they snap out of interpreting their experiences from the personal point of view and are able to perceive the deeper, transpersonal dimension of their experience. This realization creates the space for them to step out of unconsciously identifying with and personalizing their interactions, but rather, recognize that they are playing roles in a deeper, archetypal, and impersonal process which could potentially be transformational for both parties.

Interestingly, one of the underlying fundamental processes that is wreaking havoc as it plays itself out collectively on the world stage is the archetypal myth of the “negative father.” The archetypal figure of the negative father has to do with domination, abusing power, and establishing hierarchical authority over others. Not only was my unhealed father process recapitulating itself with the psychiatrist; my personal process was a reflection of a deeper, archetypal process enfolded in the macrocosm. Like an inter-nested iteration of a fractal, my interaction with the psychiatrist was a reflection of my unresolved process with my father, which was a projection of what was happening within my psyche, which itself is a mirror of the process playing out in the world’s collective body politic. The mythic father, in its negative, terrible form, is the archetypal force that is nonlocally in-forming human destructiveness and abuse of power all over the planet, as well as within ourselves. And yet, encoded in seemingly hidden form within this archetype is our own intrinsic power, as it challenges us to find and speak our true voice, access and step into our place of empowerment and true authority, and in so doing connect with the intrinsic wholeness of the Self.

Compared to the more personal aspects of the transference which have to do with the residue from unresolved issues with parents, the archetypal transference creates a bridge between the patient’s unconscious and an unconscious transcendent “other,” which, through the therapeutic instrument of the transference, is being temporarily projected onto the doctor. This projected other is a content of the collective unconscious, and should not be interpreted personalistically by being reduced to a memory of the actual parents. Whereas the personal dimension of the transference has to do with liberating the ego from the unhealthy effects of the parent’s unconscious, as well as strengthening the patient’s sense of self, the archetypal or transpersonal dimension of the transference connects and relates the patient with an inner other, a transcendental center of authority arising from being in touch with the living wholeness within themselves (please see my article “Meeting the Other Within”).

Both the personal and transpersonal levels are operating simultaneously – the doctor is playing out the role of our personal mother and/or father, which is at the same time an image in-formed by the underlying archetype of the divine parent. Similar to our parents, the doctor is channeling and carrying the archetypal image of a divine figure that exists deep within each of our psyches. Accessing the archetypal dimension of the transference is a very powerful experience due to the enormous psychic energy contained in the archetypal images. Jung comments, “And when your patient’s transference touches upon the archetypes, you touch upon a mine that may explode, just as we see it exploding collectively.” The archetypes contain extremely potent, nuclear “psychic” energy. It is important to have an alchemical, hermetically sealed container, such as the analytic vessel of therapy, in which to mediate, humanize, and integrate these archetypal energies. As the transference is successfully worked through, the patient becomes introduced to the transpersonal other who lives inside of his own soul. Encoded within these archetypal energies are hidden treasures with our “names” on them.

CLEAN HANDS

Both the patient and the doctor are embodied, mirrored reflections of each other. Just as there is, in potential, a doctor within the patient, there is also a patient within the doctor. Jung comments, “what the doctor fails to see in himself he either will not see at all, or will see grossly exaggerated, in his patient; further, he encourages those things to which he himself unconsciously inclines, and condemns everything that he abhors in himself. Just as one rightly expects the surgeon’s hands to be free from infection, so one ought to insist with especial emphasis that the psychotherapist be prepared at all times to exercise adequate self-criticism.” Jung was the first to insist that the analyst be analyzed. To the extent we haven’t shed light on our own darkness, we act out our darker sides in our life. How can we help others illumine the darkness of their unconscious if we aren’t able to see our own darkness?

Jung writes, “Surgery and obstetrics have long been aware that it is not enough simply to wash the patient – the doctor himself must have clean hands. A neurotic psychotherapist will invariably treat his own neurosis in the patient.” The doctor’s blind spots could potentially contaminate his work with the patient, contributing to the patient’s struggles, potentially re-creating the very wound and trauma from which the patient is trying to heal. If the doctor is unconscious, he will actually dream up the patient to unwittingly play out aspects of the doctor’s unconscious.

To the extent the doctor is unwilling or unable to self-reflect is the extent to which the doctor will unknowingly abuse his position of power simply because he can. His unwillingness to self-reflect while wielding the levers of power is itself abuse of power. Even if his behavior is not conscious, the doctor is nevertheless failing to exercise the primary requisite capacities necessary for the proper execution of his profession, and in a very real sense is guilty of genuine “mal-practice.” In these cases, the doctor’s negligence of his duties as a physician of the soul is harder to see than incompetence in other, more concrete fields, and hence is often disregarded, as he is operating in the province of the psyche, which is hidden, shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. Due to his unwillingness or inability to self-reflect, however, the doctor is unwittingly being used as an instrument for the will-to-power of the archetypal shadow to destructively act itself out in the therapeutic vessel. Jung writes, “Thus transference and countertransference, if their contents remain unconscious, create abnormal and untenable relationships which aim at their own destruction.” The doctor, in projecting out and seeing illness only in the patient, distances himself from his own potential for weakness, delusion, and illness, unconsciously elevating himself and degrading the patient, becoming “powerful” through using his position of power to mask his own psychological failure and in-authenticity. The extent to which the doctor, the one holding the power in the relationship, unconsciously holds onto, is attached, and even addicted to power, is the extent to which he is willing to abuse his power in order to keep it. This dynamic is a reflection of a deeper, archetypal process that is happening collectively, writ large on the world stage, not to mention within ourselves.

Jung gives a beautifully concise expression of how to genuinely be of psychological help for another when he says, “If I wish to treat another individual psychologically at all, I must for better or worse give up all pretensions to superior knowledge, all authority and desire to influence.” Even the doctor’s well-intentioned desire to help can be an unconscious reaction against something that the patient is reminding him of within himself. Of course, genuinely wanting the patient to heal is a totally beautiful impulse. The intention to want the patient to heal, however, at times can potentially be an expression of the doctor’s shadow, in that it can be an unconscious reaction to his own fear, as well as a strategy to assuage it – for if the patient heals, then the doctor might feel safer, as well as better about himself. In thinking he knows “what’s best” for the patient, the doctor can potentially tyrannize the patient with his good intentions. It is easy for the doctor to unconsciously act out his own unacknowledged arrogance, as ultimately speaking, none of us are in a privileged position to know what’s karmically best for another person.

Jung writes, “The transference is like those medicines which are a panacea for one and pure poison for another.” He continues, “…it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority…The therapist must at all times keep watch over himself, over the way he is reacting to his patient.” The more the doctor is in touch with his own countertransference reactions, the more the patient will be aided in the healing process. It is the doctor’s response to the countertransference that is the essential therapeutic factor in analysis. To quote Jung, “We could say, without too much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient.” Self-reflecting and working with his own unconscious reactions to the patient is the moral responsibility of the doctor. The doctor bringing awareness to his countertransference helps to create the analytic vessel to be a safe container for genuine transformation to occur. If the doctor can become aware of the deeper, archetypal process which is enacting itself through their mutual interaction, he can step out of the idea of a separate self and recognize their interconnectivity, and thus relinquish an attitude that is based on power. Not necessarily feeling compelled to dis-spell the patient’s projections, the doctor can choose instead to take on, step into and play out the patient’s projections with him in the analytic vessel. He can then consciously help to further unfold the transference and adroitly follow the dreaming with the patient, such that their mutually shared dynamic becomes a transformational feedback loop, a vehicle which offers a creative opportunity for evolutionary growth for both doctor and patient.

THE THIRD

Simultaneously observer and participant in a mutually shared process, both doctor and patient are in the alchemical bath together. Jung says “Psychological induction inevitably causes the two parties to get involved in the transformation of the third and to be themselves transformed in the process.” As soon as two people come together, a “third” becomes invoked, which is the spirit of relationship between them. This third thing, the “field” in which something greater than themselves is created through their interaction, is the medium through which the transference unfolds itself. This spirit of relationship dreams up who both of them are relative to each other.

“The third” is the reciprocally co-arising, interactive field which is dreamed up between them. Doctor and patient are dreaming up the field, while at the same time, in a circular, rather than a linear process, the field is dreaming them up. The field has its own rules, intentions, and creative power. The field is the “place” with no location where the boundary dissolves between inner and outer, as well as between the doctor and patient. Just like a dream, what is playing out in the seemingly external field between them is a reflection of what’s going on deep inside both the doctor and patient, as well as within the collective unconscious itself. The third is in between the field of the collective unconscious and the realm of personal subjectivity, while at the same time including them both. At points it is impossible to tell which contents of the field belong to whom, as both doctor and patient are in their unconscious together, collaboratively dreaming up the field between them. Jung writes, “This situation is difficult and distressing for both parties; often the doctor is in much the same position as the alchemist who no longer knew whether he was melting the mysterious amalgam in the crucible or whether he was the salamander glowing in the fire.” [In the alchemical imagination, salamander’s are one of the many symbols for the “prima materia,” the unconscious stuff which is in need of transformation] Is the unconscious that the doctor sees in the patient the patient’s unconscious, or is it a reflection of the doctor’s? Jung comments, “The elusive, deceptive, ever-changing content that possesses the patient like a demon now flits about from patient to doctor and, as the third party in the alliance, continues its game, sometimes impish and teasing, sometimes really diabolical.” It’s as if a living, autonomous, and mercurial spirit has insinuated itself into the field of their relationship, and is playing itself out through their shared unconscious.

One key difference between doctor and patient, hopefully, is that the doctor has a strong enough sense of who he is, so as to not become unknowingly taken over by the unconscious, but rather, becomes in ever-more conscious relationship with these unknown, mysterious contents. It is the responsibility of the doctor to not allow the manifestations of the unconscious between them to escape and vaporize back into the unconscious unrecognized, but rather, to anchor this unconscious spirit to consciousness so as to be worked on in the container of the analytic vessel. Jung comments, “We must suppose as a matter of course that the doctor is the better able to make the constellated contents conscious, otherwise it would only lead to mutual imprisonment in the same state of unconsciousness.” In our interaction, the psychiatrist and I had switched roles, as I was the one who was trying to avoid “mutual imprisonment” by making the “constellated contents conscious.”

By carrying light into the darkness of the unconscious, the accomplished doctor, at least in theory, differentiates and develops discrimination between the opposites, between what is personal and archetypal, between which contents belong, on one level, to the patient, and which belong to the doctor. As the doctor metabolizes and integrates the unconscious aspects which have gotten activated within him, he is being an instrument for lighting and lightening up the entire field. By transforming himself, the doctor has touched the archetypal level of the collective unconscious itself, which has a nonlocal influence that is felt throughout the whole field of consciousness. In re-creating himself anew, the doctor nonlocally re-creates, at a fundamental, quantum level, the whole universe, too.

Something gets created within us by being in relationship with each other, as if the stuff of which the soul is made becomes animated, enlivened, and potentially transmuted into a new state when we truly connect with someone else. Jung writes, “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a “You.” The experience of being seen by someone else with our hand in the cookie jar of our unconscious is qualitatively different than when we think we see our own unconscious, which is oftentimes just the idea of our unconscious. Realizing that another is seeing us in our unconscious is a reflection of, as well as initiating within ourselves, a process in which we are beginning to see our own unconscious. The other is the part of us, projected out and dreamed up outside of who we imagine ourselves to be, that is seeing our own unconscious. Elaborating on the strong instinct for “human connection,” Jung comments, “That is the core of the whole transference phenomenon, and it is impossible to argue it away, because relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself.”

The countertransference emerges right where the doctor is “touched” by the patient. The transference often has for its true object the doctor’s own point of wounding, and it is from this unconscious wound in the doctor that the countertransference originates. The doctor’s countertransference reactions will be provoked by the patient’s transference particularly in the places in which the doctor is unconscious of the quality projected upon him by the patient. Jung says, “It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor’s sore spot. Because this is so, difficult situations can arise for the doctor, too – or rather, especially for the doctor.” The transference works directly on the unconscious of the doctor, as it penetrates his wound, similar to how, archetypally, the God enters through the wound. Speaking of this “open wound” in the doctor, Jung comments, “somewhere there is an open door which he does not control, and there a patient will get in.”

THE WOUNDED HEALER

Jung writes that, “the true physician does not stand outside his work but is always in the thick of it.” The doctor is not just a blank screen, a passive witness sitting in the audience, behind a thick sheet of protective glass, holding space for the patient’s process, but on the contrary, is a participatory, active agent in the unfoldment and transformation of the patient’s living process. Jung says, “A genuine participation, going right beyond professional routine, is absolutely imperative, unless of course, the doctor prefers to jeopardize the whole proceeding by evading his own problems.” In the transference, the patient’s problems will get under the doctor’s skin and activate his own problems; everything depends upon what the doctor is able to do about this within himself. Jung writes, “The treatment of the transference reveals in a pitiless light what the healing agent really is: it is the degree to which the analyst himself can cope with his own psychic problems.” A healer often experiences that whomever they are working with are synchronistic reflections of parts of himself. Jung says, “If for some reason these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced. Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found.” By activating each other’s unconscious, doctor and patient become a “problem to each other,” in the sense that their own inner processes have become quantum entangled to such a degree that they are playing out, in fully embodied form, mirrored aspects of one another’s unresolved, unconscious issues. By triggering each others unconscious complexes, the unconscious enters into play in their field as their relationship deepens in intimacy.

Jung says, “Just as all doctors are exposed to infections and other occupational hazards, so the psychotherapist runs the risk of psychic infections which are no less menacing. On the one hand he is often in danger of getting entangled in the neuroses of his patients; on the other hand, if he tries too hard to guard against their influence, he robs himself of his therapeutic efficacy. Between this Scylla and this Charybdis lies the peril, but also the healing power.” It’s a razor’s edge and a slippery slope, but the middle path between the opposites is one that every would-be healer has to learn to navigate.

Jung writes, “The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. ‘Only the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect.” The doctor is called to be a genuine human being, one who is capable of being “vulnerable” (the Latin word “vulnus” means “wound”). We are all potential wounded healers (please see my articles “The Wounded Healer, Part 1,” and “The Wounded Healer, Part 2”). Only someone who has truly suffered himself can help others to heal. Only he who bears sickness as an existential possibility within himself can constellate the healing factor in others. Because the figure of the wounded healer consciously knows the experience of being wounded, he is able to bear it with others. For the wounded healer, suffering is certainly not something to seek out, but when it presents itself it is seen as a numinous experience, a sharing in Christ’s passion, a purification, a gift from God, and an initiation into the deeper mystery of the underlying, all-pervasive continuum of unified being. The wounded healer, Jung writes, shows “the mythological truth that the wounded is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering.”

SHAMANIC TRANSFERENCE

The archetypal figure of the shaman literally takes the other’s illness into himself, which is always a wounding experience – hence the shaman is an iteration of the wounded healer. A psychotherapist is in fact very much like a shaman, in that both have very direct experience of the unconscious, in both its light, and dark aspects. Due to his extreme empathy, a shamanic healer feels into and introjects the conflict of the patient within himself, as if the conflict is transferred into his own psyche. Any person with shamanic sensibilities has what I call “tel-empathy,” a highly developed telepathic sense of empathy, which combines the telepathic power of the mind with the empathic feeling of the heart. The shamanic healer, bodhisattva-like, literally takes over and shares in the sufferings of his patient, dealing with the patient’s conflict both consciously and within his own unconscious. Jung writes, “The doctor, by voluntarily and consciously taking over the psychic sufferings of the patient, exposes himself to the overpowering contents of the unconscious and hence also to their inductive action.” Exposing himself, the doctor becomes very vulnerable, open to being wounded, and because of the inductive, and contagious effects of the contents of the unconscious, susceptible to “catching” (which has the dual meaning of both “being infected by,” as well as “capturing”) what is bothering the patient.

In taking the patient’s process into himself, it is as if the underlying essence of the patient’s process is transferred over to the shamanic healer, who makes it his own. Having internalized the patient’s process, a shaman finds the place within himself that is reflected by the patient’s process. A shamanic healer uses the place within himself which resonates with the patient’s conflict as a springboard into the transpersonal realm. Beyond the merely personal, this is the dimension of the collective unconscious, whose archetypes are animating the patient’s personal conflict. Through journeying in the archetypal realm on the wings of the creative imagination, the shamanic healer finds the deeper part of himself which the patient is embodying and playing out. This is to see through the illusory idea of the separate self, which is to become lucid in the waking dream of life. Recognizing himself in the patient, the natural response to this realization is compassion, which is a nonlocal force of immense healing and whole-ing power not to be discounted.

In taking the patient’s psychic illness into himself, the accomplished shaman moves through it and doesn’t become stuck. He is only able to do this because of his strong connection to the all-pervading, spacious wholeness of the Self, a wholeness that is both transcendent to and untouched by illness. The shamanic healer doesn’t unconsciously identify, and hence become identical with, the psychic conflict that’s triggered within himself, which would be to identify with the very stuff [e.g., the salamander] which is in need of transformation. Because of his living awareness of the ever-presence of the Self, the shamanic healer doesn’t become lost in the patient’s illness, but fully experiences it subjectively, from the inside, and allows it to self-liberate and join the wholeness of the psyche. An accomplished shaman is able to transmute the psychic illness that he has caught from the patient into a curative and creative illness that reveals itself to be a prop, a prompt, and a prod to wake himself up even further. Encoded in the seeming illness is its own medicine. Since therapy is a holistic system, the shaman’s ability to creatively integrate the illness which has gotten activated within him induces a change in the whole system, which then helps the patient.

Due to his more developed sense of awareness and lucidity, the shamanic healer is able to assimilate what Jung calls “the demon of sickness.” To quote Jung, “a sufferer can transmit his disease to a healthy person whose powers then subdue the demon – but not without impairing the well-being of the subduer.” This is the archetype of the shaman/wounded healer “in action,” which involves the healer’s willingness to be vulnerable and experience the patient’s process so deeply that he is open to being wounded in his interaction with the patient. Speaking of this archetypal figure, Jung comments, “it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.”

In a collaborative dreaming process with its own teleology, the doctor invariably gets dreamed up by the patient’s unconscious to incarnate the archetypal figure of wounded healer/shaman, the primordial healer par excellence. A shaman can only be a shaman if he is dreamed up by the field to be one. An accomplished shaman doesn’t personally identify with the role of healer, which would be to inflate and become full of himself, but rather, realizes he is merely being an instrument for something to happen in the field. Just like a night dream compensates the one-sidedness of the dreamer, the archetypal figure of shaman/wounded healer is dreamed up by the analytic third to balance and compensate a one-sidedness in the whole system. This is symbolized by the storied figure of “the rainmaker,” who heals the drought in the outer world by inwardly getting in balance, accessing within himself his own fluidity, his own true nature. This inner realization is mirrored by and “precipitates” into and out of the outer world.

As the shaman subdues the demon of sickness, this in-form-ation and informing influence gets transmitted in no time at all, faster than the twinkling of an eye throughout the whole field of consciousness. In what I call “shamanizing the field,” the shamanic healer takes on the illness of the other and in so doing falls ill himself, and as he recovers his own psychic equilibrium and heals the illness within himself, this nonlocally affects the patient, in addition to the whole universe, as we are all interconnected through the channel of the collective unconscious. Speaking about the doctor in his role as shamanic healer, Jung writes “He is not just working for this particular patient, who may be quite insignificant, but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum, for it is accomplished in a sphere but lately visited by the numen, where the whole weight of mankind’s problems has settled.” Each patient is a meaningful part of the universal drama of evolving consciousness.

When the shamanic transference is fully activated, instead of just the patient’s isolated psyche wrestling with the demon of sickness, there are now two psyches, united in their healing intent, tel-empathically having it out with the same demon. These two psyches, inseparably inter-connected through the network of the collective unconscious, nonlocally in-form, flow into, and influence each other, creating a psychic container to hold, metabolize and digest the unconscious content. Their co-operative effort takes away and dis-spells the autonomy and omnipotence of the previously unconscious content, such that it can no longer act itself out unconsciously between or within them. It is like catching “the big one,” a fish from the sea of the unconscious that is too powerful to ‘land” by one’s own self; someone else is needed to help us anchor and assimilate it to the shore of consciousness.

Once the doctor metabolizes, integrates and heals what has gotten stirred up within his own psyche, the therapeutic task becomes how to pass the medicina over to the patient. The doctor administers the healing medicine through the channel of the unconscious via “influence,” which is to say, by the way he carries and embodies the transformation within himself. The influence of the doctor’s healing “substance-less substance” is nonlocally carried and transmitted to the patient through the many subtle capillaries that run through the interactive field between them. The patient is open and receptive to the doctor’s in-forming influence at this level because of the initial bridge created between them by the transference in the first place.

As the doctor metabolizes the demon of sickness, it is as if the patient is seeing the reflection of the mythic “Medusa” (which if looked at directly, would turn the patient to stone, i.e., be traumatic) transformed in the mirror shield of the doctor. Thanks to the doctor facing within himself what the patient cannot yet face within his own psyche, the patient, consciously or unconsciously, recognizes in the living person of the doctor, how someone else (which is actually a reflection of this latent part of himself), has transformed and integrated the very demon of sickness with which the patient has been wrestling. This recognition is a reflection of and nonlocally activates this very process of integration within the patient. Even if the patient doesn’t consciously recognize this process of inward transformation in the doctor, the eye of the unconscious of the patient “sees,” and is affected by, the doctor’s transformation.

Though from one point of view, shamanic transference seems to be a special type of transference, from a deeper point of view, every transference is a form of shamanic transference. Shamanic transference is not a style of transference, or a practice of a particular tradition, but is a natural interchange that is fundamental to every human relationship (please see my article “We are all Shamans-in-Training”). In the depth of any transference, the currency of exchange which genuinely creates psychological health and spiritual wealth is a dialectical relationship based on eros, authentic human relatedness, channeled tel-empathically through the heart. The shamanic doctor of the soul skillfully embodies this way of being in all his relations. Indigenous people call this being a real human being.

TRUE AUTHORITY

To quote Jung, “How can the patient learn to abandon his neurotic subterfuges when he sees the doctor playing hide-and-seek with his own personality, as though unable, for fear of being thought inferior, to drop the professional mask of authority, competence, superior knowledge, etc.?” Patients have a superb sensitivity, and are finely attuned to their doctor’s unconscious, practically looking into the doctor’s soul. Fundamentally speaking, the doctor’s inner game of “hide-and-seek” is to not only hide from his patient, but to hide from himself as well. Speaking of the doctor hiding behind his masks, and methods Jung writes, “All the disguises in which he wraps himself in order to conceal his own personality avail him nothing; sooner or later he will come across a patient who calls his bluff.”

When we see our doctor’s unconscious self-deception and denial, we are literally seeing his or her “mad” part, which, in my case at least, was a recurrent iteration of seeing my parent’s madness, as well as being a reflection of my own. When we “see” the other’s mad part, however, it is important not to solidify him as being totally mad (which would be an expression of our own madness), but rather, to realize that the madness we are seeing in him is only one aspect of the totality of who he is. The realization of the other’s mad part is shocking and de-stabilizing, particularly when it involves an authority figure, as it initiates a process within ourselves of letting go and re-assessing our own image and projections of who and where we thought our true authority was. Due to the traumatic nature of the insight, there is a very real tendency in ourselves to deny and split-off from our perception of the other’s madness, just like many of us did when we saw the abusive and mad part of our parents. If we dissociate from this perception, however, then we are investing and being complicit in our own self-deception, abuse and madness. Fundamentally, abuse has to do with fracturing the connection between the world out there and our inner experience of ourselves, splitting our perception of the world and our place in it. To the extent we deny or distrust our own perceptions is the extent to which we reject our own intrinsic authority as author of our own experience. Oftentimes, seeing the mad part of others in our family system, be it our parents or our supposedly healing physician, has a tragic aspect, in that it forces us to step out of and leave the system. It takes courage and a strong sense of self to stand for our experience and not split-off when our perceptions are not validated by those in authority around us. In not dis-associating from our experience, we are on our way to becoming an independent agent, an autonomous individual standing on our own two feet.

In a sense, the psychiatrist played her role “perfectly” in my dreaming process, as her acting out her unconscious and bungling the transference has helped me to develop in ways that I might not have otherwise. By refusing to play the role my psyche seemingly designed for her and wanted her to step into, the psychiatrist unwittingly played a deeper role in helping me discover my work in dreaming. My interaction with the psychiatrist was one of many examples over a number of years which taught me about the underlying, nonlocal field of consciousness which synchronistically manifests through outer events as well as other people, as it gives shape to and in-forms our lives. I even wrote a book about this insight (please see “The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis”).

Though the situation with the psychiatrist was, from one point of view “perfect,” from another perspective, however, it certainly seemed far less than perfect. By unconsciously abusing her position of power, the psychiatrist was guilty of forfeiting her potential to genuinely help me as a healer. While it has been transformative in a positive way on one level, at the same time, instead of helping me to heal, my work with the psychiatrist became something from which I’ve needed to heal. In our relationship we en-acted something that, even after leaving her, has taken me years to work through in my own head and heart outside of traditional therapy.

I feel like I’ve transformed the situation with the psychiatrist, at least in my own mind, from one of me being the victim to being in a place of self-empowerment. All I can do is express my experience; I can’t be attached to the psychiatrist “getting it,” as my healing is not a function of someone outside of myself getting anything. This would just be a repeat of wanting my parents to get it, which would be a further re-enactment of me giving away my power, once again re-creating my trauma from the inside out and the bottom up. The question becomes, can I be OK with the seeming authority figure, be it my parents, the psychiatrist, the culture at large, or whomever, not getting it, and therefore, seemingly not getting me? This situation offers me the opportunity to connect with and step into my own experience, my own knowing, my own authority, and my own self.

If people tell me that by writing this article I am only working out my unhealed father stuff, as well as my unresolved transference issues with my old psychiatrist, I couldn’t agree more. Finding our genuine voice, our unique mode of creatively expressing our experience of being human, is an intrinsically self-empowering, and self-author-izing gesture. In matters such as my own experience, I am a true authority, as I am “the one” who is experiencing myself. I am fully “certified.”

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, which is available on his website www.awakeninthedream.com. (See the first chapter, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis). Please feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

Novel forms of co-operative exchange such as this evolutionary social movement are a true anti-viral, spiritual antibody for the collective psychosis that is wreaking havoc on our planet. In helping to in-form, create, and cultivate a new planetary life-enhancing culture that is based on our interconnectivity, this radical social movement provides an alternative model and template for co-operatively changing the waking dream we are having. In participating in this ripple of evolution, we can help spread the seeds of these intention-filled, ever-evolving spores to proliferate themselves, inflaming an ever-consuming wild-fire of awakening mind throughout every corner of the planet.

Unlike the propaganda-based, profit-driven corporate media whose purpose is to manage our perceptions, Evolver, in media-ting a new way for us to in-form ourselves, provides an alternative platform for us to take back and expand our minds. This movement is a visionary prototype of an emerging type of interdependent media that is based on our intrinsic interdependence. This spiritual/social/political network is a multi-media and multi-channeled (both virtual and visceral, on-line and off-line) entity that we are literally dreaming up and co-creating so as to potentially wake ourselves up en masse in ways that have never been seen before in this cycle of human history. Such a living organ-ization is like an internet provider of and for the inter-connected soul of humanity, in that it provides a network through which to network with each other, so that we can co-operatively work together to create a world that works. Evolver is a portal in the cyberspace of mind through which we can co-ordinate ourselves to come together in full-bodied form, and through our interplay effect real change in the third dimension of space and time.

The Evolver Social Movement is a new form of inter-active community that, in helping us connect with and in-form each other, offers us a real-time vehicle for stepping out of the illusion of the separate self together. Offering a forum for bringing the most creative, out of the box minds of our visionary culture together, Evolver can potentially help us to realize that we are interconnected cells in a greater mystical body that is awakening through us as we awaken to it. It provides a skeletal structure upon which to build, give shape to, and animate the living body of a new world. Communities like Evolver are an antidote for the increasing fragmentation in the world today. There are so many of us who are awakening in our own way, evolving within our own limited sphere of influence. Evolver offers us an alchemical vehicle to synergistically put our unique gifts together in a way that creates a win-win situation for everyone. Each of us can be likened to pieces of a global jigsaw puzzle; as seemingly isolated selves, we might not know how we fit together in the greater whole. We are like a “soul family” who has made a sacred commitment over lifetimes to connect with each other and help one another awaken, remembering that we only exist as relatives of and relative to each other. We can assist each other to recognize that we are holding pieces of the puzzle for each other that when put together make all of us more whole; something greater than the sum of its parts gets created and emerges through us in the process.

When a community is based on the intention of serving the health of the whole, it is something precious that is to be treasured. According to the Buddha, such a co-operative venture (“the sangha”) is considered to be one of the supports for awakening, both on the individual and collective level. The Evolver community, one of whose intentions is to cut through and dissolve the hierarchical power structure of the old paradigm which engenders abuse of power over “others,” can help us to potentially discover creative and novel ways of waking ourselves up that aren’t available to us when we are not connected and connecting with each other. A community that is an instrument for evolution is a living symbol, an embodied iteration of a fractal, revealing to us what is available to our species as a collective whole. Being a socially responsible and responsive organization, Evolver is not just driven by the bottom line, but rather, is drawn towards breaking the glass ceiling of our evolutionary potential.

Evolver is an agent for an engaged form of spiritually informed political activism (political activism informed by spiritual wisdom). Infusing its activism with an expanded consciousness, Evolver expresses this deeper synthesis as a form of “art.” Evolver is a creative work in progress that is potentially, depending upon how we dream it, a form of living and lived-thru art. It is an empowering arm of what I call the “Art-Happening Called Global Awakening,” in which those of us who are awakening to the dreamlike nature of our universe come together and discover how we can help each other to deepen and stabilize our shared lucidity. Being a reflection of the dreamlike universe, the Evolver Social Movement is whatever we dream it to be. There is no Evolver outside of our own mind. Evolver, and our own evolution for that matter, is purely a function of how we dream it.

This visionary movement is an expression that our species is growing up, that we are stepping out of our adolescence, and are becoming adult, as we recognize our responsibility and intrinsic power to transform our shared waking dream. We can’t wait for a divine savior, some off-planet deity, our government, or other people to save us. We have to do it ourselves. As we mature, evolve, and step into and flesh out our incarnation, we realize that we are the very Messiah that we have been waiting for. How our world crisis turns out depends upon us, upon the choices we make, upon how we invest our attention. How this waking dream unfolds depends upon which thought-forms we energize, invest with reality and dream up into embodied form. Evolver is an emerging planetary network through which we can assist each other to snap out of unconsciously playing helpless, disempowered, and passive victims, and step into our roles as empowered co-creators and dreamers of the shared waking dream that is our world. Something very magical and potent becomes available to us when members of our species come together and re-member to remember.

This ever-evolving movement offers us the opportunity to dream into full-bodied materialization the very world we are imagining. I call this our “sacred power of dreaming,” which is the deeper part of us that is moment by moment dreaming up this universe into materialization. We are all using our sacred power of dreaming all the time; the majority of people on this planet are wielding this God-given power unconsciously, however, in a way which creates chaos and destruction. When enough of us consciously tap into this intrinsic, divinely-mandated power within us, we can get in synch with ourselves and each other, and in so doing put our sacred power of dreaming together and, I imagine, literally change the world for the better. This isn’t some sort of new age woo-woo; this is precisely the nature of our situation, just like when a sufficient number of dream characters in a dream become lucid, we can put our lucidity together and transform the dream we are having. Finding the leverage point through which we can intervene in the dreaming enables us to reciprocally stimulate each others lucidity and “dream ourselves awake,” which is evolution in action. The Evolver Social Movement is a living example of an archetypal idea that has become activated within our species whose time has come. Being archetypal, this movement is nonlocal, which means it is emerging into our world as if from a higher-dimension, while being local at the same time (coming to a town near you!).

My financial wizard friend Catherine Austin Fitts (Solari.com) reminds us that we vote with how we spend and invest our money. One of the big mistakes that many well-intentioned and spiritually minded people make is to turn away from and contract against money and all that it represents, which is understandable from one point of view, considering how money is used in our world in a way which enslaves so many people and creates so much suffering. Demonizing money, however, can potentially be a reflection of avoiding relationship with a part of ourselves. Money, as a form of potential energy, can be embraced as a means through which we can learn to effectively wield our power in the world. Seen as the symbol that it is, money is a token, one of the energetic mediums through which we navigate through and craft our world in such a way so as to make things happen. This is a fact that cannot be ignored, no matter how much we wish otherwise (at least at this stage of the game). Evolver/Reality Sandwich cannot survive on brilliant blog posts alone. It is a joint evolutionary ad-venture that needs an infusion of capital from its global members.

The evolution movement is one of the best investments we can make, as it is investing in and voting for our own lucidity. Better than gold and silver, it is an investment in our own intrinsic wealth and abundance. This ever-evolving field is like a doorway through which the awakening mind of humanity is inspiring, in-forming, regenerating, and incarnating itself. A modern-day version of collective shamanism, the Evolver Social Movement is one of the crystallizations of and channels through which the evolution of the universe is now taking place. Becoming a contributor to and shareholder of this evolutionary social movement is an incredible opportunity being offered to us to participate and wisely invest in our own mutually shared evolution. The Evolver Social Movement is a living example of over-unity technology in the medium of human relationships and information exchange, a true zero point of the mind in the process of awakening, whose return on investment is endlessly self-generating in ways we can only imagine.

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, which is available on his website www.awakeninthedream.com. (See the first chapter, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis). Please feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

Green Tara is a savioress and liberator, a Buddha of enlightened activity who embodies compassion in action and protects from fear, danger and suffering. Catalyzed into lucidity through this dreamlike and synchronistic series of events, it was clear to me that the external, physical “appearance” of the thangka under the rainbow was a symbol reflecting what was happening meta-physically, in a higher-dimension of my being, deep inside of myself. The whole event felt truly numinous, and made me feel protected, loved, and even blessed. It was as if the universe itself wanted to remind me of its support by giving me a present, gift-wrapped with a “bow,” to treasure. I was glad to have my friend there to share this experience with, so that when I would tell the story to others, I would have a witness to show that I wasn’t just imagining or dreaming. Or maybe I was, in a deeper sense. There was no one who could convince either of us, however, that something really magical and meaningful had not just happened. An auspicious co-incidence of factors had synchronistically come together in the same moment to create a shared experience which had a very powerful effect on us. We were both speechless, overwhelmed with deep feelings of awe, gratitude, and reverence. I never found out who had offered the sacred gift. Sometimes I imagine that the holy work of art just materialized out of the void, which from one point of view it did.

TERMA

We all receive gifts in our lives, as life itself is a gift, and so are we. Discovering meaning-filled and inspiring spiritual treasures in our own personal life is an individualized iteration of a profound collective process in which liberating spiritual treasures unfold out of and into the field based on a synchronization and co-operation of a number of individuals and factors. Each one of us finding spiritual treasures in our lives is a reflection of a deeper process that is happening, both in the collective unconscious and in the world at large. The spiritual “power and influence” of these sacred treasures becomes magnified when people who value them come together to share in their wealth. Over the course of many centuries, the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism has developed a unique, extraordinary, and amazingly psycho-activating (i.e., activating the psyche) tradition called the “terma” (“hidden treasure”) tradition. The Tibetan terma tradition is a distinct approach to spiritual awakening which insures that the blessings of realization don’t disappear, fade, nor become adulterated.

Discovering spiritual treasures is certainly not unique to Tibetan Buddhism; the revelation of spiritual treasures occurs in many spiritual traditions. But the terma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism in particular, which has been deeply in-formed and inspired by the phenomenon of spiritual treasures manifesting into the third dimension, has remarkably mapped and uniquely art-iculated this archetypal process in a way that is revealing for all of us.

Termas are spiritual treasures that are “planted” in the radiant luminosity of nonlocal mind itself. Termas, as well as the clues for their discovery, are sometimes discovered outside in the physical world, and sometimes are found within the substance-less substance of mind itself. Though terma are ultimately reflections of, related to, and found within the vast expanse of nonlocal mind itself, they also sometimes externalize themselves in the seemingly outer world in the form of sacred objects and teachings. Terma are boundary collapsing, in that their very existence makes the distinction between the inner and outer very fuzzy and open for question. Terma reveals to us that we are living in a “twilight zone” (a Tibetan “bardo”), where the polarities of day (lucid consciousness) and night consciousness (the unconscious) are indistinguishably turning into each other. Manifesting and imbued with living, enlightened presence, terma are the real priceless “gems” of the universe.

Termas are true miracles. The revelation of a terma is an atemporal, higher-dimensional process materializing itself in solid-seeming form into linear, historical time. Termas are a vehicle through which the enlightened sphere is able to insure the propagation of its realization with the utmost purity, as its “doctrine,” which is nothing other than the text of this living universe as a revelatory oracle of itself, continually re-freshes and re-vitalizes itself based on the circumstances of the moment. Termas are considered to be imbued with the warm, fresh, moist breath of realization itself, as they are a direct, unmediated crystallization of our own wakefulness taking on form. Termas are “lucidity stimulators,” as they are manifestations of the waking dream which literally catalyze our awakening, helping us to recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation. Like psychic alarm clocks secreted away in this waking dream of ours, waking us up at exactly the right moment, terma are like time-release vitamins that the universal dream-field organically secretes when needed. Just like different diseases need different medicines, the spiritual malady afflicting humanity today calls forth novel, embodied iterations of creative revelation to precipitate out of the field. Terma are like yeast which leaven the bread of realization. When we connect with a terma, it is as if a sleeping, unconscious part of ourselves awakens. Our spiritual inheritance, termas are like charms that break spells, or like keys that open locks (please see my article “As Viewed, So Appears”). Termas have the power to unlock the mind to its true, changeless nature. Inexhaustible by nature, termas will continue to manifest until samsara, the endless, suffering-filled cycle of death and rebirth, is empty of beings.

PADMASAMBHAVA

The Buddha himself prophesized that an even greater incarnation than himself would soon be born, a second Buddha, whose name would be PadmaSambhava, the Lotus Born. Spontaneously self-arisen during the ninth century in an innately pure physical body directly from the womb of origination itself, PadmaSambhava, who is considered to be the Buddha of this very age we live in, was the actual-ized figure who, besides founding Tibetan Buddhism, engineered and started the terma tradition for the benefit of future generations such as ourselves. Known as the tantric Buddha, he is the self-originated display and full-bodied incarnation of the nonlocal mind of enlightenment itself. The em-bodi-ment of the dynamic and atemporal process of spiritual realization in-form, PadmaSambhava was, and is, able to engage with this world in such a way so as to transcend time and be able to creatively conspire with us, in the present moment, in our own awakening. Having decoded the software of mind itself, PadmaSambhava mystically concealed sacred power objects (statues, images, ritual artifacts), healing, medicinal substances and liberating teachings throughout the many dimensions of this universe: in the earth, sky, water, and in his disciples’ dreams, visions, hearts, and minds. PadmaSambhava would then inspire his disciples and emanations to discover these terma centuries later, at exactly the right moment in history when they were needed. Termas collapse time, as if in the lineage of its transmission there is no one between PadmaSambhava centuries ago and the one who discovers the terma in the present moment. Termas are PadmaSambhava’s enduring legacy and activity in tangible form in our modern world. Termas are PadmaSambhava’s deathless, rarefied, subtle body of realization taking on whatever form is needed in accord with the perception of beings so as to serve their liberation.

Termas are not make believe, like some sort of fairy tale─the terma tradition has been deeply studied and highly venerated by both scholars and practitioners alike (see Hidden Teachings of Tibet: An Explanation of the Terma Tradition of the Nyingma School of Buddhism by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche). The well-known Tibetan Book of the Dead, a misnomer for the more accurately named, The Great Liberation by Hearing (in the “Intermediate State,” i.e., the “bardo”), is an example of a terma. It was composed and mystically concealed in a cave by its author PadmaSambhava, where it was “invisible” to anyone until it was discovered by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century. The moment of discovery was the moment when, in a synchronistic act of creation in time, the terma emerged into our third dimensional world. Like “Schroedinger’s Cat” (a famous thought experiment in quantum physics which showed that the universe can’t be said to exist in a “particular” form until there is an observer to experience it), terma are a quantum phenomenon, not taking on definitive and incarnate form until its moment of revelation. Being a terma, the “voice” of PadmaSambhava comes through the text and is, in essence, reminding us to recognize right now that everything we are experiencing is our own thought-form, our own projected energy, our own mind appearing to us in seemingly full-bodied, reflected form, which is to say that our experience is very similar to a dream. A key to the innermost recesses of the human mind, The Great Liberation by Hearing is not merely pointing out the dreamlike nature of our situation, it itself is a manifestation of the dream at which it is pointing. The Great Liberation by Hearing is reminding us that we are dreaming up its words, which are the projection of our mind, to appear before us so as to awaken us. According to The Great Liberation by Hearing, making any connection with it in any way, even simply hearing the “sound” of its words, initiates within us a process which ultimately results in liberation, hence the title. This is why The Great Liberation by Hearing says of itself, “To meet with this is great good fortune.” The words of the terma are an atemporal echo of the awakened aspect of ourselves, as if the part of us that’s already liberated sends a care package to catalyze our awakening.

The real treasure, of which terma are unmediated emanations, is the unsullied, pure nature of the mind, our Buddha nature, which is ultimately found within us. The pure, indestructible, and unchangeable nature of our mind is not acquired or produced, but rather, like a form of terma, uncovered. Seen symbolically, the discovery of terma is a reflection of the inner process of remembering and discovering who we are.

TERTON

The person who is destined to find the terma, the “terton,” or “treasure-revealer,” is a key piece in its revelation. According to the terma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the figure of the terton has, in a past life, been commissioned and empowered by PadmaSambhava himself to re-collect, re-member and reveal the sacred treasure at the very moment when it is most needed. The power of PadmaSambhava’s prophecy and intention combined with the aspirational wish, sustained over numerous lifetimes, of the terton to discover the treasure for the benefit of all beings, results in the auspicious coincidence of factors whose fruition is the revelation of the terma. The terton discovers the terma when they are able to re-access the pristine state of radiant light which they were in when they received their appointment from PadmaSambhava. Sometimes the main purpose of the terton’s life is the discovery of the terma, which is sealed in the memory code of the terton’s spiritual DNA.

Sometimes an intuition in the terton’s mind will help him or her find the terma in the form of an object or a text in the outer world, and other times, an object in the world will stimulate the discovery of a terma that was hidden inside the terton’s mind. The terton sometimes will just experience a written syllable, or a sound, whether in physical form or in visionary imagination, which will serve as a support and catalyst, a mnemonic cue, to trigger and shake forth the memory of the hidden treasure, which was stored in the limitless expanse of the pure, essential nature of the awareness state of the terton’s mind. The clue for the discovery of the terma, be it a single letter, syllable, sound, or some other means, will materialize in the same form in which it was concealed and encoded in the terton’s mind-stream.

Sometimes the terma will be found in the outer, physical world inside of a seamlessly sealed receptacle, or casket. This container is usually the first thing found when the concealment place of a terma opens. Inside this casket, which is like a hyper-dimensional time-capsule, the terma is being held and protected, as if it is a living being. At the moment of revelation, this casket spontaneously opens and typically reveals a scroll of paper. Written on this scroll is “symbolic script,” sometimes mysteriously changing like in a dream, which, miraculously, only the terton can decode. This symbolic script is the key to awakening the mind of the terton to the words, meanings and realization of the terma. Sometimes one letter, syllable, word, or phrase will catalyze the terton to remember and channel a terma that might consist of multiple volumes of teachings. From the dreaming point of view, it is as if the field has dreamed up a hint to activate the re-membering of what was known long ago. This is a reflection of a process that happens within ourselves.

Termas are both messengers and messages from the other side of the veil, skillful means that are “federally expressed” from the enlightened realm intended for our liberation. They are a novel form of language, and hence, one of the roles of a terton is to translate the terma in a way that can be received by others. If a teaching is involved in the terma, sometimes the terton has to practice the teaching themselves in order to generate the power of accomplishment and blessings contained within the terma, so as to be able to transmit it to others. They then can disseminate the terma in a way that embodies its living form and carries its timeless truth onwards and outwards as a sacred signal into the furthest reaches of the nonlocal universe. The terton is a mediator, medium, and transmitter of these treasures, as if the terton is dreamed up by the field to bring forth and birth the treasure into our world.

Bringing a realized figure of the past back to life, the revelation of a terma is a form of ventrilocution, as if something that is realized in the past is retrieved from its crypt and is uttered again through the voice of another. In the revelation of a terma the sacred words and liberating speech of the timeless, primordial Buddhas becomes spoken in the present moment. When the universe speaks, its voice is always authentic. All genuine expressions of truth originate and come straight from the ultimate source, the primordial awakened state, which is always and ever present. In the revelation of terma, it is as if a former self transmits its timeless realization through the medium of time so as to wake up a future self. Or we could just as easily say an awakened future self sends a beacon of lucidity back in time so as to awaken a past self. Collapsing our idea of time itself, terma puts a whole different “spin” on time, activating a “r-evolution” of the mind. Terma reveals that past and future selves are not separate, as both only really exist right now, in the present moment. We are not a being that only exists bound in time, but rather, we exist over, through-out, and outside of time as well. Both the terton (through his or her successive incarnations), the terma (through its ever-new renditions), and ourselves as well, have a continuing existence over multiple generations, and hence, can only be seen and appreciated when we perceive our world from a more cosmic, eternal perspective which is outside of the viewpoint of linear time. Because of the way they reconfigure our experience of and relationship to time, among other things, the existence of terma sheds an illuminating light on the nature of who we are.

Termas are a genuinely “mind-blowing” experience to contemplate, in that they explode the limitations of the conceptual mind. Conventional logic can’t comprehend the existence of terma, because during their revelation the relative circumstances of the underlying fabric of space/time becomes very flexible and elastic. We can’t recognize nor relate with terma if we are still in our egoic mind, thinking we exist as discrete entities who are separate from the universe and bound in linear time. We can’t possibly see a terma if we think the world objectively exists outside of us, in solid form, and isn’t related to us. We can’t appreciate terma if we don’t recognize the reflective nature of the world, which is the very thing which terma is revealing to us.

The discovery of terma is a revelation of a novel, spiritually-enhancing form of life emerging into our world. Termas are a new life-form, and they, like us, appreciate appreciation. As termas are appreciated, they appreciate in value, which is to say that their grace waves increase. Due to their blessing power, termas make a powerful, positive imprint upon anyone who connects with them. A collective, unifying field that is potentiated for awakening gets conjured up around a terma. Termas are a uniquely awe-inspiring phenomenon that are truly worthy of our most devoted contemplation and veneration.

Terma will sometimes be miraculously taken out from rocks, the earth, or from bodies of water by the terton. The terton might feel inspired by a dream or vision to go to a certain mountain, for example, and upon arriving at the place, a rock might spontaneously fall down from the mountain side, revealing the presence of a terma which had been hidden by the rock. The terma might include the aforementioned casket with enclosed symbolic script, ritual objects, statues, sacred images, rosaries, etc. Or sometimes the door of a concealment in a rock will open spontaneously upon the arrival of the terton, revealing the terma, which oftentimes is hot to the touch, as if it is “hot off the press.” Sometimes the terton will climb up natural steps in the mountain side to retrieve the terma, and after he or she comes back down, the steps magically disappear. Other times, as if having psychic x-ray vision, the terton will feel intuitively drawn to a certain part of the mountain side, and will use hammer and chisel to dig out the terma. The fact that termas are being found inside the womb of the earth shows that the biosphere – life itself – is spontaneously self-generating and coming to our aid in awakening us. The universe is literally a treasure trove birthing at the seams.

At other times the terma is magically brought to the terton, or will spontaneously materialize on the terton’s shrine, for example, if the specific blessed object is needed for a particular ritual. If the terma somehow becomes separated from the terton, the terma has a dreamlike way of getting back to the person to whom it belongs, who is the only one who can rightfully possess it. These sacred objects are not made of any material that has ever been found or known of before in our physical universe. The “stuff” that terma is made of is “not of this world.”

COLLECTIVE DREAMING

Termas are an expression of our collective dreaming, and as such, can be more fully entered into when we recognize that we are all interconnected, and are collaboratively dreaming a mass, shared dream into materialization. Involving the participation of more than a single, isolated individual, the discovery of terma is a field phenomenon, which is to say that in a true joint venture, all parts of the field interdependently collaborate in its revelation. The terma, the terton, and the fortunate community of people who will benefit from the revelation of the terma, as well as the awakened mind of which the terma is an emanation, all exist in an interconnected web, the recognition of which expands our idea of who we are. This reciprocally co-arising, interdependent, and self-sustaining web is a living symbol and revelation of the inherent wholeness embedded in the creativity of mutual dreaming – we are dreaming up the universe while at the same time being created by the universe. We are a co-operative venture.

The terma that is materializing itself is a function and expression of the field, as terma are condensations into and out of the field so as to keep the underlying, unified field in balance. The group consciousness of the individuals that comprise the field conjures up a collective karma, which determines the content and form of the terma, similar to how a symbol in a dream is a reflection, expression and compensation of the dreamer, only in this case there are multiple dreamers. This is evidenced in parts of Tibet and Nepal, where communities of people who have genuine belief and devotion towards a particular form of the divine, say the goddess Tara for example, will dream up and discover rock formations where clear images of Tara are materializing in the rock itself. A spontaneous manifestation and creation of nature, these are not forms that are cut into the rock, but forms that are emerging and arising out of the rock itself. These self-created images of Tara carry in-form-ation which symbolize, re-present, and activate the realization of an atemporal, higher-order of reality within ourselves. These rock-solid images are fully in-formed revelations of the power of group thought-forms imbued with intention, of the ability of collective dreaming to literally change the world. If this collective field is filled with compassion, virtue, spiritual merit, and lucidity, we then attract and are contributing to the birth and revelation of the terma, for these hidden treasures are the fruition of an evolving, awakening consciousness compassionately reflecting upon itself.

The revelation of a terma involves the auspicious co-incidence and unfoldment of a number of precisely linked events which have to line up in an unerring sequence. When the time is “right” for the terma’s revelation, events in the world magically configure and arrange themselves so as to participate in and support the birth and discovery of the terma. The revelation of a terma can be blocked by obstructing forces with seemingly negative intentions, however, which can serve to further illumine the archetypal nature of what we are dealing with. Obscuring forces are intimately co-related to and only become activated when there is something potentially illuminating about to happen. Sometimes termas will disappear like camphor if they can’t be discovered “in time,” dissolving back into the emptiness from which they arose.

Terma are archaeological artifacts of the awakened mind itself. There’s only terma if there’s a potential knower of terma. Unveiling the revelatory function inherent in the fabric of reality, terma doesn’t fundamentally exist separate from our own awakened consciousness. We begin to receive the beneficial effects from terma simply by considering and contemplating that terma exist, a perspective which instantaneously expands our consciousness. Realizing that the discovery of terma is not a fabricated fantasy of an overly-indulgent imagination, but is a real phenomenon, transforms our world into a place that is filled with magic beyond belief. The very existence of terma in our universe is like a mirror revealing the dreamlike nature of the universe. Terma, when reflected upon, are reflections of how we are always dreaming up our world. Termas themselves are composed of the stuff of which dreams are made.

COMPASSION

Termas are a manifestation of what in Buddhism is called “interdependent co-origination,” which means that no part of the universe has an independent existence “on its own,” separate from the rest of the universe; rather, everything is interconnected and depends for its existence upon everything else. Transcendent to linear causality, interdependent co-origination is an expression that all of the seemingly separate parts of the universe reciprocally co-arise as a singular, indivisible, radically interconnected whole. Termas are living symbols which express, embody, and reveal the interdependently co-originating universe that we live in. The phenomenon of terma themselves reflect back to us our own creative partnership with the genius of the universe.

Termas are ultimately relational in nature, as they are part of a living continuum that is meant to be expressed and passed on to others in a “transaction of transmission.” What the terton receives in his or her discovery of terma needs to be shared with others for the terma to fully unlock its nonlocal benefit and blessing. The terton sometimes needs to keep his or her revelation secret, however, before it is the “right” time to share it with others. The necessary secrecy protects the newly discovered terma from obstacles, dispels negative forces, and prepares the auspicious circumstances for the terma’s revelation to others. Matters such as these can’t be forced nor rushed. Timing is art.

Terma are manifestations of our reciprocal, interconnected dreaming, while at the same time stimulating its realization. The co-operative sharing and spreading of a terma ultimately reveals to us our interdependence – we are all co-creating and dreaming up our world together. The natural radiance of this realization is compassion. Termas themselves are a manifestation of the underlying compassion of the universe. In a self-generating feedback loop which gives birth to itself, compassion feeds the underlying matrix that in-forms and gives birth to terma, which invariably express and transmit compassion, ad infinitum. Another way of saying the same thing: Compassion is the culture which cultivates the treasures of the universe to offer themselves in service.

The essential and ultimate meaning of every terma is to continually cultivate the heart of compassion, as compassion is the voice and pure, high-octane, unleaded fuel of awakening. The natural expression of lucidity, compassion is simultaneously the cause and effect of seeing through the primal boundary of self and other and becoming lucid in our shared, waking dream. Like every terma invariably re-minds us, the best way to invest in our own awakening, as well as the awakening of the planet, is to generate compassion, which is the greatest treasure of all.

For information and teachings related to the terma tradition, please visit padmasambhava.org.

A long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Paul Levy is a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence. Paul is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is also an author, visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. Please visit his website at www.awakeninthedream.com. Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2010.

“Possession,” according to Jung is “a primordial psychic phenomenon” that “denotes a peculiar state of mind characterized by the fact that certain psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” Though the possessed might imagine they have free will, their freedom is an illusion. They are unwittingly being used as an instrument for some “other” energy or force to incarnate and express itself through them. Having complexes is not necessarily pathological, as everyone has them. What is pathological, however, is thinking we don’t have complexes, which is the precondition that makes us most vulnerable to possession. Jung clarifies, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” The more complexes we have, the more we are possessed. We don’t need to get rid of our complexes, rather, we need to become consciously aware of them. What is important is what we do with our complexes.

Complexes are the psychic agencies which flavor and determine our psychological view of the world. To quote Jung, “The via regia [royal road] to the unconscious, however, is not the dream…but the complex, which is the author of dreams and of symptoms.” Thematically organized (such as the power-complex, savior-complex, mother-complex, inferiority complex, etc.), the complexes are the vehicles that flesh out the rich repository of contents of the underlying archetypes, giving the formless archetypes a specifically human face. Complexes are the living elemental units of the psyche, acting like the focal or nodal points of psychic life, in which the energy charge of the various archetypes of the collective unconscious are concentrated. An emotionally-charged complex acts like the epicenter of a magnetic field, attracting and potentially assimilating into itself everything that has any resonance, relevance or is related to itself in any way. This inner process can be seen as it en-acts itself in the outer world when we come in contact with someone who has an activated complex and we find ourselves drafted into their process, picking up a role in their psyche. This is an outer reflection of how a complex can attract, co-opt and subsume other parts of the environment, both inner and outer, into itself. Complexes, when split-off from consciousness, can potentially engulf and possess the whole personality.

“Possession” is an interesting word. It conjures up immediate associations of the Devil, who, mythologically speaking, is the one who “possesses” us, in the demonic sense of the word. Jung, however, differentiates his meaning of the word “possession” from the meaning associated with the Catholic Church, for example, when he writes, “The Church’s idea of possession, therefore, is limited to extremely rare cases, whereas I would use it in a much wider sense as designating a frequently occurring psychic phenomenon.” Possession, psychologically speaking, is to identify with a complex of the unconscious, and become taken over by it such that we act it out in, as and through our lives. Who among us hasn’t done this? Who among us shall cast the first stone?

Synchronistically, as I write this article, multiple examples of people becoming possessed by and en-acting their unconscious on the world stage happened for everyone to see. Tennis star Serena Williams “losing it” when she fell into a rage at the U. S. Open, Republican congressman Joe Wilson’s unrestrained outburst, yelling “You lie,” during President Obama’s speech in front of congress, and rapper Kanye West melting down and rudely interrupting and ruining country singer Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards all illustrate exactly what I am pointing at. They were all “taken over by something.”

Jung writes, “since the world began, mankind has been possessed.” Possession is synonymous with bondage. Jung comments that in states of possession it comes down to “the same age-old experience: something objectively psychic and strange to us, not under our control, is fixedly opposed to the sovereignty of our will.” Possession means being supplanted by something stronger, being taken over and “owned” by something other than ourselves. Jung says, “Wherever we are still attached, we are still possessed; and when we are possessed, there is one stronger than us who possesses us.” We’ve all had moments where we’ve been possessed by something, where we’ve felt “not ourselves,” where we are no longer identical with ourselves. Some of us spend our whole lives living someone else’s life instead of our own. We’ve all had moments where “something” has gotten into us, where we feel out of sorts, beside ourselves. When deeper, primordial archetypes seize us, Jung writes “They easily catch hold of you and you are possessed as if they were lions or bears, say – primitive forces which are quite definitely stronger than you.”

At any moment any one of us can become “possessed” by the unconscious in a way such that a more powerful energy than our conscious ego moves and animates us. To quote Jung, “…it easily happens to any one of us that we do not act through our own volition. Then I cannot say I do, but it is done through me; something takes possession of me, the very action can take possession of me.” When we have fallen into our unconscious and compulsively en-act an unconscious complex, we become manipulated by more powerful forces than ourselves. In Jung’s words, a person then becomes “the devil’s marionette. This could happen only because he believed he had abolished the demons by declaring them to be superstition. He overlooked the fact that they were, at bottom, the products of certain factors in the human psyche.” In dismissing the demons as being mere illusions without realizing their psychological reality, we unwittingly become possessed by them. The demons are ultimately split-off, rejected, and disowned parts of the psyche that are experienced as alien and other than who we imagine ourselves to be (please see my article, “Meeting the Other Within”). The demons, psychologically speaking, are very real, in that they alter our experience of ourselves. Jung says, “As a rule there is a marked unconsciousness of any complexes, and this naturally guarantees them all the more freedom of action. In such cases their powers of assimilation become especially pronounced, since unconsciousness helps the complex to assimilate even the ego, the result being a momentary and unconscious alteration of personality known as identification with the complex. In the Middle Ages it went by another name; it was called possession.” We, as “modern” people, to the extent we are acting out our unconscious, are as much “plagued” by possession as people in the Middle Ages.

Jung comments, “…in all cases identification with the unconscious [complex] brings a weakening of consciousness, and herein lies the danger. You do not ‘make’ an identification, you do not ‘identify yourself,’ but you experience your identity with the archetype in an unconscious way and so are possessed by it.” Anything we are unconsciously identical with we are possessed by, and hence, compelled to act out in our life without understanding why. Though we have dismissed the idea of demons on the altar of our rationality, to quote Jung, “…man himself has taken over their role without knowing it and does the devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits did. In the olden days men were brutal, now they are dehumanized and possessed to a degree that even the blackest Middle Ages did not know.” More than ever, current-day humanity is certainly acting as if it’s a species possessed. Eminent theologian and 9/11 Truth Activist David Ray Griffin writes, “It does seem that we are possessed by some demonic power that is leading us, trancelike, into self-destruction.”

Jung comments, “…an unknown ‘something’ has taken possession of a smaller or greater portion of the psyche and asserts its hateful and harmful existence undeterred by all our insight, reason, and energy, thereby proclaiming the power of the unconscious over the conscious mind, the sovereign power of possession.” When we are possessed we are not free, we are not masters in our own house. When we are possessed by the unconscious, we become dissociated from ourselves such that, as Jung writes, there is “a tearing loose of part of one’s nature; it is the disappearance and emancipation of a complex, which thereupon becomes a tyrannical usurper of consciousness, oppressing the whole man. It throws him off course and drives him to actions whose blind one-sidedness inevitably leads to self-destruction.”

AUTONOMOUS COMPLEXES

“Autonomous complexes” are parts of the psyche which have split-off due to shock, trauma, or breach of our boundaries, and have developed a seemingly autonomous life and apparently independent will of their own. Though we are unconsciously identified with them, autonomous complexes are subjectively experienced as other than ourselves. Apart from their inherent obscurity and strangeness, our unconscious identification with autonomous complexes is the essential reason why it is so hard to get a handle on them. Autonomous complexes act upon us, they feel like our most intimate self, eventually need to be owned, but paradoxically, don’t belong to us. The seeming autonomy of the archetypes and complexes is what gives rise to the idea of supernatural beings. Endowed with a numinous energy, autonomous complexes are what our ancestors used to call “demons.” Autonomous complexes are a psychological name for the demons in the archetypal process of addiction that animate us to compulsively act out our addictive behavior. A demon or autonomous complex, to quote Jung, “behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. The complex can usually be suppressed, with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at the first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength.” Due to their lack of association with the conscious ego, autonomous complexes are typically not open to being influenced, educated, nor corrected by “reality.” An intruder from the unconscious and a disturber of the peace, an autonomous complex, Jung points out, “behaves exactly like a goblin that is always eluding our grasp.” If left un-reflected upon, these demons or autonomous complexes wreak havoc for everyone within their sphere of influence.

Jung writes, “…any autonomous complex not subject to the conscious will exerts a possessive effect on consciousness proportional to its strength and limits the latter’s freedom.” As it takes over and becomes in charge of a person, a complex incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche. Writing about autonomous complexes, Jung says “…the complex forms something like a shadow government of the ego,” in that the complex dictates to the ego. When we are taken over by and in internal conflict with and because of an autonomous complex, it is as if we, as natural rulers of our own psychic landscape, have been deposed, and are living in an occupied country. We are allowed our seeming freedom as long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the ruling power. Jung comments, “…a man does not notice it when he is governed by a demon; he puts all his skill and cunning at the service of his unconscious master, thereby heightening its power a thousandfold.” Being nonlocal, this inner, psychological situation can manifest both within our psyche and out in the world at the same time.

Demons or autonomous complexes have a possessive and obsessive effect on consciousness. Interestingly, the word “obsession” originally meant to be under the influence of an evil “possession.” Obsession refers to certain ideas that have taken possession of the person. We can become possessed by unshakable ideas of the way things should be or who we think we are, oppressing and tyrannizing both ourselves and others who hold a different viewpoint in the process. Jung writes, “The idea is like an autonomous being that wants a body so much that it even incarnates in the body; one begins to play, to perform the idea, and then people say one is completely mad. The idea has taken possession of one till it is as if one were out of one’s mind.” Millions of our species have killed and been killed over a fixed idea.

Commandeering and colonizing our psyche, a split-off, autonomous complex is, potentially, like a “vampiric virus,” in that it is fundamentally “dead” matter; it is only in a living being that it acquires a quasi-life. Just like a vampire re-vitalizes itself by sucking our life-force, when we unconsciously identify with an activated autonomous complex, we are literally animating and en-livening the undead. Complicit in our own victimization, we then unwittingly give away our freedom, power, and life-force in the process.

Like cancer cells ravaging the body, dis-associated, autonomous complexes are like “splinter psyches” that can become overly swollen with psychic energy, and then will propagate and metastasize themselves within the psyche, consuming, devouring, and cannibalizing the healthy aspects of the psyche. Drawing and attracting all of the wholesome parts of the psyche into itself, an autonomous complex can potentially warp and destroy the psyche of the person (or nation) so afflicted, nonlocally infecting and spreading by psychic contagion its malaise to the surrounding field in the process.

An autonomous complex can’t stand to be seen, however, in much the same way that a vampire detests the light. A demon or autonomous complex will shape-shift and do everything in its power to resist being illumined, for once it is seen, its autonomy and omnipotence are taken away. Anchored, connected and related to consciousness, the demon or autonomous complex can then no longer vaporize back into the unconscious, which is to say it is no longer able to possess us from behind and beneath our conscious awareness so as to compel us to unwittingly act it out and do its bidding (please see my article “Shedding Light on Evil”).

FINDING THE NAME

When we “see” a demon, we know its name, which helps us to get a “handle” on it. Naming is exorcistic, as it dis-spells the demon’s power over us. Jung says that “The act of naming is, like baptism, extremely important as regards the creation of personality, for a magical power has been attributed to the name since time immemorial. To know the secret name of a person [or a demon] is to have power over him.” Elsewhere, Jung writes, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” Finding the name is an act of power. Jung comments, “The moment you can designate the lived archetype by its symbol, you feel relieved, that is a good and positive moment even if it is horrible…Therefore old Egyptian medicine consisted in giving the thing the right name…A new name always produces an extraordinary effect; we cannot rationalize these things, they cast a spell, they are symbols, they really do influence the unconscious as the unconscious influences us.”

It is very important for us to re-introduce the words “demon” and “possession” back into our vocabulary, minus the fear that we will be seen as being primitive, crazy or even possessed ourselves if we use such words. We need to expand our psycho-spiritual fluency to enable us to navigate the living waters of our inner and outer landscapes. Being “possessed by demons” – taken over by unconscious, psychic forces – is something that happens to all of us, and it is to our great advantage to be able to properly name our experience. Finding the name empowers us to creatively engage with these parts of ourselves that are emerging from the shadows “in the name of healing.”

How do we make a word? We “spell” it. In finding the words for our experience, we are casting a “positive spell” whose nonlocal orbit and influence is liberating. We are then able to consciously language and give voice to our experience, which is to step into and access the creative spirit. In learning new, creative ways to express ourselves, we are dis-spelling the curse we were under of not being able to symbolize our experience. In learning to consciously spell-cast, the world is no longer written in stone, with us as its passive victims, as we realize and tap into the creative and transformative power of the Word, the Logos. As it says in the Bible, “And first was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God.” Creating a new language so as to re-create ourselves anew, we step into the archetypal figures of the “Wounded Healer” (read Part 1 and Part 2), and the “Creative Artist.” In animating these archetypal figures, we actively and creatively participate in our own evolutionary process, expanding and refining the ways we tel-empathically commune and telepathically communicate with each other, as well as with ourselves.

In addition, part of re-establishing the words “demon” and “possession” as meaning-filled is to complement these words with the idea that if we have a reaction and become “triggered” by these words, the figure within us who is being triggered might be the very demon who is possessing us (please see my article “Triggered by Evil”). I’ve coined the name “NonLocal Demon” (“NLD” for short) to “capture” this elusive, mercurial and nonlocal demon that “haunts” our world. Like minting a coin, when we coin a phrase and find the name, we create currency in the realm of mind with which to engage in commerce with each other, as well as with ourselves. This is to generate consciousness, which is something of genuine value. Once we see how the NLD clandestinely operates throughout the underlying field of consciousness by hiding and obfuscating itself through our unconscious, hooking and insinuating itself into our blind spots, we have simultaneously taken away its power and empowered ourselves, creating a wealth of new ways for us to creatively respond that were previously unavailable. Being nonlocal, one of the ways the NLD incarnates itself is through our internal, unconscious re-actions to encountering the myriad and ever shape-shifting forms and guises of the NLD in the outer world. The way to most effectively deal with a demon is to courageously turn our attention upon what it triggers inside of us. The Gnostic text “The Gospel of Philip” says,

So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved When it is revealed, it perishes…As for ourselves, let us each dig down after the root of evil which is within each of us, and produces its fruit in our hearts. It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive, to make us do what we do not want, and what we do want, we do not do. It is powerful because we have not recognized it. (II, 3, 83.5-30)

The source of the demons lies within ourselves. As compared to existing “by virtue” of something, demons can only live by the “lack of virtue” of our own obscured and unexamined minds. The above Gnostic quote brings to mind Paul’s famous passage from the New Testament, “That which I would do, I do not, and that which I would not do, I do.” (Romans 7:15 King James version), which is a clear and simple expression of our human proclivity for possession if there ever was one. An un-illumined and unrecognized autonomous complex diabolically compels us to act out contrary to our best intentions, as any of us who’ve struggled with any form of addictive behavior knows from our own experience. Being possessed by demons is a problem as old as humanity.

We are all potential shamans and healers, for as we metabolize the darkness and assimilate our own demons, we add light to and nonlocally “lighten-up” the collective shadow for everyone (please see my article, “We are all Shamans-in-Training”). If the demons are not integrated, neither is the human soul, which is to say that embracing and integrating our demons is critical to the evolution of the soul. Jung ponders, “How can evil be integrated? There is only one possibility: to assimilate it, that is to say, raise it to the level of consciousness.” Raising the demons to the level of consciousness takes away their autonomous existence, as they rejoin the profound unity of the psyche. Jung comments, “Then the opus magnum [the ‘great work’ of alchemy] is finished; the human soul is completely integrated.” (please see my article, “The Sacred Art of Alchemy”).

THE DAEMONIC

To quote noted psychologist Rollo May, the daemonic is “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person [or whole nation]…the daemonic can be either creative or destructive [i.e., demonic]…violence is the daemonic gone awry…ages [such as ours] tend to be times when the daemonic is expressed in its most destructive form.” The daemonic is not an objectively existing metaphysical entity in the Christian sense, but is an archetypal function of human experience, a psychic as well as an existential reality in which we all participate.

The daemonic is an archetypal energy which can take over a person, group or a nation. Jung writes, “We know that an archetype can break with shattering force into an individual human life and into the life of a nation.” Archetypes are living, dynamic entities, psychological instincts or informational fields of influence that provide the underlying template which patterns human behavior, perception and experience. The daemonic announces itself by drafting people into its service, enlisting human beings as instruments of its full-bodied revelation of itself. Jung comments, “One does not realize yet that when an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal.” The daemonic expresses itself by conscripting us to its cause and compelling us to unconsciously act it out so as to give living form to itself in the third dimension.

The word daemonic is related to “the devil,” which in turn is related to the word diabolic, whose inner meaning is to divide, separate, and dis-integrate. Being divisive, the diabolic splits us into multiple fragmented and compartmentalized pieces. Jung comments, “Possession by the unconscious means being torn apart into many people and things, a disiunctio. That is why, according to Origen [an early Christian theologian], the aim of the Christian is to become an inwardly united human being.” Becoming a true follower of Christ, who is symbolic of the wholly integrated Self, is to transform the diabolical nature of the disiunctio into a sacred coniunctio, where all the parts of the psyche are connected and the opposites unite. This is why the greatest protection against demons is to be in touch with our intrinsic wholeness, which is to be “self-possessed,” — in possession of the part of ourselves that is not possess-able, which is the Self, the wholeness of our being. The antonym of diabolic is the word symbolic, which, in addition to being the language of dreams, means to unite, bring together and integrate. The daemonic is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains both the symbolic and diabolic encoded within it in a superposed state, which is to say that hidden within the daemonic is the creative seeds of its own transformation. Both constructive and destructive forces are fully present in the daemonic simultaneously, and either energy can potentially manifest, depending upon how an observing consciousness interacts with it.

To quote Jung, “…the daemon of the inner voice is at once our greatest danger and an indispensable help.” Hidden in the daemonic is our inner voice, our guiding spirit, our angel, and our genius. Jung refers to the daemonic as the “not yet realized creative,” which is to say it is creativity not yet “made real” or actualized by the ego. Developing a healthy and strong ego is crucially important in entering into relationship with and creatively expressing the daemonic energies within us. One of the most destructive things in the human psyche is unrealized creativity.

If the daemonic is not honored and treated religiously (i.e., carefully considered with reverence and a sense of the sacred), however, it constellates negatively and turns truly “demonic,” in the destructive sense of the word. Jung comments, “Generally speaking the daemonic is that moment when an unconscious content of seemingly overwhelming power appears on the threshold of consciousness. It can cross this threshold and seize hold of the personality. Then it is possession.” Before an archetype can be consciously integrated, it will always manifest itself physically, because, in Jung’s words, “…it forces the subject into its own form.” In its negative form, which is a truly virulent form of madness, we, because of our unconsciousness, become a living conduit for the incarnation of an inhuman, malevolent, predatory, rapacious energy that only cares about feeding its own insatiable narcissism, ultimately victimizing, consuming, and cannibalizing both ourselves and others in the process. Describing this moment of being possessed, Jung elaborates, “The beast of prey seizes hold of him and soon makes him forget that he is a human being. His animal affects hamper any reflection that might stand in the way of his infantile wish-fulfillments, filling him instead with a feeling of a new-won right to existence and intoxicating him with the lust for booty and blood.” This in-toxic-ating energy, which is the narcissistic ego running wild as it entrances itself, is the fuel which animates any form of addiction. “Intoxication,” to quote Jung, is “that most direct and dangerous form of possession,” as unless it is reflected upon, and therefore illuminated and transformed by the light of consciousness, it inevitably leads to self-destruction.

Jung reminds us that “Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilated to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such conditions is denied.” We then fall into the infinite regression and self-perpetuating feedback loop of denying we are in denial, a self-created strain of madness that I have given the name “malignant egophrenia,” or “ME disease” for short. This is a form of self-deception, dissociation and psychic blindness in which we are ultimately lying to and hiding from ourselves. At a certain point this process entrenches itself within the psyche such that it develops sufficient momentum to seemingly become its own self-generating, autonomous entity. We’ve then become a “problem” to ourselves, creating our own Frankenstein monster in the process, and it is us. We can then be said to be the incarnation of ME disease in the flesh, its revelation in human form. Similar to being possessed by a demon, being taken over by ME disease is simultaneously its own self-revelation; encoded within the apparent pathology is its own medicine.

One of the main ways that demons become empowered within us is when we are unconscious of our shadow. Jung says, “Anyone who is unaware of his shadow is too wonderful, too good, he has a wrong idea of himself, and to that extent such a person is possessed.” The extent to which we are unconscious of our shadow is the extent to which we are unaware of our potential to unwittingly enact our unconscious in a way which could be hurtful. Jung writes, “If we don’t see the negative side of what we do, what we are, we are possessed…Only through understanding of unconscious aspects, as a rule, can we liberate ourselves from possession.” Understanding “unconscious aspects” is to shed light on darker, asleep parts of ourselves – “the negative side of what we do” — which is essentially the act of becoming conscious. The demons act themselves out through our psychic blind-spots. Jung comments, “…the demon that is always with you is the shadow following after you, and it is always where your eyes are not.”

The places where we are possessed by our unconscious are the places in ourselves where we are not able to see, where “our eyes are not,” where we are unable to self-reflectively speculate. Symbolically, this is like a vampire who casts no reflection in the mirror. Jung writes, “Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.” Interestingly, Jung simply refers to “shadow projection,” a process in which we project our own un-embraced aspects (our “own condition”) onto our neighbor, as “the lie.” One of the meanings of the word “devil” is “the liar.” (please see my articles “Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War,” and “Shadow Projection is its Own Medicine”). Projecting our shadow onto others is an activity which is itself an expression of the devil who is hiding within us, lurking behind the projection. Speaking about how easy it is for the “demons” to find a new victim, Jung comments, “…that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.”

Jung comments on the state of being possessed by an archetype such as the daemonic when he writes, “For an archetype has a life of its own; the life that is proper and peculiar to the archetype shows its autonomy by the fact that it can swallow one’s own life. It is so strong that one can be swallowed up into it and be nothing but that archetype. Of course, one does not know it.” The formless, invisible archetype has in-formed itself and made itself visible through the person, group or nation which it seizes. They can be said to be the living incarnation of the archetype, as they are its full-blown revelation in form.

An essential quality of being possessed by the unconscious is that we don’t know we’re possessed, for if we knew, we wouldn’t be possessed. To quote Jung, “When you are just at one with a thing you are completely identical – you cannot comprehend it, you cannot discriminate, you cannot recognize it.” When we are identical with something, we are not able to differentiate ourselves from it, which is to say, we have no freedom of choice relative to that with which we are unconsciously identified. When we identify with and act out the unconscious, we are truly unconscious.

Jung conjectures, “suppose I am identical with an archetype; I don’t know it and the archetype of course won’t tell me, because I am already possessed and inundated by the archetype…Just as I pay no attention to the hammer I use; I use it and afterwards I throw it away. It is not a personal hammer. That is the way the archetype uses man, simply as an instrument, as a tool of a most transitory kind.” Even though an archetype expresses itself through individuals, an archetype is impersonal. Archetypes enlist us for their purposes, taking possession of us like a piece of property, and drop us when we are no longer of use. Jung continues, “But the man is of course in an awful situation. He is possessed, and he cannot defend himself, for he doesn’t even know that he is possessed, and that is a wonderful opportunity for the unconscious.” Not knowing we are possessed by the unconscious, it is as if the parents aren’t home, creating an opportunity for the kids (the unconscious) to act out without restraint.

Jung says, “The forces that burst out of the collective psyche have a confusing and blinding effect.” The emergence of unconscious forces out of the collective unconscious typically evokes confusion and blindness, i.e., unconsciousness. Jung continues, “…as the influence of the collective unconscious increases, so the conscious mind loses its power of leadership. Imperceptibly it becomes the led, while an unconscious and impersonal process gradually takes control. Thus, without noticing it, the conscious personality is pushed about like a figure on a chess-board by an invisible player. It is this player who decides the game of fate, not the conscious mind and its plans.” It is as if an invisible coup has taken place within the psyche. Falling into self-deception, the conscious mind is under the illusion that it is deciding, that it is in control, while it is actually being led and manipulated like a puppet. To quote W. H. Auden, “We are lived by Powers we pretend to understand.”

Jung says, “The devil is the aping shadow of God.” When we are possessed by the unconscious, a more powerful, archetypal energy shape-shifts and takes on our seeming form, which we absorb into, identify with and believe to be who we are. Bamboozled and hoodwinked by the slick “salesmanship” of this imposter of ourselves, we “buy” into its version of who we are. We then live a simulation of ourselves, miming ourselves, becoming a master copy, a duplicate of our original selves. To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the daemon, it is as if a psychic parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite. It is as if our soul has become hijacked by a deeper, archetypal force, and has been replaced with a pale imitation of ourselves, and, to the extent we are taken over, we don’t even realize it. Archetypes, Jung points out, “have the most disagreeable quality of appearing in your own guise.” The spirit of the unconscious impersonates us, fooling even ourselves, as it cloaks itself in our form. This mercurial spirit has “put us on” as a disguise, appearing as ourselves, or at least who we imagine ourselves to be.

FORFEITING HUMANITY

Describing the experience of being led and taken over by the unconscious, Jung continues, “whenever a powerful content emerges from the unconscious, which we cannot yet grasp with our consciousness, there is a danger that the whole ego-consciousness will be pulled down into the unconscious and dissolved…Consciousness is completely emptied, because its contents are attracted by the unconscious as by a magnet. This process leads to a complete loss of the ego, so that the person in question becomes a mere automaton. Such a person is actually no longer there.” How many people do we know, including at times even ourselves, who zombie-like, compulsively and mechanically enact their habitual patterns with no spontaneity or creativity, like a programmed robot?

Jung says, “One can only alter one’s attitude and thus save oneself from naively falling into an archetype and being forced to act a part at the expense of one’s humanity. Possession by an archetype turns a man into a flat collective figure, a mask behind which he can no longer develop as a human being, but becomes increasingly stunted.” When we are possessed by an archetype, it’s as if we are frozen back in time, akin to what happens in trauma, where we become fixated in a rigidified and self-reinforcing point of view. Unconsciously identified with the “persona,” the façade personality that we’ve created for protection and present to the world, we have no real depth, and stop growing and evolving. “Altering” our attitude would be to step out of our “alter-personality,” which is to stop compulsively and ritualistically worshipping at the “altar” of the false self, and step into our authentic self.

Jung elaborates on the process of falling under the spell of an activated archetype when he writes, “…an archetype is mobilized within him which affects him like a narcotic. That is typical; when you get into a situation where an archetype becomes constellated, you will undergo this peculiar hypnotic effect; you fall asleep rather suddenly. It has a peculiar fascination which makes you unconscious.” The image of Dorothy and friends falling asleep in the poppy field as they approach the Emerald City in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” symbolically expresses this arche-typical situation of falling under a spell as we approach the sacred.

Jung points out that “The potentialities of the archetype, for good and evil alike, transcend our human capacities many times, and a man can appropriate its power only by identifying with the daemon, by letting himself be possessed by it, thus forfeiting his own humanity.” In unconsciously identifying with and becoming possessed by the daemon, on the personal, human level we forfeit our humanity and become an empty shell. At the same time, however, we access, become channels for and are inflated by a more powerful, archetypal, and nonhuman energy to come through us. When we are possessed by an archetype, we are a paradoxical juxtaposition of subhuman and superhuman qualities at the same time.

Jung continues, “…anyone possessed by an archetype cannot help having all the symptoms of an inflation. For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human. The archetype itself is an exaggeration and it reaches beyond the confines of humanity…So anybody possessed by an archetype develops inhuman qualities.” When we become taken over by an archetype we become inflated, unconsciously identifying with God-like powers while simultaneously forgetting our humanity. Jung clarifies, “…we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike.” Interestingly, one of the meanings of the word “evil,” etymologically speaking, is to transgress boundaries.

Continuing his description of the state of being possessed by an archetype, Jung says “…when a person has an unconscious content – say a certain archetype is constellated – then his conscious, not realizing what the matter is, will be filled with the emanation or radiation of that activated archetype. And then he behaves unconsciously as if he were that archetype, but he expresses the identity in terms of his ego personality…For he unconsciously plays a role and tries to represent something which he has taken to be his own self.” Behaving as if he, as an ego, were that archetype, he plays a mythical, archetypal role and unconsciously identifies with it (“which he has taken to be his own self”), fooling himself, and potentially others, in the process. Jung continues, “You see, the unconscious activated archetype is like a rising sun, a source of energy or warmth which warms up the ego personality from within, and then the ego personality begins to radiate as if it were God-knows-what.” The formless archetype takes on and expresses itself through the limited and particular form of the ego personality. The activated archetype transfigures the ego from within so as to suit its purposes. Jung continues, “It is a psychological fact that an archetype can seize hold of the ego and even compel it to act as it – the archetype – wills. A man can then take on archetypal dimensions and exercise corresponding effects.”

INFLUENCING THE FIELD

Conflated with and inflated by the hypnotically fascinating psychic force-field of the archetype, people so possessed become mouthpieces and amplifiers for the archetype to transmit and nonlocally extend and incarnate itself throughout the field of consciousness. Jung writes, “people who constellate an archetype have such a hypnotic effect.” People who are gripped by an archetype have a gripping effect on others; when we are under the fascination of an archetype, we unwittingly have a fascinating influence on others. Jung makes the point that “identification with an archetypal figure lend almost superhuman force to the ordinary man.” People who are possessed by their unconscious have a very magnetic, charismatic and “possessive” effect upon others’ unconscious. The part of them that is bewitched evokes the corresponding suggestible and bedeviled part of others’ psyche and hooks it, spell-binding it and entraining it into its archetypal spin. In other words, when someone is possessed by an archetype, they are literally the channel through which that archetype, both locally and nonlocally, is materializing in the field, which is to say they wield great energetic influence on their surroundings. Jung says, “But the power of the archetype is not controlled by us; we ourselves are at its mercy to an unsuspected degree…because everyone is in some degree ‘possessed’ by his specifically human preformation, he is held fast and fascinated by it and exercises the same influence on others without being conscious of what he is doing. The danger is just this unconscious identification with the archetype.” To the extent we are identified with and hence possessed by the archetype, is the extent to which we are not conscious of the corresponding influence we have on others’ unconscious. This is a dangerous situation because it is unconsciously being en-acted in such a way that guarantees that we will abuse our unresolved power issues to the extent that we stay unconscious.

Jung gets right to the point when he writes, “When someone is able to perform the art of touching on the archetypal, he can play on the souls of people like on the strings of a piano.” Connecting with the archetypal is like plucking a higher-dimensional chord of our being, which immediately activates a resonance in the collective unconscious in whoever hears it. Just like the pendulum with the strongest swing entrains all the other pendulums into its swing, the person who is channeling the living power of the deeper, archetypal force can potentially en-train and en-trance others. This power can be used for the highest good – helping people to awaken – or it can be used for the deepest evil so as to manipulate, dis-empower and enslave other people. Being archetypal, this energy is fundamentally neither good nor bad, but can potentially manifest either way depending upon our intent.

Speaking of the hypnotic power of the archetype, Jung writes, “It gets you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped. It is a power that fascinates people from within, it is the collective unconscious which is activated, it is an archetype which is common to them all that has come to life.” When an archetype is constellated, rational logic and facts have no effect. The deep emotion which is characteristic of an activated archetype ensures that, to quote Jung, “…the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.” Being unconsciously identified with an archetype is extremely dangerous, in that it is at the root of both individual and collective psychoses. Our tendency to unknowingly fall into the grip of an archetype is animating what is being acted out in the world theater, which is to say that the origin of world events is the unconscious of humanity (please see my article “It’s All in the Psyche”).

Jung writes “Nobody can realize an archetype without having been identified with it first.” Speaking of our initial tendency to identify with and become hooked by activated archetypes, Jung continues, “…you cannot realize them without having been thoroughly caught by them.” No one can realize their daemon without first having been unconsciously identified with it, which is to say, caught by it, and hence, possessed by it. In the process of integration, we have to learn to experience our archetypal daemon from the outside as well as from the inside. Experiencing the archetype from the outside means to experience it objectively, as other than ourselves, which is to separate ourselves from it, for an archetype, in Jung’s words, “…can be truly understood only if experienced as an autonomous entity.” Ultimately, we have to eventually both see the archetype as an object outside of ourselves as well as experience what it’s like relative to us, which is an experience within ourselves.

Maybe there’s a hidden reason in the deeper plan of things why we, as a species, have a tendency to be taken over by our unconscious. Jung points out that “…autonomous complexes are among the normal phenomena of life and that they make up the structure of the unconscious psyche.” Having autonomous complexes, or having a spare demon or two in our closet, is a “normal” human phenomenon, something we all possess at the same time that it possesses us. Identifying with our unconscious such that we act it out, i.e., being possessed, seems to be a natural expression of the human experience. Might there be a hidden evolutionary potential, an underlying teleology, a mysterious purpose or goal, which is possessing us to act as we do?

Perhaps we are being dreamed up to be the very instruments and midwives through which the archetypes transform themselves, the world, and ourselves as well. Becoming possessed by the unconscious is, paradoxically, the way we learn how not to be possessed, which we clearly haven’t learned yet, or we wouldn’t be possessed. By differentiating ourselves from the archetype, we make it conscious, while creating ourselves relative to it. In relating to the archetype consciously, we do not fall under the thrall of the archetype, but are able to mediate, humanize and channel its transpersonal energies and contents in a constructive, creative and life-enhancing way. As we connect with each other through our lucidity, we can potentially become a vehicle through which the archetypes themselves transform and evolve, which instantaneously, and nonlocally, has a transformative and evolutionary effect throughout the entire collective field of consciousness.

Mythologically speaking, the figure of the “would-be-hero,” which is all of us in potential, is always inhabited by a daemon. Having a daemon taking up residence inside of us is the very thing that “makes” us a hero. Our heroic fight against the paralyzing grip of the daemon is initiatory, in that it calls forth our latent, creative powers. In coming to terms and wrestling with our daemon, which is to say ourselves, we create ourselves. The daemon is the source of all creativity. It takes genuine courage to do battle with these internal forces and wrest from them the mythic “treasure hard to attain,” which is none other than our soul-filled selves. Jung comments, “As the result of the political situation and the frightful, not to say diabolic, triumphs of science, we are shaken by secret shudders and dark forebodings; but we know no way out, and very few persons indeed draw the conclusion that this time the issue is the long-since-forgotten soul of man.”

When we realize an archetype such as the daemonic, we are able, from the inside out, to channel its transpersonal power into a creative, soul-full, life-giving spirit that comes from a source beyond our ego. Encoded in the daemonic is everything we need for our healing and self-realization, as if the daemonic is a compensation of the deeper unified and unifying field of consciousness, offering us exactly what is required for us to wake up. The demons are like psychic nautilus machines that we are dreaming up to help us develop our muscles of realization. Alchemically transmuting on the spot the potential destructiveness of the demonic into stimulators of our own creative lucidity, we give birth to our daemon, our guiding spirit. Or rather, in that moment our daemon gives birth to us.

Realizing an archetype such as the daemonic is to realize ourselves as an active, participatory agent in the creation of our experience of ourselves relative to the world. This realization comes with great responsibility. We are offered a choice: either we continue to destroy ourselves, or we learn together how to create a new world. Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us as we act our unconscious out in the world. The emergence of the daemonic in our world is both potentially and actually the doorway into and revelation of the light. Being a function of our consciousness, how the daemonic materializes – as the deepest, destructive evil, or as creative genius, depends upon nothing other than how we dream it. Jung comments, “The archetype is spirit or anti-spirit: what it ultimately proves to be depends on the attitude of the human mind.”

When we become possessed by the unconscious, we become unconsciously taken over by our primal, animal-like instincts in such a way that we regress, devolve and fall into our lower nature. Jung elaborates, “Only the animal man can be possessed…It is easier to talk or to argue with a dog or a cow than with someone possessed by such a figure. For nothing that one says permeates, it is impossible to pierce the wall they put up, it is a wall of unconscious beliefs, and people behind the wall cannot be reached. They are totally inaccessible. There is no access because the human being is degraded to the state of an animal, and the thing that seems to function is not a divine being, it is a ghost.” I imagine we all know people like this, people who are under a spell such that there is really no talking with them, as they perversely take in and interpret whatever reflection is being offered of their unconsciousness as evidence of the rightness of their deluded point of view. Psychologically speaking, they are possessed, as if an “entity” has taken them over, they are no longer there, and they have no idea, literally, of their situation. When a group of people in this condition enter into agreement about the “truth,” and become card-carrying members of a dogmatic “ism,” a collective psychosis is being brewed in the cauldron of the collective unconscious.

COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

Jung never tired of warning that the greatest danger that faces humanity is to unwittingly fall into our unconscious en masse such that we become instruments for a psychic epidemic to wreak havoc in the world, just like we see today (please see my article, “Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic”). Jung writes that psychic epidemics “…are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger.” We are in the midst of a collective psychosis that has become so normalized that very few people are even talking about it, which is itself an expression of our collective madness. (please see my article, “Why Don’t We See our Collective Madness”?) Jung writes, “…collective psychoses are based on a constellated archetype, though of course this fact is not taken into account at all. In this respect our attitude is still characterized by a prodigious unconsciousness.”

Once these archetypal contents become activated in the unconscious, Jung elaborates, it is like “they have taken possession of certain individuals, irresistibly draw them together by mutual attraction and knit them into smaller or larger groups which may easily swell into an avalanche.” People who have fallen into their unconscious naturally attract and connect with each other, as they reciprocally reinforce each others’ madness. An impenetrable bubble of shared, rigid beliefs gets conjured up around them which deflects and resists any self-reflection which threatens their fixed worldview. Anyone who reflects back their unconscious state is demonized and seen as a heretic, blasphemer and enemy.

Though using individuals as its instruments, evil needs the unconscious masses for its genesis and proliferation on the world stage. Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics. In a collective psychosis there is a herd mentality, where people stop thinking for themselves and let others think for them, like sheep (“sheeple”) who just follow wherever they are being led. Jung writes that whoever buys into the collectively agreed upon group-think “is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State.” When we give away our power, there is always someone bearing the authority of the State who is more than happy to accept our offering, feeding the insatiable will-to-power of the shadow. Jung comments, “The shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into wolves.” Being archetypal, the reciprocal process of people giving away their power to others who abuse it simply because they can has continually re-created itself all throughout history.

Jung warns us that “The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.” In a collective psychosis, the many are manipulated by the few who are attracted to holding power over others. Jung points out that, “Whoever prefers power, is therefore, in the Christian view, possessed by the devil. The psychologist can only agree.” In a psychic epidemic, the masses, led and inspired by the few who are perversely possessed by and addicted to the need for power, collectively collude with, support and mutually rein-force each others’ irrational beliefs, narcissistic needs, and fears, creating a culture crazy beyond belief. This culture, or lack thereof, is simultaneously the cause and effect of their madness, as they collectively incarnate a living, self-fulfilling prophecy. They become the instruments through which the NLD, the nonlocal demon, reproduces itself, like a multi-headed hydra, in, as, and through the field.

BLESSINGS IN DRAG

Jung writes, “This state of possession shows itself almost without exception in the fact that the possessed identify themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious, and because they do not realize that the role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents still to be understood, they exemplify these concretely in their own lives, thus becoming prophets and reformers [in the negative sense, such as falling into a megalomaniacal inflation]” People who have been swallowed up by the archetype and fallen into the unconscious, instead of shedding light on and integrating the meaning of the activated unconscious contents within themselves, are unwittingly acting out the mythic, symbolic dimension of “the role which is being thrust upon them” in concretized, literal form on the stage of life. The new contents are understood when we realize that the role which is coming through us has its origin in the collective unconscious itself, as if we are playing a role in a cosmic drama. In addition to bestowing upon us a choice of how we want to play this role, this realization snaps us out of personally identifying with the role as well. The part of us that has been unconsciously possessed becomes liberated, creating more consciousness in the process.

When we become taken over by the unconscious, to quote Jung, “…the unconscious in large measure ousts and supplants the function of the conscious mind. The unconscious usurps the reality function and substitutes its own reality. Unconscious thoughts…manifest themselves in senseless, unshakable judgments upheld in the face of reality.” When we find ourselves ignoring factual evidence and holding a “magical” belief that we rationally know not to be true, we are under a spell, being “driven” by the unconscious, which is at that point in the driver’s seat. The psychic factors which make possession possible are suggestibility, lack of critical discernment, unwillingness or inability to self-reflect, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice. The contents that take us over when we are possessed by the unconscious appear as phobias, exaggerated affects, peculiar convictions, idiosyncrasies, stubborn plans, compulsions and obsessions, all of which are not open for discussion or correction.

Demons work through our psyche, “managing our perceptions” in a way such that we aren’t able to see their influence. Demons bedazzle, bewitch, and bedevil consciousness in such a way that we become blind to our own underlying, assumed viewpoint. We fall under their spell when we become entranced by our own version of reality in such a way so as to think the world “objectively” exists as we perceive it, separate from our own mind. In other words, we fall under the power of the demons when we become fixated in our non-negotiable viewpoint and imagine that what we are seeing objectively exists, in solid form, outside of ourselves, in a way that applies to everyone. We then draw to ourselves all the evidence we need to prove to ourselves the seeming truth of our self-evident viewpoint, confirming our delusion that we are separate from and not participating in helping to create the very situation we find ourselves in, which we are ultimately creating. I call this “Aparticipatory Delusional Syndrome,” or ADS for short (please see my article “Delusions of Separation”).

On the other hand, we break the spell of the demons when we realize that every moment of our experience is inseparable from our own consciousness, which is to recognize the fluid, non-objective and thus, “dreamlike nature” of reality. Just like figures in a dream, the demons are, ultimately speaking, our own energy, not separate from our own mind (please see my article “God the Imagination”). Just like a dream, the way we observe the world literally evokes the very world we are observing. This means that it is through our awareness itself that we can intervene in the underlying matrix of creation and find the leverage point where we can change the waking dream we are having, which is “evolution-in-action.” Interestingly, we wouldn’t have woken up and had this realization without the antagonistic co-operation of the demons, which is to say the demons are secretly allies in disguise, catalysts of consciousness appearing as adversaries, blessings in drag (please see my article “The Light of Darkness”).

NOT THE ONLY ONE

Jung writes, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” To the extent that we are not consciously working on integrating, via the process of individuation, the unconscious contents and conflicts that are activated within us, is the extent to which these psychic contents will manifest externally and be unconsciously acted out collectively in a literal, concrete way on the world stage. Jung comments, “One shouldn’t evade this conflict by escaping into a premature and anticipated state of redemption, otherwise one provokes it in the outside world. And that is of the devil.” An activated psychic content not realized consciously in the course of individuation manifests externally, where it gets “dreamed up” in, as, and through the outer world. To use Jung’s metaphor, the sponsor of this project(ion) is “the devil.”

Jung says, “The world powers that rule over all mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors…We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.” This brings to mind various quotes in the Bible about “powers and principalities” that rule over humanity, which is the metaphysically equivalent expression of our psychological situation. The Gospel of Luke, for example, has the devil say that the kingdoms of the world are under his control (4:5-6). The Gospel of John speaks of the devil as “the ruler of the world.” (14:30, 16:11). The First Letter of John says that “the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.” (5:19). Paul speaks of Satan as “the god of this world.” (Gal. 1:4; Cor. 4:4). Whether we call it a demon or an unconscious psychic factor, the force that rules over us is created by and an expression of our own psyche.

Reflecting upon the first World War, Jung says, “When fate, for four whole years, played out a war of monumental frightfulness on the stage of Europe – a war that nobody wanted – nobody dreamed of asking exactly who or what had caused the war and its continuation.” Similarly, in today’s “war on terror,” a war that nobody, or at least very few people want, we need to dream of asking exactly who or what has caused this war and its continuation. Jung continues, “Nobody realized that European man was possessed by something that robbed him of all free will. And this state of unconscious possession will continue undeterred until we Europeans become scared of our ‘god-almightiness’ [inflation]. Such a change can begin only with individuals, for the masses are blind brutes, as we know to our cost.” The real carrier of life is the individual. Real transformation doesn’t come through mass movements, or new legislation, but via change within the individual.

Speaking about the effects of being identified with, possessed and inflated by the unconscious, Jung writes, “Everything that exceeds a certain human size evokes equally inhuman powers in man’s unconscious. Totalitarian demons are called forth.” As a result of becoming overly one-sided in a multi-sided universe, “totalitarian demons” are “dreamed up” both within the unconscious, and, synchronistically, out in the world. Events in the outer world are symbolic reflections of what we are dreaming inside of ourselves (please see my article “Catching the Bug of Synchronicity”). What this means is that the most effective way to change the world is to change ourselves.

Jung writes, “…the historic events of our time have painted a picture of man’s psychic reality in indelible colors of blood and fire, and given him an object lesson which he will never be able to forget if – and this is the great question – he has today acquired enough consciousness to keep up with the furious pace of the devil within him.” Will we, each one of us, be able to mediate, channel and transform the archetypal, daemonic energy which is flowing through us into creativity such that we can constructively build a new world? This is the question upon whose answer rests the future survival or destruction of the world as we know it.

Jung says, “mankind, because of its scientific and technological development, has in increasing measure delivered itself over to the danger of possession…Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness…When shall we…in all seriousness seek ways and means to exorcize him, to rescue him from possession and unconsciousness, and make this the most vital task of civilization?” When shall we make “the most vital task of civilization” the exorcism of the demons that are possessing us? In other words, when shall we make our most vital task “waking up?”

Jung saw this present-day manifestation of the daemonic as an archetypal expression of the potentially catastrophic upheavals that accompany the great transitions from one age to the next. When an archetype like the daemonic appears, both within ourselves and out in the world, things become critical, with possibilities for both good and evil alike. How things actually turn out depends upon how consciousness responds to the situation. During a collective manifestation of the daemonic, such as we have today, the great danger is a mass movement where millions, or even billions of people fall into their unconscious together, igniting a psychic epidemic which spawns an apocalyptic war that ravages life on earth and destroys the biosphere of the planet (see my article “Archetypal Dimensions of World Events”). To quote Jung, “The unconscious works sometimes with most amazing cunning, arranging certain fatal situations, fatal experiences, which make people wake up.” Catastrophe can only be avoided if enough people wake up to what is being revealed to us as we act out the unconscious, and then connect with each other so as to de-activate, assimilate, and transform the potentially deleterious effects of the activated daemon. We can then, under the guidance of the Self, our intrinsic wholeness, help each other to usher in a new era of sustainable peace, understanding and mutual co-operation. Our very continued existence as a species on this beautiful planet depends upon this realization.

To be pessimistic and think that we can’t change the trajectory of our species’ suicidal, trance-like behavior is to be under a spell, to have fallen under a “demon’s curse.” Having fallen under such a spell, we only strengthen and solidify our spell-bound convict-ion by acting as if there are no other possible outcomes. Pessimism is food for the demons (please see my article “Our Situation is Dire, and There’s no Need for Pessimism”). It is crazy to not invest our creative energy into envisioning that we can “come together,” and just as crazy to imagine that we can’t. If we aren’t investing our creative imagination in ways for us to heal and wake up, then what are we thinking? Just like in a dream at night, when enough of us become lucid in the waking dream of life, we can connect with each other and put our lucidity together, changing the world in positive ways in the process (please see my article “Lucid Dreaming”).

If people tell me I am a “dreamer” when I profess these idealistic and seemingly naïve beliefs, I will simply say, to quote the late John Lennon, “I am not the only one.” There are ever-expanding numbers of us – millions? billions? — around the planet who in various ways are being drafted by the Self to be channels for a deeper process of awakening, enabling a vast range of entirely new and previously unimagined possibilities to become available to us. The universe is dreaming itself awake through us. When enough of us simply recognize the deeper, archetypal pattern that is happening, i.e., that the universe is waking itself up through us, we can “come together,” I “imagine,” and help each other to deepen and stabilize our mutually shared awakening, what I call “dreaming ourselves awake.” As wounded healers, shamans, dreamers, and artists whose canvas is life itself, we can collaboratively create an “Art-Happening Called Global Awakening.”

The real demon is our own ego-clinging. To the extent we are under the seeming influence of a demon is the extent to which we are clinging and grasping, trying to hold onto our concept of ourselves as a discrete and separate self, when in actuality there is nothing (no “thing”) to hold onto. To the extent we are clinging or grasping, we have fallen into the self-reinforcing, habitual pattern of contracting against ourselves, and in so doing we are blocking our own light. We can, in this very moment, step out of our own way and let our light shine.

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is also a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis,which is available on his website www.awakeninthedream.com. (See the first chapter, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis). Please feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections. © Copyright 2010