Click below to play the interview:
Tag Archives: synchronicity
THE WORLD IS PSYCHE
One of Jung’s greatest discoveries is what he called “the reality of the psyche,” by which he means that the psyche exists in its own right, in its own open-ended sphere of seemingly unlimited influence. The discovery of the living reality of the psyche was a precious gift that the new field of psychology had to offer to the world, and yet, it has mostly gone unappreciated and unrecognized. The discovery of the ‘reality’ of the psyche, what Jung calls the “most important achievement of modern psychology,” is something that most people still don’t even know about. Modern, behaviorist psychology, in Jung’s words, “reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and thus we achieve a psychology without the psyche.” A subject worthy of our most devoted contemplation and veneration, the psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. “I am of the opinion,” writes Jung, “that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.” The psyche is the underlying matrix, the infinite emptiness that is over-flowingly full, the maternal womb out of which world events are born… Read more »
… Continue Reading
AN EYE-OPENING SYNCHRONICITY
When I was first introduced to the world of psychiatry in May of 1981 at 24 years of age, I experienced a particularly unique synchronistic event that rocked my world and changed my life forever. I burst onto the scene of psychiatry in a dramatic way, as a life-transforming event happened within the very first minute of my being admitted to my very first psychiatric hospital.Read more »
… Continue Reading
EVOLUTION IS HOW WE DREAM IT
What would we do, I find myself imagining, as we awaken to the fact that we are having a mass, shared dream? I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly want to connect with fellow dream characters who are also becoming lucid in the dream of life. We could then conspire to co-inspire each other, I imagine, to greater heights of lucidity. The Evolver Social Movement/Reality Sandwich is like a switchboard of the “turned on” global brain, one that not only connects different parts of ourselves with each other, but further activates the very awakening of which it itself is a living expression.… Read more
THE ARTIST AS HEALER OF THE WORLD
In my last two articles The Wounded Healer, Part 1 and Part 2, I point out the importance of consciously stepping into the archetypal figure of the “wounded healer” for the healing of our planetary situation. The wounded healer receives the gifts encoded in their ordeal when they are able to alchemically transform the seemingly obscuring energies of their wound into fuel for their fire of realization. Wounded healers access their gifts when they realize that their wound is itself the source of divine creativity, as well as the portal through which the highest, most individualized form of this creativity can manifest.… Read more
THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 2
In my last article, The Wounded Healer, Part I, I contemplated how the wounded healer is one of the major underlying, archetypal processes giving shape to and in-forming events in our world today, both individually and collectively. I point out how our wounding is a numinous event that can potentially introduce and initiate us into a deeper level of our being. Any one of us accessing the healing power hidden in our wound could be, in Jung’s words, “the makeweight that tips the scales,” precipitating an evolutionary quantum leap in human consciousness, which literally can change everything.… Read more
THE WOUNDED HEALER, PART 1
One of the deeper, underlying archetypal patterns which is being constellated in the human psyche that is playing itself out collectively on the world stage is the archetype of the “wounded healer.” To quote Kerenyi, a colleague of Jung who elucidated this archetype, the wounded healer refers psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepius, the sunlike healer.” The archetype of the wounded healer reveals to us that it is only by being willing to face, consciously experience and go through our wound do we receive its blessing.… Read more
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH: A REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.… Read more
UNLIVED LIVES
A little while ago, someone forwarded me an interesting email response to an article I had written about the collective madness which has befallen our species (The article, called The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis, is the first chapter in my book of the same name). The response was from well-known author Alice Miller, author of the classic book The Drama of the Gifted Child. I was most happy that such an esteemed psychiatrist would take the time to read my work.… Read more
THE SACRED ART Of ALCHEMY
Much to his astonishment, C. G. Jung discovered that the ancient art of alchemy was describing, in symbolic language, the journey that all of us must take towards embodying our own intrinsic wholeness, what he called the process of “individuation.” As Jung wrote, “I had very soon seen that analytical psychology [the psychology Jung developed] coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists, were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery.… Read more
ISRAEL IS OUTGASSING ITS UNHEALED TRAUMA
As a human being of Jewish heritage, I feel deeply ashamed by what Israel is acting out in Gaza. I feel so shocked by the horror of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians that it has literally taken me a few weeks to sufficiently integrate the trauma which has gotten triggered within me so that I could begin to find words. I feel as if I am sitting in the audience watching a family member who I love perform on stage, and because of my intimate connection and identification with my beloved family member, I am completely mortified by what I see them unconsciously acting out in the world theater.… Read more
CATCHING THE BUG OF SYNCHRONICITY
Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.… Read more
WE ARE COMPASSIONATE, WHY ARE YOU KILLING US?
When I first started studying Buddhism over twenty-five years ago, I deeply connected with a number of Buddhist monks from Burma. They were of the “Therevadan” tradition, which is the “way of the elders,” the most ancient Buddhist lineage. They were “forest monks” who lived in the forest and followed as completely as possible the way of the Buddha. They only ate one meal each day by noon and they only ate what was offered to them. The only possessions they owned were a robe and a begging bowl.… Read more
BREAKING THE VOW OF SILENCE
Certain events play out in our individual lives that reflect back to us situations that are happening in the collective life of our nation or world. One such event happened many years ago in the very synagogue in which I was Bar-Mitzvahed. In what today seems like a dream, I was with my parents on the holiest night of the entire Jewish year, “Kol Nidre”, the night before “Yom Kippur”, the day of atonement. I probably hadn’t been to a synagogue since my Bar-Mitzvah, which was years before.… Read more
DENIAL: THE 51ST STATE
What the underlying military-industrial-financial crime syndicate that controls our government is doing, both domestically and internationally, is so horrifying (please see my article Homeland Insecurity) that it is literally traumatizing to consciously bear witness to it, to experience it. When we become traumatized, we become stuck, literally “frozen in time,” as our ability to creatively respond and mobilize ourselves in the present moment into effective action in the world becomes in-operative. When we become overwhelmed by trauma, we are not able to creatively express our internal experience in a way that dis-charges what has been triggered in us.… Read more
HOMELAND INSECURITY
If terrorists themselves had infiltrated our government and taken control of our country, they could not have done worse damage to our once great nation than George Bush and his regime have accomplished. Bush is just the latest incarnation – in amplified form – of self-serving, darker forces that have progressively insinuated themselves into our government over many administrations. Like his predecessors, Bush is a finger-puppet of the underlying financial-military-industrial crime syndicate that has animated and controlled our government for many years.… Read more
THE WAR ON CONSCIOUSNESS
We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself.… Read more
BUSH: PLANETARY PIRATE
We live in a world where the deeper, underlying mythic patterns that have endlessly reiterated themselves throughout human history are incarnating and revealing themselves through world events for all who have eyes to see. As if in a timeless fairy tale, our species has gotten drafted into playing out roles in a vast, multi-dimensional process which is revealing itself as it acts itself out through us. Seeing the mythical, archetypal roles that are being unconsciously enacted in the world theater initiates a process of deep transformation, both within ourselves and the world at large.… Read more
MOLLY IVINS’ GIFT TO US
Molly Ivins was one of my heroes. She spoke the voice of truth to power, channeled through an open heart of love. She wasn’t serving special interests, rather, she was coming from an interest in serving the whole of humanity. I find myself wondering, how will her departure affect all the rest of us?… Read more
THE BIOSPHERIC DREAMBODY
Dr. Arny Mindell, a physicist and Jungian analyst, has taken Jung’s work on the synchronistic correlation between psyche and matter to the next level of articulation with his notion of the “dreambody.” The dreambody is more than the physical body, yet includes it as a medium of communication. The dreambody is like a dream from a higher dimension of our being expressing itself in our world through multiple levels simultaneously. The dreambody is multi-channeled; it can express itself in dreams, thoughts, feelings, body sensations, movements, a variety of symptoms, addictions, relationship problems, altered states of consciousness, as well as synchronistically, through events in the outer world.… Read more