part0033

9 The Buddha himself prophesied 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 actualized figure who, by the power of his realization, “conquered” the country of Tibet, turning its inhabitants into practitioners of the holy Dharma. Transforming the negative, demonic energies into protectors of the Dharma, he founded Tibetan Buddhism. Known as the tan-tric Buddha, he is the self-originated display and incarnation of the nonlocal mind of enlightenment itself. The embodiment 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 as to transcend time and be able to creatively conspire with us, in the present moment, in our own awakening. To learn more about Padmasambhava, go to padmasambhava.org .

10 This is the mantra of Avalokiteshvara, known in Tibetan as Chenrezig, who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion and is an energetic aspect of Padmasambhava, inseparable from him.

2 Some critics of my work assert that I am creating a false dichotomy of separation by setting up an “us versus them” polarity via my notion of wetiko: i.e., “they” have wetiko and “we” don’t. I feel that this is an important point that deserves further clarification. In discussing wetiko, I continually point out that it is a “field phenomenon,” not something that some people have and others don’t . In other words, everyone “has” wetiko, to varying degrees. This is why the Buddha said, “All sentient beings are deranged.” It is not a matter of individual finger-pointing; we are all drowning in the stuff, as wetiko is everywhere. I point out that even the most hard-core wetikos are embodied reflections of these parts of ourselves. My entire discussion about wetiko can only be truly understood from the “radical” (which, etymologically speaking, means “getting to the root”) point of view of the universe being a whole system in which separation does not ultimately exist among any of its parts. Please do not dismiss my work out of hand because you imagine that it’s creating separation, for in the very act of doing so, you yourself may be creating the very separation you are opposing, ironically, in the name of opposing it. As Rumi writes, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

3 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , 46.

4 Etymologically, the word religio derives from religare , which means to link back and reconnect (to the source, God, our true selves). The term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of “the numinous.” Jung writes, “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences, you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character .” [Emphasis added] Jung, Letters , vol. 1, 377.

5 Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939 , vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1321.

6 In the Apocryphal Acts of John, Jesus says, “I would be wounded, and I would wound.” M. R. James, ed., The New Testament Apocrypha (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 253.

7 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , xvi.

8 Writing about the importance of coming to terms with the shadow within ourselves, Jung comments, “One would therefore do well to possess some ‘imagination for evil,’ for only the fool can permanently disregard the condition of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil … our lack of insight [into our own potential for evil] deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil.” Civilization in Transition , CW 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 572. Jung also talks about the importance of developing an imagination for evil in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 331.

9 Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969), 121.

2 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , CW 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), para. 93.

3 Artist and poet William Blake comments, “The Eternal body of Man is the Imagination, that is God himself.” Blake refers to Jesus as “Jesus the Imagination.” Christ, from the alchemical point of view, is the revelation of the divine imagination itself, referred to as the “Imagined God.” Alchemically speaking, this is the highest compliment.

4 Of Canada’s indigenous population, three-quarters speak the Algonquian language, including the Cree and Ojibwa.

5 Robert Brightman, Field Notes, Pukatawagan and Granville Lake, Manitoba (1977–1979), in Robert A. Brightman, “The Windigo in the Material World,” Ethnohistory 35(4) (Autumn 1988), 337–379, at www.jstor.org/stable/482140 .

6 E. E. Rich, ed., James Isham’s Observations of Hudson Bay, 1743, and Notes and Observations on a Book Entitled A Voyage to Hudsons Bay in the Dobbs Gallery, 1749 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1949).

7 Richard Glover, ed., “David Thompson’s Narrative, 1784–1812” (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1962). Quoted in Robert A. Brightman, “The Windigo in the Material World,” 343, at www.jstor.org/stable/482140 .

9 Similarly, in the Western tradition, the alchemical spirit of Mercurius is portrayed as a trickster who, being mercurial, changes shape at will.

10 Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East , CW 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), para. 600.

11 Ibid., para. 290.

12 Ibid., para. 639.

13 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Beacon Press Books, 1969), 257–258.

14 Four-valued logic was introduced in the second century CE by Nagarjuna, who is considered to be the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself and who is one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. Nagarjuna stated emphatically that the unnecessary and artificially distorting limitations of two-valued, either/or logic are the greatest cause of human suffering.

2 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , xix.

4 See Arendt’s classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism .

5 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin, 2003), 36.

2 Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche , CW 8 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), para. 747.

3 Jung, Civilization in Transition , CW 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 326.

4 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy , CW 16 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), para. 442.

5 Gospel of Truth, 29–30, found in The Nag Hammadi Library , ed. James M. Robinson (New York: Harper One, 1990), 45.

6 In Tibetan Buddhism, rainbows symbolize the empty, dreamlike nature of all phenomena; all appearances are said to be empty of inherent existence, just like a rainbow. Rainbows can only be said to exist when particular factors come together in relationship in a certain way—light, moisture, and an observing consciousness (with an eye, brain, etc). If any of these factors aren’t present, no rainbow appears, which is to say that rainbows do not objectively exist separate from consciousness. Rainbows are also a manifestation of the polar opposites of water and fire combined as one, which is to say they can be likened to a living symbol of the true nature of the universe, uniting the opposites in a higher synthesis .

7 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 232. This text is considered to be a terma , or hidden treasure. To learn more about terma , see my article “Hidden Treasures” at www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/hidden-treasures .

8 To read more about this teaching, see chapter 16, titled “As Viewed, So Appears,” in my book The Madness of George W. Bush .

9 M. R. James, ed., The New Testament Apocrypha (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 256.

10 Gospel of Thomas, 113, found in The Nag Hammadi Library , ed. James M. Robinson (New York: HarperOne, 1990), 138.

2 Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , CW 9i (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), para. 455.

3 Gerhard Adler, ed., C. G. Jung, Letters , vol. 1:1906–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 541.

4 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy , CW 14 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), para. 203.

5 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , CW 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), para. 36.

6 Quoted from Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1980), 182.

7 M. R. James, ed., The New Testament Apocrypha (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 253.

8 Georges Berguer, Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus (trans. Eleanor Stimson Brooks and Van Wyck Brooks), 265, quoted in R. Scott Frayn, Revelation and the Unconscious (London: Epworth Press, 1940), 182 .

2 Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 13.

3 Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in Simone Weil Reader , ed. G. Panichas (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1977), 441.

4 Jung, Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 373.

5 David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 179.

6 Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity , 218. There has been much controversy over whether Castaneda’s books, presented as anthropological nonfiction, were simply made up. From one point of view, it makes no difference, as there is much wisdom in the books. We live in a culture that has worshipped the hyperrational literalism of facts and lowered the status of imagination to a marginalized nonreality. Whether or not they are simply flights of Castaneda’s imagination, his works point to the “fictive power,” the world-creating artistry of the imagination itself to shape our world and influence our souls, as his books have clearly touched something very deep in the unconscious of his readers. Shamanism is very much related to the art of storytelling, dreaming, imagining, visioning, and mythologizing. If Castaneda’s books are fiction, they are living examples of the shamanic art in action, genuine shamanic flights of fictive power that help us to deliteralize our own reading of the world. The imaginal reality that Castaneda may have fabricated out of his own creative imagination is then no more real or unreal than the upper/underworld journeys of the shaman into the collective unconscious.

15 See John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006). John Lash’s website is metahistory.org .

16 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , 188.

17 Jung, The Symbolic Life , CW 18 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), para. 1374.

18 Quoted in P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1949), 316.

19 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York; Noonday Press, 1970), xvii.

2 Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), 219.

3 Infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, for example, claimed that a “malignant entity” had taken over his consciousness. Ibid., 4.

4 See chapter 3, “George Bush and the Pale Criminal,” in my book The Madness of George W. Bush .

5 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 73.

6 Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 47.

8 Jung continues that Antimimos “appears as the antagonist of the Son of God: he too considers himself to be God’s son.… We meet this daemon in many other places … he is the spirit of darkness in a man’s body, compelling his soul to fulfill all his sinful tendencies.” Psychology and Alchemy , CW 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), para. 460.

9 From an essay by Jeanne de Salzmann originally published in Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching (New York: Continuum, 1996), ed. Jacob Needleman and George Baker; posted at www.gurdjieff.org/salzmann3.htm .

10 Jung, The Symbolic Life , CW 18 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), para. 1363.

11 From W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Ernst Toller.”

12 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , 60.

2 One of Jung’s favorite words, left untranslated in English editions of his work, Auseinandersetzung is a German compound meaning literally “a sitting apart” (Setzung ) and having it out (aus) with one (ein) another (ander ).

3 Buddhism points out that avidya (a Sanskrit word; the Tibetan equivalent is ma-rigpa) , which translates as ignorance, delusion, not-knowing, or unconsciousness, is the primary root of evil. Referring to the “suffocating darkness of unconsciousness,” Jung writes, “This indeed is Sin with a capital S, and Evil par excellence .” C. G. Jung Letters , ed. Gerhard Adler, vol. 1: 1906–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 488.

4 Jung, Aion , CW 9ii (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), para. 255.

5 Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (New York: Routledge, 2009), 162.

6 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , CW 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), para. 36.

7 II, 5, 134.5–20.

8 II, 3, 83.5–30 .

9 William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 227–229.

10 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , 188.

13 Jung, Civilization in Transition , CW 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 410.

14 See Khenpo Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche, Lion’s Gaze: A Commentary on Tsig Sum Nedek , trans. Sarah Harding (Boca Raton, FL: Sky Dancer Press, 1998).

2 I want to thank Jonathan Zap for this clarification in a comment that he wrote after the initial posting of parts of Chapter 1 online. To quote Zap, “There’s an anthropologist with a lecture on ted.com who provides considerable evidence that the per capita war death rate of an indigenous rainforest tribe is much higher than that of Western Civilization (even during the 20th Century). Western Civilization because of its far greater novelty magnifies the outer edge of light and the outer edge of dark” (see zaporacle.com for more of his writings).

3 From the article by Ron Suskind titled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” in the October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine .

4 Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals , 48.

8 Jung, Civilization in Transition , CW 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 886 .

2 If you are wondering what exactly is the “Art-Happening Called Global Awakening,” I will ask you what is it you imagine it to be? If you realize right now, in this very moment, that we are all dreaming, how would you, as one of the artists and dreamers, creatively engage with the dream so as to dream it to its highest unfoldment? How do you imagine the dream wants to dream itself through you?

2 Trismosin, Splendor Solis: Alchemical Treatises of Solomon Trismosin , 18.

3 Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East , CW 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), para. 748.

4 Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East , CW 11, para. 658.

9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 36.

10 Jung, Visions 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 340.

11 Jung, Alchemical Studies , CW 13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 293.

12 Gerhard Adler, ed., C. G. Jung Letters , vol. 1: 1906–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 58.

13 Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East , CW 11, para. 238 .

2 Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1981), 11.

3 Bohm, On Dialogue , 58.

5 It is not quite right to talk of this correlation in terms of speed at all, which is an artifact of our being conditioned into thinking of everything in terms of the logic of three-dimensional space and linear, sequential time.

6 To further unfold and elaborate this contemplation, in a bit of quantum strangeness, if we ask whether the universe really existed before we started looking at it, the answer we get from the universe is that it looks as if it existed before we started looking at it.

7 See my article “The Wounded Healer” in Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, eds., Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age (New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).

8 Kerenyi, Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 100.

9 Quoted in Donald Sandner, The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1997), 15. Sandner’s quote is from Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , CW 9i (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), para. 457 (which is a slightly different translation than in Sandner’s book).

10 James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr . (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 429.

11 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 106–107n.

2 Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010), 209 .

6 See http://solari.com/blog/financial-coup-d’etat .

7 See http://solari.com/articles/the-american-tapeworm .

2 This is one of Jung’s favorite sayings from the Apocryphal texts.

3 Jung, Dream Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 217.

4 Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1934–1939 , vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1324.

5 This is tricky business. On the one hand, due to the nonlocal nature of evil, when we see it outside of ourselves, it activates a similar energy within us, which we then have to deal with. When we see evil within ourselves, we usually either dissociate from it, which feeds it, or we unconsciously identify with it, which also feeds it. On the other hand, if when we see it within ourselves, we objectify it, get into relationship with it, etc., we are then distinguishing and freeing ourselves from it, which paradoxically, is ultimately in the service of integrating it.

2 Quoted in Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind (New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 180.

3 Jung, Civilization in Transition , CW 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 14.

4 Jung, Visions 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 746–747.

5 Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East , CW 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), para. 806 .

6 Quoted in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , CW 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), para. 404, fn. 12.

7 William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 86.

2 Psychological violence, by its very nature, is very challenging to describe in words; it doesn’t easily lend itself to language. I plan on writing a book about it in the future.

3 Leonard Shengold talks about “soul murder,” or “soul rape.” His two books, Soul Murder (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991) and Soul Murder Revisited (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), describe better than any other books I have found what played out between my father and me.

4 Instead of just expressing my opinion about this, I’d like to bring in what the unconscious has to say. In one of many “big dreams” I’ve had over the years that helped to show me what I was dealing with, within the first few years of this trauma, I dreamed the following: My father bursts into my bedroom without knocking. Seeing my art supplies, he angrily says, “I thought I told you to throw those out.” I throw my art supplies in the garbage. He leaves. I immediately start looking in a mirror that is in my bedroom, and my reflection looks like the Incredible Hulk, in that I am totally muscular and powerful, so much so that my buttons are popping off my shirt, and I am completely outraged. Then I go to find my father, and when I find him, I’m about to say to him, “Dad, you’re possessed,” but out of my mouth, to my complete astonishment, come the words “Dad, I’m possessed and you’re possessed, but at least I’m doing something about it.” I wake up. A quick commentary on the dream: Notice my father transgressing boundaries by barging into my bedroom (my temenos , i.e., sacred space). Angrily “ordering” me to throw out my art supplies is symbolically expressing how he wants me to throw out the creative expression of my true self. Notice that I then did as told, throwing my means of creative expression in the trash, which symbolizes my complicity in my own victimization. When a mirror shows up in a “dream” (which itself is a “reflection” of our mind), it oftentimes is reflecting unconscious, split-off parts of ourselves that we are not in touch with, which can only be seen in reflection; these are parts of ourselves that we need to own and step into. I clearly needed to become more intimately acquainted with my rage and power. The final scene was an expression of my dawning realization, played out in the real time of the dream, that the evil that I was seeing in my father was my own condition. Possessed by the evil of wetiko, my father had unconsciously acted it out in such a way as to give the virus to me, which was something that I now had to deal with. Unlike my father, however, by doing spiritual practice, working on myself, going to therapy, creating art, studying, working on my dreams, etc., I was “doing something about it.” As Jung points out, the figure of the father has an extremely large influence on the destiny of the child. Due to my father’s inability to come to terms with the wetiko virus that had taken him over, it fell into my lap to have to come to terms with it. It was as if in my case, the “sins of the father,” to use a biblical phrase, were “passed on” to the son.

6 If I were in my normal state of mind, which I clearly was not, I would have asked for her name and phone number, so as to be able to connect with her after I got out of the hospital and prove to people that I wasn’t making this up. Trying to validate my experience while I was in my expansive state, however, was the last thing that was on my mind. A week after I got out of the hospital, I got together for lunch with the doctor in charge of me, and told him what had happened with the blind woman. He became very uncomfortable and claimed he couldn’t talk about it due to patient confidentiality.

9 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, what 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.

13 People who are in extreme states, and are having nonordinary experiences, or who see things differently from the agreed-upon, consensus reality are (arche)typically pathologized by those in positions of power, which is the default setting for psychiatry. Psychiatry’s unreflected-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” (Code V62.89) was accepted as a new diagnostic category in the DSM-IV (APA, 1994). When I was going through these experiences, although it was only thirty years ago, it was as if I had time traveled and was living in the Dark Ages. In the early ’80s, the very concept or possibility of a spiritual awakening was precluded and excluded from the worldview of psychiatry.

12 Related to and identical with the prima materia, Mercurius begets himself. In the Allegoriae super librum Turbae , Mercurius says of himself, “The mother bore me and is herself begotten of me” (Art. aurif., I, p. 151). Jung comments, “As the uroboros dragon, he impregnates, begets, bears, devours and slays himself, and himself ‘lifts himself on high,’ as the Rosarium says (Art. aurif., II, p. 339), so paraphrasing the mystery of God’s sacrificial death.” Alchemical Studies , CW 13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para. 272. Being that the alchemical figure of Mercurius is similar to wetiko, this should give us some idea of the deep mystery with which we are dealing when we inquire into wetiko.