The Fires of Transformation: Life as a Work as Art – Workshop

The often chaotic, unhealthy experience of living within our present inflammatory, autoimmune culture may be inducing a healing crisis that could open us to the highest levels of embodied health and individuation. In tonight’s program, we will explore how dreams, visions, and psychedelics, used adeptly, might be some of the best media through which we, as psychonauts, can embark on an odyssey to free ourselves from our attachment to the bad-object bio-psycho-social stressors. In 1925 Jung recalled the nature of his own psychic voyage when he wrote, “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.” Now, a century later, if we embarked on such a quest, we would encounter an even greater variety of non-conforming identities, and, for some, the spirits of plant medicines and pharmaceuticals.

Today we have an ever-expanding array of meditational healing practices available to us with the potential, guided by intentional awareness, to help us sail past our own shadowy Scylla and Charybdis. We may even be able to ride the currents of our oft-traumatized neural pathways to the roots of energetic awareness itself. Jung, by means of his prophetic visionary talents, opened the doors of numinous perception, accessed the archetypal worlds, and brought its denizens vividly to life without drugs. In a letter to Father Victor White in 1954, Jung showed how keenly aware he was of the use of psychedelics in shamanic rituals and how skeptical of new psychedelic research. Jung expressed concern that modern man could “pay very dearly” for this “Trojan Horse” sent by the gods. Quoting Goethe’s poem, “I cannot get rid/of the spirits I bid,” he pointed to the danger of unwittingly playing the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice. But then Jung also wrote, “I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvelous effect.” These marvelous effects excited a new generation of doctors who had tested and fed themselves psychedelics while pioneering research in the 1950s. This resulted in revelations of the vast potential for both healing and misuse that escalated experimentation within and outside the lab.

In the same letter, Jung warned, “It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.” With this wisdom in mind, we can better prepare to set off on our own unique therapeutic journey of initiation by the collective unconscious. This could lead us to an experience of unconditional healing within the life force itself. If we can attain even a touch of this embodiment of our true essence, it can inoculate the immune system of our entire body consciousness. Then we can meet our own revitalized holistic capacity for openness mirrored in our intimate and collective relationships in the outer world.