The Shadow of a Figure of Light: the Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment delves into the nature of modern psychospiritual transformation by examining the human thirst for wholeness through the lens of alcoholism and addiction. Establishing an unknown
"Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say cam from my student Bethany, talking about her padagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted her classroom to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life,
I can only ‘tell stories, whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.
CG Jung
“Paradox does more justice to the unknowable than clarity can do, for uniformity of meaning robs the mystery of its darkness and sets it up as something that is known.”
CG Jung
(A short 🧵)
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular." (CG Jung)
Since earliest times, the path to enlightenment has been portrayed through symbolical
The Shadow of a Figure of Light: the Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment delves into the nature of modern psychospiritual transformation by examining the human thirst for wholeness through the lens of alcoholism and addiction. Establishing an unknown
“In a world of fugitives, the person going the wrong direction appears to be running away.”
TS Elliot
“The greatest gift we have to give to the world is our aloneness.”
James Hollis
“Compulsion is the great mystery of human life. It is the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth.”
CG Jung
We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being.
—James Hollis
The great indicator of whether a person will be able to transform their psyche, whether through the Twelve Steps or in therapy, is how well they are able to turn and face inwardly, to face the compulsive forces of their own psyche.
"If we are not experiencing divinity within us in some way, it will come to possess us, through our projection of it onto the outer world. Or go inward unconsciously and emerge as symptoms."
James Hollis
Like the Trickster, the archetype of the Alcoholic is “a negative hero who manages to achieve through stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts.”
CG Jung
“A good deal of what passes for religion is often designed to prop up and endorse the ego that the founders of the faith told us to abandon.”
Karen Armstrong
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
The Shadow of a Figure of Light: the Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment is an unprecedented foray into the nature of alcoholism and addiction. Examining the psychology of human transformation, Peterson illuminates the process of recovery from the
8 secrets rule men's lives.
James Hollis, the prolific Jungian author, provided us with the 8 secrets in his book, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men.
To master these secrets is to master one's well-being...
Bill Wilson held selfishness to be particularly troublesome for alcoholics, explaining that to engage in selfish behaviors poses the greatest threat to one’s sobriety, making it a deadly proposition: “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it
“It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest himself everywhere save only in the human soul. To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal. it is a guarantee of happiness, of power, and even of omnipotence, insofar as these are attributes of divinity. To carry a
"Access to the numinous becomes blocked ... when religious images are insisted upon as final terms: as they are, for example, in a dogmatic credo."
Joseph Campbell
Religious myths can be understood as the collective dream of the human species, our shared longing to overcome the vail of tears. Myth provides us a window into the psyche, revealing much about the nature of the journey we are on--the "divine drama" we call life.
(thread) 🧵
“Do not praise your own faith exclusively so that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this you will miss much good. Nay, you will miss the whole truth of the matter. God, the Omniscient and the Omnipresent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for He says in the Quran,
"When the symbol of God is relieved of its metaphysical constraints, its life-changing power is activated."
My new book, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, examines psychospiritual transformation in modern times. Release date is 10.1.24. There is a code for 20% off preorder books
William James' most impactful discovery is called radical empiricism. It is a subjective approach to our experience of the world and counter-intuitive to the previously held notion of empiricism employed by psychologists, derived from the natural scientists who base their
“Unconscious men who suffer inner doubt, who feel helpless, have created the patriarchy, which oppresses other men, rapes women and despoils nature.”
James Hollis
Jung defines ego differently than most of us are used to, and it is worth studying to uncover what he means. Doing so, the symbolical meaning of myth becomes clear.
"All ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. . . Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists,
Dr. Murray Stein, the prolific Jungian author and analyst, had this to say about my upcoming book:
"Cody Peterson has written a book whose extension is deep, wide, and high. It rests on the solid foundations of careful scholarship and personal experience, it broadens our
The Shadow of a Figure of Light: the Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment delves into the nature of modern psychospiritual transformation by examining the human thirst for wholeness through the lens of alcoholism and addiction. Establishing an unknown
William James, the American psychologist and educator, was born in 1842 in New York City.
His magnum opus is a sweeping exposition on modern psychology he called The Varieties of Religious Experience.
(A thread 🧵)
Since the Self is all but impossible to conceptualize, we must rely on myth, which emerges out of same unconscious place, to elucidate the meaning and purpose of our compulsions—the very thing that leads us towards conscious contact with the Universal Mind.
Alcoholism and addiction create the perfect set-up for one to stumble upon the path to enlightenment, as the need to keep the primordial energies of the unconscious bottled up becomes paramount not just for one’s continued sense of well-being, but for one’s very survival.
"The spirit of evil is fear, negation... For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to to hopeless staleness, to a dab grey lit
"From its place in the psyche, an eternal dynamism funnels into our mythological symbols, seeing that myth is the imprint the collective unconscious has left upon the physical world, “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human
"Deliverance from the flux of affects, from the tension of opposites, is synonymous with the way of redemption."
CG Jung
The more conscious I become, the less I find myself on either end of the emotional spectrum. This means that I am less sad, less often: less jealous, less
“2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by seeming equivalent. An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, not infused by an archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives
The correspondence between C.G. Jung and Bill Wilson (co-founder of A.A.) elucidates the nature of the quandary in which the alcoholic is trapped, that it is a byproduct of the spiritual crisis we face in the West.
A thread...
Jung explained to Wilson the following:
“What we don’t understand in ourselves is projected onto our surroundings, and so the sum of our society is the aggregate of what is unconscious within us.”
James Hollis
"Compulsion is the doorway that opens directly into the unconscious, and to become aware of any of the compulsions that drive us is to arguably make the greatest leap in consciousness that we can make, alcoholic or not."
--Your's Truly
#soberposse
#recoveryposse
#ODAT
Solutions to insoluble, psychological problems like addiction almost always lead to a religious outcome. Of course this has nothing to do with dogma, conventional religion, or entrenched traditional religious ideas, but rather, the discovery of something transcendent deep within
Jung wrote two books in which he admits he held nothing back, writing them for his own fulfillment and deciding to not coddle his readers. Those are called Answer to Job and Aion. Both can be found in Volume 11 of the Collected Works.
They are not for the faint of heart.
Working with the shadow is the only way to integrate it. And what is not integrate will be projected onto others or leak out in dangerous behavior.
James Hollis
(🧵🧵🧵🧵)
"God’s Folly"
May I read a poem to you,
I wrote not long ago.
Words as these exist in us
from whence we dare not go.
A song like this is composed
of Love and grace Divine—
But turns into a darker tune
A tale of pure despite.
(Please share)
Read psychologically, myths like the Fall and the Atonement depict how the Self disrupts the ego’s intentions, frustrating its need for security and comfort: in order to wake the ego from its delusion of control, the Self snatches away its “fancied freedom of will.”
(A thread
The shadow is the gateway "to the deeper reaches [that] the founders of all the world’s great religions pass through to arrive at their insights … the subliminal doorway that opens up to the mother-sea of all truly objective thoughts.”
--William James
Rebellion is perhaps the most important attitude we can cultivate, for rebellion alone is what leads to "individuation."
Regarding individuation, Carl Jung writes: “It is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated... its goal [is] the development of
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein
This is Jaime de Angulo, the first hippy and an alcoholic.
Born in 1887 in Paris, the wild life that the Spaniard lived in the mountains of California would serve a much higher purpose than anyone could have imagined.
Here's the untold story of how Jaime changed the world...
“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of Spiritus, the breath of life.”
Dr. Murray Stein, the prolific Jungian author and analyst, had this to say about my upcoming book:
"Cody Peterson has written a book whose extension is deep, wide, and high. It rests on the solid foundations of careful scholarship and personal experience, it broadens our
"The ego’s relation to the Self is a highly problematic one and corresponds very closely to man’s relation to his Creator as depicted in religious myth. Indeed the myth can be seen as a symbolic expression of the ego-Self relationship.”
Edward Edinger
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not
Spiritual and psychological methods based on the modern western orthodoxy known as “positive thinking” allows us “to bury our heads in the sand to deny the ubiquity of pain in ourselves and others, and to ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness in order to ensure our
One of the problems with current Western spirituality is that so many Western agnostics have tried to adopt Eastern forms of worship, but to no avail. Eastern philosophies are meant to treat Eastern psychologies. In the West we need to use our own myths: