Overcoming Soul Sickness with Carl Jung and Terence McKenna

what do we do when we feel purposeless when the vital energy is sucked from life when we feel no deep spiritual connection no drive to do anything of substance as The Bleak statistics of the mental health epidemic demonstrate for many of us there is no clear answer of course the scientist offers data pathology and molecules to help us cope with the pain clergy tells us there's something more but for many of us their words ring Hollow they offer no way to directly experience the supposed spiritual realities that they talk about this disconnection from meaning and purpose this Soul depression is devouring the psyche of millions left us struggling to numb the pain through distraction attention consumption and ego games all of the above of course bring us no closer to that connection that we seek they leave us even thirstier for something sacred meaningful and real than we were to begin with are you winning son yes Dad I am winning I am winning I have everything everything virtue love opinion science conscience at the click of a button at the swipe of a card but something's missing dad this just isn't it it's all dust I have yearned for inalienable passions relations but it's all been turned to objects of exchange everything is for sale and has a price the market is everywhere that we won everything is realified turns to things and objects the social the people we won everything can be used in discarded as seen fit we want that and that's probably why we have lost or as psychiatrist and mythopoetic genius Carl Jung puts it the least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it so in this transmission we're going to confront this Soul sickness why it's happening try to make some sense of it and discuss ways we might be able to cope with it we might be able to even overcome it so first I want to establish how is this Soul sickness real isn't what I'm talking about just depression which is a chemical imbalance of the brain well as widely parroted as that stance is it's actually been widely outed by experts as untrue as a narrative pushed by pharmaceutical companies with no real root in scientific fact and I've been told this firsthand by experts in this field who have been researching depression for decades people like Dr Chris Palmer of Harvard and Dr Lisa Miller of Columbia here's how she puts it in her own words word knee deep in a model of depression which is a Fix-It model you know something's broken and let's fix it you take this pill your thinking is bad you take this different thought you know we're going to fix you up so that you are happy you are more functional it's really an industrial view of who we are that we need to be fixed like the carburetor needs to be replaced and then we'll move more smoothly but you know there's a lot of science that taken in aggregate suggests a very different view of depression so she goes on to say and she makes it very clear throughout our conversation that much of depression is actually developmental not all there are Myriad social physical environmental contributing factors when it comes to mental and physical health I know that I appreciate that I'm not diminishing anyone's symptoms I'm not telling anyone to stop taking their meds or doing what professionals tell them to do do what works for for you if you want to contextualize this further definitely check out my full conversations with Dr Lisa Miller and her tremendous book The awakened brain and young actually describes depression in a remarkably similar way to Dr Lisa Miller and he did it decades and decades ago quote depression can be seen as a kind of spiritual dryness a Dark Night of the soul that calls for a deeper more meaningful connection to something larger than the self religious and spiritual practices can provide a powerful antidote to depression by restoring a sense of connection purpose and meaning to life so for many of us this modern malaise this depression this mental dis-ease is not really an illness at least not in the typical sense it's a call from deep within our psyches or if you like our souls for initiation a call to discover a purpose a deeper meaning a bigger truth as Dr Miller puts it in her Ted Talk in the context of her own Dark Night of the soul I also knew that this journey was more than a disease this Depression was opening a door on a path of becoming again coming back to Young and Modern Man In Search Of the Soul he unsurprisingly goes even further I've treated many hundreds of patients among those in the second half of life that is to say over 35 there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life it is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have have given their followers so why is this Soul sickness as I'm calling it on the rise in a time where we're more connected than ever we have more science we have more friends online we have more self-help more uh empirical knowledge than ever before that we're feeling more disconnected and purposeless of course the reasons are very complicated and multifaceted but I would suggest two primary drivers the first if I had to Nutshell it I would call a malicious commodification of the human soul a cultural norm that at minimum relegates the deeper layers of who we are to an afterthought and in the extreme eats our very souls and our very will to live I mean just look at the mainstream narrative look at the mainstream depictions of success they essentially all hinge on getting into a good school on achieving status on getting a good job having a family getting married owning a nice home and those things should be enough and of course if they're not enough then there's something wrong with you then you have a pathology then we can medicate you of course this isn't true and when it comes to why this is the case well I think we can look to the top of the pyramid for a very clear answer it keeps us conditioned into being good worker drones this narrative Keeps Us on a very narrow materialistic pathway that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for big questions as author and the great psychedelic Visionary Terence McKenna put it culture is not your friend culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions churches companies tax collection schemes what have you if that is fetishes objects creates consumer Mania it preaches endless forms of false happiness forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly Cults it it invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines and I guess when you put it that way it's a pretty bleak picture how do you swim upstream against an entire culture that's essentially against you finding your soul against you connecting to your deeper purpose well we're going to talk about some ways that we can do that in a moment but first it's going to get darker before the dawn because we need to talk about the second primary driver of the Soul sickness which I think is the very fact that we have all of those things I just mentioned more knowledge more science more connection at least in a vacuous digital sense and why is that because there's a clear cost to having those things there's a cost to Constant Comfort calories and seamless technological connection the cost is that it implies that we can easily live in a temperate beige Haze we can stay comfortable and complacent through all of the above and when we live that way we're disconnected from what really matters from what would feed our souls we're disconnected from nature myth uh philosophy spirituality a real tribe even our bodies and our mortality young again to an extent forecasted this in Modern Man In Search of a soul quote we are living in what the Greeks called Kairos the right moment for a metamorphosis of the Gods of the fundamental principles and symbols this peculiarity of our time is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing coming Generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science that one deserves some digestion some real contemplation and I think on the other side of that contemplation you'll find that we probably are the generation he was talking about the coming generation who would have to deal with this might of technology and science as he put it so now as promised what can we really do about this Soul sickness don't worry I have an irrefutable complete very simple recipe for you um I just of course but here are some ideas so first I know it just sounds like I'm being rebellious by saying this but I truly believe it I truly believe that to an extent we need to misbehave we need to rebel against culture as Terence McKenna was saying and by this I don't mean start shoplifting I don't mean stop using your blinker in the parking lot I don't mean leave your shopping cart in the parking lot we need to maintain parking lot etiquette I guess is what I'm saying that is one part of culture that we can't do without so what do I mean I mean we need to rebel against the cultural conditioning that insults our souls against the people who want to use you as a drone and to do that we're going to need to break the mold we're going to need to say no to things and relationships and products and jobs that insult who we are at our cores that I'll say it again insult our souls don't contribute or harmonize with our higher selves and we're also just going to generally need to rebel by rejecting the materialistic trappings of success and prioritizing our personal Evolution another quote from Terence McKenna to this effect we Empower our existence by insisting on our own authenticity I really do believe all of that but I know it's kind of vague and kind of grandiose so I'll get more specific largely this Soul sickness is a call for reconnect should reconnection with those deep Elements of Life I've already hinted at reconnection with nature with myth philosophy spirituality our bodies the deeper parts of our own psyche and a call to connect with other quality human beings who are on that same Quest also I think another thing we've already touched on is a potent medicine in that we need to reframe our depression our malaise our anxiety not as a illness not as a pathology but as a cry for initiation for a rite of passage as a psychic growing pain a truly necessary step on the Journey of becoming who you are as admittedly kind of cheesy as that sounds because with this disposition comes the acknowledgment that whatever you're going through is not pointless it's necessary it's fuel for your own psychospiritual maturation and again this really harmonizes with Young's take this is a very deep reaching formulation in that it declares God to be suffering this suffering is laid upon man in the sense that man is not God he is not United but divided he suffers from the yearning and necessity to find unity and what is this Unity that we're seeking it's the exact kind of reconnection I've been talking about and I'll admit the more specific we get the more unanswerable it is because there is no one-size-fits-all answer the answer is going to vary from Individual to individual and to an extent this is why Young's method was called individuation This is why his chosen framework of personal Evolution rested within the psyche of the individual because it's about in part becoming truly unique through becoming whole in a psycho-spiritual sense and I want to come back to McKenna again here because his personal ethos really fits in with this as well as he put it quote reject isms seek personal truth and by the way by rejecting isms he does not mean to brush aside the philosophy and spiritual traditions of the world in fact he was a voracious reader of them as was young and I think he would say and young would say that through studying them we gain the ability to separate what's useful from what isn't so that we can build the philosophical and spiritual Nuance to really develop to really find that path to personal wholeness and on that note though I will not be able to fully dive into it in this video we can't skip over Young's method we can't skip over individuation because I think it is the symbolic psychological framework for finding personal meaning and connecting to deeper purpose so what is individuation put simply it's an archetypal multi-step process of investigating and integrating your own psyche and practically speaking this may entail a lot of things working with a therapist working on your dreams meditating journaling creativity guided imaginal exercises and the first real step on that process is confronting the unconscious and what's popularly called The Shadow this in itself is a much deeper discussion in fact I have a whole video on it highly encourage you to check it out after this one for more context and really bringing all of this together McKenna actually had great admiration for young in fact in a talk that you can watch here he actually admits that in his earlier years he wanted to be a young analyst and if you know anything about McKenna you know that his obvious addendum add-on to Young's method is to seek personal transformative mystical experiences for McKenna this was through plant medicines and through reconnecting with nature and the deeper layers of our mind through Visionary molecules and of course this Visionary path is going to immediately turn some of you off but I can say from first-hand experience and you don't need to listen to me there's mounting scientific evidence to this effect as well it is a way to quickly change your mind and reconnect with the sacred the next thing I have to mention that is vitally important that I know you've heard before but I really want to drive home because there's a lot of data on this as well is the importance of a tribe of having like-minded people in your life who are on this same path or at least people that are positive and supportive of what you're going through Dr Robert waldinger is a psychiatrist at Harvard and a Zen roshi he's done a tremendous amount of research on what leads to human thriving and human Wellness over the course of a lifetime and as he told me in a podcast that we did together and as he says in his Ted Talk what are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated well the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder the clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this good relationships keep us happier and healthier period it turns out that people who are more socially connected to family to friends to community are happier they're physically healthier and they live longer so we need people who are like-minded we need to come together in this deeper spirit this open-hearted place I can tell you that just gathering with my patrons is continuously one of the best parts of my week of my month I always leave those conversations feeling so full-hearted uh feel free to join us by the way via the third eye drops patreon another thing I know that so many of us are missing so many of us rationalize skipping over is finding Stillness finding a time to be mindful having a Sacred Space both by that I mean in your time temporally and physically so slowing down meditating going for walks in nature where you're not looking at your phone where you're tuned in to the wonder of the world this is in many ways our Natural State as human beings think about what portion of the time our ancestors would have spent looking up at the stars or just walking through the forest it's so intrinsic and integral for feeling connected to the world on this note a cue that I personally took from young is to make sure I have a Sacred Space in my house and that can mean whatever you want it to mean I think it should mean that it's used only for that and it feels sacred you keep it clean and you go there at least once a day to reflect to be quiet to meditate my favorite technique for this is loving kindness meditation I discuss it in this video here I know this is not easy I'm presenting such a massive problem but my hope is that it's slowly gets into your subconscious that it starts to affect the way that you see the world and to that point one more quote from one of my favorite mythopoetic authors and psychologists James Hillman we can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas until we begin to see things differently and on its face that may not sound that profound but when you read more of his writing you'll see that it's all to the effect of what we're talking about it's all to the effect of making the world more sacred bigger more mysterious than we can understand and connecting deeper to it and if you can wake up to that world you won't be able to help but feel more connected and more purposeful so much love for watching my friends if I didn't say it already my name is Michael Philip I hope this was something of a spiritual bomb for you don't forget to tickle the algorithm with a like and a sub it is truly important as it helps increase the circumference of our psychic splash I hope you'll also consider supporting these Transmissions via the third eye drops patreon Where We Gather bi-monthly for a book club for a Wonder gym hang we have a patron only Discord and you get rewards and with that my fellow sentient sacks of Stardust I will see you in the next transmission

Channel: THIRD EYE DROPS

Views: 29,681

Keywords: terence mckenna, carl jung, terence mckenna lecture, terence mckenna speech, carl jung shadow, carl jung quotes, Carl Jung on, carl jung on religion, carl jung on depression, spiritual awakening, mental health, Depression, carl jung on god, dr. lisa miller, dr lisa miller spirituality, Dr. lisa miller, dr. lisa miller the awakened brain, spiritual depression, terence mckenna culture is not your friend, Carl Jung Modern, carl jung modern man in search of a soul

Id: iRvSZN7dUhg

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023