At some point in my life,

The Spirit

Spirit is a complex concept with many different dimensions. Here is a short and sweet video with a description of what spirituality is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWePaMgaVZg

Jung said, “Spirit, like God, denotes an object of psychic experience, which cannot be proved to exist in the external world and cannot be understood rationally.” After his split with Freud and a “journey into his own unconsciousness” after a heart attack, he viewed the power of spirit as a force, which can address a person directly through a kind of revelation or vision. The Spirit (of the Depths) wells up from beneath as a surge of inspiration and vision. It is spirit in its role as inspirer, teacher, guide and healer because it points towards a larger wholeness and a more balanced worldview.

In the essay ‘Spirit and life’ from 1926, Jung makes the observation that spirit is essentially what brings our minds alive: ‘”spirit” is the quintessence of the life of the mind.’ To Jung, mind and spirit are closely related, but he makes it clear that by ‘life of the mind’ he does not refer to purely logical and rational thinking. Rather, spirit is the ideas that catch us because they have the ability to influence and inspire individuals and groups. We may live a life as purely physical creatures but such a life, Jung feels, is hardly worth living since it is dull to ourselves and everybody around us. The influence of exciting new ideas makes us feel alive and as such makes life worth living, but Jung also warns that such ideas need to be tested against the practical realities of daily life in order to have any real value. Being the originator of inspiration and original ideas, spirit is rarely still but always in motion. Symbolically, spirit is first and foremost connected with air, and often it is represented as birds or other winged beings. Spirit is also connected with fire, since its influence is often ‘fiery’. A new idea or a fresh inspiration may come as a gentle breeze, but it may also come as a fiery wind that stirs and awakes strong emotions.

The way we can recognize spirit in all its different forms is by its function as guide and teacher. Spirit brings new insight when old ideas or attitudes no longer work. Spirit appears in a hopeless and desperate situation that the hero of the story cannot solve by means of his own resources. Spirit brings to the hero a much-needed piece of insight, understanding, good advice or the inspiration to adopt a new attitude, which generally enables the protagonist to overcome obstacles that his existing resources and old attitude could not overcome.

Jung remarks that spirit is the spiritus rector, the aspect of our unconscious psyche which provides us with advice on what to do with our lives if we find ourselves in a metaphorical ‘tight spot’ or ‘dead end’. However, Jung points out, we can never be quite sure if the advice or inspiration we get from spirit is for the better or the worse. It can never be established with one-hundred-percent-certainty whether the spiritfigures in dreams are morally good. A discerning and reflecting ego or healthy instincts are needed to decide whether one shall heed the advice or trust the inspiration that spirit offers.

The Christian version of spirit is a healing and redeeming force that may ease the pain of a suffering individual as an act of God. It is the Holy Ghost that brings life to the otherwise inanimate human body, and here spirit and life itself are again closely connected. God breathes the Holy Spirit into dead matter and thereby creates life. In this way, the Holy Ghost equates to the principle of life itself. However, being a phenomenon of wind and air, the Holy Ghost is primarily connected with the life of the mind. Jung also writes that the Holy Ghost is how ‘God becomes manifest in the human act of reflection’. Hence, the inspiration of the Holy Ghost is primarily related to the development of new ideas or the creation of a wider consciousness, which may arrive as a Grace of God in times of trouble, turmoil or stagnation when a new attitude, a more encompassing consciousness, or a new understanding is required.

While Jung sees the influence of spirit as a necessity for the continual renewal of both the individual and of culture, he is characteristically dialectic and cautious in his discussion on the Holy Spirit; its influence may be a mixture of good and evil, and it always demands our conscious reflection and discrimination. It is not always easy to know whether spiritual impulses originate from the Holy Ghost or its dark counterparts, the demonic spirits of the Devil himself.

In Jung’s studies of alchemy, the work of spirit is again a central component. In several places, Jung states that the central goal of the medieval alchemists was to unite the opposites of the material body and the pneumatic spirit. According to Jung, Christianity had divided spirit and body: God was up in Heaven, in the realm of spirit, and nature, matter, and the body were desacralized or unspirited. Alchemy, as a compensating trend to Christianity, sought to re-unite what was being separated - the body and the spirit.

Five years after Jung’s death in 1961, the fifteenth volume of his Collected Works was published in English. This volume was entitled The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (Jung 1966). As the title suggests, the essays in this volume illustrate how the spirit operates through works of culture, such as philosophy, psychology, poetry, literature and painting.

The fundamental assumption behind all of Jung’s discussions of the phenomenon of spirit is that as human beings we are more than matter; we are also beings of spirit. If we as human beings are partly of spirit, then part of the solution to our emotional and existential problems must be found in the realm of spirit. Somewhere Jung refers to the archetype of spirit as the archetype of meaning, and this term captures the very essence of what spirit is about; spirit is about living a life that has meaning. https://rucforsk.ruc.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/75953275/Gitz_Johansen_Jung_the_Spirit_accepted_manuscript.pdf

This short video explains the Buddhist belief about spirit and mind:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xixUSBtmuk

Below are the major points about what Jewish spirituality involves:

1. All aspects of Jewish spirituality are deeply rooted in the revelation at Sinai. Its teachers demonstrate those roots, relating their teachings to the written or oral tradition of Torah.

2. Spirituality is not something you do for your own good alone, but a means to fulfill your purpose in life. Everything has Divine purpose, every event has Divine meaning; nothing is just here because it is here.

3. The Jewish concept of God is at once both personal and transcendent, but is never defined. He is often referred to as ‘the infinite light’ or just ‘The Infinite.’ And even then, with the caveat that even this does not refer to His essence.

4. Jewish spirituality brings people together, with love and with joy to celebrate life.

5. Jewish spirituality is aimed towards the ultimate perfection of all of the creation with human efforts in partnership with the Creator, in the messianic times and after. Ultimately, we are not seeking to rise to a higher place in heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth.

6. Judaism has a body and a soul. The two dance in harmony, in a wondrous union of seeming opposites. The soul finds expression through its embrace of the body, and the body comes alive through its fusion with the soul.

7. The body of Judaism cleanses and polishes the outer layers of the Jewish soul, allowing its inner light to shine through. The soul of Judaism, its spirituality, reaches the inner layers, igniting the Divine spark within. Together, the two dimensions of Judaism liberate the soul, allowing its suppressed love, wonder and innocent faith to break out into the light of day, infusing every thought, word and action with vibrant life.

   https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4017311/jewish/Jewish-Spirituality.htm

In the Islamic faith, spiritual transformation is the core objective of our purpose in what it means to be human. The human being is more than just a material substance. We are spiritual beings who must learn how to cultivate our spiritual quotient (S.Q.). Too often we tend to neglect the wellbeing of our spiritual self, which contributes to existential crises, unwanted anxiety, feelings of emptiness, and a loss of purpose. All of these may be addressed through the process of spiritual transformation, the act of working on the self and enhancing one's wellbeing as a result. Spiritual transformation in Islam occurs through four stages:

1. Certainty in faith;

2. Ethical practice in all spheres of behavior;

3. The liberation and discipline of the conscious, and

4. Demonstrating the best and most virtuous action for a given moment. All of these stages are devoted towards doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way.

All of these stages are devoted towards doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/khalilabdur-rashid/spiritual-transformation#:~:text=In%20Islam%2C%20spiritual%20transformation%20is,The%20annual%20Harvard%20Islamic%20Pilgrimage

Watch the video below for a longer examination of ‘The Science of Spirituality + Mental Health’ with Dr. Lisa Miller the author of The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWDto2R36n9pwwXq1HgjYHA

Dr. Miller’s research:

Miller L, Balodis IM, McClintock CH, Xu J, Lacadie CM, Sinha R, Potenza MN. Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual Experiences. Cereb Cortex. 2019 Jun 1;29(6):2331-2338. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy102. PMID: 29846531; PMCID: PMC6519691.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6519691/

Ford T, Lipson J, Miller L. Spiritually grounded character: A latent profile analysis. Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 12;13:1061416. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1061416. PMID: 36710823; PMCID: PMC9878557.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36710823/

Miller L, Wickramaratne P, Hao X, McClintock CH, Pan L, Svob C, Weissman MM. Altruism and "love of neighbor" offer neuroanatomical protection against depression. Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging. 2021 Sep 30;315:111326. doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2021.111326. Epub 2021 Jul 1. PMID: 34265626; PMCID: PMC8672211.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8672211/

McClintock CH, Anderson M, Svob C, Wickramaratne P, Neugebauer R, Miller L, Weissman MM. Multidimensional understanding of religiosity/spirituality: relationship to major depression and familial risk. Psychol Med. 2019 Oct;49(14):2379-2388. doi: 10.1017/S0033291718003276. Epub 2018 Nov 13. PMID: 30419987; PMCID: PMC6513730.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6513730/

The Soul and The Self

‘Ego’ is the Latin word for ‘I’. In Carl Jung’s Map of the Soul, Murray Stein writes, that the ego is a “virtual center of awareness that exists at least from birth; it is aways present and is not the product of nurture, growth or development; it is innate.” Awareness or consciousness exists at least from birth, if not before. However, it is not until 12-18 month that a “coherent sense off ‘I,’ Me,’ and ‘Mine’ develops. Once the sense of ‘I’ emerges, it weaves a cohesive narrative of continuity and identity throughout one’s life. It is shaped by one’s environment, family, educational and cultural dimensions, the pressures of instinctual and emotional needs arising rom the body; and by the growth and maturation of the body itself.” It adapts to social and later on, professional expectations. The neuro-psycho-physiological development of the body, mind and psyche is the product of a natural ‘unfolding’ of every individual that is driven by the mystery of what was called the ‘life force.’ The shaping the maturation of the mind, body and soul by the ‘life force’ from conception until death is what Jung called The Self and that many refer to as the personality. The person-ality is “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.”

The key concepts of Jung’s model of the psyche includes but is not limited to collective unconsciousness, archetypes, anima, animus, individuation, complexes as well as dreams and fantasies in mythology, art, literature, fairytale, ritual, religious rites and sacred texts. JUng said that dreams were ‘a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret rscesses of th soul, opening into that cosmic night…’ These give symbolic form and expression to the dynamics of the psyche and therefore, to the human soul. After breaking from Freud and a heart attack that took him into a period of unconsciousness, he heard an inner voice that he concluded was his ‘soul.’ The feminine name anima was given to the soul, as she was an archtype of life, the face and voice of the unconscious who “communicated images of unconscious mind to the conscious mind.’ Anima represents what is spontaneous in psychic life; it is something that lives and makes us live. He took special care to differentiate the soul from the psyche, because the German word Seele (soul) combines psyche and soul. He uses the word psyche to designate the totality of all psychic processes, conscious and unconscious.

He refers to ‘Soul’ as a ‘functional complex’ or partial personality - and never as the whole psyche. He referred to anima and animus as soul-images but wrote that women have no anima, no soul. His thoughts about these concepts seem misogynistic, and are beyond the scope of this website. This was more primitive that the Christian concept of soul, which refers to the ‘transcendental energy in man.’ The Christians considered the soul to be the ‘spiritual part of a man to be its moral aspect in relation to God.’ This assumes that agnostics or atheists have no soul - but that’s also beyond the scope of this website.

Jung did not adopt Freud’s practice of sitting behind the client who was laying prone on a couch. He felt it was important to sit face-to-face with his client - in a meeting of two psyches, two souls - in a genuine process of purification. He believed that unless both were affected, little would be achieved in the session.

Adapted from CG Jung’s Collected Works: The Basics. Yeoman, Ann and Lu, Kevin 2024.

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." -Carl Jung

Some say your soul never dies and I hope that’s true. Perhaps the soul is the deepest part of you - what makes you laugh or makes you cry; what loves another person’s soul and sees the best in them; what has been described as the 5th element or ‘aether’ or ‘quintessence,’ what leaves our body when we die. It is said that the soul “transcends the 1st four physical elements of earth, water, fire, and air. It represents a more spiritual or ethereal aspect of existence, essentially signifying the essence of life and consciousness beyond the physical body.”

The following YouTube video is an excellent summary of Carl Jung’s thoughts about the Soul, the Self, Individuation, the Shadow, Anima and Animus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q67pQ_Z-y

The soul and its parts of the personality lends itself nicely with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. This is a type of therapy that is frequently used in psychedelic-assisted therapy. A summary of IFS is adapted below from: https://www.traumawarriors.online/internal-family-systems-revealing-the-inner-world-of-parts/

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a transformative and life-changing approach to heal from early childhood trauma, that has garnered considerable attention and recognition in recent years. While it may appear to have achieved a cult-like status, it is crucial to recognize that IFS is not a completely new concept. It can be traced back to the roots of Psychosynthesis, a psycho-spiritual psychology, and its founder, Roberto Assagioli’s subpersonality model. This model serves as one of the core personality frameworks employed by Psychosynthesis psychotherapists, and has done so for the last 50 + years. By understanding the connections between these models, we can appreciate the foundation upon which IFS stands.

What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)?

Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic framework developed by author of five books, Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., that recognizes and engages with the multiplicity of our inner world. It views our psychological landscape as comprised of various “parts”, each with its unique thoughts, feelings, beliefs, needs and desires. These parts can be considered as distinct characters within us, each playing a role in shaping our behaviour, emotions, and overall well-being.

In IFS, the term “parts” refers to the various aspects of our personality, emotions, memories, and experiences. These parts can range from protective mechanisms and coping strategies to the wounded inner children and the essence of our authentic self. They emerge as a result of past experiences, trauma, and conditioning, often with the intention of safeguarding us from pain.

Key Principles of Internal Family Systems

1. Self-Leadership: Just as in Psychosynthesis, the central concept in IFS is the notion of the Self, which represents the core of our being and possesses qualities such as curiosity, compassion, and calmness. The goal of IFS therapy is to help individuals access and strengthen their Self, allowing it to become the leader of their inner system. When the Self is empowered, it can facilitate healing and harmony among the various parts.

2. Multiplicity of Parts: IFS recognizes that we are composed of multiple parts, each with its own distinct experiences, emotions, and beliefs.

   GENERAL GROUPS OF PARTS

   • EXILES

     1. These parts are often burdened with feelings of shame, fear, and worthlessness, stemming from past traumas or adverse experiences. They are called "exiles" because, in an attempt to protect the overall system, other parts of the psyche (like managers and firefighters) push these painful parts out of conscious awareness.

     2. Exile parts carry the raw wounds of our past. These could be unresolved grief, abandonment, rejection, or any form of emotional trauma. The primary function of these parts is to protect us by holding onto the pain, thus preventing it from overwhelming our daily functioning. However, because they are so burdened with negative emotions, they can significantly impact our behavior and mental health if not addressed. When exiled, these parts can become increasingly extreme and desperate in an effort to be cared for and tell their story.

     3. When exile parts are triggered, they can cause intense emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to the present situation. For instance, an exile carrying the burden of childhood rejection might cause an adult to feel an overwhelming sense of abandonment when a friend cancels plans. These parts can also contribute to patterns of self-sabotage, low self-esteem, and various mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

   • MANAGERS

     1. Parts that run the day-to-day life of the individual and attempt to keep the individual in control of every situation and relationship in an effort to protect parts from feeling any hurt or rejection.

     2. They do this in any number of ways or through a combination of parts -- striving, controlling, evaluating, caretaking, and perhaps even terrorizing.

     3. These parts try to keep the exiled parts from surfacing by controlling the inner and outer world. They may use strategies in the Self’s life excessive worrying about everything, demanding perfectionism in their jobs or with their children, or being overly critical of the Self or their loved ones.   

   • FIREFIGHTERS

     1. These parts take over when an exiled part's pain breaks through to put out the emotional fire. They do so by engaging in behaviors that provide immediate relief or distraction, such as substance abuse, overeating, compulsive behaviors like self mutilation (cutting) or sex binges.

     2. They try to soothe, control and extinguish the exile’s feelings and help the Self to regain composure in the fastest way possible or until the Self is worn out.

3. The process of healing the exile parts in our personal family system (the Self) involves using the Self’s inherent compassion and wisdom to connect with these wounded parts through talk therapy.

   Here’s how the process typically unfolds in therapy:

   1. Identify and Access the Self: The therapist helps the individual connect with their core Self, which serves as a compassionate and non-judgmental leader of the internal family system.

   2. Recognize and Befriend Exiles: The Self gently engages with the exile parts, acknowledging their pain and understanding the burdens that they carry.

   3. Unburden the Exiles: Through compassionate dialogue and various therapeutic techniques, the exile parts are encouraged to release the burdens of pain and trauma they have been carrying.

   4. Integrate and Transform: Once unburdened, the exile parts can transform and integrate into the overall internal family system in a healthier, more balanced way, leading to greater emotional harmony and resilience.

   IFS has proven to be particularly effective in working with trauma survivors and individuals with inner child emotional wounds. By acknowledging and validating the experiences of wounded inner child, IFS provides a nurturing environment for healing and transformation. Through compassionate exploration, individuals can help their inner child parts find safety, release burdens, and reconnect with their innate resilience.

https://ifs-institute.com/resources/articles/internal-family-systems-model-outline

https://www.traumawarriors.online/internal-family-systems-revealing-the-inner-world-of-parts/

“Relating all this to psychedelics, they take the Managers ‘offline,’ which enhances the presence of the Self and allows the Self to interact with the Exiles in a healing way.”

- Richard Schwartz

Inner Healing Intelligence, Inner Genius, Wise Mind…reorganizing this page

These terms seem to be referring to the same thing.