The Spiritual Roots of the 12 Steps – Peterson – Shadow Work – Book Study – Part 1 of 2 – Cody P.

Can you hear me? We good? All right. So the recording should have started, and I will do my best to share my screen now. And there we go. Just got to get situated here. All right, so thanks for coming. Thank you, Patrick, for your help. It's much appreciated as well as you, Duncan. You're a great bus driver. So yeah, it's quite an honor, I guess, that people are interested in coming to hear me talk about my book. You know, it seemed like there was a long time where I was the only one that wanted to talk about it and everyone around me was like, dude, shut up. We're so sick of hearing about your book. So yeah. This is great. It's a conversation I've been longing to have for quite a while. so um this is obviously called shadow work this is session two uh the the name of the chapter we're going to go through chapter one today psychological roots um and yeah we're just kind of meander through the book i'm doing my best to bring in stuff into these um sessions that's not in the book and sort of give a little bit of extra information and and perhaps some depth. I had a really good editor throughout the process of writing it, and I cut a lot of stuff out. So what's kind of in there is really just the bare bones enough to kind of keep it moving at a fast pace so that hopefully people can get to the chapters near the end, which I think are full of the best stuff. So as has been said, the book is available on Amazon. It's also available on Kindle. You can get it on my website. That's how it's spelled, codyhackinpeterson.com. um i'm going to post links to these videos there um so you can find them because um i know friendly circle berlin has so many videos sometimes it can be hard to find stuff um and i want to say here um that i just just to be clear like this this is not this i don't think these sessions or my book should be understood as a way to replace working in the 12 steps you know the steps themselves are really inspired. My book is a love letter to the steps, really. And I think that that's the best place to start. You know, if somebody is really interested in implementing the information that I'm talking about in the book and in these seminars, it's really good to have that foundation in the 12 steps. They really are a great method of making the shadow conscious. So jumping right in. So we're, we're really looking at part one, um, the mythological mice, my Celia of the 12 steps means means really interested in the way I pronounce certain words. My Sally is one of them. So, um and what I look at in this, in this part of the book is really the historical thread that ties Bill Wilson to Carl Jung and to William James, right? And, um he, you know, Wilson had dubbed both of these men as co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous um and and it's important to understand too that when we tie Bill Wilson to them we also tie ourselves to them right so we're sort of we exist in this sort of chain right this this kind of chain that actually extends way back way way back um and hopefully forward right so what we're looking at then is our spiritual roots. And so this part one consists of the first four chapters of the book. And what I kind of look at this historical portion, I guess, is something like the genesis of AA and the 12 steps, right? We're looking at what took place in the hearts and minds of the people who are most instrumental leading up to the advent of the 12 Steps, right. So my mycelia is defined as sort of the fibrous thread-like strands that form the subterranean strata of, of mushrooms, similar to root matter of like a forest, which that's called the rhizome. So we're going to look at both of those things in these first four chapters. Um, so kind of what we're looking at then is what, what are, what were the little offshoots, right? The, the offshoits of spiritual practice that like kind of sprouted, right? And that would grow and form into the 12 steps. Also interesting that I just like the word mycelia because mushrooms become an important part of what we talk about, especially in chapter two. So also I want to say kind of the concept that I'm trying to work with here as I write the book is that we sort of, as we go through the book, we try to go deeper and deeper, i guess into um the subterranean psychic depths right so um we're and as we do that we descend deeper and deeper into the history of religion and mythology as well it's kind of one in the same right that's that's kindof the essence of the collective unconscious so and and the hope is that by the end of these sessions um and and after one reads my book they'll have kind of a working knowledge or understanding of jungian concepts and how they correlate with the twelve steps. And also one thing I want to kind of point out here, which would be that really the goal, I guess, is that maybe each of us can learn to cultivate our own myth, right? That's really the process of Jungian individuation is that a person discovers their own myth and that they learn to live their own Myth of Meaning. And I think that that's a really interesting corollary with the 12 steps, right? That we figure out how to improve conscious contact with God as we understand God. So just a quick side note. So I'm going to talk about myth a lot. So I'm trying to get us more and more familiar and comfortable with the word myth. So this is what Joseph Campbell says. He was a great mythographer and he's a Jungian at heart. He says, from the point of view of any orthodoxy, myth might be defined simply as other people's religion, to which an equivalent definition of religion would be misunderstood mythology. The misunderstanding consisting in the interpretation of mythic metaphors as references to hard fact. The virgin birth, for example, as a biological anomaly or the promised land is a portion of the Near East to be claimed and settled by a people chosen of God. The term God here understood to be as denoting an actual, though invisible, masculine personality who created the universe and is now resident in an invisible, though actual heaven to which the justified will go when they die there to be joined at the end of time by their resurrected bodies. So Camel and really by extension myself is trying to is really challenging the conventional conception we have of religious symbolism. right and what and what we're trying to do so and it's important to recognize that we all have these same prejudices whether we're staunch believers or staunch non-believers right um and interestingly the prejudice works the same way when we view the symbols as what he called final terms and what he's describing here as um references to cold hard fact then what what we're doing is really blocking ourselves from accessing the power that those symbols actually are supposed to uh invigorate us with right that's why i love that bill wilson says the needed power wasn't there lack of power was our dilemma and he wrote a whole chapter called we agnostics which really addresses this exact thing that that that joseph campbell's referring to here now young as i've said young wants also wants us to completely revamp our approach and to start to view these symbols as tools in our quest to understand the ego's relationship to the to the self or to the unconscious and and in this chat in this verse or verse sorry in this uh paragraph he explains the necessity of exploring our own mythological roots um and and trying to find meaning within our own cultural context this is what jung says a real and essentially religious renewal can be based for us only on christianity the extremely radical reformation of hinduism by the buddha assimilated the traditional spirituality of india in its entirety and did not thrust a rootless novelty upon the world it neither denied nor ignored the hindu pantheon swarming with millions of gods but boldly introduced man who before had not been represented at all any renewal not deeply rooted in the best spiritual tradition is ephemeral but the dominant that grows from the historical roots acts like a living being within the ego bound man so in regards to our relationship to these images then what what can't what what jung is saying here is that we're we want to try to look for meaning within the symbols that we're most familiar with. And he's also explaining that, so that for example, for the modern West, he's sort of outlining the history of sort of the development or the evolution of these mythological symbols, right? Christianity grew out of Judaism. That's what he's saying there, that we really want to build on Christianity because it's sort OF the thing that came next in line as we look at this, this evolution. So, and I find it very interesting what he's saying about the Buddha, right? The Buddha didn't come and just kind of revamp the whole system, but he presented a system that builds on the previous system. And that's exactly what Bill Wilson does as well. So what we're looking at really, in my mind, and one of the sort of the, the thesis, the theses that I make in the book is that the 12 steps are really the next phase of our religious, um, sort of psycho-spiritual development that, and, and that the way the 12 Steps have spread around the world is very similar in my mind to the way, say, Christianity would have spread Around the World in the second and third century. Like it just, it's just this kind of this perfect storm bruise where um that and and these symbols just catch people's imaginations right and they just they just tend to kind of spread like wildfire so um and it's you know it's an interesting concept that we're looking at really is here sort of the beginnings of this giant kind of spiritual movement that's taking place um so another thing i want to point out here is that so i make the case in in what we're going to read this next paragraph is that william james and carl jung were riding the razor's edge of thought in terms of spiritual transformation right and bill wilson catches that wave and continues to ride it and helps to sort of build momentum and then all of us jump on that wave right so we're all sort of doing this. We're pushing the limits of spiritual consciousness of the human race. So, the first paragraph in the book is right here. It's the first paragraph in chapter one. It says, so, the subject here is we're talking about Wilson's spirituality and I'm trying to challenge sort of this idea so there's this sort of myth, I guess, in AA that Wilson really reformulated the Oxford Group principles to come up with the 12 steps. And I know that's true to a certain extent, right? But there was something else taking place in Wilson's life that's very important and that I think we haven't really taken a very hard look at. And so that's what I'm doing here. So spiritual enlightenment, it says, is all but impossible to achieve without experienced guides to lead the way. Yet those who led Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, to his own spiritual awakening were not priests, bishops, or rabbis as one might expect. Rather, Wilson's spiritual transformation emerged with the help of two psychologists he never met who themselves were riding the razor's edge of thought in what was still a nascent branch of science. Thanks to their influence, Wilson was able to cultivate a unique perspective on spiritual experience leading to the formulation of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, an unquantifiable gift for today's troubled world. Wilson first published the steps in his 1939 book AlcoholicsAnonymous, colloquially known as The Big Book, and while his big book does contain references to some of the same symbols found in traditional religion, the method he portrayed came to him as the result of his concerted efforts to bypass religious convention and to adopt an approach to transformation that resembled the one being advanced by the psychologists so um what so basically and what we're doing then is is we're gonna we're going to try to sniff out this line of thought in bill wilson with this and this sort of great you know tradition that he actually inherited from the psychologist more so than he knew it. And that's the subject of these first four chapters. Now, right here, I run into a little bit of controversy and Ming's been telling me, and I agree, that I need to kind of lean into this controversy as I'm doing these talks, right? Because it kind of helps to make them interesting. We all love a little drama. So when I was finishing the book, I started asking for blurbs and I talked about that last week. But I also, you know, when you write a book and you quote people and, and you have these big long quotes and stuff and citations that the convention is to ask for permission, right. To, to cite, uh, these different, um, authors and publishers in your work. And so I started writing emails to different publishers and whatnot. And, and I wrote an email to GSO of Alcoholics Anonymous, basically asking for permission to cite the big book and um they they said yeah sure send us back what you're uh they didn't say yes you're actually they said respond with with kind of what the quotes are and then we'll we'll get back to you so i sent over a manuscript basically and they they the the response they sent me was like shocking um because they basically said you know we unfortunately have the email here it says we unfortunately have to deny your request we only give permission to reprint limited amounts of material when someone is creating an original work a material should represent only a tiny fraction of the whole piece additionally the use of large amounts of our material would create the appearance that the work emanates from this office and would apply imply affiliation between the publisher in this office um and and so as a matter of policy they must deny their request and when i got this email i was like oh my god like what am i gonna do you know like i've I've, I've created this whole work now and it turns out I'm not supposed to even cite Bill Wilson. And so I started calling my people and one guy told me that I could just rewrite the sections that I was quoting and put them in my own words. And frankly, that felt more, that just felt like being a hack. Like I want to maintain my academic integrity here. um and and and also like i have pretty strong um opinions about this i think bill wilson deserves credit for the profound ideas that he put forth so for me to just kind of rewrite those just doesn't feel good um but as i was digging around on the internet and i kind of had a hunch that this might be the case so this this actually this is a screenshot from aa.org itself and this sort of let me off the hook right uh what is the copyright status of the big book the first and second editions of the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous are in the public domain in the United States only. The third and fourth editions remain copyright protected worldwide, including the U S given that the internet is a worldwide medium permission must be requested from AAWS for all internet postings of all editions of The Big Book, Alcoholic Anonymous. So anyways, I'm just enough of a rebel, I guess that I, so that I just decided I'm just going to roll with it and I'll just cite the first edition. And so that's what you're reading about there in that first, that first footnote. Right. You know, because, and this is the thing by, by not citing Bill Wilson, I don't think we're doing him or anyone else a very big favor. Most therapists and professionals I've found, they don't really think that here in the 12 step fellowships that were much more than anything, but a peer support group. And I think part of that stems from the fact that we have this sort of dire lack of scholarship in our fellowships you know people that write books are usually kind of poo-pooed in in some circles right like that they're trying to profit off of off of the 12 steps or something and i think it's funny that's exactly what they were um accusing bill wilson of when he wrote the big book that's that's kind of what i read in william shaver um so but you know that said um i want to shout out to Patrick again, because like this group in particular seems to be encouraging this deeper discourse. Right. And, and, and really trying to show the world and the professional community that what we're doing here is really is good stuff. It's, it's very worthy and it's, it's not peer support. Like we get some peer support while we're here, but there's something so much more profound that's happening as we practice these 12 steps. And I really, wanted to explore this in my book and I'm really happy, I must say that there's been a certain level of acceptance, I guess, among at least among the Jungians so far that they're reading this and they're kind of taking it seriously because what I tried to do was display what we do in the 12 steps but using Jungian language to describe it and I think it seems to have been getting their attention. All right. Now I'll get off my soapbox. So in the foreword last week, we read about what Stephen Herman calls the quintessentially American approach to spirituality that was to kind of percolate into the 12 steps. The reason for that is because in very large measure, this we owe the steps sort of at least the inspiration for the steps to this guy, William James, the father of American psychology. So I write, what would ultimately coalesce into Bill Wilson's own spiritual journey can be traced directly to the influence of one of these scientists in particular, the American psychologist and author William James, who was himself no stranger to the power of mystical experiences. and a quick historical sketch on James. He was born in 1842 in New York city. His dad was really wealthy. Um, and his dad was a businessman. I think he was in textiles or something and he ended up converting to Christianity and he became a published author himself. I think he wrote nine or 10 books on Christianity, like on Christian dogma. Um James studied Harvard, uh, studied medicine at Harvard. And while he was a student, he toured the world. He went to south america and europe and he met all these famous psychologists and stuff he was um he had you know that he was very privileged so uh and in in 1873 he began teaching harvard teaching at harvard um and he started teaching physiology in the beginning and then in 1875 he offered the first class in the new science of experimental psychology to ever be taught in america um and then three years later he gave the first doctorate of psychology ever given in amerika to stanley hall one of his students so now when he was a kid so um you know i'm just gonna read this as influential as henry senior uh james's father was young william was perhaps inspired even more by another writer for just before his birth in 1842 his father became close friends with the esteemed ralph waldo emerson who had been blazing his own path to transcendence through his poetry and essays emerson became williams god william's godfather conferring a blessing upon him at his birth destining him to carry forth the same mantle to proclaim a new and quintessentially american approach to spirituality according to union author and analyst stephen herman it was a vocation for which james was well prepared in his book william james and cg young doorways to the south herman tells us that james spent much of his youth listening to his father's animated debates with emerson on topics of religion spirituality and writing so um you know and i have emerson's room in in quotes up there because emerson would come and like spend time at at the james's house so they had a room set aside and probably what was their mansion with a little sign over the door that said uh emerson'S ROOM and um and so so what i find interesting here is that we're tracing this lineage back to william james and then we go back to emerson obviously we could trace emersonS roots um and we can trace this thing all the way back through the ages if we want to um now in his personal life william james was really the definition of what we might call a seeker his journals and letters are full of um his his writings and sort of he i've said this in other talks like he was literally obsessed with experience in the mystical like it was all he could think about it's all he wrote wrote about um you know he he ends up developing the science, the psychology is based on sort of this, the experience of the mystical. One of those experiences came to him in 1896 and he took a hiking trip in upstate New York to Mount Marcy, I think they call it a mountain back there. It's like 5,000 feet. Right. So, and one night when he was camping on Mount Marci, he got up and he walked outside of the tent and then what happened next would stick to him for many years. So there was like, he says there was a full moon and the it was really quiet right and he says i got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description and then he goes through and sort of describes the atmosphere that he was feeling he says the intense inhumane remoteness of its inner life and yet the intense appeal of it its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay all world inexplicably together it was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence and i understand now what a poet is he is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that i have felt and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement so um typical of william james right even in his a letter to his wife he's extremely verbose but but this experience would sort of become a catalyst to what to to james's writing of of um of varieties of religious experience that's those that's basically a quote from from biographer robert richardson who wrote uh this book um about william james it's a great it's great biography of william James so um so the variety of religious experiences so in 1901 and 1902 James had traveled over to the UK to the University of Edinburgh and he delivered a series of lectures called the gifford lectures and then the next year he just he you know a little later he decided to publish those in a book and the book was called the varieties of religious experience and so and and so what i'm kind of examining here is the state of psychology when he published varieties okay so it says and this is um out of my book chapter one when james wrote varieties the field of modern psychology was still in its infancy having been largely influenced by Sigmund Freud. On the other side of the Atlantic, William James, the leading thinker in the burgeoning science of experimental psychology in the U.S., took the opposite stance. Not only did he put stock in the validity and power of his own mystical experiences, many of which came to him while intoxicated on nitrous oxide, through his research, James discovered that people from all walks of life have at times undergone profound psychological transformations that have had the earmarks of what he called religious conversions yet most of these awakenings james noticed occurred outside of traditional religious channels leading him to theorize that something inherent within the human psyche brings them about quite apart from one's connection to any particular religious dogma and so that what what we're exploring here sort of is what would end up becoming this sort of the most important philosophy, I guess, that James put out there, which is called radical empiricism. And radical empiricism essentially states that more important than any of the facts surrounding these religious conversions or these mystical experiences is actually the story that we tell ourselves about them so it kind of goes back to what dr ben was talking about right in terms of narrative psychology that it's not about the facts right the facts are one thing but what's far more important is how is the meaning and value that we inject into these experiences and that that goes for mystical experiences as well as traumatic experiences that we have and just pretty much anything right like the story that we tell ourselves is so important um so and really so as mean as humans right meaning we we derive meaning from the stories that we tell so another subject that james broaches in varieties of religious experience is what he called the psychology of religion and this would be this was extremely important for the 12 steps because this is something that Carl Jung really hung on later on. And this is what I say, James was in fact so impressed by the evidence that subjectively defined religious experiences had the ability to transform the psyche that he began to inextricably link the fields of religion and psychology. His resulting theories emphasize the need for an element of spirituality in the psychologist's understanding of human transformation, something he termed the psychology of religion. By the turn of the century, James had begun to single-handedly change the course of both fields, defining the direction that each would take into the 20th century and beyond. For his book Varieties was a groundbreaking study on the power of religious images in treating many types of neuroses, not the least of which was alcoholism and drug addiction. Reading James's varieties was instrumental in Bill Wilson's own quest towards continued sobriety, becoming a primary source of understanding and inspiration for the spiritual program he laid out in Alcoholics Anonymous. So in other words, by having such a profound influence on Bill Wilson on one hand, and then Carl Jung on the other hand, William James single-handedly begins to alter the course of psychology and religion. And we're still experiencing those profound shifts today. A perfect example of this, which I find just absolutely fascinating, is that practically every single religion, at least in the West, sections from these religions have tried to adopt The Twelve Steps as part of their own sort of program in order to help people experience transformation. um if if uh if the psychologist is called to help people transform and change their lives you know william james was really onto something because he started studying these different spiritual experiences that people were having in order to experience this transformation and he basically is saying like hey if we're talking about transformation here we need to we need to take these accounts into serious consideration because they seem to actually have far more efficacy than this like hyper scientific approach and that leads us into sigmund freud right so jay in because in contrast to james's approach um that freud basically held he holds that religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses so freud is basically like he's he's kind of anti-religious right um he just he doesn't think that it has really anything to offer. And he's more about like addressing trauma and stuff like this, but on the, on the other side of it, James, you know, he recognizes that traumatic, you Know, we need to look at trauma, right? But that more than that, the process of psychological transformation is to help one discover their higher self or as James put it to, to conjoin the divided self, right. He, he talks about this thing called the divided self um and and obviously jung would end up borrowing that terminology from from james when he um established his own theory about the self so it not only was james open-minded to the idea of religious or spiritual practice but he was also very very democratic you know in his examination of spirituality um and again suggesting that the only thing that matters in these spiritual experiences is literally how much meaning and value we place on them. And this Jungian author, Joseph Henderson, I think he helped establish the Jungian school in San Francisco. He says, not so many years ago in his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James foreshadowed an entirely new psychological relativity towards religious experience. Ignoring theology, he brought to his readers the benefit of an impartial and above all accepting attitude to all forms of religious experience he did not consider some to be higher or lower better or worse than others and um you know i mean here uh henderson really kind of he you know he's pointing really to the same thing that we celebrate so much in the 12 steps right that's spiritual democracy and by the way that spiritual democracy is one of Stephen Herman's terms that he coined, and he actually wrote a book called Spiritual Democracy. So anyways, so this then is sort of the culture of psychology in the early 20th century, where we have Freud on one hand and James on the other, and they're each sort of embodying these two extremes of psychological inquiry. And Freud has his base in Europe, James is over here in america and and there's like these two schools of thought and then in 1909 stanley hall who was james's former student invites 26 of the world's foremost psychologists to come to clark university in massachusetts to to present at a conference on psychology and we can assume i guess that clark would have been or that um stanley howell was at least somewhat inspired by this sort of brewing conflict between the two schools of thought and so he invited both james as well as freud to travel to clark to present at the conference and set to accompany freud was one of his young pupils the up-and-coming 34 year old carl gustav jung so and so and here's a historical sketch so and this is there's like a real fun story here um so jung was a very gifted young man he was born in 1875 his father was a pastor of the swiss reform church and eight of his uncles were also pastors so he's surrounded by this christian kind of lifestyle right it's like probably like growing up in southern utah or something so and so and there's a great story about about jung when he was just a little kid i think he was nine or ten maybe eleven or something and soand he has this growing notion of a kind of a waking dream or a vision and he talks about this in memories dreams reflections his biography so and he tries to he's trying to stave off this thought right and he says there's like this thought in the back of his mind that's trying to like manifest through him and he he's like he fights it for days and days and then finally in a moment of weakness this thought like bursts upon him and you can't help but think it right and this is the thought so he he imagines the chapel it's this beautiful pristine chapel it a nice sunny day and and above it's like there's little clouds and stuff it's just this totally beautiful pristine moment and above the chapel there's like some clouds and the clouds part right and they're sitting god the father on his throne right and he's sitting directly above the chapel and before jung could stop the vision and he begs himself not to have this thought he imagines god taking a giant dump and and this giant turd falls from the sky and lands right on top of the church and then just crushes the church to smithereens and so and so this little kid is having this sort of experience right and um and so young goes through pages of this um bait and basically he tells us that when he had the thought he felt this deep sense of relief right and that you know he and he goes he kind of traces through this like dogma this this christian dogma you know about the and and and he comes to the realization that he had the thought because god wanted him to have the thought the same way god wanted adam and eve to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil so so that's young at like 10 or 11 years old right he's a very deep thinker a few years later he starts reading heady books he reads gerda um he And he loved reading Meister Eckhart. He said that Meister Ekart was his favorite ancient author, and he started reading Measter Ekart when he was 15 years old. He says that Meester Ekart showed him the breath of life, spiritus, right? Then in college, Jung, you know, when he finally goes to college, he studies medicine like James, but again, he transitions into the growing field of psychology. And then in 1909, he begins his tenure tenure at a psychiatric hospital in Zurich called Berghelzi, I think is how you pronounce that. And then in 1905, Jung becomes the director of this hospital. And around this time, he starts sending his papers, the papers that he's written as well as his own books to Freud, right? And he's hoping to get Freud's attention because he feels that he has got something to contribute to the to the field of psychology so and it works freud appreciates what he's reading and then in 1907 the two of them meet for the first time and they they spend 13 hours just in this very long uh drawn out conversation deep into the night um so then you know jung becomes sort of freud's favorite people and then In 1909 the two Of them travel across the atlantic by boat to go to the conference at clark and while they're on the boat freud asks jung to interpret one of his dreams but he admits to holding back a key piece of information for fear of tarnishing his reputation and what happens is this interaction reveals this sort of uncomfortable dynamic that exists between them and jung begins to sense that freud is kind of more interested in in maintaining uh in protecting his own school of thought than he is really applying a scientific method um to try to disprove his own theories right and and um and it turns out james would kind of end end up seeing freud in the same light um and when they arrive at clark a few weeks later jung um he's very moved by his interactions with william james who is actually 33 years older than jung at the time so if you look at this picture william James is the tall guy in the in the tan the light gray um suit uh and then to to the right that's sigmund freud and thento the right is carl jung so so and so so and this this this sort of becomes a really important moment for jung he doesn't spend a lot of time with james he only meets him once and then once more on his way to chicago the next year james was to pass right away right after that but 50 years later in a letter that jung writes he this is that he describes um having met william james and this is what he says apart from the personal impression he made on me i am indebted to james cheap chiefly for his books he was a distinguished personality and conversation with him was extremely pleasant he was quite naturally without affectation and pomposity and answered my questions and interjections as though speaking to an equal unfortunately he was already ailing at the time so i could not press him too hard aside from theodore florney one of young's earlier teachers and a close friend of james james was the only outstanding mind with whom i could conduct an uncomplicated conversation i therefore honor his memory and have always remembered the example he set on me and so this is this beautiful sort of dedication that that jung writes of james um and and jung would actually refer to james many times throughout his career he talks a lot about the psychology of religion and he really and there's actually a whole chapter dedicated to william james in volume six of the collected works called psychological types which i pull a lot of information from in the book but also you might notice here if you if you have the book and you read it uh up to this point that um i pulled the dedication um to the book from this little snippet uh and this is where i dedicate the book to ming um it says i dedicate this book to the only outstanding mind with whom conversation isn't usually complicated ming my magical other and uh so you know Ming's just been great as I kind of poured over this material and continue to pour over it um you know as I said earlier like most of my friends don't want to hear about this book anymore they're sick of it um but but Ming's always been kind of right there with me uh and she's been a great just amazing to be able to bounce these ideas off off of her and just talk about this stuff and she just follows along so well it's amazing um i also want to point out that the phrase the magical other comes from uh james hollis uh who's a union scholar he he wrote in a book called the eden project in search of the magical other and and what james is talking about in this book is really that we tend to fall in love with people who become hooks for our projections right both good and bad and that um we often turn to these magical other people to like fix things for us and to help us uh you know to to make us feel better uh but and the irony is they don't they make us feel worse right uh often when when the projections fall apart but but i think that the paradox here which i've learned from studying the archetype of the alcoholic for instance is that in my case the magical other actually has been a doorway into a deeper understanding right because me and i have really met each other on this path. We're doing therapy, we're doing the 12 step work and, and doing all that stuff together has really made both of us grow. Right? So in a way we, at least for me, she, she really is my magical other. So I just wanted to give that shout out now. Oh, and there's that. So now back to, back to the story ahead. So, and then there's a little kind of side, side story here about when I was writing the book so as I said in September of 2023 I reached out to Stephen Herman um because I knew he had written a book about this sort of influence um about so he he wrote the book called Doorways to the Self I didn't really know what was in it because I hadn't read it but I reached out to him to talk to him and um later I would learn that Herman's sort of own personal vocation if you will has been to help show the world how much William James influenced Carl Jung and um so but there's this point of synchronicity that takes place because while I'm talking to Herman um he's we're exploring like this concept of anonymity and he's he's a professional so and I'm trying to explain to him why I want to keep my anonymity as I'm writing this book and he sort of pushing back he's like well I don't see why that's useful like it doesn't make sense from a professional standpoint. You know, if you don't put yourself in the book, it sounds like you're talking about these other people and that just seems weird. So anyway, so I started really looking at how I was going to handle anonymity. And I asked my sponsor, um, you know, and explain to him all of this. And he, he responded very humbly and said, Hey man, I don't, I don'T really know what to tell you about how to handle this. I think you should call our friend Billy N. So, so I got Billy's number from him and I called Billy and, um, And Billy's just great, right? Because he's a trusted servant, right. And he understands sort of the technical aspect of like the politics, I guess, of 12-step culture, which is very useful, right, but he's also very non-dogmatic. And so we had this great talk about anonymity and I wanna clarify this because I don't think I really touched on it very well last week, is his advice to me was that I can say anything I want as long as I don't say that I'm a member of any particular 12-step fellowship. And that made sense to me. He said, of course, there's some personal things that I need to figure out regarding the 12th tradition. But technically speaking, if I don'T go out and proclaim that I'M a member OF this or that fellowship, then I'M keeping the anonymity statement pretty well. And so that became very useful. But then this other point of synchronicity begins to develop because Billy tells me that he just loves this topic and he's so excited. And he didn't know anything about Stephen Herman, but he's like, dude, I've been reading about William James and Carl Jung at this Clark University conference. Like it's so amazing. And so Billy offers to send me this little book. It's out of print. It's called Incredible Daydream. And it's written by a Clark University historian. So he sends it to me. And then, and this little paragraph in the book is highlighted. um and and this is what it says james so this is william colch he's the historian that worked at clark and he wrote this in the 80s he says jane was far more impressed with jung than with freud and the regard was mutual they had a long evening conversation at hall's house discussing such topics as parapsychology and the psychology of religious experience which james had opened up a few years before in his famous gifford lectures and which jung was to develop far more fully after his break with Freud. And so there we have that, right? That psychology of religious experience. And keep in mind, Jung at this time is really steeped in psychoanalysis or in Freud's school of thought. So when he comes over here, fresh off the experience on the boat and really kind of at that midlife point, he was 33 years old or 34 years old, James becomes a profoundly, profoundly um influence a profound influence on on carl jung's personal life so and and the question then is sort of what happens when they're alone what do they what do THEY discuss this seems to me to be of particular uh interest because um recall like i i said earlier and read some stuff from from william james's personal letters like he was obsessed with whether or not he had had of religious experience. Like, I mean, his book Varieties of Religious Experiences is it's so just it's dripping in spirituality. Right. And and so and and it becomes clear from from Stephen Herman studies that whatever took place between them during this time was of such magnitude that it would really end up shaping the course of Jung's life from then on. But what's really interesting about this, you guys, is that this is a very controversial topic in Jungian schools. They don't they don't believe this. They don't see it. They just they haven't even thought about it because they're they're European. Right. And this is sort of the American thing of what happened over here. So Stephen Herman's really tried to make a big deal about this and tried to get the word out that how really how influential James was now when I was writing this chapter because i've been working with dr herman and i wrote this chapter when my editor read it she's she's a jungian and she i mean she was like straight up like this i've never heard this before i've been doing this stuff for 30 years like you can't just put this in here you you're gonna have to back this up a lot more and so i did i did a lot More digging and that's kind of why some of those details are in that first chapter um and what i discovered was that there's not very many scholars who really have even broached this subject, right? That it's kind of like a handful. And I talk about them in the book. So Eugene Taylor was a Harvard Divinity School professor. He wrote some essays about this in the 1970s. William Kolsch obviously was a scholar who kind of talks about this in 1984. Sonu Shamdasani, who is a great Jungian scholar who I think he's in Europe now. He wrote an essay called Memories, Dreams and Omissions in 1999. So he got permission to go in and study the notes and like the original manuscripts of Jung's biography. He was actually studying the connection with Flourney. But while he was in there, he recognized that there was actually a whole chapter that was supposed to be included in Memories Dreams and Reflections, but it got omitted, right? So that's part of that omitted section of Jung biography, which also doesn't help to establish james's influence at all um and then obviously more importantly we have steven herman's book doorways to the self which is really kind of the um the the authority on the subject um if you're interested in it i highly recommend reading it so and this is what steven uh says in doorways he says in 1913 jung said that he had lost contact with his soul in 1902 the basic attitude jung found in william james and that so appealed to him when he rediscovered his soul after meeting James in 1909 at Clark is a similar one he discovered first in adolescence when he studied Meister Eckhart. And so what happens here then is that Carl Jung, upon meeting William James, he starts to see William James as something of a guru. And Stephen Herman actually uses that phrase guru. So and so Jung kind of gets set back on the track towards enlightenment, right? That he had first kind of, I guess at least dabbled in as a youngster when he started studying Meister Eckhart. So what happens is Jung begins to separate himself more and more from psychoanalysis and begins, he really begins this sort of desperate search to discover his own myth, right? And this, as we're going to see over the next few weeks, this becomes the precursor of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics, whatever. They're just the 12 steps in general. And so, and interestingly this, and I do wanna say this, this is part of my research, which I'm very happy about is that this Jung's search for his own meaning really culminates literally weeks, just weeks before he meets Roland Hazard in 1926. And I find that just highly fascinating in terms of the message we have from in our literature about that meeting. So, and then obviously I just wanna read this again. I love this quote. This is from the first page of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. This is Jung telling us about the discovery of his own myth. He says, thus it is I have now undertaken in my 83rd year to tell my personal myth. 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. Really hearkening back then to James's radical empiricism, right? I just love that in the beginning of a biography that Jung's telling us, don't worry too much about the timeline or whether this happened or that happened. It's been a long time. I don't remember most of this stuff, but what's important is that I'm telling you my story here where I find meaning. Now, back in Europe, the dynamic between Jung and Freud began to worsen and their friendship deteriorated. By 1913, Freud had had enough and sent a letter to Jung in which he carefully remunerated his defects, ending the relationship in such a way that both men would struggle to reconcile for the rest of their lives. I therefore propose that we abandon our relations entirely, wrote Freud. They never spoke again. In turn, Jung began to develop his own school of scientific thought, analytical psychology, a model that echoed James's approach far more than Freud's. And in conclusion, yet it was James's influence upon Jung's personal psychology that would lead to the creation of AA. For after he met James, Jung set out to discover his own part in the divine drama in which man plays, embarking upon a quest for what he would eventually call his own myth, the direct precursor to the spiritual journey that inspired Bill Wilson to compose The Twelve Steps. And that is all she wrote. So let's see here. I'm going to try to stop sharing oh and i'll stop recording