Shadow Work and the 12 Steps – Peterson – Shadow Work – Book Study – Part 2 of 2 – Cody P.

um and then i have to share did it okay so i didn't show it's recording yeah all right i didn'T do that on my end and here we go share screen um i gotta do this first sorry guys thanks for being here and thanks for being so patient one more thing before you're getting started there cody if folks have questions you can chat to me in the chat and I'll do my best to field your questions during the meeting today thanks all right so um all righty all rightie so thank you for coming um this so the the name I guess of this this group and this sort of workshop is shadow work This is session one. I'm open minded to doing, you know, a chapter a week, depending on the interest. Obviously, if it was just me and Duncan and Ming, we might not do 20 weeks, but I'm super. I mean, I'm very excited about it. So if you guys want to do it, we'll we'll will we'll do it. So obviously, we're going to go through the book, The Shadow of the Figure of Light, The Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment. And so what and I guess sort of like a something I'd like to keep in mind as we go through here is something Jung said that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the world around us is to make the shadow conscious. And so that's sort of something that I suppose I want to try to do. That's kind of the purpose of the book, if you will, is to help people make their shadow conscious。 um and i also want to be clear that this sort of workshop i guess is not should not be seen as a replacement for doing the 12 steps um the 12 sets are probably the most effective method available to us to make the shadow conscious so if you haven't done the steps i would recommend starting there um and so the intro uh we're going to go through the intro today um i'm this session is called personal roots also it's the introduction is named the same thing and really what i go through in this chapter is just to describe how my how my own story plays into the work and it's not so because i don't share my story in the book um i have a really kind of run-of-the-mill story and i just don't think it's anything to write about so but i i did need to i mean i'm not a Jungian, right? So I'm not educated. I have an associate's degree, but the Jungians have many years of schooling. But I needed to kind of establish myself and a little bit of sort of what I bring to the work. And that happens to be my experience, right. That's sort of what gives me my expertise. So also I want to say some of the material will be repeated a little bit from the other talks that I've given. Um, and, but we're going to cover what we're going to in these workshops is going to go at a much slower pace and really kind of, um, lay that stuff out in, in a lot more detail. And, um, so, and also during the workshops, I'll try to include stuff that maybe got cut from the book or different, just, you know, different quotes and things that kind of weave through that can maybe, uh, enhance what's already in there so the book obviously this is a cover um it's available at my website www.codypeterson-codypederson.com you can also get them at amazon like duncan said we're hoping to get the the kindle versions available uh very soon you can aussi buy them directly from the publisher at um chironpublications.com i'm happy to say they are a pretty major publishing house um and and so i'm really happy that they chose to um that they choose to publish the book that was a real honor so and i want to go through real quickly just the blurbs like i just want to start with the cover so uh the first one is murray stein and there's just like a fun story so steve and i'll talk more about steven herman too as i go through he actually became a mentor for me and he agreed to write the forward to the book and after he had written the forward and the book was kind of getting near completion, I decided to email Murray Stein and just straight up ask him if he would be willing to write a blurb for me. So and if you're not familiar, Murray Stein is sort of one of the kind of leaders, I guess, among the Jungian crowd. He's got many published books and he's pretty famous worldwide. And he actually, you know, he agreed. He told me to send him over a copy. And man, and when I sent that copy over, that was like it think you know shit got real right then because i was like oh man like if this isn't good like i'm i'm in trouble you know and he responded like a couple days later and was like hey i really like this like congratulations i'm happy to write a blurb for you and that was really just like that was an amazing experience i was very happy when that happened um the next blurb uh is from someone that you guys may know it's it was jay um and he so jay there's a funny story with that too and jay's been extremely helpful so so i kind of begged jay to read the manuscript and i think once murray signed he realized murray had written a blurb he decided that he would um at least give it a shot so he agreed to read it with the condition that he was gonna he would he would only start it he didn't he didn'T promise to finish it and he said that if if it didn'T hold his attention, then he just wouldn't be able to read it. And that's just how it was. And so I sent it to him and I was a little nervous about it. After a couple of weeks or a month or so, I followed up and he said, hey, you know, I love reading. I've read the first 50 pages. I'll happily write a blurb for you. And then he wrote a blurbs and this is the blurb. And there was something about this blurb that really struck me because he noticed something in the narrative that i didn't notice and and i just want to read it real quick he says with the introduction of a shamanic character jaime peterson infuses the bill wilson cg young narrative with insights of indigenous spiritual investigations refracting aspects of young's personal adventure through a carlos castaneda like lens this book should prove helpful to anyone seeking to comprehend the shadowland of alcoholism and and I really love that he he recognized that sort of don juan uh, esque, um, kind of essence to the book. And if you've read Carlos Castaneda, um, then, then you'll, you'll. And after you read my book, you're, you see that sort of connection there. Uh, and it, because it has to do with kind of psychedelics in this sort of like, almost like legendary story. Right. Um, so that, that was a great, it was a great honor to get a blurb from Jay. And then Ian McCabe is another gentleman who wrote a blurbs. And I'm really happy that he also agreed. He did introduce me a couple of weeks ago at the Berlin workshop, and he had some very nice things to say. Once he started reading the book, he kept sending me emails like every hour or so and just telling me how happy he was with the work. So and that was another just really great experience for me. And then finally, David Shane, who wrote the book The War of the Gods and Addiction, which some of you may have read. So and David Shane read he read the manuscript and and basically straight up said, I don't agree with everything that you say in here. so we ended up kind of talking about it quite a bit and he wrote a blurb anyways and I couldn't help but include this little section um on the back of the book you know even though I don't agree with all of his conclusions I recommend this book wholeheartedly so I thought that was that's a great blurb so I'm just I wanted to go through those uh because they make me very happy so um moving right along so I wantedto talk about um you know the cover as well and the cover art So and the title. So I actually didn't have a title until the book was almost done. And Stephen Herman had had recommended he mentioned a quote to me. And then when he said the quote, like the title kind of popped into my mind. And the reason I like the titled is because it really it calls to this sort of paradox. Right. That that I examined throughout the book. Right. And I like what Jung says about paradox. He says that it's an affront to the logic of conscious or to the yeah, to the logic of consciousness. And it does more justice to this great mystery than clarity can do. And what I find is that paradox sort of helps to collapse the ego, which is really fixated on this sort of rational kind of explanation of everything, right? And so the question of can a figure of light have a shadow? Does a figure like cast a shadow. So I just thought that was an, it was just interesting. And I was happy to include that. As far as the subtitle, The Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment. Now the alcoholic then becomes sort of this main paradoxical figure that I examine in the book. And there, there was this, it's a really important idea that it's actually developing more and more as I go. um it's related to the shaman it's related to The Trickster and then for for any Jungians that are with us today it's also related to uh the the character of Mercurius which is uh an alchemical figure that Jung was really studying and did a lot of writing about um so and then so as far as the cover art so my friend Abe uh he he drew this he actually carves it from um he carved it out of i think out of vinyl and then he he prints them and um and i i hadn't chosen this for the cover uh either until after i wrote um the story of jaime and young which we're going to go through in the first two or three chapters um and and once i saw this this piece i was like oh man i this would be a perfect cover for the book so i asked abe if i could use it. And he agreed. And it's really cool, because Abe was kind of like one of my childhood heroes, because he was such a good artist in high school. And so it was kind of really fun to be able to use a piece of his art on the cover and just to sort of celebrate his work. So this would be another sort of paradoxical image. And once we get through these first few chapters, you'll see why I chose this one. But one thing I'd like to point out about this piece is that if you look at him, so one of his feet is bigger than the others and that's because he's actually walking towards us. All right. And so, and I think that becomes a really good symbol of the self that's always making gestures towards us that, and that we need to be curious and available to understand and to recognize those sort of gestures, right? Those beckons from, uh, the unconscious is beckoning. Right. Also, um, Abe's, uh. Let's see here. Abe's Abe's handle is at Chuck Walla press. So you can find him on Twitter. You can find him on Instagram if you're interested in looking at more of his art. Also this little logo down here at Alki archetype. That's my Twitter handle, my Instagram handle and stuff. So you can follow me there. Um, so I was talking about the archetype of the alcoholic and that was sort of this paradoxical image that i formulated in the book and this this this quote right here it's not meant to be understood very well at this section this is the epilogue so this is found on page like zero right um right after the acknowledgments and and i just want to read this because this this sort of lays the groundwork for what the book's going to cover and and really what i what i appreciate most about this it just it plays in so well to everything we're going to cover in the book, including Freud and Jung's relationship and when their relationships started to deteriorate in 1909 after Jung met William James. And here you can see Jung beginning to really kind of push against Freud. And what he says here is like, is really profound in terms of the archetype of the alcoholic. He says, 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 trait trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea and without which no irresistible mass movement can come into being i think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth ever so gently to transform christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine which he was and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were a drunken feast of joy where men regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. And so I guess in a very real way, the 294 pages that follow are meant to be really commentary on this specific quote. So I'm not even going to try to explain everything that it means, but it might be worth referring back to if you're going to go through the book. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about the foreword, and I didn't send over the forward um because i didn't plan on covering much of it but then i decided that i probably should yesterday so in this in this um so steven herman i mean i'm going to talk more about him as we go but he wrote the forward for me he's a great jungian analyst and an author and he was he was a mentor to me during part of the process so um and here he introduces this sort of myth of expanding consciousness that i'm gonna talk about um as we go and he says the quintessentially American approach to spirituality that has spread around the world was a vocation William James and Carl Gustav Jung both wrote out of, and they taught their new vision of what it means to live a spiritual or symbolic life through their collected writings. Wilson caught this wave of American spirituality in a way the culture was ready for when The Big Book was published in 1939. Today, 85 years later, with the scholarship in Jamesian pragmatism and Jungian analytical psychology peterson has managed to master readers will be glad to imbibe his own spiritual offering so what we're looking at here then is is it's sort of a continuation i guess um the the roots of this myth of expanding consciousness right this sort of method of making uh the shadow conscious is is really one that has deep roots in american culture and american psychology which we're going to get into quite a bit as we move into these first four chapters and and the part one of the book is called the mythological mycelia of the 12 steps so it's really historical and and it really examines carl jung's life right before he met roland hazard and um um and specifically what what we're going to talk about in those first four characters is jung's relationship to william james who's pictured here so that's carl jung on the right william james on the left who is already an old man then we're going to talk about jung's relationship to jaime de angelo who was an alcoholic spaniard and who led jung on sort of a vision quest to taos new mexico and that's where jung's own myth of meaning began to emerge and that myth of meeting was to become sort of the antecedent to the 12 steps we're also going to examine jung's friendship with mountain lake who was the taos elder who jung met over there in taos and um finally we'll we'll look at um jung's relationship to roland and then roland's sort of brief history uh between his meeting of jung in 1926 right up until he helps ebby ebbi t gets over in 1934 and then of course ebbey and um and then bill and that that whole thing so um that's sortof the course we're gonna take um over the next few weeks and um also this is the this is part one of the of the book part two three and four dealt more delve into um the the sort of the nuts and bolts of the spiritual awakening so um as far as dr herman goes so he played a pretty big role in me writing this book so um he um the first thing that so when i when i started writing the book there wasn't any history in it and I hadn't planned on making any history. And then, but I got some feedback from a few different people that they, one woman in particular, Diane, I think she's here today. She had mentioned one day that she heard that William James had influenced Carl Jung and she thought that it would be really cool to read about that and sort of how it relates to AA. And I kind of noted what she had said and i went home and i googled william james and carl jung and what came up was a book called william James and Carl Jung doorways to the self that actually had been written by Dr. Stephen Herman and so i ordered the book and like i usually do when i get these books in the mail i went right to the index and looked for alcoholics anonymous right because it's like if you're going to talk about transformation to in in the world today and you don't mention AA, then I probably am not going to really pay attention to what you're saying. I don't see how we have a serious discussion about psychological transformation without taking the 12 steps into account. So anyways, and what I found was pleasantly surprising. Dr. Herman explained that Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the largest organizations in the world. And that really struck me because that's not some information you can just Google, right? You have to have sort of some insider knowledge to recognize how big these 12-step programs are. And so it kind of piqued my interest. And so a couple months later, I actually reached out to Dr. Herman and asked him if he would take a look at the manuscript and if he wanted to mentor me. And he agreed to do so. And this is what he says. And this really kind of gets to the nuts and bolts of our relationship. He says, this is also in the foreword. What few people realize, even those interested in how people are freed from addiction, is that there is an untold story in the background of the movement of AA that began to take shape a few decades before the co-founder of the famous international movement Bill Wilson became sober in New York in 1934. Or this is what is perhaps the most fascinating part of Mr. Peterson's book, because it shows the interconnected web of transformative relationships that set the basic pattern for individual transformation and the organizational development we now celebrate. And so kind of what he's saying here is that, I mean, he's pointing out really the narrative that I'm going to tell in these first four chapters about Jung's own personal journey and how that plays into um the development of the 12 steps so after the forward then we get into the introduction and i actually open the book then with this quote it's it's sort of the epilogue to the introduction i guess and it says what and this is carl jung he says 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. And so again, this quintessentially American approach that we're going to be looking at and that we look at really in parts two, three, and four is the idea of making the darkness conscious. And this becomes this sort of uniting thread between Wilson's approach and Jung's method, right? Wilson's is sort of this pragmatic spiritual approach. And Carl Jung's is more like a scientific method almost, which he called individuation. And the reason he calls it individuation is because it's not a widespread event. He tells us here that this process is disagreeable and therefore not popular. So and then we move right into this paragraph, which is the opening paragraph in the work says since earliest times the path to enlightenment has been portrayed through symbolical stories of adventure mythical tales that begin with a hero's plunge into the dark such tales are meant to be reflective of a pilgrimage into the parts of ourselves where we hope to discover the spiritual powers needed to bring healing and peace to our lives and yet while we usually think of the darkness as a barrier to our becoming enlightened the energy that generates a truly life-changing spiritual transformation is only found in the darkness making our engagement with it of primary concern and so what i'm doing here is is kind of laying the groundwork for for really the journey that the book is meant to to guide us on which is and and i i love um i love what happens here because young is sort of challenging us right um and and this is the next paragraph says the process laid out in the 12 steps meant to bring about a spiritual awakening in its in its practitioners is a modern template for enlightenment for all alcoholics and normies alike by guiding us into the darkness within our own psyche the 12 Steps move us towards a more meaningful connection to our figures of life yet Jung reminds us that it's a journey few are cut out for making the darkness conscious is so unpopular in fact that nothing in our culture has prepared us for such an undertaking either psychologically or spiritually thus the 12 steps like jung's process of individuation represent a journey of mythical proportions and so the the point of this here is i'm trying to i'm trying to get the reader used to this language of talking about myth and enlightenment and this transformation. And also to really point out that the path to enlightenment diverges from where we thought it would go, right? That most of us have sort of tried relying on these figures of light, right, which is that old czar of the heavens is what Wilson called it, in order to try to change and to generate this spiritual power. And yet what Jung tells us here is that the power is actually generated by going through the darkness or into the darkness and um this so so right away i'm hoping to challenge the reader to understand that like hey this this isn't going to be your typical kind of read about um you know uh you know the the feel good kind of stuff that we're used to right that we're talking about some serious stuff here this is this really requires a lot of effort and energy on our part. So like the steps, Jung's process of individuation is also a journey of bringing the darkness to light. And I want to point out, for example, in step one, this is a good example of what it means to bring the darkness into light. In step one we admitted that we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. So in the case of an alcoholic then um the way it works is that there's we have this there's an alcoholic would have like a delusion of control over alcohol and that as they as they go and they start visiting meetings perhaps and they hear about the phenomenon of craving or or their inability to stay stopped then then it starts it starts to kind of work on them in their mind and they begin to realize for themselves that they actually do suffer from a delusion of control that indeed they really are powerless right and that the more that becomes conscious to them then the more likely they are to be able to stop drinking and so that's that's one example of making the darkness conscious um herman tells us that psychology and religion are complementary paths to the same goal self realization of the unconscious and so in um the process of like therapy is also meant to kind of do the same thing, right? Like we sort of get into, you know, the whole point of it is to try to help us see ourselves in a new way, in a New Light, to really break through the subjective conditioning that we have and to be able to see ourselves from a more objective perspective. But obviously, right, there's also this problem for those of us like who qualify for a 12-step program, is that therapy doesn't quite get us all the way there. Something else needed to happen in order for us to really access this divine power. And luckily, Jung was also aware of that, which we're going to talk about in these upcoming chapters, that Jung had really cracked the code that alcoholics need something more than what psychology can really offer. They need to find sort of a mix between psychology and religion um and and interestingly then what happens is the 12 steps because jung was aware of this um the 12 steps sort of grow alongside jung's process of analytical psychology right those those two things grow together sort of in tandem or in parallel um and as far as self-realization goes we're going to talk a lot more about this in the later chapters. Um, and, and you know, if you have questions about that and stuff, obviously we can talk about it sooner if we need to. So, um, all right. So Wilson then becomes this sort of modern shaman, right? He takes his own plunge into the dark and, um. And, and it was his own plunge Into the Dark as well as his, I mean, if, if he like read Bill Wilson in the big book and everything else, like it's very clear that he was very interested in becoming more conscious of his own self and of his unconscious tendencies, right? That he really did write a masterpiece about how the unconscious tends to work in people's lives. And all of this kind of combined to really permit him to tap into really what is an ancient wisdom, right, an ancient shamanic wisdom of finding power in the midst of the darkness and this is what i write here um still in the introduction bill wilson was such an astute observer of the inner workings of his own mind that his book alcoholics anonymous might be considered a masterpiece of modern psychology in it wilson illuminates many of the more shadowy dynamics of the human psyche in a way that many of the world's best psychologists have been unable to match far from being either a prophet or a saint wilson himself was all too familiar with the darkness part and parcel of a life lived in the throes of alcoholism and addiction like all who suffer such a fate wilson found himself face to face with the brightness so bedeviling that nothing could save him not even his figures of light for people caught up in such an impossible dilemma their only hope of survival is to make the darkness conscious and you know here this is sort of where i think our collective experience kind of can come in, right? Is how many of us, again, tried leaning on those figures of light to save us. Like for me myself, I went back to church more than once hoping to tap into some sort of power and was really never able to find it. As Wilson said, the needed power just wasn't there. Now, um here here moving a little further in the book and i'm not um say saying the page numbers because people that are on kindle will have different page numbers but so this this paragraph is also in the introduction and this is really the only paragraph it's this slide of the next slide where i actually kind of talk about myself specifically and sort of reveal a little bit of my own story um and again because i needed to sort of establish myself as somebody that had at least some experience that i could bring to this kind of writing um and i do want to point out that the experience that I bring is not my own it's it's really again I tapped into this collective wisdom that we share here so this is what I say I hope the reader and I want to say this too I'm referring specifically to the story of jaime de angelo and carl jung because the way i tell the story kind of um it sort of it pulls the covers on de angolo to show him as kind of a practicing alcoholic and this this wasn't something that um like dr herman was not very happy that i was doing that we talked we talked a lot about that in our sessions together um and he felt that it was it wasn't very fair to just paint Jaime as like an alcoholic. And, and yet like, you know, for me, like I've, I've been around alcoholism my whole life. And like, so it didn't, it didn'T bother me so much to do that because I feel like there's a, there'S a way like that we get to use that darkness and kind of turn it into something beautiful. Even though Jaime didn'T get to do that himself. Right. And so what I'M, what I'm sort of doing here is, is justifying why I do that and also explaining that um in telling this story and when i read the story of d'angelo like this this was the lens through which i read this story it says i hope the reader will find the story of de angelo and young as riveting as i did though i would be remiss if i failed to acknowledge that in the retelling i did take some liberties interpreting how certain events might have been motivated instances i point out clearly in the narrative i believe that these educated guesses were inspired from my own intuition gleaned from many years of daily active membership in a 12-step fellowship as well as a lifetime of experience within the darkness of alcoholism and addiction including 10 years of going in and out trying to get clean and sober myself part of my spiritual vocation in recovery has been to carry the message as suggested in step 12 and for more than a decade i have spent countless hours working with scores of newcomers What one gains from actively participating in a 12-step program is access to a collective wisdom regarding psychological transformation that the outside world seems to know very little about, bought and paid for with our own pain, and the blood of those who, like Jaime de Angelo, never got the gift we were so freely given. And this paragraph continues. Our sense of indebtedness to the universe does not allow us to let those hard lessons go to waste. as they give us a keen insight into the nature of the disease that Jaime clearly suffered from, which we put to use in trying to help others. Because of this, I strongly believe that our accumulated acuity regarding addiction and recovery deserves a voice and a seat at the table to participate in the ongoing discussion regarding the complexity of what, with Jung's help, we know to be at its core a spiritual illness. For while most of us are not professionals, our long experience has lent us the ability to discern about the alcoholic and or drug addict's life far more than even they themselves can of a malady marked by a level of delusion that can take many years to unravel reading Jaime's story I couldn't help but see him through the lens of my own experience in addiction and recovery the reader can decide whether my interpretation feels right for them and so basically i jumped i i made i made sort of some some educated guesses about jung's relationship with jaime that that that weren't necessarily um you know backed up by by anything that jung had said himself um although it is clear that they did have a relationship and it's also clear that jaime was a raging alcoholic and so but but and i was able to kind of mix these two things together. And then, and when I noticed that Jung met Roland Hazard literally only months after having spent so much time with Jaime, it really started to make sense to me that Jaime probably played a really big role in Jung's understanding of alcoholism and what's needed to recover. And so, and here I'm kind of, I had to really kind of of um tell the truth about that that i'm sort of i do make some inferences here but that that you know they would be hard to disprove right they may not be backed up by by historical data but also it would be very difficult to say that jaime didn't influence jung in such a way um and so and then obviously too so something that comes up here then is this question of anonymity Right. And this was something that I, I really wrestled with as I was writing this book. It was how, you know, how can I present this and remain anonymous? Right. I was, you Know, I got all kinds of feedback. And really what I settled on was, was I spoke to one of my friends who has, you He's just been really, really involved at a very high level in Alcoholics Anonymous and actually other fellowships as well. And he told me that so long as I don't mention that I am a member of any of these fellowships in particular, then pretty much I'm maintaining my anonymity, technically speaking. And so and so that really once once I kind of settled on that idea, then it really shaped the way I I talked about addiction and alcoholism in the book. And so like, for example, I use the words they and them and I use alcoholics in the in the plural sense when I'm talking about alcoholics. alcoholics right um so that's trying to be more inclusive right instead of just like uh saying like he the alcoholic um in in terms of like a singular so that helped to be More Inclusive but it also um it also really helped me to stay removed from uh having really kind of being any um in any of the programs so you're going to notice that reading it um and I think this ends up being helpful, because one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book was to try to help the Jungians and maybe therapists in general to understand what's happening and what's taking place in addiction and in alcoholism, right? And to sort of interpret Jung's understanding of alcoholism through the letter that he wrote to Wilson, you know, regarding spiritus contra spiritum was to try to interpret that with sort of some experience, right? But also using their language to do so. And I think it worked out because it seems like I'm getting some pretty good feedback about that. Now, this leads me to basically this one last thing about my approach to the book and sort of my story and the story of Wilson and Jaime, which is mythopoetics, right? Which is myth-making. And this is in the intro, in the section called Myths of Meaning. And there's certainly sort of some of my own mythopoeic shining through in the book, right. And because the history that I give in thebook will be, it's going to be troublesome for historians. That's been obvious with just the few historians that I know and have talked to. um because i again i took some liberties interpreting how certain events came about um but but i think i was in pretty good um i was a pretty good company doing so so william shaberg in his book writing the big book he tells us that bill wilson um kind of took the same the same approach he says bill's recounting of the facts is sometimes so wide of the mark that it can only be explained as willful conscious myth-making the creation of the story specifically crafted to deliver a particularly clear image or an unmistakable lesson to the listener. All too often, Wilson's This Is What Happened accounts must be understood and treated as nothing less than parables, as fables he fashioned to instill some hope in the still-suffering alcoholic or to provide an uncluttered, an instructive, uncluttering story about the celebrated origins of Alcoholics synonymous and so really i guess the approach that i took um what once i so stephen herman um and i forgot to mention this so i'm glad i remembered is he he had written so we started working together and i i kind of had this book written and there was 14 or 15 chapters and then stephen when we were nearing the end of our work together he said he came to me one day And he said, hey, I'm really excited. I remembered that I had written this essay in 2014, but I never published it or anything. I didn't know what to do with it. But I want to send it to you because I think you might be able to use it. So I got the essay and I read it. And it was the story of Jaime de Angelo and Carl Jung. And as I read It, it really began to dawn on me kind of what was taking place in Jaime's life. i really related to jaime right away and and it and and so and and then i pieced together that jaime was related to jung um and associated with jung right before jung treated roland and so this sort of this narrative kind of developed which i was able to put into the book and so i rewrote those first four chapters i had basically just wrote them from scratch and added them in and that was in september of 2023 that i started doing that and um and and so and but but it occurs to me that that really what i was trying to do is to provide an un an instructive and uncluttered story about the celebrated origins of the 12 steps just kind of almost like a step back right like not necessarily talking much about alcoholics anonymous um the way um shaver has done in his book, but really more to talk about the roots of the 12 steps and how the 12 steps actually grow out of Carl Jung's own search for a myth, for a Myth of Meaning is what he called it. And so, and in doing so, I recognize that I'm using this sort of almost like mythological or sort of legendary language. You know, there's the dates and stuff are pretty accurate, but there's a few little things that i weave in there that that just aren't really backed up like by his by contemporary documents um but but i don't mind having done that very much um because underlying that i was able to really um describe i think what what it is to be a an addict or an alcoholic what that journey looks like right that it of itself it is its own sort of quest to discover meaning and so this is this quote is also in the intro it's where jung talks about his own personal myth so he said this was um something that jung said at the very end at the variant of his life in the on the first page of his biography memories dreams reflections jung 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. And something that I've kind of figured out recently is that when we're speaking of these big spiritual ideas and the spiritual transformation, that, you know, we're really talking about this mythical world And that the defining characteristic of myth is that it's true across many different sort of contexts, right? And that The Historical Component is actually the least important one. So for instance, like in the story of Jesus, right, like it's not about whether Jesus actually lived and like walked the earth and when and all that, like what's more important is that we're all sort of called on a similar adventure as Jesus was, right? And same with all of the myths. The biblical myths are the easiest ones for me to recall just because I had some experience there. But as we go through the book, we're going to look at a couple other myths as well. And really what we're doing is we're looking for our own story therein. And I think that's one of the reasons that Bill Wilson's story, Bill's story. The first chapter of the book Alcoholics Anonymous is so effective. Right. It's it's not because it's historically true, because it'S kind of been shown that it perhaps isn't historically true. But but I know that for me, when I read that story the first time, I was blown away at how deeply I related to it. And that's that's what makes it true. Right? it allowed me to see myself and to sort of recognize my own shadow a little bit more so in conclusion then um there that's sort of the justification for my own mytho poetic approach i guess um and and this is the last paragraph in the introduction it says in addition to illustrating how jung's personal myth played into the emergence of the 12 steps the aim of this book is to shine a light upon the spiritual nature of alcoholism and addiction, highlighting how the dangerous journey is at its essence a quest to discover meaning in the midst of a culture whose connection to its mythological images has all but vanished. And while my own fable, my own truth certainly forms the basis of what I present out of respect for the 12 traditions, it is not my personal adventure that I share. And yet such an approach proved to be the passageway through which the archetype of the alcoholic could emerge, a paradoxical figure that reveals many subtleties regarding the nature of the transformation that we all seek. Rather than having relevance only to those who suffer from a particular facet of the psycho-spiritual disease of alcoholism or of addiction, like all archetypes, the alcoholic is woven into the fabric of the human psyche and can therefore help all of us to make the darkness conscious. The alcoholic is a personification of the coniuntio oppositorum an image of wholeness whose function it is to evoke a reconciliation of the opposites within us fusing the darkest parts of our humanity with the figures of light we long to reconnect to as we each traverse our own paths towards enlightenment and in the end i think it turned out that my my wrestling with this concept of anonymity and me really trying to look at the 12 steps from this bigger perspective, this sort of mythological perspective, what emerged was the image of the archetype of the alcoholic. And that's been a really profound experience for me. Maybe, you know, it's very interesting now I'm working with a Jungian analyst and we're looking at my dreams and I'm looking at my dream from the past and how all of that sort of played into this um and and revealed this image and it's it's really a fascinating kind of archetypal story um even just of itself that maybe i can share more and more as we go through and um so yeah so i'm going to end the recording now and um and then we'll open we'll opened the meeting up so let me let's see okay and all right and let me make sure did i did the recording start