Paul Levy Articles: GALLERY

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Foreword to The Six Bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead

This is the foreword Paul wrote for the new book by renowned Dzogchen masters Ven. Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Ven. Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche.

Butterfly Dreaming

The literal process of what happens when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly symbolically expresses the transformation our species is undergoing as it morphs from one kind of being into another.

Transcript of an Interview with Paul

This is a transcript of a recent interview with Paul about his life and work.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" Comes to Life

It is as if people have become hollowed out by psychic termites, resulting in a vacancy within them that becomes lodging for “something other” than themselves to take up residence within them.

Reflecting Upon Jung's Answer to Job

Seventy-five years old and in the middle of a feverish illness, when he finished writing this book his illness was over. Jung describes how Answer to Job came into being by writing in a letter that it was like “the spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck.”

War and Wetiko

Many people have been hearing about the wetiko mind-virus but aren’t quite sure what exactly it is. With the recent outbreak of war in the Ukraine, it is worth noting that the human activity of war is a particularly virulent incarnation of the wetiko bug writ large on the world stage.

Conspiring with Ourselves

As quantum physics points out, we live in a nonlocal universe that transcends the conventional limitations of both space and time. This brings up the question: Are our past, present and future selves (which are, ultimately speaking, not separate), all interacting and conspiring with each other in the present moment so as to help us potentially realize who we are?

Notes from the Portland Underworld

The city I live in, Portland, Oregon, has been making headline news all over the world quite often these days. We are currently experiencing a natural disaster the likes of which I imagine could only happen in a dystopian, Philip K. Dickian Sci-Fi novel. Wildfires have ignited all over the west coast of the United States and are now on the outskirts of Portland. Living in the middle of a major American city, I never expected to ever have to seriously consider - what would I take with me if I received the news that I had to immediately evacuate?

The Light Has Cast a Spell Upon Itself

We can fall under the spell of a nonexistent phantom appearance that arises from nowhere but the immense creativity of our own mind such that it entrances the light within us into believing that this imaginary, illusory phantom of darkness is more powerful than the light that we are. The light has for some reason used its own creative energy to constrain and delimit its infinite radiance, as if the light has cast a spell upon itself.

Developing Jung's "Imagination for Evil" is the Doorway to Our Light

One of the most crucially important steps in dealing with evil is, according to Jung, to develop what he calls an “imagination for evil.” If we can’t imagine the evil that human beings are potentially capable of—and of which we ourselves, under the right circumstances, could also be capable of—in our naivety, we offer ourselves into evil’s hands.

Wounds as the Path to Awakening

What an utterly weird, amazing and utterly frightening time we are living through. Many people are walking around with masks on their faces, and yet inwardly we are all being unmasked. We are being confronted with all of the dark shadows inside of us—our wounds, traumas and unhealed abuse issues—that we’ve been able to postpone looking at up till now. All of these shadow energies are not only in our face, but behind it as well, which is to say that we are confronted within our very soul with the darkness of the world we live in, which is a darkness in which we all share.

Our Superhero Power

Our world seems to be descending into utter chaos, as if the mass psychosis that has afflicted our species is ever-deepening, wreaking more and more havoc all over the world. One idea, like a recurring dream, keeps on insistently knocking at the door of my consciousness again and again. The idea is that our sleeping dreams are, both literally and symbolically, showing us night after night—if we look at them in the right way—the very solution to our myriad world crises. This is to say that our dreams themselves, though an illusion of the mind, are potentially teaching us—and revealing—the nature of reality and how we operate within it.

The Shadow is the Doorway to the Light

The alchemical treatise Corpus Hermeticum admonishes us to save ourselves from our unconsciousness, saying “you must tear off this garment which you wear—this cloak of darkness.”

The Revelations of Quantum Physics Are a Treasure for Humanity

Beyond the world-transforming technologies that it has helped develop, the greater benefits of quantum physics will be found within the mind, which is to say that quantum physics is freely offering us something that will expand our consciousness to previously unimaginable degrees.

We Are All Wounded Healers

One of the primary mythic patterns informing and giving shape to what is collectively playing out on the world stage—as well as within the human psyche—is the archetype of the "wounded healer."

Illuminating Dark Times

“Truly, I live in dark times! An artless world is foolish.” - Bertolt Brecht

Liberating the Ancestors

In my family I became what is known as “the identified patient.”

Spiritual Emergence

In 1981 I was sitting in meditation when, just for an instant, a bolt of lightning flashed through my mind.

Quantum Rainbows

There are as many rainbows as there are observers; each observer is seeing their own private rainbow.

Lucid-Dreaming Quantum Physics

How would it change our experience to interpret our experience as if we really were in a dream?

Quantum Physics Looks at the 2004 Election: Did Bush Win the Election or Did He Steal It?

“Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there,’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

Writing Magic

The truth of our situation, simply put, is that we are geniuses with amnesia.

When the Most Awake Among Us Fall Asleep: Marc Gafni, His Supporters and Wetiko

“He was so efficient and convincing a liar that I view all of his supporters…as victims of his pathology.”

Quantum Meta-Physics

We ourselves are an essential part of the mystery that is being unveiled through quantum physics.

Quantum Physics: The Physics of Dreaming

Studying quantum theory is like ingesting a mind-altering, time-release psychedelic.

Homage to the Creative Spirit

As artists, we are continually re-creating both our world and ourselves anew at each and every instant.

The World is Psyche

“For our only reality is psyche, there is no other reality.” -Jung

An Eye-Opening Synchronicity

A life-transforming event happened within the very first minute of my being admitted to my very first psychiatric hospital.

The Birth of Self-Consciousness

The teacher called on me, and as I was about to answer her question, my world changed forever.

Psychiatry Almost Drove Me Crazy

The abuse I suffered at the hands of the psychiatric community, which was true psychological violence in the flesh, is so beyond my comprehension that I’m now just beginning to even find the words. I struggle because the abuse was truly “unspeakable,” a form of torture.

Featured

Quantum Rainbows

There are as many rainbows as there are observers; each observer is seeing their own private rainbow.

Lucid-Dreaming Quantum Physics

How would it change our experience to interpret our experience as if we really were in a dream?

Writing Magic

The truth of our situation, simply put, is that we are geniuses with amnesia.

When the Most Awake Among Us Fall Asleep: Marc Gafni, His Supporters and Wetiko

“He was so efficient and convincing a liar that I view all of his supporters…as victims of his pathology.”

Quantum Meta-Physics

We ourselves are an essential part of the mystery that is being unveiled through quantum physics.

Quantum Physics: The Physics of Dreaming

Studying quantum theory is like ingesting a mind-altering, time-release psychedelic.

Homage to the Creative Spirit

As artists, we are continually re-creating both our world and ourselves anew at each and every instant.

Featured

The World is Psyche

“For our only reality is psyche, there is no other reality.” -Jung

An Eye-Opening Synchronicity

A life-transforming event happened within the very first minute of my being admitted to my very first psychiatric hospital.

The Birth of Self-Consciousness

The teacher called on me, and as I was about to answer her question, my world changed forever.

Psychiatry Almost Drove Me Crazy

Shamanic Transference

On the surface, the two scenarios with the psychiatrist and my father were quite different.

Hidden Treasures

One day a couple of years ago I was offered a very special gift...

Are We Possessed?

“Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.”

The Artist as Healer of the World

Wounded healers access their gifts when they realize that their wound is itself the source of divine creativity.

The Wounded Healer

It is only by being willing to face, consciously experience and go through our wound do we receive its blessing.

God the Imagination

There is an age-old imagination that there exists a miraculous substance that enlightens the universe

Healing Our Wound

How our wound manifests is an unmediated, direct expression of our level of dissociation from our wholeness

The Light of Darkness

A light that doesn’t go out, the lumen naturae pervades, infuses and animates the physical world.

The Sacred Art of Alchemy

The alchemists were dreaming big.

A Family Curse

As I worked with the son, I noticed that there were two distinct parts of him.

Israel is Outgassing Its Unhealed Trauma

How we understand what is happening in Gaza depends upon where we start looking in time.

One Great Dream of a Single Dreamer

How do we best serve who we have now discovered ourselves to be?

Lucid Dreaming

ligning with the dream, we become open channels for a more refined “order” to incarnate itself through us.

The Transformation of the God-Image

Do we create our God-image? Or does our image of God create us?

We Are All Shamans-In-Training

In 1981 I spontaneously went into such an ecstatic state that I was hospitalized by what I call the “anti-bliss patrol.”

A Synchronistic Encounter: Where Dreams and Waking Life Intersect

Wondering who he was, I asked him and he replied, "I'm Dr. Montague Ullman."

Breaking the Vow of Silence

My parents told me about the rabbi being fired, and asked me, totally incredulous “How did you know”?

The Biospheric Dreambody

Paradoxically, the dreambody is continually revealing itself to us in its very veiling of itself.

Triggered by Evil

Is something being revealed to us when people are triggered by the mere mention of the word “evil?”

Meeting the Other Within

We are not the master of our own house.

Delusions of Separation

Just like in mythology, when we know the “demon’s” name, we strip it of its power.

It's All In the Psyche

The underlying source of what is playing out on the world stage is the unconscious psyche of humanity.

Archetypal Dimensions of World Events

Our species is endlessly re-creating the same mythic, archetypal process, as if we are having a recurring dream.

As Viewed, So Appears

PadmaSambhava is the supreme alchemist and exorcist: the greater the negativity, the greater his power of transmutation.