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.

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

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.”

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?

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

“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.”