"Through the combination of theurgy, quantum mechanics, and especially the ideas of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, the centrality of thought in theurgy proposed by Iamblichus comes to light in surprising and extraordinary ways." Eddie Paredes, Forms and Archetypes
An intuition about the sciences
One of my deepest intuitions has always concerned the sciences. During my lifetime they seemed to move in a direction away from the esoteric, toward a world of matter and mechanism with no place in it for the gods, the soul or the rite. I knew their discoveries had to be more than that. I knew they were a continuance of the old wisdom and also a revelation for our current age, one that supports the arts of theurgic ascent and stands beside them.
The study took up a very large part of my reading for many years. I worked with Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, with the physicist Henry Stapp and with quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen and Orthodox reading. From the autumn of 2014 I added the whole of Jung's Collected Works, much of James Hillman, the Psychosynthesis of Roberto Assagioli and the work of Will Parfitt, and in 2015 I found Fritz-Albert Popp and the biophysics of light. From late 2016, in Blackfoot, the physics and the wider sciences took a far deeper place in my study, and the modern framework of our School began to take shape. My work with all of these ran for far longer than my work with anything that came to me later through Timothy Desmond and Leonard Susskind, and the model I built from them carried my practice for many years.
Two men and a friendship
The twentieth century shifted into a scientific revolution that started with the advent of quantum mechanics and modern depth psychology. In the midst of that revolution two academics and masters of their fields met and developed a lifelong friendship. Carl Jung was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, and Wolfgang Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for the exclusion principle. They worked in their own fields with brilliant careers while collaborating for more than two decades on the parallels of psychology and quantum physics.
Together they published The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, with Jung's essay on synchronicity beside Pauli's essay on the archetypal ideas behind the scientific theories of Kepler. When I first read the two of them together, I saw a sun dawning on a distant horizon. A psychologist and a physicist, each at the summit of his own discipline, had found that they were describing one thing from two sides.
Pauli called the relation complementarity, and the view the two men came to has since been called dual-aspect monism. In it mind and matter are two exact and irreducible accounts of one ground, and neither one is made from the other. The image held in the rite and the light that filled the room belonged, in their picture, to one order of the world.
Pauli's essay on Kepler moved me in a very personal way. Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion, and he also cast charts all his life. Pauli studied him to show that the laws Kepler found were reached by way of archetypal images already present in Kepler's soul, chief among them the image of the Trinity as a sphere, with the Father at the center, the Son at the surface and the Spirit in the radiating relation between them.
Pauli also set Kepler beside his opponent, the Rosicrucian physician Robert Fludd, who held the qualitative, alchemical and symbolic view of nature against Kepler's quantitative one. Pauli confessed that he found both men in himself. For him the measuring and the meaning were two faces of one soul, and he wanted a science that could hold them together, very nearly the program I have set for our School.
Jung and Pauli gave me powerful tools to integrate the mystery of spirit with the knowledge of the mind. Jung gave me the collective unconscious, the archetypes and the objective psyche, the depth from which the answers of the gods arise. Pauli, whom I met through my years in Jung, gave me a physicist's permission to take that depth seriously, and it was through him that my study turned toward physics in earnest. He had a deep interest in the history of ideas, in Platonism, in alchemy and in the religions of the East, and he read philosophical and classical literature in Latin and Greek.
The mandala in Jung's pages
Jung's teaching on the mandala became a part of my own. For many years I have gathered it into three statements of my own, drawn from Psychology and Religion: West and East, from his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower and from Psychology and Alchemy. They are faithful to him in substance, and they are in my words.
In the first, the mandala is a symbol of wholeness, the geometrical projection of the highest state of mind, the state of enlightenment and of absolute freedom, and in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions a meditative instrument that maps the spiritual path. In the second, it is a schematized representation of this wholeness, of the divinity incarnate in the human being, serving in Tantric practice to unify and balance the conflicting aspects of the psyche.
The third statement comes from his Terry Lectures. Jung observed there that in the mandalas of modern people the place at the center once held by the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of the human being. Here was a bridge between East and West that a psychologist had built from his clinical work, one patient and one drawing at a time. In our School the Mandala is now the emblem of center and circumference held as one Self.
The Collected Works
Jung had been with me for many years before 2014. In October of that year we moved into a country home, and beside the work of the temple I read a great deal there, with Jung at the center of the reading. From the move I studied him steadily, along with everything else I was reading, through the country-home years and on into Salt Lake City in 2016. I stayed dedicated to that study, volume by volume over those years, until I had finished his entire Collected Works, from the Psychiatric Studies to The Symbolic Life.
In the full run of the volumes I met a great deal that his single essays had never shown me. In the alchemical volumes, Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis, I watched him follow a single image, the union of the king and the queen, the sun and the moon, through centuries of Latin texts until the image showed what the soul was doing in it.
In Aion I read his pages on the age of the Fishes and the turning of the astrological ages, with Christ and the Self studied as images of wholeness. In Psychological Types I found the introvert and the extravert, the terms everyone uses without knowing that Jung first gave them. In Symbols of Transformation I read the long work that took him away from Freud, with its heroes, its mothers and its suns.
All through the volumes I met the same patient method, the image taken seriously as a fact of the psyche and held long enough for its meaning to come. A god-form held in the rite and an image held in Jung's practice of active imagination both ask the practitioner to stay with the image and let it act. The psychology of our School is Jungian at its root, with the collective unconscious as the objective psyche through which the gods reach the soul (Central Doctrine, Ch. 8).
James Hillman and the gods of the soul
During the same years I read much of what was written by James Hillman. Hillman was the founder of archetypal psychology, for ten years the director of studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich and the editor of Spring Publications, and he carried Jung's archetypes into a psychology of the gods.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, which grew from his Terry Lectures at Yale in 1972, the same lectureship where Jung had spoken decades before him, Hillman taught that the psyche is polytheistic and that the gods are the archetypes of our experience. In Pan and the Nightmare he followed one god, the goat-footed Pan of panic and of the wild places, into the fears and the instincts of modern people.
Each planetary god I invoked moved my moods, my thoughts and my days in a different way, and each one asked a different posture of me, and in Hillman's pages I found a psychology of that experience. In our School we are polytheistic monists, and we approach the many gods as eternal forms within the one Divine Infinite Being. Hillman gave me a psychologist who lets the many gods stay many in the soul.
From his The Force of Character and the Lasting Life came another piece of our teaching. Hillman wrote of character as a force that grows with a long life. In our School the force of character now stands beside the Persona around the observing "I", the two aspects of the self that meet the world, held in dynamic balance, and the rite works upon both of them. Our students meet Hillman by name in Ritual Praxis and Instruction and in WaveForm Astrology.
Assagioli, Parfitt and the Egg
Through the same reading I came to Roberto Assagioli and his works on Psychosynthesis. Assagioli was an Italian psychiatrist, one of the first to bring psychoanalysis to Italy, in contact with both Freud and Jung, and the founder of the school of psychology he called Psychosynthesis.
In Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques of 1965 he drew the psyche as an egg-shaped oval. The lower unconscious lies at the bottom, the middle unconscious in the center and the higher unconscious, or superconscious, at the top. Inside the middle region sits the small oval of the field of consciousness, with the conscious self, the "I", at its center, and at the apex stands a star, the Higher Self, of which the personal "I" is a reflection. He drew the egg's outline as a dotted line, open to the collective unconscious all around it.
Assagioli joined Jung and William James in one psychology. In Sam Keen's interview with him, "The Golden Mean of Roberto Assagioli", printed in Psychology Today in December 1974, he said, "Of all modern psychotherapists, Jung is the closest in theory and practice to psychosynthesis." In 1966 he gave a series of lectures at the Istituto di Psicosintesi in Florence comparing the two approaches, published as Jung and Psychosynthesis. James stood earlier in his formation, above all on the will, and in the same interview Assagioli quotes him, "Every image has in itself a motor element."
When I first saw that drawing I recognized the sphere I had drawn around myself in rite upon rite. Assagioli had drawn an open boundary of the self, a center of awareness and a higher Self above it, and he had done it as a psychiatrist working with patients. In The Act of Will he set down a sentence I have taught ever since, "Attention, interest, affirmations and repetitions reinforce the ideas, images and psychological formations on which they are centered." In our School we call it Assagioli's law, the insight of William James extended in time, and the practice of the daily rite stands on it.
Assagioli's works led me to Will Parfitt, the British psychosynthesis practitioner and Kabbalist. Parfitt joins psychosynthesis to the Western mystery tradition, and above all to Kabbalah, and the form of the egg our School teaches follows the one he drew in Psychosynthesis: The Elements and Beyond (2003). We leave aside his Gnosticism, his alchemy and most of his Theosophy, and we bring to the map astrology, the physics of our model and theurgic practice.
Out of Assagioli and Parfitt, read in the light of Jung and of our whole Doctrine, came the Transpersonal Egg, our map of the psyche. The observing "I" stands at its center, with the Persona and the force of character about it. Around them lie the fields of ordinary awareness, the personal unconscious where the shadow lies, the collective unconscious, and at the furthest reach the transconscious, where the soul opens onto what exceeds it. We read the egg's open outline as the image in the psyche of the soul's spherical vehicle, the ochēma.
The light in the cell, 2015
In 2015, in the country home, I found the work of Fritz-Albert Popp on the light in the cells, and I read the whole of Integrative Biophysics: Biophotonics. Popp had edited it with Lev Beloussov, and Kluwer published it in 2003, the work of fourteen quantum biologists from the International Institute of Biophysics in Germany. Very little of their work was published in the United States, and when I bought my copy only twenty thousand copies had been sold in the USA, mostly to medical field enthusiasts and professionals.
I came to this field as an engineer before I came to it as a theurgist, and I read Popp's volume from the first chapter to the last.
Popp (1938 to 2018) founded the International Institute of Biophysics at Neuss, and for decades he was the best-known advocate of the view that the faint light of living things belongs to the order of life itself. His book set out the measurements of that ultraweak light from cells and tissues, its coherence and the long afterglow that follows when living matter is lit and then left in the dark. After him the field continued with dozens more biomedical engineers and biophysicists, many of them focused on the development of medical equipment built on these values.
I was struck by what I read in those pages. Here was a group of scientists measuring light from living tissue and writing about it in the language of my own profession. From that book I gained an extreme interest in biophysics in general.
That interest runs through the biophysics our books now draw on, from Alexander Gurwitsch and the mitogenic radiation he described in 1923 to James Oschman's Energy Medicine, the work of Anirban Bandyopadhyay and his colleagues on microtubules and the newer research on the light of the mitochondria. I had long sensed that the light of the body is kept as well as given off. The account of the Van Wijks, that the light the mitochondria emit is gathered and held in the chromatin, where the record of the self's design is kept, gave that intuition a form in biology.
Synchronicity and the voice of the world
Synchronicity was the doorway through which Jung's work entered my temple. Jung defined it as a meaningful coincidence of an inner state and an outer event with no causal link between them, and Pauli set it beside the causality of physics as a second kind of order in nature. I had asked a question at the altar and found the answer days later, in an ordinary afternoon, in a dream or in the words of a stranger, and I had written those answers into my journals beside the date of the rite.
In my essay Animism, Synchronicity, and the Voice of the World and in our teaching since, we have long called synchronicity the doorway to the eternal and the key to theurgic rites. If psyche and matter are two faces of one order, then the meaningful event outside the temple is the same order showing its other face, and the rite is the act by which the operator puts a question to that order and waits for its reply.
My study of synchronicity also gave me an intuition I could not yet place. I sensed that what we call the future comes to us as a kind of returning past, something the larger order has been keeping, arriving as a recurrence in a new form. Jung and Pauli wrote of a timeless order beside the order of the line, and I held the intuition for years before cosmology gave it a structure.
Pauli taught me one more thing that became a rule of my practice. In the new physics, he wrote, a transfer had taken place from a strict causality to a statistical one, which permits only predictions whose precision is set by the uncertainty relations. He named it statistical causality, and in his reflections with Jung he set it beside synchronicity.
I placed it beside my own work and came to call it the key principle of growth for the theurgist. There is always some level of uncertainty in what we ask of nature, and that uncertainty opens the imbalance between the conscious and the unconscious mind through which new experience, new knowledge and synchronicity come. At my own altar the answer, when it came, was always larger than the question I had asked.
As the years went on I came to see synchronicities as the high crests of something continuous, and I called it the continuous evidencing of the archetypes. Picture a sea and its waves, with the sea always there and the waves that crest high enough to catch the light being what we see. The beginner sees only the crests and calls them synchronicities, and the adept begins to see the swell beneath them, and then the sea itself.
Henry Stapp and the Orthodox line
Following in the footsteps of Jung and Pauli came a career physicist whom I count among my teachers, Henry Stapp of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Stapp had gone to Zürich in 1958 to work with Pauli on the foundations of quantum theory, and he was working with him there when Pauli died on the fifteenth of December of that year. He carried on Pauli's work on the parallels of psychology and quantum physics in Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (1993), Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007), Quantum Theory and Free Will (2017) and hundreds of scientific papers.
Stapp works in what he calls the Orthodox interpretation, the line that runs from the Copenhagen founders through John von Neumann. In it the observer's choice of question enters the physics itself. Between measurements the state evolves smoothly, and at each measurement an action is put to nature and nature answers.
When I read this I recognized the shape of a rite. The theurgist asks with the whole of their being, and the gods answer. Here a physicist with a lifetime in the foundations of quantum mechanics was describing a world built of such questions and answers.
Stapp also gave me a bridge to William James. James wrote that change in experience comes in "buds or drops", either not at all or in a perceptible amount. Reading James, Stapp distinguished two kinds of collapse. In the first, mental effort recalls a template for action we are already familiar with, stored in the brain, and most of what we experience is memory and habit. In the second, the possibilities include states the observer has never yet occupied, and with enough mental effort the collapse brings new knowledge.
I had seen the first kind of collapse in my own life every day, in habit and memory. I had seen the second at the altar, and later in my students, at the moment a sudden understanding broke upon them whole. The psychology of James and Jung and the physics of observation as Stapp developed it are two of the languages in which I teach the mechanics of invocation today.
One passage of Stapp's I have always read psychologically. A quantum object confined to a very small region of space has, by that very confinement, a very broad spread of momentum, and when the confinement is released the cloud of possibilities rushes outward. Stapp described such a state, squeezed and released, exploding outward and then settling into an oscillating motion.
In the language of the Orthodox picture I read this as the work of the will. Attention held on one possibility squeezes it over the rest, and when the strain is let go there is an outward explosion of new knowledge. I have long taught the theurgic ceremony itself as a deliberate squeeze, and I have seen new knowledge come all at once, after long strain, at the moment the strain was let go.
I tested the same reading on the life I knew outside the temple, and I wrote an essay on the uncertainty principle through the psychology of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur at her desk weighs payroll, customers and savings, and plays out one scenario after another until, often in the shower or at breakfast, one scenario arrives whole and she runs to call a meeting of her team. I had sat at that desk myself many times in the life of my company.
Pictures for the students
Teaching all of this to students meant finding pictures they could hold. In my teaching I have often pictured the possibilities of quantum mechanics as extending an infinite distance in all directions from the point of the observer. The physics draws it more exactly. A superposition is a superposition of possible states, and how far it spreads in space depends on the system.
The possibilities of an electron bound in an atom span a fraction of a nanometer, while whole atoms in modern interferometers have been held in superpositions of places more than half a meter apart. The picture I gave my students was simpler, and it kept what the rite needs, a field of possibilities that is many before it is one, seen from the standpoint of the observer.
Stapp also described the state of the observer at the moment of the probe and the answer as, in effect, a mixture of all the observer's current possibilities and of all the outcomes to which the answer may come. Through that description I came to read the rite itself, the probe and the answer of the theurgist held together. Stapp observed as well that the symbols which in classical theory stand for ordinary numbers in fact represent actions, and I have always heard in that a world whose elements are acts.
Over many years I taught these things to my students one lesson at a time. The soul at the center asks and nature answers, and the answer comes from a depth no question contains. The squeeze of the asking releases new knowledge, the holding of the answer makes it a template, and the form of every answer is countable while the law of the whole growth is statistical. Only much later did each of these terms receive its canonical name in the Central Doctrine.
The Zeno effect and the templates
The physics gave me a way to understand why holding a state works, and here it changed my practice more than anywhere else.
The quantum Zeno effect takes its name from the old paradox of the arrow. In quantum mechanics a system that is observed again and again, quickly enough, is held in its state, as the repeated question keeps it from drifting away. Stapp took this into the psychology of attention. A mind that returns to the same intention again and again holds that intention steady against the brain's tendency to drift, and what is held in this way becomes a template for action. Assagioli's law and James's habit stood behind it for me, and now a physicist had given them a mechanism.
I wrote of what this means for the theurgist in an essay of its own, The Quantum Zeno Effect and "Templates of Action" in Orthodox Quantum Mechanics. Over time, one's daily experiences are transformed as we become much more aware of the invoked archetype's presence in all of our experiences. This comes from the quantum Zeno effect and the development of templates for action through successive and consistent ritual praxis and divinatory intuitive exercise. We take the shape of the gods, increasing our capacity for knowledge of eternal truths, and over time they become more realized and permanent in our daily experiences.
I have always loved the saying often told as a Zen story, "Do you miss the master? No, now I see him everywhere." In my own teaching this saying is the test of a template. The student who has only imagined Hermes meets Hermes only when they imagine him. The student in whom Hermes has templated meets him unbidden, in the right word that arrives at the right moment, in the clarity that comes to a confused conversation and in the message that crosses a threshold at the instant it is needed.
A god-form held once is a visitation, and a god-form held daily, with the receptivity that listens for the god's answer, becomes a template. I called this self-discipline quantum templating, and I have taught it as the way an awareness of the continuous evidencing of the archetypes becomes more permanent.
These ideas changed how I worked. I began measuring a rite by what stayed with me the next day and the next week, and the peak of the rite became only its first sign. They also changed how I taught effort. Great effort, in the theurgist, is the effort of returning attention again and again with a gentle constancy, as I so often tell my students. Repeated faithfully, that effort matures into a holding that is relaxed, natural and at length effortless, and the answer comes most clearly there.
Light, matter and the zero of the Cosmos
Light was the other great study of those years. From the side of vision I have long taught that light and matter are two poles of the same phenomenon, and that matter is light under constraint. In the language of the Vedānta I learned in India I have always taught that tamas is no evil, and that while sattva represents light, tamas symbolizes physical matter, light frozen within spacetime.
The physicist David Bohm spoke of this common ground in words I have kept close for many years. In his dialogue with Renée Weber, "The Enfolding–Unfolding Universe", as published in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages (1986), he said, "All matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light." Here a physicist who sought a wholeness beneath the fragments of quantum theory was saying that everything we see and touch is light in another form, slowed and bound into the patterns of the world.
The cosmological proposal on which I built my bridge from physics to the teaching of Śiva and Śakti was the zero-energy hypothesis, set out by Edward Tryon in Nature in 1973 and made famous by Stephen Hawking. In it the positive energy of matter in the universe is exactly canceled by the negative energy of gravity. Two poles that sum to zero, with the whole Cosmos arising from their balance, was the picture my Śākta teachers had given me of the god and the goddess.
The black hole, from 2021
The black hole came into my teaching later than everything else here. I had no inkling of black holes in my teaching until I read Timothy Desmond's Psyche and Singularity in October 2021. From then on I saw in the black hole a figure of the Monad and the Dyad drawn in space, one point at the center and a sphere around it marking the whole.
A black hole, as general relativity describes it and as observation now confirms, is an event horizon drawn around a central singularity, and the horizon is a perfect sphere when the black hole does not spin. It became my image in physics of the pair center and circumference. I read that figure everywhere afterward, with the point as the undivided center known from within and the sphere as the boundary that holds.
The engineer's test
All of this was read by an engineer, beside a lifelong study of quantum systems and mechanics, particularly from the viewpoint of the Copenhagen interpretation. My engineering team and I explore various aspects of quantum computing.
It is a field I have a high interest in, and the quantum breakthroughs and published papers are frequently on my desk. For me the field is a reliable resource for judging the success of specific quantum theories. There is nothing more clear in quantum mechanics than the attempt to put these theories into a computational process. If they are reliable, there is an advance in knowledge toward newer quantum systems, and if they are unreliable, they are discarded immediately.
Watching that happen year after year gave me confidence that the picture of observation and answer I was taking into the temple was the working picture of the physics itself.
The engineer in me also kept the order straight. In our School the god comes first, known in the rite, and the sciences stand as its witnesses. We draw freely on quantum mechanics, the physics of light, the biophysics of the cell, the depth psychology of Jung and Hillman, the Psychosynthesis of Assagioli and the dual-aspect monism of Jung and Pauli, and we draw on them under that order. What the sciences gave me was a way to describe what I had met in the temple, in terms a student trained in the modern world could check against what they already knew.
Physics to the aid of the theurgist
In my own doctrine I moved from the idea that mathematics has a place in theurgy to the ideas of modern physics, as an example that it does, and from there into all the work with Stapp. Over the years I meticulously aligned many concepts of our poetics and sacred literature with contemporary scientific understanding. I was far from alone in this, as hundreds of other authors have highlighted the same connections. The grand explanations found in our poetics and sacred literature reveal truths about our existence that have equivalent counterparts in scientific discoveries.
In our writings I came to say at length that the modern-day revelations of physics, from the relativity of Einstein to the string theory of Michio Kaku, Leonard Susskind and others, come greatly to the aid of the theurgist. Many esoteric mysteries from both the East and the West are explained through these most current sciences. As a theurgist I have always held that understanding both interpretations of quantum mechanics is a sacred key from a modern lens for unlocking the most ancient of mysteries.
In practice I found that the sciences built a foundation which greatly amplified my results and my understanding of how theurgy actually happens. They underpin both the logical and the intuitive elements in the work. On the logical side, I could now say why the squeeze of attention releases new knowledge, why a question truly held is answered from a depth larger than itself, and why a god-form held daily stays when a god-form held once fades.
On the intuitive side, they brought the modern view of existence into harmony with the most ancient of practices.
Each time I adjusted the model I took it back into my own practice, and each time the practice answered I adjusted the model again. The journal entries and short articles that later became the Central Doctrine grew out of this back and forth. From the autumn of 2014 the reading of Jung, Hillman, Assagioli, Parfitt and Popp went into them, and later the deeper study of physics went in beside it, year after year of notes taken toward the model.
By 2021 the model rested heavily on quantum mechanics in the Orthodox interpretation, on Jung and Pauli's dual-aspect monism, on Stapp's templates and the Zeno effect, on light and matter as two poles of one phenomenon, on the Transpersonal Egg, and on the other system variables of our ritual praxis. It was the view from the center, the soul at the center of its own world asking and being answered.