Turning Toward Mental Health

Turning Toward Mental Health

To the reader. My true and real observer, the one who makes me real. It’s your eyes that lift these words off the page. I have no one else to thank for this, so thank you, whoever you might be, at whatever distance from me. ♥

This series is philosophy and testimony. It is not treatment, and it is not a substitute for a professional who can sit across from you. Please let it be a companion to help, never a replacement for it.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

Experienced: lived, and I am the only witness. Observed: watched in others, with their details anonymized or left out. Studied: read in the literature, and cited at the back.

Welcome to the fun part. Not “fun” like a slide that ends in a pool because it’s hot out. Actually … that pretty accurately describes it, if you think about it.

This is the part where you get to see that I’m just another human like you. I may write a lot, because I’ve read a lot, but I’ve also felt a lot of feelings that don’t have words. I promised my family, friends, and readers testimony, so here it is.

As I’ve gone back to school and started looking toward the future, it became clear to me that I would eventually need a dissertation to reach the level of practice I want, with Jung at the core of my method. These essays are the ground that dissertation will stand on. And Jung’s method has been greatly underappreciated over the years. That isn’t just my opinion anymore. After his break with Freud, Jung was increasingly pushed to the margins of the professional literature; one early American historian of psychoanalysis, Clarence Oberndorf, judged his later work so full of “spiritual, mystical, and quasi-theological admixtures” that it was questionable whether it counted as psychoanalysis at all (Oberndorf, 1953, as cited in Sherry, 2013, p. 492). It took until this century for the academy to formally circle back: an International Association for Jungian Studies, formally established in 2003, and an open-access Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, published since 2005 (International Association for Jungian Studies, n.d.; Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, 2005–). Underappreciated, then revalued. Keep that pattern in mind. It comes up again.

I’m going to lean heavily on his method and on my own experience of getting through different obstacles in my life, and hopefully I’ll hand you as many keys as you need to unlock your own subconscious doors. The road runs toward a doctorate in depth psychology, and these little “thoughts about life” will turn into books, and series, and so on, until the design takes me out.

How am I going to do that?

Well, there might be a few times I touch on the subject of divinity.

I’m the most analytical and logical person I know, trust me. Do you know how hard it was for me to let AI help me find the missing links across thirty years of reading? How much harder it was to trust it with my edits? Half of my philosophy about depression includes the very screen you’re reading this on …

I digress.

We’ll get to that when we get to that.

A-gnostic

Those who have known me closely, my wife included, have known and accepted that I was agnostic for many, many years.

A-gnostic.

Let’s break that down. Thomas Huxley coined the word in 1869, from the Greek a- (without) and gnōsis (knowledge), and he built it on purpose against the ancient Gnostics, the ones who held that salvation comes not through doctrine or institution but through gnosis: direct, experiential knowledge of the divine, a spark of God carried inside every person, waiting to be recognized (Huxley, 1889).¹ That parallels what I believe, because I have always thought organized religion seemed to point toward the same thing. Where I don’t fully align is where they seem to think that “we” are God. In a sense that’s true, but only because we exist within the design. A fragment doesn’t get to claim the whole.

So look at the word again. I spent years as an a-gnostic. Without knowledge. The rest of this series is about how I walked the word backward.

Let me get back to the point.

I’ve been agnostic since my first “experience” while meditating, about twelve or thirteen years ago. Before that, I thought when you died, that was it. Over. You were nothing but the dust you left behind.

True.

That’s so true. I’m not going to argue with it.

But I’ll argue this. People are so confident life is a simulation. The Matrix. So who made it?

It’s also true that nothing is something. Even in space, nothing is something. So going back to nothing? Is going back to something.

Right? Maybe?

It doesn’t matter. I’m not here to explain the design to you any more than I already have. One of my largest philosophies about these things revolves around Jung’s answer when the BBC put the question to him directly: Face to Face, 1959, filmed at his home in Küsnacht, less than two years before his death. Do you believe in God? The old man hesitated. “It’s difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know” (Jung, 1959). The answer caused such an uproar that Jung spent the following months writing letters to clarify it. Not walking it back. Calibrating it. He didn’t mean he knew some particular God of the creeds. He meant he had collided with “a factor unknown in itself” inside his own psyche, and “God” was the oldest name on file for it (Jung, 1975, p. 525).²

That quote made me laugh once, back when I skimmed his books for fun, to seem “cultured.” But this time around I’ve mapped my whole psychology career onto building on his work. Partly because of the quote. Mostly because of the letters. A man who spends months making sure the world doesn’t hear his certainty too simply: that’s my kind of certainty.

How did I get there?

Easy. I used quantum physics and relativity as the lens that let me heal some of these conditions in my own mind. I’m not going to get into details here. That’s what this series is for. Philosophy of psychology.

But what about when there’s nothing left to unravel?

For me? I finally made my peace. That’s all I’m going to say about that part, because that’s all that needs to be said. I wish more people would agree that that part is very personal, and very important.

But it’s also important that we all consider something.

Every little phenomenon that’s happened in your life, or anyone’s.

Every little synchronicity.

Every little stroke of luck. (And yes, luck also comes from hard work; I’m not denying that’s one way to explain success. This is a hurdle that caused me a lot of grief for a long time, and we’ll get to it.)

Every one of these has an earthly explanation for why it happens.

But what of it?

Nothing?

Even nothing is something.

I realized this while meditating. The art of “being nothing” in thought is pretty healthy. You come back with a better understanding of yourself, every single time. I highly recommend it, and plenty of great minds think a great deal of the power of healing rests in your own hands. That isn’t wishful talk anymore, either. Clinicians built a protocol out of it. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, essentially systematic meditation with cognitive scaffolding, cuts the risk of relapse by about a third in people who have already had three or more episodes of depression (Piet & Hougaard, 2011),³ and it is written into national clinical guidelines as an option for people at higher risk of relapse (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2022, recs. 1.8.5–1.8.6). Sitting still, on purpose, measurably helps keep the dark from coming back.

I’m not arguing against the power of pharmaceuticals. Some are very helpful, and for some people they’re the bridge that makes everything else possible. But at a certain point, many of these drugs need to be changed, increased, or switched completely, because the patient sees diminishing returns. That’s not folklore either. In the largest sequential-treatment trial ever run for depression, STAR*D, remission rates fell from about 37 percent on the first medication attempt to about 13 percent by the fourth (Rush et al., 2006). A later reanalysis of the same patients, using the trial’s original protocol, found lower remission at every step, and about half the cumulative rate the original report claimed; the original investigators have disputed it (Pigott et al., 2023; Rush et al., 2023). Clinicians even have a name for a remission that quietly un-remits while the drug and dose stay the same: tachyphylaxis (Targum, 2014). The exact numbers are still being argued, which honestly proves the point better than either side’s figure does.

None of that is an instruction. If you are on medication, every change belongs in your prescriber’s office, not in the implications of a philosophy essay. What it is, is a reason the search can’t end at the pharmacy, and why I kept looking inward while the prescriptions did their part.

That always bothered me. For now, just understand that I knew it wasn’t all there was to it. So I meditated. Prayed.

“Existed.”

Whatever you want to call it. Sometimes for thirty minutes, sometimes for five. It didn’t matter. I’ve been doing it since my cousin handed me books about it when I was a teenager. I took a long break for stupid reasons, but I came back.

Sooner or later you realize that while you’re meditating, you’re only talking to yourself.

So it’s pretty easy to tell yourself there is no creator, because you’re the only one talking.

But what if you have nothing left to ask?

Life can be pretty horrible. But what if you could always stay motivated to pull yourself out of even the worst situations? (That was the catalyst for my meditational experience: loss, over and over.)

What if you had nothing left to ask …

Who talks?

You think it’s quiet? At a meditational peak?

Oh, it’s peaceful. But you’re standing at a door.

The door

It is the wall between the ego and the Self, the collective thought of all things. I know how that sounds. I also know how old it is. Jung drew the same line, between the small “I” that does the talking and the Self that contains it, fed by a collective unconscious we all draw from (Jung, 1951/1968a, 1968b). The Upanishads drew it more than two and a half thousand years ago: tat tvam asi, “thou art that,” the individual soul and the ground of being, one thing wearing two names (Olivelle, 1996, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7).⁴ Plotinus climbed toward it by stripping away every thought until only the One was left. Meister Eckhart called it the Grund, the ground where the soul and God become indistinguishable. Emerson called it the Over-Soul. William James catalogued the doorway itself in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Romain Rolland described an “oceanic feeling” to Freud, and Freud, to his credit and his loss, admitted in print: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself” (Emerson, 1841; Freud, 1930, p. 8; James, 1902; Meister Eckhart, 1981; Plotinus, 2018).⁵ Jung could find it. In one of those clarifying letters, he described his knowledge of God as “my collision with a superior will in my own psychic system” (Jung, 1975, p. 526), and the version printed in The Listener closed with a formula older than all of us: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere (Jung, 1960).⁶

I stood at a door. It turns out half of recorded thought stood at the same one. That’s either a mass delusion with suspiciously good attendance, or a door.

It’s not peaceful there. It’s loud.

As “hell.”

It’s confusing. But it’s meant to be confusing. Look at some of the math I learned just to try to describe it.

I still couldn’t quite pull it off … just one step short, it always seems.

That’s life. I’ll tell you more when mine runs out.

Keys

For now, I’ll tell you how I got over some of the hardest hurdles a human can face. I’m going to try to show you as many keys as I can. I’m not a doctor. Yet. But I know what a dark day looks like. I’ve read about many dark days, and I’ve watched darker ones happen around me.

And I can write.

And you can read.

And maybe you feel better. Or maybe you don’t.

Or maybe you start to question why you feel the way you do, and you start to ask more, and read.

That’s how I got here.

So first, I’m going to take on the big five, in exactly the order I overcame them:

Depression. Addiction. Suicidal thoughts. Anxiety. Attention deficit.

Now that I’ve typed that out … there’s no order there. It definitely started with depression and ended with attention deficit. But everything in the middle was a mix of all of them.

And there’s one thing I want you to watch for as you read them, because it’s the thread this whole series is built on, and the thread my dissertation will pull.

I don’t believe children are born with any of these. I believe they inherit them from us.

Some of that inheritance is genetic, and I won’t pretend it isn’t; a child can be born more sensitive than the next one, and that sensitivity comes down from adults too (Belsky & Pluess, 2009). But a great deal of it is handed down the way everything else is handed down to a child: by what the adults around them model, by the emotional weather of the house, by what we name in them and what we never name in ourselves. A child psychoanalyst, Selma Fraiberg, called the unhealed pain of a parent’s own childhood “ghosts in the nursery,” because it walks back in and stands over the next cradle (Fraiberg et al., 1975). Jung put it even more starkly: “What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents (and ancestors too …) have not lived” (Jung, 1954, para. 87).⁷ Once you start looking for it, you see it in every one of these five. Which means every one of them is something an adult can begin to stop.

Who is to say I’m ever going to be good at any of this?

Who is to say I’m not?

But if you’re still reading, thank you. These next pieces will be more important and personal to me than any.

If you don’t believe in souls, you’re about to watch one on paper, in a few volumes.

In as few words as possible, like I’m someone who can keep to his word on that.

Once you figure something out, it’s hard to shut up about it.

Isn’t it?

♥

Notes

1. On the Gnostics, see Jonas (1958). Jung’s own engagement with Gnosticism runs from Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916) through his alchemical works.

2. Letter to M. Leonard, December 5, 1959. A letter Jung published in The Listener on January 21, 1960, combined this reply with another Jung (1960). See also his letter to Valentine Brooke of November 16, 1959, in the same volume.

3. Six trials, 593 participants; the benefit was significant for three or more prior episodes, not for two.

4. The first of the passage’s nine repetitions of the phrase.

5. Freud’s admission is in chapter 1 of Civilization and Its Discontents. Eckhart’s Grund runs through his German sermons.

6. The circle formula is a medieval theological maxim, which Jung quotes in Latin.

7. The next essay, Turning Toward the Subconscious, follows this idea further.

References

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Emerson, R. W. (1841). The over-soul. In Essays: First series. James Munroe.

Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)61442-4

Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents (J. Riviere, Trans.). Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.

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International Association for Jungian Studies. (n.d.). About IAJS. Retrieved October 22, 2026, from https://jungstudies.net

James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green.

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Jung, C. G. (1968a). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. 2). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1968b). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press.

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