As human beings we crave spiritual bliss or ecstasy: It is like a hug from our mother or from God. There is a part of our brain that recognises maternal love. We are wired for spiritual bliss. Our souls crave meaning the way the body craves oxygen. We can't live without spiritual bliss. Carl Jung, the most famous psychiatrist, psychologist, psychotherapist, and founder of analytical psychology, who was also a spiritual Master, explained that addiction is what happens when we don't find Faith and instead turn to imitation love in the form of substance addictions, behavioural addictions, and addiction to external validation.
Spiritual bliss
Anxiety is the distance between you and God. Carl Jung's patients included Herman Hesse who wrote the story 'Siddhartha' about the Buddha, and Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carl Jung, spirituality and addiction
Carl Jung believed that unless someone can find their way to a spiritual experience, their addiction is incurable.
Dionysus was not the God of drunkenness, he was the God of ecstatic vision. He was the God of wine, but that wine was spirituality.
If we don't get our spiritual ecstasy, we try to get it in other ways, and it pops up in its symptomatic or compulsive form, which accounts for the epidemic of addiction, mental illness, and much of the chaos in our present culture. We have to have an ecstatic dimension to our life. At times, during meditation, I reach such spiritual highs that I have to sit down if I am walking in the woods. We are simply not used to this natural state.
Carl Jung, in his letter to Bill Wilson, wrote that "The only right and legitimate was to such as experience is, it happens to you in reality and it can only happen when you walk a path (Joseph Campbell's 'Hero's Journey'), which leads to higher understanding (of your Self and the world). You might be led to that goal by an act of Grace or through personal and honest (authentic and vulnerable) contact with friends, or through a highest reeducation of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism." It also occurs through Deep Coaching, which is also known as Transformative Life Coaching (TLC), and I have experienced this myself.
Enlightenment is simply when all the moments of spiritual bliss connect together, with no pauses.
Van Morrison wrote:
No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature
And the Father
In the garden
Wet with rain
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Hello,
I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my website for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching.
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Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.