Our Inner Healing Intelligence: The Self Archetype and Soul Retrieval

Abstract

This dissertation is a ceremonial journey into the mystery of the Inner Healing Intelligence—a force known to Jung as the Self and to Indigenous traditions as the soul’s innate will to return to wholeness. Bridging the mythic pathways of depth psychology and the ancestral rituals of Indigenous soul retrieval, this work traces how entheogens open portals into non-ordinary reality where healing becomes possible. Through a hybrid methodology that treats research as ceremony and knowledge as relational, this inquiry moves in spirals—not lines—through dreams, symbols, ritual, and story. A talking circle of voices—human, archetypal, and ancestral—gathers around shared themes of fragmentation and return, the unseen and the symbolic, the sacred and the psychological. The Default Mode Network becomes a gatekeeper of ego, while plant medicines dissolve the veil, revealing the Self not as an idea, but as a presence. This is not simply a dissertation—it is a rite of return. My own healing path is woven through the text as living testimony. In honoring Indigenous ways of knowing, this dissertation becomes an offering: a map toward wholeness, where psyche meets Spirit, and ceremony becomes the language of reconciliation between the colonized mind and remembering soul.