A New Myth of Inner Alchemy and the Way of Individuation
Colin E. Davis
shadowtechalchemy.com
November 8, 2026
First let’s set the stage, then explore the Alchemical option.
The Present Era
Our age is one of LIMINALITY which will persist well past our lifetimes. This means that our uniting narratives - religious and cultural assumptions - are “up in the air”, “to be determined”, “in process”. This also means we are in an Age of Chaos.
This is also a period of experimental synthesis. Humans will try to take parts from many worldviews, to make new worldviews that fit them better. But when cultures are rapidly shifting, merging and organically degrading and rotting from the inside, there’s no time for anything to settle and there’s far less healthy soil from which to grow. Fewer people can get rooted into a single cultural operating system and bring generations of healthy progeny up through those cultures.
It’s like how our phones and computers are constantly being updated. We are forced to re-learn how the device works every year. Some aspects that we are used to are taken away, while other aspects are added which we must learn to use or work around. It’s a continually moving environment. Young people whose nervous systems are accustomed to rapid change are fine with it. As we age, it becomes a burden and we long for stability and a slower pace of change. Every area of human life and every domain of thought is now being DECONSTRUCTED.
This kind of environment puts tremendous pressures on human beings to the point where we could classify it as TRAUMATIZING. Most people are just trying to go with the flow and keep up, while getting more and more dysfunctional, more traumatized by the year.
But from a much higher perspective, this shift from local cultures to a global synthesis, which creates a chaotic liminality, is part of the evolutionary process. Every living organism, over the course of its biological evolution has suffered through many of these shifts. And what comes out on the other side is unknown and cannot be known except to say that larger patterns, the ARCHETYPAL patterns, can always be intuited by those who can perceive from higher perspectives. These are the mystics, the shamans, the artists, the prophets.
And now, every individual and every HOLON of organized humanity will proceed according to its own best interests to SURVIVE, EVOLVE or DIE - physically, culturally and psycho-spiritually. So this is the context and subjective worldview from which my next statements follow.
The Alchemical Ethic
The title of this writing includes the word ALCHEMY. This is the key term that orients my thinking and will always orient my thinking. This means the conscious bringing together of opposites to create a new evolutionary synthesis that is NOVEL - a sacred third, an alchemical child that could never be known by way of lateral, horizontal, incremental progress but only by way of vertical TRANSCENDENCE.
And when an environment of chaos, of liminality, of shifting ground becomes the norm, an alchemical ETHIC is one that doesn’t protect or defend, but one that rides the Ouroborus ‘round. It’s also an ethic that uses inner and outer conflict as the alchemical fire of creation-destruction for the purposes of transcendence, of true evolution.
Rather than avoiding the big waves or swimming in the shallow end of the pool, so to speak, it’s an ethic of diving straight into the deep end - but doing so with eyes wide open, AWAKE. Instead of sleepwalking, following the herd, instead of allowing the forces of the unconscious to interrupt our FLATLAND realities and shock us awake, against our will - just so long as absolutely necessary until we can find some place to camp out and go back to sleep - instead of that, we SURF THE DRAGON, awake.
The alchemical ethic is one that says “everything of impurity, everything undeveloped, everything pathological WILL be seen, isolated, healed and re-integrated or else burned up”. It’s an ethic that says “nothing will be knowingly swept under the rug, shoved into the closet, repressed into the shadow”. “All that is out of balance within me and within my relationships will eventually be placed on the table and worked with. Each and every dragon will be faced and the gold it is hoarding obtained”. This alchemical ethic says, “I will evolve in place, consciously”.
Instead of nature taking thousands of years to teach the human nervous system to update itself by way of catastrophe and unconscious folly, the ALCHEMIST consciously creates a laboratory out of the personal and relational psyche and performs the same processes nature herself performs over vast periods, within one lifetime. And whatever is not accomplished in one lifetime, is passed on to the next generation to continue this GREAT WORK.
The alchemist is both the experimenter and the experiment at once. He/she is the willing evolutionary agent and partner of GOD-NATURE. Melissa and I also called it “Directing the Movie of Life”.
The Way of Individuation
Everything that I have said so far is in total alignment with the alchemical philosophy of Carl Gustav Jung. This inner alchemy is what he called INDIVIDUATION. This means a number of things at once. It means to become a unique individual rather than a “mass man”. It doesn’t mean making a “cool” persona or identity out of a selection of cultural scripts that one pulls off the shelf of available options. It is a sacred practice of becoming a VESSEL OF NOVELTY by accepting the unique formula or “recipe” of YOU, that is already written in the DEEP SELF, into your ego, carefully and consciously, and thereby allowing this SOUL CODE to run you for the rest of your life. This means a shift from culturally influenced and immature ego desires to ancestral soul mission.
People talk about “exiting the Matrix” today. To Individuate is how this is really done. Everything else is an act in the existing play of mass man.
To Individuate also means becoming “indivisible” or undivided. Here we come back to the union of opposites. Conscious and unconscious, ego and shadow, animus and anima, the outer and the inner. Rather than choosing sides, we bring sides together and endure the fire of TRANSMUTATION for the sake of novel creation. Rather than projecting and displacing our shadows out into the world, we metabolize them in place. Rather than fighting the opposite sex or gender, or thinking, insanely, that we can integrate our contra-sexual energies through “transitioning” our identities or bodies, we instead discover and integrate these energies internally, consciously, alchemically. Rather than erroneously thinking the outer world has no relation to our inner world, we become conscious of the outer-inner play of psyche, As Above, So Below.
This is all the Alchemical Ethic or what Erich Neumann and Carl Jung called the “New Ethic” which they proposed after the unconscious catastrophe of WWII. And it is what Jung wrote and spoke about his entire life. And so importantly, it is what HE DID, absolutely heroically, completely committed with every fiber of his being, in total service to his DAIMON, his Soul Code, that directed and mandated him to engage in his own Great Work, to document his process, and to prophetically speak of this NEW WAY that is now available to mankind.
To anyone who wants to better understand what Jung was doing and why, you can read Peter Kingsley’s book Catafalque. And if you want to see the context behind my own perception of the Alchemical Way, you can read the book I wrote with Melissa Mari eleven years ago called Shadow Tech, where we first made clear our total commitment to the Great Work and to our own Alchemical Life Art of Individuation.
I will leave you with a quote from Jung’s prophetic Red Book, where he says so clearly that your way is your way. And while he says we must not live by others’ examples, because we must find our own unique paths, we definitely should see the Alchemical archetype which was running through him, compelling him. We can clearly see that archetype by looking at his life and pursuits.
And while Jung does offer many very useful maps and does help us to clearly see this New Way that is available to us now, the most useful thing to observe is what it looks like when someone commits to this Alchemical Way of being and the “Sacred Life Art” that can and does manifest “through you” by way of this commitment to Individuate. Melissa and I both experienced this Numinous Gift, and in fact, the only reason I am still evolving and still totally committed to the Work and the Mission after losing her is because we did tap into this archetype and allow it to run through us. I generated enough of the inner substance of the “lapis” to where it is now growing within me on its own.
Now, from Jung:
“I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.
“The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?
“Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
“There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way. I will be no savior, no lawgiver.” - C.G. Jung, Liber Novus