Inner Collective Weather

I have been reflecting on the concept of PSYCHIC WEATHER which I once heard someone speak of in Zurich. I need much more training in this subject, but I cannot find another teacher. It makes such a good analogy to look at some recent events of our modern world as if they were a kind of INNER WEATHER in the PSYCHIC world. Everyone is capable of viewing the OUTER WEATHER (THE RAINDROP KIND) as a non personal happening, but if there is such a thing as COLLECTIVE INNER WEATHER that we all share in common, few people are capable of viewing it as equally impersonal as OUTER WEATHER.

The thought comes to mind that INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER should be taken as impersonally as the OUTER WEATHER. One could be free of a great deal of guilt which most people carry about with them.If they could differentiate the two kinds of WEATHER. Such a division would allow one to take appropriate measures for each kind of WEATHER.

INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER would be the kind of suffering which is raging through our culture during the last few months and is so often viewed as a personal experience. Both WEATHERS get one "wet", so to speak, but the two are best treated by very different attitudes. INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER is the accumulated mistakes of our whole historical experience but is not a personal matter. Ordinary OUTER WEATHER is an immediate highly personal experience. To assign guilt to the wrong level is useless suffering. To confuse these two attitudes is to leave one in a helpless confusion of cures that has no conclusion.

What can we say about INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER? From the above manner of thinking, it is a profoundly deep attitude which is proving to be incorrect. History gives us some terminology that is useful for this inquiry: before the age of Copernicus COLLECTIVE THOUGHT was that the earth was the center of the universe and everything else was to be judged as peripheral to the earth. Copernicus upset this attitude by teaching that the sun was the center of our universe and our earth dependent on the sun as the center of our known world. Outer thinking slowly changed to the Copernican model but failed to make use of the model as an inner fact. It is high time we think of the Copernican model in an inner sense; if we could go through a Copernican revolution in an inner sense by seeing the center of our personal universe as not the ego, but as the SELF (as Jung defined it) we would have a far more accurate model of our human experience. To make this transition would be extremely difficult for modern man - who is used to thinking of his ego as the center of his universe - but it would be far closer to reality than our present ego-centric attitudes.

To put this in the simplest manner: It is time we made the Copernican revolution true inwardly as well as outwardly.
I am uncomfortable when I hear people saying that we will pull out of the present depression in six months or so and be back to normal again. If the Copernican revolution in its inner sense is required, no slight alteration of our "normality" will help. We had a chance at such a revolution several times in recent history but did not recognize it. Intelligence would urge us not to fail this chance.

Placebo or Symbolic Effect?

In a recent study imaging the brains of patients with major depression, some of the patients had positive therapeutic responses but did not receive the anti-depressant. “We were just looking at the placebo group as a control group,” noted Dr. Leuchther, author of the study. “It was really quite a surprise to us to see significant changes in brain function in those who received placebo, activity comparable to those patients who had received antidepressants for several weeks.”

Although sham surgery is rarely used, in a trial of arhroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knees, there was no difference in pain improvement between those getting actual procedures and those simply receiving incisions and sutures (Moseley et al, 2002)

Arthroscopy allows inspection of a joint cavity via an illuminated fiberoptic scope. Fragments of degenerated cartilage thought to be causing inflamation and pain are removed. Prior to this study, arthroscopic knee surgery was considered standard practice and nearly three-quarters of a million such surgeries were performed annually in the U.S. In the trial one group of patients had the surgery while another group was anesthetized and given three stab wounds to the skin with a scalpel. Both groups showed comparable levels of improvement with respect to knee pain. The researchers concluded that the billions of dollars spent on such procedures might be put to better use.

The placebo effect has been characterized as something to control and minimize in clinical research because it confounds studies, something to cultivate in clinical practice, and something present in all healing encounters. These distinctions are too often collapsed into a black box containing those healing elements that are not well understood. One person’s placebo may be another’s active treatment.

The word placebo is Latin for “I shall please.” In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales written in the fourteenth century there is the story of an old two-faced lecher named January who wants to marry a young girl; he discusses this plan with a man named Placebo, who advises that whatever he wants to do is fine and wise. In the 19th century this sense of the word had been adopted by physicians for any medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient.

The actual intervention that elicits the placebo effect may be words, gestures, pills, devices and, as in the case of arthroscopy, even surgery.

Assuming that the placebo response is highly polymorphic in human populations it is reasonable to expect that pluralistic healing modalities trigger a placebo response. What has been disparagingly called the placebo effect and relegated to the category of a nuisance in research studies, is in fact an evolutionarily adaptive trait, for the individual and the social group. Opportunities for catalyzing a placebo response by triggers to the mind, body and senses and diverse, which explains why patients are choosing to use multiple healthcare systems interactively.

The old language of placebo restricts our ability to think about complex healing, and I would propose that we rename it the symbolic effect. Researchers increasingly require more subtle ways to examine and describe the variety of catalysts involved in self-healing. The full range of human experience may catalyze a placebo response, and it does this through the power of symbolization and meaning to the patient. Rehearsing or visualizing is a mode of directly producing an outcome. A symbol has both conscious and unconscious dimensions, many of which can never be known. A symbol is open-ended, polyvalent, and has an inherent capacity to bring together that which has been torn asunder. Symbols are powerful agents of "wholemaking."

The Individuation Process

Individuation is a term that Carl Jung invented. It lacks poetry, but if you are searching for meaning in your life you are individuating. It is the process of you becoming yourself – that which you were put on the face of the earth to achieve. It was Jung’s genius to realize that every person is born as unique in his or her personality as in a physical structure. The shape of your ears, the color of your eyes and your hair, the contours of your body, your thumb print -- these are unique to you. It should not be a big surprise to find out that your psychology, your personality, are equally unique. To discover your uniqueness, this is the individuation process.

Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian wrote about faith in God, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. He summed up the individuation process (though he never used that term), when he wrote that there are three kinds of men in the world. Simple man comes home after work and thinks about what is for dinner. Complex man comes home after work and ponders the imponderables of the world. Enlightened man comes home after work and thinks: What is for dinner? It looks like a round trip.

Similarly, a Zen proverb says: The simple man sees the mountains as mountains, the rivers as rivers and sky as sky. Then one loses one’s way and the mountains are no longer mountains, the river is no longer just a river, and the sky is no longer sky. This is that awful, in-between stage in which we worry everything to death and read into all about us. Then, for the man who has had satori, the mountains are again mountains, the river is a river, and sky is sky. This is other language for the individuation process.

My first analyst in Los Angeles, Fritz Kunkel, used to say there are three kinds of people in the world: red blooded people, pale blooded people, and gold blooded people. These are all ways of talking about individuation.

What is Progress?

Lewis Mumford wrote a wonderful book on modern civilization and the growth of our cities. He did not believe that we were making much progress in a true sense. There has been enormous change in the past 100 years, but has our consciousness progressed? Mumford noted that the 12th century gave us cloisters and Thomas Acquinas. The 18th century gave us no cloisters, but indoor plumbing, and Voltaire. The 20th century gave us no cloisters, plumbing, and Norman Vincent Peale. Perhaps today we would substitute mega-churches. I believe this was said tongue-in-cheek, but it speaks in an interesting way to the illusion of progress. How do we measure progress, as individuals and as a culture?

The Gift of Stopping

In our busy lives today, we all need reminders that stopping is possible. Stopping is going nowhere happily, turning away from the hurry that fills so much of modern life.

Each day you can give yourself a mini-vacation, simply by stopping what you are doing so that you can reside in being for a few moments. Let go of paying bills, returning phone calls, crossing things off your to do list, and take some time to just be.

I recently had a patient whose life was in a shambles, but still she could not seem to adjust the pace. She brought her cell phone to our sessions and interrupted our conversations to take calls. One day, exasperated, I asked how much she made per hour.

“I bill my service out at $120 per hour,” she said proudly.

I inquired, “Can I hire you for an hour.”
She agreed to this. I hired her for one hour and told her I wanted her to sit in a chair and not go anywhere or do anything. She did it. She wouldn’t do it because she needed it, but she would do it for $120. That was the only way I could get her to stop doing and contemplate being.

Although it is hard for us to slow down, the synthesis of life’s tensions and contradictions requires a quiet place. Continuous doing generally flips more energy into the complications that already exist in our lives. For example, when couples are having trouble with their marriage, often the first solution is, “Let’s go on a holiday. We will take a vacation, and then we will feel better.” Well, a modern vacation generally involves expending more energy, traveling long distances, doing things from morning to night and spending money. That doesn’t help. It most likely will send the oppositions that trouble you farther apart. How often do trips like this result in conflict?

Anyone in the second half of life must find ways to, in the felicitous phrase of the Swiss psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, “decently go unconscious.” We all require relief from the tension and burdens of ordinary consciousness, and it is natural to seek altered states. (Watch children spin in circles until they become so dizzy that they fall down. They will laugh themselves silly, get up and do it again). To decently go unconscious means purposefully stopping the constant, droning buzz of information that floods the mind – but not by blotting out consciousness through excessive and soulless work, eating, drugs, shopping, sex, television, or other compulsive and repetitious behaviors.

Through the quality of our attention we can step outside – transcend – our habitual patterns and gain harmony with something greater and more complete. There is a long and rich spiritual tradition by which people achieve transcendent states using prayer and meditation. Life begins to flow again. One is open to the vast potentials and possibilities of the universe.

We are so busy living that much of the time we don’t question how we experience, and as a result we neglect most of what is possible for us to sense, feel, or think at any moment. But it all still exists. Paying attention is essential for expanding one’s consciousness.

Complexes

Each day we have choices to reclaim stuck and outmoded aspects of our being.

The poet, Rumi, urges us heed the call:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep!

So-called imaginary pains hurt just as much as legitimate ones, and a phobia of illness has not the slightest inclination to disappear even if the patient himself, his doctor, and common speech usage all unite in asserting that it is nothing but “imagination.”

In dialoguing with dream figures we are trying to alter our relationship to the complexes. The universal belief in spirits is a direct expression of the complex structure. The royal road to the gold in the unconscious goes through the complexes, which are the architects of our dreams and our symptoms. As Jung noted, this road is not so very “royal,” however, since the way is more like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath that often loses itself in the undergrowth. Whereas the ancients euphemistically referred to the Furies, which had to be propitiated cautiously, the modern mind conceives all inner activity as its own and simply tries to assimilate these energies.

For so-called primitives the world of the spirits has a real existence. Where this “naive” perspective is lost through civilization, we speak of dreams or fantasies or neurotic symptoms rather than spirits or ghosts, and thereby attribute less importance to them.

Primitive pathology recognizes two causes of illness: loss of soul (those complexes which naturally belong) and possession by a spirit (patterns not naturally belonging to the self. Similarly, for modern people we can imagine two classes of complexes, 1) all those potentials that could just as well be part of our conscious repertoire were they not rejected or repressed for some reason and deemed incompatible with out conscious personality; and, 2) those potentials which may exist in the collective but don’t rightfully belong as part of the conscious personality.

These “spirits” appear when the individual loses his adaptation to reality or seeks to replace an inadequate attitude with a new one. The primitive knows how to converse with his soul, whereas we are unable to suppress many of our emotions; we cannot change a bad mood into a good one, and we cannot command our dreams to come or go. As Jung pointed out, we believe we are masters in our own house only because we like to flatter ourselves. Semi-autonomous patterns take over our thinking feeling, and actions.

Recognizing how relative and even arbitrary many of our patterns of thought and behavior are can help us to let go of them and open to the exhilarating notion that there are other ways of being. We all rely on yesterday’s patterns of response—that is how all life learns, adapts, grows and copes with the demands of life. The problem is clinging to the fixed and the known even when it is clear that these are no longer serving us. By midlife the accumulated life becomes a crustaceous shell. Our solutions are often actually the problem. Why should we imagine that the attitudes of one stage of life and development of the personalitywould be adequate for another stage?

Rice and Vitamins

In 1905 there was an enterprising young British physician living in the East Indies. This man of science observed something quite unexpected; he grew curious and went to work to understand this phenomenon. It was the custom in Malaysia at this time to feed prisoners brown rice and water and nothing else. It wasn't an ideal diet, but the prisoners lived on it. Then the missionaries came and declared, “You really must do better by your prisoners than this; you must feed these people properly.” In response, the prison officials began doling white rice out to their captives. When they did this, many of the prisoners responded by dying. Observing this cultural clash and looking into the cause of the deaths, the British physician discovered that the polishings of the brown rice contained an essential element for the human diet—he had discovered vitamins, and it was he who named then; vita (life) min (source).

In the interim period of a hundred years we are now doing much better in understanding basic human needs on the physical level. But on the symbolic level, we have become poverty stricken. As soon as something is missing in the human diet, be it physical or psychological, symptoms appear. Something essential is missing from our psychological diet today, and that something is as important to life as any vitamin—it is connection with feeling.