The Springs of Suffering Went Dry

There is a story from India, The Ramayana, which means a great deal to me, and there is one particular passage that goes through me like a hot piece of metal. Briefly, the story is that King Rama’s partner, Sita, has been abducted by the evil one, Rawana, and spirited off to Ceylon (also known as Sri Lanka). Rama is helpless, and calls upon the monkey god to assist him in finding Sita.

After considerable struggle they do manage to recover Sita, and the entire kingdom goes into a yearlong celebration. Day and night there is dancing, singing, and happiness. Then there comes a sentence in the story of this epic from India that knocked me over: “The springs of suffering went dry.”

In the story it is told that someone starts a bit of gossip going to the effect that Sita had not been “blameless” during her abduction. The rumor spread like wildfire and Rama, by law and custom, had to exile the now-pregnant Sita because her reputation had been sullied. It seems no one bothered to ask in those days if the rumor was true (a bit like the tabloid journalism of today).

So, poor Sita was banished into the forest, where she gave birth to twins outside the protection of the royal palace. She wept continually and suffered greatly, as did Rama. Eventually the entire kingdom went into mourning.

What in the name of heaven or hell does this phrase mean: “The springs of suffering went dry”?

Every time I traveled to India over the course of nineteen years I would ask learned people what this meant, and I never got a satisfactory answer. A Brahmin priest friend, Simanta Chaterjee, provided a 20-minute dissertation, but his explanation either went over my head or under my feet. I couldn’t stand it. Some years went by, and as I grew stronger perhaps, I began to understand this passage from The Ramayana.

If you overdo one of any pair of opposites, the other one goes dry. This is unlived life. If you try too hard to be good, there will be a rat’s nest of darkness sitting somewhere in your unconscious (as can be seen in recent months in celebrated falls from grace by clergy, politicians, and other public figures). Unlived life doesn’t just fade away; it goes into the unconscious and eventually it goes rancid and gets acted out, projected upon others, or is played out as symptom. When we become too one-sided, the opposite of any quality eventually has its revenge on us. It may come out in a depression, vague dissatisfaction with our lives, resentment or rage. Eventually, the whole kingdom suffers. In the ancient Hindu epic, The Ramayana, the spring of suffering (an irreducible aspect of reality) went dry and half of the royal pair was banished. There would be no story if there were not difficulties and the tension of opposites, but how are we to live with this?

If you are feeling torn by some impossible neurotic split in your life (for example, you are tempted to have a "fling" with someone new, yet you love your family and do not want to create a mess), or you are aging and cannot find the meaning of your life, or even if you are on your death bed – it is not too late to find what is unlived in you and make it conscious by working with it symbolically. Symbolic life is the only solution for the modern dilemma of unlived life.

Achieving Our Death

Carl Jung suggested that each of us must achieve our death. What does this mean?

A life directed to a goal and purpose is far healthier and richer than an aimless life, and death is the natural goal of every existence. Shrinking away from this goal robs the second half of life of its purpose. A dying person who cannot let go of life is as neurotic and stuck as a young person who is unable to embrace it. In many cases, the same childish greediness, fears, defiance and willfulness are displayed in both situations. This is why all religions, which view death as only a transition, are psychologically as well as spiritually health-promoting.

Myth and Ties That Bind

I just finished reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a highly recommended phantasmagoria of ancient Greek stories by the Italian Robert Calasso. I won't write a full review, but this passage bears upon recent blog entries:

"The more obtuse still argue around the notion of belief, a fatal word when it comes to mythology ... we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself."

What we must do with these things (the myths) is enchant ourselves.

And later, Calasso describes the ancient practice of tying colorful strips of wool upon people and things as a form of ritual marking the intersection of the sacred and the everyday:

"Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenver life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything and everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a stature, an ax, a cooking pot...

"What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? It was a momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. Men (sic) wouldn't be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time ... the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life. We live every moment of our lives swathed in those ties ... We feel them blowing about us the minute something happens to dispel our apathy, and we become aware of being carried along on a stream that flows toward something unknown."

Intimations of Greater Presence

Out society teaches that the only reality is the one we can hold onto. It values outer experiences and material possessions. But in truth, we are doorways between different dimensions or worlds. Experience flows through us like breath, enlivening and enriching, moving in and out. From our outer world the door opens inward to another life. From that inner world flows meaning, spirit, and vitality. Our task as human beings is to become portals to the vital force.

The key is not so much what we do, but the source from which we do it.

We are conduits for a greater power. You can learn to sense the greater presence in times of decision. We sometimes call this "gut instinct," or listening to your "heart." The Greater is ever present and, upon reflection, we can see its influence as slender threads of fate. It comes to us in dreams, intuitions, and synchronicities that too often we dismiss as mere chance.

Exercise: Find a quiet place to sit comfortably. Breath. Perhaps close your eyes or focus on a single point across the room.

Now notice how you are thinking -- what is going on in your mind? There is probably a flow of clearer thoughts against a background of more vague ones. Don't chase them, just notice the tone, quality.

With these thoughts go certain feelings and judgments, either as a general state or in response to what is happening around you. These are usually simple: good/bad; like/dislike; agree/disagree; comply/resist. Let your self sense these subtle feelings.

Now just be aware that your body is sending you signals, making small movements with or without your awareness. You may slightly shift posture, blink your eyes, wiggle your toes. Notice these small shifts.

You are noticing your processes at different levels; the way in which you engage with life -- this is your outer process.

Now notice how you are feeling. What is your present state. Just be aware of subtle inner responses, the background flow to your way of experiencing. Notice what happens when I ask the question: Who are you?

Notice sensations in your hands, any tension in your neck or tingling in your feet. How is your energy? Is it stuck anywhere in your body, or can it move freely? Ask yourself: Why am I doing this exercise? Am I still interested? Notice the feelings that come up: excitement, irritation, unease, boredom. Remember things that you need to do today, a forgotten errand, a feeling of hunger or thirst, a wish to be outside. Now noticing yourself noticing these things.

Sustaining these thoughts, feelings and sensations is a pattern of association and connection, a way of organizing your inner world. This pattern is your inner process. This is how your inner self takes form.

Now we will do the impossible: drift inward and simultaneously be aware and not aware. Let your attention become fuzzy and diffuse, your mind wanders in a relaxed reverie. Remember drifting off to sleep last night or waking this morning. Stay there for a few moments. Sensations, images, memories float up from the back of your mind -- connecting together in compound images or fragmented stories. Everything becomes increasingly fluid and drifting. The landscape of dreams, symbol, myth , metaphor. Your consciousness emerges from this underworld.

Now imagine everything flowing in its natural way. Rest quietly in your own center of awareness. Sense the unity and participation of all things. Brightness, meaningfulness, lightness of body and soul. Imagine yourself filling with the joy of being -- there is no need to be anywhere else, with anyone else, doing anything. You are content just to be. This is greater process.

In daily life the outer process needs reminding that is it not always the most essential. Meditation, contemplation, prayer, inspiration, these are different ways to become aligned with something greater than the small bounded self. Experience of Greater process arises through intentional surrender.

This exercise, which we sometimes use in therapy, was developed with the help of our friend, Roland Evans. It is a tool you can try on your own to begin to differentiate levels of awareness.

Vision and Timeliness

Every time you go to work start a project, make a phone call, drive some place, envision the route and the outcome as strongly as you can. Don't force it to be too detailed but get a sense of the best way in which it can happen.

As you create your vision, notice the quality of your motivation. Are you willing to allow your vision to be real however it happens? Do you need to control it, not only the goal but also the path to that goal? Can you surrender to the way things come about? Test your intention against a sense of rightness, the flow of the Greater process.

While vision give direction, intention is the force that keeps us moving. Intention is willingness rather than willfulness. You must stay receptive and accepting of the mysterious ways that events come about.

You must keep testing your intention, checking along the way. Envisioning requires patience and a sense of the necessary unfolding of human events in time. Everything has its own time, as Ecclesiastes informs us: For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Nature teaches timeliness, for example, in planting a garden. Therapy teaches timeliness. My clients do not change until they are ready, no matter how much I push, no matter how good my technique -- if the time is not ripe my efforts just create resistance.

Reincarnation and the Ubiquity of Unlived Life

A different perspective on reincarnation is that it is a fanciful way of talking about unlived life. The stuff you carry with you, regrets, unfinished situations, stays with you. All of us carry with us this unlived life.

As one person put it jokingly, life is not long enough to marry all the people that you fall in love with, but those lost opportunities all sit there in your psyche. When you choose something, you unchoose something else, and the unchosen thing goes rancid if you don’t do something with it; it doesn’t just vanish but sets up a minor infection in some corner of the unconscious and then takes its revenge on you later. That is unlived life.

No matter how courageous you are, no matter how conscious and aware you think that you are, you have an unconscious full of unlived potenials. There is no escaping it.

It Doesn't Interest Me

The following was recently sent to Robert from a friend, and the source was not identified. We both liked it so much that we wanted to share it, with hopes that a reader might help us to identify the author. As astute reader from Germany has written that this quote is from Oriah Mountain Dreamer, for which we are most grateful. You can find the appropriate link to this author's website by clicking on comments. Enjoy.



It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow.
if you have been opened by life's betrayals or
have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own;
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful,
be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true,
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it is not pretty every day,
and if you can source your life from God's presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full
moon, "YES!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn't interest me who you are or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

One Less Blind Man in Pondicherry

An eye ailment, conjunctivitis, has been plaguing me for a couple of weeks. Two kinds of drops and ointment are slowly getting it in check. Purchase of the ointment brought back an Indian story I want to tell you now:

Long, long ago I was having my usual breakfast routine in Pondicherry, which consisted of cereal at the Ashram dining hall, then tea at a cafe near by (the Ashram never had tea or coffee), then to my coconut vender where he lopped off the top of a green coconut, inserted a straw, and gave me the third course of my breakfast.

Somewhere in the coconut ritual I was appointed by a little bare bodied Indian boy of four or five years of age (clothed by the sky, as an Indian poet defined it) each morning to give him the dry coconut for him to scrape out the unripe meat of the nut - often called Indian ice cream. I guessed that was the only thing he got to eat for breakfast.

I am infinitely vulnerable to that kind of poverty. When I noticed he had a case of conjuctivitis I went to the local pharmacy and asked if there was anyting I could buy to cure his ailment. Madras and Pondicherry bear the nickname of Conjunctivitis Haven and have huge numbers of blind people since that is the inevitable end product of the eye infection if left untreated. The pharmacist gave me a small tube of antibiotic ointment and instructions how to get a tiny ribbon of the ointment in each eye, morning and evening. Cost? Twenty-six cents American money.

Next day after "Indian ice cream" for the boy, I followed him back home. I had no idea where he lived, and ended up four blocks away to a place in the gutter where his mother and older sister existed on a dirty sheet of plastic.

You would have laughed watching me trying to train his mother to apply the ointment morning and evening when neither of us had a single word in a common language. It all worked out well, the boy's eyes recovered and there is one less blind man in Pondicherry now. All for the cost of twenty-six cents.

All this came back into my memory when I produced $54 for my tiny tube of ointment for my own present case of conjunctivitis.

Accessing the Four Dimensions of Awareness: Greater

In earlier posts , we have discussed four different levels or dimensions of awareness: inner, outer, deeper, and greater. (See Differentiating Levels of Awareness, posted on Aug. 17. To access more blog entries, just click the months in the archive to the right of this blog.)

Outer is a dimension of external experiences and outer activity – how effectively and comfortably you approach the doing aspects of your life.

Inner is a dimension of subjective experiences of your personal self – how you feel about yourself, your self-confidence and your personal relationships with others.

Deeper is the dimension of intuitive and creative experiences – how you relate to those aspects of your experience that seem outside conscious control.

Greater is a dimension of the higher Self, transpersonal connection to the divine – how you relate to spirituality, core values, and aspirations.

You can use this framework – outer, inner, deeper, greater – to check in periodically with different aspects of yourself. The goal is to keep a dynamic balance, accessing all the different possibilities of your self as you go through life. The path to wholeness is not about becoming cured or enlightened so much as managing different experiences and responding with resilience and creativity to life’s ongoing changes. As you tune into its different aspects, life becomes more interesting.

Today, we will discuss the Greater. Awareness of this dimension is the realm of experience beyond anything that is spoken or understood rationally — the numinous transpersonal dimension of our being. It makes itself known as a quiet, encompassing awareness that something greater is going on than we realize. Greater awareness refers to both that aspect of the transpersonal that we can embody (immanence) and for the totality of all processes (transcendence).

Divine inspiration is present and available to us in every moment. Greater awareness is generally inaccessible only because we fail to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary.

My intention is to be aware of the Greater potential in each daily encounter or situation — but naturally I forget much of the time. Saints and enlightened individuals seem to spend more of their time in this awareness. Meditation, contemplation, prayer, inspiration – these can assist us in reawakening or tuning in to divine presence, but the Greater process cannot be willed. It seems to come as grace. We can gently unravel the knot that keeps us tied to ordinary ego awareness. Or, to use another metaphor, the cramp of consciousness can gradually be released through non-action.

Look for the sacred in the every day circumstances of your life. In any situation, instead of asking, "What's in it for me," ask instead, "What is needed right now for greater wholeness?"

The Need to 'Decently Go Unconscious' by Stopping the Mind's Chatter

There is a deep fear in our culture that if we stop or even slow down someone else will catch us, they might even pass us in the rat race of life. The saying “24/7” is used today as shorthand in advertising and increasingly in conversations to indicate around-the-clock commitment. “This deodorant will protect you 24/7,” or, “I’m on the job 24/7/365.” This is the collective thought. It does not allow for stopping, for standing still.

When I can, I like to go swimming at the local YMCA. I am a regular there and many people know me. Not long ago one of the lifeguards saw me coming. Her manager told her that I wrote books, so she approached me looking for an inspirational quote to write on the blackboard for the people who were exercising. I thought for a moment, and a proverb from the Upanishads came to mind: “By standing still we overtake those who are running.” The teenager heard me out, thought for a moment and then replied, “No way!” She walked to the blackboard and instead wrote: “Go, go, go!”

We live in a “go, go, go” society. It is increasingly difficult to find a moment of repose.

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. We must find ways to, in the felicitous phrase of Jung, “decently go unconscious.” We all require relief from the tension and burdens of ordinary consciousness. 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.

Carrying A Parent's Unlived Life

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents." --C.G. Jung

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung meant that where and how our caretakers were stuck in their development, this becomes an internal paradigm for us also to be stuck. Frequently, we find ourselves dealing with a parent’s unresolved issues. At times we may replicate the patterns of our ancestors or we may rebel and attempt to do the opposite. Interestingly, antagonism to the influences of parents binds just as tightly as compliance. Either way, antecedents confine and limit us. Perhaps this is behind the ancient Biblical admonition that the sins of a man shall be visited “upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”

What was unlived in the lives of your parents/grandparents? How has their unlived life burdened your own life? How are you caught in the unlived life of a parent by doing the opposite of what he or she did?

How have your solutions to these difficulties, developed at an early age, become limited in their effectiveness for your life today?

A Dream of The Ring

A few years back Robert had a most interesting dream. He had read J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a boy, and was fascinated by these stories. As dreams often do, this one picked up imagery from outer experience and applied it to the inner situation of the psyche that Robert was experiencing at the time. It is a dream of a lifetime. Here is the dream:

“I dreamed of a power that controls the world, and whoever has the mystic ring has absolute power. He (or she) can teleport, become invisible, and is essentially invulnerable; no one can contest him (or her). This condition lasts for 20 years. Over time, the power of this ring diminishes for the person who possesses it, until there is almost no power left.

A young man is in possession of the ring. Then, just at that point of realizing the power is nearly gone, this young man comes running up -- he is exhausted and panting and the police are after him trying to get the ring! The man in my dream alters his path slightly and suddenly places the ring into my hand as he runs by.

Somehow, I know instantly that I have about five seconds to decide whether or not to accept the ring. It was very tempting, the power of the ring, but I intuitively knew that somehow it would fade in 20 years; so, in that five seconds, while I still had the power of decision and before the ring could overpower me, I threw the right into the ground with all my might. I did this just as the police converged on me.

The police and I got down on our hands and knees to see that the ring had completely disintegrated. The ground around the ring was golden, but there was not a piece of the ring itself anywhere. All power had been grounded by me.

And then, in one of those strange shifts that occur in dreams, the police and I walked together a short distance away to look in a pool. We were admiring the golden fish. With that, my dream ended.

That is a brief history of what was going on inside me (Robert) at the time. I believe this was a dream of discovering that my thoughts create what is “out there,” and this dream heralded a change of consciousness in me. During my nineteen years of wintering in India, traditional Hindu culture tried to teach me what is distilled in this dream of the ring: objective reality that we think is “out there” is actually only of our inner construction. Somehow in the dream I had the good sense not to become inflated or identified with the ring; I grounded the divine energy by throwing it to the ground.

This has been going on within me for years, but at the time of the dream I began waking up to this reality of the psyche.

When you wake up to it, nothing has changed in the outer reality -- yet everything in your experience changes. I suspect that is true at a certain stage for everyone on the journey into wholeness. No change, yet at a critical point of awakening there is a 180-degree shift of perspective. My attitude changed dramatically after having this small dream. I was nearly overwhelmed for days and weeks with pure joy and revelation. A huge sense of relief. I believe it was the dream of a new consciousness, one that the previous state of my ego had been preparing for (yet also fighting at every turn) for many years.

We all fight until there is no fight left in us before we accept the realization of greater consciousness.

Please note there is very little drama in this dream. It states in simple symbolic form a transformation that theology fills volumes speculating about: a shift from earthly to heavenly consciousness.

There isn’t any movement required at all to get to heavenly consciousness, it involves just waking up to what has always been. It’s no big news ... and yet it’s the biggest news in the history of the world. There is substantiation for this from Zen Buddhism which tells us: Before enlightenment you chop wood, draw water; after enlightenment, you chop wood, draw water. Nothing needs to happen, because it is already so. Most of the work in spiritual practice is preparing for the day when you are handed the ring.

Ego Consciousness: A Thin, Inadequate Diet

In the 1890s 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 India at this time to feed prisoners brown rice and water and nothing else. It wasn't an ideal diet, but the prisoners survived 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, all the prisoners soon died.

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 the deeper and greater realm through symbols. Jung called this symbolic life.

Complexes: How Past Experience Keeps You from Experiencing the Vitality and Radiance of NOW

The word complex has passed into common speech. In simplest terms, a complex is an unconscious pattern by which we organize experience. Everyone knows nowadays that people “have complexes.” In seemingly automatic responses, these emotion-laden patterns for making sense of experience catch us and take over.

Today’s neuroscience applies advanced technology such as PET-scans and powerful computers to help us understand how these mental patterns operate. The human brain is made up of an estimated one hundred billion tiny nerve cells called neurons; these neurons reach out to other neurons to form networks. Neurons provide cell-to-cell signaling -- the places where they connect are experienced as ideas, thoughts or memories. Just as a computer has electronic signals flashing off and on, neurons in the brain fire in a certain sequence. Neurons that fire together once develop a bond with each other and therefore are more likely to fire together again.

Based upon these patterns we essentially tell ourselves a story about how the outside world is. Any information we take in from the environment is always colored by the experiences that we have already had and the emotional response we were having at the time. When we experience something in the present, we assimilate it into known patterns, including the attached emotionality.

In this manner what we have seen and felt dictates what we can see and feel.

We continue to interpret present reality on the basis of these established pathways -- and some of them are non-adaptive, sub-optimal or downright wrong. But they become structural, part of our self-identity. It is difficult to think around or outside of your complexes because they are the structures by which you think. Even though you cannot think your way out of a complex, you can change it.

Just as we have all the standard physical organs, we develop complexes to organize experience for the typical things in life. It is not pathological to have complexes; it only is problematic when a particular complex is too limiting or it begins to usurp its neighbors or repeat itself even when a thought, behavior or the associated emotions are no longer optimally adaptive.

The whole-making force in us attempts to create something integrated out of every experience, but certain aspects of our being invariably become partitioned off, hidden away or awkwardly cobbled together, and this gives rise to complexes that are troublesome. If someone is touchy we say they have a negative complex on that subject, in other words there is an illegitimate stuck point. These are obstacles that confront us all.

A spider once bit Naomi when she was four years old. Now, forty years later, she sees a spider and goes into a panic attack rather than picking up a shoe and squashing the offending creature (or gently brushing it out of doors). This is her “spider complex” at work; she knows it is not rational, but all the same it is an enduring pattern by which she organizes experience. As everyone knows, old habits are hard to break. Formative experiences with strong emotions lay down the most resilient patterns.

While we cannot think our way out of limiting mental patterns, complexes can be changed. How? The most powerful tool for reformulating stuck patterns is called active imagination.