Each day we have choices to reclaim aspects of unlived life. The great Sufi 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!
The word heresy was laughable to me for many years; I thought it was just a term for anything that the Church Fathers in Rome didn't like. But then I found out that in the Christian tradition all heresy is a misunderstanding of the nature of Christ. The famous heresies in medieval Christianity invariably were arguments about whether Christ was more human or divine. If you said he was more human, you were wrong. If you said he was more divine than human, again you were wrong. Christ was fully divine and fully human, both of heaven and earth. Anything that departs from that balance is a heresy.
The power of the word heresy came when I began to apply it in my own life. You don't have to be a Christian to understand when a heresy is taking place in your psyche. When my life becomes more doing than being, then I am in heresy. When there is more being than doing, then I am in heresy. Now the word heresy is useful to me: it is a dislocation of the center of gravity of the personality. We often fall into heresy, and it is a wonderful term to describe when we lean too far to one side of the other. It points to the paradoxical nature of human life.
I became a much better Christian after living in India and learning to understand religious symbols non-literally. I began to see that immaculate conception, crucifixion, resurrection, these are living things taking place all the time -- within us. A symbol that reminds me to work each day for balance in my life is the holy cross. It is part of the genius of the Christian tradition to produce such a powerful symbol. I have come to understand the cross as a symbol of two strong opposing forces that must be balanced, with the balancing point always exactly in the center where the two forces intersect.
Dr. Jung believed that the crucifixion in Christianity is a prototype of the human being crucified between different levels of consciousness. From his reading of Christianity, the appropriate thing was to stay right in the middle, at the holy place, and to struggle to remain conscious; Christ refused the sedative that they gave to crucified people. We, too, when presented by one of life's painful contradictions must wait between the two apparent oppositions until a reconciliation or transfiguration occurs. Think of the horizontal beam of a cross as representing the earthly realm and the vertical beam of a cross as representing the heavenly realm. I have little patience with people who are trying to advance the vertical (lofty, idealized) part of their lives at the expense of the horizontal (earthy, human) dimensions of their being. As such, this is a heresy.
Which of these two great realities is better, fulfilling your earthly duties or serving heaven? If you side with either one you are in heresy. To error on either side is a sure formula for loneliness as well, because it means that you are separating yourself either from the world or from God.
The proper balance is different for each person and is constantly shifting in each moment. There is no simple recipe. Yet we like simple recipes. Some people set about the task of increasing the amount of goodness in their life or the amount of lightness or brightness or happiness. This is an egocentric journey with little nobility in it. More often than not, seeking more goodness or happiness just leads to their exact opposite. I sometimes think that exhaustion is the best tool for religious experience, as it gets the ego (with its desire for certainty) out of the way so the divine can pour through.
Too often in dream work we gain a meaning but lose the experience. A dream can be related to as a bodily felt phenomenon. The urgency to tell what it means can be a defense against the experience. The goal of dream enactment is to produce a lived experience.
1) Build the dream back into the body. Relax, go into a trance-like state by watching your thoughts but not identifying with them. Allow your breathing to become deep and rhythmic. Let a dream figure become present for you. Every image is a possible relation.
2) You may pick a dream figure you like the most, or the one you dislike the most.
3) Breathe the figure in and lend your body to it.
4) Ask what the dream figures wants; it may have something to say, a gesture, a movement. Where in your body do you feel the dream figure most?
5) Another figure may come in during the exercise. Follow the energy. Sequence does not equal consequence.
6) When you breathe the figure out, say goodbye to it.
Watch for an emotional response. All figures in the dream can be bodily felt. Meaning should grow out of the evoked presence of the dream. You are not so much to understand the dream as to enact it. Dream figures are like shades that want to be flesh and blood, to breath, or be taken for a walk.
Language ultimately fails, so you must always be ready to let go of the story you have made. There is no truth, only “truing.’
My usual Sunday morning visit to the fishing village near Pondicherry, India, has been the same for the nearly twenty years I have visited that bit of the medieval world, except that today I have been invited to a Puja performed by Ragu, the village ecstatic. Ragu had been hidden from me all these years for fear that I would not approve of such things. The villagers watched and tested me in many ways before they would allow me close to their private thoughts and ceremonies. It is only this morning that they are going to trust me with Ragu, the spiritual head of their village.
It is a tiny village, perhaps five hundred people, on the very edge of the ocean ten miles north of Pondicherry, a hundred miles south of the large city of Madras. This brings it to twelve degrees north latitude, well within the intensity of the tropics.
This village is thoroughly rooted in the medieval world and except for the fact that the fishing nets are made of nylon instead of coconut fiber, little has changed in a thousand years. Their boats - called catamarans - are made without any metal parts and consist simply of shaped wood sections sewn together with coconut fiber. The name catamaran has gone over the entire world now and denotes “double boat” in the Tamil language. The involuntary fantasy always grips my mind as I approach the village that this is what would survive if India’s attempt to be a modern nation should collapse. Without electricity and oil fuel the urban parts of India would collapse in a month. Such a collapse is not unlikely, but the small villages would continue as they always have, independent of oil fuel or electricity. Fish from the sea and the generous coconut trees would make a simple living for such a village.
The rickshaw driver is a young man, Selveraj, who attached himself to me several years ago. India functions on an intricate system of personal ownership and Selveraj and I have such a tie between us. I go to the village in a rickshaw since my ability for either a bicycle or small moped is impaired. I hire him by the week, and he devotes himself to discerning my needs and schedule, which I think he knows better than I do.
Selveraj’s wife died three years ago, and he and his ten year old son, Rama, make up one of the thin little families that live on the street in front of my guest house. When I find Selveraj to take me to the dining hall in the morning I see the two of them wrapped up in their single blanket making a ragged bundle lying on the sidewalk. All of their possessions are within arms reach and covered by a plastic tarp no larger than their own dimensions. Birth, death, cooking, eating, worship, all goes on in that small space.
We go through the early morning traffic of the city streets, out through the suburbs, then through coconut groves, little hamlets and through a regression in time of a thousand years. We turn off the main road, glad to be rid of the trucks.
When we walk from the rickshaw the boys fairly carry us down the lane and there is high competition to see who can carry the backpack and much jostling to peer into the sack to see what treat I have brought this time. Pens, candies, balls, marbles. If I pay Selveraj Rps l00 a day, that leaves him a meager income considering that the Rupee is purchased for U. S. $.03 when I cash a travelers check. For years the children have been coming out to meet us at a particular spot and run along the rickshaw with abandon of joy to sweep us in. They cannot wait to see the tall man who has blue eyes, white skin and who comes from far away. It has been a a slow progression to see the boys learn to sit in a circle and take their treats with some order. At first they were so afraid of this man from far away that they would only hide behind the coconut trees and take their gift second-hand from one of the villagers. Now some of the boys have known me since their birth. The most recent addition is that the girls come now, a dreadful breach of village etiquette but somehow permissible.
Babu meets us and serves as our chief means of communication with the village. He is in his thirties, a fisherman. Babu takes us to his father’s house where we sit on coconut mats and are “viewed.” Soon we go to Babu’s house - children fairly carrying us along the lane - and are offered something to eat or drink. This is obligatory and made a severe problem at first. The village has no sense of hygiene, and I can not take food or drink without becoming violently ill. One day I found the exact description of the dilemma of a Westerner and an Indian in this respect: my Indian friend was worrying about the caste of the person who was pouring a drink for me while I was worrying about whether the water had been boiled or not. Contamination flies under many definitions! I finally found a way out by professing a great liking for fresh green coconut cut open with a machete, and I could drink the fresh, sweet milk. They get me a coconut. The villagers are often sick and typhoid, dysentery and every amoeba, worm and parasite known to man. So I profess no liking for the soft coconut meat, sometimes affectionatly known as tropical ice cream.
Ragu is 24 years old, looks l8 as all Indians look several years younger than they are by chronological age. When he appears i realize that I have known Ragu for several years but they kept the fact from me that he was a holy person. Next I am horrified to see the lighted cube of camphor drawn into Ragu’s mouth, making a wonderful/terrible moment when the light was shining through his white teeth just before the flame disappeared. Ragu loses consciousness and goes into a trance during ceremonial times and has no memory or trace of what happens to him. In the big festivals he is attached to a cart carrying the image of God from the temple and pulls it by means of a dozen fish lines with the hooks pierced though the large muscles of his arms and back.
Babu recites the long incantations and mantras, and the God image is decked with flowers.
Ragu is given handfuls of Neem leaves to eat, until he begins to tremble and find his way into the spirit world where he can converse with the Gods. Babu asked him to consult the Gods on various matters important to the village for that day and Ragu replied in his high pitched voice which is the God speech. I pressured Babu later to tell me some of the conversation with the Gods and only got the information that the Gods had objected to the barbarian foreigner who had such bad manners as to sit on a chair for the Puja instead of being in lotus position on the floor. Ragu explained that foreigners were uneducated people and were to be forgiven for their vulgarity. The Gods asked that a cube of solidified camphor be put on Ragu's tongue again and lighted as a sign of good faith. I understood that the triumph of the spirit over flesh was exactly what primitive people need to counterbalance their earthy life.
If wholeness is the great goal of human consciousness, then it would follow that earth bound people would need as dramatic a triumph of the spirit as they could find. I have been meditating ever since that probably we, more detached from the earthiness of life than any people in history, need earthing as desperately. When it was all over, I again saw the happy smiling teenager without a conscious trace of his consorting with the Gods.
-- Robert Johnson India Journal, 1996
David Bohm, a brilliant theoretical physicist, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, conceptualizes the universe as manifestation of what he calls the universal flux. Bohm asserts that everything is process and in process. There are no stable enduring phenomena. What appear to be solid objects are simply slower processes than the human process. We perceive these as static if we vibrate at a faster frequency, and we perceive these as chaotic if we move slower. Each has its own rhythmic vibratory rate, its own velocity. Faster processes are more ephemeral. Our experience of constancy is an illusion created by relative velocity.
How might you appear to a redwood tree? Like wind or rain, people might be perceived as fleeting and intangible. To hummingbirds we are sluggish and clumsy, almost tree-like in our movements.
Modern science explains that we do not see the swirl of atoms or the hectic race of galaxies — our narrow sensory perceptions trap us. We imagine the world to be semi-static and filled with enduring things. Yet the truth is more fluid. We are ripples in a flowing ocean of changing life. We are waves breaking against some mysterious shore.
Life is constantly in flux, yet in our culture confusion is generally held to be a mistake or even a pathology. Confusion is not inherently a problem to be solved. It reminds us that life is always in transition, that everything we think is permanent is actually only temporary.
To be confused is to be in the swirling midst of what is. A basic spiritual principle is learning to accept what is instead of insisting that life be a certain way.
Ordinary convictions and common sense assumptions are part of what blinds us…Like children spinning on a merry-go-round, we desperately fix our eyes on the ground so as not to lose balance. Yet our humanness is made of movement. We are transient beings on a journey of discovery.
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado writes of turning the failures of the first half of life into meaning and purpose.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error! –
That a spring was breaking out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
Water of a new life
That I have never drunk?
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt – marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.
(Translated by Robert Bly, reprinted with permission of Mr. Bly)
As a young adult I decided to take lessons to improve my swimming skills. The teacher had a terrible time getting me to “unlearn” a set of motions that I had picked up on my own. The routine in my brain for coordinating arms, legs and neck worked up to a point, but it was not an efficient or powerful way to get through the water. Any instructor will tell you it is easier to teach a complete beginner a sport, a language, a musical instrument -- any skill. With a beginner there is less of a structure already in place, fewer “bad” or stuck habits to unlearn.
For adults our choices become more and more limited as we rely upon what is familiar and as we strive to be consistent with who we already are and how others expect us to be.
As you have probably experienced, most New Year’s resolutions dissolve in a month’s time or less. Diets come and go with every season. Exercise programs are often short-lived. (This is why you need to read my forthcoming book, Lose Weight While You Sleep! No, just kidding). Why is it we are so resistant to change? There must be stubborn obstacles that get in the way or surely we would all be healthy, trim and enlightened by now. Why do our resolutions often fade in a matter of weeks or months? Powerful inner patterns can sabotage even the best of conscious intentions.
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.” Jung, the first to use the term for psychological understanding, defined a complex as a group of psychic representations, potentially both positive and negative, infused with a strong emotion. In seemingly automatic responses, these emotion-laden habits of mind for making sense of experience catch us and take over, often despite our best intentions.
It is important to remember that complexes began as adaptive strategies; they are aimed to produce logical outcomes based on the core ideas and premises at the time they were formed. A complex is only problematic when it becomes too limiting, inflexible and one-sided. It is like having only a hammer in your tool kit and using it over and over whenever something needs fixing.
To produce real change requires awareness of how unconscious programs work and manifest in our lives. Purchase a notebook in which you can keep a daily journal. You also will need three pens, each with a different color ink. Assign a color to each of the different ways we orient ourselves to the world: black ink to record your thoughts, red for feelings, blue for physical sensations. Take time each evening to write in your journal. This is a great way to let go of your day before sleeping, so if you need to justify the effort in your busy schedule think of it as a sleep aid.
Check in with each of these different aspects of your experience at least once each day.
Noticing your thoughts will be the easiest. Use your journal as a container to hold those ideas that frequently run through your mind. Then check in with your feelings and write them down in red ink. Next, focus your attention on your physical body: Start with your toes and slowly scan up to your ankles, calves, thighs, and so on until you get to your head. Notice any tight places where you hold tension. Observe where you are numb or where there is little awareness at all and write this down. Record what you observe in blue ink.
The colors of ink will reflect different aspects of your selfhood. If you will keep a journal in this manner for a month or more you will assemble a record of how you experience life. You will see your inner patterns at work.
With this journal you will become familiar with your personal process. Are there certain thoughts that come to you repeatedly? What is the relationship of thoughts to feelings? For example, do you become depressed when you tell yourself certain things? Are there “old tapes” that you play in your head upon waking each morning? What happens when you are in a stressful situation? Do you eat? Turn on the television? Go shopping? Are you aware of your physical state when there is a conflict? Where do you hold tension in your body? Does the tension build until you "just choose" something? What do you do with subtle intuitions: Do you notice them at all? Override them with your ego’s agenda?
It is not helpful to judge or get down on yourself. We all have these complexes (also called schemas or neural networks). Simply by becoming more conscious of your personal process, it already is changing. Do something spontaneously different today (such as driving home on a different route or changing your diet) to signal to your unconscious that you are interested in change.
Practically speaking, if we would spend as much time being alert and aware as we do worrying, we would be out of any mess fairly soon. Often if a client comes to the consulting room and he or she is burdened down just past endurance, at the breaking point, I tell the client, “In this hour I can take half of the burden off you, and the rest you will have to bear.” That usually seems like a good bargain to most people. The half that I take off is the rebellion against the process, the situation as it is. If you stop struggling with it, half of the burden is removed. Then you have to work to deal with the half that remains, and you can do this creatively. Neurotic struggle goes nowhere. Creative suffering (recall that the root of the word suffer means "to allow" provides the keys to the kingdom. When you stop fighting your situation, you just have the situation but no longer the struggle to cope with. Generally one can endure that, and life begins to move again.
To find out more about Jerry M. Ruhl and Robert A. Johnson, click on a link to their website, below:
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