Inner Work Blog

Evolution of Consciousness

2010-11-17T05:31:00.001-05:00

Every creature on the planet is an emanation from the one and only source of all life and cause of the universe. In us the divine element may not yet be nearly so prominent as in the case of holy ones, but still it is a question only of degree. In a great man or woman the divine or super-human element manifests itself oftener, more clearly and to better purpose than in the case of a comparatively less developed individual. That is why people speak sometimes of the evolution of souls. Some souls are developed more than others on a higher plane…and it is possible for us to hear more often the note of divinity than in the case of other people not so fortunate or so far advanced in evolution of consciousness.

Robert Discovers Bhakti love in India

2010-09-17T12:48:00.003-04:00

When I traveled in India I had a good friend, Amba Shankar, who often went with me wherever I needed to go. He fended off beggars, paid the necessary bribes, purchased tickets, translated, made sure I had clean food and suitable water, he got me into and out of all the things that confront one in India just to survive. He made life possible for me, and I could not have prospered there without him. He was always with me with one notable exception. That exception was, in all places, in Calcutta, undoubtedly one of the most painful cities in the world for a foreigner.

It is not for nothing that the original form of the name for this city was Kali-cut. This was anglicized into Calcutta. Kaii-cut means the city of Kali, the goddess of horror, destruction and terror. She is dreadful, with eighteen arms, conceived out of the nightmare of Vishnu when he was once in a drunken stupor.

Calcutta is terribly over-crowded and the worst that one hears of India is most certainly true there. I was left in a hotel while my friend went off to complete business that he had to accomplish. He promised to be back in three days. I had traveled to India enough times it seemed logical that I could manage for myself. But three days in Calcutta broke something in me: nerve and fiber can only take so much of mothers thrusting their dead babies in my arms or children with amputations poking me in the ribs, or stepping over corpses in the street. I was strong at the time, but in a short while I began to go to pieces. My being was not strong enough to take the impact of so much darkness and suffering.

I had intelligence enough to lock myself in a hotel room, thinking I could stay anywhere for three days by entertaining myself and not going out. But the walls were very thin and it sounded as if someone was dying on one side of me while someone else was quarreling in the room on the other side. With the thin walls I finally decided I had to get out, particularly after a night in which there was a political rally with loud speakers and megaphones blasting noise in the street below and robbing me of any sleep. Fate conspired to break something in me.

The one thing I wanted and knew would help would be to find a sympathetic soul to talk to. Talk is a healing balm for someone is such a desperate situation, but I knew no one in Calcutta. There was seemingly no place to go. I was in a poor section of town.

Eventually I ventured out and wandered into a park, where it occurred to me that India had already taught me what to do in a case such as this. Go up to someone and ask if they will be the incarnation of God for you. That is what this custom is for. I brightened at the thought of this, though I am ordinarily far too shy to go up to a stranger. Desperation gives one courage. I went through the park looking about, chose carefully and settled my gaze upon a middle-aged Indian man sitting on a bench who had a kind look on his face. He was dressed entirely in traditional Indian clothing and bore a great dignity about him.

I went up, and with the courage of fear and panic, asked if he spoke English. He responded in the affirmative.

My second question in this new found relationship: “Would you be the incarnation of god for me?”

He looked up at me very seriously, nodded, and said, “Yes.”

He knew. So I poured out a twenty minute flood of talk about who I was, where I came from, what had happened to me and all that I had been through, what I felt and needed, the desperation that was going through me. After this outpouring before an empathic listener I began to heal and somehow pull myself back together. My strength and courage came back, I gained perspective. Eventually my sense of dignity and courtesy returned. After a long stretch in which he said nothing I drew breath and apologized for talking so much.

“Please tell me, who are you?”

He gave me an unpronounceable Indian name.

“But who are you,” I asked.

With a dignity I will never forget he replied, “I am a Catholic priest.”

Of all the people in India I could have pulled off the streets of Calcutta to be the incarnation of God for me I had chosen a priest to pour out my soul to. I was speechless for the first time. Speechlessness is looked upon well in India. It is a sign of wisdom. I just stood there with my mouth open. Presently he bowed and then walked off with a dignified stride that I will never forget. I will never forget that man and that day and I doubt if he will ever forget me.

For once in my life I asked someone to be the incarnation of god for me, and he complied. This is Bhakti yoga in action. It’s not just a theory or something that you do early in the morning as a ritual. It is something to set your roots into, to nourish and strengthen you. I wish I could go to someone here in the West and ask for that kind of profound relationship but it is not something that is understood generally.

Gardeners of the Heart

2010-09-15T03:34:00.006-04:00

My friend, Roland, is a master gardener. He recently learned that his home above Boulder was completely destroyed in a forest fire. He writes:

"Life is change. We do not really know what is around the next corner yet we act as though each day will be a mirror image of the last. Then the landscape totally shifts. On Thursday Sept. 9 we had final confirmation that our house and gardens in the mountains above Boulder were destroyed by the 4 Mile Canyon fire. After a few days of holding our breath, we knew the worst. It is ironic that in August I described the evolution of my garden. The linked spaces reflected the effort and love of 15 years of gardening; it had a special energy and natural somewhat untidy beauty. But gardens are ephemeral: they last only as long as nature decides. The plumes of burning pine trees reached 200 feet in the air. The temperatures were enough to melt steel and sterilize soil life to a depth of 18 inches. Nothing survives...My garden travels with me - images and designs formed in my imagination. Next week, we move into a rental house in Boulder with a small garden. Gardeners are naturally generous and giving. Already, I have offers of plants and extra space. The outpouring of love and support has been far beyond anything I could ever expect."

After a brief period of shock, despair, and grieving, Roland showed amazing resilience, throwing himself back into life. He has always displayed amour fati that inspires me. Life IS change. Nature really does heal all with time and a little help.

In moments of crisis I must remind myself: Can I accept life WHOLE? Not pursuing wholeness as another ego project of getting more or doing more but embracing the whole experience of life?

Can we say "yes" and continue to participate in life even when all around us things seem to be burning up or falling apart? This requires a sort of binocular vision, seeing all the tensions, oppositions, losses, through ordinary consciousness, but at the same time cultivating a garden that travels with us, a garden of the heart.

To Become Humanized

2010-08-30T10:51:00.004-04:00

Almost all of our myths, or at least our interpretation of them, is that you should destroy the instinct and march off heroically to rescue what is lost. In multiple stories in the West, in movies as well as fairy tales and ancient myths, we are informed that the hero must heroically fight a dragon or a witch or an evil usurper to death and with his foot on its neck then and only then will he redeem himself and rescue the fair maiden.

The Ramayana, a wonderful story from the East, says that it is only by your instincts, by your monkey nature, that you will restore the unity of the world, the wholeness that you once knew but lost.

I think the biggest joke every played upon me, a divine joke, is that I first traveled to India many years ago to be spiritualized. I had read of India and the East for decades, looked longingly at photographs long before I had the courage to buy a ticket and travel there. I presumed I would find the appropriate teachings, or a tradition, or a yogi of some kind, and sit and meditate until I found my enlightenment. Increasingly Westerners project such salvation upon a journey to a foreign land. But that is not what happened to me. Instead, I went to India and became humanized – which is what I should have sought in the first place. I did not find lofty yogic heights, I did not find esoteric wisdom. I found my monkey nature, by doing ordinary things, by listening to my instincts, by learning to accept what happens.

Sacrifice: To Make Sacred

2010-08-24T11:38:00.002-04:00

I have been gripped all day by the thought of SACRIFICE. I grew sick of the word early in my life and it was enough to drive me out of the common jargon of most churches. But when I learned that the word meant TO MAKE SACRED, I got another perspective on it. I slowly saw that it was an adequate description of the meaning of a human life. To make the evolution of an experience to the level of the sacred -- well, who needs more definition or explanation? It makes the only sense I have ever found of this enigmatic thing we call LIFE.

I recall the deaths of people close to me earlier in my life; I had no adequate sense of meaning for myself in the experience and I went away vacant and sorely wounded. Now I have a profoundly deep meaning of such experiences, and, though they still hurt, they do not torture me as meaningless any more.

On the contrary, I know I must experience the loss of everything that seems meaningful now. I am not strong enough to believe this deeply, but there is a deep understanding of it even if I play wailing infant on the surface. I can see I have not learned the basic lesson of life if I can't accept the next SACRIFICE that faces me.

What a strange statement to make!!!!! Man lives to be the vehicle of the great transformation of life from ego-centric to THEOCENTRIC. Yes, but when will I be strong enough actually to live the next such event?

Duality: The Essence of Everyday Consciousness

2010-08-24T11:35:00.001-04:00

Spiritual teachings are sometimes interpreted as advising us to let go of material things and lighten our load by reducing attachments, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding. To advance consciousness we need to be weaned, not from the body or material things, but from our allegiance to duality. The very idea that the material world is separate from some other higher existence is itself an error of duality. Reality is not dual, though our current level of awareness perceives it that way.

Renewal and Play

2010-07-07T09:03:00.003-04:00

To renew ourselves throughout busy and ever-changing careers and lives requires access to our inner sources of creativity and play. Play may be the simplest thing there is for a child. Children are in a state of perpetual metamorphosis; they have the capacity to move quickly from the fantastic to the everyday and back again, all in a moment. They play as the spirit moves them. As we grow and experience the complexities of life, play becomes a difficult achievement. Yet that same spirit of play is essential in our later years. As one ages one must foster tinkering, discovery, and creative renewal.

We are constantly required to adapt to a changing world, often in ways that we cannot anticipate. Perhaps that is why play is seen among all the higher mammals. A creature that plays is more readily adaptable to changing contexts and conditions. With fewer pre-programmed or instinctive patterns of behavior than other creatures, humans have the greatest capacity and need for play, applying our intelligence and imagination.

Play provides new approaches to problems and introduces new concepts. Even the most serious people have some play in their daily lives, though we may not think of it that way. A most common form of play is ordinary speech. We draw upon structures provided by our culture, vocabulary and grammar, but the sentences we make up with them are entirely our own. Listen to a conversation in a foreign language, or ignore the content of a conversation in English and notice its process: the stops and starts, when the voice goes up and down, the rhythm of taking turns. Every conversation is a creative act.

Any time we are preparing a meal, this too is a form of play. It can be simple and perfunctory or a work of art. It can include wild improvisations, “let’s throw a little pineapple in the chili,” or it can stick to the tried-and-true recipe.

Writing, painting, surgery, debugging a computer program, invention, “playing” the stock market, tuning an engine -- all creative acts, some of them bloody serious -- draw upon our capacity to play. Play pervades every facet of our life and is the force behind rituals, the arts, sports, and civilization itself.

We not only have inborn neurological and linguistic capacities for abstracting information and turning it into symbols, we also quite clearly enjoy playing with information in this manner. Many of the inventions, innovations, and flights of fancy created by humans have no immediate biological value; rather, they are elaborate games we impose upon reality.

When work or life gets bogged down and frustrating it is often because we are taking “the work” and ourselves too seriously. Laughter itself is a mystery. To laugh at oneself and one’s circumstances requires a playful attitude. I have laughed with clients facing the direst of circumstances, including chronic illness and death – when a patient takes the lead and indicates the need for such talk.

Emergence is a scientific term for describing creative play in evolution. Emergence is the surprising capacity for the whole to equal more than the sum of the parts. It appears suddenly and cannot be predicted. It is more poetic than logical, more synchronistic than linear, bringing together seemingly disparate elements to create new synthesis, new meanings. When different parts or aspects of any system are put together in just the right way, something new emerges—a quality or property that could not be predicted from the parts alone.

To reflect more on the power of play, please see the wonderful book, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, written by my friend Stephen Nachmanovitch.

Standing Outside one's 'I-ness'

2010-04-30T04:15:00.001-04:00

The word ecstatic in its original sense means to stand outside of oneself. We work so hard to make a personal self, an “I” or ego, with clarity and continuity. This is extremely valuable, but one pays a price for this “I” -- we become small, personal and limited; we are a highly circumscribed entity in our “I-ness.”

The ecstatic experience involves escaping from the “I-ness.” This requires that we break the boundaries of our separateness to experience a greater realm, a realm that taxes our finest poets and artists to convey. It is the most valuable experience any person can ever have. The beauty of the Golden World is that one sees a vastness, something so much greater than oneself that one is left speechless with awe, admiration, delight and rapture.

Once we have built a strong ego, we must then link it back to the matrix from which it has grown. But to say, “I want an experience of God is a total oxymoron; if there is an “I” seeking an experience, that is precisely the problem and the reason for the suffering in one’s life. There’s a Christian proverb that says he who searches for God insults God; this is because a search implies that God is separate.

Zen Buddhism also is very articulate about this, stating that the very motivation for satori or enlightenment is suspect. You find the Kingdom, not by seeking, but only by grace. Seeking after the splendor of God is a highly egocentric and insulating thing to do. I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with the slender threads.

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 in to its different aspects, life in all its manifestations becomes more interesting.

To Stop Fighting 'What Is'

2010-04-30T04:09:00.000-04:00

As Buddhism teaches so eloquently, anything you do to escape the fundamental duality of ego consciousness just kicks more energy into it. Your only choice is to stop. That unsplit, unifying place is found at the fulcrum. This is the holy place, the whole place. The demand for human consciousness to have the “right” thing at the exclusion of something else just sets the wheel in motion again.

There is a kind of consciousness that assists slowing down. If you can honestly assess what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, this is getting closer.

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. When you stop fighting your situation, you just have the situation but no longer the struggle to cope with. Generally one can endure that. This is to cease wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality — to stop complaining about what is.

down they forgot as up they grew

2010-04-30T04:07:00.002-04:00

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew

e.e. cummings

An Understanding Heart

2010-04-30T04:07:00.001-04:00

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul.

Sacrifice

2010-04-30T03:57:00.000-04:00

Sacrifice is an important concept for anyone interested in leading a religious life, but most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.

Learning the value of meaningful sacrifice is not the same as denying pleasure or practicing asceticism. There is a wonderful saying from the Judaic tradition suggesting that every legitimate joy you deny yourself on earth will be denied you in heaven. This speaks to the false spirituality of asceticism. Trading in one thing to get something better is not a spiritual act at all; in fact, it is highly egocentric. You shouldn’t make a sacrifice in hopes of getting something back from God. I see many people who pray so that God will make things go the way they would like, or go to a church to achieve social standing or some other worldly goal. This is not sacrifice at all. Properly, a sacrifice should be suffered simply because it is necessary for the transformation of consciousness -- to get beyond the wishes of your ego, not to satisfy those wishes in some backhanded way.

An excerpt from The Ramayana

2010-03-25T11:17:00.002-04:00

One day when King Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared into it. It was gone. He friend Hanuman was nearby. Rama said, Look, my ring is lost.” Dear friend, “Help me find it please.”

Hanuman was a powerful Vanara, a monkey-god, with the power to change shape and size and enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing. So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole.

He went and went and suddenly fell into the underworld. There were women down there. “Look, a tiny monkey. It’s fallen from above,” one woman said. Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (in India, a thali). The King of Spirits who lives in the underworld likes to eat animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with a plate of vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, not sure what to do.

Rama, meanwhile, was sitting on his throne above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him. They said they needed to talk privately, where no one else could hear. Rama agreed. He was told to lay down a rule prior to this special meeting. "If anyone comes in during the discussion the intruder’s head must be cut off," said Vasistha.

“It will be done,” agreed Rama.

Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman was gone fetching the ring. Rama trusted no one more than Laksmana, so he asked his half-brother to guard the door. “Don’t allow anyone to enter,” he was told.

Laksmana was standing at the door when a sage named Visvamitra approached and said he needed to see Rama at once. "It’s urgent. Where is Rama?”

“Don’t go in now, said Laksmana. “He is talking to some people. It’s very important.”

“What is there that Rama would hide from me,” said the sage. "I will go in now.”

Laksmana said he would have to first ask permission.

“Go in and ask then.”

“I can’t until Rama comes out. You will wait.”

“If you don’t go in and announce my presence, I’ll burn the entire kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse,” said the sage.

Laksmana thought, “If I go in now I will die. If I don’t go, this man will burn down the entire kingdom. All the subjects, all things living in it, will die. It’s better that I alone should die.”

So he went in.

“What’s the matter,” asked Rama.

“Vsvmitra is here.”

“Send him in then.”

So Visvamtra went in.

The private talk had already come to an end. It seems that god Brahma and Vasistha had come to tell Rama, “Your work in the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now be given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods.” That was what they had come to say to Rama.

Laskmana said to Rama, “Brother, you should cut off my head.”

Rama replied, “Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why should I cut off your head?”

“You can’t let me off just because I’m your brother. It will cause a blot on Rama’s glorious name. You didn’t spare your wife. You sent her to the jungle to preserve dharma. I must be punished. I will leave right away.”

Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Vishnu sleeps. His time was up too. He went to the river and disappeared in the flowing waters.

When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rama summoned all his followers and arranged for the coronation of his twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama, too, entered the river.

All this time Hanuman was still in the underworld looking for the lost ring.
When he was finally taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama.
The King of Spirits asked, “Who are you?”

“Hanuman.”

“Why have you come here?”

“Rama’s ring fell into a hole, and I came to fetch it.”

The king looked around and found a platter, which he held up for Hanuman to see. On it were thousands of rings. All of them were Rama’s rings. The King of Spirits set it down and said, “pick out your ring and take it.”

They were all exactly the same. “I don’t know which one it is,” said Hanuman.

The King of Spirits said, “There have been as many Ramas as there are rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep them. Now you can go.”

***

Perhaps here is where the work lies. It is our human work to extend consciousness – something that only we humans are capable of. Nothing else in the universe can bring clarity and differentiation as the human mind. This is our unique contribution to the unfolding of the divine plan. However, at one point in The Ramayana there is a passage in which Rama is told if he does not pursue his individuation properly God will abandon him to an intellectual search – which goes nowhere and is only more illusion. It is Hanuman, the instinctive monkey-God who is key to the development of this story. This seems to promise that your salvation will come from inside, from your instinctive nature. It will come from what we are taught are the dark or unreliable places. It is a big shift for a Westerner to learn that it is the sensation and feeling world, one’s instinctive world, that is the necessary intermediary on the path to wholeness.

Individuation

2010-03-25T11:14:00.000-04:00

It was Jung’s genius to realize that every person is born as unique in his or her personality as in physical structure. The shape of your ears, the color of your eyes and your hair, the contours of your body, your thumb print, is unique to you. It should not be a big surprise to find out that every aspect of your psychology, your personality, is equally unique. To discover this is the individuation process.

A Round Trip

2010-03-25T11:12:00.000-04:00

The Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard summed up the individuation process (though he never used that term), when he wrote that there are three kinds of people 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 and 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 the man who has had satori, the mountains are again mountains, the river is a river, and sky is sky. A Jungian analyst in Los Angeles, Fritz Kunkle, used to say there are three kinds of people in the world: red blooded people, pale blooded people, and gold blooded people. This is other language for the individuation process. It seems to be a round trip.

Desire, Fruits, Action, Rags of Love

2010-01-19T08:07:00.007-05:00

For some time, as I emerged from a darkness of despair, I contemplated suffering and desire.

It is instructive that the word "suffer" means to allow, to allow what is. There is a tension between engagement with life, embracing it, and detachment. That which sets my heart singing -- can I host it without attachment? That which I love keeps my ego going, keeps me incarnated. The Bhagavad Gita most eloquently tries to resolve the tension. It prescribes action without attachment to the fruits of one's desires. Gandhi has written most profoundly on this, and claimed that the Gita was the center of his spiritual practice.

Gandhi tells us there must be action where there is body. But how are we to know how to act? By desireless action; by renouncing fruits of action; by dedicating all activities to God, according to Gandhi. But desirelessness or renunciation does not come from the mere talking about it. It is not attained by intellectual feats. In Gandhi's words, "it is attainable only by constant heart-churn....Learned men possess a knowledge of a kind. They may recite the Vedas from memory, yet they may be steeped in self-indulgence....devotion is not mere lip worship, it is a wrestling with death...It certainly is not blind faith. Gandhi also tells us devotion must not be "soft-heartedness, reading beads while disdaining to do a loving service."

And yet...as I reflect on this great man's struggles, my love of the teachings of Buddhism, of the wise and colorful stories of Hinduism such as Rama and Arjuna, a few days later a student sends me the following poem:

Why I Am Not A Buddhist
By Molly Peacock

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

Yearning

2010-01-18T23:09:00.004-05:00

I have been asked by several loyal readers when we would write again. Both Robert and I have been ill in different ways. I want to try to begin a dialogue again, and thank you for your patience.

Tonight my heart is dominated by yearning. The films of the great French director Francois Truffaut are filled with yearning. George Delarue wrote many of the soundtracks which speak the feeling language of music to accompany the bittersweet images created by this most tender of film makers. If you have not seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, The Man Who Loved Women, Shoot the Piano Player -- you owe it to yourself.

What is this yearning? Our desire to be met, to be held, to be truly seen but not controlled. The fragility of life, which stubbornly endures despite all heartache and impossibilities. The humor, the arrows of eros. There is something tragically endearing in that. Freud and Jung used a clumsy psychological term, libido. Freud related it to a sexual "instinct" but Jung was closer in describing a life energy, the pulse of nature, or of God stretching out to explore and create. Perhaps yearning is what quickens the pulse and moves the green stem toward the light. In therapy one must always look for the yearning, how it has become blocked or limited. If I can help someone touch some aspect of their yearning, we can get things moving again. One can live on a diet of duty for years, but it is yearning that makes life worth living.

Woody Allen once joked about a relative who thought he was a chicken. When asked why they didn't get the poor man help, Woody replied, "We need the eggs." We all need the eggs. We need to share our yearnings and have them honored, even when they are perhaps illusory. Otherwise life is flat and two-dimensional. A fool who pursues his illusions becomes wise. Life is simultaneously absurd and a miracle, ridiculous and filled with awe and beauty. Without yearnings I am serenely indifferent, cut off, lonely.

Inner Collective Weather

2009-08-10T19:17:00.003-04:00

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?

2009-07-31T13:12:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-31T13:04:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-07-31T12:58:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-29T08:28:00.001-04:00

Complexes

2009-06-29T08:25:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-29T08:14:00.001-04:00

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.

'What is'

2009-04-26T09:09:00.001-04:00

“To this day, ‘God’ is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.”
-- C. G. Jung

2009-04-26T09:08:00.001-04:00

“The great problem of our time is that we don’t understand what is happening to the world … Our values are shifting, everything loses its certainty … Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously?”
--C.G. Jung, Letters, II, p. 590

Confusion

2009-04-26T09:07:00.001-04:00

Confusion is seen as a mistake, even a madness. In truth, our potential for psychological growth reveals itself in moments of disruption. The gift of confusion must be honored to clear a space in your life for something new to claim you.

Repetition

2009-04-26T08:59:00.000-04:00

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.”

– Flann O’Brien

Understanding Levels of Truth

2009-04-26T08:45:00.005-04:00

Years ago I began looking into the bewildering plethora of TRUTHS that the modern world lays out for a guileless youth. I grew up an unquestioning Baptist youth taking everything that my wonderful Grandmother poured out to me in her story telling love. How could one question such an outpouring of love and devotion? But predictably, I came to the age when I did question and I began a search through every religion I could lay my hungry hands on for something to BELIEVE. My youthful organ of BELIEF was very raw and gullible, but it did have its natural faculty of discernment.

I was dazzled by the Catholic Mass, awed by a Jewish Synagogue, puzzled by a Christian Science temple, startled by a Yoga teacher, impressed by a somber Presbyterian church, swept off my feet by the glittering promises of a Parmahansa Yogananda temple, hopeful at the Christian Science view, respectful at a Unitarian Church, even touched by a
Swedenborgian Church* - and finally settled down to the good sense middle way of the Episcopal Church. Even here I was not quite sure between Low Church and High Church, but settled on a Low Church congregation. Settled, yes, but I
often went to the big Catholic Church near by just to soak in the delicious pageantry of the Mass. I was ensconced in the Episcopal church and remain in its fold to this day.

As if all this was not bewildering enough for a youth, I had taken my first job as organist and choirmaster of a large Protestant church called the First Christian Church of Portland Oregon.

All of these came down in a clattering crash within a year as my job disillusioned me of church organizations and my approaching adulthood brought a sharp faculty of discrimination to bear on the whole subject.

There followed the most painful and dangerous period of my life, a time so torn with conflicts that I still marvel that I survived it. A Jungian therapist taught me some truths I could believe, salvaged me from that painful time bordering on disaster - and gave me the beginning of a profession.

Out of all that mess I remember one issue that still claims me; that is the teachings of Parmahansa Yogananda. Those teachings were far past the possible limits of belief, but they were so delicious that I refused to relinquish them into the fairy tale realm which they resembled. Life is too somber and dry if I have to give up Grandmother and her fairy tales along with Parmahansa Yogananda, but my discriminating faculty would not allow either one.

Page by thirty years of reasonably workable life that have little to do with the present subject - my year in Zurich under the watchful eye of Carl Jung, later study with Toni Sussman in London, England, years of experience as a Jungian Analyst, settled roots in Southern California. These were good and stable things in my life, but two profoundly deep roots unfulfilled, followed me. Carl Jung settled one of them; he taught me the art of discrimination of levels and how to hear Fairy Tales on a LEVEL appropriate to them. Fairy tales ( and Grandmothers also) are powerful TRUTHS if one obeys the art of LEVELS to understand them. No one can negociate a modern life and avoid schizophrenia without the art of LEVELS firmly in place.

The remaining unlived stream of life, unexplainable but indelible, was India and its yoga and reincarnation and promises of realms far beyond present possibilities.. Parmahansa Yogananda had left me with a hunger for something that was totally impossible, a complete collision of realities. unfathomable but indelible. Later I read a quote from Dr. Jung who was asked to read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI by Parmahansa and he labeled it "Pure Coconut Oil". Well, yes it is; but I refuse to let loose of it's genius even so.

Time came for me to bring these two opposites into collision to see what I can do with these two manifestations of TRUTH. I went to India, not just once, but twenty times, a three month trip every winter for twenty years, to search out this collision in me! I have a workable solution now, but the paradox is still in me. How does one survive a collision of a direct crash between outer non-truth and inner longing that is so strong as to be vital? The answer, so far as I have accomplished it, lies again in the art of LEVELS.

I can best explain this by an event in my own life: A teacher asked twelve-year-old Peter Nelson in his class, "Is there anyone here who still believes in Santa Claus?""Yes", replied Peter; Teacher "You really believe in Santa Claus?" Peter, "Yes, --- inside." So Peter articulated the answer to an unanswerable dilemma: Yes, Santa exists, if you are sure of your levels.

Individuation

2009-02-26T16:10:00.002-05:00

This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Carl Jung: Listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and -- most importantly -- approach it with a religious attitude. The psychological term for this is individuation, discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what are and are not. It is your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working through the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above it. This is a truly religious life.

Intimations of Immortality

2009-02-26T15:55:00.003-05:00

A friend recently reported a dream:

I am in a house, perhaps a house of worship. Some nice people are somewhere in this house. Jordis Ruhl (recently deceased) and "her mother" enter the house. It is now my house. Jordis says she wants some clothes to wear. She looks good, though shorter now. A good figure, I think. I tell her that I am surprised that she wants clothes, and I apologize that there is not much of her stuff left, just spring clothes. She chooses some accessories such as belts, scarves and jewelry. I again express surprise that she would want these things, since I thought she was in a spiritual form now. She says, "Oh, no. I have a real body, and I still want pretty clothes." I wonder why I was not told about this new type of body that exists after death. We would most certainly want to know about this. End of dream.

Death is such a mystery. We are not designed to fully comprehend it, perhaps. As another friend advises, "Our minds slip over it, as if the idea were Teflon coated."

Death brings up profound questions. Where does the profound richness of life go when someone dies? Does it dissipate into darkness? Our dreams suggest otherwise. The deep psyche shows no signs of ending with physical death. We die, and we do not die. When the dew drop falls into the ocean, it is no longer a dew drop, but is it gone?

Lent and Sacrifice

2009-02-26T15:45:00.002-05:00

Sacrifice is an important concept for anyone interested in leading a religious life, but most people today seem to think that sacrifice means giving something up, such as candy at Lent. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.

Learning the value of meaningful sacrifice is not the same as denying pleasure or practicing asceticism. There is a wonderful saying from the Judaic tradition suggesting that every legitimate joy you deny yourself on earth will be denied you in heaven. This speaks to the false spirituality of asceticism. Trading in one thing to get something better is not a spiritual act at all; in fact, it is highly egocentric. You shouldn't make a sacrifice in hopes of getting something back from God. I see many people who pray so that God will make things to the way they would like, or go to church to achieve some social standing or some other worldly goal. This is not sacrifice. A sacrifice should be suffered simply because it is necessary for the transformation of consciousness -- to get beyond the wishes of your ego, not to satisfy those wishes in some backhanded way.

Death and the Infinite

2009-02-26T15:40:00.003-05:00

What is the greatest wonder? That death comes yet man lives each day as if he were immortal. Death does not exist. The wind of life flows from the infinite. The infinite drinks death. When death itself is destroyed, one contemplates infinity. -- Krishna's advice to Arjuna in The Mahabharata

An Incarnation of God

2008-12-29T20:42:00.003-05:00

Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and storyteller, wrote beautifully that he was walking down the road one day when a woman, unknown to him, came up and knelt before him, asking simply and directly and with no further introduction if he would be the incarnation of God for her. There are strict laws over this in traditional Indian customs, and if one appoints another for this role, he or she must have no other relationship but that of worshipper to God. One must not become a pest, nor mix up other desires. With this safeguarding and understanding the two may undertake such a relationship in old India. Tagore thought quickly and decided that it was his duty to carry this role for the woman -- so he agreed. For the rest of the lives of these two people that was their agreement.

I have watched people in their interactions in our society and have longed silently for the language and the understanding and the collective backing in which one might give true proportion, depth, and dignity to a relationship in this manner. People here, no less than in traditional India, are capable of worship and worthy of relationship of that kind, though we don't understand it, we have no form for it, and, more often than not, we are seared by the intensity of it or invest it in other forms which are not suitable containers. Then we have the inevitable tangles so characteristic of our age.

Only One Endures

2008-12-29T20:30:00.002-05:00

Only love heals love. That which breaks us and poisons our happiness is the only recompense, the only antidote. It is not a cure because there is no cure for death. Is there a healing? Love and the end of love are inextricably linked, which is why we fear them so. We know deep down that love will irreparably wound us, but there is nothing else to replace it. Love and death are bedfellows, like you and I once were, yet only one endures.

Robert Memories of Europe in 1947

2008-12-13T16:08:00.003-05:00

I had left the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich after Christmas of l947 simply because I had run out of funds and had to return to the U. S. That was very sad for me but unavoidable. One does not argue with money, especially when it makes it's presence known negatively. I surveyed the time and place and wondered if I could see something of Italy before I returned to America. It was a lonely trip to Paris for Christmas holiday with friends, then even more solitary to go by train to Rome and then stretch out my funds still farther to Florence. I remember what a lonely time it was to be exploring such grandeur all by myself, the days being richer in magnificence than I could bear all by myself, the nights being even more solitary. I felt I was accumulating more impressions than I could safely bear alone.

Then Florence on a very cold snowy day with everything at low ebb on that early January day. The city was only beginning to recover from the great War and such things as fuel or heat mostly unknown. I found the Ponte Vecchio and was warmed by the still resonating story of the bridge being spared because neither the German Army or the U.S. forces could bear to destroy the bridge where Dante had first seen his beloved Beatricce. It thrilled me to my heart that stone could be saved from bombardment by the power of a story of Love. So I stood on the bridge and defied the snowy cold with the warmth of a mere
story.

But another story defied the cold and taught me yet another proof of miracle.

With no other human in sight on the bridge I heard a thin voice ask me - in near perfect English - "Mister will you hire me as your guide?" It was a little, thin teenage Jewish boy shivering silently beside me, and of course I could not refuse him.

His story came pouring out of him: in the terrible night two years before, word circulated the Jewish community that the German soldiers were gathering up every Jewish person of any age to be killed in the half day remaining before the Allies broke into the southern edge of the city. Thin rumor had it that any child small enough to be wedged through the iron rods of the ornate gate before the Vatican might survive. My thin companion was the youngest of his family and barely -BARELY- fitted between the medieval bars of that ancient gate. He fell to the ground on the other side of those few inches of safety and lived by the mercy of PiusXII for the next two years. He never saw or heard of his family again.

By the time he was finishing his story we were eating a thin meal of spaghetti (I, with tomato sauce to help), he refusing my demand that he also was to have more than bare spaghetti. He argued only that he was not used to such things.

I had almost no money at that point in my trip but the boy took matters in his hands and led me down the row of jeweler's shops that jut out precariously from the two sides of the famous bridge. He announced in his imperial voice that "His American master wished to see the gems - but only the best!" I was turning a couple of coins in my pocket trying to convince myself that I had at least had two coins to rub together as I looked over tray after tray of cut diamonds, rubies, star gems, etc. The boy knew exactly the right moment to announce - with disdain- "None of these are worthy of my American master" and lead us off to the next shop.

If the fantasy of the cash that the gem merchants lost to the rich American still reverberates around the stalls of that famous bridge, their counterpart still ring in my head of the fact that I have so much as looked at such priceless gems.

I did go music shopping and still treasure some of the Italian Baroque music I took away.

The boy left, ( though I will never forget him), I searched out Western Union to get my accumulated mail, staggered away reading the telegram that my Father had suddenly died. Enough is too much and I could not manage anything more than the train ride through the Gothard tunnel back to Zurick to find some friends I could talk with.

But the story is not yet finished: in Zurich I found a letter waiting for me from "Benny" another of the fateful carriers who guides me into the next step of my life, with some fistfulls of American money and a note telling me to return to school and finish the year. It was in the time following this that I had my private time with Dr, Jung and also met my English friend - and
her two adopted sons - both profound events of my life.

Heavenly Must Be Enlarged to Include Earth

2008-11-16T17:34:00.004-05:00

We are the product of centuries of Christian training that teaches us to abandon our earthy nature in order to accomplish our heavenly goal. I think the original teaching of Christianity was that Christ, the prototype of true man, is equally god and man. I was thrilled to learn that the word HERESY is not the dictates of some old men in the curia in Rome, but precisely the error of believing that Christ was more man than god or more god than man. This, the basic tenant of Christianity, somehow got misplaced into the belief that the more spiritual (heavenly, god-like) we could become the more nearly we had come to true Christianity.

For many people today the task is to divinize their earthy nature. How does one make one's earthy nature heavenly?

I was stuck at this point for many years and unable to get past the impasse of spiritualizing my earthy side. If viewed in this context it meant 'de-earthing' my instincts, especially sexuality, and disdaining everything earthy about my nature. My fundamentalist Christian upbringing taught me that everything of the body was sinful and to be at least kept to a minimum. Even fun and joy were suspect. I remember my Grandmother's stern forefinger admonishing me, "Now cool that happiness or you will offend our beloved Jesus'.

This might be excused as stern measures needed to compensate for the excesses preceding the Victorian age, but it is exactly the wrong medicine for our overly abstracted thought-dominated present age.

From this I learned who the THEY are who look over one's shoulder and disapprove of some Dionysian revelry one is engaging: THEY are the militiamen/women who are devoted to keeping the old rules intact when a new era is needing a new set of standards. THEY carry an illegitimate but terrible power over one. What will THEY think if they knew what one is doing - or even thinking?

This leaves us at the very cutting edge of evolution and requires some new terminology. New wine can not endure in old wineskins- as scripture tells us.

I found a new area to explore when I could replace the word CONSCIOUSNESS for DIVINIZING. To make something conscious which had been unconscious is to prepare it to stand in the skies along with its heavenly twin. Then both can take on godly beauty and divinity.

Another word must be updated if we are to avoid a stalemate; HEAVENLY must be enlarged to include EARTH. Heaven in not some other time some other place, but is here and now; and it is here and now that the process of the divinization of our earthy side must be accomplished.

60-second Creativity Workout

2008-10-27T09:05:00.001-04:00

The Fountain of Youth is a legendary spring that reputedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks of its waters. Florida is said to be its location, and stories of the fountain are some of the most persistent legends associated with that state. No wonder so many retirement communities exist there. A long standing belief is that Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth when he traveled to present-day Florida in 1513, but this concept did not start with him, nor was it unique to the New World. Tales of healing waters date back to the ancients. Immortality is a gift frequently sought in mythic stories of treasures such as the philosopher's stone, universal panaceas, and the elixir of life.

While our modern economy profits from the cult of youth, what is really needed as we age to remain energized and vital is to tap our inner fountain of creativity. This energy is free, refreshing and always available. To access it only requires an attitude of tinkering, discovery, and play.

In our outer-oriented, materially focused society, imaginative play is too often put aside, confined to the weekend, or left to “creative types.” But when we become too serious and overly dutiful, our work and life become dry, boring, and unspired. Under the weight of duties and responsibilities, our inner creative energies can be gradually squeezed out of us. Yet this irrepressible youthful quality lives within each of us, at least as a potential.

In the spirit of play we may toss together elements that were formerly separate. To play is to foster richness of response, to reinterpret reality, to experience life in unforeseen ways. Imaginative play is different from an organized game, such as football or a symphony, which has rules and a definite goal. When we watch professional sports on television, we see a highly constricted form of play; even amateur sports increasingly seem to be motivated less by “love of the game” than by a display of pride or greed.

Imaginative play is a divine quality that you can bring to anything, an attitude and a presence rather than a defined activity. When play is free, and not choreographed by some existing rules or regulations, it is ambiguous, exciting, risky, and open to new possibilities.

We all know people and institutions that do not age gracefully. Some trade youthful enthusiasm for what society calls ‘responsibility’ and become reactionary, defensive, and stiff – cut off from the creative spirit of creation. Far too many old people become hypochondriacs, pedants, or applauders of the past as substitutes for the broadening of the self that is called for as we age. The instinctive youthful creative energy must be cultivated in the second half of life, or we can easily become morally rigid, dogmatic, judgmental, and authoritarian.

Interestingly, our religious traditions inform us that this playful access to creativity is essential throughout life: We are told only those who “become as little children” can enter the kingdom of heaven. In psychological terms this means that we will not experience the divine aspects of life without a childlike, lighthearted quality in our efforts.

Any human ability atrophies when it is not used. Your imaginative capacities, like your physical muscles, require exercise to get back or stay in into optimal shape. Here is a 60-second exercise. It can be practiced at any time during your day, to help get your imaginative power back into shape. By practicing it you will bring more creativity, flexibility and fun to your work and your life.

Close your eyes and visualize a pen slowly writing your name on a blackboard. Now try visualizing some different shapes: a triangle, then a square, and then a circle. Now visualize the face of a loved one. Next hold in your mind’s eye the image of a favorite place you have visited in nature.

Next, imagine touching one at a time: the rough surface of concrete, a feather, the cool water of a mountain stream, a silk scarf. In your imagination, experience the taste, temperature and texture of: ice cream, one raisin, a peanut, a ripe peach, and a chili pepper.

Now imagine that you smell: a rose, fresh cookies, an ocean breeze, popcorn. Then, with your eyes closed, imagine you can hear: someone calling your name, rain on the roof, an ambulance siren, people talking in a restaurant, a tiny bell.

Don’t worry that entertaining “irrational” or downright silly energies will unseat your personality. When you allow these unlived potentials to become conscious it actually increases your integration, your creativity, and your vibrant feelings of being alive.

Dr. Ruhl Named Executive Director of Houston Jung Center

2008-10-14T11:39:00.002-04:00

The Jung Center of Houston recently announced the appointment of Dr. Jerry M. Ruhl as its new executive director, effective January 1, 2009, following an extensive international search. Founded in 1958, The Jung Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the development of greater self-awareness, creative expression, and psychological insight individually, in relationship, and within community. Dr. Ruhl succeeds Dr. James Hollis, who has served as The Jung Center’s executive director since 1997.

As a vibrant non-profit serving the psychological needs of the Houston community and beyond, the Houston Jung Center requires a unique combination of therapeutic expertise, management experience, and teaching excellence in its next director, said James Reeder, president of the board of the center. "Jerry has all of these qualities, and his leadership will be a great asset to the center as we continue our vital work of promoting psychological wholeness among all Houstonians, regardless of background or resources."

Dr. Ruhl's background reflects a lifelong commitment to education, communication, and the promotion of psychological well-being. With Robert A. Johnson, he is the author of three best- selling books on psychology and spirituality: Living Your Unlived Life (2007, Tarcher/Penguin), Contentment (1999, HarperSF), and Balancing Heaven and Earth (1998, HarperSF). A Jungian-oriented psychologist most recently in private practice in Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Ruhl brings to Houston a wealth of clinical and teaching experience. Prior to his training as a psychologist, Dr. Ruhl was a journalist and managed corporate and marketing communications for two major corporations.

"I feel honored, energized, and confident in the certainty that there is no better place for me to be of service than the Houston Jung Center," said Dr. Ruhl. "While I leave Ohio with a sense of both loss and appreciation for my clients and the C.G. Jung Association of the Miami Valley, to work beside such leaders in the field of depth psychology, religion, and the humanities as James Hollis and J. Pittman McGehee, as well as the talented and dedicated board, staff, and faculty in Houston, is a privilege that I could not pass up.

“This Center is not only a valuable resource for the greater Houston area, it is in a unique position to be a world-class institution reaching beyond walls to inspire and challenge,” adds Ruhl. “In troubled times, we need more than ever a caring and vital community to support our development of intellect and soul. The Houston Jung Center must and will continue the tradition of helping people find meaning, purpose, and connection with what truly matters in life."

Outgoing director and highly popular instructor Dr. James Hollis will continue to be meaningfully involved in the life of Houston Jung Center. In addition to his regular Tuesday evening classes, Dr. Hollis will maintain his role as the director of the Jungian Studies graduate program offered through Saybrook Graduate School and hosted by the center. “As Houston will soon learn, Jerry Ruhl is a warm, personable man, an author with excellent teaching skills, extensive administrative experience, and is most attuned to the mission and constituency of the Jung Center,” Dr. Hollis said.

The Houston Jung Center is a nonprofit educational institution where those who treasure the world of ideas and learning gain fresh perspectives and deeper insights into the human condition. Through classes, programs, and grant-funded outreach collaborations, the center provides a forum for psychological, artistic, and spiritual discourse and advancement.

A Trust to God

2008-09-24T14:30:00.003-04:00

Abdu'l-Bahá, who was the son of Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith. once interpreted a dream that was brought to him by a very troubled woman. She told the dream: “A young girl became evident to me as belonging with the family, but I could not make out who she was. She spoke of a horse that my son had once had long ago, but I did not understand what she meant. After a time it became known that she was my daughter and I felt grieved to think that I had not been conscious of her presence in all the past years. She seemed not hurt, but surprised that we did not understand her. Just as I was waking, I realized that she was our little baby who had passed away over 21 years ago, when only nine months old.” At this, the dream ended. The troubled woman added, “She was my idol, and because I loved her so much, I tried hard to put her out of my thoughts, and the dream made me feel that we should not do this.”

Abdul Baha responded: “That child is your trust within the charge of God. She was a child when she went, but you shall find her full grown in the Kingdom of God. You shall find her mature. You shall not find here there as a child. You shall find her perfect and mature. As to the horse once belonging to your son of which she spoke in the dream, this means a wish. It shows that your daughter has fulfilled her wish and her desire, and that shows the loftiness of her station. The wish is one in which your son shared,you’re your daughter has attained to it. It is my hope, God willing, that he too will attain to it.”

The aggrieved woman was still crying and Abdul-Baha continued: “Do not cry. Be happy because you saw her, and you saw her perfected. You must be happy. She is your trust with God. You have not lost her out of your hands. The only difference is this; that you gave her as a trust to God as a child, but you will take her back as a fully mature person. I had a son who was four years old, and when he died I did not at all change my attitude. I gave my son to God as a trust, and so at his death I did not grieve.”

The woman said: “But there is a difference, you gave your son to God, but God takes ours.”

Abdul-Baha replied: “It is the same thing. In both cases it is a trust of God. The cause of her surprise in the dream is this – that you are crying. Your departed daughter would say: “I have a good mother. She must be happy. Why does she cry?” Your daughter now belongs to a realm in which everything becomes mature, and she expected you to see her in the state of perfection in which she manifested herself to you. It is not good for one to try to forget (those who have departed). One must always remember them. But you must be happy. You gave her as a trust to God.”

Remembrance and Celebration: Jordis Ruhl

2008-09-24T14:23:00.007-04:00

Jordis Elaine Langness Ruhl
12/7/56-9/22/08

Jordis Ruhl, wife of Dr. Jerry M. Ruhl, died this week after two-and-a-half years of living with a brain tumor. Jordis' life was characterized by love for and service to others, in the tradition of the Bahai teachings that were instrumental in guiding her adult life.

A friend once asked Abdu'l-Bahá, the Bahai prophet and leader, “How should one look forward to death?”

Abdu'l-Bahá replied: “How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope, and with expectation. It is even so with the end of this earthly journey. In the next world, man will find himself freed from many of the disabilities under which he now suffers. Those who have passed on through death have a sphere of their own. It is not removed from ours; their work, the work of the Kingdom, is ours; but it is sanctified from what we call ‘time and place.’…Those who have ascended have different attributes from those who are still on earth, yet there is no real separation. In prayer there is a mingling of station, a mingling of condition. Pray for them as they pray for you. When you do not know it, and are in a receptive attitude, they are able to make suggestions to you; if you are in difficulty, this sometimes happens in sleep. It is not possible to put these great matters into human words; the language of man is the language of children, and man’s explanation often leads astray.”

Musings on Hell

2008-09-14T11:12:00.002-04:00

A perinatal (the period around the time of birth) interpretation of Hell tells us that if there is an astral hell like the one some people report in near-death experiences, hell's function is not damnation, but spiritual transformation (as one may read in Christopher Bache's thought-provoking work, Dark Night, Early Dawn).

The metaphysical vision that emerges is one that balances accountability with compassion. It integrates the necessity that we learn from our mistakes with the realization that our ability to make mistakes is one of the things that makes us precious to the Creative Intelligence. Instead of being the final resting place of those who have rejected God, hell may be part of a developmental sequence of imperfect persons who are drawing closer to their inherent perfection. For spiritual practitioners, it is their passionate impatience to awaken to the transcendent dimension of being, and to awaken others, that causes them to plunge deeper and deeper into this purifying ordeal.

As we draw near to the source of our existence, to that from which we originally came and in essence always are, we approach as a small flame drawing close to a large fire, Bache notes. Fire merges with fire effortlessly, but due to our history, our fire nature has partially crystalized into the constricted patterns of fragmented consciousness. As we approach this larger fire, our inner flame flares as if in response to its presence. The closer we come, the more brightly it glows until it begins to burn away and set free everything in our history that constricts it. Because our history is a record of our life in space-time, as it is burned away we suffer the excruciating "loss" of that life. The more brightly the flame burns, the more we suffer until we think that surely there is no surviving this, and there IS no surviving it. That is the point.

Only when the work is finally done can we possibly begin to understand hell's mercy. Only when it has freed us from that which we mistakenly cherished most can we comprehend its love.

IS IT POSSIBLE THAT HELL IS NOT HEAVEN'S OPPOSITE BUT THE GUARDIAN AT THE DOOR WHICH HEALS EVERYTHING? HELL MAY BE GOD'S CLOSEST COMPANION, FOR IN TRUTH IT MAY BE SIMPLY THE TRANSIENT FLASH OF PAIN EXPERIENCED BY OUR URGENT RETURN TO OUR SOURCE. THERE IS NO PUNISHMENt HERE AND CERTAINLY NO BANISHMENT.

Rather, there is simply the brief if terrible combustion that results when we feel we must shed our history as fast as possible, and "safely" staying apart from the Divine Presence is a far worse fate than suffering in it. Hell may indeed be heaven's purifying fire.

Our Conflicting Job Description

2008-08-26T12:29:00.000-04:00

We humans are given a conflicting job description. We must be civilized human beings and that requires a whole list of dos and don’ts, culturally determined values such as courtesy, politeness, fairness, efficiency – all the virtues. This is our duty to society. Simultaneously, we are called to live everything we truly are, to be whole. This our duty to our higher self or to God – to be whole, and authentic. To be all that we were put on earth to become. This creates a collision of values. We avoid waking up to the conflict because it is too frightening.

While you can’t reel in the years past, you can go to your unlived life and discover what it would be like to follow different routes than the ones you chose. There are ways to do this without causing damage to you or others or undermining the life you have worked so hard to build. This is the real meaning of growing up. Growing up to your full potentials. In some instances you will find places to express unlived potentials externally, rearranging priorities and outer life. You may discover your true vocation or new directions in work or relationships. You may discover you have outgrown old patterns and transcended the need for things that once seemed important. Then you can quiet the noise inside you and gain more contentment. You can let go o nagging and negative thoughts and habitual patterns that hold you back.

The Notes Unchosen

2008-08-26T12:24:00.000-04:00

Beethoven was asked how he composed music, and he said he unchose certain notes. What are the unchosen notes in the composition of your life?

The Second Half of Life

2008-08-26T12:15:00.003-04:00

Never before in history have people lived so long. Average life expectancy in the United States is now 78, up from only 47 in 1900, thanks to clean water, improved nutrition, better sanitation and medical breakthroughs such as antibiotics and vaccines. Two generations ago a typical forty-year-old was frequently ill and nearing the end. For us today, this is only the mid-point, a time for taking stock, setting new goals, renewing our life purpose. Today there are an estimated 77 million baby boomers (ages 39 to 57). What are we to do with these "extra" decades? Repeat the same activities and patterns that carried us through the first half of life? Or utilize what is unlived in us to create greater wholeness, fulfillment and satisfaction?

You have an ego and the spark of something godlike or divine within you. The I, or ego, that subjective sense of self, is our name for the center of consciousness. We work hard to get ego awareness going in the first half of life – the whole educational system and socialization process in invested in this. Most psychotherapies are designed to patch people up, make them more productive, better adapted socially, and then throw them back into the rat race of life. Even when such treatment is successful, over time you can watch them wither under the weight of it all.

To be complete must recognize that we have an ego, which directs earthly responsibilities, but also within us is the spark of something godlike. It pushes us to become more integrated, more creative , more whole. Dr. Jung called this the Self, with a capital S, to designate a centering force for the entire personality – conscious and unconscious. Aligning our lives with the callings of this Self is a worthy goal for the second half of life.

The Two Thors

2008-08-26T11:39:00.010-04:00

This story all began when I was seventeen years old and fell heir to the task of driving my grandmother to Spokane for the funeral of her daughter-in-law. We left Portland, Oregon, and arrived safely in Spokane to be guest of Thor and his wife (she was a cousin whom I had known during our childhood years).

I was just then needing a hero in my life (no brothers or sisters, mostly absent father, non functioning stepfather); Thor observed this and took on that role for me. The afternoon of the funeral Thor took me in tow, and we went hunting, rifles in hand, in a pine forest outside of Spokane. I was full of admiration for this big strong Danish man and was pouring out all my nacent masculinity to him. He played the role perfectly and began teaching me the high art of hunting! Carry the uncocked gun just like this, aim it down at the ground when walking, search for an animal within shooting range. Never in my life had I felt so big or IN before! We spied a squirrel on a branch a hundred feet away and I was soaking up the lore of cocking my rifle, getting the two sights on top of each other, then pulling the trigger slowly so as not to move the gun's sights out of line ---------- then FIRE. I knew nothing about backlash and nearly fell over backward from the blast and a sound I had never experienced before.

I recovered my senses, looked for the squirrel - now vanished of course - and was prepared to be chastised by my mentor with some such phrase as "Missed, but a close shot." Thor and I walked over to see the scene of my failure only to find the bloody mangled corpse of the squirrel on the ground under the limb. Congratulations from Thor and I suddenly felt the most impossible mix of horror at what I had done and pride in the presence of my hero.

This, and skinning the body of the bloody squirrel back at home at the end of our hunting expedition, was some sort of masculine rite that set off a delayed adolescence that in hindsight was a major event of my early life. I never saw Thor again but learned from my cousin that he had turned into a drunkard bum who eventually left his family.

Skip three generations for the next part of my story.

The concept of generations has always puzzled me, especially when they consist of people I have never met. The whole motion of the passage of time and the miracle of human personalities still remains a mystery to me. Out story now goes to a second Thor, whom I never met, and the passage of more than 45 years when this god-like Nordic name appeared in my life again.

It seems that my cousin married again, I did not see her for many years since she was in Montana and I was in San Diego. One day she called me and asked if I would participate in a birthday party for her and husband a few weeks hence in San Diego, I would be pleased to see her and the new husband (impossible that he would be a replacement of my hero Thor). I had no idea how to throw a party, but I would try. I asked my San Diego friend Michael to help this clumsy introvert with the difficult assignment of hosting a party.

Even with help, I was afraid of being host for a party for someone I had not seen for so many years since the funeral in Spokane - especialy when I discovered there would be nine people crowded into my tiny apartment. One of the
additional guests would be Thor, whom I had never heard about -- grandson of my heroic Thor, the man who so many years ago was enshrined in my memory as a hero of youth.

The party went well, though I had been unable to find a story I could tell as host. When I was introduced to the young Thor, I was startled to find a thin, blond, shy replica of his grandfather, and I knew I had the proper story for the birthday party. I would recount the shooting of the squirrel with Thor (I) and discharge a huge debt. This thought cheered me on immensely and I recounted in minute detail the saga (still huge in my memory) of hero and gun and squirrel and the high art of firing one of man's favorite inventions and the double feeling of being master of the power of the high art of both destruction and creation. Both these arts swam equally potent in my breast and still stand high as one of the imponderables facing any conscious human being.

The Birthday party went well - with the extroverted dimension of Michael's help. I was racing along in my fantasy underneath it all on the subject of godfathers and the very large place this had held in my own development.

Godparenting is still known in modern custom but it generally takes a place much lower than its original meaning, In modern times the term indicates that someone agrees to care for a child if he or she should be orphaned before adulthood. But its original meaning was much more profound. Old wisdom knew that the relationship between parent and child has worn a bit thin by the time the growing adult reaches his or her teens, and the custom of godparenting was devised to give a second chance at the powerful bond between child and adult which is such an important transition. A friend of mine with a wonderful sense of wit once commented that there are no handholds for one to hang onto between getting a driver's license and qualifying for social security. Godparents, in the original sense, are needed to traverse the early part of this wasteland. My own passage of this early time was a nightmarish chaos made possible only by godparents -- both men and women-- who filled in that vacancy for me.

My Birthday party fantasy was: Here would be a skinny, shy youth desperately in need of a handhold to help with the swirling rapids of adolescence; it was also a chance for me to repay a karmic debt to his grandfather who had saved me from a tortured loneliness of the same period. I said nothing of my thoughts but began a correspondence with the younger Thor, occasionally sending him some money, hearing of his triumphs and failures, generally cheering him on. He courted a girl, married her, and had a towhead son with her.

Thor the younger loved art, sculpturing especially, and began the unheard of work of gathering bits of junk from car-wrecking dumps and making imaginative sculptures of these worthless bits of castoff trash.

My favorite piece of rejuvenated waste sculpted by Thor is a life sized statue of Buddha, head made of a reincarnated carburetor, shoulder pads of long useless brake linings, etc. No single piece does anything but scream of its junk origin, but, miraculously, the whole structure has a most powerfull sense of dignity. Another piece , all of derelict auto parts, more than 15 feet tall, was bought by a wealthy donor and ensconsed in a park of modern sculptures somewhere on the East Coast of the United States.

I have only seen my two Thors, once each in my life, but both hold high places in the pantheon of my lifetime.

Literalism is Idolatry

2008-08-14T13:56:00.001-04:00

The British philosopher Owen Barfield said something that still reverberates in my mind every day. He commented, “Literalism is idolatry.” If you take the inner world literally into our time-space world, you lose it.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was in love with the church and devoted to it. But as I grew older, I became critical and left the church. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Later, I read a medieval text that made Christianity real for me again. It said that Christ is constantly being conceived, constantly being born in his stable, constantly confounding the elders, constantly being betrayed by Judas, constantly being crucified, constantly resurrecting, and, most wonderful of all, constant in his second coming.

The doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ is, for Christians, the greatest telling of the once and future king story. Early Christians said that on the eighth day after his Resurrection, Christ will come and usher the world into the new millennium, when time will end, strife and suffering will stop, and the Kingdom of Heaven will be at hand. Taken literally, this story doesn’t touch me very much. It’s too abstract, too far out of reach. If we wait for this literally, we’ll wait till doomsday.

But when we take this story out of literalism and into the interior world, which has no time and no space, we have an immediate, living fact. If we take the full story of Christianity inwardly, as a timeless fact, these possibilities are available for us to touch when we’re ready, or perhaps even when we choose. The Second Coming of Christ is not just available to us; it is beating at our doors.

Feeling, the Orphan in American Life

2008-08-14T13:33:00.002-04:00

Feeling is the orphan or unlived faculty in our society.

Ours is a thinking-oriented culture that grades and tests and honors and rewards people on the basis of their thinking capacities. Every culture has its hierarchy of values, Thinking is our primary one, with sensation coming in a close second.

Whenever you specialize you do it by robbing energy from its opposite. We have robbed from our feeling function to achieve this thinking dominance.

In considering feeling, I would prefer to abandon the term feeling and substitute the word meaning or value. We don’t regard this faculty highly enough of it to even give it a name of its own, so we use feeling, which also determines if something is hard or soft, rought or smooth.

In general, feeling is more important to women, and so the degradation of feeling in Western culture is even more painful for them. We must define some terms: Feeling is not emotion. Emotion simply means movement of energy. There is no proper or adequate word in the English language for feeling in the sense of valuing. Nobody knows what a feeling is. If someone has hurt my feelings they have challenged or damaged my valuing system, the meaning of myself.

Every faculty has its language. A thinker will tell you reasonably why something is important but generally is not capable of bestowing value. Sensation types will say that a new job pays $20,000 more per year than the old job. There is no adequate language to talk about the meaning of the job. Feeling is closer to saying, "It will serve my relationships better, or I will be much happier there." If you get a man talking about his profession you will get meaningful things in his language.

It’s often the woman who carries feeling in a marriage and who will talk about meaningful aspects of the relationship. In this culture men so often depend upon a woman for the meaning of their lives. Many men at the age of 60 are about 15 years old psychologically when it comes to their feeling function. Conversely, the wife may be a 15 year old in her reasoning facuty (but of course this is not always the case -- either partner may carry the feeling side). So the two trade insults back and forth and both feel terribly misunderstood by their partner.

What can you do with a faculty that doesn’t even have a proper name? We could start by trying to develop some language. To make a list of what you value in your life is already in the thinking manner. Thinking dominates our very language. The man in couples therapy so often says, "The only feeling she brings is to burst into tears.” Quite justifiably. People with opposite typology are often attracted to one another in an unconscious attempt to balance out the faculties. Sensation has a vocabulary: She can be an artist and work with things, or he can begin a woodworking shop.

Articulation is the desire of thinking. Feeling transmits through subtle things, such as tone of voice, the direction of the eyebrows, and other body language. I had an Italian woman in analysis who had married a proper English gentleman when they were both in their 20s. She was presently despairing of his ever understanding her volatile feeling nature. One day in the consulting room I announced: "The hit play of the season in London ends with the man standing on one side of the stage and the woman on the other side 20 feet away. There is a long and tense interval, finally she says, 'John I love you,' and after a pause the man responds, 'Mary I love you.' Now that is what you married. That is the English version of feeling!" This helped them to reflect on their inherent differrences of typology.

The noted author C.S. Lewis married into just such a situation. He was a proper Oxford don who fell in love with a fiery American.

Therapy, unfortunately, is confined mostly to talk-- a very serious shortcoming. Getting a person to paint or sculpt or draw or write music is the best hope for addressing feeling issues. The impersonal structure is like working with one arm tied behind your back.

Just being fully present can sometimes pull someone out of a dark mood, not by theory but by feeling. You must become related to something if your feeling side is in trouble.

More on Active Imagination

2008-07-23T16:24:00.005-04:00

As I have said before, in active imagination you must first define the elements that are in trouble with each other. Then you must set up a dialogue of equals. One can then sometimes do something in the physical world that demonstrates this exchange. In a therapy session I will sometimes take someone out in the yard, draw a circle, and ask them to randomly pick up objects: a stone, a gum wrapper, a stick. Then they proceed with a dialogue. For example, the gum wrapper says, "I am jealous of you," and stone replies, "Oh yeah, why you are a slut and everyone just walks all over you!" And then the dialogue is off to the races.

People can’t stop laughing when the opposites start insulting each other like this. I tell them to keep it going. "I'm just making the whole thing up," they say. "Good. Make up some more."

There are as many ways to do active imagination as there are arts in the human repertoire. If someone is depressed I might say choose a color to represent that depression and do something with your paint brush. Someone else might compose a theme in music and a counter theme and then let them dialogue.

A neurosis consists of holding two opposing views in warfare. Active imagination is a way of assessing the split, or the contradiction. People resist this with a fierceness. Some personalities cannot stand imaginal work, and it's true that this is not a medicine for everyone. If a person is near a psychotic break or suffers from dissociation caused by trauma of some sort, then this may not be helpful. But most people resist the celestial dialogue of opposites for some other reason. It's true that you will encounter the difficult sides of you nature, and you won’t always get your way. It can seem humiliating to have a true exchange of equals. It requires humility (earthiness as in humus) for the ego to let go of its imperialistic attitude and admit there are other energy systems in the psyche that want to have their say.

For example, I have a nasty streak in me. So does everyone, but that fact doesn't help with mine. To do real active imagination, I have to give my nasty side equal value and worth as my idealistic side. Why is this worth doing? I can use my nasty side to defend myself and my friends. It has a high energy charge, and I keep wanting more energy. It is better to be related to my nasty streak than to be acting it out unconsciously whenever something in me gets triggered or I get worn down by life.

The symbolic way is the only one I know for coping with things of this nature. The shadow by definition is that portion of yourself that you don’t want to acknowledge or have even hidden from yourself. It is part of the painful aspect of being a conscious human being that everything arrives as a pair of opposites, and for every conscious quality there exists the opposite in your shadow. Every virtue has a vice. We are happily aware of our virtues. I am kind, generous, and on time. Society likes these, but each one has a parallel vice in back of it and in my psychic structure. It doesn’t mean you must totally live your shadow, but you must become aware of it.

Opposites are the generating factor of energy in the universe. The outlet plug in the wall has a positive and negative charge. We are not exempt from this in our psychological structure. So much of civilization consists of dividing the pairs of opposites and deciding to live one aspect and keep its opposite out of the picture. We call that civilization. The word civil derives from the word meaning straight lines. As soon as civilization comes straight lines are imposed. So-called "primitive" people don’t like straight lines. Paths wander. When the missionaries go in they try to straighten things up. One is taught what the culture prefers and affixes this to the ego and identifies with that.

It’s good to own things, to be kind, to be solvent. What happens to the other side? Everything comes in pairs, like electricity in the wall plug: a positive pole and a negative pole. If one is courageous enough to think psychologically, what is one to do with the unlived or refused aspect of one’s character? I count myself a courteous person. I took that on as a persona, a mask. I’m courteous, but also its opposite. What to do with this dark side? That is why active imagination and symbolic life are so important. There are ways of living characteristics without ignoring them or acting them out. Thank God there are ways of living the shadow without strewing it all over the family or the neighborhood. It takes a big police force and a big army to protect us from the shadow of the other. Maybe we could reduce the cost by exploring the shadow in ourselves.

Turning Contradictions into Paradox

2008-07-23T15:59:00.004-04:00

Active imagination is a powerful tool that you can use for many of the hundreds of impossible situations that turn up in life. One is always in a dilemma of some kind: you are not young enough, or not old enough, or you need more money, or you want to change partners, or improve your work, or fix something at home.

Active imagination begins with defining two opposing facts that are in contradiction. What to do?

First, you must be as aware as possible. Turn suffering into awareness. Then you must set these two things into dialogue with each other. The art consists of quietly and privately engaging in a dialogue (perhaps in a notebook or while sitting at your computer, though you can also dance it, draw it, paint it). In doing active imagination work there are specific laws that must be obeyed. One must never engage in the error of thinking one side is correct and the other incorrect. When you make one right and the other wrong you destroy the paradoxical nature of reality.

This is what was originally implied in the word prayer: what man thinks of the situation and what fate is bringing to one -- these are the two arms of the paradox. But most prayer for a modern person is an effort to make the “right” one win out. We need rain, please God make it rain. Please clean up the suffering that I don't like. That is what I sarcastically call "bell-hoppping" God, telling him/her what to do. In true prayer, you lay out the two sides of whatever "is" and leave it to work itself out.

In active imagination we are seeking dialogue between two equals, not a dialogue in which one wins. This realization has altered my religious life profoundly. I can’t go to church and hear people beseeching God to do this or that. This does not lie within the experience of two opposites engaging each other. It is said that someone once asked St. Teresa how she could change a situation by her prayers. People would ask her to pray for them, because she was such a deeply spiritual person. She replied, "You don’t understand, I’m not telling god what to do. I’m just pointing out what the situation is, "clarifying what is."

Generally speaking, the art of active imagination consist of I, the ego, discussing with the other side what is going on and each making it as clear and conscious as possible -- this helps to set up the possibility for the near mystical situation wherein a pair of opposites can temper and even cure each other.

Symbol is the essence of religious life. Dr. Jung taught us a new form of prayer in active imagination.

Reality always comes in pairs. If I get to heaven some day I will challenge this, but in the meantime this is our reality: It comes in pairs. This is the nature of most arguments between man and woman. He wants his reality and she wants to impose her reality. And so they argue on. They must instead define the situation, not on a quarreling basis, but in an honest attempt to make the contradictory opposites more conscious. Then you allow each side to express itself in the best manner possible.

All paradoxes have a synthesis point, which is the only possible solution.

You get two humans going at each other like cat and dog and if they will only stop the bickering and discipline themselves, they often will find they are arguing the same thing with different languages or from different perspectives. In active imagination two people, or two energy systems within you, can present their points of view, not as a quarrel but as an act of awareness. The two antagonistic points of view must be held with discipline and integrity and this is the job of the ego. The ego is inclined to rush in and overwhelm the other point of view. That destroys the miracle of the paradox and you are back stuck in contradiction.

Power as Love's Opposite

2008-07-23T15:55:00.000-04:00

"Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other."
--Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Unconciousness, 1917

A Maori prayer

2008-07-10T15:52:00.000-04:00

The Lord’s Prayer: (Translation from the New Zealand Book of Common
Prayer, The Maori version)

Eternal Spirit, earth-maker, pain-bearer, life giver,
source of all that is and that shall be,
father and mother of us all,
loving holy one in whom is heaven:

may it happen in the way it is good to you;
may it happen on earth in the same way
as it happens in spirit world.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil free us.

For you live in the glory of power that is love, now and forever,
now and forever.
Amen

Giving Ourselves the Gift of Stopping

2008-07-09T11:57:00.001-04:00

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.

Here is a simple exercise you might try with a partner. Find a quiet, comfortable place where you will not be disturbed. Sit across from each other. Your partner is to ask you: “Who are you.” Reply with what ever comes into your mind, such as, “I am a writer, a good friend, a wife, a daughter, a mother, and so on.” Your partner is to feed this back to you, repeating what they have heard, such as, “I understand that you are a writer, a good friend, a wife, etc.” If you are like most people, you will begin by defining yourself through outer roles and aspects of your social identity. We often characterize ourselves by our occupation, our business cards, our hobbies, and our possessions.

Then your partner again asks, “Who are you?” This time answer with different responses. With more reflection you may begin to include inner qualities such as “I am often angry, I feel lonely, I am sad.” Try switching these statements to present tense, active processes: “I have anger in me,” “I have loneliness,” and “There is sadness passing through me.”
Once again, your partner will feed back what he or she has heard and ask once more, “Who are you?” As you continue this exercise do your best to deepen the sense of who you are, considering universal aspects of your being such as: “I am mortal,” “I suffer,” “I love.” Don’t imitate these answers – see what spontaneously comes up in you. Your first thoughts are the best. Your partner should feed back these aspects of identity to you, and ask again, “Who are you?”

Continue this dialogue for thirty minutes or until your ego has run out of dualistic ideas about who you are. When you get to the zero point, “I am...” then simply close your eyes and reside in being.

Projection: The Relationship Time Bomb

2008-07-09T11:46:00.005-04:00

Projection is a metaphorical way of talking about an interior process by which we all grow. This term refers to the process of attaching an aspect of your inner life onto someone or something on the outside. In projecting an underdeveloped or disowned part of yourself, you first see it in another person. Just like a film projector in a movie theater, your small interior image is projected onto an outer screen where you can see it larger than life. It appears to be an objective fact, and, just as in the movies it may involve strong emotions, dramatic scenes, and twisting plots.

New potentials in us don’t go in a straight line from the unconscious to consciousness. We see them first on the outside, and then reclaim them as our own.

When I was about 10 years old a distant relative of my father graduated from West Point and came to visit. I had lost a leg in a car accident at the age of 8 and was very vulnerable and sensitive, and along comes this impressive young man in his uniform who is going off to war in the military. I saw this man only once in my life. He was kind and saw that I was tagging along and attaching to him like a dog looking for a new master. He was a hero to me for many months. One has many heroes in life, hooks to hang our projections upon. A year later this man was killed at the World War Two fighting in Bataan, and he took a part of me with him.

It is important to understand hero worship as the precursor for another universal experience by which we all can grow or falter: romantic love. By the teen and early adult years we begin a search for our missing pieces by worshipping a soul mate. It is a painful fact that a good deal of what passes for romance is actually our own unlived life reflected back to us from the projections we place on others.

Hollywood is skilled at producing celluloid heroes according to this formula. We project ideal qualities, both good and bad, on celebrities and enjoy hearing about their exploits. If you want some excellent examples of projection watch the "unreality" show The Bachelor (or the Bachelorette in the most recent season). It is highly instructive on how not to create a viable relationship.

I recently watched with pained amusement a woman project her romantic image on a succession of eternal boys (puers). The puer type is endlessly fascinating to some women; when dating he seems uplifting, inspired, experimental, optimistic, idealistic, fun loving and endlessly creative. He also is irresponsible, mercurial and hard-to-pin-down. Puer dominated people (whatever their chronological age) often seem possessed by an almost sublime if somewhat dreamy spiritual quality. Jung called this pattern the Puer (Latin for boy) and the Puella (maiden). This energy is often the delight of the opposite sex, particularly during courting. Such a man or woman appears fresh, new, filled with fun, unpredictable. Life is never dull in the presence of the puer/puella in a man or woman. Once such a person commits to a relationship, however, then too much of this powerful energy can seem unruly and dangerous. They can never commit, fearing that choices may limit their options. They are filled with ideas that are never brought to fruition. Under stress they often become childish, wanting to be babied.

With some psychological maturity we begin to realize that the qualities that we most admire in a prospective partner are those unlived potentials that are ripe for development within ourselves. When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it travels by way of an intermediary. We often project our developing potentials onto someone, and suddenly we’re consumed with him or her. The first inkling that something in us is attempting to change is when we see another person sparkle for us.

Again, this is how we grow, but if we do not become conscious of unlived life our projections will undermine intimate relationships. As a relationship progresses, so often we demand that others fill in our missing pieces rather than utilizing the relationship for mutual growth in consciousness. No one notices at the time, but in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved, for we are really looking at our own incipient potentials. And precisely because we have not reclaimed these as our own, we act out unfinished business and relive old wounds with the very people we profess to love. So often we unfairly require our partners to carry what is unlived in us. By observing what we attribute to the other person, we can see our own depth and meaning.

Love, as practiced from the egocentric perspective, is finding someone to use. “I love you because you are good for me, you complete me.” In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage.

True marriage can only be based on human love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or “in-loveness.”
Romanticism is unique to the West, and only since the twelfth century. And romantic love is not in and of itself a basis for marriage. Our human life, our marriage, is fed by the capacity to love human to human. When we’re in love, we put our unlived life – our expectations – on the other person, and it obliterates him or her. There is no true relatedness.

Loving is a human faculty. We truly love someone for who that person is. We appreciate and feel a kinship and closeness. Romantic affection, on the other hand, is a kind of divine intoxication. We deify the other person. We ask that person, without knowing it, to be the incarnation of God for us. Our religious life can be fed by in-loveness. It is a deep spiritual experience, for many people the only religious experience they’ll have in life, the last recourse God has to catch them.

When you ask someone in a relationship to incubate your unlived life for you, try to be conscious of what you’re doing. If you ask someone to carry that numinous, glow-in-the-dark quality, understand that doing so will obscure him or her from you as a person. Naming the process helps. That’s the beginning. Why do I have this feeling when I look at such-and-such a person? Do I really see him or her? Do I truly love this person, or am I putting a bell jar over my beloved, which will obliterate the real person from my sight?

Most of the time, we are not conscious of this; our unlived life is bouncing around out of sight and out of control. It’s a serious problem, how much we project in our relationships. We see our own unlived potentials reflected as in a mirror, not the true reality of other people or the outside world. The exchange of projections takes place much more frequently than you might realize, and so you must try to be conscious of it and do what you can to reclaim it as your own.

The first half of life feeds on projections – this is how the unconscious becomes conscious. If we did not project idealism and love, we might never leave home. However, in the second half of the journey our projected values, hopes, and dreams lose some of their magical power. Our illusions are disillusioned. It must be so if we are to collect our own missing pieces and become more whole.

Thoughts on Levels of Awareness

2008-06-23T13:43:00.004-04:00

A start in moving to more advanced consciousness in our society would be to stop scapegoating (the old custom of putting your sins on a goat and casting it out into the desert). Today, the terrorist is the scapegoat coming back home. It could be called a communist, a Russian, etc., but now it is a terrorist. There is a growing chance that terror will destroy our civilization, but not necessarily on the premises that have been presented by our politicians.

Current plans call for the construction of an even taller building on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. We’ll show them. What does this say about our consciousness (and our memorial to those who lost their lives on 9/11). This is what most people do in analysis. Assisting them in building a still bigger ego structure goes down as a dramatic cure and both analyst and patient feel better for a time — the patient is, after all, functioning again as head of the corporation, or a cog in the industrial machinery, or whatever. Too bad his wife left him and he also lost his soul along the way.

A misconception of levels is the biggest problem facing us, both individually and collectively. Jesus referenced this when he was accused of transgression for taking grain from the field on the Sabbath. He was told, "You have defiled the sabath and stolen!" Jesus responded, “If thou knowest what thou doest thou art blest; if thou not knowest what thou doest, thou art cursed and a transgressor of the law." It’s the level of consciousness that defines the rightness or wrongness of an action or a policy. Are we building monuments to ourselves, or are we assisting in the advance of humanity and the evolution of consciousness?

Our Task in These Times: Turning Three-dimensional Consciousness into Four

2008-06-22T11:50:00.008-04:00

Dr. Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst who died recently, once examined five historical people who had been hit by what he termed "the Greater Self," and Edinger then contemplated what these people did in the face of the divine personality. He looked at: Job, Jesus, Buddha, Blake, and Nietchze.

Dr. Carl Jung once said that William Blake went farther into the collective unconscious than anyone and yet lived to tell the tale because he hung onto his ordinariness. Blake painted, wrote, and engraved, without being incinerated by his brush with God. Nietchze expressed the agonized cry of a man who had seen something but didn’t have one person who could understand. If he had possessed only a companion, he might have been able to carry his enlightenment through, but he didn’t, so ultimately it destroyed him.

In my own life I do not want to be an enlightened one or a self-styled savior. More and more I enjoy the most ordinary things, they take on a divine beauty. Occasionally just a color or taste, or slant of sunshine is just breathtaking. It is on the level of attitude -- nothing has to change but the attitude we hold for it. It’s not the things, it is our attitude toward the things.

Please understand I don’t live this way each day, and this is not my personal experience at all times, but it is an attitude that is filtering up and getting close to my reality.

People come to me lamenting the obvious break downs in our cultural and economic system. I don’t know how to talk about this without getting into the flypaper of contradiction. I think I finally understand what my old teacher Krishnamurti was trying to say to me 50 years ago, that all physical materialism and objective knowledge is inappropriate. I feel foolish because there is nowhere to go, that is the summation of what I have learned.

We live in such a difficult time. How are we to be when everything is falling down and breaking apart all around us? For our daily lives we still have to balance the checkbook, make choices and take action. We must do our best to lean toward "the good."

All one can do is carry it through to its conclusion, which is absolute exhaustion or paralysis. Christianity was at least potentially a system for waking one up to four-dimensional consciousness, but it has been translated by the church into three- dimensional terms.

How do we realize this new consciousness collectively?

No three-dimensional action or language has the slightest effect transforming things except perhaps bringing it to a ripeness for transformation. All language is inherently three-dimensional because it is based on the principle of cause and effect. In every sentence there is an equal sign, similar to a math formula. In the first half of sentence, the subject, says "this is something," and the second half, which is about the object, says “that is something” and, if we had the ears to hear it we would realize that it says this is that. But we hear it as cause and effect.

Jung did say, quoting alchemy, which was engrossed in this problem, that one begat two. In other words, consciousness splits and is aware of the other. Two begets three, consciousness turns back on itself -- for humans, this creates self awareness. This is the consciousness we have inherited now. We are three-dimensional people, for the most part, living in a time of inadequate three-dimensional consciousness.

A two-dimensional person sits in a dual world, and is played upon by that world. He or she wathches the gods fight; evil comes, good comes; he/she is sublimely childlike in watching it. That’s the unburdened simple man we are so envious of and try to go back to emulate, hippie-style. I have seen this consciousness first hand in the rural villages of India. For a time I thought of moving there, where life is filled with meaning and people, despite material hardship, are actually more at peace. There is no chance of succeeding at this regression to an earlier form of consciousness, however. Two-dimensional man is helpless -- at times delighted and at other time terrified -- by watching the gods direct his fate.

To satisfy this passion to get out of the contradictions of three-dimensional consciousness, we seek after money, or we try to get the right love partner, or we seek relief on Saturday night at a movie, and the "10,000 things of the world" (as Buddhists describe it) quickly follow. The passion is right, the level is wrong -- the true problem is three-dimensional consciousness itself.

Dr. Jung, one of my heroes, could’t explain it well, but the trinitarian symbols he wrote about in his later works refers to this level of awareness. Dreams that come out of everyone badger people half insane trying to solve in the unconscious the problem of the three. All the dreams where there are three things waiting for the fourth, something is incomplete. In a key dream from my own life, one that I took to Dr. Jung, three Buddhas are born and I am waiting for the fourth Buddha to arrive (This dream and the encounter with Dr. Jung is described in the book Balancing Heaven and Earth). Then, in my dream, a big snake scares the devil out of me. This is code language for the steps of consciousness. In three-dimensional consciousness, something is always thrown out.

All taboos are so holy that they are forbidden.

It is inevitalbe that the fourth thing will show up, the solutiion is not to go on a witch hunt trying to stamp it out. I’m amazed speechless that so many otherwise enlightened people don’t get this. Jung made a few opaque statements on this topic. He wrote that your neurosis is your salvation. Another time he wrote that "your inferior function is your enree to heaven." At Jungian workshops people nod their heads in affirmation, but clearly they don’t get it. People challenged the contradictions in his writings and Dr. Jung replied that he was trying to make it as paradoxical as he could because this is the nature of Reality. His famed book, Answer to Job, is almost universally misunderstood. A sentence at the end, which should have been the opening line, states, "I am not talking about the God in heaven that Christianity keeps making pronouncements about. I’m talking about the god complex in man!"

Theologians and oher scoffers never get that far or are too mesmerized to hear it when they get there.

Waking Up to What Has Always Been

2008-06-22T11:44:00.001-04:00

A few years back I had a most interesting dream. I 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.

“I dreamt of a power that controls the world, and whoever has the ring has absolute power. He (or she) can teleport, become invisible, and is essentially invulnerable; no one can contest him. This condition lasts for 20 years, but over time the power of this ring kept diminishing for the person who possessed it, until there was almost no power left. Then, just at that point of realizing the power is gone, a young man comes running; he is exhausted and panting, and the police are after him trying to get the ring!

The boy in the dream alters his path slightly and chucks the ring into my hand as he runs by. I knew instantly that I had 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 somehow it would fade in twenty years; so, in that five seconds while I still had the power of decision and before the ring could overpower me, I threw it into the ground with all my might. I did this just as the police converged on me. We all 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 it anywhere. All power had been grounded by my action.

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

Like all dreams, this one provides a brief history of what was going on inside me 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. During my nineteen years of wintering in India, that traditional culture helped distill a wisdom represented in this dream of the ring: the objective reality that we think is “out there” is actually only of our own inner construction.

This has been going on all the time: but in my 80s 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 for everyone on the journey into wholeness. No change, yet at critical points of transition there is a 180-degree shift of perspective. My attitude changed dramatically after having this small dream. The feeling for days and weeks was pure joy and revelation. Also a huge sense of relief. I believe it was the dream of a new level of awareness, a state that 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 find out the goal of heaven for us.

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 ego-centered to a different sort of consciousness. There isn’t any movement required at all to get to this consciousness, 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, before enlightenment you chop wood, draw water, after enlightenment, chop wood, draw water. Nothing needs to happen, because it is already so.

Another dream two years ago was much the same: I suddenly had the power to heal physical illness in people. By a nod of my head anyone I passed on the street was healed. Word got around very quickly. Soon a mob of people with their various maladies was rushing to me. I woke up on my naivite and realized I would be trampled to death by this mob of people. If this got around it would be super destructive…I thought, “what do I do now that I have been naïve? I couldn’t go home because people would be there, so I got a hotel room under an assumed name. I thought who is the best person who would understand and not lock me up? I have a friend, Dr. Dolph Arnicar, who shares an office with my friend David, so I went to talk to him for objective help. He saw what it was. First we must get you protected to cope with the mob, when that is accomplished…and there the dream ended.

Getting enlightenment isn’t difficult, or so I’ve read, surviving it is what’s difficult.

Our Place in the Great Dance

2008-06-22T11:40:00.001-04:00

I recently had a dream in which I was nearly asleep in my tiny bedroom , a single room (amazingly small dimensions) in a hotel or apartment house. I became aware of superb music coming from somewhere outside my room. The music was classical, finely crafted, a male voice singing with large orchestra as accompaniment. I was amazed at the beauty of it and wondered where such sublime music could be coming from. Then a door from the next room, which I did not know existed, opened a crack and the music was louder indicating the music was coming from that room, Also a ray of light came into my dark room. The door opened very slowly wider and wider, people began to come into my room and soon were very near meand some sitting on my bed beside me. I was greatly surprised, pleased and very puzzled. More and more people came, more light came into the room, the room very slowly expanded in all dimensions and finally became a great hall as if in a castle or Medieval building. It was lighted with golden light, perhaps from cut glass chandeliers, many candelabra, elaborate furniture, much gold, rich sculptures, tapestries, inlaid marble floor, everything one could imagine to portray a royal place of immense beauty. The music grew in volume and reverberated in the great room. The many people who had accumulated by this time were royally dressed and were dancing with great dignity on the great floor. Somewhere along the way (though I was not aware of it), I had gotten up from my tiny bed and taken my place in the great dance which was going on. A profound happiness filled me and the atmosphere of the dream.

From my teaching in Zurich, this sounds like a death dream - being ushered into the next world in all its glory. Aging or ill people approaching death often have such dreams of the Golden World. If we can accept them rather than running away from their majesty, they can provide deep meaning and inform us of the glory of our lives.

Man the Complainer

2008-06-22T11:36:00.000-04:00

It is doubtful that human beings can live outside the yoke of necessity for long. Much of one’s life is set; most people have to get up in the morning and go to work. We complain and have daydreams, “If only I could win a million dollars things would be great,” but in fact they grow worse. The meaning of life often falls apart for those individuals who actually win the lottery or unexpectedly come into a great sum of money. Recall this recent news item:

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (AP) -- The wife of the lottery winner who took home the richest undivided jackpot in U.S. history says she regrets his purchase of the $314.9 million ticket that has thrust her family into the public spotlight.

"I wish all of this never would have happened," Jewel Whittaker told The Charleston Gazette for Tuesday's editions. "I wish I would have torn the ticket up."

Since winning the lottery two years ago, her husband, Jack Whittaker, has been arrested twice for drunken driving and has been ordered into rehab. He pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor assault charge for attacking a bar manager, and is accused in two lawsuits of making trouble at a nightclub and a racetrack.

There have been several thefts involving Whittaker's vehicle, his office and his house. One of the thefts occurred at his home in September on the same day an eighteen-year-old friend of Whittaker's granddaughter was found dead there. The death remains under investigation.

Last week Whittaker, 57, reported his granddaughter missing. Putnam County sheriff's Sgt. Lisa Arthur said the granddaughter is not considered a kidnapping victim.

***

It is true that too much grinding necessity dulls a person and reduces him or her to the lowest common denominator. But not enough necessity is a guaranteed ticket to neurosis for most people. So we complain – about our family, about our job, about where we live, about the weather. Instead of homo erectus, the human species should have been called homo complingere, which means man the complainer.

It is difficult for us to accept that contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is.

Sacred and Profane

2008-06-22T11:33:00.000-04:00

I was surprised to learn recently that PROFANE means The Porch of the Church. In medieval times the sacred myths of the church were carried out in private at the altar for an elect few; the same myths were played out on the "porch" of the church as morality plays for the illiterate populous of the town.

This puts "profane" in an entirely different meaning for me.

Fountain of Youth

2008-06-22T11:24:00.000-04:00

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

2008-06-22T11:20:00.002-04:00

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these
are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real
something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem)
as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they
would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely
changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my
lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me
by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason
hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I
require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity
beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

-- Walt Whitman, from the collection Leaves of Grass (1867)
(With appreciation to Ulrike)

Cultivating Our Talents

2008-06-05T06:57:00.004-04:00

talent [ˈtӕlənt] noun
a special ability or cleverness; a skill
Example: a talent for drawing

According to the dictionary talent may refer to:

A personal gift/skill
A show-business personality or group of them
Tarento, the Japanese pronunciation of the word; a variety entertainment personality in Japan
Talent agent, a person who finds jobs for actors, musicians, models, and other people in various entertainment businesses
Talent manager (or personal manager), one who guides the career of artists in the entertainment business
Talent scout, responsible for finding and developing talent
Talent show, a live performance spectacle (sometimes on TV) where contestants perform acting, singing, dancing, acrobatics and other art forms
Talent (unit), an ancient unit of weight and currency

Everyone has God-given talents. Other qualities can and should be developed with work and dedication, but when we are in the realm of a talent then we are truly co-creating with the divine rather than willing our way through the world. A talent is like the higher Self whispering in your ear or directing your hand. Sometimes it is all we can do to keep up with this inspiration. As with all relationships, we cannot legitimately will or overpower a muse without damaging the relationship. Neither can we ignore it without making our lives miserable. We can, however, stop drugging ourselves with things of the world or activity so that inspiration allows our talent to flow.

Practice is an organized allotment of time and energy to converse with the divine through our talent. It is, at best, a conversation. When we don’t practice we don’t create anything and fail to participate in the celestial dialogue. When we try to muscle our way through practice the small “I” (ego) has taken possession of the work and it soon becomes dry, boring, empty and frustrating. We are likely to quit when this method of practice is pursued for long. Practice, or having a practice, is best when we can take delight in the conversation, relief in letting go the burden of consciousness.

Consciousness is a burden. To be forced to make decisions, to feel torn between “this versus that” takes a lot of energy and wears us down. Eventually we can’t stand it anymore and find some way to blot out consciousness through food or drink, drugs, pornography, or diverting attention by purchasing some new bauble. Such distractions are not inherently good or bad, it’s just that they are empty and ultimately unsatisfying when used in this manner. We need to learn to go “decently unconscious,” that is, to deliberately let go of the burden by participating in creation or celestial dialogue.

Life becomes a dutiful drag when our activities are one dutiful practice session after another, preparing or ploughing through, waiting for something to happen that feels vital and alive.

A practice, is deliberate stopping of the hum and buzz of the mind “stuff”, quieting the mind so that one might participate in the celestial dialogue.

We are co-creators with the divine force, which needs us to manifest in time. Our talent is the arena in which we have the highest capacity for conversation. When we are culturally rewarded for this talent it is natural that should begin to exploit it for all the wrong reasons. When this happens we often “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” When our talent is exploited – for money, for fame, for power – then it loss the divine connection and dries up.

Perceived from a more penetrating perspective, the oppositions which present themselves each day are the play of energy. They are not really opposed, but rather two sides of poles of an essential unity. To move from contradiction to paradox is to recognize the underlying unity. From a less penetrating perspective it seems that the oppositions victimize us, tearing apart our feeble and temporary attempts to get things under control, lined up, and settled. But the universe doesn’t seem to want to be settled. It is continually sifting, shifting, changing, and reinventing itself. Though cycle after cycle of birth and death, creation and dissolution. Forms take shape and then recede again into undifferentiated flux and flow. But along the way there is an accumulation and an accretion of awareness that builds upon itself into increasingly integrated.

Unity and diversity are two interesting aspects of celestial conversation or dialogue.

Practice should be a time for communing with the divine, allowing it regular space in our lives to inform and inspire us. Like the basic rhythm of breathing in (inspire) to take in the “other” and let it commingle with us, and then giving it back again, the conversation is allowing ourselves to be played.

To "Fall" in Love

2008-06-04T16:40:00.005-04:00

To fall in love is an abyss of ecstasy and bewilderment that is far beyond our western understanding. It is nothing less than seeing the image of God in the form of another person and being transfixed by a splendor beyond our comprehension. The art of falling in love is recent in human experience, probably not much known before the advent of our own modern age. It is still not known, or honored, in the eastern world except as they drink up our customs and ideals by the sudden deluge of the information age. It is astonishing to see how quickly an easterner takes on western characteristics - both good and bad - as he or she adopts the English language and western customs. Only one generation is required to turn a traditional easterner into a jeans-clad ambitious youth clambering to get to America where the streets are paved with gold.

So, what is the strange love required on the spiritual path? It is very much akin to our romantic love, or falling in love. I am inclined to think that our capacity to fall in love is a new faculty of religious comprehension for which we have so little insight as to be catastrophic. We naively presume that falling in love is the ideal preparation for marriage, when the facts are that virtually no ordinary human arrangement can hold the immense power of the Divine Love which has fallen upon us.

Perhaps romantic love, falling in love, appeared when our traditional religious forms began to lose their power to mediate the Splendor of God for us. To ask another fallible human being to carry this splendor is to ask the household wiring of our ordinary life to carry the hundred thousand volt power of the Vision of Heaven.

I once observed traditional Indian youths going to the temples frequently, sitting in yoga position before an image of God, tremble with the power of the experience, then go about their daily work and family without being tempted to ask that vast impersonal experience of a mortal human.

Probably the most volatile problem our modern world faces is what to do with the uncontrollable power of the love that is greater than any individual. Little wonder that romantic love, that lightning bolt that falls from the heavens, when laid at the feet of a mortal human , fails both persons involved. The origin of the term Honeymoon implies that it
lasts for a month.

But what about "reality"?

It is possible to invest the great love in a way which can support it and thus leave our human love to a realm which is
appropriate for it. To mix the two is a sure program for disillusionment and bitter disappointment.

All models prove inadequate finally, and it must be admitted that all loves are the same love - of divine origin; but this is a rare experience to be found only after the most careful differentiation. Freud was right: everything depends on sex as the origin of its power: however, he declined ever to define his term, perhaps in humility at the power of it. He might
have been better understood if he had used the term Love. But it is a rare individual who has earned the right to this Unitive vision.

Searching for the Will of God

2008-05-15T15:59:00.000-04:00

Buddhism states that reality is singular, never dual. Christians attest to this, sleepily, every Mass, by reciting, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth -." This implies one God, not duality.

But the human mind is based irrevocably on duality; it - and our language that dominates so much of thought - can conceive of nothing but the play of opposites. At best, this is delight, dance, drama, and paradox; but at worst it is doubt, anxiety, guilt. Modern man seems to have drifted more and more into the Hamlet state of suffering over duality. He hangs so often in the torture and paralysis between two opposing possibilities.

How to discern the Will of God?

I was exhausted with this split world and decided on a series of exercises. If reality (God) is singular, how can I restore that unity in my everyday life?

I settled on the simplest example of my split world and decided to look at it without making any judgment. Later I could express this simply; use my ego consciousness as observer but not judge. I watched for as long as necessary and was delighted to see the split gradually dissolve and one of the two warring possibilities grow clear while the other lost energy. This brought a workable solution to my paralysis.

I can’t formulate a description of this process but it seems that 'it' decided if I looked quietly enough at the split without trying to judge it.

This worked only on the simplest possible examples; I could not keep my anxiety, fear, and guilt out of the picture on larger decisions and had to resort to the usual ego solution of disciplining myself to choose one possibility against the other. This yielded a decision but left uncertainty and guilt.

I spend some years at this exercise and found that the 'no decision' technique began to work on larger issues as well. I still cannot be quiet enough to bring this exercise to bear on large issues. But I think I see a principle at work that may be useful.

But wait! I started out by saying/believing that reality is singular and here I am trying to work out a technique for choosing between two possibilities! This is an untenable contradiction.

I watched this process more carefully and discovered that there was a level in back of the split that was of a different character than the consciousness seeing the split. Was I projecting the appearance of duality from my own consciousness onto a non-split world? Does this imply that I can find a non-split consciousness if I will quiet my split consciousness?

So it seems that my efforts to find the Will of God by searching out the 'right' way is badly based from the beginning. The search is for that consciousness which is not split in the first place. The solution to the problem is not to solve it but dissolve it.

Rilke: the Terror of the Angel

2008-05-13T07:18:00.000-04:00

Who if I cried out, would hear me then, out of the orders
of angels? and even supposing one suddenly took me
close to the heart, I would perish from that
stronger existence. For what strikes us as beauty is nothing
but all we can bear of a terror's beginning,
and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel strikes terror.
And thus I restrain myself and swallow the luring call
with dark sobs. Whom then, alas, are we able
to use in our need?

--R. M. Rilke

The Ubiquity of Unlived Life

2008-05-13T07:13:00.002-04:00

Your unlived life, sometimes called your “shadow,” is the repository of everything that has been split off, everything that is unrealized and every potential that has never been developed. We all carry with us a vast inventory of abandoned, unrealized, and underdeveloped talents and potentials. Even if you have achieved your major goals and seemingly have few regrets, there are significant life experiences that have been closed to you. If you are an only child, then you will never know the experience of having a brother or sister. If you are a woman then you are not a man, and some of the masculine experience is foreign to you. If you are married you are not single. If you are a black man you are not a white man. If you are Christian you are not Muslim. And so it goes. For every thing you choose (or that has been chosen for you), something else is “unchosen.”

Consider for a moment something in your life that you cannot do and, as a result, you feel diminished in some way. What do you resent about your life? The endless demands of children or your job? The inattention of your spouse? The limitations of an illness? Whatever seems to be missing – that is part of your unlived life.

A woman may decide to pursue a career only to wake up one day, years later, and realize that some part of her always longed to stay home with the children and be a housewife. Or she may discover an aspect of herself that would have chosen a religious life, an existence of reclusive meditation. In the same way a man may feel he has the makings of a poet, but he also has a talent for business and he finds himself climbing the corporate ladder, organizing his life around the business world and supporting a family. Still, the poet in him lives on as a potentiality that he hasn’t had time to experience externally.

Perhaps you are short and you always wanted to be tall. Perhaps you wanted to be thin, or to have a different body type, or to explore a musical talent, or to be more athletic. What is unlived yet still has some urgency in you? How is it expressed? As discontent, or anger, or depression?

Reclaiming unlived life is a difficult but noble task that confronts us in the second half of life.

How Heavenly Organ Music Is Made

2008-05-13T06:51:00.005-04:00

I (Robert) wrote earlier about my love of Bach and the musical discovery of the pipe organ.

The organ has gone through a very long history of development from the small cathedral organs of Europe limited in size by the fact that they required human labor to pump the "wind" required to sound the pipes. There is a bit of insight into this evolution in the story of the great organ in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It required nine strong men to man the pumps for the wind required to operate the several thousand pipes housed in the west end of the great gothic building. In 1914 World War I demanded all the men available and it required 18 women to "man" the pumps. It was only in 1927 that electricity was allowed in the Cathedral and electric motors replaced the hand operated bellows.

Hand blown organs were limited to very low wind pressure (wind pressure was described by the inches of water the wind pressure could contain in a U shaped tube of water. The maximum for hand bellows was about two and a half
inches, (approximately the air pressure of human lungs) thus the limit of air for a pipe. Voicing on this low pressure produced a very gentle sound for any sized pipe, from two inches to thirty two feet in length.

There is virtualy no limit to the air pressure available by electric motor. Experiments took air pressure to a hundred inches on the water gauge. and the roughness of sound increased proportionately. Dr. Schweitzer made his famous Bach recordings on a small two keyboard organ in St. Aurelie, Strasbourg, France, built about 1725 by Bach's organ builder, Jacob Silberman. The wind pressure of this organ was approximately two and a half inches of wind and produced the ethereal light sound characteristic of low wind pressure. To make a comparison, the organ I played as a young man in a Portland church was voiced on twelve inches of wind and sounded accordingly.

A large adventure of my life took me to Europe in 1948 and my devotion to fine organ voicing and playing brought me to Strasbourg. That could mean only one thing by association, the organ playing of Albert Schweitzer and the organ where he made his famous recordings of Bach, the Church of St. Aurelie. Those two associations were so powerful in me that finding a hotel in this badly war damaged city was secondary to finding the Church of St. Aurelie. I asked about for the location of the famous church with no success. Finally, someone took me to an old part of town and pointed out a very small church which in no way fitted my expectations of the great resonant building I had expected. Only then did I remember that Dr. Schweitzer had written that he chose that church - of all the organs of Europe that would have been offered to him - because of its unrestored Silberman organ and, second, because of the near perfect resonance pattern of the building's acoustical structure. That is to say that the reverberation quality of that building aided the clarity of the sound more perfectly than any other that Dr. Schweitzer examined.

At various times I have heard the reverberation of different buildings such as St Paul's Cathedral in London with an eighteen second reverberation period (it is not difficult to think you have blundered into Heaven when you hear that sound) to the new Festival Concert Hall in London built to welcome the newly approaching era of the post war world, that is so dry and devoid of reverberation that one cannot escape the feeling of being naked accoustically. No matter how loudly officials argued at first that this was the ultimate of "clear" sound, they made alterations in the architecture several years later to warm the sound and provide some relief from the starkness that affronted one's ears at the musical inauguration. I have never heard music in the altered building, but have most vivid memory of its first dry concerts.

Finding Our Hidden Gold

2008-05-13T06:49:00.000-04:00

Some of our very best characteristics, the gold in one’s personality, are the most difficult of all for most of us to cope with. It is often our noblest energies that our hidden most assiduously, such as our capacity for love, generosity, relatedness – these turn out to be equally difficult to express in one’s outer life. For example, you simply cannot go up to someone you see on the street for the first time and say, “There is something about you that is enchanting, and I love you.” It doesn’t work. It is frowned upon by our society, and would create havoc. And yet that capacity for love is one of the finest characteristics in the potentials of any human being.

Inner work provides a means to live out the gold as well as the dark – all those unlived potentials that have not found an adequate place in the practical, every day affairs of one’s life. The aim of such efforts is to relieve the neurotic pressure of these unlived things and the anxiety of choice, transferring it to the level it really belongs, the celestial dialogue of the pairs of opposites, the song of Heaven.

The Opposition of Love and Power

2008-05-06T21:49:00.000-04:00

People think that hate is the opposite of love. Actually power is the opposite of love. Love is identity with the other, while power is the desire to control the other for our own purposes. Where there is unconditional love there is no issue of power. From the spiritual point of view, love is much preferred. “Love knows all things, love conquers all things, and love endures all things.”

Some of our very best characteristics, the gold in one’s personality, are the most difficult of all for most of us to cope with. It is often our noblest energies that our hidden most assiduously, such as our capacity for love, generosity, relatedness – these turn out to be equally difficult to express in one’s outer life. For example, you simply cannot go up to someone you see on the street for the first time and say, “There is something about you that is enchanting, and I love you.” It doesn’t work. It is frowned upon by our society, and would create havoc. And yet that capacity for love is one of the finest characteristics in the potentials of any human being.

Inner work provides a means to live out the gold as well as the dark – all those unlived potentials that have not found an adequate place in the practical, every day affairs of one’s life. The aim of such efforts is to relieve the neurotic pressure of these unlived things and the anxiety of choice, transferring it to the level it really belongs, the celestial dialogue of the pairs of opposites, the song of Heaven.

The Cost of Ignoring Our Shadow

2008-05-06T21:44:00.002-04:00

Despite the moral imperatives that we learn as children, it’s sometimes not enough to just say, “I won’t do it,” to banish all thought of a forbidden thing. This creates inner conflict. Who knows how much physical illness is the battleground of unlived life? You may well get a nervous stomach, back pain, headaches or some other type of ailment when you try to practice a moralistic “just say no” policy.

At the collective level, we see every day in the headlines what happens when the shadow is not recognized. It is projected onto neighbors who are defined as enemies, carrying “the other” for us. In the socially driven process of becoming legitimate and gaining credentials for success in the world, in the experience of wielding power, through our hunger for certainties in a universe filled with paradox and mystery, we don’t want to face our shadows and question our assumptions. It is easier to split off the “bad” onto our neighbors, whether they are down the street or across the ocean, to fear the “other” rather than face the “otherness” within.

If you are drawn to a “bad boy,” or a "temptress blue angel," this is probably a sign that you are too diligent and dutiful in your life. Perhaps you try so hard to be good that the other side needs to be heard to balance your life. (This is a frequent problem for pastors, politicians, families of prominent people, and anyone who feels they must appear as all “good.” One day their “bad” side is acted out in some unconscious manner).

In this example, you must ask yourself how you might break the rules a bit, be more spontaneous, own some of these “bad” qualities in yourself. How is it you became undernourished in this quality? Are there core beliefs that keep you from expressing what is unlived?

To individuate in the second half of life you must fill in the missing pieces of your personality, to become more aware and more whole. It includes both the gold and the dark side that gets projected, so we see it on the outside first and we want to reclaim it. A good part of the first half of life is about that. We probably would never leave home if we didn’t project. We project heroism and all kinds of idealism onto the world. We go out and find we really need to reclaim it, but in the beginning projection is what propels us into the first half of life. Yet, at some point, at mid-life, we gain enough strength or we get frustrated enough at the cycles we keep repeating trying to fulfill these unlived potentials on the outside that we say: “Maybe I need to sit down and do my own work.” That is reclaiming the projection and seeing that this is part of my own likeness that I need to take back.

Memories of Schweitzer

2008-05-06T21:26:00.007-04:00

I recently received a set of CDs of Albert Schweitzer playing Bach on organ in 1935. This touches some of the happiest memoriess of my life. Independent of his international renown as a humanitarian, Schweitzer is well known as a great musicologist; a reputation that rests largely upon his book, "J. S. Bach." Its influence on the subsequent performace of Bach's music was enormous, and there is scarcely a later work on Bach which does not acknowledge a deep debt to Schweitzer.

My love of Schweitzer and Bach began when I quite suddenly was old and sensitive enough to hear the grandeur of the organ in my church. I am unaware why or how these things can happen so suddenly to a youth, but it was an opening to the heavens for me. Why? How? A total mystery to me but certainly one of the greatest blossoming of MEANING that has ever happened to me. It was nothing less than the sound of heaven opened up to my adolescent ears.

The next Sunday I approached the organist and asked for instruction to play this great instrument. When he learned that I was missing one leg from a childhood auto accident he dismissed me with a sentence and sent me off feeling as if I were disconnected from the greatest beauty in the world. I sulked for a week not having any idea how to face this negation, but thought it worth another try when the following Sunday I saw the assistant organist playing the service. I presented myself to her after church and got a puzzled reply that it might not be possible to play organ with only one leg but she was willing to try.

Not only did I acquire an organ teacher at that moment but gained a Godmother who immediately began filling in the great vacuum in me left from an inattentive mother.

Organ lessons began and I learned quickly that I was ill equipped both physically and mentally for playing the organ but also that both in music and the impact of a fine teacher I was launched into the beginning of adulthood.
Few people are aware of how deeply important a Godparent can be if one's parents are ill equipped to raise a child.

There are few organs available for students to use, but my father rose to one of his infrequent generosities and found a funeral parlor next to my high school where I could practice for half an hour before school. Two years followed of some of the most complicated physical learning tasks.

Organ requires skill with both hands and both feet simultaneously. For me, this required improvising for a missing leg and also training a mind not easily able to accomplish the multiple coordination required.

I worked very hard at organ practice and soon was able to play some of the organ works of J. S. Bach, my favorite composer. One day I discovered the famous set of organ recordings by Albert Schweitzer, the world authority on the music of Bach recorded in 1935 and 1936. The records were at 78 RPM, scratchy, divided up into two minute sides, and the extreme range of pitch and volume characteristic of organ tone badly overtaxing the recording capacity of the equipment. But I loved those records with a passion and learned every composition included in the album.

Later, I was appointed as organist/choirmaster of the second largest church in Portland Oregon in 1942 , an adventure very painful to me. I had the musical skill for the job but was hopelessly deficient in the art of relationship and social ability. I left the job at the end of the year and never again tried to make a profession of music. This was both a severe failure on my part but also gave me the impetus to explore the psychological world which became my true profession.

The Ten Oxherding Pictures

2008-04-30T12:55:00.000-04:00

The ten oxherding pictures of the Zen tradition make a wonderful portrayal of a lifetime. In the first, the young man is looking for the ox. In the second, he finds the footprints of the ox. In the third, he sees the ox. In the fourth, he wrestles with the ox. In the fifth, he’s seated upon the ox. In the sixth, he’s riding off with the ox. The seventh is blank. That’s curious. You can make all kinds of things out of that. In the eighth, he’s returning the ox to the field. In the ninth, the ox is in the field and the man is walking away. In the tenth, which is possibly the most beautiful statement I’ve heard in my life, the man, now old, is utterly indistinguishable from anyone else as he walks through the village streets. No one notices him, but the trees all burst into blossom. This is the best definition of enlightenment I’ve found.

The Promise of Return

2008-04-30T12:18:00.002-04:00

There are a legends and predictions throughout the world of the once and future king, someone who has brought about a Golden Age and promises to come back in the future to restore it. King Arthur is one. He was the great and noble king who brought England together in the sense we know it now. It is said that he didn’t die at the end of his reign in England. He was transported to the isle of Avalon, a place of healing, and offered, when needed, to come back. The magician Merlin, the introverted aspect of the Arthurian story, also as he was leaving, said, “I will come back to you again.” In Mexico, just before his death, the God-King Quetzalcoatl promised to come back if he was needed.

According to Indian mythology, an avatar is sent to the earth every thousand years, and at other times when there are special difficulties. Buddha was one. India today is full of rumors that a new avatar has been born, that he’s only a boy at present, but when he comes to maturity, he will step forth and be a new savior, a new avatar. If we take this literally, we will probably be disappointed. They come and they go. But in an interior sense, it’s possible. A point of intersection between our time-bound world and eternity exists for us, and that’s salvation. I’m fascinated with this promise of a return — the once and future king. It’s a glorious promise that can give us hope.

The British philosopher Owen Barfield said something that still reverberates in my mind every day. He said, “Literalism is idolatry.” If you take the inner world literally into our time-space world, you lose it.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was in love with the church and devoted to it. But as I grew older, I became critical and left the church. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Later, I read a medieval text that made Christianity real for me again. It said that Christ is constantly being conceived, constantly being born in his stable, constantly confounding the elders, constantly being tried by Judas, constantly being crucified, constantly resurrecting, and, most wonderful of all, constantly in his second coming.

But when we take this story out of literalism and into the interior world, which has no time and no space, we have an immediate, living fact. If we take the full story of Christianity inwardly, as a timeless fact, these possibilities are available for us to touch when we’re ready, or perhaps even when we choose. The Second Coming is not just available to us; it is beating on our doors.

Envision the Second Coming as an inner reality that takes place on the eighth day of the week. Eight is a symbol of infinity, as you can see when you turn the eight (8) on its side. A Baptismal font has eight sides to indicate that when a child is baptized, he’s initiated into the eight-sided consciousness, eternity. In symbolism, there is nothing past eight. You’ve annihilated the cyclic nature and completed life.

Romantic Love and Our Search for Wholeness

2008-04-25T08:35:00.001-04:00

Romantic love is a profoundly religious experience by which we all can grow or falter. It is a painful fact that a good deal of what passes for romance is actually our own unlived life reflected back to us.

Take a few moments to look back on your personal relationships. What were the qualities that made your love interests attractive when you first met? What made them shine? Those qualities that we most admire in a prospective partner are those unlived potentials that are ripe for development within ourselves. When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn’t go in a straight line from the unconscious to consciousness. It travels by way of an intermediary. We project our developing potentials onto someone, and suddenly we’re consumed with him or her. The first inkling that something in us is attempting to change is when we see another person sparkle for us.

This is how we grow, but if we do not become conscious of unlived life our projections will undermine intimate relationships. As a relationship progresses, so often we demand that others fill in our missing pieces rather than utilizing the relationship for mutual growth in consciousness. No one notices at the time, but in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved, for we are really looking at our own incipient potentials. And precisely because we have not reclaimed these as our own, we act out unfinished business and relive old wounds with the very people we profess to love. So often we unfairly require our partners to carry what is unlived in us. By observing what we attribute to the other person, we can see our own depth and meaning.

Love, as practiced from the egocentric perspective, is finding someone to use. “I love you because you are good for me, you complete me.” I once heard a client say that she had broken up with her husband because “he doesn’t fulfill my needs anymore.” Now she wanted to use someone new to get her requirements met. In contrast to this, love is the understanding of the identity of oneself and the beloved. That’s the only true union that a human being is capable of realizing, otherwise it is just casting about for mutually agreeable bargains. People think that hate is the opposite of love. Actually power is the opposite of love. Love is identity with the other, while power is the desire to control the other for our own purposes. In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage.

As one painfully honest young man recently told me, explaining why he was filing for divorce, “I’ve fallen out of love. She just doesn’t satisfy my soul anymore.” I couldn’t help myself from replying, “Well, what did you expect?”

If we could only understand that expecting someone else to carry our unlived life is acceptable only for a period of time — until we get stronger — and someday it must come to an end. We aren’t wise in this respect, and it’s one of the most painful issues in our culture. When, six months or one year or thirty years after the marriage began, the relationship “isn’t working,” we don’t recognize that it’s high time for us to withdraw our projection and actually relate to the person — our partner, our spouse.

When you ask someone in a relationship to incubate your unlived life for you, try to be conscious of what you’re doing. If you ask someone to carry that numinous, glow-in-the-dark quality, understand that doing so will obscure him or her from you as a person. Naming the process helps. That’s the beginning. Why do I have this feeling when I look at such-and-such a person? Do I really see him or her? Do I truly love this person, or am I putting a bell jar over my beloved, which will obliterate the real person from my sight?

Most of the time, we are not conscious of this; our unlived life is bouncing around out of sight and out of control. It’s a serious problem, how much we project in our relationships. We see our own unlived potentials reflected as in a mirror, not the true reality of other people or the outside world. The exchange of projections takes place much more frequently than you might realize, and so you must try to be conscious of it and do what you can to reclaim it as your own. The first half of life feeds on projections – this is how the unconscious becomes conscious. If we did not project idealism and love, we might never leave home. However, in the second half of the journey our projected values, hopes, and dreams lose some of their magical power. Our illusions are disillusioned. It must be so if we are to collect our own missing pieces and become more whole.

Symbolic Life

2008-04-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

The word “symbol” is as mysterious to most modern people as the word soul. A clue to understanding is found in the etymology of the words symbol and cymbal. There is the brass instrument in which two metal pieces are crashed together to make a composite sound, (cymbal), and then there is a symbol,” which stands for something else, often something invisible, intangible, and unknown. The root of these words is the Greek sumballein, which means “to throw together,” and we might say that the symbolic process is putting back together that which has been torn apart, that which has been split or set aside. It is the power of symbols that heals the oppositions of ordinary consciousness. This is a healing power that we need so desperately in modern life.

Symbolic language does not primarily differentiate; it fuses things into one another. For example, a flower in a poem opens itself up to diverse possibilities. As the conscious mind explores a symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason

One of C.G. Jung’s great contributions to psychology was re-discovering for us the healing power of symbolic life. It’s not a new idea. All of our religious systems are filled with wonderful symbol systems. But something seems to have gone wrong with them for so many today. As we have become more rational, driven, and materialistic, we have lost the power of many traditional symbols, though we have not lost our need for them.

We may think we have shrugged off the need for symbolic life. Instead of having a periodic holy fast – a meaningful, symbolic action that many wisdom traditions prescribe – we’ve become slaves to perennial diets, a low-grade ritual without connection to something deeper in the unconscious. Instead of saying a blessing or a prayer when crossing one of life’s thresholds, we check and double check our appearance in the mirror, twist a strand of hair, light a cigarette, or drink a cup of coffee.

To a great extent we have lost contact with the symbolic depths. But the power of symbols and symbolic sensibility to daily life is still there. If you will observe your own naturally occurring symbols and relate to them through simple rituals, tailor-made for your situation, then much of the old power of symbolic life is experienced again.

Every night in your dreams symbols arise naturally, for dreams happen and are not invented. Dreams integrate the different energies of our being utilizing symbols that seem to preexist in the unconscious. If you dream of fruit salad you had for dinner last night, the dream is speaking of that as a symbol, not just telling you what you already know, the dinner menu. A symbol pulls together qualities, ideas, or experiences that to the conscious mind seem separate or even contradictory. Symbols integrate and heal the splitness of modern life and open us to new possibilities. To read your life, the daily events of life, symbolically will render it meaningful and filled with possibilities. To see everything literally is to stay on the surface of life.

Surviving A Crisis

2008-04-25T08:28:00.001-04:00

If God is anything, surely that divine force that we palpably experience in times of crisis is … what is. You must sit quietly in that still point at the center, without fear, desire, or expectation. If you will stop fighting what is, you can remove half the suffering. Love will heal the half that remains.

During a recent family medical crisis I found daily meditation upon the following prayer quite useful:

Oh God, refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in thy hand. Thou art my guide and my refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved. I will be a happy and joyful being. I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life. O God, thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to thee. -- Abdu'l-Baha

To Be Alone With Oneself

2008-04-25T08:26:00.000-04:00

“As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion – be it suggestive, insinuation, or an other method of persuasion – ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self…The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation.”

-- C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 12 Psychology and Alchemy, para 32.

Robert's Desert House

2008-04-05T20:57:00.003-04:00

My desert house has been one of the miraculous events that seem to fall out the skies without any intelligence required from me.

The story - let's call it the 'falling' - began something like thirty five years ago when I got up courage enough to explore my love for the desert. I knew nothing to do but to pack up my car and drive east over the Coast Range and watch the forest increase with the 6,000-foot altitude, only to fall over the top range and abruptly decent into the desert which is below sea level in Laguna Salada. What a dramatic drive, which never fails to thrill me even after so many journeys! I have a curious faculty of recalling events that become lifelong memories at particular places: rain squalls, snow fall, below freezing temperatures that startle even a new Californian, the time two mountain lions were startled by my sudden appearance, took refuge in a tall pine tree, only to get into a battle and fall from the tree to the ground in a snarling noisy ball of fur. Most of all the journeys thrilled me with the change in altitude, then humidity.

I found a barren bit of desert, spread out my sleeping bag and explored temperatures from freezing to 120F (the highest I have ever experienced).

Time was aware of the desert magic and condensed along with the desert dryness. A week of solitude vanished into its own version of eternity and the loneliness that has been my companion for so much of life vanished. That enigma still remains unsolved, but more than half a lifetime of mountain and desert magic have taught me the alchemical art of turning loneliness into solitude. That remains as much mystery as ever, but it is more plausible in desert or mountains than in any of our modern constructions.

There are wonderful living creatures in the desert: rattlers, sidewinders, rosy boas, tarantulas, chipmunks, large and small, coyotes, and big horn sheep, birds in wonderful migrations. I learned about them even before I came to fear some of them.

Sleeping bags spread out on the sand offer little protection, but the desert seemed not to require any. This went on for several years, vastly differing, and humidity. color. wildflowers, sunrises to make the heart sing, winds to drive one to the bottom of the sleeping bag.

One November night I bedded down in my bag already cold and shivering, and disappeared into my cocoon. I poked my head out for an instant at a time and discovered there was a riot of shooting stars going on in an icy sky. I was not aware that I had come out for the largest of the meteor showers, and even the brightest one visible for the last several years. I was torn between watching and freezing.

My city life consisted of doing lectures in San Diego and eventually places farther away. My audiences increased in size but I observed a little old lady, snow white hair, who always sat middle front row when I gave talks in San Diego. More good things falling out of the sky for me, a friend introduced me to Bea Burch and explained that I loved the desert and often slept on the sand in that lonely place. I learned that Bea Burch and her husband had built a solitary house just near where I had settled down to play desert creature. Bea's husband had died some years ago but she kept the house to loan to her friends. It was too lonely an experience for her alone.

Bea Burch immediately offered the desert house to me, "Where I would be much safer," in her words, and soon I was making my desert trips with water and electricity.

True: it was a nodal point in my life to love my desert with the comfort of a house, but it was appropriate at that time of my life. Bea and I made friends and I was able to surmount her nearly total deafness. With the aid of my portable computer with screen we had many fine exchanges at her La Jolla house. Deafness is the most isolating experience one is likely to suffer - more so than blindness my friends tell me.

One day I asked Bea if I could purchase her desert house. She exploded in indignation and I wondered what indiscretion I had blundered into. No more mention of buying the house, but several years later she quietly mentioned
it was time for me now to buy the house.

It was an unexpected shock to me the first time I went again to the desert house. A subtle change had taken place in it! The house had depreciated with little care and I focused much of my energy to its repair.

Some equally strange alteration is taking place now, since it is my experience to stay in San Diego more of the time and loan out the house to friends. Perspectives migrate so quietly!

The Good

2008-03-30T21:14:00.002-04:00

A student asked his Chinese master for a definition of the GOOD. The master replied,"If a man is JING (untranslatable Chinese term for a man or woman who is Whole, or Complete), he need not concern himself with the GOOD. He (she) IS GOOD."

Confession: Making Conscious What Had Been Unconscious

2008-03-30T20:37:00.000-04:00

In becoming whole, you must start where you are, even if waking up only half an hour before your death. You don’t have to power your way through every step. All that is required is to make the unconscious conscious. You must learn to live your unlived life. Speaking it aloud to another human being – the ancient practice of confession – that is enough to redeem a sin. Of course, it is morally good and right to repair what you can in outer life, but psychically, the only requirement is that you become aware, put the opposites back together. As noted earlier, I am not referring to some indiscriminate wholeness, but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You become more whole by working through the specificity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the particulars of your life.

Wrestling with Life-threatening Illness

2008-03-30T19:56:00.003-04:00

Max Lerner, in writing of his experience of two successive cancers followed by a heart attack, titled his illness narrative, Wrestling with the Angel. He began by wrestling with his disease, determined to emerge the victor. Lerner asserted a powerful will to survive, assembled his medical team like a field general preparing for war, and delighted in confounding the dire predictions of his doctors. But in the process of fighting his illness, this most active and assertive of patients also learned the limits of his own will. He came to realize that he was wrestling with unfathomable mysteries just as the Bible’s Jacob had wrestled with an angel. Reflecting upon this, Lerner wrote: As I looked out at the opposite bank, at the river and the tugs, it came to me that I no longer was sad about them, nor did I envy the people I saw. Instead I felt elated. I was part of them and they part of me, part of the same enterprise of life which flowed out of me into an indefinite future, as the river flowed ... When you learn transcendence not in the books but in the experience of a fight for life, it takes on a different meaning ... For myself, I find all sorts of things now --even “profane” things--to be sacred ... If I had to sum up in a phrase the difference my illness made in me, it would be that I have become the familiar of the sacral, and that every day of my life has learned to carry its own transcendence."

Illness and Unseen Shores

2008-03-30T19:53:00.001-04:00

In serious illness, the limitations of willful control become apparent. One sees how precarious and arbitrary conscious constructions really are, how one’s plans, habits of personality, and the rules by which one lives can be washed away like sand castles. Yet the suffering ego is capable of building bridges to unseen shores and thereby can consciously participate in the incarnation of a mystery, recognize a continuity, and perceive a connectedness. This involves mythic experience and the spiritual realm.

Conscious Interference with Inner Work

2008-03-28T16:52:00.000-04:00

“WE MUST BE ABLE TO LET THINGS HAPPEN IN THE PSYCHE. FOR US, THIS IS AN ART OF WHICH MOST PEOPLE KNOW NOTHING. CONSCIOUSNESS IS FOREVER INTERFERING, HELPING, CORRECTING AND NEGATING, NEVER LEAVING THE PSYCHIC PROCESSES TO GROW IN PEACE…OBSERVING OBJECTIVELY HOW A FRAGMENT OF FANTASY DEVELOPS. NOTHING COULD BE SIMPLER, AND YET RIGHT HERE THE DIFFICULTIES BEGIN. APPARENTLY ONE HAS NO FANTASY, OR, YES THERE’S ONE, BUT IT IS TOO STUPID. DOZENS OF GOOD REASONS ARE BROUGHT AGAINST IT. ONE CANNOT CONCENTRATE, IT IS TOO BORING, WHAT WOULD COME OF IT ANYWAY, IT IS ‘NOTHING BUT’ THIS OR THAT. THE CONSCIOUS MIND RAISES INNUMERABLE OBJECTIONS.” (C.G. JUNG, SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, PAR 20)

Our Search for Meaning

2008-03-05T15:25:00.001-05:00

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life--daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct .... These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment .... Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements .... No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man and any other destiny .... His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

Victor Frankl

Woundings

2008-03-05T15:17:00.004-05:00

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self.
- D. H. Lawrence

What Hurts the Soul?

2008-02-27T19:29:00.000-05:00

We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve
Into non-existence, but non-existence fears
Even more that it might be given human form!

Loving God is the only Pleasure.
Other delights turn bitter.

What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting the water of its own essence.

People focus on death and this material earth,
They have doubts about soul-water.
Those doubts can be reduced!

Use night to wake your clarity.
Darkness and the living water are lovers.
Let them stay up together.
When Merchants eat their big meals and sleep
Their dead sleep, we night-thieves go to work.

(From, Say I am You, trans. By J. Moyne and C. Barks)

Three Kinds of Loneliness

2008-02-27T15:05:00.003-05:00

There are three kinds of loneliness: loneliness for the past, loneliness for what has not yet been realized, and the profound loneliness of being close to God. The third kind of loneliness is actually the solution.

The first kind of loneliness is regressive. It attacks early in life, during adolescence or early adulthood. We want to return to where we came from. We want the comfort and security of the good old days, the way things used to be. How many times do your dreams take you back to early times—the playground, the backyard, the tree you used to climb, your grade-school friends? This is the backward-turning loneliness, a hunger for the Garden of Eden.

There isn’t much we can do about it. We can’t go back. The Bible describes an angel with a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, forbidding re-entry. Backward-turning loneliness is the mother complex, the wish to return to our mother’s womb. This becomes the will to fail, the propensity to relinquish power and regress. It’s the spoiler in a person, stronger than most of us are able to admit. When you have an exam at school or an interview for a job and you feel terrified, this is probably the fear of success. The enemy is inside. The first step toward curing any psychological problem is to acknowledge it. When you can put name and form to it, when you can say what you are lonely for, you’re halfway free. Being conscious is your greatest ally. If you are able to admit to yourself how much you wish to fail, this is the beginning of a cure.

Loneliness for the way things used to be can spoil a marriage, wreck a job, and leave you inert in almost every aspect of life. None of us is free of it. It is the wish to return to primal innocence. Grieving is another manifestation of harkening back to what was. We’ve lost something. Sadness and loneliness are understandable, but they’re backward-looking. It’s not just the loss of the other; it’s also the loss of an arrangement – a place to invest our highest potentials. We may not feel ready to take it back, to bear its weight, but all backward-looking qualities are doomed. We can’t go backwards.

The second kind of loneliness is the longing for what is possible but has not yet been realized. An alive, vigorous, functioning human being has a vivid intuition of what he is capable of. His intuition leaps forward, and he knows what is possible. This comes up in fantasies. He knows there is a perfect woman out there somewhere; a love affair that will touch him to the core of his being. He’s lonely for what he does not have. He sees “out there” what really belongs “in here.” Being stuck this way is a problem, because our value and sense of meaning are always outside of ourselves. There’s someone or something or someplace or some condition that, “Just as soon as…”

The first loneliness drives one backward and downward. The second loneliness drives us forward and upward. It is, at least, a progressive loneliness. It drives us to accomplishments. But both drive us.

The third kind of loneliness is the most subtle and difficult. It is the loneliness of being dangerously close to God. It is more than most people can stand. To be near but unable to touch something that you want more than anything is unendurable. A medieval proverb says: “The only cure for loneliness is aloneness.”

We go from loneliness to aloneness, from solitude to vision, and a kind of redemption takes place. The loneliness vanishes, not because it gets filled, because it was illusory in the first place. It doesn’t have to be filled; it can never be filled. A new kind of consciousness comes that does not find the immanence of God unendurable. The proximity of God is always registered first as extreme pain.

There never was anywhere to go outwardly. But there was a lot to do inwardly. This change of consciousness that turns loneliness into solitude is genius. Each time the handless maiden comes to a crisis, she goes to the forest in solitude. This is especially powerful in a woman’s way. It is the feminine spirit.

In the western world, loneliness has reached its peak, or its nadir. It’s everywhere. The old ways of protecting us from loneliness — extended families, community, marriage, church — have worn thin. We no longer invest in them. We’re at the point where the King has killed the frog, and we feel perpetual, incurable loneliness.

When we’re in this kind of pain, we cry, “Please free me from my suffering.” But if our understanding is deeper, we’ll go off somewhere, sit still or lie face down, and determine not to move until the issue is resolved. For some time, it isn’t possible to do this, and the journey is hellish, culminating in the world of ice. I don’t know if it’s possible to get through this stage more quickly or whether it’s a set path that we have to go through at its own pace, not ours.

If you’re honest, you can tell the difference between regressive loneliness, the first kind, and the ineffable third type of loneliness, when you have seen what you can’t have. If you can say exactly what you are lonely for, it will reveal a lot. But doing so takes courage. Do you want to go back where you came from, to the good old days? Or have you seen a vision you can’t live without? They’re as different as backward and forward.

Dr. Jung, with pithy oversimplification, once said that every person who came into his consulting room was either twenty-one or forty-five, no matter their chronological age. The twenty-one year old is looking backward and must conquer it. The forty-five year old is being touched by something he cannot yet endure.

God Parents

2008-02-27T15:01:00.002-05:00

Often the reason we are hesitant to carry our own inner gold is because it’s dangerously close to God. Our gold has God-like characteristics, and we cannot bear the weight of it.

In Indian culture, there’s a time-honored custom that you have the right to go to another person — a man, a woman, a stranger — and ask him or her to be the incarnation of God for you. There are strict laws that if the person agrees, you must never pester that person. You must never put a heavy weight on that person — it’s weighty enough as it is — and you must not engage in any other kind of relationship with that person. You don’t make friends, you don’t marry that person, and you don’t buddy-buddy. The person becomes a kind of patron saint for you.

J. Krishnamurti was a wonderful man. Lots of people put gold on him. One afternoon we went for a walk, and a little old lady was kneeling alongside the path. We just walked by. Later he told me, “She has put the image of God on me. She knows what she’s doing. She never talks or asks anything of me. But when I go for a walk, she somehow knows where I’m going, and she’s always there.” What was most touching was his attitude. If she needed this, he would do it.

This was the original meaning of the term “godfather” and “godmother.” That person is the carrier of God-like qualities for you. Nowadays we think of a godparent as the one who will take care of you materially in case your parents aren’t able to see it through. But the original meaning was of someone who carries the subtle part of your life, a parent in an interior, God-like way. It’s a wonderful custom. Most parents are worn out just seeing their child through to physical maturity. That’s a lot. But we need someone else who isn’t bothered with the authority, like “How much is my allowance this week?” Originally being a godparent was a quiet arrangement for holding a child’s gold.

When I was sixteen I desperately needed someone like that. So I appointed a godmother and godfather, and those two people saved my life. They knew instinctively the duties of this need, and they fulfilled them. My godmother died when I was twenty-two, and I wasn’t ready to give her up. It was the most difficult loss of my life. I was forced to take my gold back before I was ready. My godfather lived until I was in my fifties, and I was ready then to let go of him.

I respect the idea of godparents. Sometimes young people come circling around me, and I bring up this language. “Do you want a godfather?” If it fits, we work out the necessary laws. “You may have this out of me, and you must not ask that out of me.” These are the old godparent laws. It’s a version of the incarnation of God in Indian custom.

God is Out of the Box

2008-02-20T13:51:00.001-05:00

This may sound like a joke, but it’s not. God is out of the box. In olden times, God lived in the Tabernacle on the altar of the Catholic Church, and the priest had the key. God was locked in, and the rest of us were locked out. There was safety in that. But now the box is broken, and God is loose. No one knows what to do about it.

I’d love to read a history a hundred years from now to see what we’re going to do. There are wondrous possibilities, but the consequences could be dreadful. God is high voltage, and if you get more than you can stand, you need help immediately. You can’t lock God up again. You can’t put him back in the Tabernacle.

In former times, the Catholic priest had Benediction at five o’clock on Holy Days. He’d bring out the monstrance, a mandala-shaped, stemmed device with glass on both sides. The priest would put the host between the two pieces of glass and hold the monstrance by the stem using his stole, so he wouldn’t touch it directly. Then he would turn and show God to the congregation.

Those days are gone. God is not in his box or in the monstrance. He’s out and firing all over the place. The eruption of alchemical gold is one of the chief signs of this. Alchemical gold can be your best, or it can be your worst.

In India, God is still in the box. In this respect, it is a beautiful, peaceful place, because everyone knows exactly what to do. There are laws for everything, and the priest still has the key to the box. If you need to know something, you consult the ancient myths or ask your guru or your father. God is penetrable, and there are answers. It’s like the old Catholic world, where there was a right way to do things and a priest to tell you what it was.

It isn’t possible to go back to that. There is no way for us to get God in the box again. And it isn’t clear that we will survive God being out of the box. It’s like a ten-thousand-volt power surge getting into the household wiring. It’s blowing out the circuits. These are desperate times. We have to create our own forms and our own differentiation, and we are not prepared to do it. When Jesus says: “I no longer call you servants, I call you friends,” we can hardly stand it. We may be pleased for a moment, but suddenly we feel as though we weigh five tons. We can’t carry all the weight, even though it’s ours and always has been.

With God out of his old box, what vessel might contain him now? All psychological powers need a temenos, a container, a boundary. Until recent times, the container has been authority. But today we tear authority down. There’s a current going through the western world, especially America, of discrediting authority. There’s a raft of books of pulling down the great names of people. Somebody’s written a book telling how awful Einstein was. There are books discrediting Jung and just about everyone.

The only container that can conceivably work today is our own consciousness. We’ve pulled the power and the mystery out of objective, collective containers, and we’ve swallowed it into our own psychology. Now we need the consciousness to manage it. So far, we’re not succeeding very well.

Alchemy and Inner Gold

2008-02-20T13:46:00.002-05:00

The work of alchemy was to produce gold from base metals. There were charlatans trying to make actual gold, but the best alchemists were talking about the gold of the spirit.

Alchemy comes from a time when the medieval mind was at its highest flowering. The medieval mind did not divide reality into inner and outer or even acknowledge a difference between the two. For them, inside and outside were the same. Today, to accomplish all that we have, we’ve had to split the world in two. We couldn’t be competitive and aggressive enough with a medieval mind. But the price we pay for this is loneliness and an inability to love. When we’re in love, we know that we are our beloved. I spent much of my analytical life trying to help people differentiate between “inner” and “outer”: You are you, and I am I. Your husband is your husband. We have not yet completed the transition to the modern mind. Many psychological problems are a failure to differentiate between “out there” and “in here.”

According to Indian teachings, the external world is illusion, maya. It is considered illusion because it is actually within, not “out there.” We see only the “ten thousand things” that we project. In ancient China, Lao Tzu dreamed of a butterfly, and for the rest of his life he never could settle whether he was dreaming of a butterfly or the butterfly was dreaming of him.

In the West, gold is the symbol of the Self, but in the East, it is the diamond. In their interior meanings, they are the same, but the images are different. Diamonds are the hardest matter on earth —unearthly, celestial. There is nothing personal about diamonds. Gold is much softer, a matter of relationship, the Self as related. I think we’re lucky to have gold to cope with.

There are several ways we might respond when we see that we have given our spiritual gold to someone to hold for us. We could go to him or her and say, “The meaning of my life has suddenly appeared in the glow of your eyes. May I tell you about it?” It means, “I seem to have given you my inner gold. Will you carry it for me for a time?” But we rarely do that. Instead, we stand across the room, turn our back to him, and feel totally frightened, stumbling and carrying on in odd and indirect ways. We meet at the coffee pot during the morning break at work and banter with each other, speaking all kinds of nonsense. We joke and laugh, and an animated play goes on. Then, when we head back to work, we feel energized and brightened for the day. It was not the coffee. It was the inner, alchemical gold being exchanged.

The exchange of gold is a mysterious process. It’s our gold, but it’s too heavy for us, so we need someone to carry it for a time, and he becomes synonymous with meaning. We follow him with an eagle eye wherever he goes. His smile can raise us to heavenly heights; his frown hurls us to hellish depths, so great is the power of meaning.

For more on this topic, look for a new collection of Robert A. Johnson essays titled: Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection, edited by Arnie Kotler, and available in April of 2008.

Fathers Are Made, Not Born

2008-02-20T13:15:00.005-05:00

My son, Oliver, came into this world on January 3, 1997, oblivious to schedules and deadlines. He arrived two weeks early, pushed only by his innate desire to stretch out, grow, and experience life (and his mother’s strenuous labor). Anxious expectation filled the hospital delivery room. Oliver’s mother, Jordis, was determined to “do well.” As she later told a friend, “it’s not every day that you get to be God’s co-worker in producing a miracle.”

For me Oliver’s birth day was more like watching a car accident involving the person you hold most dear. I massaged my wife’s hands and shoulders and did my best to be helpful, supportive, and loving, but reality was spinning entirely outside my control. We were surrounded by medical equipment that in all my previous experience had been associated with illness. This time the suffering was life affirming, but I had little context for appreciating that fact.

When the head began to slowly emerge, then a shoulder, an arm, and a red and white amphibian-like body slipped out into the doctor’s waiting hands, I was stunned, jubilant, relieved, numb. My inner world was in a jumble. I wish I could say that it was a religious experience for me, as Jordis described, but it was not. I felt powerless, limited, and mortal in a way that I had only experienced a couple of times before -- during major surgery in my own childhood and several years later while standing next to my father’s death bed. As my son drew his first breath, I joined a line of men stretching back to the dim past, each of us carrying on our shoulders the hope, grief, and weighty expectations of fatherhood. What on earth have I gotten myself into? What do I know about fathering? How will I bring this new life to maturity?

Before my son’s birth I had ambivalent feelings about becoming a father. I am not proud of this, but that’s the way it was. Like many men of my generation I treasured personal freedom, the ability to go where I wanted and do what I pleased. Becoming a parent seemed an end to freedom, a limitation of choice. I didn’t know then that the most vital experiences in life are more precious than choice.

Jordis and I were both in our mid-30s when we married. We had busy and demanding jobs and a comfortable lifestyle. After two years of trying to become pregnant without success, we gave up. My wife mailed off an enrollment application to Vermont College to finish a long-deferred degree. I made plans to advance a writing career. We talked of paying off the home mortgage, early retirement, and eventually traveling the country as free spirits. That month she became pregnant.

The reality of becoming a father, suddenly immediate, was both exciting and terrifying. The first tri-mester I was withdrawn, often brooding about my lost youth, financial worries, and a decline in doting attention from my wife. I felt isolated and frightened. Something in me was dying, a boyish naivete, a youthful desire to keep all options open. With two notable exceptions, I found little comfort or support forthcoming from male friends. Several of them smirked, made jokes, and suggested that I had just been handed an eighteen-year sentence of servitude. By contrast, my wife benefitted from a deepening of friendships with women that seemed to come naturally with the shared experience of motherhood. She was showered with gifts and attention.

During the second tri-mester I continued to struggle with understanding my new role as a father while simultaneously feeling guilt and shame over my self-absorbed behavior. Gradually I stopped worrying so much about me and instead became anxious about Jordis. I started waking up regularly at 2 a.m. to fret about her general health, weight gain, diet, exercise, and stress at her job.

Friends, family and co-workers agreed that they had seldom seen a woman more radiant in pregnancy than Jordis. Her morning sickness was minimal, her skin and hair glowed, she wore a spontaneous and constant smile as if she knew the secret of life. I was struggling to absorb psychologically what she experienced in every molecule of her body -- the transition to parenthood.

I think that’s why she let me take the lead in naming our baby.

We assembled long lists of names, some simple, honest and forthright, others brimming with the promise of future achievement. For a time I considered naming our child after one of my jazz idols: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, or Thelonious Monk. But I also found myself thinking increasingly of my own father, Ollie Ruhl, who died in 1976, a victim of liver cancer. His death left a hole in my life that I thought could never be filled. What did I know?

We settled on the name Oliver Thelonious Ruhl, joking that if he became a Supreme Court justice people could call him Oliver, while if he ended up playing the piano, working construction or even flipping burgers at McDonald’s he could be known as Ollie T. At least in childhood we would call him Ollie, after my father. I visited my father’s grave, and his spirit seemed to approve.

The first thing most of us experience is our parents, and so they leave an indelible impression on us. Our deepest ideas and beliefs about fatherhood inevitably spring from the men responsible for bringing us into this world. How do I begin to describe my own father?

Ollie took his morning coffee with milk and a little sugar. He never liked the smell or taste of whiskey but drank a beer many nights to relax. His hands were strong and calloused from pulling heavy wire and bending conduit as an electrician, but to my knowledge those hands never struck anyone, including me. Many men complain of distant, absent, or abusive fathers, but Ollie always had time to play ball with me even after 10- to 12-hour work days. Tears would inexplicably well up in my father’s eyes when the national anthem was played before baseball games. Ollie was generally patient and always protective of his family, and I count myself lucky that such a man served as my first role model. I loved and respected him.

He wasn’t perfect, of course. He accepted jobs in dangerous situations, resulting in debilitating accidents that threw our family into tailspins and may have ultimately shortened his own life. One year he worked in a uranium mine where he was exposed to radiation. Another time he was scalded from the waist down when an illegally enclosed factory boiler exploded and he couldn’t escape the scalding water; he suffered third-degree burns that ruined the circulation in his legs, and a transfusion in the hospital with tainted blood led to hepatitis that damaged his liver. As a boy I wondered why he accepted work that other men turned down. Was it really economic necessity or rather some inner need to prove his manhood? What drove my father?

He was born on a farm in Nebraska in 1924, the youngest of 10 children. By the time Ollie arrived on the scene his mother suffered from “nerves” and much of his care was delegated to the oldest sibling, 12-year-old Marie. I never really knew Ollie’s father, Aloysius. It’s told that he was born in a sod house on the prairie. Relatives say he was a hard worker, friendly, happy-go-lucky. He must have had a tender, gentle side that he passed along to my dad.

Like many healthy young farm boys, Ollie was drafted to fight in World War Two. Aloysius told him that the family farm would be there for him when he returned. But after surviving infantry assignments in the Philippines and Japan, my father returned home to announce that he wanted to become an electrician. He loved taking things apart and putting them back together again, so you could say that in moving into town and applying his G.I. benefits to learn a trade he was following his passion. I’m proud of that.

My mother, Charlotte, worked as a waitress in the local cafe. Ollie was too shy to ask her out, but a friend set things up and it wasn’t long before Ollie and Charlotte were married. It took eight years for them to have a child, their first and last. Ollie was very excited to have a boy, someone to share his interests in baseball, fishing, and all things mechanical.

In some respects, I must have been quite a disappointment to my father, though he never once said so. A childhood battle with polio prevented me from becoming an athlete, and I never shared his natural mechanical abilities. I do know, however, that he was proud on the day I became the first in the family to graduate from college, and that he was grateful I could earn a living doing something that didn’t require breaking a sweat or getting my hands dirty.

I had no idea that within a year he would be gone, two decades too soon to see my son and his namesake. Many times since Oliver was born I have struggled to remember the sound of my father’s voice and to imagine things he might have told me about fatherhood.

Throughout the first two years of my son’s life I yearned for opportunities to talk with other men about my experiences, but most of my former buddies (all childless) seemed to disappear. I had two long-distance friendships that endured. Interestingly, both these men were fathers of young children. It now seemed as if the world was split into two camps: people with kids and people without them.

Gradually I began to realize how much my BC (before child) life had been preoccupied with work. Like so many of the people surrounding me, I had been busy, self-involved, chasing deadlines and career goals that each year seemed more arbitrary and less meaningful. Fatherhood slowed every thing down. It made me question the pace of modern life and reevaluate my priorities.

Jordis and I agreed to cut back on work and tighten our household budget to allow more time with Oliver. The goal was for both of us to work part time so that we could share parenting responsibilities. The first year was filled with sleepless nights and disrupted schedules. Often we were just trying to get through the day. Then we would collapse into bed, sleep restlessly, get up, and do it again. However, about the time of Oliver’s first birthday something changed dramatically. He was developing rapidly, becoming less dependent and more fun to be with, but the biggest change was in me -- I had fallen in love with this messy, squirming little creature.

One morning on a walk to the park my toddling son insisted that we take a detour to sit amid a pile of pine cones under a lofty evergreen tree. It was a cold day, and I had only allowed thirty minutes for our walk, so at first I tugged his arm and did my best to keep him moving. “Pine cone,” he said insistently. Reluctantly, I bowed down to fit under the lowest branches of the tree and went to join him. Together we sat on a crunchy, uneven surface of dried needles and tiny pine cones. It was half dark and the branches created a lace-like canopy over us. It reminded me of one of the forts that I loved to build in my own childhood -- we could see out but we were hidden from passersby. The earthy smell of pine pitch was in the air, and it was very quiet. I looked at Oliver, who had a radiant smile on his face. The moment was pure and filled with love. Two years after my son’s birth, I too now felt as if I had been God’s co-worker in producing a miracle.

Oliver recently turned 11. He continues to be my teacher, and is the joy of my life.

The Lame and Dreamy Goat

2008-02-20T13:00:00.005-05:00

What is illness?

It always seems to be much more than what is captured in those brief moments sitting anxiously on a paper-covered examining table before a busy doctor, searching for words to describe bodily-felt sensations. What is the meaning of illness? I have heard many descriptions of the how of illness but few attempts to help patients puzzle out the why; so I, like many others, have struggled in private moments with makeshift answers concerning the meaning of illness. How are we to live with the after-effects of illness? After the fever is pacified, the blood-dried stitches removed, the hospital release papers signed, is it enough to push illness out of sight?

Serious illness changes us forever in ways great and small. The smell of antiseptic and the clang of stainless steel, the apprehensive recognition of an unaccountable tiredness in the body, the fragile heartbeat and the warm embrace of a loved one -- these and many other experiences take on new coloration and altered meanings when one has wrestled with serious illness.

After spending a good part of my childhood in and out of medical care following a diagnosis of polio at the age of 18 months, I could not wait to become an adult and escape the land of the ill with its shameful braces, orthopedic shoes, and disfiguring scars. For more than a decade after my final corrective surgery, I refused even to set foot in a hospital. I went about the business of living in the bright, busy world of the healthy, doing whatever was necessary to get over and around colds, flu, and other temporary brushes with illness as quickly as possible. But questions always remained in the shadowy background. And each time a new tragedy arose, in my life or in the lives of friends and loved ones, such questions came back to haunt me. Why did a good friend's baby girl, carried lovingly for 9 months, unexpectedly arrive stillborn? Why was my own father struck down by cancer in the prime of life at the age of 53? Why was I one of the last children in America to suffer polio, only months before distribution of the Salk vaccine--what had I done to deserve this fate? Why was my beloved partner, one of the kindest people I have known, swept off her feet by a brain tumor at the age of 52?

Jung once said that the critical turning point in analysis is when the patient stops asking "Why me?" (important and relevant concerns that cannot, however, be answered satisfactorily) and instead contemplates, "Where is this taking me?" I have drawn strength from a poem by Rumi:

The lame and dreamy goat brings up the rear.
There are many different kinds of knowing,
the lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of Presence.
Learn from the lame goat, and lead the herd home.

From the Life of a Saint

2008-02-20T12:43:00.001-05:00

He came to know fears whose entrances
were like death and not to be endured.
His heart learned to go through slowly;
he brought it up like a son.

And he came to know nameless afflictions,
that were dark and morningless like dungeons;
and he gave up his soul obediently
when it was grown, so that it might lie

beside its lord and bridegroom; and stayed
behind alone in the sort of place
where aloneness exaggerates everything,
and dwelt far off and never wished for words.

But in recompense, after so much time
he also learned, that he might feel
a tenderness, the bliss of being held,
like all creation, in his own hands.

--Ranier Maria Rilke

Necessity and gift of chaos and confusion

2008-02-20T10:45:00.003-05:00

Confusion is seen as a mistake, even a madness. In truth, our potential for growth reveals itself in moments of disruption. The gift of confusion must be honored to clear a space in our lives for something new to claim us.

The struggle to achieve a sense of order in a chaotic world is timeless and universal, as shown by the numerous ancient myths which parallel the most recent advances in the field of chaos theory. This dynamic model of a universe as a chaotic system, neither random nor deterministic, has much in common with the mythic worldview of the ancient storytellers, who similarly saw the cosmos infused with chaotic elements yet also working in a predictable and orderly fashion. What does chaos mean to us? One is tempted to label it an archetype in the style of Jung. Though it represents a generative source, it must be remade in order for it to be fruitful.

The ocean (or simply water) is one frequently occurring metaphor for chaos. We find this not only in Japanese tradition, but also in Hebrew tradition. In the first chapter of Genesis we read of God crossing the deep waters. Genesis refers to the earliest conditions of the Earth as "without form and void", a state similar to chaos. The idea is also found in Mesopotamia and associated with Tiamat the 'Dragon' of Chaos, from whose dismembered body the world was formed. In Babylonian tradition the fierce and fertile goddess Tiamat represented chaos as a deity of the saltwater sea. Hindu mythology tells of Vishnu perched upon a giant snake adrift in the infinite chaotic primordial sea.

Water has properties that make it an ideal symbol for chaos - it is fluid and difficult to control or manipulate. At sea it can easily seem endless. Its potential for destruction is well known. In spite of this, water has generative qualities as well - it is necessary for us to survive and flourish.

In Greek mythology Chaos, or Khaos, is the original state of existence from which the first gods appeared. For Hesiod chaos was the first thing to exist and the womb from which everything emerged. For Orphics, it was called the 'Womb of Darkness' from which the cosmic egg that contained the universe emerged.

Almost universally, it the only thing that exists before any creator deity creates or first cause occurs. Most myths indicate that the creator deity or deities create order from chaos, rather than creating the world from nothing. The creator is always separate from chaos, yet chaos is just as vital as the creator in the process of creation. Chaos is the material from which our universe is built, but on its own it is not capable of fabricating the universe. It must be made to have order.

The ordering of chaos is not always a singular event. Many cultures have in their cosmology the idea of an oscillating universe that is in a continuous process of creating and destroying itself. The Aztecs believed that the degree of chaos in the universe was in flux, rising to a state of complete chaos and then settling back into order. Please note: the chaos must recur at critical intersections of life.

“Now we know that cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness…the dawn-state corresponds to the unconscious; in alchemical terms it is the chaos, the massa confusa or nigredo; and by means of the opus…the whitening , which is compared sometimes to the full moon, sometimes to sunrise, is produced.”

-- C.G. Jung, CW Vol. 9ii, para 230

“The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously — as anyone can see for himself unless he is blinded to the truth by theories and prejudices. The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as the later can modify the God-image once it has become conscious … Now if psychology is to lay hold of this phenomenon, it can only do so if it expressly refrains from passing metaphysical judgments … It can make out, with some certainty, that these symbols have the character of “wholeness” and therefore presumably mean wholeness. As a rule they are “uniting” symbols, representing the conjunction of opposites … they arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as chaos or nigredo). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. The circle and quarternity symbolism appears at this point as a compensating principle of order, which depicts the union of warring opposites as already accomplished, and thus eases the way to a healthier and quieter state (salvation).”

-- C.G. Jung, CW Vol. 9ii, para. 303-304

The Virgin Birth

2008-02-11T13:35:00.000-05:00

Christianity lays out the entire archetypal world if you can hear and see the symbols on the proper level. Apparently we cannot hear and see in the old manner anymore, and this is very puzzling for many people today. It was such a thrill to me to find out that the symbols in Christian doctrine can speak directly to the soul of a Westerner. I had to live in India for a time to understand this. Here is one small example, startling enough: the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ.

If you get this on the wrong level it can be the occasion for discarding Christian belief. It makes no rational sense to a mind trained in materialism and literalism.

Yet, the understanding of this symbol is essential in the individuation process (as Dr. Jung described our spiritual development toward greater wholeness). You cannot proceed past a certain point in your inner development unless you understand in a new way this concept of virgin birth. It is blasphemy for me to try to translate this symbol, but we are blasphemous people in a blasphemous time, so I will try.

The Self cannot be conceived by any exogamous process. You cannot go to the outer world for the fertilization which issues forth as Christ consciousness in you. That priceless information is wrapped up in a timeless, waterproof package as the symbol of the virgin birth. This refers to a unique interior process that involves no one but you, it is a virgin birth.

If you can understand that, on whatever level you are capable of, it will bring new consciousness to you. This has nothing to do with the doing, extraverted world. One is engaging in the virgin birth in every act of reflective introversion that you make, every experience of solitude that you engage in. This is immaculate conception, and it is not something just for artists or mystics or a particular time on the calendar of the liturgical year. It may be experienced only symbolically. We are such literal people that we have lost track of this truth (or not arrived at it). So the virgin birth does not happen. It sits and waits until we are ready.

Paradox and Wholeness

2008-02-11T13:09:00.000-05:00

"'Take some more tea,' the March hare said to Alice, very earnestly. 'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.' 'You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter. 'It's very easy to take more than nothing.'" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to." (Joseph Heller, Catch-22)

These are examples of paradox. Our daily lives are filled with apparent contradiction which, viewed from a different perspective are paradoxical. You can never resolve paradox, but you can dissolve it if you will sit with the contradictions until a synthesis occurs.

There are two kinds of suffering: unconscious suffering, which we experience as neurosis, and conscious suffering, which provides the keys to the kingdom.

“The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals…”

--C.G. Jung,CW12, Psychology and Alchemy, para 36.

“ … the individual may strive after perfection but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness…under certain conditions the unconscious spontaneously brings forth an archetypal symbol of wholeness. …it is given central and supreme importance precisely because it stands for the conjunctions of opposites. Naturally the conjunction can only be understood as a paradox, since a union of opposites can be thought of only as their annihilation. Paradox is a characteristic of all transcendental situations because it alone gives adequate expression to their indescribable nature.”

--C.G. Jung, CW9ii Aion, para 123,124

Words often destroy what is true. How ironic that I make my living with words.

As Lao-Tsu informed us, "If it is true it cannot be said and if it can be said it is not true." St. Paul suggested, "The word killeth." Language is a cultural trap that we often become entangled in. The trickery of words is a masculine problem that also shows up in the animus of a woman. Two proverbs resonate deeply: In the Christian tradition God says, "If you had not already found me you would not search for me," and in the second instance, "to search for God is to insult God."

Valentinus Day

2008-02-11T13:01:00.000-05:00

Our tradition of sending notes on Valentine's Day originated with an Italian monk, Valentinus, who drifted off in his old age into an unquenchable love of everyone around him. Valentinus was a second century Christian mystic and poet. He is sometimes refered to as a "Gnostic" because of the importance that mystical knowledge (gnosis) plays in his thought. He became a disciple of the Christian teacher, Theudas, who had been a disciple of Saint Paul. He claimed that Theudas taught him secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle.

For enjoyment he began writing notes of appreciation and devotion to more and more people; finally elders at the monastery allowed him to stay in his cell and do nothing but pour out his love by way of his small notes. This was finally honored after his death by beatification.

If you are weighted down by responsibilities, obligations and duties (this includes most modern people), then you must find something to love and new ways of bringing joy into your endeavors. What and who do you have energy and passion for? Write a note -- then place it under your pillow or next to your computer. Your inner soul guide is likely to respond with a dream or a creative outburst. The key is to let go of control or fears of appearing foolish. The unconscious will return to you the attitude that you display toward it.

Of course, you may also use this day to reach out in your relationships, which are so difficult to maintain in our busy and separated modern lives.

Don't Go Back to Sleep

2008-01-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

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!

Heresy, the Cross, and Balancing Our Lives

2008-01-11T11:24:00.000-05:00

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.