To Ask and Live Big Questions

    “Am I living my life, or not showing up at all?
Is my journey diminished by fear, and by my collusion with that fear?
In the presence of intimidation do I learn from time to time to stand up, and risk being who I am regardless of the cost, regardless of the voices calling me back to a fugitive life?
Where do I need to stand up now? Show up now?
Do I remember to love and serve those around me?
Do I learn that I, too, am equipped for this journey, provided the same tools, same resilience, and same tenacity that pulled my ancestors through?” James Hollis

    “Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivator. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties will never grow.” James Hollis

    Below, an excerpt from a recent James Hollis interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM
    "My latest book - 'Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances' 2025 - is really addressing two things.
    First, the word ‘philosophic’ is not a term people use very often, but it means loving what is true or loving wisdom quite literally. We should start worrying about that when we’re children I think. I did as a child. I remember asking large questions about life – Why am I here? Who’s the other? What’s this all about? What happens if I die? Etc. And the big questions persist. And I think addressing them at the different stages of our understanding, having sort of been forged in the fire of life experience so to speak, we owe ourselves an ongoing dialogue with those questions. As Socrates said, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’ because a reflexive life [in which we merely react unconsciously, on autopilot] is living someone else’s life. It’s living to pressures etc.

    Secondly, this particular book comes out of the fires of some real health crises. I mention at the beginning of the book that I’d had two cancers and then, possibly as a sequela of the cancer surgery, radiation and so forth, my spine started dissolving, so I was in excruciating pain and I had two major spinal surgeries and live with chronic pain. There was a real question about two years ago whether I was going to live or not. So that gets your attention also.
    And I’m grateful that I’m still here, grateful to be in conversation with you. So there’s not a single motivation. … Ultimately, I think this work [our soul's calling] provides two things. It’s not so much the answers, which I would have thought was the goal of life when I was young, it’s that the good questions get you an interesting life and that’s one of the things that I think is unexamined. The good life meaning not material abundance nor even good health, because I didn’t have it during that time. It’s more that your life really takes on a sharp edge that matters to you. And secondly, it gives you a larger life - it means you’re growing, you’re developing. ‘We are the sum of our questions.’ And also to suggest some tools in there about how we can go about addressing what is wanting expression in the world through us, which is a different questions than what dominates the first half of life, which is what does the world, my parents, my school teacher, the partner, the society, want from me. Now the question is, what is the soul wanting of me. And that’s a different agenda altogether.
    If happiness were a thing, then we’d have to say, let’s all go on a search for it. Is it buried in South Dakota? Let’s move there and look. It’s like that diamond mine in Arkansas. Probably only one person in a 100,000 finds a diamond, but they do have diamonds there you know. So maybe happiness is something objective, and we can find it and so forth.
    But we all know happiness is not [an object, a thing]. Happiness is contextual. It depends on what’s happening, the circumstances, and of course it’s of short duration. And even to be in a state of constant happiness would mean I’d probably be oblivious to the needs of people around me, to the needs and suffering of people, and injustices around me. So I think happiness occurs when we are in right relationship with our own souls. In other words, I would never as a young person have thought that I would become a psychoanalyst. To sit and listen with people about their life suffering, hour after hour, hardly makes one happy. And yet I’m happy to be invited into a conversation of that depth. I’m honored to be part of their journey. My work makes me happy, but it’s not about happiness. It’s about meaning. What is it that really touches you in a deep way that you know is real for you. And that’s such a subjective experience that we can’t transfer that to another person.
    So I would say I’m a person carrying a great deal of sorrow about the losses and injustices of life. I am a person who carries anger about those who are abusive and wield power mindlessly. But I’m also full of happiness too. We’re not a single thing. We’re complex beings. And the way happiness has pervaded as if it’s a commodity is truly delusional. I’ve known people for example get unhappy watching Facebook, or some other social medium, because they think all their friends have achieved that state of happiness – their children adore them, their grandchildren worship them, etc, etc, and they’re unhappy about being unhappy. Rather than say, ‘Is my life engaged? Is it addressing something that really matters? And why have I deferred accountability for the well-being of my soul to other peoples’ descriptions out there?’

    These are things people don’t think about very much. So I think that word ‘philosophical’ is an appropriate word. It’s not abstract. It has to do with how you conduct your life, what your values are, what matters most to you, and how you deal with a conflict in your life, and how you deal with contradictions. Those are the things that really define the human condition. It’s not going to make you happy, but from time to time, you’ll be flushed with happiness for a moment, and those moments are of course to be treasured. As long as we’ve construed happiness as our culture has, we’re all failures at it. So you have to have a better definition of happiness at a different level of expectation. 

    ... you touched on a memory about 25, 30 years ago, I woke up around 5 in the morning, and I had these sentences rolling out of the unconscious. And it was essentially, ‘We all like to imagine we could someday walk into a sunlit meadow free of all conflict & suffering.’ And it was the beginning of the book, ‘Swamplands of the Soul.’
    In that book, places like anxiety and loss and so forth, in every one of them, there is a task, the addressing of which moves us from victimage & passivity into an ongoing journey into an enlargement that comes from those terrible experiences. One of the gifts of loss, for example, is that it helps us really treasure the preciousness of this moment when we’re still connected, but also to tend to find the value of that which we lost – the loss of a child for example, as I’ve experienced, or the loss of people you love. Then you realize you honor that relationship because none of us is here forever. You honor that relationship by carrying on the values that rose out of that friendship or parenting experience and so forth.

    That’s what provides the richness of life, because sooner or later, no matter how thoughtfully we conduct our life, we’re going to find ourselves in some difficult places. And then we have to address these. Where is the resilience within you, and how do you honor that which was of such value to you? And that again, as I mentioned, moves you from this passive position of being a victim, to an active engagement. You take that in and you grow through it, and you render it meaningful in your life.”
    James Hollis PhD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM

"If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
To be born again"

Van Morrison "Astral Weeks"

Pointers from a Wise Elder

    My blogs have been pointing to the importance of directly experiencing how each one of us is far deeper & wiser than we realize. However, our current culture shows no evidence of depth & wisdom, hence our current global situation - as if drug-crazed scriptwriters had written a dystopic Batman movie.

    “If you set out to be less than you are capable of being, I warn you, you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.” Abraham Maslow 

    “The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear; only boldness can deliver us from fear; and if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated.” C.G. Jung

    “… the planet’s survival – and evolution – depends on our collective capacity to look within more honestly, and to act more consciously and less defensively in every sphere of our lives.” 
    Tony Schwartz. “What Really Matters. Searching for Wisdom in America.” Bantam Books, 1995. 

     “In the intellectual arena, healthy skepticism produces good sciences, testable procedures, and clearly defined rationales. Those who are overly attached to skepticism, however, can obliterate their own genuine inner life experiences by doubting them out of existence.”
    Tony Schwartz. “What Really Matters. Searching for Wisdom in America.” Bantam Books, 1995. 

    I try to select useful teachings of respected, intelligent, educated, loving, elder, mystics from different traditions, with strikingly similar visions of our shared meaningful potential.

    James Hollis PhD, 84-year-old highly-respected Jungian analyst & author of 20 books translated into many languages. A transcript of a recent valuable interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIA3oLncnPk

The role of dreams and the potential consequences of not paying attention to them: 

    James Hollis (JH): “Well it might be useful to each of us to recall what sleep research tells us today, that we tend to average in a single night’s sleep, 5 to 6 dreams. And some of us aren’t aware of our dreams or can’t remember them, but the truth is, that activity is going on nonetheless.
    Secondly, if we live to be 80 years old, we will have spent six years of our lives dreaming – not sleeping, that adds up to a third of our lives, repairing, restoring & processing – but six years dreaming. Nature doesn’t waste energy, so we have to say dreaming has some purpose in the whole system that we are as a complex organism.
    Moreover, if we begin to pay attention to our dreams, we begin to see that there is a presence there, another presence. I want to be as vague about that as I can, because we really don’t know – it’s a mystery that is paying attention to our life, and commenting upon it. Jung put it this way, ‘If you had the opportunity to speak to a two-million-year-old sage, wouldn’t you want that opportunity?’ What I think he was suggesting is we carry the wisdom of Nature inside of us, and there’s something in us that knows us better than we know ourselves, because in any given moment we’re likely to be under one sort of influence or another.
    We’re responding to the clamors of the world outside us or responding to intra-psychic components: complexes, drives, fears, etc. And yet there is a constancy that’s been here since our birth, and carries us through this journey, and possibly beyond, who knows. But that presence knows us better than we know ourselves, and again, may not be interested in our comfort but is interested in the truth of Nature, whatever that might prove to be. So over time, if we pay attention to our dreams, we begin to develop a conversation with some place within us that has the wisdom of Nature, which may not fit into our cultural setting at all, but which tells us the pathway that is right for us, and pathologizes us frankly when we get off that pathway.

From the standpoint of analytic psychology, we don’t say, well how quickly do I get rid of my symptoms or my fears. We say why have they come, what are they asking of us, where is it we need to apply some consciousness and perhaps some effort, and what happens over time? 

When we’re born, we have a natural authority – it’s called instinct. But we’re tiny creatures, we’re dependent, we have to respond to the pressures & messages around us, and so forth, so we lose contact with that voice within.

So what I’ve seen in people over long-term therapy through analysis is their sense of the locus of authority in their life begins to move from outside of them – because we’re always having to report to the world in some way – and begin slowly to shift to some presence within. So I could say to you, and I mean this quite sincerely, if I need to know what is the right course for me, right path for me, I sort of have to put it in there (pointing to his heart area), and whatever that presence is, it will speak to me over time. I don’t want to sound woo woo here. Sometimes it comes to us at 3 in the morning a week from now. Sometimes it’s a dream tomorrow night. Sometimes it’s an insight. But there’s something in each of us that I think we know as children, with which we lose contact, as we get adapted to the world around us. So dreams begin to tell us what the right course of life is for us, as seen from Nature’s perspective, not the society that we’re reporting to at all times.

Interviewer: "Palliative care nurse, Bonnie Ware found that the most common regret of dying people was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/ .

What is the relationship between us not paying attention to our dreams and that deep inner voice, and having regrets later on in life?"

(JH): “Well I think the message of childhood is over-learned. It’s a factual lesson that, you are tiny, the world’s big, you are powerless, the world is all-powerful. So we tend, for understandable reasons, to relinquish that linkage to the Voice Within, and therefore instead we’re responding to the most troubled voice out there or the most insistent voice or the one we’re exposed to day-in and day-out.

People get this strange idea that you’re supposed to lie on a couch and complain about mother and father and so forth. That’s not what it’s about. On the other hand, stop and think where your most elemental messages about self & other and the nature of the traffic that goes on between arose, and you realize it came out of those formative experiences where you’re asking basic questions like, ‘Who are you? Who am I? What’s the traffic between us? How am I supposed to – Can I approach you? Oh, and by the way, what do you think of me? Do you think I’m okay as I am – or – do I have to twist myself in some way to fit something that you expect? Or do I just stay in the periphery and not ask anything of my life?’ Those elemental messages get over-learned so to speak. They’re the only game in town until there are other forces that come into our environment. In a sense, what we’re saying here is that, yes, the pressures to fit in, to not be isolated perhaps, not to be punished, are overwhelming. I’ve talked about the two threats to our well-being that all of us have: to be overwhelmed by life or abandoned by it, either of which could not only be hurtful but potentially lethal. So we quickly learn to figure out, ‘What’s the environment asking of me, so I can somehow be in accord with that, so in time I have a compatible relationship?’ But it’s in those day in day out surrenders of personal authority, and of course we do have to be socialized to fit into a family, into a culture and so forth, we’re not talking about self-absorption or narcissism here, quite the contrary. But one also has to learn a certain kind of legitimate respect for what is wishing expression through us.

How many times have I seen professionals – many physicians for example, and it pains me to say this, who became physicians because it would fit into their family expectations. The same it true of lawyers and other professionals. We’re always looking around for clues on how to live our lives, and yet we’re flush with clues, but we learn to override them. We all do.
    The feeling function – you don’t choose your feelings, they are autonomous qualitative analyses of how your life is going as seen by the deep psyche. So I can do all the ‘right’ things, achieve all my goals, yet inside it feels empty or I’m depressed or I’m self-medicated.

We have energy systems. When you’re doing what’s right for you, the energy supports you. When you’re forcing it all the time, we all know it leads to burnout and so forth.

We also have dreams, which are often compensatory by saying, your whole world’s pushing you in this direction in terms of your adaptations but you’ve neglected this whole part of your life over here. And then of course we have our old friend, psychopathology. When we push too far to one side or the other, it shows up as an anxiety disorder, as a kind of busyness that keeps us numbed, or a kind of depression that sets in.

That’s [severe depression] what led me to this work. In my early life I was an academic and I enjoyed it and I’m still a teacher. At the same time, I had to ask the question, ‘Why has my psyche autonomously withdrawn its approval & support from the agenda that I pursued?’ And it was a good agenda. At the same time, something reached out and said, ‘Now wait a second Buddy, ‘You know you’re neglecting various aspects of your life. You’ve papered over some issues that we wish to address.’ In those moments, you’re summoned to an appointment with yourself, and that’s what happens when people come in to therapy, they think it’s about their marriage - and of course that’s very important, or they might be thinking about their career, or concerned about their self-medication, or concerned about their course in life, but underneath, the real question is, are you living the life intended by your Nature, not by the culture around you.
    I realize that sounds in the abstract, rather idealistic, but the price again is psychopathology. One can spend one’s entire life adaptive, fitting in, serving what the world asks for, and it will show up in the strangest places. People will think that their trouble is to be treated by the purchase of the latest shiny thing, and its pleasure lasts for days at the most. Or one feels that ingesting a certain substance or something of that kind that one’s life is going to improve. Or you simply change your partner and that’ll fix things. Yet, there’s something inside again that is wanting expression through us.

Another way of putting this, and again this is a deliberate oversimplification but it’s true I believe, in the first half of life we have to develop enough ego strength to step out into the world, leave our parents behind, and sort of say, what’s the world asking of me, and try to meet that. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything the world’s asking, but you have to sort of at least become a presence in the face of that.

But in the second half of life, you really have to ask the question, what is life asking of me, what is the soul asking of me? When I use the word ‘soul’ it’s the literal translation of the Greek word ‘psyche’ – that deepest essence within each of us. What is wanting expression through me?

Now I for example have, from childhood on, adored my teachers because I could see them opening a world that was larger for me. So I became very identified with teaching. That’s the one consistent thread throughout my life. That’s why we’re talking today. And I don’t always find it easy. I’m an introvert. As a child I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I couldn’t have imagined, as a child, spending most of my days listening to people’s suffering. And at the same time, I can’t imagine anything more profound, more meaningful in my life. So I feel that each of us has a vocation, and by that I don’t mean job. I mean a calling in the world as a certain presence, as a value system, what is most deeply true for you and can you mobilize the courage and the consistency to live that over time? And if you do, the world may or may not approve. But it will feel right inside, and it’s a form of service. It’s not inflation, it’s not saying well it’s all about my ego and my resume or my wonderful children or my properties that I owned or whatever that might be. That’s ultimately all out there. It’s like it’ll be confirmed inside. You’ll feel the rightness of it.

I was between 33 and 35 years of age when I became depressed, and I undertook my first hour of therapy at age 35. The two halves of life are metaphorical. In fact sometimes it happens late in life, where a person loses their partner for example, and they didn’t realize the degree that they transferred their dependencies to their partner. Or if a person has been so identified with their work structure, and they’re laid off or forced to retire. Or a serious illness comes to them. It occurs when it occurs.

This is not a new idea. Tolstoy explores this in, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ which was published I think in 1885. In it, a fellow who had completely followed the instructions: went to the right school, married the right person, lived in the right neighborhood, became a lawyer and then a judge - climbing up the ladder, etc, etc. And then one day, there’s a pain in his side that doesn’t quite go away. And to make a long story short, it turns out to be a fatal illness. And all of his presumptions about life just sort of fade away. Then for the first time, after following the instructions and modeling in his culture as well as he could, for the first time he said, ‘What if my life has been wrong?’ And nobody wants to talk about it because it’s his illness, his problem, and they run from it. So he has the first honest conversation about what is my life about with a peasant who’s there to tend to him medically, and then he dies. And of course, Ivan Ilyich is like John Johnson, it’s meant to be in every person’s story. Here’s Tolstoy describing that in detail and goes through all of the stages of denial, anger & bargaining that Kübler-Ross identified and so forth, that tells us that Tolstoy was paying attention and recognizing we all have an appointment with our souls somewhere, and the question is, ‘Have I shown up? Do I keep showing up?’ And frankly, the answer is, ‘No,’ because the Voice within is so easily overwhelmed by the cacophony of noises outside of us, as well as the noises inside of us, about fitting in, being acceptable to others, and so forth."

Interviewer: "You saw your midlife depression as a signal that you had maybe made some choices that weren’t fully aligned with who you were on the inside. Tolstoy’s story is about a chap who perhaps was also not listening to that inner Voice, his soul’s calling, and ends up with a physical pain and I’ve heard you in other interviews say that what they’re describing in that book was probably cancer for that individual. So I’m really interested as to how this lack of listening to our psyche, to our soul, whether it be by not paying attention to our dreams, or by not having any solitude each day to actually reflect on our lives, what is the physical impact do you thing on our well-being when we don’t pay attention to those noises, those sounds, those messages that the body is constantly trying to send out to us if we can quiet down for a minute to start paying attention?"

(JH): “Well you know it’s human consciousness that separates our selves. We talk about the mind, we talk about the body, when they’re aspects of the same thing. The word, ‘psyche’ embraces all of that. It includes digesting your food, it has to do with cellular replacement etc, but it has to do with your emotional life, your spiritual life, your conscious intentional life. Would we be able to separate those things? Not really. We do consciously, but whatever occurs to me, affects me in all areas, of the body, my emotional life & my spiritual life. I’m using spiritual life in the most generic sense of that term: whatever speaks to you most deeply with a numinous quality to it, that is to say, something that touches you deeply within and moves you. So yes, the whole field of psychosomatic medicine is hardly new. But it’s only in the last 20 or 30 years that Western medicine has taken it seriously to realize that sometimes the venue of the pathology is in body, sometimes it’s in our unconscious behavior, sometimes it’s in our emotional life, but it always shows up in some way. There’s a best-selling book called ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ so everything that we experience shows up in the body. We know that. So that’s why I’ve said before, it’s not about suppressing a symptoms, it’s rather saying this is a distress signal sent out by the psyche and we have to ask, why has it come to us? What is it asking of us? What corrective do I need to make in my life? And that doesn’t mean every illness is psychological in origin. There are all kinds of toxic and genetic influences as well for sure. At the same time, we have to say, what is the meaning of this? What has this brought me to? To give you what sounds like a trivial example, when I was a college student, I was living frankly for sports. And I had a torn cartilage, and the surgeon went in during Spring break, and when I woke up told me, ‘I’m afraid we found a bone disorder there and we found your bones are disintegrating, and said I don’t think you’ll be walking by the time you’re 40. So I’m lying there as a 19-year-old and thinking, oh, well I never had the body to be a professional, but I had an absorption in sports. What am I going to do? And I remember thinking, well I am in a university, maybe I could become a student. In other words, I had at that moment, unknowingly, an appointment with myself. Where does this energy go now? It had been moved from one field, where’s it going to go? That happens to us all the time, through retirement, or downsizing. People experienced it through the Covid sequestering for example. They didn’t realize the degree to which their emotional needs & structures were being carried by their work office assignments or their colleagues or family members they could not visit at the time. That was an appointment with themselves for a lot of people. And some people really understood that, dug in, and found new aspects of their own personality that were crying out for expression. But again, it’s like, whose life are we living? One of the sentences from Jung that properly haunts me, and I think should haunt all of us, was where he said, ‘The greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.’ And what he meant by that is wherever I’m stuck or blocked, my children will be, OR, they’ll be spending their life trying to break through that barrier. So the best thing that I can show them is not a perfect human being, none of us is capable of that, it’s rather have I faced up to my fears? Have I pushed through, have I stepped into a personal authority? Because that’s the biggest project of the second half of life – the recovery of a personal authority.
    Of the plethora of voices hitting us, the noises outside, the noises inside, a lot of traffic, which voices are yours? That’s a sorting and sifting process, a discernment to use an old-fashioned word that we don’t think about very much. It’s like pulling apart the threads to say, but what is this coming from in me? I often say to clients today of a certain behavior or reaction, ‘all right, the question is not what was right or wrong here, but what was that in service to you inside?’ In other words, it could have come from an old co-dependence, it could have come from a fear-based response, from a need to fit in for example, or be acceptable to the other person. Those are not capital crimes, but they are in some way offences to the autonomy and dignity of the individual human psyche. That very adaptation that helps us survive in life, becomes problematic. The single most important thing I learned in several years of analysis when I was in training in Zurich, which was in the abstract sounds pretty obvious, but at the time was pretty devastating, namely, what you have become, is now your chief obstacle. Because what we’ve become is this adaptive personality, fitting in, climbing a career ladder, playing out social roles - some of which are terrific. I love being a parent for example, or a partner. But some of it is not who you really are, and how do you tell the difference? And that’s where the psyche begins to pathologize. It’s helpful to remember that the word ‘psychopathology,’ if I could be academic for a moment, if you translate it literally means the expression of the suffering of the soul. Once you understand that, the expression of the suffering of the soul, then, even the mildest of physiological conditions becomes, in some ways, a summons: What’s going on here? What’s interrupted the psychospiritual ecology of this organism? We don’t tend to approach that. We bring our scientific armamentarium there, and in good faith. I’m alive because of medical science, and I’m grateful. At the same time, I realize that there is a deeper summons to accountability to the soul in all of our lives."
    James Hollis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIA3oLncnPk

 

But dreamin' just comes natural
Like the first breath from a baby
Like sunshine feedin' daisies
Like the love hidden deep in your heart

"Donald And Lydia" by Steve Goodman

Personal Responsibility

    In her valuable 2024 book, “Invisible Loss. Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief,” Christina Rasmussen guides us to consider our "baseline story of self - how our life story sounds and feels to us ... our past and who we are ... how we have been surviving our everyday life." 

    Most of us immediately resist doing any such thing, perhaps grumbling 'I'm just fine, thank you very much!' We may actually fail to see, or simply not be ready to deal with our wounds. Whichever the case, the vast majority of us mistakenly assume that it's better to deal with 'all that deep stuff' later, much later, never. Of the 119 folks I sent email reminders of my posts, only 50 or so look at them, and when the topic is really deep, the number drops to around 20.

    One might assume / hope that if there's anyone brave enough to take, as Joseph Campbell called it, 'the hero's journey' and face & grow from encountering their own demons, it would be monks who devote their whole lives to deep contemplation & prayer in monasteries. But legendary monk Thomas Merton told fellow monk James Finley otherwise:
    “... what I clearly remember and took to heart was the quiet assurance with which (Thomas Merton) said: ‘Once in a while you will find someone (in the monastery) with whom you can talk about (spiritual experiences). But they are hard to find. And when you are fortunate enough to find such a person it will be a temporary arrangement. For you will spend most of your life without such a person, which will be your solitude in which you will learn from God how to depend on God to guide you into ever deeper communion with God.’”
    James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023. POWERFUL, VALUABLE - A REAL HERO'S JOURNEY

    When we ARE actually 'fine,' then usually we sleep soundly, have pleasant dreams, wake up happy & energized to greet each new day our family & co-workers, we're quick to forgive, and excited to have the privilege of creatively nurturing our family, friends, humanity & Nature.
    That's NOT you? So actually it's more like you're "doing your best to get through the day" ie just trying to survive? Well isn't it time to look into that, and aim for a far better quality of life?

    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" Krishnamurti 

    YES, OUR SOCIETY IS SICK - AND - each one of us must take our own, separate hero's journey!

    “It is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening.” Mark Epstein MD

    “We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti

    In this imho excellent interview, psychiatrist / researcher / author Iain McGilchrist provides a psychiatric evaluation of our present culture as a whole AND our personal responsibility to think & behave WISELY :

    “I would think this patient who comes to me was very anxious, unsatisfied, depressed in fact, overstimulated, over-involved with his or her own inner life and not enough with a more general vision of life. I would think there was a sort of problem, not necessarily an innate problem with narcissism, but that was part of the picture. And at another level, I would say that they were – as I believe we all are now – and this helps to explain why we’re so unhappy, we’re taking onboard a vision of ourselves and of the world which is so far amiss, and so far short of the reality of who we are, that it is not surprising that we feel unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed & rudderless, as though there is no point in things. So I would see this anxious, depressed patient as over-dependent on the left hemisphere’s thinking, and I would see them as, in a simple sense, somewhat narcissistic.
    I think it’s crucial to emphasize that people don’t hear it when you first meet them and tell them, ‘Well what you need to do is more of this or less of that.” And that’s because they’re not in a place to think like that, to see their problem in the form that you are seeing it. So it’s not just that it’s somehow wrong but I’ll buy it and go with it. It’s useless! So the analogy here is that people want me very often, and it’s a very understandable reaction, I paint a picture of the modern world in so many respects as a reflection of the triumph of left hemisphere thinking over far more subtle right hemisphere thinking. (Left hemisphere thinking is) black & white, cut & dried, either or, categorical, abstracted, theoretical, but not actually in that place where it’s lived experience. And they want me to give them some answers, and that’s very understandable, because with left hemisphere thinking, one of the problems is that you see everything as a series of problems that must have solutions.
    But I think that instead of thinking in this problem-solution way, which has not worked. I’m not saying, ‘I don’t think it’s the best way to approach things – this individual problem, individual solution way.’ I’m saying, ‘It is not working, it has not worked, it never will work!’ Because it purports, that what it deals with, as the left hemisphere always does deal with, is an immediate isolated question or problem – it’s the one that helps us get stuff in a situation quickly.

    But what we are always dealing with, with human society and looking at the complexity of the natural world, and even more of the whole of the Earth, we are looking at a complex system in which there isn’t a simple cause & effect chain going on. There are many causes for every effect, and they interact with one another, and you won’t get anywhere by simply applying a simple solution. And that’s what people are longing for, ‘If only I knew, I could do this, and everything will be all right.’ 

    But I could waste your time and mine by saying, ‘Do this,’ but it won’t make everything all right, because we need to think at a bigger, broader, deeper level. We need to think in terms of complexity and I’m using that term in a technical sense that most people nowadays have heard about – complex systems and not just complicated systems like there’s quite a lot to them, it’s that they act in a different way from a complicated mechanism like a jumbo jet aircraft engine. So they require a different kind of approach, a systemic approach in which one’s looking more wisely for a shift of perspective.
    And I think what people need is exactly what they get when they enter into therapy. They get an ‘Aha’ moment. And my problem as a very naïve young psychiatrist was being able to see the solution in outline, but not allowing them to get the ‘Aha’ moment in which they see something different. And it may actually be the same set of circumstances, just seen from a quite different point of view. It’s like that illustration of the Duck Rabbit, you keep looking at it and thinking it’s a duck, but hey, it’s actually a rabbit. So it’s that kind of change.  

    In thinking about this, I’m rather tentative about bringing such a thing into the discussion here, because it might sound inappropriate or grand or something, but the distinction it occurred to me, is very much like the one described where in the gospel of St. Matthew, the Pharisees come to Jesus. You know the Pharisees were very concerned with rules & procedures and legalistic details. And they said to him, ‘Which of the laws is the most important law?’ So, it’s almost like asking, ‘Which is the one that I really must obey?’
    And Jesus said I think, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might. And the second commandment is like that. It is love thy neighbor as thyself. On this, he said, on this hangs all the law and the prophets.
    In other words, our tendency is to get things back to front, to think the rules, the procedures, the things we do, are the important things, but it is our disposition*** that matters, and from that comes, on that hangs, all the law and the prophets.
(*** our inherent qualities of mind, character, spirit - how we relate to everyone & everything)
    Now what I’ve struggled to get across and I keep on trying to find a better way of putting this, because people think, ‘On well that’s all very well, but I want something concrete to do now.’ What I’m trying to say is that simply doesn’t work, and lots of problems we have now, are actually due to previous attempts to solve a different problem, and they’ve left us worse off than we were.
    So what we need to do is to change the way in which we think. It’s about the how, not about the what. And that incidentally is another hemispheric distinction. The left is interested in things, objects. The right is in the way in which something is done, because apparently, in the abstract, if you do the same thing or say the same thing, but with a different heart, a different intention, it changes it completely.”
    Iain McGilchrist “Why Contemplation & Wonder Are Essential for the Future of Humanity” - TGS 165 WONDER-FULL INTERVIEW:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F838KOrQrRg

 

Growing Older AND Wiser

    The material below is neither monetized nor weaponized. It is solely to provide nurturing nutrition to those hungering for wise human connection.
    Below is my transcript of the first 30 minutes of the superb talk, "Spirituality in Later Life" by the respected elder psychiatrist & Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9

    “For Jung, the innate God image in us – the Self – which is a kind of Divine essence or core of the personality – will give us a set of potentials, and these potentials have to embody themselves as we live our life. And this process comes to a final development in later life. And one of the major developments in later life is the consolidation of a relationship with the Self.
    I want to begin with one of the ways that we form a relationship with the Self. The main approach is by paying attention to dreams. So I want to talk about a very numinous dream about aging, which was given to a woman in her late sixties who was very worried about the prospect of aging. This is an example of what’s called a numinous dream.
    Very briefly, numinous experiences are experiences of the Self or the transpersonal level of the unconscious. They’re experiences that have a mysterious, fascinating, awesome quality. Examples are Moses at the burning bush, or Saul on the road to Damascus - those kind of experiences where one is faced with some uncanny, larger power or otherness that defies adequate understanding. Now one of the main sources of this kind of experience is in a numinous dream.
    And the main point about this, from a Jungian perspective, is that we can’t Christianize the unconscious. The unconscious will produce imagery from any religious or mythological tradition, with no regard for the subject’s preferences, the subject’s personal history, and so on. It may contradict official teaching. And I want to give an example of the dream which does just that.
        This dream, like many numinous experiences acted as an initiation into the aging process. Sometimes when we’re in a transitional period, the Self will produce imagery which initiates us into the new consciousness that’s required.
        Now this is the dream that occurred to a woman who was quite concerned about the losses and the physical decline that we’re all very well-aware of in later life. The problem is that we have no socially-sanctioned initiation into old age. Old age tends to be devalued in our culture, and people break down emotionally during transitional periods because of the uncertainty that we experience during these liminal or transitional periods. And the transitional period into late life is no exception.
    So here’s the dream that the woman had which helped her. I’m going to abbreviate it a little bit.
    In the dream an authoritative voice says, ‘I’m going to teach you about the process of aging.’ By and large, voices in dreams tend to be experienced as the voice of the Self. So in the dream the woman sees (Dreamer's Drawing below) this black & white diagram, and underneath the diagram is the head of a very old man – this is her drawing. And you see there’s a connecting line drawn from the old man’s head to the diagram. And the diagram consists of an elongated sort of square shape enclosing an inner circle – the so-called squaring of the circle which is very familiar to people who know alchemy. And at the bottom of the circle is this crescent convex upward, and out of the crescent arise two heads on long necks.
    And the voice says, ‘This is an abstract of the Godhead and there are two heads of God – one is the male head of God, and one is the female head of God.’ So the dreamer realizes that the heads are in harmony with each other, their faces are sort of curiously unemotional and there’s a kind of crown at the top of each head, and ‘The old man,’ she says, ‘looks ordinary and earthy, with kind of reddish skin.’ And the voice goes on to say, ‘You don’t understand the process of aging. The process of aging, the reason that we age, is to enable God to rejuvenate.’ And the voice says, ‘When we are born, God is old. When we grow old, God becomes young and when we die, God experiences rebirth.'
    Particularly in old age, it’s very important that we don’t lose our connection to God because otherwise we would deprive God of our share in God’s rejuvenation and this disturbs the cosmic ecology. And the voice goes on to say that, ‘Belief in God constellates the inner child and this fosters the process of Divine rejuvenation, and as we age, we mustn’t lose touch with the inner child because if we do, we also lose touch with the Divine. '
    Now this is a deeply mysterious dream. It’s the kind of dream that Jung thinks arises from the archetypal level of the psyche – the mythopoetic level – the level that’s the source of all religious experience. It’s a numinous dream, it’s mysterious, tremendous & fascinating, and it doesn’t contain Judeo-Christian imagery. In fact, if anything, the image of an androgenous Divinity with both male and female heads contradicts the tradition that has an overly masculine image of God. Now the dream says that the purpose is the rejuvenation of God and this is a completely novel idea which the dreamer of course didn’t understand, but somehow she found it very reassuring, because she got the sense that aging is not just a period of relentless decline towards death. She got the sense from the dream that this phase of her life had a purpose and in fact it’s very typical of numinous experience of this kind to have a kind of helpful or healing effect, which it was for her.
    The dream is also what’s called a ‘big dream.’ In other words, it’s not just relevant to the dreamer, it’s relevant to all of us, to society as a whole. It’s also a revelation of the individual’s personal myth. She’s given a kind of personal revelation instead of just participating in a collective revelation like say the receiving of the law on Mount Sinai or something like this, we are given individual revelations when we pay attention to this kind of manifestation of the Self. This dream allows the dreamer to distinguish herself from the collective myth into which she was born, the collective myth that we’re born into is based on nationality, ethnicity, collective conditioning, but in this kind of way, by paying attention to this kind of imagery, we can discover our own spirituality, we don’t have to participate in a kind of mass consciousness. Jung said that you can only resist the influence of collective thinking if your own individuality is well organized. And again, this is one of the main tasks of later life.
    This is a good example of how the God image can change as we age. The dreamer was raised in a tradition whose God image is exclusively masculine, so when the dream says that the Divine has a feminine head as well as a masculine head, this was a very important corrective. And the dream also gives her a kind of abstract image of the Self, the bigger Self as a totality, the squared circle which is neither masculine nor feminine. So it’s telling her that the Self has these kind of human levels and abstract or transpersonal levels.
    Now it was very difficult for us to know what the dream meant by ‘the rejuvenation of God’ or what it could mean that ‘when we’re born God is old, but as we get older, God gets younger.’ I mean it sounded to me like a kind of Zen koan. So one way is to think about this as a comment on the image of God in the psyche or the way the Self appears to us. So when we’re born, we are immersed in the God image of a particular tradition which is old, it’s been around for a long time, so in that way, God is old. But as we age, our God image changes, sometimes radically, and I think that’s what the dream means when it says that God becomes younger. It means the God image gets younger as we work on it. The dream stresses the importance of maintaining a connection to the inner child. So this is a very important teaching. This is of course a teaching dream, and of course in many traditions the Divine appears in the form of a child. Think of the mythologies of Jesus, the Buddha, Oris, and Krishna – all these Divinities appear in the form of Divine children, usually implying renewal and regeneration.
    So as we age, the dream says we have to cultivate a more childlike approach to the Divine, reminiscent of Jesus calling on people to become like little children if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven. I think this means we have to cultivate a simple faith, and trust not a dominant ego. We have to behave in a trusting way, the way that a child relates to a good parent. So this woman’s God image was radically transformed by her dream illustrating Jung’s point that as we go more and more into the unconscious, we transform our God image.
    Now I find that this kind of contact with the transpersonal level of the psyche or with the Self is very helpful during a life crisis and old age is full of life crises of this kind because of the inevitable losses we experience at this time. So attention to dreams in later life is very important because it becomes a powerful stimulus to the individuation process. We get the sense as we pay attention to this kind of dream image that we are witnessed or supported by a larger presence than the ego, and this feeling helps us to develop a personal spirituality, without any commitment to a specific tradition.
    Now one of the effects of a dream like this is what Jung calls the 'relativizing of the ego.' What Jung means by this is that as we age, we discover, more and more that we are, in his words, the object of a supernatant. In other words we increasingly realize that something is aware of us. The Self is aware of the ego. The ego is not the essence of who we are. We are really part of this larger Self. And this is what’s meant by the 'relativizing of the ego.' We live in relation to a larger wisdom that determines a large part of our destiny behind the scenes. We relativize the ego also by giving up our grandiosity, our feelings of omnipotence, and we work on character traits like the need to control other people, the need for status, the need for external sources of self-esteem. These are all ways in which the hegemony of the ego decreases as we become more open to the demands of the Self in later life without resistance.
    And this leads to the question of surrender and letting go in later life which I’ll come back to in a few minutes. [[Please DO listen to / watch this WHOLE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9 ]] In the meantime, just a few other aspects of development in later life that are both psychologically and spiritually very important.
    One is the development of wisdom. This has several meanings. It partly means the ability to be non-judgmental when relating to others and the way that happens is that as we age, we increasingly develop our capacity for empathy for other people. The more we can be empathic with other people, the less judgmental we are of other people. And I find that empathy is one of those faculties that often develops as we age.
    Wisdom also means the ability to maintain more than one perspective at the same time, to see a situation from multiple points of view. Also the capacity to live with paradox increases as we age. And also as we age, we get better at tolerating ambiguity. Wisdom also means that we can broaden our horizons beyond our own ego concerns, beyond the concerns of our own community so that we become concerned with humanity as a whole and the situation that’s going on around us at the moment is a very good example of how we need to do that.
    Now this discovery of the Self is actually a monumental realization, but the evidence for it is overwhelming when we see the accuracy of our dreams and the accuracy of synchronistic events which are also stimulated by the Self. These are so closely tailored to our psychological structures that we realize that we’re being addressed by an intelligence that understands us better than we know ourselves.
    Now a few words about some other aspects of spirituality in late life. You’ll remember that Jung said that after midlife, none of his patients recovered unless they developed a religious attitude. By 'religious attitude,' he didn’t mean commitment to a specific tradition or a specific creed. He meant the development of a personal spirituality. He meant an individual connection to the Self or to sacred reality. This actually is the core of Jung’s approach to spirituality at any time of life. 

    ... religion is an organized, historical institution that’s been around for a long time, and spirituality in the broad sense, is simply the feeling that life is meaningful and in some way that we have a personal connection to subtle realities beyond the physical world, however you think about them, or you can define spirituality broadly as the capacity to experience mystery, beauty, awe, and the ability to affirm the value of life.

     Belief in a set of doctrines and dogma is not enough. That’s not an adequate basis for faith. Belief in traditional ideas may fade or may be eroded by painful life events. If you believe in a loving, benevolent God and then you have a catastrophic life event, your belief in that particular God image may be shattered. In the face of intense suffering, the teachings of the established traditions about how loving and good God is, can seem like mere platitudes. They can have no emotional power. And in fact then you may need a notion like Jung’s notion that the Divine has a dark side to it. [[ Please do read Sue Morter's "BUS STOP CONVERSATION" AND watch Natalie Sudman's video: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html ]]

      So belief in doctrine and dogma may not be helpful but direct personal experience of the Self, personal numinous experience is actually indelible. It leads to knowledge rather than belief, and knowledge is permanent. Once you have this kind of experience, once you’ve heard the voice of the Self, you know, you don’t have to believe.
    So an authentic spirituality is greatly enhanced by personal experience of the transpersonal psyche. This is why for Jungian psychology it’s actually impossible to sharply distinguish between psychological and spiritual development in late life. They overlap, and in fact I think they’re synonymous. So I would ignore the distinction between psychology as a discipline that’s only concerned with this world and personality, while religion has attention to spiritual matters.
    I think using this kind of approach you can seamlessly blend a spiritual and the psychological because the psyche is not purely personal. It has personal levels but it also has a spiritual, or a transpersonal dimension, the mythopoetic dimension that is the source of religious experience and acts as a very important background force within the life of the individual. The transpersonal unconscious is a source of wisdom greatly superior to the ego.
    So whereas in early life one has to develop an early ego, the older person in particular has to realize that the ego exists in relation to the Self and that a dialog is possible between them. And when this dialog is established, the issue of meaning often comes to the fore, because these experiences are intensely meaningful. And one of the cardinal features of spiritual development actually at any age, but particularly in later life, is the discovery of meaning in one’s life.
    The sense that life makes sense it’s not a tale told by an idiot. Without meaning one often despairs. And this discovery begins to be important in midlife, but becomes very important in later life, especially as we start to accumulate multiple losses & limitations. The development of meaning helps us avoid the sense that life has been nothing more than an inexorable struggle against an indifferent fate. We don’t have any control over the losses that occur in old age, but we are free to discover meaning and we are free to pursue a spiritual practice such as work with dreams which in turn allows us to be less vulnerable, less vulnerable to despair than would be the case if life seemed entirely meaningless.
    One of the difficulties we have here is that our culture doesn’t ask about the meaning of old age. Society’s main interest in aging is the medical & social management of late life. But the major task for the inner world is discovering the meaning and purpose and value of aging. This falls to the individual. There are no cultural norms that the individual can use.
    So meaning refers partly to the ability to discern a pattern in your life, to make connections between elements of your life that otherwise seem disconnected so that you can see that your life has formed a coherent pattern or theme. Sometimes you find a theme that’s moved through the whole course of your life. And you can discover this theme as you tell the story of your life. Storytelling is a very important spiritual practice which helps you discover who we are – the so-called life review – telling the stories about what’s happened in our life. This makes life events more meaningful than would be the case if we were to see events in isolation, with no connection to each other. Telling a story, telling what’s happened to us requires a life review and this can be very painful, so I think it is a process that has to be approached cautiously, because sometimes it means looking at the discrepancies between the fantasies that we had early in life, the way we hoped life would unfold, and the way in which life actually unfolded. And as we do this kind of work, we find that a great deal of grief emerges. We have to look at disappointments. We have to look at goals that we had that we now realize will never be met, and so on.
    But at least telling the story helps us make sense of life. And telling the story to other people is an important means of connecting to other people. And it’s an important means of passing on wisdom to other people. Whatever wisdom one has acquired, one can pass on to the family. One becomes, as an elder, the repository of all the family history and all the wisdom that one has acquired can be passed on ideally to the next generation. This is what Erikson meant by generativity in later life.
    Now sometimes we feel that our life has been guided to follow a particular pattern as if we have a kind of transpersonal calling. Jung calls this the ‘spiritus rector’ [[ the central, guiding wisdom of the unconscious that directs the psyche towards wholeness and health. It's the inner wisdom that provides guidance when facing difficult situations or feeling lost ]] or the guiding spirit, which is the Self within the personality, and that’s what he meant when he said that each life has its own ‘telos’ – its own goal, its own purpose, its own endpoint, and its own vocation really, that each personality has an end or a goal that’s given by the Self. And the problem is how to discern it. The work on dreams and the individuation process is one way to discern that process.”
    Lionel Corbett "Spirituality in Later Life" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9

Numinous Dream Image drawn by Lionel Corbett's patient