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

 

Choosing Oneness

     We're easily impressed with quick comebacks from politicians and stand-up comedians. Sometimes we wish we too could instantly put bullies & other critics in their place. Contestants who do well on quiz shows like 'Jeopardy' impress us how quickly they can match a short description to a name on a broad range of topics. Most tests & exams nowadays are 'multiple choice,' where again, one performs such quick matches.
    Of the majority of adults who could match 'the most famous tower in Paris' with 'Eiffel tower,' what percentage could write an intelligent one-page essay on the Eiffel tower, or even Paris? Maybe 2%? The other 98% may respond that writing an essay would be 'too deep' or that they 'don't care.'
    Increasingly, depth of knowledge (never mind wisdom), is considered too time-consuming & too boring to acquire! Now even university graduates - including most of their profs - don't deserve to be called 'intellectual elites,' which is actually being 'weaponized' as a pejorative! We're drowning in quick & dirty clichés & sound bites, which are mostly inaccurate, false, and at times malicious.
    Many, like jet-ski enthusiasts, are drawn to skim the surface as fast as possible. “... our culture [is] so conditioned on unforgiving cynicism and distracted flight from presence.” Very few - like deep-sea divers - carefully investigate the still, silent depths of the ocean. AND when we do, "What emerges is that supreme gift of being: a deeper sense of belonging ..." (Maria Popova, in David Whyte's "Consolations.") This choice always awaits each of us.

    Before I quote a small portion of Whyte's wonderful mystical word paintings on 'joy,' I'll give them a bit of context. 

    A year or so ago, I was with my then 22-month old granddaughter as she sat making chalk drawings on the sidewalk with her little friend, almost the same age. This little girl's Mom, sitting beside her, & I recognized the treasure of being in & enjoying their wonderful magical new world. At this mostly pre-verbal stage, there's an obvious, an almost tangible, yet nonverbal communication between us - WHEN adults give ourselves permission to relax into it.

    Once I dreamt that my wife was talking to me as we sat at a table. While she was speaking, I saw her lips move, yet she made no sounds at all. Nevertheless, I 'heard' & understood everything, just as if she had actually produced audible sounds.

    “Joy is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of laughter. The sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was radically other than us. 

    To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source: the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face. I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.”
    David Whyte. “Consolations. The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.” Canongate, 2019.

        "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
         Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet, William Shakespeare

     “Stay in your body and come home to your heart again & again & again.” Mirabai Starr

Mental Disciplines Joel & Michelle Levey WisdomAtWork.com

Diamonds and Rust

    To have a better understanding of, and thus derive meaningful benefit from this blog, it helps if we at least aspire to a more spacious self-concept & worldview - specifically, that of a 'holy rascal' or 'spiritually independent,' as explained by Rami Shapiro:
    “A holy rascal [a spiritually independent] is someone who thinks religion is much too important to leave in the hands of the professionals. There is such wisdom, brilliance & genius in religious stories, myth, practices, contemplative practices. But what happens when you put them into an institution, is they become very dry, very cold, & self-focused – not ‘Self’ as in some contemplative way of the capital S Self, but self-focused in the sense of the purpose of Christianity, even though they’ll say it’s salvation, it’s really to make you a better Christian, according to the denomination. The purpose of Judaism is to make you a better Jew, according to the denomination.
    So a holy rascal [a spiritually independent] is curious about the deeper meaning of religion, not at all interested in the self-focused nature of religious institutions, but is convinced that these myths and symbols and rituals are gateways to something that cannot be articulated in any other way. And so a rascal is someone who breaks the rules & tries to get to the heart of something.”
    Rami Shapiro “CHALLENGING BELIEFS: Are You a VICTIM of Spiritual Misguidance?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZLlvXFQ7k

    The small, separate self or personality is, from the perspective of mystics, the ego, be it individual or group eg one’s religious denomination, political party or nationality. The Self on the other hand, is the mystical direct experience of Oneness or Unitive Consciousness or Source or Divinity or God etc. This is very much like the meaningle$$ parti$an$hip in US politics (Democrats vs Republicans) instead of Democracy; and competition between brand$ in the food industry (Frosted Flakes vs Captain Crunch) instead of Nutrition.
    Even secular wisdom research tells us that the more self-centred (personal or group) we are instead of allo- & ecocentric (focused on the welfare of others & the environment), the more unnecessary suffering we create for ourself & others. Mystics further realize that self-centredness (again, individual or group) is THE barrier to experiencing & living from Self.
    We ARE evolving from small, narrow mind to Spacious Mind. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Martin Luther King Jr.
    The wonderful movies by Daniel Schmidt attempt to convey the one perennial teaching inherent within all spiritual traditions : https://awakentheworld.com/series/awakening-mind-film-series/

    Joan Baez wrote the song, "Diamonds and Rust," then Neil Young wrote, "Rust Never Sleeps." Indeed rust, chaos, heartbreak - whatever name we use, suffering is part of life, and too often we get stuck wallowing in past suffering, worrying that suffering will return again, so we blindfold ourselves from seeing all the Diamonds right here & now.

    Back in 1995, Kenneth R. Pelletier MD, published the results of his pioneering research in the book, "Sound Mind, Sound Body. A New Model for Lifelong Health" showing how the most well-rounded, successful people, instead of being born into wealthy, successful families, actually had had to surmount serious adversities.
    Sharon Danloz Parks, in her powerful 2000 book, “Big Questions, Worthy Dreams. Mentoring Young Adults in their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith.” introduces a powerful, useful term, 'shipwreck' : “To undergo shipwreck is to be threatened in a total & primary way. … what has dependably served as shelter & protection and held and carried one where one wanted to go comes apart. What once promised trustworthiness vanishes.”
    Then Elizabeth Lesser, in her inspiring 2005 book, “Broken Open. How Difficult Times Can Help us Grow.” recounts many inspiring examples of people instead of being destroyed by 'shipwrecks' becoming better & stronger as a result.
    Gradually, research is being published on this phenomenon that has become known as "Post-traumatic growth (PTG) - "enduring positive psychological changes experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances."
    Eranda Jayawickreme et al. “Post‐traumatic Growth as Positive Personality Change: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations.” Personality 89; 1: 145-165, 2021. 

    Please NOTE: All of the 3 individuals below endured major trauma, and suicide, drug & alcohol use is discussed - this *** may be triggering ***.

    HOWEVER, we will see how suffering can bring out the very best in us. 

    Exceptionally VALUABLE, INSPIRING examples of post-traumatic growth:
        • James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.
        • Isira. "Buddha on the Dance Floor." ‎ Living Awareness, 2014.
                and
        • Robert Falconer "An Open-Ended Conversation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQyf0ew0XCU There are so many exceptionally valuable gems in this 53-minute interview that I had to transcribe most of it:

    Throughout his childhood, Robert Falconer suffered severe sexual, physical & psychological abuse at the hands of his alcoholic & drug-addicted father.
    Robert Falconer (RF) : “So by all odds, I should be dead like my brother (who died by suicide in his teens), or in prison. You know the old, it’s not really a joke, but people call it a joke because otherwise you have to start crying, ‘Men go to prison, women go to therapy.’ So I should be living in a dumpster, dead, or in prison, and I’m not.

    More and more, I don’t think people can heal without connection to spirit. Especially from major trauma like this, people need to find a way to connect to something much larger than themselves and much larger than the pain they endured.

    And if it’s okay with you, I’m going to talk about a couple of graphic incidents where I met spirit early on. There’s a phenomenon well known among therapists who work with severely abused children. Some kids can become, what they call, anesthetic. Pain doesn’t hurt them anymore. They just go numb. And these kids are really hard to control. You can try to control them. They’ll break an arm and they don’t care. They just keep fighting. I wasn’t totally anesthetic, but I could numb out almost any pain, including cigarettes being put out on me - all kinds of stuff like that. The one thing I could never numb out was being suffocated. I think there’s a hardwired biological response to being suffocated. The body just goes wild in that struggle for a bit of breath. So when my father discovered that, of course, that’s what he did all the time. And I just want to say the waterboarding our government does to those people in Guantanamo and other places overseas, that’s a very sophisticated, very severe form of torture, even though it doesn’t leave any marks. This is torture. There are no two ways around that. So what happened? He would often suffocate me while he was raping me. What happened? I don’t know if these are near-death experiences or what. Often, when I was suffocated & unconscious, I would meet a merciful female presence. And it was the only compassion I’d ever experienced in my life, and it was so wonderful. It gave me a taste of something worth living for.
    But she kept sending me back. And I did not want to go back into that little boy’s body being raped & beaten at all. So I got angry at her and I cursed her with all the force of my young heart. And then I couldn’t get in touch with her again for years and years and years. The image I had of myself was like a soldier on the front lines with a radio trying to call back to headquarters, and I couldn’t hear anything but static. I felt very, very lost.

    But I’d had that taste. In the depths of hell, I had that taste of spirit. I think that’s actually what kept me alive and kept a core of sanity going in me. And it’s so ironic that the most severe torture he found was what opened this gateway for me.

    There were other times when spirit came in my life when I was a child that I didn’t recognize as spirit at the time and I don’t think anybody else would have either. I was a fighter & a bully and was thrown out of schools and was in all this trouble and was heading on a bad downhill path. And I got into this little religious school, and this kid threw a spitball and hit me in the face. After class, I got him by the lapels in the coat room, and I was holding him up and I was going to start hitting him. And somehow, if I’d done that, I probably would have gone to juvie hall, jails and all that.
    But somehow, I put him down, I brushed the lapels of his coat off, and I’ve never hit anyone in anger since then. Now you could think that’s some trivial event, in freshman high school, but it changed my whole life. It was a parting of the ways there.

    Another one a little later on was I dated this Chinese girl, and she treated me with kindness & affection. And we never had intercourse. Most Chinese, at least at that time, did not have sex before marriage. But there was real affection & real connection. I kept thinking, ‘When is she going to stick the knife in my back? When is the betrayal coming?’ It never came. And somehow her kindness, her basic human kindness, cracked something open.
    There was this shell of concrete that was forming around me & my heart. And just that kindness broke me open and let some light in and opened something that was able to grow later.
    Now you could dismiss this as puppy love – two teenagers necking – but it changed my life. And I think spirit was in there in a very profound way.

    And I was also drinking really, really heavily in high school, and I was on the railway line to severe alcoholism. But I ran into LSD – or LSD ran into me. In 1967 I consummated by love affair with LSD. Somehow the exposure, just the exposure … I went towards LSD with a spiritual attitude. I needed to find spirit. But because of that exposure to psychedelics, somehow I became repelled by alcohol. And there was no professional therapy involved. It was us freshmen at college doing acid. But that also was another huge changing point.

    And then I went on. I was often suicidal. But I’m very stubborn. I’m as stubborn as a mule. And sometimes that saved my life. And I just thought, well, I’d like to kill myself. But if I’m really going to do that, I ought to do this, this, & this first. And a lot of those things were pretty hard to do, like get a master’s degree in psychology, and have a nice place to live. So I did all these things and I tried every kind of therapy you can think of. And a lot of them were very damaging.
    But I came up through all these, and found these parts-work models. … Only about 15, 20 years ago, I found Internal Family Systems (IFS), which I think is the most respectful & potent form of therapy available now. I just want to say, I didn’t used to put respect and potency in the same basket. But I think IFS is potent because it’s so respectful of the person and all their different parts and welcomes all the parts. IFS was founded by Dick Schwartz about 40 years ago. … IFS has this concept of self. We’re made up of parts, and we’re multiple. We’re much more like a basketball team than a tennis player in our internal psychic structure. But there’s also this thing Dick calls ‘Self,’ which he says is always Curious, Compassionate, Calm, Clear, Courageous, Confident, Creative & Connected (the 8Cs of IFS). And I think what Self does, it sort of sneaks spirit almost like through a back door because spirit is not really acceptable in modern academia. You know you have to sort of slide in sideways.
    So I don’t think people really heal at a profound level unless they can connect with something larger than themselves.”

    Host Jeffrey Mishlove (JM) : “Well, I guess it’s fair to say, that at some level, at the level of the persona, the personality, you were extremely damaged by your childhood. And now I think many, many decades later, it’s fair to say that you are a well-balanced, happy person.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, I think I’m a man of joy.”

    RF goes on to say that he’s noticed that the interviewer, Jeffrey Mishlove himself, over the past 50 years, appears to be getting more & more joyful.

    (JM) : “I think it’s true. … It’s something about getting older that does get you in touch with something very fundamental. When you know that you’re closer to the end of life, you get to appreciate it all the more.”

    (RF) : “I think every trauma, every difficult thing presents us with a fork in the road. We can either let that break our heart open, which is difficult, and then we go forward into compassion, joy, vastness, - OR - we can contract and get bitter, hard, small, & resentful. So I think, in my experience, I’ve been presented with that choice over, over, over again. And hopefully, at least there’s a predominance of going toward the opening, which is why I think I’m happier and more & more joy-filled."

    RF goes on to discuss how his hard-earned life experiences influence his psychotherapy work with his clients.

    (JM) : “… and the paradox is that what is meant by ‘scientific’ is that you have to explain yourself in terms of materialistic reductionistic language, and that’s not what you’re doing. You’re doing the opposite. You’re doing something that is holistic.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, yeah, and I think, I hope that’s changing. There are so many wonderful people like Bernardo Kastrup, and many others who are … That materialist paradigm is dead, I think. It’s not really tenable anymore."

    (JM) : “I’m pretty sure that you understand that, and I understand that, and probably most of our viewers understand that, but we’re still kind of a subculture. The mainstream culture is, you know, for all of the lip service we pay in the United States to religion, we live in a very, very materialistic culture."

    (RF) : “Yeah, yeah, totally. I agree. I think that’s one reason why we’re experiencing an epidemic of mental illness. People don’t have anything larger than themselves they can connect to, and I think that’s necessary. I think the work of psychotherapy is really spiritual. It has to have a sacred basis or it falls apart.
    Now if I cared about academia, I couldn’t say that. And don’t attribute this to IFS or Dick Schwartz or anybody else – this is just me. I want to read a short poem, because I think it makes this point in a really beautiful way:

‘The Healing Time’ by Persha Gertler

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy holy

    I think we have to have that kind of depth."

    (JM) : “That’s beautifully put, and there are some things, I think, that can only be expressed through poetry. The logical language just doesn’t get to the heart of some things.
    But now, going back to the question of spirit possession and your very, very traumatic childhood, did you personally ever experience that idea of an ‘unattached burden,’ and ‘external entity’?”

    (RF) : “I have experienced that, and I think they were in me all along, but I was not directly aware of them as such, as an external energy in me. I think rape almost literally injects them into people. They’re very often called ‘parental interjects’ or other things like that, and as I got more & more healing, I experienced some of them quite directly.
    One I could talk about. I have wet macular degeneration, and I was told about 10 years ago, ‘Bob, you’re going blind. You better get ready. With wet macular degeneration there are these blisters on the retina that come and then start bleeding into the eye, and it slowly blinds you.’
    And I did IFS work with Richard Schwartz himself, and we looked for any psychological dimension to this illness, and saw this image that looked like a spider with a scorpion’s tail, and it was in there poking at my retina, which fits pretty well with the blisters, and it was trying to blind me. It was a lot of my mother’s and my father’s spirit, and there seemed to be some other bigger energies that had gotten into them that weren’t their personality.
    I don’t know what this thing was, but we were able to get it out of my eye and move it away, and I’m doing way better than the doctors ever thought was possible. I can still read, I can drive, you know. I get the regular medical treatments, but I’m doing way better than ever, than anybody thought was possible. So that’s really very convincing to me."

    (JM) : “And in your work with Richard Schwartz, you were able to determine that this was not part of you, that it was somehow external to you?”

    (RF) : “Yep, yet, and there are 2 questions to do that. The first one is, ‘What’s your intention?’ And this thing just wanted to blind me. ‘Why do you want to blind me?’ To make me weak. We just kept asking, ‘Well, what’s good about that? Well, what’s good about that?’ And it just went down to destroy, destroy, destroy. There was nothing good in there.
    All (IFS) 'parts' have a good intention. Even suicidal parts, if you just keep asking, ‘Well, what’s good about killing them?’ Usually you get down to, ‘Well, I’m the last line of defense against overwhelming pain.’ If they’re in absolutely unbearable pain, ‘I can take them out, I can heal them.’ And then that’s a part that’s not some external energy we want to get rid of at all. We want to say stuff like, ‘Boy, you’ve had a very difficult, heroic kind of job being the last defense.’ And what we say is, ‘If we could show you a way that we can get them out of pain, without having to kill the body, would you be interested?’ And they almost always say, ‘Yeah, we’d love that, but you can’t do it.’ And then we just respond, ‘How about giving us enough room, so as an experiment, so that we can prove to you we can do that?’ And usually the parts will say, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So the parts of people aren’t bad. They have a good intention down inside them somewhere. Even the ones who are causing them to drink, or cutters who are anorexic. When I said about IFS being respectful, we respect those parts. We don’t go in there saying, ‘You’re bad, wrong, stupid, shut up and go away.’ We go, ‘Oh, what are you really trying to do? We want to help you, not weaken you.’"

    (JM) : “But with regard to this spider-like part with a scorpion tail that is causing blisters in your eye, that seemed to have no redeeming qualities."

    (RF) : “No, it didn’t want to do anything good. So the next thing we do is just ask it directly, ‘Are you a part of me?’ And these unattached burdens or spirits, whatever you want to call it, they lie all the time. They don’t call Satan 'the prince of lies' for nothing. But they don’t seem to be able to lie in response to this question, which is a really wonderful blessing. In the 10 years I’ve been focused on this particular aspect, there were only a couple of cases where it couldn’t directly lie, but it could weasel pretty good. And then, no, it’s not a part, and then we help it go.
    And the thing that’s changed in me in the 10 years I’ve been doing this (IFS work with external parts), is I’m kinder & kinder & kinder toward these things. I’ve come to believe that they’re suffering beings who are clinging here, and they’re desperate, lost, starving & suffering terribly. But they’re sort of like – trying to rescue a wild animal trapped in a fence or something. They’ll try and rip your arm off, even though you’re trying to help. So these things are like that. Or another image that occurs to me is a child who’s drowning. If you swim out to them and try and help them, they’ll take you down, because they’re so terrified. Dealing with these external energies, seems like that to me.”

    (JM) : “When you say you’ll ‘Help them to go away’ and they’re not intent on going away, how does that process work?"

    (RF) : “They don’t seem to get to stay unless they can get some part of that person scared of them. They love fear, they feed on fear, or there are some parts of the person who want that in them. Probably the most common way these things get in, Dick used to say, was the only way, but I think there are other ways - they offer power to the powerless.
    Imagine some young boy like me being raped and beaten all the time. The young kid’s going to reach out for anything that offers it power, even if it’s just some voice in their head. But then they don’t actually give power, they give an illusion of power, and then they keep the person weak so it stays dependent.
    So what we do is we just focus on all the parts of a person who are connected to it, who are going to miss it in any way when it’s gone, or who are scared of it. Work with them one after another. And then there’s nothing left for that kind of entity to connect to. It seems to have free will. I try and encourage them to go some place where they can heal. But some of them are just defiant, rage-filled, hard, contracted, and they go back to some dark realm, look for somebody else to attack. But I try and help them all go to some kind of healing."

    (JM) : “Now, I know many people who do this work, would work with what they would call their spiritual guides or helpers, that it’s not something that the therapist does at the ego level. It’s done at a completely different level of consciousness.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. And I ask Spirit to work through me, and I ask, ‘Please shut me up and you do the work,’ you know, stuff like that. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I have not worked inpatient, but there are several people who’ve worked with psychotic people diagnosed schizophrenic, and they say the voices talking to the schizophrenics are voices of demons. And psychiatrists say, ‘Don’t encourage the patient to talk to the voices, because that’s colluding with their hallucinations, and you don’t want to do that, it makes them worse.’ But actually, Jerry Marzinsky, and there are some others too, say that’s exactly what you need to do. What he’s discovered in working with schizophrenic patients in a much more blatant and florid way, these nasty voices giving all these poisonous, weakening messages, it’s very much like what I’ve discovered in working with a much, much less damage population. …
    I don’t think people heal from lives like mine unless they find something like (a voice of wisdom) they can connect to in their inner world. And it’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of experience. I think people have to somehow have an experience of that kind of reality. And that’s what makes the difference.
    People talk about faith. Faith is not about believing a doctrine. It’s about having a certain kind of experience and being true to it. There’s a wonderful line I like, “Theology is the corpse of revelation.” It’s that experience of revelation that’s alive and real and undeniable to the people who have it, that I think can really, really change lives.

    Roland Griffiths, who just died last year, was the head of psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins for a very long time. What he realized is that it was the mystical experience that healed people. Roland Griffiths was another hardcore scientist – all statistics, very controlled and careful. So what he tried to do and what he did was to operationalize the definition of mystical experience. So they got these 6 criteria, 3 major and 3 minor criteria, and they developed a way to rate these numerically.
    The 3 major ones are:
        1 Unitive experience – part of a whole
        2 Sacred experience – precious, the present moment is precious, often in psychedelic experiences, heartbreakingly precious
        3 Noetic experience – it’s true or real or realer than real, because very often these experiences feel more real than everyday reality.

    The 3 minor ones are:
        1 Positive affect – it basically feels good, even though even in his very carefully controlled environment, 35% of the people had moments of intense terror. So there’s positive affect, but it is not an easy trip.
        2 There’s no time or space – those disappear. They no longer apply.
        3 Ineffable – “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”

    He’s created this scale and a numeric way to quiz people on it and get a number, and he realized the higher the number they scored for a mystical experience predicted how much healing they got out of that event. So a very scientific way at showing that spiritual experience is healing, almost in and of itself.”

    (JM) : “Well I was personally very influenced by Abraham Maslow and his work on the peak experience, which was almost identical to this description, in which Maslow interviewed the most successful people he could find in his day – people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. And he discovered that they had these peak experiences and that the peak experiences for these highly successful people were central to who they had become."

    (RF) : “Yeah, I think so. I definitely think that’s true. And this is not popular among psychotherapists, this idea that this is what’s really needed for deep healing, some kind of experience of this step. I think the 12-step movement knows this. The first three steps of the 12-step: we couldn’t manage it, came to believe there’s a God or a higher power who could restore us to sanity and turned our lives over. That’s all about finding some kind of bigger reality and resting into it."

    (JM) : “That’s very important for self-healing. But the work that you’re doing with the, I would call it depossession, I don’t know if you use that word or not, that takes it to yet even another level, doesn’t it? Because now you’re healing another person or you’re serving as a catalyst to heal yet another person.”

    (RF) : “Yeah. I’ve studied the Spiritists, the Brazilian Spiritists. They’ve been doing this for 150 years or more. And they say that when you do this work and you encounter one of these spirits, they become your client too. And it’s even though very often when you meet these things, they’re cussing you out and they’re screaming at you and trying to scare you and doing all this stuff. That’s your client. That’s who you need to help.
    I just want to go a little bit more into ‘The Others Within Us.’ That book took me 10 years to write. It’s very well-reasoned, rational, calm, unemotional presentation of all the reasons why this makes sense.
    The first thing that I think is so important is our minds are porous. In the West, we seem to have developed this myth that our minds are like this citadel, some kind of fortress surrounded by this nice bony thing (skull) we have up here. Everything inside it is private. It’s our property, and nothing go out, and nothing comes in. That is a myth and it’s very, very wrong and it’s very, very damaging. I think that myth is almost a definition of alienation. If you’ve taken that in as your operational myth, you’re going to feel alienated from the world and alone. There are quite a few people who’ve traced the history of this myth. It’s only come up big time in the past four or five hundred years.
    If you think about it, every living system is surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out. If it isn’t like that, it’s dead. Why would our minds be any different?
    Even Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most vehement, fundamentalist atheist alive on the planet today, and he’s a brilliant man, so he can really destroy people, he came up with this theory of memes & memeplexes. He actually came up with the theory to explain religion. He said religion is like a virus in the mind, and it can get from one mind into another, and then it can replicate in that mind and then go out to others. And then he talked about memeplexes, which would explain a whole complex combination of stuff, like a whole religion and all its mythos, and that going into minds, replicating and then going out. That also explains spirit possession. That’s a perfectly adequate theoretical explanation of spirit possession. And so here’s one of the most vehement atheists giving a perfectly rational, totally atheistic explanation of this event."

    (JM) : “I think there’s something fascinating and paradoxical about that, and I get that as well when I look at Buddhism, which is a very spiritual approach, which when you look deeply into Buddhist philosophy, they don’t believe in any kind of ultimate deity.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, and yet there are all kinds of spirit possession stuff, especially in Tibetan Buddhism. They have that State Oracle, the Nechung Oracle, and the Dalai Lama relies on the spirit who possesses the man for state advice. And you can see interviews with the guy who’s the oracle, and he’s completely unconscious of what happens. And he does amazing things. They put this huge headdress on him that must weigh 50 pounds, and he dances in it. It would snap somebody’s neck. And he says after the trance, they carry him out because he usually passes out at the end of this. They carry him out, and he says when he comes back to consciousness, he’s just filled with joy. And these guys don’t live long. They almost all die young. But he says, 'I’m just filled with joy.' It’s such a pleasure for him to be the recipient of this spirit."

    (JM) : “Well our science has a lot to learn about mediumship, about channeling, about the idea of multiple personalities. It seems to me that we’re hampered by our adherence to a strictly materialistic metaphysics. It stifles our creativity when it comes to looking at consciousness."

    (RF) : “Definitely, totally. And maybe I’m just optimistic, but I think it’s on the way out. You know the physicists aren’t buying that anymore. And there are Rupert Sheldrake and Bernardo Kastrup and even Christof Koch, the great scientist of consciousness. These people are coming around."

    (JM) : “They are. And it’s important. You’re talking about the leading edge of culture, where you certainly stand. And I would like to think that I stand there as well. But when we look at the whole vastness of human culture, you have to appreciate that the leading edge is just one movement. There’s a huge society that is still coming along very, very slowly. But nevertheless, these slow movements are the ones that are lasting when it comes to consciousness and culture."

    (RF) : “I hope so. There’s a very sad story I want to mention about that. Many traditional cultures get better results with psychosis than we do. And India was one of those. Tanya Luhrmann, who I immensely admire, anthropologist. I’m pretty sure she’s still alive. She studied psychosis in different cultures, and she was comparing California to India and Ghana. And in both of those other places, they got better results than we did. And the really sad thing, we are exporting our methods that don’t work. We’re not studying what they do. We’re exporting our bad methods. And in India, the government, in the name of modernization, is actively working to destroy the traditional temples that treated psychosis and mental distress. And they treated it on a spirit possession model. And they got better results than we do. And that’s just such a tragedy to see this being attacked in this day and age. And this is one major temple where they’ve lost some of the rights because there are not enough people left to do them."

    (JM) : “You see the same thing with Native American cultures, where the young people decide they no longer want to follow the ancient rituals. And I know of at least one tribe in California where the elders decided, and took all of their ancient ritual implements, buried them and said, this is the end. The young people are no longer carrying out our tradition."

    (RF) : “Thinking about Tanya Luhrmann, she wrote a book called, ‘How God Becomes Real.’ She says, ‘prayer is a cultivation of inner senses.’ This is something I think maybe could make the bridge between this spiritual world and psychotherapy. Because lately in the psychotherapy world, there’s been a lot of study of interoception – our ability to sense our subjective realm and to sense what’s going on in our bodies. This concept’s been around at least 100 years, but only since around 2010 has there been much research. But now it’s getting really, really clear that people who have poor interoception skills are much more likely to have treatment-resistant depression, borderline personality disorder, all this nasty stuff. Your ability to be aware of your inner world is really important in terms of your health. And you can be trained, it’s trainable. And Tanya Luhrmann coming from studying religion all over the world has come to the same conclusion. It’s all about, she calls it, inner sense cultivation. So maybe these two can meet somewhere."

    (JM) : “Very interesting. And I tend to think that having a good inner sense also is a way to cultivate psi ability."

    (RF) : “Definitely, definitely. And I think for me, the more I go inward, first, I met all the trauma from my childhood, which I didn’t want to meet. Who does? But as I moved through that, things got bigger. It’s like with the night sky, we get better and better telescopes. The sky gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The same thing happens as you pay attention in the inner world, I think.
    So at first we meet our personal history. Then there are the sort of close-in archetypes that are still human-looking. Then there are these archetypes that aren’t even human anymore. It’s fascinating to me.
    Every question I get a little bit of an answer to, opens up ten new, more fascinating questions. So I find it really exciting. Sometimes it’s a little scary. There’s a great quote I like from a Cherokee woman shaman, ‘Our foundations are ripped out from under us, over & over & over again, until the abyss itself becomes our foundation.’ Yeah. And I think that’s what this movement inward is. It’s about learning to not only tolerate, but enjoy that.”
    An Open-Ended (53-minute) Conversation with Robert Falconer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQyf0ew0XCU *** AGAIN WARNING: Major trauma, suicide, drug & alcohol use are discussed, which for some may be triggering ***

“When you think that you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more …"
Bob Dylan “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”

    The small, divided, dualistic self or mind sees rigid adherence to must haves & must avoids as essential to (the fragile ego's) life. BUT Self sees the exact opposite, how we must eventually tear down ALL our protective walls, open up & accept BOTH sides of the One reality. When we think we've lost every thing, the "abyss itself" - unmanifest Divinity or Buddhism's "Emptiness" - finally becomes our home again.