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