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