Feelings are Important

    "Our feelings are a barometer of how our thoughts are being utilized." 
     Sydney Banks, "The Enlightened Gardener" Lone Pine Publishing, 2016.

     How am I? Seriously - check in with yourself! Why? Because the whole gamut of BAD feelings are caused by "thinking." It's NOT what happens to us, but how we THINK about it that causes MOST of our suffering. And we're OFTEN caught - much like whales entangled in fishing nets - in useless thinking (self-talk, internal chatter). We're almost constantly talking to ourselves in our heads, and 90-95% of it is useless, even harmful. We innocently but WRONGLY assume that this steady chatter tells us the objective truth, who we actually are and provides evidence that we're alive & thinking rationally. NO! The vast majority of self-talk is old, repetitious bits of "the story of me" - a poor, wronged, separate me, barely surviving in a crazy, hostile world.

    Whenever we're caught up in self-talk, we actually feel BAD: stressed, overwhelmed, out of control, contracted, sad / angry, lonely & disconnected. Our "mind racing" is not normal. "Multitasking" is not productive. There's often a real sense of "time crunch" - not nearly enough time to get everything done, even in a "half-assed" way. You may be thinking, 'Stop the world, I want to get off!' This is just rushing towards burnout.  

    “Every human being is sitting in the middle of mental health and they don't know it.” Sydney Banks

    So we can't stop the world, BUT each one of us CAN let go of the actual cause of most of our unnecessary, self-inflicted suffering - we CAN let go of self-talk!  

    We can easily detect when we're caught up in self-talk because it makes us feel BAD. So we first notice self-talk going on AND we drop it, just let it go, stop supplying energy that sustains noise. EVERYONE CAN DO THIS. Then repeatedly bring awareness to the silence that is always there between, behind, underneath the words & other noises. Be curious, "listen for" & enjoy resting, luxuriating in the silence. 

    Quickly you'll begin to appreciate all that comes with silence: peace (instead of stress & time-poverty); wisdom & calm competence (instead of feeling overwhelmed & out of control); spaciousness & relaxation (instead of contraction & tension); intimacy & oneness (instead of loneliness & disconnectedness). Within this peaceful silence we effortlessly connect with deepest intelligence or wisdom & creativity which far exceeds our personal (egoic) intelligence. We operate FAR more wisely, efficiently, empathically, and joyfully when we're acting from the depth of who we truly are.

    "When mind and soul are in unison, you will experience mental well-being."
     Sydney Banks, "The Enlightened Gardener" Lone Pine Publishing, 2016.

DO listen to this EXCELLENT 56 minute Michael Neill interview

 

To Ask and Live Big Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Van Morrison "Astral Weeks"

Pointers from a Wise Elder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

"Donald And Lydia" by Steve Goodman

Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death

    The excerpts below, are from an imho EXCELLENT 88-minute discussion: "WHAT IS LIFE?" between Tim Freke & Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY 
    To get value out of this, savour slowly, with all your senses open. Enjoy!

    Tim Freke (TF):     “You & I are both human beings on this bittersweet journey of being alive, and we both got older. What is it? How have you come to terms with that mystery? How do you see it as you make that journey?”

    Iain McGilchrist (IM): “I think intrinsically it’s that mystery one never comes to the bottom of. As William James said, ‘We can never close our accounts with reality.’ And I think just being aware of that is both very valuable, and as you say, somewhat rare. We take the most mysterious things for granted, such as the nature of time and consciousness, and that we’re alive at all, or that there is anything at all rather than nothing. So these things are eternally intriguing, but that’s part of their value.
    I mean if we could say, ‘Oh I know exactly what it is,’ well first of all, you’d be a fool, but secondly, you would have lost something of what it is that makes life have meaning. The odd thing is that if we could narrow down the meaning of these things in a simple way, to what we normally mean by, ‘Oh that means that,’ then it would have no meaning. Its meaning depends on its meaninglessness at one level, much as the idea of purpose would be vitiated* if it was clear that there was a purpose in the sense of a utility - you know we do this, because of that. (* vitiate – spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of)

TF     “One of the things that I’ve explored a lot is the coexistence of opposites … and one of the opposites that plays itself out for me all the time, is the way in which I feel that I can live with an appreciation of the mystery – the numinous nature of existence, AND a story I’m telling, which I’m constantly trying to define. One of the reasons I want to have these conversations is that it refines my story, my understanding. … generally we don’t realize we’re embedded in a story, that there is a cultural story which we take for granted. And that part of the function of doubt & mystery is to come out of that story, and actually see, to actually be conscious in this moment - this breathtaking mystery, we don’t know what it is, and then we have the best story we can find to navigate it, and deeper stories open up deeper experiences.”

IM     “I’d like to pick up the word ‘story’ because of course nowadays, it can be used to mean a lie - ‘telling stories’ as children say. And the word story, and the word fable, and the word myth, which are now all used to mean things that are fundamentally unlikely to be true, started off as words that designated a perfectly truthful approach to reality. When philosophers and scientists normally talk about a narrative or a story, the background to that is often that we make it up in order to comfort ourselves, because we need some sort of meaning, so we invent it. And there again, that word has changed. Invention used to mean discovering something, finding it, whereas now it means making it up.
    So I believe there is, very importantly, a way of dealing with these imponderables that you mentioned, which is not head-on. The more you try to analyze it directly, the more you come away with a handful of dust. You need to approach it in a more oblique way, implicitly. And this is where art, music, poetry & religion take their value – from being able to embody things that normally we can’t talk about directly. If the tendency then is to dismiss them, because they can’t be talked about directly, or because this involves a narrative or a mythos or something, is to misunderstand another way of grasping reality.” 

TF      “One of the things that strikes me about that is that there seems to be the intellectual mainstream, which within its own domain is vocal & dominant, which then percolates through. When it says, ‘Oh you tell a story about it, or you make up meaning,’ seems to imply that the imagination is somehow unreal, that it’s a bolt-on extra. There’s reality, which is physics and biology – kind of, and then there’s this bolt-on extra, which is the whole realm of the imagination. Whereas it seems to me that the imagination is the most emergent level of reality. It’s the whole journey of evolution over these 13.8 billion years has led to imagination. It’s gone from hydrogen to ideas. It’s gone from matter to something not made of matter, and that realm of ideas where we’re creating stories is not a bolt-on extra. It’s actually another level. It’s not the most real exactly, but the most emergent, the latest level of reality. It’s all been leading to this.” 

IM     “I haven’t thought of imagination as something that’s a product of evolution, partly because I imagined that imagination is foundational, that it is an important part of creative consciousness, and that actually everything that exists partakes of it.”

TF      “You had mentioned purpose, and one of the key things for me which makes me want to understand this is not just what is it, but what shall I do with it?
    I’m alive. I know that I’m going to die. Life is full of joy and suffering. Does it have a purpose? Who would know anyway? And yet, it feels like we live from those purposes.
    A lot of my method, I guess, is to look at the moment, because that’s what I’ve got. And to see what’s in it. And one of the things which came from that, ‘Oh, each moment’s the realization of a new potentiality. Every moment’s new and every moment contains everything that’s ever happened before. It’s implicit within it.
    Me arriving here is implicit of our communication, the whole of the Big Bang, everything. The past is present & hasn’t gone anywhere is a very powerful idea I associate with Rupert Sheldrake. This process has been one of evolution realizing potentiality. So that the purpose of existence ... is intrinsic to the very nature of what it is, which is the continual realization of potentiality. And because of the accumulation of everything that’s happened in the past, there’s a tendency towards more & more emergent realization, so that now we can have conversation because soul has emerged, psyche has emerged, which wasn’t happening when there was just hydrogen. But that was a precursor for this. So that there seems then a very deep purpose with which we are intrinsic parts which is to continue that realization of ever deeper, more emergent potentials. And actually, I think we’re doing it right now in having this conversation, because the new potentials now are being realized in the imagination. They’re not particularly biological or physical anymore. They’re happening on this imaginary or cultural soul level.” 

IM     “Well, I want to pick up two ideas that you just raised. One is to do with meaning and the other to do with purpose, and they have something of the same structure to them.
    There’s a certain way of thinking about what meaning is. For example, I can tell you what the meaning of the instructions for how to operate a new piece of machinery I’ve got. What that means is very easy to do.
    But quite what King Lear means is another matter.
    Even more problematic is, I can say, ‘My wife means the world to me.’ And people say, ‘What does she mean then?’ And there isn’t a way you could possibly work with that. Nor does it work with great music. It seems to me that some of the most wonderful experiences, pregnant with meaning can be derived from listening to Bach – there’s no conceivable way they can be reduced to a meaning in what I would consider the left hemisphere sense, which is, ‘Come on, what’s the meaning in sentences we can analyze & understand?’ But there is another kind of meaning which we experience with the whole of our being and is more implicit and can’t be articulated because by articulating it, we reduce it, we cut bits off artificially from it, and reduce its meaning by giving it an explicit meaning.
    Now the same thing happens with purpose. When we say something has a purpose, we normally mean, ‘I can see that doing this causes that,’ and that’s an outcome that I wanted. That’s a kind of purpose, a kind of utilitarian purpose. It would seem to me that when we discover that we have no purpose, it’s that kind of purpose we discover. There is no utilitarian purpose in that sense. It’s not all designed by some engineer God to produce a certain result.
    What happens instead is that guaranteed by the fact that it is not produced to an instrumental purpose, in order to serve something outside of ourselves because the engineer is serving his own purposes. Our lives are not engineered. This universe is not engineered in that sense, but it seems to me full of purpose. And that purpose is I think, and this is where we agree, the fulfillment of potential. It’s simply in what is there potentially, becoming being. And once it’s become being, the process moves on. And that’s where you say everything that’s happened is already still there, is that something is left behind by this process but it’s also changed by the continual becoming. So even though in retrospect, it looked like this, now with further retrospect, it looks different. So the whole of everything is changing, and I would see the present moment as a something that is traveling through a medium of potential and actualizing as it goes, leaving this actual path behind it. And it’s not determined from behind by a series of steps but actually drawn towards fulfillment of purpose."

TF     “Yes, beautiful, there’s so much in there. ... so the moment right now seems to be the meeting of the past and the possible, always. And the possible is what you mean by the creative or the cosmic imagination, that kind of sense that there’s something which is giving birth to something new – doing it now, and now, and now. … It’s that journey of realization potential which seems to be fundamentally what a life is, as part of this greater journey, that ‘I am doing that.’
    John Keats said ‘the world is a vale of soul-making.’ I love that. That’s a very essential message for me. It feels like I’m making my soul, because I’m made of my past. I’m made of everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever been. This is now who I am and I’m making myself. Or I’m being made as well. It’s not just me doing it.”

IM     “I think that remark of Keats is both beautiful and quite deep. It’s suggesting that the soul is not a being, an entity, a thing, but is instead an aspect of a process which we help to nourish or can stifle. So in our lives we can grow ourselves or we can stunt ourselves. It’s those choices that make our life what it is. So I think it’s a very good remark.
    This is where we get into the realm where language is extremely difficult, but the present is where the past and potential meet. I think it’s very difficult not to almost spatialize when talking about time, so we see two things that meet but of course they’re not two things that meet. The present is an infinitesimal moment that travels through this business, actualizing as it goes. … The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood. We think of things in binary sort of ways, that is, there is nothing, but there is no thing there. This emptiness – the word 'sunyata' - is derived from a root that means a seed that is potential to grow, and it’s an emptiness as that of a womb that is a potential for something to grow in. And so quite often what we need to be doing is the idea of negation, which in the Western tradition just looks like the absence of something important. But negation is the stopping doing things that get between us & something that is there for us to discover. Often what we need to do in order to be creative is not to make something happen, but to create a space, in which what is already potentially there is invited to grow, to flourish & fulfill itself.”

TF      “My strange life has led me to be interested in what traditionally gets called spiritual awakening or waking up in consciousness to this presence which is completely spacious, emptiness. And I want to invite you to do two things: to mention just the essence of left vs right hemisphere dominance, and the thing I’m particularly interested in is how that or does that have anything to do with awakening or spiritual experience, because one of the things I notice is that a lot of people come to me and say 'Look I understand this all intellectually, but I don’t experience it.' 

    And one of my jobs is to help them experience it, and that’s probably what I do most. And I wonder, is that to do with being trapped in a left brain conceptual understanding and needing to free up into a more right brain understanding? For me the gnosis that arises, the deep knowing, the most central thing, which is before words. And I try then to put it into words and what I end up saying sounds very naïve & a bit child-like, ‘It’s all good really, despite everything. I know it’s awful, but it’s also good. It really is.’ It’s very childish intuitions, but they’re the deepest things I know. And I wonder is that also to do with the left brain and right brain thing, or is that something separate?”

IM      “Everyday language arose to enable us to utilize the world effectively, and we have to use special kind of language to deal with things that are not everyday realities for us because, unless we’re careful by expressing them in language we reduce them to familiar things, whereas the whole point about them is we’re trying to convey something that is unfamiliar. As Nietzsche said, ‘Words make the uncommon common,’ and what you’re talking about are things that are generally-speaking, unusual but nonetheless very deep in meaning. We wouldn’t expect them to translate easily into everyday words, so I think that everyday language is a problem for certain kinds of understanding, because it tells us that we’ve got it. It says, ‘I understand that.’ ‘I grasped it.’ Whereas, in fact what it needs to do is to abdicate that power because it’s actually a destructive process. It’s getting between us and understanding something that only by removing language we can contact, and for me as a psychiatrist, one of the things has been an understanding that people who are particularly articulate often need special help with realizing things of a deep emotional kind. This can be done by using implicit therapies rather than explicit therapies. A lot of therapy takes place in language, but there are therapies that don’t involve that, that involve either metaphors of bodily movement – of enacting things, or of painting or sculpting.
    And often city lawyers would be very reluctant to go and do these therapies, and I’d need to persuade that it didn’t matter that they had no artistic skill. But the trouble is they were so good at articulating things in everyday terms that that got between them & something which, only when they were able to adopt a more implicit approach a more oblique approach, came to life."

    I personally found it worthwhile to transcribe the entire conversation. In my next blog, I plan to continue where we just left off. Enjoy!

 Well worth deeply listening to the full 88-minute discussion: