Evolving to a Compassionate Universe

What did the world sound like when it came into being, I once asked a class of first graders? Many raised their eyes to the sky as if trying to remember that sound and then, one by one, without the self-consciousness that afflicts those who are much older, began to offer their answers. A bang?–one said.  A clang?—another one added.  A bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz?–still another offered.

I then played them a recording someone at Harvard had made of a simulation of the Big Bang and watched as eyes widened in response. Some of them shook their heads as if doubting it could be true while others nodded as if retrieving  the sound from memory after a long night of forgetting.

After this, I played them the first 136 bars of Richard Wagner’s eighteen hour opera, The Ring of the Nibelungen, and watched as their eyes opened wide again at the sound of that low E flat, humming the world into existence.  Once again heads nodded and shook after which, improbably, they asked to hear some more.

Six year old children asking to hear more of the Ring Cycle, one of the most complex works of art ever created, is surprising only if you forget how open children are to narratives—musical, visual or just plain old once upon a time storytelling.

And so I began to tell them of the many stories we had about how our world came into existence. I told them about the Big Bang, about how they were actually 13.7 billion years old because their bodies contained some of the very same hydrogen molecules forged in that first explosion which, recycled, had become dinosaurs, rhododendrons and each one of them. And then I told them about Wagner’s imaginative world which began on an E flat and ended on a D flat four nights and many hours later because the world does not stay the same–it transforms, it changes, it evolves in an ongoing process of renewal.

During the past few days I have been revisiting the Ring Cycle through the explorations of Father Owen Lee, that great educator of opera who, to my mind, best understands this work.  In his book on the Ring, Lee quotes writer C.S. Lewis on the subject of being awakened by Wagner:

“….there arose, at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country.”

Being fascinated with the world that Wagner created in the Ring puts you in an odd moral universe.  While his work was truly sublime, Wagner the human being was anything but.  Much has been written about Wagner’s rabid anti-semitism, his habit of stealing his friend’s money and wives, his stomach-turning egotism which had him seeing the world only in terms of how much he could take from it.  In a word, Wagner the man was an abomination.

While the man was singularly lacking in compassion, his work is full of it, almost as if he lived his golden shadow side completely through his operas.  The idea that a good man has dark shadow qualities is easy enough to digest for most but that the opposite may also be true—that a man as unpalatable as Wagner may have contained some good is much harder to accept.  And yet his works seem an attempt to touch the very best of human nature and it is that element that most attracts me to them despite the shadow of the man himself who forever lingers uncomfortably in the background.

In Lee’s words, Wagner wrote his music dramas out of an abundance of need—an inner urging that sought to balance the insanity of his exterior life.  His operas seem an unconscious attempt to connect to his feminine inner self, the inner self that placed compassion as the highest value—a compassion he rarely exhibited in his own life.

At the heart of the Ring Cycle are two acts of violation—Alberich’s stealing of the gold at the beginning of the work and Wotan’s earlier transgression which evolved from his fashioning of a spear from the severed limb of the World Ash Tree.  Alberich’s theft comes at a price–in order to possess the gold he agrees to renounce love.  Wotan pays for his theft by losing an eye and thus the ability to gain self-awareness.  Both of them acquire worldly power in return—Wotan as the chief of the gods and Alberich as the Lord of the misty realms that lie beneath the world.

The hero of the Ring is actually a heroine—Brunnhilde, Wotan’s daughter, whose act of self-sacrifice at the end allows for the renewal of a world where power ruled into one where love and compassion reign. In the language of the chakras, it is an ascent from the seat of power represented by the third chakra into the fourth chakra where the heart resides.   Seventy years after Wagner began composing this work, Carl Jung would talk about the evolution from the third to the fourth.  We were, he believed, living in a trinitarian world but were evolving into a consciousness that would allow for the establishment of the fourth–a number of wholeness and integration.

In Jung’s conception what was missing was Brunnhilde–the power of the feminine, the relational, life-asserting,”being” energy represented not by women literally, but by the feminine in all of us.   The representation of this ideal came into public consciousness in a big way a number of years ago with the release of the film, Avatar.  Suddenly, support groups sprouted up to help those who felt bereft in a world without those one-dimensional blue people living in a natural paradise where the feminine was able to counter the domination that evolves from the over-doing of the masculine principle in its most debased form.

Such public exhibitions of grief may seem bizarre but they point to how far we have strayed from the energies that keep us in balance.  This too is a  central problem in The Ring.  Once Wotan tears the limb off the ash tree to make the spear that will grant him worldly power, the tree begins to decay and the world in that form begins to end.  All gods will die, the ancient way of doing things will perish but what will replace them?

Brunnhilde’s act of compassion at the end of the Cycle points to the possibility of a new direction and the music that accompanies it is one of the most powerful in all of opera.

For we who find ourselves living over one hundred and fifty years after Wagner conceived this work, it is interesting to contemplate the image of that ash tree perishing from Wotan’s violation. It is a powerful metaphor for what is ailing our own world, both the one out there as well as the one within each of us.     Though the circle rounds in the end, the world created in the Ring does not end on an E flat but shimmers away to the tune of a D flat instead.  Evolution is possible with awareness and consciousness.

For Wagner the person, the opportunity was lost.  But his art, a product of his deep unconscious, can point the way to a world where compassion and love reigns.  It is up to each one of us to do the work.

To listen to the world coming into being in Das Rheingold go to this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKQX7B5sYOo

 The world at its end —here are the last moments of the Ring Cycle:

http://www.well.com/user/woodman/singthing/ring/Sounds/finale.au

Where the Light Comes In

Over the past two years I have embarked, with enthusiasm, upon at least four major writing projects.  For one reason or another, none of them have really taken off.  In one case, I was collaborating with another  writer and we deemed it necessary to each do some more work along our own personal lines first.  In another—a fiction  project—the story is strong, the desire to write it down is greater but things seem to malfunction when the words are committed to the page.  The other day my new computer mysteriously erased over 5,000 words I had just joyfully written in one sitting.  As any writer can tell you, the first 5,000 words are often the most difficult because they signal to your psyche that you have committed to this story and that you are prepared to sit down and spend the better part of a year living with it in your heart and in your head.

Personal tragedy struck in the middle of all of it as I lost my father and lived through the horrific first three weeks of waiting for my  nephew to wake up from a coma after a devastating car crash put his life –and ours— on hold.

Sitting with my mother and sister by my father’s bedside during the three days before he died, I was reminded of my adolescent years in  Spain.  My father lay in a hospital bed but back then people in Spain died at home, surrounded by their families like he was, but without the intrusive machinery that is part and parcel of the experience in a hospital today.

While there, we did what they did in Spain—we cried, we told stories, we tried to console our mother and, incongruously—from time to time, we even laughed.  It was, I think, Joseph Campbell who once said that the experience of death is much like the experience of birth. Both are liminal moments—the kind described in our heroic journeys which point to  those watershed times in our lives where boundaries are crossed.  They also refer to any time when we summon the courage to change our minds.  This is perhaps the most difficult thing of all.  Try doing this on any entrenched belief that “has you” and see what level of resistance is summoned from within.  We are locked in by our perception of how things should be, of how they should develop, of how much we can control.

In the face of death, you suddenly and clearly become aware that there is nothing we can control, that the notion of control is an illusion  of the worst kind because it keeps us addicted, it keeps us imbalanced, it keeps our minds from resting on the present so that they can bounce around from anxious thought to anxious thought in the mistaken notion that this will keep us safe.

If there is a liberation in grief, in the passing away of things, it is precisely that loss of the sense of control.   You realize, quite quickly, that everything is transitory, everything can change at the toss of a dime.  Over the past few months, the haunting line from a novel by Arundhati Roy – everything can change in a minute—kept going through my head.   Everything can change in a second, a minute,  a day.  Everything can change and everything has changed and you are left only with the decision to accept or resist what fate has decided to dish out and resisting, it seems to me, is sinning in the way it was once described.  It means you are literally missing the mark.

Through all of this, words have kept me sane.  Leonard Cohen’s “Ring the Bells”, offered consolation.  The song was based, I read  somewhere, on a story a Buddhist teacher told about a young man who arrived at a Monastery with a broken body and who was advised to meditate on a cracked vase.  After many months of meditation, his teacher informed him that he had outgrown the need to meditate on the cracked vase but the young man refused to get rid of it.   The reason, he said, was that the crack on the vase reminded him of his own personal imperfections and his tears and it was through the cracks, he argued, that the light came in.

One of my favourite mythological heroes is Hephaestus, the smith of the gods. In the Greek myth, Hephaestus is lame and imperfect and is  thus rejected by the other gods.  Hephaestus is even thrown out of heaven by his own mother, Hera, because she cannot bear  his imperfection even though it is precisely this imperfection that allows him to fashion miracles from bronze, silver and gold.  He is the first wounded healer, the powerful archetype of the age brought to light by the psychologist, Carl Jung.  Without the wounding, there is no way for the light to get in.

So the words may have disappeared into the computer ecosystem but the will to write the story, to allow it to inhabit my consciousness, has not.

Things change, the centre does not hold, people get hurt and people pass away.  The stories our imaginations fashion become even more powerful then.  They make sense from  nonsense, provide consolation where none can be found and—as long as you can release them after committing them to paper—they bring the promise of beauty back into the world.

Arising from deep Sleep

After six weeks of hibernation, it takes some serious words artfully arranged to bring me into life again.  As always, only poetry will do and by poetry I mean a deep plunging into a metaphorical reality that is not so easily summarized into neat categories of good and ill.  It is like Osip Mandlestam once said when he suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased “then the sheets haven’t been rumpled and poetry hasn’t spent the night.”

I wish to rumple the sheets and spend the night with some poetry but not just any old rhyme will do. Clearly, to awake from this numbing hibernation, greater words must be summoned from the depths.

This brings me, naturally, to the Spanish metaphysical poets, all gone now but whose words can wake even the dead from their sleep.  A dead man is more alive in Spain than anywhere else on earth, the great Lorca once said and he knew more about crossing the boundaries between the living and the dead than anyone else—possibly because he was Spanish—but more likely because he was a poet and could travel deep down into the heart of things.

Aside from Lorca, who could make even the grey Galician stones sing, there was Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, two Andalusian poets who lived during the same tumultuous times as Lorca did and suffered because of things out there which they could not control.  If you don’t know their poems, you must become acquainted with them soon but only if you too wish to rumple the sheets and arise from the deep slumber that visits you when you fall prey to the inanities of this world.

It was Jiménez who wrote:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die. 

Antonio Machado drew from an equally deep well and wrote one of the saddest poems ever written in any language:

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I think of this poem any time I am witness to the refusal to engage with life because of fear or lethargy, the two demons who sit facing us at the edge of the bed according to Carl Jung who knew plenty about demons and the shadow side of things. I know he was right because I have seen them there myself– gnawing on the bedspread whenever I refuse to travel to the depths that Machado and Jiménez knew so well.  Therein lie monsters, I think at those times, and then fall into the stupor that is part and parcel of refusing to go deep.

 I leave you with this—the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet who called poetry, “the bloodiest of all the arts”.  Like Machado and Jimémez, Hikmet was  not afraid to feel deeply, not afraid of being accused of sentimentality by the intellectuals in our midst.  Here is what he wrote about living on this earth:

This earth will grow cold,

a star among stars

and one of the smallest,

a gilded mote on blue velvet–

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space …

You must grieve for this right now

–you have to feel this sorrow now–

for the world must be loved this much

if you’re going to say “I lived” …

Fine words with which to rumple the sheets, face the demons and arise from a deep sleep.

 

Synchronicities

London House, Mecklenburgh Square WCN

For the last few months, people from my past have been popping up out of the woodwork.  This, I suppose, is one benefit of the growing importance of social media.  People you haven’t thought about for a while but mattered a lot to you once suddenly appear in the form of an email query—are you the Béa who lived in…???—the email asks, and suddenly you are catapulted to the distant past and you find yourself remembering faces and names that had just yesterday seemed an almost forgotten memory.

In my case, almost all of the emails are linked to my years spent as a graduate student in London, England.  I made so many wonderful friends there and became acquainted with some of the most interesting people I have ever met. It is astounding to see what has become of them now—one a counter-terrorism expert in India, another a high-ranking expert on the Middle East in Washington, another has tea daily in the once office of one of my heroes, Joseph Campbell.   Then there is the very dynamic German businessman who I remembered because he had the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard and the vibrant philosopher from Tasmania who once fell in love with a character in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and locked himself in his room for a weekend to mourn her death—and who today continues being the unabashed, life- affirming romantic he always was.

The appearance of so many of these people at the same time has led me to find others from those days following the threads of my past in order to understand something about where I now stand.  As I do not believe in coincidences but synchronicities, I began to ask myself—why now?  Why are the memories tumbling back and why are so many showing up to ask me for their yearbook (I was the editor of the London House Annual back then)?

Reflecting on these synchronicities I realized that the one thing that united my later years in London and where I find myself now is that in both cases I was fighting the strong inner urge that has accompanied me all of my life which is to write—not a blog nor the non-fiction book I am working on now, but the novels and stories that have been entertaining me since I began conceiving of them at the age of ten.   

During my London days, I fought this inner longing by telling myself I was destined for academia and devoting myself sternly to my books.  All too often, though, I would escape from my residence room and end up at the University of London library reading the short stories that appeared in the New Yorker or Granta.  Still, this seemed preferable to facing up to the hard work of not only writing but publishing a novel.  Eventually I had a complete melt down.  This was towards the end of my stay in London when I found myself without the energy to pick up any book or do much of anything.   It was as if all my inner lights had been turned off and I could not muster the desire nor the will to even get out of bed. I tumbled into a mild depression then that made me realize my days in London were over.

I returned to Canada, started writing and eventually published my first and second novels.  The story did not end there however.  Like all stories, this one meandered across some unforeseen valleys and paths until I arrived at a place where the inner stories changed.  Radically.  Where once everything seemed soaked in the patina of my Spanish past, those stories and characters eventually stopped speaking to me.   Instead, new characters and a new style emerged—one that seemed completely foreign but also very exciting to me.

A new path demands new beginnings.   I eventually wrote the new novel but–despairing that any editor or agent would ever accept it—decided to pack it away, to once again abandon the storytelling and devote myself to the non-fiction world.  The inner figures, though, would have none of that and kept me awake at nights and pestered me as I drove about tending to the more mundane aspects of life.  I quieted them firmly, telling myself that the novel-writing was over and that I was now on a new path with the Sophia Cycles and the other kinds of books that lay somewhere inside.

And then the emails arrived—not one but two, three and then four.   The memories arrived with them and I began to wonder about this person and that.   Along with the memories, the same conflicts that had visited me in London came back to haunt me now.  This way or that?  This path or the other?

Finally, the synchronicities became so surreal, they made me laugh.  It was not this way or that; not this path or the other. It was the both/and answer that you find with maturity—the one Carl Jung was always going on about.

I took out my new novel the other day out of its box underneath my writing table.   Unsurprisingly, the story is set in London.

Now the hard work begins to chart a new professional course and a new life.  In the meantime, I continue to enjoy receiving news from all over the world and learning about the fates of those who touched me so deeply back during those glorious days in England.

And the characters keep talking and the settings keep fashioning themselves out of tidbits and the stories keep weaving themselves into true narratives.

I think of Rumi then….I want burning he said and the burning is that connection to the inner fire, the one that merges and dissolves everything at the same time and which sets the world alight.  In writing the stories, the burning begins and life seems fully experienced and fully lived.

From the Third to the Fourth

One of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth-century, psychologist Carl Jung, has the unfortunate reputation among many for being a bit of a quack.  I doubt Jung himself would have minded, not the later life Jung in any case.  This later life Jung emerged after he suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead for a short while before doctors were able to resuscitate him.  During that near death experience Jung recounts how he floated out into space and saw the earth from that beautiful vantage point.  He then remembered entering a temple of some kind, knowing that soon he would be whole again.  He wrote:

 My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.

Before he could enter that temple, though, he realized he had to return to earth and soon found himself back in his hospital bed.  As he was recovering from this experience, he fell into a deep depression about not having completed his journey.  He was furious at the doctor who had resuscitated him but also concerned for him because Jung had seen this doctor on the “other side” and he intuited that this meant that the doctor was not long for this world.  Sure enough, Jung was his last patient as a week later the good doctor took to his bed with a high fever and died of septicemia.

This experience marked a new direction in Jung’s life.  While he had been a radical all of his life, breaking with Freud during his descent into a feverish mid-life crisis that would leave him questioning everything he had learned until then—the near death experience gave him the courage to explore those subjects which were more radical yet.  The period after his heart attack until his death at the age of eighty-five produced some of Jung’s most important work including the polemical and astounding Answer to Job.

Jung’s work has been adapted and cannibalized extensively in the last fifty years, serving as the foundation to many a popular self-help book where talk of the shadow and the collective unconscious abounds.   His insights into the human condition are many and they are profound but one of the most important is that we are not only material beings but meaning-seeking beings who need to find a greater purpose in our lives.  It is the individual search for meaning that makes us whole and it was this search that Jung’s own life was dedicated to.

The search does not end until the moment of our death and this is a good thing as it stresses that life is a process and not a goal.  If there is a destination, it is our death, no matter how much we deny it and try to keep it at bay.  It is in fact our very denial and fear of death that keeps us from fully living and our culture strongly supports this by grounding us in the material things of the world—from computer gadgetry to mind-numbing reality shows.

The near death experience has been endlessly written about and vigorously denied by the rationalists among us who put electrodes on people’s heads and try to explain it away using the new research being done in neuroscience. Whether the near death experience is scientifically verifiable is not my concern.  I am much more taken with how the experience often leads to a radical change in the person’s attitude and life.

One person who came close to death and decided he could no longer live with himself was the Hollywood director, Tom Shadyac, director of movies like Ace Ventura and The Nutty Professor.  After a bicycling accident left him with a concussion that would not go away, Shadyac took a look at his life and decided he didn’t like what he had become.  A multi-millionaire with enormous houses and a private jet, he downsized to a 1,000 square feet mobile home in a move to simplify his life.  He also decided to make a movie about something that really mattered to him.  The result, a documentary called “I Am”, details his journey and includes interviews with luminaries like David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky and the wonderful poet and translator of Rumi, Coleman Barks. 

 I am linking the trailer to this movie here in hopes that it arrives soon in my city and yours.

 http://iamthedoc.com/

 Watching this trailer, I was reminded of something Jung believed—that we were moving from a trinitarian world to a world where quaternity predominates (from a three to a four.)  He felt that what was needed was to incorporate the feminine principle that has been devalued for so long.  The feminine is relational, horizontal, content just to be.  Every time I hear Eckhart Tolle talk about the “now”, I am reminded of the feminine at its most centered best.  It is being present to each moment as it is, without resistance or fear.

 Those well versed in Eastern mythology, speak about the same thing albeit in a slightly different way.  Anodea Judith, an expert on the chakras—the energy centers in the body described by ancient eastern mystics—speaks of how we are evolving as a species from the third chakra to the fourth.  The third chakra is centered in the solar plexus and is seen as the seat of personal power. It rules our power, will and autonomy.  It is associated with adolescence and if we apply this to where we find ourselves as a species, it easy to understand not only our compulsive materialism, but why we choose to entertain ourselves with the nonsense that appears on our television screens.

 The fourth chakra is the seat of the heart. It is related to love and is the integrator of opposites in the psyche: mind and body, male and female, persona and shadow, ego and unity.  The colour associated with this chakra is green.    

 While all this may be considered just pretty mythology by some, I am a metaphorical thinker and always appreciate what Joseph Campbell had to say about these things.  Mythology, he wrote, is something that never was but always is.

 Returning to the colour green—the colour of spring, of renewal and of its opposite, death—I  leave you with the first lines of a beautiful poem by the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca—Romance Sonámbulo:

 Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

but she cannot look back at them.

New Directions

I met Sumit the year I arrived in London to do my Masters way back when.  I didn’t really get to know him at the time—he was younger, a medical student and I was drawn more to the large group of Spanish-speaking students from places like Venezuela and Ecuador who lived in that residence along with over six hundred students from all over the world.  I spent the year exploring the history and literature of the Romantic era, feeling a bit jealous of those on my wing who were studying more relevant things like how to implement HIV prevention programs in Nigeria or weighty matters like attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.

A couple of years later I had changed to the History of Medicine and started to spend time in places like The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine which had the best canteen in Bloomsbury not only because of the food, but because it was always filled with fantastic people from all over the world.  It was then that I befriended Sumit and we started to spend  a lot of time together.

Sumit was one of the funniest and liveliest people around.  He was very different from a lot of the medical students I knew in that he was interested in the arts and liked to discuss good books. It was Sumit who got me interested in the History of Medicine promising me it was a fascinating discipline.  In those days the Wellcome Institute was the place to study such things.  At the time, one of the brightest lights in the field, Roy Porter, was there and he was legendary already. Over the course of his life he wrote or edited over 100 books and he was a fantastic orator as well.

After some time, I began to realize that while academia was fine, it demanded a level of specialization that did not fit with me.  I returned to Canada and began my writing career. My interest in the History of Medicine did not abate, however, and I continued to read widely in the field.

Sometime during the 1990s I discovered the world of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and my life turned upside down.  Suddenly things that seemed inexplicable before began to make sense.  Lucky for me, Sumit had at this point started his studies in psychiatry and I had someone to share my new passion with. 

I visited him in England and he came to Toronto where we spent many hours discussing our respective interests.  Eventually, as we formed our own families and Sumit established himself as a psychiatrist in the United States, we fell out of touch for almost six years.

During those six years, things changed radically for me.  As a writer I began to be invited to give talks and I discovered my real passion was to teach people about our old stories and our myths.   I was fortunate in that I found Ann Kirkland and Classical Pursuits and I was able to lead trips for her to beautiful places like Mérida, Mexico and Sevilla, Spain.  Classical Pursuits taught me the importance of asking questions, of sitting with others and working your way together through the great texts.  My interests, though, gravitated more and more to the mythological and psychological side of things and I felt that I needed to form a group that would allow me to do this year round.  The Sophia Cycles was born, undergoing various incarnations until now.

In one of those synchronicities that always affirm for me that there is magic in the world, Sumit called me recently and we discovered, to our amazement, that having travelled down very different paths we had somehow arrived at the same place!

The idea for a book was born then.

Sumit

My journey began in London, and continued here in the United States. On the face of it, it’s a familiar story.  Young, second generation enthusiastic child of an ethnic family gets propelled into the profession of medicine. Only there is a twist in the story that has had seismic effects to this day. On a spiritual level, I’m now very thankful for it.

My parents had a rocky, sometimes violent marriage. I was a terrified witness to its awful consequences, stepping in to the theatrics of husband-wife conflict as a precocious referee.  After their divorce, my dad dropped off the radar, and my mom was in the throngs of depression. I was her solace, who would valiantly help ‘rescue’ her, and be her advocate. To this end, I was helping her write letters to attorneys to chase down my deadbeat dad for child support payments.

I was 13 and both intensely angry and intensely anxious  It was indeed a ‘lonely’ time for me, with some Dickensian undertones, in that I felt I had to fend for myself, while coming to terms with the fact that the world I knew (even if unpleasant) had been oddly obliterated thenceforth.

My rage at our family being left destitute by my father made me supremely ambitious. In true Don Quixote fashion, I ‘charged’ into my studies to help myself excel: first to a fancy private school, and then to medical school.   I saw a medical degree as helping right all that had been unfairly wronged against us—a heroic leap from cataclysmic past to a ‘secure’ future. Yearnings for a supra-ordinary ‘power’ therefore found their wellsprings in those experiences—the “I’ll show them!” attitude that would defiantly ‘kick’ society in its face when it would talk smugly about the children of divorced families—especially the added anger I felt at the stigmatization of divorce in Indian culture at the time.

In the midst of this, I found another, rather more nurturing, influence: my English teacher, who encouraged us to dissect the nuances of character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, or Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved it, and found that I was good at it. It was my comfort zone because I enjoyed finding out what makes people who they are: their inconsistencies as well as their “warts.” In fact it was those inconsistencies and inner vacillations that gave the characters their very humanity, allowing them to ‘jump off the page’, so to speak.

I befriended Béa while living in the aptly named International Hall of students, around the corner, and slap bang in the middle of the part of London littered with interesting book stores. The friendship, the phase, and the milieu lent itself to a wonderful journey of self discovery, humour, and friendship. She was “escaping” her trapped future in Canada; I had put my “trapped” life as a potential physician on hold. This lasted a few years.

During that time, I also became convinced I wanted to be a psychiatrist. By its very nature, it suited my “outsider” view of the world. Like watching a live court jester, I watched the theatrics of mania, including the poignant humor of patients with mixed manic symptomatology. I then became convinced of my calling.

After pursuing training at Cambridge, I left for the United States and settled at the University of Virginia. It was so Cambridge like in its small town feel that I felt “at home”, in an otherwise scary immigrant journey, away from everything I knew. I graduated and then specialized in Forensic psychiatry. No matter how much I enjoyed and learned from my residency, nothing really prepares you for the real world of managed care psychiatry. I became the proverbial cog in the corporate machine: a prescription writer, form filler, and biller/coder for the money-ness of medicine.

Increasingly I have again begun sensitized to my gut: this time, feeling a sense of unease at the dehumanization that the healthcare system inflicts upon us, both as providers and patients. Time spent talking to patients is simply not valued anymore, despite all that I have learned from the rich heritage of my professions’ centuries of knowledge and writings. We now use a manual called DSM IV in a rather ‘cookbook’ fashion. It is full of criteria, rules and algorithms for giving someone a “disorder”, but is scant in the way of meaningful description—a fundamentally flawed idea, if you ask me and many other mental health professionals.  Welcome to the mechanization of psychiatry in the 21st century (we might as well climb into our computer screens and stay there).

So I searched elsewhere, anywhere that would capture the vividness of those descriptions or moments when I felt ‘connected to’ or would ‘understand’ another human being’s state, either through experience or the written word: High and low, I searched: philosophy, then history, and finally stumbling upon novels, poetry and movies – all of which would communicate about character, personal distress and the daily vicissitudes of most humans, far more vividly than I had seen in almost decade of being a practicing psychiatrist.

Perhaps something in my own/others’ life journey, with that myriad of feelings and conflicts I and they have had to navigate through, resonated with what I have now realized: that to understand someone’s life and journey, facts and explanations are not enough. In our ‘Google-driven’ and ‘thirst for facts’ world, a ‘jewel’ has somehow been lost: compassion, understanding, but mostly important, being palpably aware of those ineffable and contradictory parts that make us who we are.

Psychiatry was beginning to make some strides toward this, then took a subsequent nose-dive, back into the tangible world of material science and disease. Excited by the new ‘toys’ of neuroscience and genetics, it again seems to have lost its historical ‘way’ at present. I now fear that unless we honour those aspects of a person’s life journey, institutions and professions such as ours will lose touch with humanity altogether. i.e. what it truly means to experience a human existence

.——————————

Sumit and Béa

Maybe we need to read the old stories together – make them match what our life experiences are revealing to us.  What if psychiatrists began to explore how the themes in their patient’s stories mirror those in our greatest works of art?  What if, as sometimes happens, a person listens to an ancient folk tale and suddenly understands, deep inside what is missing?  And what if that person decides to tell it to someone else, adding his own shading and weight and is changed again by telling it?

Once upon a time it was all story telling but that has fallen by the wayside as people tweet with abandon. 

The book we are working on is meant to remind us of the importance of the old stories; how the telling matters and how it can heal and wake us up.  Poetry, mythology, the classics and some modern transmutations of ancient truths, can enlarge us in ways we never knew.  All of the themes explored in these great stories appear every day in the therapist’s consulting room. 

We hope you will follow us as we explore these themes and experiences in our book.

Entering the Mythological Age

Are we entering the mythological age?  I dream that we are and try to find the evidence where it appears, though it is scant.  We see from the regimes that are being toppled in places like Egypt that things begin quietly and then explode once they cannot be contained within the safe parameters that a police state likes to impose.

Once upon a time, we in the west inhabited a mono world where everyone believed in one god, one church, one idea of things.  In 1899, with the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, we entered a psychological era that took us away from the mono world a bit.  Once you discover, through dream analysis and dialogue, that there is not one of you but two—your self and your shadow self—you get thrown for a loop and can no longer think in the way you did before.  In the psychological age, gods are thrown out the window and your therapist becomes your god, your parent, the one who can guide you out of the self-imposed mess you find yourself in.

But then that changes too.  After seventeen years talking about yourself to a person who wisely nods and tries to guide you into the darkness of your inner self, you find you haven’t changed much and you are still a mixed up mess, a tangle of lethargy and fear that keeps you stuck in one gear and one groove.

So you turn to mindfulness. That works and in conjunction with some deep self-analysis (with our without a guide) things begin to change.  The psychological era is over and you find yourself no longer responding to things as if you were fearful and five.  Instead, grand vistas open up and you are now astounded by the beauty of inner things. It is as if you’ve discovered a new planet.  Everything is unique, exciting, filled with energy that did not exist before. Soon you find yourself sending youtube links of Coleman Barks reading Rumi to everyone you know.  Some hide from you.  They can’t stand your intensity and don’t know why you have become so enamoured of medieval Persian poets of late. 

You have entered the mythological age.  It is a lonely place and yet, thanks to the magic of the Internet, which not only incites people to topple tyrants but connects you to little points of light all over the world, you find yourself making contact with others who secretly listen to Rumi being read by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly.  Suddenly, what once required only a literal interpretation starts coughing up a multitude of shadings and multiverses reveal themselves in the small shape of things.

Metaphor is your ally and metaphor takes you to places you’ve never been before.  A long time ago, Joseph Campbell reminded us that it was all metaphor and that it was the fact that people could no longer understand things in a metaphorical way that led to war and other disgraces.    The only way to dip into a metaphorical understanding of things is to keep asking yourself what your life’s events could mean besides the obvious interpretations that aim to extract certainty from the ambiguous waters in which we swim.

Regimes fall apart, the centre will not hold, we are on our way to a new view of things.  Read poetry or, better yet, listen to it read by the masters—W. S. Merwin, Mary  Oliver and Robert Bly.   At night, reading a good fairy or folk tale will whip up some dream images that will guide you towards where you are meant to go.  When anything happens remember to ask: what is this like?  What does this remind me of?  What could this mean in the larger story?

I am saddened by how impoverished the world sometimes seems.  Listening to the crazy white men rant on Fox News, you learn quickly what a literal, metaphor-free zone is like. It is angry, it is vindictive, it aims to diminish the human condition by spitting out venom and trying to reduce all of us to the same petty anger, the same petty concerns.

If you read this blog and wonder why I am always going on about this poem or that, a story with a witch or one with a bear, remember it is because I like to travel in the depths.  I sometimes feel as Rumi felt when he wrote:

 I don’t like it here, I want to go back.
According to the old Knowers
If you’re absent from the one you love
Even for one second that ruins the whole thing!

There must be someone… just to find
One sign of the other world in this town
Would be helpful

You know the great Chinese Simurgh bird
Got caught in this net…
And what can I do? I’m only a wren.

My desire-body, don’t come
Strolling over this way.
Sit where you are, that’s a good place.

When you want dessert, you choose something rich.
In wine, you look for what is clear and firm.
What is the rest? The rest is mirages,
And blurry pictures, and milk mixed with water.
The rest is self hatred, and mocking other people, and bombing.

So just be quiet and sit down.
The reason is: you are drunk,
And this is the edge of the roof

When Robert Bly reads this poem he barks it out in his rough way.  Bly says that he is the expert in the “scolding Rumi”, the Rumi that is just a little impatient with the deceptions of things like Fox News and the rants of half-mad celebrities who never stop tweeting. 

So read some T.S. Eliot, some Kabir, some Yeats. It is there that you will find the signs of the other world, the one we have lost but which through metaphor, we can perhaps briefly touch.

Letting the Inner Witch out

The great Robert Bly weaves his spell

I let the old inner witch out for a good ride the other day when I metaphorically swatted a couple of things out of the way with a dead fish.   It may sound odd, but the great poet and raconteur, Robert Bly, reminds us that it is healthy to let the inner witch out from time to time so we don’t go finding her in others and begin the witch hunting and the burnings that have erupted everywhere throughout the ages.

I had turned to Robert Bly after suffering through pages of one those books that try to instruct us on how to best manipulate our bodies into losing, firming, perfecting their way into immortality.  I had begun the book with high hopes, thinking I was reading a paradigm shifter, and ended up in despair.  Despair that I had squandered time on the material, despair that the material is on the New York Times Best seller list, despair that those moments spent by a wood stove in my teenage years as the old people came together to tell their stories in Spain were gone for good and all that was left was empty striving for false things.

Lucky for me, there are recordings of Robert Bly around and it only took a soothing talk by him to remind me of what matters most again.

It is Bly who best expresses why children love to be told fairy tales over and over again.   A child gets to be about two or three, he says, and one day he finds himself staring into the face of a witch.  It is his mother, who has given him all that he wanted up until then but who is now starting to set the necessary boundaries that will allow him to understand limits.  The kid doesn’t know this however, he just sees the fangs that are appearing suddenly in that beloved face and when he is read the fairy tales he thinks, “Great! The adults see the witches too!” and he asks to hear the stories over and over again, comforted by the knowledge that he is not imagining things.

Later the kid grows up, refusing to see that the witch is inside of him too.  If he continues like that, he will be seeing witches everywhere out there and one hopes he won’t rise to a position of power from where he can start a little program of persecution and perhaps get you too one day.

Bly mentions that at every wedding a secret ceremony takes place in the basement of the church.   This is where the groom’s mother hands over her son’s inner witch to the bride and says, “Here, I’m done with that.”  Then, after the wedding, the wife wonders where her bitchiness suddenly came from.  Her own inner witch is probably hiding inside as well and now she has two witches to feed!   No wonder she is feeling a bit short-tempered.

There is a way for a man to take back his witch so he doesn’t go blaming the wife or those with other political views for things.   Bly tells the story of a young man who is asked to save a girl from the curse of a witch which has turned her into a swan. The young man says yes—the timing is right and timing is everything and she has asked him on a good day and he feels ready to embark on this act and so he says, “I will try.”   So he goes to the witch’s hut which is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountain and ice, and he has to wait because there is always a waiting period before anything new comes into consciousness, into life, and you have to be strong enough to be able to withstand the waiting so that the dish will come out right. 

Eventually the witch appears and she sees this scrawny young thing and she cackles to herself, thinking a sucker is born every minute.   When he asks her to lift the enchantment that has turned the girl into a swan, she says, “Alright, I will lift the enchantment.  But first you must do some work for me because you don’t get something for nothing.  And be careful, because if you don’t finish it by five o’clock, I’m going to eat you.”

“Alright,” he says, “what do I do?”  The witch points to a mountain of garbage sitting in the middle of the hut and says, “I want you to clean this all up.”  And then she gives him a thimble and leaves the hut laughing.

The young man says, “Oh my God, this is it.  How am I supposed to clean up this mess in such a short time?”  And then he sits down and starts to weep which, as Bly says, is always a good sign in a man.  Suddenly a young woman appears because she is in his psyche too, waiting to be integrated, and she says to him, “Don’t worry.  I will do this for you.” And she does and the witch returns and is enraged to find everything cleaned up and the possibility of a good meal lessened.  So she sets the bar higher because in no fairy tale or in myth or indeed in life, do you get tested just once, and this time the witch insists that he find all of the fish in the pond and arrange them in a line by species.  Again the young man despairs and weeps and again the young girl appears and says, “Don’t worry, I will help you but I ask only one thing—leave one of the fish out of line.”

The boy obeys and the witch returns and screams, “Oh, you did it again, you did, but why is one out of line like that? Oh, you are such a useless idiot!” And she rants and rails at him like our inner witch does from time time when we don’t reach the heights we feel we should be reaching.

The young man now picks up the fish and slaps the witch hard across the face with it saying, “I did it for you my dear.”  The witch pretends not to notice because she secretly wants the young man to stand up for himself, to take a little bit of her into his own personality which is what the story is about after all.

One last trial remains—this time the boy is to cut down all the trees and line them up outside and again the young girl appears and does it for him and again she asks him to place one tree across and out of line.  The witch returns and sees the trees and screams, “And what is that one doing lying across like that? You never do anything right, you’re a failure,” and on and on she goes until the young man picks up the tree and smacks it hard across her face and says, “This is for you, my dear”.  The witch pretends not to notice again because in a way the witch is a positive figure and she knows where the young girl is but knows that the young man must go through her to get to that girl.  The only way the young man will deserve to connect to that inner side of him is by integrating his inner witch first for that is the way of things. 

Eventually he throws the witch into the fire and the young woman is released from bondage.  This little tale, like all little tales, is about integrating that part of yourself that is easy to reject, easy to burden someone else with.   Look around and notice where you are projecting your own inner witch.  You may be surprised what good can come of slapping her across the face with a dead fish and watching your projections dissolve before you.

Fighting the demons of the half-lived life

It is late January and I have been hibernating for a month now, waging a battle with a new idea for a book and my fear about having to write it.  When it comes to my creative life, this is the natural course of things.  An idea invades one day out nowhere, I scoff at it, it persists with its invasion, I resist with all my strength and so the dance goes on.  One day, inevitably, I surrender, and that day has come and with it, the underlying fear that accompanies any leap into the unknown.  I am reminded when feeling this way of what the great (and sometimes maddening) literary critic, Harold Bloom, spoke about when he defined the “anxiety of influence” that weighs on every  poet who has ever put pen to paper (obviously Shakespeare had no such anxieties which is why Bloom wisely limits his theories to those writing well after him.)

The anxiety of influence does not only dig its claws into poets but into every artist trying to bring forth something interesting and original.  It is hard to come up with a modern novel after James Joyce because he broke every rule that ever existed and did it marvellously as well.  In the operatic world, composers struggled with composing operas that would break through the established structures and elevate the art form after Richard Wagner and his forays into interminable operas with their sophisticated leitmotifs and archetypal themes.  Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with its famous Tristan chord, changed the art form for good and it is hard to tell whether it has ever fully recovered from it.

In a beautiful speech given off the top of his head (I don’t know this for sure but the beauty makes me think so), Spanish poet Federico García Lorca talked about duende, something he claimed he could not define with words but which he then proceeded to define wonderfully anyway—but it is this duende that infuses any great performance, any great book, any great musical composition.   The artist or performer loses himself in his work and something changes, something so deep-rooted and mysterious that  both the artist and the audience are transformed by it.

In that speech, Lorca defined duende in his poetically charged, inimitable way:

Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.

          Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’

          So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

Lorca goes on, saying much, losing himself in metaphor, touching the skies and then descending down to earth again.  It is perhaps only poets and musicians who can travel between heaven and earth easily though I have witnessed actors, dancers and even athletes being taken over by this mysterious force so that they do not look like themselves anymore.  The spirit enters, the mind disappears into the body, everything is one for a moment.

I am very much taken by the theme that seems to appear in all mythologies from the trials of Uranus and Cronus to the death of Darth Vader.  The slaying of the father is a big thing in mythology and it is big because it is necessary.   Scientists seem to intuit this well.  The best work done by them is often in their twenties before the rigors of attending to more mundane tasks of living disinclines them to challenging the ideas of their thesis supervisors.  The slaying of the father is  just that—the impulse to take the art form, the science, the sport you are involved beyond the limits of what is known now.  This is the impulse that propelled the young physicists of the 1930s to change the world and which forced both Joyce and Wagner into a sort of exile, where they felt misunderstood and unappreciated (Wagner especially) but which did not stop them from hacking large pieces out of their respective art forms and rebuilding them in ways that made them almost unrecognizable.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, according to the Tao Te Ching, but that first step is overwhelming whether it is the one taken towards writing a poem or a novel.  And yet when the duende interrupts your night sleep with visions so powerful that they must be heeded or when the idea will not abandon you, no matter how strictly you implore it to leave, the time has arrived for that step to be taken.

It feels just as Lorca described it:

The duende I mean, secret and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day when he drank the hemlock, and that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken sailors.

And so your pick up your pen (metaphorical of course, as all the pens have vanished into keyboards) and meet the duende head on, hoping to survive the encounter.  The American writer Herman Melville, accused by some of having written just a story about a man and a whale wrote something there that resonates with me at times like these:

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half lived life”

The duende allows you to set foot on Tahiti, even if only for a moment, and there everything seems brighter, fuller, right.

The Revolution Within

I received an email the other day saying, “If this is the Béa Gonzalez who lived at London House, please reply.  Otherwise, apologies.”  It was from an old friend of mine back from the years I spent as a graduate student in England.  While there, I lived in a couple of International Students’ residences where people from all over the world congregated studying all manner of things for a number of professional and graduate degrees.  This particular friend was a vibrant American who was studying at the School of Oriental African Studies and was a minor expert on the little known (at the time) leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.  Within a short year of my meeting him, Dave was appearing on the BBC World Service, informing people about Hussein who had jumped to world prominence with the first Gulf War in 1990.

 A week before receiving his email, I had coincidentally spent some time scouring the internet for signs of him and his wife Robyn.  The fact that he emailed me after being out of touch for over five years the very week after I had gone looking for a way to contact him doesn’t appear so strange at this point.  It is the kind of thing, in fact, that seems to be happening more and more frequently.

For years now, I have been trying to locate Jesús Sanchez with little luck however.  The name is a common one in the Hispanic world which presents one problem but I have come to believe that my inability to find him is part of the mythology I have built around him.   Filmmaker and writer Phil Cousineau, who has written a lot about myth, reminds us that it is important to recognize your personal myths, where they are operative and how they relate to the archetypal myths that exist in our stories and poems.  For years I have told the story of Jesús Sanchez whenever I am invited, as a writer, to speak to groups of different ages and interests.  The myth in this case (and make no mistake, a myth is not a lie, it is a great truth, a greater truth than the truth that is peddled to you every day by the powers that be), but this myth begins in London in the late 1980s as I completed a Masters degree while living in the international residence where I met Dave, the Saddam Hussein specialist.    At the time I had befriended a number of the Latin American and Spanish students living there—a lively group who had very spirited gatherings. The one person who would not talk to me, no matter how hard I tried, was Jesús.  He was a Mexican intellectual with horn-rimmed glasses and a serious demeanour who was just months away from finishing a PhD in chemical engineering at Imperial College.    Not one to give up on anyone, I hounded him until, as he says, he had no choice but to surrender and become my friend.  Later he would confess that it had been my accents that had kept him away.  I spoke Spanish with a Castilian accent which reminded him of the hated Spanish imperialists who had invaded Mexico and spoke English with what sounded to him like an American accent which reminded him of the dreaded imperialists who were currently controlling the ruling class in his country.  Over time, we became good friends and he acknowledged that it taught him not to assume anything from something as superficial as an accent (or two.)

Jesús was a revolutionary back when the revolution was almost over (at least if you were a Marxist hoping a Soviet style revolution would soon be arriving in your country). Walls were coming down, countries in the Eastern block were falling apart and reorganizing themselves along more ancient lines, all notions of a Marxist state abandoned in the rubble.   And yet Jesús had passion and a sense of purpose that made the rest of us believe – most of us much younger than he was — that he would accomplish what seemed ever more impossible.

“After the revolution, we will all drink tequila,” we would say jokingly to him but the revolution was no joking matter to Jesús.  He knew that his country needed to change, to become more inclusive, less corrupt.  What are your twenties for if not for believing such things are not only necessary but possible?

He finished his PhD and left London but not before we gave him a party where we sang Mexican songs and wished him luck on his revolution.  Before he left, he gave me what he said was the best gift a Mexican could give to someone else.  It was a book–Pedro Páramo–by the Mexican novelist, Juan Rulfo, a book which I read and re-read and which haunted my imagination for years after (I am still haunted by it.) It is a masterpiece too little read by those in the English-speaking world, even though Rulfo’s work has inspired the writings of the more well-known greats like the Columbian Nobel Laureate, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Jesús never wrote to us, despite many tearful promises, but we told each other that he was busy with the revolution.  In the meantime, I had my own revolution to avoid—the one that would allow me to leave graduate school in order to embark on the writing life I wished to have.  I returned to Canada, picked up a pen, dropped it again too scared to pursue my dreams.

A year later I was back in London, this time pursuing a specialized course in Medical Demography so that I could enter the PhD program, the safe haven from my impossible to realize dreams.   One day, as I was crossing the street by Russell Square, I spotted him out of the corner of my eye–Jesús Sanchez—wearing the same black coat that had us calling him “the poet” back when we had all first met.

We went for coffee and talked about what had happened.  He had returned to Mexico, he said, with plans for a revolution only to find that the people did not want a revolution from him, that they did not trust him with his fancy degree from an English institution.  And then the wall had come down and the world had changed but he had not changed with it.  So there he was now, in London, hiding from the weight of the disappointment, pursuing a post-doc he was not even interested in.

And what was I doing there, he asked?  Was I not going to go back home and make it as a writer?  We looked at each other then–recognizing the fear that was choking both of us—a recognition that made it impossible for us to continue talking.  I never saw him after that and soon after I left London for good, abandoning all plans to escape there in the future.

Years later I did publish a couple of novels and over a decade after that I ended up leading a tour to Mexico with Juan Rulfo’s book as the assigned reading.  While there, I befriended our local guide, a very enthusiastic Mexican by the name of Braulio Rosales who confessed to being astounded by my group of feverish inquirers.   

“Béa,” he said to me one day, “I have led groups of politicians around, rock stars, university students and many more but I have never been asked as many questions as with your group!  Your curiosity is killing me!”  He then asked me if he could sit in on one of our discussions of the assigned text, Pedro Páramo, but I said that he had to listen only because the rule was you could only participate if you had read the book.  He did listen and he was, he confessed later, astounded, so astounded he asked me to allow him to join our group if he agreed to read the novel over the next 24 hours.  I said yes and our local guide then became unavailable as he stayed in the bus reading feverishly while we explored a cenote without him.

Braulio did participate in that conversation the next day and it was wonderful.  Weeks after this, he wrote me a beautiful note thanking me for opening his eyes to a new Mexico, the Mexico of Juan Rulfo which is like no other Mexico because it lies in the realm of the imagination and has the power to speak to that part of you that is rarely touched, rarely addressed by the small things of the world.

This is how I came to return the gift of Mexico to a Mexican.  Both experiences touched me deeply and today, years and years later, I continue to look for Jesús Sanchez and signs of the revolution that he has probably started somewhere inside that beautiful country.

The Great Heart Way

  

 

 

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

Carl G. Jung

What does it take to look inside and what toll does this inward search take? 

I have had the opportunity to see first hand over the last few weeks the kind of resistance that arises  to the idea that the body speaks the mind and that, by extension, it is only by becoming in touch with our feeling states in the body that we are aware of the unconscious scripts that run our lives.    The notion that we have to access our bodies and feel the feelings right through is something I have written about before but it is very difficult to do as it means staying with the painful feelings in our bodies that we habitually cut away from with the mind.

Zen master and physics scholar Gerry Shishin Wick speaks about this in his new teaching series entitled “Entering the Heart.”  He notes that in the west, people’s approach to Buddhism in all of its forms is very tied up with the emotional and psychological issues that are affecting their lives.  He was astonished that once he became a Zen teacher, people seemed more interested in bringing him their emotional stories than learning specific teachings.  One day he asked one of his students, engrossed in the act of complaining about a girlfriend who had just recently left him, “Yes but how does it feel?”  The student ignored him and told him that the girlfriend had also taken his truck.   “Yes, but how does it feel?” Wick asked again, hoping to turn his attention inside, into the body.  The distraught student kept telling his story.

Wick says that a lot of students begin to study Zen in order to avoid feeling the emotions in the body.  They use the breath to stabilize themselves in an act that Wick says can become a “spiritual bypass”.  The key, though, is to enter Zen through the emotions, through the dislocation that occurs when we are emotional unhinged.   Wherever you are, emotionally, will be a good place to enter into Zen.

Wick was concerned enough about accessing this wounded place that he and his teaching partner, Ilia Shinko Perez, developed an approach outlined in their book called The Great Heart Way.  This approach is described by the authors as “a method for authentic spiritual and personal transformation, which unifies the mind, the body and the emotions”.  Their methods are meant to guide us to find our inner healer so that we may transcend the notions of patient and therapist.  It is a plan for us to align our lives with our deeper intentions by guiding us to discover what our deeper intentions are. They write:  “We have been conditioned to believe that the external world is more real than the internal world—but through careful introspection we can discover what many scientific studies have confirmed: what’s happening within us creates what’s happening outside of us.”

Wick illustrates how the great heart way works by telling a story from his own life.  He tells that all of his life he has been an overachiever.  In school he was the child with the highest marks as well as being a top athlete.  He won awards in a number of disciplines, was the class valedictorian and ended up earning a PhD in physics from Berkeley back when this was the most difficult and most prestigious program in the United States.

As a Zen practitioner his commitment to excellence continued unabated and he eventually became a successor of Zen Master Taizan Maezumi.  Still, after all this achievement in both the temporal and spiritual worlds, deep within Wick felt that none of this was deserved and that he was not good enough in ways too many to count.  He carried this attitude into his relationships and found that although he was agreeable on the outside, he was very restless inside and was not honest with his feelings and emotions.  This disconnect served to cause those he loved a fair degree of pain.

The method he used to understand the wound that was creating this feeling of not good enough draws not only from the meditative traditions but from the realizations of depth psychology.  Wick refers to Jung’s notion that “meditation is the royal road to the unconscious” and goes on to say that our repetitive behaviours, the ones that cause so much damage in our lives, are a result of scripts encoded into our unconscious.  As Dr. Norman Doidge notes, these scripts are often engraved there when we are very young and our brains are highly plastic.  The good news is that once we locate them in the unconscious, the fact that our brains continue to be plastic will allow us to disable those scripts so that they stop fueling the wounds that cause us pain.

Using his own method, Gerry Shishin Wick sat with the emotion of “not being good enough” and allowed himself to enter the feeling completely, sitting with the tightness and contraction in his stomach.  By sitting with the feeling as opposed to the thought or the story that created those feelings, he allowed images to arise which pointed to the earliest imprinting of that story. Wick then recalled that as a six-year-old child he had been taught many stories from the Bible which had really scared him.  One in particular came to mind when he was doing this practice—the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.   Wick remembered his fright upon hearing this story when he was six years old.  He recalled reasoning that Isaac had been a good boy and yet look what they were going to do to him! He told himself that he better be perfect or something like that would happen to him as well.

Once Wick was able to access this early memory through the felt sense he was able to release the energetic charge it carried so that he could live his life free of this unconscious inner directive.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas there is a statement that reads almost like a Zen koan: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

The great heart way will allow you to bring forth all that is within you and engage the healer within.  Cut the story, feel the emotions in the body and release yourself from the unconscious scripts that run your life.  Awakening awaits….

Healing Words

 

 

 

As a writer I am more and more certain that poetry is the highest form of human expression.  This is not new—it is something I have always thought and have tried, through rhythm and a kind of rhyme, to incorporate into the writing of my novels.  Of late the pull towards poetry seems to be growing stronger. It may be because it is only by listening to a great poet read his work, or a great poet read another great poet’s work, that words come alive for me.  It is the ultimate source of my own creative inspiration, my “duende”, the reason I choose to pick up that metaphorical pen and write a story in the first place.

Of all the poets, I am most taken by the metaphysical voices—Antonio Machado, Kabir, Rumi, W. S. Merwin and Mary Oliver, who may not consider herself a metaphysical poet, but whose poems are deep, powerful, numinous.  Oliver is a poet who understands why we are here, embodied, preoccupied—if we are lucky—with asking the important questions without demanding any final answers.  Here is a bit from the poem that made her famous, a poem I stumbled upon once and which had the immediate effect of reorganizing the way I saw things:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

The more traditional “mystical” poets Kabir and Rumi are best heard recited by Coleman Barks whose sonorous voice can light up the universe (and who can be found easily on youtube) and Robert Bly, who confesses to doing the “scolding Rumi”, the Rumi who admonishes and tells you to:

Just be quiet and sit down.

The reason is you’re drunk.

And this is the edge of the roof.

In a speech Robert Bly gave when he won the National Book Award in 1969, he said something that was as true then as it is still today (and not only for Americans):  “…As Americans we have always wanted the life of feeling without the life of suffering. We long for pure life, constant victory. We’ve always wanted to avoid suffering, and therefore, we are unable to live in the present.”

Three years ago, after a particularly tough soccer game, my son Will came home convinced that he was destined for failure.  He was only eight years old but he was already beginning to buy into the notion of perfection that has ruined many an adult life.  I took him to the computer and asked him to watch the old sage Bly give a reading of a poem by the fourteenth century poet, Kabir.  In that poem, there is a line that says, “everything you do has some weird failure in it”.  In the reading Bly gives, he repeats this line with the kind of devilish panache we are accustomed to from him. In the background, a cello wails and crashes as if underscoring the hint of imperfection to be found in all things. 

On that day, Will understood that line to mean that a hint of failure is inescapable, that nothing can truly be perfect, even a performance in a soccer game.  The poem provided him with enough consolation to withstand his disappointment.    Over the next days he asked to watch it again and again.  Months later, in a tribute to the healing power of those words, he named a large stuffed toy –a black panther that sat on his bed— Kabir.  Later still, he would take the poem to his sixth grade class and teach others the dangerous waters perfectionism inhabits.

Such is the power of poetry.

A couple of years ago I had a dream where I seemed to be standing in a field looking confused, as if I were waiting for someone to come and rescue me from myself.   To the west there was a large green sign that pointed to a highway. The highway’s name was QUE.   In Toronto, there is the QEW but not the QUE.  The QUE, I realized, was pointing to the fundamental question that assailed me then.  Que means “what” in Spanish and Spanish is my first language and the language that guides me when I write fiction, even though I write in English.

In the morning, that dream brought to mind one of my favourite Rumi poems:

Out beyond ideas

of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down

in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language

- even the phrase “each other” –

do not make any sense.

A great scholar from Princeton University whose name escapes me now, once said that she had decided to memorize a poem every day and had kept to this for over forty years.  Not only is her memory sharpened, but she is broken open every day to a world beyond the veil, a world that stands outside of time and space and points to the truth beneath all things.

In the end, only a poet can make sense of all the nonsense in the world.  Mary Oliver writes : “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

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Feeling Our Way to Enlightenment

 Above, Galicia, Spain–a spiritual metaphor and a vivid memory.

 

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The individuated human being is just ordinary, therefore almost invisible. . . . He will have no need to be exaggerated, hypocritical, neurotic, or any other nuisance. He will be “in modest harmony with nature.”. . .

(Jung, in Fadiman and Fragar, 1994, page 82)

Enlightenment:  ’Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.‘

You might well ask, if the above quotes are true, why bother with individuation or enlightenment in the first place?  The easy response would be that this is a question only the ego would ask because the Self knows better!  Not being a nuisance to others (and a hindrance to oneself) is of great value in a world full of nuisances and hindrances (some of them lethal.)  Let us not forget that consciousness brings uniqueness with it and to be conscious means to be fully yourself and not a carbon copy of what society wants you to be.  You will not buy the toys they want you to, nor get the fashionable haircut perhaps, but the world needs you and not another version of the status quo that is parading around on prime time television.

But how does one get enlightened, how does one become conscious?  Well, the easy answer is that no one actually ever gets fully enlightened or individuated but one can experience moments of enlightenment when he or she is connected to all things.

Raphael Cushnir has figured out one way to achieve this moment to moment connection or enlightenment without the use of spiritual language or spending years in a monastery.  His ideas are, however, echoed by a very prominent Buddhist teacher, Shinzen Young, who speaks about the same thing in perhaps more elevated language.  Both men point to the same path to enlightenment and on first glance it may appear too simple to bother oneself with.  But make no mistake—this may be the most powerful route there is, though it will require a fair degree of attentiveness.

For both Cushnir and Shinzen Young the way to enlightenment is through feeling your feelings.   What, you argue?  I already feel my feelings (this is an argument that will be made more by women than men) but in truth, it is rare to find someone who fully feels their feelings because most of us are disconnected from our bodies.  We are all a bit like James Joyce’s Mr. Duffy who lived a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.  

Cushnir discovered his own distance from his body after being catapulted into a dark night of the soul, a moment in his life when his career and marriage collapsed and he found himself adrift inside a black hole with no anchors to steady him.  Well meaning people told him to keep busy, to keep going but it wasn’t until a mentor of his gave him another piece of advice that his life changed forever.  His mentor told him to stand still, to do nothing, to feel the emotions that he was covering up with all of his doing.   In the Jungian world, this is the plunge into the feminine, the being as a opposed to the doing and is often disregarded in the world where action always takes precedence and future goals matter more than the journey.

Allowing your body to feel the feelings is not easy because we have been trained since childhood to distract ourselves with thoughts, with activities, with anything that will cover up feeling the awful pain that lodges itself in stomachs, hearts and backs.   Cushnir argues that even experienced meditators sometimes have problems feeling their feelings properly, often using meditation to distance themselves from their bodily felt sensations.

Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young would agree with Cushnir  wholeheartedly about this. In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, Young put it this way: “ ….very few people realize the most fundamental skill for any human being is how to experience pleasure and pain, physical or psychological pleasure and pain, in a wholesome way. Now, what I mean by skill is, skill implies two things — that there’s a complete awareness of the feeling, and that there is a non-interference with the flow of that feeling. To the extent that a person can have pleasure and pain in that way, to that extent the pain will not cause suffering and will not leave ghosts of fear. The pleasure will not cause frustration. It will be completely fulfilling, and it will not leave ghosts of dissatisfaction”

Shinzen believes that the root of our addictive behaviours lie right there, in our refusal to feel, in our need to cover the feelings up.  Both men agree that this is due to an evolutionary quirk, to the way our brains developed so that our emotions are so tied with our thinking that we often can’t distinguish between a real physical threat and an emotional reaction like jealousy or fear.  Both feel as if we are fighting for our very physical survival on this earth and both, then, generate exaggerated reactions to ordinary feeling states.

Shinzen puts it this way:  “… the ordinary sensations that we have in our body, the way our body feels — if we start to pay attention to it, will direct us down into the core of pure feeling within us, wherein are stored these ghosts of the past. So what we have people do is we teach them step-by-step techniques to sensitize the body so that they can feel this pain coming to the surface… Once they can do that, they find that, number one, they don’t have to act on that pain; and number two, that they work through.”

What Shinzen is asking people to do then, is to the very thing that they fear the most when they are involved in compulsive behaviour which is to feel their pain.

Cushnir gives the following example of how we are hijacked by our own inability to feel.  A writer comes to see him complaining that even though he has the time, the means and the ideas to write a book, he can’t get himself going.  Cushnir asks him to explain what is holding him back. Thinking about it a bit, the man says he is afraid of being humiliated if his work turns out to be less than perfect.  Cushnir then has the man imagine writing his book and having it completely and nastily rejected by a close friend.  At this point, the man is instructed to stay with the feelings that come up.  The man does and he finds that doing this takes work and discipline but with time, the feeling dissolves into pure peace and with it the ghosts.  Eventually, he will be able to sit at his computer and begin to work because the feeling of panic he once associated with the activity does not come up and therefore does not need to be covered up with some distraction or substance.

Cushnir also points out that many of our so-called deadly sins involve feelings and that to sin (which literally means to “miss the mark” ) means that you are not attending to what is inside, to what is happening in your body.

Therein lies the road to moments of enlightenment.  Being present to our bodies and feeling things without our heads cutting in is relatively easy to teach to children and to learn ourselves.  Let’s save ourselves a lot of physical and emotional pain then, by going to the source over and over again and slaying the ghosts that hide therein.

For those of you interested in the subjects covered in this blog, please visit Sophia Cycles on Facebook.  There you will find links to books, videos, articles and other related material updated daily.

Emerging from the Middle Realms

 

For many years I was haunted by the notion of the unlived life left behind in my native Spain. It is the curse of the immigrant—to be forever shadowed by the idea of an alternative life that could have been made with the possibilities we left behind.  In my case, from time to time I would ponder what I would be doing were I still living in Vigo, on the northwest corner of Spain.  What would the world look like to me?  Whom would I have married?  What faces would my children have? 

In my thirties, after discovering meditation and the Jungian universe that opened up the key to my dreams, I started to leave that alternative world behind.   Instead, other possibilities opened up, other worlds.  Listening to Buddhist teacher and scientist, Shinzen Young, speak on the “science of enlightenment” recently, I realized that it was then that I began attempting to travel through the middle realms and down to the source of all things.

Young argues that our psyches are like a three layered cake.  We travel mostly through the surface of things, where the icing is and appearances matter more than anything else.  This is the world that Jungian analyst and great man of wisdom, James Hollis,  says is where we disappear with our addictive behaviours, our materialism, our need for progress, our obsession with our health.  Here we walk in shoes too small for us and refuse to heed the call of genius that Goethe spoke about.  “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it,” the great German poet wrote, but we are rarely bold, constrained as we are by our histories and the dictates of society which disallow us from going forth to be ourselves.  Instead of following our instincts, we buy fancy cars, dope ourselves up with meaningless television and find a thousand ways to fall asleep.

Above all, I tell my children, be not sheep.  But it is one thing to say it, another different thing entirely to live from the depths of the heart where the material trappings, the status, the constant need for approval are disowned in favour of living  a more authentic life.

In this three layered cake, the source—what Jung called the Self and some call God but which one can never really define in the end because words cannot do justice to such things—is at the bottom. It is the source of peace, of transcendence, of our connection to everything.  It is what we access when our meditations go deep.  And yet, as Shinzen Young points out, many so-called spiritual travelers are spending their time drifting through the middle realms.  These are the places where apparitions rise up as well as what we believe to be psychic powers and all sorts of other things.   The middle realms seem so real, according to Shinzen, that people feel they are reaching great spiritual heights when what they are really doing is travelling horizontally in a spiritually material world.  Shinzen himself has spent time there and has seen the giant insects that gave Kafka his material and he has struggled with the many hued spectres the middle realms can cough up.  But, as someone who has travelled to the bottom, to the source, he knows not to confuse these experiences with what emanates from the calmer waters that lie beneath all things.   He is aware enough to know that hallucinations do not a spiritual person make and he warns us to be wary of treading in those waters lest we remain there, assuming we have become enlightened through our interior journeying when all we are doing is treading in shallow waters that masquerade as the depths.

In her wonderful book on alchemy, Catherine MacCoun sets out the path to how one can integrate learning that evolves from the depths.  She provides the simple example of a woman, Annie, who goes out with a man she is interested in and then waits and waits for him to call her for another outing.  When he doesn’t, Annie first applies visualization techniques to get him to call her.  That may or may not work but at this point the woman in question is travelling along the icing on the cake.  There is no depth to her inquiry because she has not yet turned the light upon herself. 

Time goes by and still no call so she decides to play hard to get and turns off her cell phone in case he does happen to call.   The problem, though, is that she has not yet understood the relationship she has to the object of her desire.  She is riding high on projected energy that she thinks belong to the one she has pegged it on.

Now let’s say Annie starts to meditate and in doing so, begins to understand the motivations that are pushing her to want this man to call her — a man, incidentally, about whom she knows very little in the first place.  She realizes, after many months of sitting with her desire, that what she really wants is to have a little of what the man possesses.  It turns out he is an artist and she is stuck in an energetically shallow world where inspiration is hard to find.  It turns out that what Annie is really chasing is a part of herself she has not addressed.  She begins to pick up a paintbrush and pursue something she has been wanting to do all of her life.  She is not necessarily intending to be a great artist but simply to explore a part of herself that has been calling out to her and which has had her chasing bohemian artists who may or may not call her back.   It looks like a small change but it is an intensely valuable one that may spare Annie a lot of grief.

Now imagine that if every time you felt a strong emotion, a strong pull or repulsion towards another you decided to sit with that emotion until you understood just what part of you was calling out to be heard?  It is this path that will eventually reveal the authentic self.  Equally important, this is the path we can all take to avoid heaping untold misery upon others with our crazed desires and our claims to victimhood.

There are no giant insects along this path— nor are there rainbows perhaps— but each step is a reaffirming of our humanity and helps us access the source that lies at the bottom of all things.

NOTE:  THERE IS STILL LIMITED SEATING AVAILABLE FOR THE JAMES HOLLIS TALK ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5^TH.  PLEASE HELP TO SPREAD THE WORD.  FOR TICKETS, FOLLOW THIS LINK:

James Hollis at the Robert Gill Theatre

Re-wiring Our Brains

If the twentieth-century was the grand age of Physics, the twenty-first is fast turning into the age of neuroscience. Research on the brain is exploding and the astounding results of that research hinge on a paradigm shift that is turning out to be a life changer in ways too many to count.   This shift is due to the now accepted notion that the brain continues to change throughout the adult lifespan and not only in childhood as it was once thought.  The growing acceptance of the brain’s neuroplasticity has allowed for new approaches to helping victims of strokes, psychiatric illnesses—from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) to Schizophrenia—and has even aided in addressing the cognitive decline that accompanies aging.    This research is exciting and is revolutionizing theories of the brain that have been held for over four hundred years.  Above all, it is hopeful.  Sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, OCD, Schizophrenia and other mentally debilitating disorders can get their lives back through the non-invasive re-training of their minds.

Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and author of the wonderful book, The Brain That Changes Itself, explains what is going on in the mind of someone suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder this way:    We have a worry circuit in our brains and whenever we make a mistake, a part of the brain known as the orbital cortex detects the error and sends a signal to another part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate which makes you feel anxious about the mistake.  Dr. Doidge gives the example of spilling a glass of wine at a party.  You feel embarrassed and put out and the brain is registering this.  Then, under normal circumstances, you adjust your behavior –in this case you clean the mess up, apologize and then move on.  This happens because another part of the brain known as the caudate operates like a gear shift, signaling a shift should take place and allowing you to move on to something else.  In persons suffering from OCD, however, the gear shift gets stuck so that they cannot move on.  This happens because of one of the fundamental rules of neuroplasticity which is that neurons that fire together, wire together, and in a person suffering from this disorder, this circuitry has been activated for so long that it has actually physically changed their brain.

The answers to OCD can be found, Doidge says, by using the very rule that allowed this change to happen in the first place.  With mindfulness practices, the patient is taught to catch the thought and with time is able to alter the brain’s neuronal circuitry.

One of the worldwide experts on this neuronal rewiring, Dr. Jeffery Schwartz, a researcher at UCLA, has been helping people with this disorder before his methods were even properly accepted by the vast population of neuroscientists.  Now that the brain’s ability to rewire itself throughout life has been proven and the use of PET scans had demonstrated that the brain itself is structurally different after mindfulness practices, Schwartz would like the medical field to stop separating the mind from the body as if they were two independent entities that do not communicate with each other. Schwartz  is a philosopher as well as a scientist and his interest in Buddhism was one of the reasons he was able to break with the old paradigm and adopt a viewpoint that has helped thousands and will likely help many more in the years to come.  It was his use of the Buddhist concept of willful mindfulness that allowed him to gradually develop a four-step method to help those suffering from OCD.  Of late, he has taken to appearing at conferences like the one organized by The United Nations called “Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness” to urge people to think outside of the box.  Schwartz is a trailblazer, someone who would like the sciences to open up and consider the knowledge that has been around for thousands of years in the hands of ancient cultures.  He believes that we can all benefit from of a non-reductionist, more inclusive approach to things.

One man who is excited about all of this is Dr. Doidge who, besides being a researcher and a very fine author, is also a clinician dedicated to helping his patients get well.  The kinds of methods being developed by Schwartz and others in his field gives him much optimism for patient outcomes and this is a very good thing indeed. 

The brain’s ability to rewire itself has also been used to help victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  In an interview with the CBC, Doidge describes a procedure developed by a researcher in Montreal which involves having patients first write out the events that have generated the trauma.  They are then given a drug to relax them at which point they are instructed to read their own narrative five or six times to the attending doctor.  The remarkable thing is that by the fifth time the patient often discovers that he is reading his own story as if it had happened to someone else.  That distance allows for the eradication of the traumatic side effects.  This is, according to Doidge, because the neuronal circuitry has rewired itself and the patient can now remember without the accompanying anxiety.  Energy psychology techniques like EFT claim to do the same by having people tap on some key meridian points as they retell their traumatic stories. The results there have been spectacular enough to have made Congress stand up and notice, especially with respect to their application with traumatized veterans who have found relief after decades of struggling with their intrusive and debilitating memories.

Jeffrey Schwartz says that what he is really teaching patients to do is to “not believe everything you think.”    Midfulness practices such as the ones developed into a four step process like his, are now also being used with schizophrenics with some very astounding results and are beginning to be applied to the process of aging itself.  It is indeed an exciting and hopeful new world.

If you would like to follow this story, please click on the link below to an interview conducted today with Dr. Norman Doidge, on CBC’s The Current.  On CBC television tonight, September 30^th, at 8:00 pm, you can also watch the full one hour documentary made on this subject for the show The Nature of Things.

This is truly television worth watching.

Here is the link to the radio interview:

CBC — The Current

Of Life and Death

 

Fall is my favourite time of the year although with children’s lives gearing up now –school, guitar lessons, soccer training, Spanish classes and so much more –it has become an increasingly busy time.  Last year I also embarked on a new ritual which was to start a major writing project during this season because it is when I feel the best.  This year, the idea for a new novel appeared out of nowhere (as it usually does) but is once again consuming my mental landscape.  I don’t know if this is what James Hollis meant by “re-imagining” ourselves but I have always learned something about myself through the process of writing a novel. It is, to my mind, not much different from the dreams that we are gifted by the unconscious, except for the structure that must be imposed for the tale to be properly told (although plenty of good writers also dispose of structure and produce fine works of art.)

With my mind so full of stories I am going to let Jungian Analyst, James Hollis, do the talking instead.  I located an interview he gave to the C.G. Jung Institute of Vancouver in 2009 which is worth reproducing here.  In it, he discusses many things but in honour of the fall, of endings (and passionate beginnings), I have excerpted the part of the interview in which he deals with life and death.  The interviewer is Pohsuan Zaide:

PZ: Regarding the issues of life and death, you suggest that the question is really less about death, and more about how we are living and what values we decide to embrace in the face of our mortality. Can you elaborate on this for us?

JH: Whatever death is, from the present ego standpoint we really can’t understand truly and we can’t really imagine it. So whatever it is, it’s other than our lived experience. And if it’s a continuation of some kind, then it’s a continuation, and in what form we really don’t know. If it’s a cessation or annihilation, then anything I have to say about it at this point is irrelevant too. So the key thing is [to ask] “How am I going to live my life now?” Life brings us two gifts, and that is Life itself, and awareness of our mortality. And in the end, we owe two things – one is a life fully lived, to really have served that gift, and [two is] a surrender of that life and mortality…to say that the real issue is defined by this, although not intimidated by it; [to ask] “To what degree do I live more consciously? To what degree do I take risks?” There are many ways of dying, and a careful, timid life is one that will ensure an early death. We can die before our body dies. We do.

PZ: That’s also a sobering thought!

JH: Yeah, and I think that the most vital people we know are the people who continue to grow, to develop, to keep learning, and always there’s something more interesting. I think that mostly what drives my life is curiosity. I keep finding new things that I didn’t know, and that’s very gratifying.

PZ: You talk about accepting the danger of our own personal journey, as well as the gift of our lives. What is this danger, and what qualities can we cultivate to make it possible for us to take on this challenge?

JH: The greatest danger of all is not to have lived it, to be blocked by disabling messages from others, or to have not stepped into that largeness that life asks of us. Jung was asked this question back in the 50’s and in a letter, he said, “There are three elements here that are critical…psychology can only help with the first, and that’s to give us some insight.” We need to understand what this is about…but he said, “then comes the personal qualities of the individual…second is courage to address what life asks us to address…third is endurance or persistence – to carry something through until we win our way in the end, to the place we’re meant to be.” So when you think about it, we need insight but we also need courage, and we also need persistence. Over time, that can wear away a lot of obstacles and bring a person to an enlarged place, and a place that feels right.

PZ: I’ve come to the point where I’m going to tell you where our “surprise” question is: we’ve seen all these Jung societies pop up all over the world, and yet, for as long as we can remember, Jung and his work have been marginalized in mainstream and certainly in academic psychology – when I was in school, Jung was a footnote, here and there. Why do you think this resurging, or surging interest has come about, this interest in Jung’s work?

JH: I have very strong views on that subject actually, and very biased views, and I’ll admit to that. I think most of modern psychology has suffered a failure of nerve – it’s certainly true that we are behaviors, it’s certainly true that we are cognitive processes, it’s certainly true that we are bodies, with psychopharmacological, chemical actions. You put all those curves together and add them up – it still doesn’t equal a human being. I think that so much of modern psychology, caught as it is in apparent limitations of empiricism, saying “We’re only going to address what we can address consciously, and in a way that we can measure it.” In [some] areas of life it serves us well, but in other areas, such as the issue of meaning, it doesn’t serve us at all. That’s what’s missing – the really intuitive issue of our deep sense of longing for connection, our deep sense of wanting to feel that our lives are worthwhile. Those are not measurable quantities. That failure of nerve is really a failure to take on the largeness of the human journey. Why are we here? In service to what? Historically, the mythologies of the tribe answered those questions for people, or at least sought to. Progressively, those images have eroded in their connective powers, and so individuals have been thrown back on their own resources or on the limited resources of contemporary culture. So I think many individuals have had to necessarily find their own way, and they sometimes find their way to certain books, or certain groups of people who address these questions. In a peculiar way, it’s a popular revolt, if you will, and over professional psychological circles and academia. The academy – there’s much to be said for the academy, but in the end, the academy is also interested in it’s own preservation, privileging it’s own leadership, and fails often to ask the questions that are the ones that are most important in our lives. I think Jungian psychology has always been for heroic adventures. Jungian psychology really addresses the problem of meaning, and that’s the central question of life. As Jung wrote in his memoir, he said, “You can have everything you want in life, and at the end it will still feel Maya, or illusory, if you don’t feel that somehow you’re a participant in the divine drama, that you’re living a symbolic life.” What he means is that somehow the visible world that we can weigh and shape and measure is also driven by invisible forces. Aligning ourselves with those forces that show up in history and in the unconscious of individuals and in the biographies of individuals is one of the ways in which one brings that alignment about, the failure of which means that one will always be, in some way, disconnected, from the essential mystery of what it means to be a human being. Historically, many of those questions have been questions that were addressed by religion, and still are, but there’s a place where the life of the psyche, and again remember that word means “soul”, the life of the psyche asks of us questions that standard psychology doesn’t even address. And because of that, people start looking in other directions. They look into materialism, they look into addictions, they look into political ideology, and sometimes they look for people and places that are asking these questions in a very conscious, and deliberate and directive way. That’s how people wind up at Jung societies. I’ve had the privilege throughout the years of appearing at dozens and dozens of these societies – in South America, Europe, Canada and the United States. I’ve always found thoughtful people, and people who’ve found themselves exiled, as we began today; and at the same time sharing threads with others, that these questions matter to them. As the book suggests – asking questions that matter leads to a more considered life. That’s the single best thing that we can do for ourselves, and for others – [it] is to be more thoughtful in the conduct of this journey.

PZ: Do you think there’s any value in all these little isolated groups of Jung society members connecting up and communicating…to start a revolution in thoughtfulness or consciousness? Is there any value to that?

JH: I think whenever the individual changes, the collective has to change in some small way, and the more people who begin to bail out from the collective ideologies of our time and begin to ask questions in a direct, personal way, that that changes the collective. Here in Houston, we developed the cgjungpage.org which is an international web page whose purpose is to provide articles and reviews, and to advertise the various societies around the world, and to provide a forum for people gathering not only that information but to dialogue with each other. It has literally several hundred thousand hits a year. So a lot of people are tuning in to that. I might just mention it again – that’s www.cgjungpage.org – and you’ll see an awful lot of people around the world are interested in the same things that the Vancouver C.G. Jung Society is interested in.

PZ: That’s great, thank you very much. I’ve pretty much asked you all the questions I wanted to. Thank you so much for talking with me today, and I look forward to your upcoming lecture and workshop here in Vancouver on October 16th and 17th.

JH: You’re most welcomed, and I look forward to being with the folks in Vancouver. I’ve had the privilege of meeting so many there. I look forward to the return. Thank you very much.

James Hollis will be in Toronto on Friday, November 5th to give a talk entitled “Dark Selves: Shadow Encounters in our Personal and Public Lives.”  For information and to purchase tickets please follow this link:  http://uofttix.ca/view.php?id=687

On Being a Grown Up

Five years ago, when I formed my first Sophia Discussion Group, it did not take me long to decide on what book we would start with. There has been one voice which has guided me and enlightened me more than any other during the last fifteen years and that is the voice of Jungian analyst and writer, James Hollis.  I have given dozens of copies of Hollis’s books to friends and have recommended his works to many, many more. There is, to my mind, no better interpreter of Jung’s work today and it must be added that he has developed and taken that work much further and to deeper spaces than any other Jungian writer before.  Simply put, it you are reading this blog and have not yet found him in your explorations, please go buy one of his books and read it now.  But remember to keep it because you will be reading his books over and over again and finding new things in them each time.  I subscribe to Joseph Campbell’s religion –which he declared consists of underlining sentences—and the James Hollis works in my possession are so underlined and so full of notes to myself that they have become difficult to read.

Let me return to the book that got the Sophia Discussion Group going all those years ago.  It is one of the many he published with Inner City Press, a little jewel of a publishing house run out of Toronto by Jungian analyst, Daryl Sharp.  The books he publishes are by Jungian analysts who take on a number of subjects, all interesting, all of them eye-opening, all worth reading.  Hollis’s book   — that first book – is called The Eden Project—In Search of the Magical Other and it is a must read for anyone in a relationship, contemplating one or even  those who are convinced they will never enter into one again.  It is the kind of book you read with your mouth open, madly underlining entire paragraphs in the hopes that you will somehow memorize every word.  It is the kind of book you re-read a year later, five years later and ten years later again only to find that you missed that one particular and perfect thought in all those other re-readings that allows you to look at your life in a completely different way.  It is the kind of book you give to friends hoping that it will open their eyes and that they will stop blaming their partners for their unlived lives– a gift that they may thank or curse you for because not everyone wants to be a grown up and Hollis is for grown-ups, for those wishing to take on their own lives fully by assuming responsibility for every decision made.  And be aware — for this book is not a how-to guide of any kind but a beautifully written road map to the greatest relationship we have — the one with ourselves.

It is like this with every one of Hollis’s books.  The Sophia Discussion Group – now in its umpteenth incarnation – has lately been exploring his Swamplands of the Soul, a book with a title guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of anyone looking at the cover but what a gem! In it Hollis explores all of our disowned and most troubling emotions that take us to some dismal places – guilt, grief, loss, betrayal, loneliness, anger, addictions, fear, angst–the list goes on.

His observations of what happens in these dismal places are of those of someone who has travelled through the underworld and imbibed the wisdom to be found there.  Like the Joseph Campbell hero, Hollis has returned to share his experiences and his thoughts with those of us less willing to tread so openly in such murky depths.

One of the most wonderful things about James Hollis’s books are the many references to poetry, philosophy, literature and art that appear in each of them.   They open many poetic and philosophical universes within which we recognize how human our struggles are, how beautiful, how similar to those who have travelled these paths before.

In Swamplands, Hollis quotes the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

Behold your thoughts and feelings….there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is Self.    

Every single work by James Hollis is his attempt to guide you  to connect with the Self so that your life becomes grander, fuller, less compulsive and unconscious than it was before.  They are not books for children, but then again, we are not children and many of us yearn to travel to the places that take us beyond our little manic driven selves.

When I decided to expand the Sophia Cycles into places unknown, I had to fight the anxiety that Hollis identifies as being a push from the Self to move us forward. I would rather, if truth be known, just keep things simple and continue with my discussion groups, my family, my novels and my many Hollis books.  But something calls me forward and it was in this spirit that I invited James Hollis to come to Toronto to be the first person to give a talk under the Sophia Cycles banner.  To my delight, he agreed and on November 5^th, 2010 he will give a talk entitled “Dark Selves: Shadow Encounters in Private and Public Life” at the Robert Gill Theatre.  I invite you to join me to listen to this wise man share his thoughts.  If you value what I write about and are as tired as I am of the childishness that masquerades as everything from art to political debate out there in the world, prepare to journey to some deeper realms.

It will enlighten you, entertain you and –as many of us have found – even change your views on life (and thus your life itself).

For information about this event and to purchase tickets, please follow this link:

http://www.uofttix.ca/view.php?id=687

Being Zen and Loving it

 

During a recent trip to beautiful Bainbridge Island near Seattle, I was introduced by my sister Chechi to a wonderful Buddhist teacher and writer by the name of Sakyong Mipham.  Sakyong Mipham is the head of the Shambhala Buddhist lineage to which Pema Chodron belongs as well.  He has written two books, one of which Chechi likes to give to every child in her circle when they graduate from high school.  The title of this book is Ruling Your World and it is a book that is worth reading regardless of age, religious orientation (or lack of it) or even if you are not particularly interested in things like mindfulness, compassion and taming the tiger within. It is simply a beautiful book written by an insightful teacher and the lessons contained provide an invaluable road map to life.

 

In Victoria, where I travelled with my husband and children for a couple of days before returning to Toronto, I visited a couple of bookstores hoping to pick up a copy of the book with no success.  As with many good things, I will have to wait to re-experience his depth of wisdom until I receive the book from the on-line book world.  Being unable to enter a bookstore without actually buying a book, I purchased a little paperback sitting next to the books by the Dalai Lama titled Being Zen instead.  Books often call out to me and this one had a simple cover and the right title for my current state of mind and so, despite not knowing the author, I gave it a try and discovered a gem.

 

The author of this book —subtitled ”Bringing Meditation to Life” — is Ezra Bayda and he is a Zen teacher at the San Diego Zen Center.  He has published a number of other books, all of which I have also ordered from the on-line book world.  What is appealing about the book is the simplicity of the writing.  He is able to teach about difficult concepts without getting mired in language or heady ideas that might distance us from the message he is trying to convey.

 

He begins by telling a personal story of the need to accept what is.  In the 1980s he moved to California with his wife and children to try and live a more holistic and meditative life.  He and his wife began to grow organic produce to feed their family and he began his studies at the Zen Center.  Ten years later both he and his wife developed serious immune disorders which, as it turned out, were related to the produce he had lovingly grown on his own back yard and which had been contaminated with DDT that had been buried there by previous owners of the land.  He does not blame anyone for this–as he says, burying DDT was the accepted way of disposing of this hazardous chemical back when it was still in widespread use.   Instead, he decided, after much guidance and meditation, to make illness his path.   

 

Making the difficult events we encounter in life our path is the heart of what he talks about and unlike many writers, who theorize and philosophize,  Bayda provides you with the steps to do so.  This is no Pollyanna take on misery but rather an invitation to see everything as part of your life and –despite the pain that is inherent in our missteps and our tragedies –accepting what is happening diminishes the suffering.  It also adds meaning to what has occurred and gives us strength to take the next step forward.

 

In a particularly powerful chapter, Bayda uses anger to demonstrate how living what he calls “a substitute life” creates untold suffering for us all.  It is our attachment to the idea that things must go our way that creates this anger which behaves like an underground river, darkening our moods and making us vulnerable to inflicting many acts of unkindness in all directions. Bayda points out that whether we repress or express our rage–we never actually experience it.  We get so caught up in believing our thoughts and blaming ourselves or others that we don’t experience the anger in our bodies, where all things originate.  We do this, according to Bayda, to avoid the more painful emotions of hurt or sadness that lie beneath the anger and which really threaten to tear us apart. For those of you have read my post on Dr. Sarno and back pain, you will know already where this all ends–in the pain in our necks, shoulders or backs that has no organic cause.

 

Bayda goes on to write that although repressing anger is dangerous to our healths, expressing it in the conventional way by ranting and raving at the circumstances of our fates or the people we hold responsible for those circumstances is not the way to go either.  The way to experience it is to identify the emotion first by saying to yourself “having a believed thought that he is so inconsiderate”, for example, as the thoughts emerge and the accompanying emotion surfaces with the thought.  This means we have to be vigilant, of course, and it helps to practise this when we are not so angry as we generally allow thoughts to rampage freely through our minds.  As I remind my children when they express a negative belief, it is just a thought and nothing else.

 

Labelling the thoughts, whatever they are, allow us to stop identifying with our thinking.    The next step is to sit with the anger and ask yourself “what is this?”  This is a favourite question that Bayda wants you to pose whenever you are caught in the grip of any emotion.  By residing in the emotion and feeling it–the tightness, the heat, the pressure and any other sensation, you get to the heart of what your suffering is really about.  And what your suffering is about is rarely what you think it is about.  By sitting with it and experiencing it in every shape and every form without letting the story of me intrude, you access the layers of hurt, grief and fear that lie beneath the emotion.   It is  in fact fear that often lies at the heart of our anger and it is only by sitting bravely with the rage that we can begin to identify the fears which are disempowering us.

 

Bayda adds that it is important that we acknowledge how much we love our anger, how much we love our righteous indignation.  For many people the feeling of power that often accompanies that anger validates their lives in some way.  As Bayda says, “This is the so-called ego at its work of perpetuating the self-centred dream.”

 

Let me return to Sakyong Mipham.  As I left Seattle, I was a given a CD filled with songs he has written and performs.   Besides being a teacher of Buddhism, Sakyong Mipham is a marathon runner, a poet and a musician.  On the CD I have he sounds a little like Leonard Cohen.  One of his songs goes something like this:

 

What about me?

Yes, what about me?

What about me?

Wait….let’s do something radical.

Let’s say,  “What about you?” instead.

 

You have to love a teacher with a sense of humour and that much talent to boot!

 

The way home

 

At a recent Sophia meeting the question arose about the process of individuation that lies at the heart of Jung’s work.  Can those happy souls who live their lives quietly and unassumingly ever hope to individuate, someone asked?  Or, are they in fact born already individuated, needing nothing but their happy lives to fulfill their human potential? I confess I thought of  Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings then and remembered how even Frodo Baggins had to leave his comfortable hobbit hole to find out who he really was.  The Lord of the Rings can be read, in fact, as a journey towards individuation which is ultimately a psychological preparation for death.

It is unlikely, of course, that we will every fully individuate because individuation is a process and not a cure and it continues until our very last breath on earth.  It is also a process not supported by our infantile world.  Jung had it right when he complained that our society is geared towards telling you how to manage the first half of life, the life that is lived out in the world, but leaves you high and dry to weave your way through mid-life and beyond. It is because of this that you see the phenomenon of the sports car, the new career that looks suspiciously like the old one and the obsessive need to rearrange our bodies and faces into younger versions of themselves. In the absence of a new script, we re-write the old one and live out a similar reality—one that fails to quiet the inner demons that are arising demanding to be heard.

Jung put it this way: “What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself”   The tasks of the first half of life were all about establishing a family and a career.  At the mid-way point, though, we find ourselves in a Dantean wood with no path and no way and no plan to guide us forward.    It is at this point that we must, in Jung’s view, turn inwards to find the answers to the meaning questions in life.  It is this process that he referred to as individuation.  The American poet Robert Bly uses the metaphor of a bag to show us what we need to do.  In the first half of life we fill the bag up with rejected parts of ourselves, and in the second part of life—if we are brave—we take these bits out one by one and drive our neighbours and family batty but make our way to the heart of ourselves. It is an exciting and tremendous journey that allows us to discover what makes us tick underneath the overlay that was imposed on us by our parents, our peers and society at large.  Joseph Campbell refers to this as slaying the dragon “thou shalt”.   In the first half of life we obey the dragon and thou shalt away into marriage, career and the trappings of an outwardly successful existence.  In the second, we tell the dragon to take a hike and start hacking our own way through the forest of our inner lives.

The process of individuation was best outlined by Dr. Jolande Jacobi who set out the steps as follows:  First, we must become conscious of our shadow or dark side that contains all the things we have repressed or ignored and have shoved into the bag Bly speaks of.   This process is not easy and is an ongoing one as the shadow is all that we are unconscious of and we are unconscious of much.  It requires that we look into the mirror and recognize our dark selves, the parts that we despise or reject in others but that are lying there inside waiting to be reclaimed.

The next step involves becoming conscious of the anima or animus. The anima is the feminine soul or inner femininity of every man, and the animus is the inner masculinity of every woman.    For most of our lives, we project our anima or animus onto the hapless men and women we fall in love with. It is only by removing these projections that we can have a real relationship to the other but this is not easy and requires a brutal honesty that is not for the faint of heart.  In the end our relationships get richer and our ability to withstand the superficiality of the Hollywood movie romance weakens until we can no longer do more than guffaw at such things.  Instead we begin to read Rumi, Machado and Hafez and fall in love with the things that make the universe dance in much bigger ways.

Next we must become conscious of the archetypal spirit by uniting the opposites. It is by stepping beyond duality and recognizing that we are both good and bad and that everything contains its opposite, that we are ready to become whole.  This aspect of the individuation process dovetails quite nicely with non-dual spiritual traditions like advaita that aim to take us beyond reductive yes/no, right/wrong paths.   If you cannot think of the opposite side of an argument even as you are arguing it, you are still a child for there is an opposite in everything and knowing it makes us whole.

Finally, we must become conscious of and make contact with what Jung called the Self. In the symbolic universe, the self is often depicted as a circle or mandala, glyphs which represent completeness.  The Self is the organizing principle that lies within and which seems to be writing our destiny for us. Our resistance to the machinations of our fates is what creates our greatest suffering.   It is only by going through the pain and accepting what is that we realize that there is a path, that there is a plan and that we are forging it with every breath.  The great Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, whose poems are like pinpoints of light, put it this way:

Wanderer, your footsteps are

the road, and nothing more;

wanderer, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

By walking one makes the road,

And so we walk on, forging the path, reading the stories and creating the greatest story of all—the one that will take us to the centre of ourselves.

The Bear Chronicles

 

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

—-W. B. Yeats

I have been considering renaming this blog “The Bear Chronicles” because no matter where I look, bears seem to jump out at me in images and in words.  This connection has a long history.  Years ago, as a graduate student in England, I had a German friend who when first hearing my name pronounced “Baya”, looked at me with outstretched arms and, growling, asked:  “Like the big animal?”   No, I told him slightly put out, “Bear without an “r.”  He was not the only one.  Many of my English friends there added the “r” at the end of the name due to the peculiarities of their accents. I eventually grew tired of correcting them and got used to  sharing a name with a big animal. 

Today I am not so certain I would correct anyone (although to be sure, it has been a while since someone has called me “Bear”).    I have gained a healthy respect for bears, in all their symbolic and literal manifestations.  I have even become fascinated by them.  When one of my close friends, who for years could not remember a single dream, suddenly started to have dreams full of bears, I was jealous—such an archetypal animal, an animal who carried my name around on its back and I have never once dreamed of one. 

I have written elsewhere about the Great Bear King Valemon, the Robert Bly retelling of the Psyche and Amor myth which is more beautiful somehow, perhaps because it is Bly doing the telling, but also because the central symbol is that of a bear.  Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estés, the  Jungian analyst and contadora, also tells a wonderful story that features bears.  In it a woman who lives in the forest, skimming the surface of existence, encounters three old bear women who proceed to take her to the deep spaces she has not yet traveled through.  They sit her down and tell her the old stories, show her how to look at the stars, instruct her on how to connect to what is around her.  In the end, happier than she has ever been, she asks them to provide her with a mate because that is all that she lacks. They agree to do so but exact from her the promise to invite them to the wedding.  She agrees, of course. They are her godmothers and to not invite them means to forget the sacred waters she has been swimming in.

The man shows up and they fall in love and when the wedding is planned, he is aghast that she wants to invite the three old hairy women to the ceremony.  As this is an archetypal story, we know the wedding is an inner occurrence, a sign that the masculine and feminine energies are attempting to integrate within and that the masculine is not yet ready to assume his part of the bargain.  The heroine stands firm—the Old Bears must attend the wedding.  He departs in a huff and is then subjected to severe testing by the three bears he has rejected until he returns to his beloved, side by side with the bears, wearing a bear skin over his back to signal that he has integrated that energy and is now ready for the inner marriage.

Recently, the bear caught my attention again.  I have been exploring the James Hollis book, Swamplands of the Soul, with a group of enquirers, when I noticed the bear appearing in another form.  Hollis mentions that the word “grief” derives from the Latin gravis “to bear”, and that we get our other words gravity and grave from it as well.  To experience grief, Hollis says, is not only to bear the heaviness of the condition but to testify to depth as well.  It is perhaps this that makes bears so appealing to me—that they could, through their association to other words, be pointing to the way into the depths that the bridegroom so feared in the Valemon tale.

A while back I saw a marvellous documentary featuring an elderly man and some bears in Canada’s north.  This man had lived in those parts for years and he invited a journalist up there so that he could record his interactions with the bears.  It was his hope that this would help rid us of our fear of this great animal.   The journalist was sceptical at first but ended up spending time and playing with those bears as well.   One moment in particular stood out.   When one of the bears is accidentally hit with a piece of driftwood the man throws his way (not intending to hit him), the bear goes off in a huff and won’t respond to the man’s apologies or attempts to make up.  Only after some pleading and gentle words does the bear get close to the man and let him rub his fur.  It was like watching the interaction between a loving father and a young child.

In many of our stories, the encounter with the bear is a signal that we have touched something deep that we did not know was lying there waiting to be discovered—but like the bridegroom, we must be ready first, or we will shackled by fear and reject the bearskin. 

Perhaps, Hollis writes, nothing which was ever real, which was ever important, which ever had gravity, is ever really lost.  Only in the letting go of the fantasy of control, he adds, can one truly grieve loss, truly celebrate value.

Donning the bearskin, metaphorically, allows us a way in so that we too can remember the old stories and inspect the stars and allow ourselves to travel through deep waters.