Tag Archives: Psychology

Seven Year Cycles

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If you google on almost any topic related to “cycles,” you wind up with a flood of information.  Scientists define life cycles for everything from insects to stars.

Cycles abound in spiritual and esoteric traditions, ranging from newspaper horoscopes to “Days and Nights of Creation” lasting millions of years.

I was searching for something simpler than that.  Biologists say our bodily cells renew themselves every seven years.  Parallel to that, I’ve noticed my world of ideas, interests, and ambitions changing, sometimes radically, over a similar time frame.  I’m not the only one.  Google on, “seven year life cycle,” and you get 5,400,000 hits.  Although Rudolph Steiner wrote on the subject, most of the entries I found were generic, analogous to newspaper horoscopes.  Here is Aquarius.  Here are your life tasks between the ages of 21 and 28.

No doubt Gemini’s, and seven-year-olds, and seventy-year-olds each have things in common, but I was looking for individual accounts of people who find their ideas, concepts, and aspirations changing every seven years or so

What brought this to mind was thinking of 2005, a year in which I experienced many beginnings.  One night I woke up at 12:30am, grabbed a pen and a notebook, and wrote the opening pages of my first novel.  The momentum grew, and I finished the first draft five months later (in retrospect, it was pretty bad, though I doubt that I’ll ever have so much fun writing again).

Aided by a sabbatical from work, and energized by visits with family and friends I hadn’t seen in years, I was bursting with fresh energy, new ideas, and new ambitions.  Many threads in my life seemed to become clear.  I jotted some down in a notebook.  I underlined things I was very sure of.  A bit of skepticism remained, so I made  note in the margin:  “check back in five years.”

Six years later, in most respects, I am not the same person.  I don’t really read or aspire to write the books I cared about then.  My spiritual ideas have shifted.  What I value and want to accomplish are not the same.  My overall outlook is different.  I’ve noted these seven year changes before; this was just more pronounced.

Once again I have to conclude that most of the contents of consciousness are in flux and do not capture the “core” of who I am or who anyone else is.  The metaphor I use is the mirror.  A mirror is not defined by what it reflects from moment to moment.  “I” am not what passes through awareness, “I” am the indefinable awareness itself.

This is wisdom that’s thousands of years old but I believe it more and more as time goes on.  This is the koan:  what is a mirror beyond what it reflects?  What is the heart/mind beyond what it conceives?

The Freedom Index

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Actually, there is no Freedom Index, except in my possibly fevered imagination.  The idea came from reading the WordPress Daily Post, “What Does Freedom Mean?”  That’s a good question to think about.  It is very hard to answer, which makes it interesting.

All of the obvious answers lead you in circles.  Millions of people in these troubled times long for the freedom that work brings, but that reminds me of all the five dollar bills I tossed into lottery pools at work.  I’m guessing that nearly all working stiffs sometimes dream of winning the lottery and achieving that sort of freedom – even though lots of studies show that a year later, most winners are no higher on the Happiness Index (which really exists).

News reports are always full of threats to our freedom, often couched in words of blame for someone else.  Still, on a hypothetical Public Freedom Index, things could be a lot worse.    We can watch fireworks if we choose – or not, since we don’t have mandated public celebrations.  The explosions tonight will be for fun; we live free of the threat of real bombs.  We can can blog and tweet to our heart’s content, and Google on a staggering array of topics.

Personal Freedom is always a little more dicey.  We are still guaranteed “the pursuit of happiness,” but you have to wonder how most people would answer the Dr. Phil question:  “How’s that working for you?”

The Dalai Lama says all of us desire happiness and an end to suffering, but we really don’t know how to go about it.  Many of our choices lead to the opposite result.  Perhaps the freedom to ask – really ask – where our real happiness lies, is one of the greatest freedoms of all.  That and Freedom of Information which allows us to follow the trail where ever it leads.

Here is Buddhist blessing/prayer, known as The Four Immeasurables:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the supreme happiness that is beyond suffering.
May all beings rest in equanimity, free from attachment and free from aversion.

Happy Fourth of July!

Marginal People, People of the Margins

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Given the doings and structure of the psyche, there is no such thing as being alone.  If you are the only one in the room, it is still a crowded room. – Michael Ventura

While reading and enjoying the interviews in Bill Moyers Journal (which I discussed here, https://thefirstgates.com/2011/05/24/bill-moyers-journal-the-conversation-continues/), I came upon a phrase that evoked a cluster of other ideas.

Moyers interviewed author, Louise Erdrich, concerning her novel, Shadow Tag, which he considers exceptional.  During the interview, Erdrich, who is the daughter an Ojibwe mother and a German American father, said “I live on the margin of just about everything, Bill.  I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable.”   I recommend the interview as a whole, as I do the others in Moyers’ book, but right now I want to focus on the phrase Erdrich used – “marginal person.”

Louise Erdrich

In context, she was talking about the split between people’s waking selves and their dream selves, which is one of the subjects of Shadow Tag.  She was also talking about the tensions between her Catholic upbringing and the Ojibwe culture, as well as the tensions between her various roles, such as mother and writer, which don’t always fit well together.

In short, I take the phrase, “living on the margin,” and being a “marginal person,” to mean”outsider,” one who stands at the edges watching, related but not quite part of.  I am going to take this notion a step further, because it accords with recent thought in depth psychology as well as conditions in our culture.

James Hillman, a prominent post-Jungian thinker, has written eloquently of our “polytheistic” psyches, formed of a number of archetypal forces that often compete with each other.  This is in distinction to Jung’s “monotheistic” psychology, which posits a central “Self” which is alpha and omega of the psyche.

James Hillman

Here is what Michael Ventura, a journalist, screenwriter, and friend of Hillman’s has to say:  There may be no more important project in our time than displacing the…notion that each person has a central and unified “I” which determines his or her acts.  “I” have been writing this to say that I don’t think people experience life that way.  I do think they experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about life in structures contrary to their experience.  Ventura adds, The central “I” is not a fact, it’s a longing – the longing of all the selves within the psyche that are starving because they are not recognized” (Michael Ventura.  From “A Dance For Your Life in the Marriage Zone,” in Shadow Dancing in the USA, 1985, out of print).

Ventura’s essay on marriage names a few of these “selves:”  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshipper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am you client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the more garish of the patterns. 

You get the idea, and though you may find it mildly interesting, perhaps you wonder, what is the point, and what does it have to do with margins?

Plenty, I think, and it’s all wrapped up in a word in a word related to margins.  The word is liminality, from the Latin word, limen, which means, “threshold.”  People and cultures in liminal states are “betwixt and between.”  The definition given in Wikepedia is:  a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes.  Though the word was initially used by anthropologists to anaylze the middle stage of ritual practice, it has passed into broader usage, with this important meaning: [liminality is] now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large…very useful when studying events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.

Hermes, the Greek messenger god, is the archetypal figure of liminal states, for he can easily pass between the worlds and speak to gods and mortals.  His Roman name, Mercury, is synonymous with quicksilver, that flashing liquid metal that is not quite one thing or another and cannot be contained.  My suggestion is that marginal people, people who are at home in the margins, people whose psyches welcome Hermes, are fortunate in this liminal state of our culture and world, as it becomes increasingly hard to bury our heads in the sand and fail to note “the dissolution of order…which [is] also formative of institutions and structures.”

Hermes, Messenger of the Gods

My previous post on nonfiction writing spoke of the “dissolution of order” in publishing and the nimbleness that is likely to characterize and benefit those writers who can adapt and even help create the new structures that are going to emerge.

The landscape of work is another example that touches everyone.  My father worked forty years for the same company, doing the same sort of job, before retiring with a pension.  Showing up as the same person every day served him well.  I had three distinct careers in six different organizations; that is the current statistical norm, and I bet it will seem tame to the generation now coming of age.  Access to a variety of “selves” was an asset in sailing those waters.

Rigid and hierarchical structures are not faring well this year, be they Arab governments, the government of California, the management of Borders, or people in almost any endeavor who cling to business as usual.

If you recognize yourself as a marginal person, a child of Hermes, one who has never been quite “this” or “that,” but both and neither, relax.  These may be the very times when you shine, when your gifts are needed, and when the ways will open as you come into your own.

Books for Brainiacs (literally)

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I was browsing the NPR list of recommended Sci-Fi titles today, and could barely manage a ho-hum.  I’ve slipped into one of my periodic non-fiction moods, and I’ve learned to follow such whims to see where they take me.  I fear that my book queue may get even more unmanageable after stumbling upon these NPR recommendations:  Insane Science:  Five New Books that Explain the Brain.  http://www.npr.org/2011/06/08/136896426/insane-science-5-new-books-that-explain-the-brain  Here is a quick summary of the article:

The Compass Of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, And Gambling Feel So Good  by David J. Linden.  Everyone probably guessed Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Vodka, and perhaps Generosity, but the author claims that Paying your taxes belongs in that category too.

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts To Gods To Politics And Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs And Reinforce Them As Truths by Michael Shermer.  Shermer, a former Evangelical Christian who became an agnostic in college claims that belief precedes the explanations we invent for them.  However, Shermer acknowledges that, “we could be wrong.”

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry by Jon Ronson.  The bad news:  an estimated 1% of the population is psychopathic.  The good news:  if you wonder if you are, you almost certainly are not.

The Optimism Bias: A Tour Of The Irrationally Positive Brain by Tali Sharot.  Even if you are a cynic, your brain is probably hardwired for optimism.  “Most people are programmed to predict happy endings in all facets of our lives.”  As you might have guessed, there is measurable survival value in thes.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What The World‘s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam.  If you want to know what people really think about sex, look online, claim the authors, and that is what they did.  Their conclusion, after sifting through “reams” of data?  Men’s sexual brains “are more like Elmer Fudd,” and women’s, “like Miss Marple.”  That hook I think, is enough to get me to download this one.  Not that I would be crass enough to ever make a joke about Elmer Fudd and Congressman Wiener – nope, no way.

Happy reading, everyone, and I categorically deny all rumors that I have too much time on my hands!

The Royal Wedding, Rowan Williams, and Generosity

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Having declined the invitation from a British friend to watch the Royal Wedding live, Mary set the DVR, and we watched the event when we were home during the day.  I was busy with other things, but looked up at several points, for there is something hopeful and compelling about such a pageant.  At the same time, I’d watched Helen Mirren in The Queen the previous week, so I couldn’t help but think of Diana.  You have to wish this couple a happier fate.

What really caught my attention – and we backed this up to hear it again – was the homily delivered by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after the vows were taken.  The gist of it was, as faith in God or a Higher Power has receded, we do a disservice to our marriage partners by demanding of them a fulfillment another human being cannot provide.

I searched online this morning but could not find the sermon.  I did find this interview with Williams conducted before the ceremony.  The word I most often heard him use was “generosity.”  He hoped that watching this service might renew our sense of generosity to ourselves and to others.  It’s a very nice way to think of the Royal Wedding.

Any priest or minister conducting a wedding is bound to feel a huge sense of privilege.  You’re invited into some intimate places in people’s lives.  You’re invited to take part in a very significant moment, a moment of hope; a moment of affirmation about people’s present and future.  And I’ve felt very privileged to be part of this event for those reasons.  Here are young people sending a message of hopefulness, sending a message of generosity across the world.  And it’s my privilege to be able to bless that in the name of God, to witness it in the name of God, and to send them on their way. – Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury

http://www.youtube.com/user/lambethpress?blend=23&ob=5

Spiritual Bypassing: An Interview with John Welwood

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John Welwood has studied, taught, and written about the relationship of psychotherapy and spiritual practice for thirty years.  He is currently the editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and author of Journey of the Heart.

In an interview in the Spring issue of Tricycle, Welwood discusses the concept of “spiritual bypassing” which he presented three decades ago:  http://www.tricycle.com/interview/human-nature-buddha-nature.  According to Welwood, spiritual bypassing is the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

Both eastern and western world views implicitly or explicitly elevate spirit over flesh, absolute truth over relative truth, and the impersonal over the personal.  Welwood says such an attitude is fraught with danger:  “One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, where it is likely to become acted out in covert, unconscious, and possibly harmful ways.”

We’ve all seen that dynamic play out in headlines of scandals involving both eastern gurus and western clergy.  Other consequences of an exclusive focus on the transcendent are less dramatic but far more pervasive.  I once attended a talk presented by a large organization that teaches eastern spiritual practice.  The group is well regarded – never a hint of scandal.  During the Q&A following the talk, one young woman said, “I cried when cat died recently.  Was that okay?”  Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when the speaker said yes.

Is it all right to be myself?  Is it all right to think what I think and feel what I feel?  Not if the focus of practice is transcendence of all that is messy in the human condition.  Welwood has seen a lot of this in his therapeutic practice and says:

One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that “idealism is an act of violence.” Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in two and pits one side against the other.

For anyone interested in or engaged in spiritual practice, this is a worthwhile article to consider, as John Welwood tries to articulate the vision of a spiritual discipline that aims to fully develop both “poles” of our nature, the human and the divine.

Says Who?

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This post is about judging ourselves negatively based on unexamined or under-examined beliefs.  What got me thinking in this direction was the recent exploration I did on ebook publishing.  I’m guessing that most unpublished writers long for the validation that acceptance for traditional publication confers:  “Now I am somebody!”  In fact, those ebook authors who have launched their careers by non-traditonal means have also done an end-run around our customary who’s-who assumptions.  New game, new rules.

I want to consider some of the ideas we use to bludgeon ourselves.  I’m not talking about (relatively) small issues:  I wish I had a nicer lawn. Nor am I considering such serious and potentially clinical issues as a pervasive, non-specific, feeling that I am just no good: I am not up to taking on original sin, in any of its many variations.

I’m talking about the dozens of ideas we or our friends have used to put ourselves down.  Reasons I am a loser:

  • Because I didn’t make the little league team.
  • Because I am dumb in math
  • Because girls think guys in the math club are nerds.
  • Because I’m not as pretty as my sister.
  • Because I didn’t get into my first choice college.
  • Because I don’t like my job.
  • Because I am not married.
  • Because my marriage is on the skids.
  • Because I don’t have any children.
  • Because the kids are out of control, which means I’m a terrible parent.
  • Because I got skipped over for a promotion.
  • Because I can’t handle my new job.
  • Because I got laid off.
  • Because I hate this town and want to live in (fill in the blank).
  • Because I can’t get get my book published
  • Because I want to be somebody.

Something in that list may bring to mind some past or present hot button issues.  Ideas like this can be incredibly painful, but interestingly, the moment our minds change, the issues and pain disappear.  We can see this by considering past ideas, the ones we no longer believe.  One day in grade school, I had a revelation:  I don’t really care about little league – I was just trying out because everyone else was. Instantly, all the inferiority vanished.  I was no longer a loser just because I wasn’t good at baseball.  Soon enough, however, new limiting ideas filled the void and I was a loser again.

That dynamic should make us very suspicious!

It made Cheri Huber suspicious.  Huber, a Zen teacher who is also versed in modern psychology, has made it one of her special missions to take on the voices of self-hate she finds so rampant in our culture.  Huber travels and teaches internationally, is a prolific author, has a regular radio talk show, and hosts workshops both online and at “The Zen Monastery Peace Center,” in Murphys, CA.  http://www.cherihuber.com/index.html

Huber is the author of twenty books, most of them published by “Keep It Simple,” an independent press she and her sangha founded back in the ’80’s.  Perhaps her most pervasive theme is contained in title of one of her most popular books:  There Is Nothing Wrong With You:  Going Beyond Self-Hate.  In the introduction, she writes:

Every spiritual path tells us that what we are seeking is inside us.  Society, the world, others, conditioning, teaches us as children to stop looking to ourselves in order to know what is so for us, and to begin to look to others in order to know what is right.  We first learn to look to parents, then teachers, then friends, lovers, husband or wife, children, Jesus or the Buddha or God – all “out there.”  The love, the acceptance, the approval is out there (emphasis added).

Huber sometimes uses the model of “sub-personalities,” to illustrate the origin of the self-hating voices.  Simplistically, sub-personalities are a series of “mini-me’s” living inside my psyche, with the power to take possession of my awareness from time to time.  Some of them hate me.  Some of them do nothing but whisper poisonous thoughts, and of these, Huber says:

You can listen to the voices that say there is something wrong with you.  It’s actually very helpful to be aware of them.  Just don’t believe them.  Most of what we have been taught to believe we had to be taught to believe because it isn’t true.  This is why children have to be conditioned so heavily!  We would never have reached these conclusions on our own!

I sat in a one day retreat with Cheri Huber in the summer of 2005, and got a sense of her deep commitment to this particular work.  It was clear from her comments that she had come from a starting place of crippling inferiority and lack of self worth.  She now seems like a joyous person, and one who believes her process is open to everyone, and judging by the numbers of people who threw themselves into the work that day, quite a few others have found it true for them.

As you learn to sit down, sit still and pay attention, you begin to glimpse that which sees through the illusion, beyond the voices of society’s conditioning, back to the original being.  And slowly that perceiving becomes more real than all you’ve been taught to believe…you begin to see with a much broader view…you begin to be the love, acceptance, and compassion you have always sought – Cheri Huber.


Of Hamsters, Wisdom, and Persephone

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Persephone the Innocent

The protagonist of Karyn’s Magic, the young adult novel I’m writing, is a teenager who lets something evil into the world.  Not only must she scramble for damage control, but she is forced to see the same evil as a potential within herself.  I usually think of “loss of naiveté” as theme of adolescence, but remembering hamsters brought to mind a personal experience that happened earlier than that.

My fifth grade teacher had a pair of hamsters, favorite classroom pets.  At one point she could no longer keep them, and asked if anyone could provide them a good home.  I spend my Saturdays at a small museum in Alum Rock Park, in San Jose, that had a small zoo and classes and field trips for young people.  We had day trips to ocean tide pools, a weekend camping trip to the Mojave, plus at the museum we got to play with some of the critters.  One of my favorite stunts was to wrap a boa constrictor around my neck and explain to startled visitors that these snakes never squeezed anything they didn’t regard as food.

I told the teacher I had a home for her hamsters and took them to the museum.  “Great, we can use these,” the director said.  At the end of the day, after the museum closed to visitors, I learned what he had in mind.  Before I quite realized what was happening, he dropped one of the hamsters into a glass case with a huge rattlesnake.

The ensuing drama seemed to go on forever:  the hamster sniffing, scooting around, knowing something was wrong but not quite knowing what.  I wanted to look away but couldn’t.  The snake coiled in slow motion, almost lazily, with hard, unblinking eyes.  It’s strike was a blur, you couldn’t see it;  you could only hear, not see, the hamster slammed into the top of the cage by the force.  It was over in less than a second.  The animal did not even twitch.

I asked about the other hamster and learned that a snake that big cost several hundred 1960’s dollars, and live food was expensive.  I didn’t demand the other hamster back.  There were older kids there, some in jr. high, and I wasn’t about to wimp out. And scientists sometimes have to suck it up, right?

On Monday, the teacher asked how the hamsters were doing.  I told her and the class that they were fine.  I never put another boa constrictor around my neck.  I was at the edge of adolescence, and the world was poised at the edge of “the sixties;” there would be more and bigger occasions for guilt soon enough, but most of those are long forgotten.  This is the event I come back to when I think or write about the loss of innocence.

***

What does she hear on the wind?

James Hillman, the prolific author who coined the phrase, “archetypal psychology,” for his own brand of post-Jungian thought, borrows a phrase from Keats and calls our world, “the vale of soul-making.”  For Hillman, the natural movement of soul is down, into the depths, where a darker kind of wisdom lies.

(to understand Hillman it is critical to know that he uses the world “soul” as the ancients did:  not as the “eternal soul” of western religion, but more as we use the phrase, “psyche.”  He places “soul,” the source of imagination and fantasy, between the “eternal spirit,” and the body – a three-part image of personality you seem to see in biblical references, as well as in eastern religion even now).

The story that illustrates Hillman’s perspective on “innocence,” is the myth of Persephone.  As a beautiful young girl, she is playing one afternoon with her friends, when she bends to pluck a narcissus flower.  The ground opens up, and Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, scoops her into his chariot and carries her into the depths.  Hillman writes:

“Each of us enacts Persephone in soul, a maiden in a field of narcissi or poppies, lulled drowsy with innocence and pretty comforts until we are dragged off and pulled down by Hades, our intact natural consciousness violated and opened to the perspective of death.”  Revisioning Psychology

By the time the Olympian gods put enough pressure on Hades to cause him to relent, Hermes, messenger of the gods is stunned to see Persephone transformed. No longer the naive maiden, she is the darkly radiant Queen of the Underworld. She has eaten the food of the underworld – six pomegranate seeds, and must spend that six months of every year under the earth.

Supposedly that explains why there is winter, but in a far more interesting sense, it gives us an image of why, despite our wishes, wisdom doesn’t lie in the sunny, flower dotted fields of youth, but in the depths of a soul that knows both light and darkness.

Persephone and Hades