The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image - in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.
I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.
My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.
Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located. . . We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind. . . Authenticity is in the illusion, playing it, seeing through it from within as we play it, like an actor who sees through his mask and can only see in this way.
People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.
Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.
Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing.
Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.
Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche.
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy.
We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, "What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?"
You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made
An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.
Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.
The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow.
Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul's way of working on itself.
The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten
Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.
The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?
It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood - the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling - also arises from economic pressure.
Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.
Calling can refer not only to ways of doing - meaning work - but also to ways of being.
We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.
I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being.
We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.
Aptitude can show calling, but it isn't the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough.
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way - whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.
Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity.
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this "something" as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.
All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?
We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong.
We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.
In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.
'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.
The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.
I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers.
The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.
Loss means losing what was. We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul.
The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white face.
You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.
From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.
I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
Food is so fundamental, more so than sexuality, aggression, or learning, that it is astounding to realize the neglect of food and eating in depth psychology.
In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
One strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
Each person enters the world "called," like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.
As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.
Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind's been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.
You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth...Each person enters the world called.
Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident - a result - and therefore a victim.
Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.
Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.
The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way…Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.'
Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.
How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation - like Charles Manson.
I think the worst atmosphere for a six-year-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, it's worse for the child to grow up in a vacuum where "whatever you do is alright, I'm sure you'll succeed." That is a statement of disinterest. It says, "I really have no fantasies for you at all."
We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.
I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.
Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.
Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?
The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.
Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.
By seeing differently, we do differently
Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.
I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love
In the cosmology behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or to do anything... I'am an accident - a result - and therefore a victim... if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes.... or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result .
I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
Your life is not predestined, as in Calvinist thought, where everything is written down in the book of life long before your birth and is inescapable. There are choices, accidents, hints and wrong paths, and the ego you, or whatever you call yourself, is a factor in all this. But there is still this other factor that keeps calling. At some moment, people turn, in despair or when they are unable to go any longer on a certain route, and this inner voice says, "Where have you been? I've been waiting for you to turn to me for a long time."
Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.
My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).
Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.
A mother should have some fantasy about her child's future. It will increase her interest in the child, for one thing. To turn the fantasy into a program to make the child fly an airplane across the country, for example, isn't the point. That's the fulfillment of the parent's own dreams. That's different. Having a fantasy - which the child will either seek to fulfill or rebel against furiously - at least gives a child some expectation to meet or reject.
Without time for loss you don't have time for soul.
The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel blest by everything.
You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.
Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.
It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.
We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.
We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.
