the possibility of balance

Posted on by kay

"There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace." — Leah Price speaking, from The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Do not take the shadow lightly.

Posted on by kay

My husband came up with a catchy phrase today:

Do not take the shadow lightly.

Shadow, light… lightly, as in underestimating…

that's pretty good.

I love phrases that get deeper as you think about them. Phrases that open out, or in, when you turn your attention to them.

Ranting and raving over the airways

Posted on by kay

There's a lot of ranting and raving over the airways.

And of course it's always someone being very hot and bothered by something someone else is doing. Someone who just can't seem to get off of certain subjects…

I like what Vaclav Havel said about that once:

"Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred." –Vaclav Havel

Interesting thought.

For instance, what would Michelle Bachmann have to talk about if it weren't for the "liberal" media, and how would any of us have ever heard of her, without "liberal" doses of exposure from the media she says she so thoroughly depises?

 

Admitting selfishness & saying what you mean

Posted on by kay

The rose is one of the oldest, most beloved, most frequently used icons for the feminine principle. On the symbolic level, when Beauty said, “Bring me back a rose, Father,” in Beauty and the Beast, she was saying, "Bring me back some Mama."

On an ordinary, everyday, practical level, we can see why someone like Beauty could use an animal husband as well as some Mama. She has a bad habit of being too good.

Her sisters were acting vilely in the story, of course. Begging their father to bring back clothes and jewels and riches. But couldn’t Beauty have asked for something personal? A spool of thread? A book? New strings for her lute? No. Not this girl. She denies—even to herself—that she wants anything at all—even the rose—and it is this denial that brings on the problems in the story, not the Beast. Beauty’s denial of her own needs, her refusal to even try to figure out what she wants, brings a monster down on her whole family. In real life, a girl like this would be so passive-aggressive there’d be no living with her.

Selfishness is a basic human trait. We’re each born selfish as sea gull chicks {Mine! Mine!} ready to knock our siblings right out of the nest for any extra morsel. Selfishness is instinctual. It's a form of self-preservation, an archetypal way of acting, as demonstrated by Beauty’s sisters in Beauty and the Beast. Selfishness is the raw will to thrive in a hostile world. Thus no human being who is still breathing can be totally unselfish. We can only face up to the fact that we all have an inborn tendency to be selfish, and then try to manage that tendency without harming others.

As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, there is simply no curing certain things in ourselves. All we can do is care for those things. But to take care of something, you have to—at the very least—be able to admit that it exists. Pretending not to be selfish does not equal ‘taking care of’ one’s selfishness. Pretending not to be selfish equals ignoring one’s selfishness.

Besides, if we don’t know what we want and how to go about getting it, why should anyone else know? Should other people have to read our minds so we can get whatever we want without having to come out and ask for it? That can get real nasty in real life. Not being able to just come out and say what you want—or what you mean, or what you feel—is the leading cause of resentment and divorce on the planet Earth.

But… maybe we should give a girl like Beauty the benefit of the doubt. She seems so nice. Maybe she really doesn’t want a single thing for herself. Maybe she has completely conquered all desire, like a bodhisattva.

Riiii-ght. Then she should’ve said so, "I don't want a thing, Father." Instead, she just made up a rose story to keep her sisters from getting mad at her.

Saying something you don’t mean to keep someone else happy merely allows their bad attitudes to determine your actions.

Going along with something you don’t agree with just to be polite is not civil—it’s servile. And it’s also downright dangerous, as we’re finding out every day.

Funny… how not being aware of one's own selfishness and not being able to say what you want go together so well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bombs in the baby carriages

Posted on by kay

My day job is caring for newborn to preschool infants, and in case you haven't done that for a while, or ever, it is a remarkably difficult job. Newborns require patience, complete sacrifice of one's own goals, and consciousness of the probable long-range effect of everything one is saying or doing on another human being. (Which of course is not possible. One can only strive and fail.)

When I look around at all the violence in the world, I have to ask, "Is what we're really seeing our world-wide failure as parents? What happened to those bombers, when they were so small they only slept an hour or two at a stretch, and cried interminably for 'no apparent reason'? What violence was done to them way back then, before consciousness was even possible, which settled deep into the crevices of their psyches, and burst out later in adulthood as pieces of flying shrapnel?"

I know, I know. Just saying this opens me up to all sorts of criticism. You're blaming mothers and fathers for horrible things their children do… that's  not fair, etc., etc.,etc.

And maybe it isn't fair. Maybe we can't just blame the mothers and fathers. Maybe we have to blame some of the cultures we've created, the ones that don't cherish children or childhood. The ones that create grinding poverty and a sense of hopelessness for most people while a chosen few get unimaginably rich. The ones that look down on motherhood and stay-at-home moms. The ones where it costs so much to live that everyone has to work, and no one has the time and patience to deal responsibly with a newborn. The ones that send mothers back to work 6 weeks after birth.

Once again, we end up having to blame ourselves; realizing the enemy are us.

Because it's just damn obvious that the more time, thought, and energy we put into caring and providing for young children, the less violence we would have in the world.

The Enemy Are Us

Posted on by kay

You know what's really depressing? Feeling like it's your job to spread the word about the human shadow.

This must be how exactly those Dr. Oz guys feel. They say the same things over and over — eat less bad fat and sugar, eat more good fat and fiber, get more exercise, get more rest, turn off the TV, go play outside, blah blah blah — while of course most of us stay just as unhealthy and out-of-shape as we ever were. But those guys are doctors. They feel like they have to keep saying it. So they do keep saying it. Every week, every article, every TV show… (At least they get paid for repeating themselves.)

So here I am, talking about the human shadow again: (but not getting paid)

Rather than acting like we don't know why in hell such grisly things keep happening all over the world — which will never stop them from happening — why don't we admit that we really do know.

Why don't we go ahead and admit that it's our own obsession with power and explosions and guns and graphically portrayed violence, multiplied by how many weak-minded people there are in the world.

We fly drone bombers. We wage wars and topple regimes in other countries for bad reasons. We fund munitions factories, but we don't fund schools and teachers. We let our children play — play — with deadly weapons, and with simulations of attacks on others with deadly weapons. We allow things which are absolutely sub-human to flourish on the internet, where any fool can access them.

We are responsible for the effect of our actions. And we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects. — Rollo May

We may be living in the Land of Chup

Posted on by kay

"In the land of Chup, a Shadow very often has a stronger personality than the Person, or Self, or Substance to whom or to which it is joined! So often the Shadow leads, and it is the Person or Self or Substance that follows. And of course there can be quarrels between the Shadow and the Substance or Self or Person; they can pull in opposite directions–how often have I witnessed that!–but just as often there is a true partnership, and mutual respect.

–So Peace with the Chupwalas means Peace with their Shadows, too…

[The bad guy in the story] has become more Shadowy, so his Shadow has become more like a Person. And the point has come at which it's no longer possible to tell which is his Shadow and which is his substantial Self–because he has done what no other Chupwala has ever dreamt of–that is, he has separated himself from his Shadow! He goes about in the darkness, entirely Shadowless, and his Shadow goes wherever it wishes."

—Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie, Penguin Books, 1990, p132.

Sacrifice and Bliss

Posted on by kay

Seems kind of appropriate to quote from the "Sacrifice and Bliss" chapter of The Power of Myth as Easter approaches…

 

Bill Moyers: When I listen to you talk about how myths connect us to our sacred places, and how landscapes connected primal human beings to the universe, I begin to think that the supernatural, at least as you understand it, is really only the natural.

Joseph Campbell: The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs, but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer…

Our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt, and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature.

…The act of nature itself has to be realized in the acts of life. In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes.

The Christ story involves a sublimination of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on the Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You partake of that duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.

Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cherubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians–those are the cherubim–and you're going between them to the tree of immortal life. In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree–these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate? Who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you'll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed–fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you're approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the Garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but the the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through.

We're kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of life.

Moyers: Have all men at all times felt some sense of exclusion from an ultimate reality, from bliss, from delight, from perfection, from God?

Campbell: Yes, but then you also have moments of ecstasy. The difference between everyday living and living in those moments of ecstasy is the difference between being outside and inside the Garden.

The Power of Myth, Moyers interviewing Campbell, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Doubleday, 1988, p. 98-107

Using Language Carefully

Posted on by kay

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, the National Book Award-winning poet, storyteller, and all around troublemaker Robert Bly tells us that using language carefully is one of the best ways to keep from spewing our shadow material and our projections on others wherever we go.

I haven't read that book in several years, but it must've sunk in further than I know, because the other way I woke up thinking

Strive for

more accuracy

with

less judgment.

So I wrote the phrase down and put it up over the kitchen sink, where I've been forced to stare at it ever since. Strive for more accuracy with less judgment. Humph.

We are all products of a black/white, either/or, right/wrong system of thinking. Which, as far as the range of human interaction actually goes, is about like trying to cram a large square peg into a small round hole. It's too limiting for ease or comfort, much less accuracy. And women, in particular, are groomed to say things for effect. We're trained to exaggerate, to stand out in a crowd. Men jump up and touch the awning. Women embellish.

Consider: I could say about my grandson, "He won't eat anything but fruit!" Or I could say about my grandson, "He really seems to be enjoying fruit these days."

The first statement locks him into a certain course of action. (And of course lets me off the hook about trying to get a balanced diet into the kid.)

The second statement allows him to experiment with fruit now, and then change and grow into enjoying other foods later.

The first statement sounds sort of whining and accusing, and it hands more power over to the baby than he's actually equipped to handle at such a young age.

The second statement simply says what is, without saying anything else.

Interesting.

 

 

the evil I fail to acknowledge within myself

Posted on by kay

More from Edward C. Whitmont. We're on page 162 now. He's still talking about projection.

"In each case that element (the relevant shadow issue) is something which the person is least willing to consider as part of his own personality make-up.

This type of situation is so classical that one could almost play a parlor game with it — if one wished to court social ruin. Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics — a self-description which is utterly unconscious and which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effect from other people. These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others. Negative qualities in others which do not bother us so excessively, which we find relatively easy to forgive — if we have to forgive them at all — are not likely to pertain to our shadow.

The shadow is the archetypal experience of the "other fellow," who in his strangeness is always suspect. It is the archetypal urge for a scapegoat, for someone to blame and attack in order to vindicate oneself and be justified; it is the archetypal experience of the enemy, the experience of blame-worthiness which always adheres to the other fellow, since we are under the illusion of knowing ourselves and of having already dealt adequately with our own problems. In other words, to the extent that I have to be right and good, he, she or they become the carriers of all the evil which I fail to acknowledge within myself." — The Symbolic Quest, Edward C. Whitmont, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 162.