Thomas Berry and Gerald L. Schroeder – CREDO LXXXV

   
Thomas Berry was more than a man; he was an oak tree in motion. He was many things: a Passionist priest, a scholar, a Fordham professor, a copious and passionate writer, an international force, years before others of us, to warn the world of the potential loss to humanity of our home here on Earth through ignorance of the preciousness of our planet and the sacredness of nature! That is a run-on sentence, I know, but Tom was a run-on man.

I met him once at his home on the Hudson River overlooking the Palisades, and, yes, he pointed out his favorite tree, a huge oak. We had a long conversation; I could never forget him. He followed up our meeting by sending me for several years his bound mimeographed writings in pale blue covers. Each time I received one, his dignified face, so like a stone cliff, would come to mind. For me he was Saturn exalted.

The very night I met him, I had an extraordinary dream:

Tom takes me into a book-lined chamber and explains to me that in it are all the sacred writings ever written all over the world. Then he asks, “Would you like me to show you my God Machine?” He points to a black metal standing box about the size of a two-drawer file. The top section is open. Tom flicks a switch and reveals a little stand. “I can take any book and place it on this stand, push this button, and the book will turn to crystal and the words in it that are true will turn to gold.” So he takes several books and demonstrates this. Some have more layers of gold than others. I marvel.

Then he says with a smile, “I could put a year of your life or a month or a day on it as well, but you would have to realize that we all need the plain dark of the crystal, ruled by Saturn, the god of time. It is what holds the gold.

I woke up before the test! But as you see, I have never forgotten the dream. My conclusion is that God must have a vast library with a section of rare books, first editions, and heaps of paperbacks!! And yet each one would have unique contents and has the potential to be “an open book” or “read like a book” for the instruction of others. Some will probably be more influential than others for positive or negative reasons, which brings me back to that same old question: Do two people read the same book? See the same picture? Hear the same conversation or speech? The answer is obviously, no. Each of us processes the same experience uniquely, which in one whap describes how unity through motion becomes diversity. This is the profound underlying grandeur of cosmic creativity, so obvious (aha!) we tend to overlook it. A billion manufactured butter knives or Coke bottles might look the same; a google of molecules forming different elements may be standard matter, but the minute they are used in unfolding time they too become unique. Panta rhei – everything flows, as the pithy pre-Socratic Heraclitus pointed out millennia ago, and remember, he’s the one who remarked that with our eyes open, we share the same world, but with our eyes closed each of us enters a private world.

I can’t help wondering if Thomas Berry and Gerald Schroeder read each others’ work. Tom can no longer be asked but Gerry can.[ He says he hadn’t.] Both men approach this world of ours wanting to prove the holiness of nature. Both are profound scholars and cosmologists as well as spiritual mystics. Gerald is the author of one of the most awesome books I have read in the last forty years, The Hidden Face of God.

I discovered Gerald Schroeder through listening to a Roman Catholic priest describing the book on television. As I didn’t catch either the title or author, I queried the station which led me to Father Dubay, who enlightened me. I googled Schroeder and wrote him an e-mail, and thus discovered that he grew up in Jericho, Long Island and watched the Green Vale School bus drive past his door – the school where I taught! He graduated from M.I.T., married a Jewish girl from Connecticut, now a distinguished author herself. They moved to Jerusalem, had five children. He is now an honored scientist, renowned in the worlds of astrophysics and microbiology (which covers a lot of territory!) and is also a mystic, a kabbalist, and now an Orthodox Jew.

The reason I love and honor the book is that it is an exploration, written simply enough for a layman, of the complexity of the subatomic world in which we live. The incredible beauty he reveals proves the validity of the word kosmos, which is Greek for beauty and the root of our word cosmetics. Schroeder has no need to convince us that the extraordinary intricate interactions of the subatomic world are absolutely impossible to have come about by “chance.” He does not preach; he doesn’t have to.

I remember lying out in a field one night when I was twelve, in Teufen, Appenzell, at the Swiss boarding school I attended. With me was a classmate, Dorothy Atherton. We were discussing what we wanted to do when we grew up.

I told her I wanted to unite religion and science – ha! What I didn’t realize at the time was that we were lying under the stars! So my path was through the cosmic science of astrology as a symbolic language of archetypal processes and the chart as a guide to the unique way each individual is likely to process experience. Normally, we do that unconsciously, but the option is given us to use it as a diagnostic tool in Jungian analysis. Teaching this has been my life’s work, as well as the topic of several of my books. You can imagine my delight, when I first began the serious study of Jung, to find that he had made a serious study of it all and even consulted the charts of his patients when he was stuck!

I began my studies in 1945 with Marc Edmund Jones, so in a way I was an early pioneer in promoting the serious work of rescuing astrology from its popular reputation as superstitious twaddle for nincompoops. I wanted to become an analyst, but Dr. Edward F. Edinger (bless him!) insisted that I would be of greater service to Jung sharing the value of astrology as a diagnostic tool and a guide to individuation. This is how I eventually came to teach the subject at several C. G. Jung Institutes in this country and also with countless lectures at universities and conferences, as well as a few Grand Rounds in Psychiatry. I spoke at the International Transpersonal Conference in Bombay, but the biggest one was to twelve hundred in Davos, where I was surprised and deeply touched by Marie-Louise von Franz, who, when Walter and I were picnicking out under a fir tree, silently bent under a branch and kissed me, as she passed by!

Thus, I hope you can see why I am in awe of the far greater accomplishments of Thomas Berry and the ongoing ones of Gerald L. Schroeder! What we have in common, along with many others today, is reconciling faith and reason, the outgoing dilemma of the Piscean/Virgo opposition of the ending Age.

lovingly,
ao

The Spiritual Alchemy of Sports – CREDO LXXXIV

   
Recently, I invited some men to comment on sports from a Jungian perspective. Only one came up with an answer that revealed the potential solution. In his e-mail he wrote “Sports is the sublimation of combat.” But, he seemed to overlook the fact that sublimation is an alchemical process. I remember reading in Volume I of Parabola (1976) an article by the now late Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger, and I found that I still have it! In it, he wrote:

Two outstanding and inter-related instruments of civilization were created by the ancient Greeks – the sacred games and the ritual drama. It is indicative of their psychological similarity that we refer to both games and drama by the same word, play. These action-forms give human energies a second world [level] in which to function. We are apt to forget the crucial role that games and athletic contests played in civilizing the aggressive energies of early man. . . . In the beginning, the games were always dedicated to a god, indicating that the athletes’ efforts were being offered up to a transpersonal meaning.    
                             –“The Tragic Hero”

This offered for me the solution to my puzzlement at why in archetypal astrology Sagittarius rules both religion and athletics. The icon of the fire sign Sagittarius is the centaur, which symbolizes the triplicity humankind represents: animal body, human, and the aspiring, uplifted bow and arrow aimed at the heavens. So this sign rules both religion and physical sports. The air sign Gemini, the opposite sign, in contrast, rules mental games: cards, chess, checkers, etc., but also drama, the duality of tragedy and comedy. The glyph is II(!), and the icon represents the twins Castor and Pollux.

The word play is common to all of them, and most Sagittarian games involve a solar shaped ball or puck, perhaps suggesting that the One is safely divided into uniting the Two. The Jungian coincidentia oppositorum? Heraclitus did say that “war [combat] is the great accelerator.” Alas, the negative cannonball and the bullet are the Shadow. The penis (Mars) shoots Life and the pistol (Mars) shoots Death.

So where does the alchemy come in? In the case of all these games, they must be contained (like the duality of Jungian analysis!) in the safety of a vessel where the sublimation takes place. If that glass is broken, the action falls down into everyday reality. Games erupt in riots among spectators, and, yes, mental contests can also have the same result. For this, I can give personal experience. When I was married only two weeks to my first husband in 1946, we were playing backgammon in the hushed drawing room of the Harvard Club in New York, of which my father was a member. It was occupied mostly by men reading papers and smoking pipes. Now, I had an extraordinary gift with dice and I was winning by far. When I threw doubles yet again, he suddenly took the entire board and threw it on the floor, noisily scattering all the pieces, shocking us all! Years later, I played cards with a teenager who, when losing, just threw all the cards in her hand and on the table to the floor.

In the case of the analytic vessel, we all know what happens if analyst and patient act out the intimacy often built up in safety during analysis!

I remember that when I was a child growing up in hotels my mother and grandmother never played Russian Bank, a card game, in the lounge but always upstairs where they could affectionately insult and mock one another. Eventually, I was old enough to play and during the game only was allowed to do the same! This was an unconscious application of alchemy, to be sure, but the action was limited to the safety of that vessel.

This may explain the etiquette that built up in the Middle Ages during tournaments and even tennis, where the handshake formally ended the game. (An interesting historical note: Henry VIII and Francis I of France had their first falling out as teenagers over a game of tennis.) The tradition also lives on in the formal high fives ending some sports to this day. The concept of fair play and being a good sport emerged. Contrast this with killing people with drones or transpersonal bombs.

In the Olympics, the sacred symbolism persists in the solar gold, lunar silver, and bronze medals awarded to the winners.

I can’t resist adding another astrological footnote concerning the opposite signs of Aries, ruled by Mars, the martial god (archetype), and Libra, ruled by Venus, the goddess of beauty (archetype). These two are sword dancing and fencing. Both raise the sharp weapon to a level of serving an art form. My husband engraved wedding (Libra) invitations on copper (Venus) plates with a sharp steel-pointed (Mars)] burin. These were done by hand for Cartier, the jewelry store, in New York. His chart had Mars in Libra! Go figure.

As this is written at the height of the games of another sport season, early September, I hope you can see the symbolic, archetypal, and alchemical value in their performance – they are indeed a peaceful alternative and sublimation of combat badly needed in this time, yet again, of violence and wars. In ancient Greece, all military action was suspended during the time of their Olympic games. Would that we could do the same!

lovingly,
ao

The Consequence of Naming Things – CREDO LXXXIII

   
I once asked Dr. Edward Edinger, now the late great Jungian analyst, about projection, and he told me all consciousness is projection. This can be further differentiated by the fact that no two people see exactly the same thing because 1) all of us will process what we see, hear, and feel in different and individual ways, and 2) our charts are descriptions of the unique way each of us processes any experience. This is the miracle of unity and diversity, if you think about it. However, some of us are more conscious than others, and, of course, what we choose to be conscious of is greatly determined by our Unconscious!

A toddler learns by naming. So does a student of a foreign language. Naming unites an object with our consciousness. Consciousness, per se, words, and the human bicameral brain are all ruled by Gemini, whose symbol is the Roman numeral II. Words and names both separate and communicate. My brilliant British friend, author and spiritual being Timothy Freke, just discovered the names of Yuk and Yum!! They sound like Beejum Tibetan twins, but those words describe Jung’s projective “feeling function” in a nutshell. Brilliant!

The Chinese sage Lao Tzu (604 BC) wrote the following in his Tao te Ching, translated here by Witter Bynner:

            I
Existence is beyond the power of words
to define:
Terms may be used
but are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth
there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
and whether a man dispassionately
sees to the core of life
or passionately sees the surface,
the core and the surface
are essentially the same,
words making them seem different
only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
from wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

So the concept of names, their differentiation, and consciousness is not exactly new. My hope is to point out that the things named also have a function for us! They are not just to be bought, sold, or possessed, they need to be listened to! They can be our teachers because they are manifest proofs of archetypal processes. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes gives us the words: “As above, so below . . .” so if we start with below and think symbolically we can unlock a wee bit of the above of that “heaven spread upon the earth that men do not see,” which the Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas refers to. The trick is to pay attention to what Jung implored us to do and wrote volumes about: to think symbolically and thus climb, step by step, to understanding and wisdom. Or as I have applied this, in what a zipper taught me!

This idea could help us, having eyes, actually not only to see the “heaven spread upon the earth” but might help transform our attitude to the material world that we are so busy consuming, abusing, and destroying! My whole preceding chapter of nonsense has this sense hidden in its nonsense because by naming a few objects, we were stumbling onto the realization that these objects had hidden gifts for us!

The alchemists knew this. Paracelsus taught it, and it was Agrippa who wrote, Virtutes divinae in res diffusae – divine powers are hidden in things! I used to write this on top of the blackboard at every lecture. The reference in the preceding CREDO to the same geometric spiral of the cowlick, the nautilus shell, and the spiral nebula are concrete proof of this – you cannot deny it! So Mother Nature, whose name mater hides in our word matter, is waiting through eons for us materialists to acquire fewer things and stop and learn from what we already have. This is Sophia’s game! Her delight! It is as if every thing is symbolized by wrapping paper. When you unwrap the gift, out comes a surprise! In short, there is a whole new way of applying “materialism.”

So how do we go about it? Stop reading and look for any object and say to yourself, “I know what you are, but what do you do??” Then listen.

This is the flowback of projection, which is active; now one is in a passive and receptive mode. The object can be a natural or a manufactured object, makes no difference. What you are doing is simply turning a noun into a verb. (The word noun comes from Latin nomen, the root of English name). A movie filmstrip is a sequence of “stills,” but when they move they tell a story . . . As the pre-Socratic Heraclitus wrote, panta rhea, everything flows. Nouns stop the flow. (Mercury, ruler of Gemini, as Trickster!)

One of my books, The Dove in the Stone, has the subtitle “Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace.” The title comes from a Hermetic treatise, because it was heresy for the alchemists to maintain that matter has spirit. The priest Matthew Fox was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, just a few decades ago, for saying the same thing! But the time has come for a whole new attitude toward the material world. If this idea can spread, this earth and we ourselves could live to see a whole new world.

Native people all around the globe know this instinctively but the so-called civilized world has forgotten or rejected their insight and continues to stress building an economy bent on getting and having more and more things instead of pausing to listen to them, to learn from, and appreciate the wisdom they conceal. From wonder into wonder existence opens!

lovingly,
ao

P.S.: Lest I be accused of anthropomorphism, I am conscious of the playful projection, but when it comes down to it, it is the archetypal processes that I am honoring. I can see, however, how unconscious projection can lead to the making of idols. Quite a lesson!

The Joys of Naming Things – CREDO LXXXII

   
It must have started in 1927, when my parents and I began traveling the world. With our constant separations, they had to cable directions about luggage, so each suitcase was given a name. A typical yellow folded telegram would arrive, and my mother would unfold it and read typed on the white strips such words as HAVE CHECKED DRAGON AND PLATYBUS PARIS GARE DU NORD STOP PICK UP FOR ROME LOVE REG. I remember Mother got in trouble with the Egyptian government when she wired SENDING DROMEDARY BY BOAT TO PIRAEUS LOVE PENELOPE. She was told she could not ship an animal without a permit! I had the Camel because it humped when full and the Kangaroo (pockets in interior) and my beloved Spy Bag, an over the shoulder strapped leather pouch. So naming things came naturally.

Walter, my beloved husband, the Polar Bear, understood immediately. He had the Moon in Gemini. When we married in 1980, having met on the ship cruising the Mediterranean that I was teaching on, he lived in La Habra, California and I on Long Island in New York. So after the wedding, he went back west and bought a bigger house, and I traveled shortly to a whole new life.

Walter showed off our new home but was very apologetic about the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. (I had never seen one!). It seemed he had put three orange remnants in it and they came up in the washing machine! So I named it Prokofiev, for the composer who wrote “Love of Four Oranges.” Happily, we took to “feeding Prokofiev” and he would go growlrowlgrowl from then on. When we moved east, I actually felt terrible at parting from him! I had brought Brother Lawrence, the new brown plastic garbage bin that held our ice at the wedding. I think I have mentioned the connection before. Brother Lawrence was the monk who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God in Paris and felt closest to God in the kitchen. He is still with me in mine.

When we came to Rosecroft in 1983, we purchased a freezer. Walter called it Niflheim and explained, as a Norseman himself, that this was a reference to the Norse myth of creation. It seems the world was covered with ice and given that name. Then a heavenly cow licked the first man and woman out of the ice, which is the origin of our “cowlick,” the first thing to show at our birth! Then I pointed out that the geometric whirl is the same spiral as that of a nebula in the heavens or the whirl in the water flushing down a toilet, or the way a chambered nautilus grows. So Niflheim is still a fixture in “Switzerland,” the laundry room that is neutral territory between our house and the house of my daughter Beth and her family next door. My icebox is the Igloo, and the bathroom downstairs is Tivoli, named for the child’s wallpaper featuring toy wooden soldiers in red/blue and ballerinas. For me, Tivoli is Copenhagen’s original nineteenth-century fun park plus the Royal Ballet the city is famous for. My daughter Beth disapproves of the wallpaper, but I chose it because when my clients come for a reading of their chart, they first often are apprehensive and go piddle. One sight of that wallpaper clues them in –that there must be some humor in this house – and there is!

Upstairs, we had a group of stuffed animals that turned out to be archetypal. After my stroke, I could no longer make my bed, so Walter made it and took to arranging the critters in different ways every morning. The very last time, I came up to find the wee hedgehog, Dr. Zweistein, on the baby pillow with a bottle of my “Stinkum,” my Grandma King’s name for perfume. The two bears, Rosie and Rofty (a polar bear); Oxo, the bison; and the two camels, Camille and Kahlil, were all in a circle around the pillow paying close attention. At my look of inquiry, Walter explained: “He’s giving a lesson in aroma therapy!”

Camille, the smaller camel, deserves special mention. On the ship, there were a number of middle-aged single women who all liked the handsome white-haired widower. To make them happy, he would joke with them and promise their fathers ten to twenty camels if they would become wife Number 3,.7, 8, etc.! But at 9 o’clock pm, I was No.1!! He kept us all in stitches. So at the wedding reception, the cake was brought in topped by a foil pyramid, and Roger Woolger, a Jungian analyst and the Best Man, explained that at the church wedding I had been only a proxy bride. The real one was under the pyramid. Ta dah! He lifted it to reveal Camille with a little bridal veil. There she was and, believe it-or-not, she traveled with us everywhere for eighteen years, went to the hospital with Walter each time, and was tucked under his arm on the gurney as he drew his last breath!

So even on his Aberduffy Day, Walter conveyed a smile for comfort, and today Camille presides on a shelf next to my new bed in my new bedroom downstairs.

You can imagine the whoop of joy I gave when I read in one of Jung’s biographies that he also gave names to his pots and pans and spoke of das Tuecke des Objekts, the mischief of objects, if they are not treated with respect (read affection?). If you have read my The Beejum Book, you can surely see that he was a Beejum himself!

lovingly, with a fond smile,
ao
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“Just remember that nonsense is every bit as important as sense, because sometimes it’s the last resort to help people come to their senses!” Lonesome, the rabbit psychopomp’s advice to young Teak, The Beejum Book, p.47. A sensible consequence to this Credo follows in Part II .Be sure to read it!

Love is never wasted – CREDO LXXXI

   
A helpful friend was aiding me in clearing out and reorganizing my stationery cupboard, which, before my stroke, was my secret delight and an example of a triumphant Virgo Prunefiddle. However, since my stroke thirteen years ago and the resultant loss of the use of my right hand, the cupboard has become a shambles. The task triggered my memory and the origin of my passion for stationery.

Seventy-nine years ago, I was sent to an English boarding school, St. George’s, in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera. It was a so-called Christian school set in a marble mansion built as a winter residence for Russian nobility. It had a glorious garden and view of the Mediterranean. There I was physically and psychologically abused. Cut off completely from my parents and unable to write an uncensored letter, I suffered in despair. I was eight and a half years old. (I have written about this in a separate chapter and would be willing to send it as an attachment to anyone interested.) The whole experience turned me away, big time, from Christianity. But hidden, it was my first experience of love from two strangers, and since then I have realized that such love is never wasted or even diminished by time.

These two women have a special place in my heart. One was the Italian seamstress who mended our clothes. I first encountered her when I was sent down to the supply closet for fresh paper. This closet had the marvelous fragrance of stationery stores. I could see stacks of pencils and pads, notebooks and drawing paper, clips in boxes, all neatly in place. When I ventured further into the basement room, there sat a voluminous woman all dressed in black. She smelt of honest sweat and garlic and unabashed affection. Seeing how small I was must have touched her, because she would never fail to put aside her sewing and sweep me onto her lap for a swinging hug. She would croon, “Che bella piccola! Che carina! Aleechay, vieni qua!” which translates loosely into words of endearment and approval. I would curl up and cling to this earth mother and shower her with kisses and laughter. Pretty soon, I would learn to rip the hems of my uniforms on purpose to be sent down for more doses of maternal love. I still love and bless that dear woman for understanding the needs of a lonely child. Dear Maria, you taught me to love the smell of garlic! Not only that, but a passion for stationery, and my first lesson that no love is ever wasted. Such was the gift she still gave me yesterday as I gazed into the past delights of my very own cupboard.

The other woman was called Matron. She was the school nurse. She was Scottish, and dour, and had a purple nose. She growled and she twinkled; she was gruff and caring at the same time. She made you feel safe and secure. Perhaps we each understood the suffering in the other.

After a few months, a terrible thing happened. At assembly we were told that Matron had suddenly died and was no more. It came as an enormous shock. It was, perhaps, the turning point for me. My best friend, Patsy Cliff, also my age, knew what biblically was called for: sackcloth and ashes! So we locked ourselves in the playroom, dumped our toys out of burlap bags, stripped and sat down in the fireplace and covered our faces with ashes and wept grimy tears. Never was anyone mourned more sincerely for about three minutes. Then we looked at each other and saw what a mess we were and began to giggle. After cleaning up in the bathroom, we went out in the hall and played leap-frog and were reprimanded severely by a teacher for irreverence and given two demerits each! But today almost eighty years later, I can close my eyes and feel the love that Matron gave me. It was her knowing look of secret recognition of the potential good seen in a naughty child. My soul felt realigned briefly in her presence. These were two strangers.

Since then, I myself have loved and lost in numerous hopeless love relationships and yet in every case turned them into lifelong enduring friendships and vice-versa. One of them described himself as offering “stepping stones” to the real thing that would come along, as it finally did when I was fifty-eight years old and met my so beloved Walter, who was sixty-nine!

In years of counseling others, I have heard so many versions of lost loves and have noticed the difference between those who react with anger or bitterness and those who truly try to understand and want the best for the other. The first group love out of hidden need, which is not the love that lasts, but the second group send out the message that their love gathers itself into a gossamer container, impervious to time or even future lives, that somehow is or will be available to the recipient when ready to receive. Such love is never wasted. Trust me!

As a teacher of kids, I had love for many of them. It is the fate of so many teachers that they give of themselves to their students only to lose them forever. But not always. One of my sixth grade students, came back, now a mother herself, and reminded me that I had told her that she had a flame inside her that no one could blow out! Am blessed to still be in touch with quite a few.

You can see what I learned from discovering Bronson Alcott’s book which, I was able to republish more than 150 years later as How Like an Angel Came I Down. Alcott loved his students and was rewarded by a letter from an eight-year-old boy, which Elizabeth Peabody added in 1834 to the appendix of the original Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Here is how the boy concluded his letter:

The comparisons in your letter, I think were very good – the one that struck me most forcibly and which I have before mentioned in my journal, was the Looking Glass of Circumstance, which I think meets the subject. In this letter you have fully convinced me, that we should not too often commit the dreadful sin of seeking all good without, and not beholding it within our imagination.

From the Jungian perspective, true love comes from the Self of one to the Self of the other. Alcott demonstrates that true teaching does likewise. Most relationship functions on the ego-to-ego basis, including that of teaching. It might be helpful for any readers of this to take a moment to reflect on those people they can call to mind who have recognized the Divine Guest in them or who have tasted the enduring joy of love that lasts. Esoterically, this is the nature of the catena aurae, the Golden Chain, the one of lasting, living filaments that links us forever with the wisdom and love of the great Givers of Gold, those Teachers, all composers, in different fields and times, of lasting inspiration. .

God’s grace is like an ever-blowing breeze, all we have to do is lift our sails to catch it! – Sri Ramakrishna

lovingly,
ao

The Bottle Game – CREDO LXXX

   
I learned about this game from Penny Harris in 1944. Penny was a petite woman of my mother’s generation. She knew M before I did, and he called her Nickel. Widowed and a mother of three sons, she was an heir to the Borden milk company, and had a lovely apartment on the upper east side of New York and a beautiful old home in Connecticut. Bill Regan, M’s closet companion, had been a close friend of her husband, and was now back at West Point teaching during the war. I mention these two because it reveals the kind of people that surrounded M. Penny was a Gemini and, as I was by far the youngest in the group, we became fast friends and almost like kids together. Penny struggled mightily with the highly erudite and esoteric material we studied. Her disposition was to being loving and generous. For instance, she gave M her own large bedroom in her apartment and slept in a maid’s room so that he would have the space for a meditation center and the comfort he needed for his work. He was already in his seventies when I met him. As it was up to me to translate the concepts and terminology of, say, the Kabbalah, by hindsight, I see that this was an introduction to my life’s work: helping the concepts of the Above make more sense to the Below. A kind of spiritual algebra … I was deeply touched when she once turned her beautiful blue eyes to me and said she wanted to be my child in our next lifetime! It was Penny who told me about the Bottle Game.

This was a game played at parties during the “Flapper” era of the post WWI days. It helped if the players were in a playful mood. As Penny described it, I began to see its value on an entirely different and symbolic level. I recommend it highly to any of my readers involved in giving workshops. It is certainly a good example of Sophia’s delight in making wisdom fun. Here’s how it goes: a row of eight empty bottles is set up about two feet apart. An innocent volunteer is chosen to prove that he/she can slalom the row without knocking over any bottle. This is carefully practiced three times. The volunteer is then taken to another room and blindfolded while the host explains the rules of the game. Then the volunteer is brought back and set exactly at the head of the row and challenged to slalom again while blindfolded. The other guests are instructed to make soft positive and encouraging remarks during the time the volunteer triumphantly manages to succeed. At the sound of applause, the volunteer removes the blindfold, and surprise!! No bottles!!!

The bottles seemed to me to represent many of the unconscious, built-in inhibitions we all absorb in our youthful development placed there by family, education, religious doctrine which are accepted, perhaps misunderstood, but left unexamined. As a workshop proceeds, it may be helpful for participants to list and perhaps discuss some of these. I will never forget one woman who burst into tears when she removed her blindfold. Her reason? “I was totally convinced that the bottles were there! How can a person be that wrong!” I rest my case.

I think we need to distinguish cultural mores and apply psychological and spiritual tolerance. An example is that a Muslim is permitted more than one wife, but Christians are not. An Orthodox Jew may commit a sin if he eats pork or shellfish, good advice in the light of trichinosis and a hot climate, but today it may seem unnecessary to others. I think I have already mentioned the factor that turned a boy into a lasting agnostic when he was forbidden to attend chapel wearing white socks at his boarding school. One of my own daughters was turned away for forgetting to wear her beanie! On a more serious note, the ubiquitous scandal of priests molesting altar boys has undermined their teachings of Jesus. On the positive side, the gradual shift in the acceptance of Christian women as priests in several Protestant denominations has only happened during my lifetime, and as a student of history, I find it fascinating that one century’s heretic is another’s saint (Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalen), and that goes for scientists such as Galileo and even some recent political leaders like Mandela. One of Pope John Paul II’s finest acts was his public repudiation of the condemnation of Galileo and Luther.

In closing, I really have to recommend the “Milk Stool Principle of Love, Wisdom, and Power” (Credo XXXVIII) that can help keep us more balanced and spiritually sound. The ‘Shalt-nots!” need to be replaced by our own positive personal conscience, responsibility and tolerance – my personal favorite being Buddha’s “The Noble Eightfold Path” (see Credo LXXI), which can apply to anyone. I am also partial to the kindness suggested in this Sufi counsel:

Before you criticize, pass your words through three sieves:
Are they true?
Are they kind?
Are they necessary?

lovingly,
ao

Buddhism, Jung, and the Ego – CREDO LXXIX

   
The following quote from the late Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche reinforces the message of a recent Credo, adding the spiritual application. I was struck by this as I was reading his book of lectures Counsels from My Heart. Here is what he said:

What is the root of all this, the source of both good and evil? The doer of all virtue is the mind, when it makes positive use of body and speech, its servants. The doer of all evil is also the mind, when it uses body and speech negatively. The root and cause of good and evil is in the mind itself. Nevertheless, in a sense, this mind of ours is something unknown to us. It does anything and everything, like a lunatic running here and there at the slightest impulse. This is how it accumulates karma.

The mind is the root of every defilement. It is here that anger is born; and from anger, every kind of hurt and injury to others: fighting, beating, and the rest. The mind is the soil in which all this grows: all malevolence, envy, desire, stupidity, arrogance, and so forth. That is why the Buddha told us to get a grip on our minds. Having realized that the mind is the root of all affliction, we must be vigilant in keeping it under control, holding down our defilements as much as we can. We have to be completely focused on this, gaining mastery of whatever arises.

The mind can move in a positive direction as well. . . . Through the practice of the Dharma, the mind can also accumulate the causes of its own liberation and that of others. Therefore, since the mind is the root of both good and evil, it stands to reason that it must be corrected and transformed. The examination of one’s mind is thus the principal feature of the practice.

The interesting point to me is that if you substitute the word ego for mind, you would hear Jung saying the same thing! He defines the ego by the psychological terminology of “center of consciousness” and also sees it as functioning through duality. (Astrologically, the brain is ruled by Gemini, whose glyph is II.) When we identify with our ego, we give it our name, and it serves us daily in making it possible to live in the manifest world. We do get an involuntary break every time we sleep or are rendered unconscious. It is the part of our psyche that constantly is having to make choices, not only in practical matters, but also in allowing ourselves to be influenced by the emotions Dudjom describes above. In terms of my diagram, the ego, that small circle divided by the circumference, half looking out to the world and half looking inward to the psyche, goes round and around searching. But there is a conscious decision that we can make that is helpful: meditation!

One of the purposes of meditation is to become aware of our ego or “monkey mind.” Every religion has some form of it. Many, though, confuse it with prayer which is active, whereas meditation is receptive, a surrender to something greater than one’s mind. At first, we usually have trouble concentrating, but eventually awareness grows and you ask, “Who is watching?” That is the breakthrough! Who indeed? In this magic moment the radius to the centerpoint of Jung’s Self becomes a reality in Hagia Sophia’s process of in-tuition. Holy Wisdom, Holy Spirit, name it what you will, is the “Only Way” (process, verb!) that connects us to that wick in us that holds the universal flame of Spirit. And, as Jung points out, this center dwells in (sigh!) the Unconscious! The mind can reason that there must be something going on, but what? “The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.” So, to repeat what Jung said, “The longest journey for most of us is from the head to the heart.” To meditate is to visit a place of love and eventually a state of bliss. Now Teachers and mystics have all pointed this out in every culture and every age, one way or another, but Jung clothes it in psychological terms because so many of us are ego identified and unhappy, lost and not conscious of why. Now, I am probably stepping on many toes, because there are so many instructions and how-to’s to meditation, but, honestly, forget all that to start with – just light a candle, close your eyes, and sit and listen to and receive the Silence, “that peace that passeth understanding.”

One of my favorite stories is that of one of the greatest intellectuals in history, Thomas Aquinas, who pursued and exhausted the philosophical proofs of God. At the end of his life, he had a spiritual experience that knocked his socks off! He came out of it declaring that all he had written was “as straw”; he surely had gone from the mind to the greater mystery of the heart. The Hindus would say that he practiced jnana yoga, the path of knowledge. They also tell us that there are different approaches to that “Vast Certainty”: bhakti yoga, the emotional approach of devotion; raja yoga, the totally committed path, taken by priests, monks, and lamas. A fourth, karma yoga, is to live in the world and give all of the fruits of your actions to God – my path, for sure.

Another person, lesser known, I admire immensely is Brother Lawrence, who was a French lay monk in Paris in the 1600s. He wrote a small book called The Practice of the Presence of God. He felt closest to God in the kitchen! It is a paean of delight among his pots and pans and profoundly spiritual in its joyful practice. Perhaps Julia Child is his reincarnation!

In his honor, I have a brown plastic garbage can which held the ice at my wedding to my beloved Walter in 1980. It has a label pasted on top + Brother Lawrence +. So he is a real and daily reminder in my own kitchen.

In conclusion, I am just trying to point out that one can consider oneself of no consequence and meditation to be a lofty and unreachable pursuit, but that is not the case. Each of us, if we are alive and conscious, is precious and unique, so all it takes is to be conscious of the gift and ultimate purpose, perhaps, of consciousness. As the Hindu Dadaji put it, “God is making love in your every heartbeat twenty-four hours a day.”

lovingly,
ao