Three Big Little Words – CREDO CXLVI

 
Let me introduce them before we consider their power: Meet:

            and   or   but

Grammatically they are termed conjunctions because they join modifying words, phrases, or whole sentences, but their power is indisputable!

Consider “I like coffee and tea, but I like coffee for breakfast. Tea is best at tea time, but when I dine out, I like red or white wine, depending on the main course.”

These innocent little words can change meanings instantly!

Laurel and Hardy, David and Goliath.

Love and marriage – not the same as Love or marriage! or Love but marriage . . . ?

And can be healing, as in “Mommy loves you and I don’t like you chewing with your mouth open!” sounds better than “but I don’t like you chewing with your mouth open!” which is conditional.

Sounds simple but reread it as a four-year-old might hear it—subtle difference. In making it simple, I now suggest you imagine emotional confrontations between partners, employers, and employees, or political rivals!

“Shut up or else . . . !”

lovingly
ao

The Importance of Attitude – CREDO CXLV

 
Owing to the repairs to this house caused by severe winter damage, the meditation room is still empty and awaiting fresh paint. In the meantime, I have made a mini-altar on the wide windowsill in my office. It is directly above a bookshelf, and yesterday my eye fell upon a book I hadn’t read in 28 years. Idly I pulled it out. It was Dr. Athur J. Deikman’s The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy. As I riffled backward through the pages, my eye fell upon this gem of a page dealing with the value of teaching stories. The title was “Vanity” [Inflation] and it offers such a simple solution to this, I hasten to include it to relieve the many of us who get caught in trying to avoid the traps of pride/self-blaming. I think it is most worthy of sharing and hope you will agree!

                    Vanity

  A Sufi sage once asked his disciples to tell him what their vanities had been before they began to study with him.
  The first said, “I imagined that I was the most handsome man in the world.”
  The second said, “I believed that, since I was religious, I was of the elect.”
  The third said, “I believed that I could teach.”
  The fourth said, “My vanity was greater than all these; for I believed that I could learn.”
  The sage remarked, “And the fourth disciple’s vanity remains the greatest, for his vanity is to show that he once had the greatest vanity.”

  After reading this story, I observed myself doing the same things as the fourth disciple by berating myself excessively for personal failing. As I was doing so, the story came to my mind like a mirror, and I understood the role of vanity in what I was doing. The context was different from the specific situation of the story, but the dynamics were similar. My understanding provoked a wry smile and ended my self-flagellation. Not long afterward, a male patient presented feelings of self-blame whose concealed vanity I was able to recognize, for the pattern was the same. He was castigating himself for having made a “mess” of his opportunities, particularly as he was generally recognized as being highly intelligent and likable. After listening to him for a while, I offered an alternative view: “I think you’re doing yourself an injustice. You’re not a good guy who is making a mess of things – you’re a mess who is doing a good job!”
  He stopped in his tracks, wide-eyed, then threw back his head and roared with laughter. In the next session, he reported that he felt much better and had reduced his self-recriminations noticeably. My recognition of his concealed vanity, followed by an appropriate interpretation, was matched by his own recognition and decrease in his symptoms.

The example above is one of the switcheroo types, a total reversal. There is yet another way of changing attitudes, as demonstrated below in the Chinese classic the I Ching. I have interposed Jung’s words for Self and Ego where they are appropriate. It is important to remember that Jung’s definition of Self implies the spiritual “Divine Guest” dwelling in the Unconscious and giving us the hope of individuation.

                  I-Ching
From a commentary of Richard Wilhelm on the second Hexagram:
Kun –The Receptive.

The attribute of the hexagram is devotion; its image is the earth. It is the perfect complement of The Creative – the complement not the opposite, for the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as against time, the female-maternal as against the male-paternal. However, as applied to human affairs, the principle of this complementary relationship is found not only in the relation between man and woman. . . . Indeed, even in the individual this duality appears in the coexistence of the spiritual world and the world of the senses.

                [Psychologically]

But strictly speaking there is no real dualism here, because there is a clearly defined hierarchic relationship between the two principles. In itself of course, the Receptive [Ego]] is just as important as the Creative [Self], but the attribute of devotion defines the place occupied by this primal power in relation to the Creative [Self]. For the Receptive [Ego] must be activated and led by the Creative {Self]; then it is productive of good. Only when it [the Ego] abandons this position and tries to stand as an equal side by side with the Creative [Self], does it become evil. The result then is opposition to and struggle against the Creative [Self], which is productive of evil to both.


                   
The powerful symbol of the yin/yang above shows the role of the opposites perfectly contained within the circle of wholeness. Each hemisphere contains an inner opposite. From a Jungian perspective, the feminine yin contains a contra-sexual animus; the masculine yang, a feminine anima. Both are circumscribed by the circumference of the psyche as a whole. That is just one small application of this ancient Chinese symbol. It signifies balance in motion on every level – the very tides of time!

lovingly,
ao

The Mystery We Call God – CREDO CXLIV

 
One fish said to another, “I don’t believe in water!”

I once had a dream in Latin! It said: Cogito ergo sum ergo scivio deus est! The first part is Descartes’ famous saying I think therefore I am, but then it continues, therefore I [can] know God is!

I woke my dear husband up and he wrote it down on a scrap of paper. This message gave me sympathy for those who are agnostics or atheists. Having been both in my younger years it gave me a new way of countering the dilemma. There is a ‘Catch-22’ in their argument. Here it goes: the skeptic argues that since science cannot prove the existence of God, and evolution is provable, the conclusion must be that the cosmos came into being by chance.

This is a somewhat specious argument because – granted that he is right – he, himself, must also be the product of chance. In which case, of what possible value is his opinion!

I like the quote of an Indian physicist: “The greatest discovery of science in the 20th century is of its own limitations.”

I became an atheist in Portugal at the age of 11, having been overdosed with Christianity in European boarding schools. I solemnly announced this to my mother, who asked me why. I replied that no one was going to convince me that any old snake hung on a tree and spoke English. “Probably Hebrew,” my mother smiled and murmured, but then she paused and said, “Well, if you want to be an atheist, be a good one!” She told me there were other religions that might appeal to me more and encouraged my looking into them.

I followed that advice and started a systematic program forthwith of reading the holy scriptures of one religion after another, night after night, starting with the Old Testament and making notes in the margins of my red leather Bible. Unfortunately, this relic was destroyed ten years later by my daughter’s red setter who chewed it up to Leviticus! Alas, by the age of 20, I knew a lot about religion but had experienced nothing!

I went into an empty church in New York and wept. Three days later, my father suggested that I see this astrologer Hermes who had just helped him. My opinion at the time was that astrology was the superstitious twaddle of nincompoops, but as a lark, I went. Hermes, a most attractive man, lived in Little Italy within walking distance of the Hotel Holley on Washington Square. He drew up my chart by hand, looked at me, and said, “You have been looking for God all of your life.” Everything he said to me was accurate, and I was intrigued to say the least. He summoned me to return the next morning to meet his teacher M, and my life changed forever.

Since then I have spent seven more decades studying the matter. For me, one of the most valuable lessons I have learned from this is the dangers of literalism, and that the truth is revealed to us through understanding symbolic language and perceiving that what we presume to call God is not a noun but a verb, the very process of ongoing creation. Language, by its own nature, tricks us by turning verbs into nouns. “Swimming” is fun or “to swim” is fun, both as gerund or infinitive, become subject or object of a sentence acting as nouns, and still we are not even wet!

Obviously, I am no longer an atheist but I have deep sympathy for them – atheists have rejected the definition of God at the level beneath them. We all need to keep searching until we can move from believing there is no answer to the vast certainty that there is one, only we can’t apprehend it! Today I realize that the mind is ipso facto disqualified by its functioning through duality. It is the wrong instrument! The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.

So what is the solution? To quote Jung, “The longest journey most of us have to take is from the head to the heart.”

As a wonderful old Hindu teacher said to me, chuckling, “Why, God is making love to you in every heartbeat of your life!”

lovingly,
ao

“Sweetness and Light” – CREDO CLXIII

 
There once was a nun who was a hermit and lived alone six days of the week and only joined the other hermit nuns for Sunday Mass. She lived that way for many, many years. Then she came upon a book by Jung and began to read and read his work.

Gradually she began to have nightmares, terrible dreams which truly shocked her. Then finally one Sunday she encountered a nun who had always irritated her and so she hauled off and slapped her! The poor soul then had a near breakdown thinking that she had gone mad.

At her spiritual director’s suggestion she came to me to have her chart done. The chart revealed the enormous self-discipline and utter devotion to God but also the repression and denial of any relationship. I tried to make clear to her that her anger was in a strange way a blessing, because even though it was so negative, it was still a first step in relating. My friend Brewster, a Jungian analyst, said that saying “Damn you!” to God is a huge step in relating to God. In the Old Testament we are told to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, AND our neighbor as our Self (sic) – not as our ego. So the whole point of incarnation may well be to find God incarnate as the Divine Guest within us all.

Jung wrote over and over that only to choose sweetness and light and to repress all the darkness in us results inevitably in our projecting that darkness onto others. So, simply put, trying too hard to be good can be bad for you!

My dear son, Timothy, when he was 13, came home on holiday from boarding school determined to be a saint. For two weeks he was obedient to his father, helpful to his mother, patient with his pesky sisters. He slept on the floor, ate sparingly, and got a job doing work he really didn’t enjoy. At two in the morning, I passed his bedroom door and heard sobs. When I knocked and entered I found him pounding the floor with his fists crying, “It’s not FAIR! It’s not FAIR!” I asked him what wasn’t fair, and he replied, “I’ve tried to be good all these days, and I’ve fallen into the greatest sin of all! “What sin?” I asked. He moaned, “I think I’m better than other people!”

I didn’t think it was fair either, but I did pray for a solution. The next day, as I replaced an empty paper towel tube, the light shone through it. “AHA!” I stuffed Kleenex in one end and went to my son and told him to look through it and tell me what he could see. “Duh!” said he. Then I told him to take out the tissue and look again. He looked again and at me as if I were an idiot. But then he got it: the light shines through – not out of the tube. And the good we do and the love that we share comes from that higher Source – not out of us. To claim it is to identify with it and become inflated. This aha! has been an enormous help to me and others ever since, because the corollary is that when people are grateful to you or complimentary, you can shoot it back up to the Divine Guest, so one doesn’t get trapped in hubris or terrible attacks of mea culpa. The ego can be pleased enough if it can keep the pipe clear. To this day, I am profoundly grateful to my son’s efforts.

No, he didn’t grow up a clergyman, but he majored in philosophy and then in medicine and became a great psychiatrist.

lovingly,
ao

Popcorn! – CREDO CXLII

 
By now, if you know my theory of finding the sacred in the commonplace, you will not be surprised by the title of this Credo. But in case you don’t, here is a condensed version:

Creation is the manifestation of ongoing archetypal processes. As mankind evolved people realized this and in order to speak of the processes, they gave them names, and because they were universal, they were considered divine, and thus the world over(!) they became gods and goddesses! If you study comparative mythology, you will know that the names will differ but the process of each will remain constant. And the seven original processes were ruled by the planets orbiting and reflecting the center, our SUN.

These processes are also to be found hidden in manifest things as well as subatomic realms – every atom has life at its center. Agrippa, the alchemist, wrote Virtutes divinae in res diffusae (Powers divine are diffused in things). The mysterious Hermes Trismegistus coined the phrase “As above, so below.” It seems as if my life’s work has been dedicated to finding them below to start with, because there they make sense!

My dream of Jung shouting, “CONSIDER THE OBVIOUS! I DID!” confirmed my mission. The word obvious comes from Lat. ob via, on the road. Christ said, “Nothing is hidden, having eyes you do not see, having ears you do not hear.”

With this in mind, I have discovered Sophia’s source of wisdom as delight! It is simple and anyone can play the game: I will repeat: Think of a zipper, for instance. The word is a noun. Turn it into a verb by asking it, “What do you do?” It answers, “I unite opposites going up and separate them going down.” I chuckled and thought Ego con-jung-o! I unite. So going up, a zipper unites and going down, separates opposites. I have already mentioned how my husband took to crying SYMBOLOS! in the morning as he put on his pants, and winked Diabolos at night. Uniting the opposites is a key to joy, and one way is to take any thing and discover its meaning. DIABOLOS, the process of the Devil or diabolic, separates any opposites, especially the Self (our Divine Guest in the psyche) and our ego (who we think we are). Remember, Jung says the Self dwells in our unconscious, so that’s probably why. The mind cannot reach it, only the heart.
*sym Grk. together; bolein, throw; dia ,Grk, apart: bolein, throw

So what about popcorn?

The great truth I learned from popcorn is quite obvious. Once it has popped, it can never go back again. So it is the equivalent of satori or samadhi or St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus or a baby’s first walking steps or any deep meaningful AHA! we all have experienced when a great truth emerges from our unconscious. We are permanently advanced with a pop!

One of Holy Wisdom’s (Hagia Sophia’s) messages is that the truth is also hidden in the commonplace, so my conviction is that if “As above, so below” is true, why not start humbly with the below. Besides, it is far more “delightful,” as Proverbs 8: 32-41 in the Old Testament assures us Wisdom is.

Try this: take any object and look at it, then ask it: What do you DO?

This is the feminine aspect of Wisdom at its spiritual level. (The Great Mother by Erich Neumann [Bollingen Press Princeton] is a great source on this.) Wisdom is feminine in all religions except Roman Catholicism, where the third person of the Trinity (God, the Father; God, the Son; God, the Holy Spirit) in Latin is Spiritus Sanctus, a masculine noun which takes a masculine pronoun, making the Trinity all masculine! On the other hand, the Greek paraclete translates literally as Comforter, which suggests the god-mother who mothers the messages from our indwelling Self into consciousness whenever needed, and her mythical counterpart, the Fairy Godmother, has the comforting presence and gift of transforming the invisible into the visible, and she carries a wand with a “star” on top! Her process is saving us by revealing the sacred in the commonplace. She always mediates between these two and gives the child in us practical advice!

The dark feminine archetypes, of course, are symbolically the witch, the bitch, and the sorceress, which in the male anima feed the collective negative and destructive actions recorded in our daily news. The many arms of the Hindu goddess Kali display both the powerful negative and positive aspects of the Feminine. Perhaps now, we can see this for what she truly represents. (It is essential to view such matters symbolically; literalism paralyzes meaning, hence the danger in all fundamentalism of concretizing understanding!)

My purpose here is simply to give some reason for faith in the future: we need to remember that:

Yes! has to come before No can deny it
.
The Sun shines and does not take back its rays.

And the Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas, so associated with Jung, tells us: Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it.

As to popcorn, next time you have some, ask yourself how many of your kernels have popped?

As for myself at 88, right now I feel more pooped than popped, so I think I will celebrate my “Scottish Communion,” put my feet up, and have some real popcorn myself!

Cheers!

lovingly,
ao

Unusual Encounters – CREDO CXLI

 
Recent cyber communications have mentioned Thomas Mann, Freud, and Adler, and I suppose I should mention my surprising brief connecting with all three in meaningful ways.

In the summer of 1939, my parents and I – then 16 – spent the summer at the seaside Huis ter Duin hotel in Noordwijk, Holland. I was living one of the most exciting times of my life: tennis, riding, dancing, swimming, falling in love, being a naïve teenager, yet at the same time, writing poems that were being published in the Paris Herald Tribune that contradicted my outward persona. Thomas Mann and his wife and daughter Erika (who later married W. H. Auden) were also guests. Apparently Mann was intrigued by the contrast of my persona and my poetry, and he asked my father permission to talk to me. That given, he invited me to sit with him in one of those hooded basket chairs on the terrace overlooking the sea. Mind you, I had no idea of who he was. I saw a slight middle-aged gentleman with a grey moustache.

He began by telling me he had read my poetry and was curious to know if I wanted to be a writer? When I answered yes, he said that he was one himself and saw true potential in my gifts. Then he proceeded with some serious advice: Get up an hour earlier, start writing anything – just write at least 600 words – and make this a habit. This was something he did himself daily and with positive results. Discipline was the key! He said that if I followed this rule, I would have a career and contribute something to the world. I followed his advice until I went back to boarding school in Switzerland. In the meantime WWII broke out! My career was interrupted, but the Muse hovered for some time until I married in 1945 and she then fled 20 years!

Previous to this, in 1937, I had been utterly miserable in a boarding school in Providence, RI. A total misfit now again in uniform, I had traveled in Europe and North Africa with my parents, never ever more than three months in one place, and those were spent in European boarding schools. I was in the care of my wealthy “proper Bostonian” Uncle George Foote and Aunt Doris living on Beacon Hill. My parents continued traveling as my father’s job selling Mergenthaler Linotypes to print newspapers required this. He was now their Vice-president for Overseas. I was headed for “coming out” as a debutante. My reaction was troubling to say the least, and my Aunt Doris decided I needed therapy. The answer was Dr. Ruth Adler, daughter of the famous psychiatrist Kurt Adler. She was then a plump friendly woman with a short man’s haircut.

I liked her immediately because she understood the dichotomy I felt. I decided that the study of the psyche was right up my alley! One afternoon, we interrupted analysis and turned on the radio to hear King Edward the Seventh of England abdicate his throne in order to marry the divorced commoner Wallis!

The time I spent with Dr, Adler was validating and comforting. I will always be grateful to her!

I met Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter, many years later in Bath, England, when she attended a seminar I was giving in the 1970s in the actual building of the Baths. She regaled us with wonderful descriptions of Onkel Ziggy who secretly supplied her with lemon drops he kept hidden in his jacket pocket. She adored him.

My weekend workshop was given in the magnificent Regency building surrounding the mineral baths prized and built by the ancient Romans during their occupation. Their structure of the large rectangular pool is still surrounded by Roman artifacts. Above it stands the magnificent Regency building, which houses drinking fountains, comfortable rooms, and historic displays. My group met in a downstairs room, and close by was the W.C. used by Her Majesty the Queen. I was informed that Her Majesty travels with her own toilet seat that is installed for her when she visits the small mahogany-lined cubicle we were now free to use, as I remember. At teatime, we were treated to the delicious Bath buns that melt in your mouth.

I discovered the meaning of “to toast” at that time. Apparently Beau Brummell celebrated a yearly event when the Baths were reserved for the exclusive use of a number of naked “ladies” who swam in the nude to the delight of a select group of gentlemen. Beau thought their heads bobbing in the water reminded him of the toast cubes decorating a syllabub bowl filled with that custardy alcoholic beverage served at Christmas. So he raised his glass to the “Toast of the Town!” See what etymology can reveal!

Another association with Freud occurred during WWII when we were escaping in a caravan of two buses, as a group of Americans, from Switzerland to Portugal. The long hot trip through France was hindered by hundreds of refugees on foot or in cars loaded with mattresses escaping the Germans that summer of 1940. We were delayed at the customs at the Spanish border because when we were all strip-searched, a fat lady had placed a German Swiss newspaper between her bottom and the hot leather seat in the bus. The German typescript had offset on her behind! The officials thought it might be code, so we had to spend the night. Fortunately, a kind peasant couple invited us to sleep in their home. The three of us slept on their double bed surrounded by hanging garlands of onions.

Finally, we were able to board a train, but when we arrived in Madrid, we were in every sense looking like tramps. My father was tieless and his face covered by black stubble, as we entered the Ritz Hotel! Fortunately, our American Ambassador Weddell recognized my father and vouched for us. He was the one who had just engineered the escape of Sigmund Freud from Vienna to England. I remember the first thing my mother and I did was taking turns in a bathtub of cold water. The temperature was 110 degrees. We also stopped in bullet-damaged Barcelona, still recovering from civil war. We attended a bullfight. When we reached the border to Portugal, we encountered a Jewish refugee family: grandfather, father, son, all rabbis, two wives, and a small pale four-year old little boy. We gave them the last bits of chocolate and powdered coffee we had. The last we saw of them was at the dock in Lisbon, headed for North Africa.

We sailed home on the S.S. Excambion. We had a cabin, but the lounge had people sleeping side by side like sardines, among them the publisher of Time, and Salvador Dali and wife, who were very low-key and became friends, as did the governess and baby girl who ended up at the Ritz and inspired the character in the book about her: Eloise. I met them by chance later in Central Park. They were still there!

lovingly,
ao

Depression Cure – CREDO CXL

 
With all the really bad news out there, both geological and political, it is not surprising that some of us sometimes give in to depression! And I include myself.

This early morning, in meditation, a remarkable nutty vision came to me. It was as if the entire Solar System were enclosed in a bubble, and beyond the bubble, the stars were all serenely in their place, and the words came to me, in Scots, “Dinna fash’ yersel, lass, the universe is still running on time!

That notion rings true and should give us all – no matter how terrible things are – another perspective. At 88½, obviously I realize that my entire life is about to be encapsulated and blown away, and I realize that all that remains is that which I have given away: life to four children resulting in further generations, words, spoken and written, and, throughout, the theme of love needed and received yet poured out in various forms. What about hate? Mysteriously, I can honestly say I hate no other. My Teacher M explained to me that after many lives, I had finally dissolved any hatred of people by having compassion on the future karma that they would have to endure. As I have suffered a lot of emotional pain in my life, I can view the lessons learned, but hating just never has been a problem. The evildoers in this world are destined for enormous karmic debt, and this should evoke compassion. “Hell” is living with extended negative consequences to negative actions. The difference is ignorance or conscious evil intent. A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience.

In my book The Dove in the Stone I recount the story of a conversation with my Teacher M in which he likens consciousness to a tree. Trees do not grow like poles alone. They have branches which go out at an angle from the trunk. The branches have twigs that bear leaves which are open to the sun’s rays and enable them to grow. And each leaf on the Tree of Life is an AHA! And that tree in Genesis is an apple tree. It blooms. And after time, bears apples. The apples fall from the tree and are its gift to the future.

My hates are connected to my own love of perfection – Moon in Virgo – and I hate making mistakes of any kind. So I am grateful for this: “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” Forgiving myself is another matter entirely Sigh.

Here is a poem that expresses my view:

The Poles of Eden
 
Do not let me mock you, dear
  do not let me hope
  do not let me gather
    a mother and a father
    nor ask them why
  after the release of gold
  after the silver of their peace
  after the sadness and the sleep
    they gave up, turned inward
    each to each his leaden dream
  and left you weeping in their deep
      crying
        screaming
          shuddering
  for comfort and for love to keep.

  Godself has a great pair of pincers
      half a woman
      half a man
  and where they close, where one and One
  in pulsing pinch of promise
      life begins and love began.

  Oh, constant Adam, taste your apple
  roll your tongue about those pips
  and kiss sweet knowing Eve
  upon her musing lips
sons and pentacles and steer
      her womb will render
      and chattel is what those sons
      will hold most dear-
  spliced and sliced out of spit and soil, and split
    One into desperate two
  you seek through sweat and shame
  and serpent dream, and do-
    and you, poor Eve, aborted all that pain
    that Self might gain in Abel and in Cain
      and Adam called you keening
      back to rest - you were his soul
      his hope, your breast
      and Seth he rendered second
          unto death.
  Tell me, son, still young
  and brown, and marked, and hairy
  do you range the desert?
  are you lonely?
  do you range
  where stone and spirit
  make exchange?

      if you quest and thirst and rave
      for answer, seek the mountain
      seek the fountain
      in that initiating cave -
  there you'll find a tomb will mouth
  your prick of conscience
  and swallow continents and questions
  the pestilence of thinking
  deeds and fears
      you'll pass through such a death of seed to peace
      where one in beauty bends to save
      to lead you up bright steps
      by night-webbed gossamer
        to what you crave
  and at that inner height
  you'll find from apple's pride and root
  from knowledge and apple tomb absolved
      grown
  now luminous, now numinous
  your flowering Tree of Light
  your sanctifying Fruit of Life -

  Godself holds a branch of annulating fire
  and flails his grain
  with time and with desire

        and when all and ever
        will be spent
        retted and rent
  He'll gather from the chaff and ash, the spark
  and spin it starwards up
  to spiral out to shimmer in the dark
        then rest and smile
        know and be charmed by love
        filled and fulfilled
  for this
      ah, yes
        is Wisdom.
This is what She meant.

lovingly,
ao