Dealing with Adversity – CREDO CLII

As so many people in the world are having extremely difficult times, any advice worth listening to seems welcome. There are two voices from the past that offer such on both a collective and an individual level, a very cogent observation. The renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee observed that it was not what happens to a civilization [country] but how it reacts that determines the outcome. A case in point, of course, was the “decline and fall of the Roman empire” which resulted from laxity and frivolity, political squabbling, contrasts between wealth and poverty, and many of the other symptoms facing our own country today. Those who are aware of history can think of many other examples, including some positive ones. Yet, many countries start out reacting positively only to fall into the power trap, such as Germany after WWI, which resulted in the Nazi regime of corrupt socialism and the Soviet version, which degenerated into tyrannical communism. Both countries started out with meaningful ideology and both ended with defeat from outer and inner forces. Then a new development cast off communism by people coming out in thousands peacefully demonstrating and protesting tyranny.

In our own country, in the late 1700s, a strange sequence was to emerge. Hindu philosophy came to Europe for the first time and was translated into German coincidentally with the American Revolution, and, as a result, some New Englanders chose to go to German universities rather than England’s Oxford or Cambridge. They learned of ahimsa, nonviolence. This inspired Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, which was read by a young Gandhi in South Africa, who went on to liberate India without firing a shot, which influenced Martin Luther King, and led eventually to the peaceful inauguration of Barack Obama. Phew! The power of ideas! This is a new way of reacting, for sure!

On the individual level, the Swiss psychologist Jung put forward the same idea, saying it’s not what happens to us but how we react to it that determines our fate. We have a choice. We even say, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!” An extreme example would be blind and deaf Helen Keller, but so many outstanding Americans have demonstrated this way of reacting, coming out of difficult circumstances in youth – one could almost name it a national trait. Contrast this, alas, with an increasing segment of our contemporary population who are succumbing to escapism in distorted pleasure-seeking drugs, porn, and crime. The hours spent on TV and video games, to say nothing of the Internet, imply living an ersatz life. In the meantime, we are risking losing our planet, our own physical well-being, and our ability to relate to each other in a genuine way. Now adversity offers us “the kitchen table,” the rediscovering of families around it and the challenge of reacting in a real and not synthetic way. Our frenetic national extraversion hopefully may adjust to rediscovering some of the rewards of introversion and a search for simple rather than virtual reality. This implies the need for a profound change in our values, taking time “to smell the roses,” noticing the suffering and needs of others, of animals, and the environment, and offering compassionate service to them insofar as we are able. This kind of reaction, were it to spread, might even save our world.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of this simple response to adversity! It liberates us from feeling helpless victims and gives us a very real freedom of decision and action. There is a price, of course, that comes with it: conscious decisions, psychologically understood, involve “karma,” or facing the results, positive or negative. For me, personally, the answer is to pray for inner guidance. I recite Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path every night before I sleep. The more I reflect upon its wisdom, the greater the respect I have for its simplicity and reliance on common sense. At the risk of being repetitive, I enclose it again as a daily checklist for spiritual review. So here it is again:

THE NOBLE EIGHT-FOLD PATH

The Four Noble Truths

There is suffering in this world:
All suffering comes from attachment and desire
There is a way beyond suffering
The way is the Noble Eight-fold Path:

RIGHT VIEWS
Free from superstition and delusion

RIGHT ASPIRATIONS
High and worthy of the intelligent; worthy of man

RIGHT SPEECH
Kindly, open, and truthful

RIGHT CONDUCT
Peaceful, honest, and pure

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
Bringing hurt or danger to no living being

RIGHT EFFORT
In self-training and self-control

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
The active, watchful mind

RIGHT RAPTURE
In deep meditation on the realities of life

              — Gautama Buddha , 6th Century B.C.

lovingly,
ao

Fiat! – CREDO CLI

In my coming 90th year, I go back to my 21-year-old self sitting on the fire escape in New York on West 13th Street and looking briefly at the sun. The thought came to me: The sun shines but IT DIDN’T HAVE TO!!! Existence is the primal YES!

It has to come before a ‘no’ can attempt to deny it.

Today, I realize that with my bicameral brain, it is virtually impossible, given the starry universe, to come to any cause-and-effect solution. The Big Bang must have had an origin, as well. Thus I am resigned to humility and repeat the Vast Certainty will have to do until I have a higher organ of perception! Perhaps that is the heart . . . ?

What touches me deeply is that humanity all over the world has wrestled with these problems. For many of us in the Western world, the Torah and the Old Testament are full of such questions, and so also have the indigenous people struggled with them. The Eastern civilizations, the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, and Zoroastrians, all have their creation versions, and I do not doubt that a handful of enlightened beings know the truth but on another level.

Thus, I suppose, a certain humility is required until we cross over.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I remember that question being brought up by the red-haired country priest in my German Swiss school in Appenzell exactly 80 years ago (as of tomorrow). I was 10 at the time. My response was that it might have been laid by a hen that wasn’t yet a hen, which immediately begged the question of evolution! With a sigh, I gave up, and I am back to the fire escape on West 13th Street!

As today is the last day of this year 2011 and tomorrow is New Year’s Day, I woke with the word GRACE on my mind. This word is full of polyvalent meanings – the Oxford Dictionary lists 14! I am choosing the 9th:

(Theol.) Unmerited favour of God, divine regenerating inspiring and strengthening influence; (state of ~ ) condition of being so influenced; (fall from ~) lapse into sin or disgrace, etc.

This word, of course, is the source of gratitude. So we receive grace when we say grace! The Lat. origin is simply gratus, meaning thanks!

This brings me to the point I am trying to make: gratitude is the antidote to the fear most likely generated about the Mayan ‘prophecies” that the world is coming to an end in 2012! If Y2K is any example, we should remember not to panic!

The truth of the matter is that it is the astronomical end of the Age of Pisces, as the Point of the Vernal Equinox, aligned with the first visible star in the constellation of Aquarius, signals the beginning of the Age of Aquarius! This Age will last approx. 2,000 years. (The confusion prior to the astronomy involved, was that in 200 BC when Hippolytus proposed the succession of Ages, he didn’t know exactly which degree to begin.)

So to sum up, the Grace we need to feel and accept is the following : Simply expressed.

      CATS WILL GO ON HAVING KITTENS!!!

There will be events, no doubt, that will tax our faith, but it pays to remember that we are not in the ultimate charge of existence itself. We need to be grateful for our existing in the first place! What needs to be ended is our ignorant insistence on fighting and killing, often in the name of this religion or that one, and the materialism of evil, greedy, and criminal behavior. The hope lies potentially in the balance of the opposite constellation sign to Aquarius: LEO! This, on Earth, is ruled by the Sun, as is every physical heart that gives us not only life but the capacity to

              LOVE!

We need to remember what Christ and other Teachers taught us:

A new commandment do I give you: Love one another as I have loved you.

lovingly,
ao

Instant Cure for the Blues! – CREDO CL

As some of you already know, I had a remarkable spiritual teacher – M. I met him on June 6, 1944, and my life changed from that day forward. I was 21, and today I am living into my 90th year. In all this time I have not once had a doubt concerning him. His teachings have guided me through thick and thin and many ups and downs. Last night I woke up and realized I was tired, and in considerable pain, and perhaps flirting with a potential depression, and realized that I have not shared his formula for this state of mind. It is very simple and it works:

     DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEBODY QUICK!

So I am curing myself in this act of sharing! If you think about it, if you feel sorry for yourself, you enclose yourself in a static circle of self-pity. However, if you act on behalf of another, that dynamic opens you to a spiral, and Spirit flows through you in even the humblest gesture toward another person, animal, or even flower. You are no longer trapping the flow of loving concern and appreciation of others.

This idea is present in the spiritual advice of all religions, not just one! It underlies the concept of our common humanity: that to love another as sparks of the same flame is equivalent to loving the Mystery we call Spirit. So here is just one beautiful expression of it:

            Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

These words were written in the Thirteenth century endure and transcend any religious dogma. They are the words of a mystic and are common to all other mystics. They seem so appropriate to our desperate needs still today, eight centuries later.

May they bring light, love, and life to us as we move towards another Solstice!

lovingly,
ao

As Below, so Above – CREDO CXLIX

 
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus gives us the phrase “As above, so below,” indicating that archetypal processes operate on a descending level of planes. Now looking back over the years of my long life as I approach my 90th year to come(!), I see the thrust of my life’s work has been starting at the bottom and trying to demonstrate that the “great truths” of our earthly incarnation can be demonstrated as simple self-evidence! We can learn the greatest lessons from the smallest, humblest objects!

This is the basis of the wisdom of fairy tales, proverbs, and even jokes, which contain the essence of religious and hefty philosophical classics. In the past these contained not abstract but physical “object lessons.” Most people disdain them because they are so simple; and thus the more complicated language is used to reach sometimes absurd definitions. Here is a quote from The New Yorker I used in my first book, Jungian Symbolism in Astrology:

   COROLLARIES WE NEVER GOT AROUND TO READING
  From “Prolegomenon to a Theory of Religion,” by Gerald James
  Larson, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
 

[3.1] The Definition. Within the context of these considerations, let me now proceed to a definition of Religion and to offer as well two corollary definitions that grow out of the basic definition. I suggest the following: Religion is a “complete system of communication” (or a “form of life”) showing in primarily “commissive,” “behabitive,” and “exercitive” modes how a community comports itself when it encounters an “untranscendable negation of . . . possibilities.”

I still have to laugh every time I read it!

What I am suggesting is a device to finding your own wisdom. If you are familiar with the basic tenets of alchemy or astrology, so much the better, but these are not necessary. Plain common sense will do just fine!

1. Look around the room and concentrate your attention on one thing. Ex: wrapping paper (a noun). Ask it: What do you do? (The answer will be a verb.) I conceal.

2. Think now of what this process suggests. Jot down your observations.

3. Its purpose may be to hide a gift, protect what’s wrapped. It differs from what it wraps. It hides the contents.

4. Thinking symbolically, what obvious example might you come up with: How about our body? How does it differ from its precious contents? Your consciousness? Your emotions? Your fears? The real unvarnished private you? Your unconscious? Your unique being!

In Jungian psychology the wrapping paper is the persona, the wrapping paper that we present to the world. My father, a Pisces, was a flaming extroverted friendly representative of the company he worked for. Cheerful, engaging, and successful. When he came home to the hotels we lived in in so many different countries, he became almost childlike, rivaling me for my mother’s attention! His mother died giving him birth, and he chose to turn my mother into his; this resulted in his having a mistress, much to my mother’s distress.

Actors are capable of changing the wrap by consciously assuming other characters. And, in a way, all of us assume different “roles” every day. This makes us socially adaptive beings. Only the very shy, introverted people use plain brown paper to hide behind.

It also is manifested unconsciously by alcohol! Drugs? Some introverts, when tipsy, become hilarious extroverts; some extroverts, on the other hand, become sentimental introverts. Extremes turn into opposites.

I disgraced myself in the hospital when delivering one of my daughters. I was given a whiff of something for pain, and as the doctor was stitching my torn cervix, I started singing at the top of my lungs, “Oh give me something to remember you by . . . !” Oh dear! I’m afraid this daughter has never forgiven me. I just became unwrapped!

lovingly,
ao

Fair is Fair – CREDO CXCVIII

 
I learned about injustice at a very early age when still a toddler. I remember it vividly. My nanny accused me of wiping my own bottom with toilet paper, which she deemed her own duty. I had not done this, but besides the undeserved scolding, the shock that grownups were not infallible was far greater – in fact, cataclysmic! And so from the age of three to this day, I have been careful not to project 100% certainty on another human being! Nor do I carry the total conviction that I am always correct in my assumptions, which is often harder! Thus I am a true Scorpio, I guess. There is a story of some witty ancient Greek who said, “If everybody lies, can my statement be true?”

Our own bodies carry this warning in that everybody’s vision has a blind spot!

This brings me to the conundrum of the word fair, which can be used in more than one way. To some, it means just and to others, lovely. As both come under the sign of Libra, which is ruled astrologically by Venus, the connection becomes clearer. Its symbol is the scales upon which we weigh and balance things, thus it rules LAW. The sequence being this: if a matter is fair, it is just, therefore harmonious, therefore beautiful, therefore fair! Aha!

There is a story the writer Pearl Buck, who lived in China at the time, tells. She was on a station platform waiting for a train. She noticed a grandmother with a little grandson and a granddaughter. She saw the boy do something naughty and when she scolded him, he blamed his sister. She then took the granddaughter aside and whacked her. Then the old woman saw that Buck had observed the incident with shock. So she explained, “I want my grandchildren to understand that sometimes injustice falls into the lives of everyone in life and that is only fair.”

Too true! How many times have I myself felt the outrage that many kids express shouting, “That’s not fair!” And not just kids, today nations are wrestling with strikes and mobs and outraged citizens all proclaiming the same emotion. We yearn collectively for justice, and perhaps we need to remember the notion of karma, the Oriental concept of fairness dealt to us through our own actions.

I have a confession to make; it is one of the greatest ‘sins’ I have ever committed. It was to use truth as a lie! I was eleven and in a Swiss boarding school. Across from the house we boarded in was a small candy shop occupied by an understanding middle-aged woman. We girls would steal across to it and buy candy with or without our pocket money. If we didn’t have cash, she would enter the sum in a notebook and I always paid my debt. This adventuring was called Auskratzen, and looking back as an adult, I must assume that the teachers knew all about it. Anyway, while on a group walk, I boasted out loud, “I’m going to the candy store!” The kids were appalled because the teacher heard this. Then they all assumed it was an idle boast. It wasn’t! Later that very afternoon, I crept across the road and bought gumdrops. I was not caught and savored both the Gummisalat and my devious device. I had told a truth to serve as a lie!

Now I am almost 89 and still feel guilty – not of the deed but of the ethical dilemma. May the Fates forgive me! I have never done such a thing again. So there it is: a public confession.

I sometimes wonder, statistically how many people in the world have been punished, imprisoned, or put to death for crimes they were innocent of committing? This brings up the tricky problem of karma, the concept of paying eventually for the mistakes we have made, in any previous life even. Is there a difference between an ignorant misdeed and an intentional one? And what of cultural rules such as polygamy accepted or seen as adultery? These are interesting questions.

Sometimes, it is a matter of individual conscience.

One solution in avoiding projecting guilt onto children which I have learned from my adult ones is a simple one, worth repeating (!):instead of telling a child that he or she is a bad boy or girl for doing something wrong, simply say, “That is a NO!” Making the matter objective can avoid imposing a guilt complex! I wish somebody had thought of this 84 years ago!

We know the negativity of the Ten Commandments. Contrast this with the Buddhist alternative. I rest my case by including it here.

        THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

The Four Noble Truths
There is suffering in this world:
All suffering comes from attachment and desire.
There is a way beyond suffering.
The way is the Noble Eightfold Path:

RIGHT VIEWS
Free from superstition and delusion

RIGHT ASPIRATIONS
High and worthy of the intelligent; worthy of man

RIGHT SPEECH
Kindly, open, and truthful

RIGHT CONDUCT
Peaceful, honest, and pure

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
Bringing hurt or danger to no living being

RIGHT EFFORT
In self-training and self-control

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
The active, watchful mind

RIGHT RAPTURE
In deep meditation on the realities of life

              – Gautama Buddha , 6th Century B.C.

lovingly,
ao

Knitwits – CREDO CXCVII

 
You might not realize what an argyle sock or a hand-knitted multicolored patterned sweater or more likely a machine-knitted one could teach you! Well, if you have such an item, turn it inside out and study the mess it seems to represent. There is wisdom hiding in that there wool. Honestly. It represents what most of us consider our daily if not our yearly lives consist of. That is, if you add in everything your conscious mind has to pay attention to all your waking hours, given your life up to now. There are times, at least as I approach my 89th birthday, that I despair about. Life does often seem just one damn thing after another. So I was ruminating as I picked up one of my colored socks off the floor and pulled it right side out before adding it to the laundry – a familiar task repeated hundreds of times during my life.

Well, guess what? It was as if the sock spoke to me and I had a profound and comforting attack of Jungian insight! What I had been looking at with was my ego, the part of all of us that deals with daily problems and joys, worries and fears, the whole kerfuffle of quotidian life.

What, if at the end we get to pull the sock right side out and see the pattern revealed that our Self, which dwells in our unconscious, has been knitting day by day!!

It undoubtedly will reveal a pattern that will have a genuine meaning and might even be illuminating the whys and wherefores that have long eluded us. Perhaps the patterns will reveal that it was not so much the actual events but the attitudes and emotional motives and strivings that add up mysteriously to one’s conscious or unconscious desires to do what was spiritually right.

All the millions of Earth’s human inhabitants have an Unconscious and many of us act according to the moral input of our time and place. So we may do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason—a theme that has occupied many writers such as Dostoyevsky and Theodorakis. We judge and misjudge ourselves and others constantly! So, is there a solution?

For me, in my old age, there is one: LOVE!

Think back over your childhood and adult life. Are there not people, strangers even, that stand out in your life because they were kind? Kindness is a form of agape, or love that asks nothing in return, has no secret agenda, and is naturally sincere. I encounter it in many ways and gestures: the little boy who got off the school bus with some flowers for his waiting mother and, seeing me, hurried to pick some dandelions for me, which were given with shining eyes, or the cashier at the airport restaurant who looked at every tired salesman, and made a cheerful, genuinely personal remark.

In short, one doesn’t have to be religious to be kind. In fact, the Dalai Lama said it simply: “My only religion is kindness.” Having met him in Dharamsala, I can truly say that he embodies his words, adding humility. My husband had gashed his forehead on an awning; when His Holiness noticed this, and Walter explained, he smiled and said, “Then you will always have a reason to remember your visit to Dharamsala!” Lovingly.

lovingly,
ao

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