Words of Comfort – CREDO LXXVI

   
I came across a message I received some years ago and stuck in my Commonplace Book Vol.VIII. It is handwritten and I found it in the bottom of a desk drawer I was emptying. The words came today to comfort me yet again as I seem to be evaluating all my failures at the end of this life. And I think they are worth sharing because all of you who receive these CREDOS, I intuit, are trying to grow, to become wiser, better, and of greater service to others. It seems to be a message for any one of us who tries so hard! These are seeds that may not grow for a while if not needed, but just know that if you read this, you have them now in your Unconscious!

Here it is:
Stop preceding the Love of God
with your own self-judgment!
Accept the healing waters, let them flow crystal clear
as a freshet in the sunlight.
Release, release, release – know that
you are bathed in Love.
Accept this though it come to you
from strange directions and in strange ways
You are not alone.

lovingly,
ao

The Catena Aurae: Teachers – CREDO LXXV

   
The Catena Aurae is the Golden Chain often referred to as the succession of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Alexander the Great, but it has other implications as well. In generation after generation there have been great Teachers, hidden and revealed, who have passed down esoteric truths for the enlightenment of those ready to learn from them.

The image of the chain links not only these great and wise masters in every culture throughout history but can also be applied to all those wise men and women who have influenced you and me, either formally or informally, in person or in print or any of the many new ways of communication. It is like a slowly moving river of invisible love offering itself to all that thirst.

We need to pause and reflect on the influence such may have had on our lives, to realize that each was born a child and had to grow up, often under difficult circumstances, and had to learn and realize and grow and benefit from learning the hard way. For this we need to be profoundly grateful; to pause and think how we, in turn, can pass on the good we have received.

When we think of teachers, our first thought goes to education and school. As I went to several different schools in different countries, I was exposed to a great many different teachers. I was blessed to encounter four great educators. They all had something in common and I will try to explain this in Jungian terms.

1) They taught not from ego to ego alone but from Self to the Self of the student! This means the basic difference between being an in-structor, one who builds in the structure of the pertinent discipline, and being an educator. This word comes from Lat. ex ducare, to lead forth, to make conscious the unconscious of the student. As I profited from this insight over the eighteen years I taught kids myself, I realized at the end I really had not taught them anything but perhaps had engineered a few attacks of insight – those magic words “Aha, I get it!”

This puts the words of Robert Browning’s poem to mind and might explain, by hindsight, M’s prescient mentioning of Browning to me on the first solitary encounter I had with him:

      IMPRISONED SPLENDOUR
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception – which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

2) By extension, of course, the Golden Chain involves more than one way of teaching, the most important aspect of all: teaching by example. Looking back 65 years to my spiritual Teacher M, he personified that. For all the years I knew him, I never saw him angry or depressed or careless. He had the knack of being totally present to each of us, of being kind and even fun. Yet there was always a transpersonal dignity and implicit knowing about him. A steady Light and source of Love.

In writing this, now that I am 86 years old, I realize how short I fall in living up to that example! I was 21 when I first met him, and looking back I realize the only gift I had to give him was my ability to make him laugh. As this was in the midst of WWII, he had few occasions for laughter but calling him fondly “Dr. Gumblegurk” helped. I think I was a granddaughter of sorts for him and there was that kind of love between us. He was the inspiration for Gezeebius in my The Beejum Book.

3) Just in terms of educating children, my greatest debt of all is to A. Bronson Alcott, whose two books I discovered – unread for over a hundred years – in the stacks of the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island, and which 35 years later I managed to edit and republish in my book How Like an Angel Came I Down. He was the eccentric father of Louisa May and a Concord friend and conspirator of Emerson and Thoreau. He had the most compelling approach to the education of children and prefigured Jung in many ways in his belief that the psyche of a child is not a tabula rasa, an empty slate. In the appendix of my book, I give hands-on ways I implemented my own teaching of children in fifth, sixth, and especially ninth grades in private schools on Long Island. I am still in touch with some of them today! I feel I was repaying those four teachers I encountered during my rebellious childhood! Each of them saw through all that and summoned my Self, such as it was, and encouraged with trust, responsibility, and no nonsense affection. Many years later I wrote this poem:

      GROWING
The hell I knew had human eyes
angels that were demon wise.
Pain to beauty, beauty's pain
rounded wisdom round again.
Love came down in hate's disguise;
life it is that never dies;
Love it is that tries and tries.
Child and demon, demon's child,
innocent and running wild
stropped for seizing heaven's prize.
When hell is telling, heaven lies;
when hell is selling, heaven buys.
We struggle dreaming struggle's dreams
and reaching where our wisdom gleams,
the child within us cries and cries.

lovingly,
ao

Voluntary Simplicity – CREDO LXXIV

   
My granddaughter Rowan gave me a copy of a workbook with the title above. It is extremely compelling, containing short articles by different authors and topics for discussion. I was especially struck by the following excerpts and think they are worth all of us considering, given the state of the planet.

Since 1957, the number of Americans who say they are “very happy” has declined slightly, from 35 to 30 percent. We are twice as rich and no happier. Meanwhile, the divorce rate has doubled, the teen suicide rate has more than doubled, and increasingly our teens and young adults are plagued by depression.

I have called this soaring wealth and shrinking spirit “the American paradox.” More than ever, we at the end of the last century were finding ourselves with big houses and broken homes, high income and low morale, secured rights and diminished civility. We were excelling at making a living but too often failing at making a life. We celebrated our prosperity but yearned for purpose. We cherished our freedoms but longed for connection. In an age of plenty, we were feeling spiritual hunger. (David Myers)

SOME SIMPLE TIPS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION

Before you buy …
Ask yourself these questions:
• Do I really need it?
• What are ALL the costs over its lifetime?
• Can I afford it?
• Are the resources that go into it renewable?
• How long will it probably last?
• Is it recyclable?
• Do I have one already that could be fixed or repaired?
• How many hours or months will I have to work to pay for it?
• Am I prepared to maintain it for its entire lifetime?
• Is it worth it?

Avoid the Mall …
Go for a walk; talk with friends. Fact: There are more malls than high schools in America.

Become an advertising critic …
Don’t be sucked in by efforts to make you feel inadequate so you’ll buy more stuff you don’t need.

Splurge consciously …
A few luxuries can be delightful, and they don’t have to be expensive.
[Source: Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic by Wann, DeGraaaf and Naylor © 2001]

As a result, I am busy clearing my house of much stuff that is no longer being used but might be useful to someone else. This is not a noble gesture on my part but in truth a necessity, as I am old, handicapped, and with greatly diminished need for “stuff”! As I once remarked in my wiser teens: Virtue is really enlightened self-interest! A sensible observation, if I do say so, as it cleanses one of pride.

I will keep this short today because it recommends multum in parvum, or there is much to be found in little! Granted, on a national if not a global level, this points to a different economy, not one based on spending so much on acquiring material but in paying more attention to things that matter more. Note the word matter has more than one meaning! But that is another matter for a future Credo!

lovingly,
ao

Instant Depression Cure! – CREDO LXXIII

   
Given the state of the world in general and our nation in particular, there are many, many of us who are fighting negativity and may be, as I have been myself, worried and depressed. As my mother pointed out, there are three things that usually provide us with stress: money, love, or health problems. The root emotion is fear.

Fear comes for many reasons, and trust may be hard to come by unless one is supported by spiritual faith, and even that may become sorely tested. Last night, a memory of my Teacher, M, came to my rescue. Back in 1944, some sixty-five years ago, he counseled me: When you are feeling down, afraid, and sorry for yourself,

Do something for somebody quick!

It doesn’t seem to matter what you think to do: pick up the phone and call a friend, reach out to do a favor, apologize for something, give a child or anyone a hug—all that matters is that you shift your attention from yourself to concern for another living being. As I write this, I am reminded of Christ’s last words on the cross (and you don’t have to be Christian to appreciate them), “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

This is no Pollyanna goody-goody advice but sound spiritual and psychological counsel. It is our ego that gets depressed. When one reaches out sincerely to touch someone else with kindness, one allows the flow of energy of our center of the Self and Divine Guest to course through us to not only heal us but help others. Thousands of years ago, the wisdom of the Hindu Upanishads offers us this lovely thought:

As the Sun shines upon my heart, so may my heart shine upon others.

The Bible tells us that “the sun shines upon the just and the unjust.” This is a powerful reminder that our physical sun is a star and the mysterious source of all life, warmth, and, consequently, incarnation of Spirit.

And in conclusion we also have

The Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me a channel of thy 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
Where there is sadness, Joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be comforted as to comfort
to be understood as to understand
to be loved as to love
for it is by giving that we receive;
It is by forgiving that we are forgiven
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal Life.

See what I mean?

lovingly,
ao

Original Good – CREDO LXXII

   
The Western Christian world has been dominated by the concept of “Original Sin” based on the second creation story in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve. However, the first Creation story is that God created the world in seven days and saw that it was good.

Many people do not realize that there has always been a Celtic Christianity, brought to Iona by St. Columba from Ireland, the history of which is too long and complicated to go into here. The characteristics of Celtic Christianity were based on a deep love of nature and an incorporation of spiritual presence in every aspect of human life. To the Celts, we are originally good but can fall from grace.

A terrible confrontation took place at the Synod of Whitby in Northumberland in 664 between the Roman Catholic and the Celtic Churches having to do with discrepancies in calendars and moving on to deeper spiritual matters. I went to Whitby and tried climbing the wall at St. Hilda’s but did not succeed! It was winter and everything was closed. The upshot of the Synod was that the Roman church won the vote and Ireland was changed from its nature loving ways to a strict and basically anti-feminine brand of Christianity.

St. Columba, in the previous century, was a bridge between the pagan Druidic religion because his parents became converts to Christianity but Columba was also raised in the ancient Druidic lore and so knew both. The result was a lovely combination of both and a devout inclusion of Spirit in even such things as lighting a fire or shearing a lamb

Go shorn and come woolly
Bear the Beltane female lamb
Be the lovely Brid thee endowing
And the fair Mary thee sustaining
The fair Mary sustaining thee

All nature was suffused with Spirit and deemed essentially a blessing, with the exception of leftover attacks by some dark forces of fairyland.

J. Philip Newell, a dear friend and previous Director of the Iona Community, has written an outstanding recent book called Christ of the Celts, and I can’t recommend it too highly! He is a scholar and a poet and a beautiful soul. In it, he stresses the notion of Original Good. He defended my book THE DOVE IN THE STONE: On Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace when it was rejected by the previous fundamentalist director! The only rejection I ever suffered! It had been appreciated by George Macleod himself, the founder of the Community. Thanks to Philip, that book and its sequel THE WEB IN THE SEA: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of Soul have been sold on Iona at the Abbey bookstore ever since and have had a part in bringing many readers to visit Iona! Both books are conversations with my darling husband as we wandered from site to site on that tiny precious island which I have visited twenty-three times.

Curiously enough, another book of mine entitled How like an Angel Came I Down, which was an edited version of Bronson A. Alcott’s Record of a School: Conversations with Children on the Gospels – a marvelous book lost to the world for 170 years – had the children in his school in Boston, seven to twelve years old (and recorded verbatim), insisting that they were born good! There was much debate among them as to how they had fallen from grace!

Alcott was the father of Louisa May, author of Little Women. He was a Transcendentalist and friend of Emerson, Thoreau, and others in Concord, Massachusetts. He was a wild-eyed idealist where children were concerned and fought the prevailing Puritanical approach in early education that children were “limbs of Satan” to be controlled by the strictest methods. He totally transformed my own way of teaching! His idea of teaching the Gospels comes out in the first lesson: the class will read and then instead of his telling them what it means, the children are to tell him! He replaced the straight backless wooden benches by inventing the backrest holding the desk of the child behind it, brought flowers into class, and did everything to make the children love coming to school. The worst punishment was to be kept out of class, and instead of paddling, a boy was to hit Alcott hard on his hand, which never happened! Elizabeth Peabody, who later brought kindergarten to America, was the young assistant who transcribed the conversations. The children recorded their thoughts in “Commonplace Books” and some can be seen at the Fruitlands Museum to this day. I treasure the outburst of seven-year-old Josiah Quincy who exclaimed, “Oh, Mr Alcott, I never knew I had a mind until I came here!” and the letter an eight-year-old sent him saying,

Dear Sir: I received your letter with great satisfaction; the good advice you gave me I will try to remember and profit by. That inward ray of immortal life which you have so minutely described, I understand to mean conscience, though I do not always obey its influence. 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 finally convinced me, that we should not too often commit the dreadful sin of seeking all good without, and not beholding it within our imagination.

lovingly,
ao

The Noble Eightfold Path – CREDO LXXI

   
I would be remiss if I did not share this beautiful rendition of Buddha’s advice to his disciples. Unlike the Ten Commandments of Moses, it has no specific dos and don’ts but suggests eight mental attitudes that can guide anyone to living a more harmonious and compassionate life. I memorized these over fifty years ago and often recite them to myself before going to sleep. I hope that they may be as meaningful to you as they have been for me. It never ceases to amaze me how these wise words come down to us through the millennia and are still as relevant to the human condition as they were when first spoken!

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 BC

lovingly,
ao

Science and Religion: Part II – CREDO LXX

   
In Part I of “Science and Religion” (CREDO LXVIII), I related that as a ten-year-old I lay out in a field looking up at the stars and declared that when I grew up I wanted to unite science and religion. Well, by now most of you know that I have been an astrologer for sixty-five years, having started out considering it, as many people do today, “superstitious twaddle for nincompoops.” I am grateful for this because I can understand the scoffers. However, when I had my chart done by Hermes, the one who introduced me the following morning to M, the epiphany was too profound. I went from the despair of thinking there was no answer to the conviction that there is an answer! What that answer is cannot be defined by the ego but only approached in the “vast certainty” intimated by the Self.

However, to share what I have come to understand calls for a new definition of astrology – what euphemistically people now term Cosmic Science, a far cry from Madame La Zonga and the popular predictions in newspapers. We don’t reject Shakespeare because you can find some of the same English words he used in the funny papers! And after years of studying Jung, I knew I was on the right track one great day when I discovered his serious interest in astrology!

Here is my definition: Astrology is really a symbolic language of archetypal processes. It functions in both the unmanifest and the manifest worlds and unites them in the Unus Mundus. As for the individual chart of a person: The chart reveals the unique way an individual is likely to process experience. It is a gift that we can become conscious of and that can help us psychologically and spiritually, or not. This is the way I have taught astrology’s usefulness at many Jungian institutes and centers. In that sense, and by virtue of my age of 86, I suppose I am considered by some to be a pioneer, but I studied with Marc Edmund Jones and read Dane Rudhyar, to say nothing of Jung, and honor all that I learned from them. Today, astrology is much more widely accepted as an adjunct to psychological analysis and a guide to spiritual growth.

Thousands of years ago, early humankind discovered the dual abstract processes of light and dark, expansion and contraction, birth and death, masculine and feminine, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. They sensed that these were universal, therefore divine, and needed to be named. So they gave them the names of gods and goddesses. These names differed in different cultures and in different eras, but in all the millennia, the processes themselves have never changed! No one has ever said Mars is really Venus or Zeus is really Kronos.

Once anything is named, the next step is to personify it as an archetype with human attributes. It is then further reified by temples and rituals, and thus enters the manifest world, eventually becoming a religion yet so encrusted with material thinking that the process is virtually lost! Then the old religion is supplanted by a new “Age,” and a new cast arrives on the scene – but the archetypal processes they represent remain because you cannot kill an archetype! The worst that can happen is that one is banished and moves into a fairytale. An example is the masculinizing of the Holy Spirit (Hagia Sophia) into the Latin Spiritus Sanctus (which has a masculine ending!), thus rendering the Christian Holy Trinity all male! So feminine Wisdom took refuge in fairy tales and became the Fairy Godmother. Why is she always a helpful figure, mediating between the invisible and visible worlds and giving practical advice? Why is she called the Mother of God? The answer is that Wisdom is universally feminine in all other cultures. But the Virgin Mary is loved for her sweetness and compassion rather than her wisdom. The powerful feminine archetype, as in the goddesses Isis and Kali, was split and the negative projected onto the pagan “witch.” The root of the word witch is wisdom. Symbolically, Mary as archetype is a human goddess. But she presents a challenging model for many Catholic women who cannot be immaculate mothers in the flesh, as some have protested in writing – to say nothing of the exclusion of women from Roman Catholic priesthood. Nevertheless, I am personally deeply affected by the Virgin Mary, perhaps because my moon is in Virgo.

I will give just a single example of opposite archetypal processes, expansion (astrologically Jupiter) and contraction (astrologically Saturn), as they appear on different levels. Note that any process carried to excess can become negative, so the listed characteristics may be positive or negative.

  Expansion – Yes! We can!

Psychological: + extraversion, enthusiasm, optimism, positiveness, joviality; – inflation.

Mythological: Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Indra, Ganesh. – Bacchus?

Religious:+ Pope, St. Peter, St. Nicholas, the Baal Shem Tov, the Dalai Lama, imams, rabbis, priests, preachers who are spiritually encouraging; – fraudulent gurus of all faiths.

Secular: + Santa Claus, “emperors,” CEOs, coaches. Falstaff, Winnie-the-Pooh! Thursday! – Midas, Elmer Gantry, dictators, Madoff.

Astrological: planet Jupiter, ruler of Sagittarius, ruling + religion, teaching, and preaching, wealth, succeeding, graduating, traveling, giving, enjoying; – boasting, gluttony, greed, excess of any kind.

Scientific: heat expansion, multiplication, growth, swelling, obesity, inflation, eruptions, surplus, thunderstorms, floods, hurricanes.

Culinary: cooking, boiling, roasting, feasting, celebrating.


  Contraction – No! Wait a minute!


Psychological: + introversion? logic, philosophy, rationality; – negativity, pessimism depression; caution, fear, denial.

Mythological: + Kronos, Saturn, Shiva; – Beelzebub, Satan, Mephistopheles.
Religious: + Moses, Solomon, Hammurabi, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; – Judas, Savonarola , Inquisitors, Hitler, Stalin?

Secular: + judges, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, accountants, pathologists; – Silas Marner, Scrooge, Darth Veda, Eeyore.

Astrological: planet Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, ruling + manifestation, business, time, money, diamonds (reflect Sun most brightly), construction, frontiers, restraint, discipline, outlines, old age, grammar, philosophy, logic, law and justice, Saturday! – failure, poverty, debts, limits, imprisonment, sickness, death.

Scientific: structure, cooling, solidification, carbon, ice; geology, geography, proofs, skepticism, matter, material, weight, volume, lead, earth, snow, rock, caves, bones, foundation, limits, ends, results, accomplishment!

Culinary: + salting, cooling, setting as with Jello; – hunger, dieting, starvation.

(* This is not a description of a person born a Capricorn! Only the archetypal process as such. Capricorns are often serious as children and grow younger and more beautiful as they age.)

Here is a lovely description of the two processes in balance:
When you expand think of contraction and your work will have form. When you contract, think of expanding and your work will have the feeling of effortless ease.
     – Chinese advice to any artist.

lovingly,
ao