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

The USA & the Four Elements – CREDO CXXXIX:

 
If you look at a map of North America, there are three layers, occupied by Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The US is the largest section and most heavily populated. If you think about it, we are the part beset with severe problems involving the four elements. Canada seems almost the calm brow of our shared continent. One wonders if it’s the negative collective consciousness that is bringing about these constant attacks of nature? Despite the unreported good being accomplished in our country, the output of TV seems to favor the headline-grabbing news of crime, disasters, and discord of every ilk. The ads are often violent and give no regard for the positive. Just tonight, I wondered what a child of five or six would think of a man throwing a dart at another and killing him! An advertisement, mind you, for a dating firm. We seem to forget the impact of such ads on kids.

Here are the four elements as astrologically or symbolically understood. I have focused on the negative impact, which seems to be dominant at the moment.

AIR
  which rules our collective thoughts.

We have high winds, tornadoes and hurricanes, and areas of serious drought:

Confusion and indecision, hype and mendacity?

The antidote would be honesty, good faith, and optimism.

FIRE
  which rules our collective actions.

At the moment we are suffering major fires in Texas, but there have been destructive major fires in several other states every year. California and Florida are recent examples.
Crime, murder, persecutions, and irrational behavior?

The antidote would be acts of courage, responsibility, kindness, and consideration

EARTH
  which rules our collective economy and ecology.

We have earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic lava.
Materialism, debt, greed, dishonesty, and conceit?

The antidote would be thrift, charity, honesty, and common sense.

WATER
  which rules our collective emotions.

Heavy rains and destructive floods are common, as are blizzards.
We get carried away and react with mob psychology, swayed by ads and politics.

The antidote is self-analysis, transpersonal love, and resistance to group pressure.

          * * *

Certainly, we are not the only nation to suffer but few other countries are beset with all four at once. For me, it raises the basic question, does human collective consciousness impact weather?

There is a lovely story called "The Rainmaker" Jung was fond of relating. Here it is:

              The Story of the Rainmaker

The function and role of the rainmaker is best described in a story. The concept of the rainmaker comes from a story from Jung and for those not familiar with the rainmaker, the following story is taken from The Tao of Psychology by Jean Shinoda Bolen and was told to Jung by Richard Wilhelm. It is the story of the rainmaker of Kiaochau.

"There was great drought. For months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said, "We will fetch the rainmaker." And from another province a dried-up old man appeared. The only thing he had asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the clouds gathered and there was a great snow storm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rainmaker that Richard Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion he said, "They call you the Rainmaker, will you tell me how you made the snow?" And the little Chinese man said, "I did not make the snow, I am not responsible." "But what have you done these three days?" "Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then naturally the rain came."
              —C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 419–20

lovingly,
ao

Dealing with Adversity– CREDO CXXXVIII

 
As so many people in the world are having extremely difficult times, any advice worth listening to seems welcome. Two voices from the past offer this on both a collective and an individual level. 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 started out reacting positively only to fall into the power trap, such as Germany after WWI, resulting in the Nazi regime of corrupt socialism and the Soviet version which degenerated into tyrannical communism. Both countries began with meaningful ideology, and both ended with defeat from inner and outer forces. Then a new development cast off these by people coming out in thousands peacefully demonstrating and protesting tyranny. Today, indeed, we have progressed to the United Nations, the EU and NATO, and yet, the struggle continues, resulting in more violence.

Historically, in our own country in the late 1700s, a strange global sequence took place. Hindu philosophy had come 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. There, they learned of ahimsa, non-violence. These Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts inspired Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, which was read by the young Indian Gandhi in South Africa, who went on to liberate India without firing a shot, which influenced Martin Luther King, and led eventually to the inauguration of our first biracial president, Barack Obama. Phew! Such is the power of ideas! Currently, we are now on edge observing a new rise of the Common Man in North Africa and the Middle East: the power of a united people spontaneously seeking freedom and democracy against a single tyrannical ruler. The concept already has inflamed at least eight different countries.

On the individual level, the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung put forward the same idea, saying it’s not what happens to us in life but how we react to it that determines our fate. Take note, 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 today, alas, with an increasing segment of our contemporary population that is succumbing to escapism in distorted pleasure-seeking drugs, porn, and crime. Also, 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 through ignorant abuse, our own physical well-being, and our ability to relate to each other in a genuine way. Now, present economic 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 looking inwards and a search for simple rather than "virtual" reality. This implies the need for a profound shift in our values, taking time “to smell the roses,” noticing the suffering and needs of others, of nature itself, animals, and the environment, and offering compassionate service to them insofar as we are able. As Mother Teresa remarked, we also need to remember that God is in everyone, and the importance of person to person. Such a reaction to adversity might indeed save our world.

lovingly,
ao

E pluribus unum – CREDO CXXXVII

 
We are witnessing in the last few weeks a new phenomenon in North Africa and the Middle East. It is the power of the common man to use a massive peaceful crowd to overcome a despotic ruler. Gandhi’s “Salt March” was a forerunner, and, to be sure, the Eastern countries in Europe had the Velvet Revolution against Communism, but these were not as clearly defined as what is happening in North Africa. Here the composite Aquarian rule of the Common Man is placed against its opposite sign Leo, the single ruler. Thus begins the New Age in historical terms. Nation after nation, starting with Tunisia, has provided massive rivers of humanity that moved as one to protest against single entrenched dictators; Ben Ali, Mubarak, Ghadafi and others.

The Latin quote which is the motto of the USA, and on every dollar bill, translates as “Out of many, one,” and was also used symbolically previously by the Roman Empire, which had a bundle of arrows called the fasces tied together, giving rise years later to the term “fascist.”

At another level, the United Nations, and the European Union (EU) function as one out of many.

Those are all political examples, but the same process can be discerned in large business companies, universities, government branches in many countries. The USA, however, is a triad of checks and balances: the judicial, legislative, and the executive branches, headed by a single president, who nevertheless is subject to the people, as Clinton demonstrated . . .

Day by day, at present, history is unfolding this new phenomenon. It deserves our attention. The internet, Facebook, etc. are all abstract communities in which we participate without personal contact. The reality of the “other” is a matter of personal projection. Take a certain journalist: you read his pieces, hear his voice on the radio, and you form an imaginary man to fill in what’s missing. Then one day, you finally see his picture and are amazed at the difference from what you had imagined. Multiply this phenomenon by a billion and the unreality of what one thinks is going on and what really is becomes daunting.

Mother Teresa put it succinctly: I believe in person to person and God is in everyone. Aquarius believes in the latter but forgets the importance of person to person. You pay a toll and a little green light comes on with Thank You! An Aquarian guru I knew signed all his computer mail “with heartfelt love.” An Aquarian author I knew was writing a book about the seven mysteries of the universe, but forgot to water his horse, which sickened. As I myself have Aquarius rising, I have spent a lifetime trying to be practical! A need, something my very practical husband Walter finally conveyed to me. His method was very subtle: he never criticized me. No, but he would become very, very silent and when I noticed this, I had to ask – only then would he give the reason. This was very helpful actually because by asking I opened myself to receive the reprimand! Always followed, to be sure, by an affectionate hug.

We really only had two fights in eighteen years. The first was when we moved our joint belongings and discovered the number of musical records we both had. I said the long shelf was for his, and he said no, it was for mine. Aargh! In the end, there was room for both. The second argument was over the virtue or lack of it, of the Emperor Charlemagne! He was for me, a wise and heroic hero. In fact, when Germany invaded Holland in WW II I dreamt he was in a telephone booth and I was banging on the glass shouting, “What are we going to do?!!” For Walter, who grew up in Germany, Charlemagne was “the bloody Saxon butcher” who invited the Scandinavian nobility to a banquet and proceeded to slaughter them, a tale I refused to believe on the grounds that the order came from someone else, a woman whose name escapes me at the moment.

Back to the topic! What the present media offers us is the opportunity to live a new commandment: Love thy neighbors, they are yourself! Even in a family, our relationships are basically the result of mutual complex projections. We serve as multiple masks to one another! As I have written before, many of our relationships are based upon opinion. I remember an experience in India, looking down at night at a corpse being burned on a ghat. Some dogs, whose eyes reflected the fire, were snatching bits of flesh and devouring them. I thought of the hounds of hell. The next morning, I saw the dogs and puppies again, and they were just pooches wagging friendly tails.

So E pluribus unum has a caveat: A chain is as strong as its weakest link. A river of humanity is subject to mob psychology. We desperately need to remember the importance of the unum’s responsibility.

I am reminded of the Hindu image of Indra’s Net. The net is held together with a jewel at each nexus, and each jewel reflects all the others! It seems a prophetic holistic symbol for the fractals of today.

If the dichotomy of the last Age of Pisces/[Virgo] was faith/reason, the individual vs the collective is indeed the dichotomy of our already-arrived Age of Aquarius/[Leo].

We can celebrate this in a form of “Instant Communion”: by making a circle holding hands and swaying back and forth three times chanting “Yum! Yum! Yum!” followed by “Hugs to the left and hugs to the right!” This always ends any meeting in laughter and delight. Try it, as many have, and enjoy. By the way, we tried this with over a hundred Tibetan orphans in Dharamsala in India, and they knew exactly what to do! So now we can truly say it has Tibetan links!

lovingly,
ao

The Pearl Principle of Toynbee and Jung – CREDO CXXXVI

   
This seems a moment in history to remind ourselves of one of the most significant ideas put forward in the last century! Arnold Toynbee, the famous British historian, put it this way (as I remember it):
It is not what happens to a civilization [country], but how it reacts to it that determines the outcome.

And to paraphrase Jung:
It is not what happens to us as individuals, but how we react to it that determines our spiritual growth.

This concept, collectively and individually, is probably one of the most important ideas that might sustain us as we live in these acutely challenging times! Egypt is a current case, in point.

There are many extreme individual examples of this: Helen Keller, born deaf and blind, or Nelson Mandela, the South African, who suffered decades in prison for trying to liberate his country from European colonization, who triumphed in the end and is now a revered heroic founder of this independent nation. These are just two well-known examples, but there are countless others all over the world.

I call it the Pearl Principle. It is the irritant in the oyster that produces the perfection, luster, and beauty of the pearl.

As so many, many people all over the world are suffering, one way or another, as countries under despotic rulers or victims of natural or manmade disasters, never was it more important to realize the enormous import of this philosophical, psychological, if not spiritual truth.

          * * *

Speaking for myself, last evening I was wallowing in self-pity with a dear friend, bemoaning the physical and financial calamity of this brutal winter that has caused the virtual collapse of a whole room in my house, with leaks that cannot be stopped until April at the earliest! The prospect of moving the contents and files, packing everything in boxes, and this includes the meditation room upstairs that requires a whole new window – at 88 and unable to use my right hand, in constant pain, plus the current absence of my beloved secretary due to illness, etc. etc. – this prospect seems insurmountable, combined with the effort to finish collecting materials for the Archives of Smith College! Well, my friend added a well-deserved scolding, and I went to bed in pain and misery, only to wake up with the comforting insights of Toynbee and Jung! Bless them! Hooray for the Unconscious!

Thus, I hasten to share the wisdom of Arnold Toynbee and Carl Gustav Jung, in the hopes of potentially cheering just a few others of the millions of people who are suffering far greater pains than I am.

I must not forget my magic word Vivex! that forces me, without fail, to get up and go on, or my oft-quoted words of the Bishop of Woolwich, In we are and on we must.

Finally, I offer the consolation of looking up to the stars at night: the universe is running on time and this too shall pass. As the medieval French poet Francois Villon wrote, Ou sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

hopefully and lovingly,
ao

How to Love Your Enemy: Part I – CREDO CXXXV

 
Now, there’s a tough commandment! Especially when the news of the day is so full of opposite factions striving against each other, to say nothing of killing them. After years of listening to clients and patients griping and growling about their antagonists, it seems a hopeless and unreasonable task.

It starts with blaming, which, of course is a form of projection, and this brings up the lines of wisdom in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others who trespass against us.”

But there is the problem of seemingly real evil and hateful behavior that makes the commandment perhaps seem too idealistic. Here is another way of looking at it:

This is based on the concept of karma, which is simple action and reaction. No “sin” is involved, and it takes reincarnation as a given. If you can allow these two to be a reality, you will know that when your “enemy” does something unspeakably cruel or evil, you should develop compassion for them because they will have to learn the hard way the next time around! That compassion amounts to loving your enemy, but it is not easy.

Yet, here are a few instances that come to mind. One was a young man with an angelic disposition who suffered all kinds of physical ailments and had a history of cruel mental and physical abuse as a child. Let Mark be a poster child for many, many similar cases in our world. It seems so totally unjustified. Consider the possibility that this is a “redemptive” life, and that by maintaining his good nature and kindness, he was erasing the past. In such a redemptive life, one may discover that one’s true nature is essentially to be kind. Here is an extreme example:

One of my uncles graduated with the Edward Sheldon from Harvard. Ned went on to become a famous American playwright and became wealthy in the 1920s. I corresponded with him at the age of 11, when I sent him, at the suggestion of my mother, a play that I had seriously written! I received a telegram critiquing it, and so when we went to New York, my mother decided we should meet. We went to the address on the Upper East Side, and took the elevator up to the penthouse. The small elevator door opened, and I was in for a shock! A narrow bier was in the middle of a beautifully furnished room, complete with a piano. The bier had four tall candles burning at the corners, and on it was the body of Ned. I felt scared until a hearty voice said, “Welcome, Penelope and Alice!” He was alive, handsome, and tan and looked twenty years younger than my Uncle George. He did not encounter the stress of everyday life and he was rolled out onto the rooftop to get some sun whenever possible.

What had happened to him was that when he was about 30, he had been suddenly overcome by a mysterious medical condition which left his body totally paralyzed for life and also blind!! To shorten the story, he continued to maintain his friendships with the literary and theatrical elite, without a trace of self pity, and took the time from that day on to befriend me, to encourage, and to guide me in times of adolescent crises. He became my spiritual confessor. I was to surface as an example of his kindness and wisdom in the biography written about him after his death, The Man who Lived Twice by Eric W. Barnes. Perhaps in the next CREDO I can tell the story, as it is an example of the unreasonable social mores of the 1930s. Ned always communicated by telegram, which in those days, consisted of a tickertape message pasted on a folded yellow Western Union envelope.

There is a saying, “Every saint was once a sinner.” One of the most controversial ideas that Jung came up with was that “Christ” might sometimes wear the mask of the “Devil” in order to teach us.

I suggest to anyone reading this, to look back over your own life and, in the privacy of your conscience, look at your own past and see where you might have made a mistake, a definition of which came to me years ago: A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience. My youthful error was that when I became conscious of a psychological or behavioral mistake, I thought I was free of it. Not so! I had to apply the new insight. I then had the idea of Christ’s seamless garment, presumably his aura; by contrast, most of us have holes in ours, but when we learn the lesson, we fill that hole and it’s on to the next one. This must be the distinction between being holey and wholly holy! (Forgive me!)

More in my next CREDO!

lovingly,
ao

Zodiacs – CREDO CXXXIV

 
There is a big flap going on about astrology in the news. It is based on ignorance. To clarify matters: there are two zodiacs. The sidereal zodiac which is Sun centered and the tropical zodiac which is Earth centered. Astrologers use the tropical zodiac as we live on the earth! But that is only part of the wonder. At the moment of spring, when the sun appears to cross the Earth's equator, stop the clock, and observe. That moment is called the Point of the Vernal Equinox. Imagine a clock hand at this moment pointing out, past the Sun, to the actual stars of the constellations; you would find that it is moving counterclockwise 1 degree every 72 years. Where it lands determines the Age we live in, and it is moving backwards into the constellation of Aquarius, through the spatial interface, from that of Pisces. (This feature was discovered by Hipparchus of Alexandria in approx. 200 BC!) This motion is called the Precession of the Equinoxes.

The Earth-centered tropical zodiac moves through the signs yearly in the natural clockwise direction of Aries, Taurus, etc., so, you have a wheel within a wheel. It takes approx 26,000+ years for the Point to traverse all the constellations, and this is referred to as a Platonic Year.

The flap is caused by confusing the sidereal zodiac with the tropical one, which astronomers frequently do! The Ages have a collective impact on our history, mythology, and psychological evolution that I have outlined in my book The Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness. What is fascinating is that there is physical proof in history, archaeology, and mythology. For instance, during the Age of Taurus, the Bull was worshipped all over the world, and this coincides with the first evidence of humanity moving from a nomadic to a settling down in one place, thanks to agriculture, providing for “civilization.” People had land, and presumably prayed for good weather and no plagues, etc., thereby projecting a sense of property. Even today, we speak of the market being “bullish”!

However, the individual horoscope is based upon the tropical zodiac and is determined by the time, longitude, and latitude of an individual’s birth and gives a psychological guide to how a person is likely to process experience.

I realize that this is a complex explanation but, hopefully, it sheds some light on the matter!

lovingly,
ao