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

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