The 12 Carts of Costco

We all know all of the following, but life can get a little hectic this time of year, things can start to fall through the cracks in Santa's sleigh, so to speak. So let's have a quick review:

1) No one else can give you exactly what you want without you having to say a thing. Other people are not mind readers.

2) You cannot give anyone else exactly what they want without them saying a thing. You are not a mind reader either.

3) If there's something you really want, and if you can afford it, then get it for yourself at some time other than Christmas. Take some of the performance pressure off your loved ones.

4) Surprises suck more often than they provide true delight.

5) What you really need will not be given to you by someone else. It will not come in a gift wrapped box.

6) What you really need will not come from another person, or from outside your being, at all. It's simply not possible.

7) Because what you really need is the experience of being alive, a deepening appreciation for the complexity and the mystery of life.

8) It's easier to experience being alive while playing dominoes than while opening presents.

9) Just because "everyone else" does something this time of year does not mean that you have to do it. Not all families are harmonious. Not all families are actually good for their family members.

10) So choose what works for you. You are not obligated to spend precious time off from work with people who treat you disrespectfully, whether they call themselves family or not.

11) We all get a little "dark" in this darkest time of the year. That's one of the reasons there's been a holiday at the end of what we now call December since before you could call us human beings: to lighten things up, to remind ourselves that warmth will return, that spring will come again. So it's perfectly OK if you don't feel as cheerful as all those singers on the radio sound. They were paid to sound that way, you know.

12) Cook. Eat. Walk. Repeat every few hours.

What Story Are You Telling?

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture (on Friday) and then a workshop (on Saturday) given by James Hollis. And if you've never heard of James Hollis, then get on powells.com or amazon.com after you read this, look up his books (he's written 13) and buy at least 2 of them. Hollis is one of the great hearts and great minds of our time.

His topic this weekend was the stories we live and tell in life. That, unbeknownst to us, we're born into our parents' story, our culture's story, a particular time in his-tory, a particular location on the planet. And that, also usually unbeknownst to us, our own story develops out of these stories as we move through life.

As children, we had to fit into our parents' stories. We were totally dependent on them. As young adults, we had to fit into our culture's story. We had to make a living, support an emerging family, function in the society into which we were born. 

But at mid-life, our task begins to change. It then becomes our job to examine these stories. To see where they limit us, where they keep us from becoming who we alone were meant to be. Or, to quote Hollis, at mid-life it becomes our job to find out "What are the invisible agencies keeping me from doing what I need to do?" "What assignments were you given at birth? Which ones do you want to stop carrying out now? What secrets were you supposed to keep for your family?"


One of the problems with family dynamics is that the most damaged member typically sets the pathology everyone else in the family has to adjust to. Without knowing it, we let our parents' stories and our culture's stories become the stories of our own life. Another problem with family dynamics is that family members typically expect other family members do things for them that they ought to be doing for themselves. 


What psychologists call a "complex" is simply a stimulus activating your own personal history. When this sort of thing happened to you as a child, you acted in this way. The complex was an emotional adaptation that served you as a child, but when carried over into adulthood unexamined, will keep you from fully growing up. "Children are necessarily disempowered. Therefore childhood adaptations tend to disempower us as adults." 


We can't keep complexes from occurring. They're autonomous emotional systems which develop in every human being as defenses against the 2 primal human fears: being abandoned and being overwhelmed. But here's some pithy advice from Hollis on dealing with complexes as we examine our life stories:

"Try and build a lull between stimulus and response." 

"Don't trust your first responses. They are often in service to old complexes."

"Don't judge the feelings that come up in you. They're not 'wrong,' and they no doubt worked at one point in your life. They were logical reactions to the stories you lived in as a child. But become aware of what you're feeling, now that you're mature enough to change your responses."


Ask yourself: "What am I doing? And what is it in service to?"


As he says, our task in the second half of life is "to find out what is truly worth serving; to find out what we are called to do."

--notes on lecture by James Hollis on "The Stories We Tell," given in Portland, OR, 12-4-10.

How I Recognize My Own Shadow

Icarus falling

Got this from my friend Robert Tompkins today:


How I Recognize My Own Shadow

I see Senator X on TV,
blocking the Start treaty on nuclear control with Russia.
And I loathe him.
I feel disgust, contempt.
The man is just venal. Stupid. Evil.
(All of which he may be.)

Then I ask myself:
But aren't I block-headed, overly stern and self-punishing, too?
Wouldn't I rather destroy something than appear vulnerable?
Do I tend to cling to the same tired old defenses, in spite of all logic?
(Uh, yeah. 'Fraid I do.)

Goddam it, Senator X is a part of me.
And I am a part of him.
We are actually connected by our hatred for one another's opinions.

Can I let this into my heart?
Can I feel the truth of this without applying guilt or shame?

Then can I go further?
Can I realize that this is not truly who I am?
That this is not truly who Senator X is, either?

Can I experience my Self, here and now, without denying the figures in my shadow?

Can I listen to Senator X, without denying the figures in his shadow?

--Robert Tompkins

Check out kochindustriesfacts.com

One of the reasons it's so hard for us to make good decisions about climate protection: there are mountains of sheer propaganda and false 'information' being funded and spread by the firms and families who make their billions selling oil and coal. 

In particular, I'm talking about the Koch brothers. Much of the mis-information about climate change and climate protection circulating through our culture emanates from these guys, who are not thinking about your health or mine. They're thinking about their bottom line.

Check out the new website that's being built to start bringing what the Koch brothers are up to out into the light: kochindustriesfacts.com.

The Government R Us

There's no better indicator of just how lost in the shadows we are than the fact that vast numbers of us describe the government as "them." 


But unfortunately, this is a democracy. One of those things where people govern themselves. If our government is not working, we have no one to blame but ourselves. 


What good is it doing for Republicans to be so upset at Obama that they can think of nothing more important than getting him out of office in 2 more years? (Mitch McConnell: defeating Obama in 2012 is our top priority) That is not even trying to govern, folks. That is flat-out obstructionism; a sore loser scheming to get back on top again.

And then what? Back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place? 

Bush was in the White House for 8 years. And the country was in terrible shape when he left office. In fact, the first bailouts occurred during the Bush administration. Obama has been in office for 2 years.

Now, which is the bigger number, 8 (Bush) or 2 (Obama)?


And let's be clear about the 2 year part: the bailouts were a necessary evil which kept us out of a full scale depression. The health care bill was a good start in a direction a majority of Americans want and need. Government spending is completely out of control, but not because of anything Obama's done. Government spending is completely out of control because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are completely unfunded, and because as a people we are too childish to tax ourselves in proportion to the number of goodies we like to receive. 


When people wearing funny hats start gathering together and yelling, "We want our country back!" just who do they think has it? 


Look in the mirror, folks. The government R us.

Scarier than Halloween

I don't know about you, but it wouldn't have to be Halloween for the political climate in this country to be terrifying me.  

Are we de-volving?

Have we gotten to the place where human beings only use their intelligence to project whatever they don't like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don't like?

 

High Stakes in Extraordinary Times

This is from the preface to Cosmos and Psyche, by Richard Tarnas:

"We find ourselves at an extraordinary threshold. One need not be graced with prophetic insight to recognize that we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical antiquity or the beginning of the modern era, that bring forth, through great stress and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view. Amidst the multitude of debates and controversies that fill the intellectual arena, our basic understanding of reality is in contention: the role of the human being in nature and the cosmos, the status of human knowledge, the basis of moral values, the dilemmas of pluralism, relativism, objectivity, the spiritual dimension of life, the direction and meaning -- if any -- of history and evolution. The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization's history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying, and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth."

Things Could Definitely Get Worse

This excerpt from Paul Krugman's article in the paper today is worth repeating. And worth understanding.

"...It's hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits--the perfect combination.
     More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won't seriously try to address the economy's troubles; they'll just use those troubles as an excuse to push their usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They'll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits..."

                                                   --Paul Krugman, New York Times News Service, 9-11-10

2010 Silver Medalist, Young Voices Foundation

This is very merry!

Using Beauty just won a Silver Medal for 2010 from the Young Voices Foundation in the Inspirational/Spiritual category. 

The goal of the Young Voices Foundation is to identify and honor books that inspire, mentor and educate youth.

I don't have the artwork for the medal yet. I'll put it up on the blog and the website as soon as I do.

Two medals. 

Not bad, little book.

Psychopaths in Power

Yesterday a girlfriend mentioned the possibility of Mitch McConnell gaining control of Congress after the mid-term elections. Made me think of this essay by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig:

"We can consider aggression as a quantum, something which some individuals possess more of from the time of earliest childhood. And we all know aggressive persons who compensate with a highly differentiated moral code. Put somewhat simplistically, aggression serves these individuals to move from desiring good to living and asserting what is good.

"Psychopaths or compensated psychopaths employ aggression to achieve their own, egoistic goals. A compensated psychopath with a great deal of aggression dominates his classmates, family, or business associates with his harsh and unyielding morality.

"There are certain advantages to being a psychopath or compensated psychopath. Many of them have a relatively easy time adapting to society, unencumbered as they are by moral or neurotic scruples. They replace the lack of love or of true relationship with a love of power, something they can achieve without too much difficulty owing to the absence of moral or Eros-related restraints. Even an compensated psychopath can find room for a justification of unrestrained power-seeking within his rigid morality.

"It is little wonder that psychopaths occupy so many of the top positions in society and rather astonishing that there are not more in such positions.

"Let me put it somewhat differently. One of the major problems of any society, or of any political or large organization in general, is that of preventing unscrupulous, socially adapted psychopaths from gradually taking over the helm."

Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, Meeting the Shadow. Tarcher, Los Angeles. Page 225.

Amen.

Homo hostilis, the enemy-making animal

TO CREATE AN ENEMY
by Sam Keen

Start with an empty canvas.
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women and children.

Dip into the unconscious well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares--devils,
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.

The problem seems not to lie in our reason or our technology, but in the hardness of our hearts. Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate and dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. And we refuse to admit the obvious. We human beings are Homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. We are driven to fabricate an enemy as a scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity. From the unconscious residue of our hostility, we create a target; from our private demons, we conjure a public enemy. And, perhaps, more than anything else, the wars we engage in are compulsive rituals, shadow dramas in which we continually try to kill those parts of ourselves we deny and despise. --Sam Keen, "The Enemy Maker"

from Meeting the Shadow, Edited by Zweig & Agbrams. Los Angeles, Tarcher. 197-8.

You need to get this book. It's full of great essays by everybody from Sam Keen to Susan Griffin, the historian with heart.

The Shadow in Politics

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is a conservative politician who staunchly opposes the interference of "big government." You might recall him saying, during the Republican party's response to President Obama's State of the Union speech in 2009 that "The strength of America is to be found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens."

What a difference a disaster makes! Now -- post the BP environmental catastrophe -- Governor Jindal is saying that big government isn't doing enough interfering in his state. "It is clear we don't have the resources we need to protect our coast. The disjointed effort to date has often meant too little, too late."

I guess when the shit hits the fan, compassionate hearts get covered in it, too.

AS E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post said, "'Deregulation' is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its tea party critics claim. But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the Gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions."

Well said.

The Dangers of Innocence

Here's what Rollo May has to say about the intersection of shadow material and morality in his essay entitled "The Dangers of Innocence":

The ethic of Christianity in our time became allied with the individualism which emerged in the Renaissance. This increasingly became the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in his lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity... Ethics and religion became largely a matter of Sunday, the weekdays being relegated to making money--which one always did in ways that kept one's own character impeccable. We had then the curious situation of the man of impeccable character directing a factory that unconscionably exploited its thousands of employees. It is interesting that fundamentalism, that form of Protestantism which puts most emphasis on the individualistic habits of character, tends to be also the most nationalistic and war-minded of the sects, and the most rabid against any form of international understanding with other countries.

We need not--indeed, we must not--surrender our concern with integrity and our valuing of the individual. I am proposing that our individualistic gains since the Renaissance be set in balance with our new solidarity, our willingly assumed responsibility for our fellow men and women. In these days of mass communication, we can no longer be oblivious to their needs; and to ignore then is to express our hatred. Understanding, in contrast to ideal love, is a human possibility--understanding for our enemies as well as our friends.

...our capacity for evil hinges on breaking through our pseudoinnocence. So long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up deeds by pleading innocent. This antediluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects.

...Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it.

--Rollo May, "The Dangers of Innocence," in
Meeting the Shadow, Tarcher & St. Martin's Press, pgs.174-5.

The Shadow in Relationships

"Sometimes I forget completely what companionship is. Unconscious and insane, I spill sad Energy everywhere."
--Rumi

Being troubled by the shadow in my own primary relationship, I thought it was high time I re-read what James Hollis has to say on the subject. The following excerpts are from his book, Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves:

"Our first relational messages are found in the primal bonding experiences... these parent-child encounters thereby constitute archaic messages that are always humming beneath the surface of our contemporary engagements with others. The more intimate the relationship, the more the archaic drama with its directives is present, whether recognized or not... while we believe ourselves free at any moment, how often are we in service to these archaic, primal messages, or better, are we ever free of them? Their ghostly presence in our social life and in our intimacies constitutes a continuing Shadow dimension whereby we are not who we are in the moment, but who we have been, reflexively, historically defined..."

"...the narcissistic agenda of any individual psyche will have a strong urge to impose itself upon the relationship in service to getting its needs met, even at the cost of the well-being of the other... The more damaged one's history, or the weaker one's sense of self, the greater is this narcissistic tendency and the more rigid and controlling the dynamics of the relationship... Thus, the Shadow of narcissism haunts all relationships, even the most evolved, and constitutes the ethical challenge of relationship, namely, 'to what degree can I truly love the Other by keeping my own needs from dominating them?'...

"...How many relationships are governed by the principle of love, by caring for the otherness of the other? How many are impaired, not through continuing enlargement and mutual support of their separate journeys, but by dint of habit, fear of change, lack of permission to live one's own journey, and refusal to accept the summons to their own responsibility?... love becomes a Shadow task for us all when it 1) asks more of us than that which makes us comfortable, 2) asks us to examine our own complexes and regressive imagoes, and 3) asks a greater generosity of spirit than we consider comfortable...

"...A relationship should serve the growth of each party toward becoming more nearly who he or she is capable of becoming. I do not see that a relationship in which people "take care of each other" is worthy of the name of relationship, at least not a loving, mature relationship. Love is supportive and caring, and therefore we freely offer gifts to each other... gifts that sometimes ask considerable sacrifice or ourselves. Kindness, affection, and empathy are part of any healthy relationship, and doing for the other is a gift to both of us, as long as it is not in service to an old codependency, or a sullen compliance...

"...Love asks independence of both parties, freedom, not control, not guilt, not coercion, not manipulation. Dependency is not love; it is dependency--it is an abrogation of the essential responsibility of each of us to grow up, to assume full responsibility for our lives. Not to take on this challenge is a flight from adulthood, no matter how mature a person may be in other areas of endeavor... We all find it easier to blame our partners than to grow up, or to recognize that we are the only ones present in each scene in that long-running drama we call our life. It stands to reason that we are the ones charged with its outcomes and consequences, not our partners. Acknowledging this responsibility is easy enough in the abstract, but it is fearfully challenging in the context of daily life when our will is fragmented, when we are vulnerable, and when we fall back into our archaic complexes...

"...(A typical marriage) carries and suffers the burden of our chief fantasy, namely, that the magical "other" will fix things for us, render life meaningful, heal our wounds, and help us avoid the task of growing up and facing the huge existential vacuum that all conscious souls must engage. Because life, with all its possibilities, all its decisions, is so huge, we cling to the small, and hope the Other will spare us the task of growing up. But, since they do not, cannot, and should not, we are angry with them. This is Shadow material, for it feeds on that which lies within us, that which makes us uncomfortable with ourselves, that which intimidates us...

"...acknowledging that we are the only constant in every relationship requires taking on the problem of our own Shadow."


--from Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding our Darker Selves, by James Hollis, Ph.D., pgs. 86-98.

Neural Nets... or Wagon Ruts?

At a workshop of Jerry Ruhl's recently, I learned about what brain researchers and scientists call "neural networks." (Since anything worth talking about alludes to the internet, you say "neural nets.")

Basically, neural nets exist because brains are very busy. And since they're so very busy, they take shortcuts to get from one place to another whenever they can.

So if you've done something, or felt something, or thought something, or heard something one time, you're very liable to experience it in exactly the same way the next time it comes up. Because you already have a pattern -- or a neural network -- for it in your brain.

And the more times you go over that thought or feeling, the deeper that neural network will get. There are places in Eastern Oregon where you can still see wagon ruts made by settlers back in the 1800s. That is what happens in the brain when we go over and over something. Think Rush Limbaugh. Think anyone who says the same type of thing over and over, with as much emotion as possible, whether it applies to the situation they're in or not. By that time, is it a neural net, or a wagon rut?

While this phenomenon is not exactly new -- Carl Jung first started talking about it almost 100 years ago, but he called them "complexes": sets of emotions attached to a fragment of your history, which are charged with feeling and energy, and are autonomous, which means they come up on their own -- it is getting more terrifying all the time.

Terrifying because we live in a world with thousands of highly effective ways to communicate, but a world where people do not tend to think about what they're saying. A world where most just say whatever pops into their heads first, or whatever they've heard someone else saying, with no reflection whatsoever. A world where many people actually make their living saying whatever pops into their heads first, to as many people as possible, and as hatefully as they can. (Sorry to pick on you here again, Rush. But you do make a juicy target.)

Folks, this is not good. As we all know, as we've been told repeatedly by every sage who ever walked the earth, minds need calming, not inflaming. Unless we're at the saint or Buddha stage, a good 80% of "whatever pops into our heads first" is going to be feeling-toned, overly emotional bullshit, capable of doing great damage to others. Not wisdom, not information, just complex. Knee-jerk, reactionary, monkey-mind babble.

Which we now pass around to one another faster than the world's worst virus.

Truly terrifying.

from The Red Book, on our current political climate

"The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time...

The clever person mocks wisdom...
he uses the pointed, poisonous weapon...
But the mockery falls on the mocker...
and he suffocates on his own scorn.

We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most."

--The Red Book, CG Jung, Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, p. 237



Massive amounts of contempt for others will not get us anywhere.

To progress, we have to accept the Beauty in others as well as the Beast in ourselves.

I'm interested in the human shadow, but this is ridiculous.

There is SO much shadow, so much blaming, so much accusing others of doing what one is actually doing oneself, so much newspeak, doublethink, and flat out BULLSHIT in politics right now, I don't even know where to start. I don't even want to get into it. How --and when-- did the American flag become a symbol for hatred and bigotry and name-calling, for obstructionism rather than leadership?

Hhhmm... Howard Zinn might have said 'from the very beginning, my dear...'



I can think of a good bumper sticker, though:

Not Self-Destructive Enough To Vote Republican

MUST we have more "The Book of Eli"s ?

Parts of David Denby's review in the January 18th New Yorker are too good not to repeat.




...I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers aren't using the world's end as a trope to license a neo-primitivist ethos. When people must scavenge just to survive, any kind of violence is justified. ...

"The Book of Eli"combines the maximum in hollow piety with remorseless vilolence. It's a true American commercial product, overflowing with barbarous acts and improving bromides.

Uh huh.

What do we see when we look within?