Technology and Soul, The Shadow of Technology

I went to a workshop given by Glen Slater, PhD, last weekend on "Technology and Soul, Living at the Turning Point," and was just getting on here to talk about it, when up popped a whole slew of new options I could add to my blog site -- Do I want my readers to be able to flip through my old blogs, or scroll through my old blogs, or eat my old blogs, or what? -- that I had to think about before I could even get onto my blog site. 

And of course, by the time I suffered through that initial interruption, which was full of seemingly pressing questions that apparently needed to be answered immediately before I could even get onto my blog site, I was in great danger of forgetting what I had gotten onto the blog site to say in the first place.


Perfect. And exactly what the workshop was all about. 


We are absolutely inundated with choices. Most of them technological. Most promising to make our lives easier or to make our work go faster or to make us cooler or smarter or more attractive. Most sounding downright irresistible, now that we know so much about how to market things to one another. So we scurry from choice to choice, trying to make the "right" one, trying to keep up, trying to do what everyone else is doing, leaking little bits of our own unique creative individuality all the time. 

Soul making takes some peace and quiet. Some continuity. I had an entire chain of thought going about that workshop which will never quite exist again. Because it was booted out, rooted out -- almost entirely expunged -- by another set of ideas that popped up in front of it. Did you ever read Watership Down? (Great book.) At one point the rabbits are trying to get a big old dog to go in a certain direction, so one rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases... 


...that is our minds, folks. In the USA, circa 2000s. We run hard, but we are easily distracted as to direction.

50 years ago children read Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer or Huckeberry Finn. Today, many children have to struggle to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. There are so many forms of communication and entertainment available to us we can't bear to limit ourselves or our children to only doing one thing at a time. But we know from brain scan studies that multi-tasking prevents deep understanding in any of the tasks involved. (Or, there seem to be a lot more channels available today than we actually have the bandwidth to handle. See What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.)

We can't keep technology from effecting our souls. That's where we are. That's what's happening today. But we can, as Slater suggests, try and make its impact on our souls more conscious. We can make more of an effort to choose what will serve us and to reject what will not. We can start to realize that the "hive mind" produced by cyberspace is not unbiased after all, it's actually extremely biased, and not towards wisdom, either -- it's biased towards selling products.

We can start to realize we don't have to chase every new rabbit that pops up.

Also recommended by Slater:
You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier
Enough, Bill McKibben
Alone Together, Sherry Turkle

Shadow in "The Black Swan"

 Half Jester, Half King mask.

Every few years we're blessed with another great artistic example of what happens to those who deny or bury their shadow. This year, it was The Black Swan.

Nina was a good girl. A good girl in a grindingly difficult profession where harsh judgment was the norm. A good girl trying to placate a fragile, frustrated, controlling mother. A good girl trained since early childhood to ignore the complaints and demands of her own body, the needs of her own soul.

Perhaps not since Robert Louis Stevenson woke up from a dream and began writing down The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we been presented with such a splendid and graphic vision of what happens next -- internally -- to such good girls or boys.

They die. 

Maybe not right away, in fine dramatic fashion, like Jekyll or Nina. In fact, maybe you won't even notice their deaths, since most people you know will be doing the same thing: that slow, mute, miserable shrinkage that occurs every day while we dutifully trim our dynamic, multi-faceted pegs to fit into the small round holes of Corporate America. But it will still be death.

Like Dylan said, He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

There's a lot of juice in the shadow. A great deal of creativity. 

But ignored, split off, or denied access to consciousness, the shadow turns deadly to its own ego.

 

As Marie-Louise von Franz (friend and student of Carl Jung's, acclaimed analyst and author in her own right) once put it,

The shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, it is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along. Sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love -- whatever the situation requires. 

The shadow becomes hostile only when it is ignored or misunderstood.

The Shadow In Health Care

This is my grandson Mitchell, with his friend Groucho. Yesterday we spent all day with Mitchell and him family at a local hospital's pediatric oncology unit, learning that this beautiful little guy probably has lymphoma. There is a large unexplained mass of tissue present in his abdomen, as well as smaller masses in his groin and his armpit. So tomorrow we will all go back to the pediatric oncology unit with him, where Mitchell will be biopsied and bone marrow scraped and tested and treated lovingly and professionally again by the excellent staff that work there.

We also learned yesterday that the health insurance which both of his working parents pay into out of every paycheck may not cover oncology treatment. Bumps and scrapes? You got it! Cancer? No way! It's sham insurance. Looks and sounds like health insurance, comes out of your paycheck in the same way, just doesn't cover you when it counts.

Where has this country come to? When two hard working young people have to worry about whether or not they're going to be able to afford the medical treatment which will be necessary to save their son's life? We're not talking tummy tucks or Viagra prescriptions, here. We're talking cancer care: the Big C. For one of the sweetest little boys in the world.


And where is this country going? When those in power would rather keep the "the other party" from moving forward on comprehensive health care than come up with a simple system that would work for all?

We could afford to wage an unfunded war in Iraq for trumped up reasons, killing, bereaving and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans, but we cannot afford for Mitchell to have a bone marrow scrape and chemotherapy? 

We can afford tax cuts for the rich and the powerful, but if Mitchell does get well enough to go back to school, we cannot afford for that school to have art, PE or music teachers?

If you're "Proud to be an American" right now, perhaps you're just not paying attention. 

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

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