Just Some Stuff About Life As I See It

Bravery

2012-01-04T09:17:00.001-05:00

Is not defined in singular terms. There is no one definition of courage that applies to the whole of
(wo)mankind. If I am not afraid to die, if I actively and aggressively want to die then picking up my weapon and heading into the battle is less an act of courage than the exercise of the means to the desired end.

Courage does not operate on predetermined degrees. There are those among us for whom the tiniest step outside their comfort zone e.g. leaving the house and going to the grocery store, requires levels of courage that some soldiers will never experience in their lifetime.

But the choice to exercise our own version of courage, the act of taking that tiniest step is the very first stone put in place that eventually leads over the rest of a lifetime to the kingdom of Rome.

True Art

2011-11-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

I wonder what it is that people define as “art”? Beyond that what is the specific quality that defines a particular work as “great” and what makes the individual who painted it a “great” artist? I suspect that “it” is much the same “it” that defines a “great” philosopher.

Which is to say nothing that anyone can put their finger on. Nothing that can actually be defined. Nothing that two random people with differing points of view, differing life experiences, differing tastes would agree upon. And most importantly nothing that you and I do not possess.

Yet I sit here wanting what they have that I don’t. Some deep, dark, mysterious, unexplained, unexplored depth of soul that apparently they possess that I never will. That quality that permits them to put down on canvas what I never can. To see in nebulous shapes and colors what I cannot.

This last statement I make in all seriousness and completely in jest.

Seriously because I do oftentimes wish that I had what they had and in jest because when reality intrudes upon those same thoughts I realize that in the end “art”, in whatever form it presents itself comes wholly as an expression of the individual, even if that expression is capable only of barely scratching the surface of the heart and mind. Even if that expression is capable of nothing more than a few brushstrokes of varying color because those few brushstrokes indicate where a person is in their heart and mind at that moment.

Suicide Revisited

2011-07-16T21:30:00.001-04:00

Being in the throes of suicidal thoughts and feelings is a devastatingly lonely place to be. I know this from experience… twice over. A number of years ago I was there, for an extended period of time, several years in fact. I was solidly stuck in that place, that excruciatingly painful place where I was (or so I thought) completely alone and literally struggling to hang on.

I still look back on those days with incredulousness (is that a word?) for a number of reasons first and foremost being how on earth did I ever get to that point? I think no matter how much therapy I have, no matter how much I learn about myself, no matter how much I come to understand that adult depression has its roots in childhood experience I will still and always be incredulous that I ever got to such a point. That I could reach such a painful place that it seemed the only way out was death. I think many would agree with me when I say that after struggling in such a place for so long, after exerting so much energy to a) keep myself going and b) trying to hide my awful state of mind from everyone around me the peace, the sweet release that I envisioned could only be offered in death became almost an obsession. I can honestly say that if I did not have a young son at the time I am not entirely sure I would be here now.

I said ‘twice over’. These days my son suffers from depression and I have seen him struggle through some pretty low times. I know he thinks of suicide, he told me so because I asked him. Trust me when I say there is nothing, NO THING on God’s green earth that can strike the kind of fear in the heart of a parent as the knowledge that their child thinks of suicide. I have not yet decided if it is good or bad that I have first-hand knowledge of how it feels to get to this point. I suppose it’s a double-edged sword. On the good: if I hadn’t been through this myself I wouldn’t have the first idea what he goes through sometimes and beyond that I would have that same unwillingness to talk about it with him. Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of people talking about suicide in everyday conversation. It’s one of those topics that grown people shy away from, too unpleasant, too awkward to talk about. Let’s change the subject. I am here to tell you that to have to sit calmly while your child tells you this requires a fortitude like no other.

It is the utter loneliness of that place that is so much a part of the devastation one feels. This is part II of my incredulousness. How on earth could I have let myself suffer for so long in isolation? I cannot believe I did that. How tragic that this is such a taboo subject that somebody who is seriously considering driving into the nearest tree at top speed feels like they have no other option, nowhere to go, nobody to talk to.

Little by little I am going to engage him in conversation about it. I have cracked the door open a bit and now he knows (hopefully) that the doesn’t have to suffer in this alone, that I can handle talking about this and that I can even empathize in a very personal way with him (that’s the bad side of the sword).

It is undoubtedly to those of us who have been there that falls the responsibility to bring this taboo subject out of the darkness. I can honestly say that the opportunity to talk about it openly and honestly with my therapist without her freaking out or reaching for the phone to call the nearest psych hospital has been shockingly helpful. Such a simple thing and yet the benefits that I have reaped are immeasurable.

And so I ask how it can be that something so devastating, so tragic and yet so controllable in so many cases can be buried in obscurity? Unsayable.

Because it makes us uncomfortable.

I'm Just Sayin...

2011-07-06T15:37:00.003-04:00

Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.

(James Hillman)

Rendering Unto Caesar

2011-06-14T08:23:00.003-04:00

Sucks.

There is a place between material and abstract, between physical and spiritual, between visible and invisible. I think an apt metaphor would be to say that I am right now stuck on the beach for the beach, the sand is that place between the land that we live on, the everyday place of dirt, stone, asphalt, concrete and the ocean, vast, boundless, unfathomable and mysterious. For anybody who has ever been here undoubtedly I do not have to explain. For those that have not it is likely that no explanation will be good enough to convey the reality and when I say ‘reality’ I use that term in its vaguest meaning because this place can only be described as un-formed.

A number of years ago I had the opportunity to stand on the precipice of a mountain in Colorado. The view was not down, as on the edge of high cliff but rather spread out before me as far as the eye could see, and beyond more mountains. It was awe-inspiring and I now know why the mountains hold that same attraction for many people as being at the ocean holds for me. It is as if you are standing at the edge of eternity, gaining a glimpse of forever. Moses on the brink of the promised land.

But then you have to leave. Go back down the mountain or shake the sand off your feet get in your car and go home. Back to work, back to the kids, back to the bills and grocery store, cutting the lawn, washing the car, reading the newspaper, cooking dinner for your family.

Rendering unto Caesar.

With this glimpse that I have gotten it would be so easy to simply let go of Caesar and allow myself to float into God. But that of course would be problematic when Caesar comes knocking on my door looking for the rent check… and he will come knocking.

Rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and rendering unto God the things that are God’s means living in two worlds. In this life I cannot chose to stay only in God’s world – much as I’d like to. Unfortunately if I want those opportunities to visit God’s world I have to render unto Caesar daily.

The pull of God is so strong, a force that draws me to something that I cannot see, that I cannot define, a place in which I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. But even in all that ambiguity it actually hurts to have to turn back to Caesar. It is as if I have to say to God “I’d rather do anything than leave here but I have to go now. If I want to come back here again there are things that need doing and I have to take care of my business.”

Like being in the arms of your beloved and having to tear yourself away to go back to the ‘real’ world.

Rendering unto Caesar.

Blogger Problems

2011-05-28T08:36:00.000-04:00

There appears to be a problem with Blogger whereby certain users cannot comment on posts. Unfortunately I am one of those certain users. So this is a post to let the multitude of readers and posters to my blog know that I'm not ignoring you and I appreciate your comments.

Apparently this problem has been going on for several days now. Why they cannot seem to fix it is beyond me.

Perspectives and the Weight of the World

2011-05-26T07:52:00.000-04:00

The image is of course that of the Greek god Atlas holding up the world. In Greek mythology Atlas was a symbol of strength and endurance.

Funny though, in this particular depiction it appears to me that the weight of the world is forcing him to his knees. It is interesting how perspectives can change depending on one's state of mind.

I wonder what would happen if he just lay down and let it role off.

He'd probably feel a whole lot better.

It Seems Odd

2011-05-02T11:55:00.001-04:00

To me. This outpouring of joyous celebration that I see in scenes on the news reports of the death of
bin Laden. It is as if the hometeam has finally won the World Series after years and years coming in runner-up. Like the scene in Beantown (Boston to those of you who live afar) when the Red Sox had bested the hated Yankees in 2003 I believe it was, after many years of futility.

I live about sixty miles north of Manhattan and quite a few individuals in my hometown commute to work in Manhattan on a daily basis. While I do not know anyone intimately who was affected by the events of 9/11 I am acquainted with a young girl here in town who lost her father that day. Another young man whose family lives in town was killed in the disaster.

I don't know... I guess I expected a reaction that is a little more sober, a little more somber, a little more respectful of those people who were so shockingly and painfully touched directly and left behind that day and who will no doubt have some very painful memories dredged up over the next few days and weeks and perhaps months.

But what I see is clinking glasses in bars, high-fives, table-pounding and dancing in the streets. And I cannot help but be reminded of those pieces of news footage that we see so frequently in third-world countries, where radical fundamentalists burn effigies of their enemies or worse drag the dead body of the actual enemy through the street, shooting guns into the air and assorted weapons held high in celebration because their hated enemy has been brought to his knees, or perhaps even to his grave. To me those are scary scenes, thousands of out of control people joining in a celebration of violence.

I do not consider myself a bigot but I have to admit that sometimes when I see those scenes I think to myself "those people are nuts", the operative terms being "those people". Them, the other, the ignorant, uneducated, unenlightened. I don't mean those terms in a derogative manner. I firmly believe that scenes like this play out repeatedly in third-world countries because of political and social oppression that denies basic human rights to citizens, one of those basic human rights being education. Another being the opportunity to live without the fear of bodily harm. It is unquestionably these traits (and no doubt others) that breed violence and bloodlust into a society of people.

And yet there we are, good old educated, enlightened Americans living in the equal opportunity Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave behaving just like "those people".

Odd. Somehow.

A New Heaven and a New Earth

2011-03-22T06:37:00.001-04:00

“it is only that, acting upon his naïve conviction that what he wrote was dictated by an unseen voice and that his paintings were no more than reproductions of what the inner eye had already perceived, Blake threw a brilliant light into a realm that for most men is sheathed in darkness of disbelief.”

June Singer, The Unholy Bible

This is an interesting passage in light of what I now know about manic-depressive illness. Did Dr. Singer see that William Blake was manic in his “visions”? And if he was then his voices were real. Through his mania he heard things that those of us who are “normal” would never hear and saw things that we would never see.

It is both curious and exhilarating to me that those periods of mania are desirable in their less hypo forms by the people who experience them. Perhaps the hypo-manic stages are undesirable and frightening because they tip over into that realm that exists in each of us where the darkness, the evil, the uncontrollable, the Devil resides.

Tyger, tiger burning bright…

I wonder if the “new heaven and the new earth” is that place at which we arrive that is the final culmination of human life whereby unconscious and conscious come together and integrate to create a whole new human existence. A new heaven (unconscious) and a new Earth (conscious).

As of Yet Untitled

2011-03-14T08:25:00.000-04:00

I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—

Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,

The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness

And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

- Randall Jarrell

We insist on believing that there is meaning to and relief from our pain. It must end, there must be a way to be, a place to go where somehow we can find a way to make it stop and when finally at that place there will be something, some thing that will make it all obvious. There will be gifts, a magical, mystical power, maybe wisdom, bestowed and we will see so clearly how it was all worthwhile. A newfound sense of freedom is what I have always hoped for. A certain knowledge what would one day gloriously catapult me into some other as of yet unimagined way of being, some other as of yet unimagined way of seeing, some other as of yet unimagined way of living. An existence of joy and freedom – I will rise up with wings like eagles, I will run and not get weary – a profound release, an incredible lightness of being.

And then sometimes I resign myself to those words of Mr. Jarrell. Those thoughts are not true. That place of freedom and lightness of being does not exist, it will not come. This is just pain for no discernable purpose and this is just darkness for no other reason than the fact that pain breeds darkness.

I used to think those thoughts, and sometimes I still do. Mostly I exist in paragraph one but sometimes I slide into paragraph two. I’m learning to live with ambiguity.

For Where Your Treasure Is

2011-02-25T09:15:00.000-05:00

There your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21.

There is an interesting dichotomy between body and soul. As an aside, or perhaps more accurately as a precursor to what I am about to say I have long pondered what exactly is the soul. What is that thing, that substance that defines the human soul? I have come to a conclusion that the soul is comprised of numerous attributes all culminating in that which is the essence of the person. One might call it the Self, the Center, the Christ. The Logos.

The attributes that define the Self, the mental and emotional, the unseen attributes, you cannot actually locate within your physical body but given a little thought you know it to be there nonetheless. You cannot see or hear your emotions or your thoughts, all that makes up your non-physical existence but that does not make them any less ‘there’. That we cannot view them underneath a microscope does not make them any less real.

As an aside this is where our scientific thought fails us in so many ways, or rather I should say this is where the notion that science reveals all truth fails us. Science declares that in order for something to be true, let us use the word ‘fact’, it must be observable and repeatable given the same set of external criteria, which is to say that if all factors in an experiment remain exactly the same every time than every time I should get the same results. Scientific fact. The truth. So let me ask, is that they way emotions and thoughts work? Hardly. Can I view emotions and thoughts in a laboratory on a petrie dish, define the physical conditions and know with confidence that my test will yield the same result time and time again? Hardly. Yet we know that thoughts and emotions exist. We know that humanity is comprised not only of material but also that which is immaterial. No scientist would dispute that.

But that’s another story for another time and let me get back to my original thought which was the dichotomy between body and soul.

That which ultimately decays and dies and that which lives on forever.

Our mental and emotional systems are meant to operate. If they are shut down for years and years they do not wither and die as will a physical body part. Use it or lose does not apply to that which comprises our souls. The pressure of non-use builds over the years, like a pressure-cooker. Steam building up in a closed container, it does not dissipate but rather increases in strength, searching, straining for a way out until one day it explodes. The pressure finally exceeds the level at which the heart and mind can bear and the result is bursting forth of contents, most probably in a very destructive and ugly mess.

Use it or face the ugly consequences would be a more apt way to describe the phenomenon.

There is a good reason for this.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Free Your Mind

2011-02-21T10:13:00.000-05:00

And the rest will follow.

Sometimes when I’m driving at night on a dark highway in the pouring rain I can’t see a thing save the lights of the car ahead of me. In those times I always have the same thought which is “if this guy in front of me drives off the road I’m going right off the road with him”. Because the only thing keeping me on the road between the lines is the tail-lights of his car. In the driving rain and darkness I have no peripheral vision. To the left, to the right and above me is blackness and I am concentrating too intently on that which is in front of me, which amounts to nothing much more than his lights.

That’s a perfectly fine way to get home safely on a dark, rainy night. It is however a hell of a constricting way to live a life.

Tunnel vision would best describe my manner of living for all these years.

*****

There was a dream, and one day I could see it. Like a bird in a cage I demanded that somebody free it.

I have to admit that I’m not a big one for listening too closely to song lyrics. I generally prefer instrumental music and even those tunes that I have liked over the years it’s always been more about the music underneath the lyrics.

But every now and then…

*****

Let us say that you have a child, a boy but really it doesn’t matter. The key is that you have a child and this child is over eighteen years-old making him legally an adult. For arguments sake we’ll say that this child, this boy is twenty-three. Legally an adult, too young to have matured fully. In fact very far from having matured fully (as anyone with a 23 year-old son knows). Anyway…

The 23 year-old son has cancer that requires chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is not a pleasant experience as we all know. Nausea, vomiting, hair loss, energy loss, etc. Unpleasant. To the max.

But he does it because he has to and he experiences all there is to experience with a round of chemotherapy. Sick as dog and bald to boot.

And just as he is starting to feel better, getting his strength back, getting his hair back, getting his 23 year old life back the doctor tells him he needs to undergo another round of chemo.

And your son, your child, that walking, talking, living and breathing PIECE of you says thanks, but no thanks.

Ah, you say, nobody would do that. No rational, intelligent, reasonable human being would make such a decision when his life is on the line.

Clearly you have never, ever encountered a 23 year old boy.

Some might say I should be using the term ‘man’ when referring to a 23 year old male person. I would refer you to my previous sentence.

What would you do? Well here is what (at least most of) you would do. You would tie him up, in chains if you had to and you would physically drag him to the hospital if you had to. There would be no question of letting him make his own decision. He’ll die without the treatment, you are his parent, there is but one option and you will not stop until you see him sitting in that chair, hooked up to that I.V. drip. And you will do it again, and again and yet again if you have to. And nobody but nobody would question you for your guerilla tactics.

But what if that sickness that your child carries around is a sickness of the soul? No less potentially lethal and manifesting itself in a hundred different ways simultaneously.

You know that the only potential “cure” is going to be with a healthy and continuous dose of psychotherapy (and medication if necessary).

What does a parent do in this situation?

And at what point does it become ok for the parent to ask the child to sacrifice themselves in the interest of saving the parent?

Because as any parent knows the loss of the child takes the parent also.

You Are Not What They Say You Are

2011-01-27T07:30:00.000-05:00

I can read all the books about creativity that I want, it ain’t going to make me creative. Although it can help me to know that potential exists. What I need is to dig in, push past the fears and see what’s in there. I need to push past the fears and clean out the muck. That feels the most relevant right now. Too many thoughts born of holding them all in for a lifetime, never letting them out, always doubting them, doubting myself. Let them loose, examine them, see what they’re made of, be inquisitive rather than disdainful of them. Discover what I am made of.

I do not think that You are anything like they say You are. I sense You as a force, an energy, shimmering unseen to our naked, physical eye. And yet consuming every square inch of what we call ‘space’. Flowing through and impelling everything that is. The life force that holds it all together. And part and parcel of that energy is all that we think and feel, our mental and emotional energy and that which includes our capacity to both love and hate. It includes our capacity to create anything and everything that I can bring into being from my mental and emotional energy.

I think You are there and here. “Out there” and “In here”. Not a stream but THE energy that glues all that is together. That which connects me – however indirectly (and yet so directly) to the smallest particle of matter in an ocean on the other side of the planet and in outer space a million miles away.

The Christ. I AM the way, the truth and the life. I have long puzzled over this statement. But it is the answer… when we come to discover the question. After a very long and arduous and intensely personal struggle.

The Christ. The Center. Somehow this points to the very core of ourselves, the center of the human being. Of course I can never be sure, at least not right now but it seems rational that You would exist in material form if my theory of “every idea and expression of idea points to something that already is” is true. And I sense that it is. It would make sense that You had come in human form to show us that the way to You is somehow the way to our true self, the center of our being. It is both the path to me and the path to You. I could never quite put my finger on it but it makes sense to me now.

It is both interesting and rather sad that as I reach for You and (I think) get ever closer to You the more ‘out there’ people would take me to be. But the fact is that the more I reach for You and the closer I get the less ‘out there’ I become.

*****

It is very odd to be headed somewhere and not have the slightest idea where. I still have this idea that I should be ‘doing’ stuff, ‘accomplishing’ things. What I haven’t the slightest idea. Making money? Curing cancer? Saving lives? I don’t know.

I wonder if that isn’t quite true. I suppose it can be true if that is what I choose. But in the end that which I accomplish doesn’t help me much. I’ll be dead as will everyone that is to come. So much distraction comes from without and it is so hard to close my ears to it. So hard to shut it out and not allow myself to fall for that which others impose on me as necessary. Do I let society define what is important for me? Do I let the people around me dictate what I should or should not be doing. Does somebody else get to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong, useful or useless?

Striving after wind.

Is it not true that anything that flows from me, represented in the way that I choose to represent, done in a such a way that I am capable of representing, does that not automatically make it good? Simply because it is a work of my hands and my mind and my heart brought into being by me… the image of God.

I have been wanting to say this for a very long time: You are not what they say You are.

Collateral Damage

2010-11-21T08:40:00.001-05:00

I am in awe at the power we possess to alter our reality with our minds. Let us talk about the power of denial. To me the word ‘denial’ has a very negative connotation, as if we willfully and wantonly exercise our power of denial to rid ourselves of something that is plainly obvious to us, something that is right in front of our noses that we simply choose, consciously (there’s the kicker) to ignore for some selfish, self-serving (read ‘evil’) purpose.

But our power of denial is in many instances a tool for survival and it enables us to actually alter our reality to such an extent that we can truly forget things as if they had never happened.

This is an amazing and useful tool of adaptation that we possess. The power to make ourselves forget something as if it never happened, to fragment our minds, split off that part of memory that we do not want and simply make it go away.

Problem solved.

Well, not really. For it is an amazingly useful power and at the same time an enormously destructive power. The power we have over our own minds. This ability we possess to simply make part of ourselves go away, oftentimes never to be heard from again. Amazing and tragic all at the same time. Amazing that we can do this in order to save ourselves and tragic that we find ourselves in situations that it must be done in order to save ourselves and even more tragic in that this power to slice off and away parts of ourselves closes us off to vital parts without even knowing it. It is not possible to slice off and do away with parts and pieces, e.g. painful memories without also slicing off and doing away with some of the good stuff too.

I sort of think of it as chemotherapy for treating cancer. While it is necessary to run this toxic medicine through the body to kill off the cancerous cells, there is no way it can be done without taking with it many of the good cells. There is no discernment.

We could call this ‘collateral damage’. We got the bad guys but unfortunately we had to kill numerous innocent civilians in the process. But the good news is we got the bad guys. But the bad news is…

More and more I am convinced that we are separated from God in that we are separated from ourselves. He isn’t gone, we just cannot see Him because the place where we can find Him is inaccessible to us.

I read Jungian psychology and I read it because it has become plain to me that Dr. Jung was on to something very vital and central to his psychology is the idea of circumambulation of the Self. We are looking for the center, for the Self, for OUR Self. I absolutely and positively would not dispute because it is right on the money for me. However there are questions as to whether he considered the Self to be that one thing for which we are searching, i.e. the Self as God.

I finished a book recently, The Living God and Our Living Psyche, What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung by Ann Belford Ulanov. And I do believe that this very smart lady hit the crux of the matter when she states that the Self is not God but that part of us that knows God.

I just love it when I stumble across the words for that which I have to that point been unable to put into words.

It Makes No Sense

2010-11-17T11:33:00.013-05:00

You wait for Heaven as if it’s some far off place yet to come,

Yet the Kingdom of God is within you.

You deny what you are as a person,

You call your humanity sinfulness,

Yet you are made in the image of God.

You present God as a lover of rules and regulations,

Demanding that we stay within His boundaries, laws and restrictions,

Yet in the same breath you say that the ‘truth’ will set me free.

Which is it?

Do I live under a set of laws?

Exist only within the boundaries?

Or do I allow myself to be free?

Dear Linda McMahon

2010-10-20T16:46:00.000-04:00

I realize that you are running for ~~governor~~ senator in the great state of Connecticut and I understand that in order to win the office you have to have your name out there and you have to spend a lot of money, energy and time in order to persuade people to vote. However ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon you do not have to call my house EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS to ask for my vote when I already told your campaign worker that I would certainly consider voting for you on election day. Seriously ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon once I have spoken to your volunteer (ok I'll give you two phone calls) kindly check my name off your list and move on to the next person.

I do not need a phone call every day to have you remind me that election day is Tuesday and that Richard Blumenthal is the devil himself and that I should vote for you because you are better than ALL OF THE OTHER CANDIDATES OUT THERE. You're the only one with integrity, you're the only one that isn't motivated by greed, you're the only one who wants to see the great state of Connecticut be the best state EVER!!

Not only that ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon but your phone calls do not identify you on my caller ID, which tells me ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon that you don't want me to know it's you calling because then I might be inclined to ignore the phone call.

I guess what I'm trying to say ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon is that because you have crossed over the line into harrassment YOU CANNOT COUNT ON MY VOTE THIS COMING ELECTION DAY ~~NED LAMONT~~ LINDA MCMAHON

Take that ~~Ned Lamont~~ Linda McMahon.

Additionally Linda McMahon and Ned Lamont and all of you other politicians out there who actually think that your robocalls are a good idea and that I would actually stand there and listen to your ten minute recorded phone message THEY ARE NOT A GOOD IDEA AND I WILL NOT STAND THERE AND LISTEN TO YOUR TEN MINUTE RECORDED MESSAGE AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I VOTE FOR YOU IF I RECEIVE A RECORDED MESSAGE FROM YOU.

In closing Linda McMahon you have guaranteed that I will cast my vote for the ~~Devil Himself~~ Richard Blumenthal. Thanks for helping me make my decision.

The Bible

2010-09-25T09:08:00.001-04:00

as depiction of humanity's search for self.

And in this perspective it is indeed the Word of God...

Just one among many.

The Purpose In Life

2010-09-25T08:33:00.000-04:00

I cannot say for sure however if there is just one purpose in life for each of us then I would say right now that “to become who I really am” is my one purpose in life.

Of course becoming who I really am encompasses all those things that we speak of as our purpose in life, inclusive of the external actions to be taken that are the result of what we believe to be our purpose in life, or at least one of our purposes in life.

More importantly however is that finding our purpose encompasses all of our inner world. It means getting to know our interior selves, our feelings, our thoughts, our dreams and fantasies. It means expressing our inner selves which of course means expressing our own innate and individual creativity.

What comes out of my heart and soul, what comes from my mind is the creative expression of who I am in whatever form it takes. What I say, what I do, what I think, what I like, what I dislike, all of these phenomena are part and parcel of that which is really me.

It is not possible to dispose of the mask that we wear. It is not possible to dissolve the persona that we carry around, that “me” that I show to the world at large. It is not possible for me to dispose of my mask unless everyone with whom I come into contact disposes of theirs also... and we know that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. I do not think we are capable of doing this simply because I do not think we’re even aware of where we end and our mask begins. In our conscious minds the two have become one and it takes a significant bit of work and courage to investigate and dismantle that mask. So many people aren’t even aware of the possibility of doing this.

Dismantling the mask to the greatest degree possible – this is a challenge, because it means first finding the courage and this is the true definition of courage. Finding the courage to first weed through the garbage, the emotional garbage in order to get to what is really there and then to allow what is really there to emerge even though it makes us uncomfortable, even though we don’t like certain aspects of ourselves, even though what we may find flies in the face of everything we ever thought was right and true and especially in the presence and pressure of all those other masks out there now THAT is courage.

Funny thing is that even though those of us who sense that there is a purpose to our lives tend to look right past this really rather simple idea. In Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” it was his suggestion, or rather observation that those individuals who survived the horrors of Auschwitz were those that attached a purpose to their lives, not necessarily a definitive purpose but they knew that there was something out there, somewhere, perhaps in some future time and place for which they needed to stay alive in order to ultimately achieve. God wants me to accomplish “something” in this life yet that “something” is defined I think as something very specific. Something very specific that is as yet down the road, not yet realized.

But here’s the kicker: that “something” happens every minute of our lives. That “something” happens moment by moment when we exercise our ability to think and feel and do that which we can. That “something” is exercised when we stretch ourselves, when we reach for yet more of our potential, when we grasp for more, when we put ourselves to the test, when we seek for more or different from ourselves or… OR when we simply allow to emerge what we already know to be within.

Sometimes that “something” means nothing more than experiencing what is within us in that moment. That too is part of what it means to be me and is that not our purpose? To learn how to be Me? Sometimes that purpose, that “something” means trying to hang on to life because in that moment and for whatever reason life has become harder than we might have imagined. And so in that moment, and perhaps for moments yet to come the “something” is merely to try and hang on to life.

We are here for something that much most of us would agree to be true but what we seldom consider is how that purpose changes from moment to moment and encompasses not just some unseen, future event or activity, some cause that the twists and turns in our life force us to consider and oftentimes embrace as our “purpose” but that which is happening right now, in that very moment. That cause in which we are currently engaged, sometimes joyful, sometimes a painful struggle but either way an integral piece of our purpose in life.

This Is My Truth. Here I Take My Stand.

2010-09-08T07:48:00.000-04:00

Why is it so hard for us to find that place? Or perhaps the better question would be why is it so hard to take our stand once we find that place. I think perhaps if we are paying attention we find that place of truth for ourselves many times throughout our lives. If only we recognize it definitively when we arrive at a place of our truth it then must take all of our courage to say “here I take my stand”. The influence of others is so strong that we are rendered almost incapable of making that final statement.

There are times when one’s place of truth is a place of pain that lies just below the surface and one avoids taking one’s stand by not so much in denying the truth of the pain but in a reluctance to let it flow freely to the surface. When all of one’s efforts are employed in keeping that pain at bay, hiding it from the world and projecting an image of self-control, competence and (what we have come to know as) “strength”.

Is it obvious that I am referring to myself in that paragraph? There… I took a little bit of my stand by admitting that I am talking about me while at the same time avoiding that same stand by speaking impersonally of a figurative “one”.

Sometimes our “truth” does not manifest itself in an outward display of what we would define as a position of strength. Sometimes what we define as a position of strength is in fact the means by which we deny the current truth of ourselves and it is in fact the act of allowing our “weakness” to show and our vulnerability to flow that has us taking our stand in our truth.

False Existence

2010-09-02T16:44:00.002-04:00

From Thomas Merton’s No Man Is An Island:

“… the loss of faith has involved at the same time a complete loss of all sense of reality. Being means nothing to those who hate and fear what they themselves are. Therefore they cannot have peace in their own reality (which reflects the reality of God). They must struggle to escape their true being, and verify a false existence by constantly viewing what they themselves do. They have to keep looking in the mirror for reassurance… They are hoping for some sign that they have become the god they hope to become by means of their own frantic activity – invulnerable, all powerful, infinitely wise, unbearably beautiful, unable to die!”

I would not dispute the truth of this statement. In fact with just some cursory effort and a little insight it is plainly evident in our so progressive western world. However what I cannot get onboard with is his sort of accusatory tone, as if all of us are completely aware of our choice between valuing who and what we really are vs. what we think is valuable which is to say power and invulnerability or that which we think makes us powerful and invulnerable. Money is power, owning things, a big house, a fancy car is to be admired. Power and prestige in our social and professional circles make us invulnerable. I out rank you therefore I have power over you therefore I am invulnerable to you. This is what we think, this is what we are taught, whether by word or deed that these are the truths of life.

Most of us are not aware of the other option, plain and simple. We are taught from the beginning of life to strive for power and avoid vulnerability from other people who were taught right from the beginning of life to strive for power and avoid vulnerability. It is all we know, it is all we ever knew so how could we know any other way and why does he make it sound so downright morally reprehensible? This of course is easy to do when we come to a place of feeling morally superior when we think we have ‘found’ God. I know that feeling, that attitude because I had a bit of it not all that long ago. You start to figure a few things out, you get to thinking you’re on the right track to the secret that’s hidden from everyone else, you start to thinking that you’ve got it all worked out and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. And so it becomes easy to point out how others are completely missing the point. They don’t get it those silly, ignorant, spiritually bereft people. Look at them with their big cars and their big, important jobs and their high-falutin social life. But I know those things means nothing, I just don’t understand why they don’t get it.

I do believe that those people that Mr. Merton speaks of above are indeed struggling to escape their true being and quite possibly verify a false existence but I would venture to guess that very few of them are really, truly looking in the mirror at themselves and you see there’s the rub; they’re not necessarily aware that there is a mirror that needs looking into.

I am coming to believe – most certainly it is true for me and I would venture to guess for every other individual who spends their days struggling to escape their true being that the denial, the struggle for power, the quest for invulnerability, the striving for external rewards to validate their lives is not only the product of the education handed down to us via our environment but more importantly and far more tragically it is the result of our instinct for self-preservation.

Our need for power and invulnerability is a response to a position whereby we were completely powerless and totally vulnerable, oftentimes to those who chose to abuse their position of power and authority, who chose to stomp on our vulnerability instead of treating it with kindness and gentleness and respect. It has to happen, loved ones get sick, they die, they develop addictions or simply become mean and bitter. People we love hurt us in their efforts to tackle and subdue their own demons. It cannot be helped. Our need for power and invulnerability is a normal, human response to a version of life that includes disappointment and pain and suffering, these things cannot be avoided in any life.

If I continue directing all my energy towards striving for power and invulnerability, material things, all that is characteristic of our external world then I don’t have to notice myself. I don’t have to notice my feelings. I don’t have to notice my vulnerability and I don’t have to notice any pain that might still linger long after the stomping has occurred. This is what we fear, laying our hearts open and running the risk of having it stomped on yet again. And if I stop striving long enough to realize that there is an inner world to go along with that outer world than I am faced with the realization that I might have to look into that world and see what’s there.. and feel what’s there. Who in their right mind wouldn’t choose a sports car and a big fancy house over that?

And all I can think to say is I never knew. I never, ever knew I was doing this.

Dear Ned Lamont

2010-08-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

I realize that you are running for governor of the great state of Connecticut and I understand that in order to win the office you have to have your name out there and you have to spend a lot of money, energy and time in order to persuade people to vote. However Ned Lamont you do not have to call my house EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS to ask for my vote when I already told your campaign worker that I would certainly consider voting for you on election day. Seriously Ned Lamont, once I have spoken to your volunteer (ok I'll give you two phone calls) kindly check my name off your list and move on to the next person.

I do not need a phone call every day to have you remind me that election day is Tuesday and that I should vote for you because you are better than ALL OF THE OTHER CANDIDATES OUT THERE. You're the only one with integrity, you're the only one that isn't motivated by greed, you're the only one who wants to see the great state of Connecticut be the best state EVER!!

Not only that Ned Lamont but your phone calls do not identify you on my caller ID, which tells me Ned Lamont that you don't want me to know it's you calling because then I might be inclined to ignore the phone call.

I guess what I'm trying to say Ned Lamont is that because you have crossed over the line into harrassment YOU CANNOT COUNT ON MY VOTE THIS COMING TUESDAY NED LAMONT.

Not only that Ned Lamont but because of all of your phone calls I am seriously considering un-registering myself as a Democrat.

Take that Ned Lamont.

That Old Familiar Feeling

2010-08-04T09:10:00.001-04:00

There are those of us who are referred to in the clinical literature as Adult Children of Alcoholics, ACOA for short. So many of us exist in a daily state of busyness. Our lives are full of things to do, tasks to complete, responsibilities to be met. We must always be doing something. There is generally no free time to be had because there is so much to do. When we get a free hour we’re looking around for an activity to fill that empty space. Got a free ten minutes where’s the vacuum cleaner?

We work extremely well under pressure, in fact we thrive under just the right amount of pressure. We seek out professional responsibilities that allow us to make use of our confidence and competence under pressure. Our employers love us, glowing reviews, pay raises, promotions. We are people who get it done and we’re not afraid to mix it up, in fact we welcome the opportunity to mix it up. It’s a challenge yes?

We’re probably high-achievers and to some degree perfectionists, at least that is how others undoubtedly see us. Those same others might also envy us our high energy level, our high degree of competence, “how do you do it?” they ask. “Oh I don’t know, I just do it, it’s just the way I am” I might respond. I don’t even think about it. It is what makes me go.

*****

There are those people out there with advanced degrees in psychology who do not necessarily envy those of us who exist in a daily state of busyness and achievement. In fact they probably have an entirely different perspective of that propensity to seek out busyness, pressure, too much work. I suspect in many cases that these people with advanced degrees might suggest that perhaps we are running from something. Running from our feelings. Running from our pain. Running from our memories. They may be right, at this moment I cannot say.

Life is not either/or.

I would like to posit an alternative theory and my theory goes like this:

Those competent, high-achieving, perfectionists are not running from something but rather running to something. They are running to an old familiar feeling. The old familiar feeling that is a fluttering, a nervousness, a feeling of always being on edge. This is what they know because this is what they had growing up. This feeling of edginess, or rather of always being on edge is where they are comfortable. It is what they have always known… and when it goes away they notice. They might not know exactly what it is that's missing but they know something vital is no longer there. And so they go searching. For that old familiar feeling.

The Failure of My Mother

2010-08-02T08:23:00.002-04:00

A young woman grows up in a family, one of four children of two parents, Mom and Dad – second generation Italian Americans - parents who love them and worked hard for them. Two parents who modeled good, strong American values, hard work, loyalty and responsibility to family and country. European immigrant values coming to the land of the free and the home of the brave. The country where hard work, strong ethics and for the women the ability to cook a fabulous spaghetti sauce and stand by their men are paramount.

This young woman feels different, feels that she is missing something, some vital piece or part of the normal human machine, the normal ‘girl’ mechanism that dictates her desire to date boys, to talk about boys, to be with boys, to LIKE boys. The desire for a home and a family of her own one day where she cooks for thirty family members at Christmas.

“What am I missing?” she asks of herself every day. Her younger sister, her brothers, they all got the ‘gene’. The “I want a home and children of my own someday” gene. What line did she miss getting in when they were handing out that vital part?

She wanders through adolescence, graduates high school, goes to college and the whole time she feels different, she knows she is different. And that difference is shameful. Oh she goes through the dating motions, it’s what girls are supposed to do yes? But her heart isn’t in it, she’s just doing it because she thinks this is what she’s supposed to be doing, this is what she’s supposed to like and want. She becomes isolated, she keeps her thoughts and her fears to herself. Nobody wants to hear this, nobody EXPECTS to hear this from her, least of all her mother. This is not the way she was raised… to be like this.

How could she possibly tell anyone when they don’t expect to hear this from her? She cannot stand to think about the response that she would get from family and friends. How could she be like this? They won’t understand and she cannot find a way to explain. She doesn’t know how to explain, nobody ever talked about such things in her family. Why would they? There is no precedence and besides this is so ABNORMAL.

She begins to distance herself from her mother. If she cannot talk to her mother about the most vital part of herself, the most personal, the core of her being what have they got to talk about? Her mother speaks of the life she knows, what it means to be a woman, where her family is everything, the very center of her life. She loves them, she cooks for them, she cleans for them, she wants what’s best for them which is of course a home and a family. That's what it's all about right girls?

And so in her isolation, alone with her feelings of defectiveness, of shame, of abnormality she knows the disappointment her mother would feel in her oldest daughter. In her isolation alone with her feelings of defectiveness and shame and abnormality she comes to realize that she is the failure of her mother. How could she possibly ever find the words to tell her?

There's Something About Bob

2010-07-30T09:11:00.003-04:00

There is a man, I will call him Bob, he is a star football player in the NFL. Super Bowl winning quarterback. Every American guy’s dream right? Grabs the headlines every week. Plays at a high level in the extremely competitive world of professional football. Takes hit after hit weekly from 300 lb. defensive ends and bounces right back up to throw a 50 yard touchdown pass on the very next play. A real star and the envy of every high school and college football player in the nation and every couch-potato, internet sports-site trolling wannabe who never realized his dreams of athletic stardom. He epitomizes what they had hoped to be.

Lately Bob has hit some rough patches. Turns out that he apparently thinks that his status of Super Bowl winning quarterback brings with it certain entitlements not available to the average person on the street, you and me for example.

He likes to party, he likes to spend money, he likes the attention from the young ladies who like professional athletes. Of course he does, he’s a young guy, 28 years old, at the height of his athletic ability, at the height of his stardom, everybody wants to be with him and get a chance to share in his good fortune.

He likes to party, he likes to spend money, he likes the attention from the young ladies and, as it turns out (allegedly I would specify) he likes to sexually assault the young ladies. Being a football star comes with its entitlements does it not?

Well the newspapers can only report on the alleged ‘facts’ of the assaults and they're running out of new material and facts are still under investigation, nothing has yet been proven and it's time that the story expanded a little. Gotta fill up the empty space on the page, gotta keep the advertisers coming and spending their money. So eventually the sportswriters they turn to something else, a new angle on the story. So they turn to his college and high school and boyhood friends. “Tell me what Bob was like ten, fifteen, twenty years ago” they say. “Well… Bob was a really athletically gifted person and exceptionally driven to succeed.”. We find out that Bob was always in the weight room, first one in and the last one leave. Bob tirelessly and relentlessly worked on his football skills. A real committed guy, even at such a young age. It was all about making the NFL for Bob and he deserves his success. Nobody has worked harder than Bob to get where he is today.

Driven, single-minded, strong-willed, focused. That’s Bob.

We find out a little about Bob’s family. Parents divorced and Dad remarried - nothing new there. Half the kids in the country have divorced parents. Nice home in a regular community. Money wasn’t abundant but it wasn’t scarce either. Basically Bob grew up with all the creature comforts a small-town boy could want or need. We find out that Bob’s mother was killed in a car accident when he was just eight years old. She was on her way to see him.

There's something about Bob that nobody can quite put their finger on. He was such a great kid, so much talent, such a nice guy, generous. What the hell is going on with Bob these days? We just don't get it, why this is all happening.

I wonder if it's possible that maybe Bob doesn't bounce back quite so easily from every hit he's ever taken.

The Story of Our Lives Part II

2010-07-30T07:42:00.002-04:00

There is a woman who likes to drive fast. She likes fast cars that handle the curves, she likes fast cars that go from 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds. She likes cars that respond instantly when she hits that gas pedal... and she hits that gas pedal hard and frequent. When she drives on the highway she hits speeds upwards of eighty-five mph. On this day she is heading home on the highway, as usual she is driving way too fast. But there is a certain kind of thrill in speed for her. A feeling of freedom? A little sense of danger perhaps? Hard to say.

On this day driving home she is lost in thought as she flies down the highway and she snaps back to attention just as she realizes she is about to pass right by her exit. So she veers right, never dropping her speed and gets on the exit ramp that leads to another highway that will eventually bring her home. But the second she hits this exit ramp she is in the middle of a crazy snowstorm. From sunny, dry conditions to blizzard conditions in the span of twenty yards. Road is covered in snow and she likes fast cars and she is driving fast and she hits that snow-covered road and realizes in an instant that she is driving way too fast for the road conditions. Problem is that her love of fast cars means that her tires do not grip well in slippery conditions and the second she hits the breaks she’s going into spin. The second she tries to slow down it’s over. She’ll lose control and God knows where she’ll end up.

She wants to slow down, she knows she has to slow down but she also knows that the instant that she tries to slow down control of that car is no longer hers.

The Story of Our Lives

2010-07-29T09:08:00.003-04:00

Is not this...

Or even this...

And it ain't this as I had once suggested...

It's this...

Therapists and Friendship

2010-07-27T16:47:00.002-04:00

So I'm reading this blog post about friendship and professional boundaries in the therapist/client relationship and basically the question is would I want to be friends with my therapist after the therapy has ended. In the myriad books about therapy that I've read I've seen this question raised many times both among therapists and patients. Seems that while there are rules which appear to be 'not until two years after the therapy has ended' there is much debate over the question. Whatever and not for me to decide since I'm not a therapist and I would not be the one breaching any ethical boundaries.

However I gave it some thought and here's what I think; I like my therapist. I like her a lot. She's smart and she's funny and I can tell her patients matter to her and I can tell that her job matters to her and I have never once felt like she wasn't completely focused and in that room with me. I like my therapist as my therapist. I like that she is my therapist. I like that I have a therapist that I can count on to be there every week, week in and week out. I like that I have a person that I can go to every week, week in and week out and talk about what's on my mind.

I'm totally good with the fact that she's my therapist. Could we be friends in a different time and place? I have no idea but we're not in a different time and place and I feel very fortunate to have found somebody that it seems I can count on to do her job. She is just what I need in a therapist and if we became friends I'd lose that. I have lots of friends and frankly there aren't a lot of them that I can talk to without them getting their own s**t in the way (and vice versa no doubt) so why would I trade my therapist in for a friend and take on her s**t?

No thanks. I like her right where she is.

As an aside I have also heard it said numerous times that people get a bit freaked out when they hear of (or see) their therapist at a party or some other public place and the therapist has somehow decided to be themselves, let their hair down, act like a regular person, and I don't get it. Do people think their therapists aren't real people? I'd crack up if I saw my therapist in say the grocery store and overheard her telling someone about a party she went to and had one too many and started telling off-color jokes.

I don't know... something about me wanting my therapist to be a real person I guess. Who can say?

I've Got Nuthin Part Deux

2010-07-26T08:01:00.000-04:00

I am in a place right now, a little frustration, a little confusion. I sense a movement towards a place of greater understanding or rather a place of being able to formulate a bit more competently some kind of cohesive theory of human existence and our relation to God. Or at least I hope so because this inability to gather my half-thoughts into some kind of cohesiveness is pretty darn frustrating.

I have times, right now for example where I feel on the verge of a break-through… but of what? New knowledge? New understanding? I cannot even find a word for what ‘it’ is so I use the word ‘it’. A word about as nondescript as one can get but I have nothing better. I am forced to use the word ‘it’ a lot because I don’t know another word to use to describe something that is circulating in my mind but is not yet even close to being in full view and so I cannot make out what ‘it’ is. ‘It’ is just a blob right now, not even a blob, no form, no color, no properties of which to be spoken. Very frustrating.

Take for example the whole religion thing. I will speak specifically of the Christian theology or let me be slightly more general and use the Bible as my example. Here’s the thing; I know these writings point to the ‘truth’, I’ll call it ‘reality’. I like that word better. The biblical writings point to something that really is, I just cannot come up with an organized and cohesive theory of what that something, or what that story is. Jesus for example; real or myth? Actual person as God in the flesh, living model, living archetype of what really is, sent so we could actually see and speak to the actual THING of which we all have built-in knowledge, living proof of our pre-existing knowledge or was Jesus simply a man turned into a myth that represents the reality of the knowledge implanted by God. Our projection of innate knowledge.

How’s that for convoluted?

Interesting that Carl Jung indicated that one of the errors of human beings is in our habit of looking to ourselves in an effort to get some kind of picture of God when in fact I think that the very place we should be starting in our efforts to gain an understanding of God is ourselves. Of course I suspect that he was referring to behavior and I am referring to construct.

The best I can do right now is to merely define that at which I am grasping; a cohesive theory of the basic structure of human life and it’s relation to God.

That’s all I’ve got.

Ignorance of Choice

2010-07-25T07:54:00.001-04:00

The choices we make are made in ignorance (and we’re ignorant of even that much), and as a result of our choices made in ignorance things happen, some that we never expected, some for which we are completely unprepared. And when they happen we’re lost, we flounder around looking for answers and we expend all of our energy trying to find the solution only to ultimately come to the conclusion that there is no solution, or rather no solution over which we ourselves have any control.

Unfortunately we oftentimes empty our tank in the process of trying to find solutions to problems that presented themselves in response to our choices made in ignorance and so we’re left to somehow make it through the rest of our lives running on empty.

What a dilemma.

Checks and Balances

2010-07-24T08:26:00.006-04:00

We have been given free will however we do not generally exercise that free will. The concept of free will dictates that everything we do is a conscious decision, a conscious choice to act in a certain manner given the situation at hand. We fool ourselves into believing that the actions we take upon that situation are fully powered by our own free will.

Not so.

Most of us do not at any given moment exercise nearly the full power of our own free will because our actions are motivated by forces in our psyches of which we are completely unaware. And the really sad part is that we are unaware that we are unaware. Talk about your sticky wickets huh?

Carl Jung set forth the idea that our dreams act in a compensatory manner to our waking or conscious lives. If my conscious self is behaving in a particular manner, for example I fancy myself a strong and intelligent individual, a real Type A, driven, determined, a perfectionist, always in control chances are pretty good that my dreams will present images to the contrary.

I would have to agree with that assessment although I do not believe that our dreams serve ONLY as compensatory. I think there’s a whole lot more to them but that’s not what this post is about.

I believe that our whole being is compensatory. That the whole human machine has innately a system of checks and balances that are there and if we’re paying attention (and sometimes even if we’re not) we will know when we’re stepping outside of our own healthy zone. If after many years of living in a manner that is inconsistent with what and who I truly am, with what and whom I am truly meant to be than my systems will inevitably start to break down; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually to the point – if I ignore it long enough – that I will be brought to a screeching halt. It has to happen.

My built-in system of checks and balances kicks in and if I ignorantly insist on pushing back against it year after year I will ultimately lose the battle. I cannot win, I am constructed in such a way that my defeat is inevitable… it is only a matter of time.

Checks and balances.

Another interesting thought occurs to me. This system of checks and balances is something that we, 'we' being society use 'out there' in the external world. For example our government here in the good old U.S of A has in place a form of government that is made of the three branches; the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branches. And these three branches were put in place this way so that there would be a system of checks and balances. In other words our founding fathers were quite aware of certain human frailties and had the foresight to do their best to ensure that one guy didn't grab the all the power. While the system is clearly not perfect it does manage to 'work' to a degree.

What I am getting at here is that every idea, every concept, every system that is put in place 'out there' in the world at large is an expression of something that is already a part of our human machine. These ideas are an external manifestation of knowledge that we already possess within ourselves.

I am becoming quite convinced that every human being knows a hell of a lot more than we think we know. In fact I am coming to believe that we already know EVERYTHING we need to know, which is a hell of a lot.

We just don't we know it and we haven't got the first clue how to get to it.

And so the key becomes about getting to what we already know in it's purest form possible and learning how to make use of it.

Checks and balances.

Somebody tell me that God does not exist.

The World According to Dr. Knowitall

2010-07-22T08:11:00.013-04:00

One day you’re going about your business, tending to your life and all of a sudden someone comes along and grabs you, takes all your clothes, all your money, puts you on an airplane and flies you into the middle of a foreign country where nobody speaks your language, nothing is familiar and a raging battle is taking place and that someone kicks you out of the cabin smack into the center of the battle. Bullets whizzing by your head, bombs exploding all around, debris flying and you’re in the middle of it stark naked with absolutely no protection and no way out. So what happens? Well your choices are minimal and let’s face it, in the chaos that ensues all around there’s not a whole hell of a lot of time to sit down and think about your options and reason out which is the best. You’ve had no training in warfare, you’ve had no training in self-preservation in the heat of a battle, you haven’t got the first clue what to do. The one and only thing you know is the drive to get out of there alive.

You look around and in your state of panic and high anxiety all you see is rocks. Rocks. Choices do not abound – in fact the only choice you can see is the rock at your feet. You grab the rock. It’s a crude and unsophisticated weapon in the middle of high-powered rifles and bombs but it’s all you’ve got. So you use it and somehow it works, somehow you manage to – with incredible effort and energy use the damn rocks to defend yourself. And so you keep grabbing rocks. What else are you going to do?

Fast forward to six months later. You wake up in a hospital bed in a quiet town far from the battle. You’re bandaged from head to toe because you were beaten and bloodied in a hundred places. Bones have been broken, eyes have been gouged, limbs may have been severed, internal organs have collapsed.

But you’re alive.

In walks Dr. Knowitall, Harvard Medical School, Chief of Trauma Surgery, credentials up the wazoo, drives a Mercedes, clean hands, clean fingernails, hair cut and coiffed, the envy of all his peers. Born and raised into money, had parents who put him through medical school and paid his bills while he studied and graduated top of his class, the dude knows his trade. But war-zones? Yeah… not a clue. Oh he's had to stitch up plenty of people that have been there but personally he never had the pleasure.

And as he inspects your wounds he says to you “oh my poor dear such a mess you are but you went about it all wrong. What you should have done was this, this and that and if you had only done this, this and that well then you wouldn’t be lying here in this sorry state you're in with all of these gaping wounds and facing years of difficult recovery. It’s so simple and you really ought to have known better.”

I'm such a mess. Why didn't I know better?

Such a simple solution. Why... Didn't... I... Know... Better?

Deep Calls to Deep

2010-07-21T08:20:00.001-04:00

I keep a journal and I write in it pretty much every morning. I have noticed that sometimes I become focused on the need to write something deep and profound in this journal every day. But I’m thinking about this and I’ve realized that deep and profound has nothing to do with it. Actually what I am trying to do is to write something that is satisfying every day. When I have written something that allows me to get to the core of what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling what I am left with is a very satisfied feeling.

Having the opportunity to express ourselves to someone else, being able to say to someone what we really think, what we really feel, that is the path to fulfillment. Now I do realize that this idea may change over the coming years but even that is not necessarily an indication of my self-doubt about this particular idea but more the knowledge that anything and everything we come to know about ourselves, about others, about human life in particular is subject to evolution which encompasses change in the form of expansion, in the form of deeper clarity. How cool is that?

Right now the only person with whom I am fairly comfortable disclosing my feelings is my therapist. A shout-out to her for allowing me to get to that point. It has not been easy for her this I know. And in that opportunity I have realized that the way I feel sometimes walking out of her office and for the rest of the day after having been able to express something that I truly feel touches that place of satisfaction. And what that satisfaction is I do believe is just the tiniest bit of that elusive thing we’ve come to know as fulfillment.

This is a harbinger of things to come…

To this point I thought that being able to talk about my emotions was just a matter of relieving the pressure I have felt building for so long due to the fact that I’ve held them in for so long. Years and years of pent-up emotions that never had a chance to be outed. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a well that is filled to the top with garbage and if I could find a way to empty that well of the garbage little by little until I finally reached the bottom well then I would feel better. Totally cleaned out and starting from scratch. And while that may be partly true it isn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

This feeling of satisfaction that I get when I can talk to her in a way that is completely honest and in a way that gets to the core of my real feelings might just be the spark, a tiny little hint of how it feels to live my life as my true self. I have been fake for so long that I have lost – or I should say I never had -the knowledge of what it is to live as me, to recognize what it feels like to BE me, as I really and truly am and I am quite sure that these brief times of satisfaction that I feel in the expression of what I know to be true for me is a glimpse into the experience that is available to me if I live as me, the real me.

Now I know.

Disconnection of Thoughts about Connection

2010-07-19T11:44:00.001-04:00

I’ve just started a new book entitled In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky was a student of a gentleman by the name of G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdieff was an Armenian born teacher and mystic. The following from the site www.gurdieff.org presents a brief synopsis of the basic tenets of his teachings:

Mr. Gurdjieff was an extraordinary man, a master in the truest sense. His teachings speak to our most essential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life, and of human life in particular? As a young man, Gurdjieff relentlessly pursued these questions and became convinced that practical answers lay within ancient traditions. Through many years of searching and practice he discovered answers and then set about putting what he had learned into a form understandable to the Western world. Gurdjieff maintained that, owing to the abnormal conditions of modern life, we no longer function in a harmonious way. He taught that in order to become harmonious, we must develop new faculties—or actualize latent potentialities—through “work on oneself.” He presented his teachings and ideas in three forms: writings, music, and movements which correspond to our intellect, emotions, and physical body.

P.D. Ouspensky was an author and student of Gurdjieff. The book is a reflection of Ouspensky’s spent with Gurdjieff as well as a discussion of his teachings.

I agree with much, if not all of that brief synopsis although I have yet to get far enough into the book to know the details of his teachings. I just finished chapter one.

Anyway… as I’m reading this morning I got to thinking about a few things. I got to thinking about all of the books on spirituality, theology, psychology and philosophy that I’ve read over the past few years, which include both some eastern and western philosophies about spirituality, psychodynamic and Jungian psychology, Christian theology, admittedly for much of this time I’ve read mostly what could be classified as Christian spirituality, theology and philosophy however for the past year I’ve started to open my sphere of investigation. I am starting to dabble in more mystical writings, Buddhist and the like.

And I had a thought and it goes like this…

It is interesting to me that in all of these spiritual, mystical, philosophical (call them what you will) books we are presented with what appear to present deep, dark and profound thoughts about the nature of human beings, the nature of the universe, the different levels of being right down to the concept of ‘being’ itself. I have to say that these ideas are exciting to me, always something new to consider, always something new to confound and investigate and drive me forward for new levels of insight, understanding, wisdom and so on. These ideas, they spark a flame in us, a flame that points to a place within us that allows us to think that there just might be something else ‘out’ there or ‘in’ here or around it all SOMEWHERE that can fill the gigantic hole that exists in us. A void that so many of us cannot seem to touch no matter what we do, no matter what we buy, no matter how many churches we go to, books we read, trees we hug or yoga positions we assume.

We read, we listen, we practice yoga, we meditate, we worship in church, we volunteer at soup kitchens, we fight for our causes and we write checks to charities but still that hole remains. We are always listening to somebody else’s ideas, practicing somebody else’s instructions of movement or non-movement, hanging on somebody else’s words for the ANSWER. Somebody to tell us THE meaning, THE way, somebody to point us the way to that thing which we cannot even define. We are asking somebody to show us the way to a place that remains a mystery to us. It’s like going up to police officer on the street to ask for directions and saying “I’m going to a place, I don’t know what country it’s in, I don’t know the name of it and I don’t know anything about what it looks like but I need you to tell me how to get there.”.

I have noticed a similarity however among all of the teachings; they all talk about ‘connectedness’. They all infer knowledge of creation, a way to a ‘better’ place, a ‘higher’ plane, an elusive way of existence or a feeling or a state of mind that only a fortunate few might ever attain to.

But where is God in all of this? Where is God in all of these deep and profound explanations of the universe, of the talk of suffering and the connectedness of everything. Where is God in the talk of ‘higher’ states of being?

I cannot shake the feeling that all of these concepts exclude the personal. That is our deep connectedness to each other, the NEED of a person for other persons. I could be wrong but in my brief forays into Buddhist thought I’m pretty sure I’m detecting the suggestion that God is superfluous to the whole thing. I get a sense that this Buddhist idea of enlightenment does not require God. It’s all presented so… impersonally.

I am a human being and I must be connected to other human beings if I am to survive. This is a fact, pretty much everyone knows it. And so this necessity of connectedness to other people, this requirement of being human must dictate somehow that the ‘thing’ that I am searching for, the ‘higher’ plane of being is a different level of connectedness, in fact the ultimate level of personal connectedness and interaction which would be our connectedness to God.

How is it possible that a method (a path, a teaching, call it what you will) of being and living that purports to attain enlightenment or espouses a different (higher) level of existence could possibly exclude that THING from which everyone comes, runs through, exists in moment to moment? Given our connectedness to one another and everything then how can any “answer” to life exclude God?

You might say because God does not exist and we must find ourselves within ourselves. Hmm…

Then explain the connectedness. How is it possible that everything that IS is connected to everything else that IS? Random chance?

Unlikely.

Lay Down Your Arms

2010-07-16T09:27:00.000-04:00

I knew what was going to have to be done. I would try to push it from my mind and a thought would spring to mind; maybe I can do this without going there, maybe I can find a way to do this and still avoid that, ‘this’ being psychotherapy and ‘that’ being the places of pain. The places of real pain.

But in my heart I knew. In my heart I knew that I carried around some exceptionally well-constructed defenses. Everything I ever did that I was truly motivated to do I did extremely well. I’ll have an order of control freak with a large side of perfectionist please. That would be under the heading of Adult Child of Alcoholic (among other things) on the menu.

My whole life was a defense. My entire personality was built on rock hard defenses. A great and quick wit and sense of humor, albeit at times cutting and dark and sarcastic, spilling over into caustic on frequent occasion. Uber-competent, fairly intelligent (although I have been forced to re-think my level of intelligence in recent months) and intense… always intense. I have an intimidating posture that I wield like a weapon and I have fine-tuned this ability as a well-trained artisan. I am so good at it I don’t even have to think about it anymore. I turn it on like flipping a switch.

Everything about the way I conducted myself was done in the service of keeping people at arm’s length. And I did it by issuing from moment to moment a warning, an unspoken warning to anyone who came within a twelve foot radius. I am reminded of movies about World War II when there were scenes of barbed wire and those criss-crossing poles to which the wire was attached with a big sign hanging front and center and a warning to those who dared to come near:

ACHTUNG! KEIN EINTRAG!

WARNING! DO NOT ENTER!

But no words were needed. I did not need to provide reasons, I did not need to explain why. Once people got a taste of my approach they rarely had the guts to ask why anyway.

This might sound a bit extreme, it was although truthfully I never gave it any thought. It simply was the way I had become. It became part and parcel of who I was. The extremity does not show it’s face until one starts to put it into words, which I have recently done in my own therapy. Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me cringe. Sometimes it amuses me that I could wield such power over others without even a word and at other times I am ashamed that I have perpetrated this sort of behavior on those that I call my friends and acquaintances.

I am equal parts relieved and repelled in putting this into words on a public forum. Sometimes the benefits of a very small readership are many however

those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings like eagles;

they shall run and not grow weary;

they shall walk and not grow faint.

(Isaiah 40:13)

*****

I do not want to have to give up this sword because I do not want to do what I know I’m going to have to do to make that passage a reality in my life. I know that I’m going to have to lay down my defenses and walk through so much of the pain that has been intrinsic to my life for so many years. A person as well-defended as I am is loath to even SAY the word pain let alone admit to any of it. And yet the rewards will be, I think, beyond anything I could have ever imagined for myself. You see I believe those words in that passage above. I believe, no, in fact I know there are aspects of myself that if tapped into will enable me to exceed anything that I could have imagined for myself, for my life. And I know that there is a way of living that frees up the massive levels of energy that have been necessary to maintain those defenses all these years. And I know that I am about to trade the expenditure of so much negative energy for the incredible lightness of being that is the positive and free-flowing energy of a life lived in service of who I really am.

And I am so excited about the possibilities and oh man I cannot begin to express how much I DO NOT want to do this.

The Lion Lays Down with the Lamb

2010-07-13T07:25:00.000-04:00

A world where pain and sadness, grief and struggle, all manner of suffering cease to exist. A world where we will see face to face rather than into the dim mirror into which we gaze now. We will gaze directly, we will see clearly the face of God.

The search for self, the search for answers, the search for the meaning of life, what am I doing here? What is all this for? No more questions.

The search for God ends…

Now what?

*****

I do believe that in the midst of our pain and difficulties, in the midst of the pervasive feeling that we are engaged in, that our day to day is pointless, dull, a road to nowhere, we want something or someone to sweep in and give us a point, show us the exact path, give us all the answers that will alleviate our pain, provide excitement and purpose and satisfy the unexplainable longing that burns like a low-grade flame somewhere deep within.

We want someone or something to sweep in, grab us by the hand, whisk us away from our daily drudgery, our dreary, boring existence and bring us to a place of sunshine and blue skies and clear water. Pink drinks with umbrellas in them and reggae music playing in the background (always too loud). No cares, no stress, no pain, no worries. Wasting away in Margueritaville with all the answers.

But here’s my question: How long can a girl sit on a barstool in the middle of paradise before she gets bored?

In other words what do we do when the search comes to an end?

Eternity is a long time…

Vignettes of Thought

2010-06-23T14:01:00.000-04:00

The Book of Genesis: I am confused by the story of Adam and Eve. Seems to me that the opening of the eyes to their nakedness (Gen 3:6-7), the knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness. How does this become cause for being tossed by God from the Garden of Eden? Banishment from Eden is representative of our separation from God. Somehow our consciousness is the vehicle by which we lose touch with God. That the story has been framed in such a way that presents God as the heavy is interesting, it is however a story written by a human being. I keep that in mind.

There is a strong element of punishment and yet I read and re-read this story and wonder why? There’s that Tree of Life right smack-dab in the middle of the garden and Adam and Eve are told not to touch it. Why? So they will know good and evil and “become like one of us”? Seems to me that this is a little like putting candy in the middle of a young child’s playpen and telling them not to touch it. And when they do – and let’s face it the parent knows full well the child won’t be able to deny himself and his natural desires – the poor kid is punished for it.

And so Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise because they are being punished by God for doing what comes natural and yet God spends the rest of the span of scripture trying to get them back. Well, why the hell did he throw them out in the first place?

Have we taken a story that represents an explanation of the progression of natural human development of consciousness in order that we can have an awareness of the experience of life and turned it into some kind of punishment by God? Are we that rigid and limited in our ability to live freely, to take responsibility for our own actions, to deny our own culpability in a life not lived that we have to blame God for these restrictions that we have, in reality placed on ourselves?

*****

Trusting God: What exactly am I trusting God for… or with? Am I trusting that he will never allow me to be hurt? I’d say that ship has sailed for each and every one of us. The world is a place of pain and clearly part of our experience cannot help but be one of pain.

Really a question could be “is trust part of the equation at all”? And that might be key, rather not “the” question but “a” question, implying that life is an ever-changing, constantly moving flow where the questions keep coming and a lot of answers keep coming but answers oftentimes stop the questions don’t they? And one experience is not the last experience or the best experience or the worst experience. It is just one experience in a string of millions upon millions of experiences. They keep coming one right after the other, a never-ending flow of changing experience.

There is no “one answer”, there is no “one reason” why I am here, why any of us is here. There is no “one thing” for me to learn while I’m here. Life is an open-ended process, an open source of things to learn, stuff to experience. Every choice we make or don’t make resolves in yet another experience. Even doing nothing resolves to something. And the coolest thing of all – we so often forget this – the coolest thing of all is that in every respect we get to make some decision, we get to make some choice, we are empowered with some measure of control in the experience.

The only thing I can come up with is that “trusting God” means let life unfold. Live your life, exercise your personal choice, take your personal responsibility, accept that it is both joy and pain – nobody is immune to either – and trust that ultimately God stands with us, in us as part of us – a guide so subtle, too easy to miss.

Or maybe it means something else...

*****

My book on Mindfulness: I read something funny in the book this morning. The discussion is of chronic back pain and the widely held belief that it is caused by degeneration in the discs of the spine:

… Our capacity for symbolic, anticipatory thought, while extraordinarily adaptive in allowing us to construct complex civilizations, is ill suited to coexist with our mammalian fight-or-flight system. Rather than our transition to walking upright, it appears that this evolutionary accident is responsible for the epidemic of chronic back pain.

Why do I think this is funny? Well, it’s the term “evolutionary accident” that gets me. Seems to me that if evolution, and I speak of the term evolution to mean the spontaneous accident that happened somewhere, at sometime, in some place that nobody can ever define, were actually THE explanation for why everything is here than everything that is here should be defined as an ‘evolutionary accident’ because the very concept of evolution - at least as far as I can tell generally and scientifically speaking refers to ‘without God’. Therefore if there is no thought and no intent behind the existence of everything that is then the entire thing is an evolutionary accident.

And I’m wondering why the PhD who wrote this book can’t see the joke in his statement.

Just for the record, and I’m sure it must be clear by my use of dripping sarcasm in that last statement that I do not for one minute believe that everything that is here is the result of ‘evolution’. Again, I refer you to my definition above. That the best and brightest of our scientists could think that something could come from nothing – well forgive me and I know I don’t have PhD’s up the wazoo but any fool in the street or on the hill knows you cannot get something from nothing. How is it that our best and brightest PhD’s somehow manage to look right past this little inconvenience to their theories? It reminds me of a passage in the Bible, Romans 1:22 Professing to be wise they became fools…

Some day I’m going to go up to one of those best and brightest, I’m going to hand him an empty hat, nothing in my hand, nothing up my sleeve, and I’m going to tell him to pull me a rabbit out of that empty hat. Or a lizard, or a rock or a newspaper or any old damn thing he wants.

Do I believe that the idea of evolution is possible? Most certainly. In a world where God exists I absolutely believe that man could evolve. Evolution is absolutely possible. We all evolve mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually throughout the course of our lives. Evolution is a fact of life. It is the ‘scientific’ definition of evolution that is lacking… or should I say laughable.

Mindfully Aware of Impatience

2010-06-06T08:22:00.002-04:00

This whole mindfulness thing intrigues me, I feel strongly that there is something very significant to it. Well of course there’s something significant to it – it brings us in touch with ourselves, and there is a hell of a lot going on in ourselves. Mostly we go through our days not paying the least bit of attention to ourselves. All day long we respond to the external world. Sights, sounds, commands mostly, come to us from without and we spend our days reacting to all of those things that come to us from without and we rarely give a moment’s notice, ten seconds of consideration to that which is coming to us from within. What comes from within requires just as much attention, if not more than that which comes from without.

My, myself and I have ignored everything – for the entire span of my life – that comes from within. Actively ignored I should say. I have spent my whole life responding only to that which has come to me externally. Any time a thought or a feeling arose from within, especially a thought or a feeling that was in confrontation to that from without the internal lost out to the external. Each and every time. I have never stopped during the course of my day for five minute to ask myself “what is it that I want?”, “how is it that I feel?”.

I’ve been thinking this morning about the practice of meditation. For the past few days I have forgotten to set aside those fifteen minutes each day to spend in mindfulness practice. Of course I remember the next day and I resolve to remember in the coming day to set aside that time and then life happens and I remember the next day that I forgot the previous day.

Not only that but in those few days that I did manage to set aside the time the feeling that prevails as I sit with myself in quiet is impatience. To think that the idea and practice of setting aside fifteen minutes out of a twenty-four hour day in mindfulness meditation, fifteen minutes to turn our focus to ourselves causes impatience is very sad. It’s sad because that time spent in meditation is an opportunity to focus on myself, focusing on my inner world, my thoughts and my feelings and why is that not something that I would welcome in my day? Why would I not be intrigued by me? Why would I not really look forward each and every day to find out what’s going on with me?

I spend all day, every day responding the needs of others. My family, my job and now my dog. I watch TV, I listen to the radio, I read the newspaper, I read a book… I am responding to the external stimuli in my environment and I don’t give it a second thought. These things don’t make me impatient. Well… ok sometimes but I do them… generally without a second thought. Somebody needs something? Do it. Go to the store, clean up a mess, take the dog for a walk, answer the phone and solve the problem, make dinner, turn on the TV, do this, do that and the other thing. Reacting and responding all day long to everything that comes at me from without. And all I can do when I manage to even REMEMBER to give myself fifteen minutes of quiet, reflective time all I can do is be impatient. This is un-natural. THAT is natural, that responding to the external. THIS is un-natural, reflecting on the internal.

How did I ever come to this?

This cannot be and now that I know it I will do my best that it will not be so. What I think and feel is most important to me and I want to spend time each day to investigate me, find out what’s going on with me. What do I want? I want to know me, that’s what I want.

Mindfulness Happens

2010-06-03T10:46:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I took my new puppy for a hike at a park in an adjoining town. This park is about 250 acres of dedicated public open space that offers a small beach on a lake, hiking trails and a little fenced in doggie park that borders the lake on one side.

We start out by hiking about two miles of trails up and down hills, around the lake and through the woods and we always end up (by her choice) in the dog park where she is allowed off her leash. Freedom to roam and chase blowing leaves untethered. In that little span of park she experiences the only freedom that a six-month old puppy gets in the course of a day… and she makes the most of it.

I sit on a bench in the shade. Funny thing about a hot, still day in New England, no matter how hot or humid or still the air the breeze still blows off the lake. There can be absolutely no movement of air in the other 249 acres of space but at that lake the breeze is always blowing.

Here is what I did: I felt the breeze and heard the leaves rustle. I watched the ripples in the water. I listened to the voices of the swimmers across the lake at the beach. I listened to the footsteps and chatter of people walking by on the trails. I watched the dog sit in wait for just the right moment to pounce on the next blowing leaf that had the misfortune of crossing her path. I heard birds, I heard dogs, I saw fish jumping out of the water and some sort of water animal (otter?) cutting a path through the lake. I chatted with people who walked by – my dog is a real conversation piece. I don’t mean to brag but she’s a real looker.

Here is what I did not do: Think about anything that happened the day before or even that morning. Think about anything that I had to do the next day or even that evening. I didn’t think about the mortgage or what I needed to stop by the grocery store to buy. I didn’t think about work or any other responsibility that falls to me during the normal course of any given day.

And I only realized later that for that ninety minutes that I spent in that park this was my experience. Mindfulness… being aware of where you are and what is going on in the moment. If you’re fortunate enough to get as much pleasure in the experience as I did yesterday so much the better. That ladies and gentleman is mindfulness.

And it happens… sometimes without even trying.

The Fear of Being Alone

2010-06-02T07:16:00.002-04:00

Connection by detachment. We live under the delusion (albeit a delusion that we come by naturally and honestly) that physical proximity defines ‘not being alone’. But physical proximity does not necessarily cure loneliness. Psychological proximity, emotional proximity is that which ultimately connects us with others. It is the internal - call it mental, emotional, spiritual – aspects of our humanness that provide us with basic human sustenance, the food that produces growth.

It is a sad paradox in life that our fear of being alone is ultimately the catalyst that leads us into isolation and loneliness.

Genesis

2010-06-01T17:34:00.001-04:00

I have been reading a book about a little thing called mindfulness meditation. I must segue into the rest of this post by saying that I have over the past almost two years of therapy frequently been blown away by the dawning realization of how little the average person knows about what it is that makes them tick. Most of us are so out of touch with our own inner world that we don’t have the first clue about what motivates us to do the things we do, like the things we like, fear the things we fear. It is equal parts amazing and scary and tragic because the ramifications of this ignorance for each and every single life is so profound. We close ourselves off to who and what we really are all in the interests of maintaining connection with the important people in our lives and we have absolutely no idea that we’re doing it.

Insert end of segue here.

Mindfulness meditation – the concept is laughably simple. Everything that comes into your awareness for the length of time that you are meditating is noted (i.e. you become consciously aware of it) and you accept it without judgment. For example I have taken to spending fifteen minutes each day in mindfulness meditation. I find a quiet place, I close my eyes, I turn my attention to my breathing. As each thought comes into my mind I am to become aware of it and then gently turn my attention back to my breathing.

Did I say the concept was laughably simple? I believe I did. And it is… laughably simple IF… you are the type of person who thinks your thoughts are acceptable. Which is to say not me. If you are me you spent your formative years learning and then fearing that every thought you had, every opinion, every idea was subject to somebody else’s idea of what was wrong with your thought, opinion, idea. So you learn a few things. You learn that your own ideas are subject to criticism, stinging criticism, you learn to dismiss your thoughts as invalid, you learn that your ideas aren’t worth anything, creativity flies out the window and from there you pretty much learn to keep your real thoughts to yourself. Oh you’ll discuss the weather, sports and maybe even politics but real honest to goodness deep conversations? No way. Feelings? Forget it. Creativity? You lose it.

There is an interesting bent to this kind of learning. It isn’t like intellectual learning, you know the kind that says two plus two makes four and Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two. Those are facts. This is burned into your soul learning, not unlike being branded much as cattle are branded. You don’t just scrape that brand off, it is burned in there.

Laughably simple and very difficult for me. Funny thing though, you start to realize after doing this a few times that even the thought that your thought is bad or wrong or somehow unacceptable, even that is ok. Everything is ok.

Right now I have no concept of what it would be like to live a life that accepts what I think without judgment. I suppose it comes as no surprise that I am my own harshest critic. Funny how that happens, one day you start to believe the hype and turn against yourself. I have no concept that my ideas might be worth pursuing, that my thoughts, my feelings do matter to someone, they matter to me and they are what make up my subjective world which is what makes up my experience which is what makes up my life. Acceptance of my own thoughts no matter what they are.

There is of course still much to be undone. The discovery of that brand on my behind has only just happened but where else does one start no? The world of possibilities that have just opened up before me, I see no end in sight.

Hollywood Fairytales

2010-05-03T08:44:00.001-04:00

Last week there was a movie on TV. I don’t know the name of it and I could bother to find out except I don’t really care however it was apparently the story of the wife of the founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement who also happened to be the founder of the Al-Anon movement which as many of us know is the support group for the ‘victims’ of the alcoholic. Perhaps victims is the wrong word, although I suspect many of those victims would agree with me, however I cannot come up with a better word to describe it.

Anyway, I digress. Through the years I have never been one to watch movies about alcoholics, read books about alcoholics, go to seminars about alcoholics, etc. I was well-versed in the subject matter and I didn’t care to re-hash any of it. I had put it behind me, didn’t need to remind myself.

So they tell me that’s denial. Hmm. Well maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, either way I felt no need, I had no desire to walk that road again even if it was only in memories and theories and statistics born of studies. I was done with it.

And they tell me that’s denial. So be it.

This time I decided to watch the movie. Stop the denial, face it head-on, make myself watch the movie and so I did.

I managed to get about fifteen minutes of watching time out of what was I assume a two hour running time. It wasn’t because it brought back painful memories that I didn’t want to bother with it was because what I saw in that fifteen minutes of viewing time had no relation to my experience and certainly while I cannot know for sure my educated guess is that it had no relation to the experience of the movie’s main subject, the founder of the Al-Anon movement.

Here is what I saw in those fifteen minutes: a woman, dressed neatly in her expensive clothing sitting prim and proper in a chair quietly weeping with her face in her hands (as if nobody can see that) over the pain of it all, never losing her self-control, she was the brave and stoic victim of her husband’s alcoholism, accepting quietly and in a dignified manner the hand which God had dealt her. That’s what ladies do right? Accept the flaws of their man stoically. Now I will say that at one point her father did lose control a little and gave Mr. Alcoholic a good tongue-lashing when our heroine was lying stoically in her hospital bed after (I think) losing a baby, or maybe discovering she was pregnant or whatever it was. That was irrelevant. What was relevant is that gosh-darn, good tongue-lashing her father gave his drunk son-in-law. A good tongue-lashing albeit well controlled and diplomatic.

I have no basis for comparison for that picture because I can emphatically say that was not my experience. That was Hollywood’s presentation of what it is like to live in a home with substance abuse. Neat and tidy, everyone has on their make-up, nobody loses control, there is no yelling or screaming, it’s all so… presentable.

So I got to wondering what it would be like if somebody made a movie that depicted what it’s REALLY like to live in a home where there is a substance abuser. First of all the director would have to have first-hand experience, there is no other way. You cannot depict accurately the dysfunction, and when I say dysfunction I mean out and out CRAZINESS of an alcoholic home without having done it yourself. There is simply no other way. Then, in order to find actors to play the parts you would have to scour the country for Al-Anon meetings attended by trained actors because you simply cannot play the part accurately if you haven’t been there yourself. I would suggest excluding any actor that is classically trained in Shakespeare because that’s just too damned civilized for something like this.

Ok we have our director, we have our actors now it’s time for the screenplay and again and of course the screenwriter must him/herself have come from, well need I say it?

So what’s the screenplay look like? This was a tough one but I don’t think there’s any real, organized story-line, in other words we’re not moving towards any denouement. There are no heroes only people depicted as f**g NUTS and there is quite possibly no happy ending, on the contrary although the potential for an ugly and tragic Hollywood ending is great. I think the movie would be nothing but a string of scenes with people yelling and screaming, things being throw, fights being had, various sorts of abuses being perpetrated, you know what I’m talking about, that real and raw fear and anger and anguish that actual human beings exhibit in times of high stress. People would get hurt in the making of this movie, cameras would be broken, scenery would be destroyed, insurance rates would be exorbitant. You know what I’m talking about, the kind of behavior that the censors would never allow on TV. The kind of behavior that makes you cringe when you see it and causes you deep shame when you think about how you engaged in it.

There would be no Academy Award nominations for this film because we like our Oscars to go actors who can reach deep within themselves and pull out understated and poignant performances but there is nothing understated and poignant about this. It is ugly and violent and destructive in the truest sense of those words and we seldom if ever hand out awards for ugliness and violence and destruction.

And then I thought nah, nobody would ever pay to see something like that. I know I wouldn’t.

The Unsayable

2010-04-29T08:05:00.000-04:00

Why is anything unsayable?

Because of the secrets we keep, that’s why.

We learn right from the get-go to keep secrets. Secret keeping is pervasive among human beings. It is pervasive in our largest institutions - think governments and (need I mention) the Catholic Church. Secrets are pervasive in our work environments, think high-profile, long-term employees leaving the company. We’ve all seen this happen. Never thought he’d leave wow I wonder what’s going on. He sneaks out the door one day, an email is sent out from the high-ups telling us that he’s left and using some stock language to thank him for his years of service and how much we have enjoyed working with him and then he’s gone, never to be heard from again. And the rest of us employees who apparently do not warrant an honest explanation are left to speculate and rumors are left to fly and people are left with an un-easy feeling about their own job security. Secrets.

Secrets are pervasive in our homes. As children we learn from a very young age that we aren’t privy to the secrets our parents keep but we know they are there. Our parents keep their secrets, sometimes between themselves and away from the kids and sometimes they keep them from each other and (worse yet) secrets are sometimes kept between one parent and a child and away from the other parent. When I was growing up my house was constant secrets. My mother has always been a staunch keeper of secrets. Still is.

It is through this phenomenon of secret keeping that so much of our personal experience becomes unsayable.

Unsayable in that we have learned to keep it wordless. Unsayable in that the effect of learned secret keeping causes us to detached internally, psychically from the things that need saying and therefore we lose the connection to those things that need saying simply because we have gotten the message from every direction and however subtly that we are to keep our secrets.

I don’t get it.

I've Got Nuthin

2010-04-12T22:37:00.003-04:00

Funny thing about blogs, they don’t really lend themselves to your blogging amigos just dropping by to say hello. Generally comments from those that are good enough to bother to read your thoughts are spurred only by a new post. I think that blogs should have a ‘just stopped by to say hey and wondering why we haven’t heard from you lately’ section.

I have often wanted to say something similar to bloggers with whom I’ve become somewhat familiar when I notice they sort of disappear after having built a reputation as regular posters but haven’t quite figured out what’s the politically correct way to do so without being invited by a new post.

It is one of those bits of phenomena that is always a reminder to me of how utterly impersonal is the internet. People write so beautifully and poignantly about some of the most personal aspects of their lives and I follow and I comment and I frequently recognize similarities to my own personal experiences but in the end I don’t know any of these undoubtedly excellent people. Strange.

I am oftentimes saddened by that aspect of e-connection with people because certainly in some of the blogs I follow I recognize people I would most definitely like to meet and talk with. Unfortunately that is unlikely to ever happen. The internet can bring people so close in proximity by virtue of disclosure of shared experience and yet we are all so far away in terms of geography, in that nobody knows what anyone looks like, in that mostly we don’t know of families and friends and pets and home decorating styles and so on. In the end we all have the sense to guard ourselves from too much internet exposure because, well there are predators out there right and ultimately we’re not entirely sure we want anyone to know it’s us (or maybe that’s just my hang-up).

I have run into a bumpy road recently and I’ve been somewhat caught off guard by it. It’s one of those things that kind of slaps you in the face – actually it was more like somebody walked up to me and gently removed the bag over my head and the blindfold over my eyes but not without first asking for my permission to do so (shout-out to my therapist here) - and forces you to re-examine every bit of image you ever had about yourself. Freaking therapy man. It’s like a car wreck sometimes. You drive by, you know it’s ugly, you don’t want to look but you just can’t help yourself. Afterward you might not necessarily be sorry you looked but it sure takes awhile to wrap your mind around what you saw.

And I have to admit that I’m left a bit befuddled and unable to write much lately… and I was having so damn much fun just throwing down on paper any old thing that came into my mind. And now bupkus, nothing. Go figure.

The Evolution of a Tough Exterior

2010-03-10T10:01:00.001-05:00

Back in the day racing bikes, and by ‘bikes’ I mean bicycles, were made of steel. Shock-repellent, built to withstand the elements, the rocks that were inevitably to strike, the falls, the crashes and collisions. Steel is strong, rigid and unbending. Built to take a blow.

But steel is heavy and hard to maneuver. Due to its weight it takes effort to move it. It will take a lickin and keep on tickin but at the cost of a lot of expended energy to move it.

Subsequent designs brought to us aluminum. Much lighter and more maneuverable, still a bit rigid but definitely getting better. Certainly it will not take a blow like steel but it is getting lighter. Perhaps a period of sacrificing a bit of 'strength' as a trade for offloading some of the weight and therefore requiring less energy to drag it up those hills.

With the advent of carbon fiber the construction really starts to change, little by little. The concept of what is strong, what is tough begins to evolve. We are moving from heavy and rigid construction designed to repel that which hits it (imagine if you will bullets bouncing off Superman’s chest) to construction that is built to absorb the blows and protect the posterior area of the rider (think crumple zones in cars).

Carbon Fiber and Titanium. Light and maneuverable. Shock absorbing rather than shock repelling. Built to absorb the blows and protect the rider. Very light so it requires much less energy to operate.

A new, different and more gentle concept of what it means to be tough.

The Glue that Binds the Family Together

2010-03-05T09:46:00.003-05:00

I need to know, I need to understand how it is that this phenomenon exists that tells us that it is acceptable to need help, to be hospitalized for physical illness but it is shameful, unacceptable, weak to need help, to be hospitalized for mental and emotional illness.

We readily accept that we cannot cure by sheer force of our will a broken bone, diabetes, cancer, and so we seek out medical help, we talk to our friends to get referrals to doctors, we do our research, we involve our families, at least we have no problem telling them. When we walk into the hospital to have our broken bone x-rayed and set we walk in with our head held high, we are not embarrassed, we accept, hell we don’t give it a moments thought that we cannot fix this ourselves and that we need medical intervention or it’s not going to get better. Broke my arm, go to the doctor and get it fixed.

I know, I know, I am asking that age-old question. And yet this strain of thought persists. We don’t readily admit it. If a friend tells us of their own mental anguish we don’t think twice about instructing them to get help. But when we’re feeling our own mental and emotional anguish, when it is our child, our spouse who is dealing with depression, with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse then somehow it becomes shameful. We cannot accept this version of ourselves or this version of our child, a person who is attached to us, who is an extension of ourselves, a version of a person who cannot ‘handle’ life, who is somehow not ‘strong’ enough to tackle what life throws at them.

And so when we walk into that psychiatric and substance abuse facility it is under cover of darkness, under a cloud of shame. We do not walk in with our posture ramrod straight and our head held high but we shuffle in quietly, not wanting anyone to know. Nobody calls all their friends and family prior to entering a 30 day rehab stint to tell them that they’re going into rehab and “hey I’ll see you in month, please come visit me if you can” and when we get out our friends and family are not lining up eager to ask us about the experience. “So… tell me all about it, who’d you meet, how was the food, any eligible men, women there?”.

*****

I come from a family where substance abuse has tunneled its way into the very deepest core, it has become one of the threads, that connects, that defines this family and I’m not just talking about my immediate family which is to say my husband and son and my brothers and sisters. My father had a terrible problem with alcohol, his father had a terrible problem with alcohol, some of his brothers had a problem with alcohol, some of his sisters married alcoholics, some of my cousins on my father’s side are alcoholics and I know that at one time or another in their lives a couple of my brothers had a problem with addiction and one of my sisters had a long relationship with a man who had an alcohol problem. Alcoholism has become the glue that sticks to, that binds, that joins all branches of this family together and it keeps attaching itself to members generation after generation after generation.

Substance dependency has attached itself to my son.

There is no doubt in my mind that the glue has found its way onto him through me. I cannot speak to genes, this may or may not be true although I will say that I have found nothing, no piece of literature that convinces me that this so-called ‘alcoholic’ gene is a scientific fact. It is a theory. I only know that somewhere along the line I rubbed up against him and left traces of the glue on his skin. But it isn’t really like that.

Somewhere along the line my psyche rubbed against his psyche and left traces of the glue in his mind, in his soul. The mental and emotional ‘stuff’ that was injected into me as the result of my having an alcoholic parent rubbed up against him, was transferred to his mental and emotional control center by his simply being with me, by simply living in, being raised in an environment by a person who was raised in a house with an alcoholic.

It is not necessary for the X- factor (that’s me) to be an alcoholic themselves to pass the glue on. The X-factor merely has to have had the experience and not bothered to get the help they needed before having their own children and passing on, however unwittingly, the glue.

I never got the help I needed because I was ashamed and I would not accept that first of all I could have an emotional problem. The shame ran deep in my house growing up as it does in so many homes where substance abuse has taken over. I would not accept that I needed help, although frankly if I had managed to figure it out years ago I would have had to figure it out all on my own because again, denial runs deep and strong in these homes. But slowly through the years it became somewhat apparent even to me that it might be just the tiniest bit possible that I was suffering the effects of living with an alcoholic. But I could fix it myself. Through sheer will-power I believed that I could fix it myself, or rather through sheer force of will I believed that I could control my oftentimes volatile behavior and I did, for a number of years I pulled it together, got it under control and got to thinking that I was ok.

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. What is controlled through sheer force of will on one side of the room will manage to find its way out through the cracks in some other wall in that same room. If it throws itself against the wall on the left side of the room and cannot penetrate it figures this out immediately and simply goes to the wall on the right side of the room. No big deal. Can’t get out this door? I’ll try that door.

Problem is and unbeknownst to me at the time my son who was in his formative years of physical, intellectual and emotional maturity was caught up in all the wall-banging and he was getting thrown around the room with me, by watching and hearing and feeling what was emanating from me.

The sins of the father (and oftentimes the mother).

Don’t let anybody ever tell you it’s a gene. It is NOT just a gene.

He is ashamed of himself. Ashamed that he needs help, ashamed that rehab is probably on his very imminent horizon, ashamed that he cannot, through sheer force of his own will beat this addiction. And I cannot convince him that it is not he who should be ashamed but all of us who came before who refused to look, who refused to acknowledge, who continue to willfully and wantonly refuse to look this demon of our family in the eye and say “Enough! It ends here.” There is no shame to be felt in finally deciding to exercise by sheer force of our own will the choice to exorcise the demon that has to this point been welcome in our home.

I Don't Want To Be Perfect

2010-03-04T08:34:00.001-05:00

This notion of perfection, I cannot handle it, I can’t do it. Many organized religious doctrines indicate that our life is, or at least ‘should be’ a striving for the perfection of God, to be ‘like God’, to become ‘like God’. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what it means and so I would be, will be striving for something that is out of my reach. Attempting to model myself after some ideal of which I haven’t even the slightest hint of a definition. Any concept of perfection that I can devise on my own can only be flawed because I’ve never seen perfection and I am not perfect. I know the word ‘perfection’ but I’ve never actually seen perfection. Have you?

We acquire this thing called ‘wisdom’ as we move through life, grow older, deal with the ups and downs, gain perspective, let go of what we cannot, strive to pay attention only to that which we can and I wonder in all of this striving, this hanging on and letting go, I wonder if I really need this thing that appears to be somebody else’s idea of ‘wisdom’. Sometimes I think the acquisition of wisdom is just one more intellectual feather in our intellectual cap by which we measure our spiritual progress.

Ah yes, I am gaining wisdom she thinks to herself and therefore I am getting closer to perfection.

What is that line again? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!

If I am not careful I could really start to believe all those people when they tell me that I possess this ‘wisdom’ thing. It happens and it makes me wince a little, that momentary jab in the pit of my stomach that is discomfort. That feeling tells me "don't fall for this!" If I attain to, if my desire is for our general concept of wisdom I might be inclined to start thinking that I’m a hell of a lot wiser than I really am and the effect of that will be (trust me on this) a constricting of my sphere of perception. I will stop looking and listening for others and start thinking that yeah, I’ve got it pretty well figured out.

When I start thinking I have it figured out I stop listening for what others hear, I stop feeling what others feel, I stop paying attention, I close my mind and my body to the experience of others and in doing this I stop allowing new experience for myself, when I do this I restrict my own opportunity for the endless possibilities of experience to be had. I close down rather than open up. I slip out of 52" high-definition, widescreen color and into 12" low-definition small screen, black and white.

When, as regular old and flawed people, our minds meet over a shared feeling, when our hearts connect for that instant in mutual acknowledgement of shared experience, shared feeling, whether it be in joy or pain, when we truly ‘know’ the other in this way then we are truly and definitively the image of God. I do not see where ‘perfection’ or intellectual ‘wisdom’ has any part in this.

The Mind is a Terrible, TERRIBLE Thing to Waste... So Don't

2010-02-21T19:56:00.001-05:00

What is the purpose of having a mind that has the power to generate thoughts, that is driven to create new ideas if we’re not then going to put those ideas out there for discussion? Consider all the possible thoughts of all of the possible people out there and imagine (if you’re willing) all the good stuff that could come of it if we were all willing to put our thoughts out there.

If we intend only to be drones blindly following the opinions of others or machines like computers who can do nothing but take in information, occasionally regurgitating that information in some other bland and lifeless format then why bother to expend the energy to think at all?

Yes, I know there will be people who disagree, who will look at you funny, call you crazy, even send hurtful insults your way. I’ve been there and I’m still here.

We don’t want to be different, we want to conform… but do we really want to conform? How many of us harbor a secret wish that we had the courage to speak our minds, to stand by the strength of our convictions, to unleash the creative juices that flow. We are afraid to stand out, afraid to disagree, afraid to appear insolent or argumentative, afraid that our ideas will not be well received, afraid, afraid, afraid.

Afraid of what? That somebody won’t agree with us?

I do think that one of many definitions of courage involves a willingness to push past that fear of the consequences of self-expression and do it anyway. There will be those who will chastise you for it, strongly at times but my guess is that there will be many, many more who will secretly envy and respect you for it.

And still we don’t. Still we are afraid.

(she says as she anonymously posts to her blog).

Hey, just because I think it doesn’t mean I’m ready to actually do it yet.

Props: Thanks to Little M for the inspiration for this post.

Where Titles of Essays Are Not Possible

2010-02-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

A quote from ‘The Unholy Bible’ by June Singer:

“Many problems of the individual psyche are not measurable in the same way [as the measurable data of mathematics and the natural sciences], that is they cannot be compared with a predetermined standard of measurement for they are subject to an infinite complexity of variables which serve to color each experience differently.”

This is a very exciting statement. One might take the first part re: the immeasurability of psychic data against anything that we can quantify in measurable terms as a hindrance or a weakness or a problem of psychology and the human psyche in general as it pertains to science and scientific study. Certainly if I am a scientist trying to prove my theory to colleagues or get my paper published in the scientific journals than to be sure I have encountered what might be considered an insurmountable obstacle. I suppose it matters to what extent the approval of our colleagues and our theories being published in scientific journals weighs on our minds as proof of our success, not to mention the impact on our self-esteem. Again I digress although into an area so very pertinent to my over-all theme.

However… what if I am a human being interested in living my life? What if I am a human being whose only purpose, whose one goal in life is to discover myself, discover the potential for a creative fire burning within? What if my purpose is not to prove my thought patterns, i.e. the validity of my ideas and feelings based on some scientific data of what is right or wrong, fact or fiction but rather to experience me, myself and I in relationship to the world both seen and unseen. To think what I want to think, what I actually do think, to feel what want I feel, what I actually do feel and to express those aspects of myself using whatever medium I choose for my self-expression.

What if that and only that is what I cared about? What small, tightly enclosed, dark box would I find myself crawling out of if I could actually succeed in living my life this way? I think one cannot imagine (assuming one lives in the aforementioned box) the possibilities inherent to this manner of living. What discoveries would we make of ourselves, of our family and our friends and our society? What incredibly cool things would we stumble upon along the way and what, WHAT might this feel like. What Freedom might we experience living this sort of life?

Is God there? I don’t know, let’s find out. I wonder what it does it mean if He is. I don’t know, let’s find out.

*******

Hard to do. Hard to break out of the chains of past experience that bind me. Hard to extricate myself from old thought patterns which seem to have left indelible tracks burned into my mind and heart and soul. Tracks that lead to thoughts of uselessness, of worthlessness, of sadness and grief and loss and fear. Oh that fear is a tough one to conquer, always, always knocking at the door, tapping on the window, sneaking in through the cracks. A seemingly permanent brand that screams limited or no possibility, too much chance of failure and then what?

*******

To be sure the work of a lifetime; to break free from the bonds of rigid and limiting thought patterns passed onto us through our environment. Limiting and rigid thought with its rules and regulations, its harsh and destructive judgments. A lifetime of work it seems always pushing a boulder up a hill, one tiny step forward only to roll back ten feet.

We must understand and accept that it is not a straight shot UP at even the slightest trajectory but rather a spiraling, like a coil where UP is preceded and followed by seemingly interminable periods of spiraling, spinning in place, walking around in circles, not gaining, not losing.

That is undoubtedly reality. It is a total body make-over that is not defined by L’Oreal or Estee Lauder or even Jack LaLanne. Rather it is a make-over that is defined by the Spirit of Infinity whose boundaries know no bounds and UP is part of a Whole that we can only see when we stand back and gaze from a later distance, a later perspective. Then and only then can we see the UP that somehow occurred without ever realizing.

Of Harried Housewives and Holy Men

2010-02-19T09:15:00.001-05:00

I do believe that all the mystic-speak, that is to say the language of the mystics can have the undesirable effect of distancing the experience of knowing God, can make it seem as though the possibility of knowing God becomes less and less likely and so we don’t even bother to look. The possibility of exercising, never mind that, the possibility of even having a hope of discovering our own sixth sense, our own intuitive knowledge of God becomes so foreign due to the obscurity of the mystical language that it remains something to be dismissed, laughed off, forced off our internal radar as potentially viable.

Why would I bother to look for a God that in the telling of others is so inconceivable to me as something I can attain to? If indeed He is so close why would I not have the slightest idea where to find Him? Why would I have no sense of the possibility that I could reach Him if I tried?

Must I be a twelfth century monk, friar, cloistered nun, theologian, saint? Must I wear a brown frock tied with a rope, must I shave my head or cut my hair using my cereal bowl as a guide in order that I can know God? What if my life includes grocery shopping and toilet cleaning in twenty-first century America? Am I destined never to know first-hand the love of God because of the luck of my draw in life?

It is unfortunate, crossing over into blatant tragedy that the mystical life is presented in such obscure terms and of people who are presented to us as remote and above and beyond anything we could ever know because we go to work in an office and coach youth sports on the weekend.

This presentation makes it so easy to deny for twenty-first century western society the possibility of a life fuller than we could have ever imagined, of a realization of our potential beyond what we could have ever thought possible for ourselves (assuming the spiritual books are to be believed that is).

I gotta run. The phone’s ringing, the Fed Ex guy is knocking at the door, the school bus is waiting and rush hour traffic is a bitch.

The End of the Earth

2010-02-18T17:39:00.001-05:00

Where Deep calls to deep

And leaves a memory of something long forgotten.

The Unity of Polarity

2010-02-13T08:36:00.004-05:00

The psychologists, the scientists, they want to describe everything in purely natural terms and in the mystics I have seen a tendency to describe everything in purely spiritual terms, at times teetering on the brink of falling over into rigid and dogmatic theology. They take their transcendent experience and frame it or rather force it into the box of religion. As the scientists insist on strictly natural explanations for everything that is, the mystics insist on purely spiritual explanations, something I have come to classify in my mind as ‘scientific’ religiosity or spirituality.

But the two they are one. The awakening of spiritual awareness can only happen, can only be explained in terms that completely and unabashedly integrate the two concepts together into one whole. The separation of the two aspects into natural vs. spiritual is, I think how the understanding and acceptance of the reality and process of awakening of spiritual awareness as an inherent aspect of humanness to the average person becomes confused, hard to fathom, hard to integrate into their daily life, into their normal intellectual and emotional sphere of comprehension. We think that life must be one or the other when in fact it must be both of them together, when in fact it is both of them together.

The religious, the spiritual literature would have us believe that this, whatever ‘this’ is, is not our true home. I am perplexed by this notion. Is God-awareness a severing and casting off of all aspects of our natural senses, those senses by which we experience the physical world, i.e. touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing? Does that sixth sense, the intuition by which we recognize God come only, always and completely at the expense of our five physical senses? I find this hard to believe and harder yet to accept. That we have existed in the physical world via the exercise of our five natural senses at the expense of our sixth intuitive sense is without question for most. But to suggest that we then turn the tables and develop that sixth sense at the expense of the other five seems just as questionable to me.

If we do that what then becomes of our appreciation of physical beauty? Did not God create the physical world as an expression of His existence? Does not the Word of God encompass not only that which is unseen but also that which is right before our eyes and ears and noses? Who has ever stood at the end of the earth at sunrise gazing out over the ocean? The scene that presents itself in the moments just before the sun peeks into view over the horizon is nothing short of majestic. The colors of the sky, hues for which we have no representation in a box of crayons, purples, pinks, grays and blues, all at once and yet separate. Glimpses of Eternity... all at once and yet separate. Is this not the very definition of sublime? Do I dismiss this phenomenon as purely natural and therefore unnecessary to my quest for God? Not relevant to my spiritual awareness and growth?

Must it always be natural vs. spiritual, rational vs. irrational. This AGAINST that. Two forces in direct opposition to each other? Always two ends of the spectrum pitted against one another, in competition for the rights to claim the human soul? We speak of unity when we speak of God and yet we divide and separate in our struggle to explain how it ‘must’ work.

Can we comprehend the true splendor and brilliance of the Light unless we have first descended into the depths of the Darkness?

Soup Kitchens, Photo-Ops and Fulfillment

2010-02-11T12:58:00.000-05:00

Last winter I was watching the evening news. For the record I reside in the greater New York area and around these parts we love us our NY Yankees. Perennial winners and God knows everybody like a winner. It was close to Thanksgiving and the local news was doing a story on several members of the team, I don’t remember which ones. But these gentleman were doing their duty as role-models and good citizens, which is to say that just because they now have multi-million dollar contracts to play baseball they like to show the world at large that they haven’t forgotten their roots, they haven’t forgotten the little people who aren’t blessed with a 90 mph fastball or the ability to hit a baseball 450 feet over a fence.

And so there they are at a downtown New York City soup-kitchen, chef hats on, standing behind the counter ladling out soup, turkey, stuffing, the works while photographers from every local newspaper snapped pictures and sportswriters were jockeying for position, sticking microphones in their faces trying to get a word or two about how it feels to be here on Thanksgiving doing their part to feed the unidentified homeless people. It was a great photo-op, a great five minute story and we all walked away feeling good about ourselves.

I wonder how the nameless and faceless people who take their meals in a soup-kitchen feel about these photo-ops. I wonder if anyone ever bothered to ask them. Do they feel blessed to have a big, baseball star ladling soup into their bowls? Is this something they’ll tell their grandchildren someday? Do they even know their grandchildren? Does their family even know they’re out there taking their meals in a soup-kitchen because they have nowhere else to go?

I just finished reading a blog entry posted on my local town’s blog. It was written by a woman who has a few times volunteered at the local soup kitchen in the next town over. And she talked about all the wonderful people that were volunteering their time, she spoke of the great conversations she had and how blessed she felt to have met her new volunteer friends and she talked about how downright fulfilling an experience it was for she and her fellow volunteers.

And it got me thinking the same thing… I wonder if anyone ever thought to ask the people who actually take their meals at this soup kitchen if they feel fulfilled by having her there ladling soup into their bowls. I wonder if they feel blessed to have the opportunity to meet their newfound homeless friends who are also taking their meals at a soup kitchen.

Is that why we do this? Volunteer our time? So we can feel fulfilled? And does she then go home at night feeling fulfilled because she had dumped a couple of baked potatoes on a couple of plates for some guy who hasn’t showered in probably a week. No money, no job, mental illness and lice and sleeping on a subway grate with a box for a blanket.

I probably sound incredibly holier-than-thou right now and I honestly don’t mean to. My question is sincere and I don’t know how to express my point of view another way. My goal is not to blast this woman, I guess I just wonder why we always only think about our own fulfillment and leave the dirty part out of the story.

The Moment of Despair

2010-02-06T07:55:00.001-05:00

Arrives in an instantaneous spark of realization that if all that is here is what we can apprehend with our physical senses then we are screwed and all is pointless.

It makes us lemmings, worker ants, madly running about expending energy on activities that ultimately lead to nothing.

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The Ultimate Paradox of Faith

2010-02-05T07:50:00.002-05:00

First of all I would like to make clear what I mean when I use the term ‘faith’. When I say ‘faith’ I mean ‘experiential knowledge of God’. To me they are one in the same and going forward I will use those two terms interchangeably. This, I think is an important note to what follows and in light of the fact that so many of us struggle to get our own clear concept of what faith means it is necessary to attach a definition to it. With that in mind please read on.

Our scientifically linear, rational, organized structure of thought does not permit knowledge of God. This to me is the greatest paradox of all; It isn’t really ‘thought’ at all that permits knowledge of God and no willful, intellectual effort to understand what faith means or where to find God will ultimately result in our gaining that understanding which we seek through our search.

And yet…

For some that search must happen. That willful task of struggling to understand, of groping for answers cannot be excluded from the process, the journey that seeks spiritual truth and growth. Why? I have no idea. I am reminded of a passage from St. Paul in the book of Philippians:

“So then my beloved just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

This passage seems to suggest a requirement of effort on our part and yet in the end confirms that ultimately, the result comes only from God, that our effort is somehow superfluous to the whole thing. Crazy, crazy stuff yes?

If I were to sum up my discovery of faith I would say this:

My willful efforts can only produce that which cannot find Him because my willful efforts can only be carried out in such a way as to obfuscate Reality. And so when He did show Himself to me I immediately understood that I could never have attained by my own strength that which He allowed me to know.

And yet…

I cannot help but think that everything that had come before, every moment of the search that I had undertaken to that point, every book I read, every conversation I had, every minute I spent struggling to understand by force of my intellect was absolutely necessary.

Paradoxes. Crazy, crazy stuff yes?

F(ear)AITH

2010-02-03T08:43:00.007-05:00

Anyone who experienced fear as a child raise your hand.

Anyone who has experienced fear as an adult raise your hand. Ok that might be another post but I figured I’d ask.

Hmm. Same number of people raising their hands in both groups. Who woulda thunk it? Right and of course we all have fears as children. Normal fears that stem from being small and everything else being large. Fears that stem from being dependent on somebody else. Well, look let’s face it, everyone experiences fear as a kid because we’re small and dependent. Monsters under the bed, your favorite teddy bear turns into Jack the Ripper in the dark, your mother is away for a few days are you sure she’s coming back?

And although we are not as children conscious of these thoughts, frequently as adults we are not conscious of these thoughts, these motivating forces they are there for everyone. And so my father comes into my room and assures me in his way as strongest and bravest and most handsome man on the face of the earth – there absolutely IS NOT another father as good as my father in the whole world – that the teddy bear has not come to life in the form of Godzilla. And when mom comes back in a couple of days I am the first person she goes to and I have the opportunity to tell her how much I missed her and how afraid I was that she wasn’t coming back and she puts my fears to rest, assures me that she will always come back. And so I’m good. Fears have been allayed, mom and dad are there doing their job, got my back and I’m good. Let’s go check out what’s on TV.

The normal fears of childhood… check. Parents interceding… check. Fears vanquished… check. Normal childhood development… check.

I’m five years old and its two in the morning and I’m not feeling so good. I know that feeling, I’ve had it before and I’m pretty damn sure that I’m going to be throwing up all over the place within the hour. This does not feel good. Somehow I need to make it from my bed to the bathroom in the dark. Problem is that mom doesn’t like her sleep disturbed in fact she was pretty darn annoyed the last time I woke her up when I was sick. She kind of scares me.

There’s someone there, I’m sure of it, there’s somebody downstairs. Oh that’s ridiculous she tells me, there’s nobody there. Go back to your room and go to sleep.

This kid at school, he’s not so nice to me. He calls me names, knocks me down on the playground at school, he’s always there waiting for me to say something dumb so he can tell me how stupid I am. He makes me nervous and I don’t realize it (I’m five) but I’m always looking over my shoulder at school, making sure the coast is clear because if I’m not paying attention this kid is likely to sneak up when I’m not looking and knock me in my ass. Ignore him I’m told. He’s only chosen me to pick on because he gets a reaction out of me, the other kids they ignore him. That’s what you do with a bully, you ignore him and he’ll go away – or so she tells me.

Hmm… I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a drink in his hand. I wonder if all fathers drink like that? I don’t think so. They fight constantly. Again. At night. While I’m trying to fall asleep. What if he dies? Men have heart attacks all the time. All that scotch can’t possibly help in fact it’s got to hurt.

Oh that’s ridiculous I tell myself. He’s not going to have a heart attack, he’s not going to die, go to sleep. You see she’s echoing in my head now. I don’t even have to go to her anymore, which is probably best anyway cause she scares me a little. And besides I already know what she’s going to say. It’s ridiculous, I know it. It’s ridiculous. I’m being stupid to be so afraid.

Fear is a vapor that sneaks in under the crack in the door un-noticed by everyone in the room. It is insidious and silent and when it is not put in its proper perspective by the people who are supposed to put it in its proper perspective, when in fact it is denied by those same people or worse caused by those same people it burrows its way in undetected and it permeates the soul and it leaves room for little else.

An aspect of faith is clarity. Psychological, emotional and spiritual clarity. There cannot be faith where fear is manifest. It is antithetical.

Sometimes it is easier to talk about what faith is not rather than what it is. I think this is because what it IS varies from person to person but what it IS NOT is universal.

That Crazy, Crazy God Guy Again

2010-01-31T19:58:00.005-05:00

Oftentimes I have heard it said by people supposedly ‘in the know’ that God is just sitting there waiting for us to call to him. You know who I’m talking about, the God people. The people who tell us that we need Jesus as our Lord and Savior or we need to have a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus Christ (whatever that means) or that we need to ‘believe on’ (again, whatever that means) the Lord Jesus and we will be saved. Of course this all implies that the majority of us, the unwashed masses, the heathens, the primitives buried in the woods who have never heard of Jesus are ‘unsaved’ and therefore destined for an eternity of suffering by the fires of hell. If I cannot convince my brain to believe, really, really BELIEVE like I believe that one plus one equals two, if I cannot do that than off to hell I go for the entire, unending span of eternity. How on earth is it possible that there are actually people who believe this? Please, Pat Robertson tell me the answer to this question.

I digress. I do that all the time. That damn soapbox just keeps sneaking up on me and forcing me to get up on it.

Let us get back to the original thought of this post, this ‘calling out to God’ thing.

So let me get this straight because it's important and I need to make sure that I have all the facts. I don't want to to anything wrong and I want to make sure that I do everything just right, you know I'm a stickler for details and I like my stuff to be right. So... am I to believe that while I am in the throes of my suffering whatever it may be, depression, drug addiction, self-hatred, sick child, sick parent, sick self, again, whatever. While I struggle with those desperate times, when I’m lying on my floor prostate because I have no more energy, when all I can do is cry, when I am eyeing that bottle of pills or loading up the old .45 just a gittin ready to give my walls a new, bright red paint job do you mean to tell me that God is standing there five feet away with his arms folded across his chest not budging to help me until I call to him? Do you mean to tell me that he won’t lift a finger to help me unless I say the magic words or give the secret high-sign? Is that what you’re saying cause I just need to know the facts. Like I said, I want to get it right when next it happens to me.

Well, I suppose that’s pretty much all I should expect from a guy whose will it is that schoolyards are shot up by crazed gunmen.

Standing in the Shadows of Love

2010-01-27T09:42:00.007-05:00

One day, not all that long ago a thought came to me. What if there are undiscovered, untapped sources of potential and energy within me, resources that I am completely unaware of but that somehow - if I can just figure out where to find them, how to access them well then somehow these resources would become available to me and I would blossom into this new and improved, energized, motivated superwoman who is faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane. No… it’s just me having tapped the mother-load of energy.

They will soar with wings like eagles;
They will run and not grow weary;
They will walk and not be faint.

What if?

We all know the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written by Robert Louis Stevenson or at least we know of it. The story is a metaphor for the good and evil that exists within each one of us, although I have to say that when we’re kids and we first learn about this story whether by reading or indirectly that aspect really isn’t made clear. At least it wasn’t to me. That, of course is an indication of how much even the adults around us do not get it, even some of our teachers.

I digress yet again.

The shadow knows.

Or so Orson Welles said back in the 1930s. No truer words were ever spoken, even if he didn't know the extent to which he had hit the nail on the head.

What evil lurks within the hearts of men.

Well… that would also be true however, and this is very important, along with that evil is everything that is NOT evil but that we were lead to believe is evil, wrong, inappropriate, not acceptable, pick your poison. And that is exactly what these messages are… poison. Poison to the human soul. Deadly to the intrinsic creative spirit that exists in each and every one of us.
You see this is a problem. That shadow is always presented as evil. A monster lurking within each of us capable of violence and destruction, anger, hate, jealousy, selfishness. Everything that the average person does not want to be. Everything that we have been told all our lives we are not to be.

However here is the kicker; That is not all that is contained within the shadow aspect of ourselves and the truth is that it isn’t very hard to figure this out. All you have to do is poke around for a few minutes.

Some of the aspects of my shadow include:
· Emotions like sadness and grief equate to weakness.
· Don’t talk about yourself.
· Don’t need anything.
· Never, ever let them see you cry.

It would be easy for anyone in the know to see that these messages telepathically sent to me throughout my formative years resulting in full-blown denial of those aspects of myself (e.g. sadness, need and thus relegating them to the shadow aspect that I tote around like a thousand pound weight) can cause some pretty serious difficulties in the therapy room. One can hardly start working on emotional issues when one has developed what presents as a physical inability to discuss said issues. I have to first climb a mountain simply to get to the mountain that I need to conquer.

Thanks Mom.

Our shadow is everything we don’t know about ourselves, everything we deny about ourselves, everything we are ashamed of about ourselves and everything (and here’s the coup de grace) on which we expend tons of energy in an effort to keep them at bay.

So it seems to me that if I could figure a way to a) determine exactly what exists within my shadow and bring it into the light then I could b) stop wasting energy trying to keep those aspects tucked away in the darkness and turn that energy towards things like:

· Stopping speeding bullets
· Leaping tall buildings in a single bound
· Inventing new, good stuff
· Running cross-country marathons
· Riding in the Tour de France
· Writing poetry
· Playing Mozart
· Living and loving life

The Word I Hate Most

2010-01-25T07:35:00.001-05:00

'Loser'. Don't anybody ever use it on my blog.

Earthquakes and Food Banks

2010-01-17T10:41:00.001-05:00

When disasters happen, this devastating earthquake in Haiti for example, I am always pleased to see the way it brings people out of the woodwork and motivates them to open their hearts and wallets. I recall back in 2004 the tsunami that hit Indonesia the Red Cross was practically overwhelmed with donations from around the world.

But of course every event has another side, including generosity. I also recall during the 2004 tsunami giving spree that the local charities suffered the consequences of all those donations going to global organizations such as the Red Cross.

This is just a little reminder to everyone who opens their hearts to those desperate (and no doubt deserving) people in Haiti, please don’t forget your local food banks, your local homeless shelters, your local soup kitchens. While you’re going online to donate to the Red Cross remember to throw a few bucks to a state or local social service because they really feel the heat during these natural disasters.

Trusting God... Or Not

2010-01-16T08:01:00.004-05:00

Let us go back to a thought that I had voiced in a previous post (http://jssfive.blogspot.com/2009/11/there-but-for-grace-of-god.html) whereby I had expressed the irrationality of the idea that the mowing down of young schoolchildren by a mad gunmen was somehow God’s will. There are people, seemingly religious people, those who have intentionally given themselves to God, devoted their lives to the work of God and because of the simplicity of their lives, because they have renounced their ties to the material world, because they choose horse and buggy over cars we here in the ‘secular’ world believe that somehow they might actually be more ‘godly’ than the rest of us heathens who elect to use cell phones and like to drive fancy cars.

I would like to expand on my earlier thoughts about God’s will or rather that which we might be tempted to ascribe to God’s will as it pertains to trust or perhaps more accurately the inability to trust. The events that we choose to blame on God’s will, the death of a child at the hands of a gunmen, the devastation wreaked by an earthquake (thank you Pat Robertson), cancer, aids, airplanes flying into buildings, all of these tragic events of history are ascribed by so many of our religious ‘leaders’ as God’s will and to be sure sometimes God’s will comes in the form of God’s wrath.

But here’s the thing. These same people who assign responsibility of tragic events to the will of God are those same people who insist, quite possibly in their next breath, that only God can be trusted. In order to be saved (whatever that means) we must place our trust in Jesus, give our lives, our souls over to the care of God and he alone will take care of us.

So I would like to ask how is it possible, when God’s will is served for example by their five-year-old son dying of cancer, for two parents to be able to trust God with their own lives and the lives of the rest of their children? The assignation by the parent of so incomprehensible an event as the death of their child to God’s will is a coping mechanism. “God must have wanted him” we tell ourselves. He is now safe in the arms of God. And nobody would doubt that this is a comforting thought, the ONLY comforting thought they might be able to grab on to and to be sure it may very well be true (one can only hope). Problem is that I, as the parent, am left utterly devastated. And chances are probably pretty darn good that I’m pulling the rest of my children just a little bit closer to me and just a little bit further away from that God guy who seems to apply his will rather imperiously.

I am thinking about trust in the therapeutic relationship this morning. It is, I must admit a bit of a stumbling block for me. We as clients are supposed to lay our inner world open to this person, our thoughts, our emotions, our joys and (mostly) our pain. Two problems with this. First of all the laying open of ourselves, even a little seems to have the undesirable effect of somehow drawing us closer emotionally to this person of the therapist which is an instantaneous signal for the warning sirens to go off and the deflector shields to go up because... Secondly so many of us who end up on a therapist’s couch have had mostly nothing but disappointment and (for some) the most gross violation (annihilation?) of trust by the people who were supposed to love and protect us as children.

And so I ask how is it possible for me to trust my therapist not to up and bail on me in the middle of my hour of need when I cannot even trust God as witnessed by the seeming arbitrariness of the application of His will?

I have a theory (but you already knew that didn’t you) and my theory goes something like this: It is not God’s will that a five-year-old boy dies of cancer. In fact I think it might just be possible that God was nowhere in the vicinity when that young boy died.

Foundations

2010-01-10T10:17:00.003-05:00

As I sit here listening to Ravel’s Bolero (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-4J5j74VPw&feature=fvw) I am reminded of underlying themes. If we are not listening carefully they run beneath our conscious awareness. I read once that Maurice Ravel the composer of this powerful piece of music did not look kindly on this composition of his. I got the impression that he was disdainful of it, as if he thought it rather pedestrian, not up to his usual standards. I would like to strenuously object to that assessment. From what I have seen it appears to me not only a crowd pleaser but also a performer pleaser. I saw the New York Philharmonic performing this piece on PBS recently and it was clear they were enjoying the hell of playing it. Sometimes I think composers, or perhaps it is more accurate to say artists in general do not give the general audience much consideration, much credit for discerning good art. Do I need to be a classical music aficionado to like a piece of music, a painting, a poem? Does the fact that I, ignoramus that I am in the ways of musical composition, like something mean that the composer has missed his mark? Am I not his mark in the first place? That’s called hubris.

Anyway, I digress. Back to my original theme which was well… themes.

If you are not familiar with this piece please listen to it via the link above. Even if you are familiar with it give it another listen and you will hear it. Notice the violins plucking the theme that runs through the entire piece, it maintains the rhythm. On top of it runs the melody. It starts ever so slowly, building little by little, to a very loud and emphatic ending. Call me pedestrian but I love this piece. This is manner of composition, an underlying simple theme playing continuously through the piece while the melody and harmony rise and fall, telling the composers story that is used frequently (listen also to second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony). For the record listen at the end for the audience response. Clearly they have no taste in music because it seems that they liked it too.

Does this not model our human existence? The archetypes of Carl Jung, the basic structures that run through our psyches and represented (unconsciously) in our art, our movies, our mythologies, our literature, and yes (and clearly) our music, these are the underlying themes of human existence. They set the structure, the beat, the rhythm, the tone of our lives. It is unfortunate that mostly all we ever hear is the melody of life and to be sure there are many of us who miss even that. But the melody is generally what is front and center. The sandlot baseball games of childhood, school, college, daily stresses of raising children, of going to work, of dealing with sick parents, the pain of physical and psychological illness and the fear of death. These are the melodies of human existence. They ebb and flow, they rise and fall from day to day. These are the events that hold our attention and place us in danger of missing the underlying themes.

What’s the point of this? I don’t really know, it is just something that dawned on me this morning. A reminder perhaps to remain cognizant of the foundations, to not get lost in only the enjoyment of the melody but also to pay attention to that on which the melody stands.

Dreams, Jung, God and Stuff Like That There

2010-01-08T14:06:00.003-05:00

How does anyone ignore an invitation like this? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewellyn-vaughanlee/dreamwork-what-we-can-lea_b_413787.html

As I'm reading this article, and might I just admit right here and now that I am fascinated by Jung's ideas. This man's work, his discoveries about the human psyche are to my mind just one of the many proofs of the existence of God. It is hard to deny that his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious isn't pointing to an underlying structure, the foundation of the human psyche which must point to 'Intelligent Design', I'll use that soulless, impersonal and blandly scientific term for what I firmly believe is exactly the opposite. Anyhoo...

By the way for anyone who is interested in Jung's ideas I would suggest also the work of Joseph Campbell, specifically The Hero With A Thousand Faces. If you're interested in Jung than you must also read mythology and in doing so you will find out that there have been about a gajazillion other people who have been on the same life journey as you. Jung and mythology. They go together like salt and pepper, cream and coffee, Laverne & Shirley, Abbott & Costello, like ramalamadingdong...

What If

2010-01-04T13:12:00.002-05:00

You were presented with a unique opportunity today to deconstruct, brick by brick, board by board and by your own choice, every belief you ever had about yourself, your relationships, about God or not God, about the ‘reality’ of the universe, humanity, creation, heaven and hell, life after death, etc. Everything until you got right down to nothing.

And what if this process guaranteed that you not only question every belief you ever had but caused you to realize that for your entire life you haven’t known yourself at all, that you haven’t been paying attention to what is really going on around you, that you don’t really know the people around you, your family, your friends, the sales guy at the hardware store.

What if it caused you to realize that you married your spouse for all the ‘wrong’ reasons and that in fact you never really loved her/him at all. What if you realized that your child’s drug problem, psychiatric problem, personality problem, fill in your own problem description here, was the direct result not of some gene that she/he inherited from you but rather your own psychological ‘disorder’ of which is currently not even on your psychic radar. The sins of the father and all that. In fact what if part of the deal was the realization that you don’t have the first clue what might be presented to you about yourself, good, bad, ugly, pretty and how it profoundly affected not only you but all of your loved ones also?

What if this involved the loosening of all of the bonds, the behaviors, the habits, those ‘things’ that get you through the days and nights, the booze, the drugs, the cutting, the smokes, the job, the gambling, the nail-biting and the porn in the hope of something new and undefined?

What if this process caused you to be thrown into complete and utter confusion, thick fog or even total darkness about what is real and that the only path out was to actively choose every moment for the rest of your life to live in this state of confusion and fogginess, to keep choosing to step out into the darkness, not able to see what lies even one foot in front of you, constantly letting go of the concept of ‘what is’, replacing definitiveness with a continual, active and conscious acquiescence to ‘this might not be’ again with only a promise of increasing clarity, true clarity which (it is promised) will be forthcoming only a teaspoonful at a time over the course of the rest of your life. And what if clarity turned out to be something you thought you knew the meaning of but in fact turned out to be something you had never seen before?

In other words you discard completely everything you (think you) know right now about EVERYTHING and start from scratch with a blank slate all in the interest (here’s the pay-off) of finding the ULTIMATE reality, true TRUTH.

You put yourself on a path, you have no idea where it's going to lead and you have absolutely no idea what or where you're headed and you haven't the first clue what it's going to look like when you get there.

Would you have the courage to do that?

The Jesus I Want to Know

2009-12-29T08:01:00.002-05:00

The ideas, the universal, perhaps metaphysical ideas, images, symbols, thoughts, myths – all of the abstract phenomena that represent universal thought are patterned after something. They are an imitation, a representation of something that already exists… in our minds and ‘out there’ somewhere. And these theories of super-consciousness, un-consciousness, consciousness, while in many respects are hard to discount i.e. if something empirically exists one can hardly dismiss the validity of that something, I keep getting a sense that they complicate a very simple yet vital fact. A very important factor that is sometimes obscured in all of this universal thinking is the individual, or what is the personal-ness of the individual.

We are individual, personal beings and we cannot function properly, or I should say we cannot function optimally without connection to other individual, personal beings. We need to love and be loved, we need to know and be known, we need to feel joy and pain and we need to feel the joy and pain of others. Our joy and pain, all of our feelings serve nothing, come to nothing but suffering in the absence of another. And somehow the universal ‘stories’ of the hero’s journey through life, salvation, redemption, death and rebirth, all of these concepts come to nothing unless they are shared with another. To be sure it is a universal truth that no man is an island.

I have come to the conclusion that I want Jesus to be real. Lately I find myself questioning if he was, not so much whether a man named Jesus actually existed in the flesh – that part is easy to accept. It is the part that says that Jesus was God incarnate as human being, as one of us. But this much I know, I desperately want him to be who the Gospels claim he was. Because it is God as man, divine in human form that tells me that God knows us, that God understands our struggle as human beings and not-God. That he knows the pleasure and pain of humanity that is endured daily and moment by moment for so many. In Jesus is represented the God that we need, the God that must be in order that we have hope for something more. In Jesus we see kindness and gentleness, love and forgiveness, the power to heal and the promise of so much more beyond the harsh realities of our existence in this life.

This is why I want Jesus to be real and I know that there probably will not be any definitive answers provided to me as confirmation of my wanting and sometimes I don’t understand that. But I also know that in the acknowledgement of these things, in the realizing of my desire for this to be so I may also be stating the reality. I may be recognizing the pattern, the basic structure that has been there from the beginning.

I think it safe to say that Jesus is everything we human beings need him to be.

The American Dream

2009-12-25T20:11:00.001-05:00

So I’m sitting on my deck the other day looking out over my yard - I have a comfortable (not big) home with a two car garage on an acre of land – and I’m thinking to myself what is so damn appealing about the American Dream? I have a mortgage, property taxes, when the roof needs fixing it costs thousands, when the water pump goes it costs thousands, when it rains too much for too long we’re in the basement bailing out water, the oil bill is killer, the electricity bill goes up every month and if the septic system ever lets go we’re screwed. The amount of money that one spends to own a home over the life of their tenure in that home is mind-boggling. And some day, which truthfully could be tomorrow I could be dead and then what? Who the hell is going to care about the damn septic system? Not me that’s for sure.

I want to know who in the hell thought this was a good idea. Why do we think we need this? I could rent an apartment for a couple hundred more each month than my mortgage and tax bill combined and I’d be done. No worries about roofs or septic systems or water in the basement. I wouldn’t have to shovel the driveway in the winter and when it needs to be resurfaced it’s somebody else’s problem. And when I drop dead somebody else will move in and nobody is going to know the difference.

It occurred to me several years ago when the stock market started to tank, and continued to tank monthly that I had been socking all of this money away for years for a retirement that is still many years away and in one short year every gain that I had made was wiped out. Twenty years of savings cut by at least a third just like that. And so was I to believe that now I cannot retire? Or that I’m going to end up in the streets someday? What if I get sick? What if I live to a hundred? Let’s face it, who is the average person who can afford to live to a hundred? That’s too damn long unless you have some kick-ass retirement fund that somehow managed to survive the latest purge. I might as well drive down the highway at eighty miles an hour and throw my money out the window. Same difference as investing in a retirement stock fund. All those years when I still had years until retirement all the experts told me to invest in higher-risk, higher yield funds. You’re young, you have time, don’t be so conservative. And I listened, what the hell did I know? And in practically one day so much of it was gone. It is a total crapshoot and the thing that really gets me is that all of these supposed experts, Harvard MBA economists, they’re guessing right along with everyone else. How many Harvard MBAs have we heard on CNN over the past eighteen months each telling us something different?

But the real kicker is that I could spend the next fifteen years saving my ass off for retirement, finally retire and then drop dead without ever having spent a dime of all that savings. I’m going to work like a dog, deny myself a trip to Paris, multiple trips to Paris because I MIGHT one day need to pay for a nursing home?

Seriously, let me ask this again. Whose idea was this?

How Smart Am I

2009-12-21T07:41:00.001-05:00

So I’m watching CNN last night with my husband and they’re doing a segment on global warming. Is it or isn’t it? That is the question. Anyway the dude that’s reporting is speaking to a scientist, a geo-physicist whose name escapes me and this geo-physicist is explaining his solutions for the problem of global warming. As he’s talking away I find that I’m not listening to him at all because my husband and I start into another conversation about intelligence. Seems this geo-physicist entered college at fourteen years of age, attained his Ph. D by twenty-three and now, for the past thirty years or more has performed all of the necessary duties of becoming a pre-eminent geo-physicist. Clearly a really smart guy.

And so I get to thinking… is this person really smarter than me? Actually let’s back up a step so I can admit that I don’t even know what the hell a geo-physicist is. What is the definition of a geo-physicist? I don’t know.

Anyway, does the fact that this person entered college at fourteen mean that he’s smarter than me? His head is normal size and therefore one could reasonably assume that his brain is normal size i.e. no bigger than the average six foot tall male. Should I assume because of his academic credentials that he is actually smarter than me, that when God was handing out brains he injected this gentleman with more of the intelligence chemical while perhaps giving me more of the athletic or artistic chemical to balance things out? I don’t know. Can this geo-physicist catch a football or run a sub-minute mile or ski moguls in addition to knowing what are the relevant factors when formulating a solution to global warming? Maybe he came up with the solution while participating in the IronMan Triathalon.

Could I have, if I had found that one thing that really struck my fancy, could I have had the ability to enter college at fourteen and succeed? If I had had the requisite interest in something, along with the requisite determination and persistence and thirst for knowledge did I have the smarts kick ass academically? Again, I don’t know.

So the question comes down to this: are we all, us average human beings, are we all generally endowed with the same level of intellectual potential? Is it there, lying dormant waiting for us to tap into it, either choosing to use it or not?

I think a lot about potential these days. How much do we have? Far more than I think anyone of us might suspect but beyond that how do we tap into our potential? How do we discover what riches lie deep within us for intellectual, artistic, athletic achievement?

I do not know the answer to this question.

The Art of Listening

2009-12-20T11:24:00.000-05:00

Someday I will remember that when somebody talks to me, when somebody has something on their mind and chooses to come to me with it that I must listen. No… I mean really listen. Close my mouth and L.I.S.T.E.N.

Not
Start thinking about what I think
Start offering solutions
Start offering the other side of the story
Try to fix it
Try to minimize it
Make a joke
Change the subject

Just... listen. Listen to what is being said, keeping in mind that sometimes merely being allowed the space to say what is on one’s mind is worth everything.

Dear Tiger Part Deux

2009-12-17T08:39:00.004-05:00

We, that is western society have held you to impossible standards. Because of your superior golf abilities we placed you on a level above the rest of us and in doing so we raised our expectations of you. We took the liberty of deciding that just because you could put a little ball into a little cup with a skill that most of us would-be duffers only dream about that somehow you are superior to us. And with that ascension came our elevated expectations.

And with our elevated expectations came elevated levels of pressure down on your head because we take these expectations of our world at large, and to be sure your world is larger than most, and we make them our own. It is so very hard when everyone around you is telling you how great you are to feel like you don’t have to live up to those expectations and so you spend your life striving to do so. And it is so very hard and takes always so much energy to live a life that becomes unconsciously all about meeting those expectations. It is hard when others expect things of us, things they don’t see in themselves, things they would like to see in themselves. They see them in you, they tell you how fortunate you are to possess those qualities, how envious they are of you and you have no choice but to believe them. So year after year after year you try to live up to those expectations all the while staggering under the weight of the effort it takes to do so.

I was a little hard on you in my first letter and I would like to take this opportunity to soften my stance a bit. While I stand by my assertion that you should have immediately and simply come clean, it might have lightened the press coverage just a hair, it is clear to me that a young man like you who was probably raised to be a decent person is somehow crumbling under the weight of our expectations and for this I can only apologize.

To Mrs. Tiger I would like to say please don’t listen to all the people around you who are telling you what a lying, cheating, evil, SOB your husband is. I know you are probably hurt very deeply by his actions but if you love him allow yourself the opportunity to come to an understanding of why he felt the need to do this. I guarantee you that while doing so will be immensely difficult you will also find out that he is probably not the over-sexed, uncaring louse he appears to be, or rather that we all, in our knee-jerk reactions to marital infidelity insist that he is.

Respectfully,

Me

Sunday Thoughts

2009-12-13T20:47:00.008-05:00

Every year my husband and I go to lunch at the diner down the street before we perform the annual rite that is the buying of the Christmas tree. Every year he wants to go buy the tree first – “let’s get it over with” says he - and then go have lunch but I insist that it must be the other way around. After having been with this man for more years than I care to acknowledge (for no other reason than not wanting to stare in the face my rapidly advancing age) I have learned at least one thing about him. I have learned that any time we embark on something that might cause him distress (sadly buying a Christmas tree holds that potential) it is always, ALWAYS better that he embark on a full stomach. Never take a man shopping for a Christmas tree on an empty stomach because let’s face it, in light of the fact that I am going to drag him all over the entire lot, up and down every aisle of trees pulling out each one, spinning it, shaking it out, and putting it back his endurance will be much higher if he’s working on a full stomach. Gives me a wider berth to take my time picking out the perfect tree… as if.

******

My grandmother died last week. She would have been 98 this coming Saturday. Four of my brothers and sisters and me drove to New Jersey for her funeral. It was just the five of us, the rabbi and the funeral director. All of her friends are long dead, my grandfather died six years ago, also a mere two weeks shy of his 98th birthday. The guys who dug her grave threw all of the dirt onto my grandfather’s grave so we couldn’t even see his headstone. Don’t you think it might occur to them that the family members who will be attending the service might want to oh I don’t know at least pretend that it matters that their grandfather is lying under all that dirt. Apparently not.

Something interesting about a Jewish burial ceremony, they place the casket over the grave and gently lower it down into the hole while everyone is standing there. I had to turn away when they did this. For some reason I could not watch that. All I could think about was that it was bad enough that my grandmother was being lowered into the mud, I could not imagine how I might feel if it was my child. I think I probably would have had to throw up. I was left with an oddly unsatisfied feeling walking away from that cemetery.

******

I went to church this morning and for some reason I felt very agitated. I attend the local Catholic parish here in town, not with any regularity but when the mood strikes me. I like to go during the Christmas season because the choir is terrific and the church is decorated beautifully and I just like the whole ambiance. You can say what you want about Catholicism but they know how to do mystery and they know how to do solemn and they know how to do quiet reflection like no other. A Catholic church is a great place to go when you need some solitude. It is one of the few places you can be alone without actually being alone and it’s ok.

I cannot quite put my finger on it but there are times when I feel drawn to this church. I have no explanation for it. I am not particularly possessed of the Catholic doctrine in fact I frequently disagree with their interpretation of scripture – quite frankly I’m not all that sure about the validity of scripture anymore as ‘the’ word of God - but there is something about the Catholic faith or perhaps it is nothing more than being in a Catholic church that speaks to me. I think the smell of the incense, the sound of the choir, the whole visual effect probably ignites all sorts of unconscious stirrings of childhood. That would be the psychological explanation. Whatever. I go because I like to go and because the sound of the choir moves me. Today it annoyed me. The priest annoyed me, the people in the pew annoyed me, the choir was mediocre and the service lasted too damn long.

******

I seem to be losing my religion, not that I really ever had any to begin with. Baptized Catholic, attended church every Sunday, every holy day, confession, communion, confirmation, the whole shebang. Not my choice of course but coercion. Parents are good at that. I would have remained happily, blissfully and ignorantly pagan. I was Catholic but I had no idea what that really meant and no inclination for many years to try to figure out what it meant. It was, I would say, an uninterested acceptance… Jesus, Mary, sin, our father… whatever.

Funny thing is that at this moment in my life I am more sure of the existence of God than I have ever been before, which to be sure I never was at all. It is all the rest of it that has been completely blown out of the water for me. And on the one hand my confusion has (oddly enough) taken some of the ‘good’ mystery out of attending church while at the same time causing me to be completely and utterly mystified by the whole thing.

******

I read in a prologue to St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul the following:

“The constant and simultaneous succession and recurrence of certain distinct yet similar phenomena, taking place in all centuries and in all races, might lead us to the conclusion (in the lack of other positive knowledge) that behind all Form, Dogma, Ritual and Ceremonial, there is hidden and profound and mysterious meaning which constitutes the Root Religion, whence as from a spring or fountain head all others had their rise; and this Root Religion cannot have been other than the close and intimate communication of man with the Universal Soul-the Body Soul-the Suchness, the Becoming, the Divinity, give it what name you will; so that so far from having gradually evolved into intellectual light through a scale of beings inferior to him, as the evolutionist maintains, he would rather seem to have begun as the inhabitant of a higher sphere, to boast a celestial genealogy.”

In other words the one true ideal, the root that all of our religions spring forth from is our original union with God and that we did not start out as specks of single-celled, mindless, formless ‘things’ in some puddle of mud or radioactive chemical but rather we were with God. This I actually believe to be true. Beyond that I’ve got nothing.

******

I've decided that it's true... everyone DOES need therapy. If for no other reason than it might help them to stop annoying the hell out of me. Just kidding. (not really).

Dear Tiger Woods

2009-12-03T12:58:00.003-05:00

So Tiger Woods says:

“I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect.”

We certainly don’t have to be told that Tiger is far short of perfect since we are ALL far short of perfect. I get that and so with that in mind and for just one freaking time here is what I’d like to hear one of these celebrities-caught-in-multi-year-indiscretion say:

“I knew the entire time that I was involved with these women/men/call girls/call boys/dogs/cats/horses/etc. that I was letting my family down and I chose to do it anyway. Clearly in light of that glaring truth my behavior was exactly in line and congruent with my true values which are much lower than the general public would like to believe. The only reason that I regret those transgressions with all my heart is that I got caught and now the paparazzi are camped out on my front lawn and I can’t even leave the house and I have endangered all of my multi-million dollar endorsement contracts and my wife keeps hitting me in the face with my nine iron. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect and because of that I’m not going to hand any of my adoring fans any bullshit about having high standards for myself when clearly I chose to violate those mythical standards repeatedly. “

Dear Tiger,

We’d respect you a lot more and forgive you a lot quicker (assuming you give a rat’s ass about the public’s forgiveness which I doubt) if you’d ix-nay on the bullshit-ay. We’ve all screwed up a time or two or twenty. Nobody gives a damn if you’re sorry… nobody believes you anyway so why bother?

Lay low, tell the truth (or shut it) and I'm sure this will all blow over and we'll all still be cheering for you at next year's Masters.

Warm Regards,

Me

If God Only Gives Us What We Can Handle

2009-11-28T19:40:00.002-05:00

Than why do so many people commit suicide?

The Girl With All The Answers

2009-11-28T13:52:00.002-05:00

Apparently I always think I’m right. This at least is what I have recently been told by two people close to me. I always think I’m right. Of course this observation from them is just dripping with pejorative undertones and overtones and around-all-the-sides-tones. This is apparently a deep flaw in my personality.

I always think I’m right. How dare I.

So… I got to thinking, what exactly is wrong with thinking I’m right? Thinking I am right means simply that I have come to a conclusion about some particular topic which we happen to be discussing. I have done the requisite research where applicable, I have made the requisite observations, I have investigated my feelings about the matter and I have formed an opinion that suits me. By extension it would be fair and safe to say that I believe my opinion on the matter to be correct. That doesn’t mean it is not subject to change based on new evidence, it doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to hear another side to the matter nor does it indicate that I am not willing to change my opinion. It means that at this moment in time at the start of this conversation between you and me this is the hypothesis that I bring to the table regarding this matter and yes, at this moment I think I am right. It also does not mean that after hearing your new evidence, your opinions, your arguments that I won’t continue to think I am right.

I suspect that this observation of theirs about me is pretty accurate and I suspect that it is because by the time I am ready to offer an opinion on a topic I have made thoughtful consideration and I am ready to adopt my point of view and sometimes I am ready to share that point of view. If we are talking about the mating habits of sloths then I’m generally apt to keep my mouth shut because I don’t know the first thing about the mating habits of sloths.

If thinking I'm right is wrong than I don't want to be right.

Dear People With All The Ideas About What's Wrong:

2009-11-26T08:41:00.003-05:00

I appreciate your ideas, I really do, and I want to hear them I really do because how else will I know what needs to be changed, how else will I know what needs to be improved upon unless I hear from the people that are out there in the trenches actually getting their hands dirty?
However, all you people with big ideas about everything that is wrong and everything that needs changing, I cannot implement your ideas by just the sweat of my own brow. I cannot do it alone.

So when you come to me with your ideas about how to improve the process or make it work better or make yourself feel better please be prepared to offer up your own elbow grease in the interests of making your great ideas reality. It is all well and good that you have opinions and ideas but along with those opinions and ideas what I really need, what I really, REALLY need is people to EXECUTE those ideas, to put in the hard work that is required to bring those ideas to fruition. So if you’re not willing to put your money and your sweat and blood where your mouth is than your ideas become less of a priority to me.

Dear People To Whom the People with Ideas About What’s Wrong Come To:

If you don’t listen to the people with ideas, if you don’t provide them a chance to be a part of making things better or worse yet if you completely ignore them when they come to you, if you never, ever act upon their suggestions when they are laid at your table then they will stop coming to you and they will not be there to help you when you really need them.

Love,

Me

There But for the Grace of God

2009-11-25T21:12:00.001-05:00

For some crazy reason it hit me today that this statement is absurd. So let’s say I’m walking down the street and I see a homeless person and I think to myself “there but for the grace of God go I” as so many of us do, and I feel sufficiently humbled that some people have to live in the streets and I feel a little bad that I make a good salary and I’m going to home to a warm house and a home-cooked meal and I have people around me, people who care, I’ve got my health and I have a few bucks in my pocket to blow on coffee at Starbucks (which I might add I would never do because Starbucks has the worst coffee on the face of the earth). I have a good job, a nice home in a nice town and I get to take nice vacations at the seashore every year. And this guy is homeless. Got nothing but what he can carry with him and he sleeps on a subway grate at night covered by a box.

There but for the grace of God.

Which means that for some reason God has seen fit to offer me His grace but not this poor gentleman who is homeless, penniless and blanket-less?

This phrase does not work.

It is right up there with the exclamation that tragedies are somehow “God’s will”. I actually heard somebody say that several years ago when numerous children were gunned down at a schoolhouse in an Amish community in Pennsylvania. One of the parents of the dead children used this very phrase, acquiescing her dead child to God’s will. Are you kidding me? This is God’s will? With gods like that who needs ruthless, blood-thirsty dictators?

Seriously are there truly people out there that could think that God offers his grace to me but not you? Or that crazy, out of control gunmen running rampant in schools is part of God’s plan? What the hell kind of plan is that?

It boggles the mind, seriously.

The Selfishness of Suicide

2009-11-06T13:49:00.005-05:00

The following is a direct quote from an anonymous blogger out there in Bloggerland, USA

“suicide is THE most selfish act you could possibly do. In that moment you are thinking only of yourself with no consideration for what anybody else may be feeling”.

That would be the holier-than-thou viewpoint from the proverbial Ivory Tower.

When I am contemplating suicide and I have a husband and children who love me, I have co-workers that respect and care for me, I have parents and brothers and sisters and long-time friends who have been true-blue and trustworthy let me just state unequivocally that I know that there are people who care for me. I know that. I think about it all the time. I agonize over it, I force myself to make it matter, I berate myself for even thinking of leaving these people.

I have endured what at times has been unendurable pain for months or even years in the knowledge that I have people who love me and want to help me. And I endure all of this because I am trying so hard not to be selfish, I am trying so hard to do the human thing and put the needs of others ahead of my own.

So here’s my question:
At what point do I get to put my needs ahead of the needs of others? At what point do I get to put my need to get relief from my pain ahead of your need not to feel sadness? At what point do I get to think about me? At what point do I come first or is it always supposed to be you? Do I ever get to do that? Does it ever get to be me instead of you?

Disclaimer: Ok so that was more like seven questions but they all pretty much point to the same question and for the record I am not suicidal. Some things you just know and others, well others as we can see by the anonymous blogger referenced above, other things you don't have the first clue about and so you should just keep your mouth shut.

Caring for the Therapist and the Art of Being Therapeutic

2009-11-06T08:44:00.004-05:00

So if every now and then a client feels the need to take care of their therapist, e.g. if the therapist is sick, the client detects this and just for that hour takes the initiative to go easy on the therapist, isn’t that a normal human need? Isn’t that the client, let’s call us human beings because last time I looked that’s what we are, isn’t that the expression of the need of one human being to care for another human being? Isn’t the desire of the client to care for the therapist a display of a basic human need that says I can see you need something and I can give it to you right now so let me express my basic human need to care for you just for this one time in this controlled place in this very small way.

And isn’t it inherently ‘therapeutic’ to let that human being express that need in the form of sympathy and gentleness and caring concern even if it is the client giving that to the therapist?
Sometimes I think that the whole therapy process can get so tied up in acknowledging and concentrating on what ‘we’ need, for example I am the client, I need love, I need affection, I need care and empathy and concern, I need, I need, I need, I NEED to get my needs met that it forgets that one of our greatest needs is to EXPRESS our love to another, EXPRESS our care and concern and empathy, to EXPRESS our need to address the needs of others. Part of therapy is all about learning to identify and express your feelings. Well you know what? I NEED to express my feelings of love and concern and care for others and sometimes those ‘others’ include the person of my therapist sitting across from me for that hour each week.

I know, I know, it is not in the interest of the client that this should become the pattern of the therapy, I understand that. But every now and then if you therapists could give us the opportunity to express our care and concern for you and to allow us to see that you can be comfortable with receiving that small level of care from us I do think that you would be exhibiting your skills as a therapist in an exceptional way.

We as human beings NEED to give as much as we get and THAT…. Is therapeutic.

We Live

2009-10-25T10:26:00.004-04:00

from a place of fear. This is undeniable. I should probably qualify that it is true of most people but I cannot say unequivocally that it is true of all people. So I speak here today to those of you (me included) that live from a place of fear. Let me capitalize Fear. I capitalize it because it dominates our lives, it is for some of us THE motivating force behind everything we do, everything we think, it defines our existence. I defy anyone to sit down, make a list of those events in your life that you remember, that you might even refer to as 'defining' moments of your life, and deny that the possible decisions that either you were considering or actually made were not the result of Fear. Go ahead... I dare ya.

Right, I thought so.

The opposite of Fear is Love. Not just courage but Love. I would say that courage is merely a symptom, an aspect of Love. I do believe that the definition of Divine Love encompasses many attributes, for example courage, and creativity, a sense of connection with others, a need for others. There is more no doubt but I'll stop there and let y'all use your own imaginations.

I believe that every decision we make, every decision that effects our life (and don't they all?) is made from either a place of Love or Fear. If we choose Fear then we stay in a place of pain, of regret, of stagnation. We stay in one place, never moving ahead. If we choose Love then we move to a place of courage, of creativity, of self-realization. We move one step closer to that which we are, or rather that which we CHOOSE to be. We move one step closer to realizing a potential that has no boundaries.

And isn't it courage and creativity and self-realization, are not these at least some of the things that define us as the image of God?

Now let me just end by saying this: I do not for one minute believe that it is merely the recognition of this that enables me to step right out of that Fear-mongering mode into the eternally joyful Love-mongering mode. Oh no, it's going to take work, a lot of work. I do not for one minute discount the many ways that we were influenced as we grew into adult-hood and undoing these shall we say less than healthy modes of living takes time and effort and a willingness to push through the difficulty. And it takes the help of some kind of professional counselor, whether it be psychotherapist, minister, choose your poison. But it absolutely must be somebody who is going to give you all the space you need to re-discover yourself. I do not believe that psychotherapy is a perfect means to get to that place that we want to be but the truth is that a good therapist will give you that space of re-discovery. There will be pitfalls, bumps in the road but really, what doesn't present us with pitfalls and bumps in the road? In the end a good therapist will foster an atmosphere of acceptance and exploration and a good therapist will also allow themselves the space to learn from you. Therapy is a great place to take our first tentative steps out of that place of Fear into that place of Love because it is a safe place to do so. It can be, with the right therapist the perfect place to start or should I say re-start.

Go Inside

2009-10-23T08:46:00.002-04:00

What is it that defines us? By that I mean what does it mean to say ‘be yourself’? What does it mean when I say that I am searching for the ‘real me’?

I think I have the answer.

There are two realities, there is objective reality, that is the external world around us. It is real, it is there, we can see it, it impacts us moment by moment, it presents facts, scientific, philosophical, metaphysical if you will. It is there, we can see it, touch it, hear it, all of which is to say that we can experience it through our physical faculties, our physical bodies and the attributes inherent to our physical being.

The second reality is subjective reality. Subjective reality is our own personal reaction, our own personal experience that is specific to us, the individual. It encompasses our own thoughts, our own feelings, those internal sensations that are inherent to our own personal emotional and intellectual makeup. These are the attributes of our psychic construct and our psychic construct has been formed, I’d say is dependent on our objective reality. Our psychic reality has been assembled, molded, twisted (some would say, me for example) this way and that, frequently forced to fit into spaces either too small or too big or too round or too square for our own personal capacities. The proof of this fact is that two people can see the same thing at the same time and yet each one would feel something completely different from the other.

So many of us, and admittedly I fall into this category, so many of us have had the experience of being forced into spaces too small, or spaces too large, or too round or too square for our own personal capacities. Our own attributes, e.g. talents, wishes,, likes, dislikes, hopes and fears have been dismissed as invalid and replaced with somebody else’s idea (usually our parents) of what is right. Of course we accept, at least for awhile, the other’s interpretation of reality because hey, assuming it is our parents version of reality we are referring to here, they know right? They are the parent, you are the child, they don’t need you, you need them. They must know, they’re big, you’re little.

Oh brother.

Here is what defines the ‘real me’. My subjective experience. For the record my subjective experience is valid. Oh I’m going to say that again. My subjective experience is valid. Let’s write it on the blackboard five hundred times. My subjective experience is valid, my subjective experience is valid, my subjective…

I am allowed to like what I like. I am allowed to think what I think. I am allowed to know what I know in the way I know it. I am allowed to do all these things because these things are exactly that which makes me me, which shows to the world the real me. And to find the ‘real me’ I must go inside. I must look to myself, I must recognize and accept as my subjective reality my own experience, my thoughts, my feelings. Because this is what the definition of the real me is.

Disclaimer:
The Surgeon General has warned that while the definition of the ‘real you’ is simple and easy to find, the actual act of showing the real you to the world may be hazardous to your health and requires large quantities of courage, determination and a willingness to make yourself vulnerable beyond your wildest imagination.

St. Paul said “when I am weak, then I am strong” and Jesus said “the truth will set you free”.

No truer words have ever been spoken and it is just about the saddest thing ever that most of us have absolutely no idea what those two statements mean.

The Best Piece of Advice I Ever Got

2009-10-20T17:49:00.002-04:00

I’m not a big fan of self-help books and magazines. Except of course for my ‘Quest for Positivity’ reading frenzy, and to be fair most of the reading I did was related to the business/professional end of the spectrum, i.e. motivating and managing people, I have read next to absolutely zero self-help books. I suppose that is at least partially a reflection of the cynic in me. Whatever.

But and but and another big but, the Best Piece of Advice I Ever Got came from a self-help book entitled ‘Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live’ by Martha Beck. Ms. Beck is some big, self-help, life-coach guru person and I have absolutely no idea how I came across this book but I did. I think that I was attracted to the pretty blue cover with the star on it.

Of course the book is all about finding your well, North Star and well, leading the life you were meant to live. But the best piece of advice I ever got came out of chapter 7 of this book which is called Soul Shrapnel: Repairing Your Emotional Compass. The title of the chapter probably gives a hint and in it Ms. Beck makes it perfectly clear that we’re never going to realize our potential until we heal the emotional gun-shot wounds we’ve suffered in life. She doesn’t get all touchy-feely and mushy, she just states it plainly and simply.

So thank you Martha Beck for the best piece of advice I have ever received, and probably will ever receive in my entire life. I never did finish the book, maybe someday when I’m done with therapy who knows. But I do know this, all the self-help books, all the life-coaching sessions, all the positive little mantras, all that stuff would have been a complete waste of time without the therapy. So for all of you consumers of life-coaching services and readers of self-help books do yourself a favor, if you haven’t already - spend your hard-earned money on a good therapist and then use what’s left over for the life-coach if you still need her/him.

For the record Ms. Beck is a pretty funny gal and a good writer so if y’all like that in your self-help books perhaps you should look her up. Oh and Martha when you read this, don’t bother sending me a check for the free plug I just gave you, I owed you one.

True Story

2009-10-18T11:32:00.003-04:00

One day I decided that I wanted to be a more positive person. I have always tended towards the top of the cynical, bitingly humorous, impatient and harsh curve and it seemed that this is not what is helpful to the world at large and to the people in my immediate vicinity. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. I would now say that this wasn’t altogether healthy for me either but at the time that idea was lagging towards the back of the line.

I decided that I was going to make a willful, concerted effort to be the swan of positivity floating in the sea of negative ugly ducklings. I was going to be a leader and proof of the power of positive thinking, a beacon of light on the ‘can-do’ highway of life.

And so I started about the business of readjusting my attitude. It seemed best to me, after a lifetime that if I will be absolutely truthful was most definitely top-heavy on the negative, that I should start small. Frogs only turn into princesses in the blink of an eye in fairy tales and movie theatres. This is real life and I am, if nothing else a realist (or so I thought but that’s another story altogether).

Anyhoo… I decided that it would be easy enough to smile and be nice to people in the grocery store, show a little kindness, allow others to get in line ahead of me even if I was there first. I was calm and patient waiting in line at the bank, making sure that I was pleasant and kind to the teller when my turn was up, regardless of how long I had waited to get to the head of the line. I was even pleasant to the clerk at the motor vehicle department and for anyone who has ever been there we all know what a challenge that can be. As an aside it is amazing what a little smile and humor can do to a person who has spent years toiling in the obscurity of government bureaucracy. Some of them even smiled back at me from time to time. Already some payback baby. This is going to be awesome!

I read books on the power of positive thinking, I read books on how to be a leader in the business world, how to be a leader in your personal life, how to get the most out of people, books on every conceivable positive thinking idea there is out there. I won’t lie, some of them were worth the read, occasionally I would come across something that offered a new way of seeing an old story, some little tidbit of life philosophy that I had not considered. Good stuff and I tried my best to put these things into action both at home and at work. And for awhile it was working. Most people really do respond well to positivity. Oh sure there are those that are permanently and eternally cynical and unhappy but hey, it does take all kinds yes? I would move along from them, nobody was going to rain on my positive parade.

But one day something happened. On this particular day I woke up and like a ton of bricks it hit me - this being positive thing was taking a hell of a lot of energy, I mean a hell of a lot of energy. And I pondered this. How could something that was so right, so good, so ‘freeing’, so full of everything we have come to know as true in this world be sucking up so damn much of my energy? If it’s good and right and true shouldn’t it be easier? Shouldn’t it be energizing rather energy depleting?

Umm… yes.

Thought number two for the first day of the rest of my life:

Sweetheart, get thee to a therapist.

I have saved the part that smiles and jokes with the bank teller, this IS better and it takes no energy and it is such a small thing and it truly makes a difference. Be nice to people. I still don’t (mostly) lose my temper when I get stuck in traffic. If somebody gets on my bumper I move over and let him (it is usually a ‘him’) pass. But the rest of it, the books, the forced positive attitude, the burning of the beacon of light on both ends? I’ve put that aside for awhile. I haven’t got the energy, I’m just not there yet. I have realized that it must come in its own time and in its own way and exerting my willfulness in an effort to force something does nothing but drain my resources.

My Search for Meaning

2009-10-17T16:49:00.011-04:00

Here’s a question: if I don’t know the meaning of life, or specifically the meaning of my life then how am I supposed to know what matters? How do I know what skills matter, either technical or intellectual, and by these things I am referring to the quantity of knowledge, of facts that we should be filling our heads with. Should I read a hundred books or ten thousand? Should I know five thousand words or a hundred thousand. How many actual words are there anyway and do I need to know this?

Does it matter if I’m smart? Does it matter if my IQ is high low or in between? Does it matter if I possess the qualities of kindness, warmth and empathy? Maybe it would be better to be cold, aloof and detached? Should I increase my athletic capabilities, my creative capabilities? Do I learn more about the human body or the human psyche? Should I know about rock formations or weather patterns. Do I choose to study Freud and Adler and Jung or do I tackle Aquinas and St. Augustine and Martin Luther? Math or physics? Spanish or French? Engineering or philosophy? Shakespeare or Erica Jong? Oprah or Dr. Phil?

Should I have many friends or few friends? Should I stick to hamburgers and ice cream or is there some benefit to acquiring a taste for (ok forcing myself to tolerate) caviar. Do I drink wine or beer or not drink alcohol at all? Do I try LSD so that I can know the experience firsthand? Do I need to know firsthand the experience of an LSD trip?

The psychologists tell me I must feel my emotions, the scientists tell me I must observe the world around me. What is it that matters, subjectivity or objectivity? Which one of those is right? There are those (the psycho-scientists?) that will tell me I must use both subjective and objective experience. Maybe that person is right. How do I know?

Do I need to take responsibility for my life or can I just do whatever the hell I want, let the chips fall where they may and everyone else be damned. Do I need to plunge the depths of my unconscious or should I merely go through life reacting to whomever and whatever happens to cross my path not worrying about searching for truth, not caring about morality, ignoring every thought and feeling that is generated from within myself?

If I don’t know the meaning of my life how do I make my choices?

Perhaps it is clear to anyone who might read this that I have been contemplating the meaning of life lately. It leads me to wonder if there really IS a meaning to life. What if this is just something that some caveperson suddenly came up with one day, thousands of years ago while writing drawings in animal blood on a cave wall. Who decided that life has to have meaning and how do I know if that person was right?

If anyone has ever read Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning they would know that he has determined by his years spent in concentration camps during the holocaust that those who managed to survive the horrors were those that assigned meaning to life. Of course it gave them something to live for, any fool can understand this. But what was their meaning? Were they able to figure that out or did they just make a leap of faith based on nothing that life has meaning? Were they hoping to find some future meaning and that's why they were able to endure or did they find meaning right in the middle of Auschwitz? Was it abstract or was it material?

We are all so hell-bent to find meaning in our lives but has anyone stopped to think that maybe life has no meaning? It is so easy to say that it does or it doesn't but which one of those is right and how do I know? Don't we have to figure out first whether is does or doesn't before we can then make our choices?

Does the existence of God dictate that there must be meaning in this life? Those of us who have belief in His existence look to Him to tell us a) that life DOES have meaning and b) what that meaning is. What if while I'm looking at Him for these answers He is looking back at me saying "Don't look at me sister, I never told anyone that life has meaning. That's something y'all came up with on your own."

Affairs and the beating men take for them

2009-10-12T09:13:00.016-04:00

Interesting thing about being a woman (single or otherwise) involved in an affair with a married man. If this were me (as the woman) I could lay out to my friends, to my blogging buddies, the women I mean, all of the manipulative, boundary-crossing behaviors of this man with whom I am involved and it’s a pretty safe bet that all of my female blogging buddies would be making all sorts of angry comments about what a manipulative, sex-crazed, untrustworthy bastard the guy is. Certainly I, as the woman scorned in this relationship would eat this up, roll around in it, glory in the love and support that is being thrown my way by my home-girls and keep on talking/blogging about it. Who would not want that kind of love and sympathy and support? He’s hurting me! Sisters Unite! Girls rule and men suck! Why oh why are they so cruel and heartless?!

Let us look at it from another angle.

Sweetheart you are having an affair with a married man. He does not belong to you, he does not want anything permanent with you and you have no right to expect anything from him and you have no right to expect that he won’t hurt you time and time again. Pain is an inherent quality to relationships like this and there is no way around that. He does not know that he is taking advantage of all of the emotional insecurities and dysfunctions that exist in your psyche. He does not know that your father beat you, that your mother was ineffectual and that you are a substance abuser. And even if he did he hasn't got the first freaking clue what that all means to your fragile emotional state and his role in taking advantage of it. He is not willfully and wantonly taking advantage of things of which he knows nothing, unless of course he's got a Ph D. in psychology and he has spent years as a therapist, in which case there are governing boards to whom he should be reported.

Here is a new spin on an old tune. Maybe his father beat him. Maybe his mother was ineffectual. Maybe he is a substance-abuser. And maybe you don't know these things about him and even if you did you do not have the first freaking clue what impact your involvement has on his fragile emotional state and your role in taking advantage of it. Why are we always so quick to paint the man as a predator in these kinds of relationships? We see only our own tender spots and we feel only our own pain as he runs the sandpaper over them.

If you continue to respond to his emails and text messages and phone calls then you are just as guilty of being manipulative and untrustworthy as he is and it is you who is running the sandpaper over your tender spots. This will never amount to anything in your life of any significance. You can sit around with your therapist and your friends and your blogging sisters, spending hours dissecting it, figuring out the why's, the what's, the wherefore's, spending your hard-earned money to understand the emotional need that is being addressed in your life via this affair and that's fine but first know this: It will bring you only pain and more pain and might I just say unequivocally that yes, this situation is your responsibility not his. You have two choices, you can either endure the pain of cutting him loose now or you can endure the pain of hanging onto him until you've 'worked through it'. Pick one. DO NOT waste six months of therapy sessions to come to this conclusion. DUMP HIM FIRST and then use that six months of therapy processing the whole ugly thing and getting past the pain of cutting him loose.

He does not own you, you only choose to LET him own you and yes, you should cut him off and cut him off now. There is no middle ground, these are not muddy waters and there is no ambiguity to weed through.

Put the sandpaper down and back away from the married man.

The End.

My new favorite line ever... EVER!

2009-10-07T08:55:00.001-04:00

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now if I could only figure out how to find out if its true...

2009-10-03T19:48:00.002-04:00

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 64

An answer perhaps to the eternal question of the need for human pain and suffering can be found, I think in the word ‘experience’. It is only in the experience of pain and suffering that we as human beings can know empathy. This is the only way in which two people can truly connect at a real and intimate level. This is the only way that one can truly know what the other knows. It is only in feeling the pain, in knowing of that experience that we truly and honestly share with another. This is where we come to that meeting place of true spiritual connection that enables us to know what is in the heart of the other. The defenses are gone and the truth of the other is known.

I have to admit

2009-10-01T11:50:00.002-04:00

That sometimes this whole God thing seems like utter bullshit to me. I mean mystery is cool and all, and it offers hope and it offers intrigue and all of those other really cool things. But sometimes I think to myself “what a load of crap”. What is the point? We struggle through life, we deal with the good, the bad and the ugly. We have times in our lives when things are not going well, one thing after the next and we try to keep it all at bay, try to get up and go to work each day, try to put it out of our minds and for what?

For a load of guesswork that’s what. Because in the end, despite the positive thinking, despite the ‘Just Do It’ slogans, despite all the cheap talk of God’s love, in the end when life is hitting us from every angle the bottom line is that we feel like we’re struggling through this on our own. And that’s the truth.

When I hear some guy talk about how he walked away from a car wreck because of his personal blessing of God’s protection while at the same time 500 people are killed in an earthquake it all suddenly becomes crystal clear to me that it’s all mostly just a bunch of guesswork. And perseverance and intestinal fortitude and a little bit of vodka or valium, which is a bit of a joke but it's really not all that funny. Sometimes I think it would be great to be able to just walk away.

This could be a good example of this thing that I referred to as doubt a few posts back.

2009-10-01T09:24:00.001-04:00

Just Do It

I used to take guitar lessons. One day a bunch of years ago I saw a guy playing the violin at a wedding and I decided right then and there that I simply had to learn how to do that before I died. So a couple of months later I took my bad self down to the local music store and told the dude that I was going to start violin lessons. And you know what I did then? I let that s.o.b talk me out of it. Yes I did and I have been flogging myself ever since. He told me that it takes years to learn to play the violin well and clearly (I guess by looking at me he could tell) I didn’t have that many good years left, there simply wasn’t enough time. So he pointed me in the direction of the guitar and I said what the hell. Classical guitar is lovely and I would be thrilled to be able to play classical guitar.

Yeah, well about eight years later I’m still struggling with this freaking classical guitar and sometimes I just want to throw the damn thing through the window. There is something amazingly soothing to me about the sound of shattering glass… especially when I’m the one that shattered it.

Anyway… so here I am eight years later, still learning to play the classical guitar and I am here to tell you and I don’t care what ANYONE says, there is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that learning to play the violin could be any harder than learning to play classical guitar. And all you violinists out there my hat’s off to you and you have my undying respect, as do all of the classical guitarists out there as well as any other player of a musical instrument. You do not know the meaning of the word ‘perseverance’ until you have taken up the task of learning a musical instrument. The good news is that the payoff is so high and that makes it all worth the effort (at least I keep telling myself this).
That a person could learn to play the classical guitar, or violin or any other stringed instrument is proof positive to me that we are capable of things we never dreamed possible if we are only willing to slog through the difficulties of life.

So here’s my point. I took lessons for something like five years and I made progress but I never could get over the feeling of being judged. I never could get over my obsession with playing each scale perfectly, with sounding each note perfectly, with not making any mistakes. In short I never could allow myself to play like the beginner I was instead I expected that I should, right out of the box be able to play this instrument like Segovia.

Ridiculous I know and I did know it in my head… but my heart was something else. I could not let go of this. I read books about how to practice. I read books about the learning process. I read books about how to freaking LET yourself make mistakes for god’s sake! (that is so pathetic). And still….

My guitar teacher used to tell me all the time how I just needed to ‘let it fly’. Just let it go and PLAY. And I couldn’t and I used to beat myself over and about the head trying to find that ‘thing’, that elusive gene, that mysterious whatchamacallit that would magically enable me to let go of the need to play it ‘right’ and instead just play it. What was wrong with me that I could not Just Do It?

And so to Nike and your ‘Just Do It’ slogan might I just say… Well I would be breaking my own little rule of no naughty words on my blog. But you all know what I’m thinking.

Is It Possible

2009-09-26T08:08:00.001-04:00

To possess both self-confidence and humility that is rooted in the knowledge of God’s love and acceptance?

To accept the possibility of failure in our lives and on our part without being paralyzed by the fear of it?

To permit ourselves to be satisfied and pleased with our accomplishments and successes, safe in the knowledge that they are gifts from God and testaments to the talents and abilities inherent to our personal being, placed there by Him and designed to be used by us?

To live our lives in a desire for discovery of the richness that life has to offer, to live in anticipation of the mystery and challenges, understanding that those mysteries and challenges might involve pain and difficulty and yet having the courage to step out into it anyway?

Therapy Forever

2009-09-25T12:22:00.006-04:00

Is it wrong? I have pondered this question recently. I have done a lot of reading on the whole therapy thing in the past year and from therapist to therapist you get different opinions. There are those that take the approach that certain problems ‘should’ only take two (or one or five, etc.) years to resolve and if the problem isn’t resolved in that time well then something is wrong. I read a book recently where the author had endured years of sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriends and her therapist indicated to her that it should only take two years to resolve (or whatever word is appropriate here). Two years of therapy for ten years of sexual abuse that resulted in (among other things) dissociative identity disorder? Damn, that’s some good therapy. What if she wanted to get into other things also? What is this, we’re here to fix the DID and move on? Here’s your new toothbrush and dental floss kit, out you go now dearie.

I have to say – if I had walked into my therapist’s office, related what I thought to be my reasons for being there and she told me that it should all be resolved in two years (or one or five, etc.) then I’d feel a hell of a lot of pressure to make sure that my ‘issues’ were ‘resolved’ to somebody’s satisfaction in those two years and if they weren’t well them somebody must surely be a complete failure. I wonder who that somebody might be.

In addition none of this takes into account how open the client is willing to be among other things. Being one of those clients that is disinclined to blurt it all out in a hail of gunfire I simply don’t get this idea of time limits.
Now let me just state that I understand that there very well might be appropriate endings, time to move on, with or without a therapist but I have to say these time limits really make me uncomfortable.

I am not in love with my therapist although I am certainly quite fond of her. I don’t feel any kind of excessive dependency on her, in fact I try like hell not to be dependent on her at all which may be some therapists idea of a problem but I’m good with what we’re doing. And who knows, maybe that will change someday but right now I think she’s a good fit for me and I kind of like what we’re building here. I suspect she finds me a bit of a challenge - I cannot help that but she places absolutely no pressure on me whatsoever and it simply has to be that way for me. And it’s going to take as long as it takes and I’m ok with that. And she is too.
Given the confrontational, oftentimes harsh family environment I come from - if you had a problem boy you'd better say in fifty words or less and you'd better get over it in twenty-four hours or less because didn't nobody have time for your problems - I really like having a place to go where I can get rational, thoughtful, patient, kind and accepting responses to the things I want to discuss. And I get to be confident that I will be challenged in her gentle way when the need arises and how often do we get this in life? Rational, thoughtful, patient, kind, accepting confrontation. And no time limits! I never knew it could be this way.

And if I want it to be this way for a good, long time is there something wrong with that?

Natural vs. Supernatural

2009-09-03T08:55:00.003-04:00

From Thomas Merton’s “The Inner Experience”:

“Our awareness of our inner self can at least theoretically be the fruit of natural and psychological purification. Our awareness of God is a super-natural participation in the light by which he reveals himself interiorly as dwelling in our inmost self.”

This thought is interesting and perplexing to me in the way that he seems to differentiate between the ‘natural’ or (it seems to me) ‘not God’, and the ‘super-natural’ or (it seems to me) God. In other words as if the ‘natural’ things have nothing to do with God’s involvement.

And he continues with:

“Hence the Christian mystical experience is not only an awareness of the inner self, but also, by a super-natural intensification of faith, it is an experiential grasp of God as present within our inner self.”

I have a personal, intuitive understanding of this second part. God is here, I cannot necessarily explain the experience but I know it and the knowing is not with my head, or rather I should say not just with my head.

Here’s the thing. This awareness, this knowing, this experience can come, and I might even venture to say usually comes in ways that we define as completely natural. The catalyst for awareness arrives in the form of natural occurrences that we often overlook, mostly because we are conditioned by this life to overlook them as pertinent to our spiritual development.

Take for example a period of depression, or a psychotic episode, a serious physical illness, a life-threatening accident, you pick it. All what we would consider perfectly natural occurrences. Let us look at depression. That a clinical diagnosis can be made is both perfectly understandable and acceptable and completely irrelevant at the same time. The clinical diagnosis – the ‘natural’ explanation, does not cancel out the spiritual significance of the event. I read something recently about a woman who experienced, for the first time ever in her life a severe psychotic episode. She understood it as a catalyst for spiritual awareness. The doctors and psychiatric people who were treating her, as well as the author of the article seemed to scoff at that idea, treating it as nothing more than a ‘natural’, perfectly scientific, perfectly organic case of psychosis. One can only assume that they believe that God has nothing to do with psychosis, or depression or any other human condition that can be diagnosed clinically. But you see she has a completely different perspective than they do because she knows the person she is after in comparison to the person she was before. She knows what she knows now as opposed to what she didn’t know before. She is aware of the differences in her thought patterns after as being vastly different from her thought patterns before.

We have fallen into this misguided belief that if it comes from God that it must be in terms of our definition of supernatural. That it must come in the form of the parting of the Red Sea or of some crazy vision of heaven and hell or angels or a sudden flash of thunder and lightning followed by an audible voice from the heavens. In other words it must come in the form of something that we cannot explain in our known, scientific terms.

We do not understand that mostly God works within the laws of the universe. We do not understand that he mostly works within the guidelines set forth by him and that he works quietly and slowly, behind the scenes and below the surface.

Doubt

2009-08-31T08:03:00.006-04:00

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when a person (not unlike myself) becomes quite convinced of the existence of God and beyond that of His intimate presence within us, and it was brought home to me last night in a most penetrating manner. I suspect that the title of this post gives away a clue as to what I'm speaking of.

Doubt. It's a real bugger and as I'm finding out it never goes away, it just changes in nature.

There has always been doubt for me when speaking of God. As I have indicated in previous posts to this point it has generally been the same kind of doubt that most people have which is to say 'is He here?'. Normal, everyday, regular and understandable doubt. The kind that reflects the notion of "I can't see Him and therefore I have my doubts that He's really here". Fair enough.

But that changes or rather evolves. You see I can no more ask that question since I am actually quite sure now that He's here. But it hit me big time last night that now it is a whole new experience of doubt.

I was watching a movie called The Pianist. For those who have never seen it, it is a movie about (drum-roll please) a pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman (oy!) who experienced first-hand (it is autobiographical) what it was like to live in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Funny thing about movies depicting the Holocaust, or any other form of man's inhumanity to man for that matter, you don't need to see the actual cruelty, the blood and gore, that defines these events. It is enough, and sometimes even more powerful to merely depict the everyday life, the 'normal' existence of the people caught up in it. And I think it is exactly because of that which is going unspoken. We don't need to have it play out right in front of our eyes to know the magnitude of it all and for it to make us squirm in our discomfort.

And this doubt that occurs is not a doubt that questions God's existence, it is a doubt that asks "how could you?" (let this happen). It asks "where were you?" (while this was happening), and "why did you?" (let this happen).

It is a doubt that questions the very goodness of God, the lovingkindness of God of which is so often spoken in our religious texts, the intimate, loving presence of Him in every moment of our lives.

And it makes me realize that I was far more comfortable with the other kind of doubt, you know the one which asks if He's really here because it's easier to get through the day with that kind of doubt.

And I'm left with this nagging feeling that I never had back in those good old days of regular old doubt. And the nagging feeling is that while I am asking Him those questions He is looking right back at me and asking 'how could YOU' let this happen and 'where were YOU' when this was happening and 'why did YOU' let this happen?

2009-08-29T09:24:00.002-04:00

I found a lovely post about trust over at:

http://theothersideofthecouch.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/trusting-yourself/.

Some people just say it so well.

Learning to Trust?

2009-08-27T22:39:00.000-04:00

Whoever decided that we ‘learn to trust’ someone? I’d like to meet the guy who coined this phrase. It completely misses the mark. You don’t ‘learn to trust’. If I don’t trust you it is most likely because you haven’t given me any reason to trust you not because I have not ‘learned to trust’ people. Trust is something that is earned in the context of a relationship. It is something that is developed between two people, sometimes excruciatingly and frustratingly slowly and conversely (and most unfortunately) it can be smashed to smithereens in an instant.

It is not something that you study in school, take a test and then you know it for life like multiplication tables. That’s just not how it works.

Foolishness

2009-08-26T07:47:00.004-04:00

Psalm 53 (and 14) begin as follows:

‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’

I read once not long ago that this is an inaccurate translation and should read rather as:

‘The fool has said in his heart, No to God.’

I believe that the difference and beyond that, the implications between the two are profound. To my way of thinking the first one suggests ignorance on the part of the fool. Clearly we can all cop to ignorance in our lives. There is nobody who cannot at one time or another in his or her life claim that they are not ignorant about something. We simply cannot know everything and we know that. And perhaps that makes us a fool about that particular topic of which we are ignorant. I suspect we become fools when we arrogantly think we know when we haven’t a clue. And sometimes our ignorance has a profound impact on our lives and at some later date we find ourselves berating ourselves for that ignorance as in “If I had only known”… hindsight and all that. But sometimes we cannot know and that is a fact of life. Sometimes we cannot know and we simply have to endure the consequences of our ignorance.

But the second translation, whereby the fool says ‘No’ to God, THAT suggests (very strongly I might add) willfulness. That implies choice. That implies knowledge and then a willful turning away, a willful, defiant dismissal, a thanks but no thanks to God.

I cannot help but carry around this feeling that God has set things up just right, with such exacting precision that somehow He has left it entirely up to us to either willfully choose Him or deny Him. In other words when I look around me at all that is here, the created universe, and the more I get to know of human nature, the more I learn of the ways that human beings interact with one another, the more I learn of our need for each other and our reliance on the created world, the more it becomes glaringly apparent to me that everything is connected, the more I realize just how much evidence has been given to us by Him. And yet there are so many who continue to say that there is no evidence for God and they continue to deny His existence. This I believe defines that willful turning away, that saying ‘No’ to God. And I cannot help but think that the second translation is exactly what the psalmist had in mind and probably wrote originally.

Physician Heal Thyself

2009-08-22T09:44:00.004-04:00

In the past year I have read a lot of material on the subject of psychotherapy and psychology and all things pertaining to said topic. And I've done this because well I started seeing a therapist for the first time ever in my forty something years of living just last summer and is usually the case with me I have to get my hands on as much information as I can so I can know what the hell is going on and blah, blah, blah. Some people would accuse me of having 'control issues' and to that I would say that if wanting (ok needing) to educate myself about something as personally relevant as being in therapy means having control issues well then a control freak I am. If needing control is wrong then I don't want to be right.

Anyway, enough about me. Here's the thing. In my travels through the psychotherapy/psychology literature which includes blogs and discussion groups and books, etc. I have come to realize that a lot and by a lot I mean A LOT of people become therapists because they have been in therapy and (presumably) had a good experience. I'm cool with that. But what I'm also noticing is that many of these same people who become therapists after being in therapy (and frequently still are in therapy) have and continue to have significant psychological problems, issues, maladies, choose your word. And I read this stuff and while I think it wonderful that people are brave enough to acknowledge their need for help and do their best to get that help via the therapy process I then think to myself "hmm, would I want this person to be my therapist? Would I want someone who is so clearly still working through their own 'stuff' treating me?". And the short answer is "nope".

Now let me just make one thing very clear, in no way do I discount the validity of someone who has had in the past significant psychological and/or emotional (I think they sort of go together no?) issues becoming a therapist. Quite the contrary actually. I am a firm believer in personal experience being exceptionally relevant in the helping professions. For example I honestly think that somebody who has never experienced depression can never understand the difficulty involved in dealing with depression and one thing I have come to appreciate is that there are many areas in which the understanding expressed by my therapist is paramount to me. Sometimes just plain acceptance is enough but at other times it is clear that she understands what I am saying and I can tell that it is not just at an intellectual level. I'm not necessarily suggesting that it is experiential on her part – I do not know. But it is obvious by her responses that she gets it. And that matters.

But here's the thing: at times I need her to be stronger than me – and I would interject here that I do not think that there are a whole lot of people out there who are in fact stronger than me - or at least I need to know that she can take me, that she can withstand the sometimes intense emotions that I am feeling without being repelled or afraid or just plain nervous. And I honestly doubt that if she is in the throes of her own deep depression or substance abuse issues or whatever that she will be able to handle my stuff. I think it is safe to say that if I found out that she was in the throes of her own deep stuff that I would have to leave her. I would hate it because frankly I have become rather fond of her but I know that I would have to leave her.

I guess this falls under the heading of "Physician Heal Thyself" and I would add "Before Thy Attempts to Heal Others".

And I wonder, am I wrong?

Caught Beyond Two Worlds

2009-08-17T09:07:00.005-04:00

It is being caught, trapped or perhaps imprisoned in between the two worlds. The reality is not religious or secular, the reality is somewhere in between but not really in between but rather beyond. It is beyond the divide between what we have come to know as 'religious' and 'secular'. It is beyond, where there is knowledge that religious and secular do not exist but in the minds of human beings.

So one demands that God be here, that He is necessary and the other excludes God completely and yet they both point to the same thing.

I have a nagging feeling these days that this delineation that we place on 'this' life and the 'next' life, religious vs. secular, here on earth vs. heaven are misguided. Which is to say that I am not at all convinced anymore that we actually completely leave one and cross through some doorway at death that puts us in that completely different place we call heaven. And while there is something within that tells me that the differences may very well be profound (one can only hope) I am not so sure that there is some specific dividing line between the two places. I do not think it valid that we completely leave all of this behind and I feel that it is a much more gradual and gentle exit and entry from one to the other that maybe allows us to retain what has come before. And I think we will be given the opportunity to see all of this, this life we live here on earth here and now with much different eyes. With a newness and a clarity that we never knew existed and yet somehow we will still be able to see what we now know, what is now familiar.

It's Personal

2009-08-05T06:53:00.002-04:00

I do believe that it is this idea of impersonal with which I am uncomfortable. Philosophers, scientists and even some theologians that present an idea of something more, something beyond, something higher, a supernatural power existing in the world, they accept the concept of a higher power and yet do not seem to necessarily yield to the notion that this higher power can be personal but is rather completely impersonal. It is referred to as a 'higher power' or Intelligent Design or some other euphemism for God that connotes a totally impersonal 'thing'. Like God is some sort of mass or energy or force that is behind the whole of creation - including personal human beings – that is unseeing, unhearing, unthinking and unfeeling. And I cannot wrap my mind around this. How can the personal (and human beings are undeniably personal) come into being from the impersonal? Our own personal-ness requires that we must interact with other personal beings in order that we survive, it is the way we are made and even a cursory investigation bears this out.

And I often wonder why so many people are so blind to this. I've heard it said that it is a choice, that we actively choose to deny God. Maybe that's true I don't know but I'm not so sure I accept that as the complete answer. I think perhaps ignorance or even laziness would be a better explanation. Ignorance in that nobody ever taught us properly and laziness in that we never really bothered to think about it much. I can look back on my own life, consider my own (what I would now call) blindness and realize that I never gave it all much thought but I can say this: I never, for one minute dismissed the notion of God. I never discounted completely the possibility of the existence of God. I knew that I simply did not know enough to discount the possibility but if truth be told I also didn't have the first idea of how to go about finding out whether or not God truly does exist.

However I can remember many times throughout my life those brief moments of consideration when I allowed myself to ponder the question of whether or not He was there. And I recall that there was always, every time a sort of pain associated with it, an longing present – intense, and I needed to put the thought out of my head in order to dispense with that pain and longing. As if it just hurt too much to think about it because I didn't know and it is clear to me now that the need for Him to be there was so intense that I could not bear the thought that He wasn't. It was easier to simply not think about it.

It is almost comical in a sad and tragic way that all of our science, all of our philosophy, our theology and our psychology – all these schools of thought that are supposed to provide us the answers to the basic questions of existence have frequently done nothing more than obscure the simple answers to these basic questions.

We don't know, we don't recognize the need to look to ourselves, within ourselves for the answers, to look within our own hearts, to trust our own intuition and this is so sad because it is this willingness to see only the external that enables us to deny Him, to look right past Him, to completely miss the truth and the reality of God in all of his personal-ness.

In Search of Self

2009-07-24T09:26:00.003-04:00

This is what it's all about. This is why we are here, this is what we should be doing, this is at least one of our goals in this lifetime. This is one of the features that is implanted in each and every one of us, it is an intrinsic part of what makes us human - the need to know who we really are, and hopefully to find some semblance of that person. Is it possible to find the real me in there? I don't know. But I sure need to try. And the truth is I haven't the first clue what the 'real' me even looks like – one of the casualties of living amongst humanity for all these years. We lose ourselves, or disown ourselves, or kill ourselves or have ourselves killed by somebody else. However it happens to play out.

What do I mean by this? We live our lives to please others. We learn to live, we learn to function in this lifetime in such a way that fits in with what others want, with the way others think it should be, with that which suits the lifestyle of those around us. And the person that doesn't let this happen is a rarity indeed.

Who do I mean by 'others'? Well first of all our parents because let's face it, we're at their mercy. They are our everything when we're born and through the first years of our lives and for some even longer than that. We are, as children, completely dependent on them, physically, emotionally, financially, intellectually. And so in our desperate attempt to maintain connection with them, and because they are adults and we're not we place ourselves at their mercy, knowing no other way. This is normal human development and no secrets here. For the record a second intrinsic part of being human is the need for connection with other human beings and by connection I don't mean casual interaction but rather deep and intimate knowing but that's another topic for another time. I'll get there.

But… and this is a big but, in the process of trying to maintain that all-important connection with others we lose ourselves. We learn what we need to do, how we need to function, what we need to be in the service of maintaining that connection with those individuals and in the process we suppress, deny, relinquish our own needs, our own likes, dislikes, skills, creativity. We become what those around us instruct us to become.

Until one day in whatever form it comes upon us we start breaking down. One thing I have learned, we cannot deny all aspects of ourselves and not suffer some consequences. Whether it comes in the form of depression, addiction, chronic physical or emotional pain, anger, sadness, whatever, we will suffer the consequences. When we are not true to ourselves, to what we are truly meant to be we cannot expect to function in such a way that is optimum for us.

And so begins the search. A long, arduous, confusing search for what is meant to be.

How Do We Love?

2009-07-22T08:27:00.001-04:00

How do you love someone in this lifetime? I mean that most sincerely. How do we, as fallible human beings in a fallible world yet still possessing those qualities that define us as made in the image of God, learn how to love someone the way we were meant to love someone. In other words how do we love another in such a way that reflects the image of God?

God loves perfectly which tells me that somehow, someday we too will be able to love perfectly and sometimes I think that maybe, just maybe we have the ability in this lifetime to exhibit perfect love, if maybe only just for fleeting moments.

How do I, as an imperfect human being yet still made in the image of God manage to offer myself up to someone else in love and manage to accept that other's love for myself so that we can both be in this relationship built on the very definition of perfect love? I don't know how to do it without it going wrong.

How do we relinquish our own fears of the pain involved in loving someone? And love always, always involves pain. How do we get past the fear of the pain in order to open ourselves to giving love and being loved instead of letting that fear of pain close us off to the experience and possibilities of that love?

Or how do we do this without it turning into selfishness and possessiveness? I think an aspect of perfect love is allowing freedom to both people involved in the relationship. It involves loving this person in such a way that you're willing to be without them – if only for a time, and trusting that they will come back to you instead of holding on so tightly thereby controlling and restricting that freedom.

It would be easy to just say to all of this "we can't", not in this lifetime and maybe that's true. But the problem is we are all wired from our very core, from our very soul, to need this and so this response of "we can't" only frustrates us. Knowing (or thinking) that we can't doesn't stop the need and so what do we do about that?

Joy

2009-07-14T15:34:00.003-04:00

Is it true that joy cannot come without pain? I think it may be. I had wondered lately what is joy? I can honestly say that I did not know. Maybe that's kind of sad – I suppose because not knowing equates to never having had the experience of joy but it's the truth and I would be willing to bet that it's the truth for most people. I think in general we expect that joy is some state of intense happiness but this I believe is false.

God speaks to me. I know this and yet I struggle to find the words to explain. And He speaks to me a lot. I know this because I now know things that have originated from deep within myself and therefore cannot possibly have come from anywhere else but from Him. We have established a connection He and I and through this connection I am coming to learn the true meaning of intimacy and I am quite by accident coming to learn the true meaning of joy. It is not happiness or rather while there may be moments of good feelings in the emerging recognition of joy it is not by any means pure happiness as we define happy. Far from it, I would hesitantly say that joy involves more pain and frustration and desire... most certainly desire.

Longfellow writes of it in his poem My Lost Youth describing his experience as he revisits his boyhood home. We all know this, it's a longing, a desire for what once was, for something deep within ourselves that we cannot grasp:

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

And there is mystery involved in joy, how could it be otherwise when speaking of the Divine? A frustrating sort of mystery to be sure but also a welcome mystery. In my search for God, in my continual questioning of Him I have come to realize that I am loath to give up the mystery that would result by finding all the answers to all my questions. A real catch-22. I have questions, I want answers but I don't want to lose the mystery that is inherent to life, not that I really think there's any chance of that. Because one of the basic mysteries of life is that there is more to know than can ever possibly be known by any human being due to the finite state of our humanity.

My question today is whether or not joy can come without pain and I think not, a paradox of life that the two are woven together and cannot be separate when joy is the leading aspect. And I think that joy is deep desire and discovery shrouded in mystery and darkness and that it comes only in relation to, in response from, only through contact with God. It comes in the recognition of our connectedness to God. Fleeting moments of connection with Him in the deepest part of our soul. The Joy is experienced in the small, fragile glimpses of recognition of Him and the pain comes with our inability to grasp Him fully.

Infused Contemplation (or God 101)

2009-07-10T09:21:00.002-04:00

I am just a regular girl. I'm in my forties like a million other regular girls out there (alright so maybe I don't actually qualify as a 'girl' anymore). I have a house in a regular town, I go to the regular grocery store, I go to the recycling center on Saturdays, I pay the regular bills, I drive a regular car, I make a regular salary at a regular software development job. As I said, regular. I was baptized and raised in the Catholic Church but as soon as I was old enough to have worn my parents out with my disinterest in the whole thing I stopped going to church which happened around the age of 15. And I didn't go back for years, like for 30 years. I have a husband and a child and none of us was getting up early on Sunday to get ready for church. We had better things to do like cut the grass, ride the bikes, wash the cars, watch football. Like all the regular Sunday things that all of the other regular people out there do on a Sunday.

The following is a description of 'Infused Contemplation' as defined by Thomas Merton in his book 'The Inner Experience':

"Contemplation is a supernatural love and knowledge of God, simple and obscure, infused by Him into the summit of the soul, giving it a direct and experimental contact with Him… It is a gift of God that absolutely transcends all the natural capacities of the soul and which no man can acquire by an effort of his own… in other words God is manifesting Himself…"

That is a composite of several paragraphs from The Inner Experience but it essentially gets the point across.

Here's the thing, I know what this means… from a personal point of view. Which is to say I know what it means from experience, because I am currently (clearly it's not a one time and then over thing) in the process of experiencing it for lack of a better way to say it. I know it sounds 'out there' and every day I think to myself at some point "I must be nuts, this cannot be real, this doesn't happen to regular people - monks, nuns, priests, shamans, buddhas maybe but not regular people who have to clean their own toilets and eat hamburgers and drink beer." Although to be fair I suppose monks probably clean their own toilets.

And I can see now that it's been going on for a number of years, in the form of a rather slow, arduous and painful spiritual awakening. I cannot think of another way to say it. I see things now, I know things now that I never knew before and that did not come from some external source e.g. a book, another person but this knowledge, these things which I know now to be true, I can sense that they are true, they come from somewhere within me, a place that I cannot pinpoint it's just there. Again, I know this sounds out there but it's been too long and has happened too frequently and its come to the point where I'd be a fool to deny it. I would also go out on a limb whereby I could even say that God and I speak to each other. Daily. I speak to Him and He speaks back to me. There are a hundred ways in which this happens so I'll not go into details but I know, I know that it's Him and I know that this happens. And I'm just a regular girl who likes to ride my bike and play softball and sit on the beach in the summer.

And here's one of the hardest parts - there is nobody for me to talk to about this. I am ensconced in the 'regular' world, some might call it the 'secular' world. I put these things in quotation marks because I also now know that there is no dividing line between the spiritual and secular world. We have done that ourselves, placed this imaginary line between the two but God doesn't just play in what we would call the 'spiritual' world. I'm here to tell you that He shows up in the secular world also.

And this is just about the loneliest thing that can happen to a regular person. I mean let's face it there's not a lot of God talk happening during a town recreational league softball game. Oh sure there are a lot of great books out there written by the great spiritual masters, St. John of the Cross comes to mind, and I've read some of them but they all seem to have one thing in common: they all seem to be written from the perspective of the previously 'religious' person. So does a 'Dark Night of the Soul' only happen to Trappist monks and Carmelite nuns? Must I be a Ph. D in Christian (insert any religion here) philosophy and mysticism before God will sweep in and do His thing, work His wonders on me? You might be tempted to think so after reading some of these texts. At least that's my impression. Perhaps in my ignorance I have completely missed something and if so believe me I'd love to know.

And the fact is that if I ever tried to bring this up with any of my friends they'd look at me like I had lost my mind, an unfortunate by-product of living a regular life in the regular world. Seriously, they'd think I'd gone over the edge.

Anyway over the past couple of years I've been keeping a journal which has evolved really into my daily prayer, my daily discussions with God, my struggle to understand what's going on and just a place to put all of these new thoughts down on paper and I'll tell you it's been a huge help. So during today's entry I realized something. I think maybe it's harder for us regular people because we have nobody to turn to. We're not steeped in theology, we're not surrounded by people who have either been through this before or at least have read about it and can perhaps provide some cursory guidance. And as a result of this I think we flounder around in even more obscurity because there is nobody to explain to us what's going on and what we might do about it (which essentially amounts to not much but that's not what this post is about).

And so I thought to myself well maybe I could write that text. Maybe I could be that regular person who turns into the one Supreme Spiritual 'Master' out there sitting on the mountaintop in my robe and shaved head who when asked all of the deep and dark questions about the meaning of life by some poor regular girl or guy who is going through this and is groping around in the dark for he or she knows not what, perhaps I can be the one to say "I don't have the first idea what it's all about and I know exactly how you feel and I haven't got any answers for you except to say I know how hard it is and I know how lonely it is and I'm stumbling around in the dark just like the rest of you poor, dumb bastards".

Because that would be the truth.

But maybe that's the help that comes. Maybe the help comes in the form of knowing that there are others like me out there who truly understand because they've been through it also, and they have survived or at least are surviving. Maybe for awhile (or for the rest of this life) that's all some of us ever get, I don't know. But it is an incredibly lonely place and I wish there were people out there close to me who were talking about it.

God asks a lot of us. This I now also know to be true.