Tag Archives: projection

Emily Dickinson Offered Wisdom Relevant to Modern Religious Zealotry

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The mass murder in New Zealand illustrates again the problem with “True Believers,” those who believe so strongly they will even resort to violence.  This is because if one knows the truth, and knows it with enough passion, it will shut down the “pauser reason” which would tell one that another person might feel differently about what the truth is so that violence would not be necessary.  Furthermore, it would reveal internal boundaries, i.e. discretion or “the faculty of judgement” which would allow for value of life, in all forms, so that any belief that one has would not merit acting with violence.

There is inherent in belief a peril as one can be so invested so strongly in his beliefs that the aforementioned discretion is obliterated.  This discretion involves a “still small voice” in one’s heart which might tell one thinking of acting in this fashion, “Well, maybe I don’t really have to go to that extreme.” And if this discretion is fully functioning, the issue of acting out will not even be on the table.

Poet Emily Dickinson offered wisdom about this matter of discretion and related it to meaning.  She wrote that at times, “a certain slant of light” will break through our consciousness and will bring an “oppressive” mood into our heart; it might even bring us “heavenly hurt” though “we can find no scars, but internal difference where the meanings are.”  The ability to feel “difference” in the depths of our heart, though often bringing distress, i.e. “heavenly hurt,” will offer us meaning to our life which will empower us to see meaning beyond the values and beliefs we hold dear to ourselves. The inability to experience “difference” that would offer a meaningful life will create a rigidity denying the “heavenly hurt” that is part of the human experience; it is then more likely that the resulting pent-up anguish will be projected on someone else.

People who can’t handle this internal “discord” which intrinsic to a heart that is alive, will inevitable have to “them” someone else or some group of people.  They will have to find someone who is seen as an “other” and vent their self-loathing on them.  This is a spiritual issue which is the reason why we find it so common among religious individuals and groups as spirituality often taps into a very dark dimension of the human experience leading to speech, attitudes, and deeds which can only be described as evil.

The Commies are Coming, the Commies are Coming!!!

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I had a scary dream last night in which the communists were in an adjoining room…to my left (symbolizing the unconsciousness).  I was horrified that they had “infiltrated” and aroused “penetration phobia” that was so frightening that I cried out in my sleep and my wife had to rouse me.  This is clearly a dream that draws on fears from my early youth when the Communist menace was the “fear de jour” in my American culture.  I listened to horrifying sermons lamenting the “Communist menace” and warnings that even a next door neighbor might be part of a “sleeper cell.”  And, yes, this fear was augmented by warnings that those “damn liberals” (‘dang liberals’, back then) were seeking to destroy our faith and facilitate the onslaught of “Godless communism.”

This culture of fear shaped my life and this dream reflects that the fear core in my heart has not yet by been eased by the promise of Jesus that “perfect love casteth out fear.”  Fear is an elemental dimension of life, an expression of our realization on some primitive level of just our vulnerable we are.  But instead recognizing and confronting the fear-base that drives us it is so much easier to see the embodiment of our fear “out there” in some person or group of persons.  This blindness to our unconsciousness succeeds in helping us avoid our fears but the price tag is that our judgment is horribly impaired.  Oh, sure, Communism was antithetical to our American way of life but now in hindsight historians tell us that the “threat” was gravely exaggerated, costing billions of dollars and untold loss of life.

So, what am I afraid of?  I don’t know for sure what it is but it will be some expression of vulnerability…perhaps even the grim reaper himself!  But if I keep listening to my dreams, having curiosity about life, and paying attention I will eventually have some inkling of what it is.  And whatever “it” is, once resolved there will be another fear to take its place which will tyrannize me less as I continue to discover that these fears are alleviated when I have the courage to face them boldly.

The GOP, Tom Cotton, and Blame Games

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The U.S. Congress recently sent a letter to Iran which warned them that any deal with President Obama (and other world leaders involved with him) could readily be discarded with election of a new President in 2016. Even Republicans are viewing this intrusion as being beyond the pale, and a usurpation of Presidential prerogative.

But with the heat that these 47 Senators are now facing, their response is, “It is the fault of Obama.” They argue that Obama’s heavy-handedness has forced them to take this extraordinary unusual step. But any decision that we make occurs in a context and is influenced by elements in that context. But those of us who have matured enough to use our forebrain, know that we must accept responsibility for our actions and cannot “blame” them on others. If we do so, we are in the mindset of Isis and other extremist organizations which refuse to own their decisions and blame the United States for all of their woes. Being a mental health counselor and having worked mostly with adolescents, one of the basic problems I often had to deal with was teaching a client that at some point he/she had to accept responsibility for his/her decisions and stop blaming “momma and daddy.”

Blaming is away of avoiding the work of having deep convictions (or feelings) and being incapable of articulating them so that the resulting discussion with others can facilitate resolution of the pain theretofore unconscious.  By merely blaming, one can avoid the anguish of wrestling with the terror that is lurking beneath the surface in our life, a classic example being to blame God or the Devil.

T.S. Eliot understood the duplicity now apparent with the GOP, declaring, “Oh the shame of motives later revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”

 

A Caveat re this Awakening “Stuff”

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There is a note of irony re this “awakening” business that I’m discoursing about. When you have awakened, all you get is the knowledge that, technically, you never have been awake and never will be! All you get is the knowledge…and experience…of the darkness in which you live. You will never be able to say anything but that you “see through a glass darkly” and if you have any honesty you will come to realize that your glass is a lot “darklier” than you could ever imagine!

Oh yes, I believe that “Light has come into the world” but we can only catch a faint glimmer of this Light before it is immediately beset by our ego needs which the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.” This merely means that there is always that tendency to interpret things…and certainly spiritual things…in a self-serving manner and a great resistance to acknowledging this. Of course, we see this so readily with that vast population known as “them” but it rarely dawns on us that we are guilty of the same. Since I found the temerity to acknowledge this, I have frequent “Rick Perry moments” when I have to say “Oops!” as I realize that once again I am just full of myself with some of my blather and that I am using my “enlightened” discourse to merely avoid reality.

Now, when this happens I try to not castigate myself and I certainly am not trying to say that I am a bad human being. I am not. I’m just a “human being” and it is human nature to take ourselves too seriously and not accept our shallowness and ego-centricity. And it is just so very “ok” to be “guilty” of being a human but it is important to acknowledge it! This helps me to snicker less when others are caught being guilty of the same.

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There is a note of irony re this “awakening” business that I’m discoursing about. When you have awakened, all you get is the knowledge that, technically, you never have been awake and never will be! All you get is the knowledge…and experience…of the darkness in which you live. You will never be able to say anything but that you “see through a glass darkly” and if you have any honesty you will come to realize that your glass is a lot “darklier” than you could ever imagine!

Oh yes, I believe that “Light has come into the world” but we can only catch a faint glimmer of this Light before it is immediately beset by our ego needs which the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.” This merely means that there is always that tendency to interpret things…and certainly spiritual things…in a self-serving manner and a great resistance to acknowledging this. Of course, we see this so readily with that vast population known as “them” but it rarely dawns on us that we are guilty of the same. Since I found the temerity to acknowledge this, I have frequent “Rick Perry moments” when I have to say “Oops!” as I realize that once again I am just full of myself with some of my blather and that I am using my “enlightened” discourse to merely avoid reality.

Now, when this happens I try to not castigate myself and I certainly am not trying to say that I am a bad human being. I am not. I’m just a “human being” and it is human nature to take ourselves too seriously and not accept our shallowness and ego-centricity. And it is just so very “ok” to be “guilty” of being a human but it is important to acknowledge it! This helps me to snicker less when others are caught being guilty of the same.

Karl Jung: Our Life is a “Flimsy”

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This move to Taos, New Mexico has been every bit the adventure I had anticipated…and more. Yes, the “adventure” has been intense at times as I found that “literallew” is very much alive and kicking in the depths of my heart and does not like change. I wish that rascal would go away! (But, not really! He is a key element in my heart and always will be.)

One of the first discoveries I made out here was a Jungian study group that was being organized by a Jungian analyst who was trained at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. My wife and I joined the small group and proceeded to explore several chapters of Jung’s Tavistock Lectures. This experienced as renewed my interest in exploration of archetypal energies present in my own life and in life itself. Jung had a tremendous ability to explore the depths of the heart, having explored his own even to the point of nearly suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Jung believed that dreams were very revealing about what is going on in our life and will announce what our hidden issues are and will continue to do so until we address them. But in the current reading I have now discovered that he felt that life itself is but a dream, that even our conscious life is the playing-out of our unconscious fantasies and is itself a “fantasy” of sorts. This is what Shakespeare had in mind when he said that “our life is but the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Now of course, Jung was not nuts and realized that “reality” is just that, “real.” But he felt there was more to this “real” world than what most people realize but that most people prefer to live life on the surface, not daring to look beneath that surface and begin to explore those subterranean depths where monsters and ghouls roam about at will. But as Jung noted, “What we resist, persists” and so the hidden dimensions of our life always find expression “out there” in the world, usually in other people. My favorite example of this projection is what I call the Chicken Little phenomena, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I grew up in a sub culture in the American South where impending doom was a basic assumption of life, where “the judgment of God” was always imminent, where “the sky is going to fall” was a constant fear. I now see that this subtle assumption of that culture…and primarily its religion…reflected a deep pessimism about life and an awareness of just how precarious our grip on life was. This belief system reflected a deep-seated existential insecurity which always requires the compensation of rigid belief systems. The more uncertain you are in the depths of your heart, the more fiercely are you certain about your belief system. And to consider that someone else’s belief system might be equally valid would threaten this certainty, requiring that other belief systems must be opposed or demonized in some fashion.

Here is the full context of the Shakespearean quote above, from “The Tempest”:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

More on Ego-Ridden Faith

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Yesterday I addressed dualistic thinking and the “saved” vs “unsaved” emphasis of some religions, portraying that emphasis as merely an expression of an “us” vs “them” approach to life. This expression of faith is very guilt-ridden and must have very rigid boundaries and often appears to be searching daily to find things “that we don’t do that others do” which “make us good, and them bad.” Looking back on my life, I realize that my tenuous identity was explicitly based on this false premise and consisted of a relentless list of “thou shalt nots” which I religiously sought to adhere to to compensate for a deep-seated self-loathing. And even though I was a professing Christian, that approach to spirituality was intrinsically antithetical to the teachings of Christ who said that He accepted us “as is.”

Now, in this “second half of life” (to borrow a Richard Rohr term), I find that spirituality is letting down some of these rigid boundaries and acknowledging some of those unsavory impulses, a process that Karl Jung described as “embracing your shadow” or “withdrawing your projections.” For, as Jung also pointed out, “What you resist, persists” and is therefore created in your outside world. To illustrate, the notion of “saved” would not have any meaning, would not even exist, without its complement of “unsaved” much like “green” would have no meaning or existence without “un-green.”

But recognizing this spiritual subtlety is antithetical to the interest of the ego who, should it recognize this ambiguity, would have its authority in jeopardy. So usually when an ego-bound person encounters teachings like this, they will respond with something like, “Of the devil” or “straight from the pits of hell” or “damn New Age stuff.” Thus the ego continues merrily on its way, smug in its faith, not listening to Shakespeare who noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

The Malady of Christian the Faith

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The unacknowledged malady of the Christian faith has surfaced again leading to tragedy. A 36 year old former mega-church pastor, Isaac Hunter, has committed suicide after a sex scandal. Another dimension of this tragedy is that his father…also a mega-church pastor…is Joel Hunter and he is a confidante of President Obama. Within the past year the son of mega-church pastor Rick Warren also committed suicide after a long-term battle with “mental illness.” Within the past year the pastor of a large, prominent evangelical church in Hammond, Indiana went to prison for having sex with a teen-age parishioner. And, from my youth on, I can recall the recurrent issue of “sex scandal” and “financial impropriety” and other misconduct surfacing in the clergy. When very young, it would usually lead to a sudden decision of the pastor that “the Lord” was leading him to pastor a different church, with the truth coming out much later. And, of course, we cannot overlook the horrible sexual-abuse scandal that the Catholic church is still dealing with.

My point here is not to point an accusing or shaming finger, or to snicker at the apparent hypocrisy but to express profound sorrow that men with deep spiritual direction in their life succumb to the lure of such poor choices that they wreck their lives and the lives of those around them. And, as in the present case, the anguish is so intense, that sometimes they even despair of living and take their own life. My concern is that these men have demonstrated that an essential element in faith has been missing in their life and that is an acknowledgement and embracing of dark impulses that are always present in all of our hearts. The problem is not in having these impulses but in refusal to acknowledge them and, when beset by them and the temptation to act on them, having no one to whom they can “unpack their heart with words.” They cannot disclose this shadow side of their heart because the Christian faith they have been taught does not permit them to acknowledge this darkness. Their faith is often a sanitized version in which “human-ness” is denied in the effort to trot out each day of their life a squeaky-clean “Christian” persona. They glibly quote Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me,” but do not fully appreciate the extent of that evil; for the real “evil” is the evil that lurks in the “thoughts and intents of the heart” which needs to find the light of day somewhere.

This most recent suicide brought to my mind the anguish that sexuality can bring in a man’s life. And, I don’t care how “spiritual” you are or how “noble” or “good” you are you will continue to be a sexual creature and that will always involve the temptation to…shall we say…err and might include impulses with which one is uncomfortable. As Woody Allen put it, “Of course sex is dirty, if you do it right!” But whatever impulses surfaces in our sexual life they are just that…impulses…and don’t have to necessarily be acted on. Someone in the position of spiritual leadership needs to have someone to talk to about them. But my central point here is that in some faith traditions, opening-up about sexual matters will not be permitted. Because the real intent of this type of faith is to provide a denial system, a facade that will allow the individual avoid reality; and that type of  person will inevitably be leading his flock to live the very same kind of life.

Christian faith…or any faith…involves honesty and the first step in honesty is to admit that we are not honest. We are born with blinders on and, when we see this, we will still have blinders on. But, if we can accepted the “possibility” that we have blinders on, we can be given pause, and perhaps be a little more human and less “pious.” Yes, we will then later discover more blinders…and more, and more. But that is merely to discover that you are human. That is merely to learn that, being a mere mortal, you tend to see only what you want to see.

 

“The Beast in the Human, and Vice Versa”

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For nearly four decades I’ve been intrigued with Karl Jung’s notion of the shadow and discourse here about the subject often. The “shadow” was the term Jung used to refer to the forbidden dimensions of the human heart which we all have but mercifully are filtered out for most of us. The dilemma, however, according to Jung, is that sometimes the filter is too rigid and leads to compulsive denial of this shadow side leading inevitably to projection on other people.

Creative people are the voices of this forbidden region, giving a voice to our brothers and sisters whose “filter” has not been so successful and whose lives have been hampered or even devastated by these forbidden haunts. One contemporary artist who was featured today in the New York Times is South African artist Jane Alexander whose art is now on display at a Catholic Church in New York City, St. John the Divine. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/arts/design/jane-alexanders-work-at-st-john-the-divine.html?_r=0) Her sculptures depict the grotesque, the misshapen, the ugly and I’m impressed that this church is giving expression to that macabre dimension of the human heart. And, of course, this church is not glorifying that dimension but merely recognizing it and announcing, “Here it is, people. This is you. And some of our brothers and sisters articulate this ugliness for us in their daily lives.” And when we are willing to recognize this truth, and embrace it in our own hearts, we can be a bit more forgiving and understanding for those who are less fortunate than ourselves.

The article concludes with a description of one gripping sculptured image from the display and then concludes about the image and Ms. Alexander’s work, “In Ms. Alexander’s art there are no good final answers, no clear comforts. What there is is moral gravity — political, poetic — and a deep, peculiar beauty that doggedly clings to margins, where the mysteries are, and soars.”

“Beastly Little Treasures” of the Heart

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“Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself begins to gallop on the way.” (Rumi)

It is not fun to acknowledge our limitations, the minor ones and certainly not the major ones. Jesus noted that it is easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than pay attention to the beam in our own. But spiritual teachers throughout the centuries have taught us that staring our demons in the face, “naming them”, is the way to deliverance. But, it hurts like hell! And, if you approach spiritual literature carefully, you have to wonder if one dimension of hell is living in the anguish that lurks beneath the surface when we refuse to “name our demon.” Or to phrase it differently, hell is refusing to acknowledge the anguish of our inner torments. This deliberate ignorance of these torments does not make them go away and probably makes someone near and dear to us pay for them.

I think it was Ranier Rilke who said that the heart has its “beastly little treasures.” In one of his essays…or poems…he said that if one has the courage to confront this “beast” face to face, stare in down, he/she will discover that beneath it lies the Pearl of Great Price.

 

The Crucible of Marriage

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I have said frequently, “What you see is what you are.” Karl Jung explored the phenomena of projection, contending that we often err in blaming other people or outside forces for what is going on within our own hearts.

I’m going to share with you here a simple exercise to test this premise. It will work…if you are honest with yourself. Take someone who is very important to you, a significant other or spouse and someone who you have been involved with for a long time. Then make a list of their flaws and eccentricities which anger you, which really grind your gears. Write them down and look over them carefully. THERE IS A LIST OF ISSUES IN YOUR OWN HEART THAT YOU NEED TO ADDRESS!

We get involved with and/or marry our complement, that person which completes us. They embody all those things that we desire; but, once the relationship deepens, the dark side begins to arise and conflict ensues. In our modern world, this problem is easily solved as we can divorce and, as mother once put it, “drive our ducks to another market.” But, more than likely we will end up with someone else who embodies the same qualities.

Marriage is a crucible, a container in which spiritual issues can be addressed. They will never be all addressed and the attempt to address them all is a problem in itself. But open and honest communication will put some of them on the table and allow some of them to be addressed. If the couple are then dedicated to the relationship, they will have the wherewithal to go about the daily routine of “hearth and home”, making their life together work while the conflict is addressed piecemeal, from time to time, but not compulsively!. There will be a baseline respect which will characterize the conflict and neither party will succumb to the temptation to think, “I am right! He/she is wrong!” Neither party will resort to violence, emotional or physical.

Here is a poem by Wendell Berry about the conflicted nature of marriage, entitled “Marriage”

How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt. Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows. You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
And yet I am not quiet.
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.