They sit in a row outside the kindergarten, black, red, brown, all with those brass buckles. Remember when you couldn’t buckle your own overshoe or tie your own overshoe or tie your own shoe or cut your own meat and the tears running down like mud because you fell off your tricycle? Remember, big fish, when you couldn’t swim and simply slipped under like a stone frog? The world wasn’t yours. It belonged to the big people. Under your bed sat the wolf and he made a shadow when cars passed by at night. They made you give up your nightlight and your teddy and your thumb. Oh overshoes, don’t you remember me, pushing you up and down in the winter snow? Oh thumb, I want a drink, it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there, taking giant steps all day, each day and thinking nothing of it?
“Anne Sexton remembers what it was like to be a tiny person, how she necessarily deflected authority onto the big people around her and tried to adapt and adjust as life required, but how, even now, she looks for that guidance from without and wonders how to be a grown-up: … where are the big people,when will I get there? Where are the big people who are required to discern what really matters; where are the big people to assume responsibility; when will we get there?”
James Hollis, Jungian psychoanalyst and author, wrote Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. On Saturday, May 14th, at 11:00 a.m. we will be soaking in the demands and questions engaged in reading this rich text that offers trail markers through the dark night of our soul.
James Hollis lays out the “tough shadow laden questions” to help us decipher our summons to wholeness. It requires the ego strength of a hungry student desirous to know what lies beyond her repetitive patterns and engage the teacher within. He writes,
“These questions require examining our Shadow and being willing to deal with whatever comes onto the screen of consciousness. Hearing the other’s experience of us in the face of these specific questions is often a good place to start, if we can bear that. The Other whom we most wish to blame for the shortcomings of the relationship is also the person who knows us the most, or at least knows us from a refracted angle from which we are often unable to see ourselves.”
The “whatever comes” is typically met with ego demands that throw out the baby with the bath water. Growth is aborted. The “whatever comes” will challenge one to experience and tolerate feelings of disturbance, confusion, loss of control, and anger without dissociating. Dissociation is where free will is annihilated, immobilized. How many women know this difference? Coming out of dissociating, which can take hours to years, one must be able to experience, without identifying with, all the elements of chaos, a natural part of interior reorganizing necessary for supporting growth, supporting authentic, non-destructive power. How many women get caught in the gap between these growth summons and the myriad mechanisms that have tampered them down for generations? How many women are caught in destructive power cycles?
On Saturday, May 14th, at 11:00 a.m. we will be soaking in the questions outlined in Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. Let us examine the questions as trail markers guiding us away from dissociation, toward encounter with the turning over the soil of our soul to receive the sun, water, air, and nutrients for growth. Let us dissociate from identification and become open to experience of “whatever comes.”
The Old Crone quietly whispers to the young one, “Stay Awake” as the fractal energies of creative flux endlessly spiral, demanding increasingly more attention and space, just as our friend and teacher, the chambered nautilus, practices.
Inevitably, the Crone will shout the refrain to the young one within, “Wake Up!” when the young one is high on the indulgence of any of the many adventures and bliss of her innocence, the powers of desire, the dreamy landscape of sleep, and the hubris of our human condition. Hearing the alternating demands on the spiral of Life, the self emptying art and pulse of staying awake and waking up, staying awake and waking up, staying awake and waking up… expanding into larger and larger spaciousness, is a highly evolved yet most simple dance that requires much practice in humility, gratitude, witnessing support, sage teachings, and a sense of humor!
James Hollis, Jungian psychoanalyst and author, wrote Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. On Saturday, May 14th, at 11:00 a.m. we will be soaking in the demands and questions engaged in reading this rich text that offers trail markers through the dark night of our soul.
“What is the question arriving….now…” as you soak in any particular text, action, speech, or situation? This is the question repeatedly asked at Kairos Center for Change to invite active contemplative engagement (concentration) with silence and listen for the questions, the images, or the one word responses to wisdom texts, images, art, stories, ideologies, or dream material. There are no right or wrong answers! Only energized questions, images, or words that lead us to take notice as they lead us toward or away from Truth. “What are they energized by?” you may ask. Silence… from the Still point of Source.
Observing reverent silence in the presence of wisdom text and art is an ancient practice fostering our capacity to release from the collective grabs and fads, the projections we throw out and absorb. In the silence we draw near to and converse privately with the One Mystery that knows, that lies beyond the noise and shackles of our myriad vaporous attachments, distractions, projections, addictions, habits, opinions, routines, infatuations, wounds, delusions, and reveries — each of these vying to be idolized and worshipped for itself, into their tiny containers, serving infinite forms of blind avoidance, blind subservience, and/or blind control…Shadow.
Observing reverent silence in the presence of wisdom text and art opens the door for re-discovering and re-claiming our own free will, our song, our dance, our light…Beauty and rest. Once remembered, we are less susceptible to the “moral engineering of others” (Dostoevsky) and magic tricks that eat at our souls, rendering our humanness “mechanical” and trite.
Image from the movie Giant Mechanical Man
Rather, we are able to watch, play with, and enjoy the grand symphony of EVERYTHING, including our attachments, distractions, addictions, habits, opinions, routines, infatuations, wounds, delusions, and reveries as manifestations of light, of Source…. not Source itself. It is in our human witnessing that transformation happens from the will of Source in service of wholeness and free-will.
Image from the movie Giant Mechanical Man
While it seems easy enough from the grandstands, practiced meditators know all too well that our minds may swiftly drift, at any given time, to armies of energized war machines, thoughts maintaining our ever so vulnerable hold on equanimity, where we are enrolled as actors in the never ending primordial play, exhausting precious resources as we defend the status quo (our personal broken record or myth), indiscriminately crowding out and dismissing new fractal invasions summoning growth, new possibilities, new potential, new insight….and, most importantly, crowding out intimacy with other and Other. A new equanimity awaits our arrival.
When we meet communally our courage and concentration for engagement can be strengthened by a critical mass of humility and wonder, a mutual desire to hear what newly arrives out of silence, the language and narrative of Mystery…. now. Attentively approaching the question, the image, and/or word response with beginner’s mind (Holy Maybe open to inquiry and ambiguity), as a potential doorway either to something familiar or to something altogether unknown, is the essence of Shadow work. It involves subtle, slow, and surprisingly intimate encounters with the Invisible that transforms the heart.
There are at least three experiences worthy of mentioning that we universally find aversive in Shadow work or the work of engaging an intimate relationship with the unknowable Eternal, Reality, Truth that lives beyond form, beyond gender, beyond name, beyond our imagination, and certainly beyond control or possession!…and lives not only in the majesty of gardens, oceans, and mountains but also in deserts, swamps, toilets, open wounds, messiness, illness, dis-ease, conflict, loss. First, the unknown challenges outgrown or irrelevant certainties held as identity, truth, self-validation, self-entitlement, or righteousness as it invites awareness of our real nakedness and vulnerability. Poverty of Spirit. Empty Mind. Humility. Then there is the discomfort of futility and disillusionment that arises when we mistake the door to the familiar to be the door to the exciting and new unfamiliar healing path. There we acquaint ourselves with “The Fall” out of a sense of arrival or security, into the mysteries of the “repetition compulsion” captured in the Sisyphean Myth. And finally, the discomfort of disorienting shock when we mistake the unfamiliar door as the door to the familiar only to receive undeniable burdens of our human responsibility turn our world upside down! The Ascension.
As the pains of our human condition are experienced from a lived life, one gradually becomes acquainted with the gifts of Real humility, Joy, Gratitude, Generosity, and Sorrow that burns away noise, allowing us to spread seeds on fertile ground for future generations.
Discerning which doorway the question takes us through always begins with silence, concentration built from practice and countless grace-filled failures, and a reverential attitude keenly aware that both doors often look quite the same… until the eyes of our hearts have sufficiently adjusted to light.
Hollis points to how easily we are enrolled in the part of “noise” in the grand play of life because we do not know what we do not know but think we know what others need to know only to bring them our personal room of mirrors. You know? He quotes Thomas Huxley:
. . . a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel ashamed in recalling it would rather be a man . . . who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
Cited by Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography
I close with Ecclesiastes 3:
There is a time for EVERYTHING, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, 3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, 4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, 5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, 6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, 7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, 8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
Yod Hei Vav Hei, The name of God – Breathing in and Breathing out meditation – 444HZ on Youtube
Winchester’s Guildhall clock has been lit up in blue and yellow (Image: Winchester City Council)
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Hannah shows us the power of spiritual ‘argument’, a particular sort of argument, not ad hominim (against a person) as Screwtape would have us enter, but the argument that awakens and engages the reasoning that mystics and philosophers hold up as a standard, as a still point perpetually engaging and submitting to creative flux. One might imagine the “argument” as a gatekeeper, a gargoyle, or a firekeeper to the sweat lodge or house of worship where the heart enters the Sacred to be transformed. One might imagine it as Nietzsche’s lion chewing on the scales of the Thou Shalt dragon, transforming into a Child, the Original Face, the Innocent, the Crone who is “childlike” but no longer “childish”. Such an “argument” can serve as a doorway (not “the” doorway) to realizing the many named Mystery – our humanity, our Femininity, Love, Shakti, the Beloved, the Friend, Shams, the World to Come, spacious (non-dualistic) mind, Universal Mind, the Kingdom of God, the co-existing singular and plural, the Divine Marriage, the voice of God, Reality, Truth… to name but a few for what can never be known, seen, or possessed, only joined through our brokenness, emptiness, and the sincerity that rises from the gift of humility. Never still. Always moving and changing form yet always the same.
I listen and hear Hannah continuously moving out of the narrow straights of the three P’s – perfectionism, peer pressure and performance – into engagement with her Life, with her audience of One. I hear her moving forward and backward and forward again as she plants the “seeds” in the hearts of her audience through the spiral motion. I hear her describing many deaths that birthed her into Light, enabling her to birth Light with the One with the help of her midwives – an imperfect community whose laughter changes position and form as her heart changes position and form in relation to the Eternal …. now, able be untied to false agreements.
Birth into Light and birth with Light are the substance of Mystic poetry, art, music, theatre, comedy, and true science, emitting wonder and bliss with unsettling rumbles in our very core where new awareness is laboring at a hidden crossroad. There we may hear the voice of Reason shouting, “Experience is the mother of illusion!” (Kant) while Absolute Certainty returns with “There’s no room in the Inn!” (Luke 2:7). This argument, in its myriad forms and constant spiral motion is an unceasing spiritual movement making room for intimacy with the lost sacred Heart whose picture is engraved inside our own, where Form and Formless live side by side as Tagore writes about…
When I was born
and saw the light
I was no stranger
in this world
Something inscrutable,
shapeless, and
without words
Appeared in the form
of my Mother.
First Light by Tagore, translated by Deepak Chopra
“My struggle is not to escape the storm. My struggle is to find the eye of the storm as best I can.”
At the crossroad there is a storm much like the storm seen this day, April 19, 2022, as winter tests the new buds of spring with snow and freezing rain and as Ukraine continuously and fiercely rises with spring to deliver the new ethic, showing us where we are broken and where we are being made new.
Hannah says, “My struggle is not to escape the storm. My struggle is to find the eye of the storm as best I can.” She gorgeously describes the spiritual journey through the narrows, through the storm of contradictions toward the eye of the storm, the still point that lies in the center or heart of one’s unique labyrinth that is inextricably intertwined with the Universal Labyrinth. This is where the unimaginable happens and we connect to what is ‘bigger than all of us,’ to the All and the all. This is where the heart is transformed.
As she carefully prepared herself for public testimony, she brought with her a broken spirit, a spirit readied to die, to be ex-communicated by the world. The sword of God was lit, breaking the either/or dualistic frame and filling it with gold.
How is it that intentional walking through the narrows of our own narrative, emptying our self, sends us into a much unanticipated ‘reversal’ of expectation? Stretching us well beyond our small imagination? Rooting us deeper into our character, the virtues knitted into the deepest chambers of our hearts? Embodying our walk through the labyrinth of our soul with the One, the ground feeing more solid now? A faint whisper is heard…”I remember..” with a “Thank you, thank you, thank you” in Awe.
This journey to Awe is succinctly captured in another Tagore poem….
Awe When we played together I never asked who you were. You called me from sleep under my window And you led the chosen from meadow to woods. My life was so boisterous that I was afraid of you. You were just my friend – I echoed your songs And never asked what they meant.
Now playtime is over
And I’ve suddenly gone blind.
What is this?
Why has the world taken off its sandals
And dropped to its knees
As I bow my head under the silent stars?
-A poem by Tagore, translated by Deepak Chopra “On the Shores of Eternity.”
With each reliable return to practice, the intellect imitating what is written on the score, one slowly melts into the still point of Mystery, in union with Will. Bursts of grace enter unexpectedly for a moment, dispersing any awkwardness of clunky fingers working through frozen rhythms in unknown spaces. The eye of the intellect falls into the deepest rest as it is ravished awake in delight at the new arrival. Suddenly…”all is well” arrives and the song plays the student, the student the song.
Despair enters when when we know the full depth of dis-honour and cannot seek, nor credit, G-d’s Mercy.
– C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
26:22 Do you feel remorse? I do. Do you resolve never to commit the sin again? Yes. Have you made restitution for the sin? Made recompense? I can’t. The man you beat up? Whatever the sin is, it is a private matter between you and Allah. If your repentance is sincere, you need only ask, “Allah forgive me.” He will forgive. I pray to forgive, not for forgiveness. Allah forgives. The objective is to be forgiven, not to be judged and condemned. But, you must make restitution. You must put it right.
“[G-d] sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
The threads woven through all our readings have been the strands of our human condition viewed through the lens of mythology, of psychology, of prayer, of ritual, and now the lens of satire. Each lens sheds light on a different angle of the elephant, inviting us to experience the “awe at our own ignorance and our inability to ever get things right” (Sara Regina Ryan). Once that elephant is adequately realized, our human adventure begins!
“I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.”
C.G. Jung
Each author in the Mystic Heart Series has provided a scaffolding for discerning the conscious from the unconscious, shadow from light, human from God, world from God, world from human, adaptation (ambitious) demands from spiritual demands, ego from Self, persona from Self or Soul, the archetypal from temporal. Each emphasizes the gift of awakening to our human condition, to Love, to interior freedom.
“In the gap between intention and outcome lies ubiquitous interruptions” (James Hollis). Coming to consciousness – awakening to our human condition, our human potential, our human nature – involves preparing to meet those interruptions with prepared intention, attention, and resolve built through experience in contemplative/reflective space and dialogue with the external. The aim is to move forward into wholeness (not goodness), awaken to our potential and realize interior freedom. Along the way we come to know what lurks in the shadows of our conscious experience and bring those shadows toward the light, toward the Soul’s Will.
In the Preface of his 2nd Edition of the Screwtape Letters, it reads
Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.
There is wishful thinking In Hell as well as on earth.
Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my letters were the ripe fruit of many years study of moral and ascetic theology. They forget that there is an equally reliable though less creditable way of learning how temptation works. My heart, I need no others, showed me the wickedness of the ungodly.
C.S. Lewis
As you read the Screwtape Letters consider preparing yourself to meet those wicked interruptions through contemplative active writing and write your own letter to Wormwood, in the voice of Screwtape, that reflects subtle experiences you have had of slowly falling into the gap between intention and outcome, away from the Presence, following Slubgob, Glubose, Slumtripet or Wormwood himself…or relying on your “will” alone or your sense of “will” that lies in the concentric circle of fantasy that Screwtape describes in Letter 6. For most, daily happenings can provide plenty of material! In your letter you may show how you befuddled the aim of Screwtape or how Screwtape continues to befuddle you, at least once or possibly many times through the troughs and peaks of life. The points in your letter may overlap with those in the book or not. As you read and/or write, capture a phrase (personal or extracted from the book) and write it on a piece of paper to reflect on. Use color and shape to express what is moving within you as you are reading/writing.
