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Thought of the Week Archives
June 1999
June 7
Concentration gives power. We all understand this
to a certain extent, but largely as an intellectual concept. Today many
believe that whatever they desire they can obtain by concentrating upon
it. That is a cheap form of psychological practice. Merely gaining that
upon which we have set your heart does not make for true success, otherwise
a greater number of people would be successful. The thief concentrates upon
his victim and steals his purse, yet we do not envy him his action. Temporarily
he may seem to gain his end--and that has great popular appeal--but the
fabric of his character is weakened.
Whatever a man wants he can obtain. By degrees
we accomplish our end. That is why we must purify our desires that we
may not want the wrong thing, because whenever we make a wrong choice
and work for it there is always the reaction. Moreover, after we have
achieved our aim, we may find that we no longer desire it.
Concentration implies great self-control. One
who has no control over himself, who is easily upset, made angry or revengeful,
such a one lacks true concentration, although he may long to have the
power which it gives. Owing to his weakness, he cannot have it. True concentration
means strength--strength of mind, strength of character--and cannot be
used for destructive purposes or to satisfy petty personal desires.
Our desire should be for that which makes us strong--strong to meet unexpected
shocks--depression, chaos, uncertainty--and this strength does not depend
on material resources but on poise and mental caliber.
The main idea of concentration is to make of
ourselves a channel, so clear, so direct, so unbiased that through our
instrumentality, the power of Divinity can flow and accomplish Its great
end. Keep this always in mind.
Swami Paramananda
Concentration and Meditation
June 14
The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself,
and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge and
on authority to give him understanding. Understanding comes only through
self-knowledge, which is awareness of one's total psychological process.
Thus, education, in the true sense, is the understanding of oneself, for
it is within each one of us that the whole of existence is gathered.
What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information
and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education
offers a subtile form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes,
it inevitably creates increasing misery. Conflict and confustion result
from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until
we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering
of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing
chaos and destruction.
As society is now organized, we send our children to school to learn
some technique by which they can eventually learn a livelihood. We want
to make the child first and foremost a specialist, hoping thus to give
him a secure economic position. But does the cultivation of a technique
enable us to understand ourselves?
While it is obviously necessary to know how to read and write, and
to learn engineering or some other profession, will technique give us
the capacity to understand life? Surely, technique is secondary; and
if technique is the only thing weare striving for, we are obviously
denying what is by far the greater part of life.
J. Krishnamurti
Education and the Significance of Life
June 21
As the end of the second millennium draws near, the limitations of
logic, rationality, and the "scientific method" as the sole means of guiding
our lives are becoming all too painfully clear. Increasingly our world
is turning to modes of perception and understanding that don't rely on
evidence presented to our senses, modes such as intuition and faith.
The overreliance on "linear" thought that characterizes the modern
era is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Perhaps its greatest
exponent was the great French Enlightenment philosopher Rene Decartes.
Decartes carried on an intellectual tradition whose roots go back to ancient
Greece. But remember, ancient Greece--the birthplace of logic, philosophy,
and the rudiments of the scientific method--was also the land of the Delphic
Oracle. The early Greeks recognized that rational thought is incomplete
and needs the support of intuition.
Laura Day, Practical Intuition
June 28
All literature...can be thought of as creations by the "dark side"
to enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness again.
Many ancient religious, expecially those of the matriarchies, evidentally
moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and
steadily. The movement started early in a person's life and, in the Mysteries
at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many obsevers
have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the "dark personality"
and the "light personality." Christian ethics usually involves the suppression
of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become severe,
century after century, we reacy at last the state in which the psyche
is split, and the two sides cannot find each other. We have "The Strange
Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." ...
How did the two persons get separated? Evidentally we spend the first
twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down
into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch
with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their
members to exile. In general we can say that "the shadow" represents all
that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in
the shadow. ...
Most of our literature describes efforts the shadow makes to rise,
and efforts that fail. Ahab fails; it isn't clear why; he has a strong
connection with the "old ethic" through the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets.
Dimmesdale's shadow fails. Apparently his fear of women blockes his own
shadow from rising. I prefer to use the term "shadow," rather than "evil,"
in talking of literature, because "evil" permanently places the energy
out there, as a part of some powerful being other than ourselves. "Shadow"
is clumsy, but it makes it clear that these energies are inside of us.
Robert Bly, The Little Book on the Human Shadow, (pages 63-65)
Comment
What Bly is discussing here is Jung's archetype of the unconscious,
the "Shadow." The Shadow, which is created in our youth, is constituted
of those energies, drives, desires and emotions which, when expressed,
bring us pain, embarrassment or disapproval. As Connie Zweig, Ph. D. and
Steve Wolf, Ph.D. describe in Romancing the Shadow.
Each shadow figure or character...has a story to tell with a similar
plot line: At a young age, our full range of aliveness, feeling, and dependency
was too much for our caretakers to bear. Unknowingly, they betrayed our
young souls again and again, inflicting the wounds of neglect, intrusion,
curelty, and shame. To survive this wounding environment, as children
we made a Faustian bargain, concealing the unacceptable parts of ourselves
in the shadow and presenting only the acceptable parts (or ego) to the
world. In an ongoing, subtle series of feedback loops with parents, teachers,
clergy, and friends, we learned, over and over, how to present ourselves
in an attempt to feel safe, accepted, and loves. In this way, ego and
shadow are inevitably created in tandem within us all. (p. 45-46)
As Bly said, we form the shadow in our youth and then spend the rest
of our lives trying to reclaim the energies which we have repressed or
rejected. This, I feel, is one of the great Heroic Journeys of adulthood:
reclaiming the rejected parts of our psyche so that we can once again
become a whole person. This struggle is depicted in some way in virtually
all literature and film. Either we see the struggle to discover the shadow,
a process which we can never do "consciously," or we see the grow so strong
that it overpowers the ego, or we see the continued repression of the
shadow until we kind of implode.
One need only think of some of the great pieces of literature to see
the metaphorical exploration of the shadow. Bly mentions one of my personal
favorites, Joseph Conrad, as "a great master of shadow literature." Think,
for example, of Heart of Darkness and Kurtz. Other "shadow literature"
could include Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Hemingway
short stories, and most of Shakespeare.
If you would like to learn more about the shadow, I would suggest the
two books I have already mentioned (The Little book on the Human Shadow
and Romancing the Shadow), or read Jung's own words in a work like
The Portable Jung, edited and with and introduction by Joseph Campbell.
The more one understand Jung's model of the psyche, the more one realizes
that it is an excellent model for the Heroic Journey.
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