Our Conflicting Job Description

We humans are given a conflicting job description. We must be civilized human beings and that requires a whole list of dos and don’ts, culturally determined values such as courtesy, politeness, fairness, efficiency – all the virtues. This is our duty to society. Simultaneously, we are called to live everything we truly are, to be whole. This our duty to our higher self or to God – to be whole, and authentic. To be all that we were put on earth to become. This creates a collision of values. We avoid waking up to the conflict because it is too frightening.

While you can’t reel in the years past, you can go to your unlived life and discover what it would be like to follow different routes than the ones you chose. There are ways to do this without causing damage to you or others or undermining the life you have worked so hard to build. This is the real meaning of growing up. Growing up to your full potentials. In some instances you will find places to express unlived potentials externally, rearranging priorities and outer life. You may discover your true vocation or new directions in work or relationships. You may discover you have outgrown old patterns and transcended the need for things that once seemed important. Then you can quiet the noise inside you and gain more contentment. You can let go o nagging and negative thoughts and habitual patterns that hold you back.

The Notes Unchosen

Beethoven was asked how he composed music, and he said he unchose certain notes. What are the unchosen notes in the composition of your life?

The Second Half of Life

Never before in history have people lived so long. Average life expectancy in the United States is now 78, up from only 47 in 1900, thanks to clean water, improved nutrition, better sanitation and medical breakthroughs such as antibiotics and vaccines. Two generations ago a typical forty-year-old was frequently ill and nearing the end. For us today, this is only the mid-point, a time for taking stock, setting new goals, renewing our life purpose. Today there are an estimated 77 million baby boomers (ages 39 to 57). What are we to do with these "extra" decades? Repeat the same activities and patterns that carried us through the first half of life? Or utilize what is unlived in us to create greater wholeness, fulfillment and satisfaction?

You have an ego and the spark of something godlike or divine within you. The I, or ego, that subjective sense of self, is our name for the center of consciousness. We work hard to get ego awareness going in the first half of life – the whole educational system and socialization process in invested in this. Most psychotherapies are designed to patch people up, make them more productive, better adapted socially, and then throw them back into the rat race of life. Even when such treatment is successful, over time you can watch them wither under the weight of it all.

To be complete must recognize that we have an ego, which directs earthly responsibilities, but also within us is the spark of something godlike. It pushes us to become more integrated, more creative , more whole. Dr. Jung called this the Self, with a capital S, to designate a centering force for the entire personality – conscious and unconscious. Aligning our lives with the callings of this Self is a worthy goal for the second half of life.

The Two Thors

This story all began when I was seventeen years old and fell heir to the task of driving my grandmother to Spokane for the funeral of her daughter-in-law. We left Portland, Oregon, and arrived safely in Spokane to be guest of Thor and his wife (she was a cousin whom I had known during our childhood years).

I was just then needing a hero in my life (no brothers or sisters, mostly absent father, non functioning stepfather); Thor observed this and took on that role for me. The afternoon of the funeral Thor took me in tow, and we went hunting, rifles in hand, in a pine forest outside of Spokane. I was full of admiration for this big strong Danish man and was pouring out all my nacent masculinity to him. He played the role perfectly and began teaching me the high art of hunting! Carry the uncocked gun just like this, aim it down at the ground when walking, search for an animal within shooting range. Never in my life had I felt so big or IN before! We spied a squirrel on a branch a hundred feet away and I was soaking up the lore of cocking my rifle, getting the two sights on top of each other, then pulling the trigger slowly so as not to move the gun's sights out of line ---------- then FIRE. I knew nothing about backlash and nearly fell over backward from the blast and a sound I had never experienced before.

I recovered my senses, looked for the squirrel - now vanished of course - and was prepared to be chastised by my mentor with some such phrase as "Missed, but a close shot." Thor and I walked over to see the scene of my failure only to find the bloody mangled corpse of the squirrel on the ground under the limb. Congratulations from Thor and I suddenly felt the most impossible mix of horror at what I had done and pride in the presence of my hero.

This, and skinning the body of the bloody squirrel back at home at the end of our hunting expedition, was some sort of masculine rite that set off a delayed adolescence that in hindsight was a major event of my early life. I never saw Thor again but learned from my cousin that he had turned into a drunkard bum who eventually left his family.

Skip three generations for the next part of my story.

The concept of generations has always puzzled me, especially when they consist of people I have never met. The whole motion of the passage of time and the miracle of human personalities still remains a mystery to me. Out story now goes to a second Thor, whom I never met, and the passage of more than 45 years when this god-like Nordic name appeared in my life again.

It seems that my cousin married again, I did not see her for many years since she was in Montana and I was in San Diego. One day she called me and asked if I would participate in a birthday party for her and husband a few weeks hence in San Diego, I would be pleased to see her and the new husband (impossible that he would be a replacement of my hero Thor). I had no idea how to throw a party, but I would try. I asked my San Diego friend Michael to help this clumsy introvert with the difficult assignment of hosting a party.

Even with help, I was afraid of being host for a party for someone I had not seen for so many years since the funeral in Spokane - especialy when I discovered there would be nine people crowded into my tiny apartment. One of the
additional guests would be Thor, whom I had never heard about -- grandson of my heroic Thor, the man who so many years ago was enshrined in my memory as a hero of youth.

The party went well, though I had been unable to find a story I could tell as host. When I was introduced to the young Thor, I was startled to find a thin, blond, shy replica of his grandfather, and I knew I had the proper story for the birthday party. I would recount the shooting of the squirrel with Thor (I) and discharge a huge debt. This thought cheered me on immensely and I recounted in minute detail the saga (still huge in my memory) of hero and gun and squirrel and the high art of firing one of man's favorite inventions and the double feeling of being master of the power of the high art of both destruction and creation. Both these arts swam equally potent in my breast and still stand high as one of the imponderables facing any conscious human being.

The Birthday party went well - with the extroverted dimension of Michael's help. I was racing along in my fantasy underneath it all on the subject of godfathers and the very large place this had held in my own development.

Godparenting is still known in modern custom but it generally takes a place much lower than its original meaning, In modern times the term indicates that someone agrees to care for a child if he or she should be orphaned before adulthood. But its original meaning was much more profound. Old wisdom knew that the relationship between parent and child has worn a bit thin by the time the growing adult reaches his or her teens, and the custom of godparenting was devised to give a second chance at the powerful bond between child and adult which is such an important transition. A friend of mine with a wonderful sense of wit once commented that there are no handholds for one to hang onto between getting a driver's license and qualifying for social security. Godparents, in the original sense, are needed to traverse the early part of this wasteland. My own passage of this early time was a nightmarish chaos made possible only by godparents -- both men and women-- who filled in that vacancy for me.

My Birthday party fantasy was: Here would be a skinny, shy youth desperately in need of a handhold to help with the swirling rapids of adolescence; it was also a chance for me to repay a karmic debt to his grandfather who had saved me from a tortured loneliness of the same period. I said nothing of my thoughts but began a correspondence with the younger Thor, occasionally sending him some money, hearing of his triumphs and failures, generally cheering him on. He courted a girl, married her, and had a towhead son with her.

Thor the younger loved art, sculpturing especially, and began the unheard of work of gathering bits of junk from car-wrecking dumps and making imaginative sculptures of these worthless bits of castoff trash.

My favorite piece of rejuvenated waste sculpted by Thor is a life sized statue of Buddha, head made of a reincarnated carburetor, shoulder pads of long useless brake linings, etc. No single piece does anything but scream of its junk origin, but, miraculously, the whole structure has a most powerfull sense of dignity. Another piece , all of derelict auto parts, more than 15 feet tall, was bought by a wealthy donor and ensconsed in a park of modern sculptures somewhere on the East Coast of the United States.

I have only seen my two Thors, once each in my life, but both hold high places in the pantheon of my lifetime.

Literalism is Idolatry

The British philosopher Owen Barfield said something that still reverberates in my mind every day. He commented, “Literalism is idolatry.” If you take the inner world literally into our time-space world, you lose it.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was in love with the church and devoted to it. But as I grew older, I became critical and left the church. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Later, I read a medieval text that made Christianity real for me again. It said that Christ is constantly being conceived, constantly being born in his stable, constantly confounding the elders, constantly being betrayed by Judas, constantly being crucified, constantly resurrecting, and, most wonderful of all, constant in his second coming.

The doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ is, for Christians, the greatest telling of the once and future king story. Early Christians said that on the eighth day after his Resurrection, Christ will come and usher the world into the new millennium, when time will end, strife and suffering will stop, and the Kingdom of Heaven will be at hand. Taken literally, this story doesn’t touch me very much. It’s too abstract, too far out of reach. If we wait for this literally, we’ll wait till doomsday.

But when we take this story out of literalism and into the interior world, which has no time and no space, we have an immediate, living fact. If we take the full story of Christianity inwardly, as a timeless fact, these possibilities are available for us to touch when we’re ready, or perhaps even when we choose. The Second Coming of Christ is not just available to us; it is beating at our doors.

Feeling, the Orphan in American Life

Feeling is the orphan or unlived faculty in our society.

Ours is a thinking-oriented culture that grades and tests and honors and rewards people on the basis of their thinking capacities. Every culture has its hierarchy of values, Thinking is our primary one, with sensation coming in a close second.

Whenever you specialize you do it by robbing energy from its opposite. We have robbed from our feeling function to achieve this thinking dominance.

In considering feeling, I would prefer to abandon the term feeling and substitute the word meaning or value. We don’t regard this faculty highly enough of it to even give it a name of its own, so we use feeling, which also determines if something is hard or soft, rought or smooth.

In general, feeling is more important to women, and so the degradation of feeling in Western culture is even more painful for them. We must define some terms: Feeling is not emotion. Emotion simply means movement of energy. There is no proper or adequate word in the English language for feeling in the sense of valuing. Nobody knows what a feeling is. If someone has hurt my feelings they have challenged or damaged my valuing system, the meaning of myself.

Every faculty has its language. A thinker will tell you reasonably why something is important but generally is not capable of bestowing value. Sensation types will say that a new job pays $20,000 more per year than the old job. There is no adequate language to talk about the meaning of the job. Feeling is closer to saying, "It will serve my relationships better, or I will be much happier there." If you get a man talking about his profession you will get meaningful things in his language.

It’s often the woman who carries feeling in a marriage and who will talk about meaningful aspects of the relationship. In this culture men so often depend upon a woman for the meaning of their lives. Many men at the age of 60 are about 15 years old psychologically when it comes to their feeling function. Conversely, the wife may be a 15 year old in her reasoning facuty (but of course this is not always the case -- either partner may carry the feeling side). So the two trade insults back and forth and both feel terribly misunderstood by their partner.

What can you do with a faculty that doesn’t even have a proper name? We could start by trying to develop some language. To make a list of what you value in your life is already in the thinking manner. Thinking dominates our very language. The man in couples therapy so often says, "The only feeling she brings is to burst into tears.” Quite justifiably. People with opposite typology are often attracted to one another in an unconscious attempt to balance out the faculties. Sensation has a vocabulary: She can be an artist and work with things, or he can begin a woodworking shop.

Articulation is the desire of thinking. Feeling transmits through subtle things, such as tone of voice, the direction of the eyebrows, and other body language. I had an Italian woman in analysis who had married a proper English gentleman when they were both in their 20s. She was presently despairing of his ever understanding her volatile feeling nature. One day in the consulting room I announced: "The hit play of the season in London ends with the man standing on one side of the stage and the woman on the other side 20 feet away. There is a long and tense interval, finally she says, 'John I love you,' and after a pause the man responds, 'Mary I love you.' Now that is what you married. That is the English version of feeling!" This helped them to reflect on their inherent differrences of typology.

The noted author C.S. Lewis married into just such a situation. He was a proper Oxford don who fell in love with a fiery American.

Therapy, unfortunately, is confined mostly to talk-- a very serious shortcoming. Getting a person to paint or sculpt or draw or write music is the best hope for addressing feeling issues. The impersonal structure is like working with one arm tied behind your back.

Just being fully present can sometimes pull someone out of a dark mood, not by theory but by feeling. You must become related to something if your feeling side is in trouble.