WHAT A REMARKABLE AND REVEALING SCENE. One of the cable news shows aired a brief video clip of the FBI interviewing a young man who admitted using a Taser to assault a police officer during the January 6 attack on the capitol. There were two FBI agents in the room, sitting calmly on opposites sides …
Life in a Neurotic Society
EVERY DAY, AGAIN AND AGAIN, THE NEWS SHOWS US HOW DIVIDED WE ARE and how hostile some of us have become toward the others of us who see things differently. What’s going on? How did we become so uncivil toward one another? Denial. If you understand the mechanisms and effects of a collective denial of …
Perfection Isn’t Really All That Perfect
WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT TRYING TO BE PERFECT? Not much, according to the highly influential Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann. In 1949, Neumann published Depth Psychology and the New Ethic, arguing that the “old ethic” of perfection was doing so much damage to individual well-being and human survival, that it had to give way to new …
Confronting a Cosmic Revenge Fantasy
IMAGINE WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE TO DIE AND DISCOVER YOU’VE BEEN SENT TO HELL. Never mind the fact that in the cosmos, as we now understand it to be, there’s no “below” for hell (and no “above” for heaven). In the Western tradition, hell is believed to be an infernal, fiery place for eternal, …
Images Come Trailing Clouds of Mystery
THIS YEAR, I’M WORKING TO BRING A GROUP OF ORIGINAL SONGS TO LIFE, recording them with my band, BlueStoneMojo, and sharing the recordings online. Although organizational challenges have tended to dominate the project, it’s still a fundamentally creative process in which mysterious influences can manifest in unexpected ways. Here’s an example of what I mean. …
Mist on a Breeze #9
Solitude “When one is not alone when one is alone, when one is aware of a goodly presence within oneself, then one has achieved solitude. Our popular culture is a tacit agreement to flee the terror of loneliness, and it therefore circumvents the possibility of solitude. The avoidance of solitude is the flight, ultimately, from …
The Trouble with Following “the Leader”
THE PROBLEM IS PROJECTION — AND THE DARK SHADOWS IT CASTS. For anyone to ascend to the heights of popular power in a society, he (or, rarely, she) must provide an adequate “hook” on which the mass of people can hang their archetypal projections. The primary archetypal image at play here is the Sovereign. Like …
Looking Past “Me-or-You” and “Us-or-Them”
A CORE CHRISTIAN TRADITION ASKS US TO RESOLVE A FUNDAMENTAL TENSION in human life. When you read the biblical texts in which it appears, however, you might not feel the full force of the tension. The core tradition I’m talking about is the so-called second great commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. …
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How Deep Does Depth Psychology Go?
IT DIVES TO THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF YOUR SOUL — at least in theory, if not always in practice. Take a glance at Jungian theory, for example. Jung’s structural model of the psyche traces an inward trajectory that begins with the ego, and quickly descends through unconscious complexes and the shadow (something like a neglected …
Mist on a Breeze #8
Meaning, Myth and Human Consciousness “My old Pueblo friend … thought that the raison d’être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 