Merely Human

Friends of ours took their family to a resort over the Thanksgiving holidays and let everyone know how much fun they intended to have (and have been having since arriving) by emailing and posting photos of every part of the trip. I find there is nothing like a play-by-play account of the wanton spending of money to inspire envy in even the most enlightened individual, and so it was that I fell from the pious pinnacle of my stupa and became just human enough to adhere pejoratives such as “wanton” and “wasteful” to people whose integrity and good-heartedness I have heretofore had no reason to doubt.

I have never been to a resort over a holiday, you see; nor to Disneyworld or Disneyland or on a cruise or to a foreign country other than to adopt a child that we would then spend over $350,000 to raise, according to U.S. government statistics, while our friends all have the requisite 1.86 perfect children, none of whom came from countries that lack adequate resort facilities, much less require any sort of remedial help, orthodontia, or medical or psychological interventions.

My Facebook status that day stated that being jealous reminded me that I was human, and friends joked about how I needed to be reminded of my humanity. What I meant, though, was that I’m not much given to jealousy or covetousness, for I myself am regularly the object of other people’s projections of failure or success (as the case may be) and know that the reality of what it took to get here and what it takes to live here every day is not enviable or, on the other hand, regrettable because it’s my life: My life that I have chosen a million times and have built for myself over countless moments and which could not have been lived by anyone else.

What this means, of course, is that I chose to live this life. I’m not a victim of my own life, meaning that nobody put a gun to my head or isolated me in a cell or stretched me out for torture until I succumbed and agreed to marry my righteous but pig-headed husband, or have umpteen children, most of whom had already received life’s cruelest psychological, spiritual, and emotional wound in the first hours, weeks, months or years of life, or compelled me to do or be any of the things I regularly regret doing or being because the lives my neighbors live look so much more inviting for their novelty, ease, and ability to inspire envy in me.

It means, too, on a deeper level that when I say I am human, I mean that I’ve caught myself being human: fallen, falling short, less than godly, less than a goddess. I joked in my next Facebook status update that I am usually a goddess, but I wasn’t really joking, for, as St. Paul said, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from ourselves.” People tend to focus on the surpassing power of God part without noticing that Paul wrote that we have this treasure, we have this treasure of the very power of God, the godhead, within us–the same resurrection power that created the universe with a word, impregnated a virgin, and brought Christ out of the grave after three days and three nights. That very power: in me.

Having God ride shotgun in my life means that I was disappointed about the envy I felt, for I’m used to not feeling envious due to a typical lack of attachment to things that had me telling the cleaning ladies a few weeks back not to worry if they broke anything, for it was all destined to perish anyway, and there was nothing in my house that breathes or inspires life into its inhabitants except for the inhabitants themselves, at which they looked at me agape. I had, you see, forgotten that attachment to people is an attachment, too, and projecting my “wish I could’s” onto my friends or children is no less a crime than being attached to the objects in one’s house, for people are not possessions and it is not the job of anyone else to carry my unlived life.

What my jealousy meant, in part, was that I wished I could go to a resort but I couldn’t, because I have Too Many Children and Not Enough Money. But under cross-examination, the witness admits that she could probably afford to go to a resort, go to Paris, buy her 16-year-old a brand new car, or do any manner of things other people do with their money if that were her value or desire. The problem, she further admits, is that she chooses not to value trips to resorts as much as she values the life she has chosen for herself.

The other problem is, of course, that I need someone or something onto whom or which I can project my unlived life so that I’ll continue to have a handy excuse for not living it. Alternatively, I need something to focus on that will keep me from progressing in my career as a goddess who is more attached to the things of the spiritual world than those of this temporal one.

The day I was overcome with jealously, I read this in Jung’s Psychology and the East, and it made me smile with a smile that felt like a death mask because I could see my bias toward the temporal over the eternal:

The externalization of culture may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial, yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too clearly paid for with a loss of spiritual culture. It is undeniably much more comfortable to live in a well-planned and hygienically equipped house, but this still does not answer the question of who is the dweller in this house and whether his soul rejoices in the same order and cleanliness as the house which ministers to his outer life. The man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary, but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly, and he therefore laments his poverty if he possesses only one automobile when the majority have two. Obviously the outward lives of men could do with a lot more bettering and beautifying, but these things lose their meaning when the inner man does not keep pace with them. To be satiated with “necessities” is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes the source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness in the midst of living conditions whose outcome was expected to be entirely different. The externalization of life turns to incurable suffering, because no one can understand why he should suffer from himself. No one wonders at his insatiability, but regards it as his lawful right, never thinking that the one-sidedness of this psychic diet leads in the end to the gravest disturbances of equilibrium. That is the sickness of Western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness (para. 962).

As Proverbs 27:20 says, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied; nor are the eyes of man ever satisfied.” We’re made with the quality of Never Satisfied because Never Satisfied is in our deepest beings as a sign and emblem of the depths of symbolic spiritual experience to which we can go if we will only dare. Most don’t dare, but remain stuck on a sensual, temporal level that belies a commensurately cavernous spiritual emptiness, the likes of which I recognized in myself with surprise, dread, and awe the day I envied my neighbor’s good fortune.

References

Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychology and the East. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vols. 10, 11, 13, and 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Knots

I’ve been writing about how I’ve navigated the experience of being cheated in order to illustrate how depth psychology and faith can combine to help a person get through difficult circumstances and grow. People don’t exist in vacuums; we are tested and proved through what we do when what is most dear to us is threatened or taken away. We see who we really are when we’re our most vulnerable; vulnerability also shows us where our boundaries are.

In depth psychology, we refer to complexes, which are a cluster of mental factors associated unconsciously with a particular subject or theme in the individual’s life. The simplest way of understanding a complex is the way Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, which is as a knot. The Buddhists have a concept called an internal formation, which acts very much like the complex of depth psychology. The development of a knot or internal formation is described thus on the Awakening blog:

When we have a sensory input, depending on how we receive it, a knot may be tied in us. When someone speaks unkindly to us, if we understand the reason and do not take his or her words to heart, we will not feel irritated at all, and no knot will be tied. But if we do not understand why we were spoken to that way and we become irritated, a knot will be tied in us. The absence of clear understanding is the basis for every knot.

Put in Jungian terms, the knot isn’t typically tied the moment someone speaks in an unkind way or otherwise hurts us. The most troublesome knots have already been tied in the past, usually by a parent or significant person in our life, or knotted up around a concept such as our love or respect for ourselves, our value, etc. Proverbs 26:2 says, “like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, so a curse without a cause will not alight.” As a general rule of thumb, what irritates, angers, and wounds us can’t build a nest unless a tree is there first. When the writer of Hebrews warned Christians to let no root of bitterness spring up, he was referring to potentiality and proportion: from a relatively small beginning, a very large thing may grow.

$249.98 AND TWO KNOTS LATER

You’ve just spent almost two hours at your neighborhood Target store, buying groceries and back-to-school stuff for your kids. The checkout lines are long, so you brace yourself for the last leg of your retail journey. As you wait in line behind another mother doing back-to-school shopping, you notice that the girl at the cash register seems angry. Her mannerisms are sharp, quick, and rough. She keeps her eyes on the items and nearly barks at the customer when an item without a price tag is discovered. She rolls her eyes as she turns on the lane light requesting a manager’s assistance.

Under normal circumstances, you’d hardly notice her behavior as you went through the line. Out of boredom, you might speculate about the cause of her impatience, or associate her several facial piercings with angry young people and grin ruefully within yourself. Even if you noticed, though, you’d be most likely to smile sympathetically and ask, “rough day?” or something similar, eliciting a grudging smile from the girl at the register. You wouldn’t normally personalize her actions.

But supposing the girl has the mannerisms of your mean second grade teacher, Mrs. Smith. Second grade was hell for you that year; you never stopped feeling afraid in class. All year you had a knot in your stomach every time you entered her classroom, because you never knew when Mrs. Smith was going to whack you in the back of the head with her ruler. She regularly said that you were dull-witted and slow. It wasn’t until years later that you learned that you are neither dull-witted or slow, but that your temperament type isn’t the best at pencil-and-paper work, and that many artists, musicians, and writers share your MBTI type.

As you stand in line, you don’t consciously recall how abandoned you felt when you tearfully told your mom and dad about Mrs. Smith’s meanness, and they impatiently interrupted and told you to take care of it yourself. Your parents were no help, but you didn’t understand that they were preoccupied with adult worries. You don’t recall that this was also the year your mother was diagnosed with a uterine growth and had a hysterectomy. None of this information is consciously available to you, but all of the emotional results of these situations are very much alive and active even now.

You don’t know all this as you stand in the checkout line, of course. As you stand there, you remember nothing from the past, and thus can connect nothing. But you feel a growing irritation; a knot starts to form in your belly. Unbeknownst to you, it is the Knot of Second Grade. You feel the knot, but you cannot think the knot through as you wait in line. Thinking through the knots and thus untangling them takes much time and diligent work. Catching yourself tangled in bits of the knot as you go through life takes great vigilance. But because you’re not conscious to your knot or the snare it is to you, your exasperation increases with each impatiently scanned item and grumbling statement the checkout girl makes.

The outcome of being ensnared by our own knots depends on many factors. If you’re the only one with a knot in the situation, you may simply carry the irritation with you to the car and mentally curse the girl at the register. If she has a knot that you make worse, the two of you may get into a tangle like two necklaces in a jewelry box. Her surliness and your irritation may combine to require calling for a manager. “Your girl is being rude and rang my items wrong!” you’ll heatedly exclaim. The girl may just stand there, eyes downcast, seething with anger because her own knot is growing, a knot surrounding middle aged women like her mother (you are judgmental, demanding, and mean, just like her mom).

I’m convinced that many of the conflicts we experience in everyday life arise from our own knots or complexes, which have the power to make us into caricatures of our best selves. Our knots entrench us in such a way that it’s impossible to yield to others, because we’re fighting for truth but don’t know it. If forced to yield, as my husband and I were when we were cheated out of what was promised us, we become disproportionately angry. We assert our rights; we are willing to cut people out of our lives like cancerous growths.

BEING HERE NOW

The Bible teaches that sin—missing the mark of what is loving, true, good, and right—separates us from God, our own true selves, and others. Love and truth build relationships and people. Love is unity; but there can be no unity without consciousness and awareness in the present moment. If one person in a relationship or situation is not present, but is caught up in the snare of some past knot, that person is not really there. That person is still in the past.

To love is to be present and there; Thich Nhat Hanh writes that “if you are not really there, nothing is there.” The thing is to be here now. If you’re truly in the present while standing in line at Target, the sharp movements and unhappy presence of the checkout girl can only inspire you to be empathetic and compassionate. Everything about this girl—her shabby clothing, her fingernails bitten to the quick, the yellowing bruises on her upper arms—speak trauma. Something is wrong in her life and it’s not about you. It’s only about you if you have a knot to untie.

When we were cheated out of what we contracted for and thus expected, we were devastated. We felt very much as we have felt when we’ve lost something of great value. Yet attached to that grief was an underlying knottedness that we each recognized as being not-now. Something from the past was tugging at us, pulling us backward. We knew this because we felt too hurt, too angry. I uncharacteristically gave up; my husband uncharacteristically gave in. We started being who we weren’t, abandoning who we are. Our feelings and bodies showed us that we were no longer in the here-and-now with our partners, at the same time that their stubborn refusal to budge one millimeter proved just how large and consuming their knots were.

Like Jacob and Esau, we were tangled in a conflict of gigantic proportions, one that had the potential for long-term harm to everyone connected to us.

Voodoo

I have a particular fondness for the work of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross because of her model of grief, and find that regardless of how great or small the loss I’m experiencing, her model serves me well by reminding me that my reactions are normal and to be expected.

By now, most of us know the stages of grief she observed among her dying patients: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Of course, one doesn’t have to be dying or among the dying to experience these emotional and intellectual reactions to loss. Whether you’re in the ticket line and have someone cut in front of you or whether you’ve been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, you will most likely go through most or all of these reactions to a loss. The size of the loss isn’t as relevant as the fact that we can be so predictable in our responses along the path to acceptance.

Take, for example, the March event to which my husband and I found ourselves uninvited.  I discovered that several people in our family had been invited to a function from which we’d been excluded, and my first reactions were a sinking heart (“Oh, no!”) and “realizing with a start” the facts of the situation—the reactions of shock and denial. This was followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. From this example, you can see how the grief we experience over our losses, whether small or great, takes a worn path.

If you’ll think about the last reaction of shock or “Oh, no!” you had, you will probably be able to play your initial “Oh, no!” reaction forward and see how it ended in some sort of acceptance, even if only a grudging one. You may also be able to accept that nearly every “oh, no!” reaction is part of a response to loss. Many times we don’t acknowledge our losses as we go through the day, and finally erupt by day’s end in some surprising way because we’ve been unconscious to our own suffering. I’ve found that the more aware I am of the losses I experience throughout the day and the claims I have that back up my sense of loss, the more I am able to contain myself rather than projecting my unsolved mysteries outward.

When I first realized we were in the process of being cheated, the head’s-up came in a most extraordinary way through the person who has caused me the most pain in my life, which is my own mother. My brothers do not share this pain and in fact experience my mother quite differently than I do. They point to other familial sources for the etiology of their pain. This has made my family of origin losses harder to bear, as I have to bear them without any family sympathy at all. Even so, the grief I’ve experienced over being my mother’s daughter is real and is at the root of many of the disproportionate emotional reactions I have had. Just as children playing hide-and-go-seek must tag home before they’re safe, so must I tag my concept and experience of  “Mother” before I can proceed to untangle many a knot that appears in my life.

These people who cheated us could not have arranged a more elegant way of alerting me to the impending doom of our relationship, for delivering news of what they were planning through my own mother, who is quite emotionally distant and uninvolved in my life, was an extraordinary coup for them. The news traveled, in fact, from our deal-breakers to someone who is most beloved and trusted in my life, to my mother, and finally to me. I write about this because I have not only experienced this astonishing pattern of betrayal a few times in my life, but have furthermore observed it in the lives of others enough to recognize it as a pattern. Just as one can predict the path of grief, so too one can predict the path of betrayal. There is dark magic at work.

As I wrote in my entry about being uninvited, I no longer pussyfoot around conflict as I did when I was younger, less enlightened, and more anxious about being viewed as “nice” or “good,” “loving” or “kind.” These days, I deal with situations head-on, which I find preferable to being deceitful and fake. So, after receiving this elegant invitation to my own bereavement, I double-checked the facts of the matter and then confronted our partners. Once I illustrated the way the situation had unfolded, even they were shocked. They had never dreamed that news of their intentions would travel so quickly, much less to the very person who would elicit the most significant emotional reaction in me. They were enlightened enough to know how this looked.

They didn’t mean for things to happen this way, they said. They would never want to hurt me. This is what they said, but of course I don’t listen only to words any more. Intentions mean next to nothing to me these days, for nearly everyone will swear to his own good intentions. It says in Proverbs 20:6, “Most men will proclaim their own goodness, but who can find a truly trustworthy man?” A trustworthy man has more than good intentions. A trustworthy man produces what Buddhists call right action, good action. This is why Jesus said, “Judge a tree by its fruit.” Or, as Carl Jung said, the meaning of the behavior is in the behavior.

So when our partners with whom we covenanted protested their innocence and their many good intentions, I was not fooled. I believe that large parts of them want to feel good and perhaps, in theory, even to be good. I believe that they would not want someone else to do to them what they’ve done to us. But I know with conviction that they are spellbound by the deepest possible unconscious voodoo. Otherwise, they could not have drawn so much archetypal Bad Mother juju into the situation. Otherwise, they would have heralded a change in their intentions in a different, more conscious and caring way. Otherwise, they might have done any other manner of things with good end results. Instead, as we all do when we are driven by spellbinding forces unseen and thus unacknowledged, they made a mess of things.

“For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind” (Isaiah 8:7).