Nikolai1

I think for your kind of therapeutic work its very common to start by offering appointments on only one day a week or even half of one day. The rest of the time you work on a more steady salary. Just focus your efforts on getting a job. The therapy must go on the backburner for a while longer. When the time comes try and find a room that can be rented by the hour or by the day. Health centres often have these, especially alternative health centres.

Hi everyone, You hear Buddha's Middle Way defined in so many ways. Most commonly it gets explained as a compromise between asceticism and self-indulgence. Is it really such a narrow idea as this? I'd appreciate it if some of you could some up how you understand the Middle Way and then perhaps help me with understanding it better. Thanks!

I should also say that consciously seeking to overcome the opposites is an intellectual or philosophical path. If this kind of stuff isn't your inclination, you'll find that the same intellectual insights will occur spontaneously as the fruit of your practice, whatever it is. When we follow one path consciously, we follow all the other paths unconsciously.

Hi Centertime The experience of the unenlightened person is characterised by one essential pair of opposites. The indidual self with private experience Vs An outer world of shared experience. Overcoming this pair of opposites, by uniting them, and understanding that inner and outer are the same thing is the most important pair of opposites we can overcome. But there are many others, including good and evil, truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness. These are all big ones, but overcoming are attachment to notions of say, objective truth, will allow us to lead a more peaceful and spontaneous existence. There are even more basic 'pairs of opposites' and in these we are already quite adept at overcoming them. For example, right and left at the verbal level sounds as insurmountable as subject and object. But we can all see that the coffee mug, with itts handle clearly on the right hand side, will appear on the left hand side to the person sat opposite us. We are able to complement our raw vision of the mug with a kind of 'mind's eye' understanding that what is right is also left. This skill brings us peace, harmony and mastery of our environment. Reconcling the self / other pair of opposite is clearly a lot harder and takes much more work for us to see and believe it. So many of the world's spiritual teachings are about overcoming this and experiencing the peace that comes where we realise that our very identity is nothing other than one half of a pair of perspectives. C.G. Jung called the process of overcoming pairs of opppsites 'individuation' and has desribed in great detail the challenges and pitfalls of this work in a language accessible to the westerner. In antiquity, the same process was often described in more alchemical terms, which is harder to understand. I'd be happy to discuss this further if you have any questions!

Hi Michael, Thank you very much for the reading. i found it a very interesting experience nad has led me to reflect on a lot, particular my present situation. I'll take the key material and add how I understand it. I would describe myself as a child and also as an adult as being quite scizoid in nature. If I was cheerful and confident, even boastful then it was an inner sense of myself, rather than something that was on display. I was always a very happy child, but socially I could be quite shy. I saw myself as someone competent and intelligent and my earliest memories were of adults rematking on how good I was at games, puzzle solving etc. i was the kind of kid who culd do a Rubik's cube faster than anyone else. I was also good at sports, and if there was ever a running, jumping competition I would be sure to win it. At the age of 5 or 6 I remember winning a trophy at a school sports day and there seemed to be lots of people cheering and clapping me. Despite this outer competence I was shy and didn't like attention. I've always been very emotionally continent, although I don't think it was part of my upbringing as my siblings aren't like that. I remember being very young, perhaps 4, and feeling like crying at being upset was a personal choice. I was totally in control and would express my emotion or not as I saw fit. I remember this gave me a feeling of power. If a child accidentally hurt me, i liked being able to brush it off and seeing their relief. In my case this was a much later process. Up until the age 16 my interests revolved around my sporting activities and my circle were all the boys I played with. If I was good then I was popular and admired and this was enough for me. At 16 I started becoming interested in girls. I remember the distinct realisation that they weren't interested in whether I was good at football. I needed to be good to talk to, I needed to by funny and original and interesting. My persona was invented quite late in my development I would say. My sport I loved for its own sake, my persona was developed in order to gain status, approval and so on. I never managed to tally my own innate loves and passions with the social circles I mixed in. It has been a lifelong problem and is so even now. I habitually find myself surrounded by people who could not share my deepest interests. There is no-one in my day to day life who could find this DaoBums website interesting, for example. Emotional security has been a trademark of mine since an early age and I have instinctively been attracted to women who need that. This has led to a pattern of co-dependency in my relationship, where i offered emotional stability in return for a kind of practical, material stability. This is very true, but is in line with my intellectual style which is introverted intuitive. You could say that I always look for the patterns that lie beneath. I would say this process sums up my adult life in general. From a very early age I have always felt that the outer world was not the essential world. Events in time and space, my outer biography, could not account for who I was. This made me aloof to my own emotions - I was in control of them. And I was also aloof to everyday life. It has always been very easy for me to dismiss things as unimportant. If I failed at something i wanted, it never upset me for long. I was always able to see the inconsequence of whatever it was. This also gave me a strong feelinf of superiority. Started from my teens I started to view adults and the occupations as something ridiculous, almost childish. It never occurred to me that people might enjoy, say, gardening. For me it was a silly waste of time. Garden plants die and so do the gardeners. This attitude lasted well into my thirties. If I've dropped it now its because I have seen how desolate, how nihilistic it is. It has left me in a situation where I have withdrawn from nearly all my interests and there is nothing left to propel into the second half of life. In my mid twenties I first started to understand that my dismissal of the world was due to intimations of a higher way of being than I could see around me. I became aware that there was a spiritual life, but this realisation at first just enhanced my sense of the emptiness of the everyday world. This makes sense. No dramatic changes can occur in the outer realm. I have three young children and the iron necessity of raising them keeps my life in a pattern that can't change much. Whatever happens I need to be there to bring in the money, cook the food, wash the dishes, put them to bed and so on. For years to come. Finding peace and happiness, and meaning and beauty within these fixtures seem to be the task for me. Your chart has really got me thinking about the nature of my shadow. My whole life I have looked around me and seen only meaningessness. I have always been expecting the world to give me meaning. It hasn't occured to me to inbue the world with any meaning of my own. The world IS my shadow, a lifetime of my own emptiness recoiled back on me. In recent months and years, as I've written about a lot here, I have started to feel a beauty welling up inside me. It is embodied, a kind of buzzing peace. It makes every sittuation OK, the world is made beautiful at times by the peace inside me. I want to give this back in order to make amends, but how and why still eludes me. The shadow is being addressed but in a very slow gradual way and in a way that is discernable only to me because i am the only one who can feel it. It feels to me like I need to totally reverse the way I have lived my life. I have to give and get involved after a lifetime of aloof disengagement. My friends used to call me the hermit. It was who i was; but its a way of living that, at midlife, has become unliveable any further. Succeed or die; these are the stakes when it comes to facing down our shadow! Best wishes Michael. Your readings are always astute and fascinating. I think you are a very talented person!

Wow Michael! I have a lot to say on your fascinating and illuminating post, but won't have the time until tomorrow evening. Until then!

There is a basic point about Jung's individuation process that I'm not clear on, so perhaps you and others could help me. Is individuation liberation from the dictates of the archetypal realm? Or does increasing individuation mark the increasing constellation of the archetypes in our life? Or, perhaps, could we say that individuation is simply the raising of archetypal influence from the unconscious to the conscious. From my perspective, and from the perspective of the desert, it certainly feels like whatever archetypal patterns have shaped me so far have lost their influence. At 39 years old, perhaps this is the situation of mid-life. But if the patterns of my life have been reflected by the stars (I mean astrologically) then it would make perfect sense if that would no longer yield meaning. It is difficult to express the sheer darkness I have when it comes to my future. There are no goals, no desires to steer me. If this is some kind of initiation then only time will tell. I should say that all talk of initiation ceremonies seems rather glib in comparison. A ceremony, whether Australian aboriginal, or Catholic confirmation cannot be anything more than a mimicry of what I am passing through...if what what I am experiencing is indeed an initiation. We in the west, when feeling spiritually bereft, have a tendency to elevate the spiritual ways of other cultures. Since time immemorial, your average Aborigine was just an average man or woman, following the codes of their people. Unless this code was matched by an inner sense, the code is empty. No human being, in any time or place, can find salvation by following codes. The task presents itself as forcefully today as it ever has; and just as most eschew the task today, so too did most people in the distant ancestral past.

Michael is I think, very kindly, working on my chart. But if my soul loss is sctual soul loss then surely it follows that my chart at tis time will be impossible to decipher, ambiguous, maybe meaningless?

You're right - that is the only possible therapy.

Here is my take on this soul loss. The life of the regular person is not a profane thing. Their soul is constantly found in the everyday world of people, relationships, careers, interests. But our relationship with the soul has a dual flavour because it is associated with some things and not others. We find our soul in our passions, and then lose it when we encounter that which isn't our passion. Our selfhood is the pattern of likes and dislikes we follow. Our selfhood is the pattern of finding then losing soul on a moment by moment basis. The desert comes when we are no longer content with a soul found in specific places. We are no longer motivated with a soul that is lost at the point of satiety. We therefore stop following the pattern of likes and dislikes that was our selfhood. Our loss of selfhood feels like the loss of soul because our soul was only ever found through our likes and dislikes. It will also look like loss of soul, and people will avoid you for this reason. Something 'wrong' is occurring. Individuation is a loss of a pattern, but the gain of all that the pattern gave. It is when the soul is always present and is able to stamp all things with its flavour. It is creative. It does not follow and predicatble lines. To call it individuation is therefore a bit confusing, because the individuality of the individuated person is actually invisible, They lack that unique pattern that even the most automated member of the corporate herd shows. The individuality of the purely individuated person is pure creativity. It is totally unpredictable, and untraceable. But it is this faculty that the person in the desert waits for. They are in limbo, having lost a pattern but never having gained the ability to live and find their soul without one. In real life, and in my life, the loss of pattern must be understood as an emotional loss. My heart has lost the pattern of selfhood, but my life still very much follows it. I have many responsibilities and my days are filled with them. I am forced to continue in a life that has lost its soul. This is soul loss. But it is a soul loss that has only come about because my soul was not enough for my soul. The loss of the soul can perhaps be called a hope for soul. At this point, there is no way of knowing if death is necessary for this next step. It is not suicidality, but rather facing the fact of death in the same way as a person ressolved upon suicide does. I face the fact of death, while knowing that it may be in fact be a re-birth in this body. I've just re-read this and I know it sounds garbled, but I hope, given the present company, that it will be understood!

Thanks everyone for your comments. Jung is a curious one, he talks much about the Quest, yet it is clear that he never completed it for himself and so perhaps never gained that overall perspective that others have on the process. But he was a brave pioneer, no doubt about that, and, like a great poet, provided us with a fresh and arresting set of words and concepts with which to understand spiritual growth. Great article here if anyone fancies a spot of light reading: http://www.jrhaule.net/Chan.html

Strangely, that had completely escaped my awareness throughout this conversation. My current year card for those baffled is number 12 - The Hanged Man.

I feel I lack love for the ways of the world I live in. It leaves me unable to particpate with emotional zest. I would love to 'fall in love' with the world and be able to show it. It pains me that I'm not giving more than I might.

I am not physically isolated. I have a wife and three kids. I meet their parents at the school gate, with the Dads I play tennis on a Saturday because tennis is a skill I learnt in what seems like a former life and I have no reason not to go there and make up numbers. The isolation is that deeper sense of kinship. I no longer empathise with the things that the people do around me. I am not particpating in my heart. From the outside I look normal.

This is an astute statement which I need to reflect on. Like lots of people whose interests are not worldly, I find it hard to know what my strengths are because they don't show themselves 'in the world'. I don't have all the regular people around me saying: 'Nikolai, you're really great at [insert skill] why don't you try that?' Most people in my life seem completely baffled by me, who I am and what I do. Discovering what I want to do is difficult because of the lack of desire. I am fine and without suffering in nearly all situations. I sit in the desert and wait for individual expressions of love to emerge. Desires that make no sense but are unmistakably there. On these I shall act, but for now they seem absent,

I woke up to a lot of thought provoking material, thank you. Not for the first time I have found that Jung's experience speaks closely to my own. I don't rule out a return to the world of things, but how this may look is utterly inconceivable. The life I have led is finished, the ways I have lived are over for me...have lost all appeal or interest. But this is the only way I know. The desert is a place in the midst of the world. I still live and act there, but it is a matter of expediency...there is no involvement of the heart. This is why its a desert. What will make my heart awaken again is utterly, utterly unpredictable. I can no longer follow anyone. Most people are happy to enjoy what the others enjoy. True, they don't know what this will be next year. but they will feel confident that whatever it is, they too will like it. The desert is a departure from the ways of other people and the search for one's own way. To live one's own life, to actually do that, is a radically different way of being. In the desert we learn this.

Nice post Steve thanks

I talk a lot to non-dualists. I even here that there is no need to be good, to be happy, to be less angry. No need to make any chnages at all because all of that stuff is just 'in the story'. My experience is that change is thrust upon us anyway, and it can be painful but necessary, unwanted but necessary. Perhaps stuckness is not yet admitting that further changes must occur.

Hi Des, I think I have many questions but all of them quite personal ! Sorry. we can leave it there if you wish!

Des Could you say more about how this all ended for you? Clearly not in death, but perhaps in a form of ego death?

I'm not sure this is the depletion that comes from giving too much. It is not a loss of energy, so much as as loss of motivation. Behind any expendity energy there is the motivation to expend it in that direction. What happens when that goes? Death surely?

Yes, this is the type of solution that has stopped feeling like any solution. I would happily consent to travel anywhere...but will it make me more enthused about life. No chance. Or that's how it feels. I have gone through several years of highs and lows that haven't even felt like highs or lows. To have highs and lows is to be motivated. You seek one and avod the other. What do you do when everything is just fine? It feels lethal, perhaps more so than depression.

Why necessary and important?

Sometimes we feel awake when our bodies are asleep. This isn't actually insomnia, although it may seem like it. Actually we are enjoying a higher state of awareness. The test is how tired we feel the next day. If we are just as fresh it isn't insomnia.

We owe it ourselves to stay sceptical on any memory of any event. Always remember that a memory is also a creative event in the now. This is true of any memory. If the memory causes us pain then this practice can be very healing.