dichotomies/dualities

ZOELAB DAY 105

Date of Original Post: December 14, 2012

Being a person who is filled with contradictions and multiplicity in identity, (as we all are) I have found it painful and unnatural to align myself with any one side of a dichotomy. I have come to believe, as the Taoists do, that in life, all things and thoughts have an opposite that is equally true. Nature is predicated on the balance between opposites: birth/death, light/dark, creation/destruction, and so on. If we ignore one half of a dichotomy or judge it, then we are not balanced, we are not allowing ourselves to the see and experience the whole and natural truth. As it is said: “you can’t have one with out the other.”

During my training to become a psychotherapist/expressive arts therapist with a spiritual perspective, which included years of personal therapy, I learned about “splitting”, which in Freudian terms, is a primitive defense mechanism that the ego creates for its emotional protection from anxiety (or any threatening emotion). Splitting is when the ego, for the sake of protecting the good part of a person, or an experience, splits off her perception of the person into two parts--All Good or All Bad. Instead of seeing the self, another person or an experience as one integrated whole with complexity, contradictions and ambivalence, with both good and bad parts, the splitter sees only two separate parts or just one part. Splitting is “black and white thinking” at the psychological level.

Black and white thinking or splitting occurs also at a cultural level (as is apparent in bipartisan politics.) There is pressure in Western culture to make a choice, to specialize, to take a side, to act. It is not acceptable to be in-between categories, or to exist opposing categories. These pressures stem from the left side of the brain, which is, in itself, a bias in Western culture. Generally speaking, perhaps since the start of agrarian culture, we have been a left-brain dominated society that favors masculinity, action and rationality over femininity, receptivity, emotion. (For a fascinating read that suggests that culture turned from a right brain dominated (or at least equal brained) culture to a left brain dominated culture with the introduction of the alphabet and literacy, read The Goddess Vs. The Alphabet by Leonard Shlain.)

The last few days I’ve been listening to a book called A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, which proposes a compelling argument that American culture is moving from left brain dominant (information age) towards right brain dominant (conceptual age). He outlines “6 senses” that he believes will be necessary to master in order to thrive in the conceptual age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. I would say these are the qualities I focus on in this blog. Being a right brain type of person I received this news with great pleasure and relief. After a lifetime of feeling unaccepted and alienated for being highly emotional, intuitive, and non-linear, I feel somehow validated, and understood. It’s as if, suddenly, there was a little bit more space for people like me in the world. By the way, I just did an online right/brain test and I scored 55% right brain, 45% left brain. 50% auditory, 50% visual. Perhaps this means I am becoming more balanced between right and left. It would be interesting to compare these results to the results I would have gotten when I was a child.

I truly believe, in society, and as individuals, we need to use BOTH sides of our brain (there it is again: the androgynous mind) for balance and optimum function. This is one of the underlying points of the Daniel Pink’s book. Discovering my tendency to split in graduate school, which caused much meaningless suffering, I decided I needed to change my either/or thinking to both/and thinking. I don’t have to decide if I am a clean or a messy person. I can be both! Both and thinking is integration--allowing space for all parts to exist simultaneously and harmoniously. Both/and becomes everything/and. Accepting multiplicity allows space for mystery and complexity in humanity and society.

Art Journal Lab: Soul Searching

For the past several weeks, we have been exploring the acorn theory of soul, as proposed by the late psychologist James Hillman, in his book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. As I often do with books that are poetically written, deep and radical, I am taking a long time to read this book. It was lent to me by a friend, and so I can't write ecstatic notes or underline my favorite paragraphs as I often do. Instead, I do what I did as a teenager. I copy long sections of the beloved book into my journal. There is something about rewriting the book into my journal that gives me the feeling that I am digesting the material more deeply.

The basic idea of the book, which has radically altered how I see my life and my relationship to its events, is: each person has a unique soul, which is invisible to us for most of our life, but as we pay more attention to our life and its history, we start to see signs, symbols, memories that point the way to our soul's code which expresses who we were meant to be. The soul is an acorn--containing all of our unique potentialities from before the beginning of life. The soul even chooses which parents it wants to born to. This calls for a radical re-invisioning of psychology's notion that the way the parents raise their child is what form's the child's personality and pathologies.

Soul is so elusive and perplexing, it feels like a scary theme to bring to my art journal class. And yet, I feel deeply energized and inspired by this kind of work. It feels exactly like the kind of thing I need to be doing. Both for myself, and others. In class, we have been trying different ways of imagining into each of our soul's to find understanding and meaning and to help us make choices that are in alignment with the soul's purpose.

These are the words that Hillman uses interchangeably for the word soul:

 ACORN    DAIMON    CALLING    CHARACTER    IMAGE    GENIUS    FATE   IMAGE    DESTINY

“These many words and names do not tell us what it is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, in intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms.”

Here is a poem I wrote to my art journal lab students, as an invitation to try on this theory for a few weeks, and see what they might discover about their soul's.

Imagine

even with your terror

and exquisite heartache

that everything that is

is exactly how it should be.

Your story of suffering

that you sometimes cling to,

your most secret unfulfilled longing,

your rage that you can barely touch,

your most outrageous largeness

that calls to you

(in the dark)

What if all of that were

exactly what your soul ordered

to live itself out,

to engage its depth and mystery

to grow it into the world

to become what it already is?

I have decided recently that I will be developing the art journal lab course material into an online course or an ebook. So I will be blogging more here on what we are working on in art journal lab as a way to continue to develop the material that I have been working on for the past five years.

In one of our recent art journal lab classes, I led the students into a guided visualization where they contacted their earliest memory, and then drew a picture of that memory. They then wrote in their journals--describing more deeply what the experience was like. Some of them dialogued with the child from the memory, to go even deeper. The process allowed each person to discover a seed of her soul.

My theory is: memories from childhood are moments of awakening to the soul. I believe we remember moments of childhood because there was something elemental there, some awareness of self or soul that was not there previously. What we remember is significant and says something to us about our unique destiny.

What is your earliest childhood memory and what about this memory resonates with your soul's callings or yearnings?

self & other

The paradox of humanity is that we want to be ourselves and yet we want to connect with others. We are taught to believe we cannot have both. We come to feel that in order to be ourselves we might risk losing the other because the other is afraid of our otherness. And if we connect, then we must say goodbye to that which makes us totally unique--our point of view. Connection & Separation. And so it is a dance between the two as we evolve.

But what if we got conscious enough so that we changed society simply by being different—by being more tolerant of difference, by being more compassionate towards ourselves and others?  By being whole within—our society would become whole without. It is the light of consciousness that helps us find the way, and yet, it is the hardest thing to do because it means feeling our darkness. Acknowledging and then reclaiming our shadow is so threatening to the ego because we must face that in us which we have judged as distasteful, unacceptable, shameful. Shadow work requires courage and courage means feeling our feelings--not shrinking, not puffing up--but hanging around with our fear and our uncertainty and our desire.

When we get more comfortable with our feelings we get better at connecting and when we get better at connecting, we feel more comfortable with feeling our feelings around others, which leads to deeper & more meaningful connections. And this is how society changes. One connection at a time. First to the self and then to the other.

What if we used our power and our love and our creativity to change the way are with ourselves, and with each other? What if each of us was committed to caring more? To sharing more? What if it wasn’t something to make fun of or be embarrassed about—caring? What if it were natural to treat each other as family, as if, we truly belonged to the same thing? What if we could truly feel that at the deepest level we were inseparable? And what if, at the same time, we also celebrated how different each of us is? What if we delighted in difference and saw it as a perfect manifestation of diversity? What if we could embrace both at the same time?

Ourselves and each other.

Unity and diversity. In mystery.

Can you picture this?
 

Life as Art Manifesto, First Try

We have faith in love & creativity as the underlying forces of evolution. We are at a crucial moment in time—a crossroads, where humanity is in grave danger. We can allow humanity to self-destruct, allowing the baser aspects of humanity: apathy, greed, violence, addiction, control to win over the elevated parts of humanity: compassion, creativity, passion, connection, joy, kindness or we can make the hard choice to take responsibility for ourselves, as individuals, and see the underlying truth of universal oneness. Within and without. We can start to awaken the truth behind our collectively accepted delusion into the idea that we are separate. From the place of separateness we compete, and create hierarchy and inflict deep suffering on our ourselves and each other.

We have inherited a split and fragmented world that is reflected in a split and fragmented psyche on the individual level. There is a fundamental flaw in the way we approach life, this is learned, and not part of the essence of humanity. The split. We tend to see things as either/or.  We force ourselves to choose, over and over, between self & other, male & female, republican & democrat, east & west, power & love, mind & body. Creating, at every turn, a hierarchy of choice. Instead, we must acknowledge that a balance or overlapping of two opposites is the space where truth resides. The list of splits is infinite in itself. For every truth its oppose is also equally true.  However, true love is whole because it contains everything within it. The opposite of Love is not Hate, but rather, separation. Underlying so much suffering in this world are feelings of fear, loneliness, shame, and inadequacy. This does not have to be so, but it requires great emotional risk to allow ourselves to connect, to belong to each other. This is a process that can  happen only one moment at a time, one relationship at a time.

When living Life As Art, we are not prescribing any dogma or adhering to any hierarchy. The one universal truth is is the universe itself. The totality. In this way, we acknowledge the source of our longing and the object of our longing is the same. We are simultaneously subject and object of our experience. We see the two sides of everything, but we do not take sides. We compromise between the two. We balance. We soften our hearts to allow for both. We acknowledge the ego, we can even love the ego, but we do not let it rule. We see it is as the smaller or unique self that plays an important role—it becomes a mirror for the universal spirit. A celebratory expression of god. The unique individual is soul’s expression of spirit, if we can allow its whole truth to shine forth, with out judgment. Judgment, used here, refers to value. Non judgment acknowledges that all experience is subjective, and therefore, no experience is intrinsically more valuable than another. Any experience is fodder for our art, and through art, we create our life. Through our life we create our art. This is the language of the soul that must be included, woven into our culture. We do not choose rationality over emotion, but rather, we allow them to co-exist, honoring their dual greatness and necessity for living. Even hate or violence—if it exists, we acknowledge it—we do not turn away from it—as then it would surely try to make itself known in a far more dangerous way. We learn to express hatred and violence instead symbolically—through storytelling, or games, or any art form or our choosing. This is how it is done in traditional cultures—the shadow is integrated into the rituals and rites, instead of being acting out unconsciously.

Living life as art, we celebrate the all of life through ritual, storytelling, & artmaking of all kinds. We acknowledge both our darkness and our light and locate ourselves at the center. We create space and silence for our creativity. We know ourselves, and make highest use of ourselves. We reach for our destiny through integrating our past. We exalt the beauty of life as it unfolds. We acknowledge our fears and bravely transmit our hearts.