FAMILY OF ORIGIN

(Poem)

   

It took ‘em five kids,

three country doctors,

mule stubbornness,

and one daily prayer

to reach their goal: 

two boys.

 

For her the two boys 

was an offering

to the rosy-cheeked kings

of good fathering.

 

She yearned for the daddy

before slow couch whiskeys

replaced her bedtime calvary tales.

 

Somehow, she now knew

it would take an offering of two.

 

For her husband Lyle,

the boys gleamed like a county sheriff’s

silver-starred badge–

irrefutable proof to his own law-

abiding moma that he, Lyle Jr.,

was an honest man.

 

Sure, the insurance business

paid the bills alright,  but

it didn’t make him stand up

like his daddy once told him,

“proud as a prairie peacock!”

 

Fact was, no one for many a mile

ever forgot the fateful day

preceding Jr.’s 7th birthday,

when two big commotions

got everybody in town chattering:

 

First, one nasty twister nearly

pitched apart the old canning factory,

and two, the boy’s father,

Lyle Sr., that very same day

took up and left town,

one suitcase and a Greyhound stub,

not ever to return again!

Since then, as you might figure,

Lyle Jr. grew up wantin’ boys.

 

“Thank you lord for deliverance”

 He and the wife would joke,

“But five knocks to make two?  Praise Jesus!”

 

And if truth be told, 

they hadn’t exactly prepared 

for the three intervening girls,

who he called the “tax collector,”

referring to property tax,

and she’d chime back,

“then the boys is the 30-year fixed!”

meaning naturally, the mortgage,

and so they were. 

 

In any event, the family went on

and made do like most normal folk–

working hard and giving their best

to what come most easy and familiar.

                       

School years came and went,

and if there was any changes,

they’d be the five tonsils taken,

or the house that got paid for,

or the missus’ wicked bout a depression;

but for folks around here,

most things like Sundays

remained the same: 

football and church socials,

canned ham and lemon pie.

 

Then one fateful day, everyone’s favorite–

the boys–

in somethin’ of a surprise,

was early to leave the family

(and fast), 

gone in the night

with few needs and less fanfare,

never to be heard from since.

 

The one commotion people said

might have meant somethin’

was poor old grandpa’s heart,

on account of all that whiskey,

giving out on the exact day

preceding the youngest boy–

Lyle The Third’s–

high school graduation, 

but go figure?

 

(Oddly enough, the three girls,

even today, in their otherwise lonely 

and unflattering forties,

continue most weekends, each morning

by phone, and on all the right occasions,

to keep ever closer ties

with their family of origin)–

 

but you’d think they’d be happier?                                                           

                                                   

                  1995                                  

 

 

Notes on ‘THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER’ By Mark Epstein

POTENT QUOTES DEPARTMENT: BUDDHISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

 

Excerpted from:

THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER

                By MARK EPSTEIN, MD

1. As psychotherapy has grown in scope and sophistication over the years, its parallels with Buddhist thought have become ever more apparent.  As the emphasis in therapy has moved from conflicts over sexual and aggressive strivings, for instance, to a focus on how patients are uncomfortable with themselves because, in some fundamental way, they do not know who they are, the question of the self has emerged as the common focus of Buddhism and psychoanalysis.

2. While the Western tradition has grown quite adept as describing what has been called the narcissistic dilemma—the sense of falseness or emptiness that propels people either to idealize or to devalue themselves and others—much controversy has arisen over the psychoanalytic method’s applicability for such problems.  In fact, Western therapists are in the position of having identified a potent source of neurotic misery without having developed a foolproof treatment for it.  In reaching this point, many within the field of psychology have finally caught up to William James: they are ready to look at the psychological teachings of the Buddha. 6

3. Buddhist psychology, after all, takes this core sense of identity confusion as its starting point and further claims that all of the usual efforts to achieve solidity, certainty, or security are ultimately doomed.  It not only describes the struggle to find a “true self” in terms that have impressed Western psychologists for decades…but also offers a method of analytic inquiry unavailable in the Western tradition. From the Buddhist perspective, meditation is indispensable to free the individual from neurotic misery.  

4. Psychotherapy can identify the problem, bring it out, point out some of the childhood deficiencies that contributed to its development, and help diminish the ways in which erotic and aggressive strivings become intertwined with the search for a satisfying feeling of self, but it has not been able to deliver freedom from narcissistic craving. 6

5. People are attracted to the Buddhist approach, but it remains enigmatic; they know that it speaks to them, yet they have trouble translating the message into a form applicable to their daily lives. Still approached as something exotic, foreign, and therefore alien, the power of the Buddhist approach has not really been tapped and its message has not yet been integrated.

6. (According to Epstein)—In our culture, it is the language of psychoanalysis, developed by Freud and carefully nurtured by generations of psychotherapists over the past century, that has seeped into general public awareness.  It is in this language that the insights of the Buddha must be presented to Westerners. 

7. According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.  This has always seemed very much in keeping with Freud’s views. As Freud put it, the patient:  “must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness.  His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved for the reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time a place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill.

8. In his teachings on suffering, the Buddha made clear that some kind of humiliation awaits us all.  This is the truth that he felt could be apprehended by those with “little dust in their eyes.”  No matter what we do, he taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency.  We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease.  We are all engaged in a futile struggle to maintain ourselves in our own image.  The crises in our lives inevitably reveal how impossible our attempts to control our destinies really are. 44

9. The Four Noble Truths take this vulnerability as a starting point, cultivating humility out of the seemingly oppressive and inescapable humiliations of life.  Far from the pessimistic religion that Buddhism has been portrayed to be, it is, in fact, relentlessly optimistic.  All of the insults to our narcissism can be overcome, the Buddha proclaimed, not by escaping from them, but by uprooting the conviction in a “self” that needs protecting.

10. Buddhism promises a kind of relief that is beyond the reach of the psychotherapeutic method, brought about through techniques of self-examination and mental training unknown to the West.  Happiness is a real possibility, taught the Buddha, if we can but penetrate our own narcissism. 45

11. The Buddha sees us all as Narcissus, gazing at and captivated by our own reflections, languishing in our attempted self-sufficiency, desperately struggling against all that would remind us of our own fleeting and relative natures. His message is a wake-up call.  He seeks to rouse us from our Narcissus-like reverie, to redirect our attention from a preoccupation with shoring up an inevitably flawed sense of self to knowledge of what he calls “the Noble Truth.” 45

12. Because of our craving, The Buddha is saying, we want things to be understandable.  We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent.  In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts.  We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad, for instance; we must become a happy person or a sad one.  This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make “things” out of that which is no thing.  Seeing craving shatters this predisposition; it becomes preposterous to try to see substance where there is none. 77

13. The Buddha is suggesting something very radical here: that it is possible to isolate the forces of craving in one’s own mind and become both liberated from them and unattached to them merely from seeing that craving for what it is.  The contrast with Western psychoanalysis seems at first glance to be particularly stark.  One of the fundamental concepts in psychoanalytic theory, after all, is that instinctual drives or forces (erotic, aggressive, or narcissistic strivings) are inborn, inherent, and inescapable.  

14. The vision of the Buddha is that the neurotic aspects of mind—as personified by the pig, the snake, and the rooster of ignorance, hatred, and greed—are not essential to the mental continuum.  They may be inborn or even instinctual, but they are not intrinsic to the nature of mind.  They can be eliminated, or, in psychoanalytic parlance, sublimated to the point of cessation.  Most of Buddhist psychology, in fact, is concerned with demonstrating how the narcissistic impulses to identify with or distance oneself from experience can be transformed into wisdom about the true nature of self.  This is sublimation of an order that Freud did not often consider, and as we shall see, it is brought about not only through analysis but also through methods of mental training explicitly taught by the Buddha. 79

Compiled by Art Rosengarten, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor, California Institute For Human Studies.

ART’S FAVORITE BOOKS

   BIBLIOTHERAPY

      Depth Psychology

–       THE I AND THE NOT I: A study in the development of consciousness, M. Esther Harding (Princeton University Press, 1965).

–       THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, Henri Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970).

–       JUNG: A Biography, Deirdre Bair (Little, Brown and Company, 2003).

–       MEMORIES, DREAMS. REFLECTIONS, C. G. Jung (Vintage, 1961).

–       THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C.G. JUNG, (Bollingen Series, 1959), including: THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, VOL. PART 1, C.G. Jung, (Princeton University Press, 1959).

–       HAGS AND HEROES: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Couples, Polly Young-Eisendrath (Inner City, 1984).

–       SELF AND LIBERATION The Jung/Buddhism Dialogue, Edited by Daniel J. Meckel and Robert L. Moore (Paulist Press, 1992).

–       UP FROM EDEN: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, Ken Wilber (Anchor/Doubleday, 1981).

–       KEN WILBER IN DIALOGUE Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers, Edited by Donald Rothberg and Sean Kelly, Quest 1998).

–       LECTURES ON JUNG’S TYPOLOGY, Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, (Spring, 1971).

–       WE’VE HAD A HUNDRED YEARS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE WORLD’S GETTING WORSE, James Hillman and Michael Ventura (Harper San Francisco, 1992).

–       POWER IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS, Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig (Spring, 1971).

–       CULTURAL ATTITUDES In Psychological Perspective, Joseph L. Henderson, M.D. (Inner City Books, 1984).

 

            Synchronicity

–       AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME, J.W. Dunne (Humanities Press, 1927)

–       SYNCHRONICITY, SCIENCE, AND SOUL-MAKING, Victor Mansfield (Open Court, 1995).

–       ON DIVINATION AND SYNCHRONICITY: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance, Marie-Louise Von Franz, (Bollingen, 1980).

–       CHOOSING REALITY: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind, B. Alan Wallace, (Snow Lion Publications, 1996).

–       CHAOS: Making A New Science, James Gleick (Penguin, 1987)

–       TAROT AND PSYCHOLOGY Spectrums of Possibility, Arthur Rosengarten, (Paragon, 2000).

–       ARCHETYPES & STRANGE ATTRACTORS The Chaotic World of Symbols, John R. Van Eenwyk (Inner City, 1997).

–       THE BLACK SWAN The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007).

–       C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, Robert Aziz (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology, 1996).

 

            Myth & Symbol

–       ARIADNE’S CLUE, A guide to the symbols of humankind, Anthony Stevens (Princeton University Press, 1998).

–       A DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, J. E. Cirlot (Philosophical Library, New York, 1962).

–       A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSES, Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter, Fred Plant (Routledge, 1986).

–       THE KING & THE CORPSE Tales of the soul’s conquest of evil, Heinrich Zimmer (Princeton University Press, 1948).

–       WOMAN’S DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS AND SACRED OBJECTS, Barbara G. Walker (Harper San Francisco, 1988).

–       THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF WORLD RELIGIONS, Edited by John Bowker (Oxford University Press, 1997).

–        

–       Eastern Religion

–       HOW TO MEDITATE A Practical Guide, Kathleen McDonald (Wisdom, 1984).

–       THE I CHING OR BOOK OF CHANGES, Richard Wilhelm Translation with Foreword by C.G. Jung (Princeton University Press, 1950).

–       THE COLLECTED WORKS OF CHOGYAM TRUNGPA,(Shambhala, 2003), including: CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM, THE MYTH OF FREEDOM, THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA.

–       THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (Foreword by the Dalai Lama, Mark Epstein, M.D. (Basic Books, 1995).

–       THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING, Sogyal Rinpoche, (Rider & Co,1992).

–       ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND, Shunryu Suzuki, (Weatherhill, 1970)

–       TAO THE WATERCOURSE WAY, Alan Watts (Pantheon, 1975)

–       MOTHER OF THE BUDDHAS Meditations on the Prajnaparamita Sutra, Lex Hixon (Quest, 1993)

–       AS IT IS, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, (Rangjung Yeshe Books, 2000).

–       THE EDGE OF CERTAINTY Dilemmas on the Buddhist Path, Peter Fenner (Nicholas-Hays, 2002).

 

            Self-Help

–       THE POWER OF NOW A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle (New World, 1999).

–       HE Understanding Masculine Psychology; Robert A. Johnson (Harper & Row, 1983); SHE Understanding Feminine Psychology (ibid); WE Understanding The Psychology Of Romantic Love (ibid).           

–       WHO DIES? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, Stephen Levine, (Doubleday, 1982).

–       CHALLENGE OF THE HEART Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Changing Times, Edited by John Welwood, (Shambhala, 1985).

–       SEARCH FOR THE REAL SELF, James Masterson (Routledge, 1993).

–       LOVE’S EXECUTIONER & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom, M.D. (Basic, 1989).

–       A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD: How You Can Be More Creative, Roger von Oech (Creative Think, 1983).

–       THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional and Spiritual Growth, M. Scott Peck, M.D. (Simon & Shuster 1978).

–       THE GOOD MARRIAGE, Judith S. Wallerstein & Sandra Blakeslee (Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

–       LOVE IS NEVER ENOUGH How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanings, Resolve conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems Through Cognitive Therapy, Aaron T. Beck, M. D. Harper & Row, 1988).

–       FEELING GOOD The New Mood Therapy, David D. Burns, M.D.

 

            Tarot/Western Spirituality

–       SEVENTY-EIGHT DEGREES OF FREEDOM, A Book Of Tarot, Rachel Pollack, (Aquarian Peress, 1980).

–       MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism, Anonymous (Element, 1985).

–       TAROT SYMBOLISM, Robert V. O’Neil, (Fairway Press, 1986).

–       TAROT REVELATIONS, Joseph Campbell and Richard Roberts, Vernal Equinox, 1979.

–       THE TAROT History, Mystery, and Lore, Cynthia Giles, (Fireside, 1992).

–       THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAROT (VOLUMES 1 THRU 4), Stuart R. Kaplan (US Games, 1978-2006).

–       TAROT OF THE NINE PATHS A Guide For The Spiritual Traveler (Arthur Rosengarten, 2004).

–       THE MYSTICAL QABALAH, Dion Fortune (Samuel Weiser, first in 1935)

–       MY LIFE WITH THE SPIRITS The Adventures of a Modern Magician, Lon Milo DuQuette, (Weiser, 1999).

–       777 AND OTHER QABALISTIC WRITINGS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY, Edited by Israel Regardie, Samuel Weiser, 1955).

–       THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS, Elaine Pagels,(Vintage, 1979).

–       THE FOURTH WAY, P.D. Ouspensky (Vintage, 1957).

 

            Miscellaneous

–       LABYRINTHE, Jorge Luis Borges (Carl Hanser, 1959)

–       NINE STORIES; and RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM CARPENTERS, AND SEYOUR: AN INTRODUCTION, J. D. Salinger (Back Bay Books,1959).

–       GHENGIS KHAN And The Making Of The Modern World, Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers, 2005).

–       PALE FIRE, Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin Books,1962).

–       LOVE’S EXECUTIONER & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom, M.D. (Basic, 1989).

–       A FIRE IN THE MIND The Life of Joseph Campbell, Steven and Robin Larsen, Doubleday, 1991).

–       PREY, Michael Crichton (Amazon, 2002).

–       BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, Aldous Huxley, (Perennial, 1958).

–       THE NAME OF THE ROSE, Umberto Eco (Warner, 1983).

–       GOD IS NOT GREAT How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens,(Hachette Book, 2007).

–       THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN, Carlos Castenada, (Ballantine, 1970).

–       FURTHER TALES FROM THE SARAGOSA MANUSCRIPT, Jan Potaki, (Orion, 1966).

–       ANGELS & DEMONS, Dan Brown (Pocket,2006).

–       THE COMPLETE WORKS OF HENRY MILLER, including: THE BOOKS IN MY LIFE, Henry Miller (New Directions, 1969).

–       The NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETERY (Second Edition), Edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair (W.W. Norton, 1973).

Experiment 8 TAROT AND PAST LIVES

Past Life Tarot Readings

 Part 3

Designed  by Dr. Art Rosengarten For TAROTPSYCH Jan/Feb. 2009

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