GODDESSES IN EVERYWOMAN with JEAN SHINODA BOLEN, M.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome.

Today we're going to examine the power of mythological archetypes in our own consciousness. We're going to look at whether the ancient gods and goddesses of the pantheistic cultures, such as Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, India, and China, are actually influencing the lives of us here in the twentieth century today. My guest is Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, who is an active feminist, a member of the Ms. Foundation. She is also on the faculty of the University of California Medical School in psychiatry, and a training analyst at the Jung Institute in San Francisco, as well as the author of several fascinating books, including The Tao of Psychology and Goddesses in Every Woman. Welcome, Jean. JEAN SHINODA BOLEN, M.D.: Thank you. It's nice to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, in a way you have launched a new phase, a revolution in the women's movement, looking at women's spirituality. So many women these days are beginning to ask themselves about the archetypal role of goddesses within themselves, and to begin to question, what goddess is operating within me at this moment? Your book, Goddesses in Every Woman, is a very serious, scholarly text. I imagine you were a little bit surprised at that kind of response. BOLEN: Well, I wrote the book as a new psychology of women, because mostly women were expected to be sort of in one type, and actually women are complex, and there are lots of different parts of us that operate -- either operate together, or in conflict, or whatever. We're rather complex people, and so to write a psychology that took in the complexities of women was what it was all about, within the range of what's normal. What surprised me is that it also made sacred women's lives, and so it became a text on women's spirituality, when it started out as basically a Jungian feminist new psychology of women. MISHLOVE: Well, I know that feminist writers, including yourself, have really taken Freud to task with this whole concept of a female psychology based on penis envy, of all things. BOLEN: Right -- based on what you don't have, rather than on what is innate in you. And even what is innate in you may not determine how strongly you feel about it. For example, we have uteruses, and so the whole capacity to be a mother is a biological part of us. But you can biologically be a mother and yet it may not touch the deep archetypal level of the mother. And if that happens, you biologically are a mother, but something really deep doesn't click. MISHLOVE: It seems as if women must really relate to this notion that within themselves are these powerful deities operating, these psychic complexes, because women really do have extraordinary power in their own way, and this power is very aptly reflected in the mythology of the ancient goddesses. BOLEN: Right, it is. The various goddesses have different kinds of power, and they operate through women, so that a man might feel her power if she were thinking strategically like Athena, or really into being Aphrodite. But the woman herself may feel taken over by a goddess pattern. For example, one of the first ones that I saw in my practice, because that's how it first

began, was a jealous Hera. Not all women are like Hera, the goddess of marriage, and if you are like Hera, then no matter how the rest of your life is going, if you don't have a mate there is a feeling of some major emptiness in your life, because it's through being a partner that you have a deep meaning. If you have a partner, like the goddess herself had, who is a philandering Zeus, then time and time again you're wounded and jealous, and you get caught up in the vindictiveness of it. What I saw initially, the goddess that walked into my office, was a woman that I had known before -- before this had happened to her, before she had married, before she had gotten jealous when she found out her husband was being unfaithful to her. She came in feeling like something had happened in her, that she was behaving in a way that she didn't even like herself. You know, that jealousy business is a heavy-duty, terrible feeling to be possessed by. MISHLOVE: The interesting thing to me that you've described in this pattern is that the Hera archetype will attack the other woman, rather than confront the husband. BOLEN: Right. That's very, very typical. The positive side of it is that she has the capacity to bond and really go through thick and thin, while another woman, for whom the Hera bond is not innate and instinctive and strong, doesn't feel that way at all. She isn't as susceptible to jealousy or emptiness, and doesn't get as much of her deep meaning from being a wife. MISHLOVE: Let's step back for just a moment and ask the question, how is it that these mythological images that were written in another culture, thousands of years ago, can still be operating in an active way within us? BOLEN: Well, one of the things is that it's amazing that myths live so long. These are images that go back three thousand years, and yet we're still fascinated by them. They're still powerful stories, because they're like collective dreams. You know, you can wake up in the morning and sit around the breakfast table, and someone can say to you, "Guess what dream I had last night?" You can listen to the dream and be spellbound by it, without understanding the interpretation of it. But the dream itself has power; it's someone else's dream, but it zings into some layer in yourself that resonates with it. Well, I look at myths that way too. They're like collective dreams. We may not understand them, but they move us. And they move us because there's something in us that is like that. MISHLOVE: Now, I don't know so much about the goddesses, but my sense is that with the gods of the various cultures -- Greek, Roman, Indian, Scandinavian -- they almost seem to parallel each other. There's a king of the gods; there's a god of war. Is this also true with the goddesses? BOLEN: Yes, very much so. MISHLOVE: Isn't that striking, that this would happen in different cultures? It makes one think that they really are reflections of psychic energy patterns. BOLEN: Right, and that's the basic idea of an archetype -- that it is an innate pattern that is evoked or called out by a combination of culture and nurture. But it also varies as to which one is

built in strong at the factory, so to speak, so that when I wrote about goddesses in everywomen, I also said you can often tell the basic pattern when you see your eighteen-month-old daughter, which I did. I saw my kid being able to focus on something that pleased her, not because it made any difference to anybody else. That ability to really focus on something is typical of a class of goddess images or goddesses, those that the initial Greeks called the virgin goddesses -- those who could really, say, focus on a target like Artemis, the goddess of the hunt; you know, the bow and arrow. That was what my daughter was being like when she focused on accomplishing something that mattered to her. Other women don't have as strong a drive to do that. MISHLOVE: It's an interesting distinction that you make between the virgin goddesses, who are in effect not so much influenced by their relationships with men, as opposed to, say, the vulnerable goddesses, where a relationship with a male -- a father, a son, or a husband -- seems very much to be central in their lives. BOLEN: Well, the vulnerable goddesses are relationship-oriented in general. One of them is the mother-child bond, too; it's a powerful one. It's like without the other person I don't have a meaning. With the other person in my life, I feel fulfilled, and because I am so dependent on having a relationship to give my life meaning, I am vulnerable, because the other person can leave me, and I can be bereft and in grief, or jealous if I am Hera. Or I can try to have a baby and it doesn't happen, and I can just feel the emptiness of not having a child, because that archetype just demands to be fulfilled through me. Another one could say, "I never want a child, never wanted babies." The archetype is just a very different one. So the vulnerable ones set you up to make commitments to people that really last, but they also set you up to suffer and to grow, and it makes for depths in relationship. MISHLOVE: Is there a sense in which if one recognizes that one of these archetypes is operating -- if a woman senses that this is happening, one of these vulnerable goddesses is a force moving through her -- that it's best to kind of go with it, rather than to deny it or fight it, but just to allow yourself to be vulnerable and to find your power in that? BOLEN: Yes and no. There's first the sense of fulfilling it at some point because it does give you meaning to do it. But it's like telling a goddess at times, "Not now." You know, if the impulse to have a baby arises when you're fifteen, it would be a very good idea to say, "Not now." Or at a certain phase of your life, when things aren't right, to say, "Not now." Because I've found in my practice, for example, that the woman for whom that archetype is the strongest will perhaps get pregnant when she doesn't intend to, when it's really not a good time. If she has to go through the whole process of making a decision to have the baby or to abort the baby, it is a terrible struggle for her. If she aborts that child, she is the one who gets depressed and has a real hard time of it. You'd think that given the difficulty that she had, she'd make good and sure that that wouldn't happen again. But because the archetype really wants the baby, this is the very woman for whom it might happen again, where someone else could much more easily have an abortion, feel it was very sensible, it was over, and she would also be very careful not to have another one. It really differs. MISHLOVE: In other words, what you seem to be saying is that these archetypal complexes, while they are very powerful and associated with the deities of ancient cultures, don't really stand

at the core of our being, at the exact center. There's some other part of us which has to choose and make decisions for ourselves. BOLEN: Well, the individual woman is the choice maker. MISHLOVE: In other words, we are not really these gods and goddesses. BOLEN: No, but if a woman isn't conscious of what's oeprating in her, and doesn't make choices, then she can repeat a pattern that is just brought on by a particularly strong goddess. And then she can really have a series of repetitious bad scenes in her life. For example, if she is by nature a bonding Hera woman, and she allows that to happen before she even knows the man -- I mean, she's the kind of woman where the archetype operates on her so on the first date she's fantasizing walking down the aisle -- and should that man want to marry her, she is ready to because the goddess wants to be fulfilled. Now, this particular woman would do very well to realize that she needs to know the character of the man and his capacity to be faithful and to love her. Otherwise she's really at the mercy of jealousy and pain. So the more she knows that of herself and her susceptibilities, the better. MISHLOVE: You know, Freud once wrote towards the end of his career that in spite of all his investigation into the psychology of men and women he was never able to answer the basic question, what does woman want? It seems as if in your psychology of the goddesses, you really are addressing that question. These goddess archetypes represent the different things that women want. BOLEN: Yes. And it varies from woman to woman, that's the other thing. MISHLOVE: And varies from time to time for a single woman, also. BOLEN: Yes, because at different times in your life a goddess pattern will be much stronger. For example, if you're a teenage girl, it could be that you are a horse-crazy Artemis, who just wants to go ride horses, be a backpacking Girl Scout in the wilderness. Or you could be an Aphrodite that is really boy crazy. Or you could be a scientific-minded, chess-playing Athena, or a meditative Hestia, or something like that. And it's pretty clear at that time that there's one or two goddesses that really run the show for a while. And then, come your adult years, it may be that you will get married, and Hera will get a vote, or may not. It may be that you'll have a baby, and Demeter, the mother, will be evoked; or it might not. You know, when Demeter is not evoked, it can be very sad. I had a number of people say to me, "Go see Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People. Then you'll realize what my mother was like." Basically what they were saying is: "I had a mother who was my biological mother, but at some deep level she didn't bond with me, and I knew it." And what is said is that often the woman knows it too. She may know that she felt it for another child, and isn't bonded at this deeper level with this particular one. MISHLOVE: Because the archetype -BOLEN: The archetype didn't get constellated, didn't get pulled out, didn't connect.

MISHLOVE: Many of the images that men have formed of female goddesses -- sort of the dark, terrible mother, the Kali image -- what do you think of that? BOLEN: There are a couple of terrible mothers. Interestingly, in Greek mythology they're not as powerful as in Indian mythology, so that mostly the goddesses in Greek mythology were right under a patriarchal major god, and mostly they had a tough time of it, or they stayed independent. But there wasn't a really heavy-duty, powerful Greek goddess. MISHLOVE: Because Greek mythology really reflected the patriarchal culture that developed, which is the culture that's still in effect, of course. So there's real meaning for women today, I suppose, in looking at the goddesses who operated in that system. BOLEN: Often the dark side of a goddess is like the enraged one, the one that is feeling that she has been dishonored. Hera can be reduced to being just a jealous shrew, which she often is, or she can be seen as a powerful aspect of the feminine that has been discounted, dishonored, and devalued, and she's enraged from that standpoint. Or you can have a goddess like Demeter, who is the abundant, giving, nurturing mother, who if she doesn't have a baby of her own, is the woman who is nurturing everybody. And yet if she doesn't say no to the goddess inside of her, and the person on the outside that says, "Help me, do this for me, take care of me," etcetera, the human woman is going to get burned out. And so Demeter women often do get burnt out, and when they do they're like Demeter the goddess who sat in the temple and didn't care if the whole world died of famine. This woman that used to be all-loving and all-giving, gradually feels as if there is no mothering energy in her whatsoever -- that she could let the whole world die. And the observing women in whom this has happened, then gets distressed, because she knows that somewhere there's a part of her that's missing now, and she goes into this negative side of Demeter, who is really representative of the depressed woman. There are an awful lot of depressed women in this culture too. MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting that these constellations of psychic energies are in a way rather precise, and that one can get a good deal out of rereading the ancient myths and looking at the patterns of life that are attributed to these goddesses. BOLEN: Yes, it's really fascinating when you do, and you realize that a minor myth is reflective of something in you. Like I have a lot of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. To go to medical school you have to be able to aim for a distant target and go for it. So I don't have much difficulty with that focused, go-for-it energy that some other women, because they're not naturally in this mode, have. There are characteristics -- like this is the goddess who comes out of the forest and the wilderness; she's like a deer, in that now you see her, now you don't. People that are my friends had that; you know, I would get focused on something, and I'd get totally absorbed, and it would be like disappearing into the woods, and then I'd come out again when I finished the project, or what have you. So even a little vignette of this fit something of the pattern. MISHLOVE: Is there something about feminine psychology, the way we often think of women as being more intuitive, that would lead women to be more interested in the goddess within than, say, men would be interested in the god within?

BOLEN: It could be, because if you believe in imagery -- well, not if you believe in it, but if imagery and metaphor and story and myth move you -- then if I say to you that somebody is, say, like a Persephone gathering flowers in the meadow,a then there's the picture of this innocent who is picking flowers in the meadow, but you know, oh my God, the earth is going to open up, and Hades is going to come up and abduct her. Just by giving the picture, I say the whole story for someone who's metaphorically minded. But someone else might say to me, "Why don't you just say that she is unconscious of her environment, and susceptible to being victimized?" Which is true, too. MISHLOVE: Right. I mean, why do you need all this goddess business? BOLEN: Yes, why do you need all the goddess business? And what the business does, or archetypal imagery does, is that it puts image and affect and story in one, and it deepens your whole sense of what it's about. But you have to be much more right-brained, I think. Women are supposed to have more of those corpus callosum strands that go between right and left brain, and so maybe they can move into their right brain easier, and go back and forth. MISHLOVE: Well, I should think connecting up with the mythological stories helps to make us feel as if our lives in some way are part and parcel of the great stories of humanity. BOLEN: Yes, they are. They really are. MISHLOVE: That everybody, in their own way, is probably living out some mythological role, even if they're a milkman. BOLEN: Right. One of the points I made in talking not about the goddesses, but about the heroine in everywoman, is that we are all protagonists in our own mythic life stories. Once we get a sense that we are leading lives in which we're the major character, the protagonist, we can either be a heroine or a hero, or we can be a victim; we can be passive and acted upon, or we can consciously make our decisions based on what's operating in us and what's operating on us. I began to feel that one way of looking at everybody is sort of like a sandwich, in that we are acted upon by these powerful forces inside us, of archetypes, and we have projected upon us and are being acted on from outside by these powerful qualities or projections called stereotypes. So here we are in the middle, with the archetypes acting inside and the stereotypes acting outside, and if we're not conscious of these forces acting upon us, we tend to just sort of fall in. The women's movement in the seventies raised awareness about stereotypes -- that we are limited by what the culture said we should be as women. Then I came along with all this Jungian training that I was fortunate enough to get, somewhere along the line, in a Freudian world, and began to appreciate how powerful these archetypes are, and that they act on us, whether we name them or not, whether we know them or not. But when we know them, we could say, "Aha! OK, I know this one's acting on me, and that when this happens, this is what I do." Or I can know that I need to go into my center. The goddess that hardly anybody knew about was Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. She's the one that in cleaning her house, putting flowers out, making it beautiful and orderly, does something about ordering her psyche, and it's a meditative quality, a centering quality. I can know that what I personally might need at a certain time is to have some solitude, to evoke the Hestia in me, and that that will help put some order in my psyche.

MISHLOVE: In other words, we can all conceive of the pantheons of gods and goddesses as resources within ourselves that we can invoke, we can call upon, as we need to do. BOLEN: Right, much as the Greeks used to call on them and think they were outside and up on Olympus. Now this is a way of realizing that they're inside. MISHLOVE: That's a very optimistic theme. You know, Jung himself, as I understand his psychology -- I was very struck by this -- suggests that the active archetype within males is a female, the anima, and within females the unconscious is a male, or the animus. You're suggesting a somewhat different slant. BOLEN: Yes and no. I felt like Jung was sexist in some ways, and he definitely was when he said that all women had an animus, and that the animus was what did our thinking for us. That meant if I had a good idea, it wasn't that I thought it, but that my animus did it for me. MISHLOVE: This male inside of you. BOLEN: And not only is it this male inside of me, but by nature, because it is an unconscious part of me, I can't think as well, ever, as a man could, by definition. But then I found that here's Jung also talking about psychological types, without genders -- qualities. So that I don't happen to be a thinking woman by type, but I could be a thinking woman, and if I were that would be my best suit. So what is this business? Am I doing it, or is my animus doing it for me? Well, then if you have an archetype like Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who is the best strategist, the best thinker of them all, women who are naturally thinking types begin to realize that just because they're thinking doesn't mean that a masculine part is doing it. They're thinking well because there is a pattern in them that is like Athena that is beautiful and strong and thinks very, very decently. So what I'm doing is saying that for an Athena woman, the animus model does not work, around thinking. But for another kind of woman -- say, a more relationship-oriented woman -- it often feels as if thinking is a foreign, male part of her. So she may think, "I've got to call up my animus," -- she might think of it as a litigator or a gladiator -- "who will go do battle for me." It doesn't feel like first nature. MISHLOVE: So you're making some modifications of Jungian thought. BOLEN: Right. MISHLOVE: We're almost out of time, but I'd like to ask you this in closing. It seems to me that in a way mythology is still alive within us, and I wonder if we aren't in the process of creating new gods and new goddesses, with new powers that are sort of moving us into the future. BOLEN: I think we are, and I think -- there's a fellow named Rupert Sheldrake who even explains how new archetypes can come into being. MISHLOVE: Through the theory of morphic resonance.

BOLEN: Right. And that by being human, we share images or archetypal fields that we tap into. So yes, as individual women change, for example, we may be building a new model for women in general to be able to move into expressing. MISHLOVE: So if the gods and the goddesses of ancient Greece are still alive today, surely their stories didn't end when Homer died. BOLEN: No, they didn't. MISHLOVE: They're still progressing. We must have new images all the time. And I think, Jean, in a way the work that you are doing, as a female psychiatrist and trailblazer today, is in effect creating a new image of what it means to be an Artemis, for example. It's been a pleasure having you with me, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and you really in a way do embody the very principles that you speak of. I think especially for women, but also for men, it's very inspiring to see somebody reaching deep into history and creating new meanings for modern people as well. BOLEN: Thank you. MISHLOVE: Thank you very much for being with me. END JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "Psychotherapy and Spiritual Paths." My guest is Dr. Seymour Boorstein, who is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Dr. Boorstein is an associate clinical professor at the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and he is editor of and contributor to a marvelous volume called Explorations in Transpersonal Psychotherapy. Seymour, welcome. SEYMOUR BOORSTEIN, M.D.: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, you've made quite a transition from being an orthodox psychoanalyst to now a proponent of the transpersonal approach, or the spiritual approach, to psychotherapy. One of the points that you make in your own writings in this area is that in order for a therapist to really do transpersonal psychotherapy they have to have a commitment themselves to a spiritual path, or to spiritual growth in their lives. I wonder if you could describe how that transition took place in your own life. BOORSTEIN: Well, about fifteen years ago, when I was forty, on a whim I took a seminar with a group called Mind Dynamics. The seminar was given by an internist for physicians, and what it purported to do was to teach you how through certain meditations you could then make a diagnosis from afar without ever seeing a patient -- just knowing the patient's name, address, and whereabouts. At first I thought that this would be an impossibility, but somehow on a whim I just took the course. To my great amazement, it worked. I think four or five times I was able to do that, and I knew that nobody had told me the data, and I was getting it from a source other than what was normal. That was a total mind blower, as they would say, and this then led me to begin to read everything I could lay my hands on in the area of powers, of mythology, of mysticism, of

religion, and to begin to sort out what had some validity and what was just interesting science fiction or just good fiction. MISHLOVE: Freud himself in one of his writings, I know, stated that if he could live his life all over again he would have gone into psychical research. But psychoanalysis has yet to integrate these kinds of things. BOORSTEIN: Unfortunately, I think that's true, and I think the official psychoanalytic stand is that issues having to do with mysticism really involve a pathology or a regression to more primitive states, rather than seeing it as a progression beyond traditional personality states, with the advantages thereof. MISHLOVE: So after you had this experience, I gather, you began to try and develop a more integrated viewpoint, so that you could incorporate this somehow in your life. BOORSTEIN: It took many years, and trying different meditational systems, such as TM and many others, to begin to sort out what they did for me personally, or didn't do, or for people whom I associated with, and then to begin very, very delicately, after many years, to experiment with introducing it into what I would otherwise call traditional psychotherapy, and begin to see the different results that happened. And many very amazing, more rapid, not cures but improvements occurred, and this led me to further experiment, further study, and to try further systems myself. MISHLOVE: Just for a little further background, I think many psychoanalysts today are rather agnostic in their approach to religion. Were you, at the time you began? BOORSTEIN: I would say till the age of forty I would call myself basically an agnostic or even atheist. And then, as I studied and was involved more in meditation and so on, I developed more of a sense that there was much more than meets the eye, and that the picture was far larger than we ever even conceived, and a whole sense of awe and reverence came more and more into my consciousness, so that I would now call myself a very religious person, but not necessarily in a traditional sense. MISHLOVE: Perhaps more in an eclectic spiritual sense of some sort. BOORSTEIN: More of the mystical spiritual sense. MISHLOVE: One of the points that comes up in traditional psychotherapy a lot is the notion of transference and countertransference -- that a patient projects emotions onto the therapist that would otherwise be directed perhaps to parents or to lovers. And the therapist also may react to those emotions in ways that are not totally rational in therapy. As a therapist, when you enter that situation with this new approach, this mystical, spiritual approach to life, how does that affect the transference and countertransference relationships? BOORSTEIN: Well, let me back up a little bit.

MISHLOVE: Am I getting too deep? BOORSTEIN: No, no, no, we just want to make a step backwards. Before I ever even think of introducing any of these approaches, I carefully evaluate in the history, does this person have a set of religious beliefs? Would the introduction of this material make them uncomfortable, or disorganize them in any particular way? MISHLOVE: You evaluate the client carefully. BOORSTEIN: Absolutely. MISHLOVE: I'm assuming, I guess, that you can't hide it -- if you have a mystical approach or a spiritual approach to life, that it will come out one way or another. BOORSTEIN: I think it does, although with some people I will play it down, and they will not see it because they're not ready to look at that aspect. It can go on anyway, and perhaps later we might even talk a bit about it -- how even though what is happening looks like traditional psychotherapy without any added mystical or transpersonal things going on, nevertheless in my own mind they're going on, and that makes a tremendous difference in my own mind state, my own sense of well being, optimism, trust, and so on, which on some level is also communicated to the patient. MISHLOVE: But you're careful in working with a patient, before you deliberately, consciously introduce this material, to sense that it would be acceptable to them. BOORSTEIN: Right. One of the ways that I do that is by introducing, or suggesting sometimes, certain books that then give me a chance to see what kind of reaction they have -- for instance, a book like Ken Wilber's No Boundary, which is written from an intellectual point of view, and yet if somebody is going to resonate to the material there, they'll let you know. I'll try to tailor the books to the person's background. If they're Christian, it will be a Christian-background book; Hassidic or Jewish, it will be a Hassidic book; or Hindu, or Sufi, or whatever. MISHLOVE: So that's one of the methods that you use to do transpersonal therapy. I guess some people might call that bibliotherapy. BOORSTEIN: Right -- both to evaluate and later to help loosen some of the cement that keeps people locked into their either neurotic behavior or infantile behavior. MISHLOVE: You know, some psychoanalysts and other therapists have reported that when clients come with a dream, often the client will have a telepathic dream that reveals things to the client unknowingly about the therapist -- perhaps things that the therapist did not wish to reveal. Has this ever come up for you? BOORSTEIN: Actually it has. I haven't written about it; it's interesting you should ask. On a number of occasions, patients not only had dreams about something that I had never revealed to anybody, but they had the dream before the event ever happened.

MISHLOVE: Precognitive. BOORSTEIN: A precognitive dream about me. It was mixed in with other stuff in their dream, but it was so very clear. That was another mind blower -- that basically time didn't seem to flow as I seemed to think it always flowed, which would fit in with the mystic's view of time also. MISHLOVE: Well, in a sense the therapeutic relationship is so very, very intimate, and it is out of these intimate relationships, where people develop a kind of bonding with each other, that parapsychologists have traditionally reported psychic communication occurs. So I would think it would be a very normal thing for that to occur in therapy. This probably goes beyond the sorts of things that are normally talked about in transpersonal psychotherapy, but a skilled therapist might want to learn how to project healing, to project love, to project positive things literally telepathically to clients. BOORSTEIN: When I work with patients I often do think thoughts of compassion and love, totally unsaid, just going on in my mind while working with maybe a difficult person, or difficult material. So that does go on. Whether it's communicated or not, I have a sense that the total package seems to work much better than what I used to do -- that somehow the transpersonal catalyzes improvement and speeds up the process greatly. MISHLOVE: Normally there's a kind of thin line, I suppose, between pursuing a spiritual path and being involved in psychotherapy. Alan Watts many years ago wrote a book called Psychotherapy East and West, in which he said that spiritual teachers of the East are really the equivalent of psychotherapists in the West. But I gather you might make some distinctions there. BOORSTEIN: I don't think that that's quite accurate. I like to use Ken Wilber's nine stages of development, starting from birth to sainthood or the holy person. The first four or five stages are roughly equivalent to what we use in traditional psychoanalytic developmental stages, or Erik Erikson's stages of development. That's the area that psychotherapists know how to navigate best and help people who are stuck in those areas. MISHLOVE: Could you enumerate them quickly? BOORSTEIN: In the psychoanalytic jargon it's called the oral phase, the anal phase, the Oedipal phase, that kind of thing. MISHLOVE: Stages of psychosexual development that one goes through as a young child. BOORSTEIN: Right, and up to adolescence and early adulthood. MISHLOVE: And the theory of psychoanalysis is that a person might get fixated or stuck in one of those stages. BOORSTEIN: Right. Some kind of trauma will get them stuck, at least so the theory goes. MISHLOVE: And that would result in a neurosis.

BOORSTEIN: In a neurosis, or depending if it's very early, borderline states or narcissistic disorders, or certain infantile states. In that area I don't think that the traditional gurus are equipped to be as effective as psychotherapists. However, beyond those states, the transpersonal, existential and beyond, the gurus are much more effective. I see really a need for the blending, where each has a very important piece to add. In fact, many spiritual teachers have a need for early psychological work -- well, many may be a gross exaggeration; some. MISHLOVE: Some spiritual teachers could use a good therapist. BOORSTEIN: Could use a good therapist, and in fact many have gone back for help. MISHLOVE: And many therapists could use a good spiritual teacher. BOORSTEIN: That's right, because many people on a spiritual path have leapfrogged certain psychological developmental problems and then they get stuck, or play out the earlier problems in a destructive way. MISHLOVE: In other words, you could enter into a meditative practice, experience higher states of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, blissful states, perhaps even saintly states of being, and not really have your life together. BOORSTEIN: Absolutely. MISHLOVE: In fact it's very common. I think it's one of the things that turns many people away from spiritual paths, is that they see this going on -- that sometimes people use a spiritual path as an excuse for not dealing with their real psychological problems. BOORSTEIN: Jack Engler, who writes in the latest book with Ken Wilber, Transformation of Consciousness, has a wonderful way that he puts it: going on the spiritual path is an attempt to lessen our little self -- our little egos if you will -- to lose that part of ourselves and develop the higher self. But he says it's very crucial that first you become a somebody before you become a nobody, and all too often, what you were just describing, is that people who are a nobody use this spiritual path to kind of validate their almost advanced state -- "See, I'm a nobody already" -when they really are building a penthouse without a basement. And it can be disastrous. MISHLOVE: Would you recommend, if a person like that were a client of yours, that they stop meditating and give up their spiritual path? BOORSTEIN: For many people that would be kind of a narcissistic blow. They would take that as a criticism. For some actually I have done that, where a person went on a meditation retreat and became psychotic, and I tell these people no more meditating, do hard work and a grounding kind of everyday thing, so that they can no longer be in those spheres which are destructive to them, which is unmanageable by them. I don't remember who said it, but there's a wonderful quote -- I think it's Brown who said that the psychotic person drowns in the water that the mystic swims gloriously in, something like that -- Norman O. Brown.

MISHLOVE: In other words, we really have to develop an ego. That's an important part of our development. It's a stage we have to pass through before we can give up the ego. BOORSTEIN: That's right. Or to then build an alternative or an additional structure to it. It's a tremendous error to try to leapfrog that, and many people do that, and then they use so-called spiritual strivings as a way to avoid life. MISHLOVE: So for these kinds of people, is there some kind of a clinical term, for example? BOORSTEIN: Some may be psychotic or borderline psychotic or narcissistic or very infantile. For some of them you may suggest, in order not to hurt their feelings, some very light, supportive, non-disorganizing meditative practice, maybe even reading spiritual literature. MISHLOVE: In other words, if such a person has spiritual, mystical inclinations, they may find routes by which they can satisfy those inclinations through certain types of meditation, through maybe community involvement, or through service as a spiritual practice, but they should avoid other kinds of meditations and severe ascetic disciplines and things of that sort. BOORSTEIN: In general I think that would be true. Unless it were very regulated by somebody who could supervise and would be able to monitor the situation, it's much better to leave that alone. MISHLOVE: On the other hand, you must have many clients who you would recommend get involved in meditative disciplines. BOORSTEIN: For most neurotic people who have that inclination, it can be very helpful to psychotherapy because it destabilizes neurotic defenses. MISHLOVE: What does that mean? BOORSTEIN: Let's say material that a neurotic works to bring to the surface may be defended against by normal neurotic defenses. But while meditating -- say, a seven- or ten-day retreat where you're just watching your processes, depending on what meditational system you're using -- the neurotic defenses begin to loosen and slip, and material which was repressed can then come to the surface. MISHLOVE: I wonder if you can illustrate that with an example, Seymour. It sounds almost a little bit technical. BOORSTEIN: Well, there's a person I know who actually had been in analysis with another therapist, and had a death of a parent very early in his life, and had never been able to access the sadness to it. It just never was able to be gotten to. During a meditation retreat, this material came up and flooded him with a sadness with which he wept for days and days, and he was able to identify the longing for the dead parent. It was more a feeling, because it was a preverbal experience. It was more of a feeling than an actual concrete thought, but for hours he wept and mourned, and then later was able to integrate it in therapy.

MISHLOVE: In other words, many times our neurotic defense mechanisms keep us from being in touch with our own feelings. BOORSTEIN: Absolutely. MISHLOVE: And through meditation we somehow get underneath those defense mechanisms. BOORSTEIN: Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't work that way, but oftentimes it can, and for the healthier people those kind of destabilizing meditations have that fringe benefit, in addition to the spiritual practice. MISHLOVE: How would a traditional psychoanalyst view the introduction of meditation? BOORSTEIN: Probably he'd be critical of it, as introducing a tremendous variable that would distort the transference, which in a way it does. But as long as you pay attention to that, and can keep an eye on it not being misused by the patient, it can have a positive effect. MISHLOVE: When you say distort the transference, do you mean the patient might begin to think of you as a guru? BOORSTEIN: Yes, and think that you have all kind of great spiritual wisdom and powers which in fact you don't, although you may have more than the patient has. MISHLOVE: Is this also a problem in the spiritual path itself -- that disciples have a certain transference they project onto the spiritual teacher maybe more than is appropriate? BOORSTEIN: Absolutely, and that's where you see many of the disasters where the teacherstudent relationship gets abused. MISHLOVE: Is there any way, if you're a spiritually inclined person and you meet a powerful person, that you can protect yourself against your own transference? BOORSTEIN: Oh, that's a hard one, because really what you're asking is, how can you tell who are the ethical gurus and teachers from those whose own unresolved neurotic problems will get played out in the arena of the spiritual discipline? That's a hard one. One hears of so many -MISHLOVE: We're kind of left on our own there, huh? BOORSTEIN: Or you can ask around, ask other people who have been with the discipline, and see, is it leading to skillful behavior on the part of the followers? Are they doing things that are questionable? Are they doing things that are harmful to others, or is it bringing good for the general and all? That's a very rough guideline that I would use. MISHLOVE: What about for a person who may have spiritual inclinations, and they know they need psychotherapy? Are they better off to find a transpersonal therapist?

BOORSTEIN: If they can find a transpersonal therapist that can do both, that would be ideal. I would be almost inclined to say that if it had to be one or the other, I would find a good psychotherapist first, and then when that's resolved, then find a spiritual teacher. Although you can do both. If the therapist doesn't get too upset by it, you can be involved in a spiritual path and do traditional psychotherapy. MISHLOVE: One of the things that you've introduced into your practice, Seymour, is introducing A Course in Miracles to some of your clients. How has that worked? Can you talk about that a bit? BOORSTEIN: Where to begin? It's such a broad -MISHLOVE: Perhaps we might just briefly define what A Course in Miracles is. BOORSTEIN: A Course in Miracles is a set of teachings written in Christian mystical language, which is really very close to or identical with Mahayana Buddhist writings, although it's written in Christian language. Really, all the spiritual writings are probably very close to each other, although each has their own cultural clothing that it uses. But basically it's a spiritual text. It's a do-it-yourself volume that has three hundred and sixty-five meditations, which lead to the lessening of the attachment to our little selves, and the moving towards our grander or higher self. It's a systematic -MISHLOVE: It's a complete spiritual system. BOORSTEIN: A complete spiritual system, right. And then the text is the explanation of how it all fits together and where it's all going, and how we got here, and why, and so on. Two important aspects of it that are valuable for psychotherapy, for those people who are turned on by it and can resonate with it, are that it's a very nurturing text, so that people who have low selfesteem will, I think, be very much helped by that. Also, it's very helpful in the way it works with forgiveness and the use of anger and that whole area, which is one of the main things that psychotherapists work with anyway. So those are the ways that I use it primarily, for people in that way. And they can do it by themselves without getting into the guru-student dilemma of is it an ethical teacher or not, because the student can close the book at any time, or reject it. MISHLOVE: So you might recommend it for people who have low self-esteem? BOORSTEIN: I recommend it for anybody, because it's basically a very gentle text and will not cause any psychological disruption. I think the worst that would happen is somebody would say, "Well, this just doesn't make sense to me," or "It's hogwash," and just reject the book. MISHLOVE: So it might be something that could be used in almost any psychotherapeutic situation. BOORSTEIN: I think so, I think so, although for many the Christian language turns them off, and they would not use that.

MISHLOVE: And I gather, if this would apply to the Course in Miracles, it might apply to any other spiritual text it would be safe to introduce in a therapeutic context. BOORSTEIN: There aren't many total systems in one volume, or three small volumes, that you could introduce. Like the Buddhist texts -- there are many books written, but they are not total systems. Most books are probably not too destabilizing, because the person's own defenses will come to the fore and he will just reject it if it gets too threatening. MISHLOVE: Seymour, I know your training has been as a Freudian psychoanalyst. The Jungians -- Jung was a student of Freud -- seem to have moved more into the transpersonal, spiritual arena, and have felt that the goal of psychotherapy is the full integration of the personality in all of its aspects. What do you see as the goal of psychotherapy? BOORSTEIN: Well, in many ways that would be the same as the one you just mentioned -- to resolve all those variables, or things which keep the person from moving towards unity consciousness, or the no-boundary state. It's called different things in different traditions. MISHLOVE: So in that sense, when we talk about unity consciousness, no boundaries might be like nirvana. It's almost as if really the proper role of the therapist at some level, as we move towards the goal of therapy, does become the role of a spiritual guide, in some sense. BOORSTEIN: If the psychotherapist has that inclination and knowledge. Most psychotherapists, including myself, I don't feel are spiritual teachers. But in the broadest sense, anything you do which helps the person on his spiritual path, you could certainly say would be a spiritual teacher of sorts -- although I don't like to put myself out as that. MISHLOVE: Seymour, we're out of time. Thank you very much for being with me. It's been a pleasure. BOORSTEIN: Thank you. END HUMANISTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY with JAMES BUGENTAL, Ph.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is existential humanistic psychotherapy. With me is Dr. James Bugental, noted psychotherapist -in fact the first president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Dr. Bugental is also the author of numerous books, including The Art of the Psychotherapist, Psychotherapy and Process, The Search for Authenticity, The Search for Existential Identity, and Challenges of Humanistic Psychology. Welcome, Jim. JAMES BUGENTAL, Ph.D.: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you.

BUGENTAL: It's nice to be here, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: You know, humanistic psychology, including humanistic existential psychology, has often been referred to as a third force in psychology. I wonder if you can elaborate on what the term third force means in psychology. BUGENTAL: Surely. It grew up because in the '20s, '30s, and '40s, the humanistic trend that's concerned with the human experience was subordinated by the rise of psychoanalysis and behavioristic psychology. MISHLOVE: Those would be the first and second forces. BUGENTAL: The first two forces, yes. All along there have been humanistic psychologies; it didn't just start in the Sixties. But in the Sixties there was a feeling that wes needed to represent that kind of psychology which was more concerned with the human experience, treated as uniquely human. And that often meant concerned with what is subjective, what goes on inside a person -- not just treating a person from the outside like a white rat or a pigeon or a computer or something. Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, George Kelly, and Rollo May were some of the people instrumental in bringing together a group to develop and enunciate a humanistic perspective. MISHLOVE: I understand from what you're saying how humanistic psychology would be distinguished from behaviorism, which looks strictly at the externals of behavior, much like a rat. Behavioristic psychology is based a lot on experiments with rats. BUGENTAL: We know more about the white rat, the pigeon, and the college sophomore than we do about human beings. MISHLOVE: How do you distinguish humanistic or existential psychology, then, from the psychoanalytic tradition? BUGENTAL: Well, it's not a complete separation, since many psychoanalysts are also humanistic, and many humanistic psychotherapists also practice some phase of psychoanalytic. But in the concept of the person, psychoanalytic psychology tends to be deterministic. Freud really had the model of nineteenth-century science -- the scientist in the white smock, standing removed, watching, introducing things to affect the object, the patient. MISHLOVE: In other words, we're sort of controlled by these instinctive sexual and aggressive forces, and there's not much said, say, about the higher ranges of human potential. BUGENTAL: Precisely so. MISHLOVE: And as I gather, probably the biggest difference in your writings and the writings of other existential humanistic therapists is this enormous respect for the process that the client is going through -- an enormous faith that each person can solve their own problems with a little facilitation.

BUGENTAL: Let me enlarge on that just a little bit, Jeffrey, because it's sometimes misunderstood when we say that each person can solve his/her own problem. That's true, but very often our job is to make space for that power that's resident in the person to come out. I think of it very often like weeding the garden. You can't make a plant grow by pulling on it, but what you can do is clear away the weeds, be sure it gets nutrients and sunlight, water, and then the inward growth process will have a chance to operate. Well, it's the same with all of us, with human beings. We have weeds. We have habits of thinking, ways of seeing things, ways of defending ourselves, of trying to push ourselves to be something that maybe we're not. These things are the weeds, and they keep that healthful growth process from having a chance to operate. Now here's where psychoanalysis and at least my kind of psychotherapy have a lot of overlap, because we're concerned with weeding, with getting rid of what are called the resistances to the growth process. MISHLOVE: There's a sense, then, that because we are hiding from our own inner pain perhaps, even though there is this natural urge within people towards wholeness and towards growth, many people may live their whole lives without experiencing the fullness of what it is to be a human being. BUGENTAL: You know, I'd almost say everybody lives without experiencing the fullness. It's beyond us. It always stretches to a horizon that moves ahead as you move and grow. But that's encouraging. We don't have to do it all. We can keep growing, we can keep opening up new possibilities, and know that there's still always more. MISHLOVE: You describe the psychotherapy work that you do, let's say as opposed to analyzing and providing some sort of intellectual insights for your clients, as more one of always kind of gently prodding, gently nudging your clients just to be in touch with their own deep experience. BUGENTAL: Not always so gently, but yes. But to be more in touch with the subjective experience. MISHLOVE: It seems as if in our normal life -- and I think I can attest to this in my own normal life -- there's a tendency to get caught up in looking at one's life intellectually, or not really feeling things fully. BUGENTAL: Well, I think a lot of things in our life experience teach us to objectify ourselves, make ourselves into objects, and to lose the subjective center that is really where we live. To be alive physically but in a coma is not to be very much alive, psychologically at least, and most of us would not regard it as very much vitality. And all of us reduce to some extent our vital awareness to preserve a stable world and a stable self definition. MISHLOVE: You suggest as well that most of us develop self images that are not really accurate, in a sense. One is the idealized self image, where we tend to think of ourselves as perhaps a little more perfect than we really are, and then concomitant with that the despised self image -- we hate ourselves at some level. Both of these get in our way, and in order to maintain both of them we often live away from the here and now, away from our real experience.

BUGENTAL: We blame ourselves for not being that idealized self. We fear and hate ourselves sometimes because we feel we are close to the despised image. That was Karen Horney's division, and a very useful one. Many times it's not conscious in those extremes, and it's only as one works with the person, and finds with a particular patient that he never can be content with himself -- although he succeeds reasonably well in his work and he has a feeling of accomplishment, it soon fades because it's not the perfect accomplishment. Or another person who no matter what the kinds of rewards or recognitions from the outside, never feels really clean, like they're really deserved, because that despised image is hidden back there. MISHLOVE: How do you deal with that as a therapist? BUGENTAL: Well, that's where helping the person to become more aware of that internal life is so important -- to get past making oneself into an object. Let me take a step back from your question to try to illustrate. A new person comes in for the first time, and I say in effect, "What bothers you? Why are you here?" The person starts to tell me, let's say, of a tragic incident in his life, but he tells it with a laugh. See, he's objectified his own experience. He doesn't let the pain of the tragedy come in. Instead he stands apart, sort of dismisses it, makes it impersonal. Now when that happens, he can't really find all that's going on inside himself. He's built an artificial wall between his awareness and his genuine experience. So the first job is to help him really let that experience through -- to discard the need to distance from the pain, to let the pain come through. He'll say, "Well, if I ever let that through, I'll never get out of it, it will be too much." That's where the therapist can say, "Hang in; we'll find our way through it. It's not all you are" -having someone who can really stay with you and go through the pain, go through the fear, and then emerge on the other side. Sartre says at one point, or has Orestes say in The Flies: "Human life begins on the far side of despair," and only by going through the despair do we get to that opening of awareness, that creative possibility of life. MISHLOVE: Now I have to think that as a psychotherapist -- and of course I also practice psychotherapy -- there's an enormous risk, not just for the client, in going through the pain, but for the therapist as well. Each client brings a new kind of pain, and it's always unknown territory. BUGENTAL: Exactly so. MISHLOVE: Can you talk about how that affects you personally, or how it has affected you in your years of practice? BUGENTAL: Well, I think cumulatively it's changed my life immensely. What I think of first when you ask the question is how in earlier years I was trying to be what I thought I should be as a therapist, a psychologist, whatever, but not trusting. It was always like I had to hammer myself into the shape I should be. But as I was trying to help the people who consulted me to be more genuinely in themselves, in their own lives, it was holding up an unrelenting mirror to me, with the result that I went into classical analysis, later into psychotherapy, group therapy, individual therapy. I've done a lot of that sort of thing, because this work continually says, "And what about you?"

MISHLOVE: Would it be fair for me to say that you are a human being who has spent decades at this point dealing with human pain, much of your waking life? BUGENTAL: Yes, I'd like to amend that, though. Human pain and human joy, fulfillment. People sometimes say, "How can you stand to listen to so much unhappiness and pain?" The answer is that that isn't all I hear. I also hear courage and joy and growth. So there are both sides to it. MISHLOVE: Is there a sense that with your clients, and I should think also with yourself, that one can't really quite get to the joy without going through a lot of the pain? BUGENTAL: That's very true. So long as we're denying our experience, happy or sad, the other part is being denied too. So that we laugh without the full laugh, we weep without the full tears. It's only as we open -- I'm making this too either/or; I don't like what I'm hearing myself saying, because it's a matter of movement in the direction of greater fullness of being, not something where you turn a switch: "Now I'm really authentic; now I'm not." And to help someone else get more in touch with their genuine experience is to call on oneself to be there too. You can't do it like to a rat or to a college sophomore. MISHLOVE: You've written about therapy as basically a long-term process. You're not a therapist who sort of patches up things, or gives people counseling for short-term problems, but one who really helps people to go through the many layers of the onion, to reach deeper and deeper into themselves, and in that process discover a larger and larger sense of themselves. One of the things that you describe, as we get deep inside the self, beyond some of the superficial resistances, within some people is an enormous level of loathing and self hatred. BUGENTAL: That despised self, yes. MISHLOVE: You described it so elegantly in one of your books as the kind of thing that if it's not handled therapeutically may lead a person to run amok. And it happens from time to time. BUGENTAL: Indeed so. Let me back up a little bit to comment on what you're saying. We have to create a self, a definition of who I am. We create a definition of what the world is. Different people create different world definitions and self definitions. That's not as surprising today as it was at one time, because television and other sources help us see how different it would be if we were born in Hong Kong or in Uganda or something. We know there are different world views and ways of constructing who and what I am and who and what this world is. But the work of depth therapy inevitably leads us to question the way we have constructed the world and defined who we are. MISHLOVE: In other words, you're getting beneath the level of social conditioning. BUGENTAL: Exactly so. And as that questioning comes, it's very much like feeling the ground is shaking under you, questioning the ground you're standing on, and it's a very frightening experience. In the spiritual traditions it's referred to often as the leap of faith or the dark night of the soul. In our work we think of it as the existential crisis, the crisis of existence. And when we

come to realize how arbitrary, in a sense, is the way we have defined our own identities and our world, then comes that period of panic sometimes, of fright. If there's not a therapeutic container, and someone gets to that point, there's a feeling of desperation, of impotence. Sartre describes it Nausea -- that nausea of finding the arbitrariness of things. That's when feeling helpless to change that, helpless to find something that will rescue one from that nausea, people can run amok. MISHLOVE: When you're describing this as really an existential crisis, you seem to be suggesting that in all people, not only those who go to psychotherapy, that this is implicit, or somehow latent within us. We all are confronted with an existential dilemma, even if we choose not to look at it. BUGENTAL: It's always latent; I like your word there. I think that possibility is there, and if life is reasonably congenial, and the established ways of doing things work out well, we may never have to confront that crisis. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, the world was a pretty stable place. You knew your place in it. You knew who you were. The latter part of the twentieth century, all of our world definitions are in question, our idea of what's the good and the true is debated now, it's not taken for granted. So we're much more apt to come up against that nausea, that feeling of world-sickness, and I think it's one of the reasons that there's been such a great number of people seeking therapeutic help now, compared to the past -- the feeling that there must be some truth, some anchoring point, to make things steady down, because they're too wavery. MISHLOVE: As a psychotherapist, do you seek to comfort people who are going through this search and this nausea, or rather to just help them, to facilitate them moving through their own journey, without any pre-expectation as to where they'll lead? BUGENTAL: Absolutely the latter. It just would not be helpful to kind of promise there's a rosy outcome if you'll only hang in. But to stand steady with someone going through it, and to portray less in words of comfort or reassurance and more in attitude, that you know that they can find their own way through it. Because you come out in very different places when you do that. That I think is a support, a container, again -- I like that idea of container -- which makes it possible for people to go through. But not everyone needs to. I don't want to sound like I'm prescribing this as a uniform prescription. For some people it's the only way to get to a real sense of their own strength and potential. For others, other shorter-term things -- and I don't want to put those down; those are very important. They serve an important role. I tend to work in one part of a very broad dimension. MISHLOVE: You know, I'm a little puzzled in the field of psychotherapy, how some therapists will see clients for five or six times, others maybe for twelve to twenty, others for three years, others for six years; sometimes twice a week, or four times a week, sometimes once a month. How do you know when you're really involved in psychotherapy, and how do you know when it's over? BUGENTAL: Good question. The trouble with the word psychotherapy is part of the answer to your question. It's sort of like saying, "What's a good form of transportation?" Well, where are

you going, and what's your time schedule? There's a lot of questions you have to answer to know which transportation means we're speaking about. And so it is with psychotherapy. Psychotherapy can be -- you may remember when Carl Rogers was first writing, he published at least one case, or one of his students did, that was a single-interview successful therapy case. MISHLOVE: We should mention Carl Rogers is the author of Client Centered Therapy, and one of the founders of the humanistic psychology movement. BUGENTAL: Yes -- founders of the new recognition of the movement. And of course for many of us, the number of hours went up into the hundreds. I had a classical analysis, five hundred and some hours. MISHLOVE: That would be once a week for ten years. BUGENTAL: No, five times a week for three years, I think it was. MISHLOVE: But that's an enormous investment. BUGENTAL: It is, yes it is, and I don't think it's necessary for everyone. But it depends what one seeks to accomplish. For some people the opportunity to take a very long, tough, full look at their lives, to decide is this the way I want my life to go, is an engagement of tremendous pull. They're drawn to it -- sometimes by the pain of the way their lives are going, sometimes by a kind of seeking for the more that they sense is sleeping within them. And for that kind of person, once a week is really very difficult to carry it off, as far as I can see. Twice is minimal. Before inflation made it so hard, I'd like to work three and four times a week. MISHLOVE: Well, we're dealing now with something vastly different from what behaviorists are doing when they look at symptom change. The behaviorists would advise any client going into psychotherapy to develop concrete, specific objectives that they want to get out of the therapy. You seem to be suggesting that therapy is going to result not necessarily in a symptom change, but in an existential shift which might be even metaphysical in nature, not measurable really. BUGENTAL: You're right on, yes. I don't want to put down what the behavioral therapists can do for dealing with certain phobias, with habit patterns that are intrusive. It can be very valuable. It's just a different task. Our kind of work doesn't seek to change symptoms. The symptoms may or may not exist when we're through. MISHLOVE: In other words, a person could spend three years coming three times a week, and still be as phobic or anxious or neurotic as when they came in? BUGENTAL: Ah, no. The word "as" is the trick. They could still have that pattern. I don't think we change basic patterns. Think of it this way. I worked with a lady that's described in one of the books, who whatever she was doing, that was the thing that should be. At one point she was into carrots for eyesight, and nothing would do but she had to tell everybody she knew they must have lots of carrots. Moreover when she was feeling well, she thought, "Well, it's going to be this

way from now on," and she didn't see why she ever had to feel bad again. In her work, when she came to me this kind of way, it was like an iron mask fastened on her. Everything she saw was in terms of this extreme, it was distorted by this. Our work gradually moved that mask out, like this. It was still there, but she could see other possibilities around it. It wasn't dominant. It didn't control her life. MISHLOVE: She had more of a perspective on herself, in other words. Even if the behaviors were similar, maybe she could laugh at herself a little more, or have a little bit more twinkle in her eye about it. BUGENTAL: Exactly so. I went to see her one time some years after we finished our work, and at that time it was shiatsu massage, and nothing would do but I must have shiatsu massage. She would find out who was the best shiatsu-er in my home town, and so forth. Then suddenly in the midst of it she stopped and laughed and said, "I'm doing it again!" See, it was out here; it wasn't controlling everything. Earlier, not only would she have had to insist no matter what, she would have had no perspective on it, wouldn't be able to see it in relation to the rest, but if I didn't do it she would feel her worth was gone. Now she could laugh and I'd say, "Well, maybe I'll do it and maybe not, Kate." "Well, you ought to do it," she'd say. It didn't control her. MISHLOVE: There's a sense, then, that existential humanistic work is helping people to get in touch with the core of themselves underneath their behavior, underneath their conditioning, so that even if the behavior or conditioning doesn't change, the core somehow comes through a little more. BUGENTAL: It's an art, if you will. When our work goes well the person feels life is bigger -there are more opportunities, more possibilities; I have more power. And those patterns that have been part of me are probably still there, but I'm not in their control, I have more choice about them. MISHLOVE: And I suppose it's in this sense, when one looks at this kind of an outcome of humanistic existential psychotherapy, that then we begin to move into the transpersonal possibilities of life. BUGENTAL: Indeed so, indeed so -- particularly as we look at the ways we've defined our own identities, and look at the way we've defined the world, and begin to see that it doesn't just have to be that way. Then for some people -- and not for everyone -- there's a sense of greater fluidity of being. Krishnamurti says at one point, "You have to have an ego to get to the bus." We've got to have a self definition to get around in the world. We can't just strip and run around naked without a self. But we don't have to be its creature; it can be our creation. And knowing it as our creation, then we have much more choice. MISHLOVE: So at this point a person might open up to mystical or peak experiences, or to telepathy. BUGENTAL: All of these sorts of experience -- and there's a tremendous range of them -- are potential. I don't pretend to know what's true and what's false. I do know that some of the people

that I've worked with have really moved to realms of experience that I only partially understand. There's an old saying, "You can't take anybody anyplace you haven't been yourself." That's not so; they've taken me places I haven't been. I've seen them make trips I haven't. MISHLOVE: Dr. James Bugental, thank you so much for being with me. BUGENTAL: Thank you. I enjoyed being here. END

PHILOSOPHY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY with ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we're going to be examining philosophy in psychotherapy. We'll be looking at how our behavior, our emotions, are affected by our ideas. With me is Dr. Albert Ellis, one of the most influential psychologists in the history of psychology. Dr. Ellis is the author of over sixty books and six hundred academic papers. He originally began his career as a sexologist, and as the author of such books as The Art and Science of Love and Sex Without Guilt, and is considered one of the fathers of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In addition he is considered the grandfather of cognitive behavior therapy, perhaps the most influential psychotherapeutic movement today, and the founder of Rational-Emotive Therapy. Welcome, Dr. Ellis. ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.: It's good to be here, Jeff. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You are probably most widely noted for introducing into the field of psychotherapy an idea that seems almost self evident, which is that our behavior, our being, our selves, are affected by our philosophies, by what we think. ELLIS: Right. And also conversely I introduced many years ago, when I first formed RET, Rational-Emotive Therapy, the idea that our thinking is also affected by our behavior and our feelings. MISHLOVE: So in effect it's all one system. ELLIS: That's right, interactional. MISHLOVE: And that system can therefore obviously be affected by dealing with any part of it, I would assume -- behavior, emotions, or cognition or thoughts. ELLIS: Right, but if you profoundly change your philosophy, your thinking, then you're more likely in all probability to profoundly change your feeling and your behavior, and especially your disturbed feeling and your disturbed behavior.

MISHLOVE: You drew on the ancient philosophers, coming to the notion that philosophy itself could be a form of psychotherapy. At that point you broke away from psychoanalysis and developed a form of cognitive therapy. ELLIS: Yes, I practiced and was a psychoanalyst for a while, but then I discovered that it didn't work, and I have a gene for efficiency, while poor Sigmund Freud had a gene for inefficiency. So I went back to my hobby since the age of sixteen, philosophy, the philosophy of the ancients largely -- of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and in the East, of Confucius and Lao Tzu and Buddha -- and amalgamated it with behavior therapy, which I'd used on myself at the age of nineteen to get myself over my phobia of public speaking and of approaching young females. MISHLOVE: If I could get to the kernel of your thought, it is basically that whatever happens to us in life, it's not totally responsible for our emotions. ELLIS: Right. It's partly, it contributes to it. A, activating events, contribute to C, consequences in our gut. But it's B, our belief system, our philosophy, which mainly, largely, or certainly in great part, makes us feel and think the way we do -- I should say behave the way we do, especially in a disturbed manner. We disturb ourselves. MISHLOVE: Typically, I suppose, when a person is very angry or very depressed, they almost always think that it's something outside that's causing that. ELLIS: Right. And we normally, and I think biologically, tend to think that because C, consequences -- my anger -- immediately follows your treating me unfairly, that you made me angry, instead of you made me feel sorry and regretful to some degree, but my anger I added by commanding and demanding that you not do what you indubitably did. MISHLOVE: And in a sense, if I'm right, you broke with Freud in suggesting that the parents aren't responsible, early upbringing isn't responsible -- that we teach ourselves these kinds of neurotic behaviors. ELLIS: Right. We're born gullible to our parents, influenceable, teachable, in the first place. Therefore we stupidly listen to our parents, but then we invent many musts, shoulds, oughts, demands, commands, in addition to the standards, the values, that we adopt from our parents. But the standards don't upset us. We mainly upset ourselves with those Jehovan commands. MISHLOVE: You've used the term -- I think you must have coined it -- "musterbation." ELLIS: Right. "Masturbation is good and delicious, but musterbation is evil and pernicious," is one of my sayings. MISHLOVE: Musterbation is when we tell ourselves, "I must do this," or, "Things must be this way," even though they're not.

ELLIS: Right. The three main musts are "I must do well or I'm no good," "You, you louse, must treat me well or your'e worthless and deserve to roast in hell," and "The world must give me exactly what I want, precisely what I want, or it's a horrible, awful place." MISHLOVE: It would be awful. ELLIS: It would be terrible, right. Because of the must. If you didn't musterbate, then you wouldn't awfulize, terribilize, catastrophize, say "I can't stand it," and put yourself down. If you only stuck with, "I'd like very much to do well, but I never have to," you wouldn't then disturb yourself. MISHLOVE: So the technique that you get engaged in with your clients is one of disputing their musts, their ideas, and showing them that logically, scientifically, philosophically, things are not that way -- that nothing must be, if it isn't. ELLIS: The technique is a scientific method, and we say -- and we're the only cognitive behavioral therapy which does say -- that when you think antiscientifically, devoutly, really piously, dogmatically, which is inflexible, antiscientific, then you disturb yourself. Therefore we use the flexible scientific method to get you philosophically and otherwise to undisturb yourself. MISHLOVE: Now, many people, I think particularly the Freudian school of therapy, would suggest that simply being told by your therapist that you're thinking things wrong isn't going to make a bit of difference -- that you'll continue with the same old behaviors anyway. ELLIS: We would agree -- that being told it, or told where you got it, which is you didn't get it from your sacred mother and father -- won't help you. But the insight that I made myself disturbed, I foolishly listened to my mother and father and took them too seriously, and I'm still doing it, and that now I require work and practice, work and practice, to give up my biological and sociological tendency to disturb myself, that will help you -- not the belief that I disturbed myself and that I don't have to. That will help, but not that much. MISHLOVE: Doesn't the idea that if you can simply change your philosophy your whole behavior will change, somehow go against the behaviorist concept, or the materialist notion, that the mind doesn't really influence matter? In effect you're saying that the mind will influence. ELLIS: Very significantly. But we also say that since you practiced, worked at this foolish philosophy, engrained it in yourself, conditioned yourself, that therefore it requires work and practice to give it up, and it requires feeling against it. So we always use cognitive thinking and emotive, dramatic, evocative, and behavioral techniques to get people comprehensively to change and to stay changed. MISHLOVE: In effect what you say is that every emotional state has its concomitant belief system. ELLIS: Right -- that even sorrow and regret, which would be appropriate emotions when you're not getting what you want, have the belief system, "It's too bad. Isn't it bad? Isn't it unfortunate?"

while horror and depression are, "It's awful; it must not be this way; I can't bear it." So each of the negative, self-defeating states such as depression or anxiety or despair or rage has some individual difference in what you tell yourself, what you believe philosophically. MISHLOVE: So in a sense the heart of your philosophical approach, then, is to distinguish between what we might call appropriate philosophies, appropriate emotions, and inappropriate ones. ELLIS: And oddly enough, I discovered after years of doing Rational-Emotive Therapy, RET, that there only are a few differences. And one main difference, and it's crucial, is taking a preference, a desire, a goal, a value, practically all of which are legitimate, and escalating it again, transmuting it into a demand, a should, an ought, a must, an absolute. MISHLOVE: In other words, the most terrible thing could happen to me -- perhaps I have leprosy, or some kind of fatal disease. Or as I think you pointed out, maybe somebody is slowly torturing me to death. That doesn't necessarily justify me going into a state of depression. ELLIS: Or of horror. MISHLOVE: Or of horror. ELLIS: But it does justify your saying, "I don't like this. I wish it weren't so. What am I going to do about it?" Which you won't do if you're horrified. You'll freeze and make yourself worse. So you control largely, not completely, your emotional destiny and your behavioral destiny, and if you change your basic philosophy of life, then you can change it. You have the power to do so, but you only sit on your rump and don't use that power. MISHLOVE: How would you distinguish your approach, say, from Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of Positive Thinking? ELLIS: Well, that is a good one in a limited way, because instead of, "I can't do well," it says, "I can hit the tennis ball better," and it helps you perform better. But underlying this philosophy is, "and I have to, and if I don't hit that damn tennis ball well, there's something rotten about me as a tennis player and a person." So we undermine the negative thinking and don't just cover it up, which will help to some degree, with positive and often Pollyannaish thinking: "Day by day in every way, I'm getting better and better and better" -- that's Coue. But he went out of business because people fell on their face and didn't get better day by day. MISHLOVE: In effect I guess what you're saying is things may or may not get better; they may even get worse. But they don't have to get awful. ELLIS: Right. One of the techniques in RET is to show you that you can do better, which is positive thinking, but if you don't, you don't, and even at the very worst -- and we sometimes implode what you may do or what may happen to you at the worst, show you that you don't have to be miserable. My book which is just coming out now, my new book for the public, is called How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything -- Yes, Anything.

MISHLOVE: That's quite a title. You just used a technical term, implode. Why don't we elaborate on that? ELLIS: Implode means really get into your feeling or your behavior, and do it many times forcefully, vigorously -- feel the worst, feel very upset -- and then change it to appropriate negative feelings. We're not against feelings, just against inappropriate, self-defeating feelings such as sorrow and regret and frustration and annoyance, which will drive you back to A, activating events, bad events in life, to change them. So we want you to feel, we don't want you to have no feeling, indifference, nirvana, desirelessness, or anything like that, but real feeling. MISHLOVE: In a sense it would seem that when people awfulize, when they make things awful, they're using that almost as a screen to keep from getting in touch with their genuine feelings of disappointment. ELLIS: That's right. Their very genuine feeling, their good negative feeling, would be disappointment: "I don't like this. What can I do to change it? How bad, how unfortunate." And they miss that with, "How awful, how horrible, how terrible." And then again they get bad results and sit on their rumps again and do nothing, instead of forcing themselves to go back to the grind and change what you change what you can change and to accept what you cannot. MISHLOVE: It almost sounds like good old-fashioned American philosophy in some way. ELLIS: Well, Emerson had some of it, and Thoreau, and some of the American philosophers, and I got it mainly from the original philosophers, and also from their derivatives -- from John Dewey, who had a good deal of it; Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher; Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, and other modern philosophers. MISHLOVE: In effect you're saying if you just live your life more rationally, if you think things through, you'll be saner. ELLIS: Much saner. But then again you'd better force yourself to do what you're afraid of, and to feel differently. So again RET is always primarily cognitive-philosophic, but very much also emotive, dramatic, evocative and behavioral-active. MISHLOVE: In your work as a therapist you don't just sit back and calmly philosophize. You try and use philosophical approaches that really get inside of a person, to their own inner thoughts, and work with them to change those inner thoughts, what they tell themselves. ELLIS: Right. And we teach them to do it. We have homework, cognitive and behavioral homework, so that they as homework can do most of it themselves. That's why our therapy, Rational-Emotive Therapy, is an intrinsically briefer therapy than almost all the others. That's the way it usually, not always, is.

MISHLOVE: When you're dealing with logic, you would admit, I know, that most people are irrational much of the time. ELLIS: Much of the time. MISHLOVE: Not only do we feel that we have to be a certain way, and that we must do this, and we can't do that, but we also feel bad if we don't. That is, if I'm a little bit upset, then I feel I must not be, so I make it even worse. ELLIS: Yes, the secondary disturbance is worse than the primary. The primary is, "I must do well and I'm no good if I don't," or, "You must love me and you're no good if you don't." But the secondary one is, "My God, I feel anxious, I feel depressed, I feel angry, as I must not, as I should not, as I ought not be." And you get anxious about your anxiety, depressed about your depression, guilty about your anger, and then you really -MISHLOVE: Then you go into a panic state. ELLIS: That's right, and then you're not able to really correct the primary. And so in RET we first get you over your self-downing about your disturbance, then we go back to the original disturbance, showing how you mainly, largely created it, and how you have the power within you to think differently, act differently, and feel differently, and undo it. MISHLOVE: A good deal of the philosophical aspects of this, I suppose, has to do with the labels that a person applies to themself: "I am a horrible person." ELLIS: Right, and we quote general semantics -- Alfred Korzybski, a genius, not a therapist, who said, "When we overgeneralize we render ourselves unsane." So we are against overgeneralized thinking, which again is one of the cores of human disturbance. MISHLOVE: So you would spend a lot of time, if a person thinks that they're a horrible person, saying, "Well, maybe you did a horrible thing, but that doesn't mean you're always a horrible person." ELLIS: Right, and you're never a good person. Because if you do a good deed -- save a child, for example, from drowning at the risk of your own life -- that's a good deed. But ten minutes later you might kill somebody, or steal, or lie. So you're a person who does good, valuable, selfhelping, and bad, unfortunate, self-defeating things. You are not ratable. We teach people and show them how to not rate themselves. They're being only what they do -- their performances, their deeds, their acts. MISHLOVE: Consequently, I suppose, when they're angry at someone else, not to damn another person, no matter what they do. ELLIS: Right. One of the main derivatives of the musts is, "You must do well as I think you must, and if you haven't done what you must, you are a totally rotten individual, and you

deserve, again, to never get any joy on earth and maybe roast in hell for eternity." So we are against damnation of you, of other people, and the universe. MISHLOVE: This must involve, in a sense, an unconditional acceptance of whoever might walk into your office, no matter what they may have done in their lives. ELLIS: Right. We and the late Carl Rogers had unconditional positive regard or acceptance for people. But we also teach them, which I'm afraid Carl did not, how to regard themselves -- how to teach themselves to always, under all conditions at all times, no matter how badly they act, or who doesn't adore them, to accept themselves, just because they're human, just because they're alive. Period. MISHLOVE: I guess that aspect of your work is what has caused many people to label you profoundly humanistic. ELLIS: Oh yes, and I am. One of my best and most popular books, published by McGraw-Hill, is called Humanistic Psychotherapy: The Rational-Emotive Approach, which is a little different from some other so-called humanistic approaches. MISHLOVE: Well, when a person is really all worked up, in a state of panic, as it were, do you find that disputing with them is effective when they're in that heightened aroused state, or are there other techniques that are more appropriate at such a time? ELLIS: We have many emotive, evocative techniques. One of them is accepting them ourselves, which is emotive. And we have Rational-Emotive imagery, where we get people to imagine the worst and then feel terrible, and then work on their feeling. We have my famous shame attacking exercise, because shame is the essence of much disturbance, where we get you and other people and our clients to go out and do something asinine, ridiculous, foolish, and not feel ashamed. Now don't get in trouble; don't walk naked in the streets or anything like that. But yell out the stops, if you're civilized enough in your city to have a subway, like we're civilized enough in New York. And stop somebody on the street and say, "I just got out of the loony bin. What month is it?" and not feel ashamed when they look in horror at you and think you're off your rocker, which they think you are but you're really not; you're being very much saner than they are. MISHLOVE: In other words, it's almost the opposite of positive thinking. You have people really confront their greatest fear. ELLIS: Right. MISHLOVE: And then in the middle of the thing that they thought would be the most awful thing that could ever happen to them, they learn that at least it's not totally awful -- that there must be something redeeming about it. ELLIS: Right. I got this partly because at the age of nineteen I was scared witless of public speaking and approaching young females, and I made myself in vivo, alive, uncomfortably speak

in public, so I got over my fear, and now you can't keep me away from the public speaking platform. And approaching those females -- I approached a hundred of them, and I only got one date, and she didn't show up; but I saw cognitively that nothing terrible happened, and I got over my fear of approaching women. So we get people to act against their nutty philosophies. MISHLOVE: It's as if in a sense when a person thinks that things are hopeless, if you can use your approach to show them one tiny little ray of light, that that's an improvement for them. ELLIS: That's right. When you say, "I can't stand it," you mean, "I'll die of it," which you won't, or, "I can't be happy at all if you reject me, or I fail an examination." We show you can be happy at all; you can often be very happy, despite the failure, despite the rejection, and therefore nothing is really that hopeless. MISHLOVE: One of the techniques that I see in your work that strikes me as quite interesting, and a little unfamiliar to me personally, is the use of sarcasm. ELLIS: Right, we use humor. We're sarcastic about your ideas if you're upset, because when you're unhumorous you take things too seriously, and we reduce your ideas to absurdity. But we never laugh at you, only the way you think and act and feel, and we show you how to laugh at yourself and not to take yourself too seriously, which is what emotional disturbance, again, is. MISHLOVE: You've even written a whole series of little songs that you teach people to sing, to sort of sarcastically laugh at their own ideas. ELLIS: Right, rational, humorous songs, to show them that they can look at themselves and what they do and laugh at it, and not upset themselves about it, even when they fail. MISHLOVE: I suppose the interesting thing about your work, as a whole body of work, is that in today's day and age psychotherapy in general is controversial. Scientists question whether any form of therapy works, but there's quite a bit of research that suggests that these approaches that you've developed are effective with specific problems. ELLIS: We have about 250 studies of our therapy, mainly RET, but also what is called cognitive therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy, that shows when you get people to basically change their irrational thinking, they become significantly improved. Almost all those 250, about 80 percent or 90 percent, do. Then we have another 250 studies or so which show that what I call irrational ideas -- "You must do well, and it's terrible when you don't" -- when you endorse more of those, you're more disturbed, and the people who are psychologically and psychiatrically disturbed do endorse more of them, so they look like they're valid. These are experiments. They're not clinical studies, which are always prejudiced by the therapist, but these are objective studies. MISHLOVE: Some of the reports go rather far, in terms of being able, for example, to help a person get rid of a physiological addiction, like cocaine or alcohol, by working through the cognitive processes that they have.

ELLIS: Yes, cognitivlly and behaviorally. Especially in the San Francisco area, we have Dr. Emmett Belton, who's very good at this, and many of us are. We have a new book on the Rational-Emotive treatment of alcoholism and substance abuse, by myself and some of my collaborators, and we show people that they don't have to get themselves anxious, and when they're anxious they don't have to run for the bottle or the coke or the methadone or whatever they use when they're anxious, and they don't have to put themselves down for being alcoholic or drug addicts. We show them all those things, and if they change their basic attitude and then push themselves to not take the substances, then they can overcome it, and they overcome. MISHLOVE: In other words, you get at the belief system that they must have, that it would be awful if they don't continue with their addiction. ELLIS: That's right, because that's low frustration tolerance. The two main things that upset people are, one, "I have to do well and be approved, and I'm no good," but, two, "Things must be easy, and my anxiety or my despair or my depression must not exist, must not exist. I can't stand it, so I'll cop out by taking the alcohol or the drugs." We show them they can stay with the anxiety, define it as a pain in the neck and not as awful, as horrible, and then work using RET to give it up. MISHLOVE: But when a person's belief system is that they have to -- "I have to have this drug," and they say, "Well, physiologically it's a disease; I know I'm addicted," how do you logically dispute that? ELLIS: Well, the answer is that some people -- alcoholics, for example, do have a gene for alcoholism, so they find it most difficult to drink one drink and not finish the bottle. But they don't have to drink even one drink, and when they're anxious or depressed or anything, they can say, "Too bad, tough; that's the way I am. I don't have to cover it up or drink to feel better. I'm going to get better by facing my pain and then working through it" -- which again RET specializes in telling them how to do. MISHLOVE: In a sense it's very much influenced, I think, by the Stoic philosophers, in showing people how to lump life. ELLIS: Right, and St. Francis' philosophy, and Reinhold Neibuhr, and Alcoholics Anonymous: "Give me the courage to change what I can change, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two." That's one of the precepts of RET, which we got mainly from the ancient philosophers. MISHLOVE: Well, Dr. Albert Ellis, this has been an exciting half hour. We've got just a couple of minutes left, and I wonder if there's any final thought you might like to leave our viewers with. ELLIS: The main thing is to accept responsibility for what you do -- you do it, it doesn't do itself -- but never to damn yourself for other human beings, no matter how abominable or stupid or incompetent your behavior.

MISHLOVE: No matter how low you've gone, no matter what you've done in your life, you can respect and accept yourself as a human being. ELLIS: Right, and in a sense you can like yourself and dislike what you do, and acknowledge what you do, and again work to change it. But even if you never change, you are you. You are neither good nor bad. You are a person who does good and bad, self-helping and self-defeating things. Now, how do you stop it and change? MISHLOVE: In a sense there's a paradox in all of this. It's as if you're telling people they have to face the worst, and in facing the worst there's always a ray of hope, there's always a sense of optimism. ELLIS: Right. Because you face it, because you don't put yourself down for it, because you see that with hard work and practice -- thinking, emoting, and behaving -- you can change. Because almost invariably you can. MISHLOVE: Well, Dr. Albert Ellis, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with truly one of the giants in the field of psychology. Thank you very much for being with me. ELLIS: It's good to have been here, Jeff. END

ADDICTION, ATTACHMENT, ANDSPIRITUAL CRISIS Part I: ADDICTION AND ATTACHMENT with CHRISTINA GROF The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is addiction and the spiritual quest. With me is Christina Grof, who is the co-creator of Holotropic Breathwork and the founder of the Spiritual Emergence Network. Christina is the author of The Thirst for Wholeness, and coauthor with her husband, Dr. Stanislav Grof, of a number of books including The Stormy Search for Self, Spiritual Emergency, and Beyond Death. Welcome, Christina. CHRISTINA GROF: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. GROF: A real pleasure to be here.

MISHLOVE: When we think of addiction, many people still don't feel that there might be a connection with the spiritual quest. In fact they almost seem as if they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. Yet it was, as you point out in The Thirst for Wholeness -- a phrase that comes from the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, something that took place many decades ago. He recognized, in a letter to the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, that there's a relationship between alcoholism and the spiritual quest. GROF: Yes, I would never have understood that there was a connection between the two, because they seemed really opposite ends of the spectrum. And certainly growing up, the image of an addict or an alcoholic was of some kind of low-level human being who had no self-control, kind of no ethical standards. That was the prevailing image, and I think it is still the prevailing image in some people's minds. MISHLOVE: We sort of struggle to say whether alcoholism is a moral illness or a medical. GROF: Well, there was a real revolution, I think, in the mid-fifties when the American Medical Association, among others, recognized alcoholism as a disease. And that kind of opened the door to treating addiction as something more than a moral or ethical problem. You know, now we weren't bad people trying to be good; we were sick people trying to get well. I of course think that it's beyond that. Of course there are the physical manifestations of addiction, particularly chemical addiction. There are the emotional-mental-social problems, aspects of addiction. But I also now understand that there's a deep spiritual part to addiction, and that the addict is really looking for something, and looking for it in the wrong places. MISHLOVE: Many spiritual thinkers, and I suppose particularly in Buddhist philosophy, suggest that all of our longings, our attachments, and our addictions are ways in which we try to fill an inner emptiness that has to do with our alienation somehow from the divine. GROF: And I think that's very much the dilemma of the addict. When I began my own recovery from alcoholism, I immediately saw the connection between addiction and spirituality, but also suffering. There's a Buddhist idea that the root of all suffering is attachment, and I began to think that the addict or the alcoholic is simply an exaggerated form of the rest of us as we deal with attachments -- that every human being has attachments, something that they cling to or hold onto, but not every human being is an addict. And so an addict is kind of on the very far end of the spectrum of the rest of us. MISHLOVE: Although it seems as if our definition of addiction is changing daily. GROF: Yes, yes, and I think that's a very good thing. I hate to think, if I had gone into recovery from my own addiction thirty years ago, what the atmosphere would be like. So it is changing, and I think a lot of that change is coming from the grassroots level, from people who have struggled with their own addictions, who have come into recovery, who are supported by a community of other people who have also made that journey and are discovering that this is about quality of life; this is about the spirit much more than the physical or medical implications of addiction.

MISHLOVE: Of course there are those implications. Some people just have strong attachments, and other people get addicted, and perhaps there are genetic factors or family factors that are involved in that. I think the interesting thing for me about alcoholism as a model of a classic addiction is that on the one hand, while we tend to look down on people who are alcoholics, when they go through the process of recovery they have the opportunity to enter onto a path of growth, a path of integrity and spirituality, the discipline of which might be compared to a monk in a monastery. GROF: Absolutely, absolutely. And people who have no interest in so-called spirituality or in traditional religions will go through a process of hitting bottom, of giving up, of surrendering, and from there there's nowhere to go but up. And a lot of people that I see who are in recovery and have been in recovery for some time are following a path of recovery the result of which is an incredibly improved lifestyle, but also a deep wisdom that comes, and a deep understanding that is like someone who has been doing a specific spiritual practice for some time. MISHLOVE: Your case is a unique one, because you were already a rather well known figure in the field of transpersonal psychology before you began to enter into a process of recovery from alcoholism. GROF: This is true, and it was very humiliating for that very reason. I thought of myself as a transpersonal person; I thought of myself as a spiritual person. I've been drawn to spirituality ever since I was a child. When I became an alcoholic I had a spiritual teacher; I was meditating, I was identified as this devotee of someone on the path. And that actually became part of my denial system -- you know, how could I be a lowly alcoholic, how could I have a problem with this sort of mundane stuff, because I was such a spiritual person? But I was a very unfortunate alcoholic, and had to go through the process of coming to terms with that, of hitting bottom, of realizing that I wasn't all that different from anyone else who had my same problem, and from that place of humiliation, humility to begin to live my life in a much more honest way. What happened was in the process of hitting bottom I did have a profound spiritual experience -- not in a church or a synagogue, but in a treatment center, and it was what I had been looking for for a very long time. And so it began to show me immediately that there was this deep connection between the spirituality that I had always sought out and also this yearning inside of me that I had mistakenly filled with alcohol. MISHLOVE: I suppose your case is unique, in that there had been so much preparation in terms of the spiritual work you had been doing, and then you were able to sort of use the process of recovery from alcoholism in combination with that background, to come to a point where now you're the author of a book about it. GROF: Well, it was both a help and an obstacle, because I had to really become ordinary. I had spent a lot of time in kind of non-ordinary worlds and being interested in the spirit, and I had to get right back down to ground zero. And then what was very surprising was that in the recovery community there were spiritually-based recovery programs, and I became familiar with, for example, the twelve-step programs, and I began to realize that something like the twelve steps contains within it the same wisdom as other spiritual traditions that I'd been attracted to. It was in much more ordinary kind of grounded language than a lot of the traditions I'd been interested in,

and there was this large community of people who had been doing the work who knew how to guide me that I could ask questions and ask for support. And it was like coming home. MISHLOVE: In other words, if we look at Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs, which are the major programs in the Western culture that are treating these problems, the cure for alcoholism is a spiritual path. GROF: I think so. I mean, there's the reality that people can't improve the quality of their life unless they stop doing their addiction. So first of all, take care of the physical problem, stop the addiction, work in a very down-to-earth way with doing that. And then once that's kind of established, begin to work on -- I see addiction as a mosaic, that there's the physical, the emotional, mental, social, and also the spiritual. And I think they all need to be addressed in order for successful recovery. So some people will get into their recovery and in about four or five years they will begin to discover some underlying issues -- emotional issues, or family issues, or abuse issues -- that they hadn't allowed themselves to feel because of the buffer of their addiction. So those need to be attended to. But then there is also the spiritual, and I believe so strongly that unless the spiritual aspect of addiction and addiction recovery is addressed, that the quality of recovery is really limited. MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose it's very risky, when there are so many unique individuals out there struggling with these issues, to suggest that one model should fit all. GROF: Right. MISHLOVE: And it's very presumptuous for me or for you or anyone to tell somebody who's going through the agonies of recovery, that, "Oh, this is a spiritual path you're on." GROF: Right, right, exactly. They'll say, "What do you mean, spiritual? This doesn't feel spiritual." You know, "I'm craving my drug." That's where the wisdom of the community comes in -- to be able to talk regularly and listen regularly to people who have had the experience and who may be further down the road than we are, and to learn from them. And then just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I like what the twelve-step programs say about one day at a time. You know, let's just deal with this present moment as best we can, and then we'll see what tomorrow brings. MISHLOVE: Well, one of the key aspects of the twelve-step program, as I understand it, is the idea of surrendering to a higher power, the understanding that at the level of the ego we're out of control. GROF: Absolutely. MISHLOVE: We don't have power over our addiction; our addiction has power over us. And if we're going to gain mastery of our own lives we have to call upon something larger than what we normally think of ourselves to be.

GROF: Absolutely. And in this way it's really not different from many other spiritual traditions which require some kind of surrender of the ego. There's a lot of confusion, I think, with that particular step, of how do I let go. I remember hearing a man saying, "You know, for the last forty years I've been taught in my society that as a man I should be powerful. And now you're asking me to become powerless?" Or people who have had a history of abuse or oppression in some way, who have struggled to gain some sort of power; they will say, "You're asking me to give up the power that I have worked so hard to achieve?" The irony is that by stepping aside as an ego, that there's a deeper power that's just right there waiting, and it's that power that people are then able to tap and use in their healing and recovery. MISHLOVE: And I suppose one of the other ironies of all of this is that many people find, under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, that it brings them closer to a kind of -- I think you use the term pseudo-mystical experience. They believe it gets them in touch with their larger self. They believe that they find God in the bottle somehow. GROF: Well, this is what William James recognized to be true, what Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous wrote about, this kind of pseudo-mystical experience. What Bill Wilson said is that addicts and alcoholics are seekers. They want to know about the mysteries of God and life, but they've made the mistake of looking in the wrong places. I hear it all the time from people in recovery. You know: "When I took my first drink, when I took my first drug, when I had my first sexual high, when I felt that first rush of power, that was my first spiritual experience. And then I spent the next ten or twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years trying to recapture that, and instead was spun further and further out of control into addiction." MISHLOVE: And I suppose, if one looks closely at all of the spiritual literature, one of the pervading themes in every culture is the ability to discern a genuine experience from a pseudoexperience. GROF: Yes, I think that's true, and unfortunately I think one of the most tragic examples of that is the pseudo-spiritual experience. I've seen so many lives that have been ruined. It becomes a very self-destructive path, when it could be something so evolutionary. MISHLOVE: I suppose part of the tragedy has been that in our culture, when people first experience that taste of something extraordinary, something larger than themselves, they often don't have a context for it. It may never occur to them that what their soul is really yearning for may be a way of life, a larger sense of being. They may actually think that it is the alcohol, or it is the particular drug, or it is the sexual thrill, that's creating it. GROF: I think that's true, and we are a quick-fix culture. You know, we want instant gratification at every turn, and what this kind of spiritual quest requires is a long-term commitment to some sort of spiritual life, to practicing a certain set of principles, to doing certain kinds of spiritual practice, whether it's twelve-step practice or Buddhist meditation or Christian prayer, and that gradually over time one's life changes dramatically.

MISHLOVE: I suppose it's fair to mention in passing at least that in some ancient societies -- the rites of Dionysius, or the rites of Bacchus -- inebriation, intoxication of various kinds were integrated into a temple, an ongoing spiritual community. GROF: Yes, and I've wondered, what is it that was different about that culture than about ours? It seems to me that in that context that there was a mythology, there was a kind of cultural understanding and wisdom and support, where these kinds of rituals could be integrated into the community as a whole, and also an understanding that the spiritual experience is something important and valuable. You know, I think until the last couple of decades our culture lost that, and we have been regaining it very quickly. MISHLOVE: At the height of our Western materialism. Of course, there's always been a spiritual movement here or there, but there is a sense in which the culture as a whole was moving towards a kind of secular materialism, and spiritual experiences were totally denigrated. And yet we've always talked about spirits when we drink alcohol. GROF: Well, that's the thing. It's like we're reaching for the spirits rather than the Spirit with a capital S. Another thing that you mentioned, Jung's letter to Bill Wilson -- another thing that Jung wrote in that letter was his formula for the treatment of alcoholism was spiritus contra spiritum, or the use of the Spirit, with a capital S, against the ravages of the spirits. And I believe that that is a very -- even though he was talking about alcoholism -- that this is a useful formula for any kind of addiction. MISHLOVE: But the fundamental principle is that if you can discover at the deepest level what we're really yearning for, what we're really searching for, and if we can replace our substitute gratification with something authentic, we have a chance of really building a life again on a more solid foundation. GROF: Absolutely. And I've heard a lot of people -- a lot of recovering addicts, and others -talking about this kind of free-floating yearning for something, some missing piece in their lives. Whatever it would be, what it would be would help them to feel all right, as though they belong here. And unfortunately they tried to fill that sense of emptiness or incompleteness in the wrong ways. MISHLOVE: You felt that yourself as you went through your recovery, and I think there's a great irony, because here you were already meditating. You were already on a spiritual path. Could you talk a little more about your process? GROF: Well, again, I was certainly involved in my spiritual life before I became actively alcoholic, and it was during a very chaotic time in that spiritual life that I began to use alcohol as a tranquilizer, really, to kind of medicate some of the inner chaos, and then became a full-fledged alcoholic. In those years I was kind of addicted to my spirituality in a way, using it as a way to escape pain, using it as a way to keep myself out of my everyday life, in part.

MISHLOVE: Well, there are many pitfalls and pathologies amongst people who pursue a socalled spiritual path. You know, there are so many ways that we have of dodging whatever the real issue is for us, and looking good at the same time. GROF: Well, I think I was doing some of that. I mean, I think I had also a very serious, real intent. But it wasn't until I hit bottom with my drinking, which in a sense was the surrender experience I'd been looking for in other places -- really, completely letting go as much as I could at that time. And it was then that I discovered a more solid, down-to-earth, daily practice, and that spirituality really became more and more integrated into my everyday life. I see spirituality as something that is part of everyday life, not as something that is separate. MISHLOVE: Now, as we use the term spirituality, it means so many different things in many different contexts. But I suppose in one sense we could strip it from all of its cultural baggage, and say ultimately what you're dealing with is confronting yourself at a deeper level; that we spend so much of our daily life filling our time with various activities and satisfying our attachments and addictions, and what it seems to amount to is kind of avoiding something within ourselves -- perhaps that sense of alienation. GROF: I think you're right. The spiritual experience, or spirituality, to me has to do with direct experience; it has to do with an experience, as you say, of some deeper source, in ourselves and possibly in the external world. MISHLOVE: And when you give up an addiction, then you're confronted with what it was that was pushing you. GROF: Yes. And this isn't about sitting on the mountaintop in bliss and white light all the time. As you know, the spiritual path is very gutsy, is very painful at times. It requires a lot of courage, a lot of commitment at times, and can be joyful and wonderful and rewarding in the long term. I certainly wouldn't trade any of my path for anything. MISHLOVE: Well, it's wonderful that you can say that, and I know at the same time you're not encouraging anybody else to follow you. GROF: Oh no, no, no. I certainly would not recommend -- let's emphasize that -- addiction as a way to find one's spiritual life. It's too dangerous. We read in the paper every day the consequences of addiction and the number of deaths as a result. So this happened to be my path. It was something that happened to me, and I feel very fortunate to have lived through it and to have gained from it. MISHLOVE: You mentioned the humiliation -- in fact you even write about how humiliating even at the time it was, to spend the days with your spiritual teacher and then come home at night and start drinking. GROF: Yes.

MISHLOVE: An interesting thing you wrote about was the sense in which people often confuse low self-esteem and a kind of humiliating self-image with spiritual humility. GROF: Yes. Well, I think that so-called spiritual humility, that sort of pseudo-spiritual humility, can be a cover for low self-esteem or a sense of shame -- you know, someone who's focusing constantly on other people. You know: "Don't think about me. I'll take the smallest piece. I'll spend my life taking care of you and devoted to you." There is a truly selfless spiritual aspect to that, but I think also there's the shadow side of that where people can use their spirituality, or use that sense of humility, to cover low self-esteem. MISHLOVE: Well, it's so subtle, what we're talking about. You know, the very word spirit ultimately means the essence, the innermost part, and it's always subtle. It always seems to be that whenever you think you understand something true about spirituality, there's always the dark side, or the ridiculous or perverted side of that very same understanding. GROF: Well, it sometimes seems to have this strange sense of humor. There's both the very clear, light side, and there's also this kind of dark side. I think it helps to maintain a sense of humor, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. MISHLOVE: Well, Christina Grof, you've been very courageous in sharing with the public at large the agonizing journey that you have gone through in recovering from your own addiction -courageous both because of the suffering, and also because you were already a public figure in high esteem at the time. I really appreciate your sharing that with me and with our audience. GROF: Thank you, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: Thanks for being with me. GROF: It was a real pleasure. Thank you. - END JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is "Spiritual Crisis." With me is Christina Grof, who is author of The Thirst for Wholeness. Christina is also the co-creator of Holotropic Breathwork and the founder of the Spiritual Emergence Network. With her husband, Dr. Stanislav Grof, she has authored several books including Spiritual Emergency, The Stormy Search for Self, and Beyond Death. Welcome, Christina. CHRISTINA GROF: Thank you, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. GROF: Real pleasure to be here.

MISHLOVE: Spiritual emergency, or spiritual crisis, is in many ways a relatively new term in our modern vernacular -- now, because of your efforts, quite widely used. But I suppose one can say, historically speaking, in medieval times and ancient times, it was well understood that there were crises along the spiritual path, or crises of awakening. GROF: Yes, and I think anyone who is familiar with the lives of the mystics or the saints, or even the life of Jesus, of Mohammed, that there were these dark times -- the walks in the desert, the difficulties, the struggle, the wrestling with the divine -- that appear in many different lives. And what I've come to understand is that this is a very common part of the spiritual path. It might not be as extreme as some of the statements in the lives of the saints, but for everyone who seriously embarks on a spiritual path there are times of walking through the desert, as well as times of great reward. MISHLOVE: Well, of course there can be times of soul searching, times of doubt. But when you talk about spiritual crises, often there's a physical component to this. GROF: Yes. Well, I like to talk about both spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency. Spiritual emergence is a natural capability of every human being -- to emerge into their spiritual self, to emerge out of the sense of limitation as an individual into a more expanded sense of self, and that this kind of spiritual identity gives sacred underpinnings to a person's life. And so spiritual emergence can happen easily; for some people they might not even notice that it's happening, and after a period of five or ten years they look back and say, "I really have changed." Spiritual emergency is something else. This is spiritual crisis. This is a time when the experiences, when the physical states that you mentioned, when the insights come very rapidly, and a person sometimes in that situation has trouble coping with their everyday life, and for a while may even need to step away from some of their daily responsibilities to give attention to this inner process that's become very overwhelming. MISHLOVE: It seems ironic in a sense that, on the one hand, one might say that a life in which every moment feels blessed and joyful might be considered the natural state of the human being; on the other hand, we sure sometimes have to go through an awful lot to allow ourselves to have that. GROF: Well, this is true. Wouldn't it be nice if this kind of happy, natural state were always available? But I think, from what I've seen, a lot of it has to do with the ego, with resistances, with an unwillingness to open to our true potential, for whatever reason -- self-doubt, a sense that we might not deserve what it is that's trying to happen, and many other reasons. MISHLOVE: There's a whole energetic phenomenon associated with it. In the Hindu tradition it's sometimes referred to as the rising of the kundalini, the coiled serpent energy at the base of the spine that rises up and activates the chakras, or various centers of psychic awareness, along the way. And this sometimes -- in fact in your experience -- can be a very disruptive, even painful, process. GROF: Very disruptive. The kundalini awakening is the context that I've been able to put many of my experiences into in order to understand it. It was a metaphor that works for me. When it

started, it started for me with the birth of my first child. So there I was, in a hospital, lying on my back giving birth, and suddenly this enormous spiritual force got going in me. I didn't know it was a spiritual force at the time. It felt like being out of control. It felt like there were a lot of tremors, a lot of strange breathing that started to happen, kind of in spite of my best intentions. And I was both excited and very frightened by what was going on. This certainly was not what they had taught us about in Lamaze childbirth preparation. And that's how it began. I've spoken with other women where this is true. This is not the only place that the kundalini awakening happens. MISHLOVE: Of course childbirth is, I think, by every account, as close as one can imagine in many ways to a sacred experience. GROF: Well, it is. And it also can be a kind of physical-emotional emergency in a way. I mean, it's a tremendous point of stress, and we've found out in our research into spiritual emergency that very frequently when this process gets going in people, whether it's a kundalini experience or some other form of spiritual awakening, it's at a time of stress or a time of loss, emotional or physical stress. It may be when a person has a disease, or just has had an accident, or is grieving the loss of a job or a mate or a parent. Then this awakening can start. And as you say, it has very physical form sometimes. MISHLOVE: It seems to me there's a real delicate line between the kind of experience that occurs in which you can say to yourself, "Oh, this is horrible. I'm really suffering, but I know there's a lesson in here for me. I can learn from this, and when I'm finally on the other side of it I will be a larger, wiser person," as opposed to the kind of experience where you say, "My God, I am really suffering. I just can't wait till it ends," and there is no lesson; the only hope is to end the suffering. GROF: Well, and I think you can feel both of those things at different stages in a spiritual emergence or emergency situation, because sometimes there is a sense of such hopelessness that you lose the perspective that this is a lesson and that I'm going to come out of this different. A lot of times that will happen around what we call the ego death experience, where everything feels as though it's dying. And what's happening in that kind of an experience is that all of the old structures, all of the old ways of being, the unsuccessful ways of being, are coming to an end, and it feels literally as though, well, this is it. And in that place it's a real sense of hopelessness and despair. Again, another irony is that if the person is able to open up to that experience, to be there with the experience, that just on that other side of despair and hopelessness and dying is a whole new way of being. MISHLOVE: It reminds me of, I think, one of the accounts of the Crucifixion, in which Christ's last words are said to be, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" right before the resurrection. GROF: Yes, and actually when I was involved in my own spritual-emergency years, which were -- it was about twelve years of real kind of emergency difficulty, inner chaos -- I thought a lot about "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" in various stages. It felt as though whatever resources I had previously had, had disappeared. And yet, when I could surrender to

that state and say, "OK, I don't know what else to do. Take me," then right on the other side of that was all kinds of spiritual help and nourishment. MISHLOVE: Well, there are some people in the psychological-psychiatric community, people I suppose such as R.D. Laing, or Arnie Mindell, who would maintain that every crisis is kind of a spiritual process through which we grow -- every potential psychotic episode. Do you subscribe to that view? GROF: Well, I think you can see it from many different perspectives. You know, there is the very general perspective, which is this is all a spiritual crisis -- you know, the whole life process is one long spiritual crisis or one long spiritual path, if you want to call it that. When my husband and I began to focus on the area of spiritual emergency, we put some framework on it for practical reasons, so that we could distinguish what is what we would call a spiritual emergency, a crisis of being, in a sense, and what is true mental illness, what is a psychotic experience. And we, in talking about spiritual emergency, never wanted to say there is no such thing as mental illness. So for practical purposes we try to distinguish between the two, and a lot of that has to do with style, or the attitude with which the person is treating the experiences. MISHLOVE: The person who is having the experience. GROF: Yes. MISHLOVE: In other words, there is some existential choice in all of this. Even a schizophrenic could make a commitment to turning it into a spiritual experience of some kind. GROF: Well, I'll tell you the difference in styles that we would distinguish. Somebody who is willing to somehow see this as an inner process, who may have great difficulty at times turning inward and going with the process, but still by and large will say to you, "There's something really powerful happening to me. These are the experiences I'm having." You know: "I feel like I maybe lived before, or that I'm connected with this source of energy, and I'm having all kinds of mythological kinds of experiences. Have you ever heard of this? How do I work with this?" It's a very different attitude than someone who is externalizing it all. You know, it's not about them in any way, it's about the external world. They're paranoid. It's about the CIA and the person who's bugging their home. MISHLOVE: In other words, I suppose in the most pragmatic of terms, some people are very responsive to treating their condition as spiritual emergency, and others are simply not. GROF: Well, I think so, and I have talked with many people who have had a so-called spiritual emergency in real crisis situations where they were scared, their family was scared, they went to the local hospital or their local psychiatrist and were admitted into a psychiatric ward. And they told me even though they received all kinds of psychiatric labels or drugs, that something in them knew that this was not mental illness, that this was something else, and that after they got out of the hospital, they continued to treat it in some way as an opportunity for self-exploration.

MISHLOVE: I suppose that already requires a certain level of self-esteem that not everybody has. GROF: I don't know if it's self-esteem or whether it's just that there is -MISHLOVE: An intuition perhaps. GROF: An intuition, or -- yes, it's kind of an experiential quality to it, that if they are somehow able to hang in there and stay with the process, that they are in the process of some monumental change in their lives. MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose on the one hand we might get people who are having a genuine spiritual crisis who become misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, put in a hospital and given a lot of drugs to suppress their symptoms, rather than to work through them; and perhaps on the other hand you might have people who are experiencing, for all intents, a psychotic break, who end up in the hands of a transpersonal therapist who tells them, "Oh, this is a spiritual awakening; you're so fortunate," and they never quite are able to cope. GROF: Well, I think both of these things exist. What I would like to see, and what I think has already been happening, is that the person in that situation has a choice. You know, if they come to the doctor or the therapist and say, "I just want something that's going to make this go away. I don't want to deal with it. Give me something," then maybe the best indication is tranquilizers and hospitalization. But if the person really sees it as an inner process, wants to work with it, wants guidance through it, wants support, maybe without medication and psychiatric intervention, that that should be also available to that person. What would be necessary in that situation would be some kind of a therapist or psychiatrist with a broad enough conceptual understanding that if there's an intense spiritual experience, or archetypal or mythological experience, that they would be able to support that. MISHLOVE: And fortunately there are more and more. GROF: Fortunately there are more and more. MISHLOVE: Of these people. Well, you mentioned that you spent twelve years struggling with a spiritual emergency that fit the kundalini model. Can we talk more about the details of what that was really like from the inside? GROF: Well, let me say something abou the kundalini. You mentioned it -- that the yogis see the kundalini, the spiritual energy, as feminine, that it is available to all people, that it lies dormant in all people, and that through spiritual practice or through contact with a teacher or just spontaneously, that suddenly this sleeping spiritual energy can be released through the system, and it travels through the system, kind of cleansing, opening the person to their spiritual self. It sounds very simple, but it can be very demanding when that happens. For me, I think that when this kundalini process got going I was very blocked, I was very resistant, there was a lot of cleaning out to do, and I was scared. So I kind of dug my heels and resisted the experiences much more than I wish I had, and I think that's part of what made it so difficult. I had wonderful

support through it, but it was just my own resistance that made it difficult. There were a lot of physical pains in different parts of my body. It was almost as though, as the spiritual force, the kundalini, was hitting against different areas, trying to open it up, that it would result in pains of different kinds -- temporary blindness for a while, strange eye problems and headaches. MISHLOVE: Times at which I think you described it as if you felt you might be dying. GROF: Yes, yes, it felt sometimes as though -- and really, in a lot of ways, the old Christina was dying. The part of me that wasn't operating successfully in the world was dying. The limited, materialistic part of me was dying, in order to open up to a much broader sense of who I was. MISHLOVE: And of course I'm sure there were concerns that maybe you were really physically ill. GROF: Oh yes, and my strategy was that I would go to the doctor if ever I was concerned, and I would not say I'm involved in the kundalini awakening, but I'd say, "Here are the symptoms I'm having," and I'd get the tests and find out what I didn't have, and we never did find anything. And then I would work with the process. There were also emotional surges. The people who write about the kundalini talk about the physical kriyas, or the physical releases. There were also emotional releases; so suddenly, as kind of a pocket of anger or fear or shame would open up, those would come into consciousness, and I would have to work with those to kind of process them. So I see it as a kind of purging process. MISHLOVE: Some of the traditions, I think, talk about the ten thousand visions that can occur, back and forth between heaven and hell. GROF: Oh yes, and I certainly had my share of those. MISHLOVE: Well, the classical antidote to the agonies of the kundalini is discipline, a spiritual discipline, a yoga practice. GROF: Well, and I talked with various spiritual teachers during this chaos, because I found that when I was in the middle of this there were all kinds of tremors and visions which kept me from being able to do a sitting meditation practice, for example, or something very focused and disciplined. And the answers I got were that maybe it was important for a while, while it was very disruptive, to suspend that kind of a discipline, and instead the discipline became to surrender to whatever it was that I was given on a particular day. MISHLOVE: Just surrender to your own inner process. GROF: Um hm. And the spiritual practice was waiting right there for me when the process itself calmed down enough so that I could start focusing again. MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose if we step back for a moment and look at what is spiritual practice, what is yoga, there are many different facets of it, and certainly at any one time in your life you

can't practice them all; but the postures, the meditations, are just one part of yoga. Another part is a kind of surrender, an opening of the heart. GROF: Um hm. Well, and I think it requires a certain flexibility to be able to respond to wherever one is in the process. For me it was very important to have some good guidance, to have some teachers along the way who knew about this process, who could reassure me, tell me I was fine, and this wasn't craziness, that this was in fact a spiritual awakening that was going on, and then to give me some ideas about what to do next. MISHLOVE: At that point it's a question of taking it a day at a time. GROF: Exactly, exactly. One of my big mistakes was that I began to medicate myself with alcohol, and I've talked with other people where this has been the same story, so that I severely compromised this awakening for a number of years there. MISHLOVE: We did talk in an earlier segment about alcoholism and its relationship to the spiritual path. Now we're at a point where partially what you're saying is that in your case the development of alcoholism was in response to the kundalini arising. It was so intense you felt the need to find a way to tranquilize yourself. GROF: Yes. Well, there were certainly other aspects to my alcoholism, but definitely that was a major factor. MISHLOVE: So now we're at an interesting point, because there's a sense in which the antidote to alcoholism, and the antidote to kundalini, begin to interpenetrate each other. GROF: Yes, and as we said in the earlier program, my strong belief is that one of the major antidotes to addiction is some kind of spiritual path, some kind of spiritual life, as well as doing the other aspects of recovery. For me the real turning point in my spiritual life was coming into recovery from my addiction, and it's been like a continuation of the kundalini process. Somehow, with that surrender at the bottom of my drinking career, a lot of the chaos of the kundalini settled down, quieted down, smoothed out, and now that force is available to me in other ways -creativity, for example. MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose it didn't have to be alcohol, but it seems as if what you're saying is that sometimes when you're going through a pitch of awakening, and especially in the context of our modern culture with all of its stimulation and possibilities, that in order to really find our core we need to, or we often do, at least, go through major crisis, or bring ourselves to major crisis. GROF: Well, I think that's true. And so how do we handle it is, I think, one of the all-important questions. Is there support? Do we have people we can to to talk about this? Because in the middle of it it's very confusing. I think people need to reach out at that point. Part of my work in the area of spiritual emergency has been to try in some way to provide that support. That's why I founded the Spiritual Emergence Network, and that's why I've worked hard to try to have a

network of centers where people can go, to go through the critical periods of their spiritual emergency. MISHLOVE: Centers, I guess, that can combine psychological-emotional knowledge, medical knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. GROF: Absolutely, yes. I mean, in some ways the best of addiction treatment centers can serve as prototypes for centers for spiritual emergency. The emphasis of course would be somewhat different, but there have been some very good residential treatment centers for addiction treatment, and I think some of the lessons that the addiction treatment people have learned can now be applied to those working in the area of spiritual emergency. MISHLOVE: Well, of course fundamental, as we pointed out in our previous interview, to the recovery process, in the twelve-step program is the notion of surrender to a higher power. And that seems to be pretty much part of the spiritual path of every culture. GROF: Yes, and in the spiritual emergency, in the kundalini awakening, to try to get the ego out of the way, step aside, and allow this deeper spiritual power, which is also part of who we are, to emerge. MISHLOVE: Each tradition seems to give it a different label. It could be the Atman in the Hindu tradition, or your spirit guides in a Western esoteric tradition, or your higher self in a transpersonal psychology tradition. GROF: The Holy Spirit. MISHLOVE: The Holy Spirit, or Jesus, or -- we have many, many languages for this, many, many cultural contexts. But what you're saying, when you talk about a spiritual context, is to see the common ground in all of those. GROF: Yes. And there have been many, many cultures throughout history who've recognized spiritual crisis, who have seen it as absolutely part of the path -- you know, some of the wise elders are ones who have been through that process, who can then help to guide and support other people who've gone through it. I think our culture has opened up to that need, and is responding. MISHLOVE: Well, it is amazing the way our culture seems to be responding to this spiritual thirst. Christina Grof, what a pleasure. GROF: Thank you, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: And thank you so much for being willing to reveal these deep and painful parts of yourself. I think it's a lesson and a blessing for all of us. GROF: Thank you.

MISHLOVE: Thanks for being with me. GROF: It's a real pleasure. - END -

THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY with STANISLAV GROF, M.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is the birth trauma. Is it possible that the experiences of our physical birth have conditioned our attitudes towards life today, and even our personality? With me is Dr. Stanislav Grof, a former professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, a former chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute, and a former scholar in residence for fourteen years at the Esalen Institute. Dr. Grof is the author of LSD Psychotherapy, Beyond the Brain, and The Adventure of Self-Discovery. Welcome, Stan. STANISLAV GROF, M.D.: Thank you. It's nice to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, it seems as if the birth trauma itself might be viewed as the archetype or the epitome of all subsequent traumas that the human being might ever experience in life. I think it was viewed that way originally by Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst. GROF: Yes. For me some additional dimensions emerged over the years, but certainly the process of birth seems to be one of the very significant factors in human life. We have in our work discovered some dimensions that seem to go even beyond that, which we now call transpersonal. MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose, if one viewed the human psyche as consisting of the personal realm, based on one's life experiences, and the transpersonal, which deals with archetypal patterns and spiritual sources beyond one's own personal life history, that at least insofar as we're talking about personal experiences, the birth trauma must be considered primal. GROF: Yes, it's an extremely important factor, but at the same time it functions as a kind of gateway between those two dimensions that you mentioned. MISHLOVE: The doorway between the personal and transpersonal. GROF: The personal and the transpersonal. And it's very interesting that the experiences that people have as they're dealing with the birth trauma combine two elements, and that's the experience of being born, but also the experience of dying. So in some sense it's the beginning of human life and the end of human life, so it makes a lot of sense that these experiences are a boundary between the personal and the transpersonal.

MISHLOVE: As I recall, Freud made a great deal of the notion of regression back to a womblike experience of oceanic bliss, and many critics of contemporary mystical, psychic, magical, and shamanistic traditions often dismiss them by saying, "Oh, this is just a regression back to the womb." I guess you see that view as somewhat narrow. GROF: Yes, I think there is also another tendency, represented for example by Ken Wilber, that puts tremendous emphasis on the difference -- that we have to differentiate, although there might be some similarity between just a regression into the infantile stages, whether they are early postnatal or whether they are prenatal, and the mystical, the transpersonal dimension. MISHLOVE: Wilber has called that, I think, the pre-trans fallacy, saying that we should not confuse prepersonal experiences in the womb with transpersonal experiences, which I guess might be viewed as more cosmic. You seem to think that they're more similar than Wilber gives them credit for. GROF: Yes, I think that his emphasis is a little too extreme. He presents it in a way that almost seems linear -- that you have to first develop full integration of your personality before some of these other dimensions open up for you, and that they are somehow fundamentally, qualitatively different. I see it much more that a person who is going through a transpersonal opening, a spiritual opening, goes through a process that combines regression and progression. In some sense you go back and you have to complete the unfinished things from your history, and at the same time new dimensions are opening for you. MISHLOVE: What you seem to be saying is there could be something very positive about getting in touch with the infantile side of our nature. GROF: Yes, I think it's very significant, whether it is working through some of the traumas that have imprinted us, that have programmed us, or whether it's discovering some of the very useful dimensions of a childlike experience of the world. MISHLOVE: I know when I personally think about my own state in the womb, and try and imagine it -- as I was reading your most recent book, The Adventure of Self-Discovery, I began asking myself how I relate to the experience of being in the womb. My sense was that there's a very blissful quality to it for me -- a sense of oneness, a sense almost of cosmic unity -- that perhaps in my life colors a lot of the work that I do and my approach to things today. But you point out that for other people that same sense of oneness, of merging, can have a negative side. It can be sort of disoriented, schizophrenic, no boundaries. GROF: Yes, if you look at it statistically, if you work with a number of people, there is certainly a whole spectrum of experiences, and the sort of psychological dimension of that experience really reflects also the biological spectrum. I mean, the obstetricians know that there are pregnancies which are very good, which I would call physiological -- where the mother seems to be in a good biological-physiological condition, she seems to be in a good emotional condition; her circumstances -- let's say her marital life, her social life -- are satisfactory. Under those circumstances the pregnancy could certainly be a very positive experience for the fetus. But there

are also pregnancies where for a long period of time it's not quite clear whether the fetus is going to survive. There are states which involve toxicity of the womb; there are states where the mother can be seriously ill. The mother could be under some kind of chronic pressure. She could be under constant stress during pregnancy. She could attempt to abort the child, so there could be imminent miscarriage, attempted abortion. Some of the pregnancies can be under very, very bad circumstances. For example, we have done a lot of work with people in Germany whose prenatal life was running at the time of the Second World War, when there was bombing, there were tremendously traumatic things happening. So if your prenatal life was as good as you think it was, you're certainly very lucky, because that's not something that has to be that way. MISHLOVE: You've developed, in your work as a personality theorist, the term Coex, to refer to condensed experience. It seems like you're referring to the lens through which we perceive our life, through which we create our life -- that people tend to focus on some types of experience and to filter out other types of experience. You tend to suggest, as I understand your theory, Stan, that these Coex patterns that each individual has are very much predicated on certain types of perinatal experiences -- perinatal meaning either before or right after birth. GROF: Yes. Let me clarify first what I mean by a Coex system. In traditional psychotherapies there's the idea that we have experienced a number of traumatic things in the course of our life, and that it's kind of a mosaic of trauma, whereas if you work on these past issues using experiential psychotherapy -- whether it's with psychedelics or some powerful non-drug techniques -- what you find is that these traumatic memories seem to form certain kinds of constellations. So for example, when somebody has problems with the self image, in this kind of work what can come up is a series of traumas that have damaged that person's self image, that come from different periods of that person's life, and they create a kind of psychological constellation where the connecting factor is the quality of the emotion. Sometimes it could be also a quality of the accompanying physical feelings. This kind of constellation functions in the unconscious, and when the individual is under the influence of that constellation, it colors the self-perception, self-image of that person, attitudes towards the world, certain specific forms of behavior, and so on. What is fascinating here is that each of those Coex systems seems to be anchored in a particular facet of the birth trauma. MISHLOVE: And then you suggest that there are four basic perinatal matrices to which the Coex systems might be anchored. GROF: Yes. What I found, when people in their own processes, in their regression, reached the level of birth, I was noticing four very distinct patterns of experience -- clusters of experience characterized by specific emotions, by specific psychosomatic manifestations, by a certain kind of imagery which was very specific for each of these clusters. It was actually people themselves who started relating them to the specific stages of the biological birth process, and so I extracted somehow the experiential patterns from people's accounts, and started referring to them as basic perinatal matrices. MISHLOVE: We've already touched on the first of these when I mentioned the experience of oneness in the womb. How would that, for example, in your experience, affect later life development?

GROF: That depends very much, as I already mentioned, on what the experience was like. So if that experience was predominantly positive, and if, let's say, under the influence of later experiences, the individual is pretty much in tune with this memory -- in other words, later experiences confirmed it or reinforced that particular way of being in the world -- then the individual would have first of all a sense of unity with the environment, a sense of being a meaningful part of human society, being a meaningful part of nature, being a meaningful element in the universe, and having a sense of a certain kind of flow -- so a sense of some basic security in the world. What seems to come with it is also a very natural sense of spiritual awareness that's behind the everyday world of separation, which means individual people, objects, and so on. That individual has a sense of underlying unity, of oneness. And that, of course, is essential for all the mystical traditions -- to be aware of the fact that beyond the world of separation there is some kind of underlying unitive field. MISHLOVE: It's almost as if you're suggesting it might be easier to become a mystic if one has had a healthy prenatal experience and a healthy birth experience. GROF: Yes, you would in some sense almost have a natural sort of sense of mystical awareness or mystical being in the world. Then of course if that was a very bad experience -- if it was a toxic womb, if this was an unwanted pregnancy, if there were attempted abortions and things of that kind -- that would create a basically paranoid attitude towards the world. We have to realize that the mother really represents, first of all, the first sample of a meaningful relationship; but being in the womb also represents somehow a sample of the experience with the entire world. That womb is a prototype of the experience of the world. MISHLOVE: The amniotic sac becomes like the universe itself for the fetus. GROF: Yes. I mean, this is the total experience of existence, is happening within that particular environment. So in a sense that experience imprints somehow some basic attitudes toward people, toward nature, towards the universe in general. You know -- is the universe friendly? Can people be trusted? Can you be dependent and secure at the same time? MISHLOVE: So I suppose in a sense if one perceives the universe as somehow unfriendly, it might be healthier or better for the person at some stage of their development to be able to feel separate from it, rather than joined to it. GROF: Well, that's something that develops later, that people differentiate from this kind of unitive experience. They develop a sense of differentiation, but at the same time it is as if this basic unitive matrix remains with them, so there is that sense of awareness, of separateness, but at the same time a sense of connectedness with everything. MISHLOVE: The second basic perinatal matrix that you describe is one of being trapped in the womb -- I guess at the time right prior to birth when there's pressure to escape from the womb, but yet the possibility of doing that is not yet available. GROF: Yes, what I call the second matrix really reflects the situation when suddenly this environment, which when there was a good womb was nourishing, was secure, suddenly

becomes hostile. There come first chemical changes, suggesting there is some kind of change happening, and then they are translated into actual mechanical contractions of the uterus. So suddenly that environment becomes oppressive, becomes threatening. We know that with the contractions of the uterus there are also constrictions of the vessels that bring blood to the fetus, so it also involves periods of suffocation, because oxygen comes through blood. So there is an element of emotional threat and also real biological threat, depending on how difficult the delivery. MISHLOVE: And the concomitant attitudes towards life, if someone becomes sort of fixated or anchored to that stage of perinatal development, might be one of helplessness, I suppose. GROF: Yes, it's a prototype of a victimized position -- being totally alone, being cut off from meaningful contact with people, with nature, having a sense of alienation, a sense of loneliness, and also the feeling that the universe is basically hostile. MISHLOVE: Why do you suppose someone would become anchored at that level of development as opposed to the first stage? GROF: It's a very good question, because obviously, unless we were Caesarean born, we have been through all the stages, and we see that certain people seem to be under selective influence of one particular matrix. I believe that one of the very significant factors here is the predominant quality of the postnatal experience. In other words, let's say a person was brought up in a situation that was victimizing -- let's say in a family that was kind of a closed system, where there was a lot of emotional, physical abuse, and at the same time the individual couldn't fight back -- this seems to reinforce or perpetuate the victim role that was first experienced to an extreme degree in the perinatal process. MISHLOVE: In other words, a very traumatic experience in one's later development will then cause someone to emotionally reach back to the source experience that was similar to that. GROF: In some sense a kind of mechanical model for that. The postnatal experiences create kind of bridges between the contemporary conscious experience and the memory of birth. If the postnatal experience was good, then there again is something that we can describe in terms of a mechanical metaphor, something like a buffering system. There's this overlay of good experiences. That material is still there, but it's not as relevant, it's not as available. This would be also the situation that I described earlier -- somebody who had a good womb, and then a series of positive experiences, starting with good bonding, a good symbiotic relationship with the mother during nursing, a childhood that was secure, and so on -- that person would be living in such a way that the predominant quality of life systematically reinforces the original experience of the good womb, whereas somebody who is living in a situation where in childhood there is loneliness, there is deprivation, there is cold, there is hunger, there is pain, and so on -- that person would be as if constantly reminded of the experience of the second matrix. MISHLOVE: I suppose it might be possible then, say, for a person who has had a healthy childhood, a healthy prenatal development, lived a positive, normal life, if that person were

thrust into a terrifying situation -- a catastrophe or a war, for example -- that might reactivate or reopen the early memories of being trapped in the womb. GROF: Yes, it's very important, you see; you can see all kinds of combinations. Somebody can have, for example, a very good womb and a very bad delivery. There could be a very loving mother who wants the child, but the pelvic diameters are very narrow, and for reasons that are totally beyond the mother, the delivery becomes a very difficult experience. Possibly in the extremes the child might almost die. Or there could be an easy birth and terrible postnatal experience. So we are talking here always about certain basic foundations which are laid in the early perinatal period, and then postnatal events that will selectively reinforce or cover up the different aspects of the perinatal experience. MISHLOVE: Your third basic perinatal matrix involves the actual process of birth -- the fighting or struggle to emerge from the womb. GROF: Yes, the most important distinction here is that in the second matrix there are contractions of the uterus, but the cervix is closed. So the child is sort of caught as if in a no-exit situation, in a kind of claustrophobic world where there doesn't seem to be any solution. Each of the contractions of the uterus opens up the cervix to a certain extent, until the dilation reaches such a degree that the continued contractions then actually propel the child. So suddenly there is a movement, or a certain perspective opens up. So the second matrix, to make it very succinct, is suffering without perspective; the third matrix is suffering with perspective. MISHLOVE: So instead of feeling lost in helplessness, one becomes instead locked in a struggle. GROF: Yes. You see, the basic pattern which is imprinted here is, "The world is extremely dangerous, and you better be strong, you better be tough. This is the law of the jungle; you have to fight for your existence." But you don't feel victimized anymore. It's not completely hopeless; you're just simply in a very dangerous situation. MISHLOVE: There are some negative sides to this. As I recall you mentioned that this phase might also be an anchoring for such things as sadomasochism. GROF: Yes, there's another dimension which is not very easy to explain -- it would take a while -- but this experience in the third matrix has also a very, very powerful sexual type of component. And we know, even from postnatal life, that there seems to be a built-in mechanism in the human organism that translates extreme suffering, extreme pain, and particularly suffering that's associated with suffocation -- that would translate it or transform it into a powerful sexual type of arousal. So we know, for example, that people who tried to hang themselves and were rescued in the last moment, they would describe that they suffered at first, they choked; and then suddenly there came very powerful sexual arousal, and if it lasts longer, that sexual arousal can even transcene into mystical, spiritual opening, which we see, for example, in martyr deaths -people who are put through incredible tortures and suddenly they transcend and they experience rapture, ecstasy.

MISHLOVE: Well, this seems very much related, in a sense, then, to the fourth basic perinatal matrix which you mention, which is the actual process of birth itself -- sort of like a death and rebirth experience. GROF: Yes, when it's completed. But the third matrix itself is just the element of struggle. MISHLOVE: It's not quite complete; there's not resolution yet. The person is still locked in this unresolved conflict. GROF: Yes, it's very interesting because this experience can become ecstatic, but it's a very peculiar kind of ecstasy, which I call volcanic. It's a Dionysian kind of ecstasy. MISHLOVE: It sort of reminds me of the religious martyrs, for example, in the Islamic and Christian faith, who whip themselves and torture themselves to achieve ecstatic states. GROF: You find it in the history of religion as the so-called flagellants -- people who torture each other, torture themselves, in order to transcend. Also clinically you find, as you mentioned already, sadomasochism. You see, there are people who have to suffer in order to experience certain ecstatic sexual feelings. So it's this peculiar kind of mixture of pleasure and pain. And then when birth comes, when we start talking about the fourth matrix, then there is also a sense of ecstasy, but it's a very different kind of ecstasy. I call it oceanic ecstasy that can come, and that's an experience where you feel ecstatic, but at the same time you feel extremely relaxed, you feel serene, you feel tranquil. There's not this sense of a sort of volcanic storm or rapture. MISHLOVE: It sounds almost like a return to the basic blissful aspects of your first matrix. GROF: Yes. You see, when an adult relives birth, then what typically follows is a return into the womb. So the fourth matrix gradually changes into the first matrix, and biologically there also seems to be a deep connection between, let's say, the peace that the child experienced on the breast of a good mother, and experience in the womb. So it's as if after birth you can reach the state of the symbiotic union with the mother, which is postnatal, which is during nursing, and then suddenly it deepens and it starts having the qualities of being back in the womb. MISHLOVE: I suppose the difference, then, between the fourth matrix and the first is that the fourth is somehow more integrating. It would encompass the notion of helplessness and the notion of struggle and contain it within a blissful state, rather than just pure bliss without any concept of struggle. GROF: Yes. What comes often, you see, is a redefinition of our basic experience of life. That means you remember, of course, all the suffering, all the pain, but at the same time you get some kind of meta-perspective. In some sense there is a deeper reality which you can build on or which you can trust. In other words, being in the body, being incarnate, means that you're going to have some tough times. It's not always going to be easy, but somehow there's a predominantly positive attitude -- I mean, life is worth it; consciousness, being conscious, is a fascinating experience.

MISHLOVE: I gather what you're suggesting, as we look at these four basic stages or matrices associated with perinatal experiences, is that that each of us is in some way perhaps anchored to one of these four stages, and that we could understand ourselves better if we were able to see those dynamics in our own life. GROF: Yes, and it's a little more complex than that, because, as you mentioned before, we all have been through the four stages. MISHLOVE: All four. GROF: Yes, and we have also been through all kinds of things postnatally. MISHLOVE: Stanislav Grof, we're out of time now, so we'll have to cut the program short. Thank you so much for being with me. GROF: It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you. END

POSSIBLE HUMAN, POSSIBLE WORLD Part I with JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore human and cultural potential. With me in the studio is Dr. Jean Houston, a grand master in the field of human potential. Dr. Houston is the director of the Foundation for Mind Research in New York. She is the director of the Human Capacities Training Program, a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and was chosen the Teacher of the Year by the National Association of Teacher Educators in 1985. Dr. Houston is the author of twelve books, including Mindgames, The Possible Human, The Search for the Beloved, The Hero and the Goddess, Godseed, and Lifeforce. Welcome, Jean. JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.: Thank you, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: What a pleasure to be with you again. HOUSTON: It's a pleasure to be here. MISHLOVE: Your career in human potential goes back a very long way, and I think there are many stories from your childhood that have to do with it. As a child you grew up knowing Teilhard de Chardin, and we can talk about that. But I think one of the most interesting things about your childhood is the remarkable father that you had who was a humorist and wrote jokes for Bob Hope --

HOUSTON: Everybody, everybody. MISHLOVE: And many of the great humorists -HOUSTON: Yes. Amos and Andy, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly -- all of them. And I went to twenty-nine schools before I was twelve, you know, because Dad was always on the road writing these shows. I mean, I would go to school in Biloxi, Mississippi one day and Bemidji, Minnesota the next. And in those days it was like literally going from Mars to Earth, the different realities. But I think I got interested in human potentials because of my father's career. I was just remembering how one of the most thrilling things that ever happened to me was when my father said to me when I was eight years old, "Hey kid, do you want to come and talk to Charlie?" -Charlie McCarthy, the dummy of Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist. MISHLOVE: I remember. I was very young at the time. HOUSTON: He wore a little tuxedo and was full of wise-cracking remarks. And I used to love to go and talk to him, because we would have these marvelously funny conversations, with Charlie sitting on Bergen's knee. And I said, "Let's go, Daddy." So we went, and there was Bergen in his hotel room, and the door was open. So we just walked in because we heard voices, and there was Bergen, talking to Charlie, with his back to us, asking Charlie ultimate questions: "Charlie, what is nature of life? Charlie, what does it mean to be truly good? Charlie, where is the soul?" And this little dummy was answering with the wisdom of the universe. It was as if all the greatest philosophical minds of five millennia were condensed inside that little wooden head and coming out of those little wooden jaws. And Bergen got so excited at these extraordinary, numinous answers that he said, "But Charlie, Charlie, how can we ever really know anything? Charlie, what or who is God?" I mean, no slouch he, for questions. And the little dummy would listen and then pour out these incredible gems of high crafted wisdom. And my father, who was an agnostic Baptist, got very embarrassed by these answers, and he coughed. And Bergen turned around and turned beet red and said, "Hello, Jack. Hi, Jean. I see you caught us." And my father said, "Yeah, and what are you doin'? I didn't write that stuff. You're rehearsing, aren't you?" "No rehearsal, Jack. This is real. I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers." And my father said, "But that's -- that's you, that's your voice, that's your knowledge coming out of that dummy's mouth." And Bergen said, "Well, yes, I suppose ultimately it is. But you know, when I ask him these questions and he answers, I haven't got the faintest idea what he's going to say, and what he says astounds me with his wisdom. It is so much more that I know." And I could feel -- I as a little child, eight years old, felt as if my whole future was condensed in that moment -- that as we are, compared to the way we think we are, we inhabit such a tiny part of our reality, maybe the attic of ourselves, with the first, second, third, and fourth floors relatively uninhabited and the basement locked except when it occasionally explodes. And from that moment, my life, in a sense, my life course was set, because I knew that I had to devote my life to helping people access these extraordinary domains of knowledge, of potential, that we all have, but have shut ourselves off from. MISHLOVE: Since I mentioned Teilhard, I think we should also say you were gifted with a friendship with him as a young child, about the same age also.

HOUSTON: No, I was older. I was fourteen. I once ran into this Frenchman on the street and I knocked the wind out of him, and he said to me, when I was about fourteen, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" I said, "Yes sir, it looks that way." He said, "Well bon voyage, bon voyage." And I ran to school, and the following week I met him, and we began to take these walks in the park, and they were numinous. He would say, "[French accent] Oh, Jeanne, Jeanne, look, look, a caterpillar! Hm! Jeanne, what is a caterpillar, huh? Moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jeanne, feel yourself to be a caterpillar." "Oh, very easily, Mr. --" I called him Mr. Teilhard -- "Mr. Teilhard." "And feel your transformation. Oh, Jean, sniff the wind. [Sniffing] Same wind once knew Pre Jesus-Christ. [Sniffing] Ah, Marie Antoinette. [Sniffing] Ah, Jeanne d'Arc! Be filled with Joan of Arc." It was extraordinary. Everything was sentient; everything was full of life. He looked at you, he looked at you as kind of a cluttered house that hid the Holy One, and you felt yourself looked at as if you were God in hiding, and you felt yourself so charged and greened with evolutionary possibilities. And I used to go home and tell my mother, "Mother, I met my own man, and when I am with him I leave my littleness behind." And of course I found out years later, after he had died, it was Teilhard de Chardin I was meeting. MISHLOVE: It's an interesting phrase -- "I leave my littleness behind." HOUSTON: Leave my littleness behind, yes. MISHLOVE: It seems that for many of us -- I know in my own life -- at times we get so caught up in our littleness we forget there's anything else. HOUSTON: Well, we don't have time to do that anymore, do we? I mean, we are living in the most complex times in human history. I realize other times in history thought they were it. They were wrong; this is it. I mean, what we do -- in my travels around the world, which now are almost a quarter of a million miles, working in many cultures, in many, many domains of human experience -- I really discover that maybe we have ten or fifteen years of an open corridor to make a difference. Many people, all over the world, are really haunted by this. They wake up with a sense that they just cannot live out their lives as encapsulated bags of skin dragging around dreary little egos, and that all the walls are crashing down. I mean, we have extraordinary -- the membranes have cracked through as cultures begin to flow into each other. We are on the verge of a true planetary culture, with high individuation of individual cultures. Cultures are becoming more so, not less. The potentials of different cultures -- the potentials, for example, of an African culture that I have studied, which has no history of war, no neurosis as we understand it, incredible problem solving. And when I studied this culture in West Africa, and I saw how they solved problems -- they didn't say, "Uh, yes, what is it, A, yes, Subsection 1, 2, 3 --" No. First they danced the problem. [Singing] And then they sang it, and they danced it, and then they envisioned it, and then they drew it, and they talked about it, and they danced it, then they breathed it, and they all had the solution. Because they were operating on many, many frames of mind. In the harvest of world culture that is happening in our time, what we are gaining is not only different frames of mind -- thinking in images, thinking in words, thinking with our whole bodies -- but we are gaining access to the ecology of the genius of the human race. We are all becoming Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but accessing this incredible domain of the human genius, so that we discover, for example, that we are in a state of chronic education. I

have never met a stupid child. I have met incredibly stupid systems of education that diminish our ideas of ourselves, that give us a very limited, local notion, and we can't get away with it anymore. And we have incredible access to who and what we are. It's not for nothing that the whole earth as an image is in our mind at the same time as the whole brain, the whole, whole mind, and all these cultures converging, and -- what should we say? We gestate in each other. MISHLOVE: I guess there's a sense in which, if we look at the animal kingdom -- how each species manages to develop some unique quality of what an animal can do -- it's as if cultures each foster different aspects of what it is like to be human, what is possible for a human. HOUSTON: Yes, I think that is so. And now for the first time in human history, it's as if we have all these cultures that are coming together -- because of planetization, because of the rise of women to full partnership with men in the whole domain of human affairs, because we have such easy access to each other. By the year 2000 this is going to be a world of colossal busy-bodiness. Anybody will be able to call anybody. I remember a year and a half ago I was in the Orinoco, deep in the jungle, and out comes from the jungle a man, naked, who probably had never seen a wheeled vehicle, with a transistor radio clapped to his ear, probably listening to the ball game from Mexico City. So that we have this extraordinary interdependent world, and then of course we have the access to the understanding of human potentials. We're living in the golden age of the understanding of who and what we can be. MISHLOVE: Well, what you're saying is that we have access to all of the knowledge that's been accumulated in all of the cultures throughout the history of humanity. HOUSTON: And sufficient crisis and complexity and radical need to make use of this knowledge, which we did not have to do when we were just men and women in search of subsistence, or living within tribal or nation states. MISHLOVE: Isn't there also a backlash going on? HOUSTON: Of course there is. I mean, whenever you are on the verge of so much more, people say, "Oooohhh, uummm, I don't think so. No, no, back to basics. Back to fundamentalist fortresses of truth." Back to sanctifying of mediocrity. And also the incredible yearning for a pattern that makes sense, and we are in a time in which literally all systems are in transition. Everything has shaken down into chaos. Everything is breaking down -- standard-brand governments, politics, economics, religions, relationships. And we are probably in the greatest shaking up in human history. And so what we are seeing is the sunset effect -- you know, the sun gets brighter and blazes out before it goes down -- the sunset effect of all the traditional ways of knowing, seeing, being -- and a rising of fundamentalism. But I don't think that's going to last very long, because the world is simply too complex. I've often said we're educated for a much earlier era, not for the immense complexity of who and what we are in human history. And people are discovering that the need, the yearning, that I find literally all over the world, to become what we can be -- and that's one of the main reasons why we find myth rising all over the world, because myth gives us the kind of coding, in the story of ourselves writ large, as the hero and heroine of a thousand faces. It gives us access to a much larger story, and all of us are on the verge of becoming citizens in a universe larger than our aspiration and much more

complex than all our dreams. Myths are rising everywhere. I remember last year I was in India -I guess it was a year and a half ago. On Sunday all of India stops to watch the great television program of the great mythic drama of India, the myth, the Ramayana, the story of the young Prince Rama's search for his beloved wife who has been abducted by the demons -- the young prince Rama, searching for Sita. And I was in one of those villages, one of the 600,000 villages, and almost every one seems to have a television set -- one set. MISHLOVE: In the center of the village. HOUSTON: In the center of the village, and so you see people coming in with their water buffalo and leaving them, and taking the water jugs off their head and sitting down around the set. And I was sitting next to an older lady, and she was watching the story of poor Sita, just beleaguered and not being able to do anything for herself, and she said, "Oh, I don't like this story of Sita. She is too weak, she is too passive." I said, "Oh? What do you mean? It's a beautiful, elaborate story." "No, you see, my name is Sita, and my husband's name is Rama -very common in India. And my husband is a lazy bum and I do most of the work, and we've got to show that. We've got to change the story, change the story to see how strong women are today." And she was actually talking about how the myth had to grow. Well, after this beautiful, beautiful story, guess what followed it all over India on television? Dynasty! I was incredibly embarrassed. MISHLOVE: But it's a story about strong women. HOUSTON: Yes. She said, "Oh sister, why are you so embarrassed? Don't you realize it is the same story?" I said, "Well, how do you mean?" "You've got the good lady, you've got the bad lady; you've got the good man, you've got the bad man. They've got a beautiful house, they've got the beautiful clothes. You've got the war against good and evil. Oh yes indeed, it is the same story." She was absolutely right. MISHLOVE: Interesting. Well, you have traveled all over the world, Jean. You've probably put on as many miles as anybody I know. HOUSTON: Whoever lived, practically, at this point. MISHLOVE: You are called in as a consultant by many different governments. HOUSTON: Governments and human development agencies, the United Nations. MISHLOVE: Heads of state occasionally. HOUSTON: Yes, oh yes. More than occasionally. MISHLOVE: You're spreading the gospel of human potential everywhere. HOUSTON: Well, I work in a different way, though, you see. What I will do is I'll go and I'll live in a culture for a period of time. And I don't mean the Bombay Hilton, either, you know; I

mean, I will live in huts with the peasants and with the people of the land, and I will get to know many different strata of the society and get a sense of what is trying to happen. I'll give a lot of speeches too, you know, and then I'll hold a seminar, often with the leaders or the evocateurs of the culture, for perhaps ten or twelve or fifteen days. And we'll be locked up together, and I will start with their core myth, like, for example, with India it might be the Ramayana; when I was in Burma it was the life of Buddha, or something like that. And we will take these great stories and live them out as the drama of their own potentials. And I'll integrate a great many physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual processes and exercises that are key to the story, but are also keyed to the releasing of the potentials of the culture -- what can education in Taiwan be? What can a new social ethic in South Africa be? -- using these coded stories that often contain the multiple levels of what can happen. And it seems to work, and people then continue with this kind of work and take it and change the schools and the hospitals and the social systems. MISHLOVE: There's a great paradox, though, of you, the American woman, coming in and giving, in effect, their culture back to them. HOUSTON: I agree, and I don't know why it works, but it does. And also I don't look like them, you see, because I'm nearly six feet tall, and often they're rather small people. No, it's being a woman that is an advantage, because I don't come in telling them what to do. I come in as a deep listener, and also as a student. I've spent a lot of time learning as much about their culture, so I am as full of questions for them as they are for me. So it really is interdependent and is a mutual sharing. MISHLOVE: There is a wonderful story you tell me about your encounter in Australia with an Aborigine woman. HOUSTON: Yes, yes, that was wonderful -- several years ago. We were in the center of Australia, and she was showing me how to find food. And I said, "Well, how can you find food here? I mean, it's barren; there's nothing here." And she said, "What is it? You don't see? Look at these beautiful grasses. Sip this wheat resin. Ah! Isn't that beautiful! Look! You see that sink over there, mate? Under that, oh, look what we're going to find. Oh, a beautiful tuber! Ah, under that rock there -- oh, lovely mealy grubs! What a dinner we're going to have! How can you live seeing as little as you do?" How indeed? I mean, here she was leading my blind urbanity to see nature's secrets. And then I asked her, "How do we different human beings differ from the others -- from the koala bear, from the wallaby, from the kangaroo, the animals?" She says, "Why, mate, we're the ones who can tell the stories about all the others." And that is our humanity, you see -- that we tell the stories, that we see the larger picture, that we have access to the pattern that connects us. MISHLOVE: It's interesting that some of the most ancient, most primitive cultures -- and surely the Australian Aborigines are among -HOUSTON: Perhaps the oldest, yes.

MISHLOVE: They have that great gift of storytelling that's often lost to modern culture. Jung talks about modern man in search of a soul. HOUSTON: In search of a story is what it's more like, yes. That's already an abstraction, in search of a soul. Yes, you know, I think one of the problems is when we got the television set it replaced the hearth, didn't it? It was at the hearth that the grandparents or the elders told the stories, and the great chain of being between the generations was woven, and the wisdom was passed on. And now, you know, the grandparents have moved elsewhere, often south, and we're left with the television set. But we're also being given access, and more and more, to everybody's stories, to everybody's myths. And also the sense that we are now all in it together, in perhaps the greatest moment in human history, in which we are recreating the earth story. MISHLOVE: Well, here we are, living at a time where humanity as a whole is faced with its potential for self-annihilation. HOUSTON: Yes. MISHLOVE: And at the same time, these great myths are rising up, and there's this yearning for myth. And each myth has its own embodiment of a sense of the divine. And it's ironic to me, I think it's significant, that as we face our own potential death, that we are reminded of our divinity. HOUSTON: Yes indeed. I'm thinking now of the greatest Western myth. One of the key myths of the Western world is the search for the Grail. You find that is a very key myth, and in that story, the world is a wasteland. It has lost its story; it's lost its depths. And the Fisher King, who holds the secrets of the Grail, himself can only fish because he's so deeply wounded. And the knights from Arthur's court and the healers come day and night to try to help him, but nothing works. And one day the chosen knight, whose name is Percival, or Parsifal -- his name means "piercer of the veil" to the larger story, or Parsifal, "total fool," because the total fool, the great comedian, the fool, is often the piercer of the veil. But he's just had a Ph.D. in knightcraft; you know, he's learned too much, and he knows that a good and perfect knight doesn't ask too much. He stays quiet. So this Grail is being passed in his midst of the Fisher King, and he says, "Uh --," and he doesn't ask the question. And the next morning, after he wakes up, the castle is empty, and he goes out and spends somewhere between five to seven years doing his job with no passion -- so much like ourselves; we miss our great moments. We spend seven years doing what we're supposed to do, but with no passion, with no heart, and with no story. MISHLOVE: Because he failed to ask. HOUSTON: He failed to ask the great question, and it is only after he has accumulated a great deal of human experience and a great deal of extremely hard-won wisdom, and has cracked through the membrane of his own forgetfulness, that he is then able, in the course of the story, to go back to the castle years later, and this time he does not stand on ceremony. He goes and says, "Who serves the Grail?"; in some stories, "Where is the Grail?" The Grail appears. And then "Uncle, what ails thee?" -- the question of compassion. And instantly the Fisher King is healed, and the wasteland is healed. It begins to become green again, and budding and growing and

flowing, and a new energy, a new heart, is in the minds and hearts and beings of the people. No one had had enough passion for the possible to ask the great question: "Where is it? How is it? How am I part of it?" -- the Grail, the source level, the great patterns of existence that are beneath the surface crust of consciousness. Where is it, and how does it heal and whole? How do we see the pattern of reconnection into the domain of nature, of reality, of spirit? And that is why the world was failing, from lack of the passion to ask the great question. And I think it's the great Western story, and of course it has been renewed and is reviving all over the place in movies and films and in stories, because we are back at that place, that we are in a wasteland -- a wasteland of heart, of mind, of ecology, the holocaust of ecology; the diminishing of our resources. And we are now saying, "Where is it? What is the secret of nature? What is the secret of the heart? What does it mean to truly love? How can we find our sourcing again?" And the kind of work I do all over the world is essentially to say that the Grail is within. It is there. We have access to these capacities. It is now time for us to learn to use them. MISHLOVE: The wounding seems so significant here. HOUSTON: Yes. Wounding is critical to every great myth. Christ must have his Crucifixion, otherwise no upsy-daisy, you know. Artemis must kill him who comes too close; Dionysius must be childish and attract Titanic enemies and be ripped apart. Achilles heel; Odin's eye. MISHLOVE: But there is a sense too, now on this planet, there's such wounding of nature. HOUSTON: Such wounding. Oh yes. I mean, wounding of nature and wounding of ourselves. Most of us have somewhere between, I'd say, five to a hundred times the amount of sheer human experience of our ancestors of a hundred years ago. And this has rendered us very wounded; I mean, some of us are so full of holes we've become holy. But we've become incredibly available and vulnerable to each other in our wounding, in our sympathies, in our empathies. It's as if that through the wounding of the hard shell of ego, we are now reaching out and making connections, networking -- friendships, transformational friendships between men and women, between countries, between cultures. So the depths are rising everywhere. And in all the great stories the wounding was the entrance to the sacred. It was through the wounding that the depths could rise. And the depths are rising at the same time as are all the shadows, of course. MISHLOVE: Do you find in your journeys around the world that in the affluent areas, where people are very comfortable and maybe less aware of their wounding, that there's maybe less interest in asking the deep questions, like "What ails the --" HOUSTON: No. No, you'd think the answer would be that is so, but it isn't. I find that the asking of the question is literally pansystemic. It is Pangaia. I mean, it's as if the whole earth is asking, whether it be somebody who is living very simply in the center of Australia, but profoundly -and these primitives are not primitive; they are primal, they are filled with the consummate wisdom of forty thousand years -- or whether it is some sort of high-tech cyber-nerd, you know, in California. Everybody is living in a state of divine discontent and extraordinary outreach to the larger story.

MISHLOVE: You often use this phrase. When I ask you, "What is your work about? What is your real message?" you've told me in the past that it is simply this: This is the time. We are the people. HOUSTON: These are the times. We are the people. If not now, when? If not you, who? -- as Hillel said two thousand years ago. And all of us are serving as midwives, as evocateurs of the possible in each other. And we can only do it together. There's no such thing as a guru anymore. I mean, guru should be spelled "Gee, You Are You." And that's ultimately what my work is about. MISHLOVE: We have just a couple of minutes, Jean. Is there some final thought you'd like to leave with our viewers? HOUSTON: A final thought! What an extraordinary idea that there is a final thought. I think my final thought is there's no such thing as a final thought -- that we are really part of an ongoing story, a never-ending adventure; that these are the most exciting times in human history; that what we do profoundly makes a difference. But one thing that I advise people to do so that they don't get lost in their own loneliness is to find a few friends, and to start a teaching-learning community, an ongoing teaching-learning community, in which they grow together, in which they challenge each other, in which they do perhaps physical or mental or psychological or spiritual processes, so that they really keep themselves at the growing edge. Once they start they will know what to do. Margaret Mead on her death bed -- I was very close to Margaret Mead, and she said to me, "Forget everything I've been teaching you about working with governments and bureaucracies." And I say, "Now you tell me?" And she laughs; she says, "Yes. I've been lying here being an anthropologist on my own dying. Fascinating experience," she said. "There's no hierarchy here." And I realized that if we're going to survive and green our time, it's a question of citizens' groups, volunteer groups, getting together and creating ongoing teachinglearning communities. MISHLOVE: Jean Houston, thanks so much for being with me. HOUSTON: Thank you. MISHLOVE: And for those of you who've enjoyed this discussion, you'll probably want to know that there's going to be an additional hour with Jean Houston, following up on this conversation, as part of the Thinking Allowed Inner Work videotape series. Jean, thank you once again. HOUSTON: Thank you, Jeffrey. I've enjoyed it. - END -

POSSIBLE HUMAN, POSSIBLE WORLD Part II with JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello again and welcome. This is Jeffrey Mishlove, back with one of my favorite people, Jean Houston. Jean, as we were finishing up on the last segment, you were telling about the impact that Margaret Mead had on your life. How did you meet Margaret Mead? JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.: Well, she actually invited me to create a conference with her on women's education, which we did in Bath, England. And as I observed her behavior, I was fascinated. I mean, she was doing things that I had been studying for years. She was clearly thinking in images and thinking in words. She was thinking, as we call it, kinesthetically with her whole body. She was using her dreams. She would program her dreams at night to dream about what she wanted to dream, and the next morning she would use this material. She clearly had access to all kinds of frames of mind and states of consciousness. So I said to her, "You know, you have the most interesting mind I've ever seen. I would love to study it." She says, "Well, you know, that's very interesting. All my life, all my life, people have been interested in what I think. You're one of the first to be interested in how I think, so let's do it." And so that was -- what? -July of 1973. And then until virtually the day she died we worked together on many projects. I did study the way her mind worked, and discovered so many things -- the creation of a genius. Of course she was born with remarkable talents, but apart from that she came from a family who were almost all educators, and they felt that they knew so much about education that they refused to send her to school very much. So she was educated at homes, in terms of these new-fangled theories of Maria Montessori, and also William James, who said if you want to educate a child to the fullness of their capacity, begin by educating their percepts. So little Margaret, from the time she was a little, tiny child, was exposed to masterpieces of painting; great pieces of music -- you know, wound up on the Victrola; or interesting touches -- you know, corrugated metal, ice cream, fluffy things. And so she had this multisensory body. Years later I would say, "Margaret, where do you exist?" And she'd say, "Why, all over me, of course!" And she really was. If I say to some of my relatives, "Jasper, where do you exist?" "Why, I live in my head." If I ask my Sicilian relative, "Graziela, where do you exist?" "Ah! Right here!" Margaret: "All over me, of course!" So she was multisensory, and she was also taught to do whole processes from beginning, middle, to end, so that she would say to her mother, "Mother, would you show me how to make cheese?" And her mother would say, "Oh yes, Margaret. But you also have to watch the new calf that's about to be born." Now that's the whole process from calf to cheese. "Daddy, can I weave?" "Yes, Margaret. Let's go out and cut down several saplings and make a loom." And so she would learn to do the whole process. MISHLOVE: The organic interconnectedness of things. HOUSTON: Absolutely. You see, too many people today, they know the beginning of something, they know the end --

MISHLOVE: Or a piece in the middle. HOUSTON: Or a piece in the middle. But they don't have the whole process. They have no sense of the organic unity. They have no commitment to process. So in studying Margaret's ways of working with process I began to then work to put process back into schools, so the children would learn whole process, and not just be caught in little pieces of it. That's why we put art -- in many of the schools we helped to redesign the curriculum; we would put art back into the curriculum, often as the center of a curriculum. So a child would learn to weave and also learn about fractions at the same time. A child would learn musical notation and rhythm at the same time they would learn mathematics, you see. And these children did not fail, because you can't fail when you're putting art, rhythm, music, multisensory learning, because you're operating again on many, many different kinds of mind. And the children, if they could not think, if they were not natural verbal-linear thinkers, they might be kinesthetic-musical thinkers. If they were not kinesthetic-musical, they might be visual. So if you begin to bring a child into the full domain of his or her intelligence, and teach them whole process, you generally have someone who is a very successful learner. MISHLOVE: The view seems to be, then, that no matter how many mental blocks there might be, or inhibitions, or places where a person is shut down, there are always equally many doors that can be opened. HOUSTON: Oh, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more doors, you see. And it's the old, "In my father's house there's many mansions." There are many doors. There are many passageways. The brain-mind system is immensely plastic. It is extraordinarily accessible. I remember once I was invited in Brooklyn, New York to observe a team of teachers who were very good teachers, but who were working with what are called minority-group nonlearners. And I watched these teachers teach, and they were very good, but they were not reaching the children at all. And the kids went, "Aaaaahhh . . . ," you know. Well, at recess, in the schoolyard, these kids who were so bored and just not there and vacant in the classroom, when I watched them out in the schoolyard: "Hey, man . . ." "Yeah, man . . ." And they were brilliant kids. They were much smarter than I was. So I caught one of them; I said, "Hey, Tommy, what is this? Five plus three plus two." He said, "Oh man, get lost." So I said, "Hey Tommy, what is this? [clapping three, five, and two times]." "That's ten, man." I said, "Why didn't you tell me before?" He said, "Because you didn't ask me before. You thought you did, but you didn't." He was right. I was asking him a question in terms of Northern European notions of the nature of intelligence. I went home with him. His father was a jazz musician. He had learned all kinds of things, but in terms of the patterning being rhythm and music. So I went back to that classroom, and I said to the teachers, "What are they not learning?" They said, "Anything." "Well, like what?" "Well, like spelling." "Like what? Give me a word." They said, "Well, let's start with the proverbial cat, CA-T." I said, "All right." So I got the kids up, and I had them make a C: "[Rhythmically] C [pronounced K]--C,C--C,C,C--C,C,C--C,C,C." We'd get the sound going: "A--A,A--A,A--A,A-T,T--T,T--T,T." This went on for awhile. "Now close your eyes and see the cat, see the cat, runnin' around, see the cat, chasin' around, C,C--A,A--T,T." And by God, they got cat. And you might say, what about rhododendron, you know, or a longer word? Well, it doesn't make any difference. Once the learning takes place, then the brain-mind system seeks all kinds of things to wrap itself around, and the wounded learner is healed.

MISHLOVE: It seems that in our school system we've forgotten about the body as a learning instrument. HOUSTON: Pretty much, yes. I mean, we seem to be educating people to -- you know, the soul of a fine machine. Much of our education came out of creating situations in which people would make good factory workers -- you know, in the nineteenth century, Horace Mann essentially creating, based on the education of the Prussian officers, educating people to be on time, to be punctual, to follow directions, to do the right thing. And so the body became embalmed, as it were. MISHLOVE: There was a notion in the nineteenth century that the body shouldn't be felt at all. If you felt your body, that meant you were sick. HOUSTON: Unfortunately that's true. But of course what happened is that we then got an enormous amount of wounded learners. Now, the reason that that's not working and it can't work anymore, is that America has become a multicultural society. We don't have a melting pot anymore; we're not melting away people's ecstatic or cultural edges. I mean, Koreans are still Koreans, Vietnamese are Vietnamese, Hispanics are Hispanics, and we have to work with the genius of different ways of thinking and learning of many cultures, and integrate that into the schools. You know, as I said earlier, there's no such thing as a stupid child, but there are incredibly repressive, unicultural ways that children have become repressed. And this can't happen. In a multicultural society we're going to need multiple ways of learning, knowing, and doing. MISHLOVE: Well, I guess the trick is instead of thinking of the multicultural society that we have as something that's pulling us down, as some people suggest, to think of it rather as an asset. HOUSTON: It's an immense asset. Yes, it's thought of as being a non-asset, because we have not yet learned how to deal with it. But it is inevitable. The whole world is going to be multicultural within about a hundred years. I sometimes think, you know, that as species die off -- what are the present statistics? One every twenty-five minutes or something? -- it's almost as if human beings are creating new cultures and subcultures. Some of us are members of many cultures. You're a member of -- if I were to say, "How many cultures do you belong to?" MISHLOVE: Possibly a dozen. HOUSTON: Name some. MISHLOVE: Well, of course I have my Jewish background. But I'm a member of an academic culture. HOUSTON: All right; academic. Jewish background, Jewish culture. MISHLOVE: Right. I'm a psychologist.

HOUSTON: Psychologist culture. MISHLOVE: I have a specialty in parapsychology. HOUSTON: Parapsychologist culture. MISHLOVE: One of my great thrills is to have participated in Jean Houston's Mystery School. HOUSTON: Mystery School culture; very definite culture. MISHLOVE: I have a family. HOUSTON: Family culture. MISHLOVE: I belong to a community in California. I have a culture as a broadcaster. HOUSTON: Broadcaster culture. So we would easily come up with perhaps a couple of dozen. And each of these cultures is feeding you. Now, the problem is -- or the great opportunity -- is how to make these different cultures mesh with another person's twelve or fifteen cultures, and at the same time have access to your own depth culture. See, many of us are foreigners to our deep culture, the spiritual culture within -- you know, what I sometimes refer to as the beloved of the soul, of the deep culture. We often have been afraid of this deep culture, in fact have said, "Here there be monsters," because we're afraid of the immense depths that are within us, the culture of our own private interior space. And that itself is both a savage and beautiful country, and it is rising up, this deep culture, all over the world. As cultures are becoming more permeable, more vulnerable to each other, the deep culture of our own interior space is rising up to give us perhaps more access to the possibles both within and without ourselves. MISHLOVE: Well, Jung certainly talked about the collective unconscious that manifests in dreams as embodying all cultures. That's why he called it the collective unconscious. We share it together. HOUSTON: We share it, and we seem to have very similar patterns within this depth culture. But still within each individual I find that, you know, we're not flakey, we're snowflakey. Each of us has not only unique capacities of body, mind, of intelligence. Our brains -- our brainprints, if you will -- are ten thousand times more different than our faceprints. And if we get into the deep intrastructure of our psyche, that's even much more various, while it has some commonalities. MISHLOVE: Yes, yes. It's as if the complexity within us is so vast that we have no words or symbols even to express it. HOUSTON: Well, the problem of course is the English language. English is a harvested language. It's not necessarily an organic language. It's a language that grows out of many different languages that came together. And English tends to take on nouns, but not verbs. Really, you know, we have very few verbs compared to others. So what we need are languages

that have much greater linguistic flexibility in terms of ways and styles of being, acting, doing, having. And as we begin to get those, as I think we're going to be having in the next century, the language is going to change radically. I mean, if I were to recite for you -- would you like me to recite to you how English originally sounded? MISHLOVE: Yes. HOUSTON: It's very different. I mean, for example, the original -MISHLOVE: Chaucer. HOUSTON: Chaucer, Chaucer. Now, listen to how it sounded: "[In Middle English accent] Whan that Aprille with his showres soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour, / Of which vertu engendred is the flour; / . . . Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages." The rootes and the shootes -- even if you don't understand it, it rises up in the sap. I have little children in schools learning that, and then, by God, they don't fall back to: "What do you want to do?" "Oh, I don't know; what do you want to do?" Or Shakespeare's English. Now, Shakespeare's English was very flexible. "Now I am alone. / O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force this soul to his own conceit," etcetera. Now, you see, that was Renaissance language. And in the Renaissance, when everything is popping out, in which the world, the golden world within is flowing into the world without, and the world is becoming psychetized with the new images of the psyche that are rising, in that, the speech patterns were so different that it was as if the head became -- the brain-mind system became a kind of sound box. MISHLOVE: More of the brain is involved. HOUSTON: Oh yes, when you have these tremendous sonic reaches that you find in Renaissance language; whereas in American English -- well, I once had a friend in Belgium who spoke no English at all, and I said to her in French, "Would you imitate to me what American English sounds like?" And this was what she did -- she's a good actress: "[Unintelligible mumble] Washington floating . . . push oh boy . . . but wow." Sort of a flattened out mashed potatoes. MISHLOVE: Yes, like a constriction. HOUSTON: A constriction, and the lack of that sonic fluidity that really activates the mind and keeps you at an edge. I always have all my students have a wonderful time with the language, and going up and down. You know, when you look at Texas, central, where a lot of the energy has gone, say central Texas: "[Texas accent] Well now, I don't know now. I just think what we gotta do is we just gotta sorta get us all together and get us kinda goin'." It's up and down, up and down, up and down -- sort of like, you know, on a horse, but it carries the energy. MISHLOVE: There's a difference. People from Texas, they'll come up and they'll say, "Helllooooo."

HOUSTON: [Shouting] Hello there! How are you? MISHLOVE: How are you! HOUSTON: Well, I'm just fine! Oh my, you look cute today? Oooh! MISHLOVE: It's a whole different quality. HOUSTON: Yeah, it's a quality, but it's also an energy. It's a resonance, and it keeps you alive and vital and at your edge. MISHLOVE: We didn't do that in Wisconsin. HOUSTON: [Laughs] No. But I really think that great speech has to go back into the schools. They've got to really recite Shakespeare and Chaucer, and then their mouths become full of blood, and their mind becomes full of metaphor. And once they have a mind filled with metaphor -- I sometimes say, paraphrasing poor Mr. Browning, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a meta phor?" But when your mind is filled with it, then you have simply more hooks and eyes on the pluriverse. You've got more ideas, when you can really language things, when you can hold them in your lap. MISHLOVE: You said pluriverse. HOUSTON: A pluriverse. Yes, you can touch more of reality, and you can do more with it. MISHLOVE: It's as if our way of thinking, our theories, are constrained by our language. HOUSTON: Yes -- very Latinistic, grammatically limited. When I think, for example, of certain Mesoamerican languages, the old Mayan language, for example, it didn't really have subjectpredicate-verb, nor did it have time tenses. We are governed by time and by subject-predicateverb; but instead it was open, it was circular. And when you have a circular language, then it can sort of take in all kinds of realities. MISHLOVE: Well, it's interesting because the great mystics of every culture talk about reality that seems so different from the linear way. You know, they say all time is one; all space is one. And our language doesn't give us much opportunity to let that in. HOUSTON: Well, they always say that in the mystical experience, when a little local self dissolves into a much larger reality, in which we realize that we are nested within nested within nested and we're part of the great I Am, the categories of time are strained by the tensions of eternity, that eternity floods the gates of time. But then of course when you look in terms of just brain neurophysiology of time, the neurophysiology of time, the right hemisphere to all practical purposes does not know time. I can do exercises with people which have to do with rather righthemispheric exercises, in which they think in images, you know, or they think in metaphors, or in pictures. And they will have -- let's say I'll give them five minutes of clock time, let's say, to rehearse something pictorially, imagistically, in their mind. And I will tell them it will be equal

subjectively to all the time they need -- hours and hours and hours. Let's say they're practicing a Bach toccata. MISHLOVE: I can attest to this. I've witnessed you do this. HOUSTON: And inside of five minutes, it's as if they've had five or six or seven or ten hours. MISHLOVE: They come out of a five-minute hypnotic state and sit down at the piano and play a concerto for half an hour. HOUSTON: Or they can compose one in five minutes, you see. But the point is to get beyond the grammatical restrictions of time, which is a left-hemisphere form. And so I have found that most people can learn things much more rapidly, can create things much more deeply, when they enter into this right-hemispheric, imagistic kind of thought, with a slight alteration on the spectrum of consciousness. MISHLOVE: You talked earlier about Margaret Mead and your relationship with her. Wasn't this one of her great interests -- looking at what other cultures can contribute to a whole new paradigm for us, to understand our world? HOUSTON: Yes, harvesting the genius of many cultures. So that a dominant economic culture did not trash all other cultures. I mean, I used to see in the early days of the Peace Corps, where very well meaning people would go in and say, "Hello there, my little brown brother. Let me show you the American way of doing things." You know -- whooom! There would go three thousand years of culture out the window. Where what they could have learned -- what they could have learned, let's say, from aboriginal people's symbiotic relationship with nature; what they could have learned about ways of sleeping to use their dreaming successfully; what they could have learned about the way people created complexities and beauties, aesthetic forms of relationship; what they could have learned from cultures in which the whole use of personal psychology was so much greater. And they did not, and we did not. And I think that's one of the reasons why we were called the ugly Americans, because we came to give, but not to receive. And we now are in desperate need of reciprocity, and the whole world has -- the English weren't much better. And it's so ironic when you go to England now. You sometimes see signs in London saying, "English spoken here," you know; you go to the Heathrow Airport and you don't see any English faces. You know, they went out and they sent their empire all over, and then the empire has completely come back, so the English are now forced to be multicultural, as we are now too. It's a different ball game. It literally is a world for which almost no one has been prepared. But it is, as I've often said, the most exciting time. We are literally reinventing ourselves and the future. But we have a lot of help, because we have access to the incredible use of different potentials that come in from all over the globe now. MISHLOVE: You tell a very profound story about the last days of Margaret Mead, and her search for a new paradigm. I wonder if you could tell me that again. HOUSTON: Well, it was as she was dying, and she was saying, "I'm seeing things so differently. I'm seeing things so differently. I mean, I see literally a whole new architecture of sociology, and

I wish I could live longer to get it out." But she said, "But one thing that I'm seeing is that if we're going to survive and green our time" -- and that was the word she used. "It is not a question of our traditional use of governments and bureaucracies, but something much richer, much deeper, is trying to emerge. There is a greening power there, and I wish I could live long enough to see it. But it has to do, to start it, it has to do with people getting together. People know what it is. And it happens in some kind of mystery between people. And if you could just create citizens' volunteer groups, or teaching-learning communities" -- those were the words she used, teachinglearning communities -- "where people co-create, where they learn, where they empower, where they evoke, where they call each other into beauty and into excellence, in which they do" -- she said, "exercises like you do, Jean," -- you know, activating the brain and the mind and the spirit. "And then they take on projects to make a difference in the world." And she said, "And Jean, when its time is ready, you do that." And so I did, you know, my ongoing work, but then in 1984 I created something called The Possible Society, where we worked in -- what? -- seventeen different cities, and we created seminars, and we charged almost nothing for them. We had I think something like 1500 people up here in Sacramento, you know. And I used the cultural myths -- The Wizard of Oz, about the disempowered mind, the disempowered heart, the disempowered courage, and how we begin to green the wasteland. And then after working with exercises, showing people how to activate their mind, their heart, their spirit, to get the passion for the possible, how to make use of these many capacities, then we worked for a full day in small groups around education, or hospice centers, or working with the elderly, on taking this extended sensibility, extended capacity, back into the world to make a difference. And literally thousands of projects grew up in seventeen -- there were seventeen bioregions around these. And that's still going on. MISHLOVE: Yes. So your work involves stimulating other people to think about what they could do in their community. HOUSTON: Oh yes, absolutely. And acting locally and always thinking globally, because we are now global citizens whether we want to be or not. No, my work is not about some sort of galloping narcissism -- your own Atman grooving on your own dharma and things like that. It's really about becoming citizen volunteers in making the world work, extending the capacity so that we can profoundly make a difference. Because we are in this time in which what we do makes a difference as to whether we survive or whether we just go out as a kind of brilliant experiment that didn't quite work. MISHLOVE: I know there's this social aspect to what you're doing. I know many people who resonate to what I would think of as the sacred quality of the work. HOUSTON: Yes. MISHLOVE: How do the sacred and the social come together? HOUSTON: I think society is always redreamed and remythologized from the sacred. Whenever you have found the birth of new societies, it always starts with a spiritual basis. I suppose I'm something of a Platonist in this, that I believe that there are great patterns of possibility to which we have access, and that when we get to a place either of hyperstasis -- we get too static; r too

kinetic -- you know, it could be hyperkinetic or hyperstasis -- and thus so full of holes, we begin to have access to other levels of the solutions, to these different patterns that connect. I mean, when you look at the incredible harvest of knowledge that has come in our time from many cultures, from many societies, from history, from botany, from biology, from cosmic principles MISHLOVE: And it's accelerating. HOUSTON: And it's accelerating, accelerating so fast that we can't quite grasp the pattern. But beneath the surface crust those patterns are there. And what you find in the great mystics or the great seers or the great visionaries or the great co-creators is that they allow their minds to enter into deep ecology, as I would put it, and they seem to again have, because their senses or their spirits are simply much more vulnerable and available -- it's as if their minds have been coated, filled, with all these ideas, and then these great pulsing patterns of a deep world, of a deep universe, the great co-creative patterns that are yearning at the threshold of existence to enter into time, as if they are pulsed by these patterns, and somehow it begins to fall into place, and the great ideas for the restructuring of self and society enter into time. MISHLOVE: Enter into time. HOUSTON: Yes, from perhaps beyond -- from hypertime or hyperspace, from hyperdimensional reality, from the depth world, the archetypal world. Now I don't think those patterns are set. I'm not that much of a Platonist, to say that the archetypal world is set, and we just sort of get our orders -- "Yes sir," or "Yes ma'am" -- but that we are co-creative, that the universe is continuously exploring and inventing itself. But we are, each one of us, that particular focalization in the grid of space and time of the eternal mind-body that is expressing itself and in a state of continuous exploration. But I think we're at a tremendous jump time right now -- phase breakout, jump time, jump. And I think that what we're about to jump into is what I would call High-Level Civilization One. MISHLOVE: As opposed to? HOUSTON: Two and Three. And High-Level Civilization One is when suddenly we go planetary; that's what we're doing right now. And we become responsible for planetary governance, for biological governance. I mean, we're about to generate not just things, but whos as well -- you know, people. But we also need to extend our capacities and open up to these tremendous potentials, on a sensory, a physical, a mental, a psychological, a spiritual, a mythic -we have to change our story, deepen our story -- and a spiritual basis. And then I think in several hundred years we'll go into High-Level Civilization Two, in which we become responsible, quite simply, for perhaps the solar system. We may be terraforming planets, making planets viable, livable. I would say in a hundred years from now there will be perhaps -- what? -- maybe ten thousand separate biospheres going around the sun in separate orbits, but electronically linked, with ten thousand separate cultures being born. We're at that point almost now, jump time, in which we have to make paradise on earth and go up to heaven at the same time. And so we will have an extension of our physical, our mental, our spiritual capacities. We will become not schizophrenic but polyphrenic, orchestrating the multiple dimensions of ourselves. We will have

daily life as spiritual exercise. Our own personal myths will become larger, and I'd say a thousand years from now we'll join the galactic milieu, and we'll begin perhaps to create life and planets and be part of a much larger universe. But we're at that critical point of development, of that jump time, in which we join the larger universe. MISHLOVE: That vision seems to imply such responsibility to who we can become. HOUSTON: Yes, yes, and I think that we need that lure of becoming if we're going to have the momentum for the possible. And what happened is that we're still living out of visions that were cooked in ancient caves, or in -- perhaps that's not fair -- or cooked into universities dedicated to a much simpler life and mind. We had not been planetary. And what we're missing today, in terms of at least for many people, for billions of people, is we're missing the lure of becoming, because we are coming out of an age which is now at a point of total breakdown. Issues of survival are very radical, and radical is our need and our necessity, and we're at that incredible jump point. When I was a child, I used to love to go to the movies. You know, you'd go to the movies all day on Saturday. You'd come out and say, "Is it still Saturday?" But I used to stay through all the three pictures and the short subjects and the cartoons for one cartoon. It was the cartoon in which Mighty Mouse chases the cat up and down, all over the place, and then the cat goes over a ravine, over into an abyss, and begins to tread air over the abyss until it looks down and says, "Whoops!" -- you know. And I would throw my popcorn in the air and take chewing gum and throw it and shout, and my little brother would be so embarrassed. And it was so meaningful to me, that moment, because that moment was a prefigural event of a world I would meet in my adulthood, where all of us are that cat, in the middle of that ravine, saying, "Whoops!" over the abyss -- at the end of one era, not quite at the beginning of the next, caught in the parenthesis of time. We are the people of the parenthesis. But there is no richer or more potent time to be alive than the time of parenthesis, in which we literally begin to co-create the great whatever, to create the paradigm, the rule, the necessity, the new order, the new forms and patterns that are going to be the next part of our humanity. MISHLOVE: We need to learn how to fly. HOUSTON: Yes, in our minds and our souls, certainly. MISHLOVE: You work with many exercises that help awaken these perceptual talents and talents of integration that we've been speaking about. It's not just theory for you. HOUSTON: Oh no, no, I've thousands of exercises which I invent constantly. MISHLOVE: Perhaps this would be a good time to share with our viewers. HOUSTON: Oh? You'd like an exercise? All right. Well, let's start -- you know, with these mikes on we can't jump all over the place, so let's start with some one of the simplest. I often divide my work into the extension of the physical and sensory, then the extension of the psychological and interactive, the extension of the mythic and symbolic, and of the spiritual. But let's start with a simple sensory exercise, and one that has to do with what Margaret Mead could do very well, extend our perception. Would you be the guinea pig?

MISHLOVE: I'd be delighted. HOUSTON: And then I would ask the viewing audience to do the exercise at the same time. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a simple exercise which I'm going to do very rapidly for extending your senses, and then as you and the audience have the extended senses, I have a friend who came with me, Peggy Nash Rubin, who is a magnificent actress, and she's my closest associate and works with me all over the world. And I'm going to ask her to come up here and to do a tremendous poem by Stephen Vincent Benet which has a lot of metaphor and juice and fire in it, and let people pick up this poem -- not just listening or viewing, but to pick it up by sensing it and hearing and touching it and tasting it, pick it up on many levels, to be deeply enraptured, within the full sensory panoply by what is happening with this poem. Okay? So I would like you to imagine, Jeffrey, and you in the audience, I would like you to imagine that you are traveling into rooms of the brain, and each room is a different sense, so that you go first into the room of seeing, and you see that room, and it probably has a lot of garbage in it from your, you know, your just sort of taking your seeing for granted and not really seeing. And I want you now to actually physically cleanse that room of seeing -- the visual, it's actually the visual cortex. And would you cleanse it, and actually make movements and begin to cleanse it. And you're cleansing it, and it's getting bright and shining and full of life, and all the things that block the seeing are just being ridden, and you're cleansing it and it's getting clearer and clearer -- the room of seeing. And breathing deeply into that room of seeing, and it is bright and bright. And there is another door, and you go through that door, and it is the room of hearing. Oh, what a mess that is! Just all these baffles, you know, on the walls that are keeping you from hearing as fully and as acutely as you can. Well, there's a scrub brush. Begin to clean it. Open the windows. Throw out the old baffles. Make it bright and shining and full of a kind of wonderful sonic resonance, so that you can hear as deeply as you possibly can. Clean it up, clean it up, so that you have an acuity of hearing. And now there's another door. Go through that door, and it is the room of taste. Oh my, and that plaque on the ground! Scrub it up, get rid of it. Clean it up, clean it up. Breathe deeply, clean it up, so that your taste buds know the full range of taste -- spice and salt and sugar and butteriness, curry, all kinds of sweetness, and the varieties of a kind of extraordinary vegetable experience of green things and tough things and a wonderful variety of taste. Yes, and it's fully there, and going through the room, next room, and it is the room of smell. Oooh, what a wreck that room is! Old bottles of deodorant hanging around. Get the broom and clean it up and make it bright and shining so that you can smell things as wonderful. Wonderful smells -- a sea breeze, a pine forest, a rose garden, new-mown lawn, smelling, and that's a rich, full room. And then you go into the next room. It is the room of touch. Ohh, and that's all filled with junk. Well, get rid of the junk, get rid of the junk, so that you can touch, so that you can be touched, so that you can touch a baby's skin, so that you can touch, you can touch a rose garden, so that you can touch the bark of a tree, so that you can plunge your hands into warm sloppy mud. And all these senses, now begin to breathe deeply through all the rooms, breathing deeply, breathing deeply, breathing deeply. Very good. And now, as we fade to black, I want you to get up and just go there, and Peggy Nash Rubin will come in and we will hear "The Mountain Whippoorwill" by Stephen Vincent Bent. And all of you who are listening, and you too, Jeffrey, as you begin to listen, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it, be it. Listen to this extraordinary poem on all levels of perception, as Peggy begins.

PEGGY NASH RUBIN: Up in the mountains, it's lonesome all the time / (Sof' win' slewin' thu' the sweet-potato vine). / Up in the mountains, it's lonesome for a child, / (Whippoorwills a-callin' when the sap runs wild). / Up in the mountains, mountains in the fog, ' Everythin's as lazy as an old houn' dog. / Born in the mountains, never raised a pet, / Don't want nuthin' an' never got it yet. / Born in the mountains, lonesome-born, / Raised runnin' ragged thu' the cockeburrs and corn. / Never knew my pappy, mebbe never should. / Think he was a fiddle made of mountain laurel-wood. / Never had a mammy to teach me pretty-please. / Think she was a whippoorwill, askitin' thu' the trees. / Never had a brother ner a whole pair of pants, / But when I start to fiddle, why, yuh got to start to dance! / Listen to my fiddle -- Kingdom Come -- Kingdom Come! / Hear the frogs a-chunkin' "Jug o'rum, Jug o'rum!" / Hear that mountain-whippoorwill be lonesome in the air, / An' I'll tell yuh how I traveled to the Essex County Fair. / Essex County has a mighty pretty fair, / All the smarty fiddlers from the South come there. / Elbows flyin' as they rosin up the bow / For the First Prize Contest in the Georgia Fiddlers' Show. / Old Dan Wheeling, with his whiskers in his ears, / King-pin fiddler for nearly twenty years. / Big Tom Sargent, with his blue wall-eye, / An' Little Jimmy Weezer that can make a fiddle cry. / All sittin' roun', spittin' high an' struttin' proud, / (Listen, little whippoorwill, yuh better bug yore eyes! / Tun-a-tun-atunin' while the jedges told the crowd / Them that got the mostest claps'd win the bestest prize. / Everybody waitin' for the first tweedle-dee, / When in comes a-stumblin' -- hill-billy me! / Bowed right pretty to the jedges an' the rest, / Took a silver dollar from a hole inside my vest, / Plunked it on the table an' said, "There's my callin' card! / An' anyone that licks me -- well, he's got to fiddle hard! / Old Dan Wheeling, he was laughin' fit to holler, / Little Jimmy Weezer said, "There's one dead dollar!" / Big Tom Sargent had a yaller-toothy grin, / But I tucked my little whippoorwill spang underneath my chin, / An' petted it an' tuned it till the jedges said, "Begin!" / Big Tom Sargent was the first in line; / He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine. / He could fiddle down a possum from a mile-high tree. / He could fiddle up a whale from the bottom of the sea. / Yuh could hear hands spankin' till they spanked each other raw, / When he finished variations on "Turkey in the Straw." / Little Jimmy Weezer was the next to play; / He could fiddle all night, he could fiddle all day. / He could fiddle chills, he could fiddle fever, / He could make a fiddle rustle like a lowland river. / He could make a fiddle croon like a lovin' woman. / An' they clapped like thunder when he'd finished strummin.' / Then came the ruck of the bobtailed fiddlers, / The let's go-easies, the fair-to-middlers. / They got their claps an' they lost their bicker, / An' settled back for some more corn-licker. / An' the crowd was tired of their no-count squealing, / When out in the center steps Old Dan Wheeling. / He fiddled high and he fiddled low, / (Listen, little whippoorwill; yuh got to spread yore wings!) / He fiddled with a cherrywood bow. / (Old Dan Wheeling's got bee-honey in his strings.) / He fiddled the wind by the lonesome moon, / He fiddled a most almighty tune. / He started fiddling like a ghost, / He ended fiddling like a host. / He fiddled north an' he fiddled south, / He fiddled the heart right out of yore mouth. / He fiddled here an' he fiddled there. / He fiddled salvation everywhere. / When he was finished, the crowd cut loose, / (Whippoorwill, they's rain on yore breast.) / An' I sat there wonderin', What's the use? (Whippoorwill, fly home to yore nest.) / But I stood up pert an' I took my bow, / An' my fiddle went to my shoulder, so. / An' -- they was n't no crowd to get me fazed -- / But I was alone where I was raised. / Up in the mountains, so still it makes yuh skeered. / Where God lies sleepin; in his big white beard. / An' I heard the sound of the squirrel in the pine, / An' I heard the earth a-breathin' thu' the long night-time. /

They've fiddled the rose an' they've fiddled the thorn, / But they have n't fiddled the mountaincorn. / They've fiddled sinful an' fiddled moral, / But they have n't fiddled the breshwood-laurel. / They've fiddled loud, an' they've fiddled still, / But they have n't fiddled the whippoorwill. / I started off with a dump-diddle-dump, / (Oh, Hell's broke loose in Georgia!) / Skunk-cabbage growin' by the bee-gum stump, / (Whippoorwill, yo're singin' now!) / Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, / The best yuh ever poured yuh, / But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, / For Hell's broke loose in Georgia. / My mother was a whippoorwill pert, / My father, he was lazy, / But I'm Hell broke loose in a new store shirt / To fiddle all Georgia crazy. / Swing yore partners -- up an' down the middle! / Sashay now -- oh, listen to that fiddle! / Flapjacks flippin' on a red-hot griddle, / An' hell broke loose, / Hell broke loose, / Fire on the mountains -- snakes in the grass. / Satin's here a-bilin' -- oh, Lordy, let him pass! / Go down Moses, set my people free, / Pop goes the weasel thu' the old Red Sea! / Jonah sittin' on a hickory-bough, / Up jumps a whale -- an' where's yore prophet now? / Rabbit in the pea-patch, possum in the pot, / Try an' stop my fiddle, now my fiddle's gettin' hot! / Whippoorwill, singin' thu' the mountain hush, / Whippoorwill, shoutin' from the burnin' bush, / Whippoorwill, cryin' in the stable-door, / Sing tonight as yuh never sang before! / Hell's broke loose like a stompin' mountain-shoat, / Sing till yuh bust the gold in yore throat! / Hell's broke loose for forty miles aroun' / Bound to stop yore music if yuh don't sing it down. / Sing on the mountains, little whippoorwill, / Sing to the valleys, an' slap 'em with a hill, / For I'm struttin' high as an eagle's quill, / An' Hell's broke loose, / Hell's broke loose, / Hell's broke loose in Georgia! / They was n't a sound when I stopped bowin', / (Whippoorwill, yuh can sing no more.) / But, somewhere or other, the dawn was growin', / (Oh, mountain whippoorwill!) / An' I thought, "I've fiddled all night an' lost. / Yo're a good hill-billy, but yuh've been boosed." / So I went to congratulate old man Dan, / -- But he put his fiddle into my han' -- / An' then the noise of the crowd began. HOUSTON: "An' then the noise of the crowd began." Oh, so you tell me what happened. MISHLOVE: I felt like I was the fiddle. It was like my whole body was being played. HOUSTON: As it was, because you had opened yourself on every possible level, and that poem will be in you forever, and perhaps to many of you. And you have received knowing and grace and love and -- oh, God -- deep creation and participation on every possible level. And that's how it could be in our education, you see. That's how it could be. Not this terrible distancing of the self from knowledge, but knowledge rich and cracking in our bones and rising in the sap among our marrow, so that we know on many levels. What would life be like if we knew each other, and we knew each other's cultures, in that way? Could we have wars? No. Could we be so cut off from each other? No, we would have absolute empathy and compassion, and our intelligence would bloom to a degree that today would seem more mythic than real. MISHLOVE: It requires a kind of vulnerability that -- I mean, I don't normally allow myself to feel so deeply. HOUSTON: But you do now, because you've heard great art performed by a great artist, and you were also prepared for it.

MISHLOVE: The preparation is very important. HOUSTON: Yes. MISHLOVE: I've heard the poem before. It hadn't affected me quite like this. HOUSTON: No, not quite like this, when you're deeply available. And maybe that's what this new world is about. It's about our capacity to be so primed and so deeply available to each other, so that we can understand and we can have access to the depths and begin to create -- well, let me call you to it then. I want you now in this state to envision for me, for everyone here, the possible human and the possible society, in terms now of your heightened sensitivities. MISHLOVE: I'm seeing . . . I'm in China. HOUSTON: Ah! What are you seeing in China? MISHLOVE: I'm seeing karsts along the Li River in China. I've been there; there were peasants there, people who still work with oxes and carry their loads on their shoulders. HOUSTON: Yes. MISHLOVE: People who . . . seem to . . . be forced to be cheerful and smile a lot, but there was almost a sense of deadness inside. And I'm having a feeling of . . . I don't know, the beauty of that country permeating the people. HOUSTON: Jeffrey, open your eyes and look at the people who are looking at you -- the thousands of people, and see their beauty, and tell them what you're seeing, because in this kind of state you can see. Look into the camera, and tell them what you're seeing. MISHLOVE: I'm seeing brilliant rainbow colors, radiating around everybody. I'm seeing a landscape that's so rich you can smell the earth, and the dew glistens off of the grass. And as the dew sparkles, the hearts sparkle. I'm seeing people, people smiling at each other -- not superficially, like "Have a nice day" kind of smile, a habitual smile, but a smile that wells up from the depths and resonates among each other, so that people know each other deeply in that smile. I'm seeing people work hard, but not alienated from their work -- not because they have to work to earn a living, but because they know where their work comes from and where it goes, and who benefits from it, and they feel the consequences of their labor, and they feel the labor that other people have provided for them-- in the clothes they wear, in the tools that they use, so that there's a deep sense of interconnectedness, not just theoretical, but a sense of knowing inwardly, being able to envision the history of every object that they touch; an ability to look at the earth and the mountains, and to understand the history of the cultures that have risen and fallen, and the strivings and yearnings of those people, and to see themselves as the latest embodiment of those yearnings and strivings, and to know that they are carrying forward the great, deep vision of all of humanity, into a new generation.

HOUSTON: You are seeing deeply and you are seeing well. And you are providing a lure of becoming for all those who are seeing with you and through you. What would the United Nations be like if we started each day in this manner? The extension of our capacity to see, to hear, to touch, to know, with great art and with great seeing. And that is our promise. That is what is possible. You know, Jeffrey, there's a poem that I love very much, that comes out of a play by Christopher Fry called The Sleep of Prisoners, which in my mind summons up everything we've been talking about and what we've been pointing to. And it goes: "The human heart can go to the lengths of God. / Dark and cold we may be, but this / Is no winter now. The frozen misery / Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; / The thunder is the thunder of the floes, / The thaw, the upstart Spring. / Thank God our time is now when wrong / Comes up to face us everywhere, / Never to leave us till we take / The longest stride of soul men ever took. / Affairs are now soul size. / The enterprise / Is exploration into God. / Where are you making for? It takes / So many thousand years to wake, / But will you wake for pity's sake?" I know you have, and I know you will. I don't know that we have any other option at this extraordinary time in history. MISHLOVE: Jean, I'm just speechless. I'm going to have to ask you to carry on a little bit. I feel so touched. HOUSTON: All right. Let me tell a story. It's a science fiction story. It's one of my favorites. It has to do with a little boy in the present, who's dying of leukemia, and there is no known cure, and he watches from his bed a kind of Captain Future, and he collects stamps, and he has a wonderful stamp collection, but he knows he only has several months left to live. And he wins a contest of Captain Future, but he can't go to the station to collect it, and so Captain Future comes to visit him, and he says, "Can you help me get well?" And Captain Future says, "I'm sorry, I can't, but my prayers are with you." And so he starts to think about the future, the future, and the little boy thinks, "Well, somewhere in the future they know how to cure childhood leukemia. Now, I have this stamp collection, and it is worth so much." So with his last strength he takes his collection, and he puts it into a big metal box, and he writes a letter: "Dear people of the future: I think this stamp collection will be worth a great deal in the future. Please sell it, and with the proceeds, if you know how to time travel, would you come back and get me? I'll be here on July 22, 1992" -- or whatever the year is -- "and you come and get me. I'm burying it on July 21. But you come get me and see if you can't cure me." So he makes his way to the river, and he digs a hole, and he puts this down, and he covers it, and he crawls back to his home. And the next day, with the last of his strength -- he's nearly dying -- it's on July 22, 1992, and he waits by the river, and nothing happens. And suddenly, Zoom, boom! And there's a pop, and there's this funny little machine and this funny little man, who says: "[Garbled speech, very fast] Why, we got your message, . . . We picked you up . . . whoop, whoop, whoop, zoom!" And his parents, who don't see him in bed, and they run around in that night, and they come and they go to the river, and suddenly -- "[Fast garbled speech] Whoom! There we are. All ready, all fixed. Boop, boop." And there he is, all well. And I think in a sense that's almost a metaphor for our time, and that we are sending messages to the future. We are sending messages throughout time and space that we are ready; we need to be healed, and it's as if great time and great space, ensconced in great story, and in the great feelings that we're all having for each other, is coming from beyond the local dimensions, coming up from the depth world -- it isn't the future necessarily, but it's the deep

world, saying, "The healing is at hand. We are ready to be made whole again." Not healed; it's way beyond healing, but whole. And we are on the verge of perhaps the greatest possibility for humanity that the world has ever known. These are the times. We are the people. MISHLOVE: Jean Houston, you are the messenger. HOUSTON: One of many, many, many. And so are you. MISHLOVE: Thanks so much. HOUSTON: Thank you, Jeffrey. -END -

THE HUMAN DILEMMA with ROLLO MAY, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is existential psychology, and with me is Dr. Rollo May. Dr. May is one of the founding sponsors of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and a genuine pioneer in the field of existential psychology and clinical psychology. He was recently awarded the Distinguished Career in Psychology Award by the American Psychological Association. He is the author of numerous classic books, including The Courage to Create, Love and Will, The Meaning of Anxiety, Freedom and Destiny, and Psychology and the Human Dilemma. Welcome, Dr. May. ROLLO MAY, Ph.D.: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You're really most known these days, I think, as a pioneer in establishing existential psychology as an independent discipline in the clinical area. That's a discipline which, unlike most forms of clinical psychology that rely on a medical model or a behavioral model, relies more on a philosophical model. You draw heavily on the works of philosophers such as Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, who deal with basic notions such as anxiety in a different way than most medical clinical models do. MAY: Yes. Well, in the year I think '56 or '57, the publishers called me up and asked if I would edit a book on European existential psychotherapy. I was delighted to hear there was such a book. I hadn't known a thing about the existential movement, but I knew that in this country I believed in it very firmly, because they are the ones who emphasize anxiety, they emphasize the individual, courage, they emphasize guilt feeling, that it has to be taken into consideration at least, and they see human beings as struggling, sometimes successful, sometimes not successful. This was exactly the model that we needed for psychotherapy. The medical model had turned out to be a dead end, and I welcomed the chance to edit this book of existential chapters from Europe. It met my own needs and my own heart.

MISHLOVE: Would I be correct in assuming that when you speak of anxiety you don't think of it as a symptom to be removed, but rather as a gateway for exploration into the meaning of life? MAY: Yes. Well, you've got that exactly right. I think anxiety is associated with creativity. When you're in a situation of anxiety, you can of course run away from it, and that's certainly not constructive; or you can take a few pills to get you over it, or cocaine, or whatever else you may take. MISHLOVE: You could meditate. MAY: Well, you could meditate. But I think none of those things, including meditation, which I happen to believe in -- none of those paths lead you to creative activity. What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings. MISHLOVE: I suppose much of our anxiety comes from the basic human dilemma of being mortal, of ultimately having to confront our own demise. MAY: We are conscious of our own selves, our own tasks, and also we know we're going to die. Man is the only creature -- men, women, and children sometimes even, are the only creatures who can be aware of their death, and out of that comes normal anxiety. When I let myself feel that, then I apply myself to new ideas, I write books, I communicate with my fellows. In other words, the creative interchange of human personality rests upon the fact that we know we're going to die. Of that the animals and the grass and so on know nothing. But our knowledge of our death is what gives us a normal anxiety that says to us, "Make the most of these years you are alive." And that's what I've tried to do. MISHLOVE: Another source of anxiety that you've described in your writing is our very freedom -- our ability to make choices, to have to confront the consequences of those choices. MAY: Yes, that's right. Freedom is also the mother of anxiety. If you had no freedom, you'd have no anxiety. That's why the slaves in the films are people without any expression on their faces; they have no freedom. But those of us who do have, are alert, alive. We're aware that what we do matters, and that we only have about seventy or eighty or ninety years in which to do it, so why not do it and get joy out of it, rather than running away from it? I think that's a little capsule of the meaning of anxiety. MISHLOVE: But isn't there a little bit of a conflict between feeling anxiety and allowing oneself to be open, vulnerable, to that feeling of anxiety, and then also seeking joy? MAY: Oh no. There's a conflict between that and what's generally called happiness, or the flat, I would speak of the meaningless forms, of feeling good. I'm not against anybody feeling good or having happy hours, but joy is something different from that. Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims. Musicians, men

who wrote music -- Mozart and Beethoven and the rest of them -- they always showed considerable anxiety, because they were in the process of loving beauty, of feeling joy when they heard a beautiful combination of notes. That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety but also great joy. MISHLOVE: It seems that much of our modern culture, though, is an attempt to cope with this fundamental anxiety by diversions and what you've called banal pleasures. MAY: Yes, well, you've just put your finger on the most significant aspect of modern society. We try to avoid anxiety by getting rich, by making a hundred thousand dollars when we're twenty-one years of age, by becoming millionaires. Now none of those things lead to the joy, the creativity that I'm talking about. One can own the world and still be without the inner sense of pleasure, of joy, of courage, of creation. I think our society is in the midst of a vast change. The society that began at the Renaissance now is ending, and we are seeing the results of this ending of a social period in the fact that psychotherapy has grown with such great zest. Almost every other person in California is a psychotherapist. MISHLOVE: It seems that way. MAY: Yes, it does. And this always happens when an age is dying. You see, the Greeks began their great age in the seventh, sixth centuries B.C., and then they talked of beauty and goodness and truth, all these great things that the philosophers talked about. But by the second century B.C., first century B.C., that had all been forgotten. The philosophers now talked about security, and they tried to help people get along with as little pain as possible, and they made mottoes for human beings. Beauty and truth and goodness had been lost. Our Renaissance began the modern age, and at the beginning of an age there are no psychotherapists. This is taken care of by religion and by art and by beauty, by music. But at the end of an age -- every age down through history has been the same -- every other person becomes a therapist, because there are no ways of ministering to people in need, and they form long lines to the psychotherapist's office. I think it's a sign of the decadence of the age, rather than a sign of our great intelligence. MISHLOVE: I know in your book Love and Will you refer to the great poem by T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, and the way so many people when it was first written at the early part of this century seemed to relate to it, not understanding its prophetic nature -- it seemed to characterize the emptiness of modern society. MAY: Yes, the king in The Waste Land, remember, was impotent. The wheat and the grass did not grow. Therefore it was a waste land. And he goes on in marvelous detail. Now, just about that time, in the 1920s, in the Jazz Age, there was written another book that is prophetic. That is The Great Gatsby. The movie was terrible, but forget the movie, and take the book. MISHLOVE: F. Scott Fitzgerald. MAY: F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's a small book. It's a marvelous picture of how our age is disintegrating. He ultimately dies, and dies a completely lonely man. There is nobody at the

funeral, and it's a tragedy. But Fitzgerald saw that this was happening not in the Jazz Age -- then everybody was earning lots of money and trying out new styles, just like nowadays. But he knew what was going to happen, and therefore The Great Gatsby. We are now in the age when those things, The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby, are coming to fruition. That's why I believe that if our world survives the nuclear threat -- and I believe it will -- if it survives that we will move into a new age, when the emphasis will not be on making piles and piles of money and being scared to death the stock market is going to drop tomorrow, but rather the emphasis will be on truth, on joy, on understanding, on beauty -- these things that to my mind make life really worth living. MISHLOVE: You've also characterized our present age as one in which modern man seems to be robbed of his own free will, and observed that through Freudian psychology and other scientific movements we see the human being as influenced by deterministic forces, threats of great social movements, nuclear war, and so on -- that there's nothing that we can do, and there's a feeling of helplessness, alienation. And yet you suggest that through philosophical and existential exploration we can enter into, in effect, another state of consciousness, where we reconnect with our will at a deeper level. MAY: Yes, this is why I wrote Love and Will, because you cannot love unless you also can will. I think, and thought when I wrote that book, that a new way of love would come about. People would learn to be intimate again. They would write letters. There would be a feeling of friendship among people. Now, this is the new age that is coming, and I don't think it's a matter chiefly of philosophy. See, nowadays there are no philosophers; the last philosopher in this country was Paul Tillich. People now have given up, and they now call philosophy the kibitzing on science -- a way of simply looking over the scientist's shoulder, and seeing how they can help science put things together. That's not philosophy. Philosophy is a deep search for a truth by which I can fulfill myself, by which I can create. Philosophy is the basis of freedom. It's the basis of goodness, too, which seems to not trouble many modern people, but I think it's a great mistake, because of all of our lack of ethics, our lack of morality. We need goodness, and we need beauty. All of those are philosophical terms, but beyond that -- see, I'm really a psychotherapist, after saying all these nasty things about psychotherapy. It is the way we have in our end of the twentieth century of helping many people to find themselves and a way of life that will be satisfying, and will give them the joy that human beings certainly have a right to have. I'm not ashamed at all that I'm a psychotherapist. I became a therapist because I saw that's where people unburden themselves, and that's where people will show what they have in their hearts. They don't show that in philosophy, and in most religions these days they also don't show it. This is why so many people in California join the cults. Now, I happen to believe in meditation, and I do it myself, and we've learned a lot of things from India and Japan. But we cannot be Indians or Japanese, and we must find a form of religious observation, religious experience, that will fit us as pioneers of the twenty-first century. MISHLOVE: A couple of moments ago you referred to the term a new age, and of course the new age is kind of a popular term these days for a wide scope of activities. I would gather from my familiarity with your work that you're critical of a good deal of this, as glossing over basic

human pain and attempting to make nice. I suppose these are some of the same criticisms, perhaps, that Freud had of religion. MAY: Exactly. It's very good to talk with you because you've read what I've written, and you know exactly which way to turn. No, I don't like the new age movement. I think it's oversimplified, makes everybody feel temporarily happy, but they avoid the real problems. The new age can come only as we face anxiety, as we face guilt feeling for our misapprehension of what's the purpose of life, as we face death as a new adventure. Now, none of these things does the new age talk about. It talks about only being gleeful, and everybody singing songs. MISHLOVE: But you know, I've sensed another paradox here. I noticed in your book Freedom and Destiny that you have a section on mysticism, and you refer to the great Western mystics Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart and their search for the divine fire within themselves, and you seem to see that almost -- I don't know quite what to say -- almost as a model of deep existential probing. MAY: Surely, oh yes. I'm very much a believer and follower of these mystics in our tradition. I'm not a believer and follower of Rajneesh, or the other -MISHLOVE: Maharishi. MAY: Or Maharishi. Muktananda I found the most companionable of these leaders, but most of them that come from India build up cults and get into all kinds of trouble, and they're sued for millions of dollars, and the cult then collapses. Or like Jim Jones, who took nine hundred people to an island, and there they were going to set up a perfect community, and they all committed suicide, nine hundred and nineteen of them. MISHLOVE: But my sense is that your criticism goes much deeper than just the scandals themselves. My sense is that what you're saying is that in this retreat to a mystical lotus land, or perhaps even beliefs such as spiritualism and reincarnation, that people are losing touch with the basic issues of their very existence. MAY: Oh, absolutely. You said it beautifully. I'm very critical of these movements that softpedal our problems, and that indicate that we should forget them. I think the mystics that you and I were talking about -- Jacob Boehme was burned at the stake, and the other Christian mystics, or mystics of Mohammedanism and so on -- back in our tradition, are very important, and though the Church at the time opposed them, they nevertheless left great books full of knowledge that we can read, we can understand, we can learn from. MISHLOVE: I know that some of the existentialist philosophers, such as Camus and Sartre and perhaps even Genet, made quite a bit out of the idea of rebelling against the conventional mores of society. I sense that what you're saying is that genuine mysticism has to also involve this kind of cutting-edge rebellion against the herd instincts. MAY: Yes, it does. It's a rebellion against the herd instinct. Sartre was very important in this movement of the rebel. Camus wrote the book The Rebel. And Paul Tillich, who was my dear

and very close friend for some thirty years, he and the others of the existentialists understood that joy and freedom come only from the facing of life, the confronting of the difficulties. Sartre, when France was overrun by the Nazis, wrote a drama called The Flies. This is a retelling of the ancient Greek story of Orestes, and the little bit of it that I want to quote is that Zeus tries to get Orestes not to go back to his home town and kill his mother, which he was ordered to do to revenge his father. Zeus says, "I made you, so you must obey me." And Orestes says, "You made me, but you blundered. You made me free." And then Zeus gets quite angry, and he has the stars and the planets zooming around to show how powerful he is, and he says, "But do you realize how much despair lies ahead of you if you follow your course?" And Orestes says, "Human life begins on the far side of despair." Now, I happen to believe that, that human joy begins -- it's like the alcoholics. They cannot get over the alcoholism except as they get into despair, and then the AA can take them and free them from alcoholism. That's why I think despair has a constructive side, as well as anxiety having a constructive effect. MISHLOVE: And you mentioned earlier the great artistic achievements of Mozart and Beethoven. One has a sense, where we even have this term, tears of joy -- that when one experiences deep joy, it's because it somehow incorporates the wholeness of human life, and we see the joy bubbling up, emerging through the despair itself. And that's real joy. MAY: Yes, yes, you have understood it very well. MISHLOVE: And yet there's something almost intimidating. It's as if in many of us, as we live our lives and go through our routines, that we're afraid to really drink deeply of the fullness of that. MAY: Yes, I know. Well, if it were easy, it wouldn't be effective. It's not easy. Life is difficult, and I believe has many conflicts in it, many challenges. But it seems to me that without those life wouldn't be interesting. The interest, the joy, the creativity, that comes from these is -- say, in Beethoven's symphonies: "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee." That's the end of the Ninth Symphony, and that "Joyful, joyful" comes only after the agony that is shown in the first part of that symphony. Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all. MISHLOVE: Rollo May, it's been a pleasure being with you, and looking at this very deep issue of agony and ecstasy. I must admit that when I was reading your book Love and Will in preparation for this interview, I felt after reading the final chapter, almost waves of energy pulsing through my body. MAY: Oh, marvelous. MISHLOVE: Almost what the yogis would have described as kundalini. It was a very strange feeling of ecstasy and agony. It seemed as if your willingness to look so directly at life itself is almost a willingness to stare God in the face. MAY: Well, that's marvelous. I'm very happy that you had this experience.

MISHLOVE: Thank you so much for being with me. MAY: It's been a pleasure to be here. MISHLOVE: Another concluding note -- it makes me feel like in appreciating your work, I have a sense of why tragedy was considered the very highest art form in Shakespeare, for example. MAY: By all means. The great plays were the tragedies. And in our day too -- Death of a Salesman is one of the great plays of the twentieth century. MISHLOVE: Rollo May, thank you very much for being with me. MAY: Well, I enjoyed it myself. END

VISIONARY EXPERIENCE OR PSYCHOSIS with JOHN W. PERRY, M.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is visionary experience and its relationship to psychiatric labeling, or what might commonly be thought of as madness. My guest, Dr. John Weir Perry, is a Jungian psychotherapist, the author of numerous books and most recently a book called The Heart of History. Welcome to the program, John. JOHN WEIR PERRY, M.D.: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. PERRY: It's very good to be on this program. MISHLOVE: In your research, in your scholarship, you're looking at visionary experience and how it is manifested through history. I suppose one might say that throughout history great visionaries have been accused of being mad. PERRY: They have. There have been many who have been actually insane, and many who give that appearance and yet who actually were tremendously creative and were the creators of new cultural thrusts. So it seems that in times of culture change, that's when the visionaries come up, and they have a task to do in that case. MISHLOVE: It seems as if we're almost always in some form of culture change or another. PERRY: Yes, but then there's a different degree of it. A rapid, acute culture change is the result of either foreign invasion or new conditions within the culture that necessitate a whole reexamination of the basic values and the basic outlook, the world view. So that's a much more cataclysmic kind of change, and during such times you could say first that the collective psyche

is stirred, and visionaries are those people who experience it more vividly and are more articulate. MISHLOVE: What would be an example of one such person? PERRY: Well, there are certainly many, but one right nearby here in eastern California was one a hundred years ago, the originator of the Ghost Dance. Now, this was a time when the Native Americans were getting very discouraged and looking for some hope, and he was out on a mountainside one time in a storm and saw the whole earth rolled up like a carpet, and also saw it cleave apart, so that the known earth went down inside this cleft. For three days there was no familiar earth. And after three days the earth was recreated again and the Native Americans were living with the ancestral spirits and with the Great Spirit, and had redeemed and reformed society, a whole new start. Now that became something, the Ghost Dance, then enacted ritually. MISHLOVE: He communicated the vision to the other Indian peoples who were very moved. PERRY: Communicated it, and they recognized in it right away the meaningfulness for them. MISHLOVE: They went on the warpath, as I recall. PERRY: Well, the dance spread from coast to coast, and yes, there were a good many uprisings as a result. It did give hope for a while. Naturally, the conditions were -MISHLOVE: It had a catastrophic ending, that particular story. PERRY: It did, unfortunately. And many of these bad experiments, you know, they're efforts to revive the culture. There was a much more successful one in the East, the Seneca. A man named Hanson Lake was an Iroquois-Seneca clan, and he had a visionary state in which he was sick, and he was taken up into the heavens and walked through the Milky Way, which was the pathway of the deceased, and he also saw the threat of the world being destroyed. He himself went into the realm of the dead, in other words, and he saw that if a certain light in the sky, which was a toxic substance, was allowed to reach the earth, this was a great sickness and the whole population of the earth would be destroyed by this. And he met the Great Spirit and was indoctrinated; there were angels who gave him instructions. When he came out of this, he became a very strong leader and reformed the society, gave it a renewed vitality, and they became a people. They had been a slum culture up to this point. MISHLOVE: And this was as a result of a dream? PERRY: It was a visionary state -- what looked like a coma on the outside. MISHLOVE: I see. So you would distinguish this from a dream. PERRY: I would. Often these people get actually physically ill. He was in a coma and his whole body went cold.

MISHLOVE: Like a delirium. PERRY: It was. He had a little hot spot left here; that was the only place on his body that was warm. And as he began to revive the heat spread back through his body and he was able to start to speak again. MISHLOVE: It sounds very much akin to what some people would call a kundalini experience in the yoga tradition. PERRY: It can be. A tremendous energy gets moving through this. I think the great difference is that typically in a visionary state of this kind, the visionary goes through a death experience and an experience of world destruction -- perceives it, or actually is in the middle of it -- and it's that that seems to indicate the basic reorganization of himself and of his culture both. MISHLOVE: Would you say, however, that Hitler was such a person? PERRY: Unfortunately there are many bad eggs who were visionaries. Yes, he took a long training, of course, with peyote and a guru. MISHLOVE: Now this I didn't know. PERRY: Oh yes. He went through the whole trip. MISHLOVE: I mean, many people who are skeptics of the whole new-age, mystical, spiritual trend these days suggest that what we're doing is we're creating the same kind of social conditions that existed in Germany prior to the rise of Hitler -- opening ourselves up to superstitions. PERRY: Yes. I think the great difference, of course, is that Hitler's beginning and his whole following were totally dedicated to power, which is not typical of the ordinary visionary. That's a special thing, that the visionaries have a different sort of message to give in different eras of time. That's what my book is going to be about. MISHLOVE: And we're certainly in a period of social transition right now. PERRY: That's why I'm interested in it and I'm writing about it. And I'm particularly worried as to what we do with our visionaries -- you know, clapping them all away in places where they're shut up in hospitals or clinics, or medicating them, or recommending they go into therapy and get over this state. MISHLOVE: I mean, even the Indian leader who came up with the Ghost Dance vision and led to the disaster for his people, he was in touch with a certain social reality at the time which needed to be expressed in some way. PERRY: Oh yes, dedicated to his culture.

MISHLOVE: I guess there are those who seem to feel that we must face the problems around us rationally, that we must not retreat into the subconscious, into visionary experience, into escapism. You seem to be saying just the opposite. PERRY: And for the reason that the humanistic kind of rational thinking -- thinking out a good program for society, good reforms and good policies -- that comes from the top of the head. And what fails to happen then is the stirring up of the motivations. In order for a real change to occur there has to be a deeply motivated population, and that means that the deep psyche has to be involved. It's there that the creative ideas come from, in very symbolic terms at first, just images. But they have a lot of energy in them and a lot of persuasiveness, and when people hear a visionary leader when it's time for one of these revolutionary changes, there is a sort of mass movement that sweeps through a population, and an enthusiasm. MISHLOVE: Well, do you think that some of this is why a leader like Reagan relies to a large extent on the mythology of evangelical Christianity and the notion of fighting the evil empire? PERRY: It's an effort in that direction, I think totally misguided, from my point of view, because it takes an old religious form and tries to refurbish it in sort of modern clothes. In a special way, I think -- I'm not talking of the churches in general here, but just of the particular political kind of Christianity that gets to Washington -- that that's making use of an old form to give a new message, and I wouldn't be surprised if in our time we needed a basically new mythic statement, a different way of seeing our world. MISHLOVE: Do you see this emerging in your own work with people? As you work with their dreams do you see a new vision evolving? PERRY: Yes. It depends how deeply their psyche is stirred, whether the archetypal psyche is -that is, the mythic psyche. The more deeply disturbed people are, you could say, the more purely mythic the content that comes into play. Now, the preferable thing is in ordinary therapy to get somebody with a stirred-up psyche and you're able to assimilate that and bring it into consciousness and understand it. And then it moves slowly, it moves along week by week, and it takes a few years, and that gives plenty of time to assimilate those into actual living, translate the images into living. But in the deeply disturbed ones that are more cataclysmic, what is commonly called a psychotic state, we prefer to call it still a visionary state. MISHLOVE: In other words, one of the points that you want to make here is that we do people an injustice by labeling them as psychotic, as mentally ill, as having a nervous breakdown. PERRY: We do, indeed. MISHLOVE: How would you characterize it instead? PERRY: Well, the reason for labeling that and calling it psychotic, calling it crazy, is that the ideation is considered bizarre -- you know, that it's strange. Well, if you say that, it means mythic thinking from the start of time is bizarre, because one thing that most psychiatrists don't realize

nowadays, since everybody gets medicated in these states, is that they never hear that kind of thinking. MISHLOVE: I suppose when one uses a label like bizarre, it almost presumes that the everyday reality which we take for granted is not bizarre. And that may be a form of madness. PERRY: Yes, that's the hooker -- that there's an alternative reality which is mythic, which has to do with a world of archetypal phenomena, and for a person in a disturbed state, that's the real world at that particular time. That's his reality or her reality. MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting that that's a valid reality. PERRY: That's a valid reality for a period of time. Here we're talking about acute episodes of this kind, acute onsets of visionary experience that last a few weeks. And if they're properly handled they don't become that miserable state of low-level chronic withdrawal, the discouraged outlook and the loss of hope. MISHLOVE: So what you seem to be saying is when a person begins to experience this socalled craziness, this psychotic break, the worst thing is to try and stop it. PERRY: That is the worst, and the second worst thing is giving it the label that you're mentioning. When it's called crazy, that is the moment of the person feeling crazy for the first time. I've heard many people describe swimming around in this mythic world, in this visionary world, and being overwhelmed and sometimes frightened, but mostly feeling very high with it, and as soon as they're told that this is craziness and they must be medicated and locked up, then they feel very crazy and are crazy. MISHLOVE: Because they buy into the social reality. PERRY: They buy into it right away. MISHLOVE: And the social reality is real. I mean, if people say you're crazy -PERRY: It's very real indeed, yes. MISHLOVE: In the Soviet Union, if you're a political protestor, you get labeled as crazy. And many of these people, I suppose they lose their hold on whether they are crazy or not. PERRY: They're very deviant, and there's a chasm between them and the other people. So it seems that the difficulty of a psychosis is that interface between one's state and that condition, and then their surroundings. Because the surroundings also during the withdrawing and the recoiling and the fear, both parties -- say in a family, both the person who's going through this and the rest of the family -- are both withdrawing from each other because this chasm is opening up. So then the needed thing, rather than a diagnosis and stopping the whole thing, is a receptive, comfortable kind of listening to it.

MISHLOVE: Although I suppose the people who are involved in this situation want to protect themselves from the impact, from the power of it. PERRY: That varies. There are a great many who want to go into it, and who feel very cheated if they're taken out of it too fast. They feel quite angry if they are. MISHLOVE: I don't mean the patients now, or your clients. I mean the relatives, who feel like they want to live their normal life. PERRY: It's very upsetting to relatives. And that is really the reason why this has, I think, to be treated like an initiatory experience, for instance. Typically in initiation rites the child is taken out of the usual context to live in the bush, or wherever it is, for a time, for a while. MISHLOVE: With a shamanic teacher. PERRY: With a teacher. Goes through that whole experience of rebirth, death and rebirth, and comes back new. That has to be apart. And I think these people have to be apart for a while. MISHLOVE: One might even say that in that kind of a context, the person who goes through the visionary process and heals themselves comes out stronger, more vital, more alive, more powerful than had they never had this so-called sickness in the first place. PERRY: When it goes right that is the way it happens; I wish I knew what proportion come out that way. But when it happens it's quite dramatic. The old self really does die off, you could say; they outgrow it. And where they had been inordinately preoccupied about prestige and rather afraid of relationship up to this point, when they come out, the warmth is there; the trust relationship, the warmth is there, the lovingness. And that's really the fruit of this whole process. MISHLOVE: People who have been through the experience are then able perhaps to recognize and to guide others through it as well. PERRY: Yes. We had a facility here in the city that operated this way, and on our staff were some people who had been through it that way; some had had other kinds of experience of death. But yes, when somebody's been through that they have a kind of feel for the meaningfulness of it and are able to receive it without fear, and really tune in on it. MISHLOVE: Do you think that people, once they've had this visionary, so-called psychotic state, and they're allowed to go through it, are they then free from the effects of it later on? Do they have relapses? Are they able to function? PERRY: They are able to function very well, often. What we found in our facility here, called Diabasis, was that the people in this acute state, if they were received in the sort of spirit of openness and caring and readiness to listen, all this, within two or three days came down from being quite psychotic to being quite rational. Then the process was still going on, but they felt more like people in therapy than people in an insane state.

MISHLOVE: Now, there are those who say that what causes so-called madness is a family dynamic -- that the person who is going schizophrenic, psychotic, is doing it really to save the other members of the family. Now what happens when this person heals themselves of that condition and is returned to the original family environment? PERRY: There's a lot to thrash out, and it depends very much how the family are able to take that -- whether they are able to meet that with the encouragement of the staff, let's say, and deal with it, or whether they keep trying to dismiss it and put this person back into the status of patienthood. MISHLOVE: Family members might rather the person be drugged. PERRY: Yes, often. MISHLOVE: You recommend not using drugs. PERRY: Not only I, but you know, one time I was invited to the Stanford Research Unit, which does biochemical research on psychotic states, and I was a little timid about this because that was the sort of ingroup of medication treatment. MISHLOVE: Very prestigious organization. PERRY: Very prestigious. And when I got through, they said -- at that particular time; I wouldn't say this year, they did in 1978 -- that this was the right way to handle first episodes, the way we were doing, without medication. Let the person go through it, and then if it tends to become chronic, if it goes down, sure, medicate. But I think that is a point of view that is really totally out of acceptance right now. There's a tremendous preoccupation, as you know, with brain chemistry now, and assigning everything to physical causes, and as long as that's prevailing, there's not much patience for this sort of treatment. MISHLOVE: And yet if one looks at history, which you have, there are many great, rational thinkers, great scientists like Newton or Swedenborg, who were also visionaries -- who had this totally irrational, visionary side to them, which they allowed to flower. I suppose part of the skill is knowing how to cultivate the irrational side, the mythic side. PERRY: It is; to translate it into the rational. MISHLOVE: Without confronting people in a way that's going to be offensive to them. It's more of a social skill than anything else. PERRY: I think. A very amusing example of that, I think, is Descartes, who said that a couple of angels revealed the new mathematic to him. Not many years later he was saying the imagination must be absolutely, strictly cleansed out of science -- that anything that has to do with visions and imagination is simply not permissible in science. So he was in his own contradiction about this.

MISHLOVE: What do you make of that? PERRY: I think it's what you're talking about. I think for the adaptation to society and a new trust for the new young science like this, it had to be preserved. So to mix it up with some of the old gobbledegook of just plain religious -MISHLOVE: So he was politically astute in that sense. And I suppose Newton, who was an alchemist, in much the same way sort of cleansed his scientific writing, so that he kept these two compartments of life separate, but both still very much alive within himself. PERRY: Yes, and the visionary state, then, in politics or in society, let's say, would need that also. You know, in politics there was in China a man named Hung -- Hung Hsiu-ch'uen -- who about a hundred and thirty years ago had a visionary experience. He was sick; the family thought he was dying, and he had six weeks, forty days, of visionary state, while he was in this deathlike state. And when he came out of it he was stronger, firmer, but it wasn't for six years that he knew what to do with this experience, in which he visited the heavens in the usual fashion and talked to the Great Spirit, so to speak. Now, he then became aware that this was a religious experience with a religious implication, and had a part to play in Chinese society. So he gathered a following, he led the Taiping Rebellion, which is the one that took over Nanking in the south, and set up an alternative government for several years, and he almost became emperor. So he was very successful in translating visionary states into political form and military conquest, in that case. MISHLOVE: But given the delicacy of our current situation right now, the threat of nuclear warfare, it would seem to me that the kind of visionary experience that is called for today is different than this. We don't need another Ghost Dance or a Taiping Rebellion. PERRY: We don't even need another cult, I guess, do we? You know, we're sort of allergic to cults since the recent disasters with cults. So that probably is not going to be the way, but we do have to understand our mythic thinking, when it comes to how we use the A-bomb, or nuclear energy in general. MISHLOVE: It seems that what we really need at this point is some form of global understanding, where we can live together. PERRY: Yes. I think this is where the visionary experience becomes relevant in politics right today -- that the inordinate fear that we have of world destruction is an image that you see in people's dreams; you see it in people's psychotic states, visionary states. And fundamentally, according to the history of it, it has to do with culture change -- that the end of the world is the end of the culture form, not the actual globe, and that then the regeneration of the world is the regeneration of the culture with a whole lot of new outlook, new values, new world view. And this is what I think we're really afraid of. MISHLOVE: But we're at a point in history now where we can't play around the way we used to. History has changed, I think, with the development of nuclear weapons.

PERRY: That's right. Time gets short. Something has to really be done about this soon. And if we could translate our fear of the nuclear winter, let's say, and destroying the world that way, into the thing I think we're more afraid of, which is changing our cultural preferences; if we really develop, actually, an ecological kind of society, and actually have a different point of view toward the international world, then this is a whole new mentality we're talking about. MISHLOVE: You seem to be referring in this interview quite a bit to the Native Americans. Do you see them as something of a model for us to look toward? PERRY: In a sense, yes I do -- in the sense that I think we need to heed what visions are telling us. And Native Americans always are very respectful even of what a big dream or a vision has to say to the society. I think we need that. MISHLOVE: Would you recommend people, for example, sharing their dreams over breakfast? PERRY: Yes, there's that, and like the Senoi people. But also we're including here, I think, poets who can naturally speak out at that level and render it to the people, and artists also can convey it. So there are many avenues in which the visions would be appearing to people and through which they can be expressed. MISHLOVE: At this point in time in our culture, the visionary side is sort of an alternative to all of these nice boxy looking buildings that we live among -- rectangular houses. PERRY: Yes, it's very stark, isn't it? We're in probably the most materialistic kind of extreme that a culture could reach, and very individualistic in the sense of people being out for themselves. So this view of the city you're describing as stark and rectilinear is very expressive of where we are with our rationalistic culture -- materialistic. MISHLOVE: So what you're suggesting, John, if I can summarize, is that part of us demands that we move away from this, that we develop an appreciation for the mythic, that we sense that what we call madness, what we call insane, what we call crazy, is really a healthy part of ourselves trying to express itself. And if we can come to understand that, we can as a society and as individuals achieve greater integration for ourselves -- that we can move forward as a culture PERRY: That's it. MISHLOVE: -- into a brave new world, so to speak. PERRY: Yes. And if there's going to be, as you were saying earlier, really profound change, I think it has to come right from the depths of the psyche. That's the level that needs listening to and assimilating. MISHLOVE: John Perry, thank you very much for being with me. It's been a pleasure. PERRY: It's been a pleasure for me.

END

COMMUNICATION AND CONGRUENCE with VIRGINIA SATIR JEFFREY MISHLOVE: Hello and welcome. With me today, to discuss communication, is Virginia Satir. Probably it would be fair to say that Virginia is a living legend -- one of the founders of the whole movement for family therapy, author of nine books, including Peoplemaking, Conjoint Family Therapy, Satir Step by Step, and many others. In fact, an entire discipline of psychology called neurolinguistic programming was virtually founded as an effort by other psychologists to study the incredible therapeutic work by Virginia Satir. A book called The Structure of Magic describes the underlying principles behind her work. Welcome, Virginia. VIRGINIA SATIR: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. We're going to be focusing in on communication. One of the points that you make about communication is that we very often fail to communicate what we're really feeling inside -- that we don't really express what our deepest feelings are. SATIR: That's true. And if that happens, do you know how often we can be misunderstood? MISHLOVE: All the time. SATIR: And so you don't understand me, and you make me up. So I say that when we aren't really understanding each other, we hallucinate each other, and then we behave as though our hallucinations are fact. That's how we do it. MISHLOVE: And growing up in a family where that's going on can be very tricky. SATIR: Oh sure. One of the things I have found -- I found this all over the world, Jeff -- I think it's all because we were born little; I think that's the real problem. Probably it won't happen when we're all born grown up, which I don't expect to see happen. But all over the world, the same problems are present. What are some of them? People are expected to know what somebody else means. MISHLOVE: We want other people to be clairvoyant, to read our mind. SATIR: Sort of, yes. MISHLOVE: Of course we don't really want them to do that either. SATIR: But let me tell you something. If you love me and you don't read my mind, it must mean you don't love me. I encounter that a lot. MISHLOVE: I shouldn't have to ask.

SATIR: That's right, because if you love me, or I love you, we will know ahead of time. MISHLOVE: I should be at your beck and call. Without your ever having to tell me what you need, I should just be there for you. SATIR: And you know, when we're talking about that right now, it sounds so ridiculous and absurd. And yet, this is how a lot of people function. You know where I think that came from? I think it came from when we were little kids. I often use this example: mother was at the top of the stairs, and we were putting our hand in the cookie jar. Somebody said, "Take your hand out of the cookie jar." And we got the idea that people could read our minds. Or we were very unhappy at a moment in time, and mother came in just at that time and patted us, or something of that sort. And so, people could read our minds. MISHLOVE: You know, I'm a parapsychologist. I have no problem with the fact that we are clairvoyant some of the time, but to demand that all of the time -- it seems to me that maybe we're afraid to ask because of a fear of rejection or something of that sort. SATIR: See, there's a difference, Jeff, between being able to connect with somebody else, and acting on that information without checking. Because if we didn't have this thing called rapport between people, we wouldn't be able to even make connections. But the idea that I read your mind, and then I do what fits for me in relation to you, without ever checking with you, becomes a terrible thing. MISHLOVE: It could be especially tricky if you read my mind and you're getting a message which is totally different than what I'm telling you. SATIR: Exactly. And I still say to people, we haven't developed a science of ESP that well. So let us not go into a basis of thinking that this is what we can do. Let's check things out. If I have a sense with you about something, instead of acting on that I'll ask you, "Is this so?" See, that to me is loving, it's considerate, and it opens up a chance for me to learn something about you, and also a chance for us to commit in a deep way. MISHLOVE: In other words, that's a normal part of healthy communication -- checking with a person. SATIR: Sure. I think so. MISHLOVE: Because very often we can misunderstand what a person means. SATIR: Oh yes. It happens all the time. In fact, I think that I can demonstrate the relationship between communication and health and illness, between intimacy and distancing, between competency and incompetency, and between making sense and not making sense. And it can all come within the frame of how we handle communication.

MISHLOVE: In the school of family therapy that you founded, conjoint family therapy, a lot of focus is on just studying the way communication occurs in a family, to diagnose what that family's problems are. SATIR: That's right. And as long as we're on that subject, let me tell you something that came out so clearly after I worked with many, many people. There are two dialogues that go on. One is the dialogue of the words, and the other is the dialogue of hearing. And many times those are different. I'll give you a little illustration. Ask me how I am. MISHLOVE: How are you? SATIR: I'm fine, Jeff. MISHLOVE: Hmm. SATIR: Now, when I said that, tell me what happened to you. MISHLOVE: Well, you had a very cold tone to your voice, so I thought you were trying to distance. SATIR: But didn't you hear the words -- that I was fine? MISHLOVE: Yes, uh huh. SATIR: All right. See, this is typical. Or ask me again if I like something, whatever it is. MISHLOVE: OK. Do you enjoy being here on TV today, Virginia? SATIR: Oh, I think that it's just wonderful. MISHLOVE: (Laughter). SATIR: Now I'm doing something else. I'm sending out another message about the words that disclaim what I'm doing. Now, just like in the first illustration, the thing I found out is, those two levels of the dialogue come from two different places in the person. They are not an attempt to bring trouble to other people. That's not where it comes. These are totally unconscious. MISHLOVE: Yes. I think you call one level the metacommunication level. In other words, every time we communicate we have a message, and we're also communicating a message about our message. SATIR: That's right. Exactly. See, a lot of people -- I think it's even been true of psychologists -when people give what we call double-level messages, which is where my body and voice say one thing, different from my words, they think that this is deliberately done. It isn't. The words come from the left brain -- what you should do. The other part comes from the right brain. Now, suppose that I have a rule that says that I should never complain to you. Let's suppose I'm in

terrible pain and you ask me how I am, and I say, "Fine." What am I doing? This says I've got a rule that I should never complain. And it says I have pain. But I'm giving the message of what I should do, which is I should never complain. MISHLOVE: Then it's as if underneath any conversation, no matter I suppose how abstract or intellectual, there's always a human being under there with emotions, often needing to be validated. SATIR: That's of course one of the things I try to teach people. I have to tell you something. I go to lectures, people presenting things. I listen, and all of a sudden, they may be talking about all this erudition, and underneath I hear: "I'm hurting. I feel disapppointed. I would love for you to help me." And it comes out in these very erudite terms. Now, if I were to go to one of those people and say, "I'd like to help you," the chances are that they would say, "How did you know I needed help? What makes you think I need help?" MISHLOVE: They might even deny it. SATIR: Sure, because usually people like that have rules they shouldn't ask for help -- not that they don't need it. And this is the kind of stuff that goes on with people all the time. See, I can always hear and see better in you than you can hear and see in yourself, simply because I'm outside of you. And then when I share with you what I'm seeing and hearing -- if, for instance, it happens to meet one of your rules, which is, "I should never ask for anything; I should always be right," etc., then you have to deny what's going on. And then if I am not careful, I have to prove my point, and pretty soon we've estranged ourselves. MISHLOVE: And in our culture, I suppose one of the very common rules is never to reveal what you really feel, especially the vulnerable parts. SATIR: Yes, that's absolutely true. If you think about it, people's feeling about what's vulnerable is their deep feelings. But most people give themselves "credit" for only having bad things inside, not good things. You know, I've even found people who felt that they couldn't talk about love feelings because somebody else will be jealous. So as a result, we don't communicate the thing that is really what human beings are about. You can put people on a computer, and they can talk back to each other, but they have no arms, nothing else, you know. But we are behaving a lot of times as though that's what human communication is, and I know better than that. MISHLOVE: One of the things that I've enjoyed, is that you have developed these caricatures of the stances that people take characteristically, like the blamer or the placater, when we're constantly trying to cover up what we really feel inside. And when people are always that way -pointing a finger at someone else, or always pointing it at themselves, or getting very intellectual or distracting and being silly all the time -- these are modes of operation in which people aren't being -- you use the term congruent. They're not communicating how they really feel. SATIR: Well, this is a way that people have of protecting themselves. I don't know, I have hunches about where it came from. Why do we have to be so worried about protecting ourselves? One of the conclusions I came to is that I must never get myself into a position where

I might have to protect myself, so I lie all the time. I say yes when I feel no, and I say no when I feel yes. So as a result, it's kind of like I am standing on a tenterhook all the time, worrying about what's going to be found out, or who is going to criticize me, or something of that sort. And so the very things that would make it possible for you and I to connect -- any you and I -- we can't, because we can't be truthful. And I'm now talking about truth in the emotional sense. I'm just saying how I feel. MISHLOVE: It's hard to imagine we are going to be able to run our governments, and deal with each other in politics and business and nations, when we have this problem in our families. SATIR: Well, I have said this. We couldn't even begin to heal the world until we learn how to heal the family. And we're beginning to learn how to heal the family. One way we don't heal the family is by taking sides. And yet, that's been one of the ways that people have traditionally done it. And then, which side is right? So as we move into learning how -- and now I can tell you about something that I think we're moving into, I know I am, and that is how to make an emotionally nurturing triad, where nobody has to win over anybody else, and nobody has to lose, and everybody contributes. See, I wonder what would happen if China, Russia, and the United States were able to be a nurturing triad for the world; or France and England and Russia -- any three countries. Because one of the things I've found out when I work with families is that I have to work at making a nurturing triad for people. MISHLOVE: A triad is almost like a basic family unit. SATIR: It is the family unit -- Ma, Pa, and the kid. There isn't anything else. Do you realize that three is all there is in the world? There isn't anything else. Everything is a multiple of three. Think about the trinity, that's a religious symbol. Buckminster Fuller -- he was always one of my heroes; I'm delighted to hear Brendan O'Regan talk about him. What was the triad? The triad was the basis of the most sturdy building that there is. MISHLOVE: The tetrahedron. SATIR: And so the triad is a complete unit. And it's composed of three complete units. One thing is that if I grow up, and I have not come to a place of feeling an equal part of a triad, then what I always have to do is either feel guilty, or rageful, when I leave. MISHLOVE: And this is something that we all go through in dealing with our own parents, I guess. SATIR: Yes, if that's the way we were brought up. And you know how to do that, if you're brought up by parents who have a submissive-dominant role relationship, and that can either be mean or benevolent, kind. But it's still a discrepancy. MISHLOVE: Between the two of them. SATIR: Yes. And that's the big thing that we have to take a look at now, so that we have relationships that are equal. I was just in Prague. They had the first symposium of family therapy

that was ever held by the socialist countries, and I was asked to be the president of it. And as the president of this, one of the first things I did was to introduce the ideas of how equality between people would result in good family relations and peace. See, those two things go together. And it was very welcomed, very welcomed, because everybody knows on some level that if they feel equal, a sense of value with the other, that this is going to make a very strong growth link, not a link in which I have use the gun to you. MISHLOVE: One almost senses that the relationship of a government to its people is like the relationship of the parents to the children. It can be healthy or unhealthy. And there's a sense in which young children are told, for example, they must obey because the father says so. And the same way with the government. You must obey when the president tells you to do things, must not question. Or you can question. It's as if a model for a healthy government would also be a model for a healthy family. SATIR: Exactly. That's one of the things I found out. If you are brought up to conform and obey, you are never brought up to become an independent choice maker. And at this point in time, the ones who really are willing to stick their necks out and to say, "This is what I believe," and at the same time are not putting other people down, will eventually rise to the top. MISHLOVE: In effect what you're saying is that in a healthy family, at some point the triad evolves to the point where it's no longer parents and children, but it's three equals. SATIR: That's right -- in value. And then one of the other important things about the equality is, each one is unique. And really revealing and considering and respecting our uniqueness. You know, a lot of people forget that my fingerprint will identify me anywhere in the world. MISHLOVE: That's right. SATIR: We have five billion people today. We had 74 before that -- 79 billion different fingerprints. Now, isn't that a case for uniqueness? And so we forget that we are unique beings, and we do not ask people to become the cookie cutters -- you know, like a cookie cutter. But we have a way in which all of us can value each other and learn about our uniqueness and value it, so this is one of the big challenges. And I'm glad to be aware, because I stand for this. MISHLOVE: I think what you're getting at is self esteem. When we can recognize ourselves and everyone around us as unique people, then we can all feel self esteem for our uniqueness. SATIR: It's certainly a big piece. You know, I've just been nominated -- not nominated, but picked with 26 other people to be on the Governor's Task Force for Self Esteem and Social Responsibility. MISHLOVE: Yes, I think that's very important work. SATIR: Well, it is important. But you know, I was thinking the other day, we'll never find a thought or a feeling on the operating table. You just can't find it. But we know that thought and feeling exist. We'll never find self esteem on the operating table.

MISHLOVE: Or under the microscope. SATIR: No, we never will. But you see, it's an effect, and things follow. It's both an effect and a cause. And so the interesting things that not only we but other people have, the things that count in the world, you don't have left-brain ways to put them out. You only have the effect of what's going on. MISHLOVE: When we were talking earlier about people not communicating what they really feel, it's often because what they're trying to cover up one way or another is low self esteem, isn't it? SATIR: Sure. And you know, right now, when anybody tells me that they want to just be good, I get an awful sinking feeling inside, because I hear them say, "I want to fit in, and I don't want to rock the boat." And self esteem for me is the willingness to say where you are. And if that rocks the boat, I'm not going to blame you for it, and I'm not going to be happy that the boat is rocked. But right now, I read something the other day that if we love our country, if I love myself or love you, we have to be free to criticize it. MISHLOVE: We have to be free to rock the boat. SATIR: Free to rock the boat. I think once we are willing and able to give out criticism in a real way, without blame, we can also love in a real way. MISHLOVE: It's a tricky thing. You know, I read an article recently by one public speaker who was telling people, "I don't want your advice unless I ask for it." A lot of people have this attitude, that they don't want any criticism, that any criticism is really an attempt to put them down. SATIR: You see, I can do that. I know four ways to criticize you in which you'll feel like a worm. All right, just for fun, I'm going to take something that has no effect at all. You have a wonderful tie. I want to tell you that's what I feel, for me, Virginia. Now I'm going to make believe that you could have a better choice for a tie, OK? So if I start out with you and I say, "Jeff, I have something to tell you. I don't know if I should tell you or not, but it's really quite . . . well, maybe I won't tell you." MISHLOVE: Oh, you can tell me. SATIR: That tie you're wearing. I wish you wouldn't be doing that. But then, who am I to say anything about your tie? I don't dress that way. MISHLOVE: Oh no, your opinion is important. SATIR: Are you ready to feel what's going on inside of me? I'll take another one. My God, you're coming out with that tie again. I don't know why you wear that thing all the time, just because your mother gave it to you.

MISHLOVE: That one really gets to me. I don't know how to come back on that. SATIR: What do you want to do? What's the feeling inside? MISHLOVE: Well, I wouldn't mind punching you. SATIR: Exactly. MISHLOVE: But of course I wouldn't ever say that. SATIR: No, but the point of it is, you see, because we don't say the feelings doesn't mean that they're not there. See, you tighten them in your teeth, and maybe one day you put a knife in me, or you dream about bad things for yourself. MISHLOVE: Or if I live with you, I get an ulcer. SATIR: Exactly. Or I could say to you, "Jeff, I just took this article out from Esquire. It has to do with the choice men make of ties. I just thought that you might want to have this. It has in detail what you need." How do you feel about that one? MISHLOVE: Well, it's a little easier. I can sort of put it off on an intellectual plane and not take it personally -- Esquire magazine. SATIR: Do you feel very good about it? MISHLOVE: Not great. SATIR: But at least it's a little less. MISHLOVE: More my style. SATIR: Or I could say to somebody in your presence, "Did you get a load of that? Just imagine, here he is, a fantastic guy, but look at that tie! Can you imagine?" How do you feel about that? MISHLOVE: Not too good. SATIR: Or I can say, "Jeff, I have something I'd like to share with you. Are you willing to listen?" MISHLOVE: Yes. SATIR: I just was looking at your tie, and I thought, "You've got better ties than that." How do you feel about my telling you that? MISHLOVE: That's . . . all right. It's not so bad.

SATIR: See, one of the things is that criticism is never pleasant, but it can be without blame. MISHLOVE: I think you were demonstrating here the different personality styles that you've enumerated -- the placating, blaming, intellectual type, the silly type. The last one seemed a little bit more real. SATIR: Well, it's between two people who value each other. What did I do? I asked you, could I share with you. You said yes. I didn't come in and do what I did before. And then I shared with you. Now, that doesn't mean you have to do anything about it, but at least it's clear. We both have the freedom to comment, and you know that on some level. MISHLOVE: In other words, what you're saying is that when people are really connecting at this level of being real with each other, being really congruent with each other, then criticism can be constructive, it can be healthy and normal. But when people come at each other trying to hide what they really feel, maybe their own low self esteem, then maybe what they're doing is taking out on the other person some of the bad feelings they may have for themselves. SATIR: We even have a term for it. What I won't accept in myself which is there, I can project on you. And this is happening. MISHLOVE: Technically it's called dumping. SATIR: Or dumping. In other circles it's called projecting. I dump on you what I will not accept for myself. So this is a very important piece. You see now, what I said at the beginning of our talk together, that communication from me can be related to the difficulties in intimacy, in health, in making sense, and in being competent. I was at a conference that John Naisbitt and Patricia put on in Telluride not so long ago, and they talked about some of the new ideas about choosing people to work for corporations. And one of them is Gore-Tex, which does a wonderful thing. MISHLOVE: It's an amazing corporation, yes. SATIR: You know what their criteria are for choosing people? To be kind, fun to be around, and competent -- all three. So I always ask myself, what stands between myself or anyone else in being kind, fun to be around, and competent? MISHLOVE: It almost seems like a natural state. SATIR: It is a natural state. And I say to myself, why are we busting our necks to do something that's that simple? What is it that stands between people and being kind and fun to be around? MISHLOVE: We often have trouble, I suppose, accepting our natural state. I mean, there's parts of ourselves that we deny, and then we get off balance, and we're not kind, we're not fun, we're not always competent.

SATIR: Well, I think we can be. One of the things I'm interested in now is a vision of a new consciousness about people, where we can say and do, we can be kind and we can be fun to be around and competent. There's no reason why we can't. MISHLOVE: No matter what kind of families we came from. SATIR: Exactly. And I've spent a lifetime demonstrating that, actually. You see, people oftentimes think this is so simple-minded. But maybe it's the simple things that are going to make a difference. MISHLOVE: That are the most profound. And I suppose it really is very hopeful for people just to accept, from a person with your background and your experience, that underlying all of the sometimes twisted complexities that we feel inside of ourselves, is basic kindness, basic fun, basic competence. SATIR: And with that, you can get at the truth. You can get at the truth, and you don't have to hit people over the head. You just don't. MISHLOVE: One of the things you told me before we began the program, and it may be a good note to close on, is that if life can't be fun, what's the point? SATIR: Yeah. That's what I believe. MISHLOVE: The best ways to grow and to move towards that kind of competency are the gentle. SATIR: And with that I just would like to add, plants never grow because you tell them you'll hate them if they don't. We're plants. MISHLOVE: Well, Virginia Satir, it has been an extraordinary pleasure sharing this last half hour with you, and looking at the profound and complex realms of human communication, and yet the underlying simplicity underneath it all. Thank you very much for being with me. SATIR: You're welcome. END

BECOMING MORE FULLY HUMAN with VIRGINIA SATIR JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. With me today is Virginia Satir. We'll be talking about human potential, about becoming more fully human. Virginia is something of a living legend. She's one of the founders of family therapy, the author of Peoplemaking, Conjoint Family Therapy, Making Contact, Your Many Faces, and numerous other books. She has been a role model for many people. She is the head of the Avanta Network, where she is a therapist's

therapist, and trains many people in the art of family therapy. She's also the person who is the subject of a book called Structure of Magic, written by Bandler and Grinder, who are the two founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and developed that school of psychology by studying her magic. Welcome, Virginia. VIRGINIA SATIR: Thank you. It's nice to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, when we talk about becoming more fully human, and we look at the world around us, with all of the problems that the world faces today, especially in certain parts of the world that have been at war for thousands of years, one gets a sense of despair, and there are certain movements in psychology -- the existentialists, for example -- that feel a lot of despair about what is possible -- that the basic nature, perhaps, of the human spirit contains this evil, almost, that we create about us in the world. I think you have a different view than that. SATIR: When you were talking, my mind went back to the feud between -- was it the Hatfields and the McCoys? MISHLOVE: Yes. SATIR: All right. They kept that alive from generation to generation, and I heard it said that when someone asked one Hatfield and one McCoy, "What's this all about?" nobody could remember. See, I think that there's a very important piece that we have to look at, and that is that we continue to develop the same kinds of things that have happened to us as children, and therefore what is going on today is only a repeat of what went on with our parents and their parents before them, in an oversimplified way. What is it? It is looking at relationship as being an experience in dominance and submission, and we can put that negatively or positively. The positive view is that I'm dependent and you're going to take care of me. The negative view is that I'm your victim and you're going to kill me, or something like that. MISHLOVE: In other words, like with child abuse, the people who have been abused as children, when they then become parents abuse their own children. That cycle may have been going on for thousands of years. SATIR: And that's what I see at this point in time. We've just been doing the same old thing, as far as relationships are concerned, because we didn't know anything about equality. What's new now, and it started after World War II, the roots came -- and there are a lot of people who probably have never experienced what was happening then -- when we faced the demise of the democratic way of living, through Hitler and all of that. When we came out of that, two things happened. One was the development of the atom bomb, which we dropped -- and we're the only country, by the way, that ever did it. And the other one was the horror that came because one man decided who should live and who should die. Now that was pretty tough medicine for the world to take, and I think we're still under that shadow, by the way. But being under it, we also, many, many people, never want to repeat that Hitler business again, which was the ultimate of the dominance-submission model. And no one really wants to drop bombs anymore; and in a funny way we said we'll live by killing.

MISHLOVE: I suppose you could say that really there have been more human lives lost in war and revolution during the first half of the twentieth century than there have been since, say, 1950. SATIR: Oh, I think that's true. And it was all in the interest of peace, trying to make the world a better place. I want to take that theme. You see, there are all kinds of ways that people have of trying to make the world a better place. One is to strike out all things that don't agree with you. MISHLOVE: The war to end all wars. SATIR: That's right. But we have this in people. I mean, they say, "Whoever doesn't agree with me, let's get rid of them." Then there are the people who say that we need to be able to evolve everybody so that they can be owners of their own decisions, and they can make their own decisions. It's very interesting, because this idea depends on the fact that we believe that human beings are naturally growth-oriented, that they're not bent on destruction. See, we entered the world a long time ago with the idea that people were bent on destruction, therefore we had to keep them from destroying themselves. I don't believe that for one minute. MISHLOVE: Sort of a seventeenth-century view of Hobbes and the social contract, Leviathan -that there's this monster inside of us, in human nature, and the purpose of society is to constrain this monstrous side of ourselves. SATIR: That makes us work on deprivation and limitation. And so as a result the wonderful things that people have inside themselves never get a chance to see the light of day, and so what we are doing, we're being very costly when we follow those same principles in keeping down the uniqueness, the creativity that's possible, because people find themselves feeling familiar with what's going on. If it's familiar, they don't want to change it, because they feel, "Well, I'm going into the unknown; what's going to happen then?" Now, at this point in time, enough has happened -- and I mentioned the two things about the Nazi business and the nuclear power -- that many people are willing to look at something different, to look at the possibilities that we can have different relationships with each other. It's now all around -- it's true in religion, it's true in business, it's true in almost all kinds of places that have to do with human beings at this point. So we're right in the middle of something. MISHLOVE: People are willing to look inside of themselves once again and say, "You know, we're not all monstrous." SATIR: Yes, that's right. You know, I go around this world all the time. I go into all places, and I find the same thing everywhere -- fear of the unknown. And then, when people have some kind of beginning idea that they're not so terrible, that people are really quite nice, and they find that out -- then those fears that they had about what going into the unknown is, somehow disappear. MISHLOVE: People are more willing to trust the unknown. SATIR: Do you know what makes it possible for me to trust the unknown? MISHLOVE: No.

SATIR: Because I've got eyes, ears, skin. I can talk, I can move, I can feel, and I can think. And that's not going to change when I go into a new context; I've got that. And then I give myself permission to say all my real yesses and no's, because I've got all those other possibilities, and then I can move anywhere. Why not? MISHLOVE: In other words, you trust your own integrity, you trust your own resources, to carry you through new situations. SATIR: Yes, because all I need is what I showed you -- those abilities to see and hear and think, feel, and touch, and to move and speak. MISHLOVE: And ultimately, I suppose, it's your ability to feel what you feel, to say what you feel, to be real about that, that can keep you going in the most difficult situations. SATIR: Well, for me it is, because that means I never have to say I know when I don't know; I never have to say yes when I feel no; I never have to say no when I feel yes. So I can keep all my energy in one place, and that makes it possible for me to be most effective in coping. MISHLOVE: In a sense, when a person can live with that level of authenticity, I suppose there's no existential dilemma or confrontation with death or with terror or the unknown that you somehow don't have the inner strength to handle. SATIR: I don't know if this is exactly on the point, but it's something I'd like to share with you -the idea that the event is never that which determines your fate; it's your coping with the event. Death, sickness, all kinds of things happen to human beings, and the fate of what happens as a result is in the coping. I know a lot of people who say, "Well, if you lived right, you wouldn't have those things to cope with." I don't think we know enough about that, how we can avoid things, and I don't think avoiding things is helpful anyway. But it's the coping with these things that gives us the kind of strength, and gives us our opportunities. So death is something to cope with; we're all going to die one day. MISHLOVE: You also point out quite a bit that we all have weaknesses, we're all imperfect; none of us can see our own back. SATIR: Right, exactly. This is important to remember too, because how I look at reality -- no, I'll change that. What I think reality is, is what I see, OK? What I see is not the total reality, and here's where the back comes in. You've got a back, and everybody's got a back, but how many people have seen it? A lot of other people see your back, but you don't see it. MISHLOVE: So we always have the unknown right behind us. SATIR: That's right, and when you start putting things together like that, Jeff, then you begin to get an awareness of the absurdity of thinking that all there is in the world is what you see in it. MISHLOVE: You've focused quite a lot in your lifetime on human potential, on dealing with people who come from tormented families, where there was abuse, where the parents didn't get

along with each other. These are the kinds of situations that I suppose socially we tend to blame on our worst social problems -- drugs, crime. You feel very hopeful that a person's life need not be conditioned by their past in this regard. SATIR: Well, it's not only a matter of my feeling, but I've demonstrated that. Now let me give you a little metaphor. Let's think that the human being has a countless number of little jets, that's there's a fountain inside, that there's a countless number of jets, and if our energy were free to flow, and these jets were all open, that this would just put in fantastic energy. But most or many of these jets are closed -- we shouldn't do this, and we shouldn't do that, and who's going to hate us if we do this and that and something else. So as a result, we live half lives. MISHLOVE: It sounds like they're closed because of our own mental chatter. SATIR: Exactly, exactly -- all the rules about what we shouldn't do. When we open those up -do you know what happens to a fountain where only some of the jets will let water come out? Sometimes the water comes out in big gushes in some of them, and it's very uneven, because the central pressure to make the water come out is stopped by the holes that are stopped. And I believe that's our central place inside of us, with the energy. So opening up all of these holes, so to speak, which are our feelings and our possibilities, when we allow that to happen, then we become in a totally different place, because we then can have harmony moving, and we have the total force of the energy that's possible. That's all I've done with people, is open up. MISHLOVE: Help people get really in touch with their feelings again. SATIR: Their feelings, and allow themselves to remember that their feelings are not the parts of them that decide what should happen. Feelings are like a thermometer which says what things are. You move over to another part of yourself when you make decisions. A lot of people have said if you go into your feelings, that's going to be the basis of your decisions. MISHLOVE: You'll make a bad decision then, so cut off your feelings completely. SATIR: So the important thing is that our feelings are like the juice that keeps us in a whole piece and gives us the ability to see better, to think better, to feel better -- the owned emotions. But an emotion that you have which isn't owned -- you say, "No, I don't have it" -- is one that splits your energy, because it puts you into this kind of thing. You cannot say that you aren't what you are. What I mean is yes, you can say that, but that doesn't change it. If you're angry, for instance, and you say, "No, I'm not angry," or you're feeling very excited about something and you say, "No, I'm not excited," those are the kinds of emotional lies that just steal our energy away. MISHLOVE: In our culture it seems as if females are brought up to be more in touch with their feelings. Now, I often run into many women who seem to have a lot of feeling, and then they complain about their spouses, and say, "He's so out of touch; he won't admit to his feelings." Do you think that's in general more of a problem for men?

SATIR: Yes. Now, let me just say something, because I want to tell you. I give an award which is called the reward for renovated super-reasonable men. What that means is these beautiful guys, and there are plenty of them around, who have been schooled to be brave, to not let their feelings sway them, and they've got a kind of shield around them, and many of them develop their left brain and their right brain is lying fallow. So what I do is I know that that's what a man is "supposed to" be like. MISHLOVE: Role models for men. SATIR: Role models, that's right. They're never supposed to respond in feeling and all that. And of course our men die much earlier than women; we already know that. MISHLOVE: That's a great tragedy, I suppose. SATIR: Sure. So I've developed the concept of half wit. I want to tell you about half wit. Women were supposed to never have any strong aggressive feelings, or their left brains, they weren't supposed to be smart. The men weren't supposed to be soft, they were only supposed to be hard - you should excuse the expression. So what we had when a couple got together, what I say is each one had their half wit. MISHLOVE: Yes, you often have this image of the very strong man out of touch with his warm feelings, and the woman who maybe is more in touch with her feelings, but on the other hand she tends to be silly rather than come from her own strength. SATIR: Well, this is one of the things that the role modeling has done. If you're a man, this is how you should be; if you're a woman, this is how you should be. So both suffer. Now, the woman says to her husband -- and I've heard this over and over again -- "Can't you be with my feelings?" It isn't that he can't, but he's got rules that he shouldn't. On the other hand, he would like very often to have an intellectual companion, and then he complains that he doesn't have that. So what we're in the process of, for the first time in the world, is each person has to be whole within themselves. They have to have their hard part and their soft part -- or to put it another way, their cognitive part and their intuitive part. Both of them have to have it, so that neither one has to bootleg the other part from the other person. See, that's what a lot of the marital problems are about. MISHLOVE: A lot of people seem to understand what you're saying intellectually, but then they say, "But I just can't do it. Whenever I get into a tough situation, all of my old sides, my old tapes, come out." Short of psychotherapy, what can people do? SATIR: Well, I'm glad you raised that question, because there are a lot of people that want to change. I want to relate this and look at it as a habit. Now, what do we do with habits? First of all, we give ourselves a message: Do we want to change this habit? Now, if we want to change it -MISHLOVE: If we're motivated.

SATIR: If I want to change it, then I'm going to stop thinking I'm going to do it for so and so, or so and so. I'm doing it because it's for my health, or for whatever I want. So I decide that I want to change it. Now, when we change anything that's been ongoing, we have the strong temptation to go with what's familiar. Remember, this is not the comfortable, but the familiar. And so we take a step here, and then the familiar brings us back. This is a fight that we have. It's just like dieting or giving up smoking or any of those things. But if you have given yourself a commitment, and you are doing it for yourself, then you know, like any other habit, you're going to backslide, and you're going to go ahead, and finally you're going to be able to make it. A lot of people don't realize that changing oneself is one of the hardest things in the world to do. You know, the person who thinks you could change easily is the one who's already been through the change process. You know -- all the people who were smoking and stopped, you could stop. So the big part of all of this is that this is not easy to do, changing what we've been characteristically doing and familiar with, because the pull of that is very strong. MISHLOVE: And yet you are optimistic. SATIR: Oh sure, because I know that people can be with their desires. I don't think that people have to lose in the game of life. MISHLOVE: Well, is it a question of just forcing themselves through the difficulty? SATIR: No, let me tell you something, a typical thing. I go through a whole series of changes with people, and then they say, "Well, what if it doesn't last?" I say, "Well, I don't know whether it's going to last or not, but let me say something. If at a moment in time you find yourself doing what you've always been doing, then you can give yourself an A grade for being aware. Then you can make a choice: Do I want to continue this or not?" MISHLOVE: In other words, not to berate yourself if you relapse. SATIR: That's right, because the pulls are powerful. So the first step -- I always say give yourself a gold star for recognizing it. I remember somebody who wanted to stop blaming. They had a very highly developed skill for blaming, blamed on everybody. MISHLOVE: Many people are talented at that. SATIR: This person decided, "I don't want to do that." And the reason? They knew that it was hard on their blood pressure, it was hard on their innards, it was hard on the people outside, and they didn't want to do it. So the first step, that was very clear. But now they had to put that awareness at the time that it was happening. So the first time that this person saw, "Ah! I hear. I know what I'm doing," and stopped in the middle of a blame, like that -- that's the first step, to recognize that. That doesn't mean it's not going to happen again. But this is now conscious, and now you can say, "Do I want to do this some more, or do I not?" So the first step is that. Now, that's where the commitment, the feeling of the self, come together with the awareness, because as long as you're not aware of anything you're not going to change anything. And then to be patient with yourself, so that then the next time it'll come a little faster, and after a while you'll

have built up enough experience for the non-blaming stance, that the pull of the blaming one is no longer there. MISHLOVE: It sounds ultimately as if in this case one has to stop blaming oneself in order to stop blaming others. SATIR: Absolutely, because what difference is it? MISHLOVE: And let the certain part of us, I guess the part you might call the will power, function harmoniously with all the other parts, and then the will can become stronger. SATIR: Yes, that's a very important point. Will cannot do anything without awareness. But then will -- Dr. Assagioli talked a lot about this in Psychosynthesis -- will becomes like the captain of our ship: What do we will ourselves to do? What kind of decisions do we want to take? Then we can look at the things that start to take us off our decision track, whatever it is. And it's not any different from that dialogue that goes on inside: "I want to do this, but oh, now I'm getting all of this flak from myself" -- as compared to two people. Same thing. So a lot of people also are afraid to take plunges into the unknown. This is one of the things, I mentioned this before, because in the unknown I'll be naked. I say, "Not any more naked than you are now." Really. So anyway, the literature is full of anecdotes of people who were afraid to move somewhere, and it looks like it isn't really true; it's the pull of familiarity -- like they would rather be still the abused person, in this victimizing situation, because at least they knew about it. MISHLOVE: I suppose the hopeful sign is that when you look at the people who have overcome a bad background, or overcome an addiction, that all of these people once felt that way too. SATIR: That's right, and this is a very important thing. We have thousands of people like this -just thousands of people who have moved from what I call one status quo to another. The one status quo embodied the bad habit, the drinking or the drugs or whatever it was, the abuse; to another status quo where life brings joy, and doesn't have to do this. In between those two stages is a lot of work. But you know where you start it -- as I say to people, "Bow three times to the mirror in the morning when you get up, and each time you bow, you say, 'The world is a better place because I am here,' and finally you will get to believe it. Then you will let yourself know that you can be kind, you can be fun to be around, and you can be confident." MISHLOVE: It's interesting, because we have been focusing a lot on the individual, and I know really the large thrust of your work is that change occurs in groups of people -- in families and communities. Perhaps we should address that a little bit. SATIR: I want to say something that may sound strange to you. Literally there is no such thing as a group. There are only a lot of individuals whose decisions get made to form a group, OK? I think this is very important. MISHLOVE: Groups are kind of like fictions, in a way.

SATIR: Well, they're there and you have to deal with them, but the kinds of decisions that groups make are made out of the rules that get developed in that system. They do not represent, as a whole, anything except the rules in the system. I found that out when I was working with families, and so one of the things I do is try to find the rules to free people, individuals, to be able to do what the rules do not allow. MISHLOVE: You seem to be pretty big on breaking rules. SATIR: Well, I will tell you, I think most of our emotional rules have to be broken. Like: "I should never get angry at somebody I love." You realize what a difficult thing that is. Or, "I should always be perfect." How about that one? Or, "I must never show fear." You know that one? MISHLOVE: Oh, I share all of those. SATIR: Those rules have to be broken, because they are inhuman rules that can never be lived up to. MISHLOVE: I agree with that, and then I also have to accept that I can be a perfectionist too, and not fault myself for that. SATIR: Well, whatever rule you're following, if it doesn't fit the harmony of your body and the harmony of the universe, it's going to give you trouble. And so this is one of the things. These are steps to what is now called transcendental work, or transformational work, is to recognize. When we're sick we're out of harmony with ourself, and also at the same time we're out of harmony with the universe. When I talk like that to people, every once in a while some people get a little scared, but more people understand it now than ever before. MISHLOVE: In other words, what you're saying here is that we can start with the nuts and bolts of what we're doing, and try and get through that, but also learn from it, so that if I discover that I'm sick, I don't have to feel bad. I can say, "Oh, I've learned something about myself." SATIR: And that's very important. The ongoing problem with some of the physicians today, generally speaking, is that when people get sick you give them so many drugs that they don't know what's going on, so you never discover the sickness, the cause of it. And what we're riding between is good physicians don't want their patients to have too much pain. So the drugs will kill the pain, but at the same time they also oftentimes banish the opportunity to see what the pain means, and people like Dr. Normal Shealy, who runs the Pain Rehabilitation Clinic that is now in Missouri, talked about pain as a messenger that we need to look at. He doesn't want people to have more pain than necessary, but when we start looking at the pain as a messenger, we get to a different place, and maybe we can also use things like meditation and so on. I'm not against using any good medical procedures. I think medicine has done a wonderful thing. MISHLOVE: But the physical pain and the emotional pain, I suppose, are all like guideposts for us.

SATIR: That's right, exactly. MISHLOVE: We can take a look and say, "Well, where do we need to correct?" SATIR: That's right. So again, when you think about it, how can I help this person to be able to be in a good enough state so they can begin to look at the meaning of their own pain, and the meaning of the messages that this pain is sending? MISHLOVE: Virginia, we're out of time now, but I want you to know this has been a very enlightening half hour for me. We've been dealing with some difficult issues -- how we can break through some of the real tough spots in our life, and your message has been quite optimistic. Thank you very much for being with me. SATIR: You're welcome. END

BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL with June Singer, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is Jungian psychology. With me is Dr. June Singer, a Jungian analyst who was trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and is one of the founders of the Jung Institute in Chicago. Dr. Singer is the author of numerous books, including Boundaries of the Soul, The Unholy Bible, Androgyny and Energies of Love. Welcome. JUNE SINGER, Ph.D.: It's good to be here, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: June, in your early work at the Jung Institute, you have described in Boundaries of the Soul how for your final examination you were asked to describe the process of individuation, which is the goal of Jungian therapy, as if you were talking to a street sweeper while you were waiting for a bus. I wonder if you could repeat that definition for us. SINGER: Yes, and that was a shocker of a question, I might add, because I had studied all the parallels of the individuation process from the alchemist down to the present day. So when this question came to me, to describe this process while you're waiting for the bus and you're talking to a street sweeper, I looked out at the Lake of Zurich, and I thought, well, it's something like being in a sailing boat on the lake and utilizing the wind, understanding that the wind is something that you don't make and you can't control. But you need to understand how to live

your life in the same way that you understand how you would sail a boat, taking the power of the wind and going with it and allowing your own knowledge of it and your understanding of it to help you go in the direction that you need to be headed. And so in Jungian analysis you learn how to deal with your own power, or rather the power that comes through you, and live your life in such a way that it's harmonious with that power which is above and beyond and all around. MISHLOVE: It's as if the forces within our psyche are like the winds that might blow us about, and as we learn how to work with the winds we can direct ourselves through our lives. SINGER: And we don't change them. We don't in Jungian analysis try to make somebody different from who they are. But what we try to do is to guide people to recognize themselves and discover themselves and find out what was always there, but hasn't been recognized or lived out. MISHLOVE: One of the tendencies that you've pointed out in modern culture is for people to sacrifice their individuality for the sake of security, so that they can have a comfortable home. The price that they often pay, I suppose, is they lose their soul in a way. It's almost as if Jungian psychology is a rediscovery of the soul. SINGER: Yes, it is very much like that, in a certain way. There's an old story -- I think it's an old Jewish legend, actually -- about God calling an angel to bring a soul down to the mother who is about to give birth to a child. This soul, during the pregnancy, is taken on various trips to find out what his or her life will be like. But at the moment of birth the angel hits the infant on the head, and at that moment the child forgets all that it knows about the soul and all its adventures, and then has to spend its whole life recovering bits and pieces and putting together that essence of who he really is. I think it's a beautiful story, because it suggests that we are born not as a tabula rasa, not as a blank table with society and the environment writing experience upon it and shaping the individual, but that we come with some very definite tendencies, and that certainly what happens to us influences what we are going to become, but it never really changes it totally. MISHLOVE: You know, there's really a striking contrast, I think, between Freudian psychology and Jungian psychology in this regard. One senses that the great influence that the Freudians had in our society was to look at the religious impulses and the religious traditions and reduce them down to sexual instincts and the expression of those. And Jung took almost the opposite point of view; he looked at sexuality and saw it as a symbol of our spiritual strivings. SINGER: Yes, he certainly did. In fact he's often quoted as saying that when somebody comes to him with a sexual problem he's quite sure that at base it's spiritual, and when they come with a spiritual problem he has a pretty good idea that it may be based in sexuality. But Jung saw the totality of the person, a kind of wholeness, in which you look at many, many levels of experience. When you look, for example, at sexuality, you're not only looking at the relationship between a man and a woman, but you're also looking at what each person brings of their concepts from their parents, the relationship of the parents to each other, and more than that, the parental belief system, which has to do with the guiding principles that were prevalent in the household. And that fits into spiritual issues as well -- was sexuality an expression of the divine

creative spirit, or was it a kind of falling into the material and sensual and leaving the creativity of the spirit? So the two are not in any way separated. MISHLOVE: You described a dream that Jung himself had, I think when he was a young child, that conditioned his whole outlook in this area. I wonder if we could go into that a bit. SINGER: Yes, that was a famous dream, when he was about three or four years old. He dreamed that he was going down into an underground chamber, and he went down and down and down, and he came to a huge room, and at the far end of the room there was a golden throne, and on the throne was an object that was nothing less than a golden phallus. He looked at it wonderstruck, because it was radiant, and he felt that he had found something miraculous and amazing. MISHLOVE: It was about the size of a tree, as I recall. SINGER: Something like that, yes. Then he heard his mother calling, "That's the man-eater." And he shuddered and he was frightened, and he had what so many of us have -- this tremendous spiritual attraction to sexuality, and the fear of the awesome power of it. It's never simple. It's always the tension of the opposites. Jung had much to say about the tension of the opposites. One of the things that he's quoted as saying is that whenever something you find out is true, the opposite is equally true. MISHLOVE: This really gets us into the way in which Jung dealt with the conflicts that he encountered in the Vienna Circle with the early psychoanalysts in the Freudian movement. When he would hear Freud arguing with Alfred Adler, for example, about the structure of the psyche, whether it was based on the sexual instinct or the drive for power, Jung would tend to look and say, "Well, there must be a sense in which both of these are expressing a single dynamic." SINGER: Actually, Jung was very concerned about this, because he himself had a view that was different from both Freud and Adler. The difference was one of the things certainly that led Jung to leave the Vienna Circle. After he left it he began to wonder, how can it be that everytime a case came up and the psychoanalysts were sitting around discussing it, Freud would always say that it came from the influence of the parents or some childhood trauma, and Adler would always say that it was something else, the will to power? Out of that Jung came to a discovery that was quite amazing at that time -- that it wasn't the situation that was debatable, but that each person brought to it something of his own personality typology, and that no matter what the issue, the type of the person, the psychological makeup, would determine his perspective on it. This has been a very, very important part of Jung's work as I see it, because if we believe that there is a right way to look at something, and that something is as it appears to be, there is really no negotiating, no arguing, no chance to harmonize, when people of different types come together. If you can recognize that if people are of different types, they each bring to the thing that is being discussed something novel that the other person doesn't see, then you can welcome the opposite perspective. I think if Russia and the United States, for example, could recognize that they come out of different typologies -- expanding this to an international perspective -- we could learn much from each other.

MISHLOVE: So it was Jung who in this context introduced the terms which are so common now in our culture -- introvert and extrovert. SINGER: Yes indeed. And Freud was for Jung the example of the extrovert, because the extrovert gets his energy, gets his reason for being, from the external world. There is where the meaning is, and there is where you have to be effective. The introvert is more concerned with what the external world does to him or her -- how that influences the individual psyche. These are two very different perspectives. MISHLOVE: Freud, I gather -- if we go back to the days of the Vienna Circle -- was a strong personality. He dominated this group of very powerful intellectuals. SINGER: Yes indeed. MISHLOVE: Adler, who broke away from him, seems to be described as a much milder, meeker fellow. SINGER: Well, Adler is a typical introvert who doesn't really want to get out and fight, doesn't want to make demands. He is not trying to change the world. He is only interested in changing the self. So when you have somebody who wants to change everybody else in conflict with somebody who doesn't want to, the person who doesn't want to tends to withdraw. In our American society, the extrovert tends to be more successful, in the business world for example. At least an extroverted persona is more successful -- that is, a capacity to behave like an extrovert even if you aren't one, if you're a secret closet introvert. MISHLOVE: You know, I've had an insight myself I'd like to share with you, in which I look at the yoga system of chakras, and then look at the development of Western psychology, and I see Freud talking about the sexual and aggressive instincts which are associated with the lower psychic centers or chakras. Then Adler talks about the will to power, and then later in his life the will toward altruism, raising it to the heart level. And then Jung begins to talk about the visions of the soul, and symbolism, and the collective unconscious, as if he's referring to the third eye and the spiritual chakra center. It's almost as if to have a complete psychology one needs to look at all of these. SINGER: Yes, I think Jung did emphasize the higher chakras. However, some people don't agree with that. Some people think he was more in the area of the heart and throat chakras. I don't know; but I do know that he took it all into consideration, and that he recognized the need for the flow of psychic energy to go through the whole spinal column of chakras, and to integrate all of it, and that at one time one would be prevalent, at another time another would be prevalent. But I think that perhaps where we could classify Jung is that he was very much interested in the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. So that if one chakra were in consciousness at a given time, there was the focus of the energy. All the others would be unconscious. This focus would then shift from one to another, because consciousness is not one solid thing. I like to liken it to a searchlight in a dark room that shines on one or another aspect of the individual or the world. And that's what we're conscious of at a given time, and the rest is relatively unconscious.

MISHLOVE: I suppose if we were to look at what I think of as Jung's really major contribution to psychology, and where he really broke off from Freud, it's his introduction of the concept of the collective unconscious. SINGER: Yes. Jung's and Freud's concepts of the unconscious are very, very different. For Freud the unconscious was primarily an offshoot of the ego. Whatever the ego rejected or repressed -by the ego I mean a person's self concept -- whatever I can't accept into my self concept goes into the unconscious. I don't want to deal with it, I don't want to know about it. But for Jung, it was the unconscious that was basic. Everything was in the unconscious originally, and consciousness emerges out of the unconscious like an island out of the ocean, and then the effort is to expand that consciousness, let it grow. But there is no idea of gathering up the whole unconscious and making it the province of the ego, in Jungian psychology, because the unconscious is like the universe, and you can't scoop up the universe in a teacup. MISHLOVE: In other words, Freud seemed to suggest that maybe at one time very early in human history there was no unconscious because we didn't need to repress, we were animals, and it was only with the veneer of civilization that we got the notion that our aggressive instincts and our sexual instincts were forbidden and couldn't be expressed. So we repressed them into and therefore created the unconscious. SINGER: Exactly. And with Jung it was quite the opposite. He believed that at one time there was nothing but unconsciousness, and that we lived in a kind of world where we didn't think much about things, didn't organize, didn't plan -- that we really were very much an integral part of nature, and that consciousness only grew gradually, and is still growing, and becomes more and more complex and defined. He has a very different perspective, because with a Freudian perspective there's a necessity to recover what has been repressed. With Jungian psychology, certainly the concept of repression is there -- I think Jung built on Freud in a way, and accepted much of what he said with regard to repression. But what else is there is the tremendous source of creative energy. All that we can possibly become is already there in the unconscious, and we have only to learn how to find it. MISHLOVE: You mentioned earlier that Jungian analysis isn't designed necessarily to correct a problem or to change a person, but it's more a path of self discovery. SINGER: Yes. MISHLOVE: A person who comes to a Jungian analyst -- I imagine many people come with symptoms, but you're not all that concerned as to whether they leave after many years with or without their symptoms. SINGER: Generally the symptom is not what it appears to be. It's something that precipitates a process that's long overdue. I know in my own experience, when I got into analysis I went because I thought that there was something valuable to be learned there, and I didn't recognize that I personally had a lot of serious problems. It took quite a bit of analysis to find out why I really was there, but the idea that I wanted to be educated and understand more was what precipitated the process. I remember my first dream -- to show you how unintellectual my

initiation into Jungian analysis was. Jungians put a lot of stock on initial dreams. We call them the first dream that you have in analysis, and when I was going to go the next day to my analyst, I dreamed that I was laid out on a butcher's block. My hands and feet were tied, and someone was standing over me with a butcher knife, ready to plunge in and open me up. And I realized that I was really frightened about being seen, being revealed, and of course it came out in the analytic work, little by little, that I had held so much back and been so unwilling to look at what was there. But of course that's typical. Almost everybody has that experience in some way or another. They know there's a lot there, they're curious, they have intimations. I think dreams give us intimations often, and we get a sense in strange ways that there is something that we know and yet we don't know and we want to know. MISHLOVE: Jung himself seems to suggest that almost the very opposite of what we manifest consciously is what we're about to find as we go into the unconscious. SINGER: Yes. And the dreams can point the way to this, because all of our defenses that we have during the day keep us from recognizing -- I'm going to use a word that I hope won't be misunderstood -- all the demons and the monsters and the strange creatures of the night, that we don't look at during the day. We don't allow them to exist. But when our forbiddings are taken away from us and we're vulnerable in sleep, they come sneaking out of the corners and showing themselves, and we see then what it is that we've been hiding from ourselves. It's really wonderful, if you have the courage to face it, to be able to look at those, see what they mean. MISHLOVE: In the sense that after five or six years of Jungian analysis, it's not as if those demons are gone, it's just that we recognize the terrain and we're able to sail our boat a little better. SINGER: We can make friends of them also. We have a very interesting process in Jungian analysis called active imagination, where we encounter the figures of our dreams sometimes, the figures of our imagination, and have a dialog between our conscious ego and the creature, the person or whatever manifestation it might be. MISHLOVE: It could be any dream image. SINGER: Any dream image. It could even be a rock or a castle or a plant or whatever. But we would place a question, like for example, "Why are you here? What do you want of me? Why are you pestering me all the time?" And then we don't try to visualize or make anything happen, but we really withdraw from it. We go deep into ourselves and allow the thing to come up of itself, and give it space, and listen to what comes. People often say, "How do you know that you're not just making this up, that it doesn't really come from the unconscious?" The way that I know is that when I'm making it up it sounds kind of like what I expected. When I'm really surprised, then I know it comes from down there -- when it comes with something so amazing and so unexpected. MISHLOVE: You know, in your book Boundaries of the Soul, you open with a quote, I think it's from Heraclitus, in which he says, "No matter how long you probe and how far you look, you'll never encounter the boundaries of the soul."

SINGER: Yes. That sense of vastness is an integral part of Jungian work -- the idea that the psyche is not only my psyche or your psyche, but that at some level it's collective, that we as individuals are part of our families, and our families are part of a community, and our community is part of a culture, and the culture is part of the whole human race. Each level has not only its conscious beliefs and behaviors, but the unconscious aspects of it, so that at bottom we are on the foundation of the collective unconscious that is shared by everybody. And that collective unconscious then has characteristics which are not limited by time or space, but are universal and have existed ever since we knew anything about the psyche. Those characteristics, or those areas, so to speak, in the collective unconscious are called archetypes, which is a very difficult term to understand, because archetypes are unconscious, so how can we explain what is unconscious? We can only talk in analogies. MISHLOVE: So there's a sense that while we can't really define the limits or the boundaries of the soul, the archetypes constitute the structures within the soul -- the energy constellations, the things that we organize our lives around. SINGER: Yes, or that organize our lives for us, I would prefer to say, because we don't have too much to say about that process. They make us who we are. People often ask, "Well, how many archetypes are there, and what are they?" When you think about it, it's like a map of the world, and you say, "Well, how many countries are there?" You can configure it into many or few, and over the ages that's shifted. But there are certain areas that have a kind of homogeneity about them, and so in the archetypal world you have the world of the parents, the parental world, the mother world and the father world; and you have the concept of the God image, which is universal. Eeven though there are many gods, and many cultures have different ideas of what the god or the divine or the creative force is, the fact that it seems to be necessary for people to include spiritual meaning in their lives is universal. The concept of the child, the special child, the new thing that comes out of the union of male and female, is a universal concept. Then the idea of the shadow, for example, which was called by Jung the part of ourselves that we're not so familiar with, that is this kind of dark side, the side that's away from the light. If we're looking toward the light it's the part that's behind us, and yet although we don't see it, everybody else does. MISHLOVE: So our life might be drifting in some direction, or we feel drawn towards different things, and we develop attitudes and values that we sort of take for granted, or we select in the environment around us. And what may really be happening is that some archetype is dominant in our subconscious -- an archetype that may have been shared by all of humanity. In effect it's running us. SINGER: Yes, and we never see the archetype. We see archetypal images. MISHLOVE: June Singer, we're out of time. It's been such a pleasure having you with me. Thank you so much for being with me. SINGER: I've enjoyed talking with you, and hope we'll have another occasion to do some more. END

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF LIBERATION with KATHLEEN SPEETH, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "The Psychodynamics of Liberation." We're going to explore how it is that we get locked into particular limited views of ourselves, and how we can hope to ever transcend, to move beyond those small perspectives that we develop. With me today is Dr. Kathleen Speeth. Dr. Speeth is a member of the faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice and author of several books, many articles on human development, and co-editor of a book called The Essential Psychotherapies, which she worked on with Dr. Daniel Goleman. Welcome, Kathy. KATHLEEN SPEETH, Ph.D.: I'm glad to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here again. We get stuck, we get limited. Every form of psychotherapy has its own diagnosis of what is the problem -- how do we become neurotic, how do we become stuck, how is it that we see ourselves in our smallness and can't get beyond it? And then they all offer a way to get around it. What I'd like to begin to explore with you are some of the commonalities, some of the larger things that we can say about the whole issue of liberation. Maybe a good way to lead into that is just to ask you, what is your definition of liberation? SPEETH: Well, I don't know if we can hope to find complete liberation from whatever traps we're in in this lifetime, but I'd say we could move toward liberation, if we find ourselves freer rather than less free, by whatever we understand about ourselves, or whatever techniques we use from psychotherapy or from any other religious tradition, any other technological helps we can find in the culture -- political even. MISHLOVE: It seems as if in a sense we're caught in so many veils of illusion, that as soon as we break through one -- say, racism -- then we run into another, sexism. Or we run into another, religious prejudice. Or we run into another, age prejudice. There's no end to the ways in which our perspectives are limited by our particular situations. And I suppose at some level maybe that's healthy. Maybe it would not be good for a human being to be fully liberated. How would one function? SPEETH: Well, I suppose the most liberated person from your point of view, what you just described, is a neonate -- a tiny baby, just born, who experiences the world as a booming, buzzing confusion, doesn't have any concepts to clot the world into observable things and

repeatable experiences. But perhaps a free human being, a free and developed human being, isn't like that. Perhaps they can be free without giving up conceptualization. MISHLOVE: Well, we certainly have ideal models of what this might be, especially from the Oriental traditions when they really do talk about spiritual liberation, spiritual enlightenment, completely unfettered by the bonds of karma or samsara or illusions of various sorts. And yet every time a so-called enlightened, liberated guru comes over to the West, it's like the emperor wearing no clothes. It's easy to see their foibles. SPEETH: So you're disappointed. You feel betrayed. MISHLOVE: I wonder, personally, if there is such a thing as enlightenment, really, or if it's one of these --you know, "Hitch your wagon to the stars." It's a goal we all ought to strive for, but which is not really attainable. There's something about the human condition itself which is fundamental. You know, existential reality -- we're born alone; we have to deal with death and alienataion, and no matter how much we practice yoga or meditation or build communities or begin to see through our foibles, we'll always be in these bodies, at least while we're alive. SPEETH: Well, that's undoubtedly true. There's a Sufi story about that. Basically, the story is about Bahaudin Naqshband, who is the great Naqshbandi -MISHLOVE: The founder of one of the major Sufi orders. SPEETH: Right. And he materialized an apple, I don't know why, as some demonstration of competence. And the apple had a worm in it. And they said, "Well, Bahaudin, you're so powerful that you can materialize an apple. How is it that you can't materialize a perfect apple?" He said, "In this context, nothing can be perfect." But it isn't just the Eastern meditative traditions that give us some help with liberation. I think that Western psychotherapeutic approaches are even more appropriate for us, although I certainly have participated in both rather a lot. MISHLOVE: My sense is that the Western approach is to say, well, look, the world isn't perfect; we've got to live with it, with its problems. And psychotherapy is often oriented towards adjusting, coping, dealing with how bad life really is. SPEETH: Well, that's one form of psychotherapy. But you practice psychotherapy, as I do too. MISHLOVE: I do too, and I have another view. SPEETH: You have another view. What's your other view? MISHLOVE: Well, I tend to think that underlying the basic alienation, the separateness, the otherness, the fundamental ground of reality is one of connection -- that we're connected with everything. And for me, liberation is really becoming more and more in touch with that dimension of being part of everything, interconnected with everything. That way, as we move towards that, we get closer, I suppose, to what we might think of as our divine reality, and ultimately the highest model of liberation must be divinity itself.

SPEETH: It must be. So the way you're talking now, you sound like Freud talking about eros, as opposed to thanatos -- the idea of a life instinct, something that moves toward life, and away from dying, away from entropy. Something that makes form out of chaos. And you feel that is development, and of course so do I. So then, what keeps us from that? What holds us back? What do we need to be liberated from, so that we could make connections instead of break connections, and get hot rather than cool? MISHLOVE: I would say it's our attachments. SPEETH: Uh huh. And what attachments? MISHLOVE: It could be an attachment to a habit pattern that we have, or to a belief system. My sense is that the unattached mind just gravitates naturally to that state. And when I'm with a group of people, I can watch, some of them go right there, and you have a sense they're connected and they're with it. And then somebody else, their mind just won't let them float to that level, and they've got to talk about -- it could be anything; it could be their clothing, it could be art work. We have a million excuses that we use for not always resonating, I guess is a word I might use, at that level of connectedness. SPEETH: Or living enthusiastically. And what do you think holds people back from that? You know, Wilhelm Reich would call it an anti-pleasure bias in a character. Where does it come from? MISHLOVE: That is a good question. SPEETH: I mean, we're talking about being liberated from some kind of a net we throw around ourselves. MISHLOVE: Well, in many people it's clear to me it's trauma. They've been traumatized in one way or another, and they're kind of stuck. They haven't worked through their trauma. SPEETH: And how does that trauma stick people? What really happens? I mean, let's talk about it as deeply as we can. What do we need to be liberated from? MISHLOVE: Probably -- I'm glad you're asking me all these questions. It's a delight to be interviewed, on my own show. To me, I would say the basic thing is self hatred. It's places where we feel that we can't love ourselves. If we've been traumatized, we incorporate that, and we think, "I deserved that. The universe is telling me I'm that kind of person, who should be punished." SPEETH: You're saying two things; in this way I believe we've got a lot of wisdom in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. One thing you're saying -- and I of course agree with you -is that it's something about going away from entropy and toward life. And the second thing you're saying is that it has something to do with having been hurt, right? We have to somehow work through some nonmetabolized experiences. We need to liberate ourselves from something

that has gripped us and grabbed us and is holding us back -- something that happened very early. And the wish we have to dissolve and to die hangs on. MISHLOVE: And the irony is, that "something" is us. It's something we're doing to ourselves. SPEETH: It's something we're doing to ourselves. So one extraordinary thing about liberation, it seems to me, is that the very things that hold us back are the things that hold us in our families, in the family structure. MISHLOVE: Interesting. SPEETH: So, for example, Mother doesn't want you to sit and play in your own way. She wants to have interaction with you, so she can feel like a good mother. That's one example. I just worked with someone today in a therapy session for whom that was true. He didn't dare, when he was with his girlfriend, be quiet and just look at the fire. He felt he had to keep entertaining his girlfriend. And so he was ready to clear the decks of all girlfriends, because he didn't allow himself to be himself while in the company of a person who reminded him of his mother. So he is not a free man. MISHLOVE: Right, right. Because of some conditioning he had had with her. SPEETH: Right. Or another example, somebody I worked with whose mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was a happy woman, this patient of mine -- a happy woman, and well adjusted, with four or five brothers and sisters who weren't, and a mother who was a widow and a Holocaust survivor. And she couldn't give up her guilt, because, it turned out, her guilt was the only link she had with her mother. MISHLOVE: Uh huh. That's where they could communicate, they could resonate. Her mother felt guilty because she was a survivor, I imagine, and therefore in order to kind of enter into resonance with her mother, she had to be guilty too. Then they could be guilty together and have a good time. SPEETH: Exactly. And they could be connected. Even if they had a rotten time, they would be together. MISHLOVE: The irony to me is, from my perspective guilt is totally unnecessary. It serves no function whatsoever. SPEETH: Except the function of connecting one with a guilty subculture. So in order to be free, we have to be willing to be solitary, emotionally solitary. MISHLOVE: Solitary. What does solitary mean? SPEETH: It means that we have to dare to be objective, and not to share, in order to become a "we" with other people, not to share their beliefs.

MISHLOVE: To be able to sort of remove ourselves from the herd instincts. SPEETH: Yes. Perhaps to be really free, one can't be a healthy animal in a happy herd. Or perhaps one can; but one has to take the chance to find out. And that's a courageous step. MISHLOVE: You know, one of the things that you've delved into quite extensively and written about is the Gurdjieff work. I recall a point that you made about Gurdjieff, is that he claimed, as opposed to Western psychotherapies, that all of the negative emotions -- anger, hatred, and so on -- were unnecessary. That it was possible to live a healthy, harmonious, happy life without any of those. And yet in our culture, we have so much reinforcement that says you should be getting angry, you should be feeling guilty, you should be negative a certain amount of the day. Otherwise you're not owning your emotions. SPEETH: Right. And of course that's what I think of as one of the mistakes that many therapists make. They render their patients unhappy. That is, people come out of therapy feeling entitled to a lot of negative emotions. The fact is that they have to come to consciousness, and to be worked through, and to be put aside. Because they're really not necessary. MISHLOVE: That's interesting. So for you, part of the definition of liberation would be to be liberated from negative emotions. SPEETH: One could still have them, but probaby the perverse sustaining of them would be gone. I mean, as we sit here, there are probably bombers going overhead with nuclear warheads on them, and so forth. We live in a very dangerous world, an explosive world. It would be difficult to simply accept that without a certain amount of what you might call negativity -- but not to dwell on that. MISHLOVE: When one looks at warfare in the world, and certain people, such as the Middle East, where they're just at each other, at each other, at each other, and they have been for thousands of years, one would think the only hope for peace in these situations is to somehow be able to communicate to these people to let go, to calm down, not to be so negative about it. SPEETH: And of course psychotherapy deals with an individual person, rather than a whole political scene. And within an individual that same thing is true. There are many I's and many subpersonalities. MISHLOVE: We're often at war with ourselves. SPEETH: And that war has to be ended. MISHLOVE: You know, the Muslims have a term, the holy war. And it often does refer to an internal war between the personality and the spirit, or various parts of ourselves. It's treated as something that we have to engage in; we can't avoid these things. The psychologies say the same thing -- you can't just ignore your anger.

SPEETH: It's certainly not an invitation to repression or suppression at all, to think that it might be possible to live in a very deeply content way without that. MISHLOVE: What you're saying is that if one were to see the light at the end of the tunnel, work through the anger, then there would be a time in one's life, when one had achieved a state you could call liberated or enlightened, where it would be possible to let go of that. SPEETH: And negative emotions are a little analogous to other substances that are misused, like cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. It's an addiction to feel negative. And the holy war inside, one meaning of it might be to feel no need to have the rush that a negative emotion produces. The rush -- I'm entitled, the feeling of being vindicated, etcetera. So that would be one movement toward liberation. MISHLOVE: My sense is that part of the dynamics here occurs when we become polarized to such an extent that we think that good and evil are at odds with each other inside of us, and that one must totally vanquish the other. SPEETH: Right. MISHLOVE: There is no vanquishing of that kind. They really have to come together. And one discovers usually that evil isn't really evil. SPEETH: So there's that feeling of wanting to be a whole person, a dappled person, a 3-D person -- not a person split into black and white. That's part of moving toward liberation -- to be free of the sense of being split inside, into a part of me that I love, and a part of me that I despise. So that's another aspect of what's necessary to do. And another thing you were saying that seems to me very important, is that we need to be free of the necessity to take and defend one position. Why should I see everything from a narcissistic point of view? Why couldn't I be objective and see myself as the same as other people? That would be a big liberation -- if I didn't polarize myself and aggrandize this little one that I am. MISHLOVE: You know, I recall a modern writer has a very popular book out right now -- The Closing of the American Mind. His point is that we aren't teaching people more about good and evil. We're forgetting what he calls traditional, basic values. People are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more. You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity. SPEETH: And of course that is goodness, that is freedom. The Sufis have a nice way of saying it. They say, "Let go of your preconceptions, and accept your destiny." What is the reason to be liberated? What are we being liberated from? We're being liberated, basically, from conditioning that we received in early childhood, and also from anti-life aspects of probably our biology. I suppose that's in the DNA, I don't know. For what reason? It seems to me, so that we can live out some kind of personal destiny. And how will we ever know about that if we're going through the motions in order to continue some family tradition, or some cultural tradition?

MISHLOVE: You mentioned earlier that Freud had described these two forces -- eros, the force of life, and thanatos, the force of death. And we both agreed we were very sympathetic to the eros force. But what about thanatos? How does liberation become a factor in our lives as we face death? SPEETH: It must be a very important question for many people now, because at this time in history the gay community is being terribly, terribly ravaged by AIDS. I have a friend who's gay and he's a therapist, and he said he knows forty people -- patients and friends -- who have died in the last year. He had to face death with them, and it's a very good teacher. So it certainly does help a person get their priorities straight. What could be more cleansing of stupidity, than to face one's death? But as you and I sit here, how different are we from those people who have been given a diagnosis of AIDS? I mean, right now, we're also finite. MISHLOVE: Right. We also have to die. SPEETH: We do. I mean, we are Ivan Ilyich. MISHLOVE: But I'm not looking forward to my death just yet. SPEETH: Well, why look forward to it at all? The question is to use it to give definition to your values right now. Does it help you at all to think that you're mortal? MISHLOVE: It does. In my own work I pay a lot of attention to issues of life and death. Often in hypnosis I take people beyond the realm of death -- to explore, to get in touch with some sense of eternity, which I think is with us all the time. You know, it seems to me that it's possible that when people live from a place within them that echoes of eternity, death isn't so much of an issue, really. SPEETH: So a free man or woman would be impeccable, would be courageous, would be able to face his own finitude or his own eternity. MISHLOVE: You know, it reminds me of a Zen story of a time when there was much warfare in Japan. The monastery was ransacked. A general came in and he saw the Zen monk praying, and he came up to him with his sword, and he said, "Don't you know I'm a man who can run you through with this sword without blinking an eye?" The monk looked up at him and said, "Don't you know I'm a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?" The general put his sword down. SPEETH: Right. That is a free man. So when we talk about liberation, we're talking about liberation from the perspective of ego, my own personal ego, so that I can see from all points of view. And that is divinity. What is divinity? MISHLOVE: So it's the ego that separates us from that. SPEETH: It's a kind of paranoid clot of attention inside, a trembling, paranoid clot inside. Trungpa Rinpoche called it the basic contraction of ego.

MISHLOVE: The basic contraction of ego. I like it. And I suppose that's also what's responsible for selfishness and greed and clinging of every sort. SPEETH: Uh huh, right. And of course to the degree that one is getting free of that, then it's possible to have empathy with others. If I'm not in a fortress protecting myself, maybe I can have a sense of how you're living, what your situation is. MISHLOVE: I should think there must be a difference, though, between this kind of egotistical, or egoistic, clinging, and a sense of when a person is on a real mission -- when they're following their destiny, when they're attached to something, but it's something greater than themselves -- a life purpose, a creative work of some sort. SPEETH: Right. A heroic life. A life like Theseus, who was able to go through the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. Or a life like the life of Einstein, who was able to lock himself in a room for two weeks and come out with E = mc2 and so forth. That's a heroic life. MISHLOVE: Now, how does this relate to the dynamics of liberation? How do we free ourselves from the petty clinging, and enter into the heroic life? SPEETH: How do we work through enough so that our actions come not from deficiency, and not from fear, and not from conditioning, but from what Longhenpa called lucid awareness and consummate perspicacity? MISHLOVE: That's a mouthful. Consummate perspicacity. SPEETH: The sense of doing just the right thing at the right time. How do we get there? I think as Westerners we get there on the psychotherapeutic path. There's a person named Jack Engel, who's a psychiatrist in Boston. He did a study in Burma -- I don't know if he did the study, or who took the data, but the results were that Westerners and Burmese sat with a teacher, a Theravadin Buddhist teacher, and after six weeks the Burmese had the first level of enlightenment, and the Westerners had developed a transference neurosis on the teacher. So for us, we're different from the people for whom those meditative traditions were developed. MISHLOVE: A transference neurosis, for the benefit of our viewers, is where they're projecting their own emotions, about their parents probably, onto the teacher, and they're working that out. SPEETH: Right. And they're acting toward the teacher as if he were a loved, feared, or whatever, parent. So for us, we could do the two-person meditation called psychoanalysis, in which the therapist sits with evenly hovering awareness, and the patient sits or lies with free association of thought. What could be more likely to produce self awareness than that kind of working through? MISHLOVE: I love to do therapeutic work with people myself, but I haven't necessarily heard of great geniuses, real heroes, coming out that way. Did Einstein need a therapist?

SPEETH: No. And I have to say that Rilke refused psychoanalysis. He was afraid that it would interfere with his gift. MISHLOVE: This is not to demean therapy. SPEETH: No, but I hear what you're saying, and I can only say that in my experience, the people that I know, and also my own self, have profited by understanding their minds in the therapeutic manner. And that just means to conduct your own analysis of your life, with the companionship of a therapist. MISHLOVE: My sense is that maybe therapy does get one through certain stages, but there are certainly stages on the heroic journey that go beyond what Western psychology is equipped to deal with. SPEETH: Right. And in fact a hero wants to face his destiny without a cane. So at some point he'll have to stand alone and make it, and meet whatever is coming toward him. MISHLOVE: And I guess ultimately that's everybody's destiny. SPEETH: I guess it is. MISHLOVE: Well, Kathleen Speeth, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with you. I think this is for me personally, I'd like to say, one of the most exciting interviews I've ever done. SPEETH: I'm very glad to be here. MISHLOVE: And I hope to have you back again, as well. Thank you so much for being with me. SPEETH: Thank you, Jeff. END

THE TOTAL SELF with HAL STONE, Ph.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is understanding our total self. Do we have a forgotten heritage of the mind? Have we lost track of, or even disowned, important parts of our own being? With me today is Dr. Hal Stone, author, lecturer, and therapist. Dr. Stone has written Embracing Heaven and Earth, and with his wife, Dr. Sidra Winkelman, he has authored Embracing Our Selves and Embracing Each Other. He and his wife have also developed a therapeutic process known as the Voice Dialogue technique. Welcome, Hal. HAL STONE, Ph.D.: Hello. It's good to be here.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You know, I remember when I was an undergraduate psychology student, the diagnosis of multiple personalities -- The Three Faces of Eve, and so on -- and these were thought of as very rare and extremely fascinating conditions, rather obscure. Now today, it seems as if we're developing a whole new view of the multiplicity of personalities within us. STONE: Technically speaking, the term multiple personality still is thought of in psychiatry as a condition of abnormality. They're dealing essentially with a reality of the psyche. The psyche is made up of very, very different personalities. They're called by different names with different people; some people call them subpersonalities, subs; Jung used to call them complexes; different selves; Gurdjieff called them the different I's of the personality. My wife and I refer to them as selves or energy patterns, because they are that also. So the question is, what's the difference between the abnormality of multiple personalities, and what we have discovered to be the reality, which is that we are all multiple personalities? What makes it abnormal? It becomes abnormal when there's no one around to say, "Oh, that's an interesting part of me." So if some part of me takes over in a certain moment and says something, I have a reflecting capability. I can say, "God, that was interesting. Where did that come from?" But the true multiple personality doesn't have that part of him, that reflecting agent that can say that's a part. In fact a friend of my wife who's a psychologist and therapist had a woman call her three different times one evening with three different voices, and the woman had no connection at all to the fact that she'd done that. Literally, the three took over. That's the abnormal condition. MISHLOVE: In the classical abnormal multiple personality condition, one personality often has no idea what the others are doing, and sort of goes unconscious. STONE: Absolutely. Well, that's not very much unlike what happens to us adults. Most of us have a fantasy that we are very much in charge of our lives, making free choices and exercising free will. When you begin to work with these subpersonalities, you begin to discover that that isn't the case at all. The reality as we see it is that -- I hate to say all of us, but I have to say it because that's what I believe -- we are all identified with certain selves. Now, in a way that's inevitable. You grow up in the world; you can't be everything. So if you grow up in a family where the family is rational, then you either are going to identify with being a rational person, or you're going to push off and go to the other side and be an irrational person, or an imaginative or an intuitive person. That can happen also. But we're going to identify with certain parts, and we're also going to push off on other parts. So if I grow up in a family where I identify with my rationality, automatically that means that I'm going to disown certain other parts. I'm going to disown my intuition, I'm going to disown my imagination. If I grow up identified with being a powerful person because that's what my father wants, then I'm going to disown my vulnerability. I won't be able to show weakness; I won't be able to show neediness in my relationships, you see. So for every part that we identify with, we have on the other side a system of selves that we call disowned selves, and every one of us, then, is in this condition of being identified with primary selves and disowning other parts. MISHLOVE: Typically, I suppose, we identify with those parts of ourselves that are consistent with what we admire in ourselves. I would identify with being likable, with being competent, these sorts of things.

STONE: Because those are the values of the prevailing culture. If you grow up in a culture in which fighting and beating people up is valued, then that becomes the primary self, and being nice becomes a disowned self. So it depends on the family, the culture, the historical time. And even in one's life these selves can change. For example, in the consciousness movement, many of us start out as quite conservative, identifying very much with sort of contracted values, and then in the course of our psychological and spiritual work, we change our primary selves, and pretty soon our primary self is the one that says, "You should be more expanded, you should be more expressive, you should be more sexual, you should meditate more." Expansion becomes the primary self rather than contraction being the primary self. So in one's life it can shift many different times. MISHLOVE: And I gather that typically we tend to disown or push away from our consciousness parts of ourselves that are not valued by the culture -- maybe what we might think of as ugly or horrible, extremely aggressive, or dishonest. STONE: Well, the selves that are disowned are the selves that the primary system doesn't want around. In our culture, for men vulnerability is a very, very big one. Also another system that is disowned a great deal are the instinctual energies. MISHLOVE: In other words, inside of every great big bully there is a sissy waiting to come out. STONE: Oh, there's no question about that. These opposites are always there. So the disowned instinctual energies, which we call demonic energies, they tend to be very disowned. In women, until the women's movement, power was disowned. Women were trained to be loving daughters, essentially, to please the man, and mother to please the man. And they have begun to embrace their power side, as they move out of that particular system of selves that they were identified with. MISHLOVE: Now, you've used two words here -- embrace and disowned. Could we amplify that a bit? STONE: Well, the way we think about the evolution of personality is that the first thing we have to discover is that these selves exist inside of us. They're very real, they're very autonomous. MISHLOVE: As if they were spirits or energies of their own. STONE: If we lived in the Middle Ages, we would have language that's much more accurate. In the Middle Ages they talked about spirit possession. Literally, when these subpersonalities take over, we are in a spirit possession, but we're too sophisticated in these days to talk about it. The thesis of our work is essentially very simple: we have to become aware of all the selves, and we have to learn to embrace all the selves. That doesn't mean becoming them; it means embracing them. So if, for example, I am identified with being a nice guy -- he's sitting over here next to me, let's say, and that's my prevailing way of operating in life; I'm a nice guy, I like people, I want to please you, I want the audience to enjoy what I'm saying, I don't want you to be unhappy with me. Over here is a very different person. Over here is somebody who says, "I don't care what people think. If they like you, they like you; if they don't, they don't. If Jeff likes you, he

likes you. What's the difference? Just be yourself. Say it like it is." This guy says, "Hey, wait a minute. If I say everything like it is, and I share every reaction, I can end up with all enemies. Who needs that?" This guy says, "If you don't say it like it is, and you don't express yourself, you'll end up with a heart attack." See, these characters are at war in us. It's like a car that's being driven by twenty different people. The primary selves are always fighting to be in charge of who drives the car, so if being a nice guy is primary, that part of you always wants to be in charge. It's afraid of your not being a nice guy. So embracing the selves means that you have to find out what are your primary selves. See, if you're raised as a nice guy, how do you know that? How do you know that that's a primary self? How do you know that you're disowning your not-nice guy? Well, there's a very simple way to find out. Who can't you stand? What kind of people push your buttons? What kind of people annoy you, irritate you? What kind of people do you judge? There you have the direct picture of your own disowned selves. I mean, it's literally that simple. MISHLOVE: Typically, though, a person might say, "Well, that's not me. I mean, I can't stand that. How could that possibly be me?" STONE: That lets you know what a good disowned self it is. See, this is a normal condition; we're not talking about an abnormal condition. Everyone has selves. Everyone has to be identified with primary selves; there's no way not to. And consciousness means separating from that and learning what's disowned. Let's say a woman, for example, is identified with being a mother. She has three children, so she's identified with being a mother. On her other side is a part of her that hates mothering, but she knows nothing about it. The kind of woman that makes her the most uncomfortable is a woman who is very uncaring, a woman who is very cold, like a businesswoman. Whenever she meets a businesswoman she gets very irritated with that person. Why does she get irritated? Why does she have to judge that kind of person? Because her unloving self is disowned. The part of her that doesn't really enjoy children, that never wanted to have them in the first place, is disowned. Automatically what happens, then, is life brings you whatever it is that you disown. MISHLOVE: Well, what about the case of a great saint? Mother Teresa spends her whole life caring for the sick and the dying. Do you think that inside of her there is somebody who hates it, who would really just as soon go and murder people herself? STONE: Well, I don't know what's going on in Mother Teresa, but I would be willing to give fairly heavy odds that she has a considerable system of naughties operating in her. It may be that in this particular incarnation, in this particular life process that she's in, her particular task is to live exactly what she's living. I don't judge that in any way, but I'm no longer naive enough to believe that she doesn't have the other side in her. I have spent thirty years working with people, and I don't have a lot of naivete left about these things. I don't happen to judge that. The fact that I have in me a lot of unconscious selves doesn't disturb me. I just know that they're there, and my task in life is to discover as many of them as I can. The reason that it's very important to discover these opposites, you see, is that only then do I have real choice. For example, if I am writing a book, and I only have my rational, linear mind available to me, that doesn't give me a lot of choice about what I write, or the ideas that come to me. If you make me aware of my intuition and my fantasy life, and I can separate from my mind, now I have a wonderful situation. I have my mind over here, and over here I have my intuition and my fantasy life. I now am able to

embrace both of these, OK? I embrace both without being identified with either one. That makes life more uncomfortable, you see. If I'm the woman who has the three children, I now separate from the mother, and I now have awareness. I now have an ego that is aware. I embrace the part of me that loves children, and I also embrace the part of me that doesn't like children, that never wanted children. What this results in is sweat, and my personal fantasy about God is that God loves sweat. God loves people who are able to embrace opposites. It makes life more difficult, it makes life more complicated. Decisions aren't so easy, but at least they come from a place in us that's born of knowing opposites. MISHLOVE: In this multiplicity of opposites that seems to be the psyche -- one might even think of it as larger than that, a zoological garden of all types of inner creatures of the mind -- in all of that multiplicity, where is the you? Where is the self? STONE: Well, I can tell you how we think about that, because everybody has their own way of looking at that. When we think about consciousness we think about it as operating on three different levels. Awareness gives me the ability to witness whatever is going on. It's a wonderful gift, as you well know. It means that if I have awareness I don't have to be identified with anything I'm saying. So even as I communicate these ideas to you, my awareness witnesses, and a part of me doesn't have to be identified with what I'm saying. Awareness gives me the gift of not being attached to what I'm saying. Wonderful thing. But awareness isn't enough, because if you're just aware then you never experience anything. So the second level of the definition is experience -- the experience of all of this multiplicity that you just talked about. We are an unbelievable array of energies. I mean, it's awesome what's inside of us. So the second part of consciousness is experiencing these different parts. I may not be able to do all of it this time around, but I do the best I can, and that's the journey that all of us are sharing, because every kind of consciousness work, at some level, is learning and experiencing these different energies. If you're a Jungian, you learn it the symbolic way. If you're gestalt, you learn it the emotional way. If you're transpersonal, you learn it that way. If you're a Reichian, you learn it that way. If you're a bodyworker -- but it's all dealing with all these different energies. So awareness and experience; but we need one more thing. Who's going to put it together? Who's going to figure out how to act? Who's going to make choices? The ego. But that's a little complicated, isn't it, because what we discover in this work is that what we think is our ego is really our primary selves. So if I've been trained as a rational man, and you say to me, "Who are you?" I'm a rational man, until you help me separate from that. MISHLOVE: In other words, who you are, as you're describing to me, is some potential for pure awareness, separate from all of your patterns and behaviors. STONE: Well, I am all three of these things. I am an aware ego that is taking advantage of this pure awareness and taking advantage of the experience, and I am not identified with any. I am an orchestra conductor that is trying to learn how to handle this amazing array of energy around me. I am a gardener who learns how to take care of all these plants and feed the animals that are inside of me and that inhabit my nature.

MISHLOVE: And if we use these metaphors -- the orchestra conductor, the gardener -- one gets the sense that to really be the fullest person that you can be, you want a garden that has a great variety of plants all growing, or an orchestra which plays every tone of music for you to conduct. STONE: Well, it makes life very interesting, and I can't imagine anything worse than a boring life. But some people are aware of a lot of these different things inside, and some people are aware of a great many of them, and I believe that we're living in a time when more and more people on our planet are becoming more and more aware of this fantastic garden and zoo, as you call it, living inside of us. Yes. MISHLOVE: The classical fairy tales of Western culture often refer to the story of the innocent young prince who goes out on a quest into the world and encounters dragons that have to be slain, and it's the slaying of the dragon that converts or transforms this innocent being into a hero. What does that mean to you? STONE: Well, every disowned self means that the primary self is sitting on top of another part. A woman once has a dream that she's trying to stuff a fifty-foot snake into a box, and she's exhausting herself doing it. That's a beautiful example, you see, of where the primary self, her rational mind, is trying to keep control over the snake. The snake is her instinctuality. She's exhausting herself, OK? Every disowned self means there's a sum of energy that's not available to us. Every disowned self becomes a dragon in our life, because whatever we disown the universe brings back to us. If you're a powerful business person, and you disown vulnerability, your oldest son will be vulnerable, or you will marry a woman that's ultimately vulnerable, or your German police dog will be totally vulnerable. If you disown power in your life and you identify with love and relationship, then if you're a woman you will bring into your life a man of immense power and immense authority. If a woman can't stand bitchy women, her boss at work will be a bitchy person. The law of the psyche is that whatever we disown, life brings us. If we can step back from that and see the dragon for what it is, we realize that the dragon is really our disowned self -- that that person out there that is causing us all this stress and all this difficulty is really a teacher for us. The longer that we allow disowned selves to remain there, the more heads they grow, exactly like in the fairy tale. They start out with one, they end up with twelve or more. And by the time we're older, these get to be very serious conditions. MISHLOVE: So there's a sense, if I could return to the metaphor of Mother Teresa, for that woman to have all that energy, to do all the work she's doing, she must have had to confront the disowned part of herself to allow it in some way to release that energy for her work. STONE: I don't know what she's wrestled with in her life, OK? Maybe she has wrestled with the demons, and maybe she hasn't. There are a lot of people who live their life out of particular archetypes. There are a lot of people who live their lives out of a saintly archetype, a saintly self. There are other people that live their lives out of being a mother. There are others that live their lives out of being heroic. MISHLOVE: In other words it might be totally unconscious on her part.

STONE: Absolutely, absolutely. It may have nothing to do with her. It may have to do with the fact that she is really identified with a certain system. That doesn't take away from who she is or what she does. But we need consciousness today. I mean, that is our most precious commodity. We can't afford to be sentimental about people that may do wonderful work, you see what I mean? We still need to learn about these selves and what is it that moves people, because if we don't get enough consciousness we pay a big price. MISHLOVE: You've in effect talked about embracing our disowned selves, and yet how can we do that when we truly find them disgusting? STONE: Well, you're asking the sixty-four-dollar question. I don't expect somebody to embrace their disowned selves in one hour. But it really is very much like Greek mythology. The lesson that the early Greek had to learn was that all the gods and goddesses needed to be worshiped. If you were a worshiper of Apollo, and he was your primary god -- he had to do with the mind and clarity and so forth -- it was OK for you to worship Apollo and for him to be your favorite god. The only thing in mythology is that if you did not worship Dionysius at all, if you kept him out of the picture, he's the one that punishes you. He's the one that attacks you. The disowned god or goddess in mythology is the one that kills you. That's the principle. So all that means is that you have to build a shrine to every god and goddess. You can have your favorites; you can't leave anyone out. So from our perspective, you see, we say you have to learn to value every self that's in us. That doesn't mean that these disowned selves have to take you over, it just means they have to be valued; you have to build a shrine to them. MISHLOVE: You're not implying permissiveness here. STONE: Oh no, no, no, no; because -- well, as a matter of fact, I think that one of the major problems of the consciousness movement is that it has been too permissive. It has moved people from contraction to expansion. It has moved people from a condition of being more conservative to being identified with being more liberal. And what I say is we have to step back from those two conditions into a condition of awareness, and with an aware ego we embrace the conservative part of ourselves, and we embrace the liberal part of ourselves, and if we can hold the tension of those two parts, then we have a much better opportunity to make real choices for ourselves. MISHLOVE: In other words, pure awareness, the possibility of developing an aware ego, is one that sort of steps back from these competing dualities within us. STONE: Exactly. And you know, a lot of disowned selves -- remember, if I locked you in a dungeon, shut the door, and then opened it eight years later, you would bite me, and I would deserve it, because I have locked you away. These disowned selves are just little pieces of energy; or from my standpoint, God is energy. As far as I'm concerned, all energy is God, and all I'm doing is locking away a piece of God, putting it into some kind of purgatory, so when it comes out it's vicious, and we say, "Oh my God, that's a terrible part." But it's terrible because we locked it away. And when you allow these parts out in a safe setting -- you see, I'm not talking about becoming that part -- when you allow them out, and you begin to pay attention to them, they change.

MISHLOVE: This suggests to me that in dealing with the disowned parts of ourselves, what one might really want to do is strengthen the primary part, in order that it is large enough to incorporate the parts that we formerly thought of as impossible or disgusting. STONE: Well, the principle for us, the way we approach it, is we always work with people through the primary selves. So for example, let's say that you would have a disowned energy that has to do with being a very selfish, self-aggrandizing person. That's a self that's in everybody. But you're identified with being a proper, nice person. That's disowned, the other one. So we would work with your nice person, and we would spend a lot of time with the nice guy, until you as an aware ego could separate from it. Once you're separate as an aware ego, and you recognize that I really appreciate this part and what he's done for you, now we go to the other side. But you're there as an aware ego, and you're able to appreciate this one and this one. MISHLOVE: So the process is a little bit like embracing the parts of ourselves that we've disowned, and disowning a little bit the parts of ourselves that we've embraced all our lives. STONE: In a certain sense it is that, yes -- disowning the parts we've embraced, but disowning them from a new place, with deep appreciation and love. You know, we live in a time when love has become very important, and I have no objection to love as a principle. It feels very good. I like when it comes to me; I like to give it. But if you're going to be loving, you have to do the whole shot. You can't just love the primary selves. You also have to love the disowned selves. If you love and embrace the disowned selves, that takes great courage, you see. But you can't be selective about it. MISHLOVE: Otherwise there's a sense in which we may even resent having to be loving all the time, having to be nice all the time. Our love loses its authenticity if we can't come from the fullness. STONE: Exactly. I mean, if somebody is trained to be loving, the danger is you can build a love temple on top of a garbage dump. That kind of loving does not support the evolution of consciousness in the world. We have to deal with the dump also. We have to pick up all these disowned selves and begin to bring them into the light of day and see what they're about. MISHLOVE: Well, Hal, you seem to be saying that in order to be fully real, we have to be fully whole -- wholly ourselves. We've run out of time, Hal. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for being with me. STONE: Thank you very much. END

SPIRITUALITY AND PSYCHOLOGY with FRANCES VAUGHAN, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is psychology and spirituality, and my guest, Dr. Frances Vaughan, is a clinical psychologist, and the author of several books, including The Inward Arc, and Awakening Intuition. Frances, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here. FRANCES VAUGHAN, Ph.D.: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Jeff. MISHLOVE: You write extensively about spirituality in your work, and as a former president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, you really have an extensive professional interest in the interface between spirituality and psychology. This is an area which fascinates many people, and also confuses a lot of people -- I think because spirituality is often associated with so many dogmas. What is the role of psychology, as opposed to the role of religion, in helping people to develop spiritually? VAUGHAN: Well, the way I see it is that traditional psychology tends to take a very dim view of spirituality, because psychology tends to see many people trying to avoid issues of personal confrontation by turning to spirituality. MISHLOVE: Sort of head-in-the-clouds, airy-fairy, avoiding-the-gut-feeling kind of criticisms. VAUGHAN: Exactly. Finding a kind of escape from the existential realities of our mortality, our aloneness, and the human condition. In other words, a lot of times psychologists will see spirituality as a kind of escapism, or something that people believe in in order to make themselves feel better. MISHLOVE: Conversely, it almost seems to me that you have a lot of religions describing psychology in those same terms. The Fundamentalists feel that psychology is sort of a fantasy, that they're avoiding the real issues. VAUGHAN: Exactly. So that they tend to take that view, an oppositional stance. Traditional spiritual teachers, for example, or traditional religions, often see psychology as simply concern with the ego, selfishness, and they fail to see the value of that in terms of personal growth or healthy personal development. MISHLOVE: Or at least not dealing with real values. VAUGHAN: Yes. So I think there's a lot of education that needs to happen on both sides, because in fact I see them as complementary aspects of human development, both of which are necessary for wholeness and for real healing in our lives. I feel that there needs to be a lot of bridging work between the two, so that people don't feel that they have to choose either a psychological discipline or a spiritual discipline, but that in fact both are important. MISHLOVE: In your work, what I've noticed is that you've drawn from many traditions. You've looked at the Christian spiritual path, you've looked at Zen Buddhism, you've looked at yoga and a number of others in your writings. You seem to be saying that they all point in the same direction, don't you?

VAUGHAN: Well, I like the analogy of truth as a mountain, with all the different religious paths as different approaches to climbing the mountain. You see many different paths up the mountain, and when you're down in the lower slopes, you may argue about the shape of the mountain. But the more you work on it, and the further up you go, the more you see that there's a convergence - that there are certain values, for example, that tend to be common to all different traditions, and that even though different paths provide different experiences along the way, I feel very strongly that there is a universal experience of self transcendence that's possible, and that in fact this can be very healing for people. It can have a very positive effect in terms of their psychological development, if such an experience is appropriately integrated. MISHLOVE: A universal quality of self transcendence. That's sort of putting it in a nutshell, isn't it? How does that translate, say, to a therapy practice, when you're working with someone? VAUGHAN: Well, in my practice I find that sometimes people seek me out because they know I have a transpersonal orientation, and particularly if they've had some kind of experience that has opened up some spiritual issues for them, or perhaps if they've been practicing meditation and they want to talk things over with someone who has an understanding of the practice and what those experiences might be like. Or they may have had some kind of spontaneous opening, and had an experience of self transcendence that they want to make sense out of, that they want to integrate in some way. MISHLOVE: Is it something that people need to seek? I mean, if a person came to you and they were having marital problems, or some other type of conventional psychological problem, and they don't have a thought about spiritual experience, is there any application there? VAUGHAN: Well, my experience is that it depends how deeply people want to do inner work, because often people will come into therapy seeking relief for some kind of interpersonal stress. Some relationship issue is very common, for example -- either a marital problem or a breakup of a relationship. But sooner or later I think everyone has to confront themselves, and very often in relationships we tend to think, "Well, if only the other person were different, then everything would be all right." But ultimately I think we have to take a look at what we're contributing, and how we can make a difference in terms of the quality of relationships that we have in our lives. As soon as we start to do this, as soon as we look at how it is that our state of being or our state of consciousness affects the relationships that we tend to bring into our lives, the patterns that we find ourselves repeating -MISHLOVE: Can you give me an example of this? Is there an illustration, maybe, to make it a little more concrete? VAUGHAN: Yes. For example, I recently have been working with a woman who is in her second marriage. She separated from her first husband because he had a problem with alcohol, and she felt that it was all his problem. Well, she found that she was recreating similar patterns in her second marriage, and the second time around she didn't want to just leave. She wanted to stay in the relationship and work through some of her own issues.

MISHLOVE: In other words, she thought she might get rid of the problem by getting rid of the first husband. VAUGHAN: Exactly. And of course it never works, because as soon as you get rid of a relationship you find that you either recreate a similar relationship, or you have to deal with the same issues in yourself. MISHLOVE: It's like Pogo who once said, "We have found the enemy and he is us." VAUGHAN: Yes, and I think that that's one place where spirituality and psychology converge, because we recognize that we're all mirrors for each other in some way. I see, for example, that in some way all of my clients reflect aspects of myself. I can empathize with them, because I know how it feels to be in the kinds of situations that they describe. MISHLOVE: That's almost essential for a therapist, really, isn't it? VAUGHAN: Well, I think it's something that's really available to all of us -- that the more we're willing to look at ourselves and understand the dynamics of the way the mind works, the more we realize that these are really universal patterns, and that people everywhere have to deal with issues of love and fear and anxiety about loss and facing death. And often it's just at these times, when people feel some kind of crisis in their lives -- maybe facing their own mortality or the death of someone that they're close to -- that's when spiritual issues become really meaningful and important. MISHLOVE: Now in the case of this particular woman that you just mentioned, how did she begin to look at spiritual issues? VAUGHAN: Basically it was a question of values in her life -- what were the things that really were most important to her? What she came to see was that in order to really love her partner, the person she was with, she also had to take herself into account. This is often true -- that it's not a matter of either loving oneself or loving someone else, it seems to be both. Both are necessary. So I sometimes think of spirituality or spiritual disciplines as teaching us to forgive others, and psychotherapy as a way of learning to forgive ourselves. MISHLOVE: That's a very interesting distinction. In your work you sort of describe the self as if it were an onion, with different layers. There's an existential level of the self, there's an ego level, there's a transpersonal level. Could we go through the onion a little bit, and see it from your eyes? VAUGHAN: All right. I like to use the image of concentric circles, because I think that as we become more conscious and more aware of the nature of the self, the sense of self expands, so that when we're afraid, or when we're unwilling to be in touch with the world around us, our sense of self gets constricted and smaller. First of all, I see it in a developmental framework. I see that we are usually primarily identified with the body, the physical self. Then we also become aware of our feelings. We get a sense of the emotional self, the mental self, our thoughts about feelings. We even start to think about thinking.

MISHLOVE: So the first three layers would be physical, emotional, and mental. VAUGHAN: Right. And those have been mapped by Western psychology very thoroughly. The areas that haven't been mapped so clearly are the ones that go beyond ego. That is, the ego is generally referred to as what we think we are, the ideas about our identity in terms of roles and relationships. MISHLOVE: The mask or the persona. VAUGHAN: Yes, that's part of it. Then the existential self is what we generally get in touch with when we become concerned about authenticity, when it's not enough to have a good image, or to play a role, but it really matters if you feel that you're authentic -- a sense of integrity, a sense of choice, a sense of having your inner experience match your outer expression, so that there isn't that split between the two. This would be a sense of a healthy existential self. MISHLOVE: A good deal of contemporary psychology begins and ends right there, I suppose. VAUGHAN: Oh yes, and I have great appreciation for the contribution of the existential psychologists, such as Rollo May, James Bugental, and some of the people who have really pointed out the importance of coming to terms with the existential issues of value, meaning, and purpose in our lives. Then there's another area, though, because with the existential view we're only isolated, individual, separate entities in the world, existing usually in a state of alienation in our lives. MISHLOVE: It reminds me of Camus' famous book -- Nausea, I think. VAUGHAN: That was Sartre. But both Camus and Sartre gave us a good exposure to that point of view. MISHLOVE: Camus and Sartre and Genet -- the sense one gets from these existential writers is that when you really get in touch with life as it is, it will make you sick. VAUGHAN: Because the ultimate reality there is the idea that we're separated and alone. However, it seems to me that there's another side to experience which is just as valid, which is that we're all connected, and that yes, we all have the experience of being separate and alone, but we also have the experience of being connected -- to each other, to the environment -- and that we're not just independent, we're also interdependent. So that as soon as we start recognizing how we all exist in this intricate network of mutually interdependent relationships, then I think that we wake up to the possibility of another kind of awareness that transcends the existential separateness. MISHLOVE: So we're moving beyond the existential here. I would think of this as sort of a systems approach, where we're beginning to look at networking. VAUGHAN: Yes, exactly.

MISHLOVE: Seeing human beings as analogous to cells of the body. The social structure could be thought of as like a body in that sense. But it's also transpersonal. VAUGHAN: It is, and it's what Ken Wilber has called vision logic, which is looking not only at ideas and how beliefs affect experience, but also at networks of ideas, and how we become more creative in terms of the way we view ourselves and the planet as a whole. It's a more global view, if you will, which tries to take into account not only the individual in isolation, but also in relationship to the larger whole -- both in relationship to the society, as well as in relationship to the environment. MISHLOVE: Frances, you're an expert on intuition. You've written a book on intuition. When we get beyond the existential self, the agony and the loneliness -- I'm thinking of the creative process. How many artists do we hear about who struggle, and they experience this alienation, and then they have this breakthrough, and what comes out of it is the music of Mozart, or of Wagner, the great creativity. Now, that's not the same as what we've described as this networking phenomenon of people. That's a different level also, isn't it? VAUGHAN: It is a different level, and I think that intuition is often associated with inspiration and insight. Again, it's a kind of self transcendence, in that something seems to come through us, rather than being a product of something that the ego invents. In other words, once we learn to be quiet, to quiet the mind -- this is where we can learn something from some of the Eastern disciplines, is that learning to quiet the mind opens up all kinds of creative possibilities. That seems to be something that psychology needs to investigate, I think, in more depth. And also that what we believe to be true about this process tends to become true in our experience. MISHLOVE: We create our own psychology. VAUGHAN: Well, we certainly create our own inner experience by our beliefs about it. So I think that it's an appropriate task for psychology to investigate these experiences, and to understand more the role of beliefs in generating our experience, and also in terms of what it means for psychological health. MISHLOVE: How do you define the term transpersonal? I think we were getting at it, and I've added this dimension -- we've discussed intuition, creativity, and the sense that there's a larger part of us that's not totally separate, that we're connected with other people. Am I missing something? VAUGHAN: Well, literally we say transpersonal means beyond the personal. But it also, I think, refers to the transcendental, as expressed in and through the personal. So that it's the link between the personal and that which is transcendent. Again, it's a psychological view of spiritual development, rather than a religious point of view, so that transpersonal psychology doesn't espouse any particular religious orientation, but it tries to understand the universal human experience that leads to different paths of exploration.

MISHLOVE: Transpersonal psychologists have been accused, say, by the existentialists such as Rollo May, of being advocates of religion, and not practicing psychology at all. You know -your clients come to you and they meditate in a full lotus posture; you really should be wearing orange robes or something, instead of a business suit. How do you respond to that? VAUGHAN: Well, that's not my experience at all, as the way I see it, and I've certainly had the opportunity to talk to a lot of transpersonal psychologists, actually all over the world. They are indeed psychologists, and some of them have a particular religious affiliation, and some do not. But I don't know that any of them would try to convert anybody or impose their beliefs on their clients. Functioning or working as a psychologist means, I think, maintaining a certain objectivity, if you will, or at least putting the client's interests ahead of your own, whatever your beliefs may be. MISHLOVE: There's this enormous movement in so-called modern psychology, that is everything we do as psychologists must be scientific; it should be researched, it should be experimented, and we should never go beyond the bounds of what the experiments say, as scientific psychologists. And yet as I read your writing and the writing of other transpersonal psychologists, the sense is that the science that you're looking to is not experimental science, it's the accumulated wisdom of people who have practiced meditation and spiritual disciplines and have reported phenomenologically on that. VAUGHAN: Well, I think that we do need more investigation. I think that more research would be an excellent contribution to the field -- in fact that's something where there's a lot of work to be done yet. But in fact there's considerable data to say that there are methods of training awareness, of training the mind, that have worked very well in other cultures, that we could learn something from. MISHLOVE: It's almost as if I could describe you in a way as a psychologist's psychologist. I mean, for people who have mastered the Western traditions -- the scientific literature, the existential, the social, all the issues of alcoholism and child abuse -- and now they're looking for something more in their lives. They begin to wonder about the spiritual dimension, and yet for many people in the modern world, religion is unpalatable to them. Do you sort of serve as a substitute priest in that sense? VAUGHAN: In a sense perhaps that's so, because I think it's too bad that if a person doesn't feel comfortable with conventional religion, that they should not have the opportunity to do the inner work, and to find out for themselves their own connections to that inner source of wisdom, or that sense of relatedness. It may or may not be a sense of connection to God. It depends. Some religious traditions, such as the Zen Buddhist for example, are not theistic at all. Nevertheless they have a lot to contribute to spiritual development and to values in one's life. MISHLOVE: I recall reading a Carl Sagan novel recently. He describes the Buddhist practice as saying the Buddhist God is so great he doesn't even need to exist. VAUGHAN: Well, I think we get into a question of semantics, whether we talk about God or no God. The same thing happens in psychological language, talking about the self and no self. We

do sometimes have experiences of oneness which might be called experiences of the one self, and sometimes we have experiences of the void which might be called experiences of no self. So I think that we need to be careful not to get too bogged down in oppositional language, because I think we are talking about a universal experience, or the potentiality for it anyway. MISHLOVE: In your work you've had a chance to study the phenomenological, personal, autobiographical reports of mystics of many different religions, and you've come to realize similar patterns, I think. VAUGHAN: Yes, I think there are certainly universal experiences. I always like to look for the transcendental unity of religions, that from a psychological perspective I sort of take the psychological viewing frame. It seems to me that we can't not take some type of viewing frame if we're going to say anything at all. So we need to speak in a particular language, and as soon as we say anything we're already taking a position. It seems to me that psychological language offers a way of exploration and investigation that is not already predetermined by a long tradition of particular religious views. MISHLOVE: You know, one of the most intruiguing areas in the interface between spirituality and psychology is the notion of kundalini -- that perhaps some people who we would define in our traditional Western sense as going crazy, having a nervous breakdown or a psychotic break or becoming schizophrenic, from another perspective may be experiencing a spiritual awakening, a spiritual breakthrough. Is this part of what you deal with in your practice? VAUGHAN: Well, I think the real issue here is to say, what happens when you have an experience that you can't account for in terms of ordinary psychology, if you will? I think there are two possible hazards here. One is to pathologize experiences that might in fact be an opportunity for a larger, expanded sense of self. MISHLOVE: They have these categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychologists which say if you can't think of anything else, it's some form of undifferentiated schizophrenia. VAUGHAN: Right, and I don't think that's always true. But on the other side, there's also the hazard of romanticizing all experiences that are in some way involving the dissolution of ego boundaries as being breakthroughs or transpersonal. MISHLOVE: God intoxication. VAUGHAN: Yes, and I think there are both kinds -- there are breakdowns and there are breakthroughs, and that as psychologists we need to know the difference. MISHLOVE: How do you do that? VAUGHAN: Well, there are definitely certain characteristics that are typical, say, of prepersonal experiences and characteristics typical of transpersonal experiences. The prepersonal, for example, are generally regressive and they generally have a lot of fear associated with them, and

there's the sense that the reality that's perceived at the moment seems to be the only possible reality. There's a sort of constriction of consciousness. MISHLOVE: You use the term prepersonal? VAUGHAN: Yes. MISHLOVE: What does that mean? VAUGHAN: Well, when we take a developmental frame, we talk about prepersonal development -- that's before you've become fully self aware of your own ego identity. We talk about personal, and then transpersonal. So that I think one of the confusions is between the pre and trans. MISHLOVE: In other words, a prepersonal kind of break would be one where I'm really regressing back to when I was, say, eight years old, because something incomplete occurred at that time that I have to go back to. And that's not the same as a real spiritual breakthrough. VAUGHAN: No, that's the trouble. There's a confusion between the two, I think, and that's probably a very important area that needs further documentation and investigation so that it can be clarified, but I think that we're really on the way to doing that. MISHLOVE: In the transpersonal area, though, sometimes I should think it would be hard to tell. I read a book by an Eastern guru, Meher Baba, in which he talks about the mad Musts, or Godintoxicated people, who can't tie their shoelaces, they can't dress themselves, and their disciples come and feed them. The disciples somehow recognize these people are very holy; their consciousness is lost in God. But to another person they might seem to be severely retarded. VAUGHAN: Well, I think that we need to take the cultural differences into account here, and when we're talking about a developmental approach, we're talking about expanding consciousness into higher states. Now, we differentiate higher states from altered states, because altered states are simply other states, other than our ordinary waking state, and that might include this God intoxication that you're talking about. Higher states include all of the faculties of the ordinary waking state, plus additional faculties, so that they have a noetic quality; that means that there's a sense of deeper knowing and understanding. Usually the affect is one of loving kindness, and the motivation that comes out of these experiences tends to be one of service in the world. MISHLOVE: What you seem to be saying, Frances, is that people who are experiencing these higher states have integrated the transpersonal level into their lives, and they're really functioning with -- what comes to mind is someone like Helen Keller. They're more than just average or normal; they're able to inspire other people and motivate and share with people a sense of enthusiasm. VAUGHAN: Yes, I think that's true, but I also think that it's available to all of us, and that we all have moments, if not days and times, when we tap into these states. I think that that's what we

need to remember -- that we all have access to that source of transcendent wisdom within ourselves, if we're willing to take the time and give it the attention that it deserves. MISHLOVE: To recognize those moments, to catch that spark. VAUGHAN: Yes. MISHLOVE: Well, Frances, it's been a pleasure sharing that transpersonal spark with you. Thank you very much for being here. VAUGHAN: Thank you. It's been a pleasure for me too. END

OVERCOMING COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR with SHINZEN YOUNG JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we're going to be discussing letting go of compulsive and addictive behavior through meditation. With me is Shinzen Young, the director of the Community Meditation Center of Los Angeles. Shinzen is also an ordained Buddhist monk, and a teacher of Vipassana meditation, as well as a scholar of Buddhism. Welcome. SHINZEN YOUNG: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, when we talk about addictive and compulsive behavior, the little I understand of Buddhist philosophy suggests that from a Buddhist perspective most human behavior is viewed in that light. YOUNG: That's correct, and when I work with people that have addictive or compulsive problems, like overeating or substance abuse or compulsive gambling or something like that, that's one of the things that I really emphasize with them, is that their behavior is fundamentally not different from the average person, only that the compulsiveness or drivenness, which is my word for it, is all concentrated in one object, and that object is very self-destructive. The average person is driven constantly, and that quality of drivenness, which is largely unacknowledged in the so-called happy or adjusted person, is what blocks that person from experiencing the really deep spiritual self, or the transcendent spiritual experience. So the person that has a compulsive disorder, like overeating, undereating, something like that, on one hand we can say that person has an immense personal tragedy, but on the other hand there's a sort of bright side to the picture, looked at from the perspective of the spiritual path, in that that person is forced to come to grips with this whole issue of drivenness per se; whereas the person whose compulsiveness or drivenness is distributed among many different objects may be able to postpone that confrontation. MISHLOVE: Not really deal with the issue.

YOUNG: That's right. So the person that has a problem with food, or what have you, in order to survive they may be forced to attain a spiritual state. So the motivation will be there, and my job as a meditation teacher is to teach them the spiritual dimension of the path to sobriety or abstinence. MISHLOVE: Well, Buddha, one of his basic teachings, as I recall, is that all of life is suffering. YOUNG: Well, let's put it this way. As long as there is drivenness, then we cannot experience our true nature. Our true nature is effortless. It is the nature of nature itself -- an effortless, spontaneous flow. Whether we realize it or not, from infancy on we start to acquire drivenness, compulsiveness, grabbiness -- everybody does. And that covers over our true nature. So as long as that is covered over, then yes, life is going to be suffering. On the other hand, we could just as well say that Buddhism teaches that life is heaven on earth, if we see what is really there. The basic model that I usually use for dealing with compulsiveness is that, say, when a person overeats, eats the wrong thing, and they can't stop, they are using the food -- or it could be a drug; we look at all compulsiveness as basically following the same model, you might say. When a person is abusing a substance, what they are doing is using that substance as an anesthetic or a coping mechanism for unconscious subliminal pain or discomfort. And what has been discovered in the meditative path is that there's an alternative coping mechanism. Instead of dealing with one's discomfort by trying to stuff it down, as they say, there's a special state of consciousness that is sometimes called the witness state, wherein you are able to simply observe and experience that discomfort without being caught in it. And when you're not caught in it, it doesn't get exaggerated into a suffering that must be relieved by doing a self-destructive activity. So we teach people how to enter this witness state of consciousness, and then simply observe the discomfort in a way whereby it doesn't drive them. And we have step-by-step, very specific techniques that allow a person to develop the witness state, just the way they could develop their game of golf as a skill. MISHLOVE: It strikes me that what you're saying, that all of the various addictive disorders are one fundamental problem, is now the attitude of the American Medical Association. YOUNG: Oh, is that true? MISHLOVE: Yes, they have in fact very recently come up with a new term, addictive disorder, to include all of the different addictions, because it seems as if the body -- well, it could choose one or another object, but it's still something that's called an addictive personality. YOUNG: Or a compulsiveness. So I personally like to use the word drivenness, and that's the way that we look at it -- that any drivenness works on the same mechanism, and that when a person overcomes their eating problem using a meditative technique, that that will not just be that they overcame that problem, but it will cause an immense revolution in that person's total life, because if they use the meditative path they will deal with the real issue; they will get down to drivenness per se. Now, what happens when you enter the witness state is that the discomfort that you ordinarily would cover over by, let us say, overeating, you just observe. And you are able to see that it is changing, insubstantial; it loses its gripping power, and you don't need to therefore engage in a self-destructive behavior. Now, however, the other amazing thing is that it

is not just a temporary substitution. If you can consistently observe in this witness state, as the months and years pass, that pain that is driving the behavior actually starts to dissolve of its own. We can't make it go away, because if we were try to push on it, that would be manipulating and would cause more pain. But by just observing, it breaks up of its own. And so the actual compulsion itself goes, and not just the compulsion around the food, but the overall sense of drivenness that that person may have with respect to anything, including having a conversation or making love, what have you. MISHLOVE: So you're getting at it from a deeper level. YOUNG: A very deep level. MISHLOVE: The conventional thinking around alcoholism, for example, is that through programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous an alcoholic will learn not to drink, but they'll always remain an alcoholic. YOUNG: I should say that there's a very good reason why in the 12-Step programs they say that, and what I'm saying is in no way contradicting that. Because unless you practice a very deep meditative technique for a long period of time, you probably, probably, are not going to contact and uproot that pain. Therefore, although you may deal with some of it, the seeds of the compulsion will always be there, and it is typical of the addictive personality to have what they call the phenomenon of denial. So if you start thinking, "I'm cured, and so I can take a little drink," you're going to blow it. So there's a very good reason why the 12-Step programs teach that. MISHLOVE: And they seem to be effective. YOUNG: Yes, they seem to work quite well. I would merely say that if you apply meditative technique -- and not everybody that conquers an addiction does it with a meditative technique -if you do it with a meditative technique, the advantage is you will uproot it, you will be cured. MISHLOVE: You used this term, "the seeds of the addiction." YOUNG: Right. The seeds of the addiction are the underlying pain. MISHLOVE: Where does that fit in? What does it arise from? YOUNG: Basically it arises from past experience. Whenever we have any experience, even sitting here talking on television, we have sensations that arise -- that is to say, pleasant or unpleasant feelings. If this interview goes well, I get pleasant feelings, OK? If we run into a hitch, I get tension and unpleasant feelings. Feelings are with us at all times. If a person has feelings in a skillful way, in that moment -- and I'll define skillful in just a minute -- those feelings will simply be full and complete and they'll pass through. Whether they're painful or pleasant makes no difference. They won't leave any ghosts. MISHLOVE: It's an interesting phrase -- to have feelings in a skillful way.

YOUNG: Oh yes, right. We study all sorts of skills -- skill at tennis, skill at computer languages. But very few people realize the most fundamental skill for any human being is how to experience pleasure and pain, physical or psychological pleasure and pain, in a wholesome way. Now, what I mean by skill is, skill implies two things -- that there's a complete awareness of the feeling, and that there is a non-interference with the flow of that feeling. To the extent that a person can have pleasure and pain in that way, to that extent the pain will not cause suffering and will not leave ghosts of fear. The pleasure will not cause frustration. It will be completely fulfilling, and it will not leave ghosts of dissatisfaction. So what happens is most people from infancy on begin to feel. In fact that's all we did when we were infants; we did not think very much, but we sure felt. MISHLOVE: Freud called it being polymorphously perverse, as I recall. YOUNG: Oh, I see. That's an interesting phrase. MISHLOVE: Feeling in every part of the body. YOUNG: We are totally feeling beings. We start to develop the habit of doing two things around feeling -- diverting and tensing. As soon as you're doing that, you're not having the feeling skillfully. And as soon as you have any feeling that's unskillful, it's going to leave ghosts -unresolved remnants of itself, residues. MISHLOVE: Most of us are taught as children not to cry, not to have painful feelings, to be good. YOUNG: Ah. Well, now, I would have to say that there's a difference between expressing externally and expressing internally. Skillful feeling means that you express fully internally; you totally experience it. Whether you express it externally or not is an independent dimension from that. But be that as it may -MISHLOVE: That's not a distinction that we normally teach our children. YOUNG: Well, there are some very, very fundamental mistakes that are made. But in any event, whenever you fully internally manifest a feeling, it will leave no ghost. Most people do not do that. Therefore, they start to accumulate ghosts, or residues, of pain, and that builds up and builds up and builds up. Everybody carries with them enormous subliminal pain, hidden pain, whether they know it or not. Now, some of that pain can start to come to the surface, and when it does, in order to cope with it we begin to have to engage in negative behavior sometimes, to anesthetize ourselves to it. So you asked, where does the pain come from? It is essentially the remnants of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of past experiences -- not just one or two that may come up in psychotherapy, but hundreds of thousands of moments of unskillful feeling, each one leaving teeny little ghosts. Now, what happens in the meditative state is that we begin to watch those feelings in an uninvolved way -- we have specific techniques that teach people to do this -- and in a way where we realize that those feelings are impermanent, they just come and go; they're sort of like waves of energy. When you actually experience the underlying pain -- let us say that we take a devastating disorder like bulimia, for example. When you actually get down to what the real pain is that underlies that, it is not all that horrible. But if you cannot experience it with

full awareness, it impacts at a very primitive level of consciousness which is very sensitive, and it seems like the end of the world -- like I've just got to overeat, or I've just got to vomit, or I just can't handle anything. But when that pain is actually brought to the surface and observed specifically, it's not all that intense, really. And the way we bring it to the surface, in the particular form of meditation that I teach, is very interesting. If I were to ask you to get in contact with the stored unresolved pain of your lifetime, where would you look? If somebody says, "Where's Jeffrey?" I can point with my finger and say, "Follow the finger, and there's Jeffrey." MISHLOVE: At least here's his nose. YOUNG: Where is the stored pain of your lifetime? What's the arrow or the finger that points us in the direction to look, so that we can start to resolve this stuff? One of the great discoveries that was made in the Buddhist tradition is that the sensations that we have in our body -- the ordinary sensations that we have in our body, the way our body feels -- if we start to pay attention to it, will direct us down into the core of pure feeling within us, wherein are stored these ghosts of the past. So what we have people do is we teach them step-by-step techniques to sensitize the body so that they can feel this pain coming to the surface, in the body, and just observe it as a threedimensional, impermanent wave passing through. Once they can do that, they find that, number one, they don't have to act on that pain; and number two, that they work through. It's sort of like a layer of discomfort percolates up to the surface, and then it dissolves in the light of dispassionate observation. MISHLOVE: In other words, you're asking these people to do the very thing that when they're involved in their compulsive behavior they fear the most, which is to feel their pain. YOUNG: That's correct. And that's why the meditative path is very tricky to give to somebody with a compulsive disorder. It has to be done in a very skillful way, because you are giving them a new coping mechanism which happens to be one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite direction of their old coping mechanism, and therefore you have to be very careful about the transfer of the coping mechanisms, because -- that's why you mentioned the 12-Step programs. When we teach this technique, we usually encourage people to enter a 12-Step program while they're learning Buddhist meditation for their compulsion. The reason is unless there's a strong networking from their peers to keep their behavior in line, there's every possibility that their behavior will get worse before it gets better, because we're digging down into the source, and we want to keep that under control with a behaviorally oriented program, like a 12-Step, Overeaters, or Alcoholics Anonymous. MISHLOVE: I guess what you do find in meditation is that the pain is never so great it can't be tolerated. YOUNG: Absolutely. That's why ultimately I sometimes find myself saying, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry." Because when you actually see what's there, you see somebody that has been destroying their life over something that is not all that painful, if you could just get in contact with it. But getting in contact with it is very difficult. I should say that one passes through, I would say, three basic stages. The first stage is where you do not experience it as specific bodily discomfort. You just have urge. It's the "I just gotta" -- I just gotta have a drink, I

just gotta do this or that. That's the stage where the sensations are completely covered over by ignorance. Then there's a second stage where the sensation rises to the surface, and you actually feel what you're trying to relieve by indulging in the compulsion. That's the stage I call detection. You realize, "Oh, it's like this ick and this ick," and at that stage it will usually be all over the whole body, and we teach people how to scan the body, how to just get in contact with every bit of that. They've contacted it; that's stage number two. At the third stage they see that it is really insubstantial, it's impermanent, it's not nearly as painful as what they might have thought of. At that stage the urge vanishes. You have abstinence without effort. And at the same time, the spiritual self, which has been covered over all those years by that subliminal pain, that transcendent self starts to manifest, and that opens up a world of fulfillment that is simply unimaginable to the average person. MISHLOVE: Does this process also work with some of the hard-core physiological addictions -alcohol, heroin, these things where withdrawal can become a major problem for some people? YOUNG: Absolutely. It would work. Now, what my experience has been is that basically if the person has a very high motivation, and if they can get very competent, clear instruction in meditation, then they can conquer the disorder, and not only that, but go far beyond that. In other words, the person that we so much pity in the state of having the disorder, if they use the meditative technique to conquer it, now becomes the person to envy. That person becomes an enlightened, liberated person. MISHLOVE: Stronger than they would have been if they had never had the problem. YOUNG: Incomparably stronger. So that's why I sometimes call that the bright side of addiction. My life companion, Shelly, runs a special program for eating disorders, and she came to this because she almost died from her own problem; she had an eating disorder. It was not that many years ago that she was living on the streets, penniless and on the verge of suicide. She used this technique; she now has her own center, she is an established teacher, and just a source of enormous strength and encouragement to all the people around her. MISHLOVE: There are so many examples of this. YOUNG: It's just a miracle, yes. MISHLOVE: When a person really comes to grips with their own situation and cures themselves, these people become the great healers. YOUNG: Yes. So it really does work. That's the basic model that we use, and how we teach people. MISHLOVE: You know, when you talk about the seeds of the compulsion, the addiction, I'm reminded of a term I heard once at a Buddhist center. I believe the phrase was "ancient, twisted karma." YOUNG: OK.

MISHLOVE: It's as if in some way our ancient, twisted karma may drive us into a state of illness or sickness or degradation, so that we have the opportunity to really heal ourselves. YOUNG: Yes, it's true. Of course, karma, if people aren't familiar with the word, karma just means in Sanskrit action, so the influence of your past actions is your karma. It's nothing mystical. In other words, what karma means in modern parlance would be, "What goes around, comes around." MISHLOVE: In the meditative traditions, of course, there's a lot to be said about the higher realms of meditative practice. Are people who have been through addictive disorders as capable of reaching into those higher realms as anyone else? YOUNG: In a sense more capable. That is sort of the point I was trying to make. They have an enormous motivation, and so yes, they will be drawn to that, because actually a really rock-solid addictive-compulsive disorder is not going to be cured by anything short of enlightenment, because you have to go to the core of the ego to deal with it. But it can be cured. Enlightenment will cure it. MISHLOVE: There seem to be, though, so many obstacles in the path of enlightenment -demons guarding the temple. YOUNG: Right. MISHLOVE: Aren't there -- well, I'm wondering if there are risks as one pursues that. Is that a path for everybody? YOUNG: I can only say that in my experience it is a path for anybody that really wants it. But people should realize that this word enlightenment is thrown around rather loosely. As I use the word it has a very, very specific definition in Buddhism, and it's not just something that you're going to get in two weekend seminars. It represents a fundamental understanding of the nature of the oneness of all things -- not as a belief, not as wishful thinking, but as rock-bottom reality. And that kind of experience is -- well, you would not expect to go to the moon without having an enormous endeavor. Look what it took to get us to the moon. You don't just wish your way there; you make step-by-step endeavors. If you really work at it, look, you can do it, and go to the moon. Enlightenment is like that, OK? It's not just something that you're going to wish your way to. MISHLOVE: Well, there were great hazards in going to the moon. YOUNG: Yes, and there are great hazards in the path of enlightenment, certainly. MISHLOVE: Can you touch on that a bit? YOUNG: Well, yes. The first hazard is to think you're going in the path of enlightenment when in fact you're just going in the path of ordinary mental health. Not that there's anything wrong

with ordinary mental health. In fact, in my way of thinking -- others might not agree, but in my way of thinking ordinary mental health is a necessary precondition to enlightenment. MISHLOVE: Sort of a platform. YOUNG: Yes. But what a lot of people are calling enlightenment is just sort of dealing with the personality. So one of the main things is that a lot of people think they're onto a path to enlightenment; they're onto something useful, but it's not what we would call enlightenment. The next main hazard, I would say, is that along the path to enlightenment one encounters some very interesting, special states of consciousness -- altered states of consciousness, special powers, influencing powers, even psychic powers are there as a phenomenon, whatever they may be. One encounters beings; you know, there's the whole lot of things about channeling and all this. MISHLOVE: The astral realm. YOUNG: I call them the realm of powers. It's very easy to get caught in that. In our tradition we just basically ignore it, OK? If you imagine that you have ordinary surface awareness here, and there is this transcendent source that's here, in between ordinary surface awareness and the transcendent source are some very interesting, trippy, special realms. The great majority of what goes under the name of spirituality is the pandering to people's interest in those intermediate realms, to put it bluntly. One of the major obstacles is that a person can begin the path of going from surface awareness to the source, get halfway down, find some real interesting trippy thing, and get shunted out horizontally and spend the rest of their life exploring that aspect, and not go any further in the vertical direction down. That is what I would say is the major obstacle -- being seduced into these interesting things. MISHLOVE: And surely our popular culture has many things like that, where if a person were serious about dealing with a compulsive or addictive problem, that might not be a good direction for them. YOUNG: Well, I would not say that, because obviously it's something that you encounter on the way, so we don't want to say that it's bad. And we would never say that to explore it is bad. What gets bad is if you turn it into another form of materialism. Here on the surface of the mind, we get into comparison things like, "I make more money than you do," or, "I'm better looking," or, "I've got a better education." That's surface materialism. Down there it's like, "My channel can channel a higher entity than your channel." That's middle-level materialism. But to explore those realms from a purely spiritual point of view is legitimate, just so you don't get shunted away. MISHLOVE: I see. So it's valid, I suppose, necessary and expected, that one will encounter these areas. YOUNG: Not necessarily, but it often happens. MISHLOVE: The key then is to not get caught up in it.

YOUNG: To not get caught, and not get shunted out, and to continue to go to the source. Now, when you continue in that way, when you finally encounter the source, what has happened is that ordinary, day-to-day awareness, like I'm here talking to you -MISHLOVE: I'm going to have to cut you short now. We're running out of time. Shinzen Young, thank you very much for being with me. I'm sorry to cut you off like that. YOUNG: Oh, it's OK. I think we've said enough. MISHLOVE: I think we made the point very clearly, and I'm very moved by the power of meditation to deal with such a fundamental human problem as compulsive behavior. Thank you for being with me. END

PUTTING PSYCHOTHERAPY ON THE COUCH with BERNIE ZILBERGELD, Ph.D. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be analyzing psychotherapy -- putting psychotherapy on the couch, so to speak. Many viewers are interested in whether psychotherapy really works, and if it does work, what type of psychotherapy is appropriate for what particular problems. With me in the studio is Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld, the author of numerous books, including Male Sexuality, The Shrinking of America, and Mind Power. Dr. Zilbergeld is a psychologist in private practice in Oakland, California. Welcome, Bernie. BERNIE ZILBERGELD, Ph.D.: It's nice to be here, Jeff. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, in your book The Shrinking of America, you suggest that psychotherapy has basically been oversold to the American population, and probably overused -- that it really doesn't meet up to all the claims that are made for it. Why don't we start there, and look at the ways in which exaggerated claims may be made for therapy? ZILBERGELD: Well, I think exaggerated claims are made all the time. Part of it is the structure of television; television I think is the real villain. Basically, unlike your show, when a psychologist is on pushing a book or something, which is usually why they're on, or discussing a topic, what's wanted is real short positive answers, and if you want to qualify something you really can't. The interviewers on most shows really don't have any tolerance for that. Plus, you know, we're selling ourselves, and want to put our best feet forward. You put those two things together. So what we talk about are our most dramatic successes, and you would think, if you listened to shrinks on the media -- which is really where they sell themselves; it's the only place where the public comes in contact with them, aside from reading their books, where they do the same thing, and actually being in therapy with them -- you would think you can go from rags to riches in ten minutes, or the sky's the limit, as Wayne Dyer, a popular psychologist, put it. And

of course none of these things are true. Dramatic cures in psychotherapy do happen, but they're extremely rare. By and large the research shows that psychotherapy generally does do some good, but very modestly. Now, modestly may be fine, but we're not talking about the sky's the limit, rags to riches, and you're going to go from being a depressed whatever to just a happy-golucky person in a few weeks. It doesn't happen. MISHLOVE: I suppose part of the problem here is that people can often experience a dramatic change in therapy, but they're not able to sustain it, and their previous behavior or attitudes will sort of revert. They'll relapse to that. ZILBERGELD: Well, yes. I think Mark Twain actually put it well. He said he quit smoking, it's very easy to do; he's done it hundreds of time. A lot of times people will get a sudden insight or a certain surge of energy, and they will be more assertive, less depressed, they'll stop drinking or smoking or whatever. But then it's hard to maintain, and the maintaining of it takes a lot of work. There are a lot of relapses in all the therapies, and for the most part people don't pay attention to this, and certainly therapists don't want to talk about it; they want to put their best foot forward. Basically what has happened is the total psychologization of the world. What we want -- and it's happened, by the way -- the therapeutic has triumphed in the last twenty, thirty years in America. Whatever problems people have now -- I mean, we're talking all the way from biting their nails or being depressed, sexual problems, to being rapists and murderers -- the first question is, "Well, have you talked to anybody about this?" MISHLOVE: Meaning therapists. ZILBERGELD: Meaning, "Have you seen a therapist about this?" And it is amazing -- this is a radical change in American life -- in the twenties, thirties, and forties, people who went to therapy were thought to be really cuckoo. But now, anybody with any problem -- "Have you seen somebody about this? I'll get you a name." MISHLOVE: Well, there's still in some circles certainly a stigma about going for psychotherapy, but I think your point is generally true. I guess the question really is, for anybody who's looking at making a change in their life, is it realistic? Should they try and change their attitudes, change their behavior, or should they try and accept themselves the way they are? ZILBERGELD: Well, I think a big question has to do with how much you're willing to put into it, and this is often overlooked. Therapy, to make changes of the kind most people want, takes work, whether it's self-help work, therapist work, or however you want do to it. Whether you want to work from a book, you want to come and see you or me, or however, it's going to take effort and time, and often money as well. Certainly if they're coming to our offices it's going to cost money, and even to buy books or tapes costs money. A lot of people don't consider that. They just think if they go, somehow something's going to happen. You know, on the one hand we have things like psychoanalysis, which go on for years and years and years, often three, four, five times a week; and on the other hand you might get a book for a few dollars. But just reading the book is probably not going to do it; that's very rare. Most self-help books, wisely these days, have exercises in them. They're meant for you to do, not just to glance at. You've got to do these certainly weekly, but for most things you're going to have to do them every day. A lot of people

are not willing to put in the effort. If you're not willing to put in the effort, why bother? Why not try to accept it and just move on -- accept that you're never going to be real assertive, you're never going to be a millionaire, you're never going to be thin -- and get on with it? MISHLOVE: Isn't this the job of a therapist? If I want to change my behavior, naturally I have resistance to change, and therapists are supposedly skilled at dealing with resistance, at helping people move past their resistance, in ways they can't do themselves. ZILBERGELD: Well, I think therapists create as much resistance as they actually help resolve. But why call it resistance? That's like an ugly word. Why not just admit that not everybody can be everything? That's another one of these psychological myths -- you can have everything. You can't, because if nothing else the time you spend getting A, whether it's being a better golf player or making more money, cannot also be used in doing B, whatever B might be. If you're learning to play golf you can't be taking dancing lessons at the same time, or writing, or practicing making speeches. So you can't have everything. How much are you willing to put into it? I think that's an extremely important question. Let me back up a little bit, because there's a more important question, or one that precedes that -- what is it that you want? I mean, a lot of people come into psychotherapy, just, "I'm not happy." Well, that's nice. What would you like? What would make you happy? How would you know if you were happy? These are things people can do for the most part on their own. You know -- what would it take to make me happy? Well, if I had a relationship, if I made more money, if I were better organized, if I lost weight or gained weight, or whatever. Having a specific goal is very important, whether you're going to work on it yourself or consider working on it, or go to therapy. It's the only way you can figure out, one, if you're willing to put the energy and resources into it; and two, it's the only way you can figure out if you got there or not, or are moving along to it. It's amazing -- one thing I think is an incredible abuse of therapy, a lot of therapists do not help people define their goals, and they sit there for years or months just droning on and on about all sorts of things, and you can't even evaluate success, because it's not clear where you were going, so how can you tell if you're getting there? Defining your goals, deciding if you want to put some resources into it -- time, energy, money, whatever it might take -- these are things people basically can do on their own. MISHLOVE: Well, let's suppose now that a viewer has defined their goals, and they've decided they are willing to make a real commitment, they really want to change their life. Now there's a whole supermarket of therapies out there, and they all make claims, by and large, that they can handle a huge variety of problems more effectively than any of the others. ZILBERGELD: It is not easy. Interestingly enough -- and viewers may get some comfort out of this -- therapists themselves have trouble deciding and finding a therapist for themselves. But there's not only therapists -- formal therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and those kinds of people. There's also mass therapies, like Est and Lifesprings and things like that. There's things like Weight Watchers, TOPS -- Take off Pounds Sensibly. There's the AA. MISHLOVE: Transcendental Meditation. ZILBERGELD: Well, that I think, Jeff, is a thing of the past, but certainly there are things like that, places that'll help you do everything. Then there's also the self-help materials. Go into any

bookstore. My God, there's all sorts of books on losing weight, gaining weight, being calmer, having more energy, whatever. What do you do? I think one good principle is start with the least expensive. Even though I make part of my living doing therapy, I still recommend that. MISHLOVE: Go to the library first. ZILBERGELD: Well, that I don't recommend; I want people to buy my books. But there's a lot of good self-help books. Whether you're talking about assertiveness, sexuality, depression, whatever -- most therapists these days, probably because of the advent of computers on the one hand, and on the other hand the idea that they're going to get rich with books -- there's a lot of good books, and a lot of therapists will put their best stuff into a book. So self-help books are one thing. Self-help groups -- after all these years, there's no psychologist or therapist or psychology program that does better with alcoholics than AA. That is a fine organization; I don't belong to it; they don't pay me for this promo. But when I have somebody who's having trouble with drinking or narcotics -- Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, these are fine groups. They're not for everybody; some people do not like the atmosphere and they can't get along there, but that is one of the first things to try. Groups like Weight Watchers and TOPS, Take off Pounds Sensibly -- they've been found in actual scientific studies to be as good as anything we have to offer. MISHLOVE: So you're not one of these professionals who maintain that you've got to go to someone who has a big degree after their name? ZILBERGELD: No, no, no, no. Actually there's research to prove that the process of getting the degrees makes you less good as a therapist. There's actually a number of studies that show that. They really take out of people what's best in them in helping people change. Now, a lot of people have said this about medical school too. I would say start with what's around you -- a book, a self-help group -- and see if that will do it for you. If it does, you've got it, it will cost you less money, and the results may even be better. Also, a lot of therapy, as I maintain in The Shrinking of America, really is just talking to people. There's a lot of natural therapists around. In almost every extended family or large organization or neighborhood, there's a person about which it is said, "You know, Aunt Martha is a good one to talk about it," or, "Sid really knows about these kinds of things." On every campus there are professors that are known to be good people to talk to. And you can spot them right away. Just walk down the hallway when they're having office hours, and there's a big line out there. They can give you the kind of advice and hand holding you get in therapy. MISHLOVE: What you're suggesting here, though, is that it is good to talk. If you've got a problem, if you're feeling emotionally bottled up, it's not good to sit on it. ZILBERGELD: I don't do that a hundred percent. If it's really bothering you, then you've got to do something about it, or you might want to do something about it. A lot of problems are just best denied. I happen to be one of the therapists who's a great believer in denial. It's a great coping mechanism. If your mother, or someone you love, has cancer, it's really great to go for days without thinking about it. I mean, to drive yourself into the ground, to think you've got to suffer with this every day, I think is ridiculous. Now, if talking to somebody will help you get it off your chest, and then you can have some moments or hours or days of peace, that's fine too,

but there are a lot of good people to talk to. I mean, human beings have been helping each other ever since the beginning of human beings, and we haven't been doing that terrible a job. A lot of what therapists do is take what human beings have been doing, and then give it a fancy label, and then say that only I can do it, or only my school or my group can do it. Well, but Aunt Martha may know it too; your grandmother may know it. I thought it was very interesting in the last few years when they were researching colds -- you know, hard science -- they found out a lot of your grandmother's advice was right. MISHLOVE: Chicken soup. ZILBERGELD: Chicken soup is good for you. Drink a lot of liquids. Stay in bed a few days. I mean, it turns out Grandma wasn't crazy. MISHLOVE: In The Shrinking of America you describe some of the negative consequences that can come from therapy, and one of the issues that you get at is this sort of pop psychology, or psychologized version of what it means to be responsible, and that many people are told by their therapists or by seminars that they go to that they must take responsibility for their life, for their behavior. And it causes people to blame themselves instead of really being responsible. ZILBERGELD: Oh, this goes on a lot. By the way, this is not pop psychology; this goes back to Freud, in that horrible case, which I think is available in paperback, and I think everybody ought to read it to see the ill that therapists can do. In this case with Dora, this young woman came in to therapy and Freud just beat the hell out of her. I mean, he abused her psychologically, in my mind, and he ended up saying she had an intention to be ill. A lot of therapists will do this to their patients. I think it's basically the therapist gets frustrated. They think they want to help, they think they can help, and then this person, this client, this patient, will not accept their interpretation, will not do the homework, is not getting better, and then they just get upset and say, well, it's clear that you want to be overweight, it's clear you don't want to stop smoking, it's clear you want to kill yourself, or whatever. And they do push this responsibility thing. If you were raped, you were responsible -- I mean, Est got into that, and some other people. I think one of the great virtues in life is to accept what you're not responsible for: "Look, I lost that money, or I screwed up this or that, but I wasn't responsible for it. How was I to know?" There are certain things that are beyond your control. One of the worst things, and I give a case example in Shrinking, is the cancer business -- blaming people, or holding them responsible, for their own cancer. You know -- because you didn't assert yourself, and because you didn't express anger, that's why you got cancer. You're telling this to somebody who already has cancer. I mean, they're in bad enough shape to begin with. Interestingly enough, recently Simonton -MISHLOVE: Carl Simonton. ZILBERGELD: Carl Simonton, who's really responsible for this, he sort of fessed up, and he has backed off. He is treating AIDS patients and cancer patients with the same visualization techniques he was using ten, fifteen years ago, but my understanding is, he's backed off from holding them responsible and blaming them, because that really wan't necssary.

MISHLOVE: I think the point that he's trying to make is that you could be responsible for changing your condition. ZILBERGELD: To me that's a lot different than saying, "You're responsible for getting it, and you can get better." Why not just say, "You have some powers within you" -- which I certainly believe -- "that may help with this cancer," or whatever it is, and just take it from that side, rather than holding the negative side? MISHLOVE: I suppose it's a little insidious, because therapists earn their living at this, and if they can get a person kind of guilt-ridden -- "You're responsible for your problem, and if you work with me we can find out how you caused this" -- it's a way of kind of maintaining the cash flow. ZILBERGELD: Well, that's certainly true, and I think it's an important point. What's going on in both medicine and psychotherapy now really has to be seen to a great extent as money and turf. I mean, there are too many therapists, and it turns out really there are too many doctors as well, for all these people to be able to earn the kind of living they'd like to earn doing it and have the time off they'd like to have. And so there are incredible battles going on, and a lot of what sounds like ideological warfare or technique warfare is really who's going to get the money, who's going to get the patients. You have to see it in that light. People don't like to think of their doctors and therapists as businessmen and businesswomen. We like to see them as sort of tweedy people, kindly helpers. They may well be that, and I certainly think most therapists do have a real firm commitment to helping people; they would like to be of help. But also there's incredible problems about the oversupply of therapists, which we keep manufacturing. We keep turning out incredible numbers of therapists; there are no jobs for most of them. So they will compete with each other. This reinforces everything we're talking about. I have to show that I have a better system than you. I can't prove it, of course, and I wouldn't even try, but I've got to publish books or whatever, make speeches, that will get people coming to me and my students rather than you and your students, and you feel the same way, and so do five thousand other people -- five thousand in Los Angeles alone, maybe. So we get into this problem. People have to see it this way. It's no different than dealing with Honda and Toyota and Colgate and Crest and all that. You're dealing with people who are trying to get a bigger share of the pie, namely your pie. MISHLOVE: Well, you and I are both psychologists, so this is an issue that we face personally. How do you resolve this for yourself? ZILBERGELD: I've resolved it in a number of ways. For one thing, I'm not in private practice full time; that is only a small part of my life. I spend a large part of my time teaching and talking and also writing. I'm a person who gets bored easily, so I've got a lot of different things. And I've never had to fight for my practice, because I've been public early on, and people have read my books or heard my talks and come to me or been referred to me. So in a way I'm sort of aside from the fray. I don't have to worry, as so many people do, "Gee, I had five people quit last week, and at this level I can't pay the mortgage," or something. That's really where it's at for a lot of people. I taught at -- well, maybe I shouldn't mention the college -- a college that mass produces master's degrees in psychology, and they become Marriage, Family, and Child Counselors. I've taught at several schools like that in the past, and I've actually talked to the

heads of the department, and I've said, "Why are you turning out all these people? There are no jobs for most of them. A lot of them will not --" He said, "You know, we're not a vocational school. We offer training. If people want to take it, that's fine. If they can't find jobs, that's tough stuff for them." I thought that was a pretty interesting point of view. What he didn't recognize -and of course I've had some contact with some of the former students, and they said indeed some people couldn't make it, and are now painting houses or driving cabs or whatever -- but what they don't recognize is that the oversupply will generate a kind of hyping and exaggeration of results, and a kind of real advertising ethic and business ethic -MISHLOVE: It hasn't necessarily resulted in lower fees. ZILBERGELD: No, no, no, it rarely results in lower fees -- that may not be good for the whole field of psychotherapy, and that may at least be worthy of some consideration and thought. Most of these people don't think about it. MISHLOVE: It's odd, because on the other hand -- and I know this is a point you address in your book -- from a different perspective one could look at the population of the United States or any of the Western countries, and look at the number of people who are addicted, the number of people who have suffered child abuse -- these are major problems, to say nothing of the kind of minor problems, anxieties and so on, that stem from this in the culture -- and think that, gee, we could use ten times as many. ZILBERGELD: Well, we could use; a lot of people feel that way. The question is, who's willing to come to these people? Who's willing to pay for it? One point, going back several points here -therapy has shown that it's very good for some things. Phobias, for example; certain kinds of anxiety; certain kinds of sexual problems; certain therapies with certain depressions. The problem is, the public by and large doesn't know this. MISHLOVE: It's a question of matching up the particular problem to a particular therapy which is really scientifically known to work at this point. ZILBERGELD: To work for that. But the fact is, it is very hard to get this information. I can get it, because I can go to libraries at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. MISHLOVE: Can we enumerate some of those briefly? ZILBERGELD: Well, sex therapy, the thing that Masters and Johnson pioneered, has indeed been shown to be effective with sexual dysfunctions. MISHLOVE: Premature ejaculation. ZILBERGELD: Orgasm problems, erection problems. Now, does it have a higher percent success? Of course not; no therapy does. But it can be helpful, if the person is using the methods that are shown to be helpful. Phobias -- behavior therapy is very good with that, and a lot of anxieties. Depression -- there's some real good news for people who don't want to take antidepressant medication.

MISHLOVE: Cognitive therapy. ZILBERGELD: Cognitive therapy, which is a form of behavior therapy, is very effective. It has been shown to be at least as effective as the best antidepressant medication. The good thing is, no side effects, unless your therapist beats up on you, makes you feel worse. But that's all. We don't have a lot more to show for ourselves. With psychosis, with addictions, therapy has not shown that it can do anything. With sexual abuse, which of course is a much bigger issue than a lot of people thought, I would like to think, because I end up working with a fair number of people who've been abused, I'd like to think we're doing some good -- you know, good that could be shown in a scientific study. We don't have those scientific studies. So while we're sending all these people, we really don't know that it's that helpful. MISHLOVE: Of course now there are limits to what a scientific study can observe, because if it's looking at outcomes of therapy it needs measurable behavior. And yet many people come to therapy because they want to feel better, or because they want insight, and these things are quite hard to measure. ZILBERGELD: I disagree totally with that. I think if it makes a difference, it has to be discernible. Our difference may have to do with how we're defining behavior. I mean, for me to say if somebody says, "I feel better," that's behavior, or that's worthwhile. It has to be discernible. If it's not discernible to the therapist or the patient, or the patient's wife or husband or somebody, then it didn't happen. MISHLOVE: Oh, I understand that. It just may not be discernible to an outside scientist, because if somebody reports that they fell better, well, they may not really. ZILBERGELD: Well, but that is one source of information. I think self reports are necessary. I think the therapist's opinion is necessary, although obviously they're biased, and I think anybody else's opinion. In questionnaires we can use anything. I rarely quibble about outcome measures, but we've got to have some kind of outcome. And the therapist's argument -- it was typically the analysts who used to engage in this; now more and more therapists of all persuasions are engaging in it -- "We just can't measure these things. Science hasn't caught up with it." I say that's a real cop-out. What that is, is a whole hypocrisy. It's a way of saying we can't show we do any good, but please, insurance companies, governments, whoever, give us more money so we can keep on doing what we can't prove is worthwhile. I think that's crazy. MISHLOVE: So in other words, you're recommending that for somebody who's considering that they get into therapy, that they really think in their own mind about establishing what would for them be a satisfactory, measurable outcome. ZILBERGELD: Yeah, and I think any therapist who's worth anything will help you do that, whether you've done it or not on yourself. For a therapist not to do that, in my mind -- a lot of therapists will disagree -- is unethical. I mean, if you're coming here, you're coming to my office, it is incumbent on me, I believe, to ask you, well, what would you like to achieve? Let's say we spend some time together, Jeff. What outcome would make you feel your time and money were well spent, or at least weren't wasted? All right, you'd like to be happier. What would it take to

make you happier? How would you know you're happier? Oh, if you didn't feel so tense when you woke up in the morning and the rest of the day. That's fine. I can accept most things that you would come up with, but we have to have something, otherwise how am I going to know how to plan treatment, and how are either one of us going to know if we're getting anyplace? MISHLOVE: It's tricky. My sense is, from my own practice and colleagues that I know, that some people come and basically their real goal, although it's not often stated, is just to keep from getting worse, because they're afraid that they're sliding, and if you can kind of maintain them at their present level, that's doing good work. ZILBERGELD: But that's fine too. How would we know you're at the same level and not getting worse? Well, I wouldn't be having any more migraines; I wouldn't be having any more panic attacks. OK, that's kind of a minimalist goal, but that's acceptable too. I think the important thing is that it be spelled out in some way, because not to spell it out helps lead to interminable therapy. You have people in therapy for ten, twenty, even thirty years. I know a therapist in Berkeley who had a client who'd been in psychoanalysis in Boston for thirty-three years, four times a week. MISHLOVE: And didn't feel any better, but he sure learned a lot about himself. ZILBERGELD: Right. That's actually what the guy said, and I kind of question that. Actually, if people have the money and that's the way they want to spend their time, I have no problem with it. But if insurance companies, or the government, is paying for it, I really have questions about it. Because you know what insurance companies and the government are. They have no money; their money comes from folks like us. So I do have some questions about that. Do we, as a society, want to spend money that way? MISHLOVE: Well, you point out that other societies really don't focus in on psychotherapy to the extent that ours does. ZILBERGELD: No society focuses in. Do you realize that Sigmund Freud would have been a footnote in history books if it had not been for America? Freud was accepted nowhere the way he was in the United States. I mean, he was long forgotten in most other places -- just some active little clusters in New York, France, and wherever. In Austria they forgot about him a long time ago. But it was in the United States that he caught on. We are the therapeutic society par excellence, and we are influencing other cultures because they take on whatever is here. So in other countries, even in Japan I've heard, they're starting to come along: "Well, if they're doing it in America, it must be good." MISHLOVE: Well, it seems to me that's healthy in a sense, because it also indicates that we're on the leading edge of dealing with social issues -- discrimination against women, for example, against races. We're beginning to deal as a culture with psychological issues that are still being ignored in other parts of the world. ZILBERGELD: Well, I think that would be room for another whole show. I mean, we have exported many good things. We've also exported some things that are not so good. My feeling

about psychotherapy, and I know that's strange coming from a therapist, is kind of mixed. I think it is a tool; it is useful for certain kinds of things. I think unfortunately, like everything else, like all other tools, it starts being used for everything. I wish we would stop using it for psychotics; I wish we would stop using it for addictions; I wish we would stop using it for criminals. I wish we would stop using it for all the things where there's no evidence, despite years of trying to get it, that it does any good, and to use it for what it's good for. I mean, how would you feel if they started performing appendectomies on everybody, whether they needed them or not, or tonsillectomies, which was actually the case? Actually, I would like to see with psychotherapy what happened to tonsillectomies. They used to do it on everybody. MISHLOVE: Right. ZILBERGELD: And now, when they saw the results, when they really started looking at the research and seeing what it was doing to these kids -- you know, scaring the hell out of them, a lot of negative consequences -- now they're doing it in a more discriminating way. I would like to see psychotherapy being used in a more discriminating way. If you have a certain problem that we know a certain therapy works with, let's do it. MISHLOVE: Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld, it's been very refreshing to hear a psychologist speak so honestly about the profession of psychology and psychotherapy. Thank you very much for being with me. ZILBERGELD: My pleasure. END