Moore

That’s why I said to myself, “I have to be very original and clear myself from shit.” I was still hustling. Hustling to make bread. “I must clear myself from this mess. I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.” That’s what I was thinking to myself.

I wanted to be like Malcolm X! Fuck it! Shit! I wanted to be Malcolm X, you know. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Then one day I sat down at the piano in Sandra’s house. I said to Sandra: “Do you know what? I’ve just been fooling around. I haven’t been playing AFRICAN music. So now I want to write African music … for the first time. I want to try.” Then I started to write and write. In my mind I put a bass here … a piano there. … Then I started humming, then singing. I said to myself, “How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-la-la-laaa. …

Poems by Nikki Giovanni, The Last Poets (you know, “Niggers Are Afraid of Revolution”), Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Stokeley Carmichael, Jesse Jackson, Nina Simone’s “Four Women” , Miles Davis. … It was something that happened over a period of time. It was constant talking every night, every day, over a period of six months. Politics. Love. Love and politics.

A place open to everybody. A real compound, you know. I’d think to myself: “Ah-ah! What is this city shit-o? One man, one wife, one house isolated from everybody else in the neighbourhood? Is an African not even to know his neighbours?” Man, even the Bible says, “Know thy neighbour!” So why all this individualism shit? This “mine”. That “yours”. That “theirs”. What’s that shit? Is it African?

Sometimes it all comes back to me and I ask myself: “Why all this shit? Why do all these horrors happen to me? … All the shit I’ve been through in this motherfuckin’ world ever since I was born. … What kind of world is this? A world where you get your ass kicked if you do good … but given a medal if you kill some guy in the name of patriotism! What shit is that?” My first clash with “law and order” people was on 30 April 1974. I can’t forget that, man! Oh, what bastards! There I was in my house in Surulere. At that time, you know, there wasn’t any barbed-wire fence around my place. I had nothing to fear. I wasn’t even thinking they could have something against me. I was just preaching revolution for Africa, you know.

It was the first time I ever see prison in my life-o! I use to think prisoners were criminals until that day. Inside there I found guys who were also looking for a better life.

What’s the importance of a name? A lot, man. Malcolm X knew that. That’s why he chose “X”. Slavery had taken away his African name. So he preferred an “X” rather than the slave-master’s name. But so many people, man, are just brainwashed! They’d come and ask him: “Why X?” That reminds me of that French journalist who just the other day, there in Paris, asked me: “Why did you change your name from Ransome to Anikulapo?” I looked at him surprised. ‘Cause he’d asked just the opposite of what he should have asked. That i-d-i-o-t! He should’ve asked why my name had been Ransome in the first place. Me, do I look like Englishman?

Jobless. Homeless. Still in a cast, my body all bandaged. So I told everybody, “OK, motherfuckers, we must all get back to work!” We had to try to get the Shrine moving again ‘cause we didn’t have shit. All of my equipment, my belongings, they’d all gone up in flames with the house. Not a fuckin’ thing was left. Me, my girls, and the rest of my people slept in my brother Beko’s garage for a while. We still kept our dignity, though, man. We started the Shrine back. I began playing again, with one arm and a leg in a cast. That’s when I composed “Sorrow, Tears and Blood”. We were penniless, man. Then I thought to myself: “Don’t I have money coming to me from Decca or EMI?” We’re now in June-July…

Who are these “world leaders”? Destroyers, man. Not builders. Not creators. But destroyers. You see, I can’t accept that my fate be in the hands of such fucked-up people. Does that seem normal to you? Do you accept the idea that your fate, your last hour on this earth, might depend on some motherfucker sitting up in the White House in Washington or up in the Kremlin in Moscow? Should the fate of the whole world depend on whether or not one of those bastards’ pricks couldn’t get hard one night? Is that normal? Not to me, man! You see what I’m getting at? A handful of unnatural, unbalanced people are ruling this world. That’s why when I hear that the non-aligned bloc is trying to be a third solution, I can only shake my head. ‘Cause those people who call themselves non-aligned are unbalanced. Do you know what something which is non-aligned means? It means something which ain’t straight, man. Something crooked, unbalanced, an out-of-line people, you know!

I also told them that Africans have to start by feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belonging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Africa has to open her doors to every Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man.

Industrialization? We don’t need it unless it’s industrialization the African way. That’s what I told them. Technology, industrialization, the machine, they’ve all brought about a progressive loss of respect for life, for nature, for the environment we live in, man. And Africans worship nature and life. Technology’s killing the spiritual things. Now, how can that be called modernization? No, man. That’s regression. The white man is leading us astray. The right way is the one of our ancestors: traditional technology, or naturalology. That’s the only viable way. Yeah, that’s what I believe. You know what viable means? It means life, man. Life!

Power is knowledge. Somebody who has knowledge cannot misuse power. Knowledge is not technology. Knowledge is power in the cosmic sense; it’s rhythm, you know. Once you start to have rhythm you start having knowledge.

Science is making the world get more and more expensive. When science brings out a new gadget it costs more than the others. People have to earn more to buy it. So science is making the world more difficult, more complex. It makes people run more. What we need is to rest more, talk more, walk more, fuck more and enjoy things in life more. There’s a limit to what Europeans call technological and industrial development. When that limit is achieved society just crumbles. That’s why I see the day Europe, America and Russia will come to a standstill.

A lutta continua… A lutta continua… A lutta continua... Those words kept turning over and over in my mind during the flight. At first I didn’t understand because it was Portuguese language. One of the boys finally translated it as “the struggle continues!” I said to myself: “How can a responsible leader ever want the struggle to continue?” Who can want a war to continue? War is massacring … and killing. How can anybody want that to go on indefinitely? Those were the things I kept turning round in my head on the flight back from Berlin to Nigeria. That’s when I said to myself: “No! It must not continue. The struggle must STOP!” Since then, that’s been my slogan.

The leaders of the African freedom struggle will always want the struggle to continue. For them, it means travelling around on first-class tickets and being given VIP treatment wherever they go. So when people talk to me about South Africa, I say:

“Our Heads of State, how do they dare talk about South Africa? South Africa? What? What about South Africa?”

We all agree that South Africa is a fascist, anti-Black, white supremacist régime. We all know that. But analyse the question well. Ask youself this: are the so-called independent states of Africa any better than the apartheid régime in South Africa?

Experiences such as the one related above are the source of Fela’s ‘78 hit “V.I.P.” – again a play on words, for instead of “Very Important Person”, it stands for Vagabonds in Power.

So when people say America, Russia, China are great powers, I say: “No!” They’re not. They are destructive, not great powers. The man they called “Alexander the Great” was not great, he was a destroyer. Oppressors, destroyers, massacrists can never be great people. Oh, people are so brainwashed, man! Creativity, not destruction, should be the yardstick of greatness. If you cannot create anything that will make your own life, or that of your fellow human, happier, then get out of the way. Split! Disappear! And give others a chance. That’s my advice to these so-called great people and great powers!

Do I want to leave an imprint on the world? No. Not at all. You know what I want? I want the world to change. I don’t want to be remembered. I just want to do my part and leave. If remembering is part of the world’s thing, that’s their problem. I’ll do my part. I have to do my part. And everybody has to do his. Not for what they’re going to remember you for, but for what you believe in as a man. That’s what everybody should be about. If you want to do things because you want to be remembered, you are doing it for personal reasons only. Just do things ‘cause you believe in them. A human being should be like that.

What is power? Control of your mind, man! Control your mind, don’t let your mind control you. Then you have power. Power is not government, you see. It’s a question of mind.

With my music I create a change. I see it. So really I am using my music as a weapon. I play music as a weapon. The music is not coming from me as a subconscious thing. It’s conscious. I’m consciously doing what I am doing. What I mean is that whatever I want to do is in my mind. Man can have complete control of his mind. That’s what knowledge is about. To be able to control one’s mind.

As I said, everybody has a purpose in life. You have to know your purpose. And if you don’t know it, then you have to find it out by yourself.

Education today doesn’t allow people to know their purpose. It is meant to stifle that purpose. That’s why I am against the education the white man has brought to Africa. In Africa they make the child want to be doctor, lawyer, or engineer by force, you know. People are just not allowed to choose and go their own way. The white man’s way stifles creativity, man. See what I mean?

Dreams are uncontrolled travels of the soul. We go to places. We can see the future in our dreams. We can go backwards and forwards. For instance, I dream many dreams. I found out that many dreams I dream are opposites of the future. If I dream about something successful, it’s a failure; and if I dream about failure, I’m always successful. Any time I remember a dream, it always comes to pass. I always forget my dreams, but any dream I remember always comes to pass. Dream is an experience the body cannot feel, only the soul. The body cannot pass through a wall. In a dream it can. In a dream you are given the opportunity to see, to feel the future. What you will be.

In the late 1980s he released “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” an unforgiving satirical assault on the colonial education that was fostering cultural alienation among the surging generations of Africans. He fired two still more powerful shots: “Beasts of No Nation” and “Overtake Don Overtake Overtake.” These devastating commentaries delineated the emergent face of a new world order that a decade later would bear the name “globalization.

Fela’s hit tunes of the late 1970s, “I.T.T.” (International Thief, Thief), “V.I.P.” (Vagabonds in Power), and “Authority Stealing,” already betrayed a perceptive recognition of the local implications of an emergent transnational capitalism. In that new scheme, the ruling elites in Africa appeared as amoral and soulless comprador classes, devoid of any national interests or cultural moorings, people without any specific allegiance to nation, country, or continent. African despots, too, were beasts who belonged to no nation.

Marley effectively used the hypnotic sounds of reggae laced with poetic lyrics to protest injustices, creating an entirely novel philosophical discourse through music. Brown’s aggressive funk, which became the backbone of Fela’s Afrobeat, placed the reviled, feared black body and features on the map of the world in a positive, sensuous light. But neither Brown nor Marley tried to organize popular resentment into a political party, as Fela did. Neither went as far as Fela in identifying in unmistakably graphic terms the elites that were responsible for the oppression of African peoples all over the world.

Nevertheless, he refused exile. “No one will force me out of this country,” he warned. “If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit.” Instead, he chose a life on the margins that rejected all the material excesses of Africa’s post-independence elites. He saw the Africa that he and his parents inherited as “not the real Africa.” The Kalakuta Republic he set up in the heart of a large, sprawling ghetto was his attempt to reinvent and reimagine another Africa: a space of belonging for all, especially the dispossessed.

Soul Therapy

“It takes good ideas and an open heart to do therapy well. You are the main instrument of the work, and you can never stop learning about how human beings operate and who you are. You become a therapist first through self-discovery and then by learning how human life in general works.

I define therapy as “care of the soul.” In this sense therapy happens in all places all the time. And this is real therapy—caring, helpful, generous listening and responding.

In their training, therapists learn that common sense is not always useful in counseling others. Human life is full of paradoxes and contradictions.

“I had Plato in mind when, many years ago now, I wrote Care of the Soul. I thought of it as simple, daily concrete care for our essence, our depth, and the source of our humanity. If you care for your soul, you will be more human, able to relate better and find your way through life, discovering your purpose and calling. Care of the soul is not always about dealing directly with problems but solving them indirectly by discovering your deepest self and making a beautiful life.

Therefore, often the best healing of life and body is serious, positive attention to the needs of your soul.

When someone comes into my consulting room for therapy, I’m on the alert for signs of the soul’s condition. I will hear many stories and some complaints about life, but I see my job as caring for the deep and usually hidden life of the soul. This orientation is essential. You can’t do real psychotherapy without it. Often what is called therapy looks more like life management than soul care. You can rearrange your life, but that is not the same as giving your deep soul what it needs and craves.

Education in the emotions and in life patterns is a major part of therapy. That is one reason why a therapist would benefit from a big perspective on life, one that does not reduce the soul to the brain or to mere behavior and chemicals. A good therapist is part philosopher and even part theologian, in a nonpartisan way, because the soul touches on the great unsolvable mysteries of life.

For the most part, therapy is a matter of telling stories and listening to stories. A therapist needs an acute ear because she has to hear the stories within and behind the stories told and reach so far in her hearing as to grasp the mythic tale, the one that only whispers in the background and yet expresses the essence of the story. Myth describes the basic human experience, the archetypal level, that undergirds the story of events in time. The client tells the stories of her life, but the therapist listens for the rumble of myth deep within the simple stories of life. Adventures of the soul are bigger in scope than the vignettes of ordinary days. They are captured in myths, fairy tales, and legends, not in personal stories, unless you probe these deeply enough to glimpse the myth. So I always look for the greater story within the simple, literal details of daily life. I listen beneath the surface for the great and ancient tale, the story of the soul. To do this kind of listening, it helps to know mythologies and fairy tales and folk stories. If I were establishing my own school of psychotherapy, I’d include classes on mythology and folk tales, the stories of the spiritual traditions, and even novels and short stories, all of which educate the imagination so that a therapist is ready to hear the deep rumblings of primal narratives within the telling of a personal experience. A therapist should be an expert in stories, one who not only listens well but also helps clients tell their stories vividly and meaningfully.

You ask yourself: What is the underlying plot in my client’s story? What is the main emotion? Where is she trying to take me in understanding her? What is her preoccupation? The questions you ask yourself grow darker. How does she unconsciously interfere with the therapy? Is she leaving out important parts of the story? What is her bias? These questions make your listening suitably complex and sophisticated. A good listener is not just someone who hears everything but someone who hears what is not spoken or what has been suppressed or mangled. The therapist is a detective sometimes, knowing that the client, although wanting to be open and honest, won’t tell you the whole story. You don’t let this situation make you cynical. You can still love and admire your client. You simply know that human nature is complicated and the deep stories are slow to emerge. Resistance is not usually intentional but rather an expression of the neurosis.

“This is not casual curiosity, which is on my list of forbidden responses, but a loose thought, not entirely unrelated, but not logical.

A therapist has to be clever. She has to understand that something in people, usually not intended, wants to block the therapy. Therapists sometimes refer to this blockage as resistance, but that’s an ego word. It might be better to think archetypally. Could it be that the client has a long-standing fear about facing some past event or relationship? Or maybe the client is simply a private person who does not like to say much about herself. Later, we’ll consider the myth of Daphne and appreciate that people have an inherent need, which is not neurotic resistance, to protect their privacy and integrity. Their omissions may not be resistance but reluctance.

This contrariness is one of the tools I use regularly. I not only consider an opposite position on stories and their interpretations, I usually present my contrary view. My clients are so used to me offering an alternative to their well-reasoned explanations that after they finish telling me what they think, they wait expectantly for me to contradict them. I do this somewhat in a spirit of fun and openness, even though the matter may be deadly serious. I’m not criticizing my clients; I’m playfully giving them my accustomed and often cherished alternative version.

You can invite your clients to tell a story more than once, maybe many times. Give permission for the repetition. People often feel embarrassed telling the same story again and again. Maybe something was omitted in the first telling. Or the next time the story may have certain changes and additions, a different emphasis, or an alternative ending. It is possible that something has been held back, and now it’s time to come clean. On the other hand, the story may simply need repetition so it can be heard and valued better. Repeated tellings in themselves give a story added power and sometimes a bit of ritual.

“Hermes represents the power to use language and images skillfully, to probe multiple levels of meaning, and to value surprise and synchronicity. A Hermes-inspired therapist or helping friend looks for unexpected discoveries and revelations. He is on the sidelines and between the cracks. He spots hardly noticeable remarks and gestures and pays attention to style as well as substance. He has a special eye for shadow qualities, and can sympathize with them, and knows that he can’t hide behind his professionalism and satisfied life or the healthy image his clients project onto him.

The Hermes-type therapist, said Rafael López-Pedraza, one of the founders of archetypal psychology, does not hide in his dignity but gets down into the muck of human struggle and ignorance. A therapist inspired by Hermes is not above his patient, healthy and knowing, but is in touch with his own human frailty. He does not use his rational mind as much as his empathic heart and pays attention to physical details that a more conventional therapist might overlook. He is also sometimes crafty and subtle and not always straightforward.

Another scholar of Greek myth, Karl Kerényi, made a remark in one of his books that helps me understand myth. He was discussing the goddess Artemis and noted that she is the atmosphere you sense when you are deep in nature. Think about going on a hike, moving farther and farther from the civilized world. You sense a pristine purity. That sensation is the essence of the mythic goddess Artemis. You have met her and been close to her. Now when you read about her or imagine her to be at work in you, you know with your senses who she is, and in a way who you are. She is that smell of fresh air, that unspoiled look of nature, and the special feeling of not being in the busy and noisy world or with other people. She is that whole realm of natural purity working through you. She is your natural self, or better, the spirit exuding your natural being.

She needed Richard in her personal mythic development, but she did not necessarily need Richard the person.

Through his knowledge of mythology Jung was able to see meaning in the apparent gibberish of people being treated in a psychiatric hospital. He (1973) said that a story is more important than a diagnosis: “Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation, but they do not help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor’s therapy begin to operate” (p. 124). Diagnosis can take away the individuality and complexity of a client’s experience. It puts a client into a box. It serves the therapist more than the client. It can be demeaning. It places the therapist above the client. A diagnosis can be full of shadow, even if it might please the client to have a name for what he’s going through. That, too, is an illusion. Now we know how to treat the syndrome, and we don’t have to face it as a unique invitation to become an individual. The diagnosis puts you in a pen with other people who have given up their individuality, as well. Your story is individual. Remember Hillman’s warning to keep your images, your stories, exactly as they present themselves. Don’t adjust them so they fit into a box of syndromes and disorders. Each time you tell a story it is different—different nuances and tones. You call up a story from the past and you tell it in the present with the full impetus of who you are right now.

“Often a person who is obviously weak and pushed around is actually quite forceful in ways that are not obvious.

Here is someone who needs to learn better how to let others have some power and influence over her without her feeling too dependent.

If the symptom is dependency, we help the person become effectively vulnerable.

The symptom of being too dependent becomes the virtue of being appropriately vulnerable and open to influence. Anger becomes personal power. Jealousy becomes a capacity for intimacy and interdependency.

The therapist is seeing the situation differently, and that itself may be helpful. When therapist and client are not in the same narrative, there is space for change.

The client, of course, thinks that the opposite place is glorious, the solution, happiness. The woman who thinks she is too weak would like desperately to be strong and powerful. But in fact she is already forceful, only her power is not effective and is hidden to her eyes. She does not know she is so controlling and full of muscle in her relationships. But if you were to talk to her friends, you would probably hear many stories about her annoying power issues and tendency to control. People who identify as being passive are often hyperactive and strong-willed.

The early stories, remember, don’t have to be heard as literal history but as narratives at work in her life today. Going back is really going deep.

An ignorant person is always doing something, and yet much is left undone.

“Notice that it is not the shifting of family members to a current person, but rather archaic fantasies that were once focused on the family are now wakened in present circumstances. Transference is rooted in the tendency of the psyche to produce images and narratives at all times. It is especially active in the intimacy of a therapeutic encounter.

I mentioned before that emotions can be contagious. If you are the helper and there is a transference from the past onto you, you are in danger of getting caught up in it and playing your role unconsciously in that narrative— countertransference. You may find yourself in the middle of a highly emotional drama and not aware of what is taking place. You don’t realize that your client has found a doctor or an uncle in you. I remember a client telling me that I reminded her of a former boyfriend who, like me, was interested in art and music and spirituality. That’s all it took for a transference to form. If I had unconsciously felt her interest in me through her old boyfriend, I might have developed a countertransference, an added layer of interest due to the eros flowing between us. That could be a useful complication, but it could also cause trouble. In this case I kept my wits about me and cautiously used the frisson of the boyfriend to keep the therapy warm and deep. A therapist always needs a seat in the back row, where she can watch the drama as it unfolds. She should have the skill to observe several levels playing out at once. At the same time, she has to play her part in the action. She has to be involved with a heightened level of awareness. It is particularly dangerous to get caught in a transference/countertransference because you may intensify the narrative that is causing the person so much pain, and, of course, in that state you can hardly find your way out to clarity and freedom.

“Serenity is not the suppression of conflict or emotion but the achievement of calm through a big enough vision of life that troubles don’t take it away, especially in those moments when you need it. Know the difference between the inclination to react unconsciously and the ability to maintain a greater vision that is ready to go into action in a split second. Another word for professional serenity would be neutrality.

All this complexity and all the signifying layers don’t have to be a problem. They account for life’s richness. The trouble is, we are usually under the illusion that the world we encounter is a factual one having only one layer we call reality. If you follow the archetypal, essentially Platonic view, there is no reality, absolutely none, that is not colored every day by the living imagination. The therapist does not have the luxury to live and work under the illusion things are as they appear to be.

I recommend that you remain neutral. “Neutrality and patience” is my mantra. Don’t lose your equilibrium in some powerful attraction or repulsion. Don’t be too available or too remote. Don’t be either defended or eager. Use neutral language and gestures. Don’t defend against temptation, just don’t be available to it.

The British poet William Blake said that he was not the author but only the secretary. The authors are in eternity.

If the therapist cultivates a life of serenity and neutrality, she stands a chance against the wild beasts that are let loose in a psyche that has not yet found its fenced pasture. In medieval Europe stories were told of the unicorn, a beautiful animal that could cause widespread damage and yet was the very symbol of health. The image of the unicorn at its most useful showed him in a small pasture surrounded by a wooden fence. The psyche needs some containment, a fence or a vessel, to keep its wildness contained.

“In some ways therapy is an artificial conversation. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I mean that you talk as though you were in a drama, where every word counts. You must understand that as therapist you have considerable power. The words you use are not the usual ones. They may be the same dictionary words, but in context they have an elevated standing. You must take care with them, because they can have more force than you intend and can either help or harm.

Words are never just terms from a dictionary. They are more like packaged time bombs ready to explode at the right moment. This power can be a positive resource or it can ruin everything. The main thing is to respect words and use them artfully. Understand that words don’t always do what you want them to do. To an extent, they have a life of their own. If you are careless with words and use powerful ones without thinking, you risk breaking part of whatever vessel you have been building. Words are like the two-by-fours or concrete blocks that form a wall and a structure. I am careful even with words of greeting and good-bye. You can ruin an hour of work by saying something like, “I hope we do better next time.” That’s a heavy judgment for a client or friend to carry for a week or so.

My first rule of thumb is that therapy itself never ends. No closure. The client may find another therapist or another way to do therapy in the course of life. So I don’t make a big deal of ending. I don’t worry about closure. In fact, I’d rather end with au revoir than good-bye. Until the next time. I want to invite the client to keep thinking about doing therapy in some form. I have it in my mind and therefore in my words that therapy will definitely continue. I want to seed that idea at a time of ending: this is only a pause.

Therapy is like that: you think it’s over, but there is always the chance of another beginning. I like my therapy conclusions all to be cadences that clearly feel like endings and yet are not final. Let’s be happy about life going on. Therapy is eternal and takes many forms. Remember the glass vessel, and be gentle with your good-byes.

“In that sense a therapist or good friend listens to another to find out who she is, what is special about her. In this kind of listening you not only take in someone’s words but also discover who they are.

I want to hear those voices, too, when I listen to a client narrate a life story or a recent troubling episode. I want to hear the voices of the inner critic and the influential parents, the voices of conscience and inspiration. I want to hear the mythic narrative that hums in the background of more immediate tales of woe.

That means it is not just two conscious people talking. It is two people with complicated histories and highly tiered emotional backgrounds trying to be clear about matters that are essentially thick and cloudy. Your emotional memories might get triggered several times in the course of a single conversation. You know intuitively that you should not act on those triggers, or react. But it is not easy to keep your cool when one bullet of stimulus after another hits you where it hurts.

Pedraza suggested that the therapist in this case be in touch with his own freakishness and then stay in tune with the patient’s way of speaking, echoing it if possible. The idea is to enter into whatever complex has gotten hold of the patient through his style of language, his rhetoric.

I don’t veer off in my own preferred direction but rather stay observantly with the rambling and listen closely for any quiet indications of what the person is really trying to say. I have come to understand that rambling rhetoric is valid. It is the best way my client has to express her experiences. Here and there I interject an insightful remark based on what I am hearing, which comes through like a peal of thunder. Occasionally a client, breathless from the meaningless narration, will say, “I wish you would say something enlightening.

A therapist never acts or speaks without art. You can never be completely natural, which is to say, unconscious. You are an artist of the psyche. You don’t set the tone, you let your client do that, because in that tone may be a way deeper into the problem and therefore out of it.

You remember that you’re not an ordinary person in this relationship. You are the therapist or a friend in a good position to help. It won’t hurt the relationship to wonder about her sincerity or honesty. As a therapist, you can expect a client to be dishonest. That’s material. It’s part of the complex you’re helping with. If your client is perfect, what is there to talk about? Therapy does not require full honesty. It would be better to hear the story with all its protective shields and misdirections than a tale cleaned up for therapeutic use. As a therapist you cannot be naïve. You have to expect shadow, expect to be manipulated. It’s all right. This is a basic human effort to risk telling a story by getting to the real facts slowly, one at a time. You can’t do it perfectly or purely. Only a moralistic therapist would expect unalloyed truth. A soulful therapist does not ask for purity but only a valiant effort to be present.

“One way not to get into the state of nirvana is to become absorbed in the culture. The cycle of births and deaths that describes samsara, what nirvana saves you from, is the meaningless, thoughtless, standard life: unconscious consumption of material things, assumption of thoughtless values, diminished appreciation of intelligence and wisdom, the pursuit of mere entertainment instead of pleasure, disregard of meaning and purpose, the avoidance of fate and community. Nirvana is withdrawal from this mindless and immature escape from honest living.

A familiar Zen story tells of the teacher filling the student’s cup with an overflowing amount of tea, a lesson about having some emptiness, some space for developments, some stuckness in our feverish activity.

“This is a key idea: “memories” from childhood are not vestiges from the actual past but images coloring the present. They are not history but filters for seeing certain aspects of what is going on now.

The child is a living image, in and of the present, not only a historical fact. I emphasize the imaginal child because ordinarily we assume that talk about childhood is personal history.

In general, Hillman defined memory as a form of imagination. As you remember what life was like as a child, you are reimagining your past life and returning to a child’s way of seeing the world. The child is always present but comes to the surface at the appropriate times.

Our therapy took the form of the alchemical solutio, the breaking up of a tightly wrapped image of a life into its parts. Getting cracks in her story was a partial solution, at least, of her problem.

A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.

This is a key for therapists and for friends guiding friends: Try to get to a more sophisticated story about your client’s or friend’s life. Aim for less obvious blame and for more compassion toward parents and other major figures. Learn that life is always more complicated and subtle than you have usually imagined it. Revise your stories, make them more mature and precise, and clear them of strong childish emotions.

You can also help your serious adult become friends with the playful child by actually playing more games and being physically carefree in adult situations. In a split like this, the two sides can each give something to the other. You could more often be playfully serious and seriously playful. Or you could work hard for a few hours and then play with abandon. There are many ways to keep child and adult on good terms with each other.

When you’re talking to a child, you are an adult. There is a natural distance between you. Remember that speaking to children is an art and should not ever be a spontaneous, unconscious act. If you forget they are children, you will likely treat them from your unconsciousness. Listen to an adult trying to correct a misbehaving child. What is that tone? It is not normal or human. It is a complex rooted in the split archetype of parent and child. When you are with children, you may have to make a conscious decision not to speak from a parent complex.

“I don’t have many theories or methods, though I have been strongly affected by Hillman’s (1979) book The Dream and the Underworld, in which he recommended that we enter deeply into a dream and be affected by it, rather than translate the dream into the terms and concepts of waking life.

I keep the focus on the dream images and point out when the response is too symbolic and explanatory. I ask for reflections, not interpretations. The conversation is not headed for a conclusion but always hovers over the dream. Whether individually or in a group the essential thing is to stop using your hyperactive intelligence to pin the dream down. You have to be receptive, wait for the dream to show you its meaning, put some reins on that demanding intellectual ego of yours. Be more relaxed. Let the dream give you thoughts. Don’t force it into the open. It’s a special skill to allow thoughts to arise into awareness instead of forcing them through mental exertion.

“Jung placed complexes at the heart of his psychology, describing a complex as a “splintered psyche” or as a fragment of the psyche, highly emotional and—the key quality—autonomous. A complex acts like a person inside you who can take possession of you and make you feel things you wish you did not feel. It can also give you a good picture of what is going on deep in the psyche. This is an important clue for therapy. Complexes are not things to get rid of directly. They are a doorway to the entire psyche, and so therapy pays close attention to them and respects them.

As always, the purpose is not to defeat the complex but to slowly transform it into a valuable quality. In the case of jealousy, the good part might be effective dependency that does not hurt you. But it could take a long time to transform raw jealousy into gracious vulnerability. And the complex may never go away completely but rather remain as a source of further deepening. A young man recently told me about his helping complex. He lives in San Francisco and walks the streets almost every day. If he has money in his pocket, he can’t help giving it all away to people on the street begging. Sometimes, to avoid the problem, he does not bring money with him. The man has a helping complex that arrives when he encounters someone in need. He can’t not help, even though he’s giving away money he needs. This complex is especially difficult because his action looks like a good deed. As is always the case, a therapist has to be careful not to get caught in the apparent virtuousness of the behavior. Is it not always good to give money to the poor? What should his therapist do? Don’t tell the man he has to take care of himself and ignore people who want money from him. Trying to will the complex away only makes matters worse. Suppressing the complex often looks benign, but it’s really a heroic attack on this fragment of psyche. Anyway, plain willpower is no match for it. A complex may have roots that dig deep into the psyche. You can’t just extract it. Instead, you could see this “problem” as an opportunity for this man’s life to expand. You might ask him to tell you in detail what happens when he feels compelled to give away his money. Just to describe the problem in general terms is not enough. You need a narrative, images, details. When you hear the full story, you may notice certain subthemes worth pointing out and discussing. The clue to a complex may be something small and easily overlooked. That’s why you have to be sharp and catch tiny clues hidden to an ordinary eye. Suppose you were to ask this man what happens when a street person approaches him. He says, “I feel like I’m privileged and don’t deserve to have money in my pocket.” You ask where that idea came from. “From the nuns at school. They taught me that it’s good to be poor and bad to have money.” You say, “But you don’t have much money.” “It makes no difference. Compared to the man on the street, I’m wealthy.” So here we have material for conversation, and the therapist can take this material deeper by deftly steering the discussion. For one thing, childhood is in play. He mentioned the nuns at school. And we just discussed the child archetype in some depth. Maybe this man has to develop a more adult attitude toward money and replace his childhood story with a more mature one. Religion also plays a role with its moral demands. They can last a lifetime. He may also need some spiritual maturing, an assessment of values he picked up from nuns when he was a child. This could be a project in itself. So we have rich material for opening up this person’s money complex and his need to help. There is no single-statement solution, but the narratives that could emerge, added to a dream or two, should be enough to make progress with the symptom. A complex does not puff up and blow away, it unravels, showing what is inside it and giving you material to work with.

Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it

You can render it more human and able to fit into the whole of your life.

Sometimes a complex that shows itself as a personality problem is resolved into a spiritual dedication much greater in scope. The solution is the enlargement and perfecting of a small personal issue into a serious contribution to society.

13. HOW INVOLVED SHOULD YOU BE?

“Once again let me evoke Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sexuality, sensuality, the beauty of nature, and especially the sea, gardens, and coupling. The spirit this mythological goddess embodies is fully present today in all these areas. You can certainly sense the special atmosphere when you step into a lush summer garden or find yourself in the presence of an extremely attractive person. That atmosphere, experienced both inner and outer, is what the Greeks tried to capture in their stories, rituals, and images of Aphrodite, and we can still feel her presence, even if typically we don’t use her name or engage in her formal rituals. One of the great problems of our time is neglect of this particular goddess. Interestingly, the Greeks often warned that if you neglect any deity, but especially this one, she will seek her revenge and set things right. The way Aphrodite responds to neglect is to cause intense and often problematic desire for love and romance.

Even if you are paid for your service, it is an act of generosity. The main instrument of your work is your own self.

I prefer to think of a therapist as sometimes being both intensely engaged and sometimes, maybe most of the time, standing back far enough to see what is happening.

If you’re devoted to the soul and to your job as a caretaker of soul, you should not be tempted to stray from that role. It takes all of you to do that job, and you won’t want anything to interfere with it. When I was a monk, I lived a life of celibacy, and I have always believed that such a life was possible for me, even in my early twenties, because of the intensity of the community life I experienced daily. It’s similar in therapy. The deep and intimate joy of soul work does not leave room for any personal sexual or romantic needs. The work of intense care for souls keeps my heart busy and full.

“If you are a therapist, you can’t see the planet suffering from pollution and do nothing.

Therefore, I don’t merely advocate therapy for the world but also therapy in the world.

Morris, who was certainly a therapist for the world, wrote: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

We are in psyche; psyche is not in us. The way we order and shape our world profoundly affects how our soul is either fed or starved in daily life.

Caring for the soul of the world means first making things with an acute ethical sensitivity, making them to function well and to be beautiful, using the heart and the imagination at full throttle, and giving them as much individuality as possible. These qualities are all aspects of soul. We might also create objects that we can relate to easily and even love. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, said, “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it.

“If there are problems at work, they will likely bleed over into other areas of life. I have a client who is married to a doctor. Actually, she’s married to his work, because that is where he gives most of his time and attention. Work is the third party in this marriage, or, more accurately, the doctor’s wife is the third factor that often interferes with his real marriage to medicine. In your jobs and career you “work” out the raw material of your existence.

If I were going to help a company become more psychologically sophisticated, here are a few of the many issues I’d focus on:

1. Understand that abusive controlling leaders are usually secretly insecure and weak. If you don’t perceive this contradiction, your way of dealing with them may be ineffective.

1. Jealousy and envy are to be expected in hierarchical organizations. They are raw expressions of more basic desires. You may have to be patient with these symptoms. Don’t just try to get rid of them but help them ripen into more positive energies.

1. A person in authority may not deal with their position well because of bad experiences in the family and in childhood. You may need some empathic, deep discussions before you can work out solutions with them.

1. People tend to develop hostile feelings toward each other when they don’t have opportunities to really get acquainted. It’s too easy then to direct stray negative fantasies at fellow workers.

1. Conviviality can give the soul the security and deep satisfaction it craves. Gatherings where people can truly enjoy one another and daily breaks in a convivial atmosphere could help, not hurt, productivity.

1. Being critical and vocal about fellow workers may stem from insecurity, an overwhelming need to keep the job, or habits learned at home. A few lessons in dealing with insecurity would go a long way.

1. A business can’t provide deep therapy for all its workers, but it can create a work environment that is not emotionally toxic. A sensitive style of leadership especially can help create real community, which can tone down the negativity.

1. Therapy always begins with listening. Any business could create a structure in which just listening to workers’ issues could help with morale.

1. The physical environment can also soothe the soul: fresh air, plants and trees, water, a place to walk, a comfortable workstation, well-selected colors. Therapy often involves physical details; it is not just a mental activity.

1. Images affect the soul deeply. You can devote attention to the art images in the workplace or to any aspect of the place seen as an image. How do you feel in a medical center, waiting for your doctor, in a small room with no windows and perhaps plastic images of blocked arteries or diseased organs? Even a small degree of awareness could make the image environment supportive rather than destructive.

Any workplace is a human community, what the Greeks called “polis,” a political group.”,

A human workspace, like all soulful endeavors, is based on the principle of friendship and so fosters friendship among workers, as well as an atmosphere of friendliness, an important cousin to friendship. Friendship is one of the main signs that soul is present, and yet some business owners and managers worry that friendship will slow production. Many workers feel inspired to do their work well because of the friends they have on the job.

I would offer them a checklist:

1. Listen closely.

1. Give advice cautiously.

1. Feed back what you hear at a deeper level.

1. Affirm the person.

1. Help deepen the story.

Of course you don’t want to confuse this capacity with professional therapy, but you can offer your care and help with some sophistication and intelligence. It would make sense to have a professional therapist visit a company and teach managers and maybe all employees how to talk to each other effectively. It is not only true that some things have to be taught but also that many things we assume don’t have to be taught do. We need some instruction on how to speak to each other in ways that help rather than hurt.

It would not take much to bring soul to our society simply by being reminded of the importance of our work.

16. HEALING SOCIETIE’S SOUL

“A society is like a person. It has a special history, certain inclinations, fears, hopes, and habits. A culture can get depressed and harbor old angers. A society has a personal history that needs sorting and clearing out, and it can always use some good therapy.

Therapy does not have to take the form of conversation. It may involve painting a house, building good transportation, inviting fresh and useful businesses to a region. In the little New England town where I live there is a small group of businesspeople who are concerned about the future of the region and do everything they can to provide attractive buildings and a good economy for all. They work hard to keep the international chain stores at a distance from the town center, so that they don’t quash local initiatives. They bury cables and raise money for improvements. They keep up the beautiful old buildings and demand strict codes for new ones. They are the town’s therapists, and they take their calling seriously. I talk to these people, who have skills that I lack. I encourage them and try to give them some philosophical underpinning for their good work. I’m their therapist.

I wish I could send them an old, yellowing copy of one of Carl Rogers’s basic books. Haven’t we learned yet in medicine and psychology that the person counts and deserves our full attention?

The root problem in society is an astounding degree of unconsciousness in dealings among people. Many act and speak from their deep needs, long- standing neurotic patterns and fears—with little or no awareness. You see this in shouting matches in which people hear nothing of what the other has to say. A community thrives on a spirit of cooperation and empathy, but often what you see is pure narcissism, self-interest, and gross immaturity.

We need a revolution in how society thinks of itself, a means of becoming more mature and thoughtful about social interaction.

We are back at Rule Number One: some things have to be taught. You can’t expect an average person to know the rules of effective engagement with others.

Rule Number Two: some things have to be healed. When people gather, there are many emotional wounds caught up in the discussion of social issues. You can see the pain on people’s faces as they desperately argue on behalf of their own needs and beliefs. It’s difficult to sustain a creative and happy society when the need for therapy is so strong and when little therapy is being offered.

His role and purpose was not only to liberate Black people but to free all citizens from emotional blockage to community. In his stirring and famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he said: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. . . . Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” That “soul force” is the power of psyche, and Dr. King was doing soul therapy.

“Children see events through hypersensitive eyes and have their own magnified impressions about the world. They often explode in joy, but their happiness offsets deep fears and dreads. Their pain can be so devastating as to upset their very souls. In this bigger-than-life arena, parents are figures of myth, literally.

The care of a child’s soul requires restraint and close observation. You have to see how the child finds ways to allow her essence to manifest. A parent’s job as soul educator is to “lead out” the child’s soul into actual life, and this will give rise to a unique individual. Educere, one Latin root of education, means “to lead out.” The other, educare, means “to raise and teach.” If you’re really doing education, you don’t put things into the child, you lead out what is already there and is uniquely the child’s. You can’t expect the child to be like other children or indeed like you.

If you wish to grasp a particular child’s soul for care, notice what he or she fears or finds joy in. Individual sensitivity is a key sign of soul. Look at the people she befriends, since friendship is a key element in a soulful life. What does he do when he plays? Play is like dreaming, a world within a world that the soul likes to inhabit or visit. Surely, you will see signs of a future career or lifestyle in a young child. You can nurture that seedling without pressure or demand. The soul does not respond well to force. It wants room to expand and blossom, and it needs understanding and support.

You have to see through their outbursts to the drama being played out. They are not disobeying you personally, they are freeing themselves from the archetypal mother and father. Believe it or not, you are not the object of their anger, even if they think so and lead you to believe it. They need to be free of any form of overbearing and limited version of Father and Mother. They need to grow up and ease out of the family circle and move into a larger world where they will find new avatars for the archetypal parents. If you can be therapeutic rather than reactively personal, you can help the child mature. Yes, it takes some stamina from you, but that’s a small price for the deep satisfaction of being an effective parent. Besides, the situation could help you grow up, too, so you won’t be expecting others to obey you and honor your every word. You, too, need to be free of the weighty archetypes of Father and Mother. You need to grow out and escape from a limited, heavy, suffocating role.

“The “love” in “falling in love” sometimes proves to be a huge inflation, so that when the exalted fantasies diminish, the people involved feel disillusioned. That’s a good word, because indeed they have lost their delicious illusion that was perhaps sweeter than the possibility of a real relationship. But I don’t use the word illusion negatively. We need our passing spells and visits to wonderland. They may put us to sleep at one level, but at another they take us into new possibilities and keep us there, charmed, until new life can take hold.

Normally we don’t consider the “mania,” as Plato called it, of love sufficiently dangerous to require therapy. But any escapes from reality would benefit from a degree of self-awareness. The love state is not a good place for making decisions. This kind of love fogs the mind and inspires irrational behavior. When it turns dark, especially, as in serious jealousy, it can be truly dangerous.

My own view is that marriage is a vessel in which we can explore life with a companion. Happiness is not the goal as much as vitality, to be saved from a dull existence. This is not the ordinary wish to have a perfect life—a luxurious home, a good job, and successful children—but a profound and essential urge from the very root of our being to become somebody. At the wedding, most people don’t know what they are looking for. Their emotions have a great deal of energy but not much content or direction.

When I have done couples therapy in the past, on occasion I asked one partner to sit in a chair off to the side while I worked with the dreams and life stories of the other. My idea was that the people did not really know each other. Maybe by listening to each other and exploring their psyches they might have more empathy and a deeper appreciation for what the other was dealing with. As couples share their lives, they may come to think that they really know the other well. But that kind of intimacy can be misleading. Familiarity is not knowledge, and, in fact, it may be a block to really knowing the partner as a separate person. Some distance is necessary, hence my practice of attending to one person at a time. I encourage the one partner to be a close observer, perhaps gaining some empathy for the other. By listening to the soul I mean hearing the story that can’t be told.

But the struggle to become a person and to have a genuine relationship can hold people together, perhaps more effectively than a desire for happiness and unbroken togetherness. I’m not saying that a relationship should be painful but that the happiness sought for might be deep and complex, not superficial and simplistic. Therapists who aim at simple happiness for a couple in their care may either feel frustrated eventually or misguide the couple toward an ideal of superficial togetherness.

There is a kind of happiness in a relationship that does not require constant peace. Disagreements and frustrations don’t have to negate happiness but can give it the shadow necessary to be real and lasting. If a therapist feels she has to help the couple create constant calm, she may be contributing to the problem. She needs a philosophy of relationship that is suitably complicated and cognizant of the shadow.

It may be important not to accept the stories and points of view presented in therapy but to be always on the alert for alternative explanations. Almost always, after a long and passionate tale of woe and desperation, full of explanations and the assignment of blame, I offer an alternative point of view.

19. A THERAPIST’S SELF CARE

“The main tool in therapy is the person of the therapist. You have to boldly enter the emotional field of a troubled person or a conflicted couple and use everything you have to help them sort out their lives. Ideas and techniques help, but they are for the most part in the background. The therapist has to use himself, at some risk, to care for the other’s suffering. If anyone needs care of his own soul, it is a therapist. This is also true of the informal “therapist,” the friend counseling a friend, a coworker helping another make a big decision.

You not only have to know your limits, but also if you want to be a good therapist, you may have to expand your tolerance. You may have to stretch yourself to be available to more people.

Jung said that every time you serve as a therapist, you always have to deal with your own issues. In Jung’s words (1966), “The doctor must change himself if he is to become capable of changing his patient. We have learned to place in the foreground the personality of the doctor as a curative or harmful factor; and that what is now demanded is his own transformation—the self-education of the educator” (p. 73).

With these exercises of the imagination you are expanding and deepening the sources of your pleasure.

A therapist might have to relax in ways that have more substance than the mindless escapes people often use. When I suggest good movies and books and the study of art history, I am putting together the pleasure of images and the weight of real study. Of course there is time for ultramindlessness, but in general a therapist who is always “on” needs pleasures that themselves are deep and character building.

I find the books by Timothy Gallwey on the inner games of tennis and golf insightful. Games are full of metaphors that indicate how serious they can be if played with a deeper mind-set than usual.

Read Henry David Thoreau (2013) on sauntering. He offers lessons in how to walk with your soul.

A continuing practice of reading good therapists is an immeasurably useful way of gaining confidence in your work. For this book I read Jung, Hillman, Winnicott, Laing, Rogers, and Yalom. I restore my skills by consulting books and videos by Rollo May, Fritz Perls, John Tarrant, Ronald Schenk, Robert Sardello, D. W. Winnicott, Rafael López-Pedraza, Patricia Berry, David L. Miller, John Moriarty, and Nor Hall. I keep certain spiritual books at hand: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Tao Te Ching, Black Elk Speaks, Upanishads, Sufi poetry, Jane Hirshfield’s Women in Praise of the Sacred, and my own translation of the gospels. This is a partial list. I could add many poets and writers of fiction.

It also helps to have a big vision of your work. You can raise humanity up to a new level of ethical sensitivity. You can help people become more self-contained and purposeful. You can assist people so that they won’t be acting out so much in their everyday lives. You can find the roots of rage and anger and ease jealousies. You could find ways to make your understandings more public and therefore socially therapeutic. You could see yourself, without egotism, as a therapist for the world.

“You have developed a skill for immediately going deeper and hearing the metaphors. Where others may see facts, you see images, a bigger story and figures that are not personal and human. You feel the presence of the spirits and deities described in spiritual literature. They are not just symbols, nor do they represent parts of the self. They have their own reality in an imaginal realm, not a literal one. You are in tune with that realm. You can live in the dreamworld even in daytime.

You show your ordinary self, while at the same time creating and sustaining the vessel of therapy. You are both ordinary and skilled.

If I am dealing with a particularly shaken person, I keep the boundaries strict and firm, but with most clients I make a point to be present as more than the therapist. I talk a little about, my life. If the client asks about how things are going for me, I tell him. I may bring up an experience of mine that seems apropos. I do all this thoughtfully and minimally, just enough to be present as a person. My purpose is to serve the soul of the person I want to help. I hold back my own needs for a different occasion.

From the first moment, I’m aware that therapy is a space separate from ordinary conversation. I listen more acutely than usual. I’m tuned in to levels of communication. I listen for the appearance and sound of the soul rather than the intended communication of my client. I hear overtones and reverberations. It’s not like listening at ordinary times in life. It’s not just focused listening, it’s listening for past voices and spirits and angels, to speak metaphorically.

Therapy is not all focused analysis. Once in a while I reach up to my bookshelf and read a quote or a poem that is relevant to what is being discussed. I may do this because I feel a constriction in our conversation. I feel we need a third voice to join us and allow us to look out further from our restricted space. It also models and teaches how good art and literature can be psychologically useful.

My main rule is to love my client’s soul. That is not romantic love, because it’s not so personal. You see the seeds of what this person could be. You glimpse the tragic events she had to go through, and you feel with her. You sense the promise and the possibilities. Your love of her soul is so intense, the very fulfillment of your vocation, that other kinds of love— romance, sexuality, personal intimacy—do not get in the way. The love of soul is too big and powerful.

... give yourself what you need at the deepest level. Care rather than cure. Organize your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange life accordingly. Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don’t move against the process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends.

The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard-won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years. The night sea journey taken you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgement, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being.

... there is no loss too great or challenge too overwhelming, provided you are anchored in your vision and your values, while following your destiny.

Poetry is sea-language; it keeps you in the water of your life as you articulate your experience.

In this dark place you may ask the basic questions: Who are you? What is this world? What kind of family do you come from? What are your origins, your early experiences? Deep down, what do you want? What do you fear? In the belly of the whale you are given the chance to start over. The sun-fish rises once again in the east. You get another morning in your life.

The world that has come of age,’ he [Bonhoeffer] writes, ‘is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age.

You need dialogue so that you can work out a livable connection with this challenging but ultimately creative power.

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be repressing the very source of your deepest satisfaction. You may be gullible, taking in the world’s insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction. Therefore, you have to dig deeper. Discover who you are and who you want to be. Don’t be dissuaded from that objective by the illusory promises of commercial life. Instead, be yourself.

Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.

We can’t understand what is happening to us, and if we are in the habit of always wanting to know what is going on, this aspect of the dark night will be maddening. We can find meaning in these times of change, but we have to think differently about our lives, be less psychological in our approach, and more philosophical and spiritual.

In a key letter, written to his brother and sister-in-law when he was twenty-three, he [Keats] said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?...Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making.

Today many blindly follow their clergy, their ideologies, their political leaders, and the press. Many get their life guidance from television and rarely have original thoughts about their experiences. Others may have many opinions based on the latest studies but generally have not worked out a deep vision. They are informed, but they haven’t thought deeply enough.

How do you create a supportive and livable philosophy? First, you take your life seriously. You don’t have to be morose about it, but you must realize that you can’t pass on the responsibility for your life to anyone else.

A philosophy of life begins to take shape when you educate your heart and cultivate your life. You read, you talk, and you think; you don’t just act. You consider your experience and take lessons from it.

A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.

A philosophy of life elevates and airs out what might otherwise be an emotional swamp. Feelings are wet and damp, inundating us and preventing us from thinking clearly. Ideas are drier and allow a vision to emerge from a sea of feelings.

The spiritual life is not abstract. It thrives on ritual, art, good words, and symbolic acts. These concrete actions bring the transition home physically, emotionally, and intellectually. In this way, you know you have gone through a change, and you can adjust accordingly.

Life is a continuous cycle of births. Imagine yourself as made up of three parts. One part arrives at birth and never changes, the eternal self. At that level, you are eternal, and throughout your life you recognize that unchanging self in the midst of developments, a quintessential star ever shining in the deep interior of the soul. A second level is so completely defined by events and environment that it changes all the time. This is the self that tries to survive and thrive in the everyday world, the practical self. Yet a third level is the caterpillar-and-butterfly part, the unfolding self. This self is always becoming, always evolving, unless it is blocked, and goes through deep transformations. It is the go-between that links the eternal with the everyday.

A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.

You are not complete until your relationships have been cared for. Your dark night is important not only for yourself but for those around you. You may not realize it, but they have been enduring your dark night, too. They need at least a small rite of return, some signal that night has ended and new life can get under way.

Ritualism, the fall into unconscious and often compulsive rituals, is a symptomatic form and usually does more harm than good. It’s interesting how people who lose touch with their souls become ritualistic in ways that are destructive. When you find yourself engaged in empty rituals—repeated patterns centered on certain objects and substances, such as alcohol or money—look for ways to restore solid, spiritual rituals to your life. Find a church where the ritual really raises your mind and heart. Go regularly into nature. You will be reminded what is important and essential.

It might help to concentrate on developing a vision and strong sense of values rather than on the usual psychological issues of emotion and relationship.

Spirituality and clarity go together. Spiritual practices aim at expanding the mind and the heart, and most spiritual teachers recommend some form of contemplation as the core of the practice. It may be yoga, sitting, insight, or a method more tangible and sensuous, such as music, painting, flower arranging, or dance. You can learn a great deal about contemplation from one of the ancient systems of meditation, but you can also be contemplative in ordinary ways adapted to your personal lifestyle.

...the philosopher Richard Kearney sums up catharsis as a matter of “acknowledging painful truths.” This is a simple idea, but it gets to the heart of what it takes to clear out the soul.

Contemporary writers often emphasize growth and advance. Someone should also speak for being still and not getting anywhere. The entire rhythm is crucial.

Ordinary conversation, too, is full of stories that play a central role in developing an imagination for life. The repeated telling of a story gradually allows the pieces of life experience to find their relation to each other.

Photography is a contemporary art form that has an extraordinary capacity to reveal the hidden soul. In a photograph you see things that pass by unnoticed in the flow of life. As you look closely at the images, fragments of stories come to mind—the past interrupts the present and is always the bearer of soul.

A society is like an individual: in the face of a dark night it can either become defensive and avoid the challenge of new life, or it can reform itself and discover in the darkness where it has gone wrong.

The jealous person doesn’t have to find it in himself to love without possessing. The spiritual person has found a way to be good and virtuous. The inferior one doesn’t have to be somebody and enter the fray of life with strength.

From prison he [Oscar Wilde] wrote one of the most remarkable testaments ever written, De Profundis (Out of the Depths), a letter a person suffering any kind of dark night might appreciate. The letter is apropos of our theme:

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief; . . . terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. . . . Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility.

Psychology tends to be solar, wanting to bring all things to light, to overcome the darkness and make everything manageable. It wants to banish darkness with any means at its disposal. But no one needs such a harsh cleansing and brightening. It would be better to be deepened and darkened by an experience of the night. You would then become more complex, more interesting, less one-dimensional.

You can see that the point of staying in the dark is not to trick it into making you brilliant and germ-free, but to make you a more interesting person and to give you a more fascinating life. In therapeutic times like ours, these goals may seem odd. But they are ultimately more humane. Rather than giving you a spotless, well-adjusted personality, they give you substance. You become a person worth knowing, worth listening to, and worth loving, in all your dimensions.

When a woman’s soul is set to blossom, she may feel at first that she needs to be released from the nurturing, sensitive identity she has known for many years.

But you don’t always need to be cared for. You don’t have to justify your existence by caring for others. Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence, and ignorance allow wonder and new life.

Professional men and women have their own parallel dark night. They may spend their days and hours making a living, keeping the needs of their family in mind. Then they, too, find that this is simply not enough to make their lives worth living. They, too, have to discover a deeper dimension, their own underworld. Unfortunately, they may collapse into alcohol, affairs, or excessive work—underworlds that are too literal and concrete. Instead of completing the myth by finding first the void and then some purpose in themselves, they fall into various symptomatic states that disrupt their lives.

The dark night of the soul may have a bardo quality. This is the state mentioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that is a liminal period between the old life and rebirth. One of the many instructions in the book for preparing for your new life reads: ‘Meditate for a long time on your special guiding spirit, as if it were a vision without any real inherent substance, an illusion. This is called pure illusory body. Then let this spirit disappear, from its edges inward, and rest for a while in the inconceivable state of emptiness-luminosity, which is nothing whatever.

My way is lunar. I want to sit in the dark and listen to the sounds of night. I don’t want to be a solar hero battling monsters and racking up mighty accomplishments. I don’t even want to convince you that my way is best. I don’t think it is. I doubt that many would want to adopt my style. But I think it has value and may offer you an alternative for dealing with your dark nights.

The magus doesn’t try to overcome nature but to remain deeply in tune with it. To deal with the soul magically rather than heroically requires extreme sympathy with all that is taking place.

A dark night can toughen you and steel you, helping you to be a real presence in your world. In the realm of the soul, most of us are wimps at first. We have to deepen and strengthen our outlook and style.

During a dark night of the soul, it helps to have your imagination wide open, both active and receptive. But we live in a world charmed by studies filled with numbers and charts, and machines full of blinking lights and a steady hum. We reduce most of life to factual and technical language and feel satisfied with talk of genes and DNA. In this environment, imagination, wit, and humor seem soft and nonessential.

The people I trust most to be my teachers and guides can laugh at the human situation and at themselves. They can see irony in the most serious matters. Their laughter seems to free up their compassion and liberate them from narcissistic worry about themselves. Tragedy tends toward self-pity, while a more subtle and complicated view allows you to go beyond any preoccupation with yourself.

These strong-hearted men teach us how to deal with oppression and ignorance. You can’t always beat your persecutors at their own game, but you can turn the tables on them morally.

A dark night of the soul need not be depressing. Today we tend to think of all emotional negativity as depression, and so we imagine ourselves sometimes to be depressed when in fact it is only the world that is pressing down on us. You can be bright, thoughtful, creative, and imaginative during a dark night. You can use all your power to imagine your situation in your own way. You can reverse expectations and refuse to be literally defeated. And none of this has to be a denial of your tragedy or the repression of your feelings.

Moralistic judgments are always based in anxiety. They sound high and righteous, but they come from a small, worried, and barely concealed desperation.

No, you yourself have to take your life seriously. Feel its weight. Admit its complexity. And as Jungians would say, honor its shadows. Irony can come only from an awareness of the good and the bad, the successes and the failures, the areas of intelligence and the zones of folly and ignorance.

If you can’t think, reflect, and actively imagine your life into existence, you are condemned to a half-life of unconsciousness. You are mired in facts and information and opinions and slogans. In effect, you are imprisoned in the stale notions of a dead society.

Imagination is everything, because we can’t know or experience anything outside our imagination of it. But the imagination can be old, tired, and irrelevant. It needs to be revived continually. You need to reform yourself at regular periods. Otherwise you become soul-dead, and you live and act as though you were not alive. How many contemporary people feel that way?

It takes time for the soul, so deep and complex, to sort itself out snd arrange itself for a decision. My own way is to wait and wait until the apple of decision is about to fall on its own. No doubt, I am extreme in my patience or temporizing. When I counsel others, I feel no rush. I think it’s important to gather oneself together before making a move. Many people make decisions just on the principle that you should do something. I’m afraid it may take a while for the soul to catch up with them.

Clearly, love is not about making you happy. It is a form of initiation that may radically transform you, making you more of who you are but less of who you have been. If you don’t realize that you are walking on coals and running the gauntlet and surviving the wilderness in quest of a vision—all within the confines of a simple human relationship—you could be undone by it. Love gives you a sense of meaning, but it asks a price. It will make you into the person you are called to be, but only if you endure its pains and allow it to empty you as much as it fills you.

We don’t understand that our passions have something to do with life making sense. We also tend to focus on the problem at hand, as though it were a mechanical issue in need of engineering. We often fail to see how all parts of life are connected, and how difficulty in one area may indicate change in another.

Marsilio Ficino frequently said that if you are faced with the choice of two or more things, always choose all of them.

Masochism is disguised control. My friend’s life had been on hold for years because she considered it important to keep all her relationships calm and ordered. This highly controlled suffering is full of ego and essentially blocks the natural flow of life. When that flow is finally released, a deeper source of strength becomes available, shattering the masochism and establishing the paradoxical condition of strength in yielding. Finally being able to let life flow through you, you discover a calm and courage you may never have felt before.

The relaxing of your will, however desperate, allows life to proceed. It may not go according to your plan, but whatever it makes will be more secure and ultimately more satisfying that anything you could force into existence. Such are the lessons of a dark night.

It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.

You can trust them [emotions and fantasies], not to arrange life the way you want it, but to arrange the elements of your soul in a way that will offer rich life in the future.

Love’s impossibility forces you to become a different person. You are forced to think and consider what love is all about. You believe you have to make hard choices, but, more important, in your deliberations you are educating yourself.

I remember a woman caught not in a triangle, but in a pen-tangle of new lover, old husband, children, her parents, and herself. They were all implicated in her love life, and each of them added pressure to the muddle. After a few years of struggle, she resolved the emotional geometry by discovering that she hadn’t been giving enough love to her own interests and abilities. Once her career blossomed, the other loves all took their highly original, unconventional places. It was a resolution she never could have imagined in the early days of her despair.

Part of the pain of love is that no person, however suitable and satisfying, completes the desire for love. There is always a remainder, because love takes us beyond the human sphere. It puts you in touch with the ultimate object of desire. It invites you to transcend yourself, to be more than you ever have been.

Your love expands to include the world and beyond. The Sufis, those passionate mystics of the Islamic tradition, say that our human loves form a ladder to the divine.

People still don’t know how to do several things at once or understand the importance of imagination in relationship. They suffer their unions because they think of them as unconscious, surface acts instead of deep developments of the soul. Many people aim for surface compatibility instead of deep, nonrational connection.

Your marriage participates in this cosmic pattern and has a wealth of meaning that you will never grasp.

Building a marriage can be a joyful experience, but surrendering to another person is never a happy choice.

Donald Hall is a good model of a dark night purifying the soul and opening up into insight.

Human marriage is part of a larger process of reconciling differences. It has social and cosmic implications, and, when entered deeply, can even contribute to world peace.

Most sacred literature suggests that the opposites that make life so interesting and painful cannot be resolved intellectually. You have to find some other means of getting differences in one place and letting them coexist or blend.

The ideal is not wholeness or integration, but marriage and love, not an overcoming of differences but creative coexistence and mutual influence.

We have to love our own complexities and contradictions, encouraging an interior marriage and eroticism of the soul.

Sex often becomes an issue when you are about to shift to a new level in your life. Couples are often thrown off by this tendency of sex to rise up out of its calm and cause embarrassment and conflict. You may confuse a sudden surge of vitality with the need for a change of partner or with sexual experimentation for its own sake. You may be confused about your feelings, knowing well that eros has stirred, but at the same time feeling that you don’t want to threaten your relationship.

Kathleen Raine, now an extraordinarily articulate, subtle poet and literary critic, plainly confesses in her autobiography to the divine/demonic power of sex. About the man who finally set her afire after leaving her husband she writes, ‘What Alastair was like, as a person, I neither knew nor cared. I was not interested in him; a fact which does me no credit. I never noticed what kind of human personality he had; to have done so would have dimmed and obscured the image of the god he for me embodied. . . . For his immortal soul I did not care, only for his mortal beauty.

...the soul’s progress is both deep and dark and requires a descent as well as an ascent. “Growth” is entirely the wrong word for what ripens and matures us into people of substance and gives us a soul. Sex is integrally involved in that process, and it isn’t always “nice,” clean, uncomplicated.

There is a difference, however, between becoming more mature through dark sexuality and literalizing that darkness in actual violence. There, you have gone over the line, out of the ritual of sex, in which symbolically you visit the underworld of fantasy, and into actuality, which is not an initiation but victimization.

At a deep level, society’s challenge at the moment is to convert its infantile sexuality into a thorough life of sensual pleasure, beauty, intimacy, and community. We have to transform our materialism into soulful physicality.

We work too hard and too long just to have the pleasures we might better attain through a simpler way of life.

To create usually means to make or do something for public consumption. If the public accepts you, life is exciting. If it ignores you, your spirits may slump.

The vague feeling of being nobody is not exactly a dark night, but more a hazy evening of the soul.

No doubt, celebrity will always be part of life, because it expresses a need for myth, for a level of experience far beyond the normal and literal.

A theologian would say that a creative person participates in the Creator’s work. The creation of the world is an ongoing project, and part of the divinity of the human being—an idea cherished by Renaissance philosophers—is to add to that process.

In modern life we generally suppress the child, because childishness is an affront to the particular kind of ego we admire. We prefer an educated, controlled, adapted, and largely uniform person, someone who has learned how to fit in with our social purposes, which are largely shaped by our belief in capitalism.

The crisis took place at the start of World War I, a time of widespread and intense anxiety. Whether it was a dark night is difficult to say, but there is no doubt that it was a period of extreme confusion. Jung’s biographer Gerhard Wehr refers to it as his night sea journey.

Creativity is not just about making fascinating inventions or great works of art. It has to do with shaping your life and cultivating your very soul.

If you can stop fighting your history and find workable ways of staying connected to it, you might be free to respond to new opportunities. But if you’re busy struggling with the past, you won’t be available to the present.

The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva says, making a fine distinction, that we should find language and images that are “lucid counterdepressants rather than neutralizing antidepressants.” You want to find a way to counter your heaviness without denying it or even escaping it. You don’t want to neutralize your sadness, but you want to find ways not to succumb to it. This is a fine but crucial line to walk.

From prison, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.’ Not all great art is possessed of the darkness we are probing, but much of it is.

Later these [tears and rage] turn into exquisite stories and subtle feelings. Her language changes as she gains insight. Depth of perception often leads to beauty of expression.

You use words every day. You can find the vital words that jar you into awareness. The way you talk to a friend could be your art.

Often our language is too technical, mechanistic, medical, and psychological, but falls short of our experience. Poetic speech is more personal and more adequately and precisely names the mood.

Over time, you may tell it more effectively, and its sheer beauty will help you and connect you to the people in your life. You will find unexpected pleasure in the aesthetics of your thoughts and words, and that, too, will keep you going deeper, looking for further insights and language.

The experience of beauty is not just one of pleasantness but of the power of an image to give order and to clarify your situation.

When you listen to strong, melancholic music or contemplate a sad piece of art, you are taking your attention beyond mere sensation to the interior meaning of your mood. You are educating yourself in your emotion, so that you not only get past it ultimately, but you gain from it from having penetrated deep into its nature.

Art can take up your experience and intensify it by deliteralizing it and submitting it to your intelligence and your imagination. The arts humanize the emotion and move it toward the sublime, where it can be brought to a level of perfection.

Contrary to most modern psychological approaches, which imply that the human soul is a major problem and host to a vast range of illnesses, an aesthetic psychology senses the soul as beautiful, even in distress.

You only have to understand this basic point: Beauty nurtures the soul. Expose yourself to the beautiful, and let it do its work. It will accomplish what you could never dream of. All you have to do is trust it and be open to it.

In the presence of a self deprecating person, it is often wise to look for signs of subtle control and almost invisible force.

Expressing and not expressing anger is a complicated business. Brian Keenan tells a dramatic story of how, after being taunted by a guard named Said, he had an opportunity to shove him against a wall. But his aggression merited harsh punishment for Keenan’s companion, John. The next time he was taunted, he felt his rage, but he reacted differently: ‘Anger roared up in me and I caught it by the throat, choked it and held it back. I said nothing, I merely turned and stared at him with my blind eyes as I had at Said, then turned away. He waited for me to speak. I would not.

Many people transform their anger into self-destructiveness—drinking their lives away or becoming oblivious in drugs or working too much. They make take it out on their children, employees, or animals. They may be passive-aggressive in a number of ways—being silent, uninvolved, offering insincere love and friendship, being available for people but making them suffer for it. When anger is clean, it can accomplish a great deal for a person and a relationship; but when it is camouflaged and indirect, its impact is just the opposite.

This phrase, “flexible control,” describes the reconciliation of strength and submission. The Tao Te Ching recommends wu-wei: achieve things by not trying to achieve. But another quality helps turn masochism into flexible control—intelligence. You have to know when and how to surrender, even to whom to surrender.

The safest surrender is to give yourself to life, to trust in yourself and in the laws of nature. Surrendering to a person or an organization is more dangerous and only makes sense when it is thoughtful, somewhat cautious, and never detached from surrender to your own need.

In his powerful book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker addresses the many complications and ambiguities, as he calls them, in this process, stressing the need of any person to enter life newly cleansed and liberated. ‘The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life.

It’s an illusion to think that most people are normal, rational, and in control of themselves. In fact, most people lose control frequently in anger or in brief periods of unreality. Sometimes a dark night of the soul takes the form of a passing madness.

One reason why you get into trouble like this is that you trust reason too much. Human life is rarely reasonable. You may believe that intelligent, well-meaning people can resolve any conflicts, but that assumption itself arises out of a cloudy image of how things work. Insight usually means discovering the madness hidden in an apparently reasonable situation.

It would better not to look for the one and only person to blame or the ultimate explanatory tale but rather to focus on the stories as narrative. The idea is for you to discover the play you are in, not a theory that explains your life.

It helps to know who is living through you at any given moment. The less you know about it, the more it dominates and keeps you from other adventures.

Mary Shelley offers an extraordinary model for responding to a world out of control and the resulting discouragement. At the turning-point in her life she wrote in her diary, “I must change.” And she did. The change didn’t come about automatically or at will. She had to work hard at making a life of her own, crafting a presence in the world and a sense of her own character and destiny.

Temporary insanities, like those of hard loss and grief, are always potentially creative, depending on how you deal with them. The temptation always is to sink too far into self-pity and to find relief in the compassion of others. It’s important to feel the sadness, but emotion is always only a partial resolution. Grief is complete only with a shift in being, in the way you live, think, and relate to the world.

At the very least, there is a definite moralism in our contemporary approach to health. Such things may indeed be dangerous, but maybe a completely safe life is not worth living.

Virginia Woolf sets out the scope of illness in her brief essay “On Being Ill”: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness . . . it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Nurses especially will tell you that given two people with the same condition, one will improve and the other will fail, depending on subtle and mysterious factors that aren’t considered by medicine. Medicine doesn’t have a language for this invisible world that is implicated in illness and healing.

In a highly intelligent and sensitive book, Give Sorrow Words, psychiatrist Dorothy Judd tells the poignant story of Robert, a seven-yearold boy with leukemia, and his two years of painful treatment. In her conclusion she mentions the importance of a medical staff providing clear and honest information, so that people can decide whether agonizing treatment is worth a few more months of life. She also describes how important it is to care for the emotions of patient and family, noting that the ending of a life can be meaningful for everyone involved. Dr. Judd is clearly a doctor of the soul.

I recommend quality food, good relationships between professionals and patients, accessibility to nature, and the opportunity for patients to talk about their illness to family and professionals.

Globalization threatens to destroy what local culture remains, and one wonders if cancer, runaway cell growth, is not a mirror of runaway economic, political, and cultural ambition.

The dark night of illness sets severe limits on what you can do. It forces you to slow down and focus on the things that matter. It keeps you in one place and on your back. It prevents you from eating what you want and doing the things you are used to doing.

Jungian psychology speaks of a “split archetype,” a harmful distance between the one who suffers and the one who heals. The sufferer as well as the healer has to help heal this split. The gap can be bridged if each of us has alive within us the spirit of caretaker, friend, and healer.

She separated herself from life so that she could finally heal her soul. We have seen this theme over and over, how the dark night is fulfilled in some form of withdrawal from active life.

Remorse chips away at actions done from a place of insufficient wisdom and gives a fresh imagination to them. You discover, full of feeling, how to live your life differently. Remorse serves you. It doesn’t merely make you feel guilty. It tugs at the old way of understanding and allows a new style of thought and feeling.

It may be your fate to have, metaphorically, elephant ears, and yet, with the proper vision, you may see the beauty in your essential anomaly and understand that it comes from Heaven. You may be graced by it, whatever it is, even though it may seem to be entirely out of context. You may have to stretch your imagination to appreciate it, and yet you can base your life on it.

Many people claim to have integrated their shadow sides, but that effort is itself a work against the dark. To integrate it is to co-opt it into the light. The real task is to live in, and with, the darkness, appreciating its unredeemed value and loving its irreversible qualities. What is needed is a view of life that includes the dark.

Anne Sexton never won the immediate battle, but she boldly transmuted her suffering into poetry that will last for many generations and will help many deal creatively with their dark nights.

...new life always requires the termination of the old. Death is an appropriate image. And that is exactly what it is, an image. It doesn’t mean you are going to die, although you may feel the sadness of ending in the midst of your dark night. It means that life wants to go on differently. Real, vital life doesn’t repeat itself.

Anatole Broyard complained that when his witty and irreverent friends visited him in the hospital, they were too serious and too extravagant with their good wishes. “They looked at me with a kind of grotesque lovingness in their faces,” he says. He didn’t like the falseness in their optimism. They had become emotional literalists, fundamentalist friends. They had set aside their wit because they couldn’t deal with Broyard’s situation as well as he could.

James Hillman has observed that depression may be a special problem in a society hell-bent on happiness. But let’s examine this connection more closely. It is possible to imagine that the situations life offers may not be happy ones and yet may be the most desirable of all.

As a therapist, I often see my job not as providing options, but as educating the imagination so that solutions are visible.

It’s helpful, then, during a dark night, to constantly broaden your imagination of what is happening to you. If your only idea is that you’re depressed, you will be at the mercy of the depression industry, which will treat you as one among millions, for whom there is only one canonical and approved story.

When that inner genius shows itself in personality, way of life, values, and expression, mediocrity disappears. It is the cloud that prevents the spark from being seen.

When you discover your own spark, the god within you, many elements that you have felt are wounded will suddenly be healed.