KNOW THYSELF....as considered from a different psychological perspective

 In the last post, we considered suicide as an ‘ultimate concern’ if not the most significant dramatic ultimate concern. And while there are a myriad of reasons to support such a contention, one of the primary issues is the meaning of death.

Such a question to be pondered in a post-Easter week, seems incompatible with the bright, warm sunny morning outside the window at my right shoulder. Buds are creeping out from behind their winter coats; birds have spring into song; river are over-flowing with both intense rain and winter run-off; humans have emerged from their winter caves, walking their dogs, and strolling in the warm embrace of the sun and Spring breeze. Evidence of the pulsation of life, the energies that wake up, and in their waking, wake each of us from our winter ‘survival’ mode, into another season brimming with new signs of growth, life, colour, harmony and all of the accompanying ‘outside activities’ that are foreclosed and etherized by winter’s frost.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare writes:

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in

little stars,

And he will make the face

of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love

with night

And pay no worship to the

garish sun.

Death must exist for life to have meaning, is attributed to Neal Shusterman, American writer of young-adult fiction, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his book, Challenger Deep.

Multitudes of men and women, over the centuries, have mused about, prayed about, worried over, fantasized about, become traumatized about, and written, painted, danced and sung arias and lyrics dedicated to death. Every human activity, and each human being is engaged in some way(s) with the reality of death. Whether in league with the preventionists, or the avoiders, or the romantic poets, or the deeply religious, or the pathologists, or the self-declared atheists, or the Al-Quaeda terrorists, in their/our attitudes and convictions about death, death is an intimate, deeply personal and highly ethereal abstract and numinous a notion as known to humans.

In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman writes:

To philosophize is partly to enter death; philosophy is death’s rehearsal, as Plato said. It is one of the 

forms of the death experience. It has been called ‘dying to the world.’ The first movement in working through any problem is taking the problem upon oneself as an experience. One enters an issue by joining it. One approaches death by dying.

“How” one “sees” this experience of death, as well as how one “sees” oneself, others, and all experiences, is a question that has engaged, bothered, frustrated and challenged thinkers, poets, educators, theologians and scientists forever. And the nexus of this question is manifest in the ‘experiential-imaginal’ lens in and through which one “sees”. The tension between the binary ‘’either-or’, cognitive-or-emotional, poetic-or-scientific, as both a language and a construct is the manner in which this issue has been debated. Rationalists and visionaries have explored their ‘perspectives’ and planted the seeds for their followers, in the archives of the world’s libraries.
To see in and through the imagination-soul-psyche, while, paradoxically eschewing the long-pursued ‘individuation’ of the individual into some coherent package, is to seek a different, and more abstruse, perhaps even abstract linkage, (not unity) with the voices that have been ‘singing’ through the sands, the caves, the towns and the lecture halls from the beginning. If there is to be “meaning” and “energy” and “ideas” and “images” in each of our moments, as well as in each of our encounters with others, and with nature and with buildings, towns, and travel, as Hillman envisions, the rest of us are being challenged not merely intellectually, nor even solely imaginatively, but wholeistically.

We too, as humans, are being ‘revisioned’ far from the madding voices of “merely agents of another’s purpose, or ‘merely accomplices in another’s conspiracies, or engineers/doctors/lawyers/priests/accountants as “fixers” of some empirically determined problem. The superstructure of our conventional thought imposes a kind of moral “scaffolding” on each and every incident, person, narrative, that ostensibly provides a kind of comfortable expectation for the smooth running of the culture. However, that scaffolding also ensnares and blinkers and focuses our thought-feeling-imagination into something “given” as if we were all pupils in the same classroom, when we know positively, intuitively, emotionally and theologically, we do not even know the names or the locations or the philosophies of those learning emporia. The prospect of rendering that superstructure as a little less permanent, a little less confining, a little less like an intellectual, moral, cultural, idol…seems to lie at the heart of Hillman’s ‘revisioning’.

 When we have entered the arena of ‘suffering’, including our own death, and problems with our ‘interior lives’ purportedly contained in words like psyche and soul, the scene is not amenable to the conventional linguistic, intellectual, emotional, theological, ethical, legal, medical manner of conceiving, and thereby of searching for and teasing out anything that looks and sounds and feels and sustains itself as “meaning”. Poets and writers have been exhorted to ‘write about whatever it is that you do not know”….as a paradoxical insight into the exploration of the ‘unknown mystery’ into which and from which each of us is earnestly seeking to Know Thyself”…one of the oldest, and least contemplated, yet richest epithet of all time, in the Western world.

Debate continues about its original author; perhaps it was Socrates, perhaps Pythagoras. However, whether interpreted as ‘knowing your limits’ or knowing your motivation,’ both alive and well as conventional applications, both of these imply a “relational” stance, to the outside world. As ‘how far can I go’ based  on my intimate awareness of my capabilities, and ‘confident in reaching my goal’ as a mental image of envisioned ribbons, trophies, championships, promotions, both of these templates have been securely planted in the culture in the West. Not so conversant, or even acceptable is a very different notion: knowing oneself simply for the purpose of knowing oneself. The concept of humans as “agents” for or against, in company with or opposed to, has so drowned our notion of what it is to be a human being, that we have relegated deep and penetrating, profound and imaginative pondering of the deepest recesses of our souls, (even and perhaps especially in the religious communities), to the sidelines of the ‘mystics, the spiritualists, the alchemists and the seers, as our way of dismissing the whole process.

Keeping things ‘understandable’ from a rational perspective, in order to create the illusion that we a “managing everything we need to manage and control,’ is not only a significant degree of self-imposed blindness,  (as it leaves out so much), but also a convenient way of ‘simplifying’ for the sake of avoiding confusion, and the resulting potential of chaos. Such pedagogical aphorisms, in the world of journalism, for example, as “write to a grade six reader” dumbs down the language and the level of nuance permitted to the writer/reporter on each and every story and opinion piece. The adage also protects and sustains the campaign for readers/viewers/listeners, who, themselves, when numbered, provide proof for advertisers to buy ads. Agency, for agency, for agency….and we are all enmeshed in this cultural, psychological, military, corporate, religious, political, fiscal, trap.

Any attempt to set aside, for the purposes intimate to and essential to Knowing Thyself, for its own sake, will be, initially considered rebellious, if not actually dangerous. It will be categorized as narcissistic, in a world and time when the narcissists seem to be taking over. It will be considered a ‘waste of time’ just as the idea/vision/image of becoming an artist was perpetually considered a waste of time for an aspiring college grad, by many if not most parents, who counselled a professional ‘job’ like law, medicine, engineering, accounting…where there is ‘real money’ to be made. It will also be considered by some to be a deviation from the need for a strong legal system to defer potential incipient criminals, and therefore, the superstructure depends on the church to sanctify its version or morality, first for children in the Christian Education program, and then in the school system, and then in the corporate world.

Given that morality, and ethics, are high on the totem pole of values, in Western culture, then those who ‘perform’ acts of criminal or illegal or immoral quality, will be considered first, as ‘outlaws’ in some sense of that word, rather than as human beings first, before consideration of the morality/legality/ethics of their decisions and actions. We have established cultural system dedicated to the pursuit of ‘wrong-doers’ as if that was the ‘best’ and most ‘optimal’ way to maintain social order. We have also established a health care system based on the search for, diagnosis of and treatment of an illness, and not on the premise that the goal of health is the responsibility of each person, for himself/herself. It extends the ‘sickness-intervention’ process which has been so deeply embedded in not only our socio-economic and political system, that, virtually all decisions about the public square are first and foremost diagnosed and decided on a cost-benefit basis, deploying a variety of variables depending on the body making the decisions.

Agency, agency, to-do lists, accountability, transparency, laws, regulations, enforcement, and armies of highly-paid, professional detectives and wardens to administer the system….based on a plethora of numerical, statistical, financial, electoral, medically-necessary, and religiously ‘popular’ data…this system, while having some functionality, and some modest justification, is not a raison d-etre to justify the new vision of psychology proposed by Hillman.

And among the first institutional edifices, including their hierarchy, that might give active consideration of a different way of seeing what is most important and meaningful in the life of an individual, especially in a moment of crisis, would seem to be the churches. We all know that the human soul is not amenable, reliant on, conducive to, or even tolerable of dogma, especially dogma that has been generated by those seeking approval from other church ‘fathers’ who, implicitly were engaged (had to be) in a process of planting, nurturing, growing and triumphing in their own success, as institutions. Numbers of dollars, and numbers of bums in pews, the cliché measure of success in most institutions in the contemporary western world, are not indicative of a successful religious, spiritual, disciplined pursuit of any deity.

God (s) are not desperate for greater numbers, nor greater power, nor greater arsenals, nor more positive reviews in public opinion polls. They are not dependent on sycophants whose religiosity is reduced to a weekly cheque, a weekly Mass/Eucharist, an assignment to teach in the education program, nor a clergy whose success, and value and spiritual growth is measured by the cash-flow and the attendance records each week. God(s) are not desperate for white robes, chasables, mitres, staffs and processions, however impressive, and seemingly sanctified and motivating they may be. God(s) do not need sky-reaching spires, nor bell-towers, to signify the humility, the agape, the prayer life or the mentorship of the disciple.

Indeed, God(s) are not likely to be impressed by ‘the largest military arsenal in history, as a sign that ‘we are protecting the American people in a Christian nation.’

That “Christian nation” appellation, claimed by the Americans, is so obviously unravelling on so many fronts, that, just perhaps, there might be some serious consideration given by significant thought leaders, religious leaders, and their colleagues to a different perspective on the high status and ethical value placed on the empirical attributes of American life.

KNOW THYSELF….is one of, if not the most complex, perhaps even incomprehensible, numinous, ethereal, moving, changing, ephemeral and profound activities, that engages the whole person, along with another “mirror” who might join in the process, as a way of echoing, reverberating, clarifying, questioning and supporting the process.

A first step, in the process, could well be to revision how we “see” and how we “consider” what we see, and expand the field of vision from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inner’ as a path for how we consider others as well as how we might envision our own persons.

And, while the process will not generate the ‘destination’ of perfect clarity and fixity, as a kind of dependable consistence, like a place name of a town or village, nor document a developmental graph of maturity, it might thaw some of the frozen lines of demarcation that neither express who we are, nor convey to others who they think we are. And, in that vortex of new imaginal, poetic, mythic possibilities, there is new psychic energy for all of us. And that process will embrace our atttudes, feelings and thoughts, images, even our theology of death.