The Art of Relationship (Video Podcast)

The Art of Relationship: The Morality of Love Versus Control

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Near the end of Charles Dickens’ tale, “A Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge, standing before the visage of his own grave, searching for redemption after a long night’s journey into the darkness of his own soul, cries out:

Spirit! …hear me! I am not the man I was.… Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

Over the course of Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul, the Three Spirits confront his lifetime spent in pursuit of social prominence and ravenous profiteering. His selfishness and greed have left him bereft of family or friendships—destined to die alone, forsaken, and unnoticed. In the morning, as the Dark Night passes away, Scrooge awakens to an undeveloped potential buried deep within his soul for compassion and generosity towards his fellow man. He makes a transformational choice to let go of his prior ways, to embrace a future life of charity, and to repair his broken relationships in the present.

Our own life story begins in the past, a consequence of countless, thoughts, actions, and decisions made by others and ourselves in a bygone time and place, which then forges our potential and subsequent experiences in the present moment and builds a framework of future possibilities. However, when this life story is founded in fear and scarcity, it leads to an obsession with ordering one’s relationships and circumstances according to a moral framework of control, motivated by selfishness and greed.

On the other hand, a life story founded on a belief and experience of safety and sufficiency can lead to a spirit of openness to community and sharing with others according to a moral framework of love, motivated by compassion and generosity. To understand our present foundation and capacity for relationship, we must go back and examine this underlying archetypal dynamic of love versus control as a framework for our life’s journey.

At the heart of the human condition is the recognition that we are impotent in the face of the inevitable course of time and the forces of nature. Thus, humans have attempted to reconcile themselves to the capricious whims of these often devasting powers by devising elaborate rituals to control them.

Conceptually, the word religion is fundamentally defined as a ritual action to control one’s circumstances or fate. The etymology of the word religion evolves out of an underlying Latin word meaning “to bind”, variously used to describe fear, obligation, or conformity. This may describe our personal orientation to some overwhelming circumstance or uncertainty such as a favorable fall harvest, a relationship status, an unusual skin rash, or the outcome of this weekend’s baseball championship. And then, on a societal level, it may inspire the establishment of hierarchical institutions that embody the need for social control, delegating preeminent authority to a privileged-few priests or rulers, who mediate the power of the gods.

The associated religious mythologies are fundamentally moralistic narratives that define human frailty in the face of the powers of nature and the gods. Many of these myths in turn inspire religious rituals that compensate for the desires and appetites of a particular god. On one hand, the impulse underlying these rituals may be to control chaotic human behavior that angers the god, threatening punishment upon the sinner and possibly bringing great catastrophe on the entire community. On the other hand, these religious rituals may describe a way to influence or control the gods by giving to them what they desire, transacting a reward or benefit from them.

In ancient Greek cosmology, one’s Fate was threaded by the weavers of destiny according to the god’s grand cosmic scheme, the sublime natural order. Greeks, like many other cultures, viewed humans as victims of fate, suffering from the moral consequences of their own hubris, as well as the fitful discord and petulant impulsivity of the gods. In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, Odysseus is at odds with Poseidon, the god of the ocean. As a result, he wanders for a decade upon the seas, futilely attempting to sail home after the Trojan War, thwarted by the god at every turn. In the myth of the trials of Hercules, he is a son of Zeus and a mortal woman that Zeus rapes. Hera, the goddess of marriage and the scorned wife of Zeus, jealously responds to Zeus’ infidelity by continually causing trouble for his offspring. Throughout Greek mythology, humans must struggle to pacify the powers above and below in order to survive in an often-dangerous world.

The ancient Greeks devised one of the most elaborate systems of ritual service to the gods, building grand monuments and temples to each Olympic god who represented a force of nature or a principle of human behavior. According to Plato, the Greek word for these overseers on Mount Olympus was derived from the Greek word for a runner, which he states embodies the early Greeks’ belief that these powers moved or ran across the heavens, influencing our lives on a grand scale. This then developed into a system of ritual behavior to influence the gods through festivals and offerings.

Similarly, the English word “god” comes from an old German word indicating, “One to whom one pours out a libation,” inferring the invocation of a transactional benefit. It is this archetypal sense of contracting with a god by offering materials or services that defines this universal human response to our fear of helplessness and vulnerability within the capricious world of gods and nature.

The archetypal dynamic of religious control is fundamentally transactional. It requires sacrifice to the powers that control one’s fate. One must feed the gods to gain their favor or to remove some curse. In Greek society, just as in many other pre-modern societies, this was done directly by ritually constructing images of wood or stone to represent the power of the gods, providing a tangible focus when offering an obligatory sacrifice.

Whether one calls it fate, destiny, luck, or the hand of god, our magical proclivity to create a supernatural alliance is more than just some primitive impulse confined to superstitious pre-modern societies. Rather, it is the product of a universal narrative that is perpetually experienced as an archetypal dimension of human nature, whether or not one is openly theistic.  Our deep-felt sense of fear and isolation are powerful drivers that draw us into the narrative of our separateness and the necessity to seek control. As such, in modern times, humans sacrifice time and money to gain the power of what they fear is lacking in their lives. They seek out celebrities, sport teams, and cultural authorities to follow in order to give them a sense of purpose, identity, or worth. They pursue wealth and power to control their unease and sense of vulnerability, sacrificing both personal relationships and community for an individualistic notion that possessions and authority make their lives valuable.

At a societal level, fear and isolation becomes the foundation for building the political and religious institutions that circumscribe our personal idolatry—a shared longing to pacify the gods or forces that represent our vulnerability. This political narrative of control often becomes a recursive story within a story as the foundation for racism, exploitation, and hierarchical rule. Firstly, it begins in the authoritarian narrative of the right of one heroic individual to rule over a tribal association to bring purpose, identity, and safety against the perceived dangers outside the group. And then, secondly, within this paternal narrative, it inevitably invokes the right of one tribal group to subjugate some inferior enemy caste, often identified as the valueless monster that must be dominated or destroyed to protect the wellbeing of the tribe. This, subsequently, justifies giving up even more power to the ruling elite.

Under this dysfunctional political hierarchy, humans are merely victims of a larger conflict, searching for a hero to save them from the insatiable appetite of an overpowering monster. Some individuals respond by identifying with the monster who, then, exploit others in either support or violation of a divine moral code. Still others become enrolled as societal heroes who fight the monster to restore cosmic order according to the dictates of the cultural or religious narratives.

The counterpoint to this political narrative is the relational or familial perception of power—that is, the prosocial ideology of love and community as a universal experience in which humanity has an intrinsic value that is worth celebrating and protecting. While, on one hand, this can be argued as a product of maturity as one grows and develops in their understanding of the world. On the other hand, it essentially begins, of necessity, very primitively in the unbroken gaze of mother and child, as Lover and Beloved. Mature development is merely the understanding of the universality of the human family, the value and strength of community.

In popular culture, the British band, “The Beatles” famously sang “All you need is love,” reflecting the Hippie generation of the 60’s mantra of “Peace, Love, and Understanding.” In a 1967 interview, John Lennon, a member of the Beatles, said, "Love is the most important thing in the world. It’s more important than food, or money, or anything else. Love is what keeps us together." Shortly thereafter, the Beatles unceremoniously broke up amidst irreconcilable conflicts within and without the band. The Hippie Generation of the 60’s antithetically became the self-obsessed Me Generation of the early 80’s, then the Religious Right in the later part of the 20^th century, and subsequently, the Cultural Warriors of the early 21^st century, which is currently attempting to dismantle the fundamental woke imperative of “Peace, Love, and Understanding” many of them once espoused in the 60’s.

Love is paradoxically both mysterious and obvious. Within popular culture and mythology, Love is a presumptively vague platitude--as we search for love, find love, make love, send our love, while we decide whom or what deserves our love. We love our mother, ice cream, our favorite sports team, and our favorite song without pausing to consider what it actually means to love. And we would most certainly love to see our foes suffer a humiliating defeat or be destroyed all together. The word love becomes just a vague placeholder for something we desire without truly understanding our varied experience of it.

The ancient Greeks explained different conceptual actions and desires with separate words to alternately indicate erotic or attractive desire, friendship, familial devotion, as well as altruistic action in support of another. All these separate Greek concepts get swept together when translated into English by the ambiguous emotional platitude, “love.”

Thus, love generally indicates something we feel good about and, consequently, something that can be lost if circumstances are disadvantageous or disagreeable. As such, we fall out of love with our family, friends, lovers, sport teams, and menu selections. Yet, we still believe that somehow, love is all we need.

The art of relationship is paradoxically both enigmatic and familiar. As children, we learn a pattern of relationship within our families, regardless of how healthy or functional these relationships are in our developmental journey. The formative attachment between parent and child is founded on a normative intuition, an archetypal pattern, of the safety of home and family. We intuitively discern what it means to depend on others, beyond our capabilities to meet our own needs. And we find value in the possibility and opportunity of cooperation and shared family responsibility.

Subsequently, our emotional temperament arises out of an implicit differential between an archetypal ideal of family relationship against our actual experience of support and safety—a subjective evaluation of our unmet emotional and physical needs.

Regardless of our ability to articulate this ideal, or our awareness even of our unmet childhood needs, the developmental journey must necessarily be completed to become mature personalities, healthy mates, good parents, and beneficial members of society. What is lacking in the childhood family structure must eventually be developed over the subsequent course of our adult lives in order to nurture healthy relationships.

As we travel along our life’s journey, we internalize many different narratives, different stories, based on experiences both real and imagined. As the basis for learned behavior, these narratives become an operational palette underlying habitual responses to new experiences based on emotional triggers at the core of these narratives. These associative triggers bring an instinctual script from memory to be a retrospective context for what is happening in the moment, creating a predictable pattern to our presence in the world. In turn, these psychological tendencies define our personality. And as a whole, these inculcated narratives are our personal mythology—the collection of stories that formulate our identity.

Our formative family experiences create a subset of our personal mythology that becomes the basis for our adult relationships. When this repertoire is inadequate, we must amend them with corrective experiences. A key archetype in this repertoire is the cultivated Parent image based on our developmental encounters with responsible adults in childhood—whether they be our own parents, or others that provided a safe place for our development, such as teachers, mentors, or coaches. From this, we may begin to develop an archetypal relationship with the image of a Good Parent—one who protects and nurtures the vulnerable child within our narrative repertoire.

Without a good sense of this Responsible Adult in our personal mythology, it is not possible to become a responsible adult in our experiential day to day lives. We subsequently collapse into our existential vulnerability as perpetual victims in a dangerous world, operating defensively out of fear and inadequacy. Unfortunately, without corrective engagement, one may live their entire life reacting to a state of powerlessness and victimhood, perpetually engaged in the dysfunctional power struggle of the Victim, Monster, and Hero, which empirically, is quite common.

On the other hand, the archetypal relational pattern of functional empowerment develops in the form of the Lover-Beloved relationship. Mythologically, this is illustrated in the pre-religious interpretation of the Torah and Gospel stories. In the original mythology, the term “elohim” means “a very great power.”  As such, a family of powerful elohim is described in the narrative—Yahweh is the Parent Elohim and Adam is the first Child Elohim—setting the pattern for the Universal Family of Elohim that includes all of humanity. The myth unfolds as the Parent Elohim tries to raise up his children in his image as the Good Parent.

This archetypal image, or Imago, is described in a particular conversation with Moses, a foundational leader of the mythological tribe of Israel, in which Yahweh identifies himself as one “who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant with [kindness] and truth.”  This is then repeated multiple times throughout the writings of Jewish Histories and Prophets to describe the character of Yahweh as the Good Parent. In this familial context, it becomes a description of what it means to be a mature adult Elohim, the ultimate framework for human development. Later in the Gospel accounts, Rabbi Jeshua emphasizes this purpose, stating:

Yet I am saying to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who are persecuting you, so that you may become sons of your Father Who is in the heavens, for He causes His sun to rise on the [hurtful] and the good, and makes it rain on the just and the unjust... You, then, shall be [mature] as your heavenly Father is [mature].

Our primary identity as Child Elohim defines our inherent great powers. The archetype of the Lover-Beloved is founded on our capacity to use our great power relationally, to altruistically benefit others in mutual relationship. A moral choice is given to love and support each and every person within the universal family regardless of caste, custom, conduct, or creed.  On the other hand, we also may choose to use our powers politically, or selfishly, to benefit ourselves, separating ourselves by building walls to keep out our fears and vulnerabilities.

In the moralistic religion of Judaism, the relational framework of the universal family of Adam in the Torah mythology is replaced by a transactional covenant. Coming out of the Hasidic movement of the neo-Babylonian captivity in the 6^th century BCE, the captive Jewish people sought the blessings of a tribal god to restore their national identity. The parent Elohim, Yahweh, of the Torah is reimagined as the tribal god of the Israelite nation who values and blesses the Jewish people over all other tribes and nations based on their conformity to a moral code, known as the Mosaic Law. If the Jewish nation fulfills their end of a bargain, the exclusionary tribal god will restore the dominance of the mythic kingdom of David.

In the original pre-Christian Torah-Gospel mythology, there is a fundamental narrative of the battle between the religious and familial value systems. The four Gospel accounts of Rabbi Jeshua’s life and ministry are founded on the familial Torah tradition of the fatherhood of Yahweh and his anointed Son who comes to restore the intimacy and power of love within the universal family.

Initially, this is contrasted with the moralism of the Jewish religious elite. But then later, a competing moralistic gospel of sin and salvation is instituted in the prophetic epistles of the neo-apostle Paul. This new transactional gospel replaces the need for continual offerings to satisfy the hunger of the Christian god with one ultimate human sacrifice, which sort of satisfies the anger of this moralistic Christian god, and sort of removes the curse of sin, once additional criteria are met to avoid eternal damnation. Later, this becomes the foundation for all the various Christian religious traditions after it is made a primary tenet in the fourth century Nicene Creed which unified Christian doctrine under the decree of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Many, if not most, religious mythologies begin by defining some broad relational foundation that is then developed into some divine moral code. However, there is an overwhelming tendency to move away from the relational to the institutional, from love to control, regardless of how central love or relationship is to the framework of the incipient mythology. The heart of the problem is that love and community are seen as a weakness within the political hierarchy. Relationships inevitability require one to make oneself vulnerable to another, to open up oneself to the reactions and motives of another. And this is seen as fundamentally dangerous, exposing one to potential harm by others who often may be seen as competitors and enemies. There is inherently a cost to form an open community. This has historically caused the idealism of the belief in a universal family to repeatedly fail, to be discarded for the safety of some authoritarian construct that controls our place in society at the cost of our personal relationships with one another. And of course, it is inherently advantageous for those at the top of the political hierarchy to promote and reinforce the claim that they are superior and should be given power and privileges to rule over the underclass according to the supposed will of god.

The moral foundation of human behavior, both individually and corporately, may thus be characterized by these two fundamentally opposed ways of being in the world. We either follow a path of mutual relational association motivated by love, or else, a path of hierarchical moralistic disassociation motivated by control.

As with the Dark Night of Ebenezer Scrooge, each Life is a story framed in the past, the present, and the future, written in indelible brush strokes on a living canvas that makes up who we are—our identity. Every breath we take is a note in a grand cosmic composition, born in solitude and joined to the universal chorus of humanity. While life inevitably happens moment by moment, moving us forward in time, we have an elemental choice to open up our emotive crayon box to respond to life in all the glorious colors of a shared odyssey, or to hold on to those one or two familiar crayons, representing some darker shade of fate, marked by a life of angst and dissipation, to repetitively work over the same existential spot, with the same monotonous strokes, until our crayons are worn thin in our darkest night.

The Art of life is the composite brush strokes that paint our personal mythology, framing our operative identity, what makes us who we are. Within this archetypal framework of Love versus Control, we choose the color palette from which to interpret or rationalize our experiences, privileging some stories while ignoring others, and then burying the incongruent narratives deep within our subconscious. If we choose the drab color palette of Control, we privilege the narrative of our repetitive victimization—stories of powerlessness, competition, and struggle within a dangerous world. We either rise to the top to subjugate others, or else sink to the bottom in perpetual servitude.

On the other hand, if we develop a broader, more complex palette of Love, we privilege the narrative of our vibrant empowered possibilities—turning stories of vulnerability and failure into the potential for cooperative relationship in community. We may then let our guard down in recognition of our mutual need for one another. As we reach out for help and support from others, we, in turn, make ourselves available to support those in need.

Love in community is an altruistic action operating as a product of the power narratives we develop and nurture. It begins with our lived experiences but grows as we develop a more mature understanding of these experiences and the possibilities they bring to relationship and our identity as lover and beloved.

The Formative Myth of Humanity (Video Podcast)

The Formative Myth of Humanity: Who Am I? Who Are You? And Where Are My Trousers?

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Mark Twain, once proclaimed, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

From our first breath to our last, we are continually faced with the fundamental questions: Who am I and why am I here? At birth, our identity begins in our mother’s gaze. We see ourselves through her eyes. If she is happy, we are happy. If she is anxious, we are anxious. Our sense of safety is merged into the existential haze of parental protection and fallibility.

As the calendar ticks off days, months, and years, we begin to differentiate from our parents, discovering our own needs and values apart from them. We learn to set boundaries—initially in the power of a cry, and then eventually, by the force of the word “no”. Often, we do not even comprehend the import of setting boundaries beyond the discovery that it gets a reaction from our caregivers. We begin to develop a sense of our own power as an independent organism that, at the same time, is dependent on others for our well-being. As we grow, we experience joy and laughter, hunger and pain, comfort and fear--uncertain of the source and meaning of this ambiguous existential dilemma called “life.”

Developmentally, we are in a primal dance between our separateness and relationship--between our individuality and community. As we inculcate a sense of our solitary vulnerability in relationship to the world, we find meaning and purpose in a societal narrative that either reinforces a bias towards or away from one another.

On one hand, if we experience the world as dangerous, insufficient, and combative, we may develop a conservative view of power, which effectually defines a political hierarchy of the powerful exploiting the powerless. This develops into an immature morality of selfishness, greed, and immature competition.

In this dysfunctional social hierarchy, one’s identity will either become conflated in some uneasy narcissistic bubble of the perpetrator or deflated in a fog of perpetual victimhood. If we identify with a narrative of powerlessness, we become easy prey to the powerful--those who identify power as the ability to control others by exploiting their fears and vulnerability. However, this thirst for power and control is merely in compensation for a deeper unacknowledged fear of powerlessness.

Relationally, an exclusionary narrative of scarcity, fear, and paranoia leads to separation and isolation. Our assumptions of authority may alternately become fixated on ourselves, or others, or even some specific cultural, religious, or political ideology dictating our “place” in society. Our personal power and authority become objectified in a belief in our separateness—that we are forever alone in a dangerous world.

On the other hand, if we experience the world as safe, adequate, and supportive, we may develop a liberal view of power based on the shared value of each member within the whole of society. This principal framework of security, competency, and symmetrical responsibility develops into a mature morality of compassion, generosity, and cooperation.

In community, we see ourselves as adequate within a reasonable sense of our own capabilities, supported in our limitations by the capabilities of others, and replete in our own capacity to help others in need. We consider ourselves as committed participants, members of a larger organism, a community of diverse individuals with valuable skills and interests.

Relationally, an inclusionary narrative of sufficiency, hope, and empowerment leads to cooperation and community. Our power and authority are internalized in a belief in our mutual responsibility towards the common good, inclusive of ourselves in relationship to others. Safety emerges from the adequacy of shared resources and accommodation.

Thus, we have two diametrically opposed mythologies of humanity--one based on scarcity and the other based on sufficiency. And yet in practice, we innately hold them both in an uneasy détente within our psyches. There is a non-linear developmental path from the juvenile myth of our inadequacy and dependency to the adult myth of empowerment and interdependency.

In life, there is one certainty--growing up is hard. It takes time. It takes work. A five-year-old child doesn’t just decide one day to put on a suit and tie and head off to get a job as an aerospace engineer. Becoming emotionally, spiritually, and morally mature is no different.

It takes curiosity and education to internalize the rational and moral narratives that define a practical vision of what personal and relational maturity might look like. It also takes practice and experience to develop healthy relationships, inspired by a history of both failures and successes that breeds humility and empathy towards others, and a sober assessment of ourselves and our own limitations.

Love versus control circumscribes this developmental journey. On one hand, Love inspires a commitment, acceptance, and openness to the truth, whatever it may reveal—to breathe life into one’s essential being and the essence of others. On the other hand, Control compels the refusal to accept what is, and then, forces an inauthentic dogma or foreign ideology upon ones moral or relational framework. Control takes life away from what is true and feeds some authority construct in order to transact favor or benefit, or else to remove a deeply felt curse or wounding.

As such, in ancient times, humans would carve images of wood or stone representing whatever they feared or desired, those powers above and below that one perceived had ultimate authority over one’s life. They, then, offered up food or other valuables to transact the benefits of these gods.

Archetypally, humans, in modern times, haven’t changed. Religions haven’t changed. And Politics haven’t changed. Our methods of controlling our sense of fate are given a veneer of modernity and a contrived sense of potency but are still essentially the same. The worship of wealth and power, sex and control, life over death, are all still at the heart of modern idolatry—the attempt to control the unfathomable and mysterious powers that we perceive control us is still at the core of modern life.

Inherently, we continue to be anxious idolators bowing to the performative gods of modern society, transacting our souls for a falsified promise of peace and safety. Our modern sensibilities want instant gratification and instant responses. We look to substances and stimuli to change our immediate frame of experience—a perpetual celebration of sex, drugs, and rock’n roll. We look for self-help books that give us ten easy steps to happiness. We read blogs and follow cultural and social media influencers to tell us how to live our lives. We see pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs, and even therapists as people who will just tell us what to do to become free of our demons.

In fact, we are prey in a dangerous world looking for some authority, some guru, to give us meaning and purpose. Propaganda, dogma, and cult narratives are easier to accept when the Masters of Media tell us who is the villain that makes us feel diminished and afraid. But what each of these perpetrators of despair has in common is that they each take power from us; they release us from the struggle and responsibility of our own work to grow and mature. So we become prisoners of our own devices, and the master becomes our jailor.

In the course of opening up our boundaries to others, to experience our authentic empowered selves, it takes time and deliberate engagement with our own fear-based narratives to facilitate healing of our past woundings and acceptance of our vulnerabilities.

Fundamentally, the landscape of our soul is suffused with festering pitfalls of past incongruities and woundings that prevent us from traversing directly and deliberately to some idealistic notion of adulthood. In our life’s journey, we develop experiential triggers in response to our past wounding that habituate our response to stressful circumstances. Inevitably, we predictably and ineffectually repeat the same stories over and over. The deeper the wounding lies within our subconscious, the less choice we have in responding to these triggers. The force of existential terror, the monsters from deep within us, grow as we associate our vulnerability with violence, death, and destruction. We are driven to protect and to control our vulnerabilities at any and all cost, counter-intuitively, even at the price of destroying ourselves in order to hide from them.

The harrowing story of Nick Cutter is an American tale of a hardworking man with a simple dream of building a home in the woods, settling down, and marrying his girlfriend Nimmie. However, the tale takes a dark turn when Nimmie’s jealous employer is unwilling to lose her hardworking employee to this anticipated idyllic life and so she pays a local witch to curse Nick’s work tool, his axe that he is using to build a woodland home for his beloved and himself.

The next day, when Nick swings his axe to chop down a tree, he, instead, chops off his arm. Fortunately, a magical tinsmith is able to fashion a new functional arm for Nick out of tin. Nick goes back to pursuing his idyllic dream only to cut off his other arm. The tinsmith again fashions a new prosthetic arm out of tin. Nick is undeterred. He is focused and determined to pursue his plan to build a house and marry Nimmie.

As the story continues, this cycle of self-destruction repeats itself with Nick losing both his legs and his torso. Each body part, in turn, is replaced by the magical tinsmith. Finally, Nick swings the cursed axe only to cut out his heart. This time the magical tinsmith is not able to fashion him a new heart. Without his heart, Nick’s simple dream of an idyllic life with his beloved melts away and he is left alone in the woods to rust away.

In the end, Nick becomes a victim of a larger system of exploitation and greed that jealously guards its industrial machinations. He paradoxically loses himself within his obsession to attain a simple life, progressively sacrificing his body for a dream that was doomed to fail.

In the human struggle to find a home, a place to feel safe, secure, and comfortable, we inevitably suffer frustration and disappointment. We begin to replace our vulnerable dreams with the artifice of impenetrable armor, a false identity. As we obsessively work towards a distant fantasy of a life of leisure, we progressively lose ourselves, never living an authentic life in the here and now.

Thus, in the face of this perceived sense of adversity, we are continually faced with the fundamental question: “Who am I?” However, our identity does not evolve hermetically in isolation, but rather it emerges in response to our vulnerabilities, and in context to the quality of our relationship with family and community.

Ultimately, the path to safety, our salvation, from these intrinsic forces cannot be dictated by an outside observer, but rather, is founded in a unique personal narrative of what experiences makes us feel unsafe or vulnerable.

The journey to health and safety begins when we become honest with ourselves as to what these vulnerabilities are that we spend endless amounts of time and energy to protect. These insecurities ultimately knit together our personality strategies that define our identity.

For a few, there may be some prior revelation, or experience, or self-reflection that enlightens them to what motivates their foremost fears. But for many, this remains hidden in the dark recesses of the subconscious, buried by their rational defenses, motivated by an overwhelming fear of facing one’s fears. Thus we ignore, and we hide, developing impregnable personas to face the world. Even those who think they know, quite often don’t, for this very same instinctual dilemma buried deep within the subconscious.

A common misperception is that all we need to do then is to shed light on the darkness, to become aware of the monsters, and this intrinsic terror and dysfunctional behavior will magically cease to exist. But healing is a process that takes time and effort to integrate and rebuild the dysfunctional narratives.

The genesis of discovering “Who I am” begins with the willingness to unravel the false identities that we have developed to help in coping, in surviving, against the insatiable hunger of these protective demons.

So “How do we face our demons?” This is the ultimate paradox. How do you un-defend that which you are most invested in defending; that which makes the safety of the lie, the false self, more desirable, seemingly more powerful than the truth of the authentic self. While we often perceive ourselves, the product of empirically founded modernity, as “rational beings,” it is precisely this same drive to make sense of the world that perpetuates our selective biases, our rational defenses against that which threatens our self-perception as being rational and moral entities.

We isolate and encapsulate anomalous ideas and experiences, those enigmas which cannot be integrated into our prior beliefs about ourselves without letting go or reforming our identity. We push these experiences deep into the darker recesses of the subconscious--out of sight, out of mind… except this doesn’t actually work. Rather than one integrated personality, a bastion of rationality and truth, we are actually fragmented beings, an aggregation of multiple sub-personalities, any of which may become dominant at any moment, triggered by some unintegrated narrative from the past.

At this point, if you were hoping that I would give you three easy steps to enlightenment and relational maturity, you will be disappointed. I don’t have any simple answers for you. I am not an expert on your life—in fact, nobody is. However, as a fellow human being searching for answers, it is my intention in this series of presentations to build maps to a suggested destination of psychological health and well-being based on both contemporary and ancient studies on human nature.

As such, a map does not fundamentally dictate a path, it merely shows the many possibilities. The traveler must choose their own path to their own subjective destination. In reality, there are many possible destinations, many dead-ends, many roundabouts, and many directions to get somewhere other than where you stand now. Inevitably, many folks will choose to remain in the safety of some familiar whereabouts, regardless of a better future beyond the horizon, what Henry David Thoreau described as lives of quiet desperation—resigned to the continuity and predictability of a mundane life. Lost to the potential of life’s heartfelt adventures and concealed beyond unconscious despair, they never venture further than the portals of the castle walls they have built to protect themselves--and yet, which also paradoxically constrain them.

In contrast, the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell encouraged, each adventurer to follow their own call to fulfillment, explaining:

The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. To refuse the call means stagnation. What you don’t experience positively you will experience negatively. You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

Some may already be on their own adventure to discover who they are. Others, while not ready now, may eventually respond to a deeper calling to adventure at a later time. While no path is prescribed and no solution solves every problem, this is resolved, as Campbell points out, if we each engage our own calling—our own dynamic path.

In the previous story of Nick Cutter, he was left to rust away in the woods. His girlfriend had moved on and married another guy. His dreams are buried and forgotten. But that is not the end of Nick’s story. Eventually, the time comes, when Nick is called to a new adventure, set on a path to rediscover his heart.

Initially, the focus of Nick’s new journey is a powerful magician, a legendary wise man who can solve any problem. Nick trusts that this sage magician can give him a new heart. He joins three other adventurers who likewise hope that this sage magician can resolve their most fundamental vulnerabilities.

As their journey unfolds, the team of adventurers encounter numerous trials and tribulations. In the course of these challenges, what they perceive to be their vulnerabilities unwittingly become their greatest strengths as they work together to support one another down the colorful road they travel, ultimately bringing them to safety.

However, when the adventurers finally reach the “all-powerful” wizard, they discover that he is a powerless fraud, hiding behind a false persona created to maintain power and control over his dominion, the land of Oz. The wizard’s real name is Oscar Diggs, or Oz for short.

Oscar succumbs to his unveiling. Letting down his own false persona, he helps the adventurers realize that what they truly need was already deep within them, buried by their fears, doubts, and false expectations. What they were looking for, they already had.

Nick realizes that he is more than just a Tin Man. While the dreams and expectations that had enveloped his earlier life ominously collapsed, buried underneath his Tin Armor is an authentic heart filled with genuine compassion and empathy.

My opening screed is but a sketch of a much larger picture that requires a greater investment of time and intuitive engagement by the individual seeker. I am but a fellow adventurer—an artist, writer, technologist, and student of both depth and experiential psychologies. My focus has been on the spiritual quest to open up the deeper dimensions of the narrative psyche, the soul, in relationship to others and our essential humanity. There are certainly many paths for the adventurer to explore to assist them on their journey.

My specific bias, based on training and background as a psychotherapist, is in depth psychology as well as creative arts and drama therapies. As such, I have endeavored to engage the non-rational channels of transformation through intuitive and embodied techniques already embedded in the psyche, as well as in culture and society. There are many other types of therapists and techniques that may facilitate opening up the personal narrative and experience of the individual, which one may explore. Historically, there is also the individual path of the spiritual quest—the hero’s journey into the calling of the unknown—archetypally, wandering down the untrodden path, stepping beyond one’s fears and expectations.

And then, unfortunately, as I alluded to previously, there is the more common path of spiritual entertainment, blindly following a path set by others, at a safe distance, to experience a figment of some truth, without actually getting your feet wet. For some this may be as far as they are willing to risk straying from the familiar. Yet still for others, the testing of the waters is an essential step to some future immersion into the psychic backwaters stirring deep within their soul.

In this series of presentations, at best, all I can I do is stir the waters, to help the adventurer imagine different possibilities in their life. Psychological growth and repair are not passive tasks—it takes an investment of time and effort by an individual to develop their personal and relational narratives.

Initially, I have committed to develop ten episodes, and then, I will reevaluate whether there is an audience that finds the subject matter interesting or useful, and whether I have anything else to say. This series of presentations is an expansion of a blog I started over a decade ago with the same name “Notes Between the Lines.” I will subsequently use this older blog to post the transcripts of these presentations. Some of the material in this series will be a simplification and amplification of matters I have addressed more academically in my book “Serpent in the Cellar—Love and Death in Life and Myth.” But I do not feel constrained by any previous exploration. I may traverse any incongruous rabbit hole that I find intriguing at the moment, wherever my disparate curiosities may lead within the general subject matter of psychology, creativity, and spiritual growth.

In this esoteric role of “stirrer of waters”, as I have previously stated, I am not and cannot be an expert on your life. And I have no experience or interest in being some sage guru, some mysterious authority who sits upon an ominous stage, or on top of a lofty mountain, dispensing wisdom, which seems to be the hallmark of many podcast gurus, social media influencers, and other self-proclaimed pundits.

I am, however, quite fond of sitting on top of mountains that I encounter along my own path, both proverbially and in actuality. There is much beauty and truth to be found gazing out beyond the horizon that brings a renewed perspective on one’s life—to see beyond the walls that enclose one’s mundane expectations, while deflating the immensity of one’s struggles and issues that seem to loom so large in their everyday world. These are moments we are meant to share between one another as fellow travelers.

As the lowest clouds envelop the highest peaks, we are drawn into a much larger universe. There is a moment in the depths of the traveler’s journey where they are invited to let go of their fear and false expectations, to step beyond the horizon, beyond what is known, beyond what one can see. I recognize that many will choose to step back down, below the clouds, to retrace their steps, retreating to the concrete world from which they came. But a few will choose the untrodden path of their own hero’s journey. It is for these few that I dedicate this series of presentations. Whether or not you have reached this fork in your path yet, I commend your courage, whether or not you realize it yet. May you find the depths of truth you seek, and the quality of relationships you desire.

 

Podcast: Notes Between the Lines with Tom Strelow

Searching for Humanity in a Postmodern Age of Technology, Paranoia, and Propaganda