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“Nearly every disease could be personified and experienced as possession.”
“This is so like the way of shamans and mediums all over the world. When they resist the calling, they become ill.”
“Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them.”
“In some of [Daniel] Siegel’s talks, he is much more blunt, saying we have been living a lie and it will destroy us. . . the lie of the separate self. He compares living from the solo-self to a cancer cell that’s only concerned about its own well-being. He also uses a metaphor that I prefer, saying this solo-self idea is an autoimmune disease of the mind. We are nodes in a vast system, not independent beings at war with the world. Siegel states that Indigenous peoples and mystics have known this for a very long time. When we come to live this way, it can have a profound and pervasive healing impact on us and all those around us.”
“Another indicator of the extent and power of the porosity of the human mind is the existence of mass psychogenic illness, also known as both MPI and mass sociogenic illness. My personal favorite example of this is the dancing epidemic of 1518 in Strasburg. It started with one woman dancing uncontrollably all day and into the night. She couldn’t stop and kept dancing even though her feet were bleeding until finally she collapsed in exhaustion. At least fifty people also danced involuntarily for long periods of time; some accounts put the number at over four hundred. Some people danced themselves to death. John Waller (2009) claims over a hundred died in this way. This outbreak continued form July until September, when it seemed to fade away.”
“In Internal Family Systems, we talk about Self as a particle and also as a wave or field. Our Self–the curious, compassionate, creative, clear, light-filled being that we really are–is a particle, and this particle is also part of a wave or field of Self that is far larger and wiser than we are. The idea of Self as both particle and wave, particle and field, is mainstream IFS, and if we start to follow its implications, it leads to deep waters indeed.”
“Underlying this vast swath of ruin our civilization has caused is not human nature but the opposite: human nature denied. This denial of human nature rests in turn upon an illusion, a misconception of self and the world. We have defined ourselves as other than what we are, as discrete subjects separate from each other and separate from the world around us.” (quoting Charles Eisenstein in Ascent of Humanity).
Quoting D.H. Lawrence: “This is what I believe: that I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”
“We relate to everything either as an object or a person. We live on a continuum between these two stances. I-It is objective and monological; I-Thou is immediate, mutual, and dialogical. [Martin] Buber asserts that there is no I taken by itself; I is relational. All real living is a meeting, an encounter. Everything can be related to as a person, even a tree or a rock. We are unable to sustain this. All our Thous become Its (with one exception: Buber indicated that God, The Eternal Thou, is the only being who can never be an it). “
“Nikolai Berdyaev is also a dialogical personalist and is a theologian. He argues that the fall of Adam and Eve occurred when they started seeing their bodies as objects and forgot that they were persons. ‘Objectification is always antipersonalistic, hostile to personality and signifies estrangement of personality (Berd-yaev 2009, 1).'”
“Staretz Silouan (1866–1938) was a Russian Eastern Orthodox Christian monk on Mount Athos who has been sainted in the Orthodox church (Sophrony 2021). He taught that “What is truth?” is the wrong question. The question should be “Who is truth?” He also said that life itself is a person to be related to, not an object to be studied. We need a personal, face-to-face meeting with life and truth.”
“William James was ahead of his time. He wrote that a religious attitude means that we take the universe as a Thou, not an It (James 1956, 278). This personal nature of religious thought is “the one fundamental fact” about religion (ibid., 480–81). He stated that the person is always present in psychology, and the tendency of scientists to ignore this in their search for objectivity is a mistake (James 1950, 221). He argued that a real radical empiricism must include subjectivity as well as objectivity, both the personal and impersonal, because both are present in all our experience.”
Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“In Hinduism, there is the tradition of ‘neti, neti,’ which literally means ‘not this, not that.’ This is a key element of jnana yoga and is characteristic of Vedic inquiry. Therefore, it is found in some of the most ancient religious texts on our planet. All worldly experiences and names are negated until all that remains is Self.”
“Brother David honors the apophatic truth that God can’t be named or fixed in place by saying his favorite name for God is Surprise.”
“Let me remind you that most of the greatest crimes in human history were committed by people convinced of their righteousness. Thomas Merton wrote, ‘When one is firmly convinced of his own righteousness and goodness, he can without qualms perpetrate the most appalling evil.’ Mao Tse Tung believed he was fundamentally transforming society, and his regime resulted in the greatest mass murder in human history. Hitler was stridently self-righteous and seemed to deeply believe in the purity and goodness of what he was doing. Pol Pot was trained by the most prominent French leftist academics of his day when he studied at the Sorbonne. He went home to Cambodia, put these idealist ideas into practice, and killed something like one-quarter of his people. Great criminal acts have been performed by churches in the name of God. It’s a very long list. As Rumi said, ‘The Veil of Light which is the barrier brought about by self-righteousness is more dangerous than the Veil of Darkness produced in the mind by vice.’ We are not somehow superior to all these people; we too can delude and deceive ourselves easily and profoundly.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s long poem “Please Call Me by My True Names”:
“I am the twelve-year-old girl,
Refugee on a small boat,
Who throws herself into the ocean
After being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
My heart not yet capable,
Of seeing and loving.”
The Bill Wilson–Carl Jung Letters
The twelve steps are a very effective way of dealing with addictions, and they are fundamentally spiritual. Many professional therapists have been pooh-poohing the twelve steps for decades, but the research shows that they are more effective than most therapy. The first three steps are about recognizing a higher power and turning our lives over to it. This is spiritual work, and the neutral phrase “higher power” disguises it enough to allow rationalist-materialist atheists to have spiritual experiences. Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, wrote to Carl Jung in 1961. Shortly before Jung died, he replied that he had to be exceedingly careful about writing about spiritual things because he found that he was “misunderstood in every possible way.” But he did write frankly to Wilson about Roland H., an alcoholic he had treated. Jung wrote, “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” Jung added a footnote here quoting Psalm 42:1, “as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”
The last section of the letter is:
I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protecting wall of the human community. An ordinary man not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil which is called, very aptly, The Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep away from them as much as possible. These are the reasons why I could not give a full and sufficient explanation to Roland H. but I am risking it with you because I conclude from your very decent and honest letter that you have acquired a point of view above the misleading platitudes one usually hears about alcoholism. You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experiences as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula, therefore, is: spiritus contra spiritum [the spirit against alcoholic spirits].
Jung could only be this honest very near the end of his life. Bill Wilson wrote him back almost immediately, but Jung died before he could respond. Spirituality — connection to a higher power, to the archetypal depths, to God, to something bigger than our isolated personal lives — is crucial for our health. Our society largely undermines and denies this.
“In science in the outer world, our standard of truth is whether an experiment is reliably replicable. What if this did not apply in the inner world? What if what was really valuable and meaningful in the inner world was what was unique and could not be repeated at all? This is true of art and literature. The great and meaningful works are totally unique. If this were true inside, it would turn our research methods upside down.”
Annie Dillard said, “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers…”
“The Hearing Voices Movement encourages people to dialogue with the voices in their heads, to treat them as people. The mental health establishment considers this heresy — colluding with the delusions of the insane.”
Link to pdf of book: https://dokumen.pub/the-others-within-us-internal-family-systems-porous-mind-and-spirit-possession-9798987858806.html