War and Peace: A Third Path Between Conservatives and Progressives

"As a connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites, the soul differs from the terms which it connects...It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul." James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 174-175

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     I see war or conflict as a necessary and normal part of the Cosmos – whether these conflicts show up as comets smashing into planets, stars in perpetual nuclear fusion, rain eroding rocks, or time withering once smooth skin. The cosmos is a place of war and peace.

     I disagree with the sometime myopic ideologies of both Progressives and Conservatives. Conservatives sometimes see war as a solution while Progressives sometimes  see war as something that must be eliminated. I see both ignoring the evidence found in Nature and Psyche. When I see bumper stickers advocating War or advocating Peace, as though one could exist on this planet without the other, I find myself in disagreement with both extremes.

     Many in the New Age Movement suggest that we are evolving as a species into a planet of peace, while the more traditional religions often suggest that the world will get worse, eventuating in an apocalypse. I see no evidence that either trend will overtake the other. Both extreme views are missing the point of earthly existence: we are here to make souls, and all of the opposites have been built into the psycho-cosmic curriculum for that process.

This third way is not a synthesis or blending of the two extremes, but a middle path that sees both sides as normal and necessary for the game of Soul-making. The football game metaphor works well. The aim of a football game is goal-making, requiring rules that allow moments of brutal violence and moments of huddled tranquility. Now imagine a football game where the compassionate Progressives argue that the players ought to completely stop blocking and tackling each other, while a group of hawkish Conservatives argue that the players ought to be able to block and tackle each other the entire game. The game works because it has fixed rules of conflict and concord to be followed for the purpose of goal-making. Similarly, this is how the human soul making game operates—by the laws of opposites. We did not create this game, we merely play it, consciously or unconsciously. (Incidentally, this is how all relationships function in a soul-making universe).

     There is an African Swahili Warrior Song: “Life has meaning only in the struggle. Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the gods….so let us celebrate the struggle.” The same notion is found in Hinduism where the Divine Lord Krishna claims that He generates little babies while He devours the corpses of dying men on the battle field. The mystical poet William Blake wrote: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”   

     Each person is here to experience duality in order to make a deep and fascinating soul. In this view everyone is “spiritual” because souls are being sculpted in each moment, whether one is an atheist or agnostic, Jew or Taoist, church-goer or heroin addict. Like a butterfly struggling to get out of the chrysalis, each of us is struggling to emerge from the undivided into the individuated.

In this view, “spirituality” is not a little slice of life where you chant, pray and get happy on Jesus or Energy Crystals. Full spirituality is found in the clash of Contraries, in war and peace, cancer and health, loss and gain, eating gourmet food or eliminating waste. The world of Nature is our teacher: Sharks kill seals while ants organize colonies, lions kill gazelles while birds sing songs in the Spring, frost kills leaves while the sun rises over a blue lagoon, people divorce while lovers share a first kiss, and on and on…

     Don’t get me wrong, I WAY prefer peace, health and prosperity – but I also preferred to skip algebra, and to watch TV rather than memorize my spelling words when I was in school; that which is easier and preferred is not always the most beneficial.

     So with Hillman I choose the third position between the necessary contraries. And when I am ravenously tackling and blocking those I oppose, I remember that it is not personal. And when it gets personal, I eventually take a breath, reset my heart to a soul-making stance, and only then do I understand what Jesus meant when he said: “Love your enemies, and bless those who oppose you.” Our enemies are the artists of our unique souls.

Soul-making Therapy vs. Tradtional Therapy

Put simply, the difference between soul-making therapy and traditional therapy is that soul-making therapy is about becoming emotionally and psychologically literate, traditional therapy is about healing the sick psyche. The soul-making therapist is not a doctor or healer, as in so many modern therapies. The role of the soul-making therapist/counselor is to teach one the alphabet and emotional skills so the individual can see how soul is being made in every feeling, thought, attitude, encounter and action--including sleep. That does not mean obsessive attention to every little detail in life, but rather the ability to know when an event is significant and how to read and respond to it. Soul-making therapy ought not be costly. The costly approach is the traditional therapy that makes one dependent on the therapist-as-healer/messiah. Soul-making aims at freeing you from all “professionals,” and is actually very liberating, even libertarian.

Also, a soul-making approach is about immediate action. Most traditional therapies employ an endless routine of digging up the past and gathering information for the future. Even if the action is "wrong," it is always instructive, activating the next level of consciousness awaiting the choice and deed, or misdeed. It is actually very simple. Everyone, at every moment is making soul. Most just don't know it and have not been taught to participate with it. One cannot, NOT, make soul--one can only be aware or not aware of the process--and be literate or illiterate about reading the sea of symbols in which we constantly swim.

The paradox about soul-making is that the very psyche that is confused and lost is also compelling you to seek. Just as a seed simultaneously breaks apart in the soil, and sinks roots down into the darkness as necessary steps toward unfolding the plant—so the soul must disintegrate as it reintegrates. Both occur simultaneously and are typically indistinguishable, especially in the early phases. This means there is no way to do it wrong. But as humans, we may minimize the suffering by acquiring a literacy of ideas that allow us to assimilate the insights that swarm around inside of us every minute. There will always be some amount of pain in soul-making, but ignorance increases and exacerbates the pain.

Again, this is put simply, but we must begin somewhere.

THE SOLUTION IS IN THE DIS-EASE

As modern westerners have increasingly dominated nature with technology and great inventions, making external life easier, safer and more secure—we have concurrently neglected the soul, the internal life, or character. The neglect of the internal for the advancement of the external requires a compensatory response from the psyche. The internal will find a way to restore balance. The inner and the outer, spirit and matter, like the electrons in an atom, always work in tandem and dance together to make a whole. Psyche will restore balance through dis-ease—allowing the external phenomena to proceed to their logical conclusions that those ends might complete their arc and swing back the other way like a pendulum. Internal psyche will call us back. How?

Addictions, disorders and afflictions arise from Psyche, outside of and apart from human will. These dis-eases serve to turn us back to the internal life, to attend to soul. Pandemic obesity caused by external consumption is making us sick, depressed and miserable—forcing us to abandon external concerns and to examine and feed our malnourished souls. A heart attack has a way of rearranging priorities in a literal heartbeat. Rampant drug use (legal and illegal) and ubiquitous alcohol consumption give us external chemical highs, but then force us into the depths—hitting bottom, to see our neglected souls. Greed and obsession with money, career and stuff result in recessions and depressions which leave us bankrupt and depressed—forcing us back into reflection and soul-tending. Relationship and sex obsessions leave us eventually alone, insatiate, and often bitter-- forcing us to look inwardly. Our American political process has gradually abandoned soul along with religion, calling for external solutions through rational policies and messianic politicians—and we are all raging at the other party. Psychotherapy focuses on statistics, diagnostic manuals and averages, assigning labels and standard treatments that “reprogram” the brain or body—and few are much happier. Even our western spirituality often turns to a kind of external solution as we look to theological systems, metaphysical techniques, spiritual books, seminars, teachers and intellectualized quick-fix “scientific” religions that leave us shallow and dissatisfied--forcing a spiritual crisis which drives us back into our own neglected souls.

The solution is in the disease. Each of these external failures, mostly unconsciously, are forcing us back to the radical or root source—our own bereft self or soul in need of care--not a cure. The care must come from powers that were prior to all externals, and greater than all human inventions which make life easier, safer and more secure. There is no quick fix or herd solution. Decades of soul neglect have left an overgrown internal topography. Most will not hack their way through, but return to the food, drink, relationship pursuits, technological distractions and other external answers. Most prefer the disease itself to the hard work of self knowledge--not self obsession, but deep self knowledge. But can't we change? Can't we decide to fix the problem and change our individual life?

The bad news is that this is primarily a collective problem afflciting the entire western psyche. While most of us think we can solve our problems with the right effort, maany are finding failure after failure. When individuals try to “overcome” their particular problem--which we call addictions, neuroses and afflictions--they do not know that their struggle is against a larger psychic assault on western externalized values. The neurotic “onslaught” by a compensatory psyche is not personal, but exists in pandemic numbers for the corrective of the collective soul. The corrective is bigger than the individual's obesity or drug problem, bigger than the democrats or republicans salutary policies to fix the economy. The psycho-emotional epidemic in America is from a cultural neglect of soul. Some sort of larger "victory" will arrive when a significant number of people learn that self knowledge and character need attention—that the soul must be seen, heard and attended to on a scale that will shift the western soul. Technology, industry, herd solutions, statistical and formulaic social agendas and all of the great academic rationalisms must learn to co-exist with and even surrender at times to psychic agencies which operate inwardly, individually and apart from external human consciousness.

However, if one does per chance work to achieve success, recovery, and “healing” in his/her area of addiction or affliction--it almost always requires much time and attention put on elusive and enigmatic self knowledge, and always a compassionate return to society with a message of soul over stuff. If these two criteria are not met, the successful changer will inevitably return to some external solution--and lead the proverbial life of quiet desperation.