CHAPTER 9 That We Engage Spiritual Crisis, and Other Bad Days at the Office
“Spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our roadmap are
substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or overwhelmed by experience
that cannot be contained by our understanding of self and world.”
While seemingly worthless, there are often several reasons for crisis. Hollis claims that among them are:
1. Trauma Personal or Cultural
Personal trauma comes in many forms. We may experience a sudden loss, such as a
breakup or a loss of employment. Or we may simply feel a malaise that the goals we were
striving for were not as rewarding as we had hoped they would be, or we are somehow
made to feel small, either way we struggle to find purpose or meaning to gain a foothold and
some sense of control in our lives. Hollis says that:
“Trauma occurs when our defenses and presumptions, whether somatic, emotional,
or intellectual, are overrun. We feel powerless and at the mercy of life. This crisis is in
fact our common condition, for each of us has gotten the same message identified
earlier in this book: "The World is big, and you are not; the world is powerful, and you
are not. Now, figure out a way to survive, managing that!"”
Cultural trauma is more pervasive. It may be that we thought we would be more happy
fulfilling the cultural expectations of being married with children and yet we find we aren’t.
Or, that our Western culture is so far removed from nature, so full of distractions and so
detached from each other that we feel utterly alone, superficial and/or disoriented.
“Cultural distractions urgently seek to mask the demise of tribal mythologies, where
sex, power, money are offered up as connections to replace the linkage to the
transcendent Mystic images once granted. Anyone with a modicum of consciousness
is traumatized by this current world, but it's moved from instinctual guidance,
sympathetic resonance with natural rhythms of seasons and death and rebirth, to
virtual reality such as economics, data processing, and daily distractions no more
evolved than the bread and circuses through which the Roman Emperors distracted
their citizenry from their august, megalomaniacal depredations.”
And so, we struggle to make sense of it:
“In this setting,... One has to find an order of one's own, an order persisting amid the
distractions and disorders of one's time. Some still look up "upward" to find this
transcendent order, and some find it better there; some, by looking "upward", merely
avoid taking on the task of finding meaning for themselves; and some now look
"inward" to find the centering order. Of this latter group, Albert Camus's paradox is
especially applicable. He said that life is meaningful precisely because it is absurd.
What I believe he means is that if it is "meaningful", then it is someone else's
understanding, a received package, and may or may not be confident with one's own
journey. By considering life absurd, we are obliged to make choices, real choices with
real consequences, and thereby are the active agents in creating and affirming our
value system. The more consonant these value selections are with our inner lives,
our souls, the more meaningfully we will experience these choices, and the more we
will feel supported from within.”
2. Swamplands of the Soul
James Hollis has an entire book dedicated to this specific process by which we may suffer
spiritual crises in our life; often subjected to during middle age (the mid-life crisis), or during
a drastic reframing of our worldview. It is an exceptionally deep and symbolic quest simply
to read his book, for those who appreciate this depth psychology, it is a significant read.
"Sooner or later, all of us are ushered by fate, by the actions of others, by choices
we make, both conscious and unconscious, in two places we do not wish to visit.
Such rooms in our common psychic mansion we label depression, loss, grief,
addiction, anxiety, envy, shame, and the like. Such is our humanity. In these dismal
environs we are flooded by anxiety because the fact of being out of control is no
longer deniable. Accordingly, and typically, we tend to kick into our former
management systems -denial, projection onto others, addiction, frenetic activity - and
we move deeper and deeper into the swamp. In those moments we suffer a spiritual
crisis because we have no place to go, or rather, no means by which to go there, and
we suffer our powerlessness and the failure of our provisional management
systems.”
Swamplands of the Soul are more like a Dark Night, more like a collapse of the will, where
one is bogged down and too heavy to engage in life. These are some of the most
treacherous times for our relationships to others because we have lost our relationship to
ourselves.
“While we cannot avoid these swamplands, each of them is a critical junction
whereby we must make choices that prove either psychologically enlarging or
diminishing. "
3. Discrepancies Between Expectations and Outcomes
In other words; our projections onto lovers/partners, schools, workplaces, or churches, to
take care of us.
"We expect that by investing sincere energy in a career, a relationship, a set of roles,
that they will return the investment in manifold, satisfying ways... We do not realize
that a projection has occurred, for it is an unconscious mechanism of our energic
unconscious. Only after it has painfully dissolved may we begin to recognize that we
placed such a large agenda on such a frangible place, that we asked too much of the
beloved, of others, of institutions, perhaps of life itself."
4. Incongruence Between Map and Terrain
Or, the expectations others have for us.
"Received maps come from parents, religious and educational sources, popular
culture, and from history. Sometimes these maps are helpful and rewarding, and
sometimes they are not. Sometimes we begin to cotton to the fact that we are living
someone else's map, someone else's complexes, or someone else's individuation
task."
5. Of Dystonic Relations Between the False and the Natural Self
When you lose touch with yourself, the psyche finds creative ways to let you know. These
may come out in various symptoms, many of which our culture will encourage you to
squelch and hide away. Our initial reactions are to avoid, distract, cover-up these symptoms
to keep ‘functioning’ the way we feel we ‘should’. But, as soon as a should comes into it, it is
a red flag that your will isn’t fully engaged with the behaviour. Something will give.
"The bad news is that our psyche frequently beats up on us. The good news is that
our psyche frequently beats up on us. In our infantilized time, suffering seems an
affront, as though we are to have it all figured out, have management systems in
place, or have medications to remove it from us. From The superficial standpoint so
popular in our healing armamentaria, symptoms are to be removed as quickly as
possible. We employ vast engines of ingenuity devoted to this task. However, from
the psychodynamic perspective, we consider symptoms messages, expressions of
psyche's dismay at our lives, our choices, our values. This dismay comes to us via
disturbances in the body, and troubling emotional discord, in our dreams, in our
relationships, and in our history. Reading these symptoms as invitations to reconsider
our relationship to the self, revise our values and plans, and renew our relationship to
mystery as it moves through the world and through us, is a most challenging task.
But it is the means by which we recover relationship to the gods, to the essential
mystery that lies within our individual psyches just as it courses through history.”
“Symptoms invite us to reconsider our maps, revisit the terrain, re-vision our
journeys, and reconsider our purposes. Finding that the map we have been using is
no longer adequate is always disconcerting, even anxiety provoking, but it is the
beginning of a process by which we come to a better map, more interesting terrain, a
more considered life... the psyche has a better plan for our lives than our ego's plan,
or our culture's plan."
The arsenal of options for dealing with these crises are:
1. Collapse
2. Regression
3. Distraction
4. Narcotization
5. Transformation
Of course ideally we ultimately will find transformation, or else we risk suffering our inability
to move. Remember to ask yourself when faced with depression or anxiety: “What am I
resisting?” & our answer may be yet another question: “But, how?”
(By myth Hollis means “an energy-charged image, or idea, that has the power to move and
direct the soul”)
In the face of the exhaustion of the old we may:
- Find a higher, more evolved form of the old myth.
- Move to a more compelling myth.
- Live without myth, as one's myth.
"When people say to me that they live without myth, then I know that they are
unaware that most of our lives are in service to those splinter myths we call
complexes"
"Life is what happens when we had other plans" John Lennon
- Begin one’s journey to a new place.
"My individuation began the day my god died"
"To ask what the soul wants of me is to submit to what "the gods" wish, investing
themselves through the energies of the individual psyche, energies that are
transcendent to ordinary ego-consciousness. To serve the gods, not the ego, not the
tribe, not one's parents, not one's prior picture, is to transform."
“People have misunderstood Jung’s Myth for our time, Individuation, as narcissism or
self-preoccupation. In fact it is a summons to service, of ego submission to values
larger than those previously embraced...the paradox that to serve the transcendent
we are sometimes obliged to sacrifice whatever we've theretofore most valued. There
is little comfort to the ego on such occasions, but one is brought to spiritual
enlargement.”
And it is often by the tension of paradox that we discover a renewed vision towards living: in
meaninglessness we find meaning, in letting go we become more whole, in suffering we find
joy, in taking time for ourselves we become more selfless, in focusing on one strength the
world opens up to possibilities.
“Many times, against our will, we find that in our crises and other bad days at the
office there is an enlargement of the spirit purchased by suffering and humility, but
enlargement nonetheless. The death of our myth, the experience of
meaninglessness, is the beginning of a new stage, the next stage, of our journey."
CH 10 - That We Write Our Story, Lest Someone Else Do It For Us
"It's disturbing to think that rather than we living our stories, our stories might be living
us."
Wonder:
"Do you not recall in childhood the primal sense of wonder about who you were, who
made the world, what it was all about? We were never more fully human than in
those moments of great, gracious, and enlarging questions.”
“But consider what your operative questions may be today:... Do these questions
enlarge us, or do they diminish us? Do their answers provide sustained satisfaction?
Do our questions infantilize us, or do they ask that we grow up by, paradoxically,
returning to the questions that primal Wonder first occasioned for us as children?"
Many of us are so caught up in complexes, or simply the demands of living we have created
for our lives, that the questions that occupy our minds are not the real desires of our hearts
or minds. It is a challenge to let go of distractions and self-made realities that squelch our
sense of Self to feel free to open up towards something new. But, we can look at what we
are already doing and start with that. We could look at our job and say “What strength do I
have that I could use here?”
"For the person with a high sensate function - the engineer, systems analyst,
troubleshooter, accountant- the question is "how did the pieces best fit together?" For
the pragmatist, for whom ideas are merely instruments, the question is "how well
does it work, and what are the payoffs?" For the aesthetic sensibility the question
presents as "what is the texture?" "what colour or form appeals to me?" "what would
it look like if I moved something over here instead?" All of these questions are
expressions of primal wonder and represented desire to connect with the invisible
world that informs and drives the visible world."
And, if this is too difficult, at least close your eyes a moment. With no distractions. Think
back to who you were as a child. Alone to yourself. Who were you then? What did you like
to do? What were the things you wondered about? How did you see things?
"So think of those moments in your recollected backyard, in the south field, in the
street, the park. What did you think when alone with your thoughts, then? What did
you imagine? What spectral fears harried you? When you lay in bed at night, what
strange animals growled beneath you, what groaning critters paced in your closet?"
Getting in touch with our inner child can do wonders in helping us to reframe our thinking,
discover a fresh playfulness with our present reality and open us back up to recognizing
simply being present, as well as reconnecting ourselves to our potential.
Provisional Stories
It’s natural for us to get disconnected from ourselves. Hollis describes how in nature, there
is constant separation and as emotive beings, we feel the pain of this.
"In the womb, the lungs did not breathe, the eyes did not see, we floated timelessly
through inner space. Time, consciousness, identity are the epiphenomena of a
splitting into opposites occasioned by our birth. The prerequisite for consciousness
and identity is suffering, the suffering of radical separation, the splitting of subject and
object, the loss of connection. No wonder all people have their founding myths
expressing loss, separation from a "paradisal state", and no wonder we resist
consciousness so much. When we further find our dependency absolute, vulnerability
total, we learn to adapt our narrative to whatever imperative presents itself as most
insistent. So we grow separated from our story. Later, perhaps reading the story of
others, we learn that there are alternatives."
What people do you look up to? Who are your role models? Who are your mentors? What
do they teach you? How do you live the messages that you believe in? How do you carry
the people who have passed with you forward in your life, cherishing their memory? We can
be inspired by other people’s stories, or even by a character we empathise with in a book.
This is our Hero’s Journey, and by acknowledging the heroes we come across in our lives,
we can realign the way we really want to live.
Going Home
"'Going home' means paying attention to, respecting, the witness of these clues. It
asks that we risk taking them seriously. It means tracking the clues to see where they
wish to take us, which will not necessarily be where we wish to go. Going home
means coming back to ourselves after so much estrangement. So long have we been
strangers in this world, and so long strangers to ourselves. How scary, how inviting,
how necessary it is to come home at last."
Unlike simply being distracted by the comforting feelings of nostalgia, truly coming home to
ourselves involves rediscovering our passion. It involves listening to our bodies, listening to
our dreams, listening to our minds. Sitting with them until we have a sense of what we really
need, learning to nurture those needs, learning to feel good in our own skin, learning what
we really want for our lives, learning how to move in that direction, and learning to truly see
the world with fresh eyes of hope again.
"Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent
voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better
human."
