Dangerous Wisdom

Love is a trainable skill, and luck is an inevitable ingredient in our lives. Our current science challenges the notion of the sovereign individual, the importance of love, and the need for a paradigm shift. The Harvard Study of Adult Development goes together with other data to invite us to question the nature and the role of love, luck, and the true wealth of nations. The Harvard Study also supports the need for a new kind of science.

In this episode we rewrite the headlines: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations. What is the true wealth of nations? Isn’t it gross domestic product?

And if nations are comprised of people, what is our true wealth?

We’re thinking through the true wealth of nations in relation to our last contemplation. At that time, we considered the famous Grant Study, more formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. If you haven’t heard about the study, it’s worth listening to that other contemplation of it first.

The present contemplation considers the paradigm shift we would need in order to make sense of the Harvard study—a revolution in our science and society, all in relation to the Gospel of Love that our science and our wisdom traditions now agree on.

It’s an impressive study, the longest scientific study of adult development, conducted across decades (it started in 1938). Referred to as the Grant Study or the Harvard Study of Adult Development, this famous research program has gotten several rounds of press.

But the press coverage seems to miss something incredibly vital and far-reaching in this study. Even the books have failed to make it clear. In a way, we could suggest the lead researchers of the study missed this finding—didn’t notice it, didn’t fully grok it, or didn’t understand how crucial it is.

This unstated finding is the most important finding about happiness and a meaningful and fulfilling life that we have.

A contemplation of healing, wholeness, the challenges of suffering, and the paradoxes of success. We consider some of the essential questions: In what sense is life a self-healing truth? What is the nature of health and healing? What is the nature of sickness—our cultural sickness and our own mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sickness? What is the role of nondoing in our healing and in our life?

In our culture, we have placed a set of habitual notions about time on top of the soul’s instincts and intuitions about rhythm and temporality. The physicist David Bohm said that, “. . . every thought assumes time. Whether we discuss thought or anything else, we always take time for granted. And we take for granted the notion that everything exists in time. We don’t take for granted that time is an abstraction and a representation, but we take for granted that time is of the essence—reality—and that everything is existing in time, including thought.” What if we have some very unskillful notions about time? What if the evolution of our culture depends on shifting our relationship with time?

Leslie Ellis, Ph.D.,RCC

Author, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy

https://drleslieellis.com

A delicious discussion of the importance of dreams and some of the basics of how to approach them. Dr. Ellis wrote a book called, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy that provides a highly accessible, yet insightful education on the nature of dreams and how to work with them. By offering a unified model, Dr. Ellis makes it possible for all of us (clinicians and non-clinicians) to begin to understand the importance of dreams, and to begin to work with them so as to receive the profound gifts they can bring to our own life and the life of the world we share.

Dr. Leslie Ellis is a leading expert in the use of experiential and somatic approaches in psychotherapy, in particular for working with dreams and nightmares. She is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy, has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and worked as a therapist in private practice in Vancouver, BC for more than 25 years.

She is a certifying coordinator and former president of The International Focusing Institute, and incorporates this gentle yet profound method of internal inquiry into her method of engaging with dreams. Leslie now offers dream study programs online, certifying clinicians in her unique method of embodied experiential dreamwork. She also teaches with the Jung Platform and the Polyvagal Institute.

Find out more: https://drleslieellis.com

A little singing and swearing, to help us arrive at our awesome presence.

Humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om share a common root, and considering their interwovenness can help us to touch our basic dignity. In this contemplation, the first to have both swearing and singing, we look at some elements of the dominant culture’s way of living that indicate how Nature has gotten pushed into the shadow. We consider the architectural manifestos of Hundertwasser, the memories of Jung, and the teachings of world philosophers who seek to help us find our awesome presence, even in the most mundane or seemingly profane activities of life.

Jung made at least two incredible discoveries. He wrote about one of them, and we discussed it in our first episode in this series. The other discovery appears nowhere in his writings, but it may have been his greatest by far.

In this contemplation of the shadow we ask some questions, take a kind of inventory, that can help us detect the presence of the shadow so that we could begin to bring light to its contents. But first we consider some of what we need to have in place in order to work skillfully with our unconscious, including a sense of the soul or psyche that transcends even Jung's vision.

As part of our contemplation, we consider an artefact related to Jung that many people haven’t heard about, but which we should take time to consider. This is an episode you don’t want to miss, as it brings us to the place where philosophy, psychology, and spirituality (including ecology and a sense of the Cosmic and the mysterious) come together.

Part 2 in a short series. The dominant culture tends to trivialize many of the spiritual teachings and practices that present a threat to it, or a threat to the egos within it. We get McMindfulness because a genuine practice of meditation, as part of a holistic and skillful philosophy of life, results in citizens who want nothing to do with many of the core practices of the dominant culture.

Shadow work runs the risk of the same kind of trivialization, such that we'll end up nibbling on McShadow nuggets and thinking we've confronted the vastness of the psyche. Meanwhile, the pattern of insanity will continue to unfold.

In this contemplation we try to consider a few things about the shadow and the psyche that help us to understand its importance, and to get some sense of the consequences of any kind of avoidance on our part of the sometimes unpleasant or even frightening work of freeing ourselves from deception—both self-deception and the deceptions of the dominant culture.

If you don’t look for Sophia in the shadows, She might come leaping out of them. The consequences can become severe.

“Shadow work” has gotten increasing attention in the dominant culture. This tends to carry the risk of trivialization and increasing spiritual materialism. Here we take a philosophical look at the unconscious and the nature of shadow work. Generally speaking, the dominant culture and most of the people of that culture haven’t come to terms with the unconscious, even though the spiritual and philosophical traditions warn us of its power to keep us in delusion. We avoid in the unconscious in part because, as Freud put it, the revelation of its presence and significance struck a major blow to the western ego. How can we more fully face up to the unconscious and begin to more skillfully work with it? We begin a short series of contemplations into these matters, building up to the sheer terror that the vastness of the psyche can evoke in us. In this first contemplation, we won’t rush into that terror, but begin to gather our senses and our sensibility to consider the questions and challenges the unconscious presents.