Your Heart Is My Heart

Here's a Jungian analysis I admire from Paul Levy entitled,
"The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis." I submit also an exchange of two e-mails regarding it; the first from me to Paul Levy, thanking him, in which I raise questions raised specifically in "Come to the Table," and -- the real reason for posting the e-mails -- a wonderful response from my friend Bill Coleman and his teacher, J. L. Moreno, 1889 - 1974, father of Sociometry and Psychodrama.

My e-mail
Paul -- Thank you. My friend Bill Coleman introduced me to your article, and I agree with him it is brilliant.

I also agree we must do whatever we can to bring the disease into the light of consciousness so it "can't vaporize back into the unconscious." One way I have tried to do this is to advocate against the notion blue/red "divide." The polarization that is happening, it seems to me, ignores that people on both sides actually have much more in common than not. Regardless of our political beliefs, our substance as human beings is the same... even our experience is more alike than different -- we share hopes, hurts, joys, etc. -- and we are beset by common forces of negativity such as alienation, greed, the ever-increasing difficulty of survival.

So I am left with a paradox that I am trying to plumb, partly via a weekly lunch group at work and a blog (http://onetable.blogspot.com/) . If we are to redeem our culture (including ourselves) from succumbing to the ME disease, the "others" will have to see themselves in us, and vice-versa. we have yet to resove how to do this without copping out into "everyone's entitled to their own opinion."

Bill's Response
J. L. Moreno, 1889 - 1974, father of Sociometry and Psychodrama, articulated the answer to:

"...'the others' will have to see themselves in us, and vice-versa. I haven't yet figured out how to do this without copping out into 'everyone's entitled to their own opinion'."

It is called ROLE REVERSAL and all things human depend on it.

"A meeting of two, eye to eye, face to face.
And when you are near I will tear your eyes out
and place them instead of mine,
and you will tear my eyes out
and will place them instead of yours,
then I will look at you with your eyes
and you will look at me with mine."

J.L.Moreno, 1914

Unfortunately, role reversal does depend on one important thing. First, each person must be secure enough in themselves to leave their own egos and enter the other's world of roles without fear of not being able to return back to their own. If either one lives in a fear based paradigm, where existence is threatened, such a reversal will be extremely unlikely.

In the case of Paul Levy's analysis, humanity's instinctive capactiy for fear, constellated in the Shadow (or as we now understand in the limbic and reptilian systems of the brain), has been activated with an attack on our home. We responded appropriately by going after the attackers in Afghanistan. But then, our leaders, phenomenally insecure in themselves and out of touch with the dynamics of their own Shadows, discovered a way to make themselves more powerful by expanding the projection of fear onto another field of likely candidates, Iraq. Their skill at projection and their genius at propaganda convinced enough people that their existence was still threatened.

OK. So all that's not news. We are still faced with the distressing problem of what to do. Millions of people are clinging to some vague hope that if we talk more about this it will all somehow change. Maybe. But as Alfred North Whitehead said, "The major advances in civilizations are processes that all but wreck the cultures in which they occur." Is that what we are waiting for?

Levy indicates at the beginning of his essay that we are faced with a "psycho-spiritual disease of the soul". Insofar as we all despair over a solution to the global problem, if you buy into the notion that this disease is "in the soul of all humanity" there is no other course but to heal ourselves first, at the local level. Everybody wants to simply have the madness end, the war to end, the Administration to behave itself, and Kansas goes back to being democratic. Then we can get on with our lives, while the disease lays dormant.

Not good enough.

We are being presented, again, a heavenly opportunity to heal ourselves and put the organism of life back in the balance that only the creator understands. Yes, we have to heal the entire organism...but all politics is local. To look for the pancea from above is folly. So far as I can see, that which comes from above tends to be rather destructive, sweeping away the litter of humanities delusions.

Start local. Do your role reversals at home, at work, in the local community. Explore your own Shadow in the company of those who love you. And let others explore theirs. The release of creative energy will be amazing and we might just come up with some new ideas of how to get along. We are not doing it with our current thinking.