"Where love rules, there is no will to power,
and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other."
Carl Jung
The Jung quote above is companion piece to Pat Buchanan's observation below:
Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.”
“Where the Right Went Wrong"
Jung Quotations
Dear T,
Thanks for your message.
It seems to me that you were improving spontaneously before consulting the psychiatrist.
I fully understand your urge "to do everything" you can to "get back to baseline" as quickly as possible.
But I also wonder -- without knowing... indeed, how can we ever "know" -- whether the psychiatrist is necessary.
Although I do not doubt that you are feeling notably worse than before the taper, I must say that your ability to "stay focused" and to "recall details" during your four minutes of "message leaving" seemed perfectly normal.
I often wonder if my experience with tinnitus has wider psychological applicability....
When first afflicted, I thought I would be driven to suicide by "The Unstoppable Noise In My Head."
After several months of anguish, I was sitting in the teachers' lounge at Orange High School here in Hillsborough when I suddenly realized the noise was gone!!!
But then, as soon as I "went into my head" to celebrate the silence, there was the noise - same as it ever was.
Blessedly, the experience made me realize that it was within my brain's power to "forget" about The Noise, and from that moment I had the confidence to "let go," and by "letting go" I am almost "good as new" - even though The Permanent Damage remains!?!?!
The Problem is there. But it doesn't matter.
That said, it is also true that whenever I discuss tinnitus -- like RIGHT NOW -- the noise in my head becomes immediately cacophonous and to such an extent that I will often say to myself: "Maybe it's different this time... Maybe the noise has come back in such a way that it will haunt me to suicide's door for THE REST OF MY LIFE."
In fact, it always becomes ignorable again -- even though I can ALWAYS go into my head, find the noise, and then haunt myself with it. (As a matter of fact I am aware of my tinnitus no more than a few percent of my total "waking time.")
I remember decades ago that it always seemed to me that you were objectively much "better" than you saw yourself to be subjectively.
During those years, and during the "endless" telephone calls when you would devote so much energy to your "dis-ease," it seemed to me that you were (at least to some significant extent) creating your dis-ease, causing your dis-ease, vivifying your dis-ease, putting flesh on the slender bones of your dis-ease.
During that time, I voiced two constant refrains.
One of them was that you seemed to treat the "verdant plant" of your psyche as if it were best nourished - and would be most quickly healed - by continually "pulling it up by the roots."
The upshot (as I saw it) was that your presumed "cure" was in fact the underlying cause of your dis-ease.
By continual re-traumatization of your psyche -- by yanking out the roots so you could examine them and take their vital signs -- there was never time enough, nor peace enough, nor "letting go" enough for your psyche's roots to stay in the ground long enough so that you could "take root" in The Ground -- The Ground of Being? -- which is the only place we find real nourishment, and then, with that "easy" spontaneous nourishment (which impresses me as The Ease of Being), we suddenly - and unexpectedly - find ourselves immersed in the ease of living which is the only alternative to dis-ease.
The other phrase I used to use "back in the day" was borrowed from the pop song "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)". https://www.youtube.com/
In a very real way we are prone to psychological disease whenever we "pull up the roots" to "see what condition our condition is in."
Paradoxically/ironically, psychological health is -- in a very literal way -- the care-free-ness of letting our cares go.
Not doing something about them... but letting them go.
From my vantage, psychological health distills to "not picking on ourselves."
"Not picking our scabs" (whose purpose is to accelerate healing and whose deliberate removal delays and may even prevent healing) is essential.
Yet, picking the scabs is The Very Thing the psychologically dis-eased feel most compelled to do.
They are convinced that this "vice" is "virtue," and like an addict continually mistake another dose of the addictive substance as The Dose that will finally put me straight.
That "feel-right compulsion" is the taproot of The Disease Itself.
It's like the old quip: "If you want to be enlightened, just never think of monkeys."
Having said these things, I also realize that biochemistry is a Big Deal.
But I simultaneously hypothesize that the biochemistry of psychological health can be restored -- at least to a significant degree -- by the sustained mindfulness of "letting go." To some extent we create our biochemistry. (I am NOT saying that psycho-pharmaceuticals do not play an important role in the landscape of psychotherathy.)
Carl Jung said he never had a patient who got well by dwelling on his or her problem(s).
Rather, every patient who found healing did so by finding some new, transcendental passion, the pursuit of which lifted the afflicted person to a lofty new peak from which -- if s/he chose -- s/he could look back on the valley below and see the original problems exactly "as they were," but now -- from The Heights -- what was happening in the valley didn't matter.
Psychological disease is an absolute fixation with one's problems.
Psychological health on the other hand is the relativity of leaving ones problems in the valley while scaling a new mountain. (This "mountain" could well be the practice of mindfulness meditation, whether such practice is formal or informal.)
As I said to Danny recently: "It is always advisable to read any important document three times -- and while doing so with to suspend judgment as much as we can -- before letting ourselves pass judgment upon the 4th reading.
So, I suggest that you re-read what I have written above three times.
It may bear mention that it will take you considerably less time to read what I have written three times than it took me to write it.
Love
Alan
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