Western culture emphasizes individualism and, therefore, being authentic and true to who we are. Who we are, of course, is influenced by others, who also may be influenced by us. Social neuroscientists have posited that humans evolved through interactions, as each person, each group, and each region shared their stories with…

Becoming Our Own Protective Container

The Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, is the largest single structure on earth built by living organisms. A 2012 report showed that thirty percent of  it had already been killed off by ocean warming. Another 20 percent was lost in 2018. Half of the chain has disappeared into bleached, skeletal form, and this entire 2,600 kilometre chain of reefs off the northeast of Australia will all be dead within a decade. Eventually,…

 WITNESSING TREE SPIRITS  IN ORDINARY REALITY   

Our property on the Bay of Quinte is home to several species of native trees. In one area we call the glen, we’ve been witnessing an ongoing onslaught by invasive insects. Over a period of three to four years we watched helplessly as the ash trees slowly lost their battles to the Ash Borer Beetle. It bores pencil holes into the bark, then tunnels…

The thing about living is light. It surrounds us, breathes through us – not in us but through us. The force of it is subtle as the New Mexico breeze I hardly notice under the hot summer desert sun then suddenly become acutely grateful for when under the shade of a hundred-year-old cottonwood tree.

 Light informs my psychotherapeutic work with…

How are humans permanently changed by violence in their environment?

Human fossil history suggests that about 25% of us were killed with some form of human violence in the past. Those of us who study human violence longitudinally, and recognize it’s ubiquitous nature, are still trying to identify a common source.  Is “environmental violence”, the violence that occurs around us every day, in various forms including news reports and entertainment, itself the…

In April 2011 a million people gathered in London. News reporters showed that many were apparently weeping with joy. Broadcast in over 180 countries to perhaps 160 million viewers, the wedding was one of the most watched events in TV history. With an additional 70 million live internet streams, the Guinness Book gave it the record of “Most Live Streams for a Single Event”, beating out 2009’s memorial service for Michael Jackson (see below).

Hundreds of…

The root of the White man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. – James Baldwin

As I considered the dark anniversary that is approaching, after all the writing I’ve done about race in America, it came to me as a shock of insight. It was so obvious, yet I hadn’t noticed it before. I was talking with a friend about white privilege, when he interrupted me and…

Every American president at least since Harry Truman, and arguably for much longer, has encountered a unique political dilemma created by two conditions. The first is a political reality. Capitalism and imperial expansion have dominated American politics since the beginning of the republic – and, if we are to properly understand the events of November 22nd, 1963 as a military coup – the end of the republic. In this context, all Presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been servants…

Part Three

Who is he, who even were truth on his tongue, his way of speaking it would make truth almost as offensive as falsehood? – Melville

In America part of this heritage is channeled through our unique emphasis on individualism, and, I would add, our narcissism:  What is true for…

Part One:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. – Yeats

In a previous blog series I offered my perspective on how the gatekeepers of our culture deliberately exclude and demonize much progressive thought by associating it in the reader’s mind with excessively bizarre right-wing claims, thereby…

Psychologist, author (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief) and ritual leader Francis Weller has evolved a useful psychological concept.

The Predator is a…

Most of us are drawn by simple curiosity to Edgar Cayce’s readings, to discover what the world famous sleeping psychic saw while in a trance state. And Cayce often encountered spirits, as he states in reading 3744-1: "The spirit of all that have passed from the physical realm…remain within this sphere… There are thousands about us here at present." Cayce talked about spirit possession, and informs us in reading 5753-1, "Discarnate entities… may influence the thought of an entity." In reading…

When someone asks, “How are you?”, you might say, “Great!” or “I’m good” or “Hanging in there” or some such, and leave it at that. But if you are talking with a friend, loved one, or anyone who seems truly interested, likely you might share an anecdote about why you feel the way you do. For example, you might say:

• I left my house at the…

Part One

To really understand our stubborn attachment to the myth of American Innocence, we must become familiar with our heritage of the paranoid imagination. It combines eternal vigilance, literalistic religion and constant anxiety with contempt for the erotic and a highly creative style of sadism. Why these last two features? Because what we will not allow ourselves to desire becomes a vector of judgment, fear and hatred of those whom we perceive as being willing…

In America’s fevered, paranoid imagination the “internal other” as drug dealer tempts the good citizens and leads them from the clear air of the palace roof down into the basements of sin. But the terrorist, the “external other,” wants to tunnel under the walls and destroy the palace itself. Since long before 9/11/2001, the fear mongers have been in the lucrative business of reducing rational human beings to quivering children, willing to trade their celebrated freedoms for a thin promise of…

Lately, perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, Americans find themselves in a full-blown epidemic of “othering.” We are obsessed with cataloging the qualities of those individuals and groups who appear to embody everything that we cannot accept about ourselves.

Pick one or more: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un,…

 I continue my reflections on my spiritual pilgrimage to Peru in July 2018 in this latest blog post -  200 Steps to the Principle of Gratitude 

http://ow.ly/GT1J30mbnQ

Part Four

Myth is conveyed – and consumed – in narratives and images. So it is important to understand our most fundamental mythic image. The American obsession with individualism has been built up and buttressed by three centuries of stories, repeated in thousands of variations, of the lone, violent hero.

All societies evolved versions of Joseph Campbell’s classic…