Last Sunday, my son and I took a long bike ride in the late fall afternoon, as clear and bright a day as they come. The last of the fall colors were fading into tawny brown and rust, dead leaves falling in the breeze as we rode past farms and ponds.  It was a glorious time, and I went to bed thinking that this was the true life. I felt God was with me.

Monday morning was different, however - I was coming down with a cold, or maybe Lyme disease (again) from the new spate of ticks the pets were bringing in.  Joints sore, head groggy, I felt - as I warned my wife - hard.  Grumpy.  The high spirits, with its promise of celestial opening, had gone, replaced by an emotion best summed up by a grimace.  And the clouds had returned.

In the last book commented on, This is My Body," we find that body is essential to soul.  In daily reality, we find that it affects soul, or at least mood and outlook, tremendously.  One does not have to have a healthy body for spiritual realization, but it sure helps.  Back to the book, I did as I often do when reading something I like - follow references given, to read these other books, too, that help further the ideas.  This time, I found Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, which I started Monday and continued with Tuesday, in spite of an impending health issue and, more, the first game of the World Series.  True enough, it spoke again of the body.

From the preview of the book, I found that Willard is something of a theological star in the world of Protestantism.  His initial arguments I found less compelling because they are not issues brought up frequently in my circles, or so I thought.  But I was wrong.  To begin with, we hear the old Lutheran debate concerning the primacy of grace over deeds.  Ho-hum.  But then we move along; grace, in the Protestant tradition, has led some to believe, especially Calvinists, that this reprieve from God through Christ leads one directly to heaven, in spite of earthly sins.  But Willard, while not denying this possibility, says something here that is often greatly missed: that the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus stated, is not some pie in the sky place, but Here Now.  We should not live for an after life, but for a perfect life NOW.  It is promised, and, in his view, it can be done. How,exactly, beyond just faith, I have yet to read.  Hopefully the answer will be all that I hope for - a true blue print for ending the curse of the Fall.

But for now, we see the problem of body and spirit arise again. How can we have heaven on earth when we have sickness and death, beyond, as far as we know, human agency?  In my own life, the simple change of health and beauty to clouds and slight sickness, led me to be less than I would like to be.  If I had been a boss at work, I would have been called some all-too familiar words.  But this had nothing to do with an impulse from my inner being.  Rather, it was due to a change of external things, and of the body.  That's it. Where, then, this earthly paradise?

I doubt Willard will fulfill my need to know - if he did, and if his advice were easy enough for these feet of clay to follow, we would now have millions of perfected beings among us.  And yet the promise is there, according to the scriptures.  If we are to live for today, and not for that time when we cast off our mortal coils, how do we live paradise here on earth despite illness and pain?  I know it will have something to do with 'joining the will of God,' but that has always been so much easier said than done.  

Still, I look for hope in this book, as I have looked for it in so many others. It has come to me in the briefest moments of grace that heaven IS here, right now, and all we need to do is hold onto it. But why can't we?  Don't we want it?  If it is ego's, or Satan's (or one in the same) ploy, why can't, out of billions, even a few million get it right?  

Or do they?  Perhaps we are all allowed a few bad days every now and then.  That does not seem like heaven, but maybe it is close enough.  I can think of so many "keys" to spiritual perfection that I have read, but they all, in the end, go through the body, and its own crying, insistent needs.  We shall see what Willard brings next.  In the meantime, I will try to smile through the aches and pains.  FK       (Note - I wrote these words yesterday.  Having read more, Willard is convincing; my ears are perked.  More on that next week)      

             

My tendency in spirituality has always been towards the mystical - the timelessness of certain inner experiences that transcend the limited body, including the brain, our focal point of individuality. So the book This Is My Body, by Ragan Sutterfield, is both disconcerting and, it turns out, necessary.  Necessary, because many of us see the body as limited, as a shell, from which we will be freed to spirit - which, as Sutterfield points out with great clarity, was never the message of the founder of the Christian faith.  

It is so clear now. Jesus did not tell the sick to buck up and look to heaven, but he healed them, "with their own faith;" he did not spread mystical manna, but rather gave his body and blood, as a sign of his sacrifice and salvation; and, as the Nicene Creed of the Catholic Church clearly, unambiguously states, in the final days, believers will be resurrected, not only in soul, but in body. 

How could I have missed that?  But then again, how can anyone believe in a resurrected body?  While we protect ourselves from the decay of the human body, in burial and cremation and in chemical preservatives, we all have closed our noses to the rotting carcasses along the highway.  This, we know, is the way of all flesh.  The better question is, how could Jesus believe in what he said?  How could this be so? 

Sutterfield recounts his own struggles with his body.  Born into a strong Southern megachurch family (Baptist, I believe), he recounts how he himself was taught that the body was only a temporary vehicle, one that occasioned more pathways to hell (sex, drugs and such) than of resurrection.  But the body mattered.  His depictions of his own body - usually fat; as one girl in junior high stated, "you have bigger boobs than I do," - lead one, or at least me, to embarrassment.  The body, I sometimes think - yech! Except for moments of passion with certain others, it is usually the repository of boogers, smelly areas, ugly hair, gnarled feet, and dandruff.  That I have learned to look past the body - as much as possible - to get to the inner goodness of humans says as much about our culture of disembodied spirit as it does about me.  I was not raised to despise the body, like Sutterfield - but somehow, I have learned to dislike it.  It is a traitor; it gets sick, gives pain, and dies - and stinks.  How could that be a locus of any holy man, much less Jesus?

But Sutterfield proves, through his great knowledge of Christianity learned in becoming an Episcopalian priest, that the body is key, to us as individuals, and to the soul.  

Apart from scripture and theology, he lets us know through his own experience.  After a brief marriage with a woman who found she could no longer be attracted to his fat body, he began to focus again on the spiritual - and in this, learned that his body was as much a part of it as anything.  He became an amateur athlete - and then a triathlon athlete - and finally, an Iron Man, finishing the most grueling physical contest known, of swimming, biking, and running.  He does not "win" - he is still, in some ways, the fat boy of his youth - but he competes, and he completes.  It is not to win against others or even himself, but to fulfill the yearning in the soul for completion, in rising to greater and greater challenges to one's limitations.  In the body, Sutterfield finds a vehicle for the exploration that we all crave, whether we know it or not - to delve into the last frontier, which is not space, but the soul, or, more clearly said, the ultimate, the source, God.  

The Trinity - the Father, the Son, and the Holy spirit - show us a relationship in God that we mirror here on earth.  It is spirit and body and relationships, the body given to us as a vehicle for the latter as well, for in it, we can suffer, we can kill, we can love - we can FEEL.  And in this, we can feel for others, not in a fluffy abstract world, but in something with teeth, or, in Christ's case, with whips and nails.  He rose again in body, not just in spirit.  It was an ethereal body but a real one, too: it could walk through doors, but also eat; it could live forever, but also still boor the marks of his Crucifixion.  Important, yes, this body, even central, to the Christian faith.  

Which still, in spite of it all, leaves me helpless.  I am always impressed when the priest in our church raises the host and sings "The mystery of faith, " as the bread is turned into the actual body of Christ, as Catholics believe.  This on our own sacred bodies, too, leaves me helpless, for, with all the scripture and theology, I still know that the bread is no more body than any bread, just as our bodies age, die, and stink.  Resurrected?  I can't reason this.  But I can understand, with a poetic vision, the importance and holiness of the body.  It is a crucible; it does serve as a proving ground, its trials and triumphs an arrow to the soul. But resurrection?  The mystery of faith is just that - and the source of our greatest creativity, for it is never finished.  That is what mystery is; and so, in the mix of eternity, is our very temporal body - a mystery that defies, yet compliments, our immortality.  A good book for an easy read, and some deeper thought as well.  FK                          

Today, a new essay, "Hell House," under "Essays" in the website. FK

When I was a kid, one of my favorite bedtime books was Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," now known to most through the Disney cartoons.  Just as Disney had distorted the spooky magic of Mary Poppins, so I think he had taken out the depth that was hidden in The Jungle Book, but that is not the point I wish to make here.  Rather, the book my mother read from was an anthology, and in it was another set of short stories by Kipling called "Just So Stories."  They were titled "How the Leopard Got Its Spots," and "How the Crocodile Got Its Smile" (I think), and so on - clever little myths about the nature of Indian wildlife, taken in whole or in part from Indian folklore, and similar to, but more fun than, Aesop's Fables.  They are "just so" because the leopard does, indeed, have spots - and the blanks are filled in from there as to why, as happy as we please.  It is a form of purely speculative reasoning - we take the facts and work back from them to find the cause.  In this case, serious scientific considerations were not used.  The stories are, for the most part, for children, and for fun.

Going not so far back in time, to the college years, I had a professor who would often call anthropological theories "just so" stories, because they did not have solid facts behind them. For instance, it was theorized that Jewish circumcision was really done not as a mark of Jehovah on his chosen people, as the people themselves state, but for health reasons.  Looked into, one can see that the author just assumed that such customs must have a practical reason, and health is what he chose to focus on.  Looked at more closely, however, the idea loses it clout; the health advantages as we know today are minimal at best, and would have been too small to have been noticed.  In fact, given the lack of antibiotics in those days, the health risk may have been fairly large. But it fit into the author's mind set - it must be! But really, it was just-so, no more real than a leopard getting its spots from - mud? A bird's feet?  I forget now, but something silly and fun.      

So it occurred to me this morning while thinking of Hans Kuhn's paradigm shifts in science at the sound of a woodpecker going away at our roof fascia.  I chased him away, but then recalled the article I had read about how woodpeckers can survive the impact of their pecking.  They have a liquid cushion in the brain.  And that led to the marvel of the near-perfection of species in their environment, and this led to thoughts of evolution.  How could it be that such interlocking perfection could have happened by blind chance?  Could evolution, then, merely be another scientific paradigm? As Kuhn said, science doesn't "progress" as we think it does, but only changes paradigms.  These paradigms remake the world for us conceptually, and actually seem to make the world more intelligible - but they don't.  They are only more "just so" stories that form and are formed by the social gestalt that SEEM to make more sense, but ultimately do not.

I have taught anthropology and have happily taught evolution.  To me, it seems like the perfect mechanism for God to shape the world, even if the scientists can't find an intelligently guided direction in it.  In other words, I have no purist cause against it. But also none for it.  Considered again, it seems to me that Darwinian evolutionary theory forms the perfect bridge between religion and science of the 19th century, where one was built on the other, even as it refuted it.  Before the age of science, there was humanly- understandable order to the cosmos  but it had come from the mind of God. Reason, it was seen, was God's reason in us, and by following it through, we could come close to grasping the mind of God.  In evolution, however, there was humanly understandable order to the universe, but it was Not made by a god.  So it was that, just as humans of the time in Europe were beginning to think of the world in terms of blind cause and effect, the billiard ball model, so, too, it was found that the universe was run by this same logic.

Just- so convenience or coincidence?  From Kuhn, we are forced to consider the former - that the universe does not act as we think, but that we only think it does; until, that is, we change the way we think for another that is BETTER.  But it may not be better. If history has any basis to it, the new theory may not be better, but rather just another story that we choose, for some reason or reasons, to believe.

In the literature of mystics, the mind of God - and the definition here is necessarily lose - is not knowable in a human sense. Given the great unanswerables in our own modern thought - where does it all come from and what does it all mean? (all thought systems have their unanswerables), this would seem to make the most sense, even in a world beyond our senses. In this case, humility and openness to wonder make the most sense. We are not the end all - not ourselves, and not our civilization. We may count the spots on the leopard, but the rest is just a story.  In the muted excitement of the colors of fall, I am more than willing to accept this, that beauty and being are just so, in and of themselves - at least for now.  FK             

"I dreamed that life was happiness.  When I awoke, I found that life was  service.  When I served, I found that service was happiness."  (from a homily, taken from an Indian poet (Tagore?)

"Mr. Shaw, are you happy?" "Happy? Happiness, madame, is for pigs."  (Conversation attributed to GB Shaw)

Yes, I realize that this topic is too big for a brief blog, but let's give it a try.  It is so big because happiness is an individual affair, or so it seems. It is also elusive.  What makes us happy one moment, or one year, or several, will not work for us later on. Finding happiness for an hour is easy; for a day is harder; for a year, almost impossible. 

For instance, I have dreams which continually put me back at the co-ops of Ann Arbor, where I was a graduate student.  There was a lot of work and anxiety back then, but I have long looked at this period as the happiest time of my life.  It is because I was young, and more importantly, had found my niche. I thought I had found what I would do for the rest of my life, and it would provide me with everything I then thought important: prestige, summers off, research, travel, and adventure.  This did not work out, but I have long tried to decipher the meaning of this repetition. Am I constantly going back in my mind as a reminder of a life unfulfilled?  Is it the anxiety of making it in a tough department, a sort of PTS disorder that keeps me going back?  Because I often get the feeling of suffocation, is it because of sleep apnea, and a paring of this time, somehow, with oppression?

Perhaps all of the above, but this morning I awoke thinking it had to do with happiness; for in my dreams back at the co-ops, besides always being late for a class, there are often interesting romantic possibilities and beer parties.  I love beer, and who doesn't love a romance?  And so, happiness; but why the repetition?  It occurs to me that it means this type of happiness is, in the end, for pigs.  I am too old for beer parties and youthful romance. This morning, I felt as if the message was saying, "grow up!  Get over it!" 

It is over, and in any case, this period of my life was certainly not complete happiness, and certainly was not "forever," and would never have been, regardless. 

In recent years, I have simply not looked for happiness - as I had not, in many ways, in pursuing my career.  It comes and goes, and, except in very low times, it does not matter.  I live, I do what I have to and a little of what I want to, and things work out OK. But service?  If happiness of the sort I dream of is for pigs, could the happiness of a life-time, a mature and long-standing kind, be found in service?  

I don't know.  I volunteer now and then for small-town charities and so on, and it is always worth it.  But happiness?  It seems to me that too much service would become a burden.  Mother Theresa, the poster woman of service, suffered horribly in the slums of Calcutta.  The people she served were often not the doe-eyed grateful poor that the media loves to display when it virtually markets refugees and immigrants and the poor in general.  In reality, in Calcutta they stole, they raped the younger nuns, they threatened and hurt, and even killed, those others who were weaker than they.  They were, in effect, all - too - human. Mother Theresa told of this, and it has been written - I do not know if it is true - that she had to undergo more than one exorcism, for all the evil she was exposed to.  She went on anyway, to reveal what she believed was the Face of Christ in every human.  

I do not believe that she EVER thought that her service would bring her happiness.  She did it for her belief, which she admitted wavered at times.  Think of the hell that must have been.  In the end, did she review her life and find that it possessed a deeper happiness?  I don't know.  But, in retrospect, it certainly wouldn't have brought self-chastisement, at least the service part (she probably never thought she did enough, and in that would have found fault.  Imagine.)  By contrast, in the end, the self-satisfied professor, the confident millionaire, the famous and wealthy of all types must certainly feel dissatisfaction at their lack of genuine service, the kind that doesn't buttress the ego, for in the end we all witness the dissolution of everything the ego once felt important.  Wealth, sexual conquests, parties, all those good times must seem, in the face of the infinite, to be the toys of a child, with most of the time spent on them a waste.  

Yes, then, that's it - the past in my dreams is a reference to small things, to things I must get past.  But service, real service, is such a big thing.  It is not about us or our happiness.  How strange, and yet probably true, that in not looking for happiness at all, but for someone else's well-being, we might find the one enduring kind of happiness that does not look like happiness at all, until we are finally able to see just where it is we are, and what we have really lived.  FK  
          

We went to the cabin in Upper Michigan this week for the foliage, and as usual, got much more.  The day we arrived was chilly and windy and rain was coming in.  By the next day, the winds had increased and the rain came in nearly sideways, looking like blizzard - snow.  And the big lake - Lake Superior - wow!  The "gales of November come early" would describe it, whitecaps consuming the coast in an outpouring of frantic energy.  And then the next day, peace and sun, the trees so beautiful they made us happy just seeing them.

There are no outside connections at the cabin, so we also read, and listened to a CD on the battery-powered radio/player. It was a book about Apollo 11, and it so penetrated my brain that this was all that I could think about before going to sleep.  Sleep was a different matter, however.  During the day, I had also been reading a book by Patrick Harpur titled The Silent Tradition of the Soul, and it was this that had burrowed into my unconscious, for it is about the unconscious, and the trembling of our soul as it attempts to speak to the hard daytime layer we often call our selves.  

So many things, so clear came the dreams in sleep - portraying both fears and, unusual for me, answers to fears.  Not as one might read in a self-help book, but feelings and pictures and events that had me form the answers later, in the words of the awake world.  

Last night was no different.  In this dream, I was at a meeting of people looking for jobs, mostly men in business suits.  I was not there for myself, but for my son, and I was looking all around for him, expecting him in a suit as well, trying to find a good paying job. After some searching, I noticed how odd my suit coat felt on me - and how silly.  The others appeared to be at odds themselves, uncomfortable in their suited roles as up- and- coming, or made, people of commerce or certain dignified professions.  And then the feeling came - that being here was wrong.  At that, I began to wake, and the words came in explanation.  They exposed nothing new to the world at all, just as Harpur had talked about in his book.  Our glimpses of our inner workings often are not novel - in fact, they are personal stories built on old motifs, or archetypes, as Carl Jung had called them.  And so this dream was, simple, yet layered and complex. 

The answer that came from it was obvious - I did not want my son in such a situation, even as he is being encouraged to finish college. It was - is - wrong for him, phony, a put-on, this suited world.  Then the understanding went to a deeper strata - that our suits, our professions, even much of our persona, form a cover; a suit of armor, really.  My first words to myself on waking were, "we put on our shields of invulnerability." 

So the dream was layered - at first, about my thoughts on the business world (unfair, I know, but this is subjective and specific), about what I want for my son (something that is more genuine for him) and, second, about the persona, our exterior waking selves. The latter, as far as my inner self was telling me, is a shield to protect our personal and more tender inner workings, what really makes us us - or, one could say, what makes our soul.  But in protecting this soul, the shield might also block us from ourselves, make of us people who cannot even recognize ourselves.  We become locked in our shields by no longer simply hiding behind them, but identifying with them.   We become the shield and, in so doing, lose touch with our deeper selves.

Except in dreams.  But somehow, this book spurred more meaningful dreams, as if I needed the nudge to see beyond discomfort and fear.  And oddly, there was humor there as well. The kind of humor that says, hey, it's all an act, an act so deeply portrayed that we often stand in anxious horror before it - but still, just an act.  

But the fierce waves of  Superior have not left me, either.  There is something real to fear out there, as long as we are disconnected from the ultimate, as long as we are separate individuals who die.  It is, indeed, an intense play we are part of. But there is so much wonder and awe behind it that we should not miss it. We should, it seems to me, use our shields only as shields and not become them; we should enjoy the play a little more for what it is, a temporary play of wars and kings and armor, as then step back now and then - no, often - into what endures, the marvel in the waves and the leaves held not as shields but as intimations of the greatness of our world.  FK      
          

Today, a new essay, "Howl," under Essays in the website.  FK

In Bernard Katstrup's difficult book, Meaning in Absurdity," we find some gems that make the struggle through his dense philosophy on idealism worthwhile.  His discussion of Hans Kuhn, a Catholic priest and noted European philosopher, is a case in point.

I remember Kuhn well from the 1970's, when my father's sudden interest in things theological brought him into the house.  And while his search for God ended in an uncomfortable agnosticism - such it often is if one delves into the intellectual side of faith - for me, it made the term "paradigm shift" intelligible.  And a good thing it was, for it became the intellectual term of the moment, now subsumed in our collective vocabulary along with "charisma" and "diversity."  But Katstrup makes it clear that Kuhn wasn't fooling around, which is why Kuhn was temporarily silenced by the Church at the time.  Speaking of science in particular, Kuhn said that science does not advance or progress as we have been taught to believe; rather, it changes.  What changes is found in what we decide or are given to notice, and what we decide to ignore.  For instance, Newton's idea of gravity was at first perceived as a ridiculous fairy tale: what, invisible "rays" held us to the earth, and the planets to each other and the sun?  But the idea stuck, was made real by scientific experiments, and became dogma until Einstein came along - and created a new paradigm.

But the idea is more encompassing than that: our world, the essence of our reality, is also a paradigm, and real change happens to how we view reality when the paradigm shifts.  Says Kuhn, "When paradigms change, the world changes with them." 

But what, then, of objective reality?  Katstrup believes, and does a good job of convincing us, that ALL reality is subjective - and how can he be wrong?  All our reality is perception, viewed through the biological lenses of sense and brain - and even those are merely perceptions of mind.  There is, then, no provable objective reality.  Kuhn's observations and deep thoughts echo this, for whatever reality is, we are swayed by mass perception - paradigms - more than anything else in how we view, or think about, our reality.

Better still in this vein is Kastrup's outline of Carl Jung's investigations.  Most know something of this, but Katstrup makes it crystal clear.  We are, says Jung, like islands in the ocean.  The land is what we believe ourselves to be, but our greatest bulk lies below the water, in the unconscious.  At base, like mountains, we become a single part of the collective whole.  And beneath that lies the magma, the undifferentiated potential that will someday push itself into being, where it will be formed by a myriad of forces into realities, both shared and individual.  

Katstrup, in his exposition, uses some terminology that I have been using for years - that our egos, our selves, are only thin crusts on the great ocean of being; and that we are actors who have forgotten that we are actors, believing too much in the characters we have chosen, or been chosen, to portray.  

It might sound like mumbo jumbo, but the implications of both philosophical observations are well seated and profound.  It means, for one, that our life energy, the bases of our being, is immortal - perhaps not our ego, but our greater selves that we hardly know.  It also means that our reality is far more flexible than we have imagined. For Kuhn, from what I have read, our direction for these possibilities are arbitrary - which would have gotten him in trouble with the Church (I am probably wrong about this - it is hard to believe that Kuhn did not voice some idea about a direction for our reality systems); but for Jung, they are directed towards "individuation,"  or wholeness.  Again, though, I am left to wonder whether by this he means that we have an evolutionary movement in society, or that each society and each individual merely must try to make a whole from what is given (or what is made through the unconscious) from the cultural paradigm.  

Still, it is exciting stuff.  We know that our intellect and the technology that comes from it, no matter how wonderful, falls woefully short of bringing us to a totality, to the base of Truth. But that's OK - in spite of our paradigms, we are still connected to the base, to the font of being.  In its pursuit, we might change the very texture of reality; and in finding it, which each of us can do, we can find the limitless.  That, to Jung, is our ultimate goal, and it is only our belief in our temporary roles in this temporary reality that keeps us from this, this that we are destined to find in the end.  FK                        

A few nights ago, I started and finished a book, Twisted Years, by John Smith about his time in the 1st World War.  I do not think this book is on Amazon, or anywhere in bookstores.  It was a manuscript dug up from John's attack by his granddaughter after his death, one that her mother had read to her as a child. The book was published for friends and family, and is largely unedited, straight from John's mouth.  It came to my hands from another of his granddaughters, my neighbor.  

The beauty of the book is its complete lack of pretension, something that would be nearly impossible for me to write.  It does not get into deep inner thoughts, but rather, sums up hard emotions with a few choice words, like "it was pretty bad."  I did learn a few things, but mostly, it read like a chat with an old timer at the local breakfast diner.  

It did get me to thinking, though: this man went through some horrific events.  The WWI battlefields were often left strewn with corpses, because the front lines remained static, sometimes for years, and it would have been suicide to collect them.  The freshly dead fed the rats that crowded the field, their (the human's) guts and brains and severed limbs scattered about, while the older dead remained rotting or partially mummified, sometimes held up in ghastly poses on the barbed wire defenses. Horrible, disease ridden, a nightmare.  

This is all well known.  What seems impossible is that people like John then went back home, took up simple jobs, married and had families.  They went to the Polka fests and danced and listened to the new craze, radio shows, and struggled through the depression just like everyone else.  They pushed hard on the President to not get into WWII, knowing how bad it could be, but once in, joined the fight with either their own presence or that of their sons.  Their life in America went on, apparently seamless. 

We know now of Post Traumatic Stress and how many returning soldiers are plagued by it, sometimes for years, sometimes for life, but most get over the worst of it quickly and get on with their lives.  My dad, a WWII vet, was one of these, as were most of his friends.  But you just know that such experiences never really go away.

In the book I am currently reading (more on it later - I forget the title and author at the moment), the author discusses the Jungian map of the human psyche.  There is the conscious - the ego, or what we know in waking life as ourselves; there is the personal unconscious; then the collective unconscious; and finally the open field, the point of the template of being.  I will get into the last two in another blog.  What is relevant here is the personal unconscious.

According to this author, Jung claimed that the power of the conscious world, the waking consensus reality, was so strong that it often over- road personal experience, to the point where the individual felt certain outlandish (but real) memories were nearly irrelevant (such it is that PTS sufferers feel that they are living in a nightmarish dream).  However, the unconscious NEVER loses those experiences.  Instead, they continue to live out a life in the unconscious, often recalled in dreams.  In any case, Jung found that these "forgotten" events continue to move the ego, the conscious self, in ways that are unknown to it.  Thus we are products of our experiences in far greater ways than we think.

Add to this, that the deeper levels of the unconscious also push the ego in a certain direction - that is, towards individuation, or "being" integrity - and we find we have a destiny, and self, constantly at work that we know little or nothing about.  We are, in many ways, both captives of our past, and puppets of a master blueprint beyond time and place.  

Keeping, again now, to the ego and personal unconscious, it is easy to see why we look for signals in dreams, in fortune telling, or in psychiatry to find out exactly who we are - for we know that we do not know, that something strange is pushing us on.  That this is so, only look to John Smith; regular guy, good community man, comfortable in his own skin, yet also filled with visions of death stalking him at every turn, leading him in ways he cannot know and, in many ways, does not want to know.  FK      
         

Today, a new essay, "West, Revisited," under Essays in the website.  FK