EXISTENTIAL FRUSTRATION

Disaster in the form of existential or life-style caused frustration overwhelmed an old rural parish some years ago as a traditional way of life collapsed and a community fell apart due to twentieth/twenty-first century social and technological stresses. The farming community had been hard hit by drought, a serious decline in land values and a slump in commodity prices. Some church members were losing their sense of identity while others were living on the edge of financial disaster. Many kids were leaving and few in college were interested in returning home to farm. A brisk drug trade developed when some people tried to cope with their stresses chemically and two or three committed suicide when the stresses grew too great. Major changes had been frustrating the rural community for some time, even before the bland old pastor died and his assistant retired. The community’s spiritual, economic and social anchors were dragging and many people were frightened. When two new new priests arrived, they tried to adjust to reality by shifting with the times but unfortunately, that antagonized those fearful members who yearned to return to the past.

The young priests and nuns not only taught traditional religion, meaning to some of the people only what occurred within the walls of the sanctuary during worship, but also the virtue of demonstrating faith and love in the outside society. They wanted the people to understand the dozen debilitating American wars since World War II in spiritual terms, to ask their politicians why they were committing financial suicide in the name of faith and patriotism. The priests and nuns wanted their people committed to civil, legal and financial rights for minority people and to be generous when feeding, clothing and educating the poor migrant children who'd come north to labor in their fields. The leaders were trying to keep the church alive and attractive to the next generation by asking the people to openly discuss values that had always been irrelevant to faith as practiced in the long static community. As the farm economy faltered still more and farmers and merchants fell into trouble, some of the more frustrated and aggressive members of the parish started a campaign to get rid of the trouble-makers who challenged them. Thus, they assumed, they could return to the good old days. They didn’t understand that old traditions and ideologies succeed only in the times and situations which they evolved. One elderly member told me:

I don't even recognize my church anymore and I hate it! These priests are changing everything I know and love. Did not the holy fathers in Rome assure us for fifty years that fighting Commies was God's will and that we would be blessed for our loyalty to America and the church? Why is God punishing us now?

The fearful leaders didn't understand the law of unintended consequences. One paranoid group felt there had to be an evil plot of some kind causing their pain and some men formed a local militia to drive off the villains. Quarrels and fist fights broke out at the altar during communion and in the chancel after services. The priests were harassed at all hours of the day and night with obscene phone calls. Several cars were sabotaged and a church bus was burned and the nun principal of the parish school was forced off the road by a group of cursing militia-men in pickup trucks waving shotguns.

Both priests eventually resigned and Bishop Roy Blocker refused to send out replacements.

He said, no one trying to serve God should have to undergo the harsh judgments and treatments their priests and nuns did. The parish was no longer a community in Christ.

The church had always been a sanctuary for the several hundred farm and village families who worshipped together but it couldn't keep the world at bay in changing times. The anxious and alienated members of the parish crippled the congregation rather than adapt, when the only way they could survive was through accepting change and dealing with new circumstances. After he reopened the church, Bishop Blocker explained;

For centuries we brought our people up in a static and unchanging church atmosphere. We prided ourselves that as God’s church nothing ever changed. We were eternal. We still believe in the unchanging revelation that God made in Christ. But while God hasn’t changed, everything else has. Unfortunately, there will always be some persons who neurotically need more certitude than we can legitimately offer, a certitude that Jesus himself didn’t have in Jerusalem’s garden of olives when he questioned God’s mission for his life.

Thist is true spiritual bankruptcy suffered by many that is caused by the existence we choose or have forced on us by society. Lest you think that too strong an example of alienation, during the week this anecdote was first written, Jeff Rolvag, our handsome and charming next door neighbor hanged himself from a basement rafter not thirty feet from Jard’s desk. He had hidden his existential alienation very well but he certainly isn’t alone in his frustration and the aggression or apathy that follows.

SELF FOCUS -- Have you seen situations in families, schools, companies or communities when life style created frustration causes conflicts?

THE LOVE PYRAMID - Mini Course

We must insist on this right here -- up front. As St. Paul and many other brilliant scholars of the human condition told us, a satisfying life must combine faith, hope and love -- with the greatest element of all being love.

Certainly we have found nothing that even remotely takes the place of love in our lives and our relationships with each other, our children, their children and their children's kids. With love, virtually everything falls into place. Without love, nothing fits well into the mosaic of a meaningful life.

Also, after everything else you can say about humans -- after discussing the personality patterns, life-themes, values, attitudes and expectations we write about, we agree with psychological great -- Carl Rogers and with John the Beloved Disciple. There are only two kinds of people in the world. The two are not black and white, rich and poor or even male and female, as much as we appreciate that last arrangement that seems especially created for our benefit.

There are only persons who are capable of loving others and persons who do not love anyone except those who in one way or another contribute something of value to themselves.

A vital factor we must discuss in the beginning is that while the love and sexual intimacy a couple shares is vital to satisfaction, the physical attractions of our youthful years are never enough to carry a man and woman through a life-time. In our FULFILLMENT course, a companion program to this, we have written extensively about existential frustration and alienation that occurs when men and women fail to find a consistent sense of purpose in their lives. We cannot even find happiness by seeking it -- happiness is a fleeting by-product of living a consistently meaningful life. Like sleep during a restless night, the harder we pursue happiness, the faster it flees from us. When we spend our years seeking happiness through pleasure, possessions, prestige and power -- lacking a sense of purpose in our activities and permanence in our relationships, life remains secular and pointless and becomes conflicted with confusion and discouragement. And that is simply too much to expect the sexual relationship of a man and woman to overcome. Humans need more -- we believe that each person requires the crucial support that comes from living a complete life -- that occurs through:

Worshipping devoutly, relating warmly, serving faithfully, learning wisely, persevering bravely and playing enthusiastically.

Unless we develop mature attitudes and high expectations, no marriage can succeed. Most young couples who divorce and put their children under great stress simply abandon their marriages much too soon. There is a great deal to be said for toughing it out through the learning curve, for becoming better partners rather than shopping around for some wonderful and perfect lover who will cater to your every whim. You shall have to become a spiritually maturing person to whom your partner can relate in love and friendship, without becoming your stooge. Hang on until both lovers become more maturity along life's journey. Actually, in marriage as in most of life, much satisfaction comes from showing up when needed, just being there on time for the people who love you.

A loving couple that matures in faith, hope and love, through grace within the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life, will love far more deeply than they did during the simplistic and usually naive sexual urges of youth.


THE LOVE PYRAMID

To be at its best, love must mature up through the motivational pyramid shown here. To stop in one of the lower tiers is to limit the joy a person can enjoy in a lasting relationship.




Becoming *** PHILOSOPHICAL *** Purpose/Permanence

Doing *** PSYCHOLOGICAL *** Power/Prestige

Having *** PHYSICAL *** Pleasure/Pain


PHYSICAL LOVE -- (Pleasure/Pain) Love that is limited to the physical aspects of a relationship is focused largely on arousal, passion and tension release. It makes little difference who the partner is. Any compliant body can be used, for the person is secondary to the pleasure being received by the user. Such physical passion can be shifted from one sexual supplier to another with little or no regret or concern, from one seduction to the next, as Joe Namath boasted when he slept with a thousand women in his first few years of playing professional football. Such a person can go from one prostitute to another, from one singles bar to the next, from a tryst with one lover to a new one. One night stands, sexual fantasies, pornographic movies and books and wily seductions occur within the physical aspects of love. When one person is used for another's pleasure, even if both agree in advance, it is little more than mutual masturbation. If the other person is abused or damaged in the relationship, he or she can be discarded and replaced with no more regret than for a piece of malfunctioning machinery. Many adolescents, in the first wild rush of sexuality, relate to one another at this primitive level. Unfortunately, many adults fail to mature beyond it. They continue romancing, marrying, divorcing and romancing again in a madcap search for a perfect partner, chasing the wild excitement of youth in a stage that needs a lot more stability in order to be satisfying.

Only this morning as this chapter is being written, we attended the funeral of a friend who made a great deal of money through his knowledge and energy. Donald Knopf was as hard a worker as we've ever known, not only for himself but for the poor and needy of the community. He gave an enormous amount of time and money to helping people with problems. Nevertheless, as his friends and relatives filled the front pews, we've never seen such a complex mix of brothers and sisters, half sisters and brothers, cousins, in-laws and former wives in our lives. At the age of fifty-five Don was still falling in and out of love like a teen-ager, still drifting from one woman to the next, giving her several children before falling out of love and seeking a better partner. He never did think in terms of becoming a better husband and father rather than wanting a perfect lover who would let him feel the sexual excitement of youth again. He never matured into the second and third tier of a loving relationship and if he enjoyed a long succession of sexual partners, his dozen children from several families have had a difficult time growing up without a father.

PSYCHOLOGICAL LOVE -- (Power/Prestige) In this aspect of a relationship, physical arousal, pleasure and satiation occurs as in the physical but the affection doesn't stop there. This is a deeper relationship that binds lovers together as they mature through the more complex needs and activities of adult love. The lovers not only desire one another for what each offers, but both have a deeper investment in the other's health and happiness. They trust each other with their egos, because loving another person makes you vulnerable as well as calling up protective feelings. This is the level at which many good marriages and love affairs function, especially in the more mellow middle years and while the lovers do care deeply about each other, they may still have difficult times. After all, while you and your lover love each other, differences of opinion and a variety of needs remain. Few couples never quarrel just because they love one another. Jard knew two young people who lived together as lovers without making the final commitment of marriage. Mildred was a graduate student in psychology and Henry an executive in a huge corporation. She said, when she was being offered a teaching and research job in a distant university:

I love Harry, I really do, but he cannot leave town with me. Changing companies now would cost him a vice-presidency at 3 M and I cannot ask for that. But then, I cannot see that my research and teaching about childhood learning is any less importance to society than selling glue and sandpaper. If I insisted he come to Columbus, he's soon resent me and If I turned down my offer there to stay here with him, I'd soon feel I'd given up too much after having worked so hard for my doctorate. I have to be true to my own vision of a fulfilling life.

Millie and Harry flew back and forth for a year or so but eventually drifted apart and met and married other lovers. Perhaps it was just as well they found someone else, for their careers meant more to them when they separated than the relationship.

PHILOSOPHICAL LOVE -- (Purpose/Permanence) This third aspect of love includes the passion from the physical and the sense of belonging from the psychological as it continues to include crucial spiritual elements of a lasting love relationship. The lovers have matured beyond the limitations of psychological games that cause pain to become tender and compassionate. They live with a lasting sense of purpose and permanence in the affair for they know they belong together for life. The lovers support each other against all attackers; see the relationship as being spiritual and having mystical overtones. There is neither a desire to find a substitute sexual partner nor a determination to play a dominance game through which the lover is manipulated and used. Such a love affair has taken on a lovely patina of faith, hope and love as well as grace, a glow that is shared in mutual satisfaction. The development of love at this level takes time, although for many it comes long before the later stages of one's life. The whirling of two eccentric personalities around different centers of gravity sooner or later abraid a loving fit although for some time it may include considerable smoke and flying sparks!

To best focus your love in the philosophical aspects of life, mature as a person and behave as a loving soul:

BECOME WARM AND ACCEPTING OF YOUR LOVER -- Perceive the other as a viable and independent personality rather than as a second rate appendage to yourself.

BECOME ENCOURAGING AND SUPPORTIVE OF KEY CHOICES -- Help your lover become more and more knowledgeable and wise about life's opportunities.

BECOME TOLERANT OF LIFE'S INEVITABLE GROWTH FRICTION -- No two persons ever mature at the same rate - one will grow, causing tension and only later will the other catch up.

It's common for psychologists and counselors to recommend we accept the people we love for what they are. However, that isn't good enough for by accepting them as they already are, we may be condemning them to mediocrity. We must accept the persons we help for what they have the potential to become. Don't nag, of course, but help others mature consistently through the channels of fulfillment. Your spouse, your children and your friends and relatives deserve this of you.

Always accept the fact that you can control only one half of a relationship, your half, while your lover controls his or her half. Trying to control another adult's half is a quick step to a relationship disaster for no individual worthy of love and respect will let a neurotic control freak dominate themselves, their children and their choices.

Remember;

The only way two lovers can agree all the time is when one them stops thinking.

The only way to keep an accepting lover is to become an accepting lover.

The fact that we disagree and occasionally quarrel doesn't mean we are not in love.


Two people in the very elastic harness of marriage seldom mature at the same rate and that spells trouble in many relationships. A woman who's been a secretary for twenty years and comes home one evening to announce she's been accepted in a law school program is rocking her family's boat. So is the middle manager who informs his kids, attending an exclusive and expensive private school, that he's taking a year off work to write a novel, that they'll have to attend a public school and stop buying designer clothes.

Growth friction can be compared to movement between the earth's great tectonic plates. The silent, hidden movement can be so slow as to remain invisible for a long time although stresses keep building. Finally, the pressures become greater than the resistance and the landscape lurches into motion as an earthquake. Sometimes windows are broken and crockery smashed. Some long-standing buildings cannot take the strain and they collapse. Just as many marriages do when the relationship cannot stand the changes occurring in them because the lovers mature at different speeds and in different directions.


PROJECT ONE -- LOVE LEVEL IDENTIFICATION

To discover the level of your love for another person, physical, psychological or philosophical, in the pleasure/pain, power/prestige or purpose/permanence aspects of existence, complete this project.

FIRST -- Relax comfortably in a chair or on a bed.

Visualize in your mind the image of the person you now love or most recently loved in an adult relationship. Think of the reasons you loved this person, recall his or her good points in the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life. Fix the image of that lover firmly in your mind.

SECOND -- Accept the fact or a terrible tragedy.

Through an automobile accident or an unexpected illness, your lover dies suddenly. He or she is gone - there's no doubt about it. You are left alone. Accept your loss, mourn it deeply, feel frustration and anger but in time you realize you must continue living. There is your job to do and children to love, friends to support -- so you start adapting despite the deep loss.

THIRD -- Receive a great gift from God.

Through the remarkable science of cloning, God offers you a perfect double of that dear, lost lover. The clone is perfect in every detail. He or she looks talks and thinks like the lover, makes love the same way and supports you in the same manner. He or she wants your support also.

There is only one catch in your miracle. You and your newly restored lover didn't share the mutual experiences and relationships you had in the past. Both the good and the bad are missing from the relationship you and your original lover shared. You are starting at square one now.


NOW -- To identify the level at which your current love is operating, transfer your love to the newly cloned lover. Tell how you shall do that.

If you can readily transfer your love to the new lover, your love is operating at the pleasure/pain or physical level.

If your love can be transferred with some new experiences and a growing relationship, it is functioning at the power/prestige or psychological level.

If your love cannot be transferred without an entire galaxy of mutually satisfying experiences, your love is currently at the purpose/permanence or the philosophical level.

Secrets of Lovers Relationships

The Loving Psychology of Life-Long Sexual Intimacy





* Do You want exciting intimacy?

* Do You want to save or improve your marriage or relationship?

* Do you want less conflict in your relationship?

* Do You want to have greater influence with your lover?

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Our Printable eBook Course shows you how to create a meaningful relationship that assures permanent love and consistent joyful sexuality with printable self-focus exercises and projects in every chapter.

The Course Includes:

* Your Keys to a Loving and Lasting Relationship.

* Benefit: learn the personal tools to revitalize and fulfill your
relationship.

* Consistent joyful sexuality in your relationship.


* Benefit: achieve sexual intimacy without guilt or game playing to increase your joy.

* Predict your Personality Pattern to influence and your partners.

* Benefit: learn specific communication techniques to better influence your partner.

* Learn to manage your conflicts through the Three Stage Conflict Avoidance and Control ASRAC PROCESS.

* Benefit: learning this alone could save your marriage or relationship.

* Create Couple's Contracts that really work for you and your partner.

* Benefit: negotiate about money, sex, discipline and everything else without conflict.

* Self-Focus Exercises in every Chapter.

* Benefit: achieve personal empowerment and understanding.

* Learn many interesting things about yourself and your partner with our Personality Pattern Predictor.

Men and women are mirror image souls who need one another for fulfillment - for intimacy caresses through the long nights of winter, for the yin and yang of masculine and feminine strengths, for perpetuating ourselves immortally through our children.

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Warmly,
Jard and Roberta DeVille

ELEMENTS OF MATURITY Mini-course

There are five aspects of maturity that are crucial to a person’s efforts when maturing as a person of faith, hope, love and significance.   Each one is important to an ambitious person but when they are integrated into one’s life-style, they become powerful indeed.  

Spiritual Values (Ethical Virtues) --  are vital in a maturing life -style because they determine what we consistently do because something is right or never do because something else is wrong.  When strong personal and family or organizational values are in place, people can usually avoid most of the self-defeating choices that haunt individuals and families.  Not only do ethical virtues give us a standard against which to measure our intentions, thus avoiding mistakes,  they allow our decisions to be made without endless  discussions, debates and agonizing introspection sessions.  

Positive Attitudes -- are rooted in the personal world view of individual members and entire families or organizations.  When  men and women develop positive attitudes because of  faithful and friendly connections, there are few limits as to what they can accomplish together.  Sound attitudes enable a family to mature in love and service because many more people are included in meaningful attitudes and activities.  

High Expectations -- work wonders in groups and for individuals that aim high rather than toward mediocre results and rewards.   There are indeed miracles accomplished by dreams that are visualized by dedicated men and women and brought to fruition by a community of achievers that works well together.  

Mature Beliefs --  are based on a real understanding of how people and things work in the real world.  You may believe that most people are trustworthy but don’t invest your bankroll without trusting and verifying the honesty of the salesman.  Existential psychologist  Wayne Dyer has written quite well on the power of beliefs in his book YOU’LL SEE IT WHEN YOU BELIEVE IT.   

Responsible Choices -- this is where the rubber of life meets the road through planning well to identify an important goal,  create a practical vehicle through which to attain that goal and then work hard and smart to bring it to reality.  This is where the work gets done by men and women who commit themselves to the meaningful activities of their families, companies, communities and churches.   

No one reaches maturity and no one should ever stop growing -- for maturing is a never ending process.  But each person who lives as a person of faith and grace, can keep live satisfying for all of life.

SELF FOCUS  --  Think through and write down how you shall improve your:

VALUES, ATTITUDES, EXPECTATIONS, BELIEFS and CHOICES

YOUR SOUL AND YOUR BELIEFS - LOGOTHERAPY FOR FULFILLMENT

For as long as humankind has left a written record, men and women have thought of themselves as having a soul -- or even as being a living soul who came out of the Cosmos in some mysterious manner. This crucial aspect of personhood is still perceived as the key element of our inner life by theologians, philosophers and most existential scholars -- often with the assumption that only creatures with self-introspective abilities can exist in an altered state even after death. Roberta can remember the grief she felt as a youngster when her parents explained that her badly wounded dog wasn’t going to be in heaven -- poor Tippy had no soul to carry on after his demise!

She was desolate as a child but obviously has matured to understand more clearly what theologians and philosophers mean when they speak of the soul as the central factor of human personality. Of course, most persons spend little or no time pondering how and why the soul originated in the complex creature-self or unified body/spirit personality humans have evolved to become. Unfortunately, a great many women and men fail to understand there are often choices we should make and service we must offer to others for nothing more rewarding than the health of our intangible but always active souls. The very perceptive Ernest Becker wrote;

It really doesn’t matter if we discover that our inner assumptions about human nature and the world, our self-awareness in language, art, laughter and tears, is built into ourselves genetically or socially. We still haven’t discovered the inner forces of evolution that have led to our character development in ways that no other mammal shares. But it is this development in a human mammal capable of introspection, that we still mean by the word ‘soul.’ The soul remains the mysterious life force for each person, with the inner dynamisms and pulsations of existence.

In other words, the soul is at the heart of our self-awareness, is the crucial element of the creature-self aspect of each personality. The soul is the seat of spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices and through it humans yearn to make sense of life and love, of significance, rage, guilt and violence. This causes thoughtful men and women to ponder the purpose of their lives according to their values and expectations. Our ancestors always created superstitions, traditions and philosophies in order to understand life in a pre-scientific era and to rely on theologies and ideologies to justify what they planned to accomplish. Of course from our human beginnings on the Savannah of Africa, some women and men were open minded and generous while others were closed minded and grasping. Some people loved others and other persons seemed incapable of offering love or support to anyone beyond their own supporters. Obviously, this crucial aspect of life is what we are concerned with.

Earlier scientists, physicians and psychologists, who were themselves maturing beyond myths and superstitions to understand life and matter through scientific methods, assumed that while humans were often confused and conflicted, they would live more successful lives guided by scholarship than by worn down religious traditions and ideologies. Superstitious beliefs, they assumed, would soon be banished. Men and women would surely learn how to live without the myth of a supernatural God insulating them from reality. Fearful and illogical humans would choose to live in a rational manner because the scholars were pointing out their many idiosyncrasies and irrational decisions. Boy -- did the early scientists ever underestimate the staying power of subjective human expectations and beliefs! Jard sat beside Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square one day and debated the nature of his flight around the world from Singapore with a twenty year old member of the Flat Earth Society. The young woman insisted that he had actually flown around the rim of a plate shaped world! Since he had seen the curvature of the earth from thirty-five thousand feet, he was not persuaded by the charming if somewhat ideological girl. When teaching psychology at Olivet College, he once had several Creation Science true believing students walk out of a class session when he pointed out that the resistance microbes develop to anti-biotic medications is a form of evolution occurring before our eyes. The ideological youngsters had no intention of learning anything about science -- their minds were already closed to anything new unless it fit into their constricted world-view.

One major problem in psychology arose because that Freud and many of his contemporaries had imbibed deeply of the secular philosophy of Nihilism. This mind-set is the disastrous belief in disbelief, the assumption that all values are relative, that real politik comes out the barrel of a gun and the ordinary people should be used or even abused by the aristocratic elite that controls every nation. Nihilism is the wretched philosophy of meaninglessness that focused Germany’s aggressive attitude through five bloody wars, destroyed its peasant farmers through the Industrial Revolution and orchestrated six million additional victims during the Holocaust in less than a century. The mind set that Germany was superior to all other nations, that it had a divine right to dominate Europe, was embedded in its national anthem -- Deutsland Uber Alles -- ‘Germany above everything else.’

Humans have always been prone to violence in our relationships, as a brief reading of history, scripture or the Greek tragedies reveal very well, but our ancestors always understood that war and the sacrifice of their sons and the destruction of their homes and crops was evil and spiritually bankrupt. Warfare and heroism is far more glamorous and heroic at a distance than up close and bloody. It was very hard to convince a farmer that watching a band of pillaging horsemen abscond with his family’s winter food supply was some great boon to society in the long run. Only powerful aggressors who planned to personally benefit from slaughter have justified war. They still do, as they sacrifice ordinary men and women and their wealth in order to serve their nefarious purposes!

Only in the last few centuries have philosophers and theologians, usually in the service of narcissistic rulers, rationalized aggression as somehow beneficial to a society and blessed by God. Only recently have the spin doctors of America created a bloddy,war,relationships to justify rapine and raiding, of maiming and murder. The spin doctors of society understand that fear and greed always sell better than faith, hope and love, that mind-bending propaganda in an era of televised images can step by step seduce naïve people into virtually any kind of self-defeating behavior.

Dangerous Narcissism - Wisdom From The Fulfillment Forum

In this era of increasing complexity and deepening confusion, triggered by our self-defeating choices and compounded by the existential frustrations coming from a fast changing, emotionally unstable life-style, most persons are tempted to seek simplistic solutions to their psychospiritual challenges. We all want to live well, but usually on the cheap, forgetting that H L Mencken said, “Simple and neat solutions for complex problems are usually simple, neat and wrong.”


ACTORS ALL - I MYSELF - ALONE
When life fails to bring us consistent satisfaction, when our weaknesses withhold from us the ego satisfaction we crave, most persons create fantasies that ease the pain caused by the near universal life-style dilemma of uncertainty. This allows each fearful person to protect his or her precious soul from suffering without exercising a great deal of effort. Some people cling to self-defeating attitudes, activities and relationships that offer short-term gains, while sacrificing the long range benefits only a maturing life-style provides. Our self imposed repressions and denials keep us from learning what we really need in order to live a consistently liberating life.

Spiritually minded adults who are maturing beyond their anxieties and self-deceptions have learned from our terrible 20th century disasters that existence is seldom simple. Unfortunately, psychospiritually immature persons avoid that reality of life like the plague, fervently hoping that denying everything unpleasant will deliver them from their problems. Winston Churchill, England’s great war time prime minister, muttered in disgust when he was trying desperately to get his people to prepare for the attack by Adolph Hitler’s Germany:

The average man simply cannot tolerate the truth. And should he inadvertently stumble over it, he immediately hurries away lest it force him to discard the delusions with which he comforts himself.

Around 1910, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I enjoyed so much as a boy, was also the author of several serious historical papers. He reported that the European nations had become so civilized they would never again resort to war to solve their differences. He really believed with most Victorian and Edwardian Britons that humans are rational beings who automatically make the most responsible choices for themselves and for society. It was this naive belief in rationality that helped cause such a negative reaction to Freud and his followers who demonstrated beyond dispute that a great many persons across Europe were simmering kettles of irrationality, yearning to fall violently on one another personally and nationally. Most physicians, ministers and philosophers considered the early psychologists lunatics to even hint that rational Europeans carried within themselves disastrous anxieties, hatreds and ambitions they keep hidden from consciousness. As Kipling would say, perhaps strangers such as Chinese, Americans and Frenchmen might be neurotic, but never proper English gentlemen! Actually Doyle’s Edwardian England was a hotbed of neuroticism and psychosis. And Continental Europe was even worse.

Freud was right, of course, for within forty years after Doyle’s prediction, his rational, responsible world had fought World War I and World War II, endured the Holocaust and begun a half century long financially and spiritually devastating Cold War. As usual, there was little ordinary men and women could do to keep their commercial, political and military abusers from slaughtering a hundred million persons across the twentieth century. Unfortunately, few of us made a serious effort to stop them - which for me verifies the fact that we do indeed contain within our hearts and minds the narcissistic seeds of greed and violence we deny through the ultimate lie. This lie is the myth that men and women are mostly cool and calm persons who would live at peace were it not for a few wicked abusers who disturb the peace. We, the citizens of Western Civilization, failed miserably to behave responsibly as we followed ruthless manipulators who promised us revenge on and loot from those evil savages who competed with us from across first the Rhine and later the Vistula Rivers. Look, the most vicious abusers always find some enemy through which they harness many naïve cultural neurotics to do their bidding, to slaughter one another for the benefit of some ruthless and egoistic aristocracy.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the eccentric Oxford University don ended his magnificent LORD OF THE RINGS saga with some sound advice for humans troubled by wounded egos. He had Gandalf the wizard admonish the hobbits Pippin and Merry to be modest when they return home as national heroes. After many adventures they’d met with fortitude and courage, in which the peaceful little shire-folk defeated the overwhelming forces of Sauron, their wise old comrade told them to remain modest. They must remember, he said, they are after all only very small chaps in a vast and dangerous Middle Earth. Pippin and Merry laughed from the depths of their earthy hobbit souls and agreed with Gandalf. One hobbit said not to worry, he became heroic and bold only under protest, only when forced into battle by desperate circumstances. Actually, he’d rather be home writing books on family history than treading the paths of glory which he’d found led many comrades to the grave. The other hobbit sighed and said;

Alas, we Tooks and Brandybucks cannot live comfortably on the heights with the kings and nobles of Middle Earth.

They quickly tired of fame’s limelight; both wanted to go home and operate their farms in the lush green fields of the Shire with their loved ones. Hobbits have always shown excellent judgment; they spend most of their time growing and consuming as much good food as possible.

We are all beset by challenges that frustrate us consistently in an age when an act as simple as driving on a freeway requires a life or death decision every sixty seconds. Politicians are ruthlessly destroying our beloved Republic, creating a wicked American Empire in which one percent of our citizens control ninety percent of the nation’s wealth. Corporations destroy three million American careers every year through downsizing and out sourcing, dishonesty abounds in many places, millions of Americans are addicted to narcotics and terrorism is on the increase. We have only recently come through the Cold War with the threat of mass annihilation waved constantly as a red flag by politicians to manipulate us. Millions of Americans can remember crouching under their school desks, fearful that each alert would bring a nuclear holocaust. Teachers and principals everywhere were in turmoil. I was teaching science while in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati and we teachers were powerless to change anything the Military/Industrial Complex and its political lackeys saddled us with in order to stop the spread of collective ownership of the world‘s resources.

Unfortunately, all humans are self-centered to a greater or a lesser degree. I can think of no more striking example of narcissistic selfishness than the problems Mr. Clinton brought on himself, his family and his government through sexual encounters with women drawn like moths to the flame by his power and prestige. Even after his public relations disasters with Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, he used Monica Lewinsky for his own ego satisfaction. How egoistic he was! What on earth made him think a twenty-two year old girl would keep secret a sexual relationship with the world’s most powerful man? Didn’t he realize his political enemies understood his sexual compulsions well enough to anticipate another fall from grace they could exploit? In the book HUNTING THE PRESIDENT the author reveals Clinton’s enemies had already financed Paula Jones’ lawsuit and chosen Kenneth Starr, a rabid Clinton hater for his defeating the first President Bush, as special prosecutor to attack him and still Mr. Clinton considered himself invulnerable. The egoistic use of power often overwhelms our judgment and causes us many problems. Gennifer Flowers quipped, That boy just doesn’t learn! Actually, he’s quite like many men and women who are narcissistic in their outlook. Gary Hart, a Colorado senator aspiring to the presidency, challenged the media to catch him with a woman beside his wife if they could. Unfortunately for his ambition, some reporters could and did, taking photos of him with Donna Rice on his lap while cruising aboard the launch Monkey Business and he had to drop out of the campaign and leave politics. A little modesty about one’s power can go a long ways toward survival in our relationships. Martha Stewart was egoistic and proud enough to assume she was above the law and paid a steep ego and financial price.

We bring many problems on ourselves through our selfishness. Humans are so narcissistic that we give ourselves the benefit of every doubt, thinking ourselves superior and deserving more privileges than the common folk. The world revolves around I - MYSELF ALONE! And then we repress and deny everything that causes problems and pain. Gandalf’s advice is good for us also. At best, we are temporal creatures who live briefly on the bubble of existence, although we normally ignore our vulnerability so long as health and wealth lasts. We remain only actors, Shakespeare said, pretending and strutting on the stage, speaking our few lines and vanishing into the wings as understudies take over our precious roles. Nevertheless, despite our limitations, each person whether woman or man, instinctively and automatically feels like the protagonist in the play - the central character around whom the action swirls, who deserves the lion’s share of the applause. All those lesser characters at the edges of the drama really should defer to us. That seems only right, for we can stand on life’s stage, swing our eyes around and see that I - MYSELF ALONE appears to be the only person in the midst of the action. We want to believe, if we will honestly admit it, that we are at the center of the Cosmos with everyone else waiting at the edges. And herein comes one great persisting tragedy for individuals, families, communities and entire cultures.

Very little about women and men is painted in pure black and white colors. A great many aspects of life come in shades of gray, somewhere between holy sainthood and ruthless deviltry. Humans should try to get along with a modicum of decency and satisfaction, at least until we are frustrated to distraction, frightened badly and feel we must fight to preserve our self-esteem, our possessions, our pleasure or our power to function without domination by another person.

Therefore, while I write about narcissism and self-esteem, about our desire to win respect from our peers, to become someone of significance, that also comes in many shades of gray. You may yearn to become the very best, most loving and competent nurse in Cook County Hospital. That is a noble ambition while also assuring us of continuing respect from friends and esteem about ones self. We all need to receive esteem, even if it’s only as the best neighborhood Martian slayer on the latest video game, so we almost all try to make ourselves look somewhat better than we really are. This is as normal as human narcissism gets. On the other hand, the Mafia don who wants the most respect within his “family” - which is another way of saying he demands fear from his subordinates - or a ruthless business manager who will cheat employees, suppliers and contractors to promote his or her wealth, is searching for dominance rather than esteem. This is certain to create distrust, resentment and attempts by others to restore some balance of power. But nothing is simple!


NATURE’S NASTY TWIST
Narcissism, when it gets out of hand. is an example homosapien selfishness, is usually dangerous and often fatal, leading us to lust inordinately for power, prestige, possessions and pleasure. Sigmund Freud who wrote long after Jesus’ time, reorganized the Biblical concept of mammon in classic terms. Freud used the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who was so enamored with his own beauty that he died while admiring it, to explain our often overwhelming fixation with ourselves and our schemes. He coined the phrase narcissism to identify this condition that causes such devastation at so many times and places where humans interact.

Our virtually universal narcissistic drive to be superior - to appear more important than anyone else, to seize possessions and power and prestige over others, is arguably the major cause of human conflicts and most crippling disasters that follow. Massive human problems come from our yearning to make everyone else subservient to egoistic I - MYSELF ALONE. This lusting after possessions, power, prestige and pleasure, when it gets out of hand, is at the root of almost all individual, group and national conflicts.

This universal craving for existential significance became embedded in our psyches as a survival element during our primordial ancestors’ struggles as fangless little hominids who made convenient meals for the big carnivores on the wild African savannah. Because they could neither run fast nor fight fiercely, those with the greatest narcissism were more likely to survive and pass their genes on to a family group that carried them eventually to us. Those that didn’t run and grasp and hoard what they needed, who didn’t become paranoid enough to sacrifice their peers so they could escape, were less likely to survive. Their genes were lost to us. Now, a few million years later, each of us is still determined not to be ignored, devalued or deprived of our right to self-esteem, our right to dominate those lesser creature-selves around us.

From that egoistic lust for superiority, arises the bloody history of our violent race. Disaster comes often because the people and societies we yearn to dominate feel precisely the same way about us. As in the endless Balkan and African conflicts, people are almost always on a collision course with persons, organizations and nations that are equally willing to use others for their own benefit. Of course, each group rationalizes its violence as being caused by those evil strangers across the valley who threaten their own righteous and holy way of life. Obviously, we humans virtually always deny bringing conflicts down on ourselves. We are always tempted to blame others for our problems so we can justify our attacks, can feel good about sacrificing our young people to teach the enemy of the decade a lesson about challenging us. George W. Bush never makes a speech without praising the young American fighting men and women while ruthlessly cutting the Veteran’s Affairs budget just as the flood of casualties from his wars need the most help. He also constantly condemns the ruthless villains who attack and frustrate the good and righteous American way of dominating the world. After all, most humans feel that I MYSELF - ALONE absolutely do deserve the best in life. This narcissistic fantasy that each of us is superior to the rest of humankind and more deserving is buried deep in our unconscious from where it oozes out in crucial times and places. This nasty twist of human nature has complicated life more and more for us.

I realize that in order to cope with 21st century challenges, humans must become bold and courageous. We need to be brave in the presence of adversity - to live as strong men and women when most ordinary souls like Tolkien’s hobbits wanted only to be left alone to make a living and rear a family. The human experience has never been easy, in fact it is always fatal eventually. Unfortunately, reactionary persons, those with too strong a defense system who cling to the past, always feel that society is at a crossroads, that nations can be saved only through a rebirth of the heroic self-sufficiency their ancestors supposedly nurtured. I challenge that simplistic assumption for one major reason.

The so called lost Golden Age of America, from just after our Civil War until the Vietnamese War, was golden mostly for affluent white males. Everyone else had to take what the powerful robber barons didn’t want. Unfortunately financial abusers are like the Wyoming Rancher during the range wars who said he only wanted what was his - and what was next to it! With one or two percent of contemporary Americans owning some ninety percent of the nation’s wealth, they pretty much have it all! In my youth, multitudes of families lived in abject poverty as the novels GRAPES OF WRATH and GOD’S LITTLE ACRE revealed so poignantly. I know, I was there at the time, so don’t try to fool me with half truths and ruthless ideologies. I remember the ragged, barefoot kids in school, the fights with the greedy aristocracy who opposed school lunch programs, free books and school buses as communistic in nature. I remember President Hoover sending the U. S. cavalry against fathers pleading for food for their children. And the glee of the generals who were laughing and joking when they were ordered to attack the rabble. A huge percentage of families endured severe hardships while trying to survive. And regardless of the myths many reactionary preachers and primitive politicians concoct, in order to frighten people into pulling their chestnuts from the fire, life really became much better for many persons. Only now, those benefits are being taken away by a wicked consortium of financial neo-fascists, reactionary political neo-cons and fundamental religious neo-zealots who are moving heaven and earth to crush everything decent and to deliver the nation back into the ruthless hands of the robber barons who have arisen again through Global Capitalism and the outright bribery of our politicians.

Many more persons of both genders and families of all creeds and races did better financially than at any previous time in American history. The rascals who deny this are either idiots or are yearning for a return to a white, male dominated society. Even the radical preachers protesting loudest about our liberal society, who keep trying to recreate that white, male controlled culture of the past because they are selfish white men, are fixated almost exclusively on material things. They hate sharing their power, prestige and possessions with women of all races and with men of color. To state it bluntly, the blatant narcissists want to steal everything they can haul away. That is the way their mind-sets operate, this is where their core values lead them, although they use clever propaganda to persuade the naive with their own clamoring anxieties, that they are working for patriotic or spiritual reasons when they are working for I MYSELF -- ALONE.

Nevertheless, going through the challenge of earning an education, building a career, nurturing a marriage and rearing a family while maturing, does require strength and courage. I know of no easy way to become a maturing person. I believe it is this reality that led early psychologist William James to call for human heroism on our often dangerous pilgrimage through life, for we are all bedeviled by selfish yearnings. Most of the scholars I draw from agree that many humans are frequently crippled by our universally self-centered traits that get out of control.

When it is uncontrolled, narcissism keeps every community and civilization boiling with frustration and aggression. Two cultures demonstrated this quite clearly. Our anti-bellum southern aristocratic men wore their egos on their sleeves, quarreling and dueling at the drop of a perceived insult. Imperial Germany and Spain were even worse - the haughty posturing of men and women is very obvious in old black and white photographs from the era. They struggled to win heroic significance for themselves and their social classes.

What do we yearn for and whom shall we sacrifice to get it? How powerful are the motives that flog us onward in our desire to become significant? How completely do the aristocrats in our communities shape our opportunities - with their wealth being used to control politicians and the criminal justice establishment and to finance the propaganda systems that stack the deck for themselves? How can we save the American Republic?

We all try to conceal our character flaws by finding clever ways to justify them. Not long ago my wife and I were waiting in a checkout line that had stalled when an elderly woman needed to exchange a purchase and several twenty year old youths successively paid their bills by writing checks for under three dollars. I started muttering and Roberta poked me. Take a walk before you embarrass me, she whispered.. I left and when she came out a few minutes later, she was laughing. We’ve been married half a century and she still has the ability to surprise and delight me. Naturally, she can see right through my facades - but she loves me anyway! I sometimes wonder why. She told me in her unique fashion;

It was your old egoistic need for existential significance acting up again. You just couldn’t stand having a line of simple folk slow down a world-class antique motorcycle restorer and community theater actor could you?

Not a word about my books because she fights fair. I grinned wryly in agreement but protested to protect my ego.

Well, I am not alone -- I have plenty of company out here.

Indeed I do and while I know these concepts well enough to write about them, I too have a need for esteem within my soul. I would even appreciate a little cosmic worth from time to time. And so would you! So does everyone and that yearning sometimes runs wild in every society. Few events demonstrate this narcissistic selfishness in action more clearly than the constant battling in Serbia, Indonesia and among many African tribes.

In his book MEIN KAMPF, the arch-villain Adolph Hitler described very well the frustrated narcissism gnawing at Germany’s resentful people after that nation’s defeat in World War I. After a century as Europe’s bully boy, Germany was reduced to poverty and hunger, even eating their cats and dogs to survive, calling the cats roof rabbits. Europe’s aristocrats would have done well to learn from him rather than dismiss Hitler as an ignorant rabble-rouser who deserved their contempt. They’d always issued orders and docile corporals saluted and said: By your leave, Sir. Some of Europe’s powerful died on meat hooks and in gas chambers because they failed to see that Hitler’s lust for power and prestige was every bit as great as their own. However, the slain aristocratic elite were a minority. They always are as narcissism often triumphs over ethics, morality and spirituality.

Many more, like most French, Lithuanian, Belgium, Swiss and Italian aristocrats, sold their souls to retain their possessions, power and prestige. The French House of Deputies enacted every cruel law Germany wanted, betraying their Jewish citizens to Gestapo death squads who were enthusiastically supported by the local police. The French government deliberately delivered their own demobilized soldiers into four years of slave labor in Nazi factories and sold working class girls as prostitutes in German troop brothels. Not their own children, of course, who avoided the terror by hanging out on the Cote d’ Azure during the war years, but the sons and daughters of the working families over whom they had power. Then, when France and the other nations were delivered from German tyranny, the politicians immediately repressed everything evil they’d done. To this day the ruthless abusers of France and Belgium have seldom been brought to justice - the entire French government repressed its cooperation with the Germans. Everyone pretended he or she had fought in the resistance when only a very few ordinary men and women actively opposed the Germans.

Only late in 1999 did the French government pass laws that would return confiscated Jewish property to the children and grandchildren of the original owners. The guilt of being traitors to French civilization was hidden so deep within their collective unconscious for decades that France officially insisted there was no stolen property to return. Few of the European aristocrats and their police enforcers were like the brave people of Denmark and Bulgaria who held steady to their values to battle the Germans. The Danish and the Bulgarian police were the only European cops who collectively chose to support their own people rather than betray them. They organized the resistance underground, saving virtually all Danish and Bulgarian Jews and freezing in place two Wermacht heavy weapons infantry divisions needed badly by the Germans in Normandy on D-Day. It is quite likely that those twenty-five thousand additional troops on the bluffs over Omaha Beach would have swept the D-Day invasion force of Britons and Americans into the sea and left Europe under the conqueror’s heel.

In other words --

While all humans are genetically and emotionally tempted to be selfish and narcissistic enough to cause conflicts and wars, if we live with ethical virtues and spiritual values, of the kind that Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed taught, if we lay aside our contrived self-deceptions, we can live far more peacefully within ourselves and among others. We can enjoy meaningful activities in places of the heart where we belong with the people with whom we share love and acceptance.


Author:
Jard DeVille has published more than a score of psychology books, seminars and psychological assessment instruments. His book NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a powerful best seller. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP was New American Library's offering in their Executive Development Series. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free Ebooks and Ebiz tools.

LOGOTHERAPY (SPIRIT-THERAPY) AND THE MYTH OF CHANGE

About a century and a half ago, the brilliant philosopher/psychologist of the First Industrial Revolution, Soren Kierkegaard, reported -- Western humans have turned for the relief of their spiritual ailments, from the clergy to their physicians. In other words, a great many emotionally distressed humans have failed to see that much of the confusion and anxiety of twenty-first century life that bedevil persons in a relentlessly changing commercial society, are symptoms of what pastors call spiritual bankruptcy and psychotherapists call existential frustration. Many spiritual failings are rooted in our life-styles, are caused by the secular or anti-spiritual values, attitudes, expectations and beliefs we hold and the immature way we work and play and love and learn.

There are a number of reasons why so many men and women live in a spiritually restricted zone but one of the most common problems is the way we humans resent and resist the changes that sweep over us like the great storm driven North Pacific breakers thundering onto rocky reefs. The battering is continuous. But while lay men and women are confused about the nature of their ailments, a good size body of existential or life-style psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors -- psychotherapists specifically, have seen this shift for what it is. Our inability to adapt as life changes around us cripples many souls..

According to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, for countless centuries, through their increasingly sophisticated physical, psychological and philosophical development, our ancestors laboriously climbed a sheer black Devil’s Tower of ignorance, superstition, disease and poverty. Life was often nasty, brutish and short and it was with great difficulty that families and clans wrested a bare bones living from a supremely indifferent earth. Change came very slowly and even then it occurred in minute increments. Because their simple technology changed infrequently and people seemed to change not at all, everyone assumed that life was destined to go on forever with the same seasonal rhythms of seedtime and harvest -- planting and reaping. They could see the cast of characters changing through the years but life itself seemed static. It was as if each generation could see only one frame of the world’s great motion picture show. Over time unknown and unmeasured, a distinct fear of change seems to have settled into our very genes.

Although many persons believe the myth that we enjoy new circumstances, we adapt to anything important only with great reluctance -- unless it is to our obvious and immediate advantage. We are comfortable with change only within very narrow limits. I am quite adept at shifting from roast beef tonight to spare ribs tomorrow, but don’t offer me boiled lambs eyes as many desert hosts do on the Arabian Peninsula. To be specific, humans simply fail to handle change well. Once we have leaned something early in life, we resist change for it seems to contradict our personal Truth. For example, for a century or more, virtually the entire white population of the United States suffered paranoid fears about and distrust of African Americans. For example, as late as the nineteen forties banking institutions, national and state governments and corporations, universities and churches and even our military forces told intelligent and educated black people -- We don‘t hire your kind and we never shall except as labors and as mess men to officers. Several sports reporters wrote that Blacks should be excluded from college and professional sports because their inherent awkwardness and ignorance rendered them unfit for athletic competition. Virtually, the entire white population of the United States was psychopathic about ‘Negroes’. They were comfortable with their privileges and prestige and didn’t want to share it with any racial upstarts. Vast sections of the American South still reject the Democratic Party because Lyndon Johnson forced desegregation and civil right program on their parents. We almost always resent and resist adapting to anything new until we see some personal benefit in it. And when we cannot keep life static, we become frustrated and unhappy -- with unrelieved frustration usually leading to apathy or aggression.


The last two centuries, from roughly 1820 A D when the first industrial revolution came on line, have brought massive social disruptions and the development of serious existential or life-style generated challenges. Caused by the life-styles we choose. This is the period that I call the great transition. The quiet bucolic ways of the past, with closely knit families, villages and clans, in which people worked together at subsistence tasks important to everyone, in relationships where they felt they belonged, were largely lost. Changes have exploded over us until now, for example, a great anxiety exists about the collapse of family farms. They are vanishing and agricultural careers are shifting, making it virtually impossible for a single wage earner to support a family. The past is still shutting down, despite many frustrated souls screaming Stop the world -- I want to get off, with more and more people scrambling to make life satisfying. Given our racial reluctance to change when something new and unexpected is forced on us, we often cause problems for ourselves and for society. Naturally, this creates still more stress for everyone.

Of course, it isn’t shifting circumstances per se, caused by science and new technologies that trigger the frustrations found in our industrial life-style. It is rather our inherited resistance to change that complicates our human adjustment. Because of our difficulty in discarding primitive homosapien instincts, shopworn traditions and outdated ideologies the great transition reflects much of our restlessness and the dissatisfactions that follow. Sam and Julia Monroe are a working class couple from the Midwest who won a lottery worth millions of dollars several years ago. They were ecstatic at first, but the sudden wealth and their inability to shift from their traditions and ideologies, plus the demands placed on them by relatives and friends, drove them from home. Thoroughly disappointed, they fled to Tucson where they live quietly under an assumed name. Julia said:

Our friends abandoned us, complaining that the wealth had changed us, had made us snooty and selfish. That’s not it at all! It changed them in their attitudes toward us. We tried to get along with everyone as we always had but they wouldn’t let us. Even those who didn’t want anything expected us to change, started picking apart everything we said and did. It hurt the kids terribly and we finally decided to make a fresh start where no one knew anything about us.

In Arizona, they had even more problems. They bought an expensive home in a posh suburb and quickly discovered they were not compatible with their new neighbors. They simply didn’t know the customs and mores of the country club set and didn’t share right wing political ideologies and a reactionary religious theology in a community that had been accumulating wealth and developing narcissistic and aristocratic pretensions over several generations. Sam laughed rather wryly; I do believe ours were the only votes cast for a Democrat in the county. The changes in their circumstances had burned the bridges to their old relationships without finding satisfaction in their new community.

For countless eons human life was like the story in James Michener’s novel The Source. The Cro-Magnon, early Biblical era family in Palestine invented agriculture to supplement their food supply. The water of the spring from which the book took its name flowed cool and clear even during periods of drought so they settled there. They eventually hunted bare the surrounding countryside, needing to climb higher and higher into the hills for game. This bothered the woman for her mate was getting along in years; he must have been thirty-five at least, and she worried about him breathing hard after chasing an antelope uphill for several hours. In a project to help him and to feed the family should he falter before the children were grown, she planted grain she'd gathered from the wild in the rich soil around the stream. It was a great technological breakthrough; she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The plants grew heavy with grain so the family tended them, chasing away birds and rabbits and weeding the garden. They sweated out a hailstorm and felt devoutly thankful when the crop was spared.

This is why the parables of Jesus and the Greek dramas remain meaningful to us. Our science and technology has moved in great leaps and bounds -- with perhaps the greatest single advance being each woman's ability to manage the number of children she conceives. Unfortunately, that freedom to choose enrages many emotionally primitive or ideologically driven power brokers -- because it lessens their control over society. In the deeper recesses of our souls, little has changed. We still experience the love and hate, the greed and generosity, the war and peace that the ancient stories tell so well. Naturally, that causes the problem I discussed earlier. After eons of static existence, our instincts, traditions and ideologies persuade us that life should remain as it was when we were growing up, when we were learning what was important about life and our place in it. Actually, we need to become conscious of our automatic resistance to change and learn how to adapt when the world shifts around us. Otherwise, we can be crippled by the constant changes that life thrusts upon us. Automatically resist, spending psychic energy on outdated instincts, traditions and ideologies live at a time when change has exploded exponentially through science and technology.