Michael Washburn interviewed by
Paul Bernstein
PB:
If the very fact of growing up and building secure egos causes us to cut
ourselves off from the spiritual resources and personal truths of the Dynamic
Ground, is there no way that we can remain open to the Dynamic Ground during the
growing-up process? Could parents, perhaps, do something along the way, so that
when their children reach adulthood the task of re-opening to the Dynamic Ground
would be less arduous? Or to put this another way, can you tell us how long must
a child, adolescent, or young adult build up their ego before they can benefit
from opening up -- or before their ego is ready to open up -- again to the
Dynamic Ground? I'm reminded of how important this issue is whenever I hear of
gifted healers or artists whose abilities were plainly apparent when they were
kids but who were discouraged or even punished for exhibiting those abilities by
their fearful or well-meaning parents. So the children repressed those
abilities. Then decades later, as adults, they found themselves with a friend or
two who had the same ability, and they let it come back. Would there be a way to
keep open that connection between the ego and the Dynamic Ground if the adults
around a developing child had themselves already integrated and understood all
this? Or must the ego in its own development create such secure boundaries and
such serious, effective repression, that only painful incidents in later life
can open it up?
MW:
I have two answers to this question. First, I think that some people repress the
Dynamic Ground and the creative resources of the deep psyche less severely than
do the rest of us. For various developmental and parenting reasons (which I'll
get to in a moment), these people have remained able to access the deep
unconscious even while they focus primarily on ego development, on establishing
themselves in the world. For them, as in the example that you cited, there are
times and periods, peak experiences, certain psychic gifts or spiritual graces,
that they experience throughout their lives. They don't have one, grand,
punctuated awakening later on at mid-life, as others may.
PB:
But sometimes it seems that no matter how much of a spiritual environment a
person is raised in, the ego's will to establish itself will rebel against any
practice that even a kindly older person might offer them. We all can recall
cases where the child or adolescent regards the spiritual tradition being
offered to them by the older generation as repulsive and not liberative. I
wonder if there's almost a kind of minimal threshold of closure by the ego to
the Dynamic Ground that would seem to manifest in ANY person. I'm seeking here
almost a quantitative answer: if the ego doesn't have to close its circular
boundary a full 360 degrees to insulate itself from the Dynamic Ground, then how
much does it have to close off, in every one of us? For example, just yesterday
I was talking to a woman who had tried as a child to obey her "inner
voice" and not follow the materialist path her parents wanted. As an adult
she tried to serve others and rely on her attunement to her unconscious. That
helped the organization that employed her -- but she encountered an ethical
crisis there and still had to let go of the whole ego she had constructed along
those lines in order to create a much more peaceful and fulfilling life. So it
seems as though there's almost no getting away from this.
MW:
Well, I fear that might be true. Clearly, strong and loving parents from
beginning to end are the best possibility of our weathering the difficulties of
ego development in a way that does not separate us from our spiritual resources.
Nevertheless, I think that for the great majority of us, we do lose contact. And
therefore it's difficult really to say what advice should be given to parents --
my advice would be on the one hand extremely abstract, and on the other hand
very specific! On the abstract side, I would take D.W. Winnicott's advice to
heart and say we should strive not to be perfect parents but to be "good
enough" parents, respecting the developmentalneeds of our children at each
stage. In the first couple of years, the two primary developmental needs are the
consolidation of the bond of love, and encouraging the child's movement towards
separation and individuation. And those two are not opposites. The bond of love
is the basis for a healthy separation and individuation of the young child. Then
in the so-called latency years, perhaps from age 5 to 12 or 13, to be good
enough parents means again providing for two simultaneous needs: education and
play. We need to give our children the best possible primary education we can,
while at the same time not making their lives overly disciplined, and allowing
them -- encouraging them -- ample opportunity for exploration and play. Moving
to adolescence, a very challenging time for both children and parents -- I speak
with some experience --
PB:
You have teenagers at home?
MW:
Well I have had, in the past. My three daughters are all wonderful adults now,
as they were wonderful children then. As adolescents, though, they presented
special challenges, as all adolescents do. In adolescence, the two developmental
needs for parents to attend to are sincere respect for their children's identity
experimentation and struggles for independence, and balancing that with setting
consistent boundaries and realistic expectations. And finally, once your
children are ready to cease being your children, and are ready to become adults
through picking their own primary other (no longer their parent), and perhaps
enter a career that will establish them independently in the world, we need to
simply let go of them as our children, and begin to enjoy them as our adult
friends. That's very abstract, I realize, but I don't see how we can do better
for our children than attending to their developmental needs in each stage.
Because that, I feel, strengthens their egos and personalities while still
leaving their options open, their spiritual options as well as their
practical-life options. Now, in that regard I do have one specific piece of
advice. It seems to me that parents oughtn't be too impatient if their children
don't share their own particular brand of spirituality. Clearly, spirituality
needs to grow from the inside out. And sometimes that just does not happen until
after the agenda of adolescence and early adulthood has been completed. Parents
have a responsibility to introduce their children to religion. But I think it's
almost always a mistake to impose it upon them oppressively.
PB:
One thing that also seems important to me, that children be offered from a
fairly young age, is help in expressing their most painful, their most fearful
experiences -- abreaction is the technical term. But parents often get upset
hearing their child express anger or other strong emotions, so the parents
become defensive. Yet the child (and certainly the individual as she gets older)
needs to know not to repress that healing process, or she'll become crippled.
Did you find ways to facilitate this during your own parenting? Or do you think
that it is better confined to the psychotherapeutic milieu?
MW:
I think it points to an extremely important dimension of the parent-child
relationship: open communications, not only about ideas and interests but about
feelings. Hurt feelings are often very difficult to express. Especially if the
parent is seen as the cause of the hurt, it is very difficult for those feelings
to be aired without the parent becoming defensive, as you indicated. Although
the things that I've written about don't bear specifically on this issue, it
seems a very important area, perhaps one of the most important areas, for
healthy parenting.
PB:
Let me move on to what religious practitioners -- ministers, rabbis, pastors --
might gain by understanding the psychological dynamics involved in a person who
comes to them with.13 emotional needs, perhaps even with a spiritual crisis,
because again, those two worlds are often kept separate in our culture. The
religious world doesn't get much into the psychological, while the psychologists
may be fearful of involving themselves in talk that might encourage their
patient towards spiritual categories of experience. Yet you've made the point so
well that these are one and the same, or at least that the overlap is so
enormous, that regardless of whichever institution or
authority the average Joe or Jane turns to, be
that a psychological clinic or a spiritual counselor, it seems they'd be a lot
better served if the practitioner receiving them appreciated this overlap. How
do you imagine that can happen? -- that ministers, pastors, rabbis, could
benefit by understanding that their client's ego is opening up to the Dynamic
Ground, rather than such clergy restricting their understanding to traditional
religious categories which, after all, come from millennia ago when the
religious founder (whether Jesus, Buddha, Moses or Mohammed) did not use the
vocabulary of our modern psychology?
MW:
Paul, this is a very important matter. I do feel that it would be helpful if
religious officials showed greater respect for other spiritual traditions, as
expressions of the human relationship to the Divine, and if ministers, rabbis
and pastors would have a better understanding of the mystical bases of religion
and a better understanding of the psychology of religious experience, both its
ecstatic and its darker sides, its spiritual raptures and its dark nights. If
they did, there would probably be a significant group among their congregations
whom they would be better able to understand and to mentor. So we can and should
move in these directions. I hope that is something that will happen, even more
than it already has.
PB:
There is of course the realm called "pastoral counseling" which seeks
to combine the insights of psychology with the principles of religion. People
spend years being trained in that profession. Wouldn't that seem to be a perfect
place to apply your framework? I suppose if I had a banner to carry on this
issue, I would carry it to them first!
MW:
Well maybe this is happening in seminaries and other places of that sort. But
I'm not in a position to know. I hope so.
PB:
To move to another area where I think your viewpoint applies, the field of
physical health and medicine. One of the ways our very materialistic,
rationalist -- I guess we could say ego-dominated and ego-centered -- public
culture has begun to relax its reluctance to accept spiritual things as real is
in the area of medicine, because evidence is piling up about spiritual
experiences leading to healing in cases where physical medicine had already
given up. To me, the place where such cases of mind/body healing overlap most
with your work are cases of certain AIDS and cancer patients. They describe a
change in their identity, from what you call the body and
mental ego, to identifying as spirit, merely inhabiting a diseased body. They lose the fear of death, and their body responds differently after they have that epiphany. Their immune system starts to recover and effectively battle the HIV or cancer cells. Interestingly, these patients usually describe their identity transformation as not just one of self but of cells. Every cell in their body, they say, was infused with their new awareness, and a new level of energy. They don't have the sophisticated vocabulary of professional psychology, but they describe a transformation that comes after an arduous letting go of many of their ego-defenses. In some cases that was
accomplished
through confronting their subconscious in dreams, in other cases through
meditation or prayer.
MW:
I'd be delighted to hear about those stories. The whole growing, burgeoning
field of complementary, holistic, or integrative medicine is extremely
important. It seems so evident that our lifestyles, our attitudes, and our
relationships to the sacred are essential not only to our psychological but to
our physical health. And I think that you have focused in at the exact point
where my work would apply or have implications. There are energies dormant in
the body, not just instinctual but spiritual energies, that are resident in the
Dynamic Ground, which can be awakened, just as you describe occurred for these
patients. Then they realize, "Well, I'm no.14 longer just my previous,
ego-bound, identity-framed self. I'm now in the context of a larger spiritual
life. And this larger spiritual life is concrete; it's in me. It's in my body;
it moves through my body. It enlivens my body." That does seem to me to be
a very important point: that we are
most
healthy and most whole when we realize that our physical life and our spiritual
life go hand in hand. When our spiritual life is awakened, not just in a posture
of faith, but when it is awakened as an enlivening and guiding force within our
very bodies, palpably so.
PB:
It would be exciting to pursue this area of research. In terms of your own
research, or areas of uncertainty that you want to pursue, as you develop this
framework, what are you exploring now? What might you be writing in the future
-- what subject matter, what points most intrigue
you?
MW:
I'm currently working on a book, whose title is Embodied Spirituality in a
Sacred World. In this book I argue for the sensuously embodied, this-worldly
character of mature spirituality. I agree with Nietzsche that much of religion,
regrettably, is hostile to the body and to the earth.
And so I defend the view that spirituality leads ultimately not to some
otherworldly, disembodied realm, but rather to this very earth and to our
embodied lives on earth. The sacred is sensuously embodied, I believe. It is
here and now.
PB:
Well, I certainly look forward to reading that.
MW:
Thank you.
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Copyright
(c) 1998 by Paul Bernstein and Online Noetic Network.