Hello Fierce Ones,
I’m pleased to announce the next selection of the Conscious Aging Book Club: Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey by James Hollis, Ph.D. The discussion board opens today in the comment section below and culminates July 5 both online and in-person at 10:30 a.m., Parnassus Books, Nashville. This will give you plenty of time to read the book if you are interested.
Meanwhile, a reminder that our current selection is Florida Scott Maxwell’s The Measure of My Days. The discussion is currently underway HERE and culminates June 7 both online and in-person at 10:30 a.m., Parnassus Books, Nashville.
To learn more about the Conscious Aging Book Club, click HERE.
–Carol Orsborn, Older, Wiser, Fiercer
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THE EXAMINED LIFE
For the longest time, I’ve wondered why I have worked so hard and so long to achieve so much consciousness, and I’m still not what I pictured as “enlightened.” Perhaps I was so attracted to Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich then my own fictional character Angelica Goodman Banks in my recently published novel Angelica’s Last Breath because they each broke through all the defenses, masks, misunderstandings, recalcitrant shadows, unconscious material and so on to enjoy perfect joy and peace. While immersed in these two soul-connected works, I did something of my own combination life review and confession. I peeled off layers of defenses and then had a glimpse of what it would feel like to be merged with the Divine. But then both the reading and writing ended, and I was left with one compelling question. Could it be possible for sustained resolution to be achieved earlier in life than one’s last breath, giving us more time to enjoy the freedom that comes from having made peace with our past, present and future — with time to spare?
The gift of becoming so intimate with Ivan and Angelica is finally having stopped taking the difficulty I’ve had breaking through personally. I am, in fact, coming to terms with the human condition: That beneath the superficial differences that individuate us—as multifarious as these may be—there is an archetypal template to the trajectory of our lives that transcends centuries, geographies and religious differences. In fact, I am coming to believe that all of art, literature, creativity, commerce, politics—maybe everything—are the manifestations of people struggling each in his or her own way to break through to what most of us think of as “happiness”, and that Jungian analyst James Hollis would refer to at his loftiest “spiritual independence,” at his most academic “individuation” and most mundane: “growing up.” But whatever you call it, what is blocking us? Where is that final release that some of us go to therapy, 12 step programs and meditation retreats to attain while others found companies, write novels, look for the perfect mate or attempt to create the perfect child, seek celebrity or sainthood and so on?
It was in such a mood of inquiry that I decided to go to our little boat alone, and sit there on the lake until I had some answers. On the way out the door, I grabbed the latest addition from my “to read” stack, James Hollis’ Living an Examined Life. And I won’t leave you hanging. This book is a game-changer. I had thought to journal and meditate out on my little boat, maybe read a little. But the truth is, I opened the book at random, read the following, and was hooked. I then read and underlined nearly every word. It was sunset, and when I closed the final page, tears streaming down my cheeks, I was not only understanding everything, but experiencing it.
The passage that hooked me in was this: “The issues lie quite close to the surface. What has been avoided—a delayed confrontation, the acknowledgment of a talent, a path of reconciliation, or whatever the threatening summons—(one has) wrestled with many times before. Sadly, what is made conscious does not thereby simply resolve itself.” What is also required is courage and honesty—and you can’t will these things to happen. Our defenses—our self-delusions—are too thick and deep. “Was it all lies?” Angelica asks on her deathbed before breaking through at last to something real.
“Letting go of the old is not easy” Hollis writes. “It requires being able to tolerate the aroused level of anxiety that besets any of us when ego consciousness is not in control. It requires that we let go of what we thought certain and cast our lifeboats upon a tenebrous sea. The more we resist change, the more we are allied against the nature of nature and the developmental agenda of our own psyches.”
Hollis guides us to our potential breakthroughs the fastest, most elegant way possible, by basically asking us the same question over and over again, in various ways and means: What is your unfinished business? What’s stopping you? And then through a rich parade of illustrative teaching stories and sage advice, drawn from his many decades of practice as one of the country’s leading psychiatrists, he gives us the map to the maze. Of course, it’s up to us to find our way out—especially since along the way, there will be dragons galore. But what is the alternative?
It’s been a month now since that day reading Hollis on the boat, and while I know the fog will roll back in (and out) and in again (which is the point of what I’ve learned) I have the sense that I have been given a taste of that freedom for which I have so long sought. But it didn’t come down from the sky above like a thunderbolt of enlightenment; it came from the painful confrontation with the last and biggest of my ego-driven defenses blocking my way. Oddly enough, it is pretty much the same psycho-spiritual barrier that postponed Ivan’s and Angelica’s redemption—but then again, maybe not so odd at that, given that art often makes the unconscious conscious.
So what was it that dawned on me—the unveiling of this final mask? As Angelica put it in her final confession: The conviction that I had lived an exceptional life. That the kinds of bad things that happen to others won’t happen to me. Unlike them, I can be smarter, stronger, more spiritual, more diligent, more whatever, and dance between the raindrops of life without getting wet. Yes, I did experience a potentially mortal illness, breast cancer—and in fact, when I was in the throes of it, I did have a glimpse of humility and forgiveness—but then I recovered, only to be faced anew with all my other issues that while troublesome, all also seemed handle-able somehow, someday. Of course, the truth is that as hard as I try, I don’t really ever manage to get the upper hand for long. And ultimately, there is no outsmarting the fact that I’m mortal. I guess I’m human. But this is not what I’d expected to hear when I prayed so long and diligently for revelation.
Behind this final mask is the heart of the thing that has now stuck with me: surrender to my own fallibility. And it is only by God’s grace that at least today, I do not feel only shame with the recognition of my hubris, but relief. I can at last pack up the self-defense circus and—did I already give away the punch line?—just take my spot in the lineup of suspects side by side with all the other clowns, fools and reprobates that make up the human race. And nothing of this means I can’t still have joy or do good although I now know there are no guarantees. I feel strangely okay in a way I have never felt fully okay before.
I’m glad I’ve arrived here at all—don’t get me wrong. But again, one wonders how it is that one can have worked so hard and long to become conscious of one’s shadows—even conscious of the urge to control—and still not have found for so long whatever you want to call it: redemption, freedom, merger with the divine, enlightenment? Growing up?
I’ll give Hollis the final word—and it’s a powerful one.
“Once (you) have been in the presence of the large, the timeless, the imaginatively bold, he can no longer be at peace with his own small purchase on life. When we have had our lives reframed and see them as they often are—fear driven, petty, repetitive—we either anesthetize ourselves, distract ourselves, or realize that something has to change. It is usually through numinous moments…or moments of desperation, or moments when the world gets in our face, forcing us to show up, finally.
If we are to show up, we must make choices and stop whining. In those moments, something shifts inside. We experience our life as more fully alive than it has been at any other hour. We realize that we cannot remain bound by fear, convention, or adaptation. We realize that we now have, and have always had, choices. We can say yes or no, but we cannot say we have no choice in the matter.”
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To Order Living an Examined Life, click HERE
To Buy Angelica’s Last Breath in Kindle or Paperback Version, click HERE
To learn about the Conscious Aging Book Club, click HERE
For a free subscription to Older, Wiser, Fiercer, click HERE
To subscribe to our sister site Fierce with Age: The Free Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality, click HERE
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Please support our local independent book stores, and to order your book club books from Parnassus Books, click HERE
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