The guest house. A reflection on projections and a poem by Rumi

The guest house. A reflection on projections and a poem by Rumi

“I don’t like that guy,” my friend told me after we left the cafe. “I don’t either,” I responded, but then it hit me. Why did that guy’s behavior bother me so much and why was I so invested in casting this judgement on him, so that I could feel better? I had been thinking that he was a real jerk. The person in question had not even talked to me directly but was speaking loudly  on his cell phone using lewd words.  I was offended and upset.  Then there was a teacher. He didn’t look at people and rushed through a lecture as if he didn’t care. He never stopped to talk to any of the students, as if nobody mattered. I was offended again. To top it all, someone recently deliberately tried to run me off the road with their pick-up truck.  I was shocked.  Something was stirred up in me and I realized that I had to do some deep thinking about my response to other people’s behavior. Was it all my projections? According to Wikipedia, psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

Every time I identify with some other person’s bad behavior there is some sort of projection happening. For example: I don’t like people with loud voices because my grandfather scared me with his loud laugh while slamming his fist on the table. I don’t like the teacher in question because I experienced being ignored as a child. I understand the power of projections and what it offers in terms of a spiritual practice. From Jungian psychology I know that complexes are unknown psychic material in our unconscious which seem uncontrollable but with practice can be recognized and transformed. If I can recognize a complex appearing in the form of a projection I can use my spiritual practice to first embrace it and then to let it go. My insightful spiritual director has told me to greet my complexes and projections with open arms and to allow the holy to do its work.  That resonates with me as it also is expressed in the poem by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks: 

The Guest House. 

This being is a human guesthouse.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He (She) may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in. 

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

The two directions of death.

The two directions of death.

The more time I spend as a hospice volunteer, the more I learn to understand how the soul of a human being has a completely separate life from the body. The body seems to have a life on its own, a life separate from the human psyche. It becomes more and more clear to me that it is not just the body which characterize who we are but the strange essence of our soul which lives in us the short time we walk upon this earth. I have sat and watched how dying people quietly slips away. Sometimes it takes a long time and they look as if they are in a middle place between dream and reality, between this reality and the next. As the body starts go down, stops working there is a strange presence emerging from the soul and the mind of the dying. 

The gazing eyes and the color of their skin may reveal that they are on their last journey, but there is still important stuff going on in their minds. A woman I sat with for several month while she was in comatose, clearly had a very active dream life. I sat and watched her face and eyes and knew that there was stories and pictures going through her head as she lay there unable to communicate any of it. If you have ever had a dog or a cat you know what I mean about watching them having big dreams. Unconsciously the dog is chasing rabbits in their sleep and the whole body twitches. So too it is with human beings. We may not be chasing rabbits, but the body language is the same. Small jolts of energy goes through the body when we dream and the eyes flickers in the sleep.

In a way, a dying person goes in two directions as Marie Louise Von Franz writes about in her book : On Dreams and Death. (Shambala publications 1986) She mention several examples from patients who has been clinically dead and then brought back to life.  In other words, the body died but the spirit was other places. The theme among such patients seems to repeat itself and it is the notion that the human psyche leaves the body to continue life somewhere else. The dream is from a patient who told about her dying experience.

 I floated right up into this pure crystal clear light,  and illuminating white light. It was beautiful and so bright, so radiant….It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity. It definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love. 

My experience as a hospice volunteer has left me with a  clear understanding that the dying patient is on an inward journey which is completely unrelated to the functions of the body which is slowly preparing to shut down and then to decompose. As the body shuts down however, the mind, or call it “Soul” continues in an interesting almost diametrical opposite direction. In Scandinavia we have an old tradition of opening a window as soon as the body is declared dead. It is also the custom to immediately light candles to honor the sacred moment. By opening the window, the spirit can fly out and be free. It is of course somewhat childish and naive, but on the other hand it is an important symbolic statement which underlines the understanding that the soul of the deceased now goes somewhere else. If you are a religious person it is comforting to know that the soul is now moving toward “The light of God”. If you are an atheist, at least you may agree that the essence which made up the personality of that person is no longer here, and that the body now is going back to the earth to join in the recycling of all matter. The point of my view is that in the moment of death we “Split” and Psyche and Matter goes each their way and in different directions. The body goes back to the earth and the spirit into a place which to us essentially is the great unknown. 

A reflection on holy water.

A reflection on holy water. 

It has taken me 65 years to figure out original sin. All these years, I have been in opposition to the idea that we come into this world as sinners and therefore we have to be baptized as quickly as possible. It was finally the Franciscan monk Richard Rohr who solved my puzzle in his book  “Adam’s Return”. His explanation that the sins of the “Fathers” (read parents) are passed along to the newborn in the DNA makes perfect sense. That makes the act of baptism a beautiful ritual as an initiation for a new life. To dedicate the newborn to the love of Christ and the numinous is an act of love. Baptism is also much more than the ritual of cleansing the newborn from a sinful inheritance. It is also an initiation process as C.G.Jung writes it in his notes from a seminar (1934-39 Vol.1, 22 May 1935 p. 502). You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process. In other words, the newborn passes a threshold of redemption to become a new being, just as Jesus had to be baptized by John the Baptist to start his work as the Messiah. 

Where does that ritual of transformation through water come from? We know that in Judaism the cleansing ritual happens in the Mikvah, a deep basin preferably filled with clean rain water or from a natural spring. The Jewish people were known to use immersion into such pools already at the time of Moses. During the second tempke period the Greek noun baptmos was used to refer to ritual washing in Hellenistic Judaism. I have personally been baptized many times. The first time was as a newborn in the Lutheran church, the second time, I was doused with water when I converted to Catholicism and the third time occurred on what I would call a side step into a fundamentalist Christian church .  Then I was fully immersed into a heated pool. 

Since then, there have been numerous occasions in the Catholic church when the priest bestowed blessed water unto the congregation, all in good understanding of purification and grace from above. Whenever I enter a church, I make the sign of the cross after dipping my finger in the tiny container with holy water by the threshold, that could be called a mini baptism. It is to cleanse oneself as we move from “the world” and into a sacred space. We use water as a purification and a baptism in many religions. From the bathing in the river of Ganges in India or gathering at holy springs back in pre-Christian times in Europe to the Muslim cleansing rituals before their daily prayers, water has served as the conduit between this world and the holy. That is the meaning of the ritual cleansing, it serves both as a preparation and an initiation into the world of the numinous.