If we’re shame-based, we try to act like we are not needy. We pretend we don’t feel what we feel. And then we think of all the times we’ve said fine when we were sad or hurting. We either numb out our sexuality and act very puritanical, or we use sexuality to avoid all other feelings and needs. In all cases we are cut off from vital parts of ourselves. These disowned parts appear most commonly in our dreams and in our projections. This is especially true of our sexuality and natural instincts.

Carl Jung called these disowned aspects of ourselves our shadow side. Without integrating our shadow, we cannot be whole.

Negative self-talk is the inner voice. The inner voice has been described by others in different ways. The voice basically tells a shame-based person that they are unlovable, worthless and bad. Most of us are unaware of the habitual activity of the voice. We become aware of it in certain stressful situations of exposure when our shame is activated. After making a mistake, one might call oneself a “stupid” person. Or say, “There I go again. I’m such a blundering klutz.” Before an important job interview, the voice might torment you with thoughts like, “What makes you think you could handle the responsibility of a job like this? Besides, you’re too nervous. They’ll know how nervous you are.”

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent, a fantasy bond.

In order to create the fantasy bond the child has to idealize his parents and make himself “bad.” The purpose of this fantasy bonding is survival. The child desperately relies on his parents. They can’t be bad. If they are bad or sick, he can’t survive. So the fantasy bond, which makes them good and child bad, is like a mirage in the desert. It gives the child the illusion that there is nourishment and support in her life. Years later when the child leaves the parent, the fantasy bond is set up internally. It is maintained by means of the voice. What was once external, the parent’s screaming, scolding and punishing voice creates a great deal of anxiety.

The voice is mostly constituted by the shame-based shut-down defenses of the primary caretakers. Just as the shame-based parents cannot accept their own weakness, wants, feelings, vulnerability and dependency needs, they cannot accept their children’s neediness, feelings, weakness, vulnerability and dependency. The voice is the result of the “parents” deeply repressed desire to destroy the aliveness and spontaneity of that child whenever he or she intrudes on their defenses.

There has been successful work in identifying the origins and destructiveness of the voice. And there have been some powerful ways developed to bring these hostile thoughts into the patient’s awareness. The process of formulating and verbalizing negative thoughts acts to lessen the destructive effect of the voice on the patient’s behavior.

In voice therapy patients are taught to externalize their inner critical thoughts. By doing so they expose their self-attacks and ultimately develop ways to change their negative attitude into a more objective, nonjudgmental view. As the voice is externalized through verbalization, intense feelings are released which result in powerful emotional catharis with accompanying insight.

This critical voice can be activated in any situation of vulnerability or exposure. Once activated, a shaming spiral is set in motion. And once in motion, this spiral has a power of its own. It is imperative to externalize this internal dialogue, since it is one of the major ways you keep yourself nonself-accepting and divided.

Splitting off values for human connection and interdependence and assigning them to the female sphere has left the world a hostile place, in thrall to notions of competition that have become more dangerous as technology has become more potent. Our culture’s inability to harness technology to serve human ends, has resulted in the strain of having to live with the threat of nuclear apocalypse on one hand, and the reality of environmental degradation on the other.

The old Warrior virtues — fearlessness, a thirst for combat, single minded devotion to an ideal, aggression, the ability to conceptualize the other as the enemy, the fierce need to prove oneself in contests — all of these once served the evolutionary human purpose of mobilizing the strongest adult males to preserve and protect other members of the immediate tribe. But advanced technology has turned those virtues into liabilities; aggressive heroics now threaten the survival of the larger tribe, the human race.

It has been duly noted that the inadequacy of the Warrior system has long been a subject of modern literature, the primary theme of which is alienation and despair. Since the second world war, popular and scholarly studies about feelings of pointlessness, sterility, and the separation from nature in modern life have continued to capture the public imagination. The antihero has replaced the hero as the central figure in our literature precisely because the hero myth has come to seem outmoded in a world that too well knows the human cost of pure Warrior values.

The nitration of the feminine principles into the public realm offers hope for healing this condition, returning a concern for the nurturing and fostering of life to our public sphere, and decreasing the emphasis on competition — whether to build the highest building, or to “win” a totally abstract arms race. Thus women’s entry into the public sphere can be seen not merely as the result of contemporary economic pressures, the high rate of divorce, or the success of the feminist movement, but rather as a profound evolutionary response to a pervasive culture crisis. Feminine principles are entering the public realm because we can no longer afford to restrict them to the private domestic sphere, nor allow a public culture obsessed with Warrior values to control human destiny if we are to survive.

Drawing on Jung’s study of symbols, under the old dichotomized system, the female heroic archetype was the Martyr. The martyr’s central tasks are care, sacrifice, and redemptive suffering; the Martyr’s central recognition is, “I am not the only person in this world.” This puts the Martyr in total contrast to the Warrior, whose central tasks are individuation, achievement, and action, and whose chief recognition is of his own importance and ability to make a difference in the world. Both archetype’s contain validity and worth, however, let’s hope our culture can move beyond them to acknowledge a new kind of hero that unites the qualities of both: the Magician.

The Magician incorporates the Martyr’s emphasis on care and serving others with the Warrior’s ability to affect his environment by the exercise of discipline, struggle, and will. Thus the Magician knows how to sacrifice and give care without losing personal identity, and how to work hard to achieve something without getting caught up in an unceasing competitive competitive struggle. At the Magician’s level, dualities begin to break down. Magicians see beyond apparent dichotomies of male and female, ends and means, efficiency and humanity, mastery and nurturance, logic and intuition. Instead, they focus on the interconnections that bind all human beings and relate events to one another; they take the long view because they see the relation of the present to the future.

It is this awareness of interconnections that enables Magicians to move with the energy of the universe and to attract what is needed by laws of synchronicity, so that the ease of the Magician’s interaction with the universe seems like magic. Synchronicity, is a Jungian concept that means meaningful coincidences or acausal connections — as when you go into a bookstore and the very book you need but did not even know existed falls into your hands.

This finding of one’s path is similar to the finding of one’s realizing that one’s own talents and experiences make one uniquely suited to the task that one has chosen to do in life.

Magicians in all cultures are associated with circles. They draw magic circles and put themselves in the middle, structuring the world around them as a web. From inside, they act as magnets who attract and galvanize positive energy for change by identifying places where growth can occur for individuals, institutions, or social groups, and then by fostering that growth. Taking opportunities as they come, they build up power by empowering others, valuing connections instead of competition. They recognize that all ships rise when the tide rises, so they use their power to effect a rising of the tide.

The Magician’s great talent is for tapping into and drawing strength from energy sources outside themselves, picking up signals from everywhere, and then beaming them to wherever they need to go. And certainly women with profound values for interconnection and responsibility, their ecological view, their focus on the long term, and their talent for building up strength by building up others, provide examples of the Magician’s way, for they have mastered the Warrior’s skills of discipline, will, and struggle necessary to achieve success in the public realm, but then moved beyond them to provide models of what leadership can become when guided by the feminine principles.

The once accepted idea that an individual’s personality is set in stone is changing, reported the psychologist at Stanford University recently.

One reads about all this twin research out there where these people who have been raised apart have remarkable similarities. They married women with the same name; they named their dog the same thing; they both build little ships that fit into a bottle and they show up to their reunion wearing almost identical clothing The implication there is that it’s all programmed in, that personality is permanently stamped into our genes.

This static-character research is typically based on a definition of personality comprising five features, called the five-factor model, including openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

While these factors are important to a person’s character, they aren’t the definitive word, and results generated from the model could be missing subtle, yet critical, aspects of personality. The point is that there’s a really big in-between area that’s not accounted for and these are the crucial beliefs that people develop as they grow and learn.

For instance a person might view intelligence as a fixed trait or one that can greatly impact their “trademark” behaviors. Called fixed or growth mindsets, these two different views of oneself develop early in childhood and can contribute tremendously to personality. It has a big impact on their motivation and achievement, and plays a role in business and in social relationships, or whether people can solve conflicts, and whether they can bounce back from failures and rejections.

Studies of selected students at Columbia University found that those with fixed views about intelligence were primarily focused on proving their smartness and so were less motivated to learn and less likely to take on challenges.

Stanford University research has shown that when you change the belief, a lot of important things happen and students’ motivation turns around; their grades and test scores go up; managers become better mentors, more successful negotiators.

And when children or even adults are taught that abilities and character features can develop and change, they become more resilient to setbacks.

Similarly, when it comes to romantic relationships, pop magazines often tout the idea that certain personalities (or astrological signs) are like oil and water and it’s best to just steer clear of each other. Research shows, however, oil and water can change in a way that permits compatibility.

Couples with fixed ideas about their personalities often don’t try to resolve marital conflicts. Why bother? They just try to either ignore [the conflict] or when it gets really bad they consider leaving the marital relationship. Sadly they are just beliefs, and beliefs can change, and maybe it’s not as tough as most people think to save that relationship.

Remember, you are learning spiritual wisdom as well as spiritual knowledge. Wisdom has to do with how you carry knowledge in life — how you express knowledge, where you share it and how you hold it in regard to yourself and other people.

People are eager to share because they want self-validation. They want somebody else to tell them that they are wonderful and that they are doing the right thing. Avoid this and avoid idle conversation. Avoid talking about spiritual ideas and great things with people who cannot receive them and avoid someone else’s spiritual journey.

Do not dabble in different religions because you will only be a dabbler. You can only know a religion if you immerse yourself within it. And if you immerse yourself in it, how can you be studying everything else?

There are many people who take a very eclectic approach, who try to gather a little of this and a little of that. They have postcards from all over the spiritual universe, but they have never been anywhere. They think they understand what Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or any other religion means, but they have never immersed themselves in any of them. They have never lived them fully. They have lots of big ideas and no Wisdom. Avoid this. Avoid trying to tie in what you are doing with what someone else has done in the past or in the present.

Do not make your way spiritual by saying that it is in keeping with Christianity or Buddhism or any other religion, for you don’t really know. You have not yet gone far enough.

Power is concentration. If your power, your concentration, is spread out over many things, you will not have enough power for anything. Become focused on a few people, a few things and a few ideas. Don’t try to collect all the spiritual information. Don’t try to gather anything that is unnecessary. Let spiritual enlightenment move you to choose the things that you need rather than filling yourself with ideas, with books, with people, with experiences, with places to go and with things to do. In other words, don’t clutter yourself with things that just have to be given up.

Live simple. Let your life be unexplainable. Let your life be inexplicable, for it will be inexplicable to those who cannot share it with you. You are being governed and guided by a greater power within you now, a greater power that you are coming to know through experience, a greater power that you are choosing by making wise decisions. Let there be big gaps in your understanding. Then you will be honest with yourself and honest with others, and you will be a refreshing presence in the world. Do not join with others in their odes to themselves, in singing their songs of self-assurance and self-validation. Remain silent and move on.

Prepare, then, with the right curriculum, the right attitude, the right instructor, the right companions and the right evaluative skills. The correct attitude is based upon your feeling your deeper need, which is necessary even at the outset. You need to discern, and your discerning will take you beyond the conventions of human education, which are limited and specific.

You need to become conscious of something greater in life, and this requires a different kind of preparation. This consciousness lives within you. It is the very essence of your spirituality. It represents the greater part of you that is bonded intrinsically with all life. You do not seek this. It is within you already, but only will you be able to gain access to it in the present moment, never in the future.

They have not tried to use their spiritual experience for personal gain, and instead have let it grow stronger and more intense within themselves.

You will not find this in idle dabblers or in people who are like tourists in a spiritual universe. However, you will find this in those who have had to face their own thresholds, who have had to cross their own rivers, and who have had to experience and face their own doubts and fears and the wasteful consequences of their mistakes.

These are people who are following something inexplicable that they do not attempt to define or use. Their silence is profound and inviting. They are with the Mystery. And the Mystery is with them. Through them a greater comfort and a greater power can emerge and abide. Someone who is with the Mystery can share the Mystery without words, without conversation, without debate and without self-glorification.

To attune to a spiritual presence you must first recognize a certain fundamental need within yourself. You must feel this need and separate it from other needs that may be more personal or immediate in nature. This basic need represents the yearning to discover your real purpose in life.

Along with the recognition of this need must be the realization that your many attempts to fulfill this need through love, through affluence, through excitement or through stimulation have not satisfied the greater yearning of your heart.

Something greater must be given to you to satisfy this — something that you cannot invent for yourself, something that you cannot piece together from all the various teachings and religious practices that you may encounter in life. Here you realize the limits of even your own independence, for in truth you need life tremendously. You need others tremendously. Realizing this, instead of becoming dependent, you will learn to become interdependent.

As you proceed down your chosen path to spiritual enlightenment you will value things that others do not value, see things that others do not see and know or will not know. What seems obvious to you will not be obvious to them. You will see both their gifts and their disabilities. They may see neither. You will have higher standards for yourself, but these standards will not be shared by other people. You will value a deeper experience of honesty, but you will not be able to communicate this freely with others.

Again and again you will find out the limits that other people set before you and around you. And again and again you will feel other people’s influence. You will feel yourself being pulled into idle conversation. You will feel yourself being pulled back into a state of mind that you have worked hard to emerge out of. You will feel the weight of their concerns and preoccupations, but you will not want to be encumbered by them.

Something has changed at the very core of you in a way that you cannot describe. You feel different. Your values are changing. Your priorities are changing. Your emphasis in life is changing. This steers you away from people who are not experiencing this and towards those who are. It brings you specifically towards certain individuals who share your journey. Some of them will only go a short way with you; others will travel with you for a lifetime.

You’ll find yourself avoiding many people and situations, and in fact, after a time you will look at the general activities of most people with disinterest. Perhaps you will feel lonely and estranged. Congratulations! You are beginning to find your freedom. You are starting to value something that is valuable. If this sets you apart, great. You need this freedom. You need this liberation. You need to be free of the bondage that other people place upon themselves and inadvertently place upon you.

To be continued…….

On profit-driven factory farms, veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.

A twenty-three-year-old federal law requires that cattle and hogs to be slaughtered must first be stunned, thereby rendered insensitive to pain, but mounting evidence indicates that this is not always being done, that these animals are sometimes cut, skinned, and scaled while still able to feel pain.

A Texas beef company, with twenty-two citations for cruelty to animals, was found chopping the hooves off live cattle. In another Texas plant with about two dozen violations, federal officials found nine live cattle dangling from an overhead chain.

Secret videos from an Iowa pork plant show hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the boiling water that will soften their hides, soften the bristles on the hogs and make them easier to skin.

The law clearly requires that these poor creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before this process begins. Federal law is being ignored. Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening and is infuriating.

Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food. Such insensitivity is insidious and can spread and is dangerous. Life must be respected and dealt with humanely in a civilized society.

According to laws passed by congress, the Secretary of Agriculture is to report on cases of inhumane animal treatment in regard to livestock production, and to document the response of USDA regulatory agencies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies have the authority and the capability to take action to reduce this disgusting cruelty, knowing that Congress expects them to do even better at enforcing the law, and also in their research for new, humane technologies.

Let us hope that in the future, those enforcing the law will not tolerate unnecessary, abhorrent, and repulsive cruelty to animals any longer.

Whether we’re looking for someone to date or sizing up a potential rival, our eyes irresistibly lock on to good-looking people.

In a recent study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half-second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course. But those in committed relationships more often eyed beautiful people of the same sex.

So if we’re interested in finding a mate, our attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive members of the opposite sex, and if we’re jealous and worried about our partner cheating on us, attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive people of our own sex because they are our competitors.

But this evolutionary trick is not without potential romantic peril. Even some people in committed relationships had trouble tearing their eyes away from attractive members of the opposite sex. On the other hand, fixating on attractive people of the same sex as rivals could contribute to feelings of insecurity.

Men prone to jealousy keep a close eye on attractive potential rivals, because when it came to concerns about infidelity, men are very attentive to highly attractive guys because presumably their wives or girlfriends may be too.

The Florida State researchers flashed pictures of attractive men and women and average-looking men and women in front of participants and measured the time it took to shift their attention away from the image. Surprisingly there was little difference between the sexes, and women paid just as much attention to men as men did to women.

It seems that evolution has primed our brains to subconsciously latch on to signs of physical attractiveness in others, both to find a mate and to guard him or her from potential competitors.

But we are exactly not strands in the web. We are a nature-mystic experience, not a strand in the web. We are the entire web. We are doing something no mere strand ever does — we are the entire display. To be aware of the whole system shows precisely that we are not merely a strand, which is supposed to be our official stance.

“Explaining” this experience in systems or “web-of-life” terms is a very poor way to interpret it. Ecomasculinists often prefer systems theory terms; ecofeminists generally believe that systems theory is too masculine and abstract, and prefer instead eco-sentimentalism and relationship terms: both are equally grounded in the monochrome world of simple location, the empirical or external world.

But once we’ve committed that flatland reductionism, we start to think that the way to transform the world is to simply get everybody to agree with our monological map, forgetting the six or seven interior stages the mapmaker actually had to go through in order to get to this point where we can agree in the first place.

And like the multicults, we forget all the stages of transcendence that got us to this noble point, and so not only do we bizarrely condemn transcendence itself (the actual path!), we simply collapse all those stages into an incredibly simplistic “one-step” transformation: agree with my holistic Gaia map, and I will be saved. And so, like many of the multicults, some of us folks often become rather belligerent and intolerant, claiming that all the strands in the web are equally important, but despising the strands that disagree with them.

So instead, we need to take into account the interior dimensions — we have to take into account linguistic and cultural backgrounds, methods of interpretation, the many stages of consciousness evolution, the intricate stages of moral development and decentering, the validity claims of truthfulness and sincerity and justness, monarchical degrees of depth, the hierarchy of expanding self-identity and methods of transcendence — all of those are interior dimensions, and none of those items are found on the monological and external World map!

And sadly, for just that reason, we won’t find a decent discussion of the interior stages of development in any books on deep ecology, ecofeminism, or ecophilosophy. But without those factors we’ll never make it to the new World, because we wont know how to get people into the boat and on their way. What we’ll have is a fine goal with no real path.

It’s our choice isn’t it? But without the necessary interior stages of development, and thus sufficient consciousness, a choice never exists, does it?