Working with Jon

Thursday, August 22, 2024

5:40 a.m. Jon?

It is a good thing to start getting counsel from others. You don’t replace your reliance on intuition, but you do supplement it. It’s more balanced.

Well, I’m using you that way, as long as you’re willing.

Yes, I understand. As usual, look at what you’re working with. What emotions are going into your general feeling about [a certain issue]?

[Discussion shows that I have a different attitude consciously and unconsciously.]

Now here you see an example of the shadow. Consciously, the last thing you want is [X]. But beyond the reach of your awareness, another part of you does want just that.

And I can honestly say I don’t, because that’s all I recognize, the conscious attitude.

Yes, exactly. There it is. And once you really experience it, then you know, and your view of yourself and of everybody else changes.

Is that the purpose of the analysis that prospective psychiatrists have to undergo?

You don’t want the blind leading the blind. And, you need that firsthand experience of your own resistance to learning the truth, if you are going to understand the resistances your clients will show.

It’s amazing anybody can communicate with anybody.

It doesn’t happen vey well, or very deeply. What else?

[More, leading to a topic that at first seemed unrelated.]

I would miss it, too, like everything else in my life I kicked away.

You might look at that. What is the pattern, what is behind it?

For some reason, the pattern is, there’s the glittering possibility that is probably beyond me; then, the reaching for it and attaining it; then, the worms in the apple and a forgetting what I have; then a freeing myself from what has become a constriction; then, exile, a little regret, a feeling of lostness, a temptation to return to the womb I just kicked my way out of. That’s more clarity than I have ever had. It has to be thanks to this conversation.

Now you see the pattern, things will be easier. And there is the credentials thing.

And I suppose I could go into that too, if I weren’t so tired. I disregard credentials as artificial (they are external; they don’t show what I can or cannot do) and then suffer from lack of credentials that might have opened some doors.

But it doesn’t matter, because you would have become dissatisfied anyway.

Yes, I see the pattern.

Go get some more rest. We can pick this up at any time.

Jon, thanks, this is really helpful.

 

10:55 a.m. I haven’t mentioned – maybe to anyone, ever – how my life has been shaped by a contradiction. Everybody has a private life and a public life, which amounts to, an interior life and a social role. I never bought into the social roles, the status. It seemed to me “all men are created equal,” even though everything I saw denied it.

That isn’t saying it in a way that will lead you to greater insight.

You phrase it, then.

Just as you chose intuition over sensory input – to an exaggerated degree – so you chose the soul over the persona. But of course you can’t live that way, nobody would let you. The policeman demands respect. The doctor, the teacher, everybody in your life is a function to you, and may or may not be a person behind the function.

In short, I was one-sided in this as in other things.

You were, shall we say, focused on one idea and were forgetting or preferring not to know contradictory or interfering ideas. But you had to live in the world, one way or another. So there was conflict.

It seems to me I see so much more clearly than others do, but I can’t really act very skillfully.

You see the world in a certain way, an unusual way. Because it is unusual, it is valuable, and it makes you a great deal of trouble.

And it makes it hard for me to understand where other people are coming from.

Not exactly. It makes it hard for you to understand the results of their compromises and strategies to deal with various parts of themselves.

I think I lost part of what I was getting when I wrote the first part of that.

Linda and Dave would bring strangers to see you at Rita’s house because they couldn’t get enough of seeing how you would penetrate their reserve instantly and get them to open up.

That’s true. I’d say, “How are you,” and whoever it was would say, “Fine,” of course, and I’d say, “No, I mean really,” and they would open up. I have assumed it was because they sensed I was really interested and was not making small talk.

They also saw you as intelligent, and open, and without harm. They took your bona fides from your friendship with Linda and Dave, but your manner reinforced it. They didn’t decide to trust you, they instinctively trusted you: by instinct, not by reflection or calculation.

And what is this connected to?

You relate to individuals better than you realize, but what part of the individuals?

Ah, I see. Not the social roles part but the who-am-I-really part that they are probably exploring at the program.

And few enough people find someone interested in their essence rather than in their role. Why do people learn what each other do for a living when they meet, rather than compare longings?

Not so easy to talk about deeper things, not so easy even to know, let alone to know what to say.

Leave this now and come back to it at another time.

Okay.