This was a satisfying read in that the author was aging at this point and became if possible even more introspective, and it was fascinating to follow the delight she took in seemingly simple things but on a much deeper level. Internalizing experience can happen at a lot of levels, and it seems to me that as one ages one seems to see eternity more easily in the mundane. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at as what I found in this book.

Marion Milner also wasn’t just any aging woman. She was someone who’d explored her inner workings from the time she was young, had spent years helping others do so as a psychoanalyst, and had never stopped growing and learning and considering that there was something deeper she needed to get at. So many people seem to decide that they’re “finished” at some point and become more know-it-all than questing. I feel that it’s our quests that really define us and make us wise rather than just knowledgeable.

The book is organized as a kind of internal travelogue. It follows her on four different trips to Greece, and a visit to Israel, paying attention only to what stood out for her, observations if you will that she identifies as “beads” as if she were putting together a string of prayer beads, each one special for its own (and her own internal) reasons. This isn’t what one expects from a travelogue. There isn’t anything that a casual tourist looks for. It will appeal only to the tourist of the psyche, playing with the images that stand out for the author in her travels, viewed as one might read the images in dreams.

Some early passages that stand out for me:

“Now I knew what it was I had missed in the other two visits, when there had been no time to climb the mountain, knew that it had not been that I had wanted just to see what flowers and birds were there, nor to get to the top, nor to find the Bacchantes’ cave (we really knew we’d never reach it), but rather to achieve something of what arriving at a holy place by mechanical transport deprives one of, the sense of spending, not one’s money but one’s self, to get there.”
(See the Greek play, Bacchantes by Euripides, “O hidden cave of the Curetes!” (http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/bacchan.html), which the author had been reading while on an earlier trip to Greece.)

“I had certainly found that the whole idea of turning one’s attention inwards was deeply threatening to some people.”

(Contemplating the Daphni monastery Christ Pantrocrator mosaic) “… could this be a glimpse of a new vision that the artist who made the mosaic was speculating about, perhaps not even knowing that he was, a secret doubt whether the wholesale rejection of the body which had become so embedded in the way Christianity had developed since the days of Christ really was what Christ had meant? Could it be showing the mosaic maker’s own intuition that to be truly human did not mean denying the body but redeeming it from the body-mind split that practical life in the world so often seems to demand, redeeming it by a recurrent resurrection, not after death but in this life? And, therefore, not retreating from bodily love but going deeper into it, finding richer and richer possibilities in relationship, in psychic and physical creativeness, bringing the full inner body awareness into being together?”

All of this was of course the author’s personal musing, reflecting on her Christian upbringing and coming to terms with her early rejection of that teaching and her interest in nature and in paganism – and later in psychology. Although the author was a Freudian psychoanalyst, she occasionally referenced Jung and skirted around Jungian ideas. In fact throughout her four books that I’ve now read she made reference to what she called the “inner gesture” and an “Answering Activity” or “the sense of something other that lives one.” All these I found leading to or similar to what Jung referred to as the Self.

I’ll stop sharing passages here and leave the rest to be discovered by those who choose to read the book, as I think I’ve made clear by now that this isn’t so much a travelogue of Greece and Israel as it is a travelogue of Marion Milner’s unique vision of life, and an invitation for others to find their own unique visions of life.

There are some passages that refer to her earlier books and are likely best understood if one has read them, but I don’t think any lack of familiarity with those books will detract too much from understanding this one. I just feel lucky to have read them and feel as if I know the author better to start with. This was almost like finding as yet unread letters from a dear friend.

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In the meantime, since I first started journaling, I’ve read a lot of books about writing, because I had a dream of being a published novelist. But I’d never read a book about keeping a journal until now. The other day someone posted a quote by Tristine Rainer about journaling. I looked up the name, found that she’d written a couple of books, and one thing led to another.

The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer, was published in 1978 and has a preface written by Anaïs Nin just a year or so before her death. One might expect this book to be dated and out of touch considering when it was published. What I found inside was a virtual treasure chest of gems on the journaling process, and that emphasis on the process is important. The primary product of this process is not the contents of the filled diary or journal, so much as what one gains internally from engaging in the process to begin with.

As I say, I’ve kept a journal since the mid-seventies, and I came upon some of the techniques, or devices, described in the book entirely on my own. But reading this book gave me new insight into why those techniques helped me, and additional techniques to try using in my journals. I also gained a kind of validation about some things that I’ve done in my journals that I considered negative and detrimental because I was focused on content rather than process and what was healing to me. I have never wanted anyone to read my personal journals, and I still don’t, except for tidbits that I share here and there (many blog posts start out as journal entries, as does most of my poetry). Even so I was somehow caught up in the idea that the contents, and how readable they might be to someone else, were what mattered. I came to realize, in reading this book, how much healing and emotional cleansing I’ve gotten out of keeping my journals the way I do, with my internal censors and editors turned off, and ways to make them even more personally satisfying from now on, in fact ways to go deeper into unconscious material, which is something I’ve wanted to do.

I can’t recommend this book enough, for anyone, from the person new to keeping a diary to the long-time journal keeper like me, as well as for those with painful pasts or difficult present circumstances who’ve never considered a diary, and creative people of all types.

Having finished reading The New Diary and penciled lots of passages that I want to keep in mind, I plan to go back very soon and try more of the devices that are new to me, and even rethink some of those I’ve already used.

I’ve also moved on to another book on journal keeping, by fiction writer and therapist Kathleen Adams, titled Journal To the Self, Twenty-Two Paths To Personal Growth. This one is a bit more recent, published in 1990, but again still completely fresh. I’m nearly finished and I recommend this book as a follow-up to Rainer’s or as a stand-alone key to open some of the secrets of satisfying journal writing.

Both Rainer and Adams mentioned the trademarked Intensive Journal program by Ira Progoff, which was developed in 1966 as a workshop in which he taught a structured kind of journal process using a loose-leaf binder with color-coded dividers. I have a book on my reading pile by Ira Progoff, titled At A Journal Workshop. Progoff’s book, which I’ve peeked through a bit already, is drier, a little more convoluted, and teaches a different type of journaling process than the more organic style that I’m used to. Kathleen Adams differentiates between the two types of journals by describing hers (and mine) as “smorgasbord” and Progoff’s as “a la carte.” One is simply more free flowing and integrated than the other. But both have their strength, I’m sure, and it’s a good idea to explore different ways, and especially to try one for a while and keep it in one’s toolbox rather than dismiss it out of hand. There is so much to be gained from the journaling process, from the experience itself, one shouldn’t really dismiss anything, because it’s likely to have its use somewhere or at sometime in one’s life.

One of the best things I’ve found in the books by Rainer and Adams are some journal organizing and indexing tips that help one find past entries a little easier. I’ve been thinking that I needed to digitize all my old journals, especially my dream journals, so that I could find older entries more easily, but their tips will, I think, help me avoid that nightmare and make more use of my past journals without going that far.

So I’ve veered away a bit now from my reading of Carl Jung and associates, into reading about journal writing. But that’s not such a bad thing. I’ve struggled for a couple of years now with beginning to do Active Imagination, doing it in stops and starts. Active Imagination was one of Jung’s primary tools for the self-realization or individuation process. Since reading these wonderful books on journaling, I’m feeling a lot more confident about Active Imagination. The two processes mesh very well. So I’ve veered off track with a purpose, after all.

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According to the author, in nearly every culture that has a phonetic alphabet, there was a kind of culture shock that occurred, first when the alphabet was developed and a lot of people became literate, and later when printing became common. These culture shocks came in waves accompanied by violence and/or oppression, especially against women. These periods of time, at least in the West, also coincided with the growth and spread of monotheistic religions that banished images as “graven” or evil, and reformations of those religions, particularly those that renewed the idea that images were bad and the written word was good. (Confucianism apparently arrived with similar shock waves in the East.) In addition to these effects coinciding with the spread of alphabetic writing and monotheistic religion, they also coincided with the spread of Cartesian ideals that put science and rational thought above faith, nature, irrational thought and the arts, and again with the rise of both atheism and Marxism.

I won’t go into much detail, because really the details need to be read as they’re presented in the book in order to make the most sense, and I feel that I have a loose grasp on them. This book bears rereading, for me at least. But I recommend it. Any tiny inaccuracies are excusable considering the amount of information the author sifted through to draw his conclusions.

Overall, the conclusions drawn make sense to me. The book doesn’t promote illiteracy or a return to a more “backward” culture, as one might conclude before reading it. It promotes balance, much like what Jung would no doubt encourage, between rational and irrational, masculine and feminine, Logos and Eros, science and belief, and nature and civilization. It’s easy to see how the spread of the written word and the banishing of images occurring at the same time created an imbalance that people didn’t know how to adapt to. One hopes that our increased understanding of human psychology and our need for balance will help us to adapt better to the similar shock waves that occur as we continue to evolve.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Leonard Shlain
Penguin 1999
ISBN-10: 0140196013
ISBN-13: 978-0140196016

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I don’t consider myself high in the willpower department, and though I was never sure exactly what set me back the other times that I failed to carry through with something, it never surprised me. I thought of myself as an underachiever. What I’ve found most years is that if I set a resolution, it doesn’t pan out. But in 1995 I accomplished both my big goals.

Why? First, they were goals that were both important to me, things I felt strongly about at the time, and they’d been on my mind for months and even years before the point of crystallization that caused me to go for them.

There was one other secret that I’m now convinced got me through that year.

I didn’t tell a soul about these two goals.

Not until I was well into working on them, so far that there seemed to be no turning back. So far, that I knew on my own without anyone else telling me that I was making solid progress, that I was succeeding. A head of steam and a momentum had built up that was propelling me forward with a kind of inevitability I’d never experienced before in either kind of endeavor. I took action, and kept taking action until I reached my goals.

Why might it be that not talking about my goals helped? I found an article somewhere about this a few months ago, and at the time it hit me with some force, this realization that I’d seen this principle in action, that I’d experienced it.

Keeping mum about goals can be the secret to success:

TED Talks: Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself

If we keep goals to ourselves we’re less likely to get the feeling that we’ve already accomplished or gotten some kind of head start on what we set out to do, or that we’re nearing our desired result when we aren’t yet.

In 1995 I recall that I set about my two goals with a vengeance. I spent my evenings and weekends on them, made a point of cooking less and deemphasizing food in my life, and got my imagination working full force on the creative project.

When I wasn’t working on my goals I simply put them out of my mind, didn’t dwell on them or spend any time visualizing outcomes. I didn’t want to think about outcomes. Truth to tell, I didn’t have that much faith that I’d accomplish my goals at all, only a hardened determination in my core, a burning desire, almost an angry need to prove something. I expected to fail, and I think that fed my determination. I was fed up with the status quo and I refused to accept it any longer. The status quo of me. I felt I had nothing left to lose. No matter what the outcome, I couldn’t feel worse about myself than I did already.

Unfortunately I didn’t figure out, even after my success that year, what exactly I’d done right, and I’ve stumbled over goals ever since, including the one of keeping all that weight off. So I was relieved this past year to come across an explanation and validation of what exactly happened with me in 1995.

I think my nothing-left-to-lose mentality played an important role in my success that year, but a big part of it was not talking about it up front. Just doing it. Not fooling myself into the feel-good of thinking I’d succeeded before I had. Rather I developed this hawkish perspective of myself and my efforts, not the dangerous “You can’t do this, you’re terrible,” internal criticism that can paralyze me, but more of a suspicious, watchful, “You’d better do this and you’re not putting it off. No excuses. This is your life!” Then I didn’t let up. I became my own most effective task master.

I know, now that I understand it better, that I can repeat this method and make it a regular pattern in my life. The first part of the process, though, is making sure I know exactly what I’m that passionate about at this point in my life, and making the choice to throw myself into that. What gives me that nothing-left-to-lose feeling? It won’t be what someone else thinks would be nice for me to do, and it won’t be something I think makes me look good to others. Someone else’s values and goals won’t work the same way for me. They must be my goals, what I want in the deepest crevices of my heart. No one can help me with that, no one can effectively tell me which are the good ideas and which aren’t. Only I can do that. I have to feel that.

Before you can set or attain any personal goal, you have to know what you want. Then shut up and do it.

By the way, there’s something wrong with the idea that we can only make resolutions at the start of the year. Any time of year works, if you have the right goal for you, and go about it the right way.

Now I won’t tell you my New Years resolutions, and maybe you shouldn’t tell me yours either.

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Watch Christmas in Yellowstone on PBS. See more from Nature.

Cross-posted at LiveJournal pomegranate56.

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