Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Today’s entry can be found on The Huffington Post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-witzeman/addiction-why-we-bark-up_b_419162.html
Some more thoughts:
I was on the golf course last week and one of the guys I was playing with made the comment, “I hope I never grow up.” And I thought, “wow, that’s what I used to think . . . until it STOPPED WORKING.” Carl Jung has a beautiful description of the dilemma:
“Something in us wishes to remain a child; to be unconscious, or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything foreign, or at least subject it to our will; to do nothing or in any case indulge our own craving for pleasure or power.”
And then the problem:
“Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
I get from Jung’s analysis that the real work seems to be to make some kind of a daily effort to extricate myself from the past. That seems to be a matter of connecting with all the ego’s schemes of willing and striving and then trying to turn it over to God as best I can. Ultimately it seems I have good days and bad days with that turning over thing. But so far “contributing to the planet” seems like a pretty good mantra to make the shift.
