"... Each man has his Enkidu, his other half, his hidden self. The more he is out of touch with his double the more a man's life is an empty and unsatisfying burlesque..."
"... There is never one pole without the another, no truth without a valid opposite, no going far enough in one direction without coming full circle..."
"... No man can be fully a man unless he comes to terms with the female double within him. So too, with women and their male shadows. Those who do not know their sexual counterparts are absurd caricatures of the identities to which they aspire..."
"... Like that of all other pilgrims, Gilgamesh's quest is related to a search for the meaning of life. We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select..."
"... Parents always turn out to be a disappointment, one way or another. Frustrations are many, and life is inherently unmanageable..."
"... Helpless as we are as children, to change the world, or to move on and take care of ourselves, we must develop ways of pretending that we are not so powerless..."
"... Life is mainly simply inevitable..."
"... "the meaning of life can be revealed but never explained". The point is that there is no point..."
"... Perhaps the most difficult thing for the patient to accept is that he is quite ordinary..."
"... I talk often of death, of his (patient) death and mine and of the deaths of people we love... We will be dead a long, long time. That will be it. There is no meaning. It's a random universe, and time is short. It slips by even as he wastes it complaining, feeling sorry for himself, trying to be special, to be compensated for his misfortunes..."
"... The central fact of my own life is my death. After a while, it will all come to nothing. Whenever I have to courage to face this, my priorities become clear. At such times nothing is done in order to achieve something else. No energy is wasted on maintaining the illusions. My image does not matter, I do not worry about how I am doing. I do what I do, am who I am. That's it. The imminence of my own death is the pivot around which things turn. This makes what is going on now all that counts..."
"... it's so terribly hard to remember that we have so little time..."
"... Not only are there many things that we never get around to dealing with, but even when we do, there is so damn much waste in the process, so much unnecessary distance between ourselves and those with whom we try to make life..."
"... Too often, I forget that I am dying, that we each of us suffer from the same terminal disease. At such times, when I do not remember to remember, I blow it. The pilgrimage of Gilgamesh reminds me of "the absurdity of life and death, heroic wistfulness, nostalgia for lost possibilities, melancholy of missed perfection ...[and that even] the love of comrades cannot prevail against the insult of death". The pilgrimage of my brother, Gilgamesh, helps me not to forget."
Tale of a Spoiled identity.
"... The roots of most women's problems are political and social..."
"... There was much to be learned, and perhaps even more to be unlearned..."
"... a young girl's sense of who she is in her mother's eyes is also a crucial parameter in the development of her stigmatized self..."
"... individuals cannot be understood apart from the social contexts in which they live and that an understanding of social structures and processes depends in part on knowledge of personality dynamics [Essay Statement of Purpose by Willo]..."
Tale of a Discontented Disciple.
"... This Sanskrit word, Siddhartha, means "he who has achieved his aim"..."
"... He [Siddhartha] wishes to experience the Atman (the universal consciousness) and comes to see that: "One must find the source within one's own Self"..."
"... The psychotherapy patient must also come to this heavy piece of understanding, that he does not need the therapist. The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him..."
"... Illusions die hard, and it is painful to yield to the insight that a grown-up can be no man's disciple. This discovery does not mark the end of the search, but a new beginning..."
"... They [Kamala and Siddhartha] are happy together, as she shows him that "one cannot have pleasure without giving it"..."
"... Psychotherapy patients also soon learn to be moved by their nocturnal visions as they discover that we are often wiser when we dream than we are awake. Because the dreaming experience is unhampered by whorish Reason, and the dreamer is not distracted by the conventional wisdom of other people's perspectives and expectations, we sometimes see most clearly when our eyes are closed..."
"... nightmares are simply those dreams that we are too frightened to complete. We panic. The fear that we will confront something that will face us with more terror than we can bear leads us to escape into waking, still haunted by the awful bad-dream feelings..."
"... Sexual love is an art, and art is a game; every game is dangerous, for the player may sooner or later forget it is a game... [From the book Siddhartha]"
"... After a time, Siddhartha learns to live with things as they are...He learns that wisdom is "nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life"..."
"... Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish...[From the book Siddhartha]"
"... There is nothing to tell because the distinctions between things are illusions. "Truth cannot be taught... [because] the paradox of paradoxes [is] that of each truth the opposite is equally true"..."
"... Before Siddhartha could discover that he needed no teacher, he first had to exhaust his longing for others to guide him, to take charge of his life. So too, with the patient of psychotherapy and with every one of us. Unwilling to tolerate life's ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way..."
"... But what if we are talking to ourselves? What it there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?..."
"... If I cannot have the good parent, at least I can become the good parent..."
"... It is not possible to know how much is just enough, until we have experienced how much is more than enough..."
"... The psychotherapy patient is also encouraged to give in to himself, if he is ever to be free of himself. You cannot get out of a trap unless you first get into it. Overcoming by yielding is the only escape..."
"... The only times that we can have what we long for are those moments when we stop grasping fo it. At such times, all things are possible: "to a mind that is 'still', the whole universe surrenders"..."
Tale of a Quest for Love.
"... lifetime commitment to monogamous union seems to me the most rewarding alternative available in our present culture. I certainly wish to be open to the other alternatives, which are being suggested by the articulate spokesman and spokeswomen of the sexual revolution, women's liberation, and communal living, but I do confess to finding it hard to believe that new solutions will not engender new problems. At present, I see monogamous, lifelong marriage as our most viable solution to loneliness, as the best setting so far available in which to raise children, and as the most practical contract for mutual support and freedom in a world so difficult for any one person to manage within..."
"... marriage is also limiting, frustrating, and periodically terribly painful..."
"... long-term commitments to being out of work, or to remaining single, seem to create greater problems than they solve..."
"... Ironically, in these willful struggles [marital difficulties], a spouse often complains bitterly about having to live with a mate who is acting in just the ways that he (or she) found most attractive during courtship..."
"... What people look for in marriage, at least in part, is the other half of themselves..."
"... To some extent, each of us marries to make up for his own deficiencies..."
"... In order to survive as children, we have all had to exaggerate those aspects of ourselves that pleased those on whom we depended, and to disown those attitudes and behaviors that were unacceptable to them. As a result, to varying degrees, we have each grown into disproportionate configurations of what we could be as human beings. What we lack, we seek out and then struggle against in those whom we select as mates..."
"... Like it or not, these same differences between spouses are both the strengths of a good marriage and the hazards of a bad one..."
"... One way of conceiving the origins of these struggles [marital difficulties] is in terms of how children shape their identities in their relationships with their parents..."
"... The ambiguity and uncertainties of fulfilling oneself as a man or as a woman sometimes mask the more profound anguish of simply being human..."
"... sexuality has qualities that draw other problems... Sex is an arena within which other kinds of problems get played out..."
"... sexual longings are to some extent instinctual, and therefore dependable..."
"... sexuality is an expendable instinctual need..."
"... Willfulness, stubbornness, spite, and other petty insistences of maintaining the illusion of being in control of that which we cannot control, run rampant in the relationship between the sexes. The unwillingness to be vulnerable, to be helpless, to give up control, to trust, is deployed in a mad attempt either to get one's own way, or failing that, at least to make sure that the partner does not get his (her) own way. Getting our own way, that which Dame Alice says is what women want most, is, God help us, as often what men want most for themselves as well."
Tale of a Power Trip.
"... Once content to serve those in power, he [Macbeth] now begins to know the "black and deep desires" for greatness, the "vaulted ambition" for a position over other men..."
"... Power trips often figure centrally in the struggles of the psychotherapy patient/pilgrim as well. The ironic difference is that these patients have most often been trapped into seeking an illusory form of power, one which ultimately renders them powerless..."
"... It is not the power he wields, but rather the demonically soul-absorbing longings for ascendance that eat away at Macbeth's character..."
"... the illusion of interpersonal power, the fantasy of having power over other people's feelings..."
"... One way or another, power over others always turns out to be a costly burden..."
"... For a child to be able first to survive and then to grow toward being a happy, creatively self-fulfilling adult, he must be taken care of by his parents..."
"... Power illusions are always the result of an early two-party contract..."
"... Beware the helplessness gambit of the chronic victim!..."
"... Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life, there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving. We get to keep no more than we earn by our own efforts. In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with..."
"... children need at least the continuing hope that their parents may come to love them..."
"... Her destiny did not have anything to do with what sort of child she really was. Had she been born to the family next door, she might have been valued and enjoyed for the sort of lovely little girl she once was..."
"... Her only real power lies in taking charge of her own life, enjoying being who she is, and making her life as meaningful as she can for herself, whatever others may or may not expect of her..."
"... the past cannot be buried without the pain of mourning..."
"... The illusion of power over the feelings of others is a deadly chimera..."
"... I've really got it straight in my head that no one is any bigger than I am. It's the other part that I can still sometimes get hung up on... At my worst moments, I am still tempted to the arrogant presumption that I can victimize other people, lesser beings whose fragile feelings I should somehow be taking care of. Lord protect me from the so-called "victims"!"
Tale of a Mad Knight.
"... I prefer the madness of Don Quixote to the sanity of most other men..."
"... Attempts at social change are after all usually left to the youthful idealists, while older cynics wait for young fools to outgrow their folly..."
"... Life is very dull for those too timid, too unimaginative, too sane to bring to it a sense of personal style, of individual purpose, of color, verve, fun, and excitement. Don Quixote's Quest, the personal pilgrimage of his mad life, was to live in "the world as it is traversed by man as he ought to be"[Wood Krutch]. If this be the wine of madness, then I say: "Come fill my cup"..."
"... The clinical diagnosis of psychopathology is too often a form of social control..."
"... Distorted views of the world do not always constitute corruption of the purpose of one's quest..."
"... Of course, being crazy can instead be a stubborn expression of self-destructive willfulness. There appear to be many people who choose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand..."
"... At the end of a series of colorfully zany misadventures, Don Quixote also achieved sanity. On his deathbed he had to endure the moralistic admonishment of his deadly sane housekeeper: "Stay at home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the poor". Such is the lesson of sane virtue, "but a man may have to go through hell to learn it"[Cervantes]..."
"... Don Quixote died "having gained his reason and lost his reason for living"[Madariaga]..."
"... madness. Sometimes it seems like it is the only way to travel in a dully sane and destructively stable world. In other instances it seems to me to be an irresponsibly willful cop-out..."
"... dreams can be understood, but they cannot be "explained"..."
Tale of Descent into Hell.
"... Open yourself to listening to his tale[Dante], if you dare, and surely you will see what he saw..."
"... This descent into the pit of his own soul is the journey of every pilgrim. No patient in psychotherapy can recover his own beauty and innocence without first facing the ugliness and evil in himself..."
"... The ways in which we live, the experience of our own sinful souls, still is itself our only Hell..."
"... A clear example of the built-in self-torment of neurotic behavior is apparent in the ways of the manipulative patient..."
"... you can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances..."
"... The victims of confidence men are always those secret thieves who hope to get something for nothing..."
"... You can't cheat an honest man[W.C. Fields]..."
"... I can't tell the knife from the wound..."
"... Only by facing life as it is can he[Dante] find salvation..."
"... Being neurotic is being able to act badly without feeling responsible for what you do..."
"... Mortality is an empirical issue. Worse yet, he[patient] wants to be bad but to have an excuse for his irresponsibility..."
"... His only way out[of patient] is to see that his pilgrimage to the heavenly City must be undertaken along the road through Hell. When we lay claim to the evil in ourselves, we no longer need fear its occurring outside of our control..."
"... Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted... "the sick man has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis but how to bear it"[Jung]..."
"... If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential or our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel..."
"... Dante has descended into the Abyss of Evil; he has had to spend a season in Hell, before he could rise once more to be illuminated by the Divine Light. There is no sin he could not find within himself. He is as good and as bad as the rest of us. But even if you should believe that some men are better than others then I ask you in the name of myself and all of the others who find that we have never had a completely pure motive in our entire lives: "Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?"[Lao Tzu]"
Tale of a Search for Belonging.
"... This wish to satisfy someone greater than the Self, to be found acceptable, to belong at last, is a struggle familiar to many psychotherapy patients. In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of the others..."
"... My own basic first principle had finally become: take care of yourself!..."
"... some things were just too hard to do alone..."
"... I told him that the rule that his family had neglected to teach him was that it is important for each of us to be in touch with his own feelings, to know his own wishes..."
"... Over the years it had become clearer to me that the more of a claim I made on the world, the more often I got what I wanted..."
"... I assured him, before learning the outcome, that whatever the results, he had done just right, he had honored his own wishes..."
"... There is a tyranny inherent in the reciprocities of every system. Rules for a group always violate individual rights. Both slave and master are trapped and dehumanized (though the bulk of my sympathy goes readily to the more explicitly oppressed of the pair). It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. Anarchy could never get a man to the moon, but it may become the only mode that can allow us to survive on the earth..."
"... All institutions fall short of their purposes. Sometimes it seems to me that they are more trouble than they are worth, that they bring with them evils at least equivalent to the social good that they provide. The family is the social institution that I trust most, and there certainly have been times when even that has seemed like a mistake to me..."
"... I wish [as a therapist] to help expand consciousness, not to diminish it...I hope to help the pilgrims who seek my guidance to see that all rules are mere conventions, games that one can play or not. It is only necessary to recognize that they are games, to do what you wish, and to face the consequences of your behavior..."
"... It is necessary first to teach some patients how to play, before they can become free to know and follow their own wishes. A revolution must be started in their heads. They are trapped more by the rules in their own minds than by social expectations and constraints..."
"... So often intent on learning the rules of the game of life, the patient/pilgrim often tries hard to get the guru/therapist to instruct him... The patient cannot believe that the therapist has only learned to play "the game of no game"..."
"... all rules are merely arbitrary conventions, sometimes useful but never necessary, sometimes timely but never of enduring relevance... He has no rule that is not willing to break..."
"... All these[Zen koans, shamanistic trances, and other games] serve as reminders of the arbitrariness of the rules that bring the temporary appearance of order to this absurdly chaotic, madly entropic life we live..."
"... Rules will come to serve as tentative guidelines. Each act will have to be judged as a personal experience, in terms of its existential meaning, rather than by checking it out against a rule carved on a stone tablet long ago and far away [situational ethics]..."
Tale of a Holy Warrior.
"... each person can only save his own soul..."
"... confronting one's own personal garbage is the way to begin..."
"... When a psychotherapy patient gives up just trying to feel better in recognition that he must instead be willing to change, that too is a new beginning..."
"... The practical considerations about how to maintain the Church and expand its power drained the spiritual fire and excitement of being an early Christian. Instead one had to learn to be a good Christian. No longer was it important to live out one's salvation. Instead, the point became to achieve it and keep it..."
"... It does not matter (for the psychotherapy experience) what the journey is about. It matters only that the patient stay on the road. The "aboutness" is the same pseudo-problem of "content" that was created in the world of Art when "people used to ask what a painting was about[McLuhan]"..."
"... McLuhan teaches us that "the medium is the message"..."
"... the personal and social consequences of any medium result more from the shape and the scale of the message than from its content..."
"... When applied to psychotherapy, the thesis that "the medium is the message" means that the meta-assumptions and the parameters of psychotherapy, in themselves, constitute the "cure", regardless of the content of what the patient discusses. The very act of focusing attention on himself (by telling his tale) already changes things. Behavior of which he is aware is already different from that same behavior unobserved by the patient. In fact, the mere act of entering the pilgrimage of the psychotherapeutic journey is itself a transformingly courageous acknowledgment of the existence of critical problems and a daring expression of the longing for resolution..."
"... He[the patient] will have to deal with his responsibility for what he does, at the same time that he discovers that he is not fully in control of all of his life..."
"... Being in treatment may show him[the patient] the way he is to journey, but it will be up to him to reclaim his salvation continually by remaining on the march for the rest of his life."
Tale of the Eternal Jew.
"... The repentant sinner is ever God's favorite child. Every man lives in a state of vague Kafkaesque guilt. Like Job, we all feel that if we suffer, there must be a reason; that if we are unhappy, it must be that we deserve it. So it is that we long for forgiveness, for redemption. After all, if we admitted that we lived in a random universe, where virtue is often not rewarded and evil not punished, there would never be any hope of our being forgiven for our sins and taken care of forever by lovingly all-powerful God..."
"... Recognition of my all-too-obvious fallibility can provide the relief of learning that some happiness is spossible without his[patient] having to reach some state of perfection..."
"... He[patient] can bear his pain for a while if only someday, someway, he will be able to reach a state of blissful perfection, a time when he will have no more conflicts, anxieties, or uncertainties... enlightenment does not provide perfection. Instead, it simply offers the pedestrian possibility of living with the acceptance of imperfection..."
"... What then is a man to do when he realizes that his exiled wandering is to be a lifelong pilgrim, a journey that ends in oblivion rather than in Paradise? Camus crystalized life's absurdity when he wrote: "There is but only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide". There is only THIS life. Live it, or give it up! It does no good to choose to live it reluctantly hedging by whinning that it's not sufficient, that someone must make it better for you..."
"... The experienced alienation of the neurotic is the self-sorry separation from the community of other lonely wanderers..."
"... When a psychotherapy patient does do the work of facing up to some of what he must endure, he is often rewarded by a sense of increased freedom and joy. However, as he comes to realize that there will be no light without some darkness, no rest without further toil, he may balk disappointedly to find that troubles never end. New solutions lead to new problems. New freedom leads to new responsibilities..."
"... our old problems would remain temptations to messing-up for the rest of our lives, that we must each remember to remember that we will never be beyond error. Nothing important gets solved once and for all, finally and forever..."
"... Perhaps all therapy can teach any of us is how to accept the inevitability of making this unending journey. If Camus is right, and if knowing that, we do not choose suicide, then how are we to live in a chaotically absurd world that is so often dominated by human suffering? Perhaps it calls for the Hasidic commitment to "joy in the world as it is, in life as it is, in every hour of life in this world, as that hour is". This means the hallowing of everyday life, taking each experience not as good or as bad, but as natural. In therapy, this is learned as accepting my feelings, not because they are constructive, or moral, or healthy, but simply because they are MINE, HERE and NOW..."
Tale of a Journey into the Darkness of the Heart.
"... As children we owned all of ourselves. As adults, in response to the expectations of others, we have had to hide much of ourselves away, out of sight even from our own eyes. The cost of such voluntary losses is great..."
"... No one can afford to give up any part of himself. All of you is worth something. Even the evil can be a source of vitality if only you can face it and transform it..."
"... For the sake of appearing to be what others require us to be, to be more moral than any man can be, we sacrifice strength..."
"... good is no more than the other face of evil, that it is all vitality. "Sin" derives from the old archery term that simply means "missing the mark"..."
"... Patients do not at first realize that they already have all that they need for a meaningful life..."
"... My task as guru is to interest the patient in his own evil, so that he may claim and transform it..."
"... the way in which they[fantasies] increase my freedom to live decently. By recognizing this evil in my self, and by satisfying it in fantasy, I decrease the possibilities that I will find some devious ways of living it out with other people..."
"... It is very important to me that I not hurt other people unless I mean to... I have tried to teach my sons the same freedom and responsibility..."
"... I have taught my sons to love, but first of all I have tried to teach them how to hate openly when need be so that they may survive..."
"... I am not what society has taught me that I ought to be..."
"... The bad luck, suffering, and even the death of an enemy always gives me a sense of well-being. It is a time to celebrate..."
"... In therapy, a patient can learn to become aware of the evil in himself, to live with it as he can, enjoy it as he may, and forgive himself for being human..."
"... He[Arthur Miller] knows that people will go on hurting each other, one way or another..."
"... Such horrors are possible not because of the evil of one man, but because of the folly of the many..."
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
Dr. Sheldon B. Kopp
Dr. Sheldon B. Kopp
