The following excerpts are from an interview with psychologist James Hillman. I agree with about half of these.
There are other cultures that are not historically minded at all. They’re much more concerned with whether or not the trees are in good shape and are speaking to you. Much more concerned. Or whether the river has changed course: that’s something to worry about. My goodness, if the fish turn belly up, that is far more important to my soul than what my mother did to me when I was four.
It’s the shamanistic idea that unless I’m in order, I can’t put anything else in order…We’ve held to that view, but I don’t think that’s it; I don’t think it works. I wish it did, but I don’t think it does.
I think that group of overeaters could begin to realize what goes on in school lunches, and what goes on in advertisements for potato chips. There are acutely political dimensions here, dimensions that this group could work to identify.
If that’s the goal, what’s the difference between meditation and having a nice drink? Or going to the hairdresser and sitting for an hour and flipping through a magazine? Or writing a long letter, a love letter? Do you realize what we’re not doing in this culture? Having an evening’s conversation with people; that can be so relaxing. I think we’ve misguidedly locked on to meditation as the main method for settling down.
It’s a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture.
Instead of saying, “This is my child,” they must ask, “Who is this child who happens to be mine?” Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid’s destiny might show itself — like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another.
I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
I see happiness as a byproduct, not as something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one’s well-being on earth.
Gary Snyder says, when something strikes you — whether it’s a hungry child, or the death of a fish, or the cutting of a forest, or the warming of the air — take that particular thing and enter into it. Learn about the salmon, about the Indian myths surrounding it, about the whole life cycle of the fish. Through your learning you develop sympathy, and you become an expert. You pick one place where your heart can connect to the world’s problems. We can’t just say, “This is too much. I can’t bear it.”
Why does our society believe old people need help? They are the ones who would be, in some other society, passing on help to others: teaching skills, telling stories, leading rituals, caring for children. They have a contribution to make, and instead they are segregated as sick people who need to be nursed.
We must not mix up aging with disease. We’ve done that in this country for too long. Aging is not disease. You can have cancer that is hideous at thirty-six, or leukemia in childhood, but for some reason we equate old age with disease. Many people are diseased in old age, but many are not. I just heard of a man today who is 102, and he still takes care of himself.
To avoid death, or accident, or wounding of any kind has become our prime objective. It’s as if, psychically, we live in gated communities in order to keep out the unforeseen.
Buddha Bike 