allanhunter.net Blog

John McCain has just selected a totally unknown politician with almost no experience as his running mate.  Reactions have been varied, but in Europe it’s been shock and disbelief at such an unwise choice.  McCain, at 73, has cancer and his running mate, if he is elected, would step into presidential shoes should he succumb or be incapacitated.  Sure, she’s governor of Alaska, a tiny state population wise, and she ran a town of about 6000 as mayor for a couple of years.  Fine.

Let us not forget Dan Quayle, the smiling boy idiot who was Bush’s VP.  Anyone less likley to lead a nation is hard to imagine.  He couldn’t have led a beetle out of a matchbox, although he did forever cause young folks to pause in confusion as to how they should spell ‘potato’.

Any party that selects such running mates as these is a pretty bizarre party, but not absolutely unelectable (see Quayle, above).  What it signals to many of us, though, is that this is a party that has absolute contempt for the thinking American populace.  They wanted a young, reasonably attractive female, with a son in the army and a kid who was disabled as a sort of window dressing to lend an aura of wholesomeness to a very unattractive party.

Would you vote for a party, or a candidate, that seems to be so intent upon insulting us? But then, of late years the Republicans have had only contempt for most Americans.

Why is modern literature so often a disappointment?

The Guardian First Book Award judge, Stuart Broom, put it neatly this year when he said of the short-listed entrants: “The fiction looks brilliantly varied, but once again it seems to be non-fiction that is particularly ambitious and unafraid of scaling the really big themes of history, culture, and society.” In other words, the fiction writing was narrow and uninspiring.  So why is it that so much of contemporary fiction seems to be so thin when we read it?  And why have sales of Memoir and non-fiction steadily outstripped those of novels and short stories, again, and for the past twenty years?

What, in fact, is wrong with modern fiction that it no longer appeals to modern readers?

The answer may be that readers no longer feel nourished by many of the fiction offerings that appear, since they clearly do find memoir to be more attractive. This under-nourishing aspect of modern fiction is to a large extent due to its technical virtuosity and spiritual vacuity. It doesn’t give us much to live by.  Memoir, on the other hand, is almost always about an individual’s struggle for a meaning that can be sufficient to sustain a life, and so inevitably it gives us something meaty to consider.

The difference lies in a major factor – memoir tells the story of a human being going through phases and arriving somewhere more enlightened, and it can’t really be written unless the writer has made that journey.  Of course, there are plenty of autobiographies that show us a celebrity who has remained petty-minded while being successful.  Barbara Walters’ is the most recent example most of us may have encountered. There is a life story, but no wisdom.

Whenever a human being goes on a life journey of personal growth he or she is likely to go through six archetypal stages – always six of them – the same stages that are mirrored in all great western literature since Homer.  These stages are the Innocent, the Orphan, the Pilgrim, the Warrior-Lover, the Monarch, and the Magician.  These are psychic mile-posts, if you will, and the achievement of each one involves the reflection of a series of understandings attained. In fact a writer of memoir usually may not know these stages exist in this form, but he or she will be aware that something has changed at certain points on the road to wisdom.  By contrast Fiction writers may be accomplished at their trade but simply not have lived enough real life to be able to show the path to wisdom. Readers know this, at a visceral level.

If we are to fuel ourselves with literature (and that’s what it’s for, to feed our psyches, to show us new worlds that keep us alert and alive) then we’ll have to look to see whether the archetypes appear in meaningful ways for us.  Here’s an example: Ulysses, that great literary figure that Homer produced and Joyce wanted to reintroduce us to, spends most of the Odyssey trying to get home. Lost, he has no idea as to who he truly is.  During the tale he encounters many powerful women; Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso, and he has to learn how to treat women decently, before Athena (another woman) will bless his reunion with Penelope.  At first he’s a lost Orphan, but he discovers he’s on a Pilgrimage to find meaning, and when he reaches Ithaca he has to fight, as a Warrior-Lover, for what he loves. Having done so, he has to reign with Penelope in harmony, a true Monarch.  At that point Athena appears and completes the situation, making Odysseus into a Magician of sorts. Six archetypes, all of them a step forward from the Ulysses who invented the Trojan Horse, which was after all a disgraceful trick designed to slaughter sleeping Trojans and their children. One may say that Homer redefines the notion of what a ‘hero’ is, and what it means to be an effective human. In so doing he redefines the reader’s frame of reference.  We come away from the Odyssey, with any luck, more alert and thoughtful as human beings.  We have been nourished.

There is fiction that does this – and some of it may surprise us.  J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter definitely goes through the six archetypal stages, and has to repeat them each year at a slightly higher level.  Perhaps it is this sense of development that has helped to make the books so wildly popular.  Children know all about growth and development and who’s ahead and who’s not, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that they key in at an unconscious level to issues that are vital to who they are as they grow.  There are other writers who achieve this level of awareness, also, and yet others who have no intention of doing so.

Perhaps one of the things we as readers can do is ask if the writer is taking us on any sort of journey of discovery.  If so, are we discovering simply information (“Oh wow, that’s what it feels like to be a teenage drunk!”) or are we being exposed to wisdom (“What are the things we all can learn from observing the behavior of a teenage drunk?”).
Looking for the six archetypes, though, is a pretty good litmus test.  How far has this character progressed?  It’s a reasonable question.  We’d ask it of anyone who was giving us an opinion.  We should also ask it of our authors.

There has been quite a lot of talk about education, and math and literacy, and then the MCAS, and what we should do about it.

Perhaps - just perhaps - if we reviewed education in terms not just of job skills we would make more progress.

How about this for an idea:  If we keep degrading our environment very soon it really won’t matter whether we can read or write.  And we only degrade our environment because there are so many of us on the planet that quite a few of us have no choice. Ravage the ecosystem or starve?  I know what I’d do.

Perhaps ‘education’ needs to be redefined. If we could teach people about looking after the planet, and if we could also teach them about controlling their reproduction rate, we’d have a chance.  We could put out the fire so we could salvage the house.  At the moment we’re trying to save the antique grandfather clock but no one’s called the fire service yet.

This may sound grandiose but it can be done at the most basic level.  If education was redefined so that we taught children to respect their bodies as bodies that exist in an environment (and that what they ate, what they breathed, how they exercised, and what they threw away actually mattered), we could build the sort of self esteem that asks them to use their bodies responsibly.

Massachusetts already did a small version of this.  The public schools launched a campaign against tobacco some years ago, and parents were bombaded with the things their second graders had learned.  Quite a few parents gave up tobacco, and now it is almost impossible to smoke in any building in this state.

If we could do this with tobacco, we could certainly do it with recycling, gas guzzling, resource use, etc etc, (and the limits are only in your imagination). But the big one would still be contraception.

If we don’t address that one soon, we may as well roll up the carpet.

It may seem as if everyone’s talking about the Olympics but I’ll add a few thoughts here anyway.  Much of the focus, it seems to me, is on who wins and on how many medals each country amasses.  Well, it’s a competition so I suppose the results do matter.

I’d like to consider a different aspect of these games.  When I witness a human being doing something extraordinarily well, whether it’s diving or sprinting or pole vaulting,  it is an astounding sight. To see such balance and mastery, such grace in any creature, can take my breath away.  Most of the people we see around us do not really live fully in their bodies in the way these athletes must.  We walk strangely, we run in a weird shuffle, perhaps (the joggers down my street seem to be singularly inelegant), and our minds and bodies are rarely in perfect accord with each other.  We fumble and hesitate.

The olympians can show us another way of being, where there is harmony between the mind and the muscles.  One would call it beauty, except that these days beauty tends to mean film star good looks, while I’m referring to a quality of balance and movement that can take one’s breath away.

Watch for it, whether the competitor wins or loses.  You may find it more inspiring than the human interest tales of the athletes that the press like to regale us with. you may find it more important than who wins.

Several people have asked me more about The Six Archetypes of Love, due out in a few weeks. Yahoo lost my first series of replies, so I’ll try again, and if the original responses re-appear then… we’ll get twice as much, won’t we?

What I suggest in the book is that we are born with considerable skills, namely the ability to love unconditionally and to trust entirely. These are the attributes of the Innocent. We will, perhaps, never again be able to live as wholehearted with these life skills as we are when we’re infants. Pretty soon we discover the world isn’t always friendly and we bury our loving natures.

We then are faced with a life-time of having to deal with people. We can’t avoid it, no matter how much we might prefer TV or the Xbox or video games. And we have to learn to get on with them. Our loving generous nature is then in conflict with our desire to protect ourselves. It will take most people a lifetime to learn how to get back to the Innocent loving self while not being a victim; and when that happens we can become Magicians.

Take the Dalai Lama as an example. He continues to love and act lovingly, even though he’s been forced from Tibet and many of his followers have been slaughtered. (By the Chinese. Those people whose games we are presently enjoying). He loves his enemies, but he is not stupid, so he has removed himself from their grasp. In doing so he is able to continue to be loving to his supporters, to insist in a loving way on human rights, and by avoiding his enemies, who would certainly torture and kill him if they could, he gives them a chance not to take the unloving way. That is the purity of love used intelligently. It’s the way of the Magician.

Most of us will not find ourselves in anything approaching the Dalai Lama’s plight, so our situations may need some careful thought before we can decide what the loving way forward may be. Sometimes it is loving to contain an aggressor and demand accountability from that person. That takes courage.

Courage and Love are key here, and they’re not what Hollywood wants to show us as their version - which is more correctly defined as Romance and Aggression, perhaps, or even more simply as sex and violence. So let’s leave behind what can mislead us.
Almost every night on the TV news we see scenes of death as yet another bomber strikes. We could choose to focus on the destruction. That’s what news agencies seem to want to do. Or we could note that every time a bomb goes off people, all kinds of people, run forward to help. They are being instinctively loving and compassionate. Animals tend not to do that, although there are exceptions.  The antelope herd flees and leaves the slower animals for the lions. Humans don’t seem to function that way.

Love has a way of bubbling up when we expect it least. Like grass finding its way up through the cracks in paving slabs, it can’t be kept down. Once you start paying attention you’ll see it everywhere.

Shortly I’ll be updating various aspects of the webpage – with any luck at all – and linking it to my new website www.sixarchetypes.com

This will be to coincide with the publication of my new book The Six Archetypes of Love, from Innocent to Magician.  Does the title sound familiar?  It should, since the notion of the six archetypes is at the center of Stories We Need to Know. Stories showed that the archetypes exist and are all around us, and have been for three thousand years.  The new book asks the serious question: if the archetypes are present then what are they there to tell us?  The answer is alarmingly simple.  They are there to teach us about love.

Think about that for a second. Love – most of us get it wrong most of the time. Divorce rates are evidence of that.  But also governments get it wrong pretty regularly too, and they do so by instigating wars. In each case the possibility for increasing human misery is vast.  Yet, as we look at the world, people show no signs of ceasing to fall into love, and wars bring many people to levels of caring and devotion that are remarkable. Love, like grass in desolate city blocks, has a tendency to keep on breaking through the gaps between the stones.

This book will show us how we can grow love, not discord, if we know what to look for….

There are times in one’s life when it seems almost impossible to arrange simple things like a meeting or a cup of tea with a colleague.  Existing meetings and arrangements get changed at the last minute; someone falls ill; someone’s father dies; the garage mends the car but fixes the wrong thing and you’re without a car; and so on.

I’m not sure what the critical mass of such situations might be, but it seems to me that when more than five such events line up at one time then we must pay attention. The universe is trying to tell us something.
Why should we pay attention?  Because the tendency we all have is to rush around more so that these things won’t defeat us, so that we win through.  Not only is that very hard on the stress levels, but it is also rather arrogant.  Why should we assume we have to triumph over all obstacles, anyway? Perhaps the obstacles are there for us to learn from.

Today, in the midst of such things, I found myself getting annoyed.  Then I paused and reframed it all.  And when I let go of the annoyance, of my sense that I should be in control, something rather pleasing happened.  I began to notice what was in front of my nose.  And what was before me was a series of synchronicities, little bits of information; connections that I’d have searched high and low for normally just plopped into my lap.  I could have been running around so fast that I failed to see them.  Fortunately I had let go of all that mind-mess, and so I could notice.

‘The Lord is throwing goodness at you, but with a little bit of luck, a man can duck.’ Mr Doolittle, in My Fair Lady.

Sometimes not ducking is a great idea.

Yesterday I had the inestimable privilege of being invited to a group of my present and former students who had decided to hold an informal writing group and share their work.  The writing that was shared was of extremely high quality, but even more pleasing to me was that it was depth-writing - the sort of writing that goes into difficult places and brings up a more complex view of life than some folks are comfortable with.  I call this ’soul work’, and it takes courage on behalf of the writer.
I was bowled over by this.  Of course, we write in order to discover what we feel, and what we mean, and we write to make sense of what we’ve lived.  This is true, and deserves repetition.  And… always an ‘and’…. when we do that we aren’t just sorting out odd bits of our slightly scrambled lives; we are growing our wisdom, our awareness, and our compassion.  And we are growing our souls.

This is necessary work.  If we don’t do this we will be unlikely to find peace in ourselves, and if we can’t find that, then there’s not much chance of being able to find peace anywhere else in the world, either. Peace begins with us, and deep soul work is all about finding real peace.

In a world where so many people seem to do things just for the money, or the status, it is humbling to be around those who want to do things, and do them the best they can, because it matters.

I was in Manhattan the other day and discovered a wonderful small museum, The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.  It’s everything a great museum should be.  For one thing, one walks in off the baking Manhattan streets and into a cool, serene tea room, where one can catch one’s breath and reduce the heart-rate to something approaching normal.  This is a pretty important factor when looking at Buddhist and Hindu art, it seems to me, which is all about serenity and leaving  Samsara (the illusions of the world) behind. The tea room itself is a quiet and orderly place, with a gift shop that has delightful pieces, some Tibetan in origin, and seductive books.  Then, after one has absorbed the mood, one gets to walk through the museum itself.

Compared to the frantic scramble of tourists like myself, of bag searchers, and sweaty schoolkids that was my experience of the entrance hall to the MET, we were indeed in a different world.
But even better things awaited us.  The Rubin has exquisite items, carefully chosen and displayed in spacious surroundings, and this means one can get a firm grasp of the art without being overwhelmed a sheer mass of objects.  Himalayan art is, after all, a bit of an esoteric thing for most people, and so a well-chosen exhibit can make one a convert, where an ill-chosen gallery would turn one off forever.

Well, I’m not writing about something negative.  The Rubin is a triumph.

And, as I looked, astonished, at the Fourteenth Century visions of the nature of the universe I kept noticing repeated images in which a male deity was locked in a passionate sexual embrace with a female deity - which would seem odd for a religion that is based upon monks, and so on.  The deities were shown this way, however, because they were symbolic of the union of compassion and wisdom, of heaven and earth, of male and female - and that this was the creative fusion of both. The Mandala of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi was a particularly fine version of this theme.

By any other standard these figures with the weird names were a symbolic version of the Monarch Pair of our western world. The deities, both rulers, were fusing their opposite attributes to achieve the full Monarch balance that keeps the world productive and creative.

And even more good things were to come.  Descending to the lower level there was an exhibit of very fine photographs of present day Tibet.  And that’s when I got it. It was as if the upper levels of this museum housed the higher, abstract representations of spiritual aspirations, and the lower level brought us back to the physical country the Chinese trashed and enslaved.  It would have been too easy, too solipsistic, too comfortable just to look at the art and forget the pain Tibet was in, now. the curators did not allow that.  Magical art and blood in the dust.  The fusion, again, of opposites.
After the Rubin I found myself in the MET, battling the crowds.  I suppose that’s better than an empty museum.  Still, it was very crowded. At a certain point Thierry pointed at the sign for the Etruscan Art section and we went up the stairs to find an empty gallery.  There, amid the bronzes of bewildering beauty (how did they do that with metal??) were various tall bronze lamp holders.  On the top of each were the figures of Hercules and Athena. Think about that for a second.
Hercules, half god, half cave-man.  A bruiser, very male, nearly naked. A Fighter, and impulsive, too.

Athena, so much a goddess she sprang fully formed, complete with armor, from the head of Zeus.  Virginal, linked to thought (Zeus’ head, you see) fierce, female…

So what on earth were those two doing side by side? I think they could only be seen as embodiments of the same fusion the tantric deities were demonstrating - the male/female, mind/body, heaven and earth opposites of the Monarch pair.

By placing Hercules and Athena on the top of these lamp standards the ancient Etruscans were surely showing that it is the fusion of these opposites in the Monarch that brings light, illumination, when things might otherwise be dark. After all, they could have put anything there as decorations.  Birds, dragons, fruit….  They chose the symbolic images that together represented the Monarch archetype.

Thousands of miles apart and a thousand years or more intervening, but in each case the Monarch archetype was present, at the moment of doing something miraculous. Magical, one might say.

It seems as if the American Cancer Society can’t live without phoning me each morning at an hour that is closer to military reveille than to normal human time. They’re after my money, even though I just gave.
The reason, of course, is that I’ve just had a small surgical procedure to remove an item caused by sunlight, and therefore the ACS reckon this will be something that is on my mind.  And it is. The scar is healing up neatly, and looks rather undramatic.  At first it seemed huge, with its bits of thread sticking out, and I joked that it would be like the dueling scars Heidelberg students were so proud of in the 1920s.  Some would go so far as to inflict their own scars with a straight edge razor and claim they were badges of Honor inflicted by an epee or saber. These were the things I saw in my youth.  Now the age has changed and those erstwhile young tearaways are all dead of old age.

Being cut into is nothing new.  Being gently sliced open to have piece of malignancy removed leaves one feeling that, one way and another, one has parted with one of one’s nine lives, or that a series of doors somewhere have just been closed, permanently.

It is also a reminder.  We only get a short amount of time here. My Hollywood career was never likely to be very promising, but now it seems even less possible than before. I leave it, or even the ghost of its possibility, in the ashes. No one comments on the scar.  Either its too small or they’re all too polite, or possibly my complexion was never that good to begin with. But I’ve heard the bell tolling, and I’m grateful for modern medicine, for my health insurance, and for the reminder about this body I’m in.

I look at the young people at the Mall with their piercings and tattoos, and think of my own marked flesh.

Time waits for no one.  Use it as best you can.