Sylvia's Journal

Last night, down at the beach, a bunch of 25 year olds celebrated a birthday around a fire, with beer, hotdogs and hamburgers, like a summer barbecue except that we are at the edge of winter, it’s fall already and it’s cold. I did not last long and wandered inside. I needed some quiet time to pick my reading for our Quaker retreat which starts this afternoon.

I had put a stack of books on my desk: Pendle Hill Pamphlets, Parker Palmer’s To Know As We Are Known, Robert Greenleaf’s The Power of Servant Leadership. I leafed through them but could not find what I was seeking (not that I knew what I was seeking). So I stopped for awhile and checked what all my friends were doing on FaceBook. Olivier from Holland had commented on the video I put there of Jill Taylor, where she explains in a dramatic way what it is like to observe your own stroke. Some (sympathetic?) neuron fired in my head and I opened a folder on my computer labeled ‘spirituality.’ I clicked on the ‘Jung’ file, a document that contained all the quotes that spoke to me as I read Jung and the story of our time, written by Laurens van der Post (New York: 1975, Pantheon Books). Some of the quotes are Jung’s but many are the author’s commentaries on this extraordinary conversation with this extraordinary man.

In the middle of my notes I stumbled on a reference to a Quaker, Elined Kotschnig. I wondered who she was, and googled her name. She was editor of a journal, the Inward Light, and one of the leading figures of the annual Friends Conference on Psychology and Religion, drawn to the psychology of C.G. Jung because, as she said, he took religion seriously. She wrote: “He invited us to his home. Three cars full of us drove over. We had tea in the Jungs’ garden with strawberries from the garden, and for three or four hours he discussed with us the relationship of Quakerism and Jungian psychology. Jung agreed that the Quaker idea of the Inner Light was real. I remember his saying that if he had had an early choice of Christian communities, he probably would have picked Quakerism.“

Curious about this Inward Light journal, I continued my search until I found something I did not have to buy. It was a piece from another person I had never heard of, Edith Sullwold. In ‘Mysteries of Change’ she describes how a group of people came together and made a decision that she did not think possible at first. What she really describes is the creative group process, and I felt I had come home. Edith ponders the ingredients, asks the question, what just happened? Her keen observational skills pointed out that “[…] there was an acceptance of the sense of order and lawfulness of spirit. And there was amazing patience with an acceptance of the individual, giving the persons and the ideas a large, unjudged space in which to exist.” I knew what she was talking about. I have experienced what she describes, when the chatter stops and the right brain takes over, as Jill Taylor would say.

And suddenly I see myself holding this bunch of strings in my hand, strings blown together by the internet winds: psychology, religion, Jung, Quakers, brain anatomy and physiology, creative group process. What now? I still did not have my reading.

I felt as if I was running, breathlessly, a treasure hunt, picking up gems left and right. I took a break and watched Jill’s video again. When she talks about her right brain I understand Jung and religion in a different way; not psychology and religion but physiology and religion. She knew the quiet mind, when the left brain chatter has stopped, the still place in which everything is connected to everything and energies streams across what we usually call a boundary (even though science tells us such boundaries are an illusion). Something of what Jill describes reminds me of descriptions of early Quakers and how they experienced the silence in meeting. It was a different silence than the one we usually get. Our brains must be different than those of our ancestors. Could it be that the left and right hemispheres were more balanced, more in harmony with one another?

As a child psychologist I learned that early brain stimulation was good for children but maybe, in this century, we produced hyper brains that cannot help themselves as they think, analyze, project, deduce, judge, especially judge to the point that there is no more stopping them; overdeveloped left brains that are too clever for us; that created a costly financial crisis simply out of ideas and cleverly packaged transactions few of us understand (Axel sent me a left-brain piece about the financial crisis that left me breathless). Our brainy hard disk brains whirr and whiz making ever more noise, trying to keep up while no one is feeding the right side. I think that is the message I get from Jill Taylor. It was also the message I got from Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth, Power of Now) a book that Joe gave us and that, at first, I could not (under)stand. But then I got it and I realized he was talking about exactly the same thing as Jill was, as Jung was, and as the Quakers are, and what I see when the creative process is really (really) working or when they are sitting silently in Meeting for Worship.

At one point in the video (and in her fabulous book Stroke of Insight) Jill describes that moment when she was either going to slide back into life or forward into death, while she was rushed to the hospital. It was the same eerie silent space that I remember from when we entered the actual moment of the crash and I thought everything was over and I surrendered because there was nothing else to do. Nothing else to do was also the signal that Jill Taylor received…when there is nothing else to do the left brain is of no use anymore and stops its chatter. Most of us never get to that place and so we have no idea. I glimpsed it and it was beautiful. But how to resurrect it without endangering your life?

I think I just wrote my reading.