EARTH-0

When you are ready to listen, Your Beatrice will appear. 

Clark Kent, I Know You’re Secretly Superman!

I Know Everything About You.

I Offer You One Ultimate Chance to Save Her! 

But We Must Leave This World Now Before It’s Too Late!

Sometimes I get the feelin'

She's watchin' over me

And other times I feel like I should go -

And through it all, The Rise and Fall

The bodies in the streets

And when you're gone, we want you all to know

We'll carry on, we'll carry on

And though you're dead and gone, believe me

Your memory will carry on

We'll carry on

And in my heart, I can't contain it

The anthem won't explain it

A World that sends you reeling

From decimated dreams

Your misery and hate will kill us all

So Paint it Black and Take it Back

Let's shout it loud and clear

Defiant to the end, we hear The Call

To Carry On.

When you are ready to listen, Beatrice will appear. 

A man I knew who was at this point on his journey asked me where his guide was. 

He needed her so badly. I suggested he look for her in his active imagination. 

When he did, she appeared instantly and she told him, “I’ve been waiting for you for twenty years. You only had to ask.” 

Beatrice will be there the moment you ask and are truly ready to listen.

Beatrice shows Dante the vision of the unitive world. 

She takes him through the rest of Purgatory and into Heaven. 

Then, at the last moment, she gives way to another guide, St. Bernard, which is puzzling. 

But Beatrice is the psychopomp — a wonderful medieval word for soul guide — who leads Dante through the deep levels of Purgatory into the vision of Heaven, a journey of wholeness and healing. 

Dante owes his success initially to Virgil, but primarily to Beatrice, who leads, inspires, and awakens him spiritually.

“I don’t really know what to say about my race, I’m so proud of them —

I love The Welsh with a passion that’s almost idolatrous, 

and particularly the South Welsh, the people I know best, 

and particularly the mining class.”

For I am Welsh, you know, good My Countryman —

Solitude and Community

  As an intuitive introvert, I rarely feel lonely when I’m alone. 

When I was in my early twenties, I took a job in a lookout tower, firewatching in the forest. 

I was alone on a mountain peak for four months, and I never felt lonely. 

Reality didn’t catch me there. 

I was not in danger of my Queen leaving me. 

But the moment I returned to civilization, loneliness descended on me like a landslide. 

How could I be so happy on the mountaintop and then rubbed so raw when I came back down? 

I didn’t want to live my whole life on a mountaintop—

I’m not a hermit. 

I had to go back and forth, as the King did, until the visionary life could finally stand the impact of the water of reality. 

The Queen in me had to learn to withstand the water. 

It’s a process. 

I believe that everyone who has touched the realm of spirit has had to go through this antechamber.

If you’re honest and perceptive, you can tell the difference between regressive loneliness, the first kind, and the ineffable second and third types of loneliness, where you sense and then see What You Cannot Yet Have. 

The second and third types of loneliness are nearly indistinguishable. 

If you can say exactly what you are lonely for, it will reveal a lot. 

Do you want to go back where you came from, to the good old days? 

Or have you seen a vision you can’t live without? 

They’re as different as Backward and Forward.

Dr. Jung said that every person who came into his consulting room was either twenty-one or forty-five, no matter their chronological age. 

The twenty-one-year-old is looking backward and must conquer it. 

The forty-five-year-old is being touched by something he cannot yet endure. 

These are the only two subjects of therapy.

Solitude

The Garden of Eden and the heavenly Jerusalem are the same place, depending on whether you are looking backward or forward. 

A person touched by Loneliness is a holy person. 

He is caught in the development of individuation. 

Whether it’s a development or a regression depends on what he does with it. 

Loneliness can destroy you, or it can fire you up for a Dante-like journey through Hell and Purgatory to find paradise. St. John of the Cross called this the Dark Night of the Soul.

The worst suffering I’ve ever experienced has been loneliness, the kind that feels as though it has no cure, that nothing can touch it. 

One day, at the midpoint in my life—a little like Dante—I got so exhausted from it that I went into my bedroom, lay face down on my bed, and said, 

“I’m not going to move until this is resolved.” 

I stayed a long time, and the loneliness did ease a little. 

Dante fell out of Hell, shimmied down the hairy leg of the Devil, went through the center of the world, and started up the other side, which was Purgatory. 

I felt better, but as soon as I got up and began to do anything, my loneliness returned. 

I made many round trips until gradually an indescribable quality began to suffuse my life, and loneliness loosened its grip. 

Nothing outside changed. The change was entirely inside.

Thomas Merton wrote a beautiful treatise on solitude. 

He said that certain individuals are obliged to bear The Solitude of God. 

Solitude is Loneliness evolved to the next level of reality. 

He who is obliged to bear The Solitude of God should not be asked to do anything else; it’s such a difficult task. 

For monastics, solitude was one of the early descriptions of God. 

If you can transform your Loneliness into Solitude, you’re one step away from the most precious of all experiences. 

This is the cure for Loneliness.

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.

SOL

Kindly Couple

Things Could Be Better

Feminism Can’t Catch Helicopters.

Statistically Speaking of Course, it’s Still The Safest Way to Travel.

Gentlemen, This  Man Needs Help.

The first step toward curing any psychological problem is to acknowledge it. When you can put a name and form to it, when you can say what you are lonely for, you’re halfway free. Being conscious is your greatest ally. If you are able to admit to yourself how much you wish to fail, this is the beginning of a cure.

 Loneliness for What Is Not Yet

As we will see in the next chapter, Dante describes the lowest level of Hell as the most difficult place of all. It is one hundred percent FROZEN, entirely cold. Loneliness is always cold. It’s inhuman. The worst Hell is the frozen place of unrelatedness, disconnectedness. Hell ice is worse than hellfire.

The second kind of loneliness is the longing for what is possible but has not yet been realized. An alive, vigorous, functioning human being has a vivid intuition of what he is capable of. His intuition leaps forward, and he imagines what is possible. He fantasizes a perfect woman or a love affair that will touch him to the core. He feels lonely for what is not. He thinks that he sees out there what will assuage his loneliness. But that can only happen in here. When our value and sense of meaning are always outside ourselves—there is someone, something, some place, or some condition that will cure our problem, “just as soon as...”— we are stuck in an insoluble problem.

My next book should be entitled Just As Soon As...because “ just as soon as” psychology dominates almost everyone. 

• Just as soon as I get married

• Just as soon as I get divorced

• Just as soon as I have more money, 

• Just as soon as the cancer treatment is over. 

“Just as soon as” is an intermediate stage where you sense what matters to you, but you externalize it and don’t yet claim it as your own. Your felt need might be a new task, a new psychic capacity, or a new insight, but it is too soon to realize that it is your own gold. 

To sense this value, even if you cannot yet own it, is a start.

The first kind of loneliness—for what once was— drives us backward and downward. The second kind— for what is not yet—drives us forward and upward. At least this is a progressive loneliness. It drives us to accomplishments. 

But both of these kinds of loneliness DRIVE us.

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.

Suddenly: The light changes in the Fortress. The giant head of Jor-El materializes on the opposite wall.

JOR-EL

The virtuous spirit has no need for thanks or approval...

LUTHOR

What the...

EVE takes a step back, frightened. LUTHOR looks up at the image with increasing pleasure.

JOR-EL

... only the certain conviction that what has been done is right...

LUTHOR

It's his old man! The kid looks like him! Are you his old man?

EVE

Ask him where the bathroom is.

JOR-EL

... Develop such conviction in yourself...

LUTHOR

Are you here?

JOR-EL

... the human heart on your planet is still subject to small jealousies...

LUTHOR

(catching on)

Aahh, he's not here! He speaks from the past! Cute, very cute...

JOR-EL

... lies, and monstrous deceptions.

LUTHOR yanks the crystal out.

LUTHOR

So much for moral rearmament. 

“But there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: The Marriage. 

The Clark-Lois-Superman triangle—

• Clark loves Lois. 

• Lois loves Superman. 

• Superman loves Clark.

as Elliot S! Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday — seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories.”

“Sometimes, when you put your gold onto another person, he also puts his gold onto you. 

It gets complicated when the exchange of gold goes both ways. 

One of the contaminations of levels that we make— we’re scarcely able to think otherwise—is that the exchange of gold means marriage. 

Marriage is good, and gold is good. 

They may go together nicely. 

But they’re not synonymous. It can be a problem when we mix these things up. 

We think, “I’ve fallen in love, I must take her to bed.”

Maybe you will, but that’s not synonymous with falling in love.

In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage. 

We take for granted that we will marry the person we are in love with. 

But being in love is not enough to guarantee a successful marriage. 

When you fall in love, you feel overwhelmed with excitement. 

You’ve projected your gold, your deepest inner value, onto the other person. 

You’ve given it to her to incubate for a while, until you are ready to take it back. And if the feeling is mutual, she has given her gold to you.

For the relationship to succeed, somewhere along the way each of you has to take your gold back. 

Unfortunately, that’s usually accompanied by disillusionment.

“You’re not the knight I thought you were.” 

“You’re not a princess when you wake up in the morning.” 

The gold comes clattering down by way of disappointment. 

If we could only understand that we put our gold in someone’s lap for a period of time—until we get stronger—and someday it will come to an end. 

We aren’t wise in this respect, and it’s one of the most painful issues in our culture. 

 Five years later, when the relationship isn’t working, we don’t understand that it’s time for us to withdraw our projection and actually relate to the other person —our partner, our spouse.

True marriage can only be based on human love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or in-loveness. Romanticism is unique to the West, and is a relatively new occurrence, only since the twelfth century. Romantic love is not a basis for marriage. Our human life, our marriage, is fed by the capacity to love human to human. When we’re in love, we put our gold—our expectations—on the other person, and this obliterates her. There is no relatedness.

Loving is a human faculty. We love someone for who that person is. We appreciate and feel a kinship and a closeness. Romantic love, on the other hand, is a kind of divine love. We deify the other person. We ask that person, without knowing it, to be the incarnation of God for us. Being in love is a deep religious experience, for many people the only religious experience they’ll ever have, the last chance God has to catch them.

One reason we hesitate to carry our own gold is that it is dangerously close to God. 

Our gold has Godlike characteristics, and it is difficult to bear the weight of it.

RAO

Doomed Planet

Desperate Scientists

Last Hope

 
 

Yes, I Have a Problem.

The first kind of loneliness— loneliness for The first kind of loneliness— loneliness for the past— is regressive.

It attacks early in life, during adolescence or early adulthood.

We want to return to the place we came from.

We want the comfort and security of the good old days, the way things used to be.
 

How many times do your dreams take you back to early times—the playground, the backyard, the tree you used to climb, your grade-school friends?

This is the backward-turning loneliness, a hunger for the Garden of Eden.
 

There isn’t much we can do about it. We can’t go back.
 

The Bible says that there is an angel with a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, forbidding reentry.
 

Backward-turning loneliness is the mother complex, the wish to return to your mother’s womb.
 

It is especially dangerous in men, because it becomes the will to fail, the propensity to relinquish power and regress.
 

It’s the spoiler in a man, stronger than most men are able to admit. When you have an exam at school or an interview for a job and you feel terrified, this is probably The Fear of Success.
 

The Enemy is Inside.

Excerpt from: 

"Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" 

by Arnie Kotler. Scribd.

You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you... even in the face of our death. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I've learned, everything I feel... all this, and more, I... I bequeath you, my son. 

You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. 

The son becomes the father, and the father the son. This is all I... all I can send you, Kal-El.

"The Guide for the first part of your Inward Journey is your Intellect, the Masculine Traits of Intelligence, Proportion and Good Sense.

The Lowest Level of Hell is the worst. It is FROZEN. 

To reach The Coldness of Life — Loneliness and Meaninglessness — is The worst experience a human being goes through, worse than the fiery aspects of Hell. Under the guidance of Virgil, Dante gets to the bottom of Hell and just keeps going. You don’t come out of Hell through the door you entered. You go through it and out the other side. On the other side of Hell lies Heaven.

Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the world, which is where the Devil lives. And Dante gets through that nodal point, the point of zero gravity at the center of the world, by shimmying down the hairy leg of the Devil, and finds himself in Purgatory. 

Hell lays out what’s Wrong — the hellish dimensions of life — and Purgatory begins The Repair, what you need in order to be restored. 

You need to be treated.

The verb ‘to treat’ comes from the Latin tractare “ to pull or drag.” 

The earliest therapists had a series of stones with increasingly smaller holes in them, and you were literally pulled through —the biggest one first, a smaller one next, until you couldn’t be pulled through any more. You came out of this experience minus a bit of skin, but you were treated. 

Dante is pulled through A hole from the center of the world and begins his ascent through Purgatory, its many levels and teachings.

At this point, Virgil approaches Dante and says, “I cannot take you any further. One Greater Than I will be your guide from here.” 

Dante is shaken, because he has depended entirely on Virgil. Virgil continues, “Beatrice will guide you from Here,” the same Beatrice who had opened the vision of Heaven for him on the Ponte Vecchio.

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler. Scribd.