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.