Egypt Sex Harassment on Hidden Camera - CNN

A Call To Dialogue About Gender

After my last post, Lorrie B said that gender is a huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It’s true. But talking is essential if we’re to heal our gender-related wounds, so in this post I’ll offer topics for conversations.

Tribalism: Our species is between 100 and 150 thousand years old. In that time we’ve made more progress taming the instincts of carnivorous canine and feline pack animals than our own. Why are we still so territorial? So hostile toward members of our own species whose only differences from us are physical appearances and culturally- and geographically-conditioned adaptations? Episcopal priest Matthew Fox says that as a species we are extremely dangerous and our tribalism is eating us alive. What roles do gender issues play in tribalism? What changes can men and women take to eliminate it?

Violence: Lorrie B also noted that men, onto whom we’ve traditionally projected our masculine drive (self-preservation) and values, are accountable for over 90 % of the world’s violence. Why are women (onto whom we’ve projected our feminine drive of species-preservation with its values of caring, connecting and relating) and spiritually enlightened people of both genders still so ineffective in reducing violent conflicts? Is testosterone the only culprit? How can the genders cooperate in healing our violent tendencies?

Male-Dominated Spirituality: Our “primitive” forebears appreciated and worshiped the sacredness of all life in its masculine and feminine aspects. Why do so many “advanced” Westerners believe that a one-sided masculine-oriented spirituality is preferable? Why has organized religion failed to solve the problems of male violence and female oppression? Why do both genders submit to external religious authorities instead of acting on the truth of these words from the Dalai Lama? “We can do without religion, but not compassion.” Didn’t Jesus and Mohammed teach the same thing? Why is Mother Teresa the female spirit person who most readily comes to mind? What can we learn from her?

Gender Stereotypes: Why do gender stereotypes still abound? Why are some people still rigidly obsessed with defending them, especially ones related to sexuality and fundamental personal rights? Why do some of us privately project logic and rationality onto males and sensitivity and emotionality onto females even though both genders contain the psychological potential for both? We’ve had three generations of world-wide immersion in technologically produced visual images, beginning with photography, and moving into film, television, and computers. Why are we still so visually illiterate and vulnerable to subtle manipulation by the media? When and how does advertising take advantage of gender stereotypes and perpetuate unhealthy ones? Who wins from this practice? Who loses? Is it true that men are more out of touch with their feelings than women? Why? Why do women seem to find it easier to integrate their masculine sides than men, their feminine sides? What factors account for the high divorce rate in North America? Why do the genders still have difficulty understanding each other and communicating?

Exploitation of Women, Children and Nature: What can I say about human trafficking, child labor, and sexual exploitation? About the rape of Nature, our Mother? These things are unspeakably appalling and both genders are complicit. God help us. With all the freely given bounty and beauty of life we certainly haven’t excelled at preserving it or helping ourselves and each other enjoy it! Why?

I know most of us would rather imagine figures of light than face dark realities, so if these questions have aroused uncomfortable emotions or offended sensibilities I hope you’ll understand and forgive. May we all advance toward Buddhism’s goal of joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

My newest book, Healing the Sacred Divide, can be found at this Amazon link or at Larson Publications, Inc. 

Dr. Jean Raffa  is an author, speaker, and leader of workshops, dream groups, and study groups. She maintains a blog called "Matrignosis: A Blog About Inner Wisdom."  Her job history includes teacher, television producer, college professor, and instructor at the Disney Institute in Orlando and The Jung Center in Winter Park, FL. She is the author of three books, a workbook, a chapter in a college text, numerous articles in professional journals, and a series of meditations and short stories for Augsburg Fortress Publisher.

Her most recent book is Healing the Sacred Divide.  Her book The Bridge to Wholeness: A Feminine Alternative to the Hero Myth  (LuraMedia, 1992) was nominated for the Benjamin Franklin Award for best psychology book of 1992.  Reviewed in several journals and featured on the reading lists of university courses, it was also picked by the Isabella catalogue as a must-read for seeking women. 

Dream Theatres of the Soul: Empowering the Feminine Through Jungian Dreamwork (Innisfree Press, Inc., 1994) has been used in dreamwork courses throughout the country and is included in Amazon.com’s list of the Top 100 Best Selling Dream Books, and TCM’s book list of Human Resources for Organizational Development.

What Carl Jung Means to Me—May 2013

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Dr. Carl Gustav Jung 

Carl Gustav Jung was the most famous Psychologist of the 20^th Century.  Additionally, the powers of politics, art, religion, and many other disciplines have used and abused his oeuvre for their own purposes ever since his famous split from Sigmund Freud’s iconoclastic orthodoxy.  Over the past quarter century, I have been drawn back to his work again and again.  I could say that I know not why, but that would be a falsehood.  

If you ask anyone, who thinks of themselves as a “Jungian” in whatever context, you will get a different answer about his significance.  Jung would probably be the first to tell you that Jungian Psychology is only the psychology of one man, Carl Jung himself--no one else.  One of the points of his prodigious scholarship over nearly seven decades was to show that, at base, we are all the same; but that the psychic journey of a lifetime is to individuate—to live the life we were meant to live as individuals.

This seems paradoxical, and it is, but he explains himself clearly in Psychology of the Unconscious, one of his earliest works.  By analogy, every acorn knows how to become an oak tree, but every oak tree is different in almost every detail except the fundamental features, which make it an oak tree and not a maple or a spruce, or an alley cat, for that matter.  

So it is with humans!  We unconsciously know how to become a human being; and in our depths, we know how to behave as human beings.    The psychic journey is to live our individual fate.  

Many “Jungians” believe that Jung’s work means that we should be passive vis-à-vis the lives of others.  Jung said, “I know no answer. Live, the unavoidable decides.”  [The Red Book, P. 234; A Reader’s Edition, P. 136] 

Perhaps this is the role of clinical psychologists, who seek to help us live happier lives.  I don’t mean the drug wielding ones, who would anesthetize our psychic pain with narcotics, but the ones who would help us find our own center—our Self.  Many pride themselves in not interfering with the processes of the unconscious, while helping them reach their intended goal by removing psychic obstructions.  

But I am convinced that passivity is not what Dr. Jung had in mind.  In the same passage he said, “You engender and give birth to what is to come, you are fecund, you live onward.” [The Red Book, P. 234; A Reader’s Edition, P. 136] This was the sense of his studies in Alchemy, which consumed much of the second half of his life.  One can engender an evolution; an evolution of mankind, if you like, or of any other vas.  [The vas is the container in which the Alchemist mixed his ingredients. By analogy, a Witch’s Cauldron served the same function.] 

I don’t mean, by this, that one can change what “the unavoidable decides.” But one can facilitate “the unavoidable,” and perhaps should facilitate it if you are convinced of the unavoidable result.  I offer the United States of America as an example of a vas, the success of which, over 400 years, may have been unavoidable in the Jungian sense.  

For a time I asked myself,  “What one feature about The United States of America makes it the most successful country on the planet?”  My measure for success here is the ability of the broadest spectrum of residents to live to their fullest potential as human beings.  Readers of other nationalities may disagree, and in many ways they would be right, but the results speak for themselves.  As this is my story about what Dr. Jung means to me, there is little point debating my assertion—it is only meant as an illustration; and is not offered for its truth.    

I am talking here about the alchemical transformation.  If we think of The United States of America as an Alchemist’s vas or Witch’s Cauldron, then into that we have added as ingredients peoples from every nation, ethnic group, religious group, racial group, or whatever other type of group category you might choose.  Whenever one group offers a good idea, we all adopt it.  Whenever bad ideas emerge, all of the other groups debate it out of the system (one way or another).  The result, over 400 years, is that The United States has been lifted on a tide of good ideas, while the bad ideas have been washed away.  To put it in Dr. Jung’s terms, “the unavoidable” has decided what system works best, from the best of the human psyche as a whole.  

So it is that it seems to me that contributing an ingredient to a vas, whether it is a country, a family unit, a religion, a political campaign, or the psyche of an individual  (among the millions or billions of other containers one might imagine), is precisely what Dr. Jung had in mind.  He spent his lifetime of prodigious scholarship doing precisely that.  His Collected Works offer tens of thousands of contributions of ingredients to the vas of the human condition.  Each of us can only hope that our contributions offer as much to producing the “gold” of humanity.   

Skip Conover is an international businessman, author and artist.  You can follow him on Twitter @skip_conover.

Opinion: Why a Man Eats Another Man's Heart

(CNN) -- A Syrian rebel carves the heart out of a dead man and bites it. His comrades nearby cheer: "God is great."

This is from a video that is circulating on the Internet. The appalling footage has all the world asking: What kind of people could do this?

We tell ourselves these men must be monsters, people utterly unlike us, people we could never understand. But we don't say this because it is true. We say this because it is comforting to think so. The far more frightening possibility we must face is that such evil is not diabolically inhuman or beyond understanding. It is human -- very human.

How can ordinary men commit such horrific acts? The war criminals I have met did not start out by desecrating corpses, torturing villagers or murdering children. They got there slowly. There are some men who are natural monsters, but most monsters are made.

This is how you make them.

First, take a man (and yes, it is most often a man) and isolate him. Separate him from

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James Dawes, director of the Program in Human Rights at Macalester College, is the author of "Evil Men" (Harvard University Press, 2013).