Here’s what I discovered and wrote about in 1976, at the age of 32, excerpted from the documentation of independent reading for Winter Quarter in my Antioch Portfolio. Note also that this was written less than a year before I met Mary.
The archetype of the eternal youth and the problem of growing up. In discussing the self-assessment of my past learning from Independent Reading in Buddhism and Psychotherapy, my evaluator asked me where I go next. I told him I felt split between a country mode and a city mode, returning to the communal farm at one extreme, or going to graduate school in social work at the other. He suggested I read Puer Aeternus by Marie Louise von Franz, to help clarify this matter.
This book is a series of talks with question and answer sessions, on the subject of the puer aeternus, or “eternal youth” archetype. The first half analyzes “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery, and the second half analyzes “The Kingdom Without Space” by Bruno Goetz. In both books there is a split between an “eternal youth” figure and an ageing corrupt structure. The psychological point of the analysis is that neither of these extremes can live without the other, and that they must be integrated in the individual. Often, after we identify too long with the eternal youth we overcompensate and become very formalistic and resistant to any threat of youthful joy, thinking that we must choose between reason without life on the one hand or eternal movement without result on the other. The author is talking about how to integrate the strengths of each aspect, and how to separate out the weaknesses.
I was immediately struck by the way this book cut through a lot of the conflict I was feeling. My first impression was that it was telling me it was a daydream, a youthful folly, to think about moving to the country. It was a way of avoiding my adult responsibility, my “calling” to stay in the city and train to be a therapist. And so it was very simple. The eternal youth daydreams and can’t get practical, can’t “get up on a rainy morning and go to work”. I had to grow up.
But after that my reaction started to become more complex. Assuming that I do stay in the city and train to be a therapist, while studying at the Zen Center, what then is the message of the book for me? Within this context it becomes a matter of integrating the creative, youthful, emotional with the rational, ageing, mechanical aspects of myself. But this is the dichotomy that I began dealing with when I read Norman Brown’s “Life Against Death” right before taking LSD, beginning to redress the balance away from the years of dry intellectual upbringing. Ten years later I have been through a series of ever smaller swings of the pendulum, to the point where I often feel that I have completely integrated or transcended this dichotomy. One message of the book for me is that these poles are no longer involved in a great war within me but are to a great extent harmoniously enriching each other.
Some of the ideas von Franz throws out in the last part of her analysis of “The Kingdom Without Space” seem like comments on the odyssey which I have documented in this portfolio. She talks about Goetz’ projecting the renewal function onto the East. I can see that this is what I was doing at the beginning of this program, when I assumed that Zen would be unilaterally enriching the shallow world of western psychology. Since then inputs like the Wise article have shown me that our Zen practice has something to learn from psychology too.
I heard echoes of my early identification with Jack Kerouac in her comments on the youth archetype, Fo. He is an eastern, Buddha-like figure, except that instead of advocating a release from the wheel of life, he advocates eternal wandering in this world. And I could see that this was the same element Kerouac represented for me in “On the Road”, and the model I used for so long to keep from settling down.
She offers a diagram of the characters in the book:
Von Spat = Reason without life
Melchior = Ego
Fo = Eternal movement without result
On the same page she discusses rock and roll as creative ecstasy with no further goal, and I could again see how I had been acting out of this half of the dualism to make up for the years of reason without life. But in referring to this same diagram she makes a comment that neither von Spat nor Fo have a feminine aspect, that two other poles are needed for a real healing to take place. I don’t know exactly how this fits with her Jungian system, but this is exactly the personal problem that I feel. Throughout this long odyssey I have not shared any of this struggle with a mate. It almost seems like I’m trying to get myself together enough that I can find somebody who will want to share all this growth with me.
There is no strong feminine figure in “The Little Prince” either, and this is the problem with the eternal youth, and this is the problem I feel in my life, that I deal with in therapy with Pat and in therapy with Meri. All of this struggle is going on in a sort of unreal vacuum, and von Franz suggests to me that the unification doesn’t just take place on a vertical level, within the self, but on a horizontal level too, becoming part of a greater whole with another person. This is where I do hold on to my eternal youth place, in refusing to take the risk of being with a woman. But that is changing too.
Von Franz’ final conclusion feels like the kind of integration that I am evolving. She says that the creative urge represented by the eternal youth is very important, is the life spark itself. The mistake is when we externalize or politicize it, as happened in Germany with Hitler. We must realize that it is the seed of our own individual transformation, and have the capacity to bring it into the world harmonized through our own internal searching. Otherwise, she says, we are always building rosy buildings on burnt out ruins. And so now I can see I am no longer trying to build a rosy structure, as the utopian farming commune. I am deeply committed to integrating the creative and the rational within myself, and bringing this hard earned unity up against reality as we know it.
It seems that the reason I chose these particular selections, and after describing my situation that my evaluator suggested this particular book, is that I am dealing with the problem of growing up externally through the metaphor of balancing my Zen practice with therapy experience. The terms outlined in “Puer Aeternus”, of creativity vs. structure, certainly come up in the Wise article. I have decided to choose when my sitting seems creative, and when it seems like I am just part of a mechanical institutional routine. I take responsibility for the balance between spontaneity and form. The Kondo article suggests zazen is a seed of pure awareness, and therapy is an opportunity for working through. The dualism is so well overcome in this format that it is difficult to see Zen and therapy in terms of the problem of the Puer Aeternus. Both sides of the equation are taking responsibility for growth and integration.
What is emerging is a focus on myself growing up rather than a focus on Zen and/or psychotherapy. These are the paths, but what really unifies them or anything else is the actual progress of the walker. I am not simply integrating Zen and psychotherapy, some external entities, I am bringing my own life to a functional focus, informed by a highly complex background of available resources.
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