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My Conversations With Arthur After 37 Years

Arthur and I met the second time at the nice restaurant for the second couple of hours. At the end we both agreed we were tired. We had given ourselves to the encounter. Arthur is 70 and I am 75. We could see the tiredness in each other’s eyes.

• Was it worth it? Why make space in ones valuable life and give energy to it?

At my age I have had to realize the teaching and principle to become goalless.

Have no agenda, for any desires would be desires for the wrong thing. Face each other just as one is. Feel oneself in the presence of another.

For it is this experience of presence that gives the quality, the context, to ones life in the moment.

1. What did we talk about, share of ourselves?
2. What happened to this person, those whom we knew those 40 years ago?

No, that is not a purposeful context.

I asked about Warren Stetzel, our inspiring high school teacher who had an amazing evolutionary philosophy and taught us about it when we were young. Had we then gone on to live the Gerald Heard principles in our lives, and did they work?

Key Point In Life

Since we have brains as processors, taking in experiences and analyzing them as to their relevance to our personal choices and lives, we then need a set of statements about reality, including our inner selves, by which to do this ongoing work.

It’s not the experience itself but the context out of which we derive meaning and purpose from the experience.

As a young man of 22 when I finally became fully sexual in my relating with women I chose to ask myself, what am I doing with my sex, having sex with this one and that. My second analyst, Sheila Moon, questioned my sleeping with women. It turned out she was a secret lesbian who had a life-long relationship with my third Jungian analyst, Dr Elizabeth Howes, and together they founded the Guild for Psychological Studies, the group I was in training with for thousands of hours for ten years.

The point for me was, I was having sex with this person, but who was this person I was having sex with and how did we dance together, or not?

Yes, it is relevant to my conversations with Arthur. For I said, and he agreed, it is the context of meaning and reality you build out of your experiences that determines your effectiveness in life.

Arthur and I went through concepts, people we knew, and experiences. My major context for guidance in life were my dreams, even more important than the philosophy of Schweitzer or Gandhi.

You don’t take on someone else’s ideas and say these are the ones you believe in. You maybe try things out and see if some things work for you. I also judged by the quality of the person I was letting teach me, being older and specialized. So many were not practicing what they preached!

Arthur felt Warren, whom he kept visiting over the years at school reunions, had adopted Heard’s philosophy but not developed his own inner, core principles to live by. Core principles is my term.

Arthur and I agreed that we had to develop our core values and abilities ourselves. We learn from teachers but we do not make other human beings our masters, unless we are in an early stage of apprenticeship, of course, which we get over when we become conscious of our real selves and how to consciously process our experiences.

What did I think was the core principle to live?

Conscious awareness of self and life.

Always ground your ideas and values in direct experience. Evaluate these.

I wrote my first novel at age 31 and paid an agent $300 to critique it. He destroyed it, and this was right to do. Yet, he failed by not giving the remedies that make novels work. Here I am 45 years later finally coming out with original thinking on how to write dramatic novels that readers buy and read. I have yet to put the full approach to the test, but have been working on the templates in recent years.

If I live a couple of years longer in good health then I can try out my own discoveries.

But as Arthur and I agreed, we just don’t know what is coming down the path.

Yes, said I, but what I am working with is the principle, always give a positive response, if you possibly can. Build a rich and effective context around what life and personal issues you are dealing with.

Tired older men. I had asparagus soup which was good, and the Greek salad again which was not good like yesterday. They had put too much vinegar on the salad and so I could not taste the flavors. I did not complain, though I could have.

My conversation with my friend, Arthur is what counted. He, a meat eater, had another kind of salad. Yesterday for Arthur it was salmon. Today it was ham.

The big question, Arthur, I said, is: has one fulfilled ones essential self in life? Most don’t. They think the thing to do is to grow children, money and houses. What could be more wrong, because these are not your essential self.

Bye for now, Arthur, at least in the physical presence. I am ready, I see, for other visitors. I had to keep taking little pills to keep my cough down, but that was the way it goes.

Now I have gone to bed exhausted at 6 P and woken at 10 P to write these moments down. You read them, if you do, and gain an awareness of context. When you meet someone real you know you want to share together with, what really do you two share together?

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