“[T]he consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared.”

What James Hillman talked about  above is that it is time for us to stop looking at life as the individual working on the individual and start to see our lives as part of a bigger whole.  A place where we need to stop taking action out of self for the sake of just self.  We need to stop looking to self to heal the self only and look at us as part of a whole where we start healing what goes on around us.  There is anger and sadness inside of me for what is happening to you, to my friends, to my family, my fellow sufferers. I dont think I am alone.

“The manic defense to depression is to keep extremely busy-and to be very irritated when interrupted.”  This is me and this is my society.  Before my depression became acute, I was at the least, extremely busy. I will just tell you this.   I worked approximately six days a week for my family as a professional. I also worked two days on our side investments as a construction person. I know, I know, that adds up to 8 days in the week. That was the point.

Needless to say when the depression became overwhelming, mad was an understatement about how I was.  I see a similar path for our culture.  Everything was great until the boom turned into a bust and then we found out how empty most of our pockets have become.  But what we do as a culture is we try to get manic again.   We try to get the gross domestic product back up and keep our economy growing and growing!

Its  the economy stupid.

“The depression we’re all trying to avoid could very well be a prolonged chronic reaction to what we’ve been doing to the world.” I think it was Theresa Borchard  who said that depression is going to increase 50% in the next 20 years in the United States.  Is it possible that what were talking about is what Hillman talks about in this quote? Is it possible that we are exhibiting our dis-ease as to what we’re doing as a people as a whole.  I think there is something to be said about the fact that we are isolated, we are separate, and we’re all struggling as  people.  We have  internalized self as part of an outward reality instead of realizing that we are  just a part, yes I  still think I am a big part to me,  of the whole.  Why is it that it takes this kind of depression to cause this kind of change to come about?

“Maybe people ask you how you’re doing, because that’s easier than letting on how little they could care.”[1] This line says a lot to me, about me and about us. What it says is that I am self and I move around other selves. It says that I’m so concerned with what’s going on inside of me that I struggle to be concerned with what’s going on for anyone else except those who are close to me. My friend the painter always says that we smile at people when they ask us how we are.  He said that historically we  bared our teeth at people to show that we weren’t injured or we couldn’t be hurt that people used to do.  I would say that It is symbolically still the same today, we just pass it off as some sort of symbol of caring

Is there some truth to that? Most of the time when strangers smile at me, and  I agree that most of my sociological research is done in front of a Peet’s coffee shop.  But the smiles, when I get them, are usually routine, perfunctory and emotionless. It is interesting to me that we are now becoming more and more sufferers of this di-sease, depression, that used to only be prevalent in people who had addiction to alcohol or drugs. Now addictions come in so many forms and the biggest growing one is prescription medications. Who benefits from that?

All quotes are from James Hillman from the book “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psycho-therapy and the World’s Getting Worse,” he co-authored with Michael Ventura, except [1] Jackson Browne The Late Show.

123 R.V.  Forgiveness is from Ggod, permission is man made.