You Always Have the Freedom to Change Your Attitude, and That Can Change Everything

Terrible things are happening in our world. The worst nightmares of the mind-twentieth century seem to be returning. There are days when we might find it hard to rise above despair or escape a low, lethargic mood freighted with our own negative mantras. On days like that, I often call on one of the greatest life coaches I know.

I know him from his most famous book. Maybe you do too. His book is titled Man’s Search for Meaning. His name is Viktor Frankl. He was an Existentialist — which is to say, someone who believes that we must be authors of meaning for our own lives — and a successful psychiatrist in Vienna before Nazi Germany swallowed Austria in 1938. He was a Jew and a free-thinking intellectual, two reasons for the Nazis to send him to a concentration camp. For several years he was in Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps.

In the camp, every vestige of humanity was taken from him, except what he could sustain in his mind and his heart. He was in constant pain, reduced to a near-skeleton with a tattooed number on his arm, liable to be beaten or killed at any moment on the whim of a guard. He was there to be worked to death. He watched those around him shot or beaten or carted off to the gas chambers every day.

He made an astonishing choice. He decided that, utterly deprived of freedom in the nightmare world around him, he would tend one precious candle of light within. He would exercise the freedom to choose his attitude. It sounds preposterous, if you don’t know the story of what unfolded. When people tell us we have a bad attitude in ordinary circumstances, we are usually not grateful. The suggestion that we can choose our attitude when the world around us seems cold and bleak, or we have suffered a major setback, even heartbreak, sounds cruel, and maybe preposterous. But let’s stay with Viktor Frankl.

When the light went out in his world, he managed to light that inner candle of vision. Despite the pain in his body and the screams and groans around him, he made an inner movie, a film of a possible life in a world where the Nazis had been defeated and Hitler was a memory. It was an impossible vision of course, an escapist fantasy. There was no way he was going to survive Auschwitz.

But he kept working on his inner movie, night after night, as director, scriptwriter and star. He produced a scene in which he was giving a lecture in a well-filled auditorium in New York City. His body had filled out, and he was wearing a very fine custom suit. The people in the audience were intelligent and enthusiastic. The theme of his lecture was “The Psychology of the Concentration Camps.” In his movie, not only were the death camps a thing of the past. He had retained the sanity and academic objectivity to speak about what went on during the Holocaust from a professional psychiatric perspective.

This exercise in inner vision, conducted under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances, got Viktor Frankl through. Not only did he survive the death camp; in 1946, one year after the war, he gave that lecture in his nice new suit in the New York auditorium from his inner movie set.

What do we take away from this?

First, that however tough our situation may seem to be, we always have the freedom to choose our attitude, and this can change everything. Let’s allow William James to chime in: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

Second, that our problems, however bad, are unlikely to be quite as bad as the situation of someone who has been sent to a Nazi death camp. That thought may help us to gain perspective, and to stand back from a welter of grief and self-pity and rise to a place where we can start to dream up something better.

Third, we can make inner movies, and if they are good enough it is possible that they will play in the theater of the world.

If we take Viktor Frankl’s example to heart, we see that choosing your attitude can be an exercise in creative imagination that is much more practical and original than trying to edit your inner soundtrack (though that is worth trying) or telling yourself that you can’t afford the energy of a negative thought (you can learn to use the energy of any strong emotion, including grief and rage).

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through the Twelve Secrets of Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Be Straight, Be Full, Be Ready: Directions from Emerson

I often read a page or two of Emerson before greeting the sun. For me, he is the wisest of American philosophers and the most practical, because his words create a stir in the spirit that is a wonderful incitement to action. He is the perennial enemy of hand-me-down systems of belief and self-limiting notions about what is possible in a life. When we are wandering lost in a fog of confusion in the low marshlands of group-think, he pipes the tune and shines the light that will get us back to the upward slopes of our life purpose. 

In one of the adventures in Active Dreaming that I lead, I guided a group of brave and ready souls on a journey to a real place in the Imaginal Realm that I call the House of Time. It is the kind of locale that creators, shamans and mystics have always wanted to visit, a place where we may encounter an inner teacher who is the master of any field that compels our best attention and study, and where any book of secrets - even that Book of Life containing our sacred contract - may be accessible. 

While drumming for the group to provide fuel and focus for the journey to the Library in the House of Time, I found myself in contact with intelligences who have guided and inspired my work in the past. It seemed that Emerson, in high collar and frock coat, had joined the group. I do not say this was the individual spirit of the great sage; I do not claim the privilege of a personal interview, and I am sure that wherever Emerson may now be, he has many things to do. I say only that for a few moments I seemed to be in the presence of a figure who embodied some essence of Emerson's thought. I was eager to receive insights I could easily retain, while my consciousness was working on several levels, including that of drumming for the members of the group and watching over their own adventures. 

My Emerson gave me three words: Rectitude. Plenitude. Attitude. In the twilight before dawn, as the first pink suffused the gray sky, I tracked these clues through Emerson's essays and letters, and through the pedigrees of the terms themselves. 

 

RECTITUDE 

In its origin, rectitude is the virtue of being straight, or upright, in your conduct and condition. It derives from the Latin rectus or straight. It has nothing to do with a narrow moralism. As Emerson wields this word, it is the property and armor of the brave soul who dares to live by his own lights. 

In his famous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School - a speech the faculty tried to suppress but the senior class insisted upon - Emerson defined "the grand strokes of rectitude" as "a bold benevolence", and that independence of mind that enables us to ignore the counsel and caution of our friend when they seek to hold us back from pursuing our calling, and the readiness to follow that calling without concern for praise or profit. 

Those who can do this are "the Imperial Guard of Virtue" and "the heart and soul of nature." They "rise refreshed on hearing a threat"; they come to a crisis "graceful and beloved as a bride"; they can say like Napoleon at the Massena that they were not themselves until the battle began to go against them.

 

PLENITUDE 

Plenitude is fullness or abundance, coming from the Latin plenus, or "full". For Emerson, plenitude - abundance - is our natural condition, and we miss it only by failing to live from the fullness and integrity of our own spirit. When we develop self-trust, we gain "the plenitude of its energy and power to repair harms," he instructs in his essay on Heroism. 

"There is no limit to the Resources of Man," he adds in a letter on that theme. "The one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is...that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise."

 

ATTITUDE 

Attitude has an even more suggestive etymology. It first came into usage to describe the posture an actor playing a role strikes on the stage. Go further back, and we find it is kissing cousins with the word "aptitude" and both share a common root in the Latin aptus which means "fit" or "suited" - in short, ready something. Our attitudes indeed determine what experiences we are apt to encounter on our roads of life.

 "The healthy attitude of human nature," Emerson instructs us in his essay on Self-Reliance, is "the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner" - in other words, the confidence that the universe will support us. In the face of hardship and challenge, we need to strike that posture of determination that "by [that] very attitude and...tone of voice, puts a stop to defeat," Emerson adds in his letter on Resources. 

We are now entering one of the great open secrets of life. "We are magnets in an iron globe," as Emerson told the young men at Harvard. "We have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."  We choose which doors will open or remain closed. We decide what we will attract or repel in life according to whether we are straight, and full, and ready.

Photo by RM

You Are Magnetic

 

Whatever you think and feel, the universe says Yes. The more strongly you think and feel, the stronger and faster the response it likely to be. It may come in ways you do not expect, since quite often you are unaware of the thoughts and desires you are carrying below your surface mind. The response may knock you back because you live in a world of contending energies and the force lines of your hopes and fears and ambitions may excite opposition.
     You may be frustrated because you have been drilling yourself to think yourself rich or successful or forty pounds lighter and the universe is not giving you any encouragement. That may be because your greater Self is uninterested in your ego agendas or flat out against them. It may be because what the grocery lists of wants and needs you put together in your little everyday calculating mind have nothing much to do with what stirs your soul.
     “All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other’s power,” according to the medieval magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It is a rule of reality that we attract or repel different things according to the emotions, the attitudes, the feelings, the agendas that we carry.
     Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you. If you go about your day filled with doom and gloom, the world will give you plenty of reasons to support that attitude. You’ll start looking like that cartoon character who goes about with a personal black cloud over his head that rains only on his parade. Conversely, if your attitude is bright and open to happy surprises, you may be rewarded by a bright day, even when the sky is leaden overhead, and by surprisingly happy encounters.
     Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events, and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody. This process begins before we speak or act because thoughts and feelings are already actions and our attitudes are out there ahead of us. This requires us to do a regular attitude check, asking, What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?
     It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field. If you go around carrying a repertoire of doom and gloom, you may not say what’s on your mind, but the universe will hear you and support you. Attitude adjustment requires more than reciting the kind of New Age affirmation you see in cute boxes with flowers and sunsets on Facebook. It requires deeper self-examination and self-mobilization.
     “We are magnets in an iron globe,” declared Emerson. If we are upbeat and positive, “we have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” Conversely, “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst ...dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”
     In Beauty - The Invisible Embrace John O’Donohue reminded usthat “each of us is responsible for 'how' we see, and how we see determines 'what' we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the state of soul. When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of seeing are broken. The coating of dead dust falls from the windows. Freed from their dead forms the elements of one's life reveal new urgency and possibility."
      Take a few moments in your day to check your attitude and see whether you are putting bright balloons of possibility or dour grey clouds over your head.

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imagination by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library.

Photo by RM

 

At home with the philosopher emperor

I have been rereading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in the excellent recent translation by Gregory Hays. I opened the book at random and found my favorite line (“A man’s life is dyed in the color of his imagination”) rephrased in different English: "Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts." On the next the page, I came to essential counsel: what seems to be in your way may be your way. Marcus Aurelius, in the Hays version, puts it like this:

"Our actions may be impeded...but there can be no impeding our intentions or their dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." [Book 5, 20]

               

Stoic encouragement, from 19 centuries ago, to make friends with our blocks and look for opportunity in any setback.

I turned back to the beginning of the book, possibly not to be recommended since the contents are not structured in any way. Book 1 might seem to belong at the beginning, since it is mostly composed with the emperor's testimonials to mentors (above all Antoninus, the previous emperor). But after this we get recurring ideas and no apparent evolution in personal thinking. The division of the books was probably dictated by the space available on a single papyrus scroll; you come to the end of one and start a new book.
    In his introduction, Hays reminds us that Marcus was not writing for publication and maybe only for an audience of one: himself. He did not give his reflections a title. He wrote a New Thought book for himself, to remind him how to respond to adversity and why he should get out of bed in the morning.

    Throughout he insists that we can come to no real harm if we follow the Logos in ourselves and in the cosmos. It seems that Logos here means something similar to the Dharma in Eastern thought.

     Life is short, Marcus reminds us again and again. And at the end, it seems, we either dissipate as atoms or stream into a greater light. There is no indication here that Marcus believed in a personal afterlife. He certainly did not believe that it matters whether we are remembered by others. They will die too, and those who come later will forget all of us.

There is the stern military injunction: stand at your post, fulfill your assignments, be a Roman. Not surprising in a man compelled to spend so much time with the legions – fighting in Germania, suppressing the Sarmatians, containing the Parthians, dealing with the revolt of Cassius.

   Knowledge has three divisions for him: physics, logic, ethics. His writings are devoted to the third: to mortal duty towards others and towards the order of the universe. He affirms – no doubt against all external evidence – that whatever happens in the world is for the best, that God or gods have a secret plan in conformity with Logos.

    Like Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, the Stoic emperor contends that whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude. We can go into an inner fortress that is unassailable from without.

Illustration: Teasing the HG Curtain

I lay down the book, stretch out on the bed,and close my eyes.I immediately see a beautiful woman in a red dress. She swings on theater curtains, opening and closing my view of the space beyond. I see a giant head in profile. It looks like a Roman portrait bust. Beyond it, the scene is bright and warmly lit but undefined from where I am observing. Shall I go through the curtain?

Check Your Inner Soundtrack

Do you check your inner soundtrack, as you wake and at other times during the day? Do you notice how this can set the mood for the day, for good or otherwise? Do certain songs, popping up in your mind, connect you to certain people, life themes or memories? Do you find you sometimes need to change what's playing inside your head?

    This is a very effective way of checking your attitude, including thoughts and feelings you may be carrying that have not risen to your full awareness but may condition or even control what you will encounter in the course of the day. You know, don't you, that your attitude walks ahead of you, helping to generate events and encounters around the next corner.This is because you are magnetic. Unfortunately, however, you are often less than fully conscious of what you attract and repel -until and unless you look back carefully on a certain episode and begin to discern its hidden logic.
    Checking your inner soundtrack is an easy way to check your attitude. I do this several times a day. It might start effortlessly because I wake with a snatch of a song in my head. This is may carry a mood from a dream, or part of the soundtrack of a dream movie, or may anticipate the mood of the day. It may connect me to people or places at a distance, or a certain period of my life. 
      When I am lucky, a song from the night may be an original composition. I will then spring into action to try to record it before it is gone. Like the dreamers of many indigenous traditions, I know that a dream-inspired song is one of the great gifts of dreaming. It can be a way to bring through energy and spirit from a deeper place. It can be a wing song that will help you travel from the ordinary world into real worlds beyond it.     
      A Texas woman told me,  “I wake up with different music every day. Today I woke up with "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift. In the dream I was watching a sad news story on television. I have not heard that song in a long time. I took it as a message to keep a good attitude during the day, focus my attention on positive things and shake off the bad stuff coming though the TV.”      
     A Vancouver dreamer said, “Today I accept the song that was with me when I woke and I will let it play all day. ‘Calling All Angels’.”     
     The song on your inner soundtrack may connect you to another person in your life, maybe someone at a distance. A friend told me that a song she used to sing for her son when he was very small will still pop into her head when he is thinking of her and getting ready to call her or visit her. The song is “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” She smiles when it starts playing on her inner soundtrack, remembering the joy of slapping hands with her little boy as he tried to reproduce the words.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, don’t just listen to the music, find the words that may or may not come with a tune. Check for voices from the past that may be cheering you on or bringing you down. Catch yourself when you start going over and over old histories of failure or regret, belittling yourself, telling yourself what’s wrong with you in a way that cannot help you to be right. You may notice that an inner voice has been repeating things like, “I’m such an idiot” or, “I’m in so much pain” or “I’ll never be able to face that crowd, or that person”.      
     Your inner soundtrack may include a whole chorus of voices of people who have lifted you up or pulled you down. Don’t let all of them speak! Choose the ones you are willing to hear.         Above all, check your personal mantras. These are codes for connection and manifestation. These are the magic words that can deform your life or open up avenues of bright possibility. You may have borrowed some of your personal mantras from a spiritual teacher, or a favorite book, or one of those oh-so-cute boxes in your Facebook newsfeed. 
    I have nothing against feel-good affirmations and statements of spiritual correctness, as long as they work. This means that they come to mind when you need them, when you need to respond to a challenge or make a choice at a crossroads. It means that they are playing on your inner soundtrack before you hit a select button.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, you may find that your personal mantras include:     
    “I’m sick.”     
    “I’m fat.”     
    “I’ll never meet the right guy.”    
    “I’ll never have enough money.”    
     There’s no need for me to expand the list. You want to make your own. When you detect a negative mantra of this kind on your inner playlist, you can try to delete it, but may find that it comes back. You can try to override it with happy tunes and feel-good affirmations. I find that sometimes the best tactic is not to try to cancel a long-playing blues number right away, but to trip lightly around it, saying and singing better numbers.     
     Walking my dog in the park one morning, I checked my inner soundtrack and found I was engaged in making an inventory of the complaints in my aging body, all featuring pain. The pain in my dodgy knee, the pain in my shoulder, the pain of inflammation in one of my toes, the possible beginnings of a sore throat.     
     I hit my inner pause button. I did not try to deny that my body was expressing these complaints, and might need to be acknowledged. We don’t want to push away what may be part of our body wisdom, or — in my case — my body crying out for a little TLC. All I did was shift my attention to the dappled light among the beech trees, the gentle breeze stirring the surface of the lake and playing with my hair, the happiness of my little dog as he nosed after new smells and the nether parts of other dogs. And I said to the wind and the sun and the trees, “Thank you. Thank you for the gift of this day, for being able to walk among trees, by water, with a dog who loves me no matter what. Thank you for the gifts and the challenges of this lifetime.”     
    The best answer to inner naysayers and whiners may be to say to the universe: Thank you. 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library.

Choose the Day

Carpe diem, goes the old Latin tag. “Seize the day.”  The sole commandment of conscious living is no less proactive, but more conscious: choose the day.

What we encounter on any day has a great deal to do with what we bring to that day. We draw or repel different events and encounters according to our attitudes and the basic energy we are carrying. We find doors open or closed according to our willingness or refusal to change our expectations and our plans as circumstances change.

We choose every day, whether we are aware of this or not. If we tell ourselves we have no choice, that is a choice we are making. If we tell ourselves that we have no choice because a situation is beyond our control, we forget that we can still choose our response to the world, and that can change everything. Whenever I hear someone — perhaps a voice within myself — bleating or protesting that the world is cruel and can't be changed, I think of Viktor Frankl in the nightmare of Auschwitz.

At the close of a beautiful week of soul healing and shared dreaming in one of my Active Dreaming workshops, I asked the members of our circle to choose the day, in a personal statement. Here's a sampling of what they said:

“I choose to be present today with all of my senses.”

“I choose to have Tiger in my heart.”

“I choose to follow my soul's purpose.”

“I choose to see my waking life as a dream.”

“I choose to travel with the energy of the group.”

“I choose to be compassionate.”

“I choose to be a survivor.”

“I choose to soar with the bird and see my roads from a higher perspective.”

“I choose the fire.”

My own statement, on that day: “I choose to live as if everything matters.”

Truth, in our lives, is what we remember and act upon. Lists of rules or intentions can become like grocery lists; we are forever in danger of forgetting items or getting what matters mixed up.  So my list of personal commandments reduces to this: Choose the day. The content of that choice is less important than the consciousness that we have a choice and need to approach life, on any day, as choosers, not spectators, victims, or consumers.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Path of Magic at Mosswood Hollow by RM. This is where I lead extraordinary adventures and trainings, including my five-day residential retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming", one of the most unusual creative writing workshops on the planet.

Three Words from Emerson in the House of Time

While leading an adventure in Active Dreaming, I guided a group of brave and ready souls on a journey to a real place in the Imaginal Realm that I call the House of Time. It is the kind of locale that creators, shamans and mystics have always wanted to visit, a place where we may encounter an inner teacher who is the master of any field that compels our best attention and study, and where any book of secrets - even that Book of Life containing our sacred contract - may be accessible. If you would like to go there, you’ll find detailed instructions in my book Dreamgates.

      While drumming for the group to provide fuel and focus for the journey to the Library in the House of Time, I found myself in contact with intelligences who have guided and inspired my work in the past. It seemed that Ralph Waldo Emerson, in high collar and frock coat, had joined the group. I do not say this was the individual spirit of the great sage; I do not claim the privilege of a personal interview, and I am sure that wherever Emerson may now be, he has many things to do. I say only that for a few moments I seemed to be in the presence of a figure who embodied some essence of Emerson's thought. I was eager to receive insights I could easily retain, while my consciousness was working on several levels, including that of drumming for the members of the group and watching over their own adventures.

    
My Emerson gave me three words: Rectitude. Plenitude. Attitude. The following morning, in the twilight before dawn, as the first pink suffused the gray sky, I tracked these clues through Emerson's essays and letters, and through the pedigrees of the terms themselves. 

RECTITUDE

In its origin, rectitude is the virtue of being straight, or upright, in your conduct and condition. It derives from the Latin rectus or straight. It has nothing to do with a narrow moralism. As Emerson wields this word, it is the property and armor of the brave soul who dares to live by his own lights. In his famous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School - a speech the faculty tried to suppress but the senior class insisted upon - Emerson defined "the grand strokes of rectitude" as "a bold benevolence", and that independence of mind that enables us to ignore the counsel and caution of our friends when they seek to hold us back from pursuing our calling, and the readiness to follow that calling without concern for praise or profit. Those who can do this are "the Imperial Guard of Virtue" and "the heart and soul of nature." They "rise refreshed on hearing a threat"; they come to a crisis "graceful and beloved as a bride"; they can say like Napoleon at the Massena that they were not themselves until the battle began to go against them.

PLENITUDE

Plenitude is fullness or abundance, coming from the Latin plenus, or "full". For Emerson, plenitude - abundance - is our natural condition, and we miss it only by failing to live from the fullness and integrity of our own spirit. When we develop self-trust, we gain "the plenitude of its energy and power to repair harms," he instructs in his essay on Heroism. "There is no limit to the Resources of Man," he adds in a letter on that theme. "The one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is...that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise."

ATTITUDE

Attitude has an even more suggestive etymology. It first came into usage to describe the posture an actor playing a role strikes on the stage. Go further back, and we find it is kissing cousins with the word "aptitude" and both share a common root in the Latin aptus which means "fit" or "suited" - in short, ready something. Our attitudes indeed determine what experiences we are apt to encounter on our roads of life. "The healthy attitude of human nature," Emerson instructs us in his essay on Self-Reliance, is "the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner" - in other words, the confidence that the universe will support us. In the face of hardship and challenge, we need to strike that posture of determination that "by [that] very attitude and...tone of voice, puts a stop to defeat," Emerson adds in his letter on Resources.

    We are now entering one of the great open secrets of life. "We are magnets in an iron globe," as Emerson wrote in an essay titled "Resources". "We have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."  We choose which doors will open or remain closed. We decide what we will attract or repel in life according to whether we are straight, and full, and ready.

Adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Painting: William James Stillman, "The Philosophers' Camp in the Adirondacks" (1858). Emerson is at the center of the scene.


Emerson portrait: Watercolor by Philadelphia artist Nile Livingston

Growing a dream of a better world, even in Auschwitz

Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
-
- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

He has been reduced to a number tattooed on his arm. His ability to survive until tomorrow depends on being able to dig stones for a long day without collapsing from malnutrition and fatigue, and on being able to get a few peas at the bottom of a bowl of soup, and at not falling foul of one of the SS guards or the no less brutal Capos, fellow-prisoners selected to act as wardens and help select who will be sent to the "bathhouse" that leads to the crematorium. He reaches into the storehouse of memory for images that can help him to live. He cherishes little things from the life that has been taken from him, like taking a bus ride, or turning on the lights in his apartment, or finding real food in the kitchen. Most of all, he cherishes the image of his wife. He doesn't know whether she is still alive, but the great love between them is real, and helps to sustain him.
    When he can get scraps of paper, he tries to reconstruct the book manuscript that was torn from him by a Capo when he came here. He dreams of seeing it published. In the indeterminate state of a death camp prisoner, with no way of knowing whether he will live or die within the next hour, he chooses to grow a vision of the future in his mind. It is an extraordinary vision, and it takes a terrific act of will for him to turn his mind from his bleeding feet and aching stomach to inhabit a future that very few could begin to imagine. The emaciated prisoner of Auschwitz transports himself to a warm and comfortable lecture room, in a civilized time and place in which the horrors of World War II lie in the past. The speaker is the prisoner himself, Dr Viktor Frankl. From the platform, he surveys an attentive audience, seated on handsomely upholstered chairs. His topic? The psychology of the concentration camp.
-   After his release from Auschwitz and the fall of the Third Reich, Viktor Frankl recalled the effect of this remarkable exercise in active imagination. "All that oppressed me in that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself." [1]
-   This is a stellar example of the power of dreamgrowing - of developing a creative vision powerful enough to carry you beyond adversity. Inside one of the worst of history's nightmares, Viktor Frankl reclaimed the identity and the future that had been torn from him. He not only saw himself surviving the death camps; he saw himself emerging to found a new approach to psychology on what he had learned from them. In doing this, he stepped outside and above his appalling circumstances to adopt the perspective of a witness and a scientist. He transported hmself to a future time in which the hideous collective nightmare was in the past. In doing this, he succeeded in escaping, mentally, from the camp. But he did more: he reached for a possible future so powerfully that it seems than an answering force helped to pull him towards it.
-  Whatever the pain and adversity of our lives, we can all take heart from Viktor Frankl's tremendous example. Even when all other freedoms are denied to us - he later insisted - we can never lose one final freedom, the freedom to choose our attitude. We can choose to give up, or to struggle on. We can choose to find meaning in our suffering, or to pronounce our world unfair and meaningless (as too many people do under circumstances that look quite comfortable to most of the world's poor, let alone a death camp inmate). It is our choice. If we choose to believe that we have no choice, we are still making a choice. If Viktor Frankl could say yes to life in Auschwitz, and find meaning in what life threw at him, even there, who are we to go about with the misery-guts attitude that life is unfair, or meaningless?
-   Frankl founded the method he called logotherapy, sometimes described as the third of the great Viennese schools of psychology (after Freud and Adler). As the name suggests, this is therapy based on the need for logos or meaning. The central thesis is that many of our ailments are noögenic - that is to say, they have their origin in the realm of noös, or mind, rather than in the psyche as observed by psychiatrists, or the body as diagnosed by physicians. The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, agression and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.
-   How do we find meaning in our lives? We find it in work, especially through creative action. We find it as we engage in the world, and with other people. We find it - Frankl insisted over and over - in the attitude we adopt in the face of unavaoidable suffering.
    Let me add that we also find meaning through our engagement with our dreams. Our dreams, and the powers that speak to us in dreams, are forever inviting us to reclaim the knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and what our purpose is in our current life experience.
-I read Man's Search for Meaning when I was a student. I've read it three times since, and I expect I'll read it again. It offers perennial wisdom. Frankl deploys several of my favorite quotes that are relevant to his theme.
-   From Nietzsche, he borrows this celebrated and telling truth: "He who has a why to live can cope with almost any how."
    From Dostoyevsky, this: "My only fear in life is of not being worthy of my suffering."
    From Spinoza: "Suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we produce a clear and precise picture of it."
    And then he quotes the Viennese poet, Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of Freud. Schnitzler maintained that there are really only three virtues, which he itemized as follows: objectivity, courage, and the sense of responsibility. An interesting choice for a poet.
     We saw something of the merit of "objectivity" in the way Frankl was able to take himself out of his situation in the death camp and look down - and back - from the viewpoint of a scientific observer. Courage, certainly, is a fundamental virtue. It is not the absence of fear; that could be psychosis or reckless stupidity. Courage is fear conquered by something stronger than fear, by love, or belief, or dury, or a cause. The sense of responsibiliity - of being responsible for our own lives, first and last, and for exercising our power to choose our responses to whatever life gives us - is clearly of vital importance in a ife that meets the existential challenge:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. [2]

Not a bad exercise, in our own quest for meaning, to name the three virtues that count for most in our own experience. Whatever selection we make, for me, as for Frankl (thinking of his beloved wife in the death camp) the fundament of all is love. This is what makes us human, and sustains us daily, even when we dare not say its name.

[1] Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1985) p.95.
[2] ibid p.131.

Take care of the canteloupe

A wise old bird, I thought as I neared Lynda's register in the checkout line at the supermarket. She looked to be well past retirement age. If she had gone back to work to help pay her bills, she certainly showed no signs of resentment. Brisk and efficient, she needed no help identifying more obscure finds from the produce section.
     She seized the canteloupe I had placed on the moving belt and held it up.
     "Wait one day," she instructed me. "Keep it in a paper bag."
     She grabbed a brown paper bag, popped the canteloupe in, and rolled the open end tightly shut.
     "Keep it in the bag for one day," Lynda repeated. "Then it will be perfect."
     I promised to do exactly as she said.
     As I wheeled my cart out of the store, I felt deep appreciation for the checker who passed on old wisdom about ripening fruit. I wondered what advice she gave others. Clearly, this was someone who knew how to find pleasure in work by giving more than any job description would ask for.
    She could be a role model for many, including the 20-something sales assistant at my next stop - a stationery store - who came to her station at the register literally dragging her feet. Her first words were, "I don't want to be working today."
     Whatever our situation, we have the freedom to choose our attitude. How we use, or fail to use, that power of choice determines whether we make wastelands or flowering orchards out of everyday environments. Viktor Frankl taught us that, in Man's Search for Meaning.
      I think of the flight attendant on Southwest who responded to my rowmate's request for tea by fetching a selection of six different Stash tea bags. "Southwest offers a Stash collection?" I was amazed, knowing the Stash is a very upmarket tea maker. "Not the airline," the flight attendant responded. "I just thought that people who fly with us deserve a better selection. So I've been bringing tea bags from the airport hotels where they park us overnight."
     Now that's an example of turning work into play, right up there with the lady bagging the canteloupe for me.
    Lynda was right, of course. When I cut the canteloupe for breakfast, it was perfect.