13
Adult Learning and the Second Level of Hope 2003

The group study needs to be directed toward.the contemplation of something beyond everyone and yet shared by all—images, narratives, or characters—focal points that call up and defamiliarize the familiar. Louise Cowan, “The Literary Mode of Knowing,” 16.

I confess at the outset that I have no panacea or quick fix or a list of how to’s to get one out of life situations that are slowly dissolving a person’s energy. I do acknowledge that we are living longer and have more technology to help us get through the day, but that does not mean one has more time to cultivate one’s interests. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened, in a sleight of hand that has not a little malice about it, perhaps even a full-blown conspiracy.

In my reading I discovered that in 1776 life expectancy was 35 years for an adult male; in 1886 it had climbed to 40. In 1920 women lived on average to their 54th. birthday; in 1998, someone born in this year can expect to live to the age of 83. In 2040 men will live 85.9 years. What a remarkable set of statistics on aging’s continual prolongation. But what quality of life will accompany this greater quantity?

The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung’s work as a psychotherapist and a mythologist revealed to him that the psychology of the morning of life and the psychology of its afternoon and evening each follows a different pattern (Modern Man in Search of a Soul 58). The same experience can have one meaning for a young person, another for someone like us in midlife and quite another for one in the twilight of life. Same experience, yet a very different set of values working to process that experience. One might call such a set of values the contents of one’s personal myth. Jung went on to say that “a third of my cases are suffering from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives: two thirds have passed middle age” (Soul 61) He realized as well that when the resources of consciousness have been exhausted, people came to him and as with one voice proclaimed: “I am stuck.” In their fixity Jung discerned that something in the person’s psyche was exhausted. Often it was his/her ability to have a reservoir of resources from which one could pull to keep going. They were at an impasse. Such an existential checkmate profiles a universal dilemma.

I will speak in a few moments about one of literature’s greatest historical/fictional figures; next to Homer’s Odysseus, the pilgrim Dante Alighieri, who in the 14th. century, at the beginning of his Commedia, awoke to discover two truths: 1. that he had reached mid-life in an unconscious state; and 2: that he had just awakened from such an existential slumber. He also realized with fear that he was lost in a dark wood and that no amount of nay saying could free him from the truth of this fundamental impasse; he was stuck. The good news is that he woke up to his dilemma. Yes, he initially felt hopeless. There was, in his mind, no exit and such a reality terrified him. Even in remembering this impasse, the same fears attended it. We might say, following some of the writing of Murray Stein in In Midlife, that Dante awoke to discover the power of liminal space, with all its attendant fears and shifting ground.

Stein reveals that liminal comes from limin, which is a doorway or threshold. Anytime one enters or leaves a room, she passes through liminal space. It is characterized by several elements: the forward direction of a person’s life becomes clouded. Paths to the future are unmarked, uncharted so that the future seems unimaginable in every direction. The old ways of doing or thinking no longer operate. Limi-nality is a period of psychological floating because now “the way” is unfamiliar and ambiguous at the same time that old comfortable guides no longer serve. One feels an anxious uncertainty about which road to take; the person may find himself standing at an interior crossroads feeling confused and torn. He or she is stuck. Without a guide to free them and point them in a direction that is constructive, they may experience such paralysis for months, even years. You get the idea.

To return to the liminal pilgrim Dante for a moment: slowly, and through an act of grace, he is given an initial mentor. With such guidance he struggles, slips and falls through the infernal region characterized by abject and vicious hopelessness, full of brutal anger, until he reaches the foot of Mount Purgatory, where he climbs in a spiral with great effort into a state of Hope and community that refreshes and revitalizes him.

So a big question here for all of us as I approach in one week my 58th birthday, is how to navigate our own lives through the trenches and peaks of a constantly morphing territory, as Frederic Hudson calls it. Hudson does not even like the term “life stages.” He chooses instead to speak of the process of maturation across “the life cycle” (On Renewal, xiii). He, like many of us, asks a fundamental question: “How do we befriend change, to learn to ride on the constant flux of change, and to work in a conscious way to brace the change process itself, for change can and does bring its own method of organization. Are there elements in your current squeezed life condition that could be used to your benefit instead of simply draining you of your energy and purpose? I want to believe so.

Before I say more of Dante’s poem, now over 600 years old, that deals with one exhausted adult in midlife, I want to say a few words about the adults I teach. Many sound so much like Dante’s first words of his poem, written in exile in 1310, and uttered in Inferno 1:

Midway in the journey of our life/I awoke to find myself lost in a dark wood/Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,/that savage forest, dense and difficult/which even in recall renews my fear:/so bitter—death is hardly more severe. (ll.1-5). Notice that he ties being lost to death. This insight is important to liminal experience, for here something needs to die off so that a new awakening can enter the vacated space.

What brings on this awakening in mid-life? I think his poem, studied carefully and with an open heart, reveals what so many of the adults who come to Pacifica Graduate Institute yearn for: not development; they did that in undergraduate school by studying for a profession. On this level of adult learning, the psyche is configured differently; their personal myth is hungry for more than development. They seek, instead, transformation, a deeper ontological presence to themselves, others and the world. Not more masks but a solitude, a turning inward. They seek also to be rejuvenated, revisioned, and refreshed by thinking in depth about subjects that they feel a passion for. That’s really it; they are seeking depth and community in depth. Two elements: a journey and intimacy, which are characteristics of the figure of Hermes, the Greek deity who abides in every journey and at various points in our lives, startles every soul.

Some individuals discovered that they had been traveling on the wrong path and, through suffering into its awareness, mustered the courage to change. They do not want to go into that good night alone. These are the folks who come to study clinical or counseling psychology. Others discovered that they were on the right path, but that they had stalemated, become dull, lifeless and had lost most of their earlier contact with meaning. These folks are the ones who come to study depth psychology or mythology. What all of them had become conscious of was that their destiny was end-stopped and in need of closer conscious revision. Eros had been driven from their work and from their personal lives, leaving them flat and flaccid in a colorless world. We recall as well in the myth that Eros was married to Psyche, so Psyche herself is numbed when Eros bolts out the window.

Furthermore, the path the older individuals trod was not satisfying; it failed to feed a need or desire or a destiny that they knew, intuitively, was theirs to be had if only it would find them and they in turn could imagine and embrace it. They sought renewal out of an emotional or intellectual exhaustion, much more defined and burdensome, we all know, than is physical fatigue. Here is what I have heard and witnessed over the past 7 years teaching them and giving talks at orientations where prospective students come for a day to explore the school:

•   They come to imagine their lives and the world anew. Something, they sense, has not been seen or lived clearly and they feel an urgency not to grow older and feel the terror of having journeyed through an unlived life toward an opaque end.

•   They come to remember. By this I mean that there has been so much in their past they are often amnesiac, even unconscious and senseless about; they are not seeking clarity or explanation. Rather, they seek the poetic or mythic pattern in their lives that up to now has eluded them. They want a felt sense of their lives that they can work meaningfully toward actively participating in. The process of remembering, I suspect, is understood as a projection into an unnamed future and what boons it might offer.

•   They come to satisfy a hunger, for the appetite has only recently been recognized, but their lives have reached a point of critical emotional mass such that they need to nourish this hunger with solid victuals that will satisfy. Many have been workshop junkies for years, but now need a sustained meal with others at the same table, to satisfy this hunger. Eating becomes a slow and deliberate action.

•   They come desiring depth. No longer does the horizontal in life, on which so much of the culture insists—to live in a line that never feels depth, a line that is horizontal and based on consumption—spending, satisfy. Instead, these souls demand some intimate contact with the vertical in life, with the downward movement of the imagination to engage epic human and divine issues, to struggle with them and to join a conversation that promises further depth and amplitude. This movement is exemplified by Dante the pilgrim who at the beginning of the poem, and with his first guide, the classical poet Virgil, is led “into the mysteries of the invisibles” which he must move down and through in hopelessness before arriving to the place of HOPE at the foot of Mount Purgatory. As psyche ripens in maturity desire for depth increases. If not supported here at this place in the journey, the soul may easily begin to burn up or dissolve in frustration and despair.

•   They yearn to feel an in-depth quality to how they have been living, and in this soul deepening sense a conviction that they will recover something that has been lost yet is essential for their identity as individuals. It must be returned to and recovered.

•   As I suggested, and this may be the most important observation: they come for communitas, for the companionship of like-minded people who have similar aspirations in life. When these folks leave us after a session, which lasts three days per month regardless of the program they have entered, they feel already a nostalgia for the place, but the place as it embraces the community that now evaporates, is dispersed across the United States, Europe, even Japan. Yes, there are students who fly from London, Munich, Tokyo, Dublin and other points outside the US. But the deeper community takes on a life in their imaginations.

•   I would say it this way regarding the last point: they come with their personal mythology and wish to lay it side by side with other mythologies to form a collective. There is, in the telling of their own narratives to others, a surprise and yet an anticipation fulfilled, that others’ stories would have deep archetypal similarities with theirs. In addition, so many come to hear their own story given a variation, a different motif, a unique twist of the plot—and here we enter the archetypal realm that stories place us in if they are any good. The psyche, Murray Stein observes, spills out in stories, dreams, fantasies, desires and fears. I would add that these stories all yearn for a response to them; telling alone is insufficient.

•   Adult learners also have a deep desire to have their stories told, their narratives listened to, honored, respected and then put up against other narratives. Out of this confluence, a community of narratives grows. Now they have a safe container in which to tell their stories. This vessel is the holding tank for their personal myths.

•   They search as well for what I call a poetic and religious psyche, where some quality of integration may be discerned and nurtured. Many are like you: therapists, caregivers, counselors, teachers, and people in the helping professions that need more to their lives than the satisfaction of helping others. They need the conscious awareness and deep satisfaction of helping themselves.

•   Something else as well. They seek a sense of hospitality in the world. There abides a deep connection between learning and hospitality. Homer’s Odyssey is, among other things, an epic tale about the guest and the host, about teaching and mentoring as forms of hosting; learning as a form of guesting. Together, host and guest create community, even civilization, through their interactions. Out of their work something new grows, which adds to the quality and on-going ness of the world’s order. It may even establish a further awareness of grace in the world. All of these elements Odysseus claims in mid-life after being stuck, isolated, exhausted yet protected by gods and goddesses. When he finally tells his own story, which occupies 4 of the 24 books of the epic, he is able, finally, to reach home.

In Modern Man in Search ofa Soul, Jung wonders: “Are there perhaps colleges for 40 year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life” (108). How easy it is, therefore, to become stuck, to stagnate in mid-life, absent any mentoring or learning opportunities that could aid in structuring and shaping one to prepare for the next cycle of life.

Enter the Green Bridge Project under the direction of Hardy Doyle. Jung believes that it is at this time in the psyche’s maturing that many seek for the first time a religious outlook or a spiritual life that transcends organized religion. Without some guides or helps that one can access, one easily enters the infernal realm. What is it? A vision and a version of Hades, the liminal space of mid-life.

Life’s Hopelessness

Dante’s poem guides us meticulously through the downward spiraling, ever-constricting depths of Hell. This marks the first stage towards liberation, individuation, and deepening consciousness. For any of us, to enter this realm is to enter a constantly constricting narrow path, where the world sours and its stench becomes all encompassing. It is as well a place of deep woundedness, of souls crying out for relief, often through a frantic desire for revenge. It is the place of deep resentments, of torturous self-importance and a disposition that screams “I do not deserve this.” As a consequence, souls strike out at one another amidst the most desctructive conditions of heat and cold, excrement, joylessness, isolation and worst of all—hopelessness. In Inferno, souls are forever exhausted, stuck, check-mated, with no exit. They are trapped and, even more painfully, are fully conscious of their entrapment.

The walls of this infernal region continue to restrict as Dante and Virgil move down in spiral fashion into ever more serious offenses against God, others and themselves. Life in Inferno is futile, without purpose, condemned to repetitive behavior that yields no fruits, no joy, no hope and no promise of improvement. Think of this repetitive behavior contining for eternity. Here is burnout and burn-up with a self-imposed vengeance. The terrain for Dante is uncertain, disorienting, confusing and wrought with feelings of hopelessness. Without aguide he would be doomed to this region of the heart. Suicide would begin to appear as a positive alternative.

The imagination itself in this futile realm is checkmated. Self-knowledge is limited, while knowledge of the world all but ceases. Dante, however, as a live pilgrim amidst the states of these souls after their own deaths, can recognize something of their essence, the essential person stripped of all ego defenses and behavior camouflages. No facade lingers. Self-renewal is impossible, self-motivation dissolved, self-knowing truncated. Nothing exists in the infernal realm but endless repetition, ceaseless activity without purpose except for a growing resentment and rage over one’s condition. I think it can be described on a psychological and emotional plane as a moral equivalent of burnout. The souls Dante confronts are spent, exhausted, ended and now must live within a distorted or excessive version of what they sought in ego-centered lives. These souls have not lost their egos; rather they have lost everything but their egos.

To exist thus, egotistically, is to live in hell. Such a state or condition reflects a narcissism pushed to its furthest extreme. All love is self-centered, but it has become a gross caricature of itself. The infernal realm is one of the impossibility of any longer loving selflessly. Instead it is filled with acts of self-absorption, self-devouring, cutting, eating, pummeling others, cursing one another, protecting one’s pathologies, for they are now the primary receipts of individual identity.

For Dante, however, this journey down and into constriction reflects a dissolution or breakdown of the ego in a liminal, shifting terrain that will prepare him for the hopefulness of Mount Purgatory. He must absorb all of this pathology without becoming caught in it, for he realizes, through Virgil’s mentoring, that its power has the capacity to destroy him by abandoning him forever to such a horrid condition. He also provokes the question: who mentors us in mid-life? The adult, in our culture, after all, is supposed to be a finished product! So what gives?

Instead of being destroyed by fixating on the illnesses he witnesses there, Dante must die to himself in order to be released from Inferno. His ego must, a step at a time, be dismantled, dissassembled, so that the Self in its fullest nature may surface and grow in grace and love. Liminal space is both a tomb and a womb, according to Murray Stein. Death and birth inhabit the same psychic and emotional space. What he senses almost immediately after he and Virgil have voyaged through the narrow fissure in the deepest and most frozen part of Inferno where Satan himself weeps icy tears while he devours three souls who typify the sin of betrayal, is the movement in time of souls blessing and embracing one another as they traverse up the mountain. At the bottom their pilgrimage is sluggish, then begins to accelerate as the sins they carry on their foreheads are erased one at a time, in a kind of peripatetic therapy of pathologies that at first weigh them down. The poem asks on another level: what lead mantle or weight must be lifted from me so I can continue my journey?

Journey of Hope

Struggle still exists in Purgatory, but its companion is now Hope for things unseen that drive them forward. They are driven by hope of what may be and what can be. Dante, Virgil, and all the souls spiraling up to the top of the mountain realize as well that as hope exists only in time, that time itself is a gift of grace. In this movement, the mind of the pilgrim awakens through suffering to a love that offers direction to his life. This arduous journey up Mount Purgatory, filled with souls moving in community, each attending to its own self-development while maintaining a connection to the whole of humanity, is a symbol for the difficult struggle of understanding itself. Each soul struggles towards knowledge of its own nature, an action that invites hope at every step.

Something else is at work in Purgatory as well, that domain where most of us spend our lives. Even though it is rooted in hope, which means rooted deeply in time, hope gives them and us a vision of the future that we can imagine and strive for. But at the same time, these souls are firmly anchored in the presentness of their suffering and expiation. A paradox begins to take shape in this condition, as I see it, for hope, which is a movement in imagination to the future, also embraces a fidelity to the reality of the present. How different these souls are from their hopeless counterparts in Inferno! There, the souls are not casting forward, but, full of the toxic poison of resentment, of victimization, cling instead to the egoic life that blocks them from the present. They seem to exist anywhere but in the present, so to excuse their own culpability in their eternal and infernal condition. These souls want to know about the future as they wallow in their pasts. The present is simply not present for them; this they deny with excuses, rationales and the language of victim-hood and blame. By contrast, the souls in Purgatory are alive to the present, for it is only there that expiation, and thus a form of growing freedom, can flourish. Purgation can only take place when the ego has been silenced or dissolved into an acquiescent state, when one fully owns up to and embraces the present, even as the souls are in movement, in motion, towards a future good.

As we witness this journey towards understanding unfold, we notice Virgil coach Dante at one moment, lecture him at another, goad him with enthusiastic praise at another, silence him at still others—all in the service of his necessary journey out of the enshrouding darkness in which the poet discovered him. We also see them rest, take breaks, pause, even sleep and dream, so that the journey becomes measured, rhythmic, while the chance for exhaustion is minimized. At one point, at the base of Mount Purgatory, Virgil washes Dante’s face with dew he swipes from the grass beneath their feet. The body is not incidental; its care is essential to the pilgrimage towards a fuller awareness of itself in relation to the divine source of life. We see both of them drink; words are compared to food that nourish body and soul; Dante’s hunger increases, not for self-gratification, but for understanding. He becomes informed through his learning journey on a deeper level. He sees more, not less, as he progresses and begins to break from his mentor to ask questions and to confront souls on his own, unmediated by Virgil. As a wise mentor, Virgil knows that the goal for his student is independence from him and his limitations.

Built into this action is the belief that the journey is the central archetypal action of our lives; it contains its own rhythm, its own destiny and design. Moreover, it is being created not just by the pilgrim and poet, but by forces unseen but palpably present. In the process Dante’s imagination and intellect are reshaped, recalibrated and refashioned, so that he sees more and more deeply than when in the dark woods. This process, among other effects, infuses him with joy and hope. Purgatory is the terrain of expiation, whereas Inferno is the realm of perdition. The end of the entire journey is a deepened sense of liberty of freedom based not on himself but on the grace of God. The poem suggests that it is impossible to feel hope if freedom is not part of one’s journey; freedom cannot begin outside of hope. Nor does it gain an opportunity to take root without a total fidelity to the Now, to the present moment, when consciousness cannot exist in the future, but in the Now of one’s cleansing. Present in this moment is joy and freedom.

But even here Dante pauses, transfixed, at the conditions of some souls. He is always in danger of returning to a state of stasis, fixated once again on the appearances of things in a narrow pattern of perception and thus missing the deeper implications of what he sees. This temptation to return to stuckness never abates. The cycle of motion and of being stuck, passing out, falling asleep in exhaustion never disappears from the journey. Here he becomes as it were, unconscious to his own emotions so they are able to take over his trajectory. He periodically loses that distance so essential so as not to be swallowed by the thoughts and emotions we are all at risk of being chained to. This temptation to identify far too intimately with one’s feelings actually makes one unconscious to the present. This temptation, one we all know too well, is always present; in its force field one loses the larger paradigm guiding one and confuses instead the part for the whole.

Virgil’s task, as is true of any mentor, is to keep the larger, more panoramic and epic images in front of the learner lest he be dismembered from them. Such action includes envisioning one’s self both as to the future one heads towards and the past, both personal and collective, that one originates from, one’s historical and cultural roots. Dante’s vision must include all of time if it is to sustain him; fixations, complexes that narrow one’s categories for response, continually threaten to reduce time to an unconscious present, where his own history and his own desires invade and overwhelm him. This movement signals the beginning of a regression into the infernal realm. On one level, one never completely leaves the infernal possibilities of the soul. Seen in this manner, Virgil is like a voice of present-ness who alternately cajoles, coaches, speaks sharply to Dante to maintain and develop further a deepening consciousness to what is, but not to dwell so intensely on it that he loses his identity and with it, consciousness itself.

I want to make an analogy here with a very insightful book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, by Eckhart Tolle. He offers a provocative distinction between my “life situation” and “my life.” My life resides underneath my life situation. Suffering in all forms—fears, resentments, angers, anxieties, hurts, victim-hood—arise out of confusing life situations with my life. Focusing on life situations has a tendency, he asserts, to keep me unconscious of my life. My mind, often egoically bound and driven, assumes control and my self, my deeper Being, is subsumed by life situations. In essence, I live an unlived life and thus remain unconscious of it and what he terms the liberating power of NOW.

While we may think we are conscious most of the time, Tolle suggests, in fact most people alternate between different levels of unconsciousness. Ordinary unconsciousness he describes as identifying with my thought processes and emotions, reactions and desires. In this condition I am run by my egoic mind and remain in large measure unaware of Being. Life challenges, crises, or the feeling of being trapped, burned out, exhausted, can either awaken me from unconsciousness or push me further into it. His claim is that our biggest challenge in a culture where speed, overstimulation by media, responsibilities and life’s unending burdens threaten to make us fully unconscious, is to become instead a conscious witness to our thoughts and emotions. We have concentrated too much on our life situations and have lost sight of our life.

Tolle offers not a panacea in his fine book, but rather a way to become conscious of what we are in by regaining the power and consciousness of Now. If we are fully present in the Now, there is no room for negativity, victim-hood language, discord, resentment, anger, and anxiety. But the mind resists the Now because it often relies on these very emotions of turmoil for its identity and unswavering control. The mind would rather move to judge, criticize, complain, worry, and be anxious than to enter fully into Now. It prefers to live somewhere in the past or push out into the future to avoid the vibrant presentness of the Now. There is no escaping the fact, Tolle insists, that we are all part of a collective dysfunction rooted primarily in constant craving, desiring, wishing, fantasizing as frustrating designs to avoid the Now.

To be free of such afflictions is to make them conscious, which is to bring them into the Now. He offers several simple but effective exercises in which to begin such a practice: One way to free one’s self from an affliction is to make it conscious. So, observe the ways in which unease, discontent and tension arise within through unnecessary judgment. Tolle believe that what is constantly being resisted is the NOW.

Ask yourself: Am I at ease at this moment?

What’s going on inside me right now? Can I identify it specifically?

Do I resent what I am doing? Do I resist what I have to do? Observe the negative energy. Ask yourself: what thoughts is my mind creating around the situation? Look at the emotion in the body’s reaction to these thoughts. Did I choose to feel the way I am reacting to this situation?

There is nothing new in what Tolle suggests; rather, he reminds us of how we can lose control of our lives by confusing my “life situation” with “my life.” To complain of or to resent these conditions creates the very negative energy that feeds the ego and keeps one out of the Now. Rather, what are one’s real choices?

Change it.

Leave it.

Accept it. Surrender to what you cannot change; there is strength here.

The mind will continue to play games, such as: “You should be working.” Or “You are wasting time.” Observe the mind making these claims. These expressions are further examples of how the mind wants to avoid the Now in order to insure one’s incarceration in the past or the future, thus never present to what is. How, he asks, do my thought processes create guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret or self-pity? All of these emotions reinforce a false sense of self even as they actually accelerate the body’s aging. The only place or condition in which there is a fullness of Being is in the present, in the Now.

I think his vision and his exercises address a large cultural malady: a fear and avoidance of being fully present at this moment. To use Dante’s image, one remains asleep in the dark woods. Many religious traditions, as you know, foster such an attitude of presentness wherein the mind is quieted, where wants and needs are abated or dissolved, and where one feels an abundant joy in simply being and being Now. It is not enough to make time for a few moments for yourself each day. What Tolle proposes and what the psychology of Dante’s narrative poetically deploys with great subtlety, is that Now is only Now, in the present and one’s becoming more conscious of that reality may be one crucial way to carry one into the second half of life, fully conscious, in the face of heavy demands that will never abate.

Personally, I take the image of “stations” as my way of moving through the day or the week. Each event or situation I enter, be it teaching, traveling, writing, reading, cleaning the house, visiting our sons, is to take each event as a station I pull into, as on a train. When I disembark, I work to be fully conscious and fully present at that station, regardless of its duration. When it is completed, then dissolved, I get back on the train in my consciousness and move to the next station, where again I work to be fully conscious of where I am. When I am finished with a station, I let it go, not rethink it in my mind or rework it as a “what if I had only....” Letting the previous station go frees me to be fully present to the next station, not half living in the previous station and partly anticipating the next one. To be fully here and Now is powerful, very hard to do and very satisfying when I have moments when I feel its visceral reality. Care giving of oneself may in fact begin there. It is certainly worth our authentic attempt.

Notes

Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Cowan, Louise. Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority: Essays from a Principals’ Institute. Ed. Donald and Louise Cowan. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1993. 14-22.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans., edited Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1967. 4-336.

Jung, C.G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. San Diego: Harvest Books. 1933.

Stein, Murray. In Midlife: A Jungian Perspective. Putnam, Ct: Spring Publications, 2003.

Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Novato, California: New World Library, 1999.