After giving a lecture where I discussed the Holocaust, an elderly man approached me. I could see a genuine kindness and compassion in his face, and also sensed that his soul had seen far too much in his lifetime. He wanted me to re-consider my comment that we could never understand what created the Holocaust and ongoing acts of genocide.

Gently, yet firmly he explained that when we stop trying to understand, we open the door open for future occurrences. I immediately realized that I had made a terrible mistake, and apologized to him and to the memory of all the past, present and future victims of these crimes against humanity whose tragic fate may have been sealed by our collective lack of involvement.

Now, yet again we stand aghast looking at the ongoing proliferation of violence in the world. From the slaughter and rape of the young woman in India, to the shooting of Malala, the 14 year old girl who was targeted because she spoke up for girls right to an education, to the current rash of violence in our own country. We have only to look at the news to be reminded of the slaughter of the innocents in Newtown, CT, of the Tucson shootings a few years ago, and this most recent horror where after shooting a school bus driver, a man held a five (5) year old boy hostage in a bunker for days. Click link to continue reading....

Elie Wiesel once commented that the true hero cares more about the spiritual welfare of their community than for their own needs.  So how is it that with the perennial wisdom on heroes taught to us by Wiesel, Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung, and Marie Louise von Franz, we persist in falsely identifying and projecting this archetypal pattern onto individuals whose frail shoulders will never carry these cultural and spiritual responsibilities?
   
Is the saga of Lance Armstrong yet another story in ou rcultural and psychological tendency  to glorify and inflate and then take great pleasure in seeing the demise of ourill-fated “heroes”? In part, Armstrong’s story speaks to our illusions and mistaken ideas about the nature of the hero archetype. Unfortunately, these individuals, the great athletes, movie stars, members of the nobility, and all those others ask to carry the (Click here to read the full post...)

In looking at patterns, we see an incarnation and expression of archetypes and spirit within the internal and external world.  The specific form and design of these patterns gives voice to the reality of these underlying shapers of experience.  
   
From the moment a dancer steps onto the stage, to the lyrical musings of a poet, and even to our most intimate of relationships, we find these highly stylized, patterns in our life.  Joseph Campbell allowed us to see that one’s life is an unfolding of a mythic tale, and that our behaviors, choices and desires are expressions of these eternal traditions. It is through the recognition of the patterns we live by that reveals the nature of our particular relationship to spirit, soul and 
psyche.

 Virtually everyone can identify patterns in their own life, and in many instances, we have to admit to those which do not serve us well.  There are patterns of... (Finish reading here)