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Within each of us
is an underground stream of images and
recollections that is nothing more or less than
our interior life. Through keeping a special
sort of "intensive" journal, Ira Progoff
believes we can enter that stream. At his
workshops, many secularized Americans rediscover
the spiritual.
Last year, thousands of Americans with no
literary pretensions whatsoever started
producing stories of surpassing interest that
will probably never be published, or even read
by their best friends. They were writing their
own, often eye-popping, tear-evoking journals,
under the direction of a tireless, tireless New
York psychologist named Ira Progoff.
They wrote these journals in 392 workshops
sponsored by colleges and universities across
the land, by branches of the armed forces, by
army hospitals and women's prisons, by groups of
artists, priests, poets, business people, and
engineers (and combinations of all of the
above); they didn't enroll in them because they
felt they needed therapy, but because they
wanted to put their lives in perspective and
find in them some deeper meaning.
The Intensive
Journal method
comes from everywhere—and from nowhere, except
the synthesizing mind of Ira Progoff. Because he
is a psychologist who studied under Carl Gustav
Jung and is one of the founders of the
Association for Humanistic Psychology, people
have a mistaken notion that he is either a
therapist or the newest in a long line of gurus—
like Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, and Werner
Erhard—who helped people "actualize" themselves.
`'Wrong," says Felix Morrow, the editor of
Progoff's last two books, At
a Journal Workshop and The
Practice of Process Meditation. "It's
hard to get a handle on Ira. He's an original.
He's not a therapist and he's not in the human
potential movement. But if you're looking to see
what ‘line’ he's in, I think you'd have to say
he follows Martin Buber and Paul Tillich."
By many accounts, Buber and Tillich, who both
died in 1970, were the 20th century's greatest
philosopher-theologians. They were great because
they refused to be confined by the traditions
they grew up in—Buber was Jewish and Tillich,
Lutheran—and because they were open to the full
horizon of possibilities reachable by men and
women with dynamic religious faith. Furthermore,
they were able to communicate their vision to a
wide group of followers.
Ira Progoff has the same vision and the same
thrust: he is now very much like a
philosopher-theologian himself, interested not
only in helping people find meaning in their
lives but also in making the world a gentler
place. Progoff may never write anything as deep
as Buber's I
and Thou or
as broad as Tillich's Systematic
Theology. But he may be doing something even
more important: working out a method that will
help people find ultimate meaning, both for
themselves and for others. That method is the Intensive
Journal system,
which many believe is a unique tool that
contemporary men and women can use to make
tangible the most elusive, most subjective parts
of themselves—those subtle "intimations of
truth" that give direction to their lives.
At the beginning of his book on process
meditation, Progoff tries to explain what he is
up to by recalling a story. When he returned to
civilian life after World War II, he had a
recurrent daydream. He wondered what might have
happened to civilization if the Nazi's ritual
book burnings had continued until all the
recorded wisdom of mankind had been destroyed—
all the bibles of the world, the Old and the New
Testaments, the Tao-te Ching, the Upanishads,
the Koran, and all the others. "If that
happened," he asked himself, "what would befall
mankind?"
Finally the answer came to him and in a very
matter-of-fact tone: "We would simply draw new
spiritual scriptures from the same great source
out of which the old ones came." And soon
another thought came: "If mankind has the power
to draw additional spiritual scriptures out of
the depth of itself, why do we have to wait for
a Hitlerian tyrant to burn our bibles before we
let ourselves create further expressions of the
spirits?... Perhaps there are new bibles, many
new bibles, to be created as the sign of
spiritual unfoldment among many persons in the
modern era. It may be . . . part of the further
qualitative evolution of mankind."
There not only may be new expressions of the
spirit, Progoff added, there must be. Why?
Because we find that the old bibles of whatever
tradition are being lost to moderns.
Contemporary men and women live in a different
way than Moses, David, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
Paul, and all the rest; they have begun to think
differently as well. Progoff's solution: mankind
has to renew its old bibles, get in touch with
the profounder meanings of life, which he claims
are in everyone, "whatever their faith or lack
of faith."
A member of the Teilhard Association for the
Future of Man and a peripatetic scholar who is
always on the move, always talking to people
with ideas, Progoff sometimes sounds like an
affable missionary of the mind who wants to
enlist much of mankind, person by person, in the
task of "extending the process of evolution." He
believes that men and women who plumb the
sources of meaning are automatically "building
up the noosphere," that cloud of thought which,
according to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the
French Jesuit paleontologist, philosopher, and
theologian, hovers over the earth and somehow
provides the nurturing environment mankind needs
in its march toward an omega point of fulfilling
perfection.
For those who want to plumb the sources of
meaning, Progoff likes to use a metaphor that
many find helpful. He says that there's an
underground stream of images and recollections
within each of us. The stream is nothing more or
less than our interior life. When we enter it,
we ride it to a place where it wants to go. He
says this is not a discursive method, not
analytic: "There's no neat wrap-up; you don't
end up with 'insight.' It's an
event, and
when it's happened, your life is different."
All of this may sound rather mystical. But then
the mysticism gets terribly concrete, because
everyone at a Journal workshop ends up with a
workbook weighing several pounds, full of
stories and recollections and often surprising
new insights about the most fascinating mystery
of all: themselves and their relation to the
world around them. To produce a Journal,
however, Progoff is quick to point out, "You
don't need to be a mystic. All you need is a
life. Almost anyone can do it."
A trip to Dialogue House, Progoff's cluttered
third-floor headquarters in a Lower Manhattan
office building, provides proof enough of that.
Thomas Duffy, Progoff's director of advanced
studies, opens his files to me and shows me
reports from workshops across the land. In
Morgantown, West Virginia, for instance, I see
that Dr. Virgil Peterson conducted a Journal
workshop for faculty members at the University
of West Virginia. James Armstrong, a professor
at Loyola University of Chicago, gave a Journal
workshop at the annual convention of the
American Holistic Medical Institute. For the
past three years, Sister Maureen McCormack, a
Sister of Loretto, has been giving Journal
workshops to groups in Lakewood, Colorado, who
are training for the lay ministry. An
organization in Chicago called the Institute of
Women Today has sponsored l 6 Journal workshops
in six different women's jails and prisons in
the Midwest.
In one experimental program at a New York City
facility for the elderly, some 300 recruits from
the city's welfare and unemployment rolls were
enrolled in a Journal workshop as part of their
on-the-job training as nurse's aides, dietary
workers, security guards, maintenance men, and
housekeepers. Most of them were either
a poor population from the South or recent
immigrants from the Caribbean, people likely to
fail in the big city and end up on its bulging
welfare rolls. Ninety percent of them kept their
journals over a six-month period (they met once
a week), finished their training, and stayed on
to perform their low-status hospital jobs. After
a year, 80 percent of them either were still on
the job or had gone on to better jobs. One in
three had moved on to better housing; one in
four had started night school or community
college. Program officials gave the Journal
method much of the credit and agreed with Progoff: "Poverty is not simply the lack of
money. Ultimately, it is a person's lack of
feeling for the reality of his own inner being."
Perhaps this is one reason for the popularity of
Progoff's Intensive
Journal method
today: people feel poor and alone and devoid of
ultimate meaning in their lives. In the Journal
workshops, they have found a way to remedy that.
But how? I didn't quite understand until I had
gone to a Journal workshop myself. Last spring,
I spent a weekend with a disparate group of
artists, teachers, housewives, and some college
students at the Terros Center in Warwick, New
York. Father Lewis Cox, a tall, placid New York
Jesuit who is one of 95 consultants trained by
Progoff and authorized to give the workshops,
got us started at 8:00 P.M. on a Friday by
passing out loose-leaf notebooks filled with
blank, lined paper and a series of 21 colored
dividers. He invited us to enter the interior
worlds of our own memories and imaginations,
opening our "exploration" by helping create some
preliminary moments of meditative silence. Then
he invited us to answer the question for
ourselves, "Where are you now in your life?"
Father Cox said the answer might not, probably
would not, come in the form of a judgment or as
an answer in a college quiz. We might have an
image—see a picture of ourselves on a bumpy
plane ride or hear the strains of a favorite
symphony. Whatever it was, the point was not to
merely think about
it. We were to write it down in a section of the
Journal called the Period
Log and
were to refrain from making any judgments about
whether the images we recorded were good or bad.
It was all right, Father Cox said, soothingly
and assuringly. We would return to it later.
After perhaps half an hour of work on the Period
Log, Father Cox asked us to turn to some red
sections in the middle of our books, first to
the Life
History Log,
subtitled Recapitulations
and Rememberings. He
invited us to submerge ourselves in our own
underground stream of recollection, but not to
begin writing anything like an
autobiography—just quick, significant scenes in
our lives. Again, no judgment. Just get into
that underground stream.
Soon we were into the next section of the
Journal workbook, called Steppingstones.
Here, Father Cox asked us to set down what could
be chapter headings in an autobiography—not only
an objective sequence of events, epitomized in a
word or two or an image, but also a subjective
perception of meaning and value. My Steppingstonesturned
out to be people; I wrote down a few dozen
names—people I'd loved, people I had a hard time
loving. Next, I wrote down the titles of the
four books I'd published, the significant jobs
I'd had.
And then it was time to retire until the next
morning. So far, there had been hardly any
conversation, hardly any noise. At one point, I
had looked around the room and seen a few dozen
heads bobbing over a few dozen notebooks, a few
dozen ball-point pens gliding away. A lot of
intensity and then, when the evening ended, a
collective exhaling of breath and blinking of
eyes. I thought I noticed tears streaming down
the cheeks of an elderly man with a gray beard.
For some of the next day we amplified our Steppingstones section,
going deeper into any period that seemed to draw
our special interest. We made the same
meditative trip in another section of the
workbook, calledIntersections, subtitled Roads
Taken and Not Taken. I thought of my own
spiritual intersections: I'd studied to be a
priest for 10 years, then took another path. I
thought of my emotional intersections:
marriages, other loves. I thought of my career
intersections: I'd worked for Time, then went
free-lance and lived in a paradise in the High
Sierra, then opted for a richer life of the mind
by taking a job in New York with the Times.
And then Father Cox asked us to move to another
section of the workbook, the Twilight
Imagery Log. "We turn our attention inward,
and we wait in stillness," he said, "and let
ourselves observe the various forms of imagery
that present themselves. We let them come of
themselves. As they take shape, we perceive
them. We observe them as though they were
dreams. We describe them in the same neutral,
non-interpretive, nonjudgmental way that we
record our dreams."
Unbidden, the image of a roller coaster came to
my mind, and I recorded the roller coaster of my
life. I didn't dwell much on it there and then,
but later I realized that that was what Progoff
meant when he wrote that, frequently enough,
images deep inside us "enable our life to
disclose to us what its goals and its meanings
are." For me, the image of the roller coaster
was fun—and depressing: how can I ever manage to
get off the
roller coaster without breaking up in little
pieces ?
For many of us, the most creative time was spent
in the Dialogue
Dimension, part of an entire system of Journal
Feedback where,
after laying out our life, we could not only
step back and look at it but also explore its
meanings. We did this, in part, by engaging in
imaginary conversations with some of the
significant people we'd already listed in the Steppingstones section.
To help make sure that the conversation wasn't
one-sided and that we didn't give ourselves all
the good lines, Father Cox suggested that we go
through a short Steppingstones exercise
for "the other." (I recalled an old Indian
proverb I'd heard in my Arizona boyhood: "Judge
no man until you've walked a mile in his
moccasins." Father Cox's suggestion made sense.)
I did the Steppingstones for my daughter Polly,
in England, who has been visiting me only in the
summers since she was a tot, except for last
summer, when she didn't come to the United
States at all. I got into her moccasins, and
this dialogue ensued:
Polly: You going to ignore me again?
Me: Ignore you?
Pony: You did last time.
Me: I was in a different place last time. That
was two years ago. I was broke, alone, insecure.
Polly: And now?
Me: I've got some money in my pocket, I've got
friends, I'm secure. And I'm so happy you're
coming this summer.
Polly: You'll spend some time with me?
Me: I’ll have to - or lose you.
Polly: No. Not for that reason. Because you want
to, because I am someone, too. I don't want you
to love me because you have to. I want you to
love me because you want to. I am a person, too,
flesh of your flesh, but my own person, too.
Look at me, listen to me, understand what I
want.
Me: That's very hard. I get a lump in my throat.
Polly: You feel.. . ?
Me: I don't know. Guilty, maybe. Afraid that I
won't come through for you ?
Polly: I don't want anything from you. Just your
undivided attention for a time.
Me: Polly, you have to let me be me, too. I
enjoy the roller coaster. If you want to be with
me, you've got to get on the roller coaster,
too.
Polly: Okay. But don't forget I'm here, next to
you.
At the end of this exercise, Father Cox
suggested we might start to re-read what we had
written, then write down how we felt. I wrote:
"Sense of shame: I knew this all the time, but I
wasn't paying attention. Enlightening.
Shocking."
There wore other dialogues: with society, with
events, with the body, with works. The most
productive dialogue was with the book I'd been
doing on and off, mostly off, for two years.
Book: Help!
Me: Hello.
Book: Don't you recognize me?
Me: Oh, yes, you're my memoir.
Book: You're not paying me enough attention.
Me: Strange, that's what the women in my life
keep telling me.
Book: You can't do everything.
Me: I try.
Book: At what cost?
Me: Everything suffers. I suffer.
Book: So?
Me: So I guess I'd better set some priorities.
Book: That sounds very old and very
...Jesuitical. What do you really want?
Me: I want it all.
Book: You've got to conserve your energies for
the most important things first.
Me: The old "necessary, useful, agreeable" rule,
huh?
Book: That's too puritanical. Have you ever
thought about going with your feelings?
Me: Sometimes it gets me in trouble.
Book: Some people call that living.
Me: Say, whose side arc you on, anyway? I
thought you were complaining that I wasn't
giving you enough attention.
Book: I was, but if you're harried when you come
to me, what good arc you? You're only going to
be writing down stuff you end up throwing away.
Me: So how do I arrange to come to you unharried?
Book: Don't be taking on so many things, so many
people.
Me: Some call it living.
Book: Touché! But can't you strike a happy
balance? Get a rhythm going?
Me: I got rhythm, I got music.
Book: Buffoon. You're avoiding something by
being a buffoon. What is it?
Me: I don't know.
Book: You afraid of something?
Me: Maybe. Some of this stuff is pretty
intimate.
Book: That's what makes a good memoir. I love
that.
Me: But I just don't want to look like a fool.
Book: You want to write an honest memoir?
Me: Yes.
Book: Then maybe sometimes you have to risk
looking like a fool—if you want to be honest.
Me: An honest fool, huh? Some people may laugh
at me.
Book: Who?
Me: Stupid people.
Book: Good people?
Me: No. They'll applaud me for taking chances.
Book: Then why don't you?
Me: Loosen up, huh?
Book: You don't want me to sound staid and
stuffy and boring, do you?
Me: Nope.
Book: Then let go.
Me: Okay.
For the record, although I did not make any
"resolutions" at the Journal workshop, that
dialogue helped point a way for me: I started
working on my memoir, something I had been
postponing for 10 years, and finished it just
before Christmas. The book took about nine
months to "emerge.'' I must have a dialogue with
it soon. Or, at least, Soon.
At the Journal weekend, there was hardly any
interplay among the members of the workshop.
We'd chat a bit at coffee breaks or at lunch,
and that was it. There were none of the social
pressures I'd experienced in any number of
encounter groups, and therefore, no play acting
was necessary. Furthermore, since I knew no one
was going to see or hear what I was writing, I
felt a sense of perfect freedom. Several times
Father Cox drew a session to a close by issuing
an open invitation to the group: would anyone
care to read what he or she had just written?
Some accepted his invitation, some didn't. It
didn't seem to matter. Father Cox said that
reading aloud was for the reader’s benefit, not
the group's. Even so, I couldn't help feeling
good about the feelings, often of joy, that were
evident in the notebooks of others.
One woman reported that she had kept a diary for
50 years and had "never listed a feeling or an
awareness— just events as they happened." Now,
under guidance, she said she had been able to
write down her own feelings and felt exhilarated
in the process. Moreover, she found new
direction in her life: recently widowed, she
simply didn't know what she'd do next. But in
the Journal chapter called Intersections, she
remembered a road she had very much wanted to
take at one time—but had taken another that led
to marriage and a family. Now, she realized,
there was nothing stopping her from going back
and taking the other road.
After my own Journal workshop, I was all too
aware that I'd only just begun to scratch the
surface of the Journal process. There were a
good many sections of the Journal that Father
Cox hadn't even told us about. I found that I
was in the first of three stages: a Life
Context Workshop.
I could go on to a Depth
Contact Workshop
and then, finally, to a Journal
Feedback Workshop;
in these, I would get a chance to work with,
among other things, my own dreams.
In brief, Progoff looks at dreams as most
benevolent messengers, bringing things up from
our own inner wisdom. "Dreams," he says, reach
back into the past and call our attention to
those experiences that can give us a clue with
which to solve our present problems and move
into, the future. Our dreams can give us these
clues, however, in the only mode of functioning
that is available to them—that is on the
unconscious level, by indirection, allusion,
imagery, and symbolism." In one of Progoff's
theoretical works, Depth
Psychology and Modern Man, he says:
"Image-making is not a conscious process. We
cannot create our images. The very reverse is
true." In a way, then, we don't make our dreams;
our dreams make us. Sounds intriguing, I said to
myself. I have to go on with this.
I thought I might attend further workshops.
However, I also realized that I could work on
alone and at my own pace, using Progoff's two
major guides in the Journal method: At
a Journal Workshop (now
in its 12th printing), a basic introduction that
would help me take my life in my own hands and
draw it together, and The
Practice of Process Meditation (just
published) which would help me open up a whole
new spiritual dimension. A warning: like the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola,
written more than 400 years ago, these Progoff
works, though often original, are not so much
books to read and understand as they are manuals
of things to do. Do them, and then you
understand better.
Anaïs Nin, a diarist who logged an estimated
150,000 pages before her death in 1977, reviewed At
a Journal Workshop in
1975 and noted that Progoff had found a way to
help people toward intimacy, intimacy with
themselves, intimacy with others. She then
remarked:
"The lack of intimacy with one's self, and
consequently with others, is what created the
loneliest ant most alienated people in the world
Progoff ultimately proves that the process of
growth in a human being, the process out of
which a person emerges, is essentially an inward
process."
And where does that lead? Progoff’s answer is
commonplace: it leads to meaning and to truth.
But when you ask "Whose meaning? Whose truth?"
Progoff answers: "Your own . . . To the reality
of your own inner being."
The reality of your inner being. If that is what
Progoff is about, he is a braver man than his
quiet, unassuming, professorial demeanor
suggests. He tends to agree that he's not
selling 1981's hottest product. "In Freud's
Victorian age," he says, "the awful secret that
nobody wanted to talk about was sex. Today, the
awful secret is spirituality. People today will
discuss anything but their inner life." The
wonder is that Progoff has gotten thousands to
start working on (if not actually talking about
precisely that—and, moreover, in the
hard-driving hurly-burly of the United States
today, where men and women are lucky simply to
keep the body alive, never mind the soul. Some
sociologists of religion claim that a majority
of Americans have rejected the very notion of
spirituality as something pious and impractical
and all-too-dependent on unreal dogmas committed
to memory long ago by their local priests,
ministers, and rabbis and handed on to the
faithful in the form of slogans that were sappy
and of categories that did not contain.
Nevertheless, Progoff has gotten precisely those
secularized Americans involved in a search for
meaning. He's done it because, though he has a
reverence and a respect for all the great
thinkers and all the great religions, he has
recognized that this is a time when autonomous
men and women need to find their own meaning.
"It is," says Progoff, "a difficult time,
because the old answers don't respond to the new
questions. It is also a time of opportunity,
because now we have to work out new ways of
dealing with ourselves, with others."
In brief, Progoff seems to have secularized
spirituality. How has he done it? His immediate
answer is: "I don't do it. The people who come
into the workshops do it—for themselves." He
quotes Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit
theologian: "The theological problem today is
the art of drawing religion out of a man, not
pumping it into him. The art is to help men
become what they really are."
Progoff, of course, quotes a good many men and
women who come from traditions quite different
from Rahner's. He is rather proud that his
theory of human personality and human creativity
has come from a long line of thinkers stretching
back into history: Lao-tzu, Buddha, Augustine,
St. Francis of Assisi, Feodor Dostoevsky, Jan
Christiaan Smuts, Henri Bergson, Carl Gustav
Jung, D. T. Suzuki, Martin Buber. The amazing
thing is that this disparate bunch end up saying
pretty much the same thing to Progoff. "I am not
so original," he says. "I am a synthesizer."
The synthesizer began life on August 2, 1921, in
the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the son of
a man who dropped out of the rabbinate to sell
furs. One of Progoff's earliest recollections:
his grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi, prostrate
before the ark, rising to tell him: "You are the
one who will do great things."
He wondered for a good long time what the great
things might be. "The ‘right answers’ that
people gave me," he told me recently, "were
usually superficial. I went to Brooklyn College
in the late 1930's and early 1940's and found
that the Marxism so popular there was
superficial, too." But he had an economics
professor, an Australian named Findlay MacKenzie,
who "had a habit of putting mystical books in
front of Jewish boys. He handed me a copy of
Manly Palmer Hall's lectures on ancient
philosophy, and that gave me the realization
that history didn't start with the French
Revolution. That the main things about history
were not economic. And that they were
mysteries."
Four years in the U.S. Army were, for him, a
dark night of the soul. "The only good thing
that happened to me, " he says, "was that a
chaplain gave me Israel Zangwill's Dreamers
of the Ghetto. It brought together the
tragedy and the pathos of Jews like Heine and
Spinoza who were trying to enter the modern
world. It introduced me to Ba'al Shem Tov, the
founder of modern Jewish spirituality, Hasidism.
And it brought me closer to my own Jewish
roots."
After the war, although he got "a European
education" from a whole mob of brilliant
expatriate professors who had fled Germany and
taken up residence at the New School in New
York, Progoff floundered academically. He did a
dissertation on Jung that was "too long for a
master's and not long enough for a doctorate."
He got a job working as a welfare investigator
on the Bowery, ''out of a sense of giving up."
But he spent his evenings reading the novels of
Balzac and the spiritual journals of Emanuel
Swedenborg, "the Buddha of the North." He read Holism
and Evolution by
Jan Christiaan Smuts, who claimed that
"psychology shouldn't deal with sick people, but
with great people," and he read Thorstein Veblen
on "the unfoldings of history and whether
anything can be done about it." He read the
poems of Walt Whitman who said yes to life and
yes to the spirit in the midst of a brutal
America. He read Lao-tzu, the first philosopher
of Chinese Taoism, whose meditations on the
cyclic in all earthly affairs rang true to him,
and he read the essays of Henri Bergson, whose
insight into the creative evolution taking place
in Everyman, the elan
vital, rang even truer.
But it was also a period in Progoff's life in
which he really didn't know where his vital
force was leading him. He was tempted to cry
out, almost in despair, "If God had wanted
something great from me, He would have worked it
out for me by now." Finally, he finished his
thesis, Jung's
Psychology and Its Social Meaning, and found
on the strength of it, and to his surprise, that
something called the Bollingen Foundation had
given him a fellowship to go to Zurich and study
under Carl Gustav Jung himself.
He was with Jung from 1953 to 1955, met D.T.
Suzuki, the great Zen master, at Jung's table,
then returned to direct the Institute for
Research in Depth Psychology at the graduate
school of Drew University in New Jersey,
spending a good deal of research time with his
students on the great creative lives of all
history. "At the time," Progoff recalls, "I was
making the grand sum of $300 a month. To save
money, I started writing my books on half-sheets
of typing paper. My manuscript looked like a
stack of toilet paper."
The "toilet paper" was to become The
Death and Rebirth of Psychology in
1956, and the first work in a trilogy of his own
theoretical synthesis. Depth
Psychology and Modern Man followed
in 1959, and The
Symbolic and the Real in
1963. At the same time, as a licensed
psychologist, he started taking in patients.
"People came. I had a large practice. They paid
me. But I should have paid them. I was learning
from them; I was beginning to see in them how a
life unfolds. In terms of any social interest, I
didn't know what that meant. But the Quakers
soon showed me. In 1957, I was invited to spend
a weekend at Haverford College at 'The Friends'
Conference on Psychology and Religion.' Robert
Greenleaf, one of the participants, an executive
with AT&T, turned his life around after that
meeting. He went on early retirement and opened
up the most creative time of his life."
Progoff was learning the impact of his holistic
depth psychology on others. Soon he would start
learning what impact it could have on himself.
In the mid-1960's, he went through a profound
emotional crisis: he and his wife separated, and
it looked for a time as if he might lose his two
children. What to do? He started noodling around
in a notebook and discovered that he was able to
get a fix on his life by writing things down,
going over them, feeding them back into the
computer of his mind, as it were, engaging in a
dialogue with himself and with his wife and
children.
"I could see that I was onto something, but I
wondered how original the method was. At the
Quaker Library at Pendle Hill, I found (and
read) Quaker journals of the 17th and I 8th
century. As far as I could see, the Quakers used
their journals as a way of keeping tabs on their
consciences (after they'd thrown away ritualized
confessions). For them, it was only a means of
self-measurement—against which they inevitably
failed.
"I looked at other journals, notably those of
Dostoevsky and Anaïs Nin, and I could see that,
for them, the journal was a vehicle that led to
greater creativity. But I found that a good many
other journals were just diaries: without a
project to be done, people's diaries just went
around in circles."
Without a project -that was the key that opened
the door for Progoff. He'd already seen in his
own case that a journal could lead somewhere for
him if he had a problem. It could also lead
somewhere for a novelist or a writer with a
project. But what about everyone else in the
world? What projects do they have? The answer
came to Progoff in a flash, the result of all
his previous reading, from Lao-tzu to Smuts to
Buber: everyone has a life and that life must be
his or her great work of art. The synthesis had
produced something new, the Intensive
Journal system,
aimed at helping almost anyone who wished to
start thinking of life as a work of art, of
becoming, in Rahner's words, "what they really
are."
A Thomist philosopher would explain the process,
in part, by citing the notions of Aristotle and
Aquinas on potency and act, final and efficient
causality. You plant an acorn and you get an
oak. You plant a tomato seed and get a tomato
plant. But what do you get when you plant a
human seed? Nothing so identical as oaks to oaks
or tomatoes to tomatoes. In what direction does
a human life go? Says Progoff: "We’re limited,
in part, by our own culture. Gautama Buddha
couldn't become a Francis of Assisi. But aside
from that, we all have free will. We can become
pretty much what we want to."
But why do some people go only so far, and
others much further? Ah, that’s Progoff's next
book, the work he began years ago at Drew, the
study of creative lives.
"I'm 59 years old," Progoff says, with a smile.
"As a good Jewish boy, l have to believe I'm
going to live to be about 120. So I figure I'm
just about to the halfway point in my life, the
point where Jung says we begin our most serious
work.... Now, what I'd like to do is get the
most creative men and women in the world and
give them Journals. . .''
For further information read:
The Practice of Process Meditation
At A Journal Workshop
© Copyright from Psychology Today, by Robert
Blair Kaiser, with Ira Progoff. |
