In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (12 page)

After contributing several valuable books on psychology and teaching depth psychology at Drew University, Ira Progoff has evolved a remarkable method using the intensive journal to unify the personality and effectively achieve a kind of self-therapy.

He begins by eliminating the idea of the journal as a literary achievement, so that anyone from any walk of life and with any degree of education can complete a “minor image” of his life and character, make a synthesis of experiences and dreams, and arrive at a self-creation, which until now were seriously hampered by the absurd puritan taboo against self-development and the pursuit of the inner journey—supposedly expressions of narcissism or neurotic subjectivity. This book, the result of years of experience with the expansion and development of journal writing, proves that an inner journey into the labyrinth of the self can mean maturity, the understanding of experience, the cohesive action of a reporting, an examination, a confrontation of one’s experience. The erroneous concept that extroverted life is superior to the exploration, and therefore creation, of the self was disproved by the disintegration of the personality which dominates our culture, dependency on therapy, confusion, and chaos. Progoff’s method is highly spiritual in its concept. It is in effect far more selfless than the artificial objectivity of those who believe that by not writing about themselves they contribute more to society than by creating a harmonious self.

From the very beginning,
At a Journal Workshop
establishes the motive for the inner journey; the first chapter is titled “The Intensive Journal as an Instrument for Life.” What follows is a series of suggestions for ways to record our experiences, our memories, our dreams, as keys to an understanding of our lives. Progoff has illuminating suggestions such as: “Loosening the Soil of our Life,” “Listing the Steppingstones,” “The Life History Log,” “Intersections: Roads Taken and not Taken,” “Reconstructing our Autobiography.” His book achieves a therapeutic effect “not by striving towards therapy but by providing active techniques that enable an individual to draw upon his inherent resources for becoming a whole person.” No one, in this era of chaos and confusion, will question the value of bringing a whole person to the collective life.

“Many persons have already had experiences in which they sensed the presence of an underlying reality in life, a reality which they have recognized as a personal source of meaning and strength.”

“The Intensive Journal is specifically designed to provide an instrument and techniques by which persons can discover within themselves the resources they did not know they possessed.” Again Progoff reminds us that “the essence lies not in the events of his life in themselves, not in the things that ever happened to him, but in his inner relationship to those events.”

The atmosphere he tries to create during weekend seminars is that of a group, a group which does not spend its time in talk but in writing journals, in meditating. The companionship is there, but it is not dissipated in talk.

There is an intelligent self-creation behind the Intensive Journal, one usually achieved by long drawn-out therapy, “the experience of drawing the present situation of your life into focus.”

One cannot help being amazed by what emerges from this skillful inner journey. All the elements we attribute to the poet, the artist, become available to everyone, to all levels of society.

The level and quality of each individual life is revealed by Progoff. Consulting with dreams, dialogues with lost parents or figures of wisdom, meditating, and the beautiful exploration of what he calls “Twilight Imagery,” all give each life a poetry, a beauty, a spiritual content which has been totally lacking in our culture because of suspicion of subjectivity. One can see so clearly the life being created, becoming a beautiful, cohesive story. To explore its meaning heightens all experience. Lack of self-confidence or self-respect vanishes.

The Journal Workshop becomes a sanctuary, “for it provides a protected situation safe from the pressures of the world in which an individual can quietly reappraise his relation to his life.”

To witness the rich material, the images, the dreams which are called forth in this situation from individuals who never knew they possessed such inward riches, is to put to shame those who worked so persistently at destroying all inner life in favor of activity and blind extroversion, creating a culture prey to brain washing of the lowest quality by the media, a people who could not think or judge for themselves and who became the blind followers of corrupt forces.

“The Tao of Growth.” The self begins to appear like a fruit or a plant, but unlike these, the human being experiences obstacles, traumatic events which arrest his growth. The Intensive Journal encourages a rhythm, a continuity, which in turn becomes a natural flow. In recording experiences, one is urged forward, urged to move. “Physical growth is easy to recognize, but personal growth is inward and elusive.”

One of the most impressive results of Ira Progoff’s method is that every life acquires a value, a richness. The “Twilight Imagery” encourages the imagination, the visualization, which lies beyond our consciousness. The greatest lack in our culture is the sense of meaningfulness, which leads to hopelessness and indifference, often to more serious criminality. The miracle of understanding and cohesion, of centering the self, is the pride it acquires, its renewed sense of dignity and of the potential of human beings. “Outward activity propelled from within is the essence of a creative existence.”

Progressing from “Dream Log,” “Twilight Imagery Log,” “Imagery Extensions,” and “Inner Wisdom Dialogue,” the self unfolds like a surprising cache of treasures long buried and unused.

One of Progoff’s most striking symbols is the well. We go into our individual wells as deeply as we can, and instead of finding ourselves cut off from the world we reach the universal waters which feed wells. “It is the image of the well connecting to the underground stream.”

The other miracle is that as we intensify our understanding and creation of the self, we understand and communicate with others with far more intuition and wisdom. “We each must go through our own personal existence, but when we have gone deeply enough we find that we have gone through our personal life beyond our personal life.” The construction of a cohesive self becomes a source of strength to meet destructive or tragic experiences or losses. “The key to Twilight Imagery lies in the fact that it takes place in the twilight state between waking and sleeping. We find that by working actively in that intermediate state of consciousness, we are able to reach depths in ourselves, depths which are very difficult to contact by any other means.”

The fascination of this method lies in the discovery of a self we did not know lay within us. It is an adventure into unexplored, undiscovered spheres. It becomes a source of strength, courage, and pride. “As much as possible, our writing should focus on the essence of the experience.” One of the obstacles to this inner journey has been people’s lack of confidence in their writing ability. But Progoff has foreseen this and reminds us that “the daily log is not an exercise in literature; it is an exercise in our lives.”

No one has analyzed the fascination of fiction; and no one, until Progoff developed this structure, has realized that our lives can become as interesting as any biography or fiction we read with such interest. It is a matter of seeing one’s life as a metaphor, as a tale, as a story of enormous drama. This is in relation to the meaningfulness of any life which is examined and recorded with care. The other benefic aspect is that the cumulative effect “is to draw our life into focus so that we have a basis for making the decisions that are pressing at the moment.”

One of the most inspiring chapters deals with the steppingstones of our life. “The steppingstones are the significant points of movement along the road of an individual’s life.”

Progoff emphasizes the need to eliminate all censorship and judgments. He believes these are inhibiting factors, overused by a narrow-minded culture and harmful to the spontaneous creation of the self. He stresses this throughout the book. There is a difference between judgment and evaluation; evaluation is creative, judgment is not.

Another inspiring sequence is “Intersections: Roads Taken and not Taken” which opens rich sources of meditation. “We go back over the road of our life looking for unlived possibilities.” The study of these movements is invaluable because, as Progoff says, “it is not always easy to recognize the intersections in our lives because we are often not aware of their being intersections at the time they occur.”

The physical atmosphere surrounding the work is also important. Progoff stresses first of all relaxation, then closed eyes, and finally the silence and quiet necessary to the inward journey.

Following his pattern recreates all that our memory, our consciousness, have discarded, revealing a treasure chest of dreams, thoughts, memories, experiences. In denying the need of intimacy with ourselves, our extroverted culture destroys the possibility of intimacy with others. This valuable experiment, which recreates a human being, inevitably enables one human being to perceive more in others’ lives.

The overuse of therapy came from our inability to put order and cohesion in our own lives, from an inability to develop an intimate knowledge of ourselves, from having no place to commune with our unmasked selves. This communion is vitally essential. Progoff guides us along the way of this spiritual discipline.

Having learned to commune with ourselves, we step into a wide range of dialogues: Some dialogues might complete dialogues which were interrupted by a death or a quarrel or whatever; others might be with any person of our choice. “We carry around within ourselves the traces of relationships that have unfulfilled potentialities.” We learn of an infinite number of dialogues, with some lost by death, with others lost by estrangement, with figures of wisdom, with those who influenced our lives.

The lack of intimacy with one’s self and consequently with others is what created the loneliest and 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.”

With this book anyone can learn to extract meaning from his life. “Now let us sit in silence. Our eyes are closed. Our breathing slower and slower. In the quietness our attention is drawn inward.”

And where does this lead? To the transpersonal meaning of our existence. “We have moved from the purely personal to the deeper than personal level of our experience.” We know that our generation has been preoccupied with “how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness.”

When, after the publication of my diaries, I was asked to lecture, the one question I could never answer is illumined by this book: How? How to begin, how to expand, how to develop journal writing?

A review of
A Safe Place,
written and directed by Henry Jaglom, in the
Los Angeles Free Press,
6 October 1972.

From the early beginnings of the motion picture film, Antonin Artaud said that only films would be able to depict dreams, fantasies, the surrealist aspect of our experience. But very soon they veered away from that magic power and turned to one-dimensional stories. Very few made attempts to penetrate the deeper layers of our way of experiencing life. Yet it was the perfect medium for capturing our inner life. We know, we are aware of how our lives are an intermingling of dream, reality, illusion, fantasy, childhood influences, and wishes. As soon as I saw
A Safe Place,
I knew this was the film which attempted to penetrate that level and did so with unusual sensitivity and skill. It was a perfect fusion. It was the perfect superimposition of memory, dream, illusion, and the grappling with reality.

The writer-director Henry Jaglom accomplishes the extraordinary feat while situating his story in the most ordinary of all backgrounds: Central Park, New York, and the roofs of apartment houses in New York. This magic transformation of reality by the dream, he tells us, can take place anywhere. It is in Central Park that the magician, who so deeply affects the child in the woman, Noah, practices his skills. There is a delightful humor in the magician’s relation to the zoo animals. There are tender and wistful scenes, as when the girl shows her secret box in which she keeps her wish and the young man wants to open it. She knows that the day it is opened it might be empty, as the magician’s hands are occasionally empty. There is a beautiful scene in which she hides in a closet from the luxury and art of the young man’s background, which does not reach her, and where she contemplates the nature of love as it is expressed in different eyes. The writing here is that of a poet.

The theme, which runs through the film like a musical motif and gives the many-leveled story its continuity, is the constant return to the magician, to the real bond between the girl and the magician because he can make a ball fly in the air. Noah bounces back from every encounter with love to the magician who performed for her when she was a child. She is obsessed with the memory that as a child she was able to fly in a tree from one branch to another. She insists the rational young man who loves her should believe this. It is important that he believe this. The symbolism of what she is trying to reach, to assert, to seek, is deeply moving: She seeks a dimension in life in which dream and reality are fused. He cannot follow her. There is a scene in which they both improvise on telephone prefixes and he flunks the poetry test. Everything in the film has to be interpreted as we interpret dreams.

One of the great seductions of the film is the perfection of atmosphere and poetic elements. The simplicity of the realistic scenes, a table at an open-air restaurant, a sun deck, and their facile replacement by a scene of fantasy. The hunger for magic. Noah’s recognition that she cannot love in a human way: No one has found the key to the locked box which she is for others. There is in the film great mobility, fluidity, a sensuous dwelling on color, light, facial expressions, with an original use of silence. The accompaniment of music and the flow of the images serve to connect these worlds which we have kept separate.