The Unclad Soul

What is Real? The HBO series, “Westworld,” is a tough to watch show about a futuristic park; sort of a perverted Disneyland for rich adults. It offers people a chance to live out their worst fantasies with “hosts,” who are human-like and life-like robots. As you can imagine things go horribly wrong. You can’t create an environment of no consequences no matter what awful things you do, without disastrous results. Even if you do them with and to robots. We were created with a conscience, the ability to self-limit our actions, if we know they will harm or destroy others. This is an essential part of our humanity. In Westworld, those innate boundaries are eliminated. In one insightful scene, Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) the programming director of Westworld, is talking privately with one of the beautiful hosts, Delores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood).  Delores is becoming confused. She questions her purpose. She’s having disturbing dreams she doesn’t understand. In the scen...

I have asked this before, but I still want to know. What does any of it mean? Why are we here? Why do we so easily give in to hate and resist giving in to love? Why is aggression okay but the way of peace is not?   Why are we all so afraid? And of what? Are we, as religion teaches, just evil at heart? Are we already ruined at birth? Is it in our DNA to make wrong choices, so that we require an outside force, God or Karma or Allah or whomever, to coerce us to do good, through threats of punishment, suffering, damnation, and hell? Are we not able to do that on our own without being forced? I believe we are. I know too many good, decent people who are not driven by evil and selfishness. But unfortunately, they are always overshadowed, especially today, by an ugly, arrogant, mean-spirited crowd of self-aggrandizers, who are bitter, angry people. People obsessed with fears and prejudices and resentments. These people are all around us. In the government. In the media. ...

Writer and producer David E. Kelley’s HBO series, “Big Little Lies,” is a powerhouse revelation of modern-day marriage. Though the series is often outrageous and extreme in the happenings between people, it does provide a slice of life today experienced by many couples. Set along the gorgeous beachfront town of Monterey, California, it shows how complex relationships can be, and how wounded, damaged people wade through their pain often with incredible courage and sometimes with self-defeating denial. The cast is a brilliant group of actors, including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgard, Jeffrey Nordling, Adam Scott, Zoe Kravitz, Meryl Streep, and others. I don’t think as a society, we have ever come to grips with the reality of just how strenuous and effortful marriage almost always is. Or, as far as that goes, any serious couple relationship. But marriage poses its own unique set of challenges. Perhaps Einstein said it best, ...

I am fascinated with TV series that deal with the seedier side of life. I loved The Sopranos. And Peaky Blinders. Also, Boardwalk Empire, Gypsy, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Nurse Jackie. These shows and others like them portray people caught in their human frailties. They are deeply flawed people, wounded, sometimes by their own poor choices in life and sometimes by people who betrayed or used or mistreated them in some profoundly cruel way. I am currently making my way through Showtime’s series, “Ray Donovan.” Soon to begin its 6 th season, the series centers around the Donovan family, a father and three sons mired in old hurts, deception, corruption, and crime. Ray (Liev Schreiber) is the middle son, a “fixer” for L.A.’s elite crowd of Hollywood stars, producers, financiers, and old money people who inevitably cross the line into affairs gone wrong, crooked payoffs, illegal deals, and so forth. Mickey Donovan (Jon Voight) is the father, an old-schoo...

In general, but not in particular, because there are many opposite examples, but generally speaking, we are a nation of lazy, greedy citizens. Our laziness resides in the fact that we continue, year after drubbing year, to tolerate a Congress that is 98% corrupt and in the pockets of huge corporations, including Wall Street banks and the giant tech companies, not to mention the entire network of media communications. Our indifference to the blathering incompetence and the arrogant disregard of representative government by so many senators and House members in both parties is staggering. That we as a people allow this says something alarming about our character. Leo Tolstoy, the brilliant Russian novelist, once wrote in one of his many essays, “ If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”...

There is a brokenness in our society, a pervasive moral collapse, a reckless disregard for community, neighborliness, courtesy, and compassion. Our government leads by this example. Both parties are incompetent to guide us into a more responsible living, into a serviceable structure of humanity. Our leaders are dominated by greedy oligarchs who don’t just want more, they want everything, even if it costs our society its dignity, its soul, even its future. What is on display here daily is a wretched lack of self-esteem. The loss now influences all of us. We’re all affected in ways that keep us shamed by our actions. When we feel powerless, aimless, without any higher goals than the accumulation of things and the momentary thrill, we then mute our intelligence. We live by raw emotions—anger, appetite, urges. We don’t think, we don’t consider, we merely react. We push. We disregard. We threaten. We act out. And we fail. Self-esteem is a learned process. It builds on gen...

Care of the Soul Don’t ignore or repress your complexes, instead try to befriend them By Thomas Moore 2016 March/April Issue: Spirituality & Health When it comes to dieting, my willpower buckles when I’m faced with mashed potatoes and gravy. I may have just read a book on eating only green veggies, and I’ve resolved to go the Spartan route, but I can’t pass up the basic food that I associate with my mother and grandmother and cozy dinners with beloved family members in my childhood. It probably doesn’t help that I left home at an early age for a boarding school. My diet problem is not so much that I lack the willpower but that my “Warm Irish-American Family” complex is so strong and deeply planted in me. A psychological complex is a set of emotions, memories, anxieties, desires, and habits focused around a theme—my need for family comfort, for example—that urges a person in a certain direction that may or may not fit his or her conscious and rational purposes. For ...

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. In Jesus’ day mourning was serious business. People suffering loss or some inner wound would go out into the streets and tear at their clothing. They would scream and weep in agony. They would gather a handful of dirt and pour it over their heads and let it mingle in their tears. It was a sign of their connection with their mortality, their belonging to the earth where sorrow breeds. They would wrap themselves in the arms of others. They didn’t lose themselves in mindless work or distract themselves in foolish activity. Grieving hurt. Mourning meant something. And I think what Jesus is saying here is: be open to the wounds of the world and to your own. Mourn the hurting of people and when you yourself hurt. Weep over the suffering of humanity and your suffering, too. Don’t hide from it. Don’t attempt to chase it away with meaningless clichés or empty escapes. Feel it and be moved. We are to mourn the deaths of those we l...