Tammie: What does "growing down" into life mean to you?

Cliff: It means the rooting of soul in the "underworld." We live in an over-spiritualized culture. Although I value the spiritual, our problem is learning the way our symptoms and our pathology, our shadow motivations, reveal our destiny. The spiritual has become one of our time's greatest means of repression.

Tammie: How does the spiritual repress?

Cliff: Of course, I don't mean that the spiritual inherently represses. It's just my experience that in many forms of religiosity, especially so-called New Age spirituality, problems become spiritualized and not dealt with. The classic example, of course, is the way anger is demonized as everything from sin to "toxicity" when in practice, as you know, its expression is a necessary step toward forgiveness, resolution of grief and any other problem in which the client feels disempowered. Another problem is the way people develop a "things are as they should be" kind of thinking which sabotages activism. Fundamentalism, which has become a political movement the world over, is another example of subsuming authoritarian, controlling agendas in religious dogma.

I hasten to say that, in my view, this is a misdirection of the religious impulse -- a repression, not a bonafide expression of it. Were the spiritual allowed authentic expression in all areas of life, the world would certainly be very different.

Tammie: What would your definition of wholeness be?

Cliff: It would probably be pretty consistent with Jung's idea of individuation -- the shadow brought into consciousness. In all honesty, though, "wholeness" is one of those words that suggests something false to me. My whole point here is that our soul, our nature, is revealed in our wound. I think this is why the "freak" has held such fascination and created such awe in every culture throughout time. I asked a client once who she wanted to be marooned with on a dessert island -- Doris Day or Bergman. The tormented" personality is the one who offers us the most richness and stimulation ---opportunity for soulmaking -- in life.

Tammie: Do you believe that pain is a valuable teacher and if so, what has your own pain taught you?

Cliff: I have done Buddhist meditation practices for years, and I think I mainly follow Buddhism's lead. I do not think there is any INHERENT value in suffering. On the other hand, as the Buddha said, life IS suffering. So one is left wanting to avoid needless suffering but knowing that a lot of suffering is inevitable. So, you have the choice of how you imagine your suffering. You can call it a teacher but you don't have to call it inherently a good thing. I am thinking of Viktor Frankl. He might say his experience in the death camps taught him something but he'd never say the Holocaust was of inherent value. I think this distinction is really important. Something of value can be (but isn't always) constellated in your relationship to suffering, but it doesn't make suffering a good thing.

And yet, ultimately and crazily, you can end up in the curious place of thanking the gods for your suffering. -- if you transcend it (and I REALLY want to make the point that some suffering simply cannot be transcended). This idea was unimaginable to me even five years ago. My childhood was very unhappy and lonely. I dealt with it by retreating into my imagination and this fed the part of me that later became a successful writer. I would NEVER tell a parent that to encourage his child's artistic talent he reject and isolate the kid. But I do know this fed my own creativity. It could have severely damaged someone else -- and perhaps had I not had the opportunities I did, it might have damaged me more.

I think it's dangerous, to say nothing of hubris-filled, to ever tell anyone they should appreciate their suffering. One can only hold the space for that possibility. It is not everyone's fate.

Tammie: If your life is your message, then what message do you see your life being?

Cliff: I spent a great deal of my life's energies worried about being an outsider, being unconventional. If my life illuminates anything for people, I hope it's that -- as I said earlier -- these wounds and symptoms, these things we call pathologies that make us different, really are the marks of our character and our soul's path."

next: Kris Raphael on "Soul Urges."