THE SEVEN VALLEYS

BY F. GUZZARDI

“I asked myself a very simple question: How do you cope with life’s difficulties? An open question, which requires a broad answer, because the psyche has a spiritual vocation and the spirit is wandering, it likes to wander everywhere.

If we observe the wandering of restless souls in search of answers, we can grasp in the very choice of places, a narration made up of images; the soul speaks in images. In fact, the unconscious is poetic. But words are unable to fully accept the secret meaning of things, because wisdom cannot be communicated, science can be communicated.

This is why the search for the essence of life can only be personal; the story that the soul intends in this brazen search of his, resembles the enchanting story of a pilgrim who proceeds resolutely towards the hostel. The voice of the soul is feeble but persistent, it never gives up because its request comes from an unconscious intuition that throbs in the dark background of the psyche, comes from an inexplicable vision that needs to be understood, the voice of the soul burns to be escort to listen.

We need an inspired emotional attitude; that is, the poet is the one who directly grasps an objective truth by identifying himself with situations in order to grasp something that is well represented by the other, the other with a capital A, that is, the stranger who dwells in us; this stranger is the unconscious that seeks contact with God.

So it is not I who seek the truth but I am sought, something happens inside me, without my knowledge, without my being able to intervene; this thing I mean, visit existence with a religious approach. So let’s go back to our question: How can we live a worthy life?

Psychologically speaking, our life is a process of creative restructuring and our job is to understand ourselves in order to grow. Therefore, it is a spiritual journey that is described psychologically in terms of a process, of filling and restructuring, precisely of our visions of the world, that is, of the relationship with ourselves and with others.

The encounter with the most intimate truth that dwells in your soul is described for example by Buddhism as a pilgrimage through seven valleys: knowledge, feeling, impediments, tribulations, death, abyss and celebration.

The various initiatory paths have these obligatory passages in common; to achieve inner transformation, initially one passes through despair, then doubt, death and finally one arrives at a new life, made up of freedom and love for others

Santa Teresa, for example, describes the access to the deepest center of our being as a dark night of the soul; in this case there is always a common root. In the psychoanalytic field, a fundamental moment of the work of analysis from the depths is the process of elaboration of mourning and depression following the loss of childhood illusions, it is a particularly intense and dramatic period.

But here we are at the point represented by the question: How can the shot go if I don’t shoot it? the student says and the Zen master replies: YES pull, YES remain in maximum adhesion!

When the student has understood that YES, he will no longer need the teacher, he has pulled! As if the arrows started by themselves, without our intervention, it is something that cannot be explained well with words, because words are limited and wisdom cannot be taught. Something happens inside, it’s a change of attitude, we empty ourselves of the ambition we had inside.

Therefore, it is not the one who counts how many times he hits the target, for which the target is only a piece of paper, or the analysand who unnecessarily worries about interpreting and rummaging through the truth.

Instead, we must rejoice in our intuitions, as if another had them and without ambition hits the target but at the same time, it is the target that hits us, so we are spiritual. The eyes of the body are corporeal, the eyes of the spirit are the connection, the conjunction of opposites, the creative synthesis.