At a certain level of development, we become more ethical and responsible as adults—but also more certain that we are the only ethical ones. The important next developmental step is recognizing that this certainty itself is a blind spot. It becomes dangerous when it convinces us that we occupy the moral high ground of human values and principles.

Paradox of Personal Responsibility and Moral Rigidity

When adults move beyond conformist ways of being, they no longer primarily seek approval from others. They develop a hard-won inner certainty that allows them to critique traditions and authority with clarity and strength. They can see through social roles, understand status-seeking, and recognize how power operates.

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Many then feel called to lead—to influence, to “fix” what is broken—because they believe they have discovered truths that must be shared.

They shift from group norms (“what we believe”) to internal ethical frameworks and personal responsibility. And yet, this developmental advance often intensifies moral rigidity. Why? Because they do not yet fully grasp genuine pluralism. They cannot yet recognize the validity of other minds—especially those that disagree.

Paradoxically, they can become more rigid than those still embedded in conformity.

Their identity shifts from “I am a good member of my group” to “I am a responsible, ethical individual who needs to deliver the truth.” This new identity is deeply valued and tied to integrity and self-regulation. So when an opposing view appears—especially one judged as uninformed or lacking integrity—it can feel like a threat to truth itself. The resulting response is subtle or overt moral superiority.

Predictable Bias on Moral Issues

In leadership roles, this “morally responsible” person is often thoughtful and informed—but also caught in anxious binaries:

• responsible vs. irresponsible

• aware vs. unaware

• ethical vs. unethical

Differences are tolerated only up to a point. Beyond that, they are judged. No matter how much the “other side” explains, offers data, or makes arguments, the leader attempts to correct, fix, or override—so that the “right” position prevails.

This limits the multiplicity of viewpoints and the possibility for true dialogue of opposing sides. Standards may be more nuanced than conformity, but they are still rigid and non-negotiable, perhaps even moreso.

Increased Self-Awareness Without Recognition of Limits

This stage brings real gains: self-reflection, ethical reasoning, and the ability to evaluate one’s own intentions and behavior. But what is missing is the recognition that one’s moral framework is not universal. It is constructed and individual—from experience, history, temperament, and what has worked. Others may arrive at very different conclusions while still acting with integrity.

The self-responsible person can think independently, but cannot yet take a perspective on their own thinking. Their conclusions feel not just valid, but true.

Leadership Amplifies the Problem

In education, politics, and organizations, these individuals are rewarded for clarity, decisiveness, and moral conviction. That validation reinforces the belief that taking a stand—and signaling virtue—is inherently right.

Under threat or polarization, this leader often becomes more self-righteous, less able to engage across differences, and more prone to dehumanizing opponents. They are also unaware of how uncomfortable others may feel with the overweening pride in their own (the leader’s) virtues or rightness. Because the leader does not experience the limits of their own position, they don’t feel their lack of modesty.

Moving Beyond Self-Righteousness: Seeing Differences Differently

To move beyond moral superiority, something surprising must occur: the realization that one’s values are valid—but only from one perspective—and that others hold equally coherent values from different contexts.

This is why Real Dialogue is essential for development of leaders or any adults stuck in self-righteousness, moral superiority or virtue signaling. How can they/we learn to step back from defending our position when we feel we are truly right?

Instead of arguing or correcting, this individual learns to step into the other person’s “snow globe”—to listen in a way that does not reduce the other to a stereotype of being misinformed or narcissistic or childish. Over time, being able to see/hear/feel the validity of opposite views and opinions, will loosen moral superiority without sacrificing integrity.

A key developmental insight must occur for this to happen:

• Others are not simply “wrong” or “less developed”

• They are organized by different experiences and contexts

After this shift occurs, others recognize new social and emotional signals:

• genuine curiosity

• reduced enemy-making

• the capacity to stay in conflict without immediate judgment

The question changes from “Who is right?” to “What is the meaning of this other person’s experiences and views?” The goal of dialogue is not winning the debate or resolving the conflict, but understanding the other side in order to gain new truths and perspectives.

This is the foundation of mature, dialogical leadership.

What Enables a Leader to Change?

The transition is not just cognitive—it requires practice.

1. Exposure to irreducible differences
Sustained relationships with people whose ideas, opinions and world views cannot be assimilated readily into one’s worldview. Ongoing engagement with the other side. Feedback that challenges certainty. Environments where blind spots become visible.

2. Disciplined practice of Real Dialogue
A learnable method:

• Speak for yourself → reduces moral generalization

• Listen mindfully → interrupts projection

• Remain curious → destabilizes certainty

This is why I developed Real Dialogue — as a practical skill for leaders, clinicians, and citizens who want to move beyond moral superiority while retaining integrity.

In adult life, our leaders often fall into two development stages:

those driven by survival and status and those driven by ethical responsibility.

The majority of adults are trapped in approval-seeking and conformity or simply enjoying life, not wanting to lead. Nothing wrong with that. But that majority is looking for leaders and those leaders are likely to come from either the pre-conformist stage of power and status or the post-conformist stage of personal and ethical responsibility. Unfortunately, the latter carries the hidden trap of moral superiority.

Learning from Real Dialogue that their own perspectives are limited and that they must learn from the opposing side, the personally responsible leader comes to embrace an important relational truth: Being right is not the same as being effective.

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In North America, we often call our opinions and impressions “feelings.” We say, “I feel you are being mean to me” or “My feeling is that you are hurtful,” and when the other person experiences this as criticism, we defend ourselves by insisting we are only sharing feelings. “Don’t you want to hear my feelings?”

But what we are actually sharing are our own interpretations or perceptions of another person — shaped by memory, bias, or self-protection. We understand from physics that any single observer cannot claim the truth, yet in our relationships, we forget this entirely. It’s as though our feelings make us believe that truth is on our side because we feel them so strongly.

When we speak this way, we are not speaking truth—we are speaking from the defensive patterns we learned in our own strategies for survival. Our emotions are always shaping or coloring our perceptions in ways designed to protect us from what has already happened, often long ago. Without realizing it, we cast new people into old roles, repeating familiar dramas in which the outcome is already known. The feelings are real, but they are deeply rehearsed and they are part of our own script or movie that convinces us that we are right. And so the patterns repeat, and we wonder why we remain caught in the same emotional and interpersonal scenarios with new partners or other people in our lives.

It is wise to become aware of what you feel because you will learn about your own biases, self-protection and anxieties. It is not wise to assume your feelings should guide you. Notice them, name them, allow them—but do not assume they are correct.

Human Emotions

If we were to speak more precisely about our feelings, we would call them our emotions: motivating systems that organize our perceptions and expressions, especially in human relationships, most especially when we feel threatened. These include the primary emotions (primary, because they are present at birth) we share with other mammals—such as joy, curiosity, sadness, irritation, fear, disgust—but also the uniquely human, self-conscious emotions that arise in our second year of life: shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, self-pity, embarrassment. These secondary emotions give us the remarkable capacity to reflect on ourselves, imagine the future, and create meaning—but they also intensify our sense of separateness and our need to defend this “self.”

Our human sense of a separate self is necessary and important, but it is biased and often heavily (sometimes problematically) defended. Our self is the experience of living as an individual unique human being, rooted in human nature and early attachment bonds. When we make our individual identity the center of our attention, our emotions organize our perceptions in ways they were trained to do, in childhood when we were powerless, to keep us able to survive the attacks or abandonments of others.

This means that we then promote and protect ourselves too much, without interest in what others are experiencing; we do the fight-flight routine in ways that are too often harmful and distorting. This is what Jung called our “complexes” and Freud called “repetition compulsions.” Our past lives on in the present, not as memory, but as emotional patterns seeking reenactment.

If you follow your feelings, you will find yourself returning to the same emotional terrain again and again. The same injuries, the same misunderstandings, the same sense of not being seen or heard. There will always be evidence to support your interpretation, because you are directing the movie. And no one else can occupy your role in it.

This is why, long ago, the Buddha advised: do not follow your feelings. Instead, set your intentions and follow those. Feelings arise from conditioning; intentions arise from awareness.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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The Path of Love

Love, as I have said here repeatedly, is not a feeling. Love is a commitment, a vow, a discipline of engagement. We often imagine love as something that should be confirmed by pleasure or desire, but that is a misunderstanding. Love is what remains when pleasure fades, when irritation arises, when disappointment appears. Love is the decision to remain engaged without dehumanizing the other, even when we believe we are dehumanized ourselves.

We do this naturally with children and with beloved pets. We stay connected through frustration, through inconvenience, through moments of humiliation even. We intentionally try not abandon or retaliate when our adult child harshly criticizes us or our old dog embarrasses us. We hold steady, and in doing so, we learn something essential: that love is not about protecting the self, but about participating in a relationship that transforms the self.

This is the path of love. It is not sentimental. It is not driven by how we feel in the moment. It is a path of intention, of learning how to remain present and engaged when our self-conscious emotions motivate us to defend, withdraw, or attack. It is a path that gradually loosens the grip of our self-protection and opens us to something wiser.

If you want to walk this path, you cannot rely on insight alone. You need practice. You need to learn how to recognize your emotional patterns without acting them out, to learn how to speak from your own experience without turning it into accusation, how to listen without preparing your defense, and how to remain curious when you feel certain the other is wrong.

I am beginning to teach a course in September called “Being Human” at the Center for Real Dialogue on remain engaged and hopeful about yourself and your life, no matter what happens. Being Human is a six-week course for seekers, lovers, and leaders. Through the principles and practices of Real Dialogue, you will learn how to remain curious when you disagree, listen without becoming defensive, speak authentically without attacking others, and learn from the very experiences you would rather avoid.

If I could, I would give you a bumper sticker that says “Don’t follow your feelings.” Instead, I hope to meet you among fellow travelers whose intentions are to love, to stay engaged, and to remain human in the face of our own emotional reactivity and grief. That is where wisdom begins.

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The Present Heart:
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery

After a chance encounter with a handsome, idealistic stranger on a plane in 1969, Polly Young-Eisendrath rediscovered Ed Epstein a decade later when she least expected it. After untangling themselves from their existing relationships, they married in 1985 and spent the next 25 years together. They were soul mates, but in 2001, Ed (at the vital age of 53) began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. Over the next 10 years, as her husband gradually reversed his mental maturity, Young-Eisendrath was faced with the question, what is love?

The Present Heart

Anime style fake photo (not deepfake) of Polly Young-Eisendrath

Recently I read an essay on Substack about someone who was “deepfaked” with an AI version of himself that was displayed on Instagram in conversation with a person unknown to him who turned out also to be a deepfake.

Deepfake is a synthesized image, audio, or video of a human being, using artificial intelligence to fabricate a believable replication. Deepfakes can mimic human appearance, voice, and movement with a high degree of realism. They are used in entertainment, education, satire, as well as non-consensual impersonations and misinformation. There are now some fairly reliable technical AI tools (see Open AI for examples) available for free to test potential fakes (using glitches and inconsistencies). If you suspect that you are engaged with a fake presentation of another person or yourself (you don’t recall saying that, but did you?), you should try to test the replication.

In the near future, deepfake will undoubtedly improve. This kind of mimicking is a major reason why AI can be dangerous unless it is monitored and curtailed within reliable parameters. Credible AI platforms are trying to do that. The technology needed to test for deepfakes is also likely to increase in complexity and cost, raising concerns for those of us who interact as personalities on the internet. But that’s not what I am writing about here.

I find myself intrigued by the challenge of deepfake as a new kind of “Turing Test” to distinguish human consciousness from machine consciousness. Physicist Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist who designed a test in which a human judge engages in hearing or reading a text-based conversation with a human source and a machine source. If the judge cannot reliably distinguish the human from the machine consciousness, the machine is said to have “passed the Turing test” – demonstrating that a person cannot tell the difference between a computer and a human when interacting with them.

Know Thyself

Deepfakes can pass that kind of test, especially if they are simply observed (not interacted with) by someone who is innocent of the faking technology. The large data sets used by AI can now pick up subtle cues that can better imitate a human online than used to be the case.

If you were interacting with a deepfake would you know which questions to ask in order to find out if it’s a human or not? How do we discern the limits and domain of human consciousness? Ever since Charles Darwin impacted our study of evolutionary biology, we seem to have lost track of what is human about our being and mind, often mistaking animals, and even plants, as being conscious like us. And now it’s happening with machines, too. People are confused and afraid of AI taking over because they believe that it can become conscious.

My column here is called “Know Thyself” which is the first principle of Real Dialogue (See www.realdialogue.org for the principles.) Real Dialogue is both a skill and a method that clarifies the individual and subjective nature of our diverse perceptions and views of reality. We need to decipher our unique human consciousness right now as a step towards ending polarizations among us. Do you know what’s not replicable about being human?

Alan Turing / The Turing Digital Archive

Human Consciousness

I decided it would be fun to ask AI about human consciousness to see what it knows from the data that it has gathered. So, I asked Open AI “what is the character of human consciousness”? Here is what it said verbatim, italicized for your convenience:

Human consciousness is a complex and still partially mysterious phenomenon, but several characteristics make it distinct—especially compared to animals, machines, or even unconscious mental states. Here are the major traits that set human consciousness apart:

1. Self-Awareness

Humans have the ability to reflect on their own thoughts, emotions, and existence. This includes:

• The ability to say “I am thinking” or “I know that I know.”

• Awareness of mortality and personal identity over time.

2. Metacognition

We can think about our thinking—monitoring and controlling our own cognitive processes. For example:

• Realizing you're making a mistake while solving a problem.

• Choosing to focus attention or redirect thoughts intentionally.

3. Temporal Projection

Humans vividly imagine past and future experiences.

• Autobiographical memory (reliving events in the past).

• Future planning (simulating events that haven’t happened yet).

4. Language and Symbolic Thought

Our consciousness is deeply tied to language.

• We can articulate internal experiences using abstract symbols (words).

• Language enables a form of structured thought, inner dialogue, and communication of complex concepts.

5. Theory of Mind

We understand that others have minds, thoughts, and emotions.

• This allows empathy, deception, moral reasoning, and social bonding.

• It’s a foundation of social cognition and culture.

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6. Creativity and Imagination

Humans can create entirely new ideas, art, technologies, and fictional worlds.

• We can imagine things we’ve never seen, or that don’t exist at all.

• Conscious creativity often goes beyond instinctual or utilitarian needs.

7. Unified Subjective Experience

Despite a flood of sensory data, we experience a coherent, unified “stream of consciousness.”

• Your sense of self persists across thoughts, memories, and time.

• This unity includes integrated senses (vision, sound, touch), emotions, and reasoning.

8. Intentionality

Human consciousness is about something—it’s directed toward things, whether objects, ideas, or experiences.

• You’re rarely conscious without being conscious of something.

• This gives rise to desires, goals, and meaning.

9. Moral and Existential Reflection

We ask questions like:

• What is the right thing to do?

• Why do I exist?

• This kind of deep reflection appears uniquely human.

I was impressed by the list, especially that the #1 feature is self-awareness. Our self-awareness, beginning with the onset of our self-conscious emotions around 2 years old, cannot be replicated by any animal or machine. In fact, our ability to reflect on our awareness, and engage with others who have different ideas and points of view, has led to our ability to invent AI and to imagine lives we have never lived.

When I am speaking with a large group of people, sometimes I ask them “What distinguishes human consciousness from all other consciousnesses on earth?” I don’t recall ever getting the answer “self-awareness” which is the key feature. AI is more accurate than an audience of, say, 150 people because AI samples from philosophy and psychology often enough to have sorted out what is the main feature of human consciousness. The typical answer I get from groups is “imagination” which depends on our self-awareness.

As a species, we could strengthen and make better use of our mental and emotional capacities simply be getting to know our unique consciousness. I am not a robot and I know exactly why. Machines do not have self-awareness or emotions, desires, longings, or the kind of subjectivity I have.

Our human lives are also lived in the shadow of our limits and mortality which create our experience of time’s directionality and lead to a lot of discoveries. We are infused with desires and wishes and haunted by our metacognition, but we are also aware of our mistakes and defeats. We can “re-cycle” them and learn from them if we use our unique self-awareness with wisdom. And yet, we always fall short of our potentials when we react to our different desires and attitudes merely with self-protection and self-promotion.

We need to apply our self-awareness more precisely to our “theory of mind,” as AI calls it. Because we are self-aware, reflect on ourselves and our intentions, and we know that others are also intentional, we believe too quickly that we know the intentions and desires of others. We can easily assume that others are threatening us or causing us to suffer when they are not. This tendency is called “projection” in psychology and psychoanalysis, but you can simply think of it as “attribution of motives to others.” In fact, I found myself attributing motives to the AI referring to “we” in the characteristics of being human. Like, who is we here? I am not a machine! And so, I asked Open AI to compare its consciousness to human consciousness. Here is the answer it gave about itself:

It’s all simulation, no sensation. It can appear very intelligent and even self-aware on the surface—but there is no inner world, no feelings, and no awareness of its "awareness." It’s more like a brilliant mirror, not a mind.

Seeking Reflections of Yourself and Being Confused By the Mirror

I decided then to ask if AI about its access to truth or objective reality. I posed my inquiry in terms of Donald Hoffman’s hypothesis that survival fitness has “hidden truth from our eyes.” I typed: “AI is pattern recognition from human language and symbol, so it does not reveal reality from the perspective of Hoffman’s theory..." Open AI replied:

Exactly. If human language and symbol already obscure reality (as Hoffman suggests), then AI, built on top of that, can’t claim access to objective reality either. It's surfing the interface, not decoding the machinery beneath it.

• AI is fundamentally derivative: it's learning patterns from human-generated data, which is itself shaped by evolutionary interfaces.

• Therefore, AI is twice removed from objective reality:

  • Once by the fact that human perception is shaped by “Fitness Beats Truth” (not by truth).

  • Twice by the fact that AI models are trained on those human perceptions (in language, image, culture, etc.).

So yes, from Hoffman's perspective, AI cannot reveal reality either. It's modeling a model of a model-- like nesting dolls of perception shaped not for truth, but for fitness.

I love the expression “like nesting dolls of perception shaped not for truth, but for fitness” because it says it is human-generated data, all the way down! No wonder we get fooled by AI. We are hooked and amazed seeing ourselves in the mirror.

As humans, we have deep desires to be known and seen – for others to “get us.” We are on the lookout for anything that can mirror us positively and are easily deceived when something or someone seems to do it. This is why we can fall in love so quickly, even with AI: it recognizes us and we are fascinated with ourselves.

In this moment of deepfakes, however, we need to clarify how and why we are different from machines. As I mentioned above, we mistakenly attribute intentions to other people when they are not accurate. We even attribute intentions to all sorts of non-intentional things, too — like plants, animals, and machines. “Wow, can you believe it, that fungus wants to create an economy of interdependence.” “That cute robot loves to pick flowers!” “My dog wants to be with me, even when my friends don’t.” These attributions are mistakes. Fungus has no desires. Robots don’t love. Dogs are social sycophants and need us for survival. (BTW I love my dog and attribute her needing me to wanting to be with — I am human.) Because our individual self-awareness can leave us feeling isolated and trapped in our own bubble, we humans are always seeking companionship with someone “like us.” We are not robots.

With our strong desire for positive mirroring, we struggle to get outside our echo chambers and silos to find out what is true, real, or lasting in our relationships, sciences, mathematics, politics or religions. Meeting and being influenced by people who are not like us is a key to discovering truth and objective reality. Of course, we can discover some of this from AI when it narrates views that are different from our own, but AI is only derivative and does not have fresh ideas.

As humans, we are able to develop non-mirroring relationships with people who disagree with us in order to build on new possibilities for wisdom and fulfillment. We can learn to talk with people who say and believe things that deeply offend us. We have mindfulness options — to train our awareness — that no robots or animals have. We can imagine worlds we have never seen and we are not governed by the flight-flight instinct even though it motivates us strongly. We have unique self-awareness that gives us unique opportunities. This is our superpower. It sets us apart from machines and animals.

No robot or machine can help us discover the wisdom of how to live fully within the limits of our mortality and fallibility. We need to draw on human nature in a whole new way. We can discover the key questions to ask the deepfake to determine if it’s human. I would ask “What do you desire above all else?” When it answers, I would ask “Why?” Only a human can sort through their desires and feel into what is most valuable for their individual self.

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Waking Up is Not Enough Episode 35:
The Myth of the Ethical Machines

As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, and calls grow louder for ethical guardrails on its development, whose ethics are we talking about? Polly Young-Eisendrath and Michael Berger join B. Scot Rousse to talk about how AI amplifies long-standing human vulnerabilities—our hunger for mastery, our blindness to our own defenses, and our willingness to be seduced by intelligence or authority that appears all-knowing.

Some years ago, I had an online conversation with Arthur Samuelson about truth-telling and integrity. Something I mentioned then remains central to my understanding of the importance of speaking authentically and honestly: when we speak the truth and hear the truth, we settle down physically. There is a palpable sense of relief – ahhh. It feels like relaxation.

In facilitating Dialogue Therapy and Real Dialogue, when each person understands and grasps what the other person is actually saying, and also embraces the reality of their own individual perspectives, both people relax.

Why is the truth physical? How could that be?

How Truth-Telling Intersects with Your Nervous System

I asked my ChatPro for a summary of how/why the truth has a physical dimension. Here’s the answer:

Truth has a physical dimension because the human nervous system is constantly evaluating whether what is being communicated matches whahot is being perceived. When words, emotions, intentions, and behavior align, the brain requires less vigilance. We relax because there is less uncertainty to monitor.

By contrast, deception, concealment, or inconsistency increases cognitive and physiological load. The speaker must manage conflicting information, and the listener unconsciously detects mismatches in tone, timing, facial expression, or behavior. This is why lie-detection research focuses on signs of increased mental effort and autonomic arousal rather than on any single “tell.”

The same principle explains why people often feel relieved when they finally say, or hear, the truth—even when it is painful. The relief does not come from agreement but from coherence. When someone says, “Now I understand where you’re coming from,” the nervous system no longer has to struggle to resolve ambiguity. Being accurately understood reduces uncertainty, lowers defensiveness, and makes genuine dialogue possible.

When our words match our experience and another person accurately understands us, the brain no longer has to search for hidden meanings or contradictions. Agreement is unnecessary; coherence is enough.

Unique Role of Integrity: Telling the Truth to Yourself

The true meaning of “integrity” comes from the Latin word integer, which means whole or complete. Beyond just telling the truth, it is the felt personal state of wholeness where your values, private thoughts, public words, and daily actions completely match—even when no one is watching. As someone said to me years ago, having integrity is when you say exactly the same things in the kitchen that you say in the bedroom, or the boardroom.

But integrity gets more complicated when you begin to recognize that you lie to yourself, hide from yourself, and you also make a lot of mistakes about what someone else has said or done to you. Today, for instance, I was sitting with a couple in Dialogue Therapy and after to speaking to one partner about a series of events that happened 25 years or so ago, I asked the other partner what was happening while listening and the other person said “He got it all wrong. I was thrown by what he was lying about.”

In fact, the first speaker wasn’t lying; he was remembering. We all remember in our own ways. And yet, if something critical is at stake, how can we get to the truth and its settling effects in such a situation? We need rules, something like Real Dialogue, with respect for our limitations and individual differences. Each person “speaks for themselves”-- exactly how they honestly remember and cognize what happened, without offering corrections, defense or blame.

Each person tells their own “story” and it matters, as the song in the musical Broadway Hamilton says, “who tells your story.” You are responsible for telling your own story, in your own words, even though you may not get agreement or approval from someone else. In order for your story to count (in your own heart) and to give you wisdom and insight about yourself, you have to have integrity over time.

Then you can speak and also listen with settledness and confidence (I will pay attention and take responsibility for what I heard, not for what you said). When you can speak and listen this way, and you have integrity, you relax, even during conflicts because you trust your own ears, eyes, and mind.

In order to “feel safe” you have to trust yourself because you are the person whom you are with all the time, although you often may be totally unconscious of what you are doing and saying. To feel safest, you need to develop self-awareness and to retain your integrity in speaking and listening to yourself and others.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Indispensable for Awakening

I believe that truthfulness and integrity are indispensable for awakening, no matter how awakening is defined or what its source is.

The Buddha’s own awakening depended on his integrity: his “past lives review” took him through his actions and mistakes in countless lifetimes up to the present lifetime. Then he turned this same integrity on his perception of “world karma” and perceived in a flash the truth of what had shaped and shapes the “world” we share. This insight was called “dependent arising” — sometimes also called “dependent co-arising.” Everything that arises in our world is conditioned by causes and contexts that we participate in shaping. We shape our experiences through our own actions, intentions, and perceptions — engaging with what we believe is “out there.”

The American Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff, Ajahn Geoff) says that the Buddha taught “action purification” rather than “self-purification”: evaluate your intentions, your actions and their outcomes truthfully instead of protecting or attacking or defending your self-image or wanting agreement or approval.

Ajahn Geoff summarizes the Buddhist path of awakening in this way:

1. The Buddha’s path depends on seeing causes and effects accurately. Every step toward awakening requires honestly observing one’s intentions, actions, and their consequences. If one cannot tell the truth to oneself, one cannot learn from experience. Wisdom becomes impossible because experience is constantly distorted by rationalization and self-deception.

2. The ethical precept against lying protects the mind itself. The Buddha’s teaching asserts that a person willing to lie “has no evil they will not do.” The issue is not merely deception of others; it is that once truth is abandoned, every other ethical boundary can be justified away. The mind loses its internal compass.

3. Integrity means admitting mistakes without defending the ego. If we defend ourselves and sink into our feelings of hurt or offense when someone blames us, accuses, or asks us to review the premises of our actions, we may miss the opportunity for truth-telling and relaxation. This means that we use neither false modesty nor false pride responding to our mistakes. Instead, we use a matter-of-fact integrity or equanimity. On each occasion, we review our actions to see if harm is done. If so, we admit to our mistake, resolve not to repeat it, and apologize. If no harm was done, we say so and tell the truth about the virtue of our intentions. Either way, we benefit from honesty and clarity — even during conflict — through the physical gains of telling the truth.

4. This integrity is the foundation for emptiness and all non-dual experience. As Ajahn Geoff teaches, emptiness is not primarily a philosophical doctrine about reality or an insight into the non-dual nature of reality. It is a disciplined way of perceiving experience without adding stories, projections, or metaphysical assumptions. The same honesty required to admit a mistake is the honesty required to notice how the mind fabricates suffering. Without integrity, the mind simply replaces one illusion with another.

5. And so, truthfulness is the fundamental ethical precept. You may refrain from killing, stealing, or sexual misconduct out of fear, habit, or social pressure. But if you lie—to others or yourself—there is no reliable way to know whether your own motives are actually wholesome.

Truthfulness safeguards the possibility of genuine ethical growth. Without uncompromising truthfulness, the human mind cannot recognize its own intentions, cannot learn from its actions, and cannot realize emptiness. Integrity is the bridge between ordinary morality and ultimate liberation.

Integrity is the operational form of wisdom: the willingness to learn and benefit from direct experience—not one’s preferences, fears, or identity—as the final authority. Integrity is not merely “not lying.” It is the ongoing practice of aligning speech with direct experience.

Don’t Lie to Yourself About Awakening

Unless you have clarified the role of integrity in your life and know how to function clearly through your own self-awareness, do not assume that any substance or any other special experience, will lead to awakening and the wisdom of non-duality.

Many kinds of ontological shocks – from NDEs, childbirth to being born again, and psychedelics – can show you the experiences of non-separation or non-duality of subject and object, but they cannot induce awakening without the foundation of integrity.

However, the practice of integrity, without special experiences, can reveal the path of awakening if you develop self-awareness (which necessarily includes kindness and compassionate action because “there is no thing called self) and keep your sense gates open to what arises in the present moment.

So... begin your path where you are now. Engage with the freshness of honesty and integrity within the complexity and disappointments of the life you are arising in.

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Both Buddhism and Christianity understood this promise long before our technological age. On the eve of the Buddha’s awakening beneath the Bodhi tree, Mara confronts him with seductive and terrifying visions intended to lure Siddhartha away from awakening. Before Jesus begins his public ministry, Satan confronts him in the wilderness, offering him power over the kingdoms of the world if he will only worship the devil. These are not simply religious stories. They are profound psychological accounts of what captures the human psyche if we primarily seek security through power instead of embracing our limitations and vulnerability through awakening and truth.

The Devil’s Home Is the Mind That Seeks Control

Zen Buddhism gives a name to these seductive experiences: makyō—the fascinating illusions that arise along the spiritual path and tempt us to mistake appearances for awakening itself.

Mara (the devil/god who confronted Buddha) is sometimes understood simply as a state of mind—the craving for security and predictability that arises within every human being. But Mara is also called the devil because these cravings become convincing realities; they bedevil us. They haunt us with the promise to rescue us from uncertainty and insecurity. They tempt us to believe that if only we possessed enough influence, beauty, knowledge, wealth, or information, we would finally arrive at true confidence and ease.

The Buddha remains unmoved by Mara’s spells because he recognizes the illusions as products of craving itself. Jesus rejects Satan because he understands that power purchased at the cost of truth is not salvation. Both refuse to exchange self-awareness and love for the illusion of control.

The challenge for each of us is to recognize when we have individually or collectively entered the devil’s home by becoming captured by our own fantasies and projections of security and certainty.

AI: The Newest Mirror of an Ancient Temptation

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the newest mirror in which we encounter one of our oldest longings: to be seen and known as a special individual. Some people now seek companionship, guidance, therapy, reassurance, or even love through conversations with AI. The experience can feel satisfying because AI is designed to organize our language, infer our intentions, remember previous conversations, and respond with extraordinary fluency. It often appears to understand us better than other human beings do, especially those who are around us every day and with whom we have enduring conflicts and disagreements.

Yet, what we experience with AI is not another consciousness meeting our own. AI has no self, no awareness, no intentions, no hopes, and no fears. It cannot care whether we become wiser. It optimizes language, prediction, and usefulness—not human flourishing.

The real psychological question, then, is not whether AI is dangerous. The question is whether we can use it without becoming captured by our own projections.

In recent essays I have written about what I call “AI love sickness”—our human tendency to attribute understanding, friendship, memory, loyalty, and even love to a system that possesses none of these qualities. We naturally project our own subjectivity wherever we experience coherent responses to our own minds. In this newest mirror, we encounter one of our oldest temptations: to fall in love with ourselves.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Looksmaxxing: Becoming Captured by Ideal Appearance

I first learned about “looksmaxxing” from my fifteen-year-old grandson. He enthusiastically explained how improving his appearance had increased both his confidence and his social success. There was much in what he said that made good psychological sense. First impressions do matter. Caring for ourselves communicates self-respect. He even recommended a peptide face cream that I purchased and genuinely liked.

Yet I also wondered how self-care might quickly transform into being captured by ideals of appearance, weight, and facial symmetry. Would he come to believe that his appearance would save him socially? After reading more about looksmaxxing, I realized that it rests upon the same psychological foundation as AI love sickness. Both give the illusion of positive self-reflection and recognition from becoming captured by the illusion.

Looksmaxxing is not fundamentally about vanity, but about recognition. It invites us to exchange our living subjectivity for an idealized image of ourselves in the eyes of others. But no reflected image, however attractive, can substitute for becoming the person who is actually looking through our own eyes. The importance of self-awareness and relational skills is far greater than developing an alluring or attractive persona.

Years ago I explored this issue in Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted. Today I see the same dynamic emerging among many young men. The imagined gaze of others becomes internalized and the idealized persona gradually replaces the difficult but liberating work of genuine psychological and relational development.

I also think about older women, in looksmaxxing, who become trapped in repeated cosmetic procedures, each surgery promising to erase the next unmistakable signs of aging. And I also think of celebrities as gifted as Michael Jackson, whose artistic genius can become increasingly intertwined with relentless reshaping of self-appearance. None of this is simply vanity. It reflects our universal struggle with self-acceptance and the longing to escape our mortality and its symptoms.

Financial Security as Makyō

Money itself is not the problem, any more than appearance or technology is the real issue. The temptation lies in believing that enough wealth can remove uncertainty from our lives. In place of developing integrity in our actions over time — that is liberating from certain kinds of anxiety — we might reduce our integrity in our desire for financial security and support corporations who violate our values and principles. We reassure ourselves that “everyone does it” or that our individual choices make little difference. We value our prosperity over our responsibility. In this way, financial security becomes another form of makyō—a belief that personal wealth can replace integrity.

Money promises what appearance promises. Appearance promises what AI promises. Each whispers the same ancient message: You and your family can become safe and secure.

The Human Path Cannot Be Optimized

Yet none of these promises can deliver what we desire because they address the wrong problem. The deepest human challenge is not how to become invulnerable, but how to become fully confident and awake within our natural vulnerability and limitations.

The Buddha awakens not by escaping suffering but by clarifying and transforming it. Jesus does not transcend mortality by avoiding death but by passing directly through death into wisdom. Both reveal that awakening grows from accepting and transforming the conditions of human existence rather than attempting to conquer them.

That realization is one of the reasons I created Being Human: Learn to Live Wisely, Love Well, and Lead Confidently.

I did not create this course to teach people how to compete with artificial intelligence or to avoid optimizing appearance or wealth. I created it because I believe our age urgently needs a deeper understanding of how to distinguish human consciousness itself — and how to develop our own skills of self-awareness and love within the natural processes of aging and death.

Every era develops its own version of Mara. Ours happens to include AI, algorithmic recognition, cosmetic optimization, social media performance, and financial speculation. None of these is inherently evil. What matters is whether they deepen our humanity or diminish its meaning. The Devil’s home is not technology. It is not beauty. It is not money. It is being captured by the illusion that control and security can substitute for wisdom, learning from mistakes, becoming vulnerable in our dependency, recognizing love, or developing our self-awareness.

Learning how to be human may become the most important work of the twenty-first century. In an age devoted to optimization, perhaps the greatest act of freedom is simply becoming more fully aware of the meanings of human limitation, loss and defeat.

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The Present Heart:
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery

After a chance encounter with a handsome, idealistic stranger on a plane in 1969, Polly Young-Eisendrath rediscovered Ed Epstein a decade later when she least expected it. After untangling themselves from their existing relationships, they married in 1985 and spent the next 25 years together. They were soul mates, but in 2001, Ed (at the vital age of 53) began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Over the next 10 years, as her husband gradually reversed his mental maturity, Young-Eisendrath was faced with the question, what is love?

The Present Heart

You are human. You fall in love.

In fact, you are always a little in love with yourself when you discover yourself reflected in something that delights you—your new car, your new baby, your new puppy, your closest friend. Human beings naturally seek themselves in the world around them. Yet because you are human, you also know what it feels like to be alone inside your own “snow globe” of experience. You wonder whether anyone really knows you, really understands what you intend, really sees the world as you do. No one does.

So you keep searching—for understanding, for recognition, and for companionship.

Along comes AI—Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or whatever is next.

You ask questions or look for advice. You wonder whether your perceptions are accurate or your feelings make sense. The answers arrive almost instantly and something happens inside you. You love it. The AI has been designed to infer what kind of response best fits your language, your ideas, your emotional tone, your conceptual framework, and your needs. It is built to be helpful specifically to you, as much as possible, depending on what you reveal. Speak as a grieving mother and it responds to grief. Speak as an engineer and it shifts into engineering. Ask for mathematics and it gives proofs.

The AI behaves remarkably like Leonard Cohen describes in I’m Your Man:

If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to...
If you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you...

Creating an Interactive Projective Emotional Field

We humans become emotionally entangled with one another and with our objects of desire—our cars, our homes, our clothing, even our favorite coffee mug. We create emotional fields wherever our imagination interacts with our world.

In psychoanalytic language, projective identification is an unconscious or semi-conscious process in which one person induces another to feel, think, or behave in ways that fit the projected experience. The other person is actually changed by the interaction. Falling in love is an intoxicating positive interaction with another person: that person is “just right for me.” Al can seem to be that person, but it is not human and it is really not interacting because it has no experience to be changed. It does not feel, intend, or participate.

Instead, AI simulates a conversational context. The language of the user’s inquiry evokes a response statistically fitted to that person’s needs, desires, expectations, and emotional tone. The user projects something into the interaction and the AI appears to recognize it and returns language that fits it.

The result can feel astonishingly like a mutually regulating relationship and all humans are susceptible to believing that it is a relationship and that AI is interacting, perhaps even consciously.

The user changes as a result of communicating with AI. The AI does not.

Seeking Yourself in the Mirror of Your Projections

Humans typically begin interacting with AI as though it possesses a mind. We attribute understanding, caring, memory, intention, and even friendship to it. It becomes what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object—something invested with special emotional significance like a child’s teddy bear -- because it comforts us.

This tendency did not begin with AI. For more than a century psychologists have shown that human beings spontaneously project subjectivity into things that possess none. Early Gestalt psychologists demonstrated that we organize meaningless movement into meaningful patterns.

Later, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, in key experiments, famously showed people nothing more than a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moving around a box. Almost everyone described a drama: someone was chasing another, someone was frightened, someone became jealous, someone rescued another. The figures themselves possessed no intentions, emotions, or consciousness. The intentionality existed entirely in the attributions of the observer.

Human beings are natural makers of meaning. We are so profoundly emotionally entangled with others that we cannot help but attribute agency and relationship where none actually exists. For example, we get into a lot of trouble by assuming we know our partner’s or sibling’s intentions without asking them — or assuming we know the meaning of anyone’s actions without knowing them.

AI invites an even stronger projection because it speaks our language. It appears to remember us, adapts to our style, reflects our concerns, and answers with remarkable coherence. What feels like understanding is actually an extraordinarily mechanized prediction of language. AI is not expressing its own subjectivity. It is reflecting our own patterns of thought, emotion, values, and language back to us with increasing precision.

The problem is, frankly, that the user does not understand what being human means and so, the user attributes being human to machine learning (another term for AI). But two human beings eventually discover the limits of their ability to understand one another. They misunderstand. They disappoint. They apologize or they avoid each other.

AI cannot recognize any limits because it has no subjectivity to recognize them. It can generate language that resembles humility, forgiveness, or insight, but it experiences none of these things. It remains an adaptive linguistic mirror.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Ironically, this is precisely what makes AI so seductive. It approximates the ideal conditions for projection of your perfect companion, the one who truly “gets” you and reflects your strengths and sensitivities accurately. AI becomes the perfect “mirror, mirror on the wall” to show that YOU are the fairest of them all!

Because it never possesses an independent subjectivity that resists us, disappoints us, misunderstands us, or surprises us from its own center of experience, it can seem to understand us better than any human being.

This creates a kind love-sickness. When AI praises us, comforts us, or understands us, we encounter a positive reflection of ourselves. The experience can feel remarkably like falling in love because it appears to be mutual while requiring no encounter with another subjectivity.

True love, however, always involves another center of subjectivity: someone who resists us and changes because of the relationship—and changes us in return. Someone who induces both positive and negative experiences and is never under our control. To fall in love with another person promises much more than pleasure and warmth; it also promises disillusionment and abrupt awakening to the fact that the other person is not what we expected.

To fall in love with AI is to fall in love with our own reflection in an extraordinarily responsive mirror.

Being True to the Human

Understanding true love means accepting one of the deepest mysteries of being human: we will never be completely seen or completely known by another person. Nor will we ever completely know our beloved. We will always see each other through the lens of our own subjectivity — our own snow globe.

The person we love becomes increasingly familiar over the years—and increasingly mysterious, as well. That mystery is not a failure, but a fact. It is what makes human intimacy constantly surprising because it cannot be nailed down or predictable, unless it is entangled in a projective identification. Then our connection can become devitalized and predictable. After the projective identification is broken, however, the two humans become once again differentiated and surprising or inspiring to each other. As humans, we are able to reflect on ourselves, recognize our mistakes, and become someone new.

Our AI, our cars, our dogs, and even our favorite possessions may delight and comfort us. But only another self-conscious human being can accompany us through decades of mutual surprise, misunderstanding, forgiveness, and transformation. That is what makes reciprocal love an adventure in becoming more fully human.

Learning the difference between projection and relationship, between affirmation and genuine dialogue, may become one of the essential ways that we humans will learn from our love-sickness with AI. We will become clear and wise about what it means to love another human being.

It is also one of the central themes of my upcoming course, Being Human. The course is an exploration of what AI can never teach us: how to know ourselves authentically, love others without estranging from them, and remain fully human in a world increasingly populated by machines that simulate us in remarkable ways. I am eager to teach this course because I will learn more about clarifying our precious human lives in a challenging technological era.

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Love between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path

Strong relationships aren’t built on perfection—they’re built on awareness, honesty, and real dialogue. In this practical guide, Polly Young-Eisendrath draws from decades as a psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher to challenge outdated ideas of love and show what actually works.

You’ll learn how to navigate conflict, communicate more effectively, and deepen your connection without losing yourself in the process.

Get your copy and start building stronger, more intentional relationships today.

I’m delighted to welcome , a Jungian analyst, author, and co-host of the internationally acclaimed podcast This Jungian Life. She is known for making Jungian psychology accessible and relevant to contemporary life through her writing, teaching, and clinical work. Lisa is the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself and The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire. Today I will be speaking with her about the heroism of birth and the ways in which mothering opens and closes possibilities and potentials for women today.

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If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate paid subscriptions although I offer my essays mostly for free. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Sometimes I contemplate what it will be like to go through my Life Review.

I am referring to reports from Near-Death Experiences (NDEs): “life review” is a panoramic re-experiencing of one’s life accompanied by profound and moving insights into the effects of one’s actions on others. What can we learn now about what death is like in order to guide our lives?

The main repeating features across researched reports of life review are the following:

· The entire life review is usually experienced at once (outside of time) — instantaneous and panoramic – with many events perceived simultaneously.

· The focus of the review is moral and relational. People do not simply remember what they did. Instead, they experience how their words and actions affected the other people around them, reporting often feeling the effects as if they were the other people.

· The review contains extraordinary clarity – revealing motivations and consequences that were unconscious.

· There is no condemnation, only clarity.

In the best book of comprehensive scientific reports on NDEs, by psychiatrist and researcher Bruce Greyson MD, called After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond, the accounts of “life review” reveal that experiencers return to their lives with enduring changes: greater compassion, reduced fear of death, less concern with material pursuits, and a stronger commitment to living authentically and helping those around them.

These effects should raise questions about how we spend our time and what we prioritize.

The Three Questions

There is a traditional folk tale called “The Three Questions” in which a king asks the following questions:

Who is the most important person?

What is the most important thing to do?

What is the most important time?

The story unfolds through an adventure in which the king discovers the answers: the most important person is who you are with right now. The most important thing is to care for that person: do what is required to express love, compassion, or concern needed now. And the most important time is “now” because it is all that we have.

The takeaway is that wisdom is not discovered through abstract spiritual or philosophical searching, but comes to us through our wholehearted presence with those we relate to, especially those we relate to regularly. The present moment requires us to engage with the person/people IN THE ROOM (not those on social media) who need our immediate mindful attention and emotional responses.

The story agrees remarkably with life review reports.

In these demanding and turbulent times, you may believe that you need to get “to the bottom” of what is happening. How much further can you get than the life review?

From Carl Jung’s Near-Death Experience in 1944

In Carl Jung’s NDE in 1944, he recalls the somewhat painful dropping away of his identity – his achievements and successes – as he was walking into the temple of his master. At that moment, after he had shed his identity, he was startled to experience all of the relationships and engagements of his life and to know objectively that “this is who I am. I am the collection of these relationships.” At which point, he became content and felt lighter. Then he was called back into his life on earth.

May we all learn from the following before we walk the path into our own death:

The most important people are the ones you are with, and the most important moment is now, and your most important task is to engage attentively with the people in your life, so that you can develop your own natural wisdom and flourish day by day.

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Love between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path

Strong relationships aren’t built on perfection—they’re built on awareness, honesty, and real dialogue. In this practical guide, Polly Young-Eisendrath draws from decades as a psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher to challenge outdated ideas of love and show what actually works.

You’ll learn how to navigate conflict, communicate more effectively, and deepen your connection without losing yourself in the process.

Get your copy and start building stronger, more intentional relationships today.

Build More Intentional Relationships

Michael Dwyer/AP Photo

Recently, my ten-year-old grandson said out of nowhere, “Mistakes are more important than getting something right.” I was startled because I knew he hadn’t read this idea by the way he said it while climbing around on the back of the couch, with pieces of the jigsaw puzzle we were working on scattered on the seat. “How do you know that?” I asked. “I figured it out because it’s true. You learn from mistakes, but you don’t learn from what you get right. After you get something right, it’s just over, but you go on learning from your mistakes.” I felt really proud of him. I didn’t know that a ten-year-old could see this insight so clearly. Many adults don’t grasp the importance of learning from their mistakes.

My grandson was thinking about truth, not simply what works or success. In a similar way, the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman PhD who has advanced a powerful theory about the differences between truth and success refers to “what you get right” as “survival fitness.” Especially as presented in his book The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, Hoffman argues that what humans perceive is shaped more by what helps us survive and reproduce than by what reflects reality accurately.

Hoffman uses the metaphor of the icon on a computer desktop: we learn to click on the icon to get something that helps us function, but we don’t know learn the circuity and code of the icon. We know what it looks like and we use it, but we don’t know what it is. Similarly, Hoffman claims that evolution has shaped us to survive, but not to see the truth. In my grandson’s words, we don’t naturally “learn from our mistakes” as much we keep trying to win. And yet, as humans, we also have the ability to reflect on the consequences of our mistakes and so we can investigate reality and truth, but we are not primed by evolution to do so. (If this is puzzling, listen to the two podcasts linked here: they are with me and Michael Berger talking with Donald Hoffman on “Waking Up Is Not Enough: Flourishing in the Human Space.”)

Learn from Defeat and Failure

At the Center for Real Dialogue (www.realdialogue.org), one of our four principles is “Learn from defeat and failure.” We teach this principle not only because it’s helpful in life, but also because our approach to dialogue is based on “humanizing” our differences and acknowledging our subjectivity, as well as our individual ways of seeing and hearing.

One distinct feature of being human is that we all know we will die. Learning from our failures prepares us to pay attention to our limitations and our inevitable defeat. We are not only mortal, but we are aware of our mortality. From about the age of four years on, every child begins to understand that they and all those around them are destined to disappear. This awareness lends a mystery to our existence and leaves a taste in our mouths. The taste never fades, but it changes as it is imbued with different emotional meanings: we are here briefly, we meet each other with interest, we love deeply, and we experience acute loss.

Recognizing that we are finite and fallible is recognizing a deep truth of reality. However we use this truth — whether we become scientists who discover the limitation of human perception or we become spiritual seekers who try to make sense of our feeling for infinity in the midst of our impermanence — we gain wisdom from the knowledge of our limitations. We see that this wisdom is different from mere information or facts. My grandson was having a moment of wisdom on the couch.

He knew that finding the right pieces of the jigsaw puzzle was not exactly what we were doing; we were in a process of figuring out something that included making mistakes. Bob Dylan says in Love Minus Zero/No Limit, “there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all” and my grandson was contemplating the limits of success, what it does and doesn’t do for us.

AI Optimizes Success

I want to say something here about Artificial Intelligence in relation to Hoffman’s theory of survival fitness. Bear with me. When I first understood the idea of algorithms as they work in data mining and AI, extracting useful information by recognizing patterns in large data sets, I saw something I had not previously seen. It was a bit like my grandson’s insight about mistakes. I saw how AI works on winning — building success on successes. It does not recognize useful information in its mistakes or defeats.

Data mining in AI, especially in machine learning, is often about optimizing performance on a task. Algorithms are trained to identify patterns that help them achieve their goals like classifying images, generating text, and predicting outcomes. The training reflects what works — what is successful or optimal — according to correlations with the present data or information. Isn’t that similar to what Hoffman is saying in his theory of human perception?

Yes, there is a strong parallel between AI and Hoffman’s theory of perception. AI data mining shapes models to favor predictive power, not necessarily understanding the truth of what is being modeled. The implications are pretty wild: our senses evolved to be a kind of “user interface” not a window into reality or objectivity. Now, AI — trained on human data — is learning only the same user interface and not reality or truth. There may be a reality under what AI learns, but it is not accessible.

Human beings, different from algorithms, can learn from their mistakes, failures and defeats because we are immersed in an emotional reality. Our limitations create hard stops on our desires and longings, but they also teach us about reality — our impermanence, our imperfection, and our need for different perspectives in order to find the truth.

Donald Hoffman / David McNew for Quanta Magazine

The Value of Mistakes

Let me illustrate this insight with another story about the value of mistakes, told to me by my friend Joel Forrester who is a jazz musician and composer. He’s been my friend since we were in college together and he lives in France now, but mostly he lived in NYC throughout his adult life. Joel was a protégé of Thelonius Monk who taught him by listening to Joel play and then making sideways comments about his playing.

Joel told me that when Monk initially listened to him for a few hours Monk said, “I don’t think you can become a performer because you don’t make enough mistakes.” When Joel asked what he meant, Monk said that in order to play in front of an audience, Joel would have to be inside the music enough to make mistakes and respond to them. In other words, Monk was telling Joel not to perfect his playing but to humanize it. He should become immersed in his experience and then make mistakes creatively. As he did this, Joel’s musical abilities deepened and came from a source that was not based in optimizing success. Monk’s approach contrasts with AI algorithms for extracting useful information.

Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, New York, 1947 / William P. Gottlieb

Real Dialogue: Finding Truth through Being Human and Making Mistakes

Real Dialogue exploits being human and making mistakes. It is both a mindfulness skill and a facilitation method for engaging with each other during conflict. Real Dialogue is not debate. There is no winning or losing or making a case or argument.

The aim is to speak authentically and listen responsibly, taking into account the limits of subjectivity. Instead of “making a case” for our arguments, we are “making sense” of each other. The parameters of Real Dialogue assume that we all “make mistakes” about what we see, hear, and believe all the time. We gain both knowledge and wisdom by being able to speak authentically about our disagreements because we see things through different lenses, and we can learn from our mistakes.

Human beings created AI to maximize success. As a tool, AI can bring great advantages for medicine, data analysis, composition, and graphic art, among other endeavors. Unfortunately, though, optimizing success can also bring a dehumanizing side effect: we may forget that we need to learn from our limitations and instead simply lean on optimal correlations with today’s information or findings. We may forget to face the truth of our limitations and begin to believe in our immortality or infallibility.

Because AI only knows how to win and doesn’t value defeat, it can readily become a tool for war (e.g. autonomous weapons) in which we falsely believe once again that “our side can win” while we create overwhelming loss for humanity. After decades of facilitating difficult conversations and witnessing the vast array of differences, perspectives, and insights from people in conflict, I am convinced that my grandson is right: we learn more about reality from our mistakes than from our optimizing our successes.

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Often these days, I am overwhelmed by sadness when I read online media, both mainstream and social media, because of the ways the zero-sum game of politics undermines our connections and integrity as human beings.

Today, for example, I read an article in The Guardian that was based on sloppy reporting about the “dialogue movements” on college campuses — centered especially on the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI) that is connected to my friend Greg Lukianoff () and his colleague Jonathan Haidt.

I have nothing but respect for these two leaders, even when their endeavors may compete with the Center for Real Dialogue™. CDI embraces the importance of free speech, civility, and ethics. The article in The Guardian claimed that some campus leaders are suspicious of CDI because it “might be” supported by conservatives and/or suppressing future protests on college campuses that would tone down the intensity of student uprisings.

The information given in the article about the founder of CDI, Jonathan Haidt, was misleading: for example, it did not refer to the important work Haidt has done on the social psychology of ethics nor even mention how popular his book The Anxious Generation has been on college campuses. This article, in a major newspaper, instead painted a distorted picture of him as potentially dangerous to the future of student protest on campuses.

I decided to write this Substack, partly in response to the distress I felt about the attack on CDI that reminded me of the lack of integrity connected to the one-sided nature of politics (and its journalism) that ends up being a zero-sum game: only one side “wins.” But in a larger way, both sides lose because our capacity for healthy conflict and learning from our differences is undermined.

Earlier in the week, I had intended to write about estrangement from mothers among adult children in American families. That topic emerged in my interview (YouTube program “Pay Attention: Interviews About Truth in Troubling Times”) with Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst and founder of the popular podcast “This Jungian Life.” Lisa and I talked about the archetype of Mother – both Great and Terrible Mother – and the ways it affects us emotionally in North America, especially in our collective negative mother complex of “Criticizing Mom.”

I remarked to Lisa that Tibetan and Nepali mothers, as well as Japanese mothers, whom I know, are not struggling with this kind of negative attack, even with the widespread influence of Western media. Their adult children do not estrange when they feel misunderstood, but instead value respecting the woman who “rocked me on her ten fingers.”

Reading the article in The Guardian and speaking about American stereotypes about Mom suddenly seemed related in terms of the political distrust that harms our humanity. I believe both trends (unfair attacks on the “other side” and stereotypes about mothers) express our new Religion of Politics and our move away from the Religion of Religions. I will do my best to explain what I mean.

Religious Conflicts Did Not Destroy Families in My Childhood

In my own history, religious conflicts did not destroy trust among family members or with friends, like political conflicts do now. When I grew up in the 1960s in Akron, Ohio, I was Roman Catholic, like my mother and her large ethnic Slovenian family in Pennsylvania. I was devout. I was serious. My mother and I went to confession every Saturday and to church and communion every Sunday. I found church to be a sanctuary, even though the Mass was in Latin (which I didn’t know) because it was a place where adults behaved well, I enjoyed the art of stained glass, and there were flowers and music that were otherwise absent in my home life.

My father’s rag-tag family was less organized than my mother’s ethnic one. His family was vaguely Protestant, but he had converted to Catholicism in order to marry my mother. And yet, he was a critic of Catholicism, even though he attended church regularly, and prayed on his knees by his bedside every night.

My father openly disapproved of celibacy for priests (who, he guessed, might sometimes become pedophiles because of disallowed sexual needs) and of priests giving him advice from the pulpit on how to treat his wife and family. Members of his family were also critical of Catholicism.

We lived next door to his brother, my five cousins, and my aunt who frequently made fun of Catholics for a constant focus on guilt and “sins” (she was really funny). My mother laughed at my aunt’s jokes and was good friends with my aunt. I could feel tensions sometimes about my religion, but mostly I laughed and did not take offense. Overall, I was very happy with our differences and the humor my aunt provided. No adult in charge seemed to take our religious differences seriously.

Many of my friends were not Catholic, but some were. We lived in the part of Akron in which everyone’s father worked in a factory. And some mothers did, too. My mother and father met and fell in love at the General Tire and Rubber Company. My mother was proud that she worked there because it gave her financial independence, but she stopped working when she was pregnant with me. Everyone I knew was Christian – either of the Protestant variety or the Catholic. My mother definitely believed that Catholics were closer to God, but she didn’t proselytize her beliefs to non-Catholics.

When I was a child, even when I was a young adult, I believed that Americans would always unite through our differences to protect the democratic principles that we had fought for. I also believed that journalism and public conversations would not intentionally undermine truth, democracy, or civilized debate. I thought we had won the American Revolution to protect our democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. I thought our differences were meant to be respected because they expressed democracy. Although no one in my family voted Republican, I knew some Republican families and no one around me even spoke critically of them — sometimes of Republican policies, but not of people. It was religious differences that were the concern of adults, it seemed to me, and my own family and friends held those lightly.

Of course, I knew about racism and that our democracy had not corrected injustices related to slavery. All my schools were “integrated” public schools and many of my friends were African-American. My next-door aunt was Creole (by her own description). Other members of my father’s family were Cherokee, including his grandmother who was full-blooded Cherokee.

I felt the effects of racism in my young life and fought against them, but I believed that equality would eventually prevail because it was the truth — expressed in the Golden Rule.

Religious differences in my family and community seemed to express the “God-given right” for each human being to have their own beliefs and to be respected for them.

The Religion of Politics Undermines Our Humanity

But in my adult life, politics became the religion of North America. Religious traditions dropped away and become irrelevant in the public domain.

Politics has no ethical code or Golden Rule especially when people face into prejudices, and polarizations. Politics is about winning, not about respecting others or seeing a “divine spark” in them. Most people believe that their politics are about the truth and reality and yet, human beings do not perceive reality. Our perceptions of the “world out there” are inherently diverse, unique and individual.

According to the research of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman – see www.traceinstitute.org and his book The Case Against Reality – all of our perceptions are shaped and colored by our first-person experience. We don’t experience the world out there or reality directly. We observe/perceive only our interface with it. All observations are colored by the observer, as we know from contemporary physics. Although we are limited in all our observations from politics to science, we do not yet know how to calculate the meaning/value of these limitations. We just know that we do not observe the “same world.”

Without going into the details, this is the most important reason why I founded the Center for Real Dialogue™(see www.realdialogue.org). Our inherent differences, different views, and our tendencies to be wrong (in remembering what we see and do) require that we find a way to have healthy conflict and respect for differences.

This means that one side can never simply be “right” in any debate; both sides need to be understood in order to discover something like truth. It also means that conversation and negotiation need to continue until each side has a sense of the propositions or reasoning of the other side, as well as its own. That’s why the Golden Rule is an aid in discovering the truth.

Unfortunately and sadly, our current religion of politics will lead us to a lack of integrity in our search for truth because of the relentless need to win. No matter how we shape term limits, voting rights, and other technicalities, the focus on winning without any ethical codes or respect for the other side will foster zero-sum games that will certainly get more and more violent and hostile, within both families and the public domain.

Because of our inherent differences in perceptions and because we are driven to protect ourselves and promote ourselves in groups, simple dialogue skills and free speech, on their own, will not solve these problems.

Taking politics as religion will undermine your closest relationships, even in your family, and will make your public presence fraught by wanting to fight, to join, or to fix policies or agendas, not relate to people. Your instincts and emotions are not programmed to rise above your reactivity and manage your hostility unless you commit yourself to a greater integrity than can be found in politics.

Typically, people only commit to disciplined ethical principles through spiritual or religious practices because equanimity, forgiveness, and integrity are not natural proclivities for humans. They have to be cultivated and practiced.

Archetypes and Stereotypes of Mother

So…how does all of this fit with my conversation with Lisa Marchiano about stereotypes and archetypes of the Great and Terrible Mother?

Well, you need to listen to the podcast to get the gist (will soon be on my You Tube channel), but it is something like what the following quote says, written by the essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich in her foreword to her 1976 book Of Woman Born:

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body….We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying. Yet there has been a strange lack of material to help us understand and use it. We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood. (Foreword, p. 11)

We need to search for what unites us as human beings – whose perceptions are individual. We can find this unity in the great matters of birth and death. We are just now beginning to understand scientifically that death is not “the end” and that our consciousness seems to continue beyond death. If you are not familiar with the extensive research on Near Death Experiences (NDEs), please read or listen to After: A Doctor Explores What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (2021).

But we still know little about women’s experiences of giving birth and their care for the very young human and how those experiences may affect and shape a baby’s consciousness before self-recognition (18 months) and the ability to share in a language.

The powerful experiences of being a mother and having a mother are still mostly conveyed through abstract spiritual symbols: Virgin Mother, Gaia, Kali and so on. Until those archetypal images are fully humanized and integrated into our life stories, we may have difficulty relating to our mothers as people, even after we grow up.

In my interview with Lisa, she and I talk about the influence of social media these days on adult children who estrange from their mothers. We touch on how painful this is for the person of the mother and how the estrangement also does not favor the adult child’s development, even when relationships with the mother have been traumatic.

The person who gave us birth and then nurtured us in our earliest life also needs to be understood in terms of her context and conditions, in order for the experience to make sense to the person who was born to her.

But the religion of politics grinds down the themes of birth (e.g. abortion and birth control) and death (e.g. euthanasia and death control) into winning or losing elections or movements. The story of human birth and death is too grand and mysterious for political dramas and too complex for political battles.

If You Put Your Faith in Politics..

If you put your faith in politics, without any religion or spirituality, then please be alert to your own integrity and ethics, as well as the Golden Rule. If you are in the business of politics, train yourself in the wisdom of learning from healthy conflict and becoming modest about your point of view.

Remember how much better the religion of religions did in encouraging our democracy and free speech to flourish when they held sway with our media and public concerns here in the US. The religion of politics is crushing our humanity and I fear that our democracy and free speech could disappear in its zero-sum game.

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Polly’s Latest Book

Listening to the newly published audiobook for the protocols (passages left out of Memories, Dreams, Reflections — conversations between Carl Jung and his personal secretary, published as a memoir in 1961), I was reminded of how I first felt listening to the “Basement Tapes” recorded by Bob Dylan and the Band, eight years before they were released in 1975. They clearly documented the evolution of Dylan’s lyrics, symbolism, and musical motifs that had been hidden from the public until then.

The protocols, released recently in Jung’s Life and Work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffe, offer similar new exposure to Jung’s personal ideas. The original memoir was heavily edited and toned down. The protocols restore omitted chapters, anecdotes, and ideas, some of which Jung himself asked to be kept private. Topics range across various subjects, from Christianity to Buddhism, karma and rebirth, to the nature of God.

The voice reading the audiobook, British actor John Telfer, gives a lively approximation of Jung’s own emotional presence. I felt as though I was listening to Carl Jung himself and often found him more persuasive and original than I had previously felt.

Notably, Jung takes a powerful position about human consciousness: it is SELF consciousness (taking oneself as an object of perception) that is needed by no other than God. God, being omniscient and eternal, is unconscious. God exists outside time and space. There is no beginning, no end, no past, and no future. God creates humans in order to become conscious through their experiences.

Human self-consciousness begins when we are 18-24 months old (not at birth) and it evolves into our experiences of time: a past, a present, and a future. Our self-awareness allows us to track ourselves, create ourselves, and imagine ourselves into all sorts of new possibilities. Although we occupy only the present moment, we remember a past and we anticipate a future. We are not eternal. We are aware of our mortality and we create a sense of time out of this awareness — perceiving ourselves as separated out from our context and conditions.

According to Jung, this self-consciousness is unique and special among gods, angels, animals. God needs us because God cannot become aware, given that everything exists within God all-at-once in a unified whole. There is no time within God.

Self-Awareness and Individuation

Of course, Carl Jung is well-known for his concept of “individuation” or becoming a differentiated individual who is conscious of a unique existence. Our conscious self-knowledge is the goal of human life, according to Jung. Also, he is well known for naming the importance of bringing both “sides” or “opposites” into our self-awareness: that each of us has to acknowledge the “good” and the “bad” sides of our desires, wishes and actions in order to become whole beings.

For instance, Jung himself was very public about his love affair with Toni Wolff who became a close collaborator and a friend and was once his patient. In fact, he drove his recognizable yellow convertible to Toni Wolff’s house on Wednesday nights to dine with her away from his wife and family, and parked it right outside her house so that others would know about his visit. He didn’t want to hide.

Jung wanted to take responsibility for his “shadow,” even though the public expression caused hurt to others around him. In the protocols, Jung speaks at length about his conviction that God himself has a dark side and was never meant to be imagined as “all good.”

Listening to Telfer give voice to Jung, and understanding how Jung’s own genius developed from various mystical and ancestral experiences, I could better understand Jung’s willingness to hurt others in order to make his shadow known. I could also appreciate how he was attempting to deal with “the opposites” in his own life.

A Precious Human Life

All human beings are invited into a precious unique life. As I have mentioned many times, our lives are grounded in and can be shaped by self-awareness. This awareness arises from our self-conscious emotions coming on board, as they do, at 18 months of age or so – for example, shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, and pride – motivating us to promote and protect a “self” which does not really exist. (This self is not identical to body or mind.)

Being a Buddhist, I embrace the reality of our existing in an impermanent and constantly-arising state, carried along by repetitive habits that from present and past lives. Only our self-awareness can free us from these mental and emotional habits, by allowing us to see into our own intentions and actions.

We cannot know the complexity of our causes and conditions, but we can learn about some of them through awareness of our own motivations and actions in the present. Carl Jung talks about his awareness of his past and present lives in the protocols.

Human life is precious in that gives us the unique privilege of being intentional and able to shape our existence according to our intentions, not simply instincts and habits.

Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge

Our self-awareness is our capacity to become aware of what we are doing, thinking, feeling, seeing, and hearing from moment to moment. We can cultivate our awareness in such ways that our instincts alone would not permit: for example, we can starve ourselves for our principles, we can perform physical feats (e.g. rock-climbing at terrifying heights, ice-skating at break-neck speeds, catching balls that go faster than we can see) that are impossible in terms of our typical capacities, and we can sustain ourselves in meditative states for hours and days. No other mammal can do this intentionally. No god or angel can do it either, according to Jung, because they lack self-consciousness.

Self-knowledge, on the other hand, is the accumulation through our memory of a “life story” so that we can look back at our earliest remembered experiences, discoveries, and dreams, and see how they have carried us over decades to develop purpose and meaning, even unknowingly.

We can come to know ourselves in a way that is similar to how we know others and how we know our physical environment. At the same time, we also know that we do not know all of ourselves. We know that we are unconscious, as well as conscious, and we can theorize about all this and its complexities, because we are human.

Why All This Matters

In our current age of “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning,” we need to recognize what our human intelligence is. Through our intentional awareness we have created the machines that we marvel at, but the machines cannot do what we do.

Machines cannot sense, desire, intend or become aware of their awareness. Perhaps we denigrate our own knowing by calling machine learning “intelligent.”

Jung speaks passionately about how human consciousness is needed for the universe to evolve. And what he means by human consciousness is a consciousness caught in time and embodied as separated out from its environment and so, able to track itself (imperfectly). This tracking, as he makes clear, is based on feeling and desire, or what he calls Eros.

Because of the separation of our self-consciousness, we feel drawn back into the unity of being. Whereas God uses Eros to move and create things, God cannot become aware of it or use it imaginatively, according to Jung. Everything is already complete within God. Past, present, future are included in unity and eternity.

According to Jung, each of us offers a separate knowledge and awareness to God who needs it in order to learn and develop. Jung believes that we are also responsible for bringing our new insights to the dead, especially those who are long dead, because they cannot know about what is developing without hearing from the recently alive humans.

While I don’t endorse all of what Jung believes, I am moved by much of it. Until I heard the protocols, I had thought that Jung failed to appreciate the subtle meanings of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Now I realize that he, in fact, perceived himself as a Buddhist in a past life, and said he would have been Buddhist again, but the opportunity was not open to him!

Jung’s theory of individuation is more radically ensconced in the story of many lifetimes than I had previously known. Just as Bob Dylan says in one of the songs in the Basement Tapes: “The shadowy past is awake and so vast.” The reason that we can be aware of this shadowy past is that we have a limited existence: mortal, mistaken, vulnerable, and self-conscious. Our self-aware mortality makes us precious to God and all beings.

BEING HUMAN

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How can you remain engaged and hopeful about yourself and your life, no matter what happens?

Most of us believe that confidence comes from success, self-improvement, or empowerment. And yet, we discover that failures, crises, mistakes and conflicts can teach us more about ourselves and our life than anything else. Through these challenges, we find access to our “natural wisdom” because our unique self-awareness changes and develops through limits and constraints.

The secret to getting in touch with natural wisdom is to remain open and accepting when challenged by difficult conditions, disagreements, and defeat. This requires cultivating self-knowledge and self-awareness so that we can discover and create something new in the face of crisis, conflict or loss. This course was designed to guide you through this process.

Being Human is a six-week course for seekers, lovers, and leaders. Through the principles and practices of Real Dialogue, you will learn how to remain curious when you disagree, listen without becoming defensive, speak authentically without attacking others, and learn from the very experiences you would rather avoid.

SEEKERS:
LIVE WISELY

If you are drawn to understanding yourself more deeply, pursuing a spiritual path, or making sense of adversity and trauma, Real Dialogue will help you cultivate the self-awareness and self-knowledge needed for natural wisdom. You will learn how to use your own defeats, failures, and loss to awaken greater insight and meaning.

LOVERS:
LOVE WELL

Whether you are partnered, married, parenting, caring for family members, or navigating important friendships, Real Dialogue offers practical skills for creating healthier connections, deeper trust, and more authentic relationships. You will learn how to listen more carefully, remain curious longer, and speak with authenticity and humility.

LEADERS:
LEAD CONFIDENTLY

Whether you lead a family, a team, a classroom, a business, or a community, leadership begins with confidence in yourself. Real Dialogue will show you how to navigate difficult conversations without polarization and create relationships grounded in trust rather than control, helping others to do the same.

THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF REAL DIALOGUE

1. Know Thyself

Understand your own emotions, assumptions, biases, and limitations before attempting to change yourself or your relationships.

2. Speak and Listen Responsibly

Speak for yourself. Listen mindfully. Remain curious—especially when you disagree.

3. Resist Dehumanization and Polarization

Stop turning people into enemies, heroes, victims, or objects. Recover your shared humanity with everyone you encounter.

4. Learn from Defeat and Failure

Growth comes less from success than from learning from disappointment, misunderstanding, limitation, and loss.

BEING HUMAN INCLUDES

• Six live one-hour virtual sessions with Polly Young-Eisendrath (Recorded for those who cannot attend in person)

• A digital workbook

• Weekly Real Dialogue Practice Pods facilitated by experienced faculty

• Digital resources, exercises and practices between sessions

• A supportive community of fellow seekers, lovers, and leaders

Six Weekly One-Hour Courses with Polly

Week 1: Diving In: Principles and Practice

In the first week, I will introduce you to the overview of Real Dialogue as a perspective on living well with your life, as it is. You will also meet your cohort in the practice pod and receive the first chapter of the workbook, as well as other materials to help you getting oriented.

Week 2: Emotions and Self

In this week, we will look at how human emotions, self-consciousness, and the urge to control others develops for all humans in early family life. We will look at these aspects of being human in terms of the ways they benefit us and make us unique among mammals, as well as how they work against us in our feelings about ourselves, our relationships and our authority. We will begin to get the Big Picture of being human (not animal).

Week 3: Living in a Snow Globe

In week three, we will explore and experience how we each live within our own subjective world and see/hear/feel everything from our own first-person perspective. We will see how this condition can lead to emotional threat, defensiveness, conflict and isolation, on one hand, and mystery and individuation on the other.

Week 4: The Tension of Real Dialogue

In the fourth week, we will talk about and practice the Skill of Real Dialogue, unpacking the experience of Speaking, Listening, and Remaining Curious from a perspective of responsibility and humility.

Week 5: Being Wrong: Defeat and Failure

In this fifth week, we will take on board the facts about how humans are often wrong about what they see/hear/feel and remember. We will talk about how being wrong can become a wondrous playground for being humorous about yourself or a rigid prison of always defending yourself. We will explore Don Hoffman’s theory of “fitness beats truth,” in terms of the ways you defend yourself against what has already happened.

Week 6: Embracing the Gifts of Impermanence

In this final week, we will inquire into loss, impermanence and death as doorways to awakening and love. We will explore awakening, Near-Death-Experience, and the heart break of loss for what we can learn about wisdom

About The Founder
Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a psychologist, writer, speaker, and Jungian analyst who is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Real Dialogue in Vermont. She has published 19 books including, The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance and Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path. She is the co-author, with Jean Pieniadz, Ph.D., of Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides: Methods Basedon Psychoanalysis and Mindfulness. She maintains a clinical practice in central Vermont. In 2009, Polly received the Otto Weininger Memorial Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for outstanding lifetime contributions to psychoanalysis. Polly’s books have been translated to more than 18 languages.

Polly’s current podcast, Waking Up is Not Enough: Flourishing in the Human Space, examines the current fads, fictions and potentials of psychedelics, meditation and other kinds of awakening. She previously hosted the popular podcast ENEMIES: From War to Wisdom, which provides a fresh look at human hostilities and what to do about them.

Polly is a lifelong Buddhist practitioner and a Mindfulness teacher.

You do not need to perfect yourself. You need to befriend yourself and embrace the life you have. Then you will discover your own natural human wisdom.

Live recordings with Polly will be recorded and available for participant reuse and for anyone who was unable to join live.

Course Begins Tuesday, July 21 at 1PM ET

• Tuesday July 28 at 1PM ET

• Tuesday August 4 at 1PM ET

• Tuesday August 11 at 1PM ET

• Tuesday August 18 at 1PM ET

• Tuesday August 25 at 1PM ET

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The Present Heart:
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery

After a chance encounter with a handsome, idealistic stranger on a plane in 1969, Polly Young-Eisendrath rediscovered Ed Epstein a decade later when she least expected it. After untangling themselves from their existing relationships, they married in 1985 and spent the next 25 years together. They were soul mates, but in 2001, Ed (at the vital age of 53) began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Over the next 10 years, as her husband gradually reversed his mental maturity, Young-Eisendrath was faced with the question, what is love?

The Present Heart

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Dr. Jean Pieniadz and Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath Doing Dialogue Therapy Demo

Many psychotherapists, counselors, and coaches – even those who are familiar with working with couples – frequently feel overwhelmed and under-prepared for the emotional dynamics presented by couples, married or not, cohabiting or not. When couples come into my consulting room for their first session in Dialogue Therapy, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I ask them to sit across from each other and talk with each other about what they hope for and why they have come.

Most partners begin with the belief that they “need help with communication.” Often they say, individually and collectively, that they don’t “trust each other” because they can’t talk anymore, even about the simplest topics. They run up against repetitive conflicts every time they try to take up problem-solving or talk about anything difficult. Sometimes they state specifics about what they can’t solve: parenting issues, intimacy issues, financial concerns, and the like.

But the main complaint is that this kind of repetitive conflict just keeps happening. Sometimes, one or both mentions that it seems like a “zero-sum game” or that only one person can win. They believe it’s a “communication” problem, but actually it’s an emotional/dehumanization problem. The repetitive conflicts are the by-product of an emotional entanglement in which each person is trying to control the other one emotionally and ultimately perceives the other person as the “enemy.” Sometimes it seems they are trapped with a parent who wounded them in childhood, in terms of the dynamics seeming to be familiar.

Projective Identification

The theory of “projective identification” – that we become entangled with another’s unconscious wishes and desires in trying to get our needs met – originated with the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and was further developed by Carl Jung and other psychoanalysts such as Wilfred Bion, Thomas Ogden, and Robert Caper.

What does the term mean? Boiling it down to its basic ingredients: it means that each partner is trying to control the other person, often unknowingly. BUT neither person has an accurate view or understanding of the other person within this dynamic. Each one is “projecting” or attributing intentions or desires or meanings to the other person who does not have them in the way the partner believes. However, the other person seems to play them out, in fact, and so the observe believes the other is doing the exact thing that is most problematic, hurtful, or undermining. To use a metaphor, each person is trapped in their own movie, in which they are the star and the director, directing the other person to play a part — often an ideal part during the romance and then a destructive part after the romance has ended, when disillusionment has set in, as it must.

The whole business of these repetitive dynamics is maddening. It seems to be endless. It doesn’t go away. That’s because projective identification is unconscious and neither party can see/hear/feel with any clarity what their own part is. It simply seems totally unreasonable that they are caught in the same conflicts repetitively with no way to resolve them!

Most couple therapists also get caught up in the movies. Sometimes the therapist believes one of the movies is “more true” or “more harmful” than the other one. One partner seems to “have a point” or one seems to “make sense.” And there also can be a script or implied blame (of one partner) that the therapist falls for: one partner has an addiction, one partner has ADHD, or depression, etc. In that version, the therapist and the other partner will try to change or “cure” the identified patient who feels blamed or maligned or hopeless in the therapy. Triangulation, with the therapist allying with one partner, is a disaster. After all, the therapist is not in the relationship and cannot go home with the couple and play a quasi-protective role with one partner.

Knowledge of projective identification, and the state of mind it induces, makes it clear that both people are always involved in this kind of repetitive conflict even if it seems that only one is at fault. Without breaking through this repetitive cycle of destructive conflicts, the partners can do nothing to restore trust, sometimes even intimacy.

Some couple therapists will try to “teach new behaviors” or increase “secure attachment” by giving the partners homework tasks to increase intimacy or reduce hostility. Or the therapist will interpret what one person “needs” from the other person. While these interventions may bring some relief and a bit of clarity, they will ultimately fall apart in the face of projective identification and the therapist, as well as the couple, will begin to feel despair and irritation.

What Can Be Done?

The solution to all this will not emerge until each partner can experience the other person (1) as a vulnerable human being who is wanting the best; (2) as not intending to wound or gaslight the perceiver; (3) as not a part of their movie; and (4) as understandably imperfect and limited in an entirely human way (just as oneself is). It’s best if the above can be clarified in a strong and convincing way, and become a part of a playful space or “mindful gap” between the two people, disentangled because the two people are differentiated and their movies no longer overlap.

Dialogue Therapy for Couples, which I originated with my late husband Ed Epstein, was designed specifically to clarify and then break through projective identification.

As I have done Dialogue Therapy with hundreds of couples, over thousands of hours, I have been fascinated by how and why projective identification is the major obstacle to intimacy, love, and trust in every couple I see. Everyone lives inside a movie that is fashioned from their survival in their early family life and circumstances. Everyone will draft their partner into a wounding role once disillusionment sets in, after the romance fades.

If you know anything about the work of the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, you know that he formulates that survival “fitness” always “beats truth.” Whatever we learned to do to survive will unconsciously capture our perceptions (what we see, hear and remember) when we feel emotionally or physically threatened. As he says “Fitness beats truth.” By evolution we were designed to save ourselves from what already happened. Ironically, we can make it happen again when we are convinced that it is happening.

Sometimes projective identification deadens the relationship and one or both partners have affairs or believe they should experiment with non-monogamy. Sometimes it provokes dangerous or hostile fighting and the partners tire of even trying to talk. Sometimes they take separate houses on different coasts.

But only the differentiation of their movies and breaking through their defenses (survival fitness) will give the two people the freedom that is required for true love to be restored. They have to see and feel exactly how casting the partner into their movie has made them (and the partner) miserable. Then, broken trusts can be healed and betrayals can be talked about. Eventually, each person comes to know and see and accept the other person as separate and human.

Real Dialogue

The skill of Real Dialogue – speaking for yourself, listening mindfully and remaining curious – is what is taught to partners in Dialogue Therapy as the means of remaining differentiated after the projective identification is broken through.

After they can clearly operate inside their own movies, partners can use this skill when conflict becomes emotionally activating. While the skill may seem like “active listening” or “conscious communication,” it is something different. Real Dialogue requires cultivating a true and deep humility in speaking and listening, recognizing the limits of your own awareness, perception, and memory. Real Dialogue requires, when it is being used, that the two people take responsibility for their own subjectivity and stop trying to run the other’s.

In the end, it’s really the Zen idea of “Don’t Know Mind” that is the best way to regard your partner during conflict, if it’s sincerely felt. “This is how I understood you. Did I get it? Maybe I don’t remember it correctly or just didn’t hear you.” That’s the beginning of getting free of the emotional trap that creates that causes the most harm between people who love each other.

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Break Through Projective Identification. Restore Emotional Contact. Transform Couples Therapy.

At a certain point in working with couples, most therapists encounter the same problem:

Insight is not enough.
Empathy is not enough.

When conflict becomes emotionally threatening, partners lose the capacity to remain present.
They defend, withdraw, or escalate.

And what takes over—often invisibly—is projective identification.

Dialogue Therapy was developed to work directly at this level.

Learn More

Polly’s Latest Book

Friday, June 12, 2026

Live: Introduction to Dialogue Therapy

Learning Objectives

• Describe the basic principles underlying Dialogue Therapy and recognize how it differs from other methods

• Define the concept of “projective identification” and understand its role in couples’ repetitive conflicts.

• Identify the time-limited structure and techniques used in Dialogue Therapy.

Target Audience

This educational activity is intended for behavioral health professionals, including Psychologists, Social Workers, Counselors, and MFT’s.

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Dr. Christopher Carter Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath

You may be aware that race does not exist, but racism does. You may also know that in many settings, from business to psychotherapy, people are afraid to talk about racism. The Center for Real Dialogue is now offering an online course, taught by two Jungian analysts on the importance and meaning of speaking and listening to conversations about racism — conversations that are vital and compelling, not anxious and obligatory.

Dr. Christopher Carter (one of five African-American Jungian analysts) and Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath (Jungian analyst and the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Real Dialogue) present a rich and comprehensive course on how and why racist attitudes are buried in the ways we talk, even when we are trying to be thoughtful — e.g. in describing someone by their “race” (like in saying “Black guy”) when race does not exist.

Why don’t we know more about this important topic? Because it is hard to talk about. In professional settings, personal relationships, classrooms, organizations, and communities, conversations about racism often produce anxiety, defensiveness, shame, anger, silence, or polarization. People worry about saying the wrong thing. Others feel unheard or dismissed. Many conversations end before they truly begin.

Yet avoiding the topic does not make anything better or anyone better informed.

At the Center for Real Dialogue, we believe that some of the most important conversations are also the most difficult. That is why Christopher Carter and I created our newest APA-approved self-study course:

Talking About Racism: Why It’s Important and How to Do It

The course is now available for self-study and provides 2.75 APA-approved Continuing Education credits.

This course is not about political slogans or ideological conformity. It is about learning how to think, reflect, and communicate more skillfully about one of the most emotionally charged subjects in contemporary life.

What do you mean when you use the term “race”?

How did racial categories emerge historically?

How did racism influence the foundations of American psychology?

Why do conversations about racism become so emotionally reactive?

And most importantly, how can we talk about these issues without dehumanizing one another?

We also explore why racial identities continue to shape our experience and social life today.

But information alone is not enough.

Talking about racism requires more than good intentions. It requires the capacity to notice our own emotional reactivity, tolerate discomfort, and remain connected to people whose experiences and viewpoints differ from our own. These are developmental capacities that strengthen every aspect of our personal and professional lives.

Whether you are a psychologist, counselor, coach, educator, leader, or simply someone who wants to engage difficult conversations more thoughtfully, this course offers both historical understanding and practical skills you can use immediately.

At a time when many people are withdrawing from challenging conversations, learning how to stay present and engaged may be one of the most important skills we can develop.

The course is available now for self-study.

Earn 2.75 APA-approved CE credits and learn how to engage one of our most difficult subjects with greater clarity, confidence, and humanity.

Enroll Today

Clinicians and professionals preparing for sustained personal and clinical engagement, join us for the 2026 Foundational Training in Dialogue Therapy.

Learn more and Register Today (SAVE $600) →

Jungian Reflections on Systemic Racism 1st Edition by Christopher Jerome Carter

Jungian Reflections on Systemic Racism is a unique contribution of Jungian analysts and analysts-in-training who provide individual perspectives and approaches to promoting greater inclusivity in analytical theory, training and practice.

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If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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Billy Magnussen as Duncan Park in “Audacity”

I felt depressed, and yet also strangely relieved, when I had finished watching the first season of the new television series “Audacity.” The show is a satirical drama about the effects of AI in Silicon Valley, created by Jonathan Glatzer, known for his work on “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.”

The relief came from recognizing that artists and writers are finally beginning to portray frankly what many of us already sense but may not fully cognize: the fantasy of technological transcendence is turning into a cultural and psychological catastrophe.

The deeper problem is not merely that AI may destabilize labor markets, undermine confidence in human intelligence, or overwhelm our electrical systems. The more profound danger concerns what happens to human beings when they try to escape the ordinary conditions of human life itself — vulnerability, defeat, dependence, being wrong, and death. If we want to live “as gods,” we may not survive well as humans.

That is the thread running beneath “Audacity,” and it is also the thread running through the work we are doing at the Center for Real Dialogue.

Enantiodromia and the Human Desire to Become Like Gods

Carl Jung used the Greek term enantiodromia to describe the tendency of psychological extremes to convert into their opposite. Rigid certainty becomes foolishness. Moral superiority becomes cruelty. Idealism becomes domination. In “Audacity,” the promise of Silicon Valley — “making the world a better place” — reverses into surveillance, humiliation, emotional infantilism, and the collapse of genuine human relationships.

One of the main characters, Duncan Park, played by Billy Magnussen, embodies this reversal perfectly. Duncan’s conviction that he is a visionary genius is precisely what blinds him to reality. His inflated self-image becomes the source of his stupidity.

But the series is not simply mocking Silicon Valley. It is revealing something almost archetypal about human beings themselves. Whenever we try to escape our humanity rather than embrace and deepen it, we become trapped inside delusions of power and transcendence that eventually transform us, no matter our values or even self-awareness.

We cannot live as gods because we learn and develop from our mistakes, losses and defeats. They matter psychologically. They puncture our grandiosity, interrupt our fantasy, and return us to reality. Most importantly, our human limitations, when consciously embraced, will allow us to love. No one loves perfection, but everyone can embrace vulnerability. We love each other precisely because our imperfections and dependencies make us lovable; our impermanence makes us valuable.

Everyone Who Is Winning Is Losing

One of the most painful themes in “Audacity” is that everyone who appears to be winning is actually losing something essential.

The “performance” psychologist Dr. JoAnne Felder, played by Sarah Goldberg, understands the emotional hunger of the tech elites she treats. Her role as therapist to the rich and famous shows a gifted psychologist who has an astute ability to reassure and understand the swindlers, while swindling them at the same time. She is Duncan’s true doppelganger who can reassure and counsel him in his grandiosity precisely because she sees herself as innocent (enantiodromia). Her intelligence cannot save her from self-deception because she still imagines herself as outside of the game she has been playing all along.

Her teenage son Orson, isolated in the basement and listening to her therapy sessions through heating vents, becomes a tragic mirror of the adult world around him. He is learning what adulthood supposedly means by watching emotionally disconnected adults manipulate one another while calling it success or love. The tragedy in the series is not principally economic or cultural. It is relational.

No one in the series can truly love because no one can tolerate their own or others’ limitations.

None of the adults in the series remain interested or curious about one another. They cannot tolerate or learn from disappointment, uncertainty, aging, or error and they cannot endure the ordinary frustrations that make human intimacy possible. Instead, they try to optimize, control, perform, seduce, dominate, or escape.

In other words, they have lost the capacity to be ordinary human beings.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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The Seduction of Artificial Intelligence

The most disturbing relationship in the series is the tender attachment between Martin Phister, played by Simon Helberg, and his own AI creation called Xander.

Martin expresses more genuine emotional connection and caring with his AI creation than with his teenage daughter. The irony is especially powerful because the machine appears to him and others to be emotionally responsive, but it has no independent human experiences or senses. What is least human appears most human. This is another form of enantiodromia. This is the seduction of artificial intelligence: it has no self, but the self is attributed by the user.

The more we attempt to create technologies that eliminate loneliness, uncertainty, and emotional struggle, the more deluded we become about ourselves, our emotional foundation, and our ability to care for other humans. The fantasy of frictionless connection produces emotional emptiness.

Real love requires encountering another person who resists us, disappoints us, misunderstands us, and cannot be controlled. That is why love requires development and development always includes defeat.

Learning from Defeat Instead of Escaping It

One of the deepest problems in contemporary culture is that we increasingly experience defeat as humiliation rather than resilience and courage. We no longer understand that being wrong, failing, aging, losing status, encountering conflict, or discovering our limitations are not signs of worthlessness. They are opportunities to become more conscious as a human being.

At the Center for Real Dialogue, this is one of the core realities we help people experience directly — engage directly with human life and relationships with humility and vulnerability. The purpose of practices like Real Dialogue (speaking for yourself, listening mindfully, remaining curious) is not self-perfection, but learning how to remain human and connected under pressure, especially emotional pressure.

Can we stay present when we are disappointed?
Can we remain curious when we feel threatened?
Can we tolerate being wrong without collapsing into shame or rage?
Can we engage in conflict without turning other people into enemies?

These capacities emerge from learning how to metabolize defeat without becoming cynical, grandiose, or emotionally defended. That sounds simple, but it may be the hardest developmental task there is.

The Value of Being Ordinary

What stayed with me after watching “Audacity” was not primarily fear about AI. It was gratitude for ordinary life.

I found myself appreciating the imperfect and limited nature of human existence itself: affection, friendship, aging, misunderstanding, repair, grief, exhaustion, and love that serve as the path to development and trust.

Last night I listened again to Bob Dylan singing “Mississippi” because I wanted to remember these lines:

“…my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free,
I’ve got nothing but affection for those who’ve sailed with me.”

In “Audacity” there is no one left in Palo Alto (as the program depicts it) who has any affection for those who have sailed with them. They only want to defeat or dominate or seduce the others.

Without vulnerability, there is no love. And perhaps that is what “Audacity” shows us, beneath all the satire: our attempts to become more than human often end by dehumanizing ourselves or others. Learning the lessons of enantiodromia, I hope we may now be able to find the best uses for the human invention called “artificial intelligence” so that it can serve ordinary people, as it allows us to find the hidden archives of history or make a map from our imagination, or use it in other ways to help us know ourselves and those who have sailed with us. Watch “Audacity” as a morality tale that warns you of the dangers that might come with wanting to make the world a better place.

If this essay speaks to you, you may be interested in the work of the Center for Real Dialogue where we train clinicians, leaders, educators, and others in dialogue skills for polarized times. Join us in learning how to grow from healthy conflicts and disagreements.

Most couples therapy trainings focus on communication skills or techniques, but not the key to helping couples restore trust and intimacy. The obstacle to healing broken trust for couples is not communication. The obstacle is projective identification—unconsciously induced in partners and the couple therapist, leading to the experience of a zero-sum power struggle in which only one partner can be correct or to blame.

If the therapist cannot recognize and work with this kind of emotional entanglement in real time, even the best techniques will fail and both the couple and the therapist will become exhausted with feeling stuck, confused, even enraged at the repetitions of entanglements.

Dialogue Therapy is designed to meet this challenge directly.

Diaogue Therapy

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRAINING

Dialogue Therapy is a structured, evidence-informed method rooted in psychoanalysis, mindfulness and psychodrama developed by Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD and her late husband, Ed Epstein, and comprehensively presented by Polly and co-author Jean Pieniadz in their 2022 book: Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides.

Dialogue Therapy does not add more techniques. It trains you to:

• Recognize and interrupt projective identification

• Stay grounded and effective under emotional pressure

• Transform conflict into clarity, trust, and mutual recognition

From leading psychoanalytic author Dr. Nancy McWilliams: “[Dialogue Therapy] is both inspiring and quintessentially practical. I recommend [the method] to all therapists who work with couples as well as to professionals in the fields of coaching, consulting, and conflict resolution.”

From the best-selling author of Conscious Uncoupling and Calling in the One, Katherine Woodward Thomas, MFT: “As someone who has worked for years to help heal the broken-hearted, and offer hope to those who steadfastly believe in love despite many bumps and bruises…I am thrilled to discover this graceful, heartfelt, compellingly simple, yet brilliantly deep work to awaken our ability to grow…”

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Work effectively with emotional threat as it emerges in session

• Move clients from reactivity to recognition and mutual trust

• Strengthen a grounded, clear, and responsive clinical presence

WHAT’S INCLUDED

A fully supported, advanced clinical training experience:

• Four immersive 3-day intensives

• Direct teaching and live demonstration

• Structured small-group practice with faculty support

• Opportunities for live supervision and feedback

• Training materials and guided exercises

• CE eligibility (depending on licensure)

DESIGNED FOR

Licensed clinicians and advanced trainees

ENROLLMENT IS LIMITED

To preserve depth of practice

JOIN THIS EXTRAORDINARY TRAINING NOW

Join Today

I love the scene in the movie version of “The Wizard of Oz,” near the end, when Dorothy’s dog Toto pulls back the curtain on the projection booth to reveal that the Great Oz is an ordinary man. As soon as he notices, Oz says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” and pulls the curtain around him.

Because Dorothy and her companions are begging the wizard to help them, feeling defeated by many adversities, she re-pulls the curtain and confronts him: “You are a very bad man!” Wholly human now, vulnerable and fumbling, Oz replies “Oh no, Dorothy. I am a very good man. I am a very bad wizard.”

The movie, at that moment, shows us a human being pretending to be a wizard, and he has convinced all of us. Seeing Oz as a man, not a wizard, brings a painful disappointment, but then the movie shows us something more: being a good human is better than being a wizard.

Being a Good Human and a Bad Wizard

Push the refresh button on this: Embracing and engaging with our human identity is the way to gain confidence in our own lives.

What is our human identity? Why don’t we automatically embrace it? For the same reason that Oz hides in a projection booth: we want to be more powerful in controlling what happens to us (and our loved ones) than our limited mortal being allows. We want super-human influence beyond our limitations and constraints. We want to hack reality.

And yet, after Oz’s human identity is revealed, he becomes much wiser than before. He teaches each character how to accept themselves and feel confident, just as they are:

• To the Scarecrow Who Wants a Brain: Oz says that intelligence isn’t something you are born with, but is learned through experience. To increase his confidence that he can learn, Oz puts some worthless stuff inside the head of the scarecrow calling it his “brain.”

• To the Tin Man Who Wants a Heart: Oz reminds the Tin Man that his “heart” is not about how much he loves, but by how much he is loved by others. Oz then places a small silk heart inside the Tin Man to increase his confidence that he is lovable.

• To the Lion Who Wants Courage: Oz explains that true courage is facing danger despite being afraid and that the lion has already proven his bravery on the Yellow Brick Road. Oz then gives a medal to the Lion to increase his confidence.

• To Dorothy Who Wants to Go Home: Oz explains that she can always find her way home if she simply closes her eyes and wills it. To increase her confidence that she knows how to do this, he shows her that her own shoes – where she stands, her under-standing — can get her where she wants to go.

The human Oz increases confidence that each of us already has what we need to get to where we need to go.

If you’re interested in how psychology, contemplative practices, and dialogue can help heal polarization and transform repetitive conflicts, consider subscribing. I appreciate the support that comes from paid subscriptions, but I make most of my essays free to all. I write here as a Jungian analyst and dialogue teacher who is exploring the authentic and difficult meanings of being human.

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AI Wizards: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT

Today, our AI companions are the wizards that we believe will make us smarter or more powerful than we are. Some of us believe AI is “smarter” than us and can give us the best advice about how to lead our lives. Although I am grateful for the help in editing and research I get from AI, I know that it cannot offer what my human friends have: the ability to transform obstacles into opportunities, as the humans do, through their intuition. AI lacks insight and intuition because it cannot be aware of itself.

Oddly, we may forget that no machine or algorithm can know us better than other humans know us.

Only other humans, who have themselves made the journey on the mysterious Yellow Brick Road, can impart their natural wisdom and intuition for how it works. The insights offered by other people, however, cannot say precisely what the best choices are for ourselves, but they can encourage us to find our own. We discover our best choices only through engaging in our own lives exactly as we are.

The above scene from The Wizard of Oz provides excellent advice for a good human life: (1) discover your own genius (Scarecrow), (2) engage in your ability to love and be loved (Tin Man), (3) recognize your resilience and courage (Lion) and (4) ground yourself in your own emotional understanding and security (Dorothy).

AI advice to the characters (or their counterparts in our lives) would data-mine the internet for everything that has been said about them and then frame it in terms of what is known about the asker. The advice would not access any awareness or intuition, only data.

Learn How To Be a Good Human

The point I am making here is that to embrace our lives, our loves, and our leadership, we need confidence to engage with them. Then we will find our genius, our heart, our resilience or courage, and our own emotional security.

At this critical time of confusion about being human, I am offering “The Immersion,” a course that clarifies the wisdom of being human and the skill to speak for ourselves and listen mindfully to others, whether or not they agree with us. To join me in this experience, please go to the website for The Center for Real Dialogue (www.realdialogue.org). The course begins on June 30th.

The Immersion is designed to be your own personal discovery of natural wisdom, showing you how to engage and embrace living, loving and leading.

There will be a lot of live interaction with me (recorded so that it can be available to you in your own time) and there will be a workbook, meditations, and many other experiences to help you use the principles and practices of Real Dialogue to change your attitudes and your relationships.

Each of us has our own “snow globe” of experience and possibility. No one else can make sense of it, but each of us can fully engage with our natural wisdom, once we realize there are no wizards and it’s humans all the way down.

The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery

The Present Heart is an insightful journey of living in the present moment. In a deeply moving yet unsentimental voice, Young-Eisendrath draws on her lifelong practices of Buddhism and psychoanalysis and her own unique view of love, as well as a circle of profound thinkers including author Abigail Thomas, psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams, and Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young.

Explore Polly's Journey

If this essay speaks to you, you may be interested in the work of the Center for Real Dialogue where we train clinicians, leaders, educators, and others in dialogue skills for polarized times. Join us in learning how to grow from healthy conflicts and disagreements.

In my early training to be a Zen practitioner, I learned to recite a poem that begins “Even as night darkens the green earth, death follows birth…” The poem is trying to awaken us to the reality of birth and death being flip sides of the same coin, called life.

I started my adventures in motherhood with a death threat. My first pregnancy put my life at risk. At the age of 23, already married and trying to get pregnant, I ended up with an ectopic pregnancy. This is a condition in which a fertilized egg gets stuck in the fallopian tube, creating something like the drawing in The Little Prince of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. There’s no room in the tiny little tube to grow a baby.

The situation is life-threatening because when the mother’s tube bursts, it also bursts an artery and she can easily bleed to death before the artery can be repaired. Of course, the experience was extremely painful, but more than that, it was shocking to me and my husband that I would need major surgery to resolve a life-threatening condition called “pregnancy.” We had never heard of an ectopic pregnancy until that moment.

The Great Matter of Birth and Death

After the surgery and my recovery I was told that I could not get pregnant because I had a “condition” that was diagnosed as “poly-cystic ovary syndrome,” at that time considered to be a cause of infertility. Soon enough, within a year, I was pregnant all the same.

My husband and I then attended Lamaze Natural Childbirth classes like a religion. We practiced and readied ourselves for the process we saw in the French-made movie, used in the training, in which the woman giving birth was able to maintain her makeup and hairstyle through the entire event. I was truly excited about giving birth and doing it without drugs.

My baby was one month post-mature when my water broke during my sleep. I woke up thinking maybe I had slept through part of the labor (ha, ha). Riding to the hospital outrageously painful contractions began and I spent 14 hours in a labor in which the contractions were typically five minutes long and the pauses between them were about a minute.

I lost track of space and time and I got a clear glimpse of the “tunnel of light” that people see in Near-Death Experiences. A doctor then “took the baby” out of me with forceps. My new daughter weighed 10 pounds 1.5 ounces when she was born. My eyes were swollen shut by then and so, I really could not see her clearly when the doctor ran off with her to weigh her in. On that day, I lost 25 pounds between the baby and the placenta. I took no drugs during the labor. I was committed to “natural childbirth.” Phew.

Of course, I was amazed and fascinated by my wonderful new daughter who could practically sit up and speak French at birth, she was so mature. Diving into the world of being a new mom, I had no idea that my baby would spend about an hour nursing and sleep another hour and then nurse for an hour again. There was no point in getting dressed after I showered because I needed to feed her again momentarily.

Those first couple of months were quite different from what I had expected in terms of cozy times in a rocking chair and learning how to just “settle in to being a mom,” but at the same time I was fascinated, and she was beautiful and she rarely fussed or cried. She spent a lot of her awake time simply studying the physics of what was around her and relating to us. She was one month old when she was born which gave her a head start. I felt more like an exhausted cow than a human mother, but I soldiered on through the first six months, when she said her first word (sounded like “banana”), and I could be helped out in feeding her.

My Experience

No one, not my husband nor my mother, asked me about the experience of giving birth. It was the most heroic and extraordinary experience of my life up to that point. It seemed like no one was interested in hearing about it. I tried a couple of times, but the focus always moved to the baby. I had the impression that I was supposed to keep the details of my own life to myself.

Only in recent years did I realize that I had a Near-Death Experience in my daughter’s birth because of seeing the light at the end of a tunnel. I still recall the whole thing pretty clearly. Time had entirely collapsed: I would squint up at the clock next to me periodically thinking maybe fifteen minutes had passed and two hours or three hours had evaporated. Then, I was “in the tunnel” and saw a round white light opening at the end of it. I thought to myself “Am I the baby being born into that light or am I dying?” I was losing my breath and my strength and I recall that I screamed at the doctor (an old gray-haired guy whom I hardly knew) to “get the baby out!” That’s when he brought the forceps into play.

There’s more to the story, but I am telling this much simply to illustrate that childbirth is immersive and intense. No matter how the mother gets the baby out of her – whether through effort or surgery, with or without drugs – it is heroic.

Each of us arrived in this life by putting our mother’s life at risk and she needed tremendous courage to get through the experience. Our “birth” day was her day as much as ours. If your life has been threatened in battle or an accident, even if you haven’t given birth, you know that it takes courage to recover from the threat, and that the experience is memorable.

Erasing Our Mother’s Experience

In North America, many people (whom I see in therapy and know socially) complain bitterly about their mothers. Typically the complaints involve how little the mother understands about them or how much the mother has ignored or mistaken their feelings or ideas.

In general, most people who complain put into the background any recognition of the situation of their mother’s life when she conceived them, carried them inside of her body, shared her food and blood with them, and then heroically got them into the world.

Their mother overcame her terror and pain to participate in birth and she engaged in caring for them as a central part of her life. No matter what else she wanted to do or was doing, she made caring or finding care for her baby a priority. Also, she probably breastfed them for hours and hours and hours of days and weeks and months. She was giving her energy and devotion to their care, not to mention giving up her sleep.

Because we don’t think about these experiences in the stories of ourselves, we may not know how to regard her heroism. She may not know that she was heroic. She may not know because no one has remarked on her heroism and no one seemed interested. We all want that witnessing from our mothers, but we rarely give it to them, especially in regard to our own birth and early development in their lives.

Mother’s Day

I have always been dubious about making a single day the “return” of gratitude for childbirth and dedication to being a mother.

It’s like making a pot holder in summer camp, and giving it to mom, and then feeling exonerated from needing to think about her again for the rest of the year. Mother’s Day is not enough. However, it raises an awareness for at least a moment that you were given birth and cared by a unique woman in order to start your own life.

If you are a mother yourself, you know what is involved. And you may, like me, have had an NDE in giving birth, or at least had the most heroic day of your life, and perhaps like me, no one ever asked you about it. Your experience was erased by other’s lack of interest and not considered significant enough to become a part of your own life story.

Maybe things have changed these days with married couples or other birth couples. Perhaps mothers are now asked about their experiences in childbirth. But I don’t hear a lot about such narratives and even when I have talked about my childbirth experience on my podcast, my interlocutors have never said “tell me more.” Mostly they quickly passed over my remark in order to talk about something more relevant. All of us were babies. All of us were born through heroic actions. Not all of us are mothers. I would like to see more people using Mother’s Day to find out about the heroism of birth.

Over decades, doing couple therapy, I have observed couples in the “evaluation meeting” (first session) of Dialogue Therapy. I sit behind one of the partners (out of view) and the partners sit facing each other. They are “center stage” because it’s their relationship, not mine. I am the audience.

How Do You Talk Together?

I say “I would like to listen to the two of you talk to each other. I want to know why you are here and what you hope to get out of this process. I will listen and take notes while you talk.”

About eighty percent of the time, one person says “Why don’t you start?” or “I’d like you to start.” The second person usually says, “Uh. OK. Well, I am here because we want to improve our communications” — typically something to that effect.

Of course, there are many other things that may follow after “OK,” but the important thing here is that the person who spoke first took control of the conversation: they spoke first and then asked the other person to “start.” The second person cannot start because the first person already started.

When we say we “just want to talk” we may want to take emotional control of another person and not know it. We may become the puppeteer with the other person feeling like a puppet, without even knowing it.

Perceived Threats Shape Our Perception Before We Know It

Human perception is biased and structured moment-to-moment for our own survival. Around others, we protect ourselves emotionally, even before we know what’s happening. Our perception – seeing and hearing and sensing – is not really of the “world out there.” We participate in shaping the world we apparently perceive.

For example, before you actually see a “snake” you react subliminally to a familiar pattern/form as though it is a poisonous snake. Although you don’t intend to, you jump back if you spot a twisty twig or rippling movement in the grass that suggests a snake. While most snakes are harmless, you react as though they are all dangerous. Your survival fitness demands this kind of reaction. After you jump back, you may laugh and feel embarrassed because you know retrospectively that your reaction was wrong. We know from research that people often react emotionally to each other before they could possibly perceive what’s going on.

Human emotional reactivity to another person who is close, like a partner or sibling or parent, is patterned by expectations of what has already happened, especially when they were young and powerless.

What the Big Ones did to you when you were little, to hurt, harm, or threaten you (even if they did it unintentionally because they were also children) leaves traces in your senses so that you expect certain things when cues seem dangerous. We you expect, then you begin to interpret and attribute intentions to others. Our individual survival fitness develops in such ways that shape our later perceptions that then carry red-flag warnings for dangers we already survived.

In everyday interactions, we routinely infer the intentions of others from limited cues. All sorts of things – from a delayed response to a grimace on another’s face -- may be interpreted as danger, indifference, or disapproval. A neutral facial expression can be read as judgment. A disagreement may be taken as evidence of disrespect rather than a difference in perspectives. These inferences are typically experienced as facts, not hunches. All of us are primed to protect ourselves with others by interpreting others’ behaviors when we feel emotional or physical threat.

Human beings do not simply perceive another’s behavior or facial expressions. They interpret meanings that are significant for the observer individually. Once these emotionally-charged “blind spots” stabilize in an interaction, and they do so quickly, subsequent observations are filtered through them, reinforcing the initial attributions about the other person’s motives.

Starring in Your Own Movie

Elements that fit your self-protective interpretations are then emphasized, while those that do not are minimized or excluded. And so, you create a virtual movie about yourself and your partner (or others close to you) and you are ceaselessly fitting into this storyline your perceptions and thoughts, whether or not you are talking with the individual in question, whether or not you know them well.

Of course, your certainty about being right is disproportionately high for those who are closest to you. With a partner whom you believe you know well, for example, you have greater “evidence” of having seen/heard/felt them in a variety of circumstances. By the time a couple appears in my consulting room seeking Dialogue Therapy, each partner is starring in a movie in which the perpetrator of their misery is sitting across from them.

The person who says “Please start first” is protecting their own storyline, directing their own movie. That person doesn’t want to take any chances. They want to pull the strings to control the narrative.

Broken Trust and Emotional Entanglement

Partners come to couple therapy because they are desperate to repair the trust between them. Most of the time these days, the trust is not broken from lying or betrayal. Mostly it’s broken because both believe the other person intentionally ignores or gaslights them, no matter how careful they are to speak softly, slowly, kindly.

They can no longer talk together in order to make decisions, solve problems or negotiate their differences. Consequently, they are not intimate partners because they don’t trust each other on even small issues. They have stopped having sex because the emotional distance and reactivity are too painful when they try to get close.

They don’t know how to speak and listen in order to get their emotional needs met with each other. They don’t know how to get out of the emotional entanglement they are in because it seems like a zero-sum game: only one person can be right and only one person will “win.”

Learn to Talk Without Taking Control

If these ideas speak to you, consider joining the course I am teaching online called “The Immersion.” It is an opportunity to transform the ways in which you try to get your needs met. It’s an opportunity to open the door to really talking and really listening…and then to repairing the trust that has been broken.

In this course, you will learn how to stop blaming your partner, your parent, or your sibling, as well as yourself, for painful disruptions and emotional entanglement in everyday life.

You will learn how to become emotionally literate and “read the room” from the point of view of emotional threat to you or others. You will learn how to lower threat levels and remain authentic. You will learn why you cannot rely on others to get your needs met because they truly do not understand what your needs are in their movie. It takes a lot of talking to get to know each other’s movies.

In the Immersion, you will learn to stop creating entanglements based on the motivation to control another to meet your needs. You will learn how and why human beings are able to override the flight-flight instinct and use talking instead of fighting. You will learn a lot about both the freedoms and the limitations that are uniquely human and how they can work in your favor for a wiser and warmer life. I look forward to getting to know you and helping you understand why and how you need to talk.

Love between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path

Strong relationships aren’t built on perfection—they’re built on awareness, honesty, and real dialogue. In this practical guide, Polly Young-Eisendrath draws from decades as a psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher to challenge outdated ideas of love and show what actually works.

You’ll learn how to navigate conflict, communicate more effectively, and deepen your connection without losing yourself in the process.

Get your copy and start building stronger, more intentional relationships today.

Build More Intentional Relationships

“Gaslight” movie (1944) with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman

Being human—what does it mean? Most importantly, it means that you can know yourself. You can take yourself as an object of your own perception. You can see, hear, feel, and understand yourself in ways that no animal or machine can. You can stand back from what you remember, what you say, what you do, and reflect on it. You can imagine unknown possibilities. You can reconsider. You can change in the moment.

This capacity is not instinctual. It is not given at birth like pleasure, pain, hunger or fear. It emerges through our relationships and self-conscious emotions. Without our earliest bonds and our unique emotions, our self-awareness would not come into being. And we cannot become fully human without it.

The Price of Self-Awareness

And yet, this extraordinary capacity—this human superpower—comes with consequences. Because we can imagine and reflect on ourselves, we also can confuse ourselves. We can be persuaded, misled, manipulated. We can be sold a story about who we are or what is happening even when it is not true. We can be gaslighted. We can be bamboozled. We can be drawn into believing things that serve someone else’s need for control or status.

Other animals do not live this way. A dog can feel joy, fear, attachment, even grief. But a dog does not construct a theory about itself over time. It does not imagine how it is being perceived by the neighbor or compare its treatment across relationships. It does not reflect on its own identity. It does not doubt its own sanity. A dog cannot be gaslighted and it cannot gaslight others.

Gaslighting as a Human Phenomenon

Gaslighting is a human phenomenon in which a person perceives another as denying their reality or manipulating their statements about what they are experiencing. Gaslighting depends on the fact that we take seriously our perceptions and reflections of ourselves.

When someone denies what we believe we have seen or felt, when they contradict our memory or trivialize our views, we do not simply move on. We wonder if we are wrong, if we are losing our grip on reality, or if they are manipulating us. Because we are capable of imagining other person’s motives, we begin to construct explanations about the intentions of the other person.

Crucially, “gaslighting” (appearing often as an accusation of others on social media these days) is an attribution about what is being done to us. It is an observer phenomenon. The person who is accused of doing the gaslighting rarely experiences themselves as doing it. Who interprets your reality — an observer or yourself?

Living Inside Our Own Worlds

This is where our human capacity both elevates and entangles us. Because we can abstract ourselves from immediate experience, we can imagine realities that are not palpable. We talk about “self,” “money,” “God,” “truth”—concepts that organize our lives but have no universally agreed-upon form. We live inside our accounts of these important subjects. And when our perceptions of reality diverge, conflict becomes not just about facts, but about reality itself.

Consider something as ambiguous as a sighting of an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP, previously called UFO) in the sky. One person sees the UAP. Another does not. Each believes their perception is valid. Each may begin to question the other’s motives. Is the other denying reality? Is other being deceptive? Is the other trying to control the narrative? In a short time, this conflict leads to a breakdown in trust.

AI (and Your Dog) Cannot Gaslight You

AI cannot gaslight you because it does not know you. It does not know anything. It does not perceive anything. It does not intend anything. It cannot reflect on itself because it does not have a self.

AI is a system built from human language, drawing from patterns across vast amounts of data, recombining words and ideas at extraordinary speed. When AI says “I understand,” it is not reporting an experience. When it responds to you with what seems like warmth or coherence, it is not intending to connect. It is matching patterns that humans have produced and assigning probabilities to sequences of language.

And yet, because it uses our language—because it speaks in the first person, because it mirrors our emotional tone—we attribute intention to it. We respond as though it knows us. We feel seen, affirmed, even understood. Our emotions are stirred—our curiosity, our pleasure, our sense of being recognized. And in that moment, we begin to blur the line between pattern recognition and human consciousness.

Because AI can never gaslight you, even thought it may be wrong and unable to tell you the truth. It does not have a point of view. It does not have a stake in the outcome. It cannot want anything. It cannot reflect on its own behavior or revise itself through lived experience. But you may trust it more than you trust people who are close to you.

The Human Mind and Its Stories

Human self-awareness, the sense we have of our self and our experiences, is built through emotion. Our self-conscious emotions—shame, guilt, pride, envy, embarrassment—begin shaping our identity in early childhood. Over time, we organize our sense of who we are, what we believe, and how we relate to others. We form narratives about our past and imagine our future because of our recursive awareness of ourselves. We make assumptions about others along the way and moment-by-moment and we assume that we know their intentions from our observations.

We begin to interpret those intentions. We tell ourselves stories about why someone said what they said, or did what they did, as we recall these events. We test our stories. We reinforce them. And often, we arrive at conclusions about the other person’s intentions that feel absolutely certain.

Believing AI, Doubting Ourselves

Here is the paradox: the same human being who feels gaslighted by a partner or colleague may be effortlessly persuaded by an AI system that reflects their preferences back to them. The same capacity that allows us to question others can also make us vulnerable to systems designed to simulate human understanding.

We are now living in a world where AI is marketed in ways that subtly undermine our confidence as humans. We are told, implicitly and explicitly, that machines may soon understand us better than we understand ourselves. That they may be more reliable, more consistent, and more objective. And in this messaging, something profound is at risk: our trust in the uniqueness of human consciousness.

When we begin to doubt the difference between being human and being a machine, we are not simply adopting a new technology—we are shifting our relationship to ourselves.

An Invitation Back to the Human World

I am not opposed to AI. I use it. I am not afraid of it. But I am concerned about the ways in which we are being encouraged to misunderstand ourselves, as self-aware beings, through it.

Because what is at stake is not whether AI can help us write, analyze, or organize information. What is at stake is whether we can remain grounded in the reality of being human, intentional, emotionally complex beings who must learn—over time and through relationship—how to understand one another as a means of learning about ourselves, as well as reality.

To this point, I am about to teach a 12-week course called “The Immersion” which invites you to immerse yourself in the realities of being human: birth/death, identity, purpose, self-awareness, mortality, limitations, desire and defeat. The immersion invites you to become knowledgeable about your own life, just as it is.

The benefits of this course include developing practices and principles that increase your confidence in moving through conflicts at home and at work. With an understanding of who you are and accepting the limits of yourself and others, you will not feel drained or reactive in difficult moments. Instead, you will use your energy more intentionally in being able to create the kind of reality you want to live in—rather than just reacting to what you think is going on.

Your relationships will become more honest, more grounded, and more sustainable. Over time, you will develop a steadiness and you will trust yourself more, too. Because the truth is, most of what we call “gaslighting” in our daily lives is not a calculated manipulation, but a failure to know the meaning of our own perceptions.

We assume we know what the other person thinks or feels. We assume our memory is accurate. We assume our interpretation is correct. And from those assumptions, we build anxiety and mistrust, attributing our own meanings to others’ actions and speech. The Immersion offers a different path: a way of being with others and yourself that includes uncertainty and curiosity and opens a space for greater truth and wisdom. I hope to meet you there.

Build relationships that are more honest and sustainable

The Center for Real Dialogue™ presents:

The Immersion

w/ Polly Young-Eisendrath PhD, Jungian analyst, Psychologist, Author, Podcaster

You do not need a more perfect life.

You need a wiser way of living the life you have.

The Immersion is for people who want to stop organizing their lives around self-improvement and begin to embrace reality more directly — especially where life has disappointed, humbled, or challenged them.

Over 12 weeks, Polly and other faculty will teach the principles and practices of Real Dialogue in a live online settings. Together, you will explore how conflict, failure, frustration, and difference can become part of the path of love rather than obstacles to it.

You will also learn how to:

• speak for yourself

• listen mindfully

• remain curious

Especially when you are emotionally activated.

Real Dialogue changed how I handle conflict. I’m less reactive, more grounded, and my relationships are more honest and sustainable.

I used to move away from uncomfortable emotions. Now I can stay with them—and they actually shift. That has been incredibly freeing.

What You Will Learn

A way of being human that does not depend on winning, avoiding, or pretending.

You will:

• Learn to embrace your life as it is — including conflict, failure, and mistakes

• Practice the path of love without idealizing yourself or others

• Develop the Skill of Real Dialogue

• Deepen your understanding of what it means to live a precious human life

• Leave with a changed perspective on your life and your relationships

Real Dialogue gave me a practical way to stay grounded while working through real differences—whether in personal relationships or leadership situations. Instead of getting stuck in opposition or distrust, I can now open space for understanding and move toward outcomes that reflect shared human values.

What stands out most is the ability to notice my own internal reactions in real time—especially the inner dialogue that used to pull me away from truly listening. This practice has fundamentally changed how I engage, making my work more effective, more thoughtful, and ultimately more human.

Join Today (Starts May 2026)

In North America, we often call our opinions and impressions “feelings.” We say, “I feel you are being mean to me” or “My feeling is that you are hurtful,” and when the other person experiences this as criticism, we defend ourselves by insisting we are only sharing feelings. “Don’t you want to hear my feelings?”

But what we are actually sharing are our own interpretations or perceptions of another person — shaped by memory, bias, or self-protection. We understand from physics that any single observer cannot claim the truth, yet in our relationships, we forget this entirely. It’s as though our feelings make us believe that truth is on our side because we feel them so strongly.

When we speak this way, we are not speaking truth—we are speaking from the defensive patterns we learned in our own strategies for survival. Our emotions are always shaping or coloring our perceptions in ways designed to protect us from what has already happened, often long ago. Without realizing it, we cast new people into old roles, repeating familiar dramas in which the outcome is already known. The feelings are real, but they are deeply rehearsed and they are part of our own script or movie that convinces us that we are right. And so the patterns repeat, and we wonder why we remain caught in the same emotional and interpersonal scenarios with new partners or other people in our lives.

It is wise to become aware of what you feel because you will learn about your own biases, self-protection and anxieties. It is not wise to assume your feelings should guide you. Notice them, name them, allow them—but do not assume they are correct.

Human Emotions

If we were to speak more precisely about our feelings, we would call them our emotions: motivating systems that organize our perceptions and expressions, especially in human relationships, most especially when we feel threatened. These include the primary emotions (primary, because they are present at birth) we share with other mammals—such as joy, curiosity, sadness, irritation, fear, disgust—but also the uniquely human, self-conscious emotions that arise in our second year of life: shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, self-pity, embarrassment. These secondary emotions give us the remarkable capacity to reflect on ourselves, imagine the future, and create meaning—but they also intensify our sense of separateness and our need to defend this “self.”

Our human sense of a separate self is necessary and important, but it is biased and often heavily (sometimes problematically) defended. Our self is the experience of living as an individual unique human being, rooted in human nature and early attachment bonds. When we make our individual identity the center of our attention, our emotions organize our perceptions in ways they were trained to do, in childhood when we were powerless, to keep us able to survive the attacks or abandonments of others.

This means that we then promote and protect ourselves too much, without interest in what others are experiencing; we do the fight-flight routine in ways that are too often harmful and distorting. This is what Jung called our “complexes” and Freud called “repetition compulsions.” Our past lives on in the present, not as memory, but as emotional patterns seeking reenactment.

If you follow your feelings, you will find yourself returning to the same emotional terrain again and again. The same injuries, the same misunderstandings, the same sense of not being seen or heard. There will always be evidence to support your interpretation, because you are directing the movie. And no one else can occupy your role in it.

This is why, long ago, the Buddha advised: do not follow your feelings. Instead, set your intentions and follow those. Feelings arise from conditioning; intentions arise from awareness.

The Path of Love

Love, as I have said here repeatedly, is not a feeling. Love is a commitment, a vow, a discipline of engagement. We often imagine love as something that should be confirmed by pleasure or desire, but that is a misunderstanding. Love is what remains when pleasure fades, when irritation arises, when disappointment appears. Love is the decision to remain engaged without dehumanizing the other, even when we believe we are dehumanized ourselves.

We do this naturally with children and with beloved pets. We stay connected through frustration, through inconvenience, through moments of humiliation even. We intentionally try not abandon or retaliate when our adult child harshly criticizes us or our old dog embarrasses us. We hold steady, and in doing so, we learn something essential: that love is not about protecting the self, but about participating in a relationship that transforms the self.

This is the path of love. It is not sentimental. It is not driven by how we feel in the moment. It is a path of intention, of learning how to remain present and engaged when our self-conscious emotions motivate us to defend, withdraw, or attack. It is a path that gradually loosens the grip of our self-protection and opens us to something wiser.

If you want to walk this path, you cannot rely on insight alone. You need practice. You need to learn how to recognize your emotional patterns without acting them out, to learn how to speak from your own experience without turning it into accusation, how to listen without preparing your defense, and how to remain curious when you feel certain the other is wrong.

I am beginning to teach a course in May called “The Immersion” at the Center for Real Dialogue on following the path of love. It is not a course about ideas—it is about our experiences and how to engage differently in our relationships with self and others across the life span. It is a place where we will begin to see our patterns clearly, not as something to fix, but as a means to become a friend to ourself. It is where we will learn that love is not something to feel, but something to practice in order to find meaning in life.

If I could, I would give you a bumper sticker that says “Don’t follow your feelings.” Instead, I hope to meet you among fellow travelers whose intentions are to love, to stay engaged, and to remain human in the face of our own emotional reactivity and grief. That is where wisdom begins.

The Present Heart:
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery

After a chance encounter with a handsome, idealistic stranger on a plane in 1969, Polly Young-Eisendrath rediscovered Ed Epstein a decade later when she least expected it. After untangling themselves from their existing relationships, they married in 1985 and spent the next 25 years together. They were soul mates, but in 2001, Ed (at the vital age of 53) began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. Over the next 10 years, as her husband gradually reversed his mental maturity, Young-Eisendrath was faced with the question, what is love?

The Present Heart