Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way of wisdom, and it is the way that people operate in the first half of life. “Primitive” and native societies might well have held this tension better than we do today.2 There is much evidence that many traditional societies produced healthy psyches and ego structures by doing the first half of life very well, even if they were not as “developed” or individuated as we
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