In April 1964 I met a man who changed my life forever. I was twenty years old, in my highest year at UC Santa Barbara, when I got a class from the world -renowned philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich defined religion not as a set of beliefs or practices, but as a human experience of “finally worrying”. This concern is what defines a religious person. His idea of God was Nobut the territory of being. For Tillich, the territory of existence could mean the Big Bang, the Universe itself or a Catholic God.
He rejected the traditional theoretical concept of God as a being that moves around the universe to do great things and to worry, intervene and deal with human beings. On the contrary, Tillich conceived God as a symbolic object of global human concern about the final issues of meaning and purpose. So God is out of our universe and is a symbol for the answers to our deepest questions, but the answers always escape our understanding.
Tillich said,
“Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions. First, what’s up with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of alienation?
Second, how would we be like we were whole? Healed? Did it take place? If our feature was fulfilled?
Third, how do we move from the state of breaking to wholeness? What are the means of our treatment? ”
I have spent the last sixty years of my life that are deeply immersed in these three fundamental questions and I know that it is a journey of life and especially about the times we now live in, who have echoes with Tillich times.
Tillich was one of the first team of teachers and the first non-Jewish professor to be fired by Hitler for the opposing Nazism. The Nazis suppressed his book The socialist decision (1933) and sent it to the flames on the burns of Nazi books. At the end of 1933, he left Germany with his family in the United States, where he was founded as a public spiritual, holding positions as a philosophy professor at many universities.
Meeting Dr Phil Stutz
I never thought I would meet another spiritual with Paul Tillich’s practical wisdom, but that changed when I learned about Phil Stutz. I am a psychotherapist specializing in men’s mental, emotional and relational health for more than sixty years. But by November 13, 2022 I had never heard of Dr. Stutz. This was the day I received an email from my colleague, Brian Johnson, a optimization creator and the founder + CEO of Heroic. Brian shared information about a new documentary movie called Post by the well -known actor Jonah Hill (Moneyl and The Wolf of Wallstreet.) Brian said,
“I love Phil Stutz. He’s my coach, my yoda, and my spiritual godfather.”
I learned that Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist who felt psychiatry, as he is practiced, was mainly limited to the treatment of symptoms, not to the underlying causes of our problems. He has become a therapist/coach who works with some of the most elite actors and executives of Hollywood in a 40+ year career. He is also the writer of bestselling, his, his, The tools; Liveand more recently True and false magic: a tooling workbook. I watched the Documentary Netflix and bought the books.
“Why are you here?”
This is the first question. Psychotherapist Phil Stutz asks each of his patients, including Jonah Hill, whose documentary focuses on the therapist who says he has changed his life. Unlike many therapists whose primary approach is to sit and hear, Stutz prefers to take a more active role in the process: he says that his goal is to find out what his patients really want and to give them tangible steps to get there.
Watching the film for the first time, he introduced me to a man who is clearly a teacher to help people, but is also a man who is very human and is not afraid to share his vulnerabilities, including his challenges with Parkinson’s disease, which he developed in 2006.
I felt immediate with his life and his work. We were both born in New York, I in 1943, Phil Stutz, 1948. We both had provocative childhoods that contributed to our professional work as healers and writers. In the introduction to his book True and fake magic Says,
“I’m not special. I never thought I would be a public figure or writer, in fact, for the first stretching of my life, I didn’t even think I was smart. I had the perfect parents to perpetuate an ignorance of who I was, why I didn’t know.”
I could write these lines myself. Like Phil, I worked hard in college, got good grades and accepted two excellent medical schools, one in New York, the other in San Francisco. I chose the UC San Francisco, partly because they offered a four -year, full tuition scholarship. But mainly because I imagined that if I finished the Medical School and became a psychiatrist, I could understand why my father in the middle of my life took overdue hypnotic pills when I was five years old.
As I wrote in my book, My distant dad: treatment of family father’s injury, My father did not die. Instead, he was committed to the state hospital in Camarillo, north of our Los Angeles home. I grew up wondering what happened to my father when it happened to me and what I could do to keep it happen to other families.
Phil’s father wanted to become a pediatrician because he had lost a child – Phil’s younger brother who died of a rare kidney cancer when Phil was nine and his brother was three. Phil defied his father’s wishes and went to psychiatry. I flawless my father’s wishes when I left the Medical School and went to social work. Most of them all thought I was crazy to give back four years of scholarships and leave the Medical School, but I felt I called to follow a different path.
“I really liked to work with people,” Phil said, “but from the beginning I knew something was missing, I quickly discovered that the position of the treatment of psychiatric patients was a combination of psychotherapy model, which I did not believe at all, and sometimes.
I could write these same words. When I left Medical School and went to social work, I developed my own way to help people. Ever since he learned about Phil Stutz, I often imagine what could be if we had attended the university together and worked on the three questions that Paul Tillich called us to explore:
- What about men, women and society?
- How would we be if we were healed, whole, did?
- How do we move from breakage to wholeness?
Phil Stutz: God reveals himself in three areas
One of the things I have most appreciated for Dr. Stutz and his work is that it offers practical ways to harness the power of what he calls “the power of life” and “God-Chinese” and combines them with practical guidance for treatment. We all have our own perception of God and the way God-Spirit is revealed. I very much echo the way Dr. Stutz describes it:
- God is revealed in three areas. Each sector contains some aspect of God and each sector has its own request.
- You cannot access the forces that God wants to have and you cannot really experience reality until you face the three areas. Dr Stutz calls them “the three great inevitable realities of life”.
- The first sector is pain. The pain is every event in which you meet the universe and it hurts. The universe is not designed for your comfort. It is designed to support you by pressing you forward. “Forget to avoid pain,” says Dr. Stutz. “It is impossible and it is God’s first gift.”
- The second sector is uncertainty. The universe is in steady flow, constant movement. Everything changes every second. Our desire to be sure of the important things in our lives is a trap. It is not bad that we are not experienced in the rules of the universe. Like the wisdom of 12 -step recovery programs, “leave it, and let God.”
- The third sector is Continuous work. Most of us work for money and many will retire if we won millions in the draw. Most of us want to know ourselves and hope that someday we will reach our goal. However, “we live in a universe that always moves,” says Dr. Stutz. “Everything is constantly changing and shifting. Continuous work is our gift from God and all the life on planet Earth.
“The three areas, in combination, unlock the real magic, not a false power,” says Dr. Stutz. “As soon as you learn to move the pain, you will gain the ability to expand, as soon as you develop faith, freely selected, to deal with uncertainty, you will gain the ability to decide and create; and once you embrace continuous work, you will get the ability to be infinite.
In future articles I will share other things I have learned from my work in the last sixty years and from what I have learned from Dr. Stutz and his work. If you appreciate articles like these I invite you to visit my website and sign up for my free weekly newsletter.
