by Stanley
You must have had the experience of realising something you already knew, in a way – but didn’t know. Somehow you knew it all along – but didn’t know you knew. It’s as though you knew it at the back of your mind but paid no attention to it. Very strange how one can do this! But it’s only the tip of a vast terra incognita.
There is a whole area of mindbody which, to varying degrees, is not conscious. We are not talking about the Freudian unconscious which consists of repressed feelings, wishes and painful material. There is a wider area of knowledge that you are not conscious of because you don’t need to be. You know how to ride a bike, but you don’t have to give your body instructions to do it. Your fingers know how to type, but you are past deliberating about it. You know all the subtleties of English usage without the use of gramma. You know the intricate etiquette of the family Christmas gathering without reference to all the unspoken and highly complex rules of behavior – how to behave with each relative comes naturally, like riding a bike! But there are differences: riding a bike is only sensorimotor knowledge; the Christmas gathering implies a vast store of relational knowledge, the actual complexity of which is truly staggering. You know it all too well, but mercifully not consciously. It is what we call implicit knowledge, and we don’t have to bother our heads with it. In fact, we are much better off if we don’t. Some things are best left unexplored. You know the old story of how to ruin your golfing partner’s game: you just get him to analyse his stroke in detail when he is half way round the course.
When we try to explain something we have a feel for, but only know implicitly, we run into an unfathomable chaos. In focusing we refer to it as the murkiness of the felt-sense. But this chaos is more ungovernable and ominous than this suggests. ‘Go on, explain what you really feel’ is a monstrous and impossible challenge. Even in the act of explaining, it changes; something else occurs to us, some slightly different perspective. We struggle on, trying to maintain our original flash of certainty. But we falter. Our original feeling isn’t so simple. When we really look at it, it’s a mess of confusion. Our exposition gets dangerously weaker until we’ve lost all sense of what we started to explain. New feelings about the whole thing crowd in on us. Lost! Unless, of course, we are one of those dogged souls who can rave on having quite lost the theme, just managing to keep up the appearance of certainty; or, at the very least, still running the worthy effort to show others who and what we are.
Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco expresses something similar:
‘Here's the trouble. ...When you express an (implicit) idea you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organized and concise, and comprehensible to others. As long as you limit yourself to thinking it, the idea can remain the marvellous mess that it is. But when you decide to express it (in words) you begin to discard one thing, to summarize something else, to simplify this and cut that, to put it in order by imposing a certain logic: you work on it a bit, and in the end you have something that people can understand ... At first you try to do this in a responsible way: you try not to throw too much away, you'd like to preserve the whole infinity of the idea you had in your head. You try. But they don't give you time, they are on you, they want to know.’ [1]
I suppose this is the reason why other people’s understanding of you is seldom what you feel about yourself. Unless it be in one of those beautiful moments when two people mutually recognise each other in a way that is beyond speech – that, in fact, can’t be spoken about, but which is clearly known implicitly by both. Such are moments of meeting, moments of wordless compassion and empathic implicit understanding, moments of true intimacy. Some people will tell you that even this is a delusion, like falling in love.
But this kind of implicit understanding is what you had before you learned language, where you learned all those lessons that will be a baseline for the rest of life, where your instincts were moulded. It is the very search for intimacy that required you to learn what others wanted of you. And you learn it all before ever you can speak or understand cognitively what is being said. It becomes your particular version of human nature. There never was a time when you learned so much so quickly; learning, too, how to be intimate, and just how much and what kind of intimacy, was allowed.
From the point of view of tidiness, your implicit nature is a shambolic mess. Like nature itself it is a vast conglomeration of make-do adaptations to circumstances and to a culture that is itself a shambolic mess. No intelligent design anywhere in sight. But from another point of view it is a miracle of spontaneity. It’s like the difference between a wildflower meadow and a cultivated suburban garden.
The tidy mind despairs, but the child in us whoops with delight.
[1] Quoted in: Stern, D.N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Norton, NY, 2004 pp.117
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