psychelog

BRIEF ENCOUNTER 

        One of the best questions to ask in a quiet moment is: ‘how am I’.  A good question, but a difficult one – difficult, because unless you are in an unusual state, it is hard to tell. You just feel ordinary. And ordinary is – well, just normal, just like usual. But if you and I could do a miraculous switch, if we could swap places, if I could feel just like you usually do, and you could feel just as I usually feel, we would both have a great shock. It would seem utterly strange and unfamiliar to both of us. I would say, “Good God! Is this how you normally feel?” And you would say, “Is this what you call ‘ordinary’ – you can’t possibly always feel like this, surely!” We would both be either pleasantly surprised or horrified. 

        Does this mean that we are condemned to be totally blinkered, never to really meet anyone outside ourselves – to never really know anyone? Well, not quite. There are windows where we can see outside our own goldfish bowl. These are usually treasured moments that stand out in one’s memory; and, no matter how long ago, we never forget them.  Often centred on a certain time and place, for an instant the world opened up to reveal something much bigger. Something happens, like a momentous release. Hard to say whether it is oneself that opened up or the world – probably both. Certainly the experience is so emotionally stunning that we are gobsmacked. Falling in love is a universal high that everyone knows at some point in their life – and with it the world looks completely different,   

If you are lucky you may have many such high points in your life, what Abraham Maslow called ‘peak experiences’. Maslow thought that, aside from the use of psychotropics, the two easiest ways of achieving a peak experience is through sex and music. Peak experiences can last a few seconds, to hours, to weeks. Usually the more intense they are the briefer the encounter.

       They occur in circumstances you might expect, like standing on a mountain top or arriving in a new country or a rendezvous at the Brighton Library. But they can also occur in the most unlikely situations. These encounters always feel as though something is coming from the outside, as though something is being given; they carry a sense of absolute reality. They can’t be earned or prepared for; and they can happen at the most unlikely times and places: walking down an ordinary street, or whilst making an omelet or sitting on the toilet, or perhaps, more understandably, whilst making love or feeding the baby you have just given birth to. There is a sense of revelation – that this is what life is about, what I was born for. There is the conviction that this experience makes sense of everything without in the least worrying about how it does. If anything is fulfillment, this is it.

       James Hillman observed that peaks and highs say nothing of the worth of the person having them, for they can occur among psychopaths and criminals. Soldiers experience a high in battle and so does a crowd at a lynching. This is perhaps a little unfair; there is surely a distinction between the buzz of killing someone and being transported by a tree in blossom. 

       We can attach all kinds of labels to these peak experiences and this can lead us off into the misty realms of metaphysical speculation: are they spiritual moments; can we regard them as religious, transcendental, psychological, chemical, hormonal or mystical? Do they give us an insight into ultimate reality or are we just looking deep into our own navel? Here the intellectual question is: what are we going to do with them, where are we going to place these experiences in the vast panoply of explanatory claims. It’s almost a matter of take your pick – it depends on your partiality, whether you are ‘spiritually’ inclined, or have more ‘naturalistic’ leanings. For myself, I incline towards the latter because anything religious or spiritual makes me nervous, and because I see these things as part of the natural world. 

In one important respect these brief encounters, these peak experiences, are different to ordinary life in that they come as a gift - you are not called upon to make any effort. This is what that makes them unique and worthwhile. It seems like a miracle that for once I do not have to try. Whatever is happening is being done and as such is outside my control. The amazing thing is that this is not frightening. Giving up control seems like a wonderful relief. It actually seems possible to take my hands off the steering wheel without coming to grief. I don’t need to drive, to steer my way through every circumstance in life, negotiating other people’s every move, watching out at every intersection, obeying the rules, I don’t have to watch all the signs. I can let go and let life carry me. And after my brief encounter do I still believe this? Not really. It never seems that safe to do so. And it very likely isn’t. We didn’t evolve our cognitive faculties for nothing.

      There is no way we can layback as though life is total gift, but is there anything we can gain from peak experiences, these brief encounters with freedom? The best might be to consciously value them, keeping them at the back of one’s mind, knowing what one’s real values are and, in doing so, maybe just touching on the felt-sense of how it actually felt when it was fresh. This can help keep things in proportion and inspire a little more trust; and subliminally it will help steer one towards better choices in life. Real values do that.

      In these brief encounters something is given to us. It’s as though they come from outside the ego, that they are being done and, as such, outside our conscious control. This made our ancestors curious. If it was ‘being done’ who was doing it? The ultimate ‘who’ of course was God (or gods). Maybe spirits were responsible; or some supernal cosmic consciousness; or maybe The Ground Being (whatever that is). But maybe all this is looking in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s our biological nature, or some aspect of it, that we give over to in these brief encounters. Our recent research into focusing does suggest something of the sort. Whatever that aspect is, it is something even more marvelous and unknown than any of our divine astral imaginings.

        Before 1700 just think of all the disastrous ideas we had about the nature of things – and all the things we didn’t know; and we knew nothing at all about our biological nature. We do move forward and today we are beginning to understand that these unknowns, all that happens in these brief encounters for example, are open to enquiry. What we have in our favour, what we didn’t have in times past, is a consciousness of how much more there is to know about the human species and the way it has evolved.