The felt-sense is an active intuition, a sort of internal
guidance system, seeking out the lost parts of you that have been waiting to be
found, waiting to be felt, waiting to be sensed – the parts of you that have
been rejected and want to come home. In therapy, when a person trusts the felt-sense,
the talk seems to wander all over the place. No one is guiding it, but it is a
process of active intuition, honing in on exactly what avenues have to be
explored and in exactly what sequence. Afterwards, it is only looking back on the
session that we are aware of the purposeful tracking that has taken place – an expedition
that apparently had the aim of naming an emerging reality – “What I looked upon as selfishness I now
realise was my first attempts at a healthy self assertion”. The old reality
(selfishness) has dissolved and there is now a new name for a new reality.
For an emerging reality to fully realise itself it has to
have a new name. Here, two things have happen simultaneously: the awareness of
a new ‘something’ and a new name for it: healthy
self-assertion. Both the awareness and the new name are now the new way of
looking. The old reality has been un-named.
Where a person’s felt-sense has been suppressed there can be
no emerging dimensions of reality. Old realities cannot be unnamed; they remain one-dimensional and fixed. There are no
doubts. There is a confidence of what is so. A mind with perfect confidence and
stability is like a chemists’ lab where everything is classified, labeled and
named. The advantage of this is that life seems to be clear cut and there is a
certain feeling of rightness; the disadvantage is that there is no change. All
attitudes are inflexible.
The process of therapy involves the naming of things, but it also undoes
what has been named. Realities are constantly made and unmade. In the process we
move through cycles of certainty and uncertainty as our picture of life
dissolves and reassemble itself in new forms.
The naming of things is an indispensible psychic activity. It
forms the solidity of the world. We imaging we know what things are. There are
a great many things that need to be permanently fixed: my name and date of
birth, which house I live in, the very house itself, the sky, the earth, my
bank account number. Each of these has a name and a fairly fixed reality, (provided
we are not on LSD). We count on no change
– that when I wake up in the morning I will find the same world I left last
night. When we name something we freeze-frame it; like a still photograph we
keep for reference. It gives us our conceptual stability; indeed it keeps the
world itself stable. An apple is an apple, a chair is a chair, meanness is
meanness, a kind heart is a kind heart, the moon is the moon. The name of a
thing tells us what it is and what it is not. We draw boundaries when we name
things – each thing is then a discrete ‘itself’. You might say that naming is
what makes ‘things’. When we do this, a thing is what it is and nothing else.
But the naming things can have a deleterious effect; we are
inclined to get too occupied with the name of a thing than by the thing itself,
we stop seeing things and concentrate on what they are called. “Don’t think, look!” Wittgenstein urges us in his
Philosophical Investigations.
There is a Zen saying, ‘name the colours, blind the eyes’. All
the same, we need words to order the tumultuous impressions of experience;
otherwise we would never be able to make up our mind about anything. When we
call someone a ‘bully’ the word means something. Saying they are a bully gives
us a grip on a doubtful character. Now we know what they are! We have ordered
the world just that little bit more. We say that labels stick – and one would
have to say, yes, that’s what they’re for
! They make for stability and
understanding.
But given too much stability and we get stuck in a sea of
categories and labels. Just like modern psychiatry is stuck in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders). There is now hardly any aspect of normal human behavior that is
not labeled a ‘mental disorder’. Great for medical diagnosis, but lacking a
certain humanity, not to say, humility
Reality itself is remarkably diverse and as culture evolves
and changes so do all the labels we give things. Masturbation is no longer an
illness; an earthquake is no longer God’s vengeance; and dogs are now no longer
just ‘pets’ but ‘caregivers’ (see RICH
PICKINGS in the right hand column).
Living a realistic life involves the awareness of the way
things change, the way ideas change, and this recognition requires that we be
in touch life as an emergence; it
means learning to undo what we have
learned, undo what we have named. Not only is this true of psychological life,
but it is also true of how genuine science works. Someone notices that the
prevailing scientific paradigm doesn’t quite fit certain emerging facts. There
is doubt and uncertainly, dissolving what we thought was fact and reason. ‘The
earth is obviously flat, but why do a ship’s masks gradually disappear when it
drops over the horizon?’ What we thought was true is refashioning itself.
The earth is not flat, of that we can now be certain, but
doubt had to come first. Just as in therapy, as a new reality is emerging there
is a sense of doubt. There is a pause, validating uncertainty. An obvious truth
is suddenly in question. The old paradigm is dissolving. ‘Maybe it wasn’t selfishness, but a healthy self assertion I really
needed to affirm – and I did.’ But doubt comes first. Only when you doubt a
prevailing ‘truth’ can a new ‘truth’ emerge.
Being able to tolerate
doubt is what John Keats called the Negative
Capability. ‘It is’, he said, when a person is ‘capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. We
have learned to place such emphasis on positiveness and certainty we forget the
value of the Negative Capability, the value of doubt and uncertainty. Without
these our attitudes to life get frozen.
Dear old Aristotle gave us the classic view of unchanging
stability. He said, roughly, that a thing
cannot both be and not be – a law of logic that that consolidates fixed
boundaries. But Heraclitus said that all is change and nothing stays the same.
“We step and do not step into the same
river, we are and we are not’.
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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