FELT-SENSE: the soft science

by Stanley

With every experience there is an underlying mood. Or perhaps ‘mood’ is too strong a word. Maybe I should say: there is an underlying feeling component or feeling tone to every experience. We call this the ‘felt-sense’. Every thought you have, every imagining, every encounter with others, everything you touch, every experience in life carries this feeling component with it.

To get a handle on this consider what it’s like when this feeling component is missing, what it’s like when life goes completely flat, where all meaning just drains away, where everything is one dimensional – dead. Nothing suggests anything, nothing enlivens. It is as though one has gone tone deaf. The world is all there, but it means nothing. [1] The opposite of this would be to listen to your favourite piece of music; the bodily felt sensation will likely be quite strong – and with it that non-verbal sense of meaning. In the arts we dignify this by calling it the ‘aesthetic sense’.

We have learned about this felt-sense from the therapeutic technique of focusing where you give attention to a kind of bodily feeling-sense that can unwind a personal problem. But the felt-sense is a much wider phenomenon than just this. Not only does every personal problem have its unique felt-sense, but so does every experience you have in life. The difficulty is that the felt-sense is so seamlessly part of every experience that it has never before been properly differentiated. It is so subtle that it passes unnoticed as something distinguishable. Nobody notices it – until it’s missing. When people look for it, having read something about focusing, they might look for something quite distinct from the experience itself, instead of an aspect of that experience. It is a difficulty that’s understandable because people are not used to selecting or lifting it out. And for some people the feeling signal is quite weak. It’s like tuning into a radio station that’s distant – turn the tuner minutely one way or another and you loose the signal and can’t get it back.

It is often difficult to get the difference between the felt-sense and emotion. Emotion is elephantine and opaque. But emotion can be the object of the felt-sense just like any other experience. You can find out what’s underneath it. For example if you are angry with someone, the emotion is quite definite. But the anger, by itself, does not reveal what is underneath the anger. Emotions blot out the felt-sense, so you have to stand beside the emotion and tune in very carefully what is just alongside it.

Focusing in therapy has been a wonderful research area because though it we have been able to examine this component of experience closely. We emphasise the bodily aspect of the felt-sense because it is a vital and seamless part of you as a whole organism and can be more sharply sensed in the heart, chest or stomach. The body is the reference point, not ‘the mind’.

You can check out the ubiquitous presence of the felt-sense. Stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘what do I really feel drinking this cup of tea right now?’ or ‘what is the felt-sense of doing the dishes right now?’ If you do this seriously and intentionally you will find that tea drinking and dish washing is never just tea drinking and dish washing. It isn’t simply flat. Things are never ordinary. If they feel that way, just ask ‘what does this so-called‘ordinary ’really feel like? You will find that the sense of ‘just ordinary’ is a veritable portmanteau of luggage. Pull one thing out of it and it will drag out more and more: memories, intimations, feelings, wishes, longings, anxieties.

This is our sense of meaning. I don’t mean the big MEANING OF LIFE. Something much simpler. It’s the feeling of meaning attached to every small action: ‘gathering sticks and drawing water’. In Jungian psychology we sometimes call it the sense of ‘depth’. Really it is the sense of being involved, connected or interested and curious; if it’s strong we call it a fascination, even an obsession.

Some people are lucky enough to be easily interested. Things interest them. One noticeable characteristic of such people is that they don’t pre-empt surprise, they don’t ‘already know’. If you tell them something they don’t ‘already know’. They are always on the lookout for nuances that are different from what they thought was the case. They actually find out things. They are attracted to new meanings that had never occurred to them. That is precisely the characteristic of someone working the felt-sense in focusing-type therapy. There is openness to the as yet unexplored. More than anything, there is the sense that one doesn’t already know.

The felt-sense is not a source of mystic knowledge. It merely displays the unexpected connections between things that are going on for you right now. Perhaps you may tune in to your present feelings and discover that you feel guilty. For example: ‘this person expects something of me and I feel mean for not giving them what they want’. This isn’t your felt-sense telling what to do. It doesn’t give moral signals; it’s simply telling you how you are and an invitation to find out more, to see what further is implied. Are you being mean or are you simply standing up for yourself. Questions arising like this are not to be answered – they show you sharply what state you are in. Ah! That’s right. I can feel how difficult it is to say ‘no’? I didn’t realise how strong that is. And so on. When you’ve got more of what is going on the knot of guilt simply unties.

The felt-sense does not reveal great psychic truths. It’s no use asking the felt-sense about the Divinity of Christ because there is nothing more to be said. All the absolute truths about that are in the bible. There is nothing to open up. The felt-sense doesn’t work on fixed systems – except to undo them! It doesn’t work on fixed beliefs for the same reason. That’s the whole point: following the felt-sense undoes mental and emotional structures; it loosens fixities, places where we are stuck. It works best where there is uncertainty. There is room then for movement.

Of course, if you are hanging on to a fixed belief for dear life then you won’t want anything that will loosen it.

It is a mistake to look for the causes of a personal problem. When using the felt-sense on any personal problem you are not looking for causes – what is the cause of the problem or what to call it. You are not on a diagnostic mission. Once you get into such speculation the head will take over and run the show. There are many ways to diagnose you, most of them completely useless.

The felt-sense moves things, it carries a problem further, it opens out a problem. It does this progressively as a process, not as simplistic and interpretive one-off revelation. After the process has taken place, looking back, you can see what contributed to the problem. But you can never get that first. To start with you never know where the felt-sense will lead.

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[1] Feeling and loss of feeling are complex issues in psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature.
Here we are coming at it from the phenomenological point of view, how these
appears directly to consciousness.

REALITY AND IMAGINATION

by Stanley

Some say imagination is King. We are basically ‘homo imaginalis’; our true nature, so it is said, lies in our creative imagination. Reality, of course, cannot be ignored; but to neglect creative imagination is to lose all that is rich, vibrant and alive in us. Quite naturally we react against the dehumanising world of technology and the dead hand of scepticism where the highest of spiritual truths are reduced to mere mythical fables; where our deepest concerns are merely a disorder in some psychiatric textbook and where education is condensed to rote learning. There is such a thing as a ‘higher knowledge’ and the road to it is through a greater faith in our imaginative and intuitive sensibilities.

Yet, scientific research does everything in its power to guard against wishful thinking intruding into the search for truth. Imagination is OK in its place, but it can deceive us like the very devil. That you can predict the future by the stars or by reading signs in the entrails of dead animals is simply not on. Neither is fundamentalist religion, Ouija boards, Iridology, bleeding statutes, witchcraft, and channelling, alien abduction and crop circles. These and their like just do not pass muster as secure forms of knowledge, however much they may gratify a colourful imagination.

Imaginism and scientism seem to be opposing forces that grind against each other like two tectonic plates pushing in opposite directions – and psychology finds itself right on the fault-line. Nowhere is the opposition so strong as between behaviourists on one side and the archetypal and Jungian psychologists on the other. They glare at each other like enemies across the Great New Age divide. But the same conflict is seen among educational theorists. Now, after a decade or more stressing the importance of creativity, the government has decided that too many children are leaving school unable to read and write.

‘In Dreams Memories and Reflections Carl Jung describes his own struggle to honour the autonomy of the soul and its artist’s voice. In the chapter entitled “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Jung asks “what am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it? He then heard a voice that said “It is art.”’ (Glenyse Hyland 2006)

Marie-Louise von Franz was 18 when she first met Jung and was quite overawed at meeting the great man. 30 years earlier Jung had been working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich and mentioned a patient who lived on the moon. Finding her courage, Von Franz said: ‘surely you mean that the woman acted as if she lived on the moon’. ‘No’, said Jung ‘it was not as if – the girl really did live on the moon.’ Von Franz later became a great disciple of Jung, but at the time she came away thinking ‘either he is crazy or I am’.

When I was young I was in the first class in England taught by the since notorious L. Ron Hubbard. There were no Hollywood stars in the class at that time. I remember at one point we touch on the tension between imagination and reality. I piped up: ‘if imagination conflicts with reality, so much the worse for reality.’ It was a clever remark because I picked up on the sort of thing Hubbard would want to hear. And he did – he liked it. Had Jung been there he would have smiled too.

The whole swag of ideas and sentiments that comprise what we call New Age is a sort of modern Romanticism. It is the same sort of ‘spiritual’ reaction as happened in the 19^th century revolt against scientific mechanisation. William Blake thought Newton’s influence was ‘Satanic’. He said, ‘God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep’. He was referring to what he thought was the narrowness of Newtonian physics, a cornerstone of the Age of Reason and a prime initiator of the scientific and the industrial revolution.

Charles Tart, an American psychologist said: ‘...the current popularity of ‘New Age’ ideas is a reaction against the dehumanising, despiritualising, effect of scientism, the philosophical belief...that we are nothing but material beings’.

But this idea of ‘scientism’ is a New Age romantic and mythical view of science. Isaac Newton actually wrote religious tracts, biblical hermeneutics and deeply studied the occult and alchemy. The idea that science is ‘materialistic’ comes about because it finds out what causes what. And when we find out exactly what causes what we call it a ‘mechanism’. For some minds it is a great achievement to be freed from illusion and bullshit; others feel trapped and spiritually deprived because they are no longer free to imagine what they like. Darwinian evolution by natural selection may take more getting used to than mythical Creation Stories that abound in every culture; but it is much simpler and also more awe-inspiring.

Because you are a therapist dealing with all that human stuff you may think you are on the spiritual side of the great divide, with the world of science on the other. But that’s not the way it is. If you are a good therapist you are a good scientist. Why? Because if you are a good therapist you wait upon phenomena; like Galileo, with his new toy telescope, you wait night after night, patiently observing Jupiter’s moons orbiting the planet that no one had ever noticed before.

You do not impose upon phenomena, you wait upon phenomena. Hippocrates of Cos was the Greek father of medicine. He urged meticulous and careful observation. ‘Leave nothing to chance’, he said. ‘Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.’

The term ‘psychotherapy’ has become a misnomer; there really is no adequate name yet for what we do. The client in the consulting room is like nature. You ask questions of this living world we call a person. But what is most important: you listen to the answers as though nature itself was speaking. You wait upon phenomena. You do not contradict or try to fashion nature. You do not tell nature anything – you let it tell you. You know that this person has her own ways; there will be a precise way her nature will unfold. Your fantasies have no place. You are not there to mold a human being; you are not a teacher, but a pupil. You are there to learn and to let nature show you what it does naturally: natura naturans. This is no different from a true scientific attitude. It takes the same creative imagination and respectful sense of wonder. Ours is not a highly disciplined science, and who knows if it ever will be. But we have more in common with Galileo, Newton and Darwin than we think.