THE ‘WHERE’S-THE-SCISSORS’ DISORDER

by Stanley

I would like to tell you about an odd personal disturbance of mine. I’ll call it the Where’s-the-Scissors disorder. It used to happen regularly with my car keys, but it can happen with anything: ‘where did I leave the scissors’; ‘where is my diary’; ‘where did I put my notes’; ‘where’s my cell phone’. The other day I had no idea where I had left my cell phone, so I rang it up on the land line – heard it ringing and searched all over the house to find where the ringing was coming from. Eventually I found it in some unlikely place.

But it’s my condition of mind that is interesting. It is based on the assumption that something is lost. When I am afflicted with this condition I know something is lost in the same instant that I turn to find it. Both go together: where is it – I’ve lost it. It’s the same as searching for a name I can’t remember. I know the name full well and I know that I know it. But in the instant I reach for it in my memory, I know I can’t remember it.

This syndrome is especially noticeable where the thing I’m looking for is right in front of my nose. ‘Where’s the scissors?’ Anyone else would see them right there on the table in front of me; but do I see them? No, I do not. I know I can’t find them because I’m looking for them. That very ‘knowing’ produces a blind spot. ‘Can’t find’ is built in to ‘looking for’.

If you think I must be getting a bit Alzheimerish I can only say that I was like this when I was 10. I can remember crying out, “Mum…Muuum where are my…..?” to which my mother would invariably reply, “Well where did you put it…?” This would infuriate me because if I knew where I’d put it I wouldn’t be asking her.

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There are many kinds of seeking and all kinds of things we seek. But there are certain quests that are doomed to fail because they have an out-of-reach quality already built into them. They are quests with a nullifying shadow. Rather like my conviction that I can’t find the scissors. It was Plato who said, (and I somewhat paraphrased him) “we never want what we already have”. It is also true, in some perverse sense, that I never have what I want. Wanting already implies an absence. It is almost like wanting turns on the deficit; just as ‘looking-for’ turns on ‘can’t find’.

Let’s hone in on something a little more specific. Sometimes in session a person will say to me, “what am I supposed to be talking about.” Such a simple, honest question reveals a propensity for impossible quests. Maybe the thing that is important to him isn’t really the most important thing. The person has the notion that there is something he should find within himself that isn’t already there. That’s the perfect set-up for the impossible quest. The very worst reply would be to try and help him find it. Why? Because you would be playing into the ‘quest’ state of mind. You would be collaborating in the idea that there is something he is not doing which he ought to be doing. Even if he found something that he wanted to talk about it might not be the right one. It wouldn’t be, would it? Obviously – otherwise he wouldn’t be asking, would he?

The very worst thing you can do is to set someone up for an impossible quest. So many religious and spiritual systems do just that. A typical example would be to suggest that there is something one must find within oneself. “The answer to your problems lies within”, you wisely suggest. That’s the trigger that sets them up. It’s only a short step to trying to find God. They’re probably already stuck on ‘trying to find themselves’. And what you suggest closes the trap that’s already waiting for them. It’s a very subtle thing. Who they are can’t be right because they are looking for themselves.

I have been guilty of unintentionally perpetrating this ploy myself. As you know I have been very keen on the technique called focusing. But it has one major snare that’s easy to fall into. In my keenness it took me a while to learn this. The technique asks people to look into the felt-sense to find what they feel. The felt-sense is a murky, uneasy physical sensation somewhere in the body; and, if you give it attention, new and important feelings will emerge. And it does work – except for people who are already inclined toward impossible quests. The first thing that hits them is “what feeling am I supposed to look for”. With that question they’re gone !! Even if they just think it.

‘Well no’, you might say, ‘just put your attention on that tightness in your chest and see what comes’. Yes, the person is willing to try it. So they wait for something that isn’t there to reveal itself. That’s the catch! If something is there, that can’t be it because I’m looking for it. You don’t search for what is there, do you?

I will go so far as to say that any instruction in how to do therapy is in danger of being counterproductive. Firstly, because the person will search for what is supposed happen and will overlook is actually happening. In doing so they become one step removed from direct involvement; and one step removed from their own experience.

The trouble is, any psychological or spiritual belief system tends to dictate what you should strive to be or to search for. They address something that is felt to be missing and therefore precipitates the search for something that ‘should be there but I can’t find it’. I can just as easily try to find Christ as my Buddha nature, or the meaning of my archetypal dreams; or the Love that the Universe is Sending me; or the Real Me; or the Meaning of Life; or just simply ‘Love’ or ‘Happiness’. Or – here’s a good one – ‘faith ’.

All harmless enough pursuits I suppose. But just be on the lookout for the various mutations of the deadly ‘I-can’t-find-the-scissors’ disorder.

DIARY OF A DABBLER

by Stanley

What’s the similarity between falling in love and a passion for collecting beetles ? The answer is that in both cases, when it happens, you give yourself over. In spite of anything you may have originally intended, you find that you’re hooked! You are dedicated, devoted! Well yes, this makes sense when you fall in love with a person - everyone knows you don’t fall in love unless, in some sense, you’re already prone to giving yourself over. You surrender and find yourself cheerfully attached. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you. It’s the same with collecting beetles – but I mean more than just collecting beetles, I mean being a passionate entomologist. I mean being in love with bugs.

In his autobiography the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his fervent love affair with butterflies, “From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender”.[1] And in an essay, Strong Opinions, he wrote “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. In spite of this, Nabokov knew all about obsessive human love affairs. After all, he wrote Lolita.

An anonymous writer cries, “It was the mantra that kept repeating in my head, It hummed in my head, and seemed to be said by multiple voices, of multiple sexes, voices of women, voices of men, voices of children, and no voice at all. " I love all insects... I love all insects... I love all insects.

I knew what entomophobia means, so I wondered if there was such a thing as entomophilia; and yes, there was. It means sexual arousal involving insects – although it is never stated how this is achieved; Google and the medical dictionaries were all modestly sparse on details.

When he was at Oxford my old friend Charles Darwin spent too much time out in the countryside collecting beetles. He once surmised that “the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them.” He was somewhat smitten with them himself. His girlfriend Fanny Owen scolded him and announced that he had to choose between her and chasing after insects. She finally broke up with poor Charles because he apparently he couldn’t break his attachment .

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Most of the activities that engage me have a personal agenda, a purpose, a goal. There are very few things that interest me of which I can say I have no selfish interest. But my agendas are quite unreliable and change like the weather. And as my mind wanders so too do my interests.

Being a dabbler I never quite digest what I happen to be eating, for my appetites move on. I can’t seem to settle down. To give up dabbling and be really unswerving you have to be a specialist. You can’t really open your heart fully unless you hone in on the singular. Being a specialist is very hard for anyone who is afraid of missing out. It’s hard to commit oneself to one thing because something better might come along and I’ll miss out. In any case, there are so many avenues that beckon. I buy a promising book of study, intending to read it from cover to cover. But half way through some luring reference leads me elsewhere.

So I tend to be a professional dilettante, frivolously drifting from one thing to another. It is the style of an intellectual decadent; I want to know everything. So, as a consequence, I’m a Jack-of-all-Trades and master of none. I envy people who have managed to be specialists, who can devote their lives to a single study or cause. I comfort myself with the idea that if you hone in on the single grain of sand you miss the beauty of the beach. This romantic idea makes me out to have a larger vision, in touch with the mystique of the cosmos. In any case, specialist are boring and opinionated.

William Blake was a funny fellow. He was a romantic mystic who hated science. He poured scorn on the scientific aspirations of his day and demonised Newton,“ Pray God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!” he wrote. In a little poem he proclaimed,

To see the universe in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

He didn’t see the paradox. He uses the small as the window to the larger vision. I mean, if you can see the universe in a grain of sand you are a specialist like a physicist studying atomic structure; like Newton and his apple. But Blake saw the specialist as missing out.

It is precisely the single vision that the specialist has. Being a specialist in beetles or butterflies or physics can take you to the wonder at the heart of things. I think of Nabokov prancing about in shorts with his butterfly net. Of his book on butterflies, someone said that it, “…glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death.” His speciality opened up the rainforest of the cosmos. In that he was the perfect combination of the specialist and the poet.

There are other reasons why I cannot be a specialist: the million and one things that have to be done, that have to be thought about, duties that demand my care. And the next thing to be done is always a little more important than what I am doing now.

To specialise means to neglect all other claims and possibilities. I can’t even specialise in myself – I’m too busy. I’m a multitasker. That’s a nice way to put it. But when I meditate I ask myself a crucial question: why does my mind always have to go somewhere else?

Somewhere else always calls me; and I can never make up my mind whether this is a terrible disadvantage or a gift.

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory Speak. Everyman Library, 1966

IMPLICIT NATURE

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.

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[1] Quoted in: Stern, D.N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Norton, NY, 2004 pp.117