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. 

PIXILATED PICTURES[1]

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The painting above is by Jackson Pollock, an American artist who was a deeply tortured and angry man, prone to severe bouts of alcoholism, depression and violence. Only when he painted did he find a sense of peace and release from his anger and sadness. His way of painting made use of the lucky accident. He would lay the canvas out on the floor and, walking around it, he would use his brushes to drip, fling and fire paint at the canvas. Someone drolly called him ‘Jack the Dripper’, but his work was no joke. At only 44, drunk, he died in a car crash. What’s for sure is that his work was the only place where he could evade the mental torture of his life: art as the ultimate therapy of escape.

In stark contrast to his anguished life, imagine the confidence he must have achieved when painting. He worked in a way no other painter had done before. A friend described it. “A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor ... There was complete silence ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot we were there.” All of his most famous paintings were made like this, yet all are very different, each with its own kind of uncanny internal consistency. In 2000 a film was made of Pollock’s life with Ed Harris as the artist. Well worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Photography has largely replaced the influence that painting once had. Being a somewhat mechanical process you would think it offers little opportunity for the same sort of creative moment that art once provided. With photography how could you possibly do a Jackson Pollock and cut out an island of emotional confidence amid the turmoil of an unstable life. These days, a camera is part of everyone’s mobile phone; and every day millions of photos slosh around social network sites on the internet.

A photo is no more special than a doodle on the cover of a phone book done in a moment of forgetfulness while phoning. The covers of some phone books are literally covered with doodles as the owner has scratched away with a ball-point, filling in letters and making patterns, while engaged in a conversation with a friend or holding the line to a tiresome insurance company. A doodle is art that has fled to the margins.

In the early days the photographer was the inferior down-market cousin of the painter. A painter might be poor, he might live in a garret, but he had the prestige of belonging to a long historical heritage. The Victorian daguerreotype photographer was an upstart, cashing in on a craze that would soon lose its appeal. But it didn’t – it took over the image market and expanded into movies, television and advertising. In my 30s I worked hard for my Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society. The standard was high. I know the rigours of the trade in the days before digital: it was all about cameras, darkrooms, enlargers, developers, films and all the intricate combinations of these. Colour was just coming in and there were a lot of artistic choices.

Photography may not appear to have a fortuitous nature. After all, you press the button when you intend to. Nothing could be more mechanical. But here’s a question: why do you release the shutter at just that moment. That moment delivers a photo that reveals more than you saw. ‘Unintentionally, you caught the subject with a strange expression on his face. It reveals a reality that is not what you or he intended. We were all were laughing, but in the photo there is a suggestion that he is really bored; that strange half twist of the mouth is not how he should have looked at all – but its him ! And you caught it in a fraction of a second.

I take a photo of a child and it reveals whether I ‘look down’ on them or whether I am at their level. A good question to ask is: what effect do I intend to create when I take a picture, what impression do I want to make: family life as one long series of happy holidays? Are they for ‘pretend’ memories? Or do my pictures show the dump at the bottom of the yard, or my absurd reflection in a shop window, or the empty beach on a winter’s day, or Tommy’s face when he is moody? What’s worth remembering, life as a fantasy that it never was, or revealing moments of how it actually was?

Early on I taught classes in creative photography so, if I may now venture, here is some advice for non-professionals:

1. Never pose people for a photograph.

2. If you are among people, never compose a picture. Posing and composing freezes the subject(s)

3. Among people take so many photos that everyone stops paying attention to you.

4. At any gathering take so many pictures and so fast and so nonchalantly that people stop crediting you with anything serious.

5. Take everything and anyone indiscriminately, click, click, click – fast. Above all don’t hesitate.

6. If you want to capture a single subject keep them moving, talking, doing something – and again take so many and so fast they stop posing.

7. Creativity and quality control comes later on the monitor screen. Here be ruthless. Toss out 99% of your pictures. With the two or three that remain compose and crop carefully. You’ll end up with some good pictures. Certainly not the usual stuff.

REPETITION

Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera

Repetitive behaviour has always been a bit of a worry. Freud worried about the way veterans repeatedly re-experience shell-shock traumas long after the battle. Then there’s the way people repeat failures, like hooking up with the same unsuitable type of partner time after time; or small things, like always misspelling the same a word, or always forgetting that particular person’s name.

Yet when you think about it, most of our lives are repetitious: the same habits year after year; the same breakfast cereal; same friends; same time to bed; same workspace; the same face looking back at me in the mirror; the same daily grind, the same pleasures, over and over. There are, of course, disruptions like the occasional earthquake, but we try to get back to the familiar as soon as possible. Occasional variations are OK – but not too much!

It’s not surprising, though, when you realise that repetition (or replication, as they call it in biology) is the basis of all life. The exact duplication of the DNA molecule each time a cell divides is a miracle. Without it life on earth would not exist.

It seems like it’s only in the context of repetition that useful change happens. It’s the slight variation in DNA, a minute variation from exact duplication, as it is passed from the parents to the child, that’s the basis of evolutionary change. And in therapy it’s the cumulative effect of small changes that count, always in the context of reiteration.

What got me to think about all this is how we look upon repetition in therapy; I mean the way we do therapy. The client has an hour a week for an indeterminate period. But how do you decide when therapy is finished. Freud worried about this too and wrote a paper called: Analysis Terminable and Interminable. There’s no simple answer, but I think we can gain a glimmer of light by looking at the nature of repetition in another kind of therapeutic endevour.

Let’s take a long standing and reputable method like meditation. In its present-day secular form, known as Mindfulness, it has gained a lot of medical and scientific recognition. It works. But how long should you do it. An hour a day? Five minutes a day? Once a week? For a month, a year, a lifetime? Repetition of some kind seems to be necessary. To me, one thing is fairly clear: a little and often is better than a lot seldom.

The main problem with meditation is how to keep going. In a monastic setting or on a ten days retreat, keeping going is decided in advance. After all, doing meditation is why you went there. Keeping going might be difficult, but you do it. It’s when you are home again and in your usual surroundings that meditating for an hour a day is more onerous. Of course, you can do it, but you don’t. And the reason you don’t or can’t is because you are asking too much of yourself. The process has to be adjusted to the limitations of your actual life-style. Otherwise, trying to do too much ends up with doing nothing. On the other hand, a little and often gives you something you can do without strain: ten minutes a day is about right.

I’ve been working on a slightly different form of meditation which I’ve called ‘Bodyminding’. It owes something to focusing and something to traditional meditation. I’ve discovered that it’s very important to limit the amount of time you spend doing it, otherwise it locks into something you should do. As soon as this happens the practice gets on the wrong side. The practice period becomes an opponent that requires something of you; and before you know where you are a resistance develops which only gets stronger the more you persist.

You have to be very strict with the time. You finish dead on ten minutes. And there must be no suggestion that the meditative state is how you should live your life – contrary to Ancient and Modern Spiritual Idealists. The ten minutes must be separate and special; otherwise everything gets conflated and mixed up. In order to work it has to be a time that’s special, something you look forward to – otherwise it is useless.

And this is where it gives us a window on counselling and therapy. In the same way, the therapy session has to be special, separate and distinct from usual life; and it has to be something you look forward to. As with meditation it is repetitious: same day of the week; always for one hour, same therapist, same room, same process, same appointment time.

This limitation is a great advantage. It creates a special ‘mental set’ every time you walk in the therapy room. Within the compass of that ‘set’ insights happen that would never occur to you in the outside world. This ‘mental set’ builds up slowly over time. The therapy room becomes a place where something different happens. That’s part of the enjoyment. Mental sets are have a powerful suggestive effect and can change your whole psychological state – like stepping into another country. It’s as though the therapy room, the setting, takes on a special ambience. It becomes more than just what you do in the room, but rather all that’s happened for you in that room builds up into this slightly other-worldly home, like walking through the looking-glass. I have known people who stopped therapy simply because I changed my consulting room. It is a powerful phenomenon I’ve never seen discussed in psychological literature.

So far as the duration of therapy is concerned, I have to completely disagree with the way this is managed in most counselling agencies. In the classical days of psychoanalysis the duration of therapy was measured years rather than weeks. But all that is out of date now, and modern counselling agencies are obsessed with ‘goals’, ‘throughput’ and ‘outcomes’, achieved in the minimum time, all annotated in reports, forms and clinical reviews; very satisfying for the administration, no doubt. Administrators love paper. Not the client, but the paper work is what counts. Who for? Why the government ministry that supplies the funding, of course. In the midst of all this paper work the client, the person it’s supposed to be about, is lost. In truth, the forms and details, pretending to be helpful, are a vast distraction. For me, they are so unimportant I sometimes forget to get the clients telephone number. As for therapy goals – I never ask. It’s a red herring. I want to know how the person is now.

How long should therapy last? What are the real criteria? The most important one is, again, it has to be a time you look forward to. Not in the sense that you hope it will do you good eventually. That’s OK, but it’s not the crucial factor. The only thing that counts is the enjoyment derived from the process itself, the pleasure of having a place where you can unfold yourself. If you enjoy it, it’s doing you good. Other factors may determine when therapy ends, but in my experience the more successful therapy is, the longer it can go on with benefit. There are no rules; and certainly no arbitrary time limits.

In any kind of serious relationship real intimacy can only be achieved through repeated cycles of connection. Intimacy between two people is a quality that develops. Intimacy is cumulative. For example, first whirlwind of being in love is, perhaps, not real intimacy because you only know a fraction of the other’s personality. It takes being with them in all kinds of interactions, all the many moods that arise, all the complexities that the relationship evokes – and that takes time. Lots of times.

One difficult problem in life is when too many bad things have happened that must not happen again. Too many losses, too many failures, too many humiliations, too many disappointments. Repetition becomes a threat. Then, when things start to ‘happen again’ the feeling of repetition provokes a kind of anxious boredom. The search for something new takes on a driving compulsion. Certainly, a life based on the avoidance of boredom is no way to go. The constant effort to escape repetition can drive you crazy.

And to end with, that mad and provocative philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence… Would you curse the demon or crave nothing more fervently?”

In spite of my advocacy of repetition I have to admit I can’t get my head around that one !! Moreover, I know many people for whom such an idea would be the worst nightmare they could imagine and who would curse the demon.