HEARING YOURSELF

Hearing yourself speak out is very different from thinking. To voice something you’ve been thinking about is like giving body to what might otherwise just be tortuous worrying. This is especially true when dealing with difficult emotional questions. The truth is that most of our emotionally tinged thinking is very confused by conflicting ways of looking at a problem. Before any consideration of solutions, how, in fact, should I look at the problem in the first place. Should I regard the problem as important or not; is it the real problem; is it my problem or his; is it that I am not being fair or that I am not being treated fairly; am I too soft or too judgmental; is the real problem that she wants everything her own way – or perhaps it’s me that’s too critical. What really is the problem? And so on – round and round! 

Momentarily I might think I have arrived at a steady conclusion, but then another viewpoint intervenes and I’m back on the merry-go-round. Ruminating like this goes around in circles, always arriving at the place one started. The internal critic, the Mad Judge, is usually hard at work. Every thought, before it can be fully thought, is contradicted by an opposing viewpoint; which itself is stopped short by yet another contradicting viewpoint. It’s a battleground where nothing is vanquished and no way of thinking gains the upper hand. No single thought-line gets the chance to fully express itself. There is no way I can know what I think where every possible viewpoint is squashed before it has had a chance to fully express itself. In this state much of my deeper thinking is unknown – like the iceberg, most of it is below the water-line. 

This is where ‘hearing-yourself’ it comes into its own. When you let a viewpoint speak out it seems to find more energy to follow through and is more immune to internal criticism. Hearing myself say it gives it strength to follow all the implications of itself. It finds its voice. I find myself saying more than I had yet thought or felt. I’ve heard it said many times, “I don’t really know what I think until I hear myself saying it.” It’s always a surprise and sometimes quite a shock when what was just a weak idea suddenly finds its voice. Hearing yourself speak out gives you courage.

But however forceful and convincing, it will be only one of the many voices within struggling to be heard. They are not all one’s own voice either, but the voices of others that have been adopted. Impinging on the problem-at-hand are all kinds of viewpoints that have gained a foothold in the psyche, bits you have read, lectures you have been given, advice, unwanted criticism, as well as the urges of our animal instincts. When speaking out like this you may find yourself taking a tour of them all; first one line of thought gains ascendancy then another, a veritable medley of contradiction as you switch from one to another. But the difference is that now you are more able to judge the worth of each viewpoint because you are actually hearing them speak out with greater force, as they battle for supremacy. Each one now reveals itself for what it is actually worth. The various viewpoints will now interact with each other and encourage new ideas, modifications never contemplated before. Instead of ruminating in the shadows, the thinking-mind gets out there and lets off steam in full view – somewhat like a rowdy brain-storming session. 

Hearing-yourself fully will also include the changes of emotional tone as you express yourself and shift form one aspect to another: the sounds of your impatience, exasperation, groans and grumbles; physical gestures of futility, annoyance, resignation or amusement; the stamp of your anger with yourself and others. These physical gestures also need to be heard and recognized.

It would be easy to say that eventually you find your own true voice and with it your own reality and undying self.  It certainly does appear this way because the final outcome of hearing-yourself seems eventually to settle the conflict and you arrive at a certain steadiness and rightness; and with it an ability to act more decisively. As moderator, you will finally have heard enough of the conflicts and have reached a settled conclusion.

As an analysis of what goes on we could easily leave it at that, but the truth is a little more complicated and less romantic. Ideas and viewpoints undergo a process very much like that of Natural Selection in biology. Even in the narrow compass of one’s personal life, why do some viewpoints survive and others go extinct. Why do you come out of this process feeling that you have at least settled what the problem is about ?

The answer is similar to that found in the natural world: some ideas are more conducive to survival, more able to flourish in a changing environment, whereas others are not. The battle between our viewpoints and ideas is a battle for survival that goes on in our personal, emotional life, taking all factors into account: my own interests, my family, my group; and, last of all, perhaps, way out there, what is best for human kind and the planet – in roughly that order of importance. This is the way evolution has designed the emotions that motivate us. 

But we must imagine survival as not merely the ability to exist, but to flourish. The right solution to even a personal problem is the one that gains dominance by virtue of its ability to secure the survival of all that is dear to us. Of course, the style of survival will take into account the group within which we live; and these, of course, vary a great deal.

But on a basic individual level, the practice of ‘hearing-yourself’, as we have described it, is the process of bringing out into the open all the ideas and viewpoints that battle for dominance in one’s mind; and provided you have a good listener, hearing-yourself is a wonderful tool. And it is how and why person-centred therapy works.

There is one more aspect of ‘hearing-yourself’ that I can only touch upon here. This not about working through ideas that oppose each other, but ideas that compliment and can cross fertilise each other; this is more about the smoldering, but disconnected ideas in your own mind that need only to hear each other to light the spark of novel invention. But more about this in another bog.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

A PHILOSOPHICAL ROMP

                      
                      
      I want to start off by asking a ridiculous question: “How much of me is me?” My crazy question is prompted by a recent discovery in neuroscience that our freedom of choice in life could be an illusion. For an experiment they chose a subject to whom they gave two simple pushbuttons. He was to hold one in each hand. Now they told him “Just push the buttons, one after the other in any sequence you like, completely at random.” Then they put him in a (fMRI)  Brain Scanner to do it. When he chose the left button a certain spot in the brain lit up, when he chose the right button a different spot lit up. But the time sequences were different. They found that six seconds before he made a choice the brain lit up the appropriate spot. In other words, his brain made the decision six seconds before he consciously chose. The experimenters could then predict which choice he would make six seconds before he consciously chose – every time without exception.
        Consternation among the proponents of ‘free-will’ and those who claim we are responsible for our choices. The idea of responsibility and free-will rests on a simple proposition: that you could have chosen differently from the way you actually did. This is impossible to verify. As with any choice or decision there is no way you can go back to the time before you made a choice and choose differently. It is just impossible to know whether you ‘could have’. The claim is untestable in principle and is therefore meaningless. You may feel as though you ‘could have’, but there is no assurance in that at all. 
       The above experiment seems to validate determinism, that we are simply the effect of brain functioning over which we have no control. Freedom of choice is an illusion, in spite of it being a very convincing illusion. How can we possibly be so wrong about something so immediately obvious to our firsthand experience?
        If you consider the brain is one thing and you are something else the implications are disastrous. It means that you are being controlled by a mechanism that is totally beyond your control. You are an automaton. Which brings me back to my crazy question in the beginning: how much of me is me? But if I consider the brain and all the complex process of the body as me, if I include them in what I mean by ‘me’, then the problem disappears. It simply means that there is more to ‘me’ than I thought.
       There is no way I can be consciously aware of all the huge volume of computations that go on when any practical decision has to be made. All I need is the end result – I only need to be aware of what I have finally decided. All we know is that something is going on in the body that makes a decision before I am consciously aware of it.
         But this is really nothing new. It is already obvious in focusing. Using the felt-sense is precisely feeling into that area that is active prior to conscious awareness. As a conscious being I am the recipient of answers; all the work goes on under the bonnet; I am more than just a conscious being. In focusing I attend to answers that are forthcoming from me. As in the experiment, I experience a choice after I have made it. To put it another way: ‘I make a choice subliminally, then, seconds later, I have the experience of making it. That’s the feeling of coming to a conclusion.
         In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex the god Apollo prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid any chance of this happening Oedipus moved away from his parents, right out of the district. What Oedipus didn’t know was that he was, in fact, an adopted orphan and that the town he moved to contained his real parents. So, in an effort to avoid his fate he moved right into the path of it. Later discovered to his horror that he had, in fact, killed his father and married his mother. But what has always puzzled scholars are the last words that Oedipus spoke in the play: ‘I am responsible, but the god made me do it’. This sounds like a contradiction until you realise that Apollo and Oedipus are two aspects of the same person.
In the play the delay between the subliminal decision and the conscious realisation of it was considerably longer than six seconds; but the principle is the same. Crediting the decision (prophecy) to the god Apollo is Oedipus projecting himself outside himself.