TREPIDATIONS

                                                                    by Stanley

 By way of a personal confession I want to admit publically that I wrestle with a devil.  I don’t know whether it’s always been a devil or whether it is a fallen angel. Its called ‘Spirituality’. When that simple word is voiced out loud in my company it has a devastating effect; I go into a state of shock and trepidation. It has almost the same effect on me as when the word religion is uttered – only it’s worse, because in recent times, Spirituality has detached itself from religion and become modern and healthy, along with the New Age belief that pre-religious native people were spiritual in the best possible way. The problem is that there is some truth in it. It all has an enormous pull for those who strongly feel, there’s got to be something more than this..!

But for me it conjures up all the terrors of the Middle Ages where religion and spirituality, the living and the living dead, God and the Devil, merged in a ghastly dance of death, and where the power of the unseen had us by the throat for centuries of oppression. Belief in the unseen resulted in a hundred of years of witch burning, where it was believed that witches – always women – kidnapped babies for sacrifice, flew through the air, could, by their association with the devil, cause hailstorms; and where, with their insatiable sexual appetite, these supposed witches cavorted with demons.

Some spiritual beliefs are not only stupid but very nasty, like the belief that a bit of real estate in the Middle East called Jerusalem is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians – it’s been a vicious obsession since the Crusades. Mad also is the current worldwide violence over a third-rate film insulting the Prophet Mahomet. Spiritual beliefs are potentially lethal.

I know that after its long, dark supernatural history, spirituality in the west has come to mean a higher realm of mystical experience, a consciousness of our oneness with all of nature. It is an interesting theatre of struggle. Sam Harris, that implacable atheist – famous now for his book The End of Faith and his Letter to a Christian Nation – recently wrote a blog saying how we should not be afraid of this term, as many atheists are.  He said,

‘I strive for precision in my use of language, but I do not share these semantic concerns. And I would point out that my late friend Christopher Hitchens … believed that “spiritual” was a term we could not do without, and he repeatedly plucked it from the mire of supernaturalism in which it has languished for nearly a thousand years.’

Sam’s sane advice doesn’t settle my anxiety. I fear that it is not so easy to make the distinction; we are still too close to the use of the unseen to terrorise and subjugate. Even now we can see it in every religious cult from scientology to the doomsday sect of Heaven’s Gate.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the hugely influential Mindfulness movement, doesn’t like the term ‘spirituality’ either, I suppose because of the bad press it has in academia and medicine, even though he would happily say that his work on mediation has its roots in Buddhism.

Perhaps the term ‘spirituality’ is the only word we have to register the utter disjunction between certain types of ‘higher’ mystical moments, and those which are of our normal everyday experience. The two types of encounter are so different that there seems to be no bridge between them. Mystical highs, where we seem to touch something greater, defy the rational world, inviting all kinds of fantasies to explain them.

Our modern world has been stripped of ancient mythology that placed all power in the supernatural and unseen. This has left us with a society that is much more practical, down to earth and much less cruel and violent, but in some way missing something.

I think the most convincing case for the existence of the so-called ‘spiritual dimension’ has come from the use of psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms). In the 1960s the recreational use of these substances caused panic government legislation, even against legitimate research into their effects. The current research using psychedelics heralds a reawakening to the healing possibilities of these now prohibited substances and has generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several dozen books and six international conferences.

Stanislav Grof and colleagues at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, working with terminally ill patients, provided strong evidence that a psychedelic experience can be immensely beneficial for the terminally ill, relieving them of the pain and fear of death.

Psilocybin mushrooms have been used for thousands of years by indigenous cultures for a variety of religious and therapeutic purposes. In 1954 ‘Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. This book can also be seen as a part of the history of the entheogenic model of understanding these drugs, seeing them in a spiritual context, as they always have been in primitive cultures. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, Huxley goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, his illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written, says J. G. Ballard. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered even more profound than those he spoke of in The Doors of Perception. He had discovered that Love was the primary and universal fact of the cosmos. This kind of remarkable experience has been corroborated with hundreds of other accounts of a similar nature using psychedelics for spiritual exploration. People have reported having acid trips that changed their lives forever, by essentially removing the way perception is filtered in normal brain functioning. They say they saw things they'd never seen before, on a physical or spiritual plane. Is all this a wonderful truth or a magnificent illusion?

There is no doubt now that non-ordinary states of consciousness, as Groff prefers to call them, can produce lasting improvements in the quality of living and in how we face death, and can do so from a single non-addictive psychedelic session.

What has been learned since the discovery of LSD is that this work must be undertaken in what I would call a person-centred setting (although researchers do not put it this way). It is vital that such trips be prepared for and conducted in a respectful, careful and thoughtful setting. As researchers would insist now, the set and setting is everything. That is a lesson we already knew in person-centred therapy.

What is most impressive is that these elevating results are not the effect of religious or cult indoctrination. They seem to arise out of the nature of the psyche itself.

Who knows where western humanity will go once it has gotten over its knee-jerk shock when these magic medicines were released into the headily ignorant sexual revolution of the 60s. Thankfully much work is now underway by organisations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). I’m sure these slow advances will eventually calm our nerves and trepidations.  

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

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