PERCEPTION

“Modern psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we already believe.(1)

         This is obviously very true; but not all perceptions are misperceptions; it is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality. At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.

       Let me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster; or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?

        Now lets say you, you yourself, are the equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a spectrum of you can they get.  How much do they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out, reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out right, or their timing will be wrong.

          You cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the awareness of how things are. Put simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.

         When we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.

          You don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to action is the ultimate form of self-trust.

*

       Nothing marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise same sex marriages.

        Different styles of relationships that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships. The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.

           As one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable with sudden changes of mood.

          What struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial; how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is such that you see the other as a role your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a ‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time perception will be inadequate.

          Its not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is, you are really in touch.

[1] Tart, Charles T.   The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

PERCEPTION

 “Modern psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we already believe[1] 

This is obviously very true; but not all perceptions are misperceptions; it is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality. At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.

Let me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster; or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?

Now lets say you, you yourself, are the equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a spectrum of you can they get.  How much do they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out, reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out right, or their timing will be wrong.

You cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the awareness of how things are. Put simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.

When we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.

You don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to action is the ultimate form of self-trust.

*

Nothing marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise same sex marriages.

Different styles of relationships that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships. The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.

As one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable with sudden changes of mood.

What struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial; how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is such that you see the other as a role your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a ‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time perception will be inadequate.

Its not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is, you are really in touch.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

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[1] Tart, Charles T.   The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009

HORSE-SENSE

“Through my work as a horse trainer and equine-facilitated therapy specialist, I’ve observed that feelings are contagious. They expand outwards like sound waves travelling through the air and affect others in predictable ways – even across species lines. No matter how good you are at hiding feelings from yourself and others, your nervous system involuntarily broadcasts what you are really feeling – at a frequency horses are especially good at tuning into.”

So writes Linda Kohanov in her book Riding Between the Worlds. She is best known for what she calls ‘equine facilitated psychotherapy’. She founded the Epona Equestrian Services, a collective of riding instructors and counsellors for equine-facilitated psychotherapy sessions, located in Tucson, Arizona. There are, of course, many riding schools that use horses to facilitate people with physical difficulties – but this one is different.

 Kohanov sees the horse as almost the perfect counsellor: non-judgmental; perfectly in tune with a person’s emotional state and extremely sensitive to any psychological incongruence [1]any inner conflict or self disharmony. So much so that the horse will straightforwardly react to the emotion a person is trying to suppress. The horse will pick up falsehood and pretence in an instant, she assures us. This isn’t just a theory. Linda Kohanov demonstrates this in story after personal story in her book, leaving one in no doubt as to its authenticity.

It is worth noting that children too, even before they can talk, are also able to pick up incongruence in adults; and I think young babies even more so. Like horses and some other domesticated animals they have no awareness of deceptive mind-games and are open to the physical emanations of our animal nature. In human families where there is a huge discrepancy between what people are pretending to be and what the actually are can drive children to despair.

What children obviously see as reality is totally denied by an adult conspiracy of lies which the perpetrators even believe themselves. This causes the child to doubt their perception of reality. It is the stuff of insanity and is known as the ‘double-bind’ syndrome’[2]  

Conversely, the horse comes from a family that is at one with its own nature, unaffected by the advantages and dangers of symbolic language. The horse has a direct non-verbal perception of reality. Its mother, father and the herd have no use for prevarication; their being is identical to their appearance; what you see is what they are. There is no such thing as pretence; and apparently they just can’t stand incongruence.  “Unlike human beings, horses don’t judge or reject us for what we’re feeling; it’s the act of trying to suppress our emotions that drives them crazy”. With their ability to see directly into our nature and accept us as we are, they are perfect psychotherapists, being fully there, but counselling nothing – no advice or clever interpretations. And if a person can tune into a horse’s nature they benefit by osmosis.

In the wild, a herd of horses depend for their survival on a sense of danger being instantly communicated to each other. A lion with a full belly can walk close to the herd without alerting them. But the moment a lion is on the hunt, a herd of horses or zebras will react instantly as a whole. Putting it in human terms you could say that they have the ability for instantaneous emotional communication with each other. And it is this ability they have carried forward in their domesticated life with us, giving them fine intuition and empathy. They are actually better at it than we are. Even though we ourselves, for most of our evolution, were also prey animals[3] like the horse, we have since lost touch with our primal senses.

Such are the attributes of the horse that are so useful in Kohanov’s kind of therapy?  She uses the immediacy of their nature, without all the mental trappings of human culture, to draw out that part of our own nature that is intuitive, communicative and empathic – in fact, all the qualities that we ourselves have beneath our educated mind. In our wordless encounter with this animal it is as though a mirror is held up showing us how we are deep down.   

There are some passages in the book, where the author strays from the importance this wordless encounter and uses the style of most self-help books.  I find this at odds with the implicit psychological insights of the horse/human relationship. She will occasionally step outside this magic place and give us a popular self-help mode of cognitive analysis and prescriptive advice. For example, she suggests that when you are feeling ‘vulnerable’ ask yourself, “What belief, behavior or perception is being challenged?” Apparently a useful question, no doubt. The problem is that such an approach will put most people straight into their thinking-heads to look for an answer. This is not a good guide in how to relate to one’s emotional self – in fact, it is counter-productive, validating entirely the wrong way to relate to bodily feelings. There are a number of examples like this in the book. Where they occur they impose an artificial analytical approach instead of using a natural process – which, after all, is really what the book is all about.

Such slips are perhaps forgivable for she does see the difficulty, which is precisely finding an adequate concept of the relationship between feeling and language. As she says, “To share this equine inspired wisdom with others I had to point to non-verbal realities with words and procedures.” Had she known ‘Focusing’ and Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the Implicit she would have found the task a good deal easier.

[1] “Incongruence” See my last blog: The Vale

[2] Bateson, G. (1972). Double bind, 1969. Steps to an ecology of the mind: A revolutionary approach to man's understanding of himself, 271-278. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

[3] Ehrenreich,  Barbara. (2011) Blood Rites. Granta Publications, 2011

Contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264