WITHDRAWAL OR ENGAGEMENT

by Stanley

I’ve often wondered about the difference between spiritual meditation and person-centred therapy. Are they complimentary or are they going in different directions? Do they help or hinder each other. Maybe we can work out some distinctions and differences of purpose. We need to do this because in recent times there has been a tendency to conflate the two.

It isn’t easy to generalise about meditation because there are so many different styles, but I think certain generalisations can be made. Many popular modes of meditation emphasise relaxation of the body and of ‘getting out of the mind’. This usually means to ‘witness’ what is going on in the body, to observe the flow of thoughts in the mind, but to not identify with any of them; that is to say, be aware, but distance oneself from them so that one remains neutral or equanimous. The general idea being that I am none of them. I am not my body or my mind, not my sensations or my thoughts. The passing states of oneself and the world are an illusion. This is the ideal practice, not just for meditation, but for living. The good life is achieving this non-attachment as an ongoing state, a way of being in the world.

And it is just here that we run into difficulties. Being in the world forces me to make choices. Each morning I either go to work or I don’t. At the party I either have another drink or I don’t – I have to identify with one or the other. I cannot do both. I either stay in my marriage or I leave. Some would say I could sit on the fence. But I am either indecisive in the marriage or I am indecisive out of the marriage. I am forced to choose. I ask myself: what is best for all? What is it I want? Even if I say I want nothing, that itself is a form of commitment. I identify myself as wanting nothing. I can’t escape from being either this or that.

So it’s understandable why meditation works best when one is isolated from worldly activities, in a ashram or a ten day course, where one meditates and speaks with no one. Worldly choices are at an absolute minimum. After an intense course of meditation people will report a wonderful spiritual transformation, a state of wholeness and peace. In coming back to the world, however, they cross over into their normal selves. The old problems are there waiting for them just as they left them. When you are in the world it won’t let you be a detached onlooker. It pulls you in. You have to take a position, you have to engage. It’s impossible to be only a witness, a detached onlooker.

Today the meditation mode is having quite an influence on our psychological practices. There are some benefits in this and some distinct disadvantages. Both in popular psychology and in serious therapy it has become customary to talk in terms of ‘parts of myself’. You know what I mean: ‘ part of me feels this and part of me feels that’. Indeed, there are some respected therapists who appear to base therapy entirely on this recipe. It is an attempt at non-attachment. It is useful, they say, because acknowledging the different parts of yourself integrates them – more than this, these different parts may have some important things to say. We should be a witness to all the parts of the psyche; but to do this we have to be in some sense detached, present but not involved.

In a therapy session, if you start with meditation or relaxation you will find that people do not move from this into their current problem area. If you start with observing a body sensation or pain the person will not move from that into the problem that generates it. In other words the mediative mode tends to cut off the route to the world; so does relaxation. By ‘world’ I mean all your worldly memories, desires and aversions; I mean all that’s going on for you in your life. Detaching from all that is OK if that’s what you want, but it also cuts you off from the therapeutic process; it cuts you off from being a person in the world – and all that this requires of you.

It’s interesting to note that standard focusing procedure starts with ‘what problem would you like to work on?’ It starts with your worldly mind, with something that engages you, with a consciously felt concern. This is done to start things moving at the place where they need to move.

Every movement in a focusing session is an engagement, a movement into this or that, into a feeling about that problem or a position about this concern. Each movement is a thorough going engagement. First, the problem seems to be this; then it seems to be that. New positions emerge. The process is one where you keep changing your mind. Things do actually change, but each change is one you believe in – you have to because that’s where you’re at. In each of these moments you are not sitting on the fence, not witnessing, but involved. You identify with each moment. True, the next moment there will be a movement to something else, to another position; but that itself is another engagement, another concrete position. What we call ‘experiential shifts’ in therapy are a series of movements as you work through your engagements with the world, your connections that need to be dealt with. The therapeutic process, in other words, moves through identifications, through one engagement after another. Each time, for the moment you are in it, you are not detached, but identified. These are not positions you assume, but viewpoints you successively find yourself in. At any given moment you cannot not be in some position or other. The whole idea of a neutral witness is an oxymoron. You cannot observe something from nowhere. Trying to impedes the process.

Take the proposition that ‘the internal critic is part of me’. This can be merely an idea I have learned and am rather fond of. But if I am stirred into really looking – yes, the critic is part of me. But, no, that’s not quite right. It feels more like a bunch of demons chattering away in the back of my head. They nag me and I’m sick of it.

At that vital moment I grasp how it really is for me. Not from some detached overview. I’ve really got it. They nag me and I’m sick of it…. I mean it: I’m sick of it. Not ‘part of me’ is sick of it – I am sick of it. In that moment I am passionately myself. The demons that nag me are now not the issue. Something else has taken centre stage. Not that I have thrown the inner critic out, or ignored it, or befriended it or integrated it. No clever psychological tricks. I have moved on to something else that is now more real and, at this moment, more important: they nag me I am sick of it !

I have arrived at a new place.

I am at one with my impatience.

At that moment there is no split - I discover how I am.

DYING AIN’T YOUR FAULT or Why you don’t need an attitude transplant

by Stanley

In the end you will die, not because you had a negative outlook, but because it is a biological inevitability. And there are a many other misfortunes in life that are not your fault either.

In the New Spiritual Religion (it goes under many names) there is something they call the ‘Law of Attraction’ by which your ‘attitude’ is supposed to ‘manifest’ events in the real world. The idea is that if you think negative thoughts, negative events will manifest; if you think positive thoughts, positive things will come to you.

If you Google ‘Manifesting Happiness’ you will get nearly two million hits. That means there are two million websites involved in or trying to sell you the New Spiritual Religion – for a fee. They will all tell you, in one form or another, that ‘The Secret Law of Attraction’ is the key to manifesting abundance, money, love, success and happiness. Obtain the life of your dreams’, they will tell you, ‘using the Universal Law of attraction!’ Apart from its appeal to people who are just greedy, this doctrine has a bad effect on needy people, like most of us, who have a critical super-ego.

The implication is that if you haven’t got all those wonderful things, it’s your fault: you don’t have the right attitude. My main gripe with all this spiritual hard sell is that it preys on people who are already inclined to self-blame, who too easily fall into a sort of hyper-responsibility, who can never stop questioning whether something is their fault. Moreover, it locks them into an impossible struggle to improve themselves.

These spiritual con-artists will convince you that if you invested in Lombard Finance & Investments Limited and lost your savings, the error lies in you. Not with former Justice Ministers Sir Douglas Graham and Bill Jeffries, now facing criminal charges for their role in Lombard Finance's collapse. Your loss is not their fault, but yours for being ‘negatively attracted’ to such people.

If your marriage collapsed it may well be because you were naïve enough, young enough, trusting enough, to marry someone who was sick, thinking love could triumph. But no, it has to be because your thoughts were sick and you ‘attract’ bad partners.

Now, we all know that there are those who marry people with the same kind of flaw over and over: women who can’t resist marrying drunkards; men who, again and again, get attached to bossy women. There are all kinds of intricate reasons for this, but attributing it to a ‘cosmic law of attraction’ is way over the top and far too generalised. In any case, trying to do an attitude transplant, trying to have positive thoughts does not get down to the specifics of what is going on in such repetitive behaviour. Without the specifics, smiling and being cheerful will get you nowhere. Correction: it will get you somewhere – you will become a smiling face disconnected from a body that is likely to get more and more depressed – ‘smiling depression’ they call it !

A more general criticism of the so-called Law of Attraction is that it is infantile and narcissistic. The very idea that my thoughts radiate out and actually create the world I live in is solipsistic, inferring that no one else really exists. Do you mean no one else’s thoughts do that? Only my thoughts control the environment, and everyone in it.

Now, you can do a spiritual one-upmanship on this by saying that the Law of Attraction is about non-specific love; that if you are open to all the love in the universe it will manifest. So OK, how do you do that? Do you pray? Do you simply keep affirming that it is so? Perhaps it’s a question of faith. In religion faith is always the bottom line. If you can’t do faith – too bad.

There is definitely an attraction, however, between the New Spiritual Religion and Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. They have joined forces in what has become known as ‘Prosperity Theology’ which proclaims that we have a right to wealth, health and riches and that God Himself wants us to have them. Another infantile wish. Unfortunately, He can only do so for believers through their positive affirmations of faith. He would like to do it for everyone, but somehow his hands are tied. The blessing of wealth – big houses, yachts, BMWs and perfect love matches can only be granted to believers.

Prosperity theology, with their televised megachurch services, is very widespread, not only in the US, but increasingly in the less prosperous parts of the world. The most recent Time Magazine carries an article called ‘Salvation Armies’ in which it says, ‘In poorer regions of Asia, as well as in many Chinese ethnic communities, converts are lured by the so-called prosperity gospel, an American theology, linked to Charismatic Christianity that promises riches to those who follow the moral path.’ In Indonesia, too, a growing and increasingly militant Christianity is beefing up Islamic fundamentalism into violent opposition.

I’m not an expert on the further reaches of spirituality and I am sure I have much to learn about how the Laws of Attraction fit in so well with the Bible. I do admit that I am at a disadvantage here because I find it all puts a great strain on my credulity.

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOSE YOURSELF ?

by Stanley

‘I am trying to find out who I am’. When I hear someone say this I believe it’s not just a figure of speech. It means something quite real and taking it seriously says something of profound importance: it is possible to lose yourself. Let me tell you a story of how it can happen.

I came into this world naked - not just physically naked, but my needs were naked too. They were raw and totally unmediated by any sense of proper behaviour – they were undiluted, with no notion or care about the style of the family game or its problems.

The baby, you can say, is totally itself, driven to assert instincts that have evolved to serve its needs. Hopefully, its mother is driven by complimentary instincts too.

But growing up, as we know, is to become socialised. This means adapting to whatever style of family you find yourself in. Adaptation means, to some extent, giving up that instinctive, naked drive with which you were born. This can be painful. I can remember vividly the terrible dread and darkness whenever I was a bad boy – and this as a very small child. I know how it is to adjust myself and avoid the black hole of disapproval.

Very early, if something goes terribly wrong, the first thing the child concludes is: ‘there’s something wrong with me. I’m bad.’

This is how you begin to lose yourself. It depends on just how much and what kind of adaptation you have to do as you become increasingly aware of expectations.

There are certain equations I still have in my childlike mind: being Good = adaptated. Being Bad = being myself. Let’s stick with these simplistic equations because somewhere deep in my mind this is how I understand life works. Being Good is doing it right: being the way I’m expected to be – the reward is approval and love; the price is loss of self assertion. Being Bad is doing it wrong, deviating or being different – the reward is being true to myself; the price is disapproval, abandonment and guilt. I hide as much as I can, but if they find out who I really am they certainly won’t want me. Deep down I still believe this.

Granted, this is a naive scenario, but my child mind is like this, seeing everything in black and white.

Having successfully adapted myself and put away my childish tantrums and frustrations I become a reasonably good child – not all of the time, but most of the time. Things settle down after my initial training. That is, until adolescence when biology again kicks in with an avalanche of sex hormones; nature once again forcing a self assertion that wakes up all the old conflicts between being how I am expected to be and how I actually find myself.

Well, I get over that and things settle down again. My youth is a great time of doing what I please, joining with my peers, all of us trying hard not to be how we were taught to be, all of us similarly revolting, all of us wearing the same kind of hat and digging the same kind of revolting music. I’m OK except that I smoke and drink too much; and I’m not quite sure how to handle my freedom.

If I am a woman and get married the problem of too much freedom disappears. Suddenly I find myself confronted with the old choice: adapt or lose the person who means everything to me. It’s the same old situation. Again I become increasingly aware of expectations. I find myself anxiously trying to meet them; always understanding and doing everything to be helpful. I’m a good girl, adapting to the whims and vicissitudes of his character – giving him all he needs. But the old price has to be paid: the gradual loss of myself. Without my being aware of it, he is probably doing exactly the same. But the time will come when I will utter the words that will upset him so much: “I need some space – I think we should separate for a while”.

I do this not because I want to, but to save my life. It began to seem as though I was drowning in the relationship, which is how people will often describe it. You see, in this latest version of the drama I am not just dealing with the present situation. The original one I first went through as a child is there in full force, but entirely projected onto the marriage relationship; but I have no grasp of this. The problem seems entirely in the now. If it were only about now it would all be reasonable and solvable. But it isn’t like that. My overwhelming emotions run deep, deeper than I can comprehend; and they are so conflicted that it seems as though I don’t know what I want. As the saying goes, ‘I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him. To be with him is to drown and lose myself. To be without him is to face life on my own.

Emotions and feelings are temporal, always echoing and powered by the past. The temptation is always to give up myself in order to have someone. This is hardest thing is to grasp and most of therapy can be a gradual realisation of it.

I know this too: in spite of all the battles and heartache, I really did love my Mum and Dad so long ago – so much that I would give myself away, give them what they want of me, to make them happy. Then we could all live.

CULTURE AND HUMAN NATURE

by Stanley

It is possible to educate people in ways that are harmful to them. Some cultural traditions are fundamentally pathological: an education in religious fundamentalism is an extreme example.

We can think of such cultural ideas as ‘memes’ or viruses that infect the human mind. We can say that although such cultural memes are successful at replicating themselves, passing from one mind to another, they do so at the expense of their hosts. Many harmful religious doctrines are of this kind. This phenomenon is not unusual in the story of evolution. An example is the aids virus which uses a host, a living human cell, to replicate itself in order to infect other cells. You are also host to millions of bacteria in your body. Some are benign and actually assist certain necessary functions of your body. Some are pathological and harmful.

Ideas behave in the same way. You are host to many that are damaging to human wellbeing. They are transmitted from one host to another, not as organisms, but as packets of information we call ‘memes’. Their sole purpose is replication. A successful religion is an example successful memetic replication. Many religious practices (memes) are unquestionably harmful. For example, the idea of going to hell for your sins - no one today, except those infected with the meme, can possibly pretend that this idea is in any way helpful.

Let’s take the vivid example of Muslim women who wear the burka. A burka is a head to toe costume worn by some traditionally devout Muslim women designed to conceal every part of their bodies, except for the eyes.

In looking at this cultural practice, we can do a post-modernist move by saying that all cultural values are relative. We can say that when a Muslim woman says she is quite happy being enclosed in a burka we should take this at face value. Who are we to say that she is wrong? In saying this we are also agreeing that there is no basic human nature that this practice offends. A human beings, so the post-modernist doctrine goes, is a blank slate upon which anything can be written; human beings are infinitely malleable and there are no objective values by which we can judge. This is a very late western view in which we deny there is anything like a universal human nature. Every human being is nothing more than the product of their society. Any judgement we make is simply the one-sided product of our own culture and therefore without any universal justification.

However, biological science is showing us what we already know from common sense observation: that there is such a thing as human nature and that we are indeed born with predispositions, some are universal to all humanity. Not only this, but each individual is born with slight but important variations – a fact obvious to any mother. We do not come into the world as a blank slate upon which any whacky idea can run the show without fear of harm.

What we call our human nature can adequately be accounted for by our biological makeup. Cultural memes are a different class of events. Harmful cultural memes use our natural biological makeup as hosts for their own purposes, just as other parasitic organisms can.

It is impossible to imagine that a child who has not been infected with the burka meme, that is to say educated as a devoted Muslim girl, would freely choose to wear a burka. There is nothing in our biological make up that would instinctively incline a child toward that kind of choice.

Of course, once infected, the meme virus induces a certain kind of typical behaviour and reinforces it with instructions from a, in this case, divine source. The idea is that a woman will be happier and safer protected from the lascivious gaze of men. This meme is supported by the whole information package of the Islamic religion. So of course, in wearing a burka the woman may well feel happy and contented. But this fact does not make it any the less an offence against her nature than it would if she felt she deserved to be murdered by her father as punishment for being raped by a stranger – another Islamic meme.

‘The moment we admit that there is anything to know about human wellbeing, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it.’ [1] Some cultural practices and ideas are obviously inimical to human nature; there are universal truths about what conditions are bad for human wellbeing. Would anyone like to argue that celibacy for catholic priests is good for them or for the sexually abused children under their institutional care?

The moment we reject the post-modern idea of the relativity of what is good for people the whole ground of our discourse is changed. We realise that people can be hypnotised into believing that they are happy or that adverse circumstances are good for them. A principle survival mechanism of a successful meme is the hypnotic instruction that you are happier and better off, or will be, for willingly embracing its instructions, (e.g. sacrificing yourself as a suicide bomber or giving yourself to Jesus).

The desire to be happy is part of our genetic makeup and the meme mobilises this for its own use; just as the aids virus mobilises the ribosomes, enzymes and cellular reproductive machinery of the cell to reproduce itself and spread itself to other hosts.

There is a level, then, at which we have to say that people can lose their sense of what is good for them. People hypnotised into a religion, for example, are obviously not responsible for their judgements. It is well known how notoriously difficult it is to debrief someone who has been infected by a cult-church. We should not submissively tolerate this kind of human abuse in the name of cultural and religious tolerance.

The view expressed here may seem dangerous in that it looks as though it runs counter to human rights and our belief in democracy and self-determination. But it is a primary requisite for judgements that are consistent with the needs of human nature that there is a genuine freedom of choice. Once we admit this we throw into doubt many questionable practices that have gained immunity to debate.

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[1] Harris, Sam. Moral Confusion in the Name of Science: http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/

Also: http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN.

Every time it rains

Pennies from heaven

Don’t you know each cloud contains

Pennies from heaven

by stanley

It’s extraordinary the way the madness of positive-thinking infects people who have not been directly exposed to its teachings. It has spread like a virus. It has mutated into a form for which we have little resistance. It has merged with spirituality. To think positively has become a secular spiritual religion, where being positive and being spiritual are the same thing: an irresistible and deadly combination.

We need to say again that this new religion flies in the face of all psychological evidence. The truth is that our thoughts do not govern our emotional life. The kind of thinking that goes on in our head most of the time is the product of our emotional life, not the cause of it.

But at last there are some brave souls who are speaking out. This week’s Listener (March 20-26) carries a front page banner: HOW POSITIVE THINKING IS FOOLING US; and inside there is a full five page article reviewing a new book by Barbara Ehrenreich ‘Smile or Die: how positive thinking has fooled America and the World’

The ChCh Public Library’s summary of the book is: ‘A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism, existential clarity and courage.’

‘We have, she says, been “bright-sided”. Although there is nothing more natural than the pursuit of happiness, it is now being ruthlessly enforced in a way that is most unnatural. Positiveness is now demanded of powerless employees, who in the US, can be sacked if they don’t have the “right attitude”, of Christians who are told they are letting God down if they dwell on bad things, even of invalids, who are told their negativity probably made them ill.

There is no proof, Ehrenreich says, that adopting a positive attitude will make you happier, healthier and richer – instead, says a US researcher, it could be making things worse. “Other studies suggest that mild pessimists are more resilient to life’s catastrophes and less pray to actual depression, because they may be slightly more realistic than optimists.”

Retuning to my point that the kind of thinking we do is the product of our emotional life, not its cause, I am reminded of David Hume’s famous remark (Treatise, ii. iii. 3): ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.

What Hume meant by ‘the passions’ in his day, we would now call one’s ‘emotional life’.

‘Smile or Die’ (also published as ‘Bright-sided’) by Barbara Ehrenreich is available at the Canterbury Public Library : 155.23 EHR.

THE QUEST: ‘There is more in heaven and earth…’

by Stanley

Some people have a strong spiritual sense – backed up, not by mere belief, but personal experience that confirms the existence of a psychic domain or imaginative sphere that can penetrate to the heart of things and give a deeper kind knowledge.

Maybe they have intuitions about people that later prove correct; or perhaps predictive premonitions that are too near the mark to be co-incidence; or visions and dreams; or perhaps merely inexplicable moments of uncanny insight. They may use physical aids like cards, pendulums, runes, crystals, sticks, gemstones, divining rods etc, perhaps insisting that these are just conduits that facilitate their psychic abilities. Others eschew such physical aids and rely solely on their own deeply felt intuitive sense.

There is no denying that there is something mysterious going on in all this that we do not understand and have as yet no adequate concepts even to discuss intelligently. But I would like to pause and consider some of the psychological effects of the spiritual quest, to look at the quest from the psychological angle rather than how spirituality views itself.

The spiritual world can provide hope and solace for people to whom life has been less than kind, much as the tortured souls of the Middle Ages, burdened with original sin and harassed by the omnipresence of devils, must have looked towards redemption and relief in a life to come. And who would deny unhappy souls a spot of comfort. But from the same psychological perspective there are others for whom spirituality acts as brake on their personal development, giving them, in the long run, more struggle than reward.

Spiritual doctrines can strongly reinforce personal hang-ups. An example is the injunction to ‘to pray and act for the welfare of others’. A most commendable idea, but we have to take into account the effect such guidance has on someone who already finds it difficult to assert themselves and who is compelled to fulfil the needs of everyone except themselves, who, in fact, actively neglects their own welfare. The number of people like this is surprisingly large. The effect is to reinforce an already serious displacement that makes life even more difficult for them.

Similarly, a person with an oversize conscious already feels they are to blame for everything. Any failure in a relationship and they will gnaw away at the idea that if they had done something differently everything might have been OK. The kind of spirituality that will appeal to them is one stressing that one is responsible for everything that happens, suggesting perhaps that their ‘thinking’ was at fault. These are pernicious one-sided ideas that screw them down, making it impossible for them to stop hammering themselves, a habit which is really their chief problem.

Then there is the tendency of spiritual practices to elevate one’s ideal of the sort of person one should be. The notion of the spiritual life suggests that you can be better than you actually are – which of course is true. But for someone who already has an overlarge and punishing internal critic such a suggestion enhances their own accusations of not being good enough. The failure to measure up and the struggle to do so is now justified as spiritual work. They are then condemned to a life of trying.

Then there is the opposite effect it can have on the narcissistic personality, who is already the centre of the universe and who has difficulty in getting the reality that other people actually exist. Spirituality will be attractive because secretly it will imply a certain superiority. Being spiritual will inflate the ego, whose grandiosity is blown up even further by its supposed intimate connection with the ‘transcendent’.

Spiritual advice can fail to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all. Lets say person has progressed to a point where they can, at last, get angry about something, whereas all their life they have too scared to be. After a lifetime of servility they are finally able to feel annoyed about something. If you now tell them that resentment is bad for them spiritually you have effectively done them in.

Another trap: if you are pursuing a path of spirituality and you feel depressed something must be wrong with the way you are thinking. Negative thoughts are not spiritual. That idea is psychologically disastrous.

On another level there is the problem of education. There are indeed fascinating phenomena associated with what one could roughly call ‘the transpersonal’. But educationally there is a difficulty with the beliefs that arise to explain it. Because it is such a nebulous sphere it is wide open to fantastic projections of meaning and interpretation, unchecked by any kind of evidence.

It is when we look into the beliefs and explanations about spirituality that we have to face up to the possibility of error. Merely to believe something sincerely is not enough. Mere sincerity can be highly dangerous. Muslim suicide bombers believe that 12 virgins will be theirs in the next life – it has never been established what women suicide bombers hope for.

There is perhaps one more doubtful psychological service that the spiritual quest performs. I mean as a defence against the overwhelming influence of science and technology and the materialism of the modern world. Spirituality seems to provide another dimension in which the true values of the soul can be preserved. But as a purely defensive manoeuvre it suffers inevitably from a sense of isolation and irrelevance in the stream of modern life.

I would suggest that the spiritual quest as a defensive manoeuvre is no solution either to the narrowness of the modern world or to the lostness of the soul. One way to re-ensoul ‘materialism’ is by seeing the modern world as the wonderful achievement that it is in so many respects. Seeing, as Stephen Pinker said, not what we have done wrong in civilisation, but what we have done right. Perhaps we could even regain the spirit of the Romantic poets for whom the burgeoning new sciences at that time were a source of wonder and inspiration.

FELT-SENSE: the soft science

by Stanley

With every experience there is an underlying mood. Or perhaps ‘mood’ is too strong a word. Maybe I should say: there is an underlying feeling component or feeling tone to every experience. We call this the ‘felt-sense’. Every thought you have, every imagining, every encounter with others, everything you touch, every experience in life carries this feeling component with it.

To get a handle on this consider what it’s like when this feeling component is missing, what it’s like when life goes completely flat, where all meaning just drains away, where everything is one dimensional – dead. Nothing suggests anything, nothing enlivens. It is as though one has gone tone deaf. The world is all there, but it means nothing. [1] The opposite of this would be to listen to your favourite piece of music; the bodily felt sensation will likely be quite strong – and with it that non-verbal sense of meaning. In the arts we dignify this by calling it the ‘aesthetic sense’.

We have learned about this felt-sense from the therapeutic technique of focusing where you give attention to a kind of bodily feeling-sense that can unwind a personal problem. But the felt-sense is a much wider phenomenon than just this. Not only does every personal problem have its unique felt-sense, but so does every experience you have in life. The difficulty is that the felt-sense is so seamlessly part of every experience that it has never before been properly differentiated. It is so subtle that it passes unnoticed as something distinguishable. Nobody notices it – until it’s missing. When people look for it, having read something about focusing, they might look for something quite distinct from the experience itself, instead of an aspect of that experience. It is a difficulty that’s understandable because people are not used to selecting or lifting it out. And for some people the feeling signal is quite weak. It’s like tuning into a radio station that’s distant – turn the tuner minutely one way or another and you loose the signal and can’t get it back.

It is often difficult to get the difference between the felt-sense and emotion. Emotion is elephantine and opaque. But emotion can be the object of the felt-sense just like any other experience. You can find out what’s underneath it. For example if you are angry with someone, the emotion is quite definite. But the anger, by itself, does not reveal what is underneath the anger. Emotions blot out the felt-sense, so you have to stand beside the emotion and tune in very carefully what is just alongside it.

Focusing in therapy has been a wonderful research area because though it we have been able to examine this component of experience closely. We emphasise the bodily aspect of the felt-sense because it is a vital and seamless part of you as a whole organism and can be more sharply sensed in the heart, chest or stomach. The body is the reference point, not ‘the mind’.

You can check out the ubiquitous presence of the felt-sense. Stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘what do I really feel drinking this cup of tea right now?’ or ‘what is the felt-sense of doing the dishes right now?’ If you do this seriously and intentionally you will find that tea drinking and dish washing is never just tea drinking and dish washing. It isn’t simply flat. Things are never ordinary. If they feel that way, just ask ‘what does this so-called‘ordinary ’really feel like? You will find that the sense of ‘just ordinary’ is a veritable portmanteau of luggage. Pull one thing out of it and it will drag out more and more: memories, intimations, feelings, wishes, longings, anxieties.

This is our sense of meaning. I don’t mean the big MEANING OF LIFE. Something much simpler. It’s the feeling of meaning attached to every small action: ‘gathering sticks and drawing water’. In Jungian psychology we sometimes call it the sense of ‘depth’. Really it is the sense of being involved, connected or interested and curious; if it’s strong we call it a fascination, even an obsession.

Some people are lucky enough to be easily interested. Things interest them. One noticeable characteristic of such people is that they don’t pre-empt surprise, they don’t ‘already know’. If you tell them something they don’t ‘already know’. They are always on the lookout for nuances that are different from what they thought was the case. They actually find out things. They are attracted to new meanings that had never occurred to them. That is precisely the characteristic of someone working the felt-sense in focusing-type therapy. There is openness to the as yet unexplored. More than anything, there is the sense that one doesn’t already know.

The felt-sense is not a source of mystic knowledge. It merely displays the unexpected connections between things that are going on for you right now. Perhaps you may tune in to your present feelings and discover that you feel guilty. For example: ‘this person expects something of me and I feel mean for not giving them what they want’. This isn’t your felt-sense telling what to do. It doesn’t give moral signals; it’s simply telling you how you are and an invitation to find out more, to see what further is implied. Are you being mean or are you simply standing up for yourself. Questions arising like this are not to be answered – they show you sharply what state you are in. Ah! That’s right. I can feel how difficult it is to say ‘no’? I didn’t realise how strong that is. And so on. When you’ve got more of what is going on the knot of guilt simply unties.

The felt-sense does not reveal great psychic truths. It’s no use asking the felt-sense about the Divinity of Christ because there is nothing more to be said. All the absolute truths about that are in the bible. There is nothing to open up. The felt-sense doesn’t work on fixed systems – except to undo them! It doesn’t work on fixed beliefs for the same reason. That’s the whole point: following the felt-sense undoes mental and emotional structures; it loosens fixities, places where we are stuck. It works best where there is uncertainty. There is room then for movement.

Of course, if you are hanging on to a fixed belief for dear life then you won’t want anything that will loosen it.

It is a mistake to look for the causes of a personal problem. When using the felt-sense on any personal problem you are not looking for causes – what is the cause of the problem or what to call it. You are not on a diagnostic mission. Once you get into such speculation the head will take over and run the show. There are many ways to diagnose you, most of them completely useless.

The felt-sense moves things, it carries a problem further, it opens out a problem. It does this progressively as a process, not as simplistic and interpretive one-off revelation. After the process has taken place, looking back, you can see what contributed to the problem. But you can never get that first. To start with you never know where the felt-sense will lead.

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[1] Feeling and loss of feeling are complex issues in psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature.
Here we are coming at it from the phenomenological point of view, how these
appears directly to consciousness.