THE ‘WHERE’S-THE-SCISSORS’ DISORDER

by Stanley

I would like to tell you about an odd personal disturbance of mine. I’ll call it the Where’s-the-Scissors disorder. It used to happen regularly with my car keys, but it can happen with anything: ‘where did I leave the scissors’; ‘where is my diary’; ‘where did I put my notes’; ‘where’s my cell phone’. The other day I had no idea where I had left my cell phone, so I rang it up on the land line – heard it ringing and searched all over the house to find where the ringing was coming from. Eventually I found it in some unlikely place.

But it’s my condition of mind that is interesting. It is based on the assumption that something is lost. When I am afflicted with this condition I know something is lost in the same instant that I turn to find it. Both go together: where is it – I’ve lost it. It’s the same as searching for a name I can’t remember. I know the name full well and I know that I know it. But in the instant I reach for it in my memory, I know I can’t remember it.

This syndrome is especially noticeable where the thing I’m looking for is right in front of my nose. ‘Where’s the scissors?’ Anyone else would see them right there on the table in front of me; but do I see them? No, I do not. I know I can’t find them because I’m looking for them. That very ‘knowing’ produces a blind spot. ‘Can’t find’ is built in to ‘looking for’.

If you think I must be getting a bit Alzheimerish I can only say that I was like this when I was 10. I can remember crying out, “Mum…Muuum where are my…..?” to which my mother would invariably reply, “Well where did you put it…?” This would infuriate me because if I knew where I’d put it I wouldn’t be asking her.

*

There are many kinds of seeking and all kinds of things we seek. But there are certain quests that are doomed to fail because they have an out-of-reach quality already built into them. They are quests with a nullifying shadow. Rather like my conviction that I can’t find the scissors. It was Plato who said, (and I somewhat paraphrased him) “we never want what we already have”. It is also true, in some perverse sense, that I never have what I want. Wanting already implies an absence. It is almost like wanting turns on the deficit; just as ‘looking-for’ turns on ‘can’t find’.

Let’s hone in on something a little more specific. Sometimes in session a person will say to me, “what am I supposed to be talking about.” Such a simple, honest question reveals a propensity for impossible quests. Maybe the thing that is important to him isn’t really the most important thing. The person has the notion that there is something he should find within himself that isn’t already there. That’s the perfect set-up for the impossible quest. The very worst reply would be to try and help him find it. Why? Because you would be playing into the ‘quest’ state of mind. You would be collaborating in the idea that there is something he is not doing which he ought to be doing. Even if he found something that he wanted to talk about it might not be the right one. It wouldn’t be, would it? Obviously – otherwise he wouldn’t be asking, would he?

The very worst thing you can do is to set someone up for an impossible quest. So many religious and spiritual systems do just that. A typical example would be to suggest that there is something one must find within oneself. “The answer to your problems lies within”, you wisely suggest. That’s the trigger that sets them up. It’s only a short step to trying to find God. They’re probably already stuck on ‘trying to find themselves’. And what you suggest closes the trap that’s already waiting for them. It’s a very subtle thing. Who they are can’t be right because they are looking for themselves.

I have been guilty of unintentionally perpetrating this ploy myself. As you know I have been very keen on the technique called focusing. But it has one major snare that’s easy to fall into. In my keenness it took me a while to learn this. The technique asks people to look into the felt-sense to find what they feel. The felt-sense is a murky, uneasy physical sensation somewhere in the body; and, if you give it attention, new and important feelings will emerge. And it does work – except for people who are already inclined toward impossible quests. The first thing that hits them is “what feeling am I supposed to look for”. With that question they’re gone !! Even if they just think it.

‘Well no’, you might say, ‘just put your attention on that tightness in your chest and see what comes’. Yes, the person is willing to try it. So they wait for something that isn’t there to reveal itself. That’s the catch! If something is there, that can’t be it because I’m looking for it. You don’t search for what is there, do you?

I will go so far as to say that any instruction in how to do therapy is in danger of being counterproductive. Firstly, because the person will search for what is supposed happen and will overlook is actually happening. In doing so they become one step removed from direct involvement; and one step removed from their own experience.

The trouble is, any psychological or spiritual belief system tends to dictate what you should strive to be or to search for. They address something that is felt to be missing and therefore precipitates the search for something that ‘should be there but I can’t find it’. I can just as easily try to find Christ as my Buddha nature, or the meaning of my archetypal dreams; or the Love that the Universe is Sending me; or the Real Me; or the Meaning of Life; or just simply ‘Love’ or ‘Happiness’. Or – here’s a good one – ‘faith ’.

All harmless enough pursuits I suppose. But just be on the lookout for the various mutations of the deadly ‘I-can’t-find-the-scissors’ disorder.

DIARY OF A DABBLER

by Stanley

What’s the similarity between falling in love and a passion for collecting beetles ? The answer is that in both cases, when it happens, you give yourself over. In spite of anything you may have originally intended, you find that you’re hooked! You are dedicated, devoted! Well yes, this makes sense when you fall in love with a person - everyone knows you don’t fall in love unless, in some sense, you’re already prone to giving yourself over. You surrender and find yourself cheerfully attached. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you. It’s the same with collecting beetles – but I mean more than just collecting beetles, I mean being a passionate entomologist. I mean being in love with bugs.

In his autobiography the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his fervent love affair with butterflies, “From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender”.[1] And in an essay, Strong Opinions, he wrote “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. In spite of this, Nabokov knew all about obsessive human love affairs. After all, he wrote Lolita.

An anonymous writer cries, “It was the mantra that kept repeating in my head, It hummed in my head, and seemed to be said by multiple voices, of multiple sexes, voices of women, voices of men, voices of children, and no voice at all. " I love all insects... I love all insects... I love all insects.

I knew what entomophobia means, so I wondered if there was such a thing as entomophilia; and yes, there was. It means sexual arousal involving insects – although it is never stated how this is achieved; Google and the medical dictionaries were all modestly sparse on details.

When he was at Oxford my old friend Charles Darwin spent too much time out in the countryside collecting beetles. He once surmised that “the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them.” He was somewhat smitten with them himself. His girlfriend Fanny Owen scolded him and announced that he had to choose between her and chasing after insects. She finally broke up with poor Charles because he apparently he couldn’t break his attachment .

*

Most of the activities that engage me have a personal agenda, a purpose, a goal. There are very few things that interest me of which I can say I have no selfish interest. But my agendas are quite unreliable and change like the weather. And as my mind wanders so too do my interests.

Being a dabbler I never quite digest what I happen to be eating, for my appetites move on. I can’t seem to settle down. To give up dabbling and be really unswerving you have to be a specialist. You can’t really open your heart fully unless you hone in on the singular. Being a specialist is very hard for anyone who is afraid of missing out. It’s hard to commit oneself to one thing because something better might come along and I’ll miss out. In any case, there are so many avenues that beckon. I buy a promising book of study, intending to read it from cover to cover. But half way through some luring reference leads me elsewhere.

So I tend to be a professional dilettante, frivolously drifting from one thing to another. It is the style of an intellectual decadent; I want to know everything. So, as a consequence, I’m a Jack-of-all-Trades and master of none. I envy people who have managed to be specialists, who can devote their lives to a single study or cause. I comfort myself with the idea that if you hone in on the single grain of sand you miss the beauty of the beach. This romantic idea makes me out to have a larger vision, in touch with the mystique of the cosmos. In any case, specialist are boring and opinionated.

William Blake was a funny fellow. He was a romantic mystic who hated science. He poured scorn on the scientific aspirations of his day and demonised Newton,“ Pray God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!” he wrote. In a little poem he proclaimed,

To see the universe in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

He didn’t see the paradox. He uses the small as the window to the larger vision. I mean, if you can see the universe in a grain of sand you are a specialist like a physicist studying atomic structure; like Newton and his apple. But Blake saw the specialist as missing out.

It is precisely the single vision that the specialist has. Being a specialist in beetles or butterflies or physics can take you to the wonder at the heart of things. I think of Nabokov prancing about in shorts with his butterfly net. Of his book on butterflies, someone said that it, “…glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death.” His speciality opened up the rainforest of the cosmos. In that he was the perfect combination of the specialist and the poet.

There are other reasons why I cannot be a specialist: the million and one things that have to be done, that have to be thought about, duties that demand my care. And the next thing to be done is always a little more important than what I am doing now.

To specialise means to neglect all other claims and possibilities. I can’t even specialise in myself – I’m too busy. I’m a multitasker. That’s a nice way to put it. But when I meditate I ask myself a crucial question: why does my mind always have to go somewhere else?

Somewhere else always calls me; and I can never make up my mind whether this is a terrible disadvantage or a gift.

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory Speak. Everyman Library, 1966

IMPLICIT NATURE

by Stanley

You must have had the experience of realising something you already knew, in a way – but didn’t know. Somehow you knew it all along – but didn’t know you knew. It’s as though you knew it at the back of your mind but paid no attention to it. Very strange how one can do this! But it’s only the tip of a vast terra incognita.

There is a whole area of mindbody which, to varying degrees, is not conscious. We are not talking about the Freudian unconscious which consists of repressed feelings, wishes and painful material. There is a wider area of knowledge that you are not conscious of because you don’t need to be. You know how to ride a bike, but you don’t have to give your body instructions to do it. Your fingers know how to type, but you are past deliberating about it. You know all the subtleties of English usage without the use of gramma. You know the intricate etiquette of the family Christmas gathering without reference to all the unspoken and highly complex rules of behavior – how to behave with each relative comes naturally, like riding a bike! But there are differences: riding a bike is only sensorimotor knowledge; the Christmas gathering implies a vast store of relational knowledge, the actual complexity of which is truly staggering. You know it all too well, but mercifully not consciously. It is what we call implicit knowledge, and we don’t have to bother our heads with it. In fact, we are much better off if we don’t. Some things are best left unexplored. You know the old story of how to ruin your golfing partner’s game: you just get him to analyse his stroke in detail when he is half way round the course.

When we try to explain something we have a feel for, but only know implicitly, we run into an unfathomable chaos. In focusing we refer to it as the murkiness of the felt-sense. But this chaos is more ungovernable and ominous than this suggests. ‘Go on, explain what you really feel’ is a monstrous and impossible challenge. Even in the act of explaining, it changes; something else occurs to us, some slightly different perspective. We struggle on, trying to maintain our original flash of certainty. But we falter. Our original feeling isn’t so simple. When we really look at it, it’s a mess of confusion. Our exposition gets dangerously weaker until we’ve lost all sense of what we started to explain. New feelings about the whole thing crowd in on us. Lost! Unless, of course, we are one of those dogged souls who can rave on having quite lost the theme, just managing to keep up the appearance of certainty; or, at the very least, still running the worthy effort to show others who and what we are.

Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco expresses something similar:

‘Here's the trouble. ...When you express an (implicit) idea you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organized and concise, and comprehensible to others. As long as you limit yourself to thinking it, the idea can remain the marvellous mess that it is. But when you decide to express it (in words) you begin to discard one thing, to summarize something else, to simplify this and cut that, to put it in order by imposing a certain logic: you work on it a bit, and in the end you have something that people can understand ... At first you try to do this in a responsible way: you try not to throw too much away, you'd like to preserve the whole infinity of the idea you had in your head. You try. But they don't give you time, they are on you, they want to know.’ [1]

I suppose this is the reason why other people’s understanding of you is seldom what you feel about yourself. Unless it be in one of those beautiful moments when two people mutually recognise each other in a way that is beyond speech – that, in fact, can’t be spoken about, but which is clearly known implicitly by both. Such are moments of meeting, moments of wordless compassion and empathic implicit understanding, moments of true intimacy. Some people will tell you that even this is a delusion, like falling in love.

But this kind of implicit understanding is what you had before you learned language, where you learned all those lessons that will be a baseline for the rest of life, where your instincts were moulded. It is the very search for intimacy that required you to learn what others wanted of you. And you learn it all before ever you can speak or understand cognitively what is being said. It becomes your particular version of human nature. There never was a time when you learned so much so quickly; learning, too, how to be intimate, and just how much and what kind of intimacy, was allowed.

From the point of view of tidiness, your implicit nature is a shambolic mess. Like nature itself it is a vast conglomeration of make-do adaptations to circumstances and to a culture that is itself a shambolic mess. No intelligent design anywhere in sight. But from another point of view it is a miracle of spontaneity. It’s like the difference between a wildflower meadow and a cultivated suburban garden.

The tidy mind despairs, but the child in us whoops with delight.

---

[1] Quoted in: Stern, D.N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Norton, NY, 2004 pp.117

PRESENCE OF MIND

by Stanley

In the 60s, carried along with the spirit of the times, I was very taken by Zen. Eastern Ways of Liberation were all the thing – Aldous Huxley, the Beatles, Alan Watts and Timothy Leary: “Turn on, Tune in and Drop out.” I loved the outrageous anti- intellectualism of the old Zen Masters who ask the monks questions like: “Does a dog have a Buddha nature? If you say it has I’ll give you thirty blows; if you say it hasn’t I’ll give you thirty blows.” For me, at the time, was all such a relief from Aristotle. As far as I could see, Zen was the only religion (can you call it that?) that perfectly understood how words and systems are not the things themselves. They had no holy book and were even disrespectful of their own traditional origins: “What is the Buddha.” Answer, “A lump of dung.” But along with this apparent bravado they had the keenest perception of what it is to have presence of mind.

Something I learned all those years ago from Zen and the Art of the Motor Cycle Maintenance – a wonderful little book: when a machine goes wrong you can rush in to try and fix it; or you can spend time just looking before you do anything. The first way usually generates more trouble; with the second way you almost don’t have to do anything – after a moment the fault just stares you in the face. Fixing it is now a piece of cake. You could call it the art of pausing.

You could almost claim that simple presence of mind fixes the machine. And when you think about it, pausing like this can fix a lot of other things too. Isn’t what we do in therapy and meditation just giving ourselves an extended pause? Isn’t that too what Darwin did on the Galapagos Islands: “Hey, Wait a minute. How come these finches have different shape beaks on different islands?” But first he had to notice it. Before he even asked this, what turned out to be a world shaking question, was noticing that it was so.

That’s the big trick isn’t it – noticing that it is so !

But it takes time. You have to give things time to show themselves; and time for them to cut through all one’s ready made assumptions of how things are. And don’t say how they are too quickly.

And don’t say you don’t know how they are too quickly either.

VITAL CONNECTIONS

by Stanley

With careless overuse some modes of expression become tired and worn out. I once knew a man who said of every emotional experience: ‘It pisses me off!’ So much was the phrase used to describe everything that it had become meaningless. The cliché no longer revived the freshness of a feeling. It was, in fact, an escape from feeling.

The purpose of psychological refection is to revivify an experience. Not to relive it – that’s a different thing – but to tune into all the subtleties of it that are waiting in the wings. And the way we use language has a lot to do with this process of connection.

Have you ever noticed that the closer you get to the precision of a feeling the harder it is to name it? When I say ‘precision of a feeling’ I mean the sharpness and freshness of it. It’s much like the sensation a colour. A colour is precisely what it is; when I try to accurately name it, I fumble around saying things like: ‘it’s a sort of a bluey-greeny-greyish.’ Then, realising the hopelessness of such a description, I look around the room searching for a colour that will match – usually unsuccessfully. What this means is that the precision of the colour is like nothing else – no word-symbol is accurate enough and no other colour is quite the same.

When you really tune into a feeling it’s the same kind of thing. ‘How do I feel about Aunt Amelia?’ No word symbol is accurate enough to say it exactly and no other feeling is the same; and the closer you tune into how I feel about her, the harder it gets to name it. To give up and say ‘I really don’t know how to describe it’ is honestly true; and moreover, it honours the uniqueness of your perception.

How is it then, in focusing, after fumbling around, a person will suddenly hit on the most ordinary word imaginable and light up as though they have really hit it? Let’s say I have been scratching around, trying to describe how I feel about Aunt Amelia who is coming to stay. ‘Apprehensive? Well, yes, I suppose so’. ‘Scared she’ll dominate me? No, I’m not scared of her any more’. ‘Will I be able to cope with her? I suppose so’. Pause…….. ‘Fact is … she SUFFOCATES me – the whole thing SUFFOCATES me.’ That word seems to absolutely clinch it. I can feel the energy release as I say it. I take a deep breath.

How can this happen? Here we have been talking about how the precision of a feeling is basically indescribable. And now this very ordinary word somehow says it exactly right. No long, meandering description, no elaborate poetic metaphors. How come a commonplace cliché like ‘she suffocates me’ is precisely right?

My theory is that we don’t actually choose words that fit like that; what happens is a deep ‘knowing’ suddenly infuses an ordinary word with its own energy. A word gets close enough to the bodily feeling for a spark to leap across the gap like a flash of lightening, changing a cliché into an experience. How I really experience my Aunt comes alive and the word is its bearer. The word now sounds utterly right. This ordinary word gets a jolt and is electrified into a life that it normally doesn’t have. It isn’t ordinary word any longer. The reality of the experience has burst through. The words and the energy fused together into a single meaning. The words don’t describe the feeling, the word has ignited and has become the feeling – the words have been enlivened by an authentic force; words and felt-sense become a single meaning releasing my blockage and bringing me to a full awareness.

‘She SUFFOCATES me’ now gives me the full physical experience I’m referring to. Now I remember it clearly. Now I absolutely know what I’m talking about. It releases me.

*

From the therapist’s point of view it is vitally important to understand the mechanism I have described above. You won’t interfere with the working of it if you understand it. The moment when the energy of the felt-sense makes contact with the word is of paramount importance. Such a word or phrase can be reflected back to the client exactly, giving it the weight of significance it deserves, seriously acknowledge the moment. It is a moment of self-discovery. In our example, I really didn’t know that my Aunt suffocated me until then. Now I know what happens to me; I can even feel my breathing constricting – and now releasing.

Not every therapeutic encounter follows this blueprint as precisely as my example. Often it does, but more often it is woven into the fabric of the session. But if you understand the underlying mechanism you will see the way the vivid power of an experience, when it happens, coalesces with a certain precise way of putting it - no matter how simple the expression. What matters is that it connects. This moment is very valuable and easily invalidated. Don’t modify it. Let it stand and it will act like a launching pad for further exploration and carry the person to another important step.

NATURAL OPPORTUNISM

by Stanley

There are some things in life of which we like to say: ‘It was meant to be.’ This idea comes from ancient philosophical and religious thought avowing that there is some kind of guiding hand that pulls events the way they are suppose go. ‘It was meant to be’ can be a celebration when thing turn out well; or a resigned acceptance when things go wrong. But we only use the expression to indicate some higher or transcendent intention. We never say, ‘This cup of tea was meant to be’. We say simply ‘I made a cup of tea’. ‘Meant to be’ indicates an influence outside human intention. We call it ‘God’, Fate, Necessity, The Spirit or The Unconscious’. But whatever this agency is, it supposedly has things worked out in advance. It many ways, it relieves us of burdensome responsibilities; we hand things over to a higher power, as they say.

In contrast to this idea, consider that life’s events can be opportune, that we are, like the rest of life, simply opportunists; if there is a niche somewhere, we exploit it. New circumstances give us new possibilities – some work, some don’t. Whenever we sense an opening for enhancement we instinctively move to exploit the opportunity. The word ‘niche’ comes from the Latin which means ‘to make a nest’. In biology it has come to mean that wherever there is an ecological gap, a species will evolve to exploit it, to ‘make a nest’ for itself.

Someone once said that the dust mites in a bed mattress must feel like children let loose in a chocolate factory – only they feed on flakes of human skin. Each person sheds about half a kilo of skin flakes annually – more than enough for a thriving colony of dust mites in any decent mattress. Mites are opportunists, filling every imaginable niche in the world. There are over 50,000 species exploiting an array of habitats too numerous to mention.

Opportunism is a characteristic of life everywhere. I don’t suppose God or any Higher Power had a hand in fashioning dust mites to exploit the comforts of the conjugal bed; so it is hardly possible to say in any meaningful sense that dust mites were meant to be.

The word ‘opportunism’ has come to mean amoral self-seeking; but it means much more to us than it does to dust mites; and being opportunists doesn’t mean that we are fundamentally selfish. A nest is made for more than one. We don’t only want a prosperous niche in life for ourselves, but for our children and those we love. We want them to be able to seize what life has to offer; and not just material prosperity, but all the possibilities of human wellbeing. For us humans a worthwhile niche is simply a good life.

Opportunities happen when there is a space for them to happen. For us humans it’s not an ‘ecological gap’ we seek, but more like ‘psychological gap’ – a psychological space where new things can happen. For many people opportunities don’t happen because their psychological space is already too crowded. A new species of ideas cannot evolve because the psychological space is already teeming with pre-existing necessities that preclude any creativity. There is so much mental overcrowding there is no air to breathe.

What has this got to do with therapy and counselling? Everything!! Actually ‘counselling’ is a terrible word. Good counselling is where one does no ‘counselling’ at all. Good therapy is where you do that unimaginably rare thing – just giving a person space.

Giving someome space means that you never imply a necessity: something that has to be done, something that must be dealt with, a program that should be followed, a conclusion they should reach, a way they should behave, a gaol they should strive for, a way they should think, a problem they must face, an attitude they should take. This only multiplies the over-crowding.

Given space, a person will invariably make the right move – but not a predictable one. Someone is tired and apathetic. Give them the right space and they start crying. That is exactly the right move, exactly what needs to happen. Someone strongly feels the necessity to make difficult relationship work. No advice; just give them the right kind of space and suddenly they get that it’s impossible. That’s exactly the right move. Now there is a way forward, making room for what comes next. Someone is energetically trying to work out a problem. Give them space and they suddenly realise they are dog-tired. To realise that you are dog-tired is to seize an opportunity that was right there in a hidden space. You sit with someone who doesn’t talk and neither do you. Finally, they tell you they can’t talk. But they’ve just told you.

THE BIG NOW.

by Stanley

We are told it is best to live in the now. But seldom are we so gripped by the moment as when the earthquake first struck, seized by the immediate violence, the house brutally shaking as though by some ferocious predator. In this moment you are totally in the present, awestruck by the experience. There is nothing else. Overwhelmed by the BIG NOW .

What you perhaps don’t realise is that all the BIG NOWS you’ve ever had collapse on you at that moment. All at once. All those ‘nows’ fused into one overwhelming experience, merged into the same spasm of fear. They are all same, felt as an overpowering NOW – all experienced instantly.

When there is a great calamity you tend to experience all your overwhelmings at once. They all collapse on you at the same time. Trouble is you can’t get past the conviction that it’s all about the very latest now. In one overpowering moment there is no space between these incidents on the time-track. Time conflates. It is totally THIS experience that is scaring me, it’s this bloody earthquake that is happening NOW that’s frightening. And surely it is – but it also wakes up all the times in your life when there were emergencies and impacts that were life threatnening.

Even after the earthquake it’s particularly hard to see past it. Why do bad moments conflate like this? Why do they condense into one single experience, the last ‘now’? Why does the time-track collapse into one single terrifying moment? The whole mechanism suddenly dawned on me when I saw someone’s reaction to the quake, (and since I have seen many similar). An overwhelming panic reaction seems to be followed by a need to be hugged and held like a child, with the haunting fear of being alone. For days they can be in this childlike state with the persistent feelings of fear and aloneness – the slightest after-tremor triggering the same intense moment of panic. Focusing carefully on this reveals that these feelings are exactly the same as in certain incidents experienced earlier in life, particularly in childhood. A focusing session on the instant of the quake opens up and differentiates all these sequences stretching back in a lifetime and dissipates the continuing restimulation. I have found there is a special way to do this kind of focusing session.

Bad impacts conflate because they all have one thing in common: you are overwhelmed by the now; and this is the reason why each, as it happens, is the only one. Each one is NOW. This last one isn’t a different experience: emotionally it’s the same, the same experience of being overwhelmed and rendered powerless. I cannot emphasis enough that these moments of extreme emergency in one’s life are not differentiated – the impact is felt as THE SAME. This is not to devaluate the awfulness of the earthquake and the devastation it has caused for many, it is merely to look into the psychological effects.

Believe me, there have been times before when you were afraid you were going to die, most likely as a child. As a child, with all the promise of life, you were in fact very close to the death. Before you were conceived you were nothing; now suddenly launched into a foreign space where the air hurts and the light blinds. Frightened and powerless – desperate for the right kind of care. With so fragile a grip on life, it doesn’t take much to scare you to death; and the imprint of such moments become prototypes of all the terrifying fears down the line, right up to the present, whether it’s a car accident, fear in a bumpy aircraft ride, a divorce – or, an earthquake.

MEME SOUP

Take a whole Jung (make sure its fresh), a handful of finely chopped archetypes, a squeeze of Darwin and you have the makings of a lovely Meme Soup.

In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is thought of as having an existence beyond the personal; likewise, in archetypal psychology, the archetypal imagination is seen as transpersonal, inhabiting a sort of realm of its own. We are quite used to these ideas, but give them a squeeze of Darwin and we can see it all in the light of evolution.

From The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised); meme noun: biology – an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.

Biologist Richard Dawkins invented the word ‘memes’ to describe how ideas are similar to genetic information in the way they replicate, spread and evolve. ‘Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission’, he said. Both are copying and evolving processes. ‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’.[i] Just as genes propagate themselves, so too do ideas, jumping from mind to mind creating all kinds of myths, vogues and movements that seems to take hold of the collective imagination.

Sounds reasonable enough. But here’s the pièce de résistance: memes are literally alive; they are ‘self-replicating’ and behave exactly like living organisms or viruses And the ‘primal soup’ in which they breed are human brains/minds. Seeing it this way can make all the difference. Over time we can see how these collective ideas are subject to natural selection to create not only short live crazes and fads that quickly go extinct, but also building great cultural institutions that survive. And, very importantly, we can understand how some memes are pathogenic viruses – I mean, they make us ill. If you are host to some of the most malicious, they can kill you. Things like teenage binge drinking, suicide bombing and fundamental religion are not just fads, they are lethal meme infections.

We can completely imagine this from the biological perspective. We can regard culture as a step in organic evolution and see how cultural ideas are meme life-forms with the ability to replicate and spread – just as all living organisms do. In this way, cultural ideas are organisms that breed using humans as their hosts. This is not so different as the notion that we are ‘run’ by archetypes, except that now we can imagine them as part of biological evolution rather than inhabiting an eternal and separate realm. The reason for taking such a unifying step is that ideas and culture bear all the hallmarks of evolutionary growth through natural selection.

It’s difficult to imagine a new pop song as an independent life form with its own replicating mechanism, just like a computer virus. It’s hard to imagine because it is a viewpoint that is foreign to us. Ideas are supposed to be only ‘mental’ – whatever that means. We create ideas and we think of ourselves as responsible for spreading them around; all that happens is we simply communicate mental ideas to each other – that’s the standard view.

And it’s right up to a point – but take one more step and imagine that ideas have a life of their own with all the characteristics of living organisms. Just like bacteria or viruses, they are ‘information packages’ and they replicate by infecting other hosts; and, like computer viruses their ‘purpose’ is to breed by infecting other computers. Once created, an idea has the capacity to spread like wildfire and, under favourable conditions, it does. No single person is responsible for the way it does this. A panic on the stock market spreads in a few moments across the whole world. Whether or not there is any foundation in the panic-idea that starts it is beside the point – it’s whether people believe it. Many memes have defence code in them that says should be believed and are trustworthy.

Once installed, the virus is ‘executable’ and can take command of various functions of a computer. We might say that it is not really ‘alive’, but it behaves as though it is. And you know the old saying: if a thing looks like a rose, smells like a rose, and feels like a rose – it probably is a rose !

The human body is host to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbic life-forms. There is ten times number of these organisms than our own cells in the body. From our point of view we have different kinds of symbiotic relationships with microbes – some are friends and some are foes. With friends we both benefit. We would not survive without them. This relationship, mutualism, is a two way deal: the microbes derive their nutriment from us and in return they help us with digestion, stimulate the immune system and use up space that would otherwise be colonised by pathogens. But then, there is also parasitism where the bacteria benefit while the host is harmed. It is a fascinating thought that the one place in the body where no organisms are allowed is in the human brain. This has to remain sterile; but it is the place that memes colonise.

N.K. Humphrey’s said memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

We are most concerned with memes that resemble parasites – that is, ideas that, once a person is infected, as a host, they are driven to infect other people also. This they will do even though the meme harms the host – as, for example, with the meme instructing a suicide bomber to blow himself up. We must understand that that the compulsion to infect others is not the fault of the host, rather it is in the programming of the meme. In a religious meme it might be the instruction to ‘save’ others or do God’s work.

The analogy of the executable computer virus is quite apt. Religious memes can also be fail-safe; that is, they incorporate code which makes them impervious to any counter measures. For example, all three Abrahamic religions have code that says that the code itself was dictated by God – and God is by definition infallible. This circular bit of programming cannot be invalidated – both terms lead to and confirm each other. The Code is right because it was dictated by God; and God is right because it says so in the code. And all three of these religious memes carry the instruction for hosts to proselytise – that is, replicate the meme across the cultures and down the generations.

Ideas have the power to spread from person to person and to make copies of themselves as they go. Ideas replicate and spread. Ideas that are commonly shared is what distinguishes one culture from another. When successful they aggregating in clusters (or bodies) that we call social institutions that can survive for centuries, like the Catholic Church for example.

Some would say that religions memes can be mutualistic, that is, they can benefit both the meme and the host. This could be so, but is obviously not the case where the meme causes the destruction of the host. Not only is this true of suicide bombers, but is also where the meme requires an action that runs counter to natural human wellbeing. An extreme example of which would be female genital mutilation.

From the meme’s point of view it is irrelevant whether the meme kills the host so long as it can replicate before doing so. So long as a meme is copied and passed on before it kills the host its survival-line is assured. There are many examples of this in the animal kingdom; the bacteria of tuberculosis are a simple example. We always have to remember that in natural selection no one is ‘guiding’ anything.

There are other pathological memes that run counter to human wellbeing. Political doctrines like communism and fascism put the state above the welfare of the individual. In his last hours Hitler said, ‘Individuals die - that is nothing, the state goes on’. The survival of that cluster of ideas called ‘the state’ is what must survive. The people who propagate such memes are irrelevant in themselves. A meme like this has its own compulsive program – a human being is merely a host who incubates it and passes it on. Remember, these are actually ideas that people have in their minds – they believe them, act on them and pass them on. These are what we are calling parasitic memes. They are harmful to their hosts.

Not all memes are bad, of course. We are looking at the whole evolving ecosystem of culture. Just as most of the bacteria we host are harmless or beneficial; so most of the memes that give rise to human culture are likewise helpful to us or neutral.

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[i] Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene'. Oxford University Press, 1989 edition: