PIXILATED PICTURES[1]

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The painting above is by Jackson Pollock, an American artist who was a deeply tortured and angry man, prone to severe bouts of alcoholism, depression and violence. Only when he painted did he find a sense of peace and release from his anger and sadness. His way of painting made use of the lucky accident. He would lay the canvas out on the floor and, walking around it, he would use his brushes to drip, fling and fire paint at the canvas. Someone drolly called him ‘Jack the Dripper’, but his work was no joke. At only 44, drunk, he died in a car crash. What’s for sure is that his work was the only place where he could evade the mental torture of his life: art as the ultimate therapy of escape.

In stark contrast to his anguished life, imagine the confidence he must have achieved when painting. He worked in a way no other painter had done before. A friend described it. “A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor ... There was complete silence ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot we were there.” All of his most famous paintings were made like this, yet all are very different, each with its own kind of uncanny internal consistency. In 2000 a film was made of Pollock’s life with Ed Harris as the artist. Well worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Photography has largely replaced the influence that painting once had. Being a somewhat mechanical process you would think it offers little opportunity for the same sort of creative moment that art once provided. With photography how could you possibly do a Jackson Pollock and cut out an island of emotional confidence amid the turmoil of an unstable life. These days, a camera is part of everyone’s mobile phone; and every day millions of photos slosh around social network sites on the internet.

A photo is no more special than a doodle on the cover of a phone book done in a moment of forgetfulness while phoning. The covers of some phone books are literally covered with doodles as the owner has scratched away with a ball-point, filling in letters and making patterns, while engaged in a conversation with a friend or holding the line to a tiresome insurance company. A doodle is art that has fled to the margins.

In the early days the photographer was the inferior down-market cousin of the painter. A painter might be poor, he might live in a garret, but he had the prestige of belonging to a long historical heritage. The Victorian daguerreotype photographer was an upstart, cashing in on a craze that would soon lose its appeal. But it didn’t – it took over the image market and expanded into movies, television and advertising. In my 30s I worked hard for my Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society. The standard was high. I know the rigours of the trade in the days before digital: it was all about cameras, darkrooms, enlargers, developers, films and all the intricate combinations of these. Colour was just coming in and there were a lot of artistic choices.

Photography may not appear to have a fortuitous nature. After all, you press the button when you intend to. Nothing could be more mechanical. But here’s a question: why do you release the shutter at just that moment. That moment delivers a photo that reveals more than you saw. ‘Unintentionally, you caught the subject with a strange expression on his face. It reveals a reality that is not what you or he intended. We were all were laughing, but in the photo there is a suggestion that he is really bored; that strange half twist of the mouth is not how he should have looked at all – but its him ! And you caught it in a fraction of a second.

I take a photo of a child and it reveals whether I ‘look down’ on them or whether I am at their level. A good question to ask is: what effect do I intend to create when I take a picture, what impression do I want to make: family life as one long series of happy holidays? Are they for ‘pretend’ memories? Or do my pictures show the dump at the bottom of the yard, or my absurd reflection in a shop window, or the empty beach on a winter’s day, or Tommy’s face when he is moody? What’s worth remembering, life as a fantasy that it never was, or revealing moments of how it actually was?

Early on I taught classes in creative photography so, if I may now venture, here is some advice for non-professionals:

1. Never pose people for a photograph.

2. If you are among people, never compose a picture. Posing and composing freezes the subject(s)

3. Among people take so many photos that everyone stops paying attention to you.

4. At any gathering take so many pictures and so fast and so nonchalantly that people stop crediting you with anything serious.

5. Take everything and anyone indiscriminately, click, click, click – fast. Above all don’t hesitate.

6. If you want to capture a single subject keep them moving, talking, doing something – and again take so many and so fast they stop posing.

7. Creativity and quality control comes later on the monitor screen. Here be ruthless. Toss out 99% of your pictures. With the two or three that remain compose and crop carefully. You’ll end up with some good pictures. Certainly not the usual stuff.

REPETITION

Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera

Repetitive behaviour has always been a bit of a worry. Freud worried about the way veterans repeatedly re-experience shell-shock traumas long after the battle. Then there’s the way people repeat failures, like hooking up with the same unsuitable type of partner time after time; or small things, like always misspelling the same a word, or always forgetting that particular person’s name.

Yet when you think about it, most of our lives are repetitious: the same habits year after year; the same breakfast cereal; same friends; same time to bed; same workspace; the same face looking back at me in the mirror; the same daily grind, the same pleasures, over and over. There are, of course, disruptions like the occasional earthquake, but we try to get back to the familiar as soon as possible. Occasional variations are OK – but not too much!

It’s not surprising, though, when you realise that repetition (or replication, as they call it in biology) is the basis of all life. The exact duplication of the DNA molecule each time a cell divides is a miracle. Without it life on earth would not exist.

It seems like it’s only in the context of repetition that useful change happens. It’s the slight variation in DNA, a minute variation from exact duplication, as it is passed from the parents to the child, that’s the basis of evolutionary change. And in therapy it’s the cumulative effect of small changes that count, always in the context of reiteration.

What got me to think about all this is how we look upon repetition in therapy; I mean the way we do therapy. The client has an hour a week for an indeterminate period. But how do you decide when therapy is finished. Freud worried about this too and wrote a paper called: Analysis Terminable and Interminable. There’s no simple answer, but I think we can gain a glimmer of light by looking at the nature of repetition in another kind of therapeutic endevour.

Let’s take a long standing and reputable method like meditation. In its present-day secular form, known as Mindfulness, it has gained a lot of medical and scientific recognition. It works. But how long should you do it. An hour a day? Five minutes a day? Once a week? For a month, a year, a lifetime? Repetition of some kind seems to be necessary. To me, one thing is fairly clear: a little and often is better than a lot seldom.

The main problem with meditation is how to keep going. In a monastic setting or on a ten days retreat, keeping going is decided in advance. After all, doing meditation is why you went there. Keeping going might be difficult, but you do it. It’s when you are home again and in your usual surroundings that meditating for an hour a day is more onerous. Of course, you can do it, but you don’t. And the reason you don’t or can’t is because you are asking too much of yourself. The process has to be adjusted to the limitations of your actual life-style. Otherwise, trying to do too much ends up with doing nothing. On the other hand, a little and often gives you something you can do without strain: ten minutes a day is about right.

I’ve been working on a slightly different form of meditation which I’ve called ‘Bodyminding’. It owes something to focusing and something to traditional meditation. I’ve discovered that it’s very important to limit the amount of time you spend doing it, otherwise it locks into something you should do. As soon as this happens the practice gets on the wrong side. The practice period becomes an opponent that requires something of you; and before you know where you are a resistance develops which only gets stronger the more you persist.

You have to be very strict with the time. You finish dead on ten minutes. And there must be no suggestion that the meditative state is how you should live your life – contrary to Ancient and Modern Spiritual Idealists. The ten minutes must be separate and special; otherwise everything gets conflated and mixed up. In order to work it has to be a time that’s special, something you look forward to – otherwise it is useless.

And this is where it gives us a window on counselling and therapy. In the same way, the therapy session has to be special, separate and distinct from usual life; and it has to be something you look forward to. As with meditation it is repetitious: same day of the week; always for one hour, same therapist, same room, same process, same appointment time.

This limitation is a great advantage. It creates a special ‘mental set’ every time you walk in the therapy room. Within the compass of that ‘set’ insights happen that would never occur to you in the outside world. This ‘mental set’ builds up slowly over time. The therapy room becomes a place where something different happens. That’s part of the enjoyment. Mental sets are have a powerful suggestive effect and can change your whole psychological state – like stepping into another country. It’s as though the therapy room, the setting, takes on a special ambience. It becomes more than just what you do in the room, but rather all that’s happened for you in that room builds up into this slightly other-worldly home, like walking through the looking-glass. I have known people who stopped therapy simply because I changed my consulting room. It is a powerful phenomenon I’ve never seen discussed in psychological literature.

So far as the duration of therapy is concerned, I have to completely disagree with the way this is managed in most counselling agencies. In the classical days of psychoanalysis the duration of therapy was measured years rather than weeks. But all that is out of date now, and modern counselling agencies are obsessed with ‘goals’, ‘throughput’ and ‘outcomes’, achieved in the minimum time, all annotated in reports, forms and clinical reviews; very satisfying for the administration, no doubt. Administrators love paper. Not the client, but the paper work is what counts. Who for? Why the government ministry that supplies the funding, of course. In the midst of all this paper work the client, the person it’s supposed to be about, is lost. In truth, the forms and details, pretending to be helpful, are a vast distraction. For me, they are so unimportant I sometimes forget to get the clients telephone number. As for therapy goals – I never ask. It’s a red herring. I want to know how the person is now.

How long should therapy last? What are the real criteria? The most important one is, again, it has to be a time you look forward to. Not in the sense that you hope it will do you good eventually. That’s OK, but it’s not the crucial factor. The only thing that counts is the enjoyment derived from the process itself, the pleasure of having a place where you can unfold yourself. If you enjoy it, it’s doing you good. Other factors may determine when therapy ends, but in my experience the more successful therapy is, the longer it can go on with benefit. There are no rules; and certainly no arbitrary time limits.

In any kind of serious relationship real intimacy can only be achieved through repeated cycles of connection. Intimacy between two people is a quality that develops. Intimacy is cumulative. For example, first whirlwind of being in love is, perhaps, not real intimacy because you only know a fraction of the other’s personality. It takes being with them in all kinds of interactions, all the many moods that arise, all the complexities that the relationship evokes – and that takes time. Lots of times.

One difficult problem in life is when too many bad things have happened that must not happen again. Too many losses, too many failures, too many humiliations, too many disappointments. Repetition becomes a threat. Then, when things start to ‘happen again’ the feeling of repetition provokes a kind of anxious boredom. The search for something new takes on a driving compulsion. Certainly, a life based on the avoidance of boredom is no way to go. The constant effort to escape repetition can drive you crazy.

And to end with, that mad and provocative philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence… Would you curse the demon or crave nothing more fervently?”

In spite of my advocacy of repetition I have to admit I can’t get my head around that one !! Moreover, I know many people for whom such an idea would be the worst nightmare they could imagine and who would curse the demon.

THE MORTAL SOUL

The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body. Montaigne.

With the recent success of the wholebody workshops in the South Island, led by Karen Whalen, perhaps it is timely to look at our foundations. I think it is true to say that the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’ have had an antagonistic relationship; or perhaps we should say that our ideas about these two supposed entities have been antagonistic. The soul or spirit is immaterial and the antithesis of the material body. Or so the story has always gone.

In antiquity, philosophers of the Ionian school were materialists; but the Platonic School saw the world divided between matter and spirit – the body was not of the spirit and very much the inferior partner.

Two horses draw the chariot (of the personality). One of the horses is good and the other one is not. The good horse represents spirit, is noble, well formed, handsome, and tending to behave magnificently. The other horse, representing the appetites, is crooked, lumbering, ill-made, stiff-necked, short-throated, with bloodshot eyes.[1]

It was the Platonic School that decisively influenced later Christian theology. And this view has coloured our whole culture ever since. As Christianity gained ascendancy, ‘the flesh’ was viewed as the source of corruption, evil and temptation. The body has had a very bad press. Today, the body is OK in the gym, but its imperious desires can still lead to trouble.

This leaves us in a difficult position. In focusing we stress the body, but we don’t want to be labeled ‘materialist’. So, in saying that the body has its own mysterious wisdom we are tempted to use ‘spiritual’ language. Or we fall back on New Age Romanticism (the body’s association with Mother Earth). Sometimes we resort to meaningless scientific clichés (like the body has ‘universal quantum wave forms). This merely underlines our plight. Writers on focusing, like myself, have a hard time finding the language to describe what we are doing. There is no community of discourse to which we can refer, no common language on which we can draw, no tradition in which we can comfortably place ourselves.

We haven’t yet seen our place in the big picture. For there is a big picture, a struggle that began long ago with the effort to free ourselves from religion and mythology that would place the centre of our life elsewhere than in our corporeality, displacing our physical existence. When Christianity took over we had One God instead of many and the focus on spirituality got stronger, the demonising of our embodied life even worse.

A significant turning point in this sad history was the Renaissance discovery of physical beauty. It was a time when our flesh and blood was affirmed after this long period of desecration. The change in artistic styles illustrates this graphically. In the Christian age before the Renaissance the human figure was flat, emaciated and otherworldly; Michael Angelo’s ‘David’ signals the big change. This work celebrates complete physicality, as does the work of most masters of the Renaissance. There have been ghastly backslidings for sure, like when the Pope decreed that all male genitalia in the Vatican collection of classical art should be fig-leafed.

The Renaissance was a breakthrough and many thinkers, poets and artists turned to the classics that espoused atheism and materialism, as did the poet-philosopher Lucretius. Some Renaissance thinkers, like Giordano Bruno, who was influenced by Lucretius, were burned at the stake; Galileo, almost! But the artists and poets of the Renaissance got away with it because they used poetry and images – harder for the Inquisition to nail down. Essayists like Montaigne hid their affinity with Lucretius in private footnotes. Not that there was an all-out revolt against the teachings of the church; this would have been personally very disturbing and highly dangerous. But a new vision was on the horizon.

The discovery of the body’s importance in psychology has been slow. I’m not talking about experimental psychology, neurology and bio-chemistry, but the discovery of our own corporeality; I mean the discovery of soul as physical existence

Why is this history so important for us? Because without it we haven’t been able to name what is happening. We cannot see that we are part of a monumental historical struggle to give physical existence its due place in the scheme of things. When we look at philosophy, theology, the practice and teaching of all the religions over the years, and even our attempt to import Eastern practices – they all stress, in one way or another, that the desires of the flesh are the cause of suffering or sin; and that all our noble intuitions do not come from our blood and brains, but from a ‘higher source’; that our true self is something other than the physical. All this is a bum steer. It disembodies us. For 2000 years we have suffered the body’s systematic degradation in the scheme of things.

For me, the turning point was the incredible story of evolution and Darwin’s monumental discovery of ‘natural selection’ – which Daniel Dennett called ‘the greatest idea ever’. Dennett went on to say that the ‘immaterial immortal soul’ is a crutch, and that Darwin replaced that idea with that of a ‘material mortal soul’. Very much like Montaigne had said all those years before, ‘The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body’.

For people who work in or are interested in depth psychology and are following the turn we have taken, it is important to understand these historical changes and to realise the long struggle these ideas have had to find expression.

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[1] The chariot allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus

Contact – stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

03 891 2264

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TENDENCIES.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. Oscar Wilde

Many times I have poked fun at the modern obsession with making goals. It is particularly pernicious in some counselling and self-help books. According to these experts nothing is achieved in life without the careful constructions of one’s goals. But in truth, goals are ego-driven fantasies, often quite detached from the multifaceted nature of reality and, no matter how unrealistic they may be, we are encouraged to believe that the future is ours to fabricate as we wish. And to our detriment, the compulsion to make goals keeps us in our thinking-heads.

A more interesting question is to enquire about one’s ‘tendencies’. This is a much more delicate procedure and requires one to listen rather than dictate; and not merely to listen to the many voices within, but not to be too hasty in taking sides. Big questions are usually arrived at somewhat outside conscious awareness. Eventually, you find yourself going in this direction rather than that. Sometimes when you are agonizing over what to do, you are vaguely aware that something inside has already decided. You know what your inclination is and that it will win in the end – that is, unless some demon wipes out all your alternatives. Incidentally, I use the word ‘tendency’ in the same sense as ‘inclination’.

If you say to me, “Ah yes, but it’s not always wise to follow one’s inclinations, is it?” True, but not to follow a certain inclination is merely another inclination of a different kind. We have dozens of inclinations, all at cross purposes.

A tendency or inclination is quite different from a goal. A goal is idea you place in the future that is suppose to drag the present towards it. It is, as they say in philosophy, ‘teleological’ – what we call purposeful – like the complete design of a new car before the car is made. But a tendency does not create a future – it sniffs its way forward, feeling for openings. A tendency is opportunistic, staying close to what’s available, with a constant eye on what is going on. Sure, there are basic needs, but a tendency is governed by what is possible among the shifting sands of contingency.

A tendency has been described as a ‘seed, a sort of potentiality of the soul. Wherever you are destined to go, you will go. Whatever you are destined to be, you will be – like the acorn is destined to be an oak tree. But a tendency is more malleable than that, more adaptable. You can’t tell – an acorn might become a daffodil. There isn’t really an end goal. I definitely have a tendency to grow, but if the soil is more suitable to being a daffodil, that’s what I’ll be. I may have been an acorn to start with, but oak trees may not have been on the menu. In the natural world, of course, this cannot happen; an acorn cannot grow into anything else but oak tree. But we do not entirely live in the natural world. To a large extent we have built the world we live in. We have built lots of worlds to live in – they are called ‘cultures’.

If I had been unfortunate enough to have been born in Afghanistan the pressure of circumstances, the culture, might have made me a respectable paidup member of the Mujahidin.

There is no pre-programming in my soul to make me a typical westerner. They say there are a many ways to skin a cat – so too there are a many ways to survive – it depends where you wake up born.

It’s not that you come into the world as a blank slate upon which anything can be written, that your culture and family environment completely determine what you will become. You have a nature, but it is so malleable that it amounts to having a conglomerate of natures. I am quite aware that I would be just as fulfilled if I’d become a Master Plumber or an archivist in the Nature History Museum or a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. I’m sure I would have done reasonably well in any of these. As it happened, as a young man, I stumbled across a mentor who nudged me in the direction I have actually gone. But I can say with confidence that I was not born to be a therapist. I don’t mind that because I have become quite good at it.

Our tendencies are in conflict with each other, a perfectly natural competition. As we evolve as personalities only a few are picked out for survival. Those inclinations that survive the rough and tumble of our family and culture determine what we think are our ‘choices’. The truth is: we grope our way through life. And therapy, the person-centred way we do it, is a good way of groping. Just getting hold of that is a considerable relief. It means I can let go and relax a bit.

I can’t control what’s coming at me in the next minute, never mind next year. I cannot control life however I might want to.

Have you ever wondered why a drinker cannot stop drinking or a drug addict can’t stop using. We find this amazing. “But it’s killing you”, a friend might say, believing that such a reasonable point should make a difference. Both friend and the addict think this is true. It should make a difference, so neither can understand why the addict doesn’t stop. The friend feels impatient and the addict feels foolish and weak.

If the addict had enough confidence he might say to the friend, “Why don’t you stop living, it’s killing you!” – which is just as sensible.

PSYCHOSOMATICS

by Stanley

The term ‘psychosomatic’ was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes; it is a compound word from the Greek (psyche) plus (somatos) body. The whole idea has had a long tortuous history with much disagreement as to exactly what this means. We are still a long way from overcoming the basic assumption that the mind and body are two different things, instead of two viewpoints of a single interwoven network. I am going to bypass the historical controversies and try to look at the question in a new way.

Strictly from our point of view we can regard all physical problems as psychosomatic, not because we are ignorant of viruses and all the other physical causes of disease, but because whatever the causes may be, the ‘psychological’ aspect is always involved in some way. Put simply, if I catch the influenza virus and am suffering the usual symptoms, I also will have an ‘attitude’. I may think I am dying; I may be sorry for myself; I may bravely soldier on; or profit by being looked after; or, more subtly, it may revive body memories of previous illnesses and traumas – together with the ‘attitudes’ I had to them at the time. The past is invariably involved.

Now, it may seem that I have complicated things instead of simplifying them. Not really, because we are now free to explore the psychological side of the equation, putting aside whatever else is involved whether bacteria, viruses, accidents, injuries, fungi, dog bites or genetic predispositions. We are not disavowing the reality of these causes, but simply saying that we can address the psychological aspect for what it is. We are interested only in the subjective experience of body, the way we experience the condition. This allows us to refer to any and all the bodily sensations as simply: somatics. In this way we side-step everything else except the subjective experience of the physical sensation.

A somatic is any physical feeling/sensation. It doesn’t have to be bad or painful. Without distinctly felt bodily sensations there can be no pleasurable excitement or anticipation. Even the purest form aesthetic appreciation is a finely felt erotic excitement.

The term ‘somatic’ has a wider application than ‘felt-sense’ as in focusing – and it is used differently. There are similarities to ‘wholebody focusing’, but it has a different theoretical underpinning and a different perspective; one difference being an appreciation that the environment is not universally supportive. The struggle for survival is a continuous fact of life. We are guilty of New Age deception if we romanticize otherwise. Our immune system, for example, is engaged in a continuous battle with the hostile forces of nature.

Whilst fully acknowledging this, we don’t have to work out the material ‘causes’ of somatics when we are doing this kind of work. We don’t have to look into the etiology of a somatic. We are primarily interested in the reality of the somatic as we sense it and the effects of bringing it fully to consciousness without asking anything of it. Through this process we can unwind the psychosomatic aspect of any life problem whatever its cause. It can also unveil the ‘secondary gains’ of being sick.

Then there are other problems that have no physical cause whatever. For example, an emotional upset in the family. These will have psychosomatic consequences such as physical tension, or anxiety stomach, or a stiff neck.

However, it is quite normal to have a stiff neck and have no idea of its connection with the family upset. When you have an emotional problem, the somatic effects can seem completely disconnected. Indeed, to suggest such a connection is often felt to be ridiculous. A stiff neck is a stiff neck – that’s that! Probably due to the way I slept (which might be true). The solution would then be some kind of physical manipulation – which may, incidentally, work; but this will not advance a person’s deeper understanding of herself.

The sixty-four dollar question is: how do you come to know, how do you discover, the intimate connection between psyche and soma? Here’s one way to get it started. A strong feeling is usually accompanied by some kind of visible physical reaction. I may sit up in my chair; I may lean forward or shrink back. If it’s a pleasant feeling I may feel an excited energy in my chest. If unpleasant, I may pull a face with disgust or horror. Ask the person to repeat the exact physical effort involved, to do it again, in other words. Get them to pull the same grimaced face they had a second ago. They might discover that their shoulders also make the effort to hunch up at the same time. Then ask them to do it again and hold it whilst exploring what else it may lead to. Give the person time – in fact, tell them to take their time to explore.

This simple little dodge is one way into mindbody connections. Incidentally, this process is not about relaxation – quite the opposite. Bodily tensions – we will call them ‘efforts’ because they have an intention – are what the body is intending. Ask the person what the effort, the screwed up face and hunched shoulders, want. Exploring this will reveal a whole string of efforts and somatics in other parts of the body. Then the person might unexpectedly start thinking of a traumatic incident early in life – even of birth. This is the string of somatics unwinding. This process gives rise to many interesting conscious reflections that can be dealt with in the usual person-centred way of counselling.

There is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a somatic and an incident in life. A somatic effort has multiple references because you make the same effort in may different circumstances. It works like this: many times when faced with an actual or potential threat you react with the same body response. Whether it is a loud noise, or seeing someone hurt themselves, or a fight in the family, or when you were intimidated at school, or being interviewed – your stomach went anxious, you tightened your shoulders, your heart beat faster, and your anus squeezed up – a whole swag of your own precise and characteristic body reactions to a certain kind of trouble. The incidents may not seem similar, but they feel the same because of the same physical response to each of them.

As the somatic efforts unwind I don’t need to remember all the incidents associated with them – my body remembers them. I need to talk about them only when a memory or an incident arises. Otherwise, concentrate on the moving sensations and let the somatics unwind in their own way.

It is important not to get stuck on this form of bodywork (call it ‘bodyminding’) as a method. Not everyone can do it. One has to be fluid with it, adjusting it to the needs of the moment and the person. It should be introduced carefully. It’s a way of gradually learning how give way to one’s biological nature when it is right to do so.

GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING

by Stanley

“Come over here and look out of the window”.

She obeyed.

“Look at the clouds”, he said. “What colour are they?”

“White”, she said. Then she paused, still looking at the clouds. “No …they’re ….green and yellow and silver and..”

He smiled at her. Although she was just a housemaid, she had got it.

This was a scene from the movie (and the novel) Girl with the Pearl Earring in which the Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, encounters the servant girl who is to be his model for the famous painting. Vermeer must have seen something about the girl that attracted him and prompted him to find out whether she had that special quality with which he himself was endowed – a quality which his wife, although he loved her, lacked.

What was that special quality? Put very simply, it is the ability to see. It sounds so very simple. Everybody knows that clouds are white, grass is green and the sky is blue. But these words are labels, symbols, ciphers – they are not colours.

Most of the time we live in Cipher-Land. Consider the world of trade, business and economy. This is a complex game with ciphers where we manipulate things called dollars. A dollar is a symbol of worth, it is not worth itself. In a sense it isn’t real life; and yet it seems like real life; and in a way it is. The elaborate world we live in would not function without these secondary systems, the world of ciphers.

When you first abandon Cipher-Land and cross over into reality, you look at the clouds and have no idea what colour they are. You are unsure. Could be this, could be that. The old labels don’t mean anything. When you really taste the clouds the old ciphers are irrelevant. Taste is a good analogy. Have you ever put something new to your tongue and tried to describe the taste. It’s impossibly difficult, isn’t it? Taste is so direct, immediate and untranslatable.

It’s the same when you look at your inner landscape. Your feelings aren’t just sad or happy, resentful or jealous, angry or painful. These are just ciphers. In my work I have come to know exactly when a person is tasting themselves, or whether they are talking in ciphers. When you cross over into really experiencing yourself, tasting yourself, the old ciphers don’t fit. You fumble to say exactly how you feel. Then, like Vermeer, I am please because I know you’ve got it. I’m not interested in the ciphers, except when they point to the experience. As they say in Zen, ‘Not the finger pointing to the moon – but the moon!’

When I try to do therapy in Cipher-Land I ‘consider’ my feelings; I ‘reflect’ on how I feel. I shuffle my ideas around on the mental chessboard. When I look past Cipher-Land and into the real taste of myself I find only the sensation of my body as it usually is: a surface skin and an inner darkness – maybe a few of the usual discomforts. Nothing more.

Neither should there be anything more, for I have stepped into a new place, beyond the chess-game of the mind. I am where I can begin to use my taste-buds. I don’t worry. It’s like getting used to the dark. I know that, as I continue, my discernment will get more sensitive, and surprising vistas will emerge – colours and scenes unfamiliar, yet in some way reminiscent! But definitely outside the box.

Achieving this is not just a matter of passively meditating. The thinking level has a resistance, insisting on doing things its own way. I feel a bit diffident about writing a blog like this because I know how what happens: one reads it and finds it interesting, but that’s as far as it goes. That’s as far as it can go because it is too difficult to do by oneself. It needs to be done within a relationship – I mean, a therapeutic not a romantic – relationship. And that takes time, which is why short term counselling is only of limited value.

WHY MARITAL SEX CAN BE DIFFICULT.

By Stanley

Married life can sail along quite amicably in a routine sort of way, but if there are unresolved communication problems, the bedroom is where they surface. In day to day life a couple can get along quite happily. There are no hard words and each is kind to the other. Their relationship is a success. They have learned not to tread on each other’s toes; they both know where the trouble-triggers are, have learned to avoid them and have achieved that happy state of being almost unconscious of them. But the unresolved barriers are there. The problem is that sexual congress requires a deeper intimacy that cannot flow past those hidden barriers – they are like invisible elephants in the bedroom. Eventually both partners quietly learn to leave sex alone.

Why does marital love degenerate like this? To answer we must remember that a partnership or marriage emotionally approximates childhood. Marriage revives long lost hopes, wishes and desires that were given up ages ago. Given up? Not quite – rather sleeping in daydreams and imagination, waiting for a better day. They remain quiescent so far as behavior is concerned.

This is not so hard because, as a child, I learned how to live in two worlds: one where I do what I’m supposed to; and the other, a fantasy life, where I do what I want. But when adolescence comes along there rises up a want so powerful that it overwhelms the whole neat solution. The burst of my hormones shout: ‘I don’t care what you want me to be, I AM ME. At that moment I become a revolting adolescent. My wants are very strong and embellished with fantasy.

But it is this unequivocal ‘I AM ME’ you need as a sexual being throughout your life. It simply means being in touch with your body and being able to let it take over when the time is right. In a satisfying sexual encounter you are able to let the body run the show and progress to where two bodies are running the show in sync. The beauty of this is that I become both of us, without loosing the sense of ME. It is a process beginning with ME as one, towards ME as two; through selfishness to love. This blessed state precisely mirrors the ideal nursing relationship of infancy.

The problem is that the dream of a relationship revives all these long lost desires. At last there is the hope that I will really get what I want, the hope of harmonious union. Maybe I can recover that blissful state of safe, innocent togetherness; a place where I don’t have to try. At last I will know what love is – all that I had to give up to grow up.

Anxiety about sex is typically infantile. It is the fear that if I don’t do it right I’ll be cut off. In infancy this spells disaster. It is literally the fear of abandonment, annihilation and death. Such emotional intensity goes with trying to re-kindle the deepest attachment since babyhood. In the beginning of life, such an attachment was a matter of life and death and thereafter, all one’s life, sexual closeness takes one back to the beginning and opens up the same vulnerability.

In my sexual life I am wide open and vulnerable. I have to risk it. There is no escape. Without the vulnerability I cannot reach the centre of the sexual experience, but I also risk failure and disaster

Intimacy is where I can safely bare my soul, and the other to me. The resolution of the sexual problems does not lie in the sexual scene per se. The resolution lies in improving the quality of the relationship in general. The kind of intimacy that is needed in sex is required throughout a relationship, although perhaps not quite so intensely. Intimacy is not specific to the sexual scene; but whereas in other situations I can blur the lack of it, in my sexual life I cannot.

The quality of sexuality is present across the whole spectrum of a relationship. It is easy to see it in a way couple look at each other and in the tone of their conversational interchange. You can always tell when Eros is present or if he has left.

LOVE & WAR part 2: our better nature

by Stanley

As civilization evolves our modes of living change; social practices that were once acceptable, like harsh corporal punishment of children, are no longer tolerated. And things that are ordinary to us, like having teenagers, would have horrified our forefathers. No doubt in the future ‘same sex marriage’, which causes so much heated debate now will, in the course of time, be quite unremarkable.

We are marginally different from what people were like fifty years ago. And if we read a Victorian novel, their drastically controlled manners and their censored emotional life is quite foreign to us. Taking only a slightly longer view, we are unimaginably different from what people were like in the Middle Ages; if you could be suddenly transported into that time the shock would blow you away – the disgusting smell if nothing else. We not only live in a different world, we are different people. One of the biggest differences is the amount of lethal damage we afflict on each other.

A good question is to ask is: Am I more likely die by the hands of another man now than say 100, or a thousand or ten thousand years ago? What would be my relative chances of scraping though life without being knocked off in one way or another? We have to look at the historical and archeological records to find out; and the evidence is that the probability of death by violence has been diminishing dramatically over time; my chances, and yours, of getting through life without being strangled, shot, executed, hung, blown-up, stabbed, killed in battle, mutilated, buried alive, raped, decapitated, lynched, assassinated or burned at the stake, are better now than at any other time in human history.

Even in our two recent world wars (including all the combatants) there was only a quarter the violent death rate as in the earliest hunter-gatherers societies; and the same is true of those groups that exist today, despite all our romantic imaginings about ‘indigenous cultures’. If we crunch the actual numbers, it turns out that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. In proportion to population, death by violence has been diminishing over historical time.

This thesis is hard to swallow because we watch the nightly news and pass on the pessimistic memes of current opinion. But no one has ever actually counted or crunched the statistics or done the thorough historical research. If death by violence in the last world war had been the same order of magnitude as it was in Neolithic times, the figures in our most recent wars would have numbered in the billions, not millions. In the West at least, by all standards of measurements there is an observable evolution, a civilizing process that has distinctly speeded up since the 17^th century; and this goes for all the areas of human violence: homicide, capital punishment, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, slavery, human sacrifice and superstitious killing.

Steven Pinker’s monumental new book, just published, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is a long overdue recognition of our better nature. It turns out that violence is not a single instinct, but a strategic response to circumstances. And the fact is, our cultural and social circumstances have changed out of all recognition over time and we have changed in synchrony with it. The interactive network of modern society could not exist with the mindset that existed in feudal times, prior to the emergence of the nation state. In most of Europe it was the nation state governed by the King that brought an end to the factions of squabbling feudal warlords.

This pacification process didn’t require a set of new genes because sympathy and empathy are also part of our evolutionary heritage, though on a smaller, family scale. The emergence of the nation state favoured these cooperative evolutionary adaptations. The gradual expansion of commerce and the interactive social networks we call trade, both within and among nations, made these inherited characteristics more dominant, since trade and commerce are functionally based on trust. And as our society got more complex, we depended more and more on each other. As my trading partner you are worth more to me alive than dead, however much we disagree.

Pinker shows, with an enormous amount of historical and archeological research, that violence has been on a variable but steady decline. He shows this, not by taking absolute numbers, but by calculations proportionate to the size of populations. This is obviously the only way to calculate because the greater the population, the greater total number of deaths by violence. Remember there are six billion of us today. The only measure is not the absolute numbers, but the proportion that die by violence.

There is a ‘New Age’ view that the ‘good old days’, where we lived in harmony with nature, was somehow better. But I’m afraid Thomas Hobbs had it right: life in a hunter-gatherer tribe was indeed ‘nasty, mean, brutish and short, quite unlike Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’; a theory that would have us believe that civilisation made us worse.

In biblical times and even in Greek Classical times whole cities, every enemy man woman and child, would be put to the sword as a matter of course; and this behaviour was given divine sanction. Normal life then was a constant fear of attack, rape, pillage and plunder. And it all goes down the sink-hole of fictionalized history on the TV screen – we don’t really believe it.

Later, in the Middle Ages, life was violent too. The myth of the heroic and gentlemanly knights of old is a fairy tale. The Barons were more like Mafiosi gangsters running incredible protection rackets – not unlike the bad old days in mob controlled Chicago, where the city was divided up into areas, each controlled by a mobster. The emergence of the central state where the King ruled over the Barons, although repressive, was an improvement and certainly less lethal.

It’s true there has been a long history of glorification formal war, as Hillman shows us, but war has lost the glamour it once had. In 1914 young men eagerly flocked to the colours, today they are more likely to burn their draft cards. War has become distinctly distasteful; and between nation states it is recognisably a zero-sum game – no one wins. ‘The kind of patriotism that enabled the people of Europe to endure two world wars now appears as archaic as the feudal loyalties that it had displaced’[1]

Today, the only popular reflection of the glorification of war is what we call ‘sporting events’. But these are surely an improvement on the games of blood that were played out in the Roman Coliseum.

Human nature has certain fixed characteristics, and yet it is malleable. It can be conditioned by circumstances and upbringing. Sure, we are wired for aggression, but also part of our biological inheritance is the capacity for love, cooperation, care and empathy. How these are all balanced is determined by the quality of the society in which we live and with which our human nature is inextricably interwoven.

What have certainly changed dramatically are the values with which we regard violence and cruelty. A stark illustration of this is the way today we regard the brutality of the God of Old Testament. Taken as a reflection of the standards of justice and moral behaviour – as it obviously was at the time – we simply ignore that part of the Bible. Yet we know full well that Christianity has gone hand in hand with torture and persecution beyond description. So much have our standards changed that Christians today more or less disown the Old Testament – like it’s not really important. But the violent sadism of early Christianity speaks clearly enough through its central symbol: the cross – an instrument of torture; and where we cannibalistically eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. We prefer to think that all this is merely symbolic (incidentally, the Vatican does not) because our moral feelings have changed.

Today we deplore capital punishment and the long waiting lists on death row in the backward states of the US. But we forget that not so long ago death sentences in England were meted out after a trial of only a few minutes; and the methods of execution were ghastly. You could be hung, your body taken down before you finally strangled, stretched on the rack, after which you would be castrated, disemboweled and your four limbs torn from your body and burned while you watched, if you were still conscious; and your crime – saying a rude word about the King. The spectators watching these public entertainments would have enjoyed the show. In 1660 Samuel Pepys records in his diary of how he and his party were at a public hanging-drawing-and-quartering in Charing Cross Road, after which they all went to a tavern for a feast of oysters.

But still the attachment to pessimism about the human saga persists. It’s almost as though we dare not think that human society and our social feelings have improved – let alone speak of progress. Have our humanitarian sensibilities progressed at all over time? It is a crucial question, for resting upon how we answer it depends whether we regard any effort to improve human wellbeing as a waste of time.

In this regard, Steven Pinker has done us a signal service in debunking the fashionable shadows of misanthropy. It is quite amazing how the critical reviews of Pinker’s book are polarized. One critic wrote ‘I have not read the book, but I entirely disagree with its hypothesis’. Well done!

We must remember that we always judge the misdeeds of present with the sensibilities of the present age. If we use those same sensibilities when we look at the past we can only be appalled at unimaginable extremities of everyday cruelty and violence, and amazed too that, at the time, it didn’t occur to anybody to think it was wrong.

In the last analysis it is not a question of optimism or pessimism, but of facts. And it is a fact that over time, at least in the matter of violence, war and homicide, there has been an improvement in the quality of the human pageant. No guarantee that it will continue – history is full of unexpected turns, but the historical facts remain. And as Pinker says, perhaps it is time we looked at what we have been doing right, instead of all the things we have done wrong.

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[1] Howard, Sir Michael. The Invention of Peace. Yale University Press, 2001