TREPIDATIONS

                                                                    by Stanley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

The felt-sense is an active intuition, a sort of internal guidance system, seeking out the lost parts of you that have been waiting to be found, waiting to be felt, waiting to be sensed – the parts of you that have been rejected and want to come home. In therapy, when a person trusts the felt-sense, the talk seems to wander all over the place. No one is guiding it, but it is a process of active intuition, honing in on exactly what avenues have to be explored and in exactly what sequence. Afterwards, it is only looking back on the session that we are aware of the purposeful tracking that has taken place – an expedition that apparently had the aim of naming an emerging reality – “What I looked upon as selfishness I now realise was my first attempts at a healthy self assertion”. The old reality (selfishness) has dissolved and there is now a new name for a new reality.

For an emerging reality to fully realise itself it has to have a new name. Here, two things have happen simultaneously: the awareness of a new ‘something’ and a new name for it: healthy self-assertion. Both the awareness and the new name are now the new way of looking. The old reality has been un-named.

Where a person’s felt-sense has been suppressed there can be no emerging dimensions of reality. Old realities cannot be unnamed; they remain one-dimensional and fixed. There are no doubts. There is a confidence of what is so. A mind with perfect confidence and stability is like a chemists’ lab where everything is classified, labeled and named. The advantage of this is that life seems to be clear cut and there is a certain feeling of rightness; the disadvantage is that there is no change. All attitudes are inflexible.

The process of therapy involves the naming of things, but it also undoes what has been named. Realities are constantly made and unmade. In the process we move through cycles of certainty and uncertainty as our picture of life dissolves and reassemble itself in new forms.

The naming of things is an indispensible psychic activity. It forms the solidity of the world. We imaging we know what things are. There are a great many things that need to be permanently fixed: my name and date of birth, which house I live in, the very house itself, the sky, the earth, my bank account number. Each of these has a name and a fairly fixed reality, (provided we are not on LSD). We count on no change – that when I wake up in the morning I will find the same world I left last night. When we name something we freeze-frame it; like a still photograph we keep for reference. It gives us our conceptual stability; indeed it keeps the world itself stable. An apple is an apple, a chair is a chair, meanness is meanness, a kind heart is a kind heart, the moon is the moon. The name of a thing tells us what it is and what it is not. We draw boundaries when we name things – each thing is then a discrete ‘itself’. You might say that naming is what makes ‘things’. When we do this, a thing is what it is and nothing else.

But the naming things can have a deleterious effect; we are inclined to get too occupied with the name of a thing than by the thing itself, we stop seeing things and concentrate on what they are called.  “Don’t think, look!” Wittgenstein urges us in his Philosophical Investigations.

There is a Zen saying, ‘name the colours, blind the eyes’. All the same, we need words to order the tumultuous impressions of experience; otherwise we would never be able to make up our mind about anything. When we call someone a ‘bully’ the word means something. Saying they are a bully gives us a grip on a doubtful character. Now we know what they are! We have ordered the world just that little bit more. We say that labels stick – and one would have to say, yes, that’s what they’re for !  They make for stability and understanding.

But given too much stability and we get stuck in a sea of categories and labels. Just like modern psychiatry is stuck in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). There is now hardly any aspect of normal human behavior that is not labeled a ‘mental disorder’. Great for medical diagnosis, but lacking a certain humanity, not to say, humility

Reality itself is remarkably diverse and as culture evolves and changes so do all the labels we give things. Masturbation is no longer an illness; an earthquake is no longer God’s vengeance; and dogs are now no longer just ‘pets’ but ‘caregivers’ (see RICH PICKINGS in the right hand column).

Living a realistic life involves the awareness of the way things change, the way ideas change, and this recognition requires that we be in touch life as an emergence; it means learning to undo what we have learned, undo what we have named. Not only is this true of psychological life, but it is also true of how genuine science works. Someone notices that the prevailing scientific paradigm doesn’t quite fit certain emerging facts. There is doubt and uncertainly, dissolving what we thought was fact and reason. ‘The earth is obviously flat, but why do a ship’s masks gradually disappear when it drops over the horizon?’ What we thought was true is refashioning itself.

The earth is not flat, of that we can now be certain, but doubt had to come first. Just as in therapy, as a new reality is emerging there is a sense of doubt. There is a pause, validating uncertainty. An obvious truth is suddenly in question. The old paradigm is dissolving. ‘Maybe it wasn’t selfishness, but a healthy self assertion I really needed to affirm – and I did.’ But doubt comes first. Only when you doubt a prevailing ‘truth’ can a new ‘truth’ emerge.

 Being able to tolerate doubt is what John Keats called the Negative Capability. ‘It is’, he said, when a person is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. We have learned to place such emphasis on positiveness and certainty we forget the value of the Negative Capability, the value of doubt and uncertainty. Without these our attitudes to life get frozen.

Dear old Aristotle gave us the classic view of unchanging stability. He said, roughly, that a thing cannot both be and not be – a law of logic that that consolidates fixed boundaries. But Heraclitus said that all is change and nothing stays the same. “We step and do not step into the same river, we are and we are not’.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

MEANING AND MADNESS

                                           by Stanley

We are the hollow men…
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
T.S.Elliot

The ‘meaning of life’ is something people crave if they haven’t got enough and are driven mad if they’ve got too much. Not enough 'meaning' is what we call ‘depression’; and too much is what we call ‘manic’.
       Too much and not enough meaning are both symptoms of despair. We meet the hollow men when our rage for life meets no one at home.
       Depression is easily spotted. People will say there’s no point to life, nothing in it – life has no meaning. But the other end of the scale, the manic end, can be a bit more deceptive; largely because our whole culture tends to favour a manic lifestyle. Existence is like rugby game - all push and shove and fight, where triumph and glory await you at the end. This type of mania is quite mad, but normal.
        Then there is the more 'clinical' mania regarded as abnormal. This is where a person turns the smallest details of life into stories pregnant with meaning and burgeoning with significance, where everything is monstrously larger than life, where a bird sitting on the garden fence is trying to tell me something; or spiritualising about the significance of the clock stopping at exactly twelve; or what did the postman mean when he said ‘good morning’ like that.
         But the world fraught with meaning comes in all shades from simple faith to the most bizarre superstitious concoctions. The more outlandish beliefs and meanings, separated by the distance of history, are easily recognizable for what they are. The Incas, for example, knew quite well the meaning of life. It was simply that the sun was hungry for blood and human hearts. So, twenty times a year there would be these wonderful festivals. A thousand celebrants, one by one, would ascend the sun-temple steps where a priest would raise the sacrificial knife and surgically gouge out their living hearts and hold them aloft still pulsing with blood – a gift to appease the sun-god.
        What is it? Is it the terror of nothingness that incites these profusions of significances with which we embellish life? It’s almost as if any meaning is better than none. When the Roman Empire was crumbling, astro-religion (astrology) swept through the population in a wild scramble for security – the stars as a comfort blanket. Every upper-class family had their personal astrologer who would daily announce the complicated conjunctions of the stars and what they meant – and god help the Emperor’s astrologer if he failed come up with a favourable prognostication or, if he did , it didn’t happen.
        Then there are the deep meanings that the great thinkers have given us. Saint Thomas Aquinas probably wrote the most influential philosophical theology of all time, trying to reconcile paganism with Christianity. The work of Doctor Angelicus, as he was known, has been the bedrock of church thinking for seven hundred years and is so even today. He wrote the most profound and scholarly tomes of drivel you could imagine; they had meaning for the time, but we never get to the small things: we never get to hear whether St. Thomas was worried about his piles when he went to the toilet. We only get the up market Big Stories of the more grandiose manic mind-set.
              Today some of the most revered masters of unfathomable meaning are our top physicists who search for a 'Theory of Everything'. even the authors themselves quite frankly admit that no one understands 'quantum mechanics' or 'string theory' or ' parallel universes'     
        I am impatient and sceptical with large-scale meaningful scenarios because they hide the really important issues in psychological life. Perhaps that’s their purpose. They encourage a cloak of grandiosity that covers up the small worries we think we should have grown out of. They inhibit reflection on the close, personal concerns in life that really mean something. Over and over in therapy we find it’s the small, childish things we overlook that really count. Simply acknowledging them can make a world of difference – helping us to be more relaxed about our frail humanity and what it all means.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

 

ELABORATION.

At some point in any classical western movie the taciturn and reserved cowboy, on being questioned about his life by the heroine, will be bound to answer: “If you don’t know, then ah caint tell yer !”  

He is the archetypal lone hero, silent and self sufficient. He is a man’s man, but strangely shy of a woman and unwilling to explain himself to her. It’s not necessary and he doesn’t even try.

 I am referring to that most fearsome of human afflictions, the inability to elaborate, to amplify one’s meaning, so as to make oneself understood. The disease is found in women too.

Take the following dialogue,

She: “I can’t stand the way things are”.

Him: “How do you mean?”

She: “You know perfectly well what I mean”.

Him:  “You mean about the money situation?”

She: “I hate it when you deliberately

           misunderstand me”.

Him: “I’m sorry, but   …”.

She: “Don’t play the innocent with me. I’ve told you a dozen times.

Him: “You mean about the weekend.”

She: “I’m not going to repeat myself.”

Him: “You mean me being too facetious?”

She: “You know I don’t mean that.”

He: “I don’t know what you mean until you tell

         me”.

She: “Ahhhh. You are so exasperating.”

In spite of a genuine attempt to find out what she is actually referring to he is still none the wiser.

Or take this example. Someone hands you an

enigma like this,

Him: “I hate it when people are rude, but I suppose it’s me.”

She: “How do you mean?”

Him: “Well, that’s the point isn’t it?”

She: “You mean they might be rude because of

          the way you look?”

Him: “Maybe.”

She: “Or do you mean you always feel you’re at

          fault?

Him: “Probably”.

Without a little elaboration whatever he is trying to say is a puzzle and it stays a puzzle.

Or take this one,

Him: “You seem a bit quiet”.

Her: “It’s the same thing”

Him: “The same?”

Her: (no reply)

Him: “The same as when?”

Her: “When it came up before. I told you.”

Him: “I remember you said something about the wedding”.

Her: “No not that”

Him: “You mean when we went to the movie?”

Her: “No, it was the time before that.”

Him: “I’m sorry I don’t quite….”

Her: “Never mind!”

She is obviously annoyed with him because he hasn’t read her mind. She said it once three months ago and that should be enough. It is as though she is completely unaware of all the possible incidents she could be referring to. It’s almost an offence to her that she should have to repeat something once she has said it. And as for elaborating on the full extent of her preoccupation – well, she shouldn’t have to. He should know.

Why do some find it so difficult to amplify, to give any kind of fullness to their meanings, so as to eliminate all the things they could mean? Such paucity forces one to probe and dig out what they alone have in mind? Its hard work and they are likely to get angry with you for trying. Is it that they are mean? Are they frightened of too great an exposure? Are they secretive? Are they just trapped in nobility of silent suffering? Or is it just in the family and culture? All of these are good guesses – but there’s something else.

It can be the regressive, infantile fixation that others should know what one needs. Every person is rightly born with such an instinct. If the environment doesn’t fit exactly what an infant needs it loudly lets everyone know. It behaves as though it were the centre of the universe because it is. There is no other centre but itself. It has all the necessary instincts to plug into a world that should be there and ready with exactly the supplies it needs to grow: the breast, care, warmth, protection and love.

It’s a basic narcissistic stage of development. If it is skipped over because the supply is inadequate or simply absent, it leaves a hole in the development of the personality that is never forgotten – it is remembered deep in the tissues of the brain and body. It leaves a memory trace that colours relationships, particularly close relationships. And it hangs around as a suppressed rage.

“I shouldn’t have to say it – they should know”. Not that this is ever consciously realised or stated, but it forms the background to the way I behave. I am the narcissistic centre of the universe and I know absolutely that they do know what I want without me having to tell them. They know perfectly well! And therein lays my anger with people – they pretend not to know.

There is a fascinating aspect to elaboration: if you are reasonably good at it conversationally you find out yourself what you mean. You listen to yourself elaborating; and what comes out can by very surprising. Like someone once said, "I don't know what I think until I hear myself say it." That is the whole principle of person-centred focusing.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

HEARING YOURSELF

Hearing yourself speak out is very different from thinking. To voice something you’ve been thinking about is like giving body to what might otherwise just be tortuous worrying. This is especially true when dealing with difficult emotional questions. The truth is that most of our emotionally tinged thinking is very confused by conflicting ways of looking at a problem. Before any consideration of solutions, how, in fact, should I look at the problem in the first place. Should I regard the problem as important or not; is it the real problem; is it my problem or his; is it that I am not being fair or that I am not being treated fairly; am I too soft or too judgmental; is the real problem that she wants everything her own way – or perhaps it’s me that’s too critical. What really is the problem? And so on – round and round! 

Momentarily I might think I have arrived at a steady conclusion, but then another viewpoint intervenes and I’m back on the merry-go-round. Ruminating like this goes around in circles, always arriving at the place one started. The internal critic, the Mad Judge, is usually hard at work. Every thought, before it can be fully thought, is contradicted by an opposing viewpoint; which itself is stopped short by yet another contradicting viewpoint. It’s a battleground where nothing is vanquished and no way of thinking gains the upper hand. No single thought-line gets the chance to fully express itself. There is no way I can know what I think where every possible viewpoint is squashed before it has had a chance to fully express itself. In this state much of my deeper thinking is unknown – like the iceberg, most of it is below the water-line. 

This is where ‘hearing-yourself’ it comes into its own. When you let a viewpoint speak out it seems to find more energy to follow through and is more immune to internal criticism. Hearing myself say it gives it strength to follow all the implications of itself. It finds its voice. I find myself saying more than I had yet thought or felt. I’ve heard it said many times, “I don’t really know what I think until I hear myself saying it.” It’s always a surprise and sometimes quite a shock when what was just a weak idea suddenly finds its voice. Hearing yourself speak out gives you courage.

But however forceful and convincing, it will be only one of the many voices within struggling to be heard. They are not all one’s own voice either, but the voices of others that have been adopted. Impinging on the problem-at-hand are all kinds of viewpoints that have gained a foothold in the psyche, bits you have read, lectures you have been given, advice, unwanted criticism, as well as the urges of our animal instincts. When speaking out like this you may find yourself taking a tour of them all; first one line of thought gains ascendancy then another, a veritable medley of contradiction as you switch from one to another. But the difference is that now you are more able to judge the worth of each viewpoint because you are actually hearing them speak out with greater force, as they battle for supremacy. Each one now reveals itself for what it is actually worth. The various viewpoints will now interact with each other and encourage new ideas, modifications never contemplated before. Instead of ruminating in the shadows, the thinking-mind gets out there and lets off steam in full view – somewhat like a rowdy brain-storming session. 

Hearing-yourself fully will also include the changes of emotional tone as you express yourself and shift form one aspect to another: the sounds of your impatience, exasperation, groans and grumbles; physical gestures of futility, annoyance, resignation or amusement; the stamp of your anger with yourself and others. These physical gestures also need to be heard and recognized.

It would be easy to say that eventually you find your own true voice and with it your own reality and undying self.  It certainly does appear this way because the final outcome of hearing-yourself seems eventually to settle the conflict and you arrive at a certain steadiness and rightness; and with it an ability to act more decisively. As moderator, you will finally have heard enough of the conflicts and have reached a settled conclusion.

As an analysis of what goes on we could easily leave it at that, but the truth is a little more complicated and less romantic. Ideas and viewpoints undergo a process very much like that of Natural Selection in biology. Even in the narrow compass of one’s personal life, why do some viewpoints survive and others go extinct. Why do you come out of this process feeling that you have at least settled what the problem is about ?

The answer is similar to that found in the natural world: some ideas are more conducive to survival, more able to flourish in a changing environment, whereas others are not. The battle between our viewpoints and ideas is a battle for survival that goes on in our personal, emotional life, taking all factors into account: my own interests, my family, my group; and, last of all, perhaps, way out there, what is best for human kind and the planet – in roughly that order of importance. This is the way evolution has designed the emotions that motivate us. 

But we must imagine survival as not merely the ability to exist, but to flourish. The right solution to even a personal problem is the one that gains dominance by virtue of its ability to secure the survival of all that is dear to us. Of course, the style of survival will take into account the group within which we live; and these, of course, vary a great deal.

But on a basic individual level, the practice of ‘hearing-yourself’, as we have described it, is the process of bringing out into the open all the ideas and viewpoints that battle for dominance in one’s mind; and provided you have a good listener, hearing-yourself is a wonderful tool. And it is how and why person-centred therapy works.

There is one more aspect of ‘hearing-yourself’ that I can only touch upon here. This not about working through ideas that oppose each other, but ideas that compliment and can cross fertilise each other; this is more about the smoldering, but disconnected ideas in your own mind that need only to hear each other to light the spark of novel invention. But more about this in another bog.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

A PHILOSOPHICAL ROMP

                      
                      
      I want to start off by asking a ridiculous question: “How much of me is me?” My crazy question is prompted by a recent discovery in neuroscience that our freedom of choice in life could be an illusion. For an experiment they chose a subject to whom they gave two simple pushbuttons. He was to hold one in each hand. Now they told him “Just push the buttons, one after the other in any sequence you like, completely at random.” Then they put him in a (fMRI)  Brain Scanner to do it. When he chose the left button a certain spot in the brain lit up, when he chose the right button a different spot lit up. But the time sequences were different. They found that six seconds before he made a choice the brain lit up the appropriate spot. In other words, his brain made the decision six seconds before he consciously chose. The experimenters could then predict which choice he would make six seconds before he consciously chose – every time without exception.
        Consternation among the proponents of ‘free-will’ and those who claim we are responsible for our choices. The idea of responsibility and free-will rests on a simple proposition: that you could have chosen differently from the way you actually did. This is impossible to verify. As with any choice or decision there is no way you can go back to the time before you made a choice and choose differently. It is just impossible to know whether you ‘could have’. The claim is untestable in principle and is therefore meaningless. You may feel as though you ‘could have’, but there is no assurance in that at all. 
       The above experiment seems to validate determinism, that we are simply the effect of brain functioning over which we have no control. Freedom of choice is an illusion, in spite of it being a very convincing illusion. How can we possibly be so wrong about something so immediately obvious to our firsthand experience?
        If you consider the brain is one thing and you are something else the implications are disastrous. It means that you are being controlled by a mechanism that is totally beyond your control. You are an automaton. Which brings me back to my crazy question in the beginning: how much of me is me? But if I consider the brain and all the complex process of the body as me, if I include them in what I mean by ‘me’, then the problem disappears. It simply means that there is more to ‘me’ than I thought.
       There is no way I can be consciously aware of all the huge volume of computations that go on when any practical decision has to be made. All I need is the end result – I only need to be aware of what I have finally decided. All we know is that something is going on in the body that makes a decision before I am consciously aware of it.
         But this is really nothing new. It is already obvious in focusing. Using the felt-sense is precisely feeling into that area that is active prior to conscious awareness. As a conscious being I am the recipient of answers; all the work goes on under the bonnet; I am more than just a conscious being. In focusing I attend to answers that are forthcoming from me. As in the experiment, I experience a choice after I have made it. To put it another way: ‘I make a choice subliminally, then, seconds later, I have the experience of making it. That’s the feeling of coming to a conclusion.
         In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex the god Apollo prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid any chance of this happening Oedipus moved away from his parents, right out of the district. What Oedipus didn’t know was that he was, in fact, an adopted orphan and that the town he moved to contained his real parents. So, in an effort to avoid his fate he moved right into the path of it. Later discovered to his horror that he had, in fact, killed his father and married his mother. But what has always puzzled scholars are the last words that Oedipus spoke in the play: ‘I am responsible, but the god made me do it’. This sounds like a contradiction until you realise that Apollo and Oedipus are two aspects of the same person.
In the play the delay between the subliminal decision and the conscious realisation of it was considerably longer than six seconds; but the principle is the same. Crediting the decision (prophecy) to the god Apollo is Oedipus projecting himself outside himself. 

BRIEF ENCOUNTER 

        One of the best questions to ask in a quiet moment is: ‘how am I’.  A good question, but a difficult one – difficult, because unless you are in an unusual state, it is hard to tell. You just feel ordinary. And ordinary is – well, just normal, just like usual. But if you and I could do a miraculous switch, if we could swap places, if I could feel just like you usually do, and you could feel just as I usually feel, we would both have a great shock. It would seem utterly strange and unfamiliar to both of us. I would say, “Good God! Is this how you normally feel?” And you would say, “Is this what you call ‘ordinary’ – you can’t possibly always feel like this, surely!” We would both be either pleasantly surprised or horrified. 

        Does this mean that we are condemned to be totally blinkered, never to really meet anyone outside ourselves – to never really know anyone? Well, not quite. There are windows where we can see outside our own goldfish bowl. These are usually treasured moments that stand out in one’s memory; and, no matter how long ago, we never forget them.  Often centred on a certain time and place, for an instant the world opened up to reveal something much bigger. Something happens, like a momentous release. Hard to say whether it is oneself that opened up or the world – probably both. Certainly the experience is so emotionally stunning that we are gobsmacked. Falling in love is a universal high that everyone knows at some point in their life – and with it the world looks completely different,   

If you are lucky you may have many such high points in your life, what Abraham Maslow called ‘peak experiences’. Maslow thought that, aside from the use of psychotropics, the two easiest ways of achieving a peak experience is through sex and music. Peak experiences can last a few seconds, to hours, to weeks. Usually the more intense they are the briefer the encounter.

       They occur in circumstances you might expect, like standing on a mountain top or arriving in a new country or a rendezvous at the Brighton Library. But they can also occur in the most unlikely situations. These encounters always feel as though something is coming from the outside, as though something is being given; they carry a sense of absolute reality. They can’t be earned or prepared for; and they can happen at the most unlikely times and places: walking down an ordinary street, or whilst making an omelet or sitting on the toilet, or perhaps, more understandably, whilst making love or feeding the baby you have just given birth to. There is a sense of revelation – that this is what life is about, what I was born for. There is the conviction that this experience makes sense of everything without in the least worrying about how it does. If anything is fulfillment, this is it.

       James Hillman observed that peaks and highs say nothing of the worth of the person having them, for they can occur among psychopaths and criminals. Soldiers experience a high in battle and so does a crowd at a lynching. This is perhaps a little unfair; there is surely a distinction between the buzz of killing someone and being transported by a tree in blossom. 

       We can attach all kinds of labels to these peak experiences and this can lead us off into the misty realms of metaphysical speculation: are they spiritual moments; can we regard them as religious, transcendental, psychological, chemical, hormonal or mystical? Do they give us an insight into ultimate reality or are we just looking deep into our own navel? Here the intellectual question is: what are we going to do with them, where are we going to place these experiences in the vast panoply of explanatory claims. It’s almost a matter of take your pick – it depends on your partiality, whether you are ‘spiritually’ inclined, or have more ‘naturalistic’ leanings. For myself, I incline towards the latter because anything religious or spiritual makes me nervous, and because I see these things as part of the natural world. 

In one important respect these brief encounters, these peak experiences, are different to ordinary life in that they come as a gift - you are not called upon to make any effort. This is what that makes them unique and worthwhile. It seems like a miracle that for once I do not have to try. Whatever is happening is being done and as such is outside my control. The amazing thing is that this is not frightening. Giving up control seems like a wonderful relief. It actually seems possible to take my hands off the steering wheel without coming to grief. I don’t need to drive, to steer my way through every circumstance in life, negotiating other people’s every move, watching out at every intersection, obeying the rules, I don’t have to watch all the signs. I can let go and let life carry me. And after my brief encounter do I still believe this? Not really. It never seems that safe to do so. And it very likely isn’t. We didn’t evolve our cognitive faculties for nothing.

      There is no way we can layback as though life is total gift, but is there anything we can gain from peak experiences, these brief encounters with freedom? The best might be to consciously value them, keeping them at the back of one’s mind, knowing what one’s real values are and, in doing so, maybe just touching on the felt-sense of how it actually felt when it was fresh. This can help keep things in proportion and inspire a little more trust; and subliminally it will help steer one towards better choices in life. Real values do that.

      In these brief encounters something is given to us. It’s as though they come from outside the ego, that they are being done and, as such, outside our conscious control. This made our ancestors curious. If it was ‘being done’ who was doing it? The ultimate ‘who’ of course was God (or gods). Maybe spirits were responsible; or some supernal cosmic consciousness; or maybe The Ground Being (whatever that is). But maybe all this is looking in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s our biological nature, or some aspect of it, that we give over to in these brief encounters. Our recent research into focusing does suggest something of the sort. Whatever that aspect is, it is something even more marvelous and unknown than any of our divine astral imaginings.

        Before 1700 just think of all the disastrous ideas we had about the nature of things – and all the things we didn’t know; and we knew nothing at all about our biological nature. We do move forward and today we are beginning to understand that these unknowns, all that happens in these brief encounters for example, are open to enquiry. What we have in our favour, what we didn’t have in times past, is a consciousness of how much more there is to know about the human species and the way it has evolved. 

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.