Miracle at East Grinstea

In May 1960 a 16 year boy was admitted to Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, suffering from a complaint known as fish-scale disease. He looked ghastly. John’s body was covered in black warts while his hands were encased in a black, rigid horny scale so inelastic that any attempt to bend it would cause it to crack and become infected. Fish-scale disease is congenital and considered incurable.

Queen Victoria’s Hospital had a worldwide reputation for plastic surgery. An attempt was made to transplant skin from John’s chest to the palms of his hands. The attempt was a failure. However the anesthetist, who was also a skilled hypnotist, had previously cured a case of warts with hypnotism. He had an idea. If a couple of warts could be made to disappear with hypnosis why not try with the boy whose skin resembled a mass of warts. When he suggested this to the surgeon, Sir Archibald McIndoe, he was not amused and, turning on Mason, sourly told him to have a go if he wanted to.

Dr Mason went ahead with John’s session and the boy fairly quickly went into a hypnotic trance in which Dr Mason suggested that the disease in his left arm was healing and would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh beneath.  By the end of ten days the arm was completely normal. Dr Mason took John along to Sir Archibald who was stunned. “Good God man, do you know what you’ve done. That boy had congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma. Go and look it up.”

Dr Mason took himself to the Medical Library and learned that congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma is a rare type of skin diseases which occurs in 1 in 200,000 to 300,000 births. The boys' condition was caused by a genetic fault and, therefore, should not have been curable in the least. The evidence as it stood suggested the possibility that Dr. Mason had somehow changed the boys' genetic code was impossible. There is no way the genetic code can be changed like that.

This discovery that the disease was incurable had a curious effect on Dr. Mason. Whereas before he had a sort of innocent confidence, now, in spite of his visible success, a shadow of doubt must have crept into his unconscious. For when he tried to repeat the process on the boy’s right arm, nothing happened.

The success of hypnosis depends not only on reaching the unconscious of the subject and on implanting, you might say, a belief. It also depends on the hypnotist’s state of mind too. He has to be confident, or just simply lack any doubt, a knowing that hypnosis works.  Dr Mason’s discovery that what he had visibly achieved was impossible cast a doubt right where it mattered. Logic cannot reach into the Soul Mind. And so, the second and third attempt to cure John’s right arm failed. Not only that, but some time later the boy himself proved to be unhypnotizable. Whereas before he had easily gone into a trance he was now completely resistant.

If we take divine intervention out of the equation, there are some important insights to be gained from remarkable stories like the one above. The first is that the mind (the Inner Soul Mind not the Analytical Mind) can create realities in the most dramatic way. When a person is hypnotised their Analytical Mind goes to sleep, making the Inner Soul Mind reachable. Their fantasy life and their perceptions can be completely changed. The imagination can make us see things that are not there and render things invisible that are - but John’s fish-scale disease was not just an illusion.  This was not dealing with mere imagination, but with physical reality. Quite a different thing. Somehow the laws of nature were subverted by human mental intervention. *  That the mind can directly effect physical reality we might call miraculous, forgetting for the moment that telepathy, an everyday occurrence, also violates ordinary scientific common sense. So does every placebo effect in the doctor’s surgery.

*  The ability of the mind to directly effect physical objects is called telekinesis.

See Dr Mason’s Hypnotic Miracle : http://anomalyinfo.com/articles/sa00107.php

  See also :  http://www.hypnosis-kids.com/hypnosis-healing-stories-brocq.htm

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

WHEN MAGIC HAPPENS pt 1

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.     Charles Fort

We are in two minds about everything – all of the time. We literally do have two minds: one logical and the other intuitive. Popularly, we know them as the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, sometimes as the rational and Intuitive minds.  But we name these two aspects of the psyche in so many different ways it can be confusing.  To make it easier to talk about let’s call the (rational, thinking, Animus, logical mind) the Analytical Mind and lets call the (emotional, artistic, intuitional, feeling mind) the Soul or Inward Mind. ^*

The Analytical Mind seems easy to understand. It is simply ‘me’ as a thinking, conscious individual; it’s my sense of personal identity where I can say ‘I am the manager of my life’. The Analytical Mind is the one who copes with the realities of day to day existence. The person I call ‘me’ lives in this coping mind; it’s who I am most of the time, living in a rather flat, one dimensional world, doing what has to be done each day so that I will have a tomorrow where I can do it again.

In our ordinary life The Soulful Inward Mind, our other half, is like a stranger within – mostly in hiding. But there are moments when this stranger comes alive and I can feel the zest for living life outside the box. Reminders of Christmas morning as a child can free me up, or the first day of the school holidays are memories of a time when I was fully awake to the wonders of the world. Remembering these moments I realise that the stranger within is no real stranger at all, but is really me at my best. At those moments the coping mind takes second place and life is full and flourishing.

The Inward Soul constantly reverberates with the ordinary day to day of living, giving us two realities at once. Then the Soul’s input can vitalize the plain facts of life with wider intuitive panorama, colouring each moment with a deeper significance. We see further. We feel further. Using our Felt-Sense we, as it were, live in two places at once: the ordinary world and the world of the imagination. Living in two places like this we are more connected and alive.

The Analytical Mind working alone is simply flat and boring. For me this is most noticeable when I am writing. To try to write using the Analytical Mind alone I am inside the Box. I can only repeat what I have said before. My writing is dry, wooden, unimaginative and boring. To work well I have invoke the magic of living in two places at once. I have to invite The Soul’s deeper sense before the writing comes alive. Magically, the Inward Soul constantly disrupts the status quo, bringing fresh insights and connections.

But the Soul Mind has to be larger than this taste of aliveness. The problem is: where do we put all our psychic stuff we don’t understand. There is so much of it.  All my bizarre dreams, memories and fantasies, the vagaries of the libido, the imaginative magic and abilities that seem to defy the rules of nature. These are powers over which I have no control. They are my powers, yet they belong to the stranger. For example, telepathy is an established fact – it happens all the time. The only place we can put this ability is somewhere in the Inward Mind. We call it paranormal or supernatural, dismissing it because it shouldn’t be possible.  We banish it beyond the natural world only because there is no place for it in our present restricted scientific outlook. This is the reason for Rupert Sheldrake’s call to free science from its materialistic fixation.

Then there are even more fantastic worlds: bizarre and unlikely phenomena like poltergeists, faith healing, telekinesis, hypnosis, pre-cognition, the experiences of LSD, children who remember past lives, autistic savants, shamanism, near death experiences, alien abduction, and exceptional artistic talents. All this, as well as the higher levels of spirituality. Either it’s all delusional nonsense or there is something going on, something real we should give serious attention to.

We have only a vague idea of what it all adds up to or what it prefigures for humanity as we evolve – except to be sure they are all connected in some way with the great mystery of the Inward Soul and beyond that to our connection to what Aldous Huxley called ‘Mind at Large’. Plus we do know that to make life peak we must be able to live in two places at once. 

*   

Seven years before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Thomson Jay Hudson (1834 – 1903) published his Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893) in which he proposed that:

1. Man has two minds: the objective mind (conscious) and the subjective                                               mind  (subconscious).

2. The subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by suggestion.

3. The subjective mind is incapable of inductive reasoning.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

OTHER LIVES

A two year old American boy, James Leininger of Lafayette Louisiana, was having nightmares again. It was a nightly occurrence in which the boy thrashed around screaming as though trying to fight his way out of bed. “In the throes of these nightmares you couldn’t work out what he was saying” said his mother, “but two or three months in I was walking down the hall and I heard something that chilled me to the bone. James cried out: 'Airplane crash, plane on fire, little man can't get out’.

As James became more able to express himself, he began to describe things that his parents could hardly believe. He began to detail his life as a fighter pilot and how he died when he was unable to get out of the cockpit of his Corsair, which had been hit by enemy aircraft in the battle for Iwo Jima in 1945

His parents Bruce, 59, and Andrea, 47, were initially skeptical about the idea of reincarnation. His father’s initial reaction to his son’s chilling assertions were that they were ‘bullshit’, but he was impressed by the boy’s apparent memories of the war and he became a sort of detective, determined to find out whether there was any validity to his son’s stories. A search of the internet led him to the ship Natoma Bay, a small beat up aircraft carrier in service in the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr Leininger found that just one pilot died from that ship during the battle: James M Huston Jnr, 21. Shot down on March 3, 1945, while on his 50th mission, his last before he was due to go home.

Bruce and Andrea were at first unable to rationalize James’ behavior. They could not explain his vast knowledge of airplanes, crew members, or his recollection of actual events which had taken place during the life of James M. Huston Jr.  Flicking through a book, the two-year-old pointed at a picture of Iwo Jima in the Pacific and said that was where his plane was shot down. At the age of four, James was able to name crew members who had died before him.

The Leininger’s systematically verified and put all the pieces together, with the help of James’ surviving fellow shipmates into an undeniable catalogue of facts that rocked their solid Christian beliefs.

As with many cases of children who recall previous lives, the memory of it, like much of childhood memory itself, began to disappear.  James, now 11, said, "I think the story is incredible. I don't remember any of it now but hearing about what happened when I was two, it is incredible.”

*

Dr. Ian Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia have collected two and half thousand cases from all over the world of children who persistently talk about having lived before. Dr Stevenson is a remarkable man who, for forty years has been researching and documenting – not so must past lives per se, but children who show clear signs of such recall. Two and a half thousand cases adds up to a lot of evidence and these are the ones who have passed his controlled recognition tests that methodically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories. 

His evidence comes from the plain accounts of children, some as young as three or four. These children supply names of relatives, occupations, and details of houses and locations they lived in, often of places far removed from their present home and which were unknown to their present family. 

From the moment these children can talk, they will speak of people and events from previous lives – not vague lives of centuries ago, but lives of specific, identifiable individuals who may have died just months, weeks, or hours before the birth of the child in question. These children often express an intense desire to revisit their former home and are able to identify specific details that adds up to a convincing picture. This was just the effect it had on skeptic journalist Tom Shroder who accompanied Dr. Stevenson, then going on 80, on one of his journeys to collect stories. After the trip Shroder wrote Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives.

With deliberately limited research Dr Stevenson advances no theory about reincarnation in general. Nancy Hurrelbrinck writes: ‘Dr. Stevenson, who came to University of Virginia in 1957 to chair the psychiatry department, began his reincarnation research at that time. "I was dissatisfied with current theories of personality such as psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and genetics," he said in an early interview. "I don't think these alone or together adequately explain the uniqueness of human beings."

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE MONKEY MIND

Gurus and teachers of meditation somewhat disrespectfully call our wandering attention the ‘Monkey Mind. In trying to focus on breathing, for example, I am distracted by thoughts and fantasies. The Monkey Mind heads off on its own trip with rehearsals of the future or fantasies of the past, quite ignoring what I’m supposed to be concentrating on. Past and future is not what meditation is about; they are distractions from being able to live in the here and now. Monkey Mind is a well known Buddhist term meaning that part of the mind which is unsettled, restless, and uncontrollable.

The Monkey Mind’s non-stop chatter is about unimportant trifles. Even when not meditating I think silently most of the time, sometimes bordering on talking to myself, like an internal dialogue – much of it trivial chatter. Yet such trivia became the very tools of psychoanalysis. Rather than trying to ignore or overcome the Monkey Mind, Sigmund Freud decided to pay close attention to it. Of course, Freud didn’t use that term, but we’re talking about the same thing: the stream of consciousness.

The analyst would sit in a chair behind the patient who reclined on a sofa. Not even the sight of the analyst must distract the patient from reporting his ‘trivia’. The patient’s instructions were to say whatever came to mind without censoring or omitting anything. Capturing one’s passing thoughts, actually being aware of them, is no easy task because this stream of images, thoughts and wishes are almost unconscious; almost, but not quite. Moreover, it is subjected to varying degrees of self-censorship and self-disapproval.

Freud called speaking out this stream of consciousness ‘free association’.  It is, he said, the “fundamental technical rule of analysis... We instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation.” The patient is to report any passing thought or idea, taking care, he said, not to "exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said".

What’s interesting is that the Monkey Mind does not just wander aimlessly as it appears to do. Free association is not free at all. It is anchored and hovers around and returns to certain underlying issues that are anything but trivial: they are connected to painful memories or unpleasant urges and impulses – all the disagreeable things that have been neglected or stuffed into the unconscious. The so-called trivia are disguised symbols representing deeper things. They are watered down ciphers, disguised by their apparent unimportance. The Monkey Mind does a good balancing act of reminding without remembering. The trivia doesn’t worry us, but it doesn’t let us forget either.

Sometimes though, the Monkey Mind only partially hides a hidden anguish, as when a present-time problem becomes such a symbol. The present-time worry represents, without revealing, something repressed and forgotten. The pressure from the unconscious leaks through, attaching itself to a present-time issue, making this appear bigger than it actually is. The Monkey Mind deceives us that the present-time issue is the real problem. Again the Monkey Mind provides a defense from and compensation for the pain of the real thing.

The analyst is supposed to work all this out by listening to the patient with a third ear, matching it up with his Freudian theory and divulging his conclusions at the end of the session. Sometimes he gets it right, but more often than not his conclusions are off key, too bogged down with theory.

Freud looked upon free association as a tool, but Ferenczi, one of Freud’s early colleagues, thought differently. He said, ‘the patient is not cured by free-associating, he is cured when he can free-associate'.  The implication of this would seem to suggest that the act of free associating is what benefits the patient, not the analyst’s interpretation of it. In hindsight we can see how very true this was. Firstly, being aware of what is going on almost out of sight and then revealing it to another person whom one trusts – that’s what does the trick !

There is no need for the analyst’s interpretation. It is irrelevant, even counterproductive. What is needed is simply for the therapist to listen with a non-judgmental attitude and allow the client to explore his own reality. Later, this is exactly what Carl Rogers, the founder of counselling and person-centred therapy, recommended; and 90% of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

For a stubborn and unyielding difficulty a little more suggestive intervention is required, based on the hard-won knowledge that a persistent or recurring problem in present-time derives its intractability from an early trauma or conflict. Such events may even be within the person’s range of memory, but cut off from any feeling of what it was like. Still, the Monkey Mind will hover around its present-time incarnation, giving us plenty of clues of what it was like. The emotions and anxiety that the present-time problem evokes can almost be guaranteed to be exactly those of the original trauma. The task of the therapist is to point the person in the direction of the original situation, not just to recognise it cognitively, but to begin to feel the connection.

Why the past is so important. Well, really it isn’t. It is the repression of it that does the damage. Even if the person can cognitively remember, the emotion of the incident is repressed and it is this that leaks through in the worry about the present-time problem. A lot of nervous energy is spent keeping the emotion of original at bay. One does this by concentrating on the present-time problem; but because the present-time problem isn’t the problem, it cannot be solved in its own terms. Thus the same type of present-time problem occurs again and again. Each recurrence is an incarnation of the original repression.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious changed everything. Copernicus had shown us that our planet was not the centre of the universe, Darwin demonstrated that we were just another animal species, and then Freud came along to give us another shock: the ego was not the center of the person: we have an unconscious mind, he said, that exercises an enormous power and influence over our lives. Freud's work and theories helped shape our views of childhood, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy. Just how influential he was can be judge by W.H.Auden’s poem written at the time of Freud’s death,

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion.

The years since then have seen a gradual change in that climate. Freud is no longer fashionable. Indeed, the present received wisdom among scientifically minded psychologist is that Freud is passé. Only in the humanities is Freud still a subject for study. Patricia Cohen said that psychoanalysis is taught at all the top universities, but not in the Psychology Departments. In therapy we now concentrate on the various versions of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Forget the past; what matters is The Now and how to enhance it.

Folk wisdom from pop psychology to meditation, all stress the importance of living in The Now – the great Ekhart Tolle fever. But the present moment isn’t as simple as we make out. The past is an aspect of the present moment of which we are unconscious. What we call the present moment encapsulates the past. The present moment contains, yet hides the past. The past is always present. What we regard as ‘the present’ in common sense is actually an abstraction. Freud never said this, but it’s what I take from his remark that there is nothing in the id corresponding to the idea of time; there is no recognition of the passage of time.

The past is that aspect of the present the influence of which we are unaware, oblivious of how it is woven into our perceptions and behaviour. We can, of course, cognitively discern the past as something quite distinct from the present, but this is an abstraction from the actual presence of the past. 

If the ‘present moment’ were denuded of the past, our experience would be relatively formless; in fact, what we call the present moment would disappear if it wasn’t informed by the past. In its place would be a world of pure being – impossible to describe, a mystic state of consciousness that people often find after a long retreat in meditation. Because this state is relatively detached from the past, the environment seems completely new and is hardly recognisable. It is a state of bliss that usually last for only a few days. After a while ordinary consciousness returns where the present moment carries the past as it’s hidden but active component. It’s back to business as usual.

The past is an essential ingredient of the present, seamlessly interwoven with the body and influencing our day to day life in the most profound way. When we experience life in a detached way we are relatively cut off from the body and its feelings and memories. We are then unconscious of the body and its store of memories, and can pretend we have put the past behind us. We then live in the head and our bodily memory becomes that aspect of the present which is invisible. We can then be victims of strange emotions and reactions for which there seems to be no reason.

Under these circumstances the unconscious gets to a point where it screams to be heard. But it can only express itself in a hidden way and it does so with strange pains and physical dysfunctions of all kinds. This is the reason for the placebo effect: I contact my therapist or doctor and she gives me attention and treats me seriously. My unconscious gets that it is being heard. It can then drop the symptoms which were the effort to be heard. Sometimes just ringing for an appointment is enough for the symptoms to disappear. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE GREAT DIVIDE.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became fast friends the moment they first met way back in 1907 and Freud viewed Jung as protégé and heir to psychoanalysis. Over the years they began to drift apart. Jung was drawn séances and spiritualism, whereas Freud wanted to keep his psychoanalysis within the fold of scientific respectability. Freud famously warned Jung, ‘beware of the black tide of the occult’. This is the same paranoid fear that today’s militant atheists have of admitting any validity to parapsychology. They insist that it would open the door to all kinds of crack-pot and dangerous beliefs.

For Freud and Jung it was a difference that ran too deep for any kind of resolution. It wasn’t just a disagreement between two intelligent individuals; rather it was a gulf that had its origins in the age old fight between the church and the rationalist, the belief in the supernatural and the growth of science and scepticism in the 17^th century. It was a struggle that gouged a rift that divided these two men and still divides us today. Having banished all the ghosts, ghouls, devils, demons, werewolves, and spirits, the guardians of science are still scared of them coming back to haunt us – deep down they still believe that the unfettered psyche could throw us back into superstition and savagery.

The gulf is now deeper than ever. On one side of the great divide is science which is objective and impersonal. This enables a physicist in Beijing to understand exactly what a physicist in Boston or Reykjavik is talking about; a common language, and unified view of the natural world. Standing behind this tradition are all the technical achievements of the modern world.

On the other side of the divide there are only subjective opinions and all our individual slants, preference, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, dreams and moods, styles and fashions, as well as the huge range of alternative medicines and spiritual beliefs, as well as the many crazy religions, cults and self-opinioned gurus I can believe in. There’s huge choice of fantastic promises out there in the wild.

Amid all that chaos, science does give us some certainty. Throughout history there has been wave after wave of smallpox epidemics, decimating millions. Following aggressive vaccination campaigns during the 19^th and 20^th centuries the World Heath Organization certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979. To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated. The virus is now totally extinct. The story of polio is shaping up to go the same way.

With triumphs like this it is no wonder that we have faith in the scientific method. Nonetheless, the growth of alternative medicines shows that we have growing doubts. Something remains unsatisfied. Maybe our uncertainties about science are due to its inability to deal with human subjectivity – viruses are objective things, human minds are not. Consciousness itself is still a mystery. In many medical treatments the placebo effect is so strong we don’t know quite what we are dealing with. Where does science end and the power of belief begin?

Personal subjectivity is admittedly messy and certainly no one can say what is normal. Still, when dealing with personal subjectivity we have to take everything into account and treat what we find seriously and respectfully, even if we don’t understand it. We cannot tidy the mind up without losing what makes us human. To fully grant being to something we don’t understand is a brave step; and in our personal encounters this is exactly what is demanded of us.

Clinical and medical psychology tries to categorise human nature. The trouble is that despite all its wonderful achievements, when science turns it attention on human psyche it objectifies and depersonalises it. The very project of science from the beginning was to discount ‘qualia’ and ‘feelings’ and stick to what is objectively measureable. The individual human then becomes an object to be categorised instead of a subject to be felt.

The world of science is a world of objects, not subjects. And so clinical psychologists are apt to deal with people more as though they were dysfunctional machines. The wild and volatile realms of human subjectivity do not fit well with psychological systems; we nervously hide behind them when confronting the stormy oceans of the soul.

“I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.” 
                                                                 ― George Carlin

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

IS STEALING PEOPLE WRONG

   

When I was a teenager I was a great orchestral conductor. I gave many concerts of all the notable Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Stravinsky; but my favourite was Prokofiev, particularly his lively and cheeky Classical Symphony, a wonderful parody on Joseph Hayden. I knew the score inside out; or at least I knew how to wave my arms about and exactly where to bring in the woodwinds and the cellos. I had conducted this work many times in the lounge room when my parents were out, accompanied by three large 78 records going full tit. The applause was overwhelming. I took many bows, not forgetting to acknowledge the members of the orchestra.

In my later years I have gone off most classical music – except for some old favourites. I’ve definitely given up the baton, perhaps because I now have more of my own identity; I don’t have to steal one as I did back then when I was less than nobody. It was so much better to be someone else.

Is it a question of growing up, of absorbing role models? Do we target someone who we will later emulate? No, I think one steals celebrity, of being someone who is the centre of adulation. Its about being adored. We ardently imagine what it must be like to be that loved. The actor, singer or star knows this and pretends to live up to our image, wearing fabulous clothes and sporting a fabulous partner. The more adulation they get, the more they get.

We don’t envy them simply because we identify with them. Every little girl at the roadside of the Royal Tour is Princess Kate with her Prince William – and not less the ecstatic ladies who wait with her, trembling with excitement.

We underestimate the power of the imagination, how it can transform who we are. Naturally, no one walks around declaring that they are Princess Kate. Stealing someone is much more subtle than that. It’s secret. It’s stored away in the hidden places of the heart, but it can transform the feeling of the day.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

HUMORESQE

          Don Quixote del la Mancha – the archetypal absurd hero

   

HUMORESQUE 

My bad mood transforms into humour when it becomes aware of itself.* When my mood becomes conscious of itself I can’t help seeing the funny side of it. I am a little bit absurd. A sense of humour dissolves my serious self-regard. As the ancient meaning suggests, humour is moist. A sense of humour softens my rigidity with amusement – I laugh at myself. The self importance, the posturing and domination of my mood becomes ludicrous.

Googling ‘laughing at funerals’ produces about 8 million hits. Apparently it’s a distressingly common experience. There are many theories about it: relief of tension, hysteria, denial of the loss etc. My theory is that perhaps it serves the same function that all humour does – it blows a hole in seriousness. Funerals become ridiculous.

 I did Classics at university and I remember a special tutorial where we spent a whole afternoon reading aloud, in turns, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. The Greek heroes of the story have monstrously overblown egos; and, in the battle scenes, the gods take sides and urge the heroes on. Great deeds and displays of courage are graphically rendered with bodies sliced and chopped in combat, urged on by the gods of Olympus. Real blood and guts with cosmically momentous consequences. Towards the end of these tutorial readings I remember one student got the giggles. Very soon the whole class went to pieces. Overblown heroic egos are idiotically funny. Not quite what the great classic of western literature was meant to inspire.

When, like don Quixote, I take my heroic suffering seriously, I’m already in deep trouble.  So the whole question is how to change a serious mood into a humour. I wont do it by trying to understand it. I have no real rationale for my mood. I should never try to explain it. To do so would be to reveal my absurdity without it being funny. Explanations are a bottomless pit. You can never reach the end. Oh yes, I was certainly angry as a child because things weren’t right. But there must be a reason why I have held on to this feeling for so long. Why would that be? Understanding always needs something else to explain the last term explained. In getting a hold of myself, ‘understanding’ is the wrong tool.  The closest I get to myself is getting what my mood is like.

Seems strange to suggest that I can be ignorant of what my mood is like. I mean ‘like’ not in the analogical, comparative, form of the expression, (i.e. similar to), but the experiential form, as in “no one knows what it is like to be me”. In this latter sense it can be true that I do not know what my mood is like. I have never really experience it. I have been it, but I have never experienced it.

To change a mood into a humour is to grasp what the mood is like; and the most useful way of doing this is what we know in person-centred therapy as ‘reflection’. If I can reflect another’s mood, if I can imaginatively enter into it, if I can show the other person I know what his mood must be like, what it must feel like, what its implications are – then, when he sees his reflection, he can begin to grasp what it is like himself. In the earlier days of counselling ‘reflection’ was done verbally and this is still the most useful. But I have learned many times over the years that it can be enough to imaginatively grasp what it must be like for the other person. Nothing is said, yet somehow telepathically they get it. So often I have been a silent reflector and it has worked.  Or perhaps it’s that if I really get what their mood is like, whatever comes out of my mouth is an accurate reflection.

That’s in therapy, but how do you turn your own mood into a humour on your own? Very tricky! How do you get what your own mood is like? Obviously by self-reflection. When you ask yourself, ‘what’s the matter with me’, you can get it for a flash – grasping your mood by the tail, actually experiencing it, before it slithers away. There I am … swishhhh. I get what its like before the recognition slips through the floorboards. I have to be real quick.

What do you do when you’ve got it?

Well, nothing. Getting what its like is all you need.

The recognition is instantaneous – then gone.

Do that a couple of times and you’ll be in a better humour.

  

*     I realise I am redefining ‘humour’, coming from

       from medieval physiology: i.e. the four humours

or body fluids. But I am also using the other meaning

of ‘humour’,  i.e. a funny or amusing quality

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264