AM I DEAF OR SOMETHING?

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.

And Hebrews learn it backwards,

which is absolutely frightening.

But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.

Why can't the English,

Why can't the English learn to speak?

So sang Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, a 1956 Broadway musical based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. The professor has made a bet with a friend that he can transform a cockney flower girl, Eliza

Doolittle, played in the film by Audrey Hepburn, into a lady he can pass off in society simply by teaching her how to speak. The professor gets himself very involved and empresses his exasperation with the inability of the English to speak properly.

Rex Harrison was an excellent choice for the part because he was one of the old school like Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier whose skill had been honed in the theatre, where one had to project one’s voice in order to be heard in the stalls, never mind the gallery. An actor had to speak out; otherwise the audience would be literally left in the dark.

In 1951 Marlon Brando mumbled his way across the silver screen in the film of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. He used something called Method Acting, a technique developed by Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director. In this method the actor aims at a complete identification with the person he is portraying. Unfortunately, Brando set a style that inarticulate mumbling under the breath is a sign of realistic acting and the traditional style came to be thought of as old fashioned and theatrical.

Whether they are consciously applying Stanislavsky’s method or not so many modern actors today are bedeviled by the need to mumble under their breath, especially in initiate love scenes. It seems they believe that to speak clearly would somehow violate the intimacy. And so the love scene becomes an exchange of inaudible whispering between the lovers in which the audience is left out.

Am I old fashioned to want to know what is going on in a movie or a novel? A certain amount of mystification I can stand. It’s not only that actors don’t speak English, but the action is too fast or the plots over-mystify. So many mystery series like Midsummer Murders start off quite easy to follow, but gradually winds themselves into such a tangle of complications that I literally lose the plot.

With the forced idleness of recuperation – I have been sick for a few months now – I am discovering my difficulties with television. Audibility and articulation is certainly a problem. I wonder, perhaps if, with US shows, it might help to introduce sub-titles for English speaking audiences !

Shakespeare knew that the play’s not the thing, the audience is the thing. That’s why his characters would often speak asides directly to the audience so that they were included. A play is for the sake of the audience. A play is not to show off the actors or clever directors or fabulously ingenious plots. A play is to enchant the audience; and an audience has to be able to comprehend, to be included, in what is going on.

When being entertained by a play, like most people I’m sure, I have this childish desire to be included in what is going on, to be able to identify with the characters and their lives. Drama as we know it originated in ancient Greece where the audience was very much included. Everyone knew the myths which the theatre dramas played out. There was no mystification. The actors spoke their lines from behind masks and had to project their voices into the open air theater. Moreover, seated in the Greek thearon, everyone knew what was happening to Oedipus in Sophocles’ play – the whole point of the story was that Oedipus didn’t know. He was ignorant of where fate was leading him, but not the audience. They knew in advance his tragic destiny and could be thoroughly involved as it was gradually revealed. But they knew every step beforehand. They knew the story; and as every child will tell you, you have to know how the story goes. Otherwise the whole thing is spoiled.

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DARWIN’S COMPLAINT

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure, and music very great delight. Even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”¹

What an amazingly insightful admission!

Astonishing that Darwin, probably the greatest scientist of modern times, should see so clearly that his powerful analytical mind has cut him off from his soul, and the awful cost that entails. He has lost his ‘aesthetic sense’, which we take to mean the feeling emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.

Darwin recognises that the loss of the aesthetic sense can be detrimental to our ‘moral character’ - a rather old-fashioned expression, better stated as ‘kindness, gentleness and sensitivity. Indeed, these qualities only come into being when I am aware of the other as a person, only when the other person is as real to me as I am to myself. I need the presence of another subject, a first-person singular who can be addressed, implored, reasoned with, and loved. Without the aesthetic sense there is no subject-to-subject encounter. The other person isn’t actually there.  I ride rough shod over them and end up with a distorted version of how they actually are.

Also Darwin sees how the enfeebling of our emotional nature could be ‘injurious to the intellect’.  True. The intellect also fails without the esthetic sense. You have to feel what is there before you can think about it. Without the aesthetic sense you tend to ‘intellectualise’, dismissive of small, but vital details, again riding rough shod over discrepancies in order to bully reality into being what you want it to be.

The intellect begins with curiosity – and curiosity is very careful with details. Observation becomes a magical enthrallment with the finer points of how things actually are – nothing missed or overlooked. Only then can you afford to think.

The aesthetic sense is not interested in theories and structures but in the immediacy of sensation, the flow of life with all its muddle and indeterminacy. But the analytical mind wants a world that can be relied upon. All the facts and observations that Darwin has collected must be reduced to rational truths and so he grinds out general laws that sideline the confusion – very successfully.

This urge to abstract precise principles from the confusion of the world has been called ‘reductionism’. Booming, bustling nature gets explained away. Consistency is the watchword. Oddities get ignored. When something is odd we rush to a general principle to explain it away.

The urge to diminish confusion drives the compulsion to have things shipshape, like in the household where everything has its place.  ‘The fruit go there and the loose veggies there’. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Have you ever been in a household where absolutely nothing is out of place? It’s kind of scary. There is no flow, no confusion, no untidiness – everything is anesthetized and static. That’s interesting, isn’t it: an-esthetized means a loss of sensation - precisely what Darwin was complaining of.

It’s understandable that Darwin should lose his love of poetry and music, but why should it nauseate him. His analytical mind has become so overdeveloped by concentration on establishing principles that his soul has become ‘atrophied’, as he says. But why should poetry now turn his stomach, making him feel sick?

 I will hazard that there is something about the thinking mind, the analytical mind, that is against poetic feeling. The analytical mind doesn’t just neglect the aesthetic sense, but actually feels threatened by it. The naked world is too much, too overwhelming. The analytical mind feels terribly unsafe when confronted by primitive nature. That’s why every morning you forget your dreams. They don’t fit and so get put down.

Aldous Huxley suggested that the analytical mind is like a reducing valve.

 ‘Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed’. ²

No wonder Darwin felt sick – and I’m not feeling too well myself !

¹ The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882.   Collins, London 1958

²   Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception, 1952

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THE UNEMBODIED

There are few things more disconcerting for the modern western mind than the idea of discarnate, autonomous spirits – souls without bodies. We don’t believe in ghosts any more and we have little faith now that clairvoyants can help us communicate with the souls of the departed.

Yet, during the Victorian area dabbling in spiritualism was popular at all levels of society in both Britain and America. The séance became a feature of drawing room society – sometimes entertaining, sometimes intense and serious. Interest in spiritualism became a veritable counter-culture, in many ways comparable to the 60s revolution in our own time. It tended to upstage current religion, indulge in altered states, and give more power to the intuitiveness of women. By 1855 two million people were followers of the movement.

In some circles the encounters in the darkened séance room could be quite risqué, taking on sexual overtones. Favorite familiars from the ‘other side’ would materialise to entertain the assembled guests, many of them elderly gentlemen who flirted with such ‘apparitions’. The spirit child Pocha ‘stole money and trinkets from the sitters, climbed on the laps of gentlemen, stroked their whiskers, and allowed herself to be kissed and cuddled.’ ¹

In spite of such fraudulent theatricals, sincere spiritualism carried Royal Approval. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert participated in Spiritualist séances. Later, the clairvoyant Georgiana Eagle demonstrated her powers before the Queen at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. The Queen’s consort had recently died and the clairvoyant revealed to the Queen the pet name that Prince Albert used for her – a secret that no one else knew. The Queen was impressed.

And there were some very famous people who were deeply involved in spiritualism: William James, the psychologist, studied spiritualism, publishing supportive conclusions; people like Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and other famous names were involved.² And in 1840 in The British Society for Psychical Research was founded – and still exists to this day.

I would like to remind my colleagues that Jung himself had an early interest in spiritualism; his mother was a psychic and later in life Jung dialogued with disincarnate spirits. His conversations with Philemon were just that:  ‘He taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought, said Jung.

But the situation gets blurred by his calling Philemon ‘a fantasy figure’, suggesting that he is not an autonomous spirit. Philemon was, Jung said, taken from classical literature. In other words he was a mythical character. Jung thus gives the whole thing a scientific spin by granting objectivity to the spiritual world whilst sidestepping the objectivity of Philemon as an independent spirit. However, I would say, that for Philemon to teach Jung so much he was not simply fictional, he must have been a self-directed, thinking individual, capable intelligent communication.

 But Jung refuses to call a spade a spade, throwing out a smoke screen of mythical references. Such contrived avoidance is evident throughout Jung’s work as he tries to give his occult leanings a scientific spin. He was up against the medical establishment and had to give his writings the appearance of scientific objectivity. So Instead of being legitimate agents, his spirits become ‘archetypes’, seeming to be non-personal myths of the soul-at-large. This same evasion is seen in archetypal psychology where it is de rigueur not to be ‘literal’, but to keep the discussion in the realm of imagery and fantasy, befogging the reader with endless literary references. The simple phenomenological appearance of individual spirits is fudged.  Its all in the imagination.

We can distance ourselves from the whole unreliable farrago of ‘mediums’ who claim to have access to unembodied spirits. They are either cheats or sincere hysterics with over-excitable imaginations.

However, I can’t help looking over my shoulder at the ancient traditions of shamanism among indigenous people the world over or to the priestess at the Delphi’s Temple of Apollo. As Apollo’s voice she made prophesies that determined the political and military strategies of the state. ‘She also made thousands of pronouncements that led to the freeing of slaves, the creation of successful marriages, the honouring of local gods, the successful planting of crops and engagement in trade and industry.’ ³

I can tell you, no one in ancient Greece regarded the Oracle of Delphi as a figment of the imagination.

¹  Owen, Alex. The darkened room: women power and spiritualism in Victorian England. University of Chicago Press, 1989

²    Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Cornell University Press, 2002

³   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oracular_statements_from_Delphi

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BRAIN FEVER

As a theory of everything The Brain has definitely won the Gold Medal in this year’s Memes Olympics. Everybody’s got the brain on the brain  – if it’s not the brain, it’s the genes that’s the fashionable theory of everything. Neuroscience has it all licked, or soon will have. It will not be long before everything about human nature is known and treatable.

Promises, Promises, promises !

 Your actual scientist may not say this much, but he allows the public to be blinded with science.

The brain is this miracle computer in your head with a hundred billion neurons that manages everything: perception, language, memory, emotions, planning, learning, social interaction etc; and each part of the brain has its allotted function. The external world is not at all what it seems – its all a vast phantasmagoria promulgated by your brain. A person who is brain dead may appear alive – there may be a heartbeat, they may look like they're breathing, their skin may still be warm to the touch – but they are dead. So runs the last word in medical science.

But what about the case of a man with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). His brain had shrunk to a thin sheet of tissue due to a build up of fluid in his scull, reports Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille. Intelligent tests showed that the patient had a IQ of 75.  The British neurologist John Lorber was tempted to ask if the brain was really necessary. ‘He scanned the brains of more than 600 people with hydrocephalus and found that about 60 had more than 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Some were seriously retarded, but others were more or less normal, and some had IQs of well over 100. One young man who had an IQ of 126 and a first class degree in mathematics, a student from Sheffield University, had ‘virtually no brain at all’.

Some neurologists, clinging to their place in the sun, have suggested that the brain is marvelously adaptable. But one has to ask how is it possible for a brain that isn’t there to be adaptable ?

By rights that Sheffield University student shouldn’t have been able to recognise his own mother, never mind get a degree in mathematics. No, something is seriously wrong with our materialistic assumptions about human beings.

‘Cases such as these undermine established beliefs about the relationship between the human brain and consciousness and so are largely ignored by mainstream medical science. ¹

Rupert Sheldrake writes that there is no evidence for the materialist claim that the mind is nothing more than the activity of the brain. ‘No one has ever seen a thought or an image inside someone else’s brain or inside his or her own brain. When we look around us, the images of things we see are outside us, not in our heads. Direct experience offers no support for the extraordinary claim all experiences are inside the brain. Direct experience is not irrelevant to the nature of consciousness:  it is consciousness’. 2

What difference does it make?

Quite a lot when you begin to regard yourself, not just as a physical organism, not just as a lump of meat – but primarily as a psychological being.

¹   http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm

²   Sheldrake, R. The Science Delusion. Coronet, 2012.  pp 214

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

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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.

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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."

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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