ONE MORE TIME…. with feeling !

by stanley

.....Have you ever thought how your life consists of repeat performances? If you are lucky you make the same mistake twice in a lifetime, but if you are like me you make the same mistake over and over.
.....I never learn!
......Well, maybe that’s not altogether true. I do learn, but very slowly. Take my relationships for instance. It’s only now, when many people would say it’s too late, something seems to have changed for me. I seem to have advanced from infantile dependency to mature dependency. Really quite good. But for most of my life I have repeated the same cycle, the same excitement of hope followed by the same dénouement of disappointment.
......After making a mistake – I mean an important emotional investment that goes wrong – it would seem you are a more sensible person if you carefully avoid the same mistake again. Unfortunately, if you are sensible enough to do this, your life becomes an avoidance strategy, where very little happens. The alternative seems to be intolerable repeat performances, same drama over and over. The archetypal image of this is the wife whose drunken husband repeatedly beats her up and from whom she retreats to a safe house – only to return to him again for the umpteenth time – with feeling!
......The hope for a better future is part of the deadly cycle of pointless repetition. Hope always comes before the first act of the drama begins. In fact, without hope the cycle would never start up again. At my age, having a limited future is a forced advantage. But for younger people who do have a future the problem is much more difficult. It tends to stimulate the infantile state, where no matter how bad life is, it most definitely won’t go on like that. One day my Prince will come. The future has everything.
......The philosopher Santayana said: ‘He who cannot remember the past is doomed to repeat it.’ Mostly we repeat it without remembering it in the right way. But therapy is more than just remembering. In therapy life’s repetitions are condensed. That’s why in therapy, without prompting, you return to the same problem area over and over, each time slightly differently.
......Freud worried about what he called 'The Repetition Compulsion'. But there has to be repetition because real change is slow.
.....One more time with only slightly different feelings – that’s realistic movement. There has to be repeat performances to gain any depth in life. Real change is not leaping out of your skin into a different lifestyle with the past just a thing of the past. Real change is slow and it carries the past with it; you gradually discover the past enriches you as it accompanies you on your journey, sometimes a very long journey. That’s why you can’t duck in for a few counselling sessions and fix things. The old psychoanalysts knew this. That’s why they thought in terms of years rather than weeks. And this is especially true now that we have a better understanding of the how the process works, the way things move forward in their own way, at their own speed, step by step, each step having its own emotional logic.

THE POWER OF THOUGHT

by Stanley

It is fashionable to blame your thoughts for the way you feel. But not to blame your feelings for the way you think.
Interesting
Why is that ?
Perhaps it’s because when something is wrong people don’t get the feel of it first. Their first warning is the way they are thinking. Even then they may not get the way they are feeling – or perhaps only much later. Quite natural then to assume that what come first causes what comes second. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, (the logical fallacy of ‘after this, therefore because of this’).
It is more useful to think of thoughts, everyday thoughts that carouse through one’s head, as epiphenomena – particles floating on the surface of consciousness that often have only an oblique connection with what is really going on. But this does not explain the illusionary transference of power into one’s thoughts.
In thinking about sympathetic magic, the belief that one’s thoughts and actions can effect both physical and spiritual actions in the world, Freud said that this was due to an archaic belief in what he called the ‘omnipotence of thought’ (die Allmacht des Gedankens).
Children seem naturally to believe in the omnipotence of thought: ‘close your eyes, throw a penny into the fountain, and wish’; and the utter seriousness with which children believe that a wish will convey itself through the air to Father Christmas.
This, Freud said, is a phase of infantile narcissistic development and also seen in adult regression in obsessional neurosis, where the same kind of magical thinking occurs as a very serious symptom.
Freud also pointed out that the feature of magical thinking and the omnipotence of thought in primitive magic was taken over by religion: ‘And God said: Let there be light, and there was light’.
Prayer and positive thinking are the most widespread practises of magic. Whether prayer actually works is a debateable. But there is an amusing story told by Richard Dawkins about an experiment in ‘intercessional prayer in a medical setting’ conducted by a certain Dr. Benson who was inclined to believe it could be beneficial.
‘Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it... Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase 'for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications'.’
The results show no difference in the recovery of groups 1 and 2.
Group 3, those who knew they were being prayed for, ‘suffered significantly more complications than those who did not.’ The experimenters wondered whether they had suffered from ‘performance anxiety’.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. NY, Houton Mifflin, 2006

KNOTTED

I'm used to living a life where there is always something I have to do and where I look forward to a time where there is nothing I have to do. When that time comes I miss not having something I have to do !
Stanley

INTIMATE STRANGER.

by Stanley

IN THE BEGINNING it is not even like living in an ocean – one is the ocean. There is not even a mother and child; the difference has not even been thought of. There is no inside or outside, no past or future. There is not even a ‘myself ’. Though there is sentience, I am nowhere near human … yet!

This is all before I even know there is anyone else. So that the first meetings with the intimate stranger (not yet even named) comes as quite a shock – exciting and frightening, carrying with it the fist hint that there is a ‘me’ too, the beginning of my psychological birth.

Ever since that time, whenever I meet you, the boundaries between us are always blurry – at best a pleasant nonchalance about who I am. Where I can happily say: I don’t think I am quite myself. Or, paradoxically, I feel more myself than I have ever been.

There is an incredible agitation at finding ‘another’ as I emerge from what Freud called ‘primary narcissism’: the first schism of being. It is the momentous discovery that ‘another’ actually exists – a feeling I revisit over and over in life every time I fall in love, every time I rediscover a wave of affection for whoever, whatever – close to that undivided, unbounded place.

Every renewal in life is a revisiting of that beginning before it all went wrong; before enchantment became disappointment; before finding became losing; affection, resentment. The vicissitudes of relationships are life’s cycles of loving and leaving. Forever repeating all that has gone before, again and again, with only slight variations on the same theme. With help though, I come back to the beginning, perhaps with a little more wisdom – who knows? But always more from chance than good management. The tragedy in many a life is where it has gone so wrong that the door to the beginning is shut. Luck run out. Locked in where ‘I have to do it all for myself’.

What I require to find the beginning all over again, one more time, is what they call, a ‘significant other’, one who can be for me, with me. Alone, it is impossible. There are those who insist that the only person who can provide what I need is myself; no one is going to do it for me, they say. True in a sense. Especially true for those who have given up that there ever can be the intimate stranger who can kick-start what it was like in the beginning.

This is the perennial longing to start over, to move to another place, another country, another life – to be born again, don’t they say? To act out such fantasies misses a vital factor. It isn’t about places, it’s about living and loving connections.

To recover the sense of one’s beginning one has to discern that the intimate stranger has retuned in whatever shape or form, someone with just that certain smell or something: a mate, a dog, a presence of some sort. Then the flow of life can start to move down the track, onwards once again. One more time with feeling! With luck, maybe even a bit more feeling.
Even though I encounter once again where it all went wrong I will…

..........… Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
...............Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!...


The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz

We may not be big – but we’re small

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES (NDE)

........................................................by Stanley

People come to the subject of near death experiences (NDE) with pre-set attitudes: either for or against. The subject excites people who, for obvious emotional reasons, want to believe, opposed by those who try to defend rationality against the rising tide of New Age religiosity – these are the sceptics who would rather dismiss NDE along with alien abduction, tarot cards, creationism and channeling dead Himalayan gurus.

But near death experience is a real phenomenon. It is not confined to those who have religious or spiritual beliefs, or to the mentally disturbed. It isn’t the result of indoctrination. It occurs cross culturally and is often brought on by heart failure when a person is, for a short time, clinically dead.

Time magazine’s recent article on NDE comments: “Of the thousands of NDEs reported, none has done more to convince some researchers that the phenomenon's explanation must lie outside the square than the case of Pam Reynolds, an American who underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm in 199I. Preparation for Reynolds' operation included taping her eyes shut, blocking her ears and monitoring her EEG to ensure her brain was functioning at only the most basic level. Yet, after coming around, Reynolds described not only a full-blown NDE but the bone saw that had been used to cut her skull.”


Then there was the convincing case, reported by Dr. Bruce Greyson, of an elderly woman in intensive care who had a heart attack followed by a NDE in which she saw some red tennis shoes on the roof of the hospital. A maintenance worker and some medical people later went on to the roof where they found the shoes exactly as described.


Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, published an impressive study in the British medical journal Lancet in which 144 Dutch patients were resuscitated from clinical death, of which 12% reported NDEs. The paper is full of medical and scientific details but his conclusion was that we must consider the possibility that, “consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness.”


Some suggest that NDEs are hallucinations activated by brain activity when the electroencephalogram (EEG) line goes flat. van Lommel likens the brain in this state to a "computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn't hallucinate. It couldn't do anything at all… A flat electroencephalogram recording doesn’t suggest mere impairment. It points to the brain having shut down.” Yet this is when NDEs are most likely to occur.


At last year's first International Medical Conference on Near-Death Experience, held in Martigues, France, eight participants describing themselves as “a group of dedicated physicians and researchers working in different scientific fields” released a statement. They said that while the NDE is mediated by chemical changes in the brain, “its extremely rich and complex content cannot be reduced to a mere illusion.” It is of the "utmost importance,” they argued, “that scientists wishing to understand the nature of human consciousness conduct research without prejudice.”


van Lommel advances one possibility – the same idea as Rupert Sheldrake’s – that the brain is more like a radio or television receiver. There is a continuous flow of electromagnetic waves around us in the form of radio and television transmissions. We are unaware of this until we switch on our radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. “We do not realize”, he says, “ the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us.”


But the TV show is not part of the television set, it does not come from inside the set. What is transmitted is not part of the electronic circuitry of these devises. Could our brain be compared to such receiving sets? It would be the receiver of consciousness, not the originator of it. van Lommel asks us to keep an open mind, entertaining the possibility that: “people can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions.”


“There are, he says, “still a lot of mysteries to solve, but one has not to talk about paranormal, supernatural or pseudoscience to look for scientific answers on the intriguing relation between consciousness and memories with the brain.


However, my feeling is that we are not simply up against a scientific difficulty. I would say the problem is more profound: it is the philosophical problem of consciousness itself, as we discussed in our last TAAP seminar. The brain-correlates of consciousness can be studied objectively, but consciousness itself, by its very nature, cannot be. Right here we may be up against the absolute limits of empirical science. Your consciousness and experience cannot be experienced by anyone else but you. You can tell people about it, and even elicit similar a experience in them, but there is no third agency that can compare them to say how similar or different they are.
You can study people’s brain activities with objective scientific methodology, but you cannot study consciousness in the same way. Consciousness is, as the philosophers say, sui generis, a unique class of its own in the natural world.


So near death and out of the body experiences must be taken as valid for those who describe them. There are no external criteria by which we are permitted to judge otherwise.

If you wish to glance at a few of the hundreds of accounts of NDEs go to http://www.nderf.org/NDERF_NDEs.htm

The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz

We may not be big – but we’re small

A MAN OF HONOUR

I have my principles...
.....AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT
.......I have others !
...............................................Groucho Marx

ON FINDING AND BEING FOUND

. ..............................................................by Stanley

One of the unique experiences in therapy and good counselling is that of discovery – of finding oneself, as they say. When it happens it is nearly always a finding something unexpected and surprising. Well, perhaps not totally unexpected because the appearance of a hidden aspect of oneself is usually preceded by a vague penumbra, a foreshadowing. When it comes, it has the quality of recollection, of remembering something you always knew, but didn’t.

Some people in therapy are full of surprises. Different aspects of themselves continually come into view; it’s like riding the rapids. For others, the unexpected appears more like a ripple in a gently flowing stream. It’s all highly relative; how great or small the turbulence is relative to who you are and what you are used to.

But what I want to emphasize is the aspect of finding, of self discovery in therapy. This is not the same as imagining. People tend to worry about this, particularly when some vague image occurs that could be a memory or not: ‘Am I remembering something or just imagining it!’ The person is really not sure whether they are manufacturing what occurs to them or whether they are discovering something. ‘Is this vague image of a woman my mother of long ago; or do I just want it to be? Is it a memory, or am I just imagining?’Such questions and doubts do not have that quality of finding.

When you find something – a forgotten memory for example – there is the sense of opening, of something being revealed. It can be a jolt, making irrelevant any idea that you are making it up. There is recognition. The question of whether it is literally the image of my mother of long ago seems less pressing. Destructive questions lose their power. It feels like I am looking out at her from my cot before my actual memory began. The possibility that this was how my mother seemed to me is exciting. I don’t have to make a decision about it. The effect is felt physically. I have found something – not merely found an image, but an emotion, as though I have found a part of myself. More importantly, the discovery calls me further down an unknown path.

Therapy is not a question of finding yourself as a final act of self discovery, or even some final truth about you. Therapy sessions merely provide the conditions in which the process can happen. In calling this a ‘process’ we simply mean that it is finding a way. As though you had been in a dense forest and had come unexpectedly on a path. You follow it and suddenly there is a clearing that lets in the light – showing, too, where the path leads on.

Of course, what you find in therapy is by no means always recovered memories, but more often a sudden stumbling over an emotion, a mood, an attitude you may have been familiar with, but had no idea was so definite and strong; maybe something you had always dismissed as trivial and unimportant. But the whole thing has this same characteristic of finding. It can be a sudden flash, wherein what had been confusion suddenly organises itself into clarity; not by the usual means of trying to work the confusion out, but a finding of clarity that instantly rearranges everything. It is a clarity you didn’t produce: you found it.

And incidentally, don’t worry about changing your attitudes in life; find the ones you have.

All these ways of finding are each one, also a being found. Each time one has the sensation that the person sitting listening to you has found you. Not only have you found yourself, but you have been found.
You know, babies that used to be abandoned, swaddled on church doorsteps, were called ‘foundlings’.

I too am waiting to be found, waiting for someone to find me, but find me with kindness.
Because if there is no kindness, I’d rather not be found, thank you very much!
I’ll stay in hiding

The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz

We may not be big – but we’re small

THE SACRIFICE OF REASON

By Sam Harris

Reposted from the Washington Post

Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God.
In many ancient cultures whenever a nobleman died, other men and women allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to serve as his retainers in the next world. In ancient Rome, children were sometimes slaughtered so that the future could be read in their entrails. The Dyak women of Borneo would not even look at a suitor unless he came bearing a net full of human heads as a love offering. Some Fijian prodigy devised a powerful sacrament called “Vakatoga” which required that a victim’s limbs be cut off and eaten while he watched. Among the Iroquois, captives from other tribes were often permitted to live for many years, and even to marry, all the while being doomed to be flayed alive as an oblation to the God of War; whatever children they produced while in captivity were disposed of in the same ritual. African tribes too numerous to name have a long history of murdering people to send as couriers in a one-way dialogue with their ancestors or to convert their body parts into magical charms. Ritual murders of this sort continue in many African societies to this day.
It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious. They are the product of what certain human beings think they know about invisible gods and goddesses, and of what they manifestly do not know about biology, meteorology, medicine, physics, and a dozen other specific sciences that have more than a little to say about the events in the world that concern them.
And it is astride this contemptible history of religious atrocity and scientific ignorance that Christianity now stands as an absurdly unselfconscious apotheosis. As John the Baptist is rumored to have said upon seeing Jesus for the first time, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). For most Christians, this bizarre opinion still stands, and it remains the core of their faith. Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehaviour and thought-crimes of all others.
Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfilment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.
The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it. Add to the abject mythology surrounding one man’s death by torture—Christ’s passion—the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist. Did I say “symbolic”? Sorry, according to the Vatican it is most assuredly not symbolic. In fact, the opinion of the Council of Trent still stands:

"I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and that there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into blood; and this change the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species."

Of course, Catholics have done some very strenuous and unconvincing theology in this area, in an effort to make sense of how they can really eat the body of Jesus, not mere crackers enrobed in metaphor, and really drink his blood without, in fact, being a cult of crazy cannibals. Suffice it to say, however, that a world view in which “propitiatory sacrifices on behalf of the living and the dead” figure prominently is rather difficult to defend in the year 2007. But this has not stopped otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people from defending it.
And now we learn that even Mother Teresa, the most celebrated exponent of this dogmatism in a century, had her doubts about the whole story—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of heaven, and even the existence of God:

"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated."

Teresa’s recently published letters reveal a mind riven by doubt (as it should have been). They also reveal a woman who was surely suffering from run-of-the-mill depression, though even secular commentators have begun to politely dress this fact in the colors of the saints and martyrs. Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be. Her doubts about God’s existence were interpreted by her confessor as a sign that she was sharing Christ’s torment upon the cross; this exaltation of her wavering faith allowed Teresa “to love the darkness” she experienced in God’s apparent absence. Such is the genius of the unfalsifiable. We can see the same principle at work among her fellow Catholics: Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, having been interpreted as a further evidence of God’s grace.
Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?
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The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz

We may not be big – but we’re small