SAVING NOTHING.

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

.....I am obsessional about backing-up my work on the computer. In the early days I had some nasty experiences where, at the touch of a wrong key, I lost some magnum opus I had been working on - a terrible sinking feeling when a whole thing just disappeared into cyberspace – gone! The loss was particularly appalling when I had written a passage or a turn of phrase that was just right. I knew that it having vanished I would never, never be able to produce it again. It was a sickening sensation of loss.
....Of course, I have no doubt that this was an entirely hubristic fantasy brought on solely by the vanishing, making the job I had lost more perfect than it really was. The fact of its disappearance magnified its impeccable aptness. Never before was such a wonderful turn of phrase ever written – and now it is lost for all time. Very much like a funeral eulogy heaped upon a deceased relative who was, after all, not all that great.
....I am sure that the last day of my life – assuming that I know it is the last and that I am still in reasonable shape – will be the most perfect day of my life. At least, that’s the way I’m imagining it. Why would I picture it like this? Because I know that the absolutely valuable is always on the verge of loss. It’s why we cry at something overwhelmingly beautiful. The exquisite always has the taste of nostalgia because we imagine ourselves looking back on it when it is gone.
....Or the darker side told by Macbeth that life is a tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. The romantic agony is that things must pass away, the flower must fade, beauty must turn to dust and all those poetic conceits.
....But deeper than the thief of time is something more philosophical, metaphysical, existential or something. I’m sure the mystics were right in saying that in the heart of being is nothingness. The ‘plenum’, the empty fullness, they called it - that out of which all creation arose.
....I don’t want to get all spiritual and start pontificating about things that can’t be talked about, but there is a very practical sense in which all this touches our lives. It’s interesting that a person who is depressed will say in a few simple words the way they feel: ‘There’s nothing, absolutely nothing’, they will say – meaning there is nothing in life. And, in a sense, this is absolutely true. And it is a truth that cannot be avoided. In fact, if you run away from it, it will bite you in the bum – like when the stuff on my computer vanished down the gurgler; or when you wake up in the morning sick with dread at the meaninglessness of another day.
.....Whenever you hit the blues you will find yourself being terribly ‘negative’ – the greatest sin in popular culture. But more we try to be ‘positive’ the more the Great Nothingness threatens to swallow us in unguarded moments.
.....No, we have to do the exact opposite – we have to save nothing.
.....There is a very precise felt-sense, like a physical sensation, at the heart of a bluesy mood. Elusive, because one is so used to avoiding it or trying to chase it away. But if you concentrate you’ll find it there. Sit down with it for a while, tune into it, get in touch and have it. Don’t think or get distracted, just tune in to the felt-sense of it, stay with it for a while without doing anything about it, and you will find the mood will shift. Save the nothing and, amazingly enough, something creative will come out of it.
.....Many times I’ve caught myself at a loose end looking around for something to do. On the face of it, that’s quite OK. But there was a sort of background tension behind it; and when I looked a bit closer there was a vague feeling of fear, noticeable enough to make me sit down and focus on it. What came out was a memory of childhood, of being utterly, desperately, frantically bored.
.....I’m the only child. It’s Sunday afternoon and all the grown ups have had a big Sunday roast dinner. Now everybody is having a sleep for Gods sake and I am suppose to be quite. I am utterly and frantically bored because there is nothing to do. But ‘bored’ isn’t quite right because it’s such a frantic feeling. It’s as though I am faced with immanent death – The Big Nothing. And I will do anything, anything, not to experience that – even now!
.....That’s a little bit of me I’ve rescued from oblivion, paradoxically by saving nothing.

WORLD ENOUGH, AND TIME.

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

......I remember vividly – something Somerset Maugham said: “Now that I am 90 I have more time than I have ever had”. Being young then myself it seemed an amazing thing to say. Being young, as the young are, I was always in a hurry. A hurry in life and a hurry in love. That must have been why Andrew Marvel’s poem To His Coy Mistress appealed to me so much. You remember how it goes:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day…
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.

.....It is as though time has always been my enemy. If I had been born into another family or another culture I could have been a mad Christian sure that the end of the world was nigh. It’s why I can’t wait in queues for anything; it’s why I can’t waste time and have to keep busy; it’s why I am obsessively on time for appointments – I hate to waste other people’s time; it’s why the goal has been more important than the journey; it’s why I have a clock in every room; and why when asked if I am hungry I look at my watch.
......It’s not all my fault though. My training for time wasn’t good. I was breast fed on schedule – brought up on time’s rack, you might say. When the great moment did come it was so valuable that I guzzled and was sick. Then there was the incredible drag of waiting and the ache for the next time. Not a terribly good mindset for the future.
......Maybe that was why, like Andrew Marvell in that poem, I was always in a hurry for love. I seemed to have an ongoing feeling that I would miss out. Lovemaking was always a bit of a gallop too. But like time, the scarcity of love, is endemic in our culture. That’s why we talk so much about sex.
......Even the Pope is now talking about sex. He goes all the way to Australia to apologise for the fact that over 100 catholic priests have been sentence in Australian courts for sexual offences. That’s only in Australia, never mind Ireland or the rest of the world where they have covered up their juicy sins more successfully. What he doesn’t apologise for is the reason Catholic Priests – and really the rest of Christendom – is so obsessed with sex. Why doesn’t he get up say:
“Look fellars, I’ve just had an Infallible Idea – this is really ridiculous – its time we caught up with the 20th century. Why don’t you priests all go out and get married. After all, Paul said, ‘Its better to marry than to burn with passion’ – and you priests Down Under seem to be burning with quite a of lot of passion !”
......But he won’t say this will he? In the religious area of life time has really stood still. It is as though we are still in the Middle Ages. The body is still the enemy. Part of our culture is frozen in time, much as part of an individual can be frozen in the past. Just like my love life was frozen when my mother was afraid of feeling sexual when she was breast feeding me. Love and sex are part of the melody of life that sing together.
.......Some women even have a full blown orgasm when they are breast feeding – its nature’s reward for doing her work properly. But in the religious, archaic corner of our culture its God’s work that’s supposed to be done – not Nature’s. And we pay for it dearly. Each one of us – we pay for it because we can’t help embodying the neurosis deep within us, whether we are Christians or not. We are not quite as bad as the Pontiff, but inside we each carry a little frozen, archetypal Jesus, stuck back in time, throwing his shadow across our lives – while we hurry forward, knowing somehow we are missing out on something.

JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING.

.....‘Something’ is the most beautiful word in the language. Well, if not the most beautiful, certainly one of the most useful in something we call psychology. There you are, I just did it. It saved me from having to define psychology and fuss around. We all know there is something called psychology, whatever it is.
.....That’s what’s so wonderful about ‘something’. You can refer to ‘something’ without saying what it is, or even knowing what it is:
.....Quick! Something terrible has happened.
.....I think there’s something wrong.
.....You ought to take something for that cold.
.....I’m not sure what I want to say – but I know I want to say something.
.....I don’t feel anything’ – ‘Oh surely you feel something!
.....There really is something about that man, something
attractive, wouldn’t you say?
.....Or, we could reach into the depths of philosophy and talk about the ‘brain’ v. ‘consciousness’ problem. The neuroscientist tells me I’m a bunch of neurons firing in a most wonderful organic computer, my brain.
.....The philosopher says: ‘yes, but what about my consciousness. It seems a different order of things’.
.....‘Prove it’, says the neuroscientist.
..... 'Well, says the philosopher, ‘there is undeniably something – whatever it is – I call my conscious
............ awareness’.
.....‘'There I have to agree’, says the neuroscientist, ‘we definitely do refer to something we call our consciousness. For you and for me there is definitely something.
.....And back to the land of psychology: ‘something’ is particularly useful when you are working at the edge, where you are feeling your way forward, the meaning of a dream maybe or what is behind an emotion. New thoughts, new feelings, can be barely perceptible – scarcely hint at the back of the mind, an awareness only of something. At that point it is a something that could be anything. It’s vague, but referring to it as something helps you not to dismiss it. I get people to use it all the time in therapy. Very useful to name it without yet knowing what it is – while you work out what it is.

...........................THE KIM HILL PROGRAM

.....There are some really interesting people who interview Kim Hill each Saturday morning on the National Program; the best are those who don’t interrupt her too much.

Stanley

GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

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

......I’ve noticed in myself and in others that, as people become more present to themselves, emerging as persons more centred in their own being, relationships can dramatically change, often bringing to an abrupt end friendships that may have endured untroubled for years.
......Friendships have the habit of defining who I am, enclosing me in a network of unspoken expectations. Unspoken and unnoticed, they fashion me into a ‘suitable’ person. A longtime friend easily relates to me because they know who I am and can trust my continued stability as a person. I’m a reliable friend. In fact, being a friend is being reliable. But my friend’s sense of my reliability may not take into account the fact that I have changed. And as I change the old expectations come under increasing strain until at last there is a blowup and they crack. Naturally, relationships crack-up for all sorts of reasons – this is only one of them.
......This scenario, or something like it, is especially true in family relationships. Nowhere is one held more tightly in a network of expectations than as a member of a family. God save us – they know who we are! Do they ever! We are immobilised. Their view of us is like a frozen picture, always the same, unmoving and reliable. There is no shifting it. They know us intimately from long experience. Or they think they do.
......At first, as I grow, I begin to define myself by who and what I am not. As I begin to change from what others think I am into someone more authentic, their projections of me gradually become more intolerable. More accurately: my acting, my pretending, becomes more intolerable. Worst of all, I am pretending for their sakes, trying not to disappoint them. The split between who I know I am and what they expect of me becomes unbearable until I blow – usually on some exaggerated minor issue. The truth is, I can no longer contain myself, pretending to be what I am not – and all just to keep them happy and undisturbed. It feels like I have been made use of all this time, merely a prop to support their fantasies about me that are useful to them.
......The awful thing is: I know there is no way of letting them know what has happened. I know it is impossible for them to actually understand me, the me I now am. They are hurt and disappointed or angry because they have made an investment in me that has suddenly ceased to pay dividends. And because they are hurt and angry by my rejection they cannot possibly see things the way I do. They are locked in their point of view.
......Even in the best and most loving relationships there are investments. The nature of such investments is a huge subject; in fact, it is what psychoanalysis is all about – something beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that the psychological life is a life of change, a constant and gradual redefining of who we are in relation to our environment, powered by an inner personal necessity to be true to myself.
......Change is of the essence. So, it is important for me to realise just how the flow of life can be locked in a network of expectations that enclose me. I have always seen myself through their unchanging eyes. They have held me in a motionless image, like an old frozen photograph; I do not define myself, am defined by them. I am who they think I am – and I cannot escape. When I begin to realise this I’ve already taken a step towards the exit.
......I can find no justification for the changes that I happen, except to say that they happen by virtue of a mysterious force I can only describe as ‘me’.

AGAINST GOALS

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

.......The entire counselling community has been infected by a misdemeanour contrary to the whole idea of personal growth. Like a virus it has infected the psychological helping professions and compromised the best interests of our clientele. It is the idea that all psychological help must by guided by a plan, a plan that states at the very beginning what a course of therapy is supposed to achieve.The buzzword is ‘outcome’. There must be a proposed ‘outcome’. We need goals, it is said, to able to detect whether therapy is accomplishing the desired ‘outcome’. Counselling has to go somewhere. There has to be an aim. Not only to be able to make regular progress reports, but goals are necessary otherwise sessions stagnate and become a mere indulgence and a waste of time.
......Pushed by social workers, government agencies like ACC, and WINZ and also by profession bodies like NZAC, NZAP, the need for therapeutic goals seems to be implicitly accepted by everyone. Therapists have to write reports on ‘outcomes’ and proposed ‘outcomes’ for future appoinments. Although there are those who privately disagree with all this hoo-hah, it has become the official line. Counselling has been surreptitiously redefined without anyone really challenging it – hi-jacked by institutional requirements taking precedence over the real welfare of individuals.
.......All the work and research done in person centred therapy over the years indicates conclusively that personal growth is spontaneous, yet no one seems to see the contradiction between this and the requirements of therapeutic plans and goals.
......The absolute benchmark of good counselling is surprise – you simply cannot, and should not try, to predict what is going to happen in a session. This is why among the most productive sessions are those where the person comes to it with no notion of what they are going to talk about. The client finds herself saying what she had no idea needed to be said. The unconscious can begin to speak.
......The truth is that having a precise goal actually hampers the course of therapy. And it is easy to see why. It restricts. A goal is set by the conscious ego, what you are at the moment, what you are struggling with. The goal is set by the struggle – but the whole nature of the repetitive struggle, is precisely what must change. But goals hold the status quo in place. By insisting on the goal of therapy we perpetuate the struggle. Whatever the goal is, it issues from the presupposition of having what it is you are trying to banish. The exact nature of the goal is part of the struggle. The goal is the problem.
.......‘I must get over my addiction’ prevents any other slant from emerging. It simply confirms that you are addicted. ‘I must improve myself’ confirms that you need improving. The goal itself is born from your concentration on the problem. So, all the time you work at it, you confirm what you are trying to get rid of. Thus you never find anything new. You are quite conscious your aim and it leads around the same circle of effort and defeat it always has. The goal itself includes trying and failing. Or more precisely, the failing is the implicit shadow of trying.
.......Of course we all have non-neurotic goals, otherwise nothing would ever get done in the world, but those are not the goals people worry about and bring to therapy
Neurotic goals are as much the problem as the problem they focus on. Even vaguely making these a guideline in therapy is to guarantee the illusion of going somewhere whist remaining stuck. Of course, the therapist can make goals for the client without consulting her – that’s even worse !
.......How do you tell the difference between a stuck, neurotic goal from a genuine one? Realistic goals are interactive; they change and develop as reality changes. A neurotic goal never changes – always the same struggle to get there. Always working to make it better, guaranteeing the outcome is more of the same.

D H LAWRENCE AND THE BODY

.................................... Discovered by Elizabeth Little

.......Elizabeth has found this stunning piece of writing by D H Lawrence that’s the perfect follow-up to my last blog The Ghost in the Machine. Let’s forgive Lawrence his sexist language – it was the style in his day. Really, he is anything but macho. .......................Stanley

............... On Being a Man
................By D H Lawrence

......Man is a thought adventurer,
Which isn’t the same as saying that man has an intellect. In intellect there is skill and tricks. To the intellect the terms are given, as the chessmen and rules are given in the game of chess. Real thought on the other hand is an experience, which begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It can end as a new piece of awareness a new reality of being.
.....In order to think in this way man must risk himself doubly. First he must go forth and meet life in the body, and only then can he face the result in his mind.
.....The risk is double because man is double. Each of us has two selves. First is this body which is vulnerable and never quite within our control but the self that occupies that body part of me I can never fully finally know. It lets me in for so much irrational suffering, real torment and just occasional frightening delight. That me that is in my body is like a jungle in which dwells an unseen me, like a black panther in the night, whose two eyes glare green through my dreams. Or, if a shadow falls through my waking day.
.....Then there is this other me that is fair faced and reasonable and sensible and complex and full of good intentions. This is the known me which can be seen and appreciated. I say of myself ‘yes I know I’m impatient and rather intolerant in ideas. But in the ordinary way of life I am quite easy and rather kindly. My kindliness sometimes makes me a bit false. But then I don’t believe in mechanical honesty.’
.....This is the known me having a talk with itself. It sees a reason for every thing it does and feels. It has a certain unchanging belief in its own good intentions. It tries to steer a sensible and harmless course among all the other people and personalities around itself.
......To this known me everything exists as KNOWLEDGE. I am what I know I am. Nothing exists beyond what I know except the acquisition of more things to know.
......So this is how we live. We proceed from what we know already to what we know next.
......Take the case of men and women. A man proceeding from his known self likes a woman because she is in sympathy with what he knows. He feels that he and she know one another. They marry and then the fun begins. In so far as they know one another they can proceed from their known selves, they are as right as ninepence. Loving couple etc. But as soon as there is real blood contact a strange discord enters in. She is not what he thought her. He is not what she thought him. It is the other primary or bodily self appearing very often like a black demon out of the fair creature who was erst the beloved.
.....The man who before marriage seemed everything that was delightful, after marriage begins to come out in his true colours a son of the old and rather hateful Adam. And she who was an angel of loveliness and desirability emerges as an almost fiendlike daughter of the snake-frequenting Eve.
......What has happened?
......Marriage is the great puzzle of our day. It is our sphinx riddle. Solve it or be torn to bits is the decree.
......When man and woman actually meet, there is always terrible risk to both of them.
There is always risk, for both him and for her. Take the risk, make the adventure. Suffer but enjoy the change in the blood. And if you are a man, slowly, slowly make that great experience of realizing- fully totally conscious realization. If you are a woman on the other hand make the same great experience of realizing within you the strange slumberous serpentine essence which knows without thinking.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

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

......In western depth psychology there is an aspect of what we call ‘the self’ that has been missed; it is an omission that runs through the whole gamut of psychoanalysis from Freud to Jung and Hillman. What we’ve missed in our psychology is the physical body – the body as essentially me.
.....We must be very clear what we are saying here. The body stands at the threshold of both the subjective and the objective worlds. Firstly, the body is an objective thing in the world. We can look at it from the outside and examine it just as we can any living organism. It can be studied scientifically and medically. I can have this objective view of my own body, just as I can with anyone else’s.
......When we refer to the physical body there is a lurking ambiguity. We usually mean heart, blood circulation, brain, nervous system, etc etc. The difficulty arises when we imply by this that our subjectivity, our mind, our soul, is not physical. This lands us in a dilemma because it artificially splits our actual experience. Arthur Koestler called it the illusion of the ghost in the machine.
......But the body is not just a machine that I inhabit; it is also my subjective experience of myself. This is the experience of the body as me, the foundation of myself as a subject; and this subjectivity is mine alone. No one else can experience it directly but myself. It cannot be examined medically or scientifically because it is not an object – it is a subject, the sense of myself.
......There are all kinds of arguments, religious and cultural, that might persuade us that there is a difference between the body on the one hand and the soul or mind. But putting these arguments aside, and going on how I actually find myself from moment to moment, there is no question that I experience myself subjectively as a physical being. It is part of my essential nature that I am located in physical space and time and that I experience seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, loving and hating as a physical being.
.....If one imagines oneself as a ghost without a body it is impossible to conceive, for example, that one would have any emotions, because emotions are both subjective and physical. Both. We only experience our emotions through our physicality. Deaden the body with drugs or anaesthesia and there are no emotions.
......But we have a cultural prejudice against thinking this way. It seems to offend our preconceived notions of the soul or mind. But there is no reason we cannot say that the ‘soul’ is just another name for our embodied experience. Certainly there is the body, but there is also the body of me. There is no way we can get away with a philosophy that does without either – the body as an object and as a subject.
......There are all kind of interesting avenues that flow from this idea. In one aspect, it really does turn psychotherapy on its head. We can now credit the body’s powers that we always knew it had, but never admitted.
.......When a person disowns the body they will never let it inform them, they can never trust it. Sometimes the body becomes the enemy. We can see why they lack vital emotional functions; why their intuition of other people and the environment is shot; also because they are disembodied why they can never be certain of themselves. We say they live in their heads – as though the head is the last domain they can occupy. Obviously they can think – and sometimes brilliantly – but that’s all. They lack the body’s imagination and its own kind of complex practicality, its holistic intelligence that can work without thinking. Of course, people in this state of deprivation do go on functioning because the body goes on doing its job on its own, doing its own thing without permission, help or credit, often against the opposition of the head-centred ego.
......Neuroscience is discovering how we can manipulate the brain and produced all kinds of subjective affects; and we know how chemical substances can do the same. But we forget that the body made the body in the first place and that subjective emotional experience can alter the body’s objective structure.
......The body stands at the crossroads. It is the only thing in the world that is also your conscious self. Our value of the mind has had a good go, but we are incomplete unless we can give the body its due. Not locating the mind in the body, but getting the mind as the body.

I’M FINE – how are you ?

...........................by Stanley
......The determination to make things OK when they are not OK begins early in life. The game of pretend is what kids do best; they are wonderfully competent at transforming reality into what they want it to be. Fine, when you are pretending the lounge sofa is a fire engine, but not so good when you are trying to make a miserable home life into a feel-good happy family. No two people are the same, but I’ll tell you a story of the way it can go.
.....There is a limit to how long a kid can keep pretending against all odds. Reality will break though when family quarrels or dysfunctions are too overwhelming, forcing the child to endlessly renew its efforts to make the environment safe and nurturing by sheer wishing and willing. It doesn’t have the power to change reality, but it can fantasise, it can pretend.
......I can pretend that if I am good enough it will make them happy. Trying to make myself good enough for others can turn me into a lifelong people-pleaser.
......Of course, I can pretend I don’t need a family and go off on another tack. There are a thousand clever ways to make it all better: ‘At least I’m good at school’ is one way; or ‘When I grow up I’m going to… – imagined futures overriding the present; adults euphemistically call this ‘having goals’. Or much later I can make like I’m a successful entertainer, amusing everyone; or even getting to be an actor, singer or performer on the stage, actually creating a big approving family – admiration on a big scale.
......Come to think of it, each profession is also a form of pretending. To have a profession is to profess. To make this real to myself is to constantly keep up the fantasy of actually being what I profess.
......All these devises, you might say, are perfectly harmless, even necessary in the game of life. Where they become questionable is when they are used to suppress the bodily felt-sense that something is not-OK. Trying to pretend over the top of anxiety is hard work. But no amount of physical or mental juggling will really help – only a direct address to the bodily felt-sense of something being not-OK, giving up trying to make it OK. Daring to look at a persistent sense of something wrong that’s been with me longer than I can remember.
......Ages ago when I first began to pretend everything was OK I thought that if I wanted something badly enough it would happen – a kind of infantile positive thinking. I suppressed the not-OKness into my body and my body has been carrying it ever since like a low grade illness. It can turn some people into hypochondriacs, imagining that the body is only physical.
......The body can remember what really went wrong, even if I have forgotten; and when I first begin to look at it, it feels like an uncomfortable physical sensation, a feeling I am so used to I no longer notice it. It’s a vague discomfort. Then the work begins of tracking this vague something, unraveling a long, tangled but precise history, going back to my childhood.
......It’s not that I have forgotten the factual events of the past, not a question of ‘recovered memories’. I can remember what happened, but I had forgotten the way it was, the sharp feel of it, the implications, the endless ramifications, and of just how it keeps recurring in my present life.
......My own story surprises me because it is so different to what I had pretended; and yet, in a way, it doesn’t surprise me because I knew it all the time – at least, I could always sort of sense it there.
.......And when it is unraveled there is a relief in being able to give up the constant struggle to make like everything is OK. It’s then I realise this struggle has been far worse than the reality I was trying to suppress – a reality that belonged to the ever present past
.......But for a Great Pretender like me the first step is to admit everything is not-OK.
.......I’m not fine – how are you?