DARWINMANIA

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

....To talk about the ultimate value of the individual seems absurd set against the 3.5 billion years since life began on the planet earth. Religion has fought hard not to get swamped by it. The question is: are we in the same boat. Does triumph of Darwin pose the same threat to a valid psychology of the person?

....That is seems to do so indicates that we are not at all as sure of ourselves as we might be. Biology seems set to have it all wrapped up. It seems our only recourse is to say that there are things about which science knows nothing. Of course, a good scientist would agree. ‘Certainly there is much we do not know’, but he would add … ‘yet’.

....That little ‘yet’ is threatening. It suggests that eventually he is going to snuff out your soul because he will have found out about all that stuff. Explained it all away. No room for feelings or mystery, or personality, or the great ambiguity of life. You’re gone. Old Egg-Head will claim he has worked it all out. What on earth can we possibly mean by a ‘person-centred psychology’, let alone anything we call the soul? 

....This is a paranoia based on our fragile grasp of what we are doing.  In fact, biology is not our enemy but our friend. True science is a state of wonderment, the same kind of wonderment that stands out on every page of Darwin’s notes as he voyaged around South America in H.M.S Beagle. “The day had passed delightfully”, he wrote. “Delight itself however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian rainforest”.

....There is the true naturalist’s openness to nature. In that sense we do no less than Darwin did and as every genuine scientist does. We stand before nature in the same way, with the same sense of awe – only with us, we stand before human nature.  

....There is no need to retreat into the supernatural in order to hold on to our realities and our values. We don’t have to invoke spiritual agencies, astrological influences, crystal balls, clairvoyance or the gods to escape the clutches of materialism. Neither do we have to fixate on quantum physics to reassure ourselves that even the scientists have passed beyond nature. Science is not about materialism or any kind of ism. It is about humility and a respect for nature as the great unknown. There is no need to create a realm that science cannot reach, because there is room enough in nature to accommodate our most valuable asset: our sense of the infinite vastness of what we do not know.

.....In Darwin’s time the accepted doctrine was that in the beginning God made all the species exactly as they are now. To doubt that for a moment was to face the unknown. It was to doubt what everyone knew. That Darwin did so was an act of great self-confidence and at the same time an act of supreme humility. He was confident enough to humble himself before nature and let it teach him.

....Perhaps the highest human cognition is ‘I don’t know’. This is not the same as the existentialist’s ‘nothing’. It is not the perception of nothingness, but rather that there is a something one does not know. That’s very different. And, more importantly, it is an unknown something that presses to be known. This pressure does not come from another realm, but precisely from what is observably there. Neither does this sense come from dwelling on a realm of unknowables like God, or spirit, or ‘the unconscious’, rather it comes from that which we directly know, what is directly before us. One example: for Darwin it was from the direct observation of the finches on the Galapagos Islands. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what caused the variation in their beak size, but in looking at this obvious fact, there was something pressing to be known. Species change over time and place; that was obvious. But how? Why?

....It isn’t anything outside the observable that this unformed something presses its demands on us like this. It comes directly from what we observe.

....Also, whatever it is, this something cannot be derived from what is observed – it cannot be derived in the sense of ‘deduced from’. The observed form does not directly tell us what the unknown something is that’s pressing to be known. In this situation one’s present knowledge, by definition, has no way, no language, no concepts by which to formulate it…yet. 

....For Darwin, there was something about those finch’s beaks – something that wouldn’t let him go. It was a something which was as yet unformed, not even an idea. But by paying attention to it, a new idea comes. But how do you pay attention to something that isn’t yet an idea? 

....It’s no use saying that the unconscious does it. That just puts the same problem back one step: how does the unconscious form an idea from something that isn’t yet formed as an idea. The fact is, at this point, no one has the idea. 

....This is a philosophical problem and it presses on us to give it attention – which we are doing right here.

....Let’s look at some other concrete instances: if you have a problem, say a machine breaks down or let’s say you don’t know how to write a difficult letter or you don’t know how to finish an essay. What you do is attend to the problem in a certain way; the old thoughts and solutions don’t work, so now you attend to what is before you with a certain openness. Then suddenly the answer flashes on you. Where did the answer come from? Not from you, not from beyond. All we can say with certainty is that it comes from attending to the problem in a certain way, a contemplative looking at the situation rather than thinking. Just the way Darwin observed nature, out of which, eventually, came a new idea that shook the world of science.

....Incidentally, for those who are interested, this is where we part company from post-modernism.

....You may realise that this is the essence of what we call ‘focusing’. Focusing is all about how you attend to an unknown, unformed something in this certain way. 

....However, it is helpful to recognise that the scope of this idea is much broader than that of a psychotherapeutic tool. It is also what we do in good science and philosophy and why we should celebrate Charles Darwin who was, quite naturally, very good at it. Very good at it indeed.    

NOTICING THE BARELY NOTICEABLE

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

....Having practiced focusing, without even trying now, I find myself noticing small thoughts that before I would have overlooked. They are the quiet little thoughts that arise out of some mood I may be in. 

....I’m not what you would call a moody person, but what moods I have are so general, so pervasive, they don’t actually exist – not to me. Other people might notice my moods, but not me. They may ask me, ‘what’s the matter’, and I simply don’t know what they are talking about. 

....‘I’m just my usual self – nothing’s the matter !’  I’m irritated.

....Personally, I have a small selection of moods and I move from one to the other depending on all kinds of things. I’m like the weather. On any day the weather is just what it is, sometimes clear, sometimes a nor’wester, sometimes cool. Whatever it is, I’m inside the day’s weather, just like I’m inside a mood.

....A mood is definitely not an emotion; it’s hardly even a feeling. An emotion definitely gets you; a feeling you usually notice. But a mood is something different; it is not even a colour, it’s a ‘tone’, a subtle ‘shade’, it’s the ‘atmosphere’ of your being at any given moment. It often sits in the background behind an emotion. 

....A mood has its own thoughts. It has its own opinions and judgments entirely appropriate to it. But never make the mistake of thinking that the thoughts cause the mood – the thoughts are only the outcrop of a mood; but they always match the tone of the mood. They blend with it so much that they tend to be as invisible as the mood itself. From day to day you don’t notice the tables and chairs in your home. While you are having your breakfast, the house furniture is taken for granted. Just so, the thoughts of a mood are part of the mood. Taken for granted. Invisible as you go about your business.

 ....It all sounds so mild and harmless. So lightweight. But moods dictate the quality of life in ways that don’t overtly draw your attention. They don’t produce immediate crises, but over time they dictate the course life. They determine what happens and what doesn’t happen; who will put up with you and what you can tolerate; the choices you make and the one’s you can’t. Wherever your moods go you are likely to follow.

....The difficulty is that moods are so lightweight. And this is where focusing is so helpful. The one thing focusing does is train you to notice the barely noticeable. Once you get used to this you can suddenly get a vague sense of the mood you are in and the characteristic thoughts attached to it; thoughts you recognise as belonging to it. The mood opens up and reveals so much more. It’s like looking into developing dish and seeing the photographic image gradually appearing.

....As this happens you are no longer inside the mood, but looking at it. Outside it. It’s a very subtle process. But the key is paying attention to the barely noticeable, getting used to paying attention to what is only a vague bodily sense. 

....A mood turns out to be a non-verbal physical sensation. Paying attention to this is what we call focusing. The act of stopping and paying deliberate attention to the felt-sense of the body develops the mood’s presence more clearly and yields up what it’s all about. The body’s vague, murky, wordless mood/feeling/sense is where it’s all at. When you get this the mood opens up and you can move on. In future it’s much easier to recognise that particular mood at least. It kind of carries a red-tag from then on.

....A mood is like a finger print – there are no two alike in the whole world. I might tell you I’m sad, but that tells you nothing. It’s an empty label. It has no body. But that’s often how a mood feels when you first look at it. Bland. Featureless. A monotone. When someone tells you they are sad, that’s often what it feels like to them: like sadness without any content. That’s why it’s so easy to think you know what a person means when they tell you they feel sad. But believe me, you know nothing about it – and it’s likely they don’t either. 

....Because underneath my featureless mood there are intricate connections to the whole of my life that makes the quality of my sadness different from anyone else’s. As my mood unfolds it reveals a delicate network of meanings that stretch into the most surprising corners of my existence. Times and places that I may have given no importance, or, although I knew they were important at the time, are long gone. Irrelevant.

....This kind of work is very person specific. It has to be. There are no generalisations, no archetypal revelations, no interpretations, no big bangs, just the quite unfolding of a precise mood. And it is so exact. To watch someone going through this is to marvel at how absolutely original this person is, how completely, I mean completely, different to anyone else; and to realise too the utter inanity of all psychological labels and categories and programs.

THE PROCESS OF BECOMING:rewriting the past

  .............. by Stanley

...Alfred North Whitehead, who died in 1947, was an upmarket Harvard philosopher who wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics and education. He co-authored the epoch making Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Quite an influential joker.
...Whitehead said there are two different ways we perceive things, two different ‘modes of perception’. The first is simple raw data, how things just seem to the immediate senses, what he called ‘presentational immediacy’ – ‘a barren display’ of things, where everything is just as it presents itself: a chair is just a chair, a mountain is just a mountain, a telegraphy pole is just a telegraph pole.  The second is more primitive. It is our feeling of connection with the whole, of the interconnectedness of everything, past and present. It doesn’t have the clarity and definition of presentational immediacy. It is vague, undifferentiated and fuzzy. Whitehead said, it is ‘heavy with the contact of things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves’.
...This more basic mode perception you will recognise as describing exactly what Gendlin refers to as the ‘felt-sense’.  Gendlin’s original contribution is his emphasis that this sense can be directly accessed in therapy.
... How Whitehead’s more primitive mode of perception can work in therapy, Neville Bernie writes:

'Causal efficacy is an immediate, direct, non-sensory connection with our client in a universe in which all things are interconnected. The whole past experience of the universe flows into us in each moment. We may recognise this in our gut feelings, in our intuition, in emotions which do not seem to be related to anything we can observe in the present moment, in occasional experiences of knowing more than our senses can tell us, in premonitions of what our client is about to say, in instinctive behavior which responds to a moment of crisis without time for reflection. Through this mode of perception, which has been seriously undervalued and denied by modern science, we experience our client directly and internally, and acknowledge that vague tugs on our awareness may be meaningful.'
...One consequence of this primal mode of perception is that the distinction between past and present becomes fuzzy. It alters the simple way the past seems to effect the present. To common sense it seems as though the past stamps its mark indelibly upon the present, as when a person has something in their life they can ‘never get over’.
...Whitehead had something interesting to say about the whole problem of ‘time’ and ‘causation’. Put simply, there is a sense in which the present ‘causes’ the past. He said that the active ingredient in our experience cannot be the past. The past is dead, it’s gone. It is over and done with. It cannot be active or creative in itself. It has done its dash. It’s inert. ‘What is active is not the past, but the present actuality which is in the process of becoming’.
...Our present experiencing is where it all happens, where the action is. Although the past seems unalterable, this does not mean that it irretrievably shapes the present. There is a sense in which the past is passive and indeterminate; we can only view it from the present, a present that is always dynamic and actively changing. The past is like a piece of clay that can be moulded. I can tell stories about my past. I can say that my father died when I was three years old, and that my marriage broke up when I was thirty-five. But these facts are the bare bones, they have the quality of raw data – incidents that happened – full stop. All the consequences and infinite ramification are hidden, they radiate out into the cosmos, yet they are no less real than the bare events themselves, each considered as singularity.
...The past only has meaning in that it lives in the present with me, changing colour as I change. Shift viewpoint a little and you have a different past, a different story. The stories I tell about my past are much more determinative of my future than the singular facts upon which I weave my story.
...But the bare bones of my past I must never neglect because somehow they will always feature one way or another as my life goes forward. In fact, without them I can never be truly creative. Without the details of my past I would be lost in space. They are the materials of my imagination. Without them I have nothing to reflect upon, no stepping stones to my depths. And sometimes in my best moments the bare bones of my past come alive and flesh out with a life I never knew they had.
...Only such ideas, or something like them, makes therapy possible. How else could I ‘rewrite my childhood’ as Bachelard suggests. It is my present ‘becoming’ that shapes things. But the essential materials of my art-work are those ephemeral ghosts of the past. However gruesome, I depend upon them.  I grow directly out of them. I need them like a plant needs compost. I know I cannot shape my life just as I fancy, so that I never get carried away too far by my creative abilities.
...Looking deeply, there is always more to the a past than one thought – always more to it. The past is not simply a set of facts like the pebbles on a beach.  What we call our past is a slanted story that somehow got fixed; and it all depends on who spins the story and what mood we are in when we tell it. 
...When a person has been in therapy for a while we realise there is a certain situation in the past they regularly return to. Each time they revisited it the story changes, sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly – but enough to gradually make a difference as their assessment of past people and situations change.
...Let’s say that way back there was an event that has always haunted me. I was hurt and it seems like an immovable fixture. There is no changing what happened or the effect it had on me – and still has. In therapy I find myself revisiting it as I have done many times. But I notice that each time it changes slightly. It is never the same twice – not exactly the same. I’m surprised that my story begins to involve other things I never suspected. And the more times I revisit it the more it changes, as though someone had revised the play when I wasn’t looking. New slants appear that throw a different light. This seems to be the process we are talking about – rewriting the past – the process of becoming.
...In therapy it’s not just my present possibilities that unfold; you could equally say my present unfolds my past. In that sense, the present, which is always in the process of becoming, is like an act of digestion that chews up the past and reconstitutes it for my present needs and purposes.

[1] Neville, Bernie. ‘What Kind of Universe? Rogers, Whitehead and Transformational Process. In Person Centred & Experiential Psychotherapies. Vol, 6. No 4. Winter 2007 
[2] Maclachlan, D.L.C.  Whitehead’s Theory of Perception. http://www.religion-     online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2839

REASSURANCE AND ALL THAT.

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

 

....If you are a therapist and a generous soul – as most counsellors are – then the temptation to give reassurance when the client desperately needs it, is almost overwhelming. 

....In listening-oriented therapy there is often a test moment early on when the client looks at you and is obviously waiting for you to say something. Maybe not to give her reassurance, but she obviously wants something from you. So far, she’s done all the talking – now it’s your turn! Maybe she is thinking: ‘what shall I talk about now’ and she is waiting for you to initiate the next move. That’s what conversation is – like a game of ping-pong. You don’t really initiate anything, you respond. You let what the other person says generate what you say next.

....It’s very safe if a session can be turned into a conversation. Maybe you can both have a tête-à-tête about why she is not such a bad person as she thinks she is. Or maybe you can try reassuring the client in some other way. Such conversations are nice, but relatively dead ends. And sometimes they turn into strenuous but affable arguments roughly along the following lines.

....I’m no good!

....Oh but…there are lots of ways…

....No I’m not.

....You are. Look at all the times…!

All of which is the standard ping-pong conversation the client has whenever she meets with another generous person.

....OK, so we’re not going to have this kind, or any kind, of conversation. So what is it about when the client is looking at you and waiting like that? Maybe she has simply run out of things to say and now faces a blank. In any case, there she is looking at you – waiting for you to say something. 

....This is crucial moment of decision. Do you help her out the easy way? 

....If you say, ‘Yes, go on’, she might reply, ‘Well, that’s it really’. Then you’re in a spot because now you have to reply; and here we go on a dead-end conversation – you’ve missed the crucial moment of decision. 

....What is this crucial moment of decision?

....It’s this: the client has to ask herself, ‘Do I have to look back inside myself to see what’s there now?’ 

.....The prospect of doing that continually for any length of time, not just talking, but looking moment by moment for what feelings arise is something the client is not used to. The only way to really help is to wait quietly for her to go on. If you don’t interrupt, if you don’t provide the distraction, the ping-pong game of conversation, there is no way out but for her to feel her way into what is coming up for her right now. 

....You might call this a beginner’s lesson in focusing; a good beginning, in one way, because it’s done by doing, rather than the more hazardous way of trying to explain.

 .....Of course, you could always say, ‘I can see you have come to a stop, but let’s just see what else is there for you’ (pointing her back to herself). That would be perfectly OK and it might work. It really doesn’t matter what you do at such moments of decision so long as you manage to put her on her own track of unfolding from within. 

.....Such unfolding always comes from the next unclear bodily sense of what has not yet formed into words, but yet wants to be said. We’ve called this the ‘felt-sense’. This is the looking into that murky  something, that a vague unformed feeling, that will give her the next step, the next image or idea, that will move her forward in the way she needs to go.

.....Each step always totally unpredictable. If she could have predicted it, or if she had known it, she would have already taken it. But she didn’t and she couldn’t – until the moment she stopped looking at you and looked into that fuzzy, indistinct sense of herself that she usually shies away from – especially when she is with other people. Only from this place will something come that’s surprises and moves things forward. 

...................................... *

.....Now we say that this entails looking into the bodily felt-sense. When I try to do this for myself I know I am working with an anomaly. I am doing something artificial, a deviation from my real state where there is no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my body’. I am accepting the anomaly of how it has become for me in the course of my life; but when I came into this world there was no distinction. I was all one piece. As a child, for instance, when I wanted something, I wanted it with my whole being. I didn’t have to consult my bodily feelings to discover it. I yelled, I screamed, I reached out, my face went red, my blood pressure went up, I absolutely, damn well knew what I wanted. If you say that I had an idea – it’s true, but it was totally expressed in my physical being. 

.....Now for all kinds of reasons, as I grew up, I discovered this is not the way to go on. Yelling and screaming was non-productive. Splits and denials of all kinds finally resulted in ‘me’ not really quite knowing what I feel and what I really want. My body still had its own knowing, but now I am not quite connected to it. My body may even have become my enemy. So, at first, when I’m asked for my felt-sense it can feel all wrong. I am so used to living apart from it that asking me to feel it can seem very artificial. Yet being together with it is the way I once was in the beginning.

.....Still, anomaly though it is, ‘me’ has come a long way since then. I have grasped the world in ways that were impossible for me as an infant. 

.....There is a saying in Zen: ‘Before you start the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees; when you are half way through the practice mountains are not mountains and trees are not trees; when you are through the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees’.

WHO OWNS YOUR BODY?

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

......Whist still alive a person can abandon their body; and can do so for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps it is too painful, or is the repository of too many painful memories; or perhaps they have been seduced by an otherworld spirituality; or maybe they just detest the look of it. But I have become interested in another situation: when a person has given their body away and now someone else owns it.

......Why on earth would anyone do that – give away their own living body? Why would a person say to someone: ‘OK, you can have it’ – and forever after go on living a normal life – except that their body doesn’t belong to them.

......That’s right. Nobody would do this without some powerful reason. But perhaps it was the best thing to do if you’d lived in a poisonous family. It works like this: ‘nobody actually sees me. I am invisible. They really don’t know I’m here. They see me only as a physical presence in the family. I’m forced to behave and take part in their crazy games – I pretend, but it’s not me. The object they criticize and boss around is a ‘thing’ I inhabit.  I am angry with my body because they control it. It belongs to them It’s the symbol of my capitulation, of everything I despise. They hate it and I hate it too.  No one in my world talks about themselves, only about things. My body is just another object. It belongs to the world of them. A thing – well, I want nothing to do with it. It’s not me !

......The family knows ‘somebody’ is there, or rather they know a ‘body’ is in their space, but that’s all. It’s hard to believe that there are people to whom the existence of other subjectivities is quite unreal. Shocking I know, but they have no grasp that other persons exist in the way they themselves do. 

......But there’s a worse scenario – another nasty twist. When my body becomes the hated object, I switch over and adopt the family’s viewpoint and hate the ‘thing-body’, my ex-self, as much as, sometimes more, than they do. I am thoroughly on their side. Put graphically, I become part of the family that owns my despised body. I agree with them. I view it and hate it through their eyes. In such a family I tell myself: ‘everyone is beating me up, so I may as well beat myself up. Join the club. Let’s have a nice gang rape.’

 ......Years later the psychic situation remains the same. I may even insist that my family was always quite OK. But I find it strangely hard to take care of myself. I have this curious sadomasochistic attitude toward myself, particularly my physical being. I don’t even hate my body now, I just neglect it, use it with disregard. But my real dislike comes out whenever I look in the mirror.

......Childhood sexual abuse is another very strong reason a person will abandon their body.  I have seen some awful cases where, for a child, the physical and emotional pain of sexual abuse is so unbearable that they have simply given their body over to the abuser. It belongs to them; but it’s a body that is now disgusting. This is the psychic situation for the child – and can remain so for the rest of life.

......A consequence of any kind of evacuation of the body is a shortage of sensation. The body is the medium of communication with the world and we are hard wired to have all channels of perception wide open. Simply as an organism we need this to survive; as a human being we need it to enjoy the world. When the ‘doors of perception’ are wide open the grass looks greener and the sky looks bluer and the world comes alive.

......People who have experienced sensory deprivation in lightless, soundless floatation tanks will normally start hallucinating after a time. The mind makes up its own stimuli when the normal channels are shut down. 

......When I don’t own my body it has an anesthetizing effect so that I become sensation starved. I start to invent sensation. Self-harming is one way to satisfy this hunger. Pain is then somehow desirable. When you are deprived of sensation, any sensation is better than none. 

......Of course, since my real body belongs to the enemy, I can always have a substitute body like a shiny automobile that I make love to and masturbate in the garage every Saturday morning. But my real body is my primary home. If am a refugee from it, I can’t get back into it without help. Trying to do so by myself confirms that I can trust no one. And I will react badly to any manipulative therapy, simply because manipulation is why I left home in the first place. 

......If I am sensation starved there are all kinds of ways I can create some high powered input. I can always pick a fight with the wife or get paranoid about the neighbours. There is a thirst for excitement, the shot of adrenalin, the hit of drugs – anything that will open the doors of perception, if only for a moment.

......What do I really need?

......Some would call it human love. But it has to be of that rare kind that lets me be, that lets me own myself; the kind of connection with someone who doesn’t want to possess me or change me or make me a better person. As Carl Rogers said, I need that kind of regard for me as a person that is unconditional. I need someone who has an insatiable appetite to know who I really am, someone who doesn’t see me as reprehensible or ugly or deficient; above all, someone who doesn’t covertly try to manipulate me. And it will be someone who doesn’t even have to forgive me because there is nothing to forgive. But even then, it’s a long haul to trust again.

BEING UNDERSTOOD.

............a true fiction by Stanley

.....Being an understanding person can make you feel like the least understood person in the world, all relationships as a one-way flow – doing all the listening whilst seldom being listened to. Specialists in understanding people know its value because they have had so little of it from others. Scarcity teaches value. So, me, I’m very good at it.
.....As one of these ‘understanders’ I don’t really expect to be understood or for anyone to take the time and trouble to listen to me. There are compensations, though. I can assure myself I don’t need people to empathise with me. Not as much as most people do. I guess I’m different. In any case, people think they’re listening to you when they are really hanging their agendas on you. I try never to do that myself. I’m a very non-invasive person. At least, I think I am.
.....As a specialist in understanding people you’d think I’d know all about it. I do, but I’m learning a lot on the focusing workshop. Being on the receiving end of a focusing session came as quite a shock. Here I am talking about a personal problem, not a huge one, but still a problem; and there is this person sitting over there, not only listening to me, but who seems to be devoted to getting exactly what I’m saying. This is not easy to get used to. At first I think she’s doing it because she’s supposed to. After all, she’s a student like me. But the further we go the more I realise she’s not just putting it on – each moment she is seriously trying her best to understand exactly where I’m at. That’s all.
.....That’s it.
.....This has a strange effect on me. Every time she makes the effort to simply understand what I’m saying I find out what I am saying. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Seriously, no kidding. I hear myself. I actually hear what I’m saying. Weird! Not only that, I find out what I’m not saying, what is on the tip of my tongue. Things I normally wouldn’t say. When she gets what I mean, I seem to go on to get what I really mean. Meanings I didn’t know I meant until that moment.
.....Amazing! There is this person sitting over there not telling me anything, not suggesting anything, not implying anything. Not doing anything really. How come the effect on me is so powerful? What’s going on? I think I know what’s going on – it’s me that’s going on. I’m going on in a way I don’t usually do.
.....She’s very precise though. She won’t let anything go until she’s got exactly what I’m saying. That’s all she does. And once she’s really got what I mean … nothing! She does nothing with it! Just waits. No advice, no subtle suggestions. Nothing. I am back with myself. Strange how I’m half afraid of this – being with myself. And being myself with someone else too – daring to say what I really think. It’s like I have no alternative but to be honest with her and myself. The next thing I say I will have to tell the truth as far as I can. Daring to look inside myself and actually speak out. Hearing my voice talk about me. That’s how the session goes, leading me from one surprise to the next.
.....What would I normally do? I’d ask her a question about herself. Get her talking. Slip into my understanding role, escape and disappear.
.....Funny though, I like not escaping.
......It’s really nice to have someone.

DEAD BODIES WITH THINKING HEADS.

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


......La petite mort, the French call the human sexual orgasm, the little death.
But it is not the body that dies in this moment. It’s the thinking head that passes out. It has been said that we go unconscious at the moment of orgasm. But it’s the thinking head that switches off, not the body. For once, it’s the body’s life that takes over; when nature, you might say, has its way with us.
......There are many people whose bodies are so suppressed that they cannot have a sexual orgasm, or they struggle to get a little jerk, a frustrating hint of ‘poor man’s nirvana’ as they call it in India. For many, working themselves up to get a little ‘pop’ can be quite hard work. They battle the supremacy of the ego, where the body’s nature has been anaesthetised. Sexual foreplay – whether self administered or with another – is painful instead of pleasurable. And when the big moment is about to come they grit their teeth as though it is being wrenched out of them in spite of themselves; or worst still, it’s completely genital and localised, raising almost no emotion. Hardly more than a sneeze.
......For those lucky enough to be more connected, the lead up to an orgasm is not a struggle, but profoundly pleasurable; and the orgasm when it does come is like a seizure, shaking the very foundation of their being, knocking the ego off its throne. For a moment the thinking head gives up and is possessed by something utterly and profoundly bigger than itself. And the relief that follows is the smile of trust that one can allow oneself to be overtaken and taken over instead of always being uptight, in control and on guard. A moment that is highly desired yet feared.
......There are practices where foreplay by itself provides the transcendent experience. In any case, what is sought is a relief from responsibility, a wholesome connection where one gives over to nature.
......Have you ever tried living in your body instead of your head – shifting the centre of where you live? It’s not easy, even for a couple of minutes. There are meditation techniques that are helpful. Vipassana and Yoga are two disciplines encourage this shift. But the thinking head is too anxious to give up easily. It fights any relinquishment of its hegemony, its need for control and certainty, knowledge and answers to shore up its insecurity. All of which has distinct disadvantages.
......How often have you seen this with a friend: after wrestling with a personal problem for the umpteenth time, they say with a sigh of defeat:
.....‘Ohhh, I don’t know. I really don’t know’.
......It’s like they come up against a wall where they can go no further – only back to the beginning to repeat the same old story, the same old frustration, all seen in the same old way. There’s no answer. They have reached the boundary between the thinking head and their dead body, their deceased but most immediate friend who could have helped. They can only stare into the black hole inside themselves from which no help comes.
......But the very moment when the thinking head reaches such a deadlock, just where it gives up, is a moment of great opportunity. It is then maybe, just maybe, the head can let something else in. In Zen it can happen after the practice of long mediation on a deliberately impossible problem, the Koan, where the ego finally gives up. In focusing we call that place the ‘unclear edge’.
......The body’s not dead. It never has been; it’s just been shut out – losing the closest contact you have with nature’s life-force. And incidentally, your body knows more than just how to have an orgasm.
......It knew how to form you long before you developed a thinking head; it devised a way of dealing with your difficult family long before you could consciously work out a strategy; and your way of doing that may have saved your life. I’ve seen this many times. It knew exactly what you needed at each stage of your development from the moment you were conceived. Even when you didn’t get what you needed, your whole organism knew exactly what it was that was missing. And surprise! It still knows, right now. Exactly what you need. It knows things your thinking head can easily deny. It knows what nourishment you need; what subtle shift of ideas will move you forwards. It knows a place to look where you have never thought of looking. It holds the dead-end and frozen feelings that want to move on – and will do so given the chance.
......Freud signaled the end of the Victorian hypocrisy about the body and the instincts, dragging sex out into the open, exposing what lay beneath manners of polite society. The Victorian era has long gone, but today we have been hijacked by another kind of moralistic puritanism. The psychological revolution that promised a relief from repression has been hijacked by another form of obsessional hygiene. In Freud’s time you couldn’t pause in case you thought a naughty thought; today you can’t pause in case you think a negative thought.
......Positive psychology, spiritual positivism, positive therapists, positive outcomes, are all aspects of the new religion, the new hypocrisy, infecting every area of mental welfare and methods of professional help. The new ministers of this religion are the clinical psychologists, social welfare workers, cognitive behavioral therapists, self-help gurus and teachers in our counselling training institutes – all of those who pander to the illusion that the thinking head can provide a limitless spiritual credit card. All you have to do is think the right thoughts!
......Try our local Polytechnic courses on counselling and you will find them teaching NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, training a new generation of counsellors who are ‘solution focused’, intolerant of any depth, but who are experts in putting people back into their thinking heads, making them preoccupied with cognitive hygiene, creating undernourished people whose only physical relief will be the occasional sneeze.
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NO EXIT

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

....I’m in a crowded bus going to town. I’m going to meet my girlfriend to buy her some underwear for her birthday. The bus is jammed packed with people. I think we must be getting near town so I start to work myself towards the exit. People are standing in the aisle. I push my way through. It’s a struggle. Near the exit I’m jammed in even tighter. The crush of people around me is unbearable and I begin to feel claustrophobic. Suddenly I wonder if I’m on the right bus and maybe it’s not going to stop to let me get out. My anxiety turns to panic. I wake up with a sense of recognition.
....How many times have I dreamed variations of this! Always it’s being confined in some sort of small space and unable to get out. As a boy I remember terrifying dreams of being shut up in a coffin and buried alive. Later of being locked in the boot of a car where I go screaming mad. It was always more or less the same scenario.
....I know what this is all about, so it doesn’t scare me so much now. I discovered what it was some years ago when I read about Stanilav Grof’s work with patients – regressing them into the birth trauma in full reality using Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Dozens of patients testified to the same terrifying experience: the last stage in the birth canal where you are being crushed by massive forces and there’s no exit. I didn’t know about the felt-sense at that time – but reading this made an impact and connection so strong that I knew for sure. Thank heavens my claustrophobia has always been confined to the imagination and to a very occasional dream. The Germans have a colourful word for this experience: torschlusspanik. It means, literally, ‘gate-shut panic’. Like the ‘have-to-get-out’ scare that swept through East Germany when they built the Berlin Wall to keep them all in. It was a mass stampede to escape to the West.
....Although I have never had any fear of being in lifts or crowded places, like many people who suffer from claustrophobia, I have great sympathy for those who have.
....The birth experience is universal; for some it is highly traumatic. Some get over it, some don’t; and people can re-experience it in different ways during their lifetime.
....The interesting variation in my dream is that I am going to town to by a birthday present of underwear for my girlfriend. Very curious! Whose birthday are we dreaming about? The day of my birth, no doubt. And when I get out I will have a girlfriend. Not a Mum, but a girlfriend – which is even better with its promise of intimacy and underwear.
....The past is factual enough, but nothing in one’s history has a fixed meaning. Dreams reflect how meanings have endless possibilities. So far as meaning goes, my history is always being rewritten – not according to my whim, but to the way my life needs to go.