INCREMENTAL INNOVATION

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION:
creative change in small steps. Part 1

by Stanley

Encounter Groups in the 60s were great fun, although quite naive and over excitable. Amid a heap of pillows, maybe for a whole weekend, a dozen or so of us would challenge ourselves to be spontaneous and ‘encounter’ each other with a determined disregard for convention and politeness. We were trying to be ‘who we really were’. It was the time of the Counterculture, the Beatles, LSD and the demand for greater social and sexual freedom of expression. At the time, it felt like a social revolution was underway and the Encounter Group was very much a part of the scene. The simple philosophy that motivated us was the idea that the road to personal freedom was to be ruthlessly honest and to be able to show one’s real feelings. Sometimes riotously noisy, always youthful, often healing, but idealistically over the top.

The great solution was simple and obvious: be true to your feelings and true to others. And it did seem to be so simple and obvious. Time and again one saw someone suddenly release a pent up emotion they had long suppressed through guilt or shame. These were moments of transformation. The effect in a group setting could be startling, convincing us we were on the right track.

Much of the wisdom gained at this time has now passed into psychological common-sense. We know that if a person is upset it is beneficial for them to express their feelings in an atmosphere of acceptance. And we also found it was not helpful to just talk about one’s feelings, one had to experience the feeling in present time. The encounter group was suited to this because it was provocative in a way that one couldn’t escape into mere discussion. The focus of interaction was about people’s reactions to one another – right then and there. You were in at the deep end to start with !

We were learning what worked and what didn’t. At the same time there were things that were puzzling. There were anomalies. For example, sometimes, the expression of feelings or emotion was completely non-productive. It seemed only to confirm the status quo. Nothing shifted and the person was no better off. But because, at that time, we were stuck with our theory we used all kinds of tricks to get people into their feelings: beating pillows, kicking, screaming, crying. People would return over and over to their old familiar emotions. We do that in real life too. Situations arise that trigger the same emotional reactions – easy to be fooled into thinking one is ‘working through it’.

Exceptions to what a theory predicts are always interesting. But it wasn’t till much later in my reading of Gendlin and Focusing that the answer became clear. What we didn’t know in those days was that there’s a difference between feelings or emotions that are discovered and those that are merely repeated. Sincerity is not the point, rather it is whether there is a discovery of feelings or whether the feelings are just being replayed.

There is no question that the discovery of a new feeling is an exciting step forward. It can be the release of hidden pent up emotion or something as light as a new way of looking at an old situation. The new perspective releases new possibilities. But when a life situation always triggers the same emotional response it is a mistake to think that expressing it again and again is of any value, no matter how sympathetic and understanding your interlocutor is.

Perhaps returning and replaying like this derives from the hope that, like the first discovery of it, it will yield a similar expansion of one’s being. Sometimes, of course, it does. The same scene revisited, the same story, can be a goldmine. Here we have to recognise that what looks like mere repetition can contain tiny elements of change. It’s never quite the same story. We return to the old scene again: some circumstance in childhood, some abusive situation, a stubborn difficulty in present time perhaps – a place we know so well, but on each return there is a small shift of attitude, something that had not come to mind before, a slightly new slant that makes revisiting worthwhile.

It is the element of incremental change that’s important. Not the subject, not the material, not the sincerity or earnestness, but the emergent element. Sometimes recognising this is not so easy because what is new can be so subtle. Especially difficult if the person has a very critical side – they might castigate themselves for going over the same ground again, thus missing the minute difference from the last visit. So although we should be wary of repetition, at the same time we must be careful not to use this idea to clobber ourselves. The answer is to be very respectful of small changes of viewpoint that can be so easily overlooked.

To grasp the process of incremental novelty is the foundation of psychological awareness. Without this there is no appreciation that the movements of the psyche have their own direction or that there is any movement at all.

All counselling and psychotherapy is predicated on a need to respond to a life circumstance in a new way. The big question is: how does novelty arise? Where can a new emotion, a new attitude to life, come from. Apparently not from anything we are familiar with. It is as though we spend our existence within the confines of our own special house wherein we are familiar with every stick of furniture, the mantle-piece nicknacks, the junk in the attic, the kitchen utensils, the contents of every nook and cranny, bookshelves, the bits and pieces in every cupboard – the story of our life summed up in the bric-a-brac of the home-life in which we have been encapsulated for so long.

All so true, but out of all our tried and tested responses to life, out of all that is so familiar, how does novelty arise. Where does real innovation come from? This is not just a psychological question. With the same astonishment we stand before the spectacle of the evolution of biological life itself in all its amazing variety of forms. It is as though there is something in the very nature of life itself that rewards creativity and innovation. We know that creativity is remarkably serendipitous and that it incrementally forms itself out of chaos and confusion. Suddenly, out of the unruly disorder and the murky muddle of the ordinary, something never before seen comes together and life steps into another realm.

In therapy and meditation, small, new changes of consciousness are what we should value. We know that new relational attitudes arise from a vague bodily sense. It is an incremental process and there is a good deal more to understand about it. Just how something original and new can arise from the detritus of all too familiar – this I’ll look at in my next blog.

THE HOLISTIC RESPONSE

By Stanley

A gut-reaction is literally felt in the solar plexus. It’s something you can’t easily ignore. Often unpleasant, like my reaction to the wet kisses Old Auntie Doris use to give me when I was a boy; or later in life, like the tedious committee meeting that goes on and on until I am overwhelmed with frantic boredom: ‘I can’t’ stand this a minute longer’; some gut-reactions are pleasant like falling in love; some, like a gambler’s hunch, can turn out to be either inspired or horribly wrong. Gut-reactions like chronic anxiety can seem to have no present cause at all.

Why do I call these holistic responses? [1] Well, they are all sort of global reactions of the body, impossible to analyse. When questioned one is likely to fall back lamely on: ‘I just got this feeling’ . This difficulty is the hallmark of holistic responses of all kinds. Reasonable explanations are inadequate because what its about isn’t singular or simple.

If we question a gut-reaction we want to know what it’s about. And there’s the difficulty: I have a hunch about this person, but is it about me or about them; are they really mean or am I projecting my own meanness? Is my fear of authority about my Oedipus Complex or my Inferiority Complex; are the quarrels with my partner because I am too critical or because she is too sensitive, or both.

A holistic response is too illusive, too slippery to answer black and white questions like these. Whatever story you tell only rings partly true. You can never quite settle the matter because a gut-reaction is holistic. It is never about only one thing; and it is potentially mobile. The rational mind wants a simple story; but any holistic response is potentially a wider story. A holistic response wants to mutate. It has the impulse to expand and evolve.

If you go to the whole feeling of a gut-reaction – not going over this or that about it in your head, but to the whole feeling of it in your gut – if you stay with the whole physical sensation itself, focusing on the non-verbal feeling of it, interesting changes start to happen. Other connection will pop up; it starts to mutate, to widen, to develop sub-plots. You could easily say: ‘I change my mind when I think about it’. And yes, you can do this by thinking about it. But what I’m suggesting is precisely that you don’t think about it. If you give-over to the gut-reaction itself, always going back to the whole sense of it, a surprising and unexpected widening of the story begins to emerge. This process seems not to be directed by the thinking ego. So what does direct it? It can only be something in the gut-reaction itself. It seems to have a larger story to tell. It wants to evolve. This is astonishing! Why should stories want to evolve? But they do – and in a certain kind of way.

The Cognitive Behaviorists and Narrative Therapists are right about one thing: so much of our emotional life is tied up with the stories we tell about ourselves – optimistic stories or stories of failure and doom, stories of inadequacy and blame, reasons why we feel guilty or wrong, fantasies about who we are or want to be, stories about what others think of us. Some would advise us to simply change our stories, but we can’t just invent positive stories at will. We can try, but they don’t warm you at a gut level. If there is to be a different story the belly has to believe it !

Sometimes personal stories seem to change, yet really all have an identical theme. These are stuck stories. If you have ever been a worrier you will know how each different worry is really the same story in a different setting. If it isn’t one thing to worry about its another. Each new worrying story holds one in its spell until the next day – next day, new episode.

Some people have what are called ‘problem-saturated’ stories. Such stories can define a person’s identity, leading them to claim that they have always been nervous or self- conscious. Stuck stories tell only a single tale and will even limit a person’s memory to events that confirm their story.

What we call our moods each have a entirely different story to tell about what the day means, indeed, what life itself means. Each moods can seem like a different but parallel universe having little in common with yesterdays mood – that is, if you can remember what that mood was like. Moods have a way of vanishing when another has taken its place. Sometimes I think am like a travelling drama company with a repertoire plays. Depending on the audience, I know what drama to turn on. It’s second nature. As a kid they said I should have been an actor.

Stories are biological. They arise from our history as an organism, going way back beyond the origins of myth; and our personal stories arise out of own history – you could call them personal myths. There are plots within plots, plays within plays. We watch them dramatised as we grow up living in a family within a network of other families and friends. We watch how happy-go-lucky Dad is at a party and how angry he is at home; how bonhomie he is to mates and how mean he is to his kids. We watch Mum smiling at Mrs X and how she frowns about her to someone else. I can find remnants of all these dramatis personae in my own character.

Plots are donated to us largely through the family that brought us into the world, and we make the best of them we can. Some dramas we get drawn into whether we want to or not and we act them out unconsciously taking one role or another.

Most people who want to be better than they are do manage to filter out much the bad stuff. But much we get stuck with. And try as we will it is difficult to change. Complete ‘biblical’ conversion is usually fake and changing the major plot is never entirely possible. The idea that we have freedom of choice is greatly exaggerated……But

And it is a real ‘but’… as I said, stories do want to evolve. A holistic response is about a bigger picture than the tale we tell of it. The best way is to take your gut-reaction to a nursery, give it healthy soil, tend it, water it and give it room to grow – then, just see what kind of hybrid it turns into. You might be surprised.

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[1] The adjective ‘holistic’ has been sequestered by the Green Movement and New Age. I have invented the term ‘holistic response’ to designate a subjectively felt biological reaction. It could be called the ‘whole body response’; or, more colloquially, a ‘gut-reaction’.

A DIFFERENT ‘ME’

by Stanley

Our work isn’t like landscaping a gardening: enhancing appearances and removing the weeds – it’s more like an expedition in search of terra incognita; a different garden on the other side of the world. ‘I don’t quite know where I’m going with this’, someone might say; or, ‘If we keep going down this road I’m a bit scared of what I might become’. This can happen when someone is on the edge of new feeling, an intimation of what could be a unknown landfall. As though a completely different ‘me’ is locked away somewhere and could pop out at any moment. It can be quite scary, like someone else is lurking in the background and might take over my life.

It doesn’t take some enormous impending change of personality to give rise this kind of fright. The slightest deviation from the confines of some antique psychological habit can be enough for it to seem like the coming of the revolution: perhaps sensing the dangerous possibility of a personality reversal, so that where I have been reticent and modest, I might become boastful; where I have always deferred, I might kick up an almighty fuss; or I might start demanding all kinds of outrageous things. Worst of all, I could even be thoroughly annoying to people and not care. What hangs over all these calamitous presentiments is that if any of this got out I would suffer the most terrible consequences: surely, everyone would just abandon me.

This fear of a reversal only goes to illustrate that I have simply engineered my more socially acceptable traits. I was never really modest, never really deferential, never really undemanding, but rather I have acted as though I were. Quite clearly, engineered and acted for fear that otherwise, ‘everyone would just abandon me’ – didn’t I say ?

But of course, my secret has been well kept. So well kept that it is quite blank, until I got that fright just now. The best kept secrets are those that seem not exist. Isn’t it amazing, though, how I could have gone along all this time with that other ‘me’ living in the shadows; and what energy it must have cost me to hold him down.

Only looking back can I say this because I have since discovered that all the while he was a source of trouble, causing me at times to be quirky, but never bold, reckless but never adventurous, sentimental but never loving, funny but seldom joyful, smart but never confident. He isn’t really quirky like this, but his behaviour seeps out this way because all other avenues have been closed.

Unlike the usual ‘me’ whose character is rather too fixed, this ‘me’, this other ‘me’, is constantly changing, constantly reevaluating. That’s one reason he’s a bit scary: he’s so changeable. But really, that’s one of his great virtues. He realistically lives in a world of change.

Things like ‘meanings’ and ‘memories’ are not written in stone. They are not immutable ‘facts’. Memories, for example, are not just facts with an attitude, because attitude changes what we select as being facts. Perhaps this is not the best way of putting it; I’m not subscribing to the idea that all you have to do is change your attitude.

It’s not a question of looking at facts in a new way – because there are no immutable facts. The essence of reality is change. Hurtling down the rapids of time I have to be aware of the constantly changing configurations of the river, now rapids, now rocks, now calm, now twisting and turning through mad whirlpools and waterfalls. Alertness to the present moment and constant reevaluation is essential. I dare not be consistent for a second. Nothing is the same as it was a moment ago.

You can easily see this at work in a good session. It may appear that I am dealing with the ‘fact’ of my relationship breaking up. But as I proceed, what I am ‘dealing with’ changes. Oh! sure, I am consistently dealing with a certain area of my life, but what started out as important gradually dissolves into other considerations that seem even more important. Until finally my father, of all people, is on the scene and his part in my present problem is so crucial that he has upstaged all the other players. That’s how it feels now. Ask me again in two minutes and it’ll be different.

And with all these changes I am changing.

That’s the ‘me’ I want – the me that can keep up with the flow.

LIVING FROM ONE’S CENTRE

by Stanley

A perceptive friend of mine made a very important observation. She said, ‘There is a difference between being selfish and living from one’s centre. I’ve thought lately’, she said, ‘that I’ve been too unselfish in my life. But the thought of saying I should be more selfish didn’t feel right. I’ve known selfish people and seen how irresponsible they can be. But I’ve discovered that living from one’s centre doesn’t make one less, but more responsible.’

I knew at once she was absolutely right and wondered how this could be. When I thought of the selfless people I have known, it would seem that they are too responsible for everyone else and have a slim idea of responsibility toward themselves. Selfless people take far too little care of themselves. They acknowledge that they should, but in practice can’t seem to do it. Thus their relationship with others is lopsided. Living from your centre makes you more responsible for yourself and your own life, so that the balance is more even. And you are more realistic about the impact you have on others. A selfish person has a poor idea of what it feels like to be someone else; and a selfless person projects their own sensitively on everyone else and takes care of them on this basis. Both are unrealistic. But when you are living from your own centre you realise that everyone has their own very different centre and thus you have no choice but to let them live their own lives in their own way. This is realism.

So how do you find your centre if you’ve lost it or haven’t yet found it? The best is when someone else picks up on a mere hint about something that really matters to you, but which you hardly recognise yourself; its when someone hears your throwaway line and treats it as though it were serious; its when someone hears your heart when you can hardly hear it beating yourself. These are moments when someone picks up on your centre that’s hidden away. That’s when, for an instant, you recognise yourself. If you study in detail the interactions on video between a mother and baby, as researchers have done, that is exactly what a good mother does, moment by moment. It is a gift one particularly needs in one’s young life – and to some extent throughout one’s life. If that gift has been missing, giving it to oneself is much more difficult, although some say you should be able to: ‘No one can give it to you but yourself’, they say – which is a lie perpetrated by narcissists.

A narcissist is someone who recognises no other centre of life but their own. They give nothing and receive nothing. They live in a egocentric universe where the sun and all the stars circle around them. Living in their presence you are simply orbital flotsam and jetsam. They might tell you they love you, but such a one shines like a God who has made you in their image.

This may seem harsh and judgmental, but when it is true, recognizing it can save your life. It’s a serious as that.

I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE

by Stanley

The 1994 BBC interview that Melvin Bragg gave to playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter, was what Brian Edwards called ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’. Potter was the genius who wrote The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven. At the time of the interview Potter was dying of cancer and sipped morphine throughout the interview in the BBC studio. I remember the moment when he recounted how, a few days before, he looked at an apple tree in blossom from his bedroom window:

…instead of looking at the apple blossom and saying ‘Oh! Isn’t that nice’. Now, last week, it was the whitest, frostiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of things. Everything is more trivial and more important than ever – and the difference doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of things is absolutely wonderful …

Those sort of Big Moments in life are somewhat rare – like perhaps when you come upon an opening in the forest and there is this huge roaring waterfall, the sun shining through the mists rising from the depths. It’s as though reality bursts through one’s usual way of seeing and saturates the senses. One is overwhelmed by the thereness of it all! It doesn’t have to be the Big Nature Deal, either; you can get it at the sight of someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking at them. Suddenly, they are so very there !

You absolutely get it.

When you walk from the garage into your house, you know the house is there. Of course you do – but you don’t experience the house like that. You don’t ‘get it’. Not like that. You can live in your house quite comfortably without being enraptured by it.

Then there is the other kind of overwhelming thereness. Not something too good, but something that’s too awful. Not the bountiful, life-giving Mother Nature so beloved by the eco-idealists, but the death-dealing mother, whom the ancients knew as Kali; she who wears a necklace of human skulls; she who reminds of destruction and shakes the ground that before had felt so firm.

Our usual life is lived in a bubble that filters out too much of anything, both ends of the good/bad spectrum. But when an earthquake happens it rips open not just the earth but also all those darker, more frightening aspects of the world, enough to make us shudder with dread. That’s when I really don’t want to ‘get it’ or be there in any sense.

But oh dear! There are a hundred ways of not being-there. You can move to another city; you can curl up under the blankets; you can go on a people-saving spree; you can work your butt off; you can pray; watch television.

I had my own special way when the earthquake hit. I went on a creative binge that was quite manic, writing up this wonderful idea that that had occurred to me when all the power and water was down after the earthquake. In this manic phase I was possessed by a wonderful confidence. Inflated mania is not bad in some ways. You can travel to distant places without any airfare and you can let flourish ideas you wouldn’t normally entertain! Thankfully, however, my trip got harder and harder to maintain, until finally I came down to earth. The strange thing was that my return to reality was facilitated by one of the ideas born of mania itself – which brings me back to the idea of ‘thereness’ we started with.

Try sitting a chair in your lounge and get the room as there ­– by which I mean not just knowing it is there – but actually tuning in to the full perception of the walls, floors and the objects in the room, really getting them as solid and real – and hold it. You will most likely find that you can do it for a few of seconds … and then you will flinch.

I used to think that this was just a wandering mind, unable to concentrate for too long. But I discovered this is not aimless wandering, it’s a flinch. Almost as though you’d touched a hot stove before feeling the burn – in fact, its a flinch so effective that you don’t feel anything. I think maybe it’s a millisecond of unconsciousness. But the result is that you find yourself thinking – and you are somewhere else.

I found if I insisted on getting the solid reality of the room like this, I mean really getting it and holding it for 20 minutes, I got incredibly tense. I mean holding onto my body as though there was some dreadful emergency going to happen. Ah! so that’s what I’m doing. I realised I was resisting being totally present. There could be only one reasonable answer to this: being-here was somehow dangerous. There was something I didn’t want to experience. And it was glaringly obvious that resistance to experience is closely tied to physical, I mean muscular, tension. I suddenly thought of the phrase ‘body armour’ and remembered, tucked away in my dusty shelves, a book I bought in 1975 by Alexander Lowen, a pupil of that mad genius friend of Freud, Wilhelm Reich. Lowen’s book was called ‘Bioenergetics’.

‘Children learn early in life that they can reduce painful feelings by holding their breath and tensing muscles to cut off feeling. When emotional experience is difficult (as it is for many), the holding patterns become "second nature" – built into the body as chronic muscular tensions that persist into adulthood. The tensions operate below awareness and rob the person of a fuller and more vital experience of life.’[1]

We are all, especially as children, experts on detecting toxic people and environments; we instinctively know what is death-dealing. And children solve it, if they cannot escape – which invariably they can’t – by shutting it out, pulling down the blinds, deleting the experience, pretending it’s something else. All very effective ways of not being-there, blotting out experiences; but the price is alienation from the wonderful nowness of things. Realising the connection between bodily tension and the resistance to being totally present has lead me down some interesting pathways. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

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One wants to be open to life and wellbeing, but closed to the darker aspects of existence. But experience is experience. Close down on one aspect and you close down on them all; and when you do this, both the highs and the lows become invisible ends of the spectrum. Life can get far too narrow; and the only way is to open up the field of vision to both the highs and the lows. People come into therapy and counselling because they instinctively know they must open up to a wider bandwidth of living which they know they can’t get at on their own. They don’t want to be prised open, but allow to lift the lid and have a look.

How much to turn on and tune in is a question of psychological economics – a question of how much life do you think you can afford. That’s a very serious consideration.

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[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_analysis

GOLDILOCKS ZONE

by Stanley

Just recently, somewhere amid TV images of the bloody struggles in the streets of Cairo, almost unnoticed at the end of the news, there was a small announcement that astronomers had confirmed the discovery of six new planets. They are known as ‘exoplanets’ because they orbit stars other than our own sun. Twenty years ago the idea of planets outside our own solar system was mere speculation – today 1235 have been found, 63 of them exist in a so-called ‘goldilocks zone’, that neither fries or freezes them by being neither too close or too far from their parent sun, a habitable zone where liquid water and therefore life could exist. Since there are from 2 to 400 billion stars in our local Milky Way alone, the probability of finding earthlike planets in the near future is, I am told, as good as certain.

All this is mind-blowing enough, but what do you suppose the psychological effect on humanity will be if extraterrestrial life is discovered. The impact will be far greater than Darwin’s discovery of evolution; maybe even greater than was the impact of Greek philosophy and science on Medievalism. Should we find only extraterrestrial bacteria it will doubt go right over the heads of the majority; and many will simply go into denial. But the long term effect will be another step in the process of humanity’s growth out of childhood, out of being, how shall I say, embedded in the local.

The Medieval Mind saw the universe as centred on ourselves, where even the animal kingdom was there to provide moral lessons on the Christian life. It was OK for everyone at the time; and we still give a respectful nod to such archaic beliefs; and even now we might say that if a Muslim woman is happy and prefers wearing a full burka with only the tiniest holes to see through and believes that women should be stoned to death for adultery, who are we to quarrel with her? To be thus thoroughly embedded in a local backwater is nothing unusual. It’s part of growing up.

When I was a child the universe was number 31 Crownfield Rd, London E15, one of the poorest parts of the East End. I emerged into life embedded in this particular cultural and family locality. There was nothing else. As I grew up there were other places with differing styles of life. I could begin compare, evaluate, imagine. But being embedded in a ‘local’ is a state I can still fall into when some event fills my horizon and I am suddenly confined – a friend has cancer; an earthquake; or, by chance, I am thrown into a narrow mood. Suddenly, my horizon becomes restricted. I am encapsulated within an experience. The is no outside.

Nobody grows up all of a piece. We all start off fairly localised as a child, a pretty much ‘together’ creature; but different aspects of the personality grow at a different rates. Some pieces are very slow moving; some pieces hardly move at all. Some pieces get left behind and are so attached to the earliest years it is as though no time had passed at all. I give as an example my moods and attitudes to close relationships. In this aspect, I have always been a ‘slow developer’, as they say. I offer no excuse since most people drag their feet here to some extent – at least, everyone I have ever known. ‘Relationships’ are a department of life that is the most difficult in the world – apart from floods, typhoons and earthquakes.

Though you would think, wouldn’t you, that becoming acquainted with worlds beyond my local origins, learning about foreign cultures, history, evolution and exoplanets, as well as all my life experience, would devalue the local? If not devalue it, at least make it less riveting, relativising its importance. Well, in a way it does; and yet, paradoxically, the wider view helps us see the local for the first time. Just as, when earth is viewed from the moon, we see it and cherish it with new eyes.

This is well demonstrated in practical psychological work. Therapy deals with areas in a person’s life where they are cornered in some local concern, past or present, some precise situation that offers no shift of horizon, no possibility of imagining otherwise. Sometimes a person is so embedded, so implicated in some such compressed, home-like zone, so localized, that they are completely in it – so, of course, they cannot see it. Then there are no qualifications or questions; and they are so accustomed to it that, no matter how deadening the style, they do not see it as a problem – there is no problem. Such people don’t come to therapy – any more than a hot Muslim or a evangelical Christian would.

To free oneself from an entrenchment one has to see that it is and how it is. Not try to change it, that only makes it persist – but to see it. Just distant enough, yet close enough to the isssue – in the goldilocks zone you might say – to be able to distinguish it and turn towards it. There’s no need to work on it – that’s all it needs.

THE ‘WHERE’S-THE-SCISSORS’ DISORDER

by Stanley

I would like to tell you about an odd personal disturbance of mine. I’ll call it the Where’s-the-Scissors disorder. It used to happen regularly with my car keys, but it can happen with anything: ‘where did I leave the scissors’; ‘where is my diary’; ‘where did I put my notes’; ‘where’s my cell phone’. The other day I had no idea where I had left my cell phone, so I rang it up on the land line – heard it ringing and searched all over the house to find where the ringing was coming from. Eventually I found it in some unlikely place.

But it’s my condition of mind that is interesting. It is based on the assumption that something is lost. When I am afflicted with this condition I know something is lost in the same instant that I turn to find it. Both go together: where is it – I’ve lost it. It’s the same as searching for a name I can’t remember. I know the name full well and I know that I know it. But in the instant I reach for it in my memory, I know I can’t remember it.

This syndrome is especially noticeable where the thing I’m looking for is right in front of my nose. ‘Where’s the scissors?’ Anyone else would see them right there on the table in front of me; but do I see them? No, I do not. I know I can’t find them because I’m looking for them. That very ‘knowing’ produces a blind spot. ‘Can’t find’ is built in to ‘looking for’.

If you think I must be getting a bit Alzheimerish I can only say that I was like this when I was 10. I can remember crying out, “Mum…Muuum where are my…..?” to which my mother would invariably reply, “Well where did you put it…?” This would infuriate me because if I knew where I’d put it I wouldn’t be asking her.

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There are many kinds of seeking and all kinds of things we seek. But there are certain quests that are doomed to fail because they have an out-of-reach quality already built into them. They are quests with a nullifying shadow. Rather like my conviction that I can’t find the scissors. It was Plato who said, (and I somewhat paraphrased him) “we never want what we already have”. It is also true, in some perverse sense, that I never have what I want. Wanting already implies an absence. It is almost like wanting turns on the deficit; just as ‘looking-for’ turns on ‘can’t find’.

Let’s hone in on something a little more specific. Sometimes in session a person will say to me, “what am I supposed to be talking about.” Such a simple, honest question reveals a propensity for impossible quests. Maybe the thing that is important to him isn’t really the most important thing. The person has the notion that there is something he should find within himself that isn’t already there. That’s the perfect set-up for the impossible quest. The very worst reply would be to try and help him find it. Why? Because you would be playing into the ‘quest’ state of mind. You would be collaborating in the idea that there is something he is not doing which he ought to be doing. Even if he found something that he wanted to talk about it might not be the right one. It wouldn’t be, would it? Obviously – otherwise he wouldn’t be asking, would he?

The very worst thing you can do is to set someone up for an impossible quest. So many religious and spiritual systems do just that. A typical example would be to suggest that there is something one must find within oneself. “The answer to your problems lies within”, you wisely suggest. That’s the trigger that sets them up. It’s only a short step to trying to find God. They’re probably already stuck on ‘trying to find themselves’. And what you suggest closes the trap that’s already waiting for them. It’s a very subtle thing. Who they are can’t be right because they are looking for themselves.

I have been guilty of unintentionally perpetrating this ploy myself. As you know I have been very keen on the technique called focusing. But it has one major snare that’s easy to fall into. In my keenness it took me a while to learn this. The technique asks people to look into the felt-sense to find what they feel. The felt-sense is a murky, uneasy physical sensation somewhere in the body; and, if you give it attention, new and important feelings will emerge. And it does work – except for people who are already inclined toward impossible quests. The first thing that hits them is “what feeling am I supposed to look for”. With that question they’re gone !! Even if they just think it.

‘Well no’, you might say, ‘just put your attention on that tightness in your chest and see what comes’. Yes, the person is willing to try it. So they wait for something that isn’t there to reveal itself. That’s the catch! If something is there, that can’t be it because I’m looking for it. You don’t search for what is there, do you?

I will go so far as to say that any instruction in how to do therapy is in danger of being counterproductive. Firstly, because the person will search for what is supposed happen and will overlook is actually happening. In doing so they become one step removed from direct involvement; and one step removed from their own experience.

The trouble is, any psychological or spiritual belief system tends to dictate what you should strive to be or to search for. They address something that is felt to be missing and therefore precipitates the search for something that ‘should be there but I can’t find it’. I can just as easily try to find Christ as my Buddha nature, or the meaning of my archetypal dreams; or the Love that the Universe is Sending me; or the Real Me; or the Meaning of Life; or just simply ‘Love’ or ‘Happiness’. Or – here’s a good one – ‘faith ’.

All harmless enough pursuits I suppose. But just be on the lookout for the various mutations of the deadly ‘I-can’t-find-the-scissors’ disorder.

DIARY OF A DABBLER

by Stanley

What’s the similarity between falling in love and a passion for collecting beetles ? The answer is that in both cases, when it happens, you give yourself over. In spite of anything you may have originally intended, you find that you’re hooked! You are dedicated, devoted! Well yes, this makes sense when you fall in love with a person - everyone knows you don’t fall in love unless, in some sense, you’re already prone to giving yourself over. You surrender and find yourself cheerfully attached. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you. It’s the same with collecting beetles – but I mean more than just collecting beetles, I mean being a passionate entomologist. I mean being in love with bugs.

In his autobiography the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his fervent love affair with butterflies, “From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender”.[1] And in an essay, Strong Opinions, he wrote “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. In spite of this, Nabokov knew all about obsessive human love affairs. After all, he wrote Lolita.

An anonymous writer cries, “It was the mantra that kept repeating in my head, It hummed in my head, and seemed to be said by multiple voices, of multiple sexes, voices of women, voices of men, voices of children, and no voice at all. " I love all insects... I love all insects... I love all insects.

I knew what entomophobia means, so I wondered if there was such a thing as entomophilia; and yes, there was. It means sexual arousal involving insects – although it is never stated how this is achieved; Google and the medical dictionaries were all modestly sparse on details.

When he was at Oxford my old friend Charles Darwin spent too much time out in the countryside collecting beetles. He once surmised that “the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them.” He was somewhat smitten with them himself. His girlfriend Fanny Owen scolded him and announced that he had to choose between her and chasing after insects. She finally broke up with poor Charles because he apparently he couldn’t break his attachment .

*

Most of the activities that engage me have a personal agenda, a purpose, a goal. There are very few things that interest me of which I can say I have no selfish interest. But my agendas are quite unreliable and change like the weather. And as my mind wanders so too do my interests.

Being a dabbler I never quite digest what I happen to be eating, for my appetites move on. I can’t seem to settle down. To give up dabbling and be really unswerving you have to be a specialist. You can’t really open your heart fully unless you hone in on the singular. Being a specialist is very hard for anyone who is afraid of missing out. It’s hard to commit oneself to one thing because something better might come along and I’ll miss out. In any case, there are so many avenues that beckon. I buy a promising book of study, intending to read it from cover to cover. But half way through some luring reference leads me elsewhere.

So I tend to be a professional dilettante, frivolously drifting from one thing to another. It is the style of an intellectual decadent; I want to know everything. So, as a consequence, I’m a Jack-of-all-Trades and master of none. I envy people who have managed to be specialists, who can devote their lives to a single study or cause. I comfort myself with the idea that if you hone in on the single grain of sand you miss the beauty of the beach. This romantic idea makes me out to have a larger vision, in touch with the mystique of the cosmos. In any case, specialist are boring and opinionated.

William Blake was a funny fellow. He was a romantic mystic who hated science. He poured scorn on the scientific aspirations of his day and demonised Newton,“ Pray God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!” he wrote. In a little poem he proclaimed,

To see the universe in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

He didn’t see the paradox. He uses the small as the window to the larger vision. I mean, if you can see the universe in a grain of sand you are a specialist like a physicist studying atomic structure; like Newton and his apple. But Blake saw the specialist as missing out.

It is precisely the single vision that the specialist has. Being a specialist in beetles or butterflies or physics can take you to the wonder at the heart of things. I think of Nabokov prancing about in shorts with his butterfly net. Of his book on butterflies, someone said that it, “…glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death.” His speciality opened up the rainforest of the cosmos. In that he was the perfect combination of the specialist and the poet.

There are other reasons why I cannot be a specialist: the million and one things that have to be done, that have to be thought about, duties that demand my care. And the next thing to be done is always a little more important than what I am doing now.

To specialise means to neglect all other claims and possibilities. I can’t even specialise in myself – I’m too busy. I’m a multitasker. That’s a nice way to put it. But when I meditate I ask myself a crucial question: why does my mind always have to go somewhere else?

Somewhere else always calls me; and I can never make up my mind whether this is a terrible disadvantage or a gift.

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory Speak. Everyman Library, 1966