ECSTASY

The word ‘ecstasy’ is from the Greek ekstasis meaning: entrancement, displaced outside (oneself). Used by 17^th century mystical writers it meant ‘a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things’. What we would call these days an altered state of consciousness.

Perhaps the most famous tradition of involving ecstasy was what was known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, practiced for two thousand years right up to 390 AD. Thousands of people, slaves, philosophers and aristocrats, from all over the Greek world came to Eleusis, 15 miles northwest of Athens, to celebrate the festival each year. The procession of initiates would start from Athens and make their way towards the Telesterion (Initiation Hall) where they would rest for the night.

The next day they would drink a special brew of barley water and mint. After that, whatever happened inside the Telesterion has always been the most dreadful secret. Initiates were forbidden to speak of it on pain of death. But many were able to speak about the effect of the experience on their lives. What they had to say sounds every bit like what modern people have said about the effects of psychedelic drugs, taken in a sacred or therapeutic setting.

In the Elusion Mysteries, Plutarch tells us, ‘… there are all kinds of terrors, with shivering, trembling, sweating, and utter amazement. After this, a strange and wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into clean and verdant meadows, where he discerns gentle voices, and choric dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions.’

There is evidence that the Kykeon, the ‘special brew of barley water’ given to the initiates, was derived from locally grown barley which regularly gets infected with the ergot fungus known as Claviceps Purpurea, a potent hallucinogen related to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). It means that all those thousands of initiates way back then were on a dope assisted, holy trip.

Many spoke about how it changed their whole outlook on life. Aristides the Rhetor in the 2^nd century speaks of the ‘ineffable visions’ they had in the Telesterion: ‘Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth’ he said, ‘and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous. Aristotle’s view was that the initiates did not have a lesson to learn, but an experience to undergo.

The Roman emperor Theodosius closed the sanctuary in CE 392. It was probably the first drug-bust in history; and when Christianity arrived in the region all cult worship was forbidden.

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The picture above is of the session room at the Behavioural Biology Research Center Johns Hopkins University. Sandy Lundahl, with the blue eyeshade, lies on the couch listening to classical music through headphones. She has just taken two 30milligrams capsules of psilocybin, the active hallucinogenic in ‘magic mushrooms’ for an ongoing research study. It is the first study of its kind since the early '70s – ‘a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonised and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.’

The research made news around the world. Its conclusion: ‘psychedelic drugs offer the potential for profound, transformative, and long-lasting positive changes in properly prepared individuals’. Recalling her experimental session four years later Sandy said "Nothing had ever been that vivid. There was this grid on top of everything, all these colors. And I don't know how long, as I was mesmerized by it, and then I started thinking, Oh, no ... am I going to be looking at this for six hours? Oh, no, no. It was interesting for about five minutes -- maybe not even. I started thinking, Oh, what a waste of time. But I’d made a vow (to go along with the research).

 "I'm never going to make an inauthentic decision again. Never again”. And as soon as I said that to myself it was like -- whooosh -- the colors were gone. And I felt like I was being whisked ... whoa, boy ... and then I went to all these other places."

Bill Richards, in charge of the experiment, said later said. "First, it's sensory and aesthetic. People experience colors, patterns, intriguing bodily sensations -- what most people think of when they think of the effects of a psychedelic drug. It's not life-transforming, by any means. Beyond that stage, they start dealing with psychodynamic issues – the sense of self, obstacles, fears. It's very personal. In that stage, people often regress to their childhood and relive emotional episodes with parents, sibling, spouses, and children. After that ... we enter the archetypal realm. Visions of Christ, or Buddha, or Greek gods, that sort of thing.”

It was in this stage that Sandy saw this jester. “He was coming down the street. I was in the crowd, I was right there. And one side of him was totally black, and the other side was totally colorful, and here he is, just laughing." She closes her eyes, remembering. "And I'm getting the image of the dark side of life, and the light side, and here is this jester ... just laughing! Laughing at the human condition…” and Sandy began to laugh with him.

What seems to follow this stage is the mystical realm, says Richards. Here people have this overwhelming sense of oneness with the universe: "There's a dimension of awesomeness, of profound humility, of the self being stripped bare. In the psychology of religion, mystical experience is well-described:  unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, ineffability.”

The team had marked success with alcoholics and neurotics; and then quite by accident a member of the research team developed a terminal cancer. She was open to the idea of trying psychedelics to see if it would be helpful.

"She experienced a dramatic decrease in anxiety and depression and lived the time that she had left much more fully," Richards says. Over the next ten years the team applied psychedelic therapy to cancer patients at Baltimore hospital.

"There are a lot of people with cancer lying in bed, depressed, just lying there, suffering, preoccupied with pain and estranged from their family members.  Sort of half alive while they're waiting for the cancer to advance. We found that people who have mystical experiences tend to benefit most dramatically. They resolve conflicts of guilt, grief, estrangement from family members, breaking through the denial and pretense that often accompanies cancer. That's incredibly helpful. They are less anxious, less depressed, closer in their personal relationships, less preoccupied with pain.

"And, perhaps most significantly, those who have mystical experiences claim loss of a fear of death ... that they somehow feel part of something eternal”, says Richards. “Not necessarily personal immortality – there's a paradox there – it's not denying death, but that somehow in spite of the reality of death, it's a good universe. Life makes sense. And there's every reason to live the rest of this lifetime as fully as possible. It's pretty inspiring."

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Perhaps we are getting over the awful fright psychedelics gave us in the 60s; maybe rediscovering what we lost when the Elusion Mysteries were closed down sixteen hundred years ago.

For a most instructive TED talk by Dr Roland Griffith on psilocybin research go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKm_mnbN9JY

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

PSYCHOLOGICAL GENEROSITY

From my first moments in this world there could have been many contingencies impeding my full human development: a faulty gene, sickness, neurotic parents, poverty, being born into a criminal or undeveloped society – any of these misfortunes could have inhibited my growth.  One can adapt and survive almost any kind of ill fortune and, although diminished, still remain fundamentally the same person.

But there was one circumstance I could not survive, although I lived through it – a circumstance where adapting could not work, where no adaptive response of mine was acceptable to those around me on whom I depended as a child, where nothing I could say or do rendered me acceptable to my caregivers. There was no violence – indeed, there was every outward sign that I was being cared for. I simply could not seem to be what they wanted. It was a hidden kind of rejection with every appearance of care.

When they rejected me as such, then changing a response here and there altered nothing. It was no use trying to improve. I couldn’t modify myself because it was me that was the fault. It wasn’t what I did, although they made it sound like it. No was me that was at fault. My fault was that I existed.

In such a dire situation all I could do was kill me - and be someone else: a virtual suicide. Kill the one who is me and be someone I was supposed to be. It’s a radical solution any young child is capable of. Of course, to be brought to this point I had to learn my lesson thoroughly. There had been many times when I screamed for what I wanted. I created merry hell, balling out in all kinds of ways: I want, I want, I want, without really knowing what it was I wanted. All it did was get me into more trouble. Finally, I murdered the one who wanted.

The consequences were grim. The one who wanted became the ‘dead’ enemy within and I had to constantly guard against any sign of it coming to life again. The things I once seemed to crave I no longer wanted; not only did I not want them, I actively resisted them. Intimacy I pushed away, closeness I couldn’t tolerate, the expression of emotion I squashed in myself and in others; I subtly disapproved of physical displays pleasure; kissing did not appeal to me; and I had the tendency to be mean spirited and dominating, denying others what I denied myself. Sex was an anxiety rather a pleasure.

After I killed my child-self I could manipulate people and gain sympathy by pretending to be a child – although I was a child. I had to pretend because the real child was missing. All my life since I have pretended to be a person, knowing all the while I was a fake.

After my suicide I was born again alright, but the person I became I did not like. Recently I have begun to feel a bit better about myself because I realise that what I did to myself back there, I did in order to survive. There were no other options.

There’s nothing like a personal story to whet the appetite – fortunately, the above story is not quite my biography, or anyone’s in particular, it’s a composite portrait you might say. Using the first person singular is a literary device to tell a fictional story. It captures the attention.

But now for the bigger picture behind the story.

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In my last blog I spoke of what it means to grant being to another. It is what I would call psychological generosity. For short, just let’s call it ‘generosity’. It is exactly the reverse of psychological domination; here let’s just call this the ‘domination’ model. These two models are opposed styles of psychological relating. Generosity is characterised by a granting of being, tolerance of differences, a sense of partnership and equality, minimal power structure and control and, not merely a tolerance of individual deviation, but the encouragement of it. The domination model is characterised by rigid hierarchical patterns, authoritarian control, inequality and intolerance of differences.

However, we must never confused material generosity with psychological generosity. In families there can be material generosity whilst at the same time severe domination. This can be confusing.

These factors vary from culture to culture and between families within a culture. The higher primates also differ in this respect: chimpanzees have a domination style. The alpha male dominates all the members of the community, male and female. He attains his high-ranking position through intimidation, strength, and intelligence.  The bonobos – a distinct species within the same genus as the chimpanzee – have a generous culture. It is female centred and egalitarian, where sex is allowed in every kind of partner combination, facilitating conflict resolution and social bonding. They actually practice ‘make love not war’.

 It is worthwhile recalling that we share 98% of our genetic makeup with both species; so it would seem that both generosity and domination are not determined by genetics, but by culture. It’s what you happen to be born into that counts.

You might think, at first glance that these two opposed qualities are easily recognisable. Not so. Generosity often passes unnoticed because it is unstructured and unclassifiable. You can’t show a certificate or degree in generosity. It cannot be taught. It is a quality of soul that that does not even notice itself. It has no ego pushiness and nothing to prove. A floor cleaner going her rounds in mental hospital, chatting to patients as she goes, can do more good than all the hospital clinicians put together, simply because she has a generosity of  soul – she brings just a little bit of sanity and sunshine simply because of who she is – and other people catch it. Few really notice the profound effect she has.

And domination, although palpable, is not always easily recognisable either. Domination can easily disguise itself as ‘help’: telling what you should do, how you get it wrong, how to put it right; demonstrating as well which category of deficiency you suffer from. Not necessarily saying these things explicitly, but implicitly by a shake of the head, a facial expression. Then there are the confidence tricks of language, the disingenuous bull-shit that passes for intelligence and worldly wisdom, demonstrating nothing, except how to sound impressive, and how to play one-upmanship games to intimidate.

Whole social systems can be in the domination mode although claiming otherwise, institutional and cult religions are prime examples. The so-called ‘helping professions’ are riddled with dominating individuals. It seems to attract them; as a consequence there are terrible dissonances between the dominators, usually those in control, and the generous people, who do the work.

In families where domination is hidden but severe, it leads to actual or virtual suicide, as in the story we began with.

Generous people don’t advertise themselves, but there are plenty of them around. Even without the more obvious signs, you can easily tell when you have parted company with someone who is generous. Even without them giving you anything, you come away feeling better, affirmed, feeling that you are at least a viable person. Invisibly, they have granted you yourself.

I believe that there is a slow evolution of cultures towards a more generous style of society. The fact that we all know that this is preferable is something new in our values.

 The picture at the head of this article is of Claudine Andre

(with a little friend). Claudine founded a sanctuary for bonobos in
 the  Republic of Congo.

See: Friends of Bonobos.
  http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/index.htm

*

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF BEING HAPPY

He seems to create a crisis out of nothing. Everything is fine, then some trivial thing upsets him. The theme is: “everything was going well - now its all spoiled”. Say you are on holiday with this person. He has planned and looked forward to it for months. He seemed to be overjoyed to have at last realised a dream. On the second day, suddenly and without warning – something you said, some trivial mistake by the waiter – and everything is ruined. He becomes bad tempered and the whole holiday is tarnished. What happened was an idealised dream was shattered. In such a case you will notice that the degree of upset is always directly proportionate to the intensity of the fantasy.

The story begins with the dream of the perfect holiday and proceeds towards the bursting of the bubble. That’s the way the story goes, the way it always goes. The promise of happiness ends in a terrible letdown that robs one of ultimate satisfaction. The awful truth is that the state of happy anticipation actually sets this person on the road to disaster. You see, it’s written in the story. It’s happened so many times that whenever he is happy, somewhere inside him he knows what’s coming because the story has already been written.

Naturally, in life there are many upsets that are not trivial; the cause in present time is real enough. But because it also triggers an old story it is harder to get over than it would otherwise have been.

Thinking again about that ruined holiday: if there are always terrible consequences to being happy a person can get to the point where they might avoid anything that promises satisfaction. Suggest something they might enjoy and they will find an excuse to knock it back.  It’s better to be permanently toned-down than to risk anticipation. Happiness is the inevitable road to doom. You’ve seen people who are determined not to experience any satisfaction; or if they do, they hide it. It’s as though they are convinced that if the fates find out they’ll drop them in the poo !  

A single memory is not just a still snapshot of a past event. Each memory is a story with a beginning, middle and an end. So really, a cluster of memories is really a cluster of similar stories; and because they are all condensed together, when a cluster is restimulated the same story will happen again.

There’s one story of this kind that is probably the most powerful and devastating. William James noted the serenity of pre-natal existence, the tranquility of immersion in the amniotic fluid. Freud said it was the source of the mystics ‘oceanic feeling’, the sense of one oneness with the cosmos. Somebody rightly called it a state of ‘liquid love’. In any case, you could call it the ultimate bliss of perfect union. Everything is very much alright, until all hell brakes loose in the crushing and agonising contractions of labour where the infant literally faces death.

For most of us this incident is tucked away in the recesses of the unconscious. Out of sight and out of mind. Only those who have recovered birth and relived it in full, have any idea of just how terrifying the experience is – and the enormity of the shock. You might call it the mother of all let-downs. And it is a story that can be retold, with many variations, over the course of lifetime. It is the source of that fatal conviction that happiness ends in disaster.

*

But clusters of memories and the stories they contain are not some kind of fatal human mechanism to which we are all doomed. It is true, as Rupert Sheldrake tells us, the more times something happens the more likely it is to happen again; but we are not the helpless victims of our past, doomed to repeat bad experiences. We certainly can get over traumas, so what is it that turns a trauma into a breeding ground for repetition?

If trauma is not followed by a special kind of conscious attention it becomes an attractor for further traumas that adds to the cluster. At its broadest level what repairs trauma is attention. A baby can fully recover from a bad birth experience. It depends on the quality of attention the child receives afterward.  

We could say that the quality of attention the child needs is love. But ‘love’ is one of those portmanteau words that is so loaded it can mean anything.

The kind of attention I mean is the granting of being to something that is exactly the being it is.

Can I say that again because you might need to pause over it to get it:

It is the granting of being to something that is exactly the being it is.

With a person it is not simply a passive letting them be. It is actively grants them exactly who they are and how they are. To do this you have to be able to get how they are.

Getting it is the key. Here’s an example. When we have unsuccessfully tried to get a point somebody is making we struggle to understand. Then, the light turns on and we say, ‘Ahhh, now I’ve got it’. Getting it means consciously grasping the whole of what they mean. This is a creative act. Such communication is not passive. You are not a blank slate on which you allow them to write. You actually create what they mean – or as near to it as you can get. You create what already is. When you grant being to another person – it is the being they already are. When you really boil it all down, getting it, is the same as Rogers’ unconditional positive regard. You want them to be just as they are and for them to get themselves as they are. This is the central pillar of person-centred work whatever modality the therapist is using. With it, almost anything will repair, without it nothing will.

If a person is upset they don’t need you to help them get over it, they don’t need advice or sympathy. Before anything they need you to mirror them, to actively reflect their state of being. It even got that name in early person-centred work. It was called ‘reflecting’ – a powerfully effective style that is neglected by many modern counsellors. It doesn’t even feature in much present day training.

A person who is struggling needs to know that you actually appreciate the struggle itself.  Not just viewing it as something to get over, but that you actually grasp what the struggle is like. To try to minimise the struggle so as to achieve the goal is the greatest mistake.

Even if you can get the way someone is, they may not be able to get themselves the way they are. They can’t grant themselves the being they actually are. Past traumas persist and repeat because of the deficit of this kind of attention.

As a baby, of course, you couldn’t give it to yourself. And this can be true even in later life. The deficit persists and repeats. One says colloquially, they just don’t love themselves. And they actually can’t. They have to experience being given it.  They have to receive it as it should have been given. The root of the problem is in the past and they are trying to repair the past. It can be done, but sometimes the deficit is so bad it’s a long hard road to receive this gift from another.

 It is so dangerous to go back there, as it were, and trust somebody because the stories of the way it always goes are so powerful.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

CLUSTERS OF MEMORIES

Memories grow in clusters, each one clinging to its like: physical traumas bond together; so do all the insults; I have a bunch of humiliating memories; a bunch of betrayals; a collection of lost loves. Similar experiences coalesce together and merge. Each single experience in a cluster, then, feels like all of them. Stan Grof has a good term for this. He calls them ‘condensed experiences’.  Similar memories can be bunched together so tightly that it’s hard to distinguish one from another. This is particularly true when the memories have been forgotten or suppressed. Often in therapy a person cannot tell where they are on time track; like a woman re-experiencing her own birth and also re-experiencing herself giving birth at the same time – with all the physical sensations of both incidents – two incidents: one at the beginning of her life and the other 25 years later in the same cluster.

In everyday life a cluster of memories works like a coalesced blob. It seems to search out incidents in present time that are similar to itself. Each present time reminder gets added to the cluster. Then, each time when someone leaves me or abandons me, all the past times of loss and loneliness surface and are all felt at once. When I sense someone is criticising me, the whole condensed experience of past criticism surfaces. I don’t react only to the real present time happening, but to the BIG EXPERIENCE, the whole cluster of my memories that are activated and felt all at once. I know full well what being criticised is like. Don’t tell me I can’t recognise it when I am being criticised !

So, of course, my reactions are over-the-top – far more dramatic than is justified by the present. I take things ‘the wrong way’. I am said to be ‘over-sensitive’, or ‘over-emotional’. And in all this I don’t blame my cluster for the upset, I blame the person who triggered it. Regardless of whether she was actually criticising me or not, I don’t blame my cluster because I don’t see it. I project it on to the present scene.  My life-long cluster of criticisms comes alive – happening right in front of me in the form of the present experience.

The other person might then say: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to criticise you – I was just telling you how I felt’. To no avail. All I can see is that she was criticising me – it all feels the same as it always does. And indeed, it is always the same because all memories on this are condensed into a sameness; and this last one gets added to the cluster. Even though, in fact, I wasn’t being criticised, it feels like it; and it feels like it so convincingly that you wouldn’t be able to talk me out of it. You would probably get irritable with me for being so stubborn – which confirms that you are being critical.

In working with dreams you find that a dream image doesn’t just mean one thing, but myriad of associated memories, all with a similar theme; often wildly diverse, but all in the pull of a specific ‘cluster’ or condensation of memories. Freud was certainly on to this with his idea that the dream was ‘overdetermined’ which, he said, was the condensation of a number of thoughts (‘a multiplicity of connection’) in a single dream image. Freud neglected the seriousness of the body’s memory of pain and impact; these form the core of the most severe clusters that affect me.

Freud confined dream exploration to the patient’s verbal associations. Paying attention also to the physical associations with the dream is doubly productive.

Working on a dream, with attention to the body, a person can find themselves propelled into many diverse memories and fantasies scattered throughout life, all with some strange but compelling similarity, perhaps all with a similar body pain or discomfort – or maybe a childhood dream, a visit to the doctor, a new birthday bicycle, a scene at the beach 50 years ago when this woman looked at me and smiled. Somehow, collectively they all have the same strange association and meaning, the sensing of which deepens the feeling of my life.

There is one aspect of memory clusters I should mention. Each of these condensations of experience has a central core. This is the earliest experience that starts the cluster going.  As time passes it gathers mass, like a snowball rolling downhill. In 1950 Dianetics there was a good model for this. The core was the earliest experience and was called an ‘engram’. This might be a physical trauma like the painful squeezing of the head during the birth process. Later in life, perhaps in childhood, I receive a slap round the head in an emotional family row where I am also very anxious. This second incident ‘keys-in’ the original engram. From then on, key-ins can occur more easily. Every time there is emotional tension I feel overly anxious, headachy and trapped. Each time this happens I feel the original core experience – plus all the times it has restimulated. I can’t remember the contents of the cluster. This is impossible – but every time there is another key-in I feel all the effects at once.

Not all clusters have their origin in birth, but most begin fairly early on in life and set the stage for what is to come. Let’s take the example of the ‘bad father’, not the father who abuses, but the father who is a physical presence, but who is himself not there. The core experience is that of an ‘absence’ – but it is so general and consistent with every experience of him that it becomes normal. I learn to withhold in his presence – in fact, to not be there myself as well. I build up a cluster of experiences with men where there is a withholding.

This knowledge of the way clusters of memory work is very useful even though in person-centred work very early memories may not be addressed. With practically any negative experience one knows that inevitably there are earlier incidents of the same kind – if not the same, then with some element similar enough that their emotional energies are the bonded. Then, without seeking out the core early memories, one leaves space for them to appear – and they will when the time is ripe.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE PROMISE

                                                       by Stanley

        The Swinging Sixties seems a long time ago, but it is worth remembering that it was a time of great cultural upheaval. It came with the craze of Rock and Roll and the Summer of Love; of the Beatles frenzy, the Pill, the hippy communes, of ‘make love not war’ and the revolt against the Viet Nam conflict. ‘Tune in, turn on and drop out’ they said – meaning, ‘tune in to your instincts, turn on with psychedelics and drop out of the rat race. Naturally, like all revolutions there was a counter-revolution; and the counter-attack was aimed directly at the engine that drove the insurrection: the discovery of LSD; for it was hallucinogenic drugs that had opened the psychic sluice-gates threatening the very fabric of civilised world. There was too much energy in it for the pillars of society. The government panicked and, in sweeping counter-revolutionary legislation, psychedelic substances were made illegal and the long arduous war on drugs in the western world began.
            Our ordinary state of consciousness varies a great deal. Each night when we go to sleep or when we get into noticeably better or worse moods our state of consciousness alters; but the range of these changes is fairly consistent. Most good moods are similar – the circumstances might change but the tone is much the same; and each of our bad moods has a similar quality. 
          There is a range or spectrum of emotional tone that is ‘normal’ for me as a person. I fluctuate within my range and I am very familiar with every shade of it. Outside of that I have awareness that there are states of consciousness that are quite different. I think everyone has a deep inbuilt knowing that there are quite different and better ways of being. They glimpse them occasionally; just often enough to keep a vague longing alive. It gets projected into the future in the form of goals and projects that promise happiness; they chase it with destructive drugs like alcohol and amphetamines – all very understandable because these pursuits are like a thin thread connecting them to something good and profoundly desired. Even the drag on the first cigarette can do it. It’s an instant of pure pleasure.  It’s understandable that people will cling tenaciously to a habit that is killing them rather than let go of Ariadne’s thread that could lead them out of the labyrinth. Paradoxical as it may seem, such people are on the side of life.
        The term ‘pleasure’ has equivocal connotations. Epicurus taught us that pleasure is the highest good. It is the purest signal that we are getting something we need. The collateral effects may be damaging, but the signal itself is pure. It may only be a sense of promise – but it’s the intuition that there is something better; and it’s more precious than mere survival. That’s why the 60s upheaval was so dramatic. The windows were thrown wide open, the Music of the Celestial Spheres came through loud and clear and the acid trippers went crazy. It was like a religious hysteria or like falling in love where everything you’d ever dreamed of was possible – not only possible, but you could experience it – LSD would take you there. 
       A promise is a great thing. One can live on promises. When someone is down in the dumps they will say, ‘there’s nothing to look forward to’. But a promise is not simply a delusion. It hooks into something one has known somewhere, at some time, maybe long forgotten. Pleasure in the present moment maybe dulled by the sobering thought that it will not last. Tomorrow it’s back to the office. But the first time there was no such dampener. Maybe when you first opened your eyes after the life and death struggle of birth and saw that the world was good, maybe then … ah then! 
Maybe then you knew.

TREPIDATIONS

                                                                    by Stanley

 By way of a personal confession I want to admit publically that I wrestle with a devil.  I don’t know whether it’s always been a devil or whether it is a fallen angel. Its called ‘Spirituality’. When that simple word is voiced out loud in my company it has a devastating effect; I go into a state of shock and trepidation. It has almost the same effect on me as when the word religion is uttered – only it’s worse, because in recent times, Spirituality has detached itself from religion and become modern and healthy, along with the New Age belief that pre-religious native people were spiritual in the best possible way. The problem is that there is some truth in it. It all has an enormous pull for those who strongly feel, there’s got to be something more than this..!

But for me it conjures up all the terrors of the Middle Ages where religion and spirituality, the living and the living dead, God and the Devil, merged in a ghastly dance of death, and where the power of the unseen had us by the throat for centuries of oppression. Belief in the unseen resulted in a hundred of years of witch burning, where it was believed that witches – always women – kidnapped babies for sacrifice, flew through the air, could, by their association with the devil, cause hailstorms; and where, with their insatiable sexual appetite, these supposed witches cavorted with demons.

Some spiritual beliefs are not only stupid but very nasty, like the belief that a bit of real estate in the Middle East called Jerusalem is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians – it’s been a vicious obsession since the Crusades. Mad also is the current worldwide violence over a third-rate film insulting the Prophet Mahomet. Spiritual beliefs are potentially lethal.

I know that after its long, dark supernatural history, spirituality in the west has come to mean a higher realm of mystical experience, a consciousness of our oneness with all of nature. It is an interesting theatre of struggle. Sam Harris, that implacable atheist – famous now for his book The End of Faith and his Letter to a Christian Nation – recently wrote a blog saying how we should not be afraid of this term, as many atheists are.  He said,

‘I strive for precision in my use of language, but I do not share these semantic concerns. And I would point out that my late friend Christopher Hitchens … believed that “spiritual” was a term we could not do without, and he repeatedly plucked it from the mire of supernaturalism in which it has languished for nearly a thousand years.’

Sam’s sane advice doesn’t settle my anxiety. I fear that it is not so easy to make the distinction; we are still too close to the use of the unseen to terrorise and subjugate. Even now we can see it in every religious cult from scientology to the doomsday sect of Heaven’s Gate.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the hugely influential Mindfulness movement, doesn’t like the term ‘spirituality’ either, I suppose because of the bad press it has in academia and medicine, even though he would happily say that his work on mediation has its roots in Buddhism.

Perhaps the term ‘spirituality’ is the only word we have to register the utter disjunction between certain types of ‘higher’ mystical moments, and those which are of our normal everyday experience. The two types of encounter are so different that there seems to be no bridge between them. Mystical highs, where we seem to touch something greater, defy the rational world, inviting all kinds of fantasies to explain them.

Our modern world has been stripped of ancient mythology that placed all power in the supernatural and unseen. This has left us with a society that is much more practical, down to earth and much less cruel and violent, but in some way missing something.

I think the most convincing case for the existence of the so-called ‘spiritual dimension’ has come from the use of psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms). In the 1960s the recreational use of these substances caused panic government legislation, even against legitimate research into their effects. The current research using psychedelics heralds a reawakening to the healing possibilities of these now prohibited substances and has generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several dozen books and six international conferences.

Stanislav Grof and colleagues at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, working with terminally ill patients, provided strong evidence that a psychedelic experience can be immensely beneficial for the terminally ill, relieving them of the pain and fear of death.

Psilocybin mushrooms have been used for thousands of years by indigenous cultures for a variety of religious and therapeutic purposes. In 1954 ‘Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. This book can also be seen as a part of the history of the entheogenic model of understanding these drugs, seeing them in a spiritual context, as they always have been in primitive cultures. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, Huxley goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, his illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written, says J. G. Ballard. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered even more profound than those he spoke of in The Doors of Perception. He had discovered that Love was the primary and universal fact of the cosmos. This kind of remarkable experience has been corroborated with hundreds of other accounts of a similar nature using psychedelics for spiritual exploration. People have reported having acid trips that changed their lives forever, by essentially removing the way perception is filtered in normal brain functioning. They say they saw things they'd never seen before, on a physical or spiritual plane. Is all this a wonderful truth or a magnificent illusion?

There is no doubt now that non-ordinary states of consciousness, as Groff prefers to call them, can produce lasting improvements in the quality of living and in how we face death, and can do so from a single non-addictive psychedelic session.

What has been learned since the discovery of LSD is that this work must be undertaken in what I would call a person-centred setting (although researchers do not put it this way). It is vital that such trips be prepared for and conducted in a respectful, careful and thoughtful setting. As researchers would insist now, the set and setting is everything. That is a lesson we already knew in person-centred therapy.

What is most impressive is that these elevating results are not the effect of religious or cult indoctrination. They seem to arise out of the nature of the psyche itself.

Who knows where western humanity will go once it has gotten over its knee-jerk shock when these magic medicines were released into the headily ignorant sexual revolution of the 60s. Thankfully much work is now underway by organisations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). I’m sure these slow advances will eventually calm our nerves and trepidations.  

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

The felt-sense is an active intuition, a sort of internal guidance system, seeking out the lost parts of you that have been waiting to be found, waiting to be felt, waiting to be sensed – the parts of you that have been rejected and want to come home. In therapy, when a person trusts the felt-sense, the talk seems to wander all over the place. No one is guiding it, but it is a process of active intuition, honing in on exactly what avenues have to be explored and in exactly what sequence. Afterwards, it is only looking back on the session that we are aware of the purposeful tracking that has taken place – an expedition that apparently had the aim of naming an emerging reality – “What I looked upon as selfishness I now realise was my first attempts at a healthy self assertion”. The old reality (selfishness) has dissolved and there is now a new name for a new reality.

For an emerging reality to fully realise itself it has to have a new name. Here, two things have happen simultaneously: the awareness of a new ‘something’ and a new name for it: healthy self-assertion. Both the awareness and the new name are now the new way of looking. The old reality has been un-named.

Where a person’s felt-sense has been suppressed there can be no emerging dimensions of reality. Old realities cannot be unnamed; they remain one-dimensional and fixed. There are no doubts. There is a confidence of what is so. A mind with perfect confidence and stability is like a chemists’ lab where everything is classified, labeled and named. The advantage of this is that life seems to be clear cut and there is a certain feeling of rightness; the disadvantage is that there is no change. All attitudes are inflexible.

The process of therapy involves the naming of things, but it also undoes what has been named. Realities are constantly made and unmade. In the process we move through cycles of certainty and uncertainty as our picture of life dissolves and reassemble itself in new forms.

The naming of things is an indispensible psychic activity. It forms the solidity of the world. We imaging we know what things are. There are a great many things that need to be permanently fixed: my name and date of birth, which house I live in, the very house itself, the sky, the earth, my bank account number. Each of these has a name and a fairly fixed reality, (provided we are not on LSD). We count on no change – that when I wake up in the morning I will find the same world I left last night. When we name something we freeze-frame it; like a still photograph we keep for reference. It gives us our conceptual stability; indeed it keeps the world itself stable. An apple is an apple, a chair is a chair, meanness is meanness, a kind heart is a kind heart, the moon is the moon. The name of a thing tells us what it is and what it is not. We draw boundaries when we name things – each thing is then a discrete ‘itself’. You might say that naming is what makes ‘things’. When we do this, a thing is what it is and nothing else.

But the naming things can have a deleterious effect; we are inclined to get too occupied with the name of a thing than by the thing itself, we stop seeing things and concentrate on what they are called.  “Don’t think, look!” Wittgenstein urges us in his Philosophical Investigations.

There is a Zen saying, ‘name the colours, blind the eyes’. All the same, we need words to order the tumultuous impressions of experience; otherwise we would never be able to make up our mind about anything. When we call someone a ‘bully’ the word means something. Saying they are a bully gives us a grip on a doubtful character. Now we know what they are! We have ordered the world just that little bit more. We say that labels stick – and one would have to say, yes, that’s what they’re for !  They make for stability and understanding.

But given too much stability and we get stuck in a sea of categories and labels. Just like modern psychiatry is stuck in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). There is now hardly any aspect of normal human behavior that is not labeled a ‘mental disorder’. Great for medical diagnosis, but lacking a certain humanity, not to say, humility

Reality itself is remarkably diverse and as culture evolves and changes so do all the labels we give things. Masturbation is no longer an illness; an earthquake is no longer God’s vengeance; and dogs are now no longer just ‘pets’ but ‘caregivers’ (see RICH PICKINGS in the right hand column).

Living a realistic life involves the awareness of the way things change, the way ideas change, and this recognition requires that we be in touch life as an emergence; it means learning to undo what we have learned, undo what we have named. Not only is this true of psychological life, but it is also true of how genuine science works. Someone notices that the prevailing scientific paradigm doesn’t quite fit certain emerging facts. There is doubt and uncertainly, dissolving what we thought was fact and reason. ‘The earth is obviously flat, but why do a ship’s masks gradually disappear when it drops over the horizon?’ What we thought was true is refashioning itself.

The earth is not flat, of that we can now be certain, but doubt had to come first. Just as in therapy, as a new reality is emerging there is a sense of doubt. There is a pause, validating uncertainty. An obvious truth is suddenly in question. The old paradigm is dissolving. ‘Maybe it wasn’t selfishness, but a healthy self assertion I really needed to affirm – and I did.’ But doubt comes first. Only when you doubt a prevailing ‘truth’ can a new ‘truth’ emerge.

 Being able to tolerate doubt is what John Keats called the Negative Capability. ‘It is’, he said, when a person is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. We have learned to place such emphasis on positiveness and certainty we forget the value of the Negative Capability, the value of doubt and uncertainty. Without these our attitudes to life get frozen.

Dear old Aristotle gave us the classic view of unchanging stability. He said, roughly, that a thing cannot both be and not be – a law of logic that that consolidates fixed boundaries. But Heraclitus said that all is change and nothing stays the same. “We step and do not step into the same river, we are and we are not’.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

MEANING AND MADNESS

                                           by Stanley

We are the hollow men…
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
T.S.Elliot

The ‘meaning of life’ is something people crave if they haven’t got enough and are driven mad if they’ve got too much. Not enough 'meaning' is what we call ‘depression’; and too much is what we call ‘manic’.
       Too much and not enough meaning are both symptoms of despair. We meet the hollow men when our rage for life meets no one at home.
       Depression is easily spotted. People will say there’s no point to life, nothing in it – life has no meaning. But the other end of the scale, the manic end, can be a bit more deceptive; largely because our whole culture tends to favour a manic lifestyle. Existence is like rugby game - all push and shove and fight, where triumph and glory await you at the end. This type of mania is quite mad, but normal.
        Then there is the more 'clinical' mania regarded as abnormal. This is where a person turns the smallest details of life into stories pregnant with meaning and burgeoning with significance, where everything is monstrously larger than life, where a bird sitting on the garden fence is trying to tell me something; or spiritualising about the significance of the clock stopping at exactly twelve; or what did the postman mean when he said ‘good morning’ like that.
         But the world fraught with meaning comes in all shades from simple faith to the most bizarre superstitious concoctions. The more outlandish beliefs and meanings, separated by the distance of history, are easily recognizable for what they are. The Incas, for example, knew quite well the meaning of life. It was simply that the sun was hungry for blood and human hearts. So, twenty times a year there would be these wonderful festivals. A thousand celebrants, one by one, would ascend the sun-temple steps where a priest would raise the sacrificial knife and surgically gouge out their living hearts and hold them aloft still pulsing with blood – a gift to appease the sun-god.
        What is it? Is it the terror of nothingness that incites these profusions of significances with which we embellish life? It’s almost as if any meaning is better than none. When the Roman Empire was crumbling, astro-religion (astrology) swept through the population in a wild scramble for security – the stars as a comfort blanket. Every upper-class family had their personal astrologer who would daily announce the complicated conjunctions of the stars and what they meant – and god help the Emperor’s astrologer if he failed come up with a favourable prognostication or, if he did , it didn’t happen.
        Then there are the deep meanings that the great thinkers have given us. Saint Thomas Aquinas probably wrote the most influential philosophical theology of all time, trying to reconcile paganism with Christianity. The work of Doctor Angelicus, as he was known, has been the bedrock of church thinking for seven hundred years and is so even today. He wrote the most profound and scholarly tomes of drivel you could imagine; they had meaning for the time, but we never get to the small things: we never get to hear whether St. Thomas was worried about his piles when he went to the toilet. We only get the up market Big Stories of the more grandiose manic mind-set.
              Today some of the most revered masters of unfathomable meaning are our top physicists who search for a 'Theory of Everything'. even the authors themselves quite frankly admit that no one understands 'quantum mechanics' or 'string theory' or ' parallel universes'     
        I am impatient and sceptical with large-scale meaningful scenarios because they hide the really important issues in psychological life. Perhaps that’s their purpose. They encourage a cloak of grandiosity that covers up the small worries we think we should have grown out of. They inhibit reflection on the close, personal concerns in life that really mean something. Over and over in therapy we find it’s the small, childish things we overlook that really count. Simply acknowledging them can make a world of difference – helping us to be more relaxed about our frail humanity and what it all means.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264