The Appliance of Science (2/2): changing the brain

The previous post unpacked a diagram that attempted to look at some of the inner dynamics of the mind, as I see them. Although there were other inner forces that it didn’t look at such as the idea that will is a spiritual force rather than simply a product of the brain, it was still a fairly complex picture.  We examined the idea of reflection or disidentification as a powerful means of experiencing the true nature of our minds.  Now its the turn of a different idea: how the mind can change the brain. At the top of this post is a model of one aspect of that: at the bottom is a reminder of the diagram we are working from.

Changing the Brain

The other part of the power of Transactional Analysis (TA) comes from something else, something that is made more easily possible by the power of reflection but can be achieved without it. While TA has its own idea of what needs to be substituted for the bad habits we want to supplant, the focus now is on the underlying dynamic of the mind-brain interaction which makes it possible for TA, or any other system for that matter, to bring about enduring change if we deliberately persist with it long enough.

Every time I pull myself up short from implementing Oscar Wilde’s advice that the best way of getting rid of temptation is to give in to it, my brain changes as a result of the combined effects of focused attention and the exercise of deliberate choice. Even the habits of a lifetime can be changed in this way if the effort is repeated often enough.  Admittedly that can mean repeating the change thousands of times. It’s rather as though there are cart tracks which constant travel has carved deep into the brain: the wheels of the cart of our attention and thought constantly slip back into these ruts and it requires great effort to steer our cart out of them over and over again until other more constructive ruts have been laid down.

You may have already become aware that the diagram barely does justice to the unevenness of the contest here. It’s as though we are trying to listen to Handel‘s Messiah on an old-fashioned valve radio with a poor signal in the middle of a full-volume Black Sabbath concert. How can we boost the Messiah and muffle Black Sabbath?

Well, obviously we have to be clear that this is what we want to do at the deepest and most important level of our being, otherwise Black Sabbath will win every time. Then we have to recognise, as soon as we hear the first chord, that Black Sabbath is the music we have decided we do not want to listen to anymore. All too often we notice too late that we’re listening again and have moved nearer to the speakers drawn by fascination and habit. That gives Handel very little chance of ever being heard.

If we catch ourselves listening to Black Sabbath just as we are entering the O2 arena again (sorry about the anachronism – it just seemed the best short hand) we have more chance of moving towards the exit or finding a relatively quiet place and tuning into Handel. In terms of our old habit, we have to spot it as early as possible, stop it as fast as possible and swap it. You have to have a clear plan of the right thing to do instead. Doing nothing would be like not switching on the valve radio and failing to put anything else in place of Black Sabbath. Yet again Black Sabbath would win very time.

It is very hard indeed to follow this game plan with a long standing habit. It’s rather like learning to think in a new language, but it will work if we persist. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy makes it very clear that we have to be prepared to face discomfort, even painful experiences, along this path to constructive change: choosing discomfort over ease is something modern minds are not programmed to do. That may be the first hurdle we have to overcome. Also when we do slip back into the old habits, as we inevitably will, we need to remind ourselves that we are in this for the long haul: lapses are bound to happen but they don’t mean we have failed.

If we do manage to persist, it’s as though eventually we are able to upgrade our valve radio to a state of the art sound system leaving Black Sabbath with at best a couple of acoustic guitars and no microphone.

If we are dealing with a sudden temptation it may be enough to press the pause button before acting. This gives time for the most powerful part of the impulse to subside, for a process of reflection to take place and for us to do the right thing instead or act out the impulse more constructively. If acting on impulse is our pattern, then the same game plan as with tuning into the Messiah applies. We need to spot the impulse early, stop it in its tracks and put something more constructive in its place, over and over again before the habit of acting on impulse fades away and becomes something we can choose to do sometimes when it’s appropriate.

So the essence underlying the effectiveness of TA, and of many other therapies that claim to be unique for quite other reasons, is this two-fold pattern-breaking power: reflective disidentification and the deliberately chosen replacement of the destructive pattern of behaviour with a better one.  If, for example, we pursue the roots of our present conduct in the mind’s archaeology at the expense of using what we have learned to help us to distance ourselves from our habitual patterns and to replace them systematically with something more consistent with our highest values, then we will be mummified along with the remains we are exploring – the Freudian pun is intentional. Insight on its own often achieves nothing. Persistent action is also required as is the creative distance that comes from recognising that we are not the contents of our consciousness. We can choose to turn the mirror of our minds towards something completely different if we wish.

It’s probably obvious, but I’ll say it anyway before moving on, that reflection and disidentification as habitual practices (along with meditation, mindfulness etc), though special in their focus, achieve their transformative effects because they exploit the brain’s potential for neuroplasticity in exactly the same way as these other pattern-breaking techniques I have just described.

Whispers of the Spirit

It will also be obvious that I have focused primarily on internal dynamics and processes. I am well aware that external factors such as culture, religion, community and family all impact upon behaviour in significant ways. However, for the kinds of enduring changes in the brain that we have been dealing with here to take place, we have to feel we have freely chosen to act as we do, not done so as a result of irresistible external pressure. Work on cognitive dissonance indicates that the more you pay someone to argue against their own beliefs (i.e. the higher the perceived external pressure) the less likely someone is to change their mind. I suspect that those who have an extrinsic motivation (eg the desire to be accepted socially) to practice a religion, the less likely it is that their conformist behaviour will lead to inner transformation.

And this is where the last skill of all comes in and is so important if we are to experience ourselves as following an inner guide towards the highest possible values. It is something which seldom gets a mention in mainstream psychotherapy even now: tuning in to the whispers of the spirit rather than to the amplified ravings of our reptilian brain or the plausible rationalisations of our frontal lobes. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá expresses perfectly the nature of and need for this skill that can take us a lifetime to acquire:

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign (from God) in every phenomenon: the sign of the intellect is contemplation and the sign of contemplation is silence, because it is impossible for a man to do two things at one time—he cannot both speak and meditate.

It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.

(Paris Talks: page 174)

I didn’t begin meditating for another four years after my work in mental health began and I didn’t read those words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá until I became a Bahá’í, two more years at least further down the road. It seems you simply can’t rush this sort of thing.

I am aware that I may have packed too much into these posts for easy digestion and may have to come back to some of the themes to unpack them further, but I felt such a strong desire to catch these ideas on the wing before they flew away that I thought it best to write the posts anyway.  And it looks as though flowcharts don’t quite do the reality of all this justice after all. Maybe they help a bit though.

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The Appliance of Science? (1/2): stepping back

I’ve been doing a lot of book reviewing recently but I have not been sharing anything about what kinds of uses could be made of this knowledge. I’m going to have a trial run at doing that now.

In a previous post on a chapter from the Kellys’ substantial book, Irreducible Mind, I explained a little about the thresholds that place a filter between our consciousness and experiences from above and as well as experiences from below. This way of looking at things was originally derived from FWH Myers whose slightly confusing use of terminology I tried to clarify in that post using the diagram above.

I am planning to look at things from a slightly different angle now, more to do with the dynamics of the mind rather than its possible structure.

Reading, Writing and Relating, my three ‘R’s

In ‘My Background’ on this blog I have written: ‘I have been learning to use books and writing as two of the ways in which I can improve the maps I use to live by.’

My experiments with using what I was reading in this way began in earnest in the mid-70s. I had stepped back into the mainstream after living for nearly a year in communes devoted to bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. (I may write more about those some other time.) I was working in a day centre for mental health. It wasn’t the clients that stressed me out but the tensions between the manager and her deputy, both of whom were pulling in opposite directions. After a few months of using a glass of sherry to de-stress when I got home, I decided I needed a healthier remedy. I enrolled in a Transactional Analysis (TA) group (more on that too later, maybe). I also bought lots of books about mind work, and I kept a detailed journal of my reading and my reflections during this whole period and have continued the same practice for much of the time since.

TA was extremely helpful in assisting me in the management of my interactions with other members of staff, not only in terms of understanding better how I was getting hooked into unhelpful patterns of relating, but also in terms of how to straighten out my responses so that I could more successfully avoid the hooks. Journaling is a good way to think about your thinking if you go back over what you have written with a more dispassionate eye later.

Somehow, though, this was not enough.

I was convinced of this when, in one of the books I was reading at the time, I came across a most interesting way of expressing the problem. It went something like this. ‘Why would you give someone else the power to make you upset/sad/angry? It’s your mind. Why let them control it.’ At the time I’d never thought of things this way, or at least not so clearly.

TA took me only so far in my understanding of how this might work. Yes, it gave me tools to examine my thoughts and behaviour, to step back from them to some extent. It also gave me other ways of thinking and behaving to substitute for them. These are two very powerful processes for inner change. However, the emphasis was very much on the TA way of analysing what was happening and on substituting the TA remedy. It hid the essence underneath. The essence, as I now understand it, only gradually became apparent. It’s this essence I hope to unravel now.

Stepping Back

This diagram will hopefully help.

‘Well, that’s a fat lot of good!’ you shout, ‘I haven’t a clue what it means!’ And I can’t blame you for saying that. My initial response won’t be much help either: ‘I think in diagrams which saves an awful lot of words for me at the time.’

Now I realise I have to unpack what that means, of course. Behind those few coloured shapes and their labels stands my debt to Bahá’í ideas about the mind/soul/brain relationship, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, psychosynthesis, work on neuroplasticity, and a myriad other things I can’t call to mind right now. As this is not meant to be an academically respectable post, I’m not going to fret over that. Let’s get down to the basic practical implications.

The diagram represents the forces that might be impacting either directly or indirectly upon our consciousness and the decisions we make about what to do. We need to bring it down to earth a bit so we’ll start with a scenario.

Temptation Scenario

What does this vignette illustrate in terms of the diagram?

My values are clear: compassion is the key. They come, you could argue, from a sense of spirituality that says we are all in essence one and when I harm someone else I am harming myself. One model suggests that our mind is an emanation of the spirit and could convey to us intimations of such higher values. This would affect the way we feel about the situation we are in. The diagonal line in the feelings box is there to flag up that that such intimations do not have quite such direct access to consciousness as the more powerful signal from our drives. Using similar imagery to that which Myers employed, the membrane between my awareness and promptings of the spirit is not as permeable as my higher self would like it to be, though it’s probably far too leaky already as far as my lower self is concerned.

My drives, that can be described as coming from lower urges generated in my brain, are pushing me to secure a competitive advantage. They come through; loud – passions tend to run high; clear – I know exactly what the message is; and very swiftly – they often have a short cut to my attention that bypasses my higher cognitive functions: for those reasons they can all too easily commandeer my will to their purposes even under the best of circumstances. Even more so if I forget what I have decided is really important to me.

A pause for reflection before action is often imperative. Reflection is not just thinking, as I have explained in more depth in a previous post, but thinking about thinking, and allows us to step back from what we are experiencing and inspect it more carefully, not mistaking it for who we really are or for the truth. The disidentification exercise created by Roberto Assagioli is a key tool in learning to understand the power of this insight and how to apply it to our lives. This was part of the power of TA: it gave me some tools at least with which to think about my thoughts and feelings and about how to pull back from a complete identification with them. (Below is the adaptation of Assagioli’s disidentification exercise I made to reflect other traditions as well.)

This is only one half of the picture though. The other half will have to wait until the next post.

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An Angle on Suffering (3/3): the nature of choice

Had the life and growth of the child in the womb been confined to that condition, then the existence of the child in the womb would have proved utterly abortive and unintelligible; as would the life of this world, were its deeds, actions and their results not to appear in the world to come.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá inBahá’í World Faith: page 393)

In the previous two posts, I have been looking at Dabrowski’s Theory of Personal Disintegration (TPD) most particularly for what it has to say about suffering.

Both TPD and a rich and interesting approach to psychotherapy – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – owe much to existentialism. Mendaglio acknowledges his debt in the last chapter of the book he edited on this subject (page 251):

However, there is a great deal of similarity between existential psychology and the theory of positive disintegration. Both emphasise similar key concepts such as values, autonomy, authenticity, and existential emotions such as anxiety and depression. A more fundamental similarity is seen in the philosophical underpinnings of TPD, which is in large measure existentialism.

In spite of my own immense debt to existentialist thinking, only rivalled by my debts to Buddhism and to the Bahá’í Faith, I have certain reservations about Dabrowski’s take on the degree of choice we are able to exercise.

Crucial Caveats

His take on suffering is truly inspiring. Care needs to be taken though that we do not adopt this view in a way that assumes that those who are crushed by their sufferings are somehow to blame.

It is true that his model presupposes that each of us will probably meet a challenging choice point sometime in our lives, where we can either cling to the familiar comfortable half-truths that have failed us or strive to rise about them to higher levels of understanding. It is also true that he feels that many of us are capable of choosing the second option, if we only would.

However, not everyone is so lucky. I include here a brief summary of the life history of Ian – the man whose interview I have quoted extensively in the first three posts on An Approach to Psychosis.

His history shows very clearly that he could only make the second choice at times and then meet the pain and work through it to alleviate his tormenting voices. At other times the voices were preferable to experiencing the guilt and he chose what we might call madness rather than lucidity. Given the horrors he had faced it was clear that he should not be thought a failure. I would probably have done the same had I gone through what he had experienced in his life, from his earliest days.

Dabrowski seems to feel that our capacity to choose is genetically determined. Mendaglio explains (page 250):\

Dabrowski . . . . postulated the existence of a third factor of development, representing a powerful autonomous inner force which is rooted in the biological endowment of individuals.

It seems to me that it would have taken a truly exceptional individual to make the choice to experience Ian’s level of pain in order to progress. If that does not seem quite convincing, there is another case history I would like to share very briefly.

Among the sequence of posts related to mental health there is a poem called ‘Voices.’ The woman upon whose experiences that poem is based, was brutally abused by her father, sexually, and by her mother, physically, from her earliest years through her mid-teens.

She came to us to work on her father’s abuse. We developed a safe way of working which involved starting with 15 minutes exploring how things had been since we last met. Then we moved on to 15-20 minutes of carefully calibrated work on the abuse. Then the last half hour of the session was spent helping her regain her ordinary state after mind after the work on her early experiences had intensified her hallucinations.

After almost a year of this work things seemed to be going well. Then came the unexpected. She found herself in a building that closely resembled the building strongly connected with the worst episode of abuse she had experienced at the hands of her father. Just being there was more than she could cope with. She became retraumatised in a way we none of us could have anticipated or prevented. The next time we met she could not stop sobbing.

We discussed what she might do. There were two main options.

She could, if she wished, continue on her current low levels of medication and move into a social services hostel where she would be well supported while we continued our work together, or she could be admitted onto the ward and given higher levels of medication in order to tranquillise her out of all awareness of her pain.

She chose the second option and I could not blame her in any way for doing so. It would be a betrayal of the word’s meaning to suppose she had any real choice at that point but to remain psychotic while the medication kicked in rather than deal with the toxic emotions in which she felt herself to be drowning.

It is when I consider these kinds of situation at my current level of understanding of his theory, that I feel it could leave the door open to destructive attitudes.

He believes, if I have understood him correctly, that some people’s genetic endowment is so robust they will ultimately choose the harder option regardless of the environment in which they grew up. Most of us are in the middle and with an environment that is not too extreme we will do quite well. The endowment of some is so poor, he seems to be saying, that it requires an optimal environment if they are to choose to grow even in a modest way.

This approach, if I have got it right, has two problems. The first, which is less central to the theme of this post, is that it is perhaps unduly deterministic because of the power that is given to inherited ‘endowment’ to determine the life course of any individual. The second problem is more relevant to current considerations in this post, though related to the first point. By placing such a determining role upon heredity, the force of the environment may be unduly discounted.

I am not claiming that he attaches no importance to environment. In fact, education for example is much emphasised in his work and he is clearly aware that limited societies will be limiting most people’s development – and he would include the greedy materialism of Western cultures in that equation. I’m not sure where he would place the impact of natural disasters in his scheme of things.

He may though be minimising the crushing impact of such experiences as the two people I worked with had undergone, in the second case throughout almost all her formative years. Could a strong genetic endowment have endured such hardship and come through significantly less damaged? If you feel so, you may end up not so much thinking ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!’ but more ‘They broke because they were weak.’ Empathy, which Dobrawski values so much, would be impaired because we can start to define people as essentially different from us, not quite part of the same superior species.

More Complexities

This is a truly complex area to consider though, and I will have to restrict myself at this point to a very brief examination of one approach to it which does justice to that complexity.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his description of the various components of our character, suggests that what we inherit is a source of either strength or weakness (Some Answered Questions: page 213):

The variety of inherited qualities comes from strength and weakness of constitution—that is to say, when the two parents are weak, the children will be weak; if they are strong, the children will be robust. . . . . . For example, you see that children born from a weak and feeble father and mother will naturally have a feeble constitution and weak nerves; they will be afflicted and will have neither patience, nor endurance, nor resolution, nor perseverance, and will be hasty; for the children inherit the weakness and debility of their parents.

However, this is not quite the end of the matter. He does not conclude from this that moral qualities, good or bad, stem directly from the inherited temperament of an individual (pages 214-215):

But this is not so, for capacity is of two kinds: natural capacity and acquired capacity. The first, which is the creation of God, is purely good—in the creation of God there is no evil; but the acquired capacity has become the cause of the appearance of evil. For example, God has created all men in such a manner and has given them such a constitution and such capacities that they are benefited by sugar and honey and harmed and destroyed by poison. This nature and constitution is innate, and God has given it equally to all mankind. But man begins little by little to accustom himself to poison by taking a small quantity each day, and gradually increasing it, until he reaches such a point that he cannot live without a gram of opium every day. The natural capacities are thus completely perverted. Observe how much the natural capacity and constitution can be changed, until by different habits and training they become entirely perverted. One does not criticize vicious people because of their innate capacities and nature, but rather for their acquired capacities and nature.

Our habits and choices have a crucial part to play. Due weight though has also to be given to the power of upbringing and the environment (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Sec. 95, pp. 124–25):

It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or vilify him, for the child’s character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.

This theme is taken up most powerfully by the central body of the Bahá’í Faith ((Universal House of Justice: April 2000):

In the current state of society, children face a cruel fate. Millions and millions in country after country are dislocated socially. Children find themselves alienated by parents and other adults whether they live in conditions of wealth or poverty. This alienation has its roots in a selfishness that is born of materialism that is at the core of the godlessness seizing the hearts of people everywhere. The social dislocation of children in our time is a sure mark of a society in decline; this condition is not, however, confined to any race, class, nation or economic condition–it cuts across them all. It grieves our hearts to realise that in so many parts of the world children are employed as soldiers, exploited as labourers, sold into virtual slavery, forced into prostitution, made the objects of pornography, abandoned by parents centred on their own desires, and subjected to other forms of victimisation too numerous to mention. Many such horrors are inflicted by the parents themselves upon their own children. The spiritual and psychological damage defies estimation.

This position allows for the fact that we need to take responsibility for our own development while at the same time acknowledging that we may be too damaged by the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous’ upbringing to do so to any great extent without a huge amount of help from other people. And most of us are the other people who need to exert ourselves to protect all children and nurture every damaged adult who crosses our path to the very best of our ability. Maybe Dabrowski is also saying this, but I haven’t read it yet. Even so his thought-provoking message is well worth studying.

In the end though, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, any consideration of suffering that fails to include a reality beyond the material leaves us appalled at what would seem the pointless horror of the pain humanity endures not only from nature but also from its own hands. I may have to come back to this topic yet again.

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Willing Change (4/4): the first rule of holes

It has proved impossible in a few short posts to feel I have done justice to all that ACT has to offer. I have barely mentioned mindfulness at all, yet it is a key part of their approach. Perhaps this is not so important given how much literature there is around dealing with that reflective skill.

Less forgivable is the fact that I have only hinted at one of ACT’s most powerful antidotes to stuckness. They are very aware of the ways that language can be a trap (page 71), and very aware that most of us don’t see it like that:

Language is an extremely important element of human existence, but it is not everything. Perhaps more than any other behavioural domain, language products have been cultural sanctified to the point that seeing language itself as a problem is quite unlikely.

Hayes et al feel language deals very well with practical realities, but it has major limitations:

The fact is that language has a very limited capacity to apprehend and decipher personal experience, but we are taught from the moment of first consciousness that language is the tool for developing self-understanding

(Acceptance & Commitment Therapy: page 151):

In discussing their clinical work they write (page 183):

Most clients are initially so thoroughly trapped by this conceptual prison that they do not know and do not believe that they are imprisoned. The conceptual world in which they live is taken to be a given.

This is something very important of their own that they bring to the mix of other ingredients that are not unique to them. The way they have combined what is often found elsewhere is powerful and appealing in its own right: this lifts their recipe for change to another level altogether.

From a Bahá’í perspective this view of language makes a great deal  of sense. Paul Lample, in his excellent overview of the current work of the Faith Revelation & Social Reality, writes (page 18):

It can be argued that social reality emerges through the vehicle of language and, at the same time, language is a component of social reality. In essence, social reality is made up of words and meanings that human beings have agreed upon.

What words do not give is a complete and accurate description of reality (page 173):

. . . .reality does exist, but human beings are limited in their capacity for understanding and, therefore, must struggle over time to derive more useful descriptions and insights about reality that can guide more effective and productive action in the world.

One of the ways that ACT uses to help people free themselves from language traps is the liberating power of metaphor. It is using a richly evocative non-literal form of words to loosen the chains prosaic words have shackled us with. The Man in a Hole is a good example (pages 101-102)

The Man in a Hole Metaphor is a core ACT intervention in the early phase of therapy.

The situation you are in seems a bit like this. Imagine you’re placed in a field, wearing a blindfold , and you’re given a little tool bag to carry. You’re told that your job is to run around this field, blindfolded.  . . . . Now, unbeknownst to you, in this field there are a number of widely spaced, fairly deep holes. You don’t know that at first – you’re naive. So you start running around and sooner or later you fall into a large hole. You feel around, and sure enough, you can’t climb out and there are no escape routes you can find. Probably what you would do in such a predicament is to take the tool bag you were given and see what is in there . . . . Now suppose that the only tool in the bag is a shovel. . . . [Y]ou try digging faster and faster. . . . Oddly enough the hole [just gets] bigger and bigger. . . .  [D]igging is not a way out of the hole . . .

This metaphor is extremely flexible. It can be used to deal with many beginning issues.

And they go on to discuss how the need to understand the past can be a form of digging. They imagine an exchange with a client (pages 103-103):

“I’m not saying your past is unimportant, and I’m not saying we won’t work on issues that have to do with the past. . . . . [but] it is only the past as it shows up here and now that we need to work on – not the dead past. . . . [D]ealing with the past isn’t a way out of the hole.”

They also explain that the scariest step is stopping what doesn’t work before you know what might (page 103):

“Suppose someone put a metal ladder in there. If you don’t first let go of digging as the agenda, you’ll just try to dig with it. And ladders are lousy shovels – if you want a shovel you’ve got a perfectly good one already.”

What’s needed here, they say, is a leap of faith (pages 103-104):

‘[Because you are blindfolded] notice you can’t know whether you have any options until you let go of the shovel, so this is a leap of faith. It is letting go of something, not knowing whether there is anything else. . . .  [Y]our biggest ally here is your own pain. . . because it is only because this isn’t working that you’d ever even think of doing something as wacky as letting go of the only tool you have.”

This, as they put it, is the ‘opportunity presented by suffering.’ It needs to be added here that ACT distinguishes between pain and suffering. The latter is what we add to the pain life inevitably brings, and in general in their view (page 79) ‘suffering is the intrusion of language into areas where it is not functional:’ in other words we add to our pain with the suffering thinking, usually in words, can bring in its train.

So, where does all this leave us?

In previous posts on this issue we have seen how powerful a force for change acting courageously on our values can be. We have seen how important it can be to persist in the face of discouraging and uncomfortable experiences. We learnt the importance of distinguishing between the values we hold and the steps we take towards goals we believe express them: these may or may not be the same thing. Only a dispassionate look at the results will tell us whether we are moving in the direction the compass of what we truly value points us towards. All of this, I feel, is useful in deepening our understanding of the implications of what the Universal House of Justice is seeking to communicate to us.

In this post we have looked at how language can betray us into traps from which metaphor can release us and we have touched on the importance of being mindfully aware of what we are experiencing. We have already seen, in many other posts, how mindfulness of that kind can allow us to step back from inhibiting ideas of who we think we are and release energy to go in new directions.

This too is helpful. It seems to me that the Universal House of Justice, in its latest message, is re-emphasising once more how important reflection/mindfulness is (paragraph 10) when they describe how those working towards a vision of community building should operate:

. . . it is only through continued action, reflection and consultation on their part that they will learn to read their own reality, see their own possibilities, make use of their own resources, and respond to the exigencies of large-scale expansion and consolidation to come.

Consultation, as we have seen in a much earlier post, is a group process of reflection complementary to our work of reflection as individuals. Mindful awareness and detachment is at the heart of both ways of experiencing our inner, outer and social worlds.

In its exhortation to us to grasp the total vision, not just fragments of it, the House is also pointing up the traps of language we could fall into by turning guidance which is rich in implications into one-dimensional slogans. They are, in a sense, reminding us that we could end up in a hole as bad as that from which we wish to climb and as a result fall far short of the whole to which they are urging us to aspire (paragraph 37, already quoted in full in an earlier post):

. . . . achievements tend to be more enduring in those regions where the friends strive to understand the totality of the vision conveyed in the messages, while difficulties often arise when phrases and sentences are taken out of context and viewed as isolated fragments.

Seeing things as a whole is a right-brain gift that our left-brain culture in the West has taught us not to value. It seems to me that a book like the one about ACT can help us redress that imbalance if we are prepared to make the effort, and enable us to reach behind the wall of words and touch something closer to reality. If we do not make such an effort the complex coherence of texts such as those the Universal House of Justice creates will forever be beyond our understanding in practice, and, if so, we will be handicapped in our most important work and this will seriously delay us in helping to heal a broken world.

This is work that will not wait. I am hoping that writing my way towards understanding, on top of trying to put it into practice, will speed up my learning process. I also hope that by sharing it in this way I am at the very least not slowing you down in this work as you read.

A Wall of Words?

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Willing Change (3/4): adding value

. . . the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionising principle will increasingly empower individuals and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to . . . the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

(Universal House of Justice: 24 May 2001 in Turning Point page 164)

One of the most useful insights I gleaned from Hayes et al’s book on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy concerned their clear definition of a trap you can fall into when you firmly believe you are enacting your values. It’s when you confuse values with goals (page 231).

A value is a direction, a quality of action. By definition, values cannot be achieved and maintained in a static state, they must be lived out.

This was completely coherent with my own experience in my field of clinical work.

It is important therefore not to confuse values (why we do things) with the steps we have decided to take to enact them (the what) or even the outcomes that we hope to achieve as a result of those steps. We have to be open to the possibility that this step or that outcome, as we experience working in that way, comes to seem at odds with the value we are seeking to give expression to or with a value we come to realise is more fundamentally important to us than the one we thought we wanted to express.

It would be easier perhaps to give a concrete example.

A value that is central to the work of the Bahá’í Faith at the moment is making the world a better place by striving to empower others to help themselves. This is why we do much of what we do. Because Bahá’ís believe that this is a process that depends for its success upon spiritual power first and foremost, we are encouraged to hold devotional meetings. This is a key step (what) in our process of helping heal the world.

There is a third aspect to this though. Simply to invite people to our homes, sit down and say a few prayers, uplifting though that may be, is not enough. It might make some small contribution to improving the world, at least while it is happening. Prayers are powerful after all. But it is not in itself empowering others either to hold similar meetings of their own, or by the nature of what is happening to feel inspired to work for the well-being of their neighbours more than they do already. It needs to be spelt out that this is what such meetings are for. That will help. Even better is to see it create an opportunity for us all to link in with other experiences that will be more likely to change the way we behave towards others in the future. This relates to how we hold devotional meetings.

If we find that the way we host such meetings does not bring about such changes in us at least (and hopefully in other people who attend of course, but in the end they are free to choose what use they make of the experience) we may have to check out whether we have truly understood why we are holding them and the implications that has for how it should be done.

If we have failed to fully grasp the why of it (i.e. the value underpinning the activity) then we will fail fully to understand the how of it (i.e. the manner and spirit in which it should be carried out) and to that degree the action involved (i.e. the what) will not achieve its full potential. If we do not add into the mix of what we are doing a sense of its underlying value, what we do will fall seriously short of what needs to be done at this juncture in the world’s affairs. While you may not agree with the way I have defined the how and the why, the underlying concepts are what matter and hopefully the illustration has conveyed them clearly.

What is required of us if we are to succeed in doing that?

There is a key passage in the message from the Universal House of Justice of 28 December 2010. I believe it is so important that I am quoting paragraph 38 in full:

It is heartening to note that the friends are approaching the study of the messages of the Universal House of Justice related to the Plan with such diligence. The level of discussion generated as they strive to put into practice the guidance received, and to learn from experience, is impressive. We cannot help noticing, however, that achievements tend to be more enduring in those regions where the friends strive to understand the totality of the vision conveyed in the messages, while difficulties often arise when phrases and sentences are taken out of context and viewed as isolated fragments. The institutions and agencies of the Faith should help the believers to analyse but not reduce, to ponder meaning but not dwell on words, to identify distinct areas of action but not compartmentalize. We realize that this is no small task. Society speaks more and more in slogans. We hope that the habits the friends are forming in study circles to work with full and complex thoughts and to achieve understanding will be extended to various spheres of activity.

It is useful to note in passing that the Plan referred to is one designed to lift our attempts at community-building to a level where the healing of society becomes increasingly within the reach of those who are empowered by the processes we are piloting. It is also worth picking up on the need to apply our understanding, and learn from the results, if our understanding is to improve. The value of this is unpacked very clearly by Peter Reason when he says:

. . . [T]he practice of co-operative inquiry requires skills which are in short supply in our world today - particularly the skills of working in genuine collaboration on a complex task with a group of peers; of managing the anxiety which arises as we genuinely examine our world and our practice; of paying critical attention to our experience as we act in our world. All these skills are important; the last calls for a subtle rigour of consciousness which is particularly unusual. . . . These skills can only be learned through doing.

(From The Co-operative Inquiry Group in Human Inquiry in Action, page 19)

In terms of our theme of the moment though it is crucial to be clear that the study of the messages of the House of Justice (the what in this case), if we are to be true to the purposes for which we are studying them (the why, i.e. to learn how to build a better world), then we must be careful how we approach the task (i.e. we need to do it in a way that helps us to ‘understand the totality of the vision.’)

This interaction between why, how and what underpins almost everything we do. The three aspects are not always so conveniently located in one place, as in this example, but making sure we pull them together in our minds is one way of ensuring that we do not take things out of context or treat them as isolated fragments. You cannot get a better grasp of the picture in a tapestry by unravelling the different coloured threads. You have to find a way of holding their relationships more vividly in mind.

It is a valuable exercise for any of us to try to pick up on how these three ways of thinking about what we are doing sometimes have to be pulled together from different places, not only from within one message from the Universal House of Justice but also on occasions from across several messages written at different points in time.

In the next post all we will have time to do is look at another small set of key ideas from ACT and how they might illuminate the path we are seeking to tread. The focus will be partly on language and its weaknesses and potential dangers.

An interesting slant on how slogans can be unhelpful when we come to act in the real world was pointed up in a recent BBC exploration of fairness and the ‘big society” with Professor Michael Sandell and an audience in the lecture theatre at the London School of Economics (I cannot find it on iPlayer now though there is a series still there which is cast in the same format but at Harvard).

The vast majority of the LSE audience considered the big society to be a slogan with little practical meaning in the real world. Further exploration revealed though that the audience as whole, regardless of position on the slogan issue, had some highly significant common ground. There is ‘an important public space,’ Sandell summed up by saying, for ‘civic activism and engagement,’ which, in the words of one of the audience, is the ‘third leg of the stool’ to complement the state and the market.

This space is clearly where cultural creatives operate. Certainly it is where the Bahá’ís are working in the Western world, where states and markets are strong. The slogan, for this audience at least, seemed to have failed to grasp and convey this complex reality.

The debate, though, still missed what Karlbeg points up, which makes describable reality even more complicated than the slogan: the modern state and the modern market are rooted in a competitive model of the social and political world, whereas the LSE debate highlighted that civic activism has to work with dialogue and co-operation. If the modus operandi of this third leg spreads to the other two, in the market place and in politics, there would be very interesting consequences for the way the world develops. But that is another story, and one this blog has explored already from many different angles (see the Karlberg link above for a good example).

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Willing Change (2/4): lifting our game

In order to fully understand the power and range of ACT‘s ideas, which are pulled together from a number of traditions, it helps to look at what other thinkers have shared. I feel this seeming digression is needed if some of the fog around their language is to lift.

We have met Koestenbaum, the existential philosopher, in the context of reflection, and his ideas also relate to translating values into higher realities in the personal world, an issue close to the heart of ACT. Much of what they borrowed from existentialism can be found in his book, far more clearly expressed.

When I lived in London more than twenty years ago, at least once a month, sometimes more often, I  would set out from my house in Hendon and either turn left, heading for the library nearby on foot, or step into my car and drive down the North Circular to Hendon Way, then onto the Finchley Road to the library at Swiss Cottage. Upstairs there they housed a wealth of books on philosophy and psychology.  I borrowed his book, The New Image of the Person from Swiss Cottage library in early September 1982. It is the only book of that period in my life from which I have kept such hugely detailed notes. I finished my encounter with it in October the same year, shortly before I became aware I was a Bahá’í. It had a huge impact on me as a person and as a therapist. Maybe I shall blog about that some day. For now one small quote will do. He writes:

. . . the retreat of consciousness from lower identifications enables it to realise (understand and bring into being) increasingly higher levels of being.

The notes form part of the journal I kept in those days. Jottings about the day’s events are mixed with long quotes from whatever book I was reading at the time. Revisiting the journal entries around these quotes from Koestenbaum’s book gave me at least one mild surprise.

Half my notes from his book are in a rust red notebook that ends in September 1982. I started a new notebook on 3rd October stating:

I think I am at the beginning of a very long climb upwards. . . . . Perhaps the best thing I can do is read that book on clinical philosophy for some hints about how to give a banal life some meaning.

It had become clear, in some work I did with a Jungian therapist, that I had a bit of a problem with commitment. We discussed this and concluded that my epitaph would read: ‘He died with his options open.’

The issues were clarified but remained unresolved until,I think, the ideas in Koestenbaum’s book helped me move beyond that problem and also gave me a strong steer towards an acceptance of the Bahá’í Faith when I finally read a book about it in late November that same year. It could go some way to explaining my extreme excitement when I came across the identical ideas nearly 25 years later in the ACT book without at that time having any awareness of the link the journal supplied. I thought I’d read the book much earlier than 1982.

This indicates to me how powerfully the application of what I read to the way I live lifts my life sometimes to higher levels. Reading can have the opposite effect, of course, and my early taste for escapist fiction may have seriously arrested my development well into my twenties.

In previous posts I have dealt with two issues that relate to what I am about to explore. The first concerns the proven power of the mind, when deliberately focused, to change the brain. The second concerns the power that reflection has for individuals and consultation for groups to unhook us from unhelpful habits of thinking, feeling, behaviour and self-image. Much of that thinking underpins the ideas this post explores but it would be impossible to rehearse them all over again.

In an earlier post on motivation I looked at certain basic ideas in the ACT approach that might begin to help us enact our values more effectively and over sufficiently long periods to make a real difference to our world. An unusually clear statement of their position comes on page 238:

Applying willingness to support action consistent with chosen values is a central goal of act.

They also explain that ‘willingness is not wanting. It is an act of choice.’ They use the example of a marriage to illustrate exactly what they mean. Their explanation repays careful reading and re-reading (pages 218-219).

Marriage is a commitment, yet half of all marriages end in divorce. How could this be? In part it occurs because people do not know how to make commitments. They try to make them on the basis of judgements, decisions, and reasons, not choices. In so doing they put their commitments greatly at risk. Suppose, for example, that a man marries a woman “because she is beautiful.” If his spouse then has a horribly disfiguring accident, that implies that the reason for marriage has left. . . . . This kind of thing happens all the time when people marry and later find that they no longer have the same feelings of love towards their spouses. Marrying because of love is considered quite reasonable in our culture, and love is dominantly thought to be a feeling, not a kind of choice. But feelings of love are extremely unpredictable. . . . . [W]e say that we fall into and fall out of this emotional state . . . It should not then be a surprise when we fall into and fall out of marriages in much the same way.

If the client can learn to make choices in these areas, things work differently. Consider how much easier it is to keep a marriage vow if marriage is based on a choice to marry and if love is considered to be a choice to value the other and hold the other special.

This idea of commitment may go some way towards helping us understand more fully what the Universal  House of Justice is requiring of us when they ask (Turning Point page 164) for a ‘[c]ommitment to [the] revolutionising principle’ of accepting ‘responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family.’

These concepts and practices, so close to those of Koestenbaum, gel with similar ideas in many other thinkers I have been exposed to, both at the time and later. It is worth quoting from some other writers to demonstrate how important this group of ideas is and how prevalent they are. They help clarify the core point.

Aspects of Consciousness in Psychosynthesis

Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, is one person who shares a similar perspective. His view is that we are being raised by a higher force ‘into order, harmony and beauty,’ and this force is ‘uniting all beings . . . . with each other through links of love’ (Psychosynthesis: page 31). He explores what we might do to assist that process, and what he says resonates with Schwartz’s idea that persistent willed action changes brain structure. He writes (The Act of Will: page 57):

Repetition of actions intensifies the urge to further reiteration and renders their execution easier and better, until they come to be performed unconsciously.

And he is not just talking about the kind of physical skills we met with in Bounce. He goes on to say (page 80):

Thus we can, to a large extent, act, behave, and really be in practice as we would be if we possessed the qualities and enjoyed the positive mental states which we would like to have. More important, the use of this technique will actually change our emotional state.

This is what, in the realm of psychology, underpins the power of determination that the Universal House of Justice refers to in paragraph 5 of their 28 December 2010 message:

Calm determination will be vital as [people] strive to demonstrate how stumbling blocks can be made stepping stones for progress.

And this determination will need to be collectively sustained over generations because building a new world is

. . . an enterprise of infinite complexity and scale, one that will demand centuries of exertion by humanity to bring to fruition. There are no shortcuts, no formulas. Only as effort is made to draw on insights from His Revelation, to tap into the accumulating knowledge of the human race, to apply His teachings intelligently to the life of humanity, and to consult on the questions that arise will the necessary learning occur and capacity be developed.

(Universal House of Justice: 21 April 2010 – para 25)

As an intriguing note to end this post on, it is interesting to see that even from well beyond the edge of widely accepted thought, where you might expect to find a laissez faire laid-back do-your-own-thing approach extolled, this kind of discipline is sometimes recommended. Jim Leonardand Phil Laut wrote in their book on Rebirthing (page 224):

Discipline means staying with your plan and integrating the cross-current desire. Discipline is the virtue that is cultivated with repetition and is one of the greatest privileges of being a free human being. Indeed it is impossible to be free without it. Some people think that freedom means freedom to satisfy their desires, but that is just slavery to desires. Real freedom means being able to choose where you are going with your life and then going there. Discipline means knowing what your goal is and then doing what it takes to action it.

Of course, there is a catch to that last point.  What goals you set, and whether they will be ultimately self-serving or altruistic, depend upon the values you have.

And that brings us back to ACT once more and the way it is helping me understand many of the implications of the latest complex and demanding message of the Universal House of Justice. Because each point the authors make is so rich in possibilities we will only be able to focus on one or two key issues in their approach in this sequence of posts. If I ever get round to doing a review of Koestenbaum’s book there will be an opportunity to unravel more.

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