What’s so special about the 23rd of May?

Room in the House of the Báb

On the 22nd May the world will again start to be circled in celebration. About two hours after sunset, when the new day starts for us, Bahá’ís everywhere will come together to share prayers, readings and music in memory of a very special event. What’s it all about?

In this ordinary room pictured on the left, 166 years ago, an important meeting took place. It began a process that is still unfolding to this day.  For Bahá’ís this meeting has a very special meaning, the full significance of which would not be immediately obvious  to all those attending a typical Holy Day Celebration. This is a brief attempt to unpack its key significance in the words of the central figures of the Faith.

The Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith opened his description of the event with these words:

May 23, 1844, signalizes the commencement of the most turbulent period of the Heroic Age of the Bahá’í Era, . . . . . No more than a span of nine short years marks the duration of this most spectacular, this most tragic, this most eventful period of the first Bahá’í century. . . . .

He continued:

The opening scene of the initial act of this great drama was laid in the upper chamber of the modest residence of the son of a mercer of Shiraz, in an obscure corner of that city. The time was the hour before sunset, on the 22nd day of May, 1844. The participants were the Báb, a twenty-five year old siyyid, of pure and holy lineage, and the young Mulla Husayn, the first to believe in Him. Their meeting immediately before that interview seemed to be purely fortuitous. The interview itself was protracted till the hour of dawn.

He quoted the words of Mulla Husayn:

“This Revelation,” Mulla Husayn has . . .  testified, “so suddenly and impetuously thrust upon me, came as a thunderbolt which, for a time, seemed to have benumbed my faculties. I was blinded by its dazzling splendor and overwhelmed by its crushing force. Excitement, joy, awe, and wonder stirred the depths of my soul. .  . . . .

And concludes:

With this historic Declaration the dawn of an Age that signalizes the consummation of all ages had broken.

Shoghi Effendi: God Passes By, Pages: 3-8

(For a more detailed sense of what happened see this link.)

`Abdu’l-Bahá in America

`Abdu’l-Bahá, in His visit to America in 1912, spoke briefly of the day itself:

It is a blessed day and the dawn of manifestation, for the appearance of the Báb was the early light of the true morn, whereas the manifestation of the Blessed Beauty, Bahá’u'lláh, was the shining forth of the sun. . . . On this day in 1844 the Báb was sent forth heralding and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, announcing the glad tidings of the coming of Bahá’u'lláh and withstanding the opposition of the whole Persian nation.

He then gave a brief outline of the events that followed, detailing the ensuing persecution which was severe and persists, of course, until today in Iran:

Some of the Persians followed Him. For this they suffered the most grievous difficulties and severe ordeals. They withstood the tests with wonderful power and sublime heroism. Thousands were cast into prison, punished, persecuted and martyred. Their homes were pillaged and destroyed, their possessions confiscated. They sacrificed their lives most willingly and remained unshaken in their faith to the very end.

The Báb was subjected to bitter persecution in Shiraz, where He first proclaimed His mission and message. A period of famine afflicted that region, and the Báb journeyed to Isfahan. There the learned men rose against Him in great hostility. He was arrested and sent to Tabriz. From thence He was transferred to Maku and finally imprisoned in the strong castle of Chihriq. Afterward He was martyred in Tabriz.

He holds up the life and sacrifices of the Báb as an example:

We must follow His heavenly example; we must be self-sacrificing and aglow with the fire of the love of God. We must partake of the bounty and grace of the Lord, for the Báb has admonished us to arise in service to the Cause of God, to be absolutely severed from all else save God during the day of the Blessed Perfection, Bahá’u'lláh, to be completely attracted by the love of Bahá’u'lláh, to love all humanity for His sake, to be lenient and merciful to all for Him and to upbuild the oneness of the world of humanity. Therefore, this day, 23 May, is the anniversary of a blessed event.

`Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace, Pages: 138-139

So, there are implications in these events, remote though they seem to most of us in both time and place,  for how we should conduct ourselves today. The Guardian unravelled some of these possibilities in the following passage.

The moment had now arrived for that undying, that world-vitalizing Spirit that was born in Shiraz, that had been rekindled in Tihran, that had been fanned into flame in Baghdad and Adrianople [i.e. the places to which Bahá'u'lláh was successively exiled], that had been carried to the West, and was now illuminating the fringes of five continents, to incarnate itself in institutions designed to canalize its outspreading energies and stimulate its growth. [My emphasis] The Age that had witnessed the birth and rise of the Faith had now closed.  . . . . .

The Formative Period, the Iron Age, of that Dispensation was now beginning, the Age in which the institutions, local, national and international, of the Faith of Bahá’u'lláh were to take shape, develop and become fully consolidated, in anticipation of the third, the last, the Golden Age destined to witness the emergence of a world-embracing Order enshrining the ultimate fruit of God’s latest Revelation to mankind, a fruit whose maturity must signalize the establishment of a world civilization and the formal inauguration of the Kingdom of the Father upon earth as promised by Jesus Christ Himself.

(God Passes By, page 324)

Even such a powerful explanation as this does not convey the full impact of this Revelation on the lives of all Bahá’ís nor explain in terms which are easy for everyone to grasp why the core of the Bahá’í vision applies to everyone, Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í alike.

Shrine of the Báb at Night

In 2001 the central body of the Faith wrote a message to all those assembled in Haifa to witness the ceremony that marked the completion of the Terraces that climb above and descend below the Shrine of the Báb. The core paragraphs for our present purpose begin by explaining what the Faith and all our activities within it are for:

Reflection on what the Bahá’í community has accomplished throws into heartbreaking perspective the suffering and deprivation engulfing the great majority of our fellow human beings. It is necessary that it should do so, because the effect is to open our minds and souls to vital implications of the mission Bahá’u’lláh has laid on us. “Know thou of a truth,” He declares, “these great oppressions that have befallen the world are preparing it for the advent of the Most Great Justice.” . . . .  In the final analysis, it is this Divine purpose that all our activities are intended to serve, and we will advance this purpose to the degree that we understand what is at stake in the efforts we are making to teach the Faith, to establish and consolidate its institutions, and to intensify the influence it is exerting in the life of society.

They make completely explicit the change in our way of thinking that is required of us:

Humanity’s crying need will not be met by a struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness, for a wholehearted embrace of Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching that 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 revolutionizing principle will increasingly empower individual believers and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to the Day of God and to the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world. We demonstrate this commitment, Shoghi Effendi tells us, by our rectitude of conduct towards others, by the discipline of our own natures, and by our complete freedom from the prejudices that cripple collective action in the society around us and frustrate positive impulses towards change.

(From the 24 May 2001 message from the Universal House of Justice to the Believers Gathered for the Events Marking the Completion of the Projects on Mount Carmel)

So, in short, the Báb surrendered His life to show us the way. Bahá’u'lláh endured roughly 50 years of imprisonment, torture and exile as He explained to us in detail what was required. The rest is up to us.

Flowers near the Shrine

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Recommended: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Baha’u'llah’s Declaration

I came across an interesting post on the subject of Ridván through the Huffington Post. Below is an extract: for the full article please click on the link.

On April 21 this year, the Baha’i community will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the day when Baha’u'llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, first publicly announced His mission in a garden in Baghdad, thus beginning the Baha’i community that today comprises virtually all the races of humankind in more than 200 countries and territories.

In a sense, the global festivities involving people of thousands of ethnic backgrounds is representative of the key message of the Baha’i Faith: that a time of happiness has arrived for the entire human race as it gradually moves from a state of collective adolescence to a stage of maturity and wholeness. “We desire the good of the world and the happiness of the nations,” said Baha’u'llah to Edward Granville Browne, the Cambridge University scholar who interviewed Him in 1890, “that the bonds of affection and unity between the sons of men should be strengthened … what harm is there in this? … these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the ‘Most Great Peace’ shall come.” These words provide an outline of the aim of Baha’u'llah’s teachings and the work of the Baha’i community today.

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Recommended: ‘A radiant heart.’

A good friend posted this on Facebook. It seemed a good idea to share it! The words comprise the first of the Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh:

O SON OF SPIRIT! My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.

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Near-Death Experiences Revisited (3/3): And then what?

I had some conversations with the Light. The Light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images and signs. I asked the Light, “What is going on here? Please, Light, clarify yourself for me. I really want to know the reality of the situation.” I cannot really say the exact words, because it was sort of telepathy.

The Light responded. The information transferred to me was that during your life after death experience your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before the Light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have a chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not.

(From the NDE Story 
of Mellen-Thomas Benedict - for more see YouTube video below)

Two Main Elements

The last post, after looking at the issue of whether there is a real experience here or just a story, paused before looking at two examples of so-called core elements of the Near-Death Experience. Though widely known, their exact significance has been hard to pin down. Mark Fox continues his exploration.

1. The Being of Light

It has long been understood that the meaning people place on this part of the experience is strongly influenced by their background culture and the nature of their religious beliefs. He quotes Badham quoting Evans-Wentz (page 71):

To appeal to a Shaivite devotee, the form of Shiva is assumed, to a Buddhist the form of the Buddha Shakya Muni; to a Christian, the form of Jesus;  to a Muslim the form of the Prophet; and so far other religious devotees, and for all manner and conditions of mankind a form appropriate to the occasion.

He accepts (page 106) the theoretical ‘possibility . . . . that there is more than one light.’ However, Badham’s position clearly makes sense to him (page 107):

. . . that some sort of transcendent core being is encountered by everybody but interpreted by them in accordance with their respective cultural backgrounds.

He explores certain problems with that which it would be impossible to deal with at length here but can be summarised by saying that there is quite a degree of variation in the interpretations given to this part of the experience. Some even feel the light has no personality at all. It therefore remains a possibility that too facile a conclusion that it must be Christ or Muhammad or the Buddha needs to be avoided.

Even so the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) data is illuminating here (page 299):

[In previous studies] the light appears to fulfil the function of a judge, divine presence, psychopomp, or identifiable religious figure. This was clearly not the case with the RERC study, in which the light manifested or contained an identifiable presence, personality or role in only two out of the thirteen CE  accounts in which it figured. However, analysis was complicated by the fact that whilst the definite and recognisable presence was only manifested in the light on two occasions, a very significant number of other respondents – no less than eight out of the remaining eleven – reported usually overwhelming sensations of love, peace or calm either within or coming from the light indicating that it was the source of a range of identifiable feelings and therefore in some sense the possessor of personality.

The Tunnel

The tunnel with the oncoming light has formed a central element in the neuroscientific explanation of the NDE. Even in its simple form, though, the explanation has been challenged by Peter Fenwick and others. The RERC data allows for even more doubt to be cast upon it (page 262):

What should be done with accounts that included descriptions of the seemingly similar – perhaps identical – experience but which words such as ‘void’, ‘whirlpool’, ‘passage’ or ‘shaft’ to describe it? Nowhere here it is absolutely clear that a tunnel is being described. Neither is it clear that in each case the feature is black or dark.

He feels that their sheer variety casts serious doubts on a neuroscientific explanation.

There is another equally interesting dimension (page 276-277):

Before moving on, mention must be made of the curiously high incidence of descriptions of outer space encountered in this phase of the investigation. . . . . . At the very least, however, we have a total of five CE and non-CE accounts out of a total of 24 which describe an encounter with some sort of darkness motif in terms seemingly suggestive of a visit to outer space: more than 20% of the total.

It is for this reason that he feels that his study must part company with previous accounts (page 278), ‘having found descriptions of tunnels to be in the minority, having also found that other descriptors are more frequently chosen as preferred ways of describing experiences of darkness, voids and – in some cases – transitions to other realms.’

The Impact

Before we consider what all this might mean, there is one other important element to consider: the effects these experiences have upon the lives of those who have lived through them. While a strong effect on the person afterwards does not prove the experience is ‘real’ it certainly adds weight to that possibility.

Starting with Hampe in 1979 Fox reviews the traces of this theme at various places in his book (page 59):

Hampe draws attention to the transformative effects of such experiences and the possible therapeutic application of his discoveries, devoting a chapter to the ways in which exposure to such experiences may have beneficial results of the field of medicine, pastoral counselling, and for the clergy generally.

The close links with other forms of spiritual experience also becomes apparent (page 83):

[Cressy notes parallels with mystical experience] drawing attention to the transformative effects produced in the lives of both mystics and NDErs as a result of their experiences. Here, she notes, changes in the sense and meaning of the self reported by NDErs and mystics are similar, including increased feelings of self-worth and enhanced feelings of love for mankind.

Obviously therefore these after-effects are to be found in the accounts of the RERC archive. There is one particularly beautiful example (page 285):

Since the phenomenon, I have had a sense of belonging, as if I were related to every rock, tree, flower, mountain, cloud, animal and person. I am truly concerned about them and I feel a great love for everyone and everything in the universe. In other words, I am in attunement with my world, which is the whole world.

So what?

Carl Jung

So where exactly does all this richly varied but closely linked body of evidence leave us. For Fox there is a core issue (page 345):

In the light of the recognition that testimonies to NDEs are all we possess, near-death researcher Robert Kastenbaum is surely right to draw attention to the crucial issue of whether an NDE is, in fact, an experience or a report of experience.

There follows a complex consideration of this question, all the twists and turns of which are too many to include here. Instead I’ll just pick up briefly on two basic threads.

He looks at Kellehear’s theory that NDEs depict a kind of ‘transcendent society’ (page 354). He feels that as such they will appeal to many people in the West.

. . . . in its implied criticism of many of the dominant values of modernity such as competition and selfishness and its promotion of others such as spirituality and humanism, it has a post-modern appeal: it shares post-modernity’s loss of faith in many of the grounding convictions of modernity, including those which have exploited and oppressed the human spirit in the name of greed and the obsession to acquire.

He also considers Grosso’s work, which is rooted in Jungian archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious (page 357):

NDEs, like archetypes, contain the cross-cultural consistency that the collective unconsciousness bestows, combined with the cross-cultural variation which their location in time and space inevitably creates.

He feels this last possibility has great explanatory power and points the way towards future avenues of fruitful research.

In fact, the main emphasis of his concluding chapter revolves around encouraging researchers to sink their sometimes acrimonious differences and buckle down to a serious and prolonged investigation of this phenomenon, pooling their knowledge as they go rather than each school prizing their own perspective to the exclusion of all others. His most eloquent advocacy of this deserves quoting at length at the conclusion of this series of posts (pages 344-45):

Narrative theology can explore ways in which emplotment turns experience into story. Psychology of religion can make its own contributions to exploring naturalistically the aetiology of the NDE, responding and contributing to the valuable insights provided by secular neuroscience. Sociology of religion can investigate the social and cultural forces that call forth the need for new myths when old myths lose their power. Philosophy of religion can test the epistemological accuracy and phenomenological cogency of the claim that a common core underlies the variety of reported religious experiences across cultures, including, of course, the end NDE. And so on.

I suppose in a way I have copped out here and told you where this all leaves him while remaining silent about where I find myself right now. Perhaps there’s only really time for one brief observation. When confronted by the question ‘Is any of this true ?’ I remember the words of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh (Gleanings: LXXXII):

Thou hast asked Me concerning the nature of the soul. Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel.

It therefore seems inevitable that something so transcendent would be experienced by people in many different ways, all of those ways representing an aspect of the reality of that experience. The same would therefore apply to all parts of the spiritual realm. That the descriptions vary while containing a core of common resonance is precisely what you would expect. So for me this thorough and dispassionate treatment of this all-important subject confirms me in my feeling that something real but ineffable is being described.

And I am speaking as someone who found the idea of an immortal soul one of the most difficult ideas to accept when I became a Bahá’í. I simply couldn’t understand why beings so seemingly inconsequential when compared to the awesome glory of the universe as whole should have been gifted with something so precious. It was far easier to accept the idea of God in the Bahá’í Writings as an unknowable Great Being whose consciousness had brought this all into being and was holding it in place. But that is another story for another time, I think.

Postscript

A comment from Kristine on a previous post pointed me in the direction of Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven. The experience he describes has a bearing on almost all the issues dealt with in this sequence of posts. In the New Year it is almost inevitable that I will write about it.

Edited Extracts

Extraneous material cut out of interview from Mellen Benedict speaking on coastam with George Noory 

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Liberalism vs Conservatism: reflections in the wake of an election

Divided We Fall

Now we have the results of the US Presidential election, there may be an opportunity to reflect upon some underlying aspects of the polarised debate between left and right without getting pulverised with arguments from one side of the divide or the other. A fascinating treatment of some of these underlying issues is to be found in Jonathan Haidt‘s recent book, The Righteous Mind.

He begins his analysis with a study of how well each side of the divide understands the other side’s mind set, acknowledging that he tends to favour the liberal emphasis on the individual rather than society.

He reckons the findings were unequivocal (page 287):

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

Haidt is very honest about his own initial biases (page 289):

As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.

The source of the study data takes a different view (ibid):

But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances.

Moral and Social Capital

He reviews his previous position and admits (pages 289-90):

I began to see that [conservatives] had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital.

This is strongly linked to another kind of capital (page 290):

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors.

He spells out the link with morality (page 291):

To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital.

And he goes on to state (page 292):

. . . . . we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community . . . . . .  and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

Unfortunately, this moral and social capital is a mixed blessing (page 293):

Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.

He feels that the liberal-left is prone to discounting or ignoring the value of this kind of capital and that is a risky position to take (page 293):

. . . . .if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism.

The Need for Balance

He feels that both political perspectives are necessary for a state to be healthy. He quotes John Stuart Mill (page 294):

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

He proceeds to examine various aspects of the moral matrices of the two camps. This clarifies that on the American political scene the word ‘libertarian’ denotes someone of a conservative mind set.  He teases out some important aspects of this world view in order to get out from under his preconceptions about it (pages 305-306):

[Libertarians] do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family).

He unpacks this (page 307):

We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital. . . . . To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

John Stuart Mill

So, after this analysis of the way that liberals, with whom he identifies, fail to understand some of the crucial insights of their political opponents (and of course vice versa), he reflects upon a disturbing trend (page 309):

America’s political class has become far more Manichaean since the early 1990s, first in Washington and then in many state capitals. The result is an increase in acrimony and gridlock, a decrease in the ability to find bipartisan solutions. . . . .

The recent election has done nothing to reduce the potential damage that might ensue from this mutual incomprehension and increased polarisation. The US still has a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. This polarisation does not stop there though, he argues (page 311):

Our counties and towns are becoming increasingly segregated into “lifestyle enclaves,” in which ways of voting, eating, working, and worshipping are increasingly aligned.

Transcending the Divide

So, it seems pretty clear that a society that is divided, to put it simply, between those who place individual rights and freedoms first on the grounds of compassion and those who most value community solidarity on the grounds of fairness and responsibility, may not be able to sink its differences effectively enough to achieve the objectivity and unity of vision that will enable it to solve its problems.

From my point of view as a Bahá’í the way out of this stalemate is as plain as a pikestaff – not that you see many of those about these days. We need to develop a perspective that balances the rights of the individual with the needs of society. Even at this early stage in its development the Bahá’í Faith offers some fruitful insights into how this balance might ultimately be achieved.

The central body of the Bahá’ís has shared some profound reflections on this subject:

Freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of action are among the freedoms which have received the ardent attention of social thinkers across the centuries. The resulting outflow of such profound thought has exerted a tremendous liberating influence in the shaping of modern society. Generations of the oppressed have fought and died in the name of freedom. Certainly the want of freedom from oppression has been a dominant factor in the turmoil of the times: witness the plethora of movements which have resulted in the rapid emergence of new nations in the latter part of the twentieth century. A true reading of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh leaves no doubt as to the high importance of these freedoms to constructive social processes.

They are in no doubt though that we cannot uncritically espouse the ideal of freedom at all costs:

Bahá’u’lláh’s assertions clearly call for an examination of current assumptions. Should liberty be as free as is supposed in contemporary Western thought? Where does freedom limit our possibilities for progress, and where do limits free us to thrive? What are the limits to the expansion of freedom?

Their feeling is that the system of elected and appointed institutions within the Bahá’í Faith offers exactly the right counter-balance to the dangers of unbridled freedom. Clearly, the fact that all Bahá’ís have chosen to believe that these institutions are divinely ordained creates a consensus about their supreme value that is hard to match in the wider world. However, it brings very significant benefits in its train:

Within this framework of freedom a pattern is set for institutional and individual behavior which depends for its efficacy not so much on the force of law, which admittedly must be respected, as on the recognition of a mutuality of benefits, and on the spirit of cooperation maintained by the willingness, the courage, the sense of responsibility, and the initiative of individuals — these being expressions of their devotion and submission to the will of God. Thus there is a balance of freedom between the institution, whether national or local, and the individuals who sustain its existence.

Of course, the core value underpinning this system is the belief in the oneness of all humanity and the preeminent need to combine the compassion of the individual with the fairmindedness of an institution within the one system.  This makes it even easier to tread the fine line between liberty and anarchy on the one hand and fairness and oppression on the other.

Bahá’ís acknowledge that learning how to understand and implement such insights as these will take generations, partly because parenting and education are key factors in the process. But it is also true that every crisis, and Americans as well as most of the rest of us are surely in the grip of one, provides a great opportunity to begin to learn how to shake off old values and methods that have grown unhelpful and replace them with new more constructive ones.

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An Approach to Psychosis: the Mind-Work process (5/6)

One hour’s reflection is worth seventy years’ pious worship.

Bahá’u'lláh: quoting a hadith in the Kitáb-i-Íqán

Some years ago I posted a series of attempts to describe my work in the NHS as I experienced it. Since then I have been also attempting to use poems to approach the same experiences from a different angle. Because my poems tend to come from a darker place than my prose it seemed only right to publish the poems alongside the more positive feel of the republished mind-work posts. It felt as though that would be more balanced, more true to the experience as a whole. So, what I am doing is following up a prose post with a poem after a day or two, but they need to be read together to get a more complete picture of what was involved in the work I did. Above all else I would hope to convey the reality of this area of experience more completely by tackling it this way, and do more justice to the courage of those who suffered. They are stronger than we realise for bearing the unbearable so bravely. 

Three Crucial Factors

There are at least three other crucial factors in the mind-work process over and above what we have dealt with in the previous posts: Reflection, Relatedness and Relativity. They are qualities that the mind-worker must have from the start. The names for these qualities are used in an existential model of mind-work. (Reflection is also a core quality of the Bahá’í spiritual process and has been discussed at length in other posts on this site, as has consultation which can be fairly described as a process of group reflection.)

Reflection, relativity and relatedness as discussed here are the antidotes to three forces of fixity – drowning, dogmatism and disowning — which I discussed in detail in the article on Collaborative Conversation (a term I borrowed at the time from Anderson and Swim) in Madness Explained mentioned in a previous post. The forces of fixity are common when we function in survival mode. Psychotic experiences in people who need help from Mental Health Services are very threatening. Being in survival mode is therefore very much the norm for many of them. Creating a situation that feels safe is of paramount importance. Otherwise it can be very difficult to mobilise the forces of flexibility.

Reflection, Relatedness and Relativity are the core of the mind-work process. They will need some further explanation. They are what the mind-worker models and what the client can either develop further or discover how to use. If the mind-worker lacks them the process of mind-work is likely to remain locked in unproductive disputes that tend to drive the client further into his private world. The client may or may not demonstrate them at the beginning but should increasingly do so as the mind-work progresses.  The better the mind-worker models them the more likely it is that the client will begin to use them too. These qualities are what consolidate and generalise the process of change. They ensure that the process of mind-work becomes a permanently transformative one. If the client does not develop these abilities there is likely to be no real sustainable progress.

These three capacities combine with the relationship aspects in different ways – trust, containment and authenticity – each of which contributes something special and important to the therapeutic process. They may have an order of importance which is discussed later in that without Trust it may be impossible to develop Containment and without Trust and Containment Authenticity may be impossible. Eventually the client will certainly need to acquire and evince Reflection, Relatedness and Relativity, without which he will never make his own any clarity that comes from the mind-worker.

What, in the Relationship, Makes Change Possible?

The Plane of Authenticity

Clarification and Congruence (see earlier posts) are two sides of a square mind-space, so to speak, which is completed by Reflection and Relativity, two concepts which are also related. The combination constitutes what we might call Authenticity.

Let’s take reflection first. Reflection is the capacity to separate consciousness from its contents (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. We may have been trapped in a mindset. Through using and acquiring the power of reflection, we do not then replace one “fixation” with another: we are provisional and somewhat tentative in our new commitments which remain fluid in their turn. Just as a mirror is not what it reflects we are not what we think, feel and plan but the capacity to do all those things. Knowing this and being able to act on it frees us up: we are no longer prisoners of our assumptions, models and maps.

The principal focus of reflection in mind-work is often upon our models of reality and upon the experiences which give rise to them and to which they give rise in return. This is especially true of “psychosis.” The capacity to reflect increases the flexibility of our models in the face of conflict and opens us up to new experiences: the adaptation and change that this makes possible enhances the potential usefulness of our models and their connected experiences. It is the antithesis of drowning where we are engulfed in our experiences and sink beneath them.

The ability to reflect, one part of our repertoire of tools for transformation, enables us to achieve our own clarification without depending upon another mind-worker. If a mind-worker does all the reflecting she is just giving people fish: if she can help someone discover how to reflect, she has taught him to fish. In combination with its sister quality, relativity, it becomes a powerful tool indeed. The antidote to chronic dogmatism, another of the forces of fixity, is relativity. Being dogmatic seals us off from new evidence which makes it hard to change our minds even when we are wrong.

It is not surprising that Reflection and Relativity are interconnected. By placing our models and assumptions mentally in brackets or inverted commas, which is a necessary first step towards reflecting upon them, we inevitably acknowledge, at least implicitly, that we have no monopoly on the truth, that we understand and experience the world at best imperfectly from a particular viewpoint or perspective which is only relatively true. This is not the same as saying there is no truth out there and any viewpoint is as good as any other. We refine the usefulness and accuracy of our simulations of reality partly at least through a process of comparing notes with others in consultation or, as I call it here, collaborative conversation.

We can, and as mind-workers we must, become almost as sceptical of our own position as we tend to be of other people’s.  Any other posture is unhelpfully dogmatic in this context. The extent to which I should then explicitly endorse the client’s position is still an issue of debate. Peter Chadwick, for instance, in his book Schizophrenia: a positive perspective, contends that it would not have been at all helpful to him to have staff endorse his beliefs in supernatural influences at the time he was experiencing extreme psychotic phenomena, even though he still holds those beliefs to be valid now that he is well: had they been endorsed by staff at the time he might have killed himself.

Authenticity matters because without it the clarity necessary for effective action and coping is unlikely to become possible. Client and mind-worker could well remain in a warm and sympathetic muddle that leads nowhere. As we will see in a moment though, without the warmth of an accepting relationship, authenticity and its resulting clarity can seem far too dangerous to risk.

Without a clear sense of uncertainty about absolute truth radical authenticity of the kind required here may prove impossible. An example from my own work serves to illustrate this well. A client was convinced the devil had a purpose for him. He was very concerned about whether I believed in the devil or not. He pressed me in almost every session for an answer. In the end, concerned to be congruent, I told him I did not. He broke off mindwork. I reflected on this afterwards. It became apparent to me that I had spoken from a position of dogmatic and unreflecting identification with my views about the devil. It would have been more authentic to acknowledge that, as a fellow human being struggling to make sense of the world, I couldn’t know for sure whether the devil existed or not. I could have shared with him, if he had pushed me further, that I had chosen to operate in my own life on the assumption that the devil did not exist. This would not, I think, have broken the relationship in a way that made further work I possible.

The Plane of Trust

Relativity shares a space with Relatedness. This term was chosen because it began with an ‘r’! Perhaps openness is a better word. Ernesto Spinelli (1st Edition: 1994) uses the expression “ownership.” Either way, along with Warmth, Encouragement (both discussed in earlier posts) and Relativity, it helps develop Trust, a crucial component that the client must eventually bring to the therapeutic process, and along with Empathy, Solidarity and Reflection it helps the client develop the ability to contain, rather than disown or act out, his inner experiences. The relation between Trust and Containment we will return to in a moment.

First of all we need to know what Relatedness is. Relatedness, in this context, is the capacity to consciously acknowledge and relate to what we are experiencing. It is the antidote to disowning, the last of the forces of fixity. It makes us sufficiently accessible to relationships with people and things to learn to accommodate to as well as assimilate experiences, to make appropriate adjustments to our selves or to our circumstances. If we disown parts of experience we become a prey to it, just as Ian was a prey to his repressed pain which turned into hostile or destructive voices. Anything we disown controls us while eluding our influence to change it in any way. What we are open to we can affect even though it may also affect us directly in its turn.

Trust comes first. We need to trust someone sufficiently to feel the strength flow into us from her Solidarity, to be able to know that she understands how we feel but will not therefore dump us or summon undermining and unwanted help, and to see how she feels confident enough to open up to what she feels about us and subject it to careful Reflection.  This is what gives us the opportunity to learn that we can contain our experiences and change our relationship with and understanding of them.

How do we develop Trust?

First of all, we need to feel the warmth of the mind-worker, her unwavering and unconditional valuing of us. Next, we need to sense her relativity, that she knows the incompleteness and inadequacy of her understanding and can suspend judgement and criticism indefinitely until it is really constructive to share (not impose) it. Then, we need to experience her encouragement, which unfailingly rewards our efforts to apply what we have discovered to our problems. Last but by no means least, we need to see her relatedness, her unthreatened openness to all experience, which allows us to become more aware of other dimensions of our own experience.  These things together make it possible for us to trust other people, our experience and ourselves. Without this making and sustaining change becomes almost impossible.

The Plane of Containment

This mind-space comprises empathy, solidarity (both discussed in an earlier post), relatedness and reflection. If someone is standing beside us in our struggles, giving us comfort, understanding what we are going through, and showing an open and reflective attitude to the revelations we share, it helps us to contain what might otherwise be too scary and/or disturbing to contemplate. What we cannot contain, we find it almost impossible to reflect on and process. Containment therefore plays a central role in the therapeutic process.

In our culture we are all too prone to either repression (convincing ourselves we’re not experiencing something when we are) or acting out (expressing whatever we are currently experiencing and ignoring the consequences until it is too late). Containment is the creative third way and a key to change.

An inability to contain experiences of a disturbing nature accounts for much substance abuse, self-harm and dependency on mind-altering subscription drugs. Containment is often not possible outside a set of supportive relationships of the kind I am attempting to describe.

Furthermore, if we cannot trust anyone, and perhaps least of all ourselves, we cannot contain what frightens us or threatens to overwhelm us. So perhaps without Trust there is no Containment. And without Trust and Containment, Authenticity will be impossible, I suspect. Any life-lie will seem a tempting port in the storm of life if distrust and disowning rule the mind.

In the next post I will attempt to pull this all together.

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