An Angle on Suffering (1/3): is it all bad?

Kazimierz Dabrowski

Suffering is both a reminder and a guide. It stimulates us better to adapt ourselves to our environmental conditions, and thus leads the way to self improvement. In every suffering one can find a meaning and a wisdom. But it is not always easy to find the secret of that wisdom. It is sometimes only when all our suffering has passed that we become aware of its usefulness. What man considers to be evil turns often to be a cause of infinite blessings.

(Shoghi Effendi: Unfolding Destiny pages 134-135)

Suffering

Sometimes an issue keeps poking you harder and harder until you simply can’t ignore it anymore. Suffering is one such issue for me at the moment. I did a couple of blog posts on the topic fairly recently and felt I had laid it to rest, if not for good, at least for a very long time. No such luck apparently. I kept producing poems that were locked into its gravitational field. The news keeps thrusting it before our eyes. I began to realise it was not finished with me yet even if I thought that, for my part, I had completely done with it.

Just before I made a recent visit to the Bahá’í Shrines in Haifa and at Bahji, I started a series of blog posts on mental health related issues. A comment was made on one of them:

. . . . two things that have encouraged me to see . . . mental suffering as growth have been developing a deeper spirituality, and learning about a theory of personal growth developed by Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychiatrist/psychologist, known as the “Theory of Positive Disintegration.”

I have to admit I’d never heard of Dabrowski but I’ve learned to catch at the hints life gives when I manage to spot them and I spotted this one. It was the first strong hint of something new in 20th century thinking, a different angle on the issue, and fortunately I snatched at it and obtained a book about his Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD).

I began reading it on the plane out, continued reading it in the Pilgrim House at the Shrine of the Báb after my prayers, and carried on reading it in the plane home. Conversations in the Pilgrim House explored the issue of suffering and some of his ideas. Even BBC iPlayer programmes I was watching on the plane out rubbed my nose in the possible value of suffering.

I heard Dave Davies of the Kinks, in Kinkdom Come, stating at 58 minutes in: ‘If there hadn’t been bad times I might not have have got interested in spiritual things.’

So, here I am blogging about it yet again.

The Effects of Suffering

Stephen Joseph

Perhaps the best place to start is with a recent article in ‘The Psychologist.’ To my surprise, when I got home I found that the latest issue contains an article by Stephen Joseph about the psychology of post-traumatic growth. Trauma can shatter lives, it is true, but for some it seems rather to be an opportunity for growth. He draws an interesting distinction between two kinds of reaction to trauma (page 817):

Those who try to put their lives back together exactly as they were remain fractured and vulnerable. But those who accept the breakage and build themselves anew become more resilient and open to new ways of living.

Work has begun on teasing out what specific factors might be involved in creating this difference in approach (ibid):

Research shows that greater post-traumatic growth is associated with: personality factors, such as emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience, optimism and self-esteem; ways of coping, such as acceptance, positive reframing, seeking social support, turning to religion, problem solving; and social support factors (Prati & Pietrantoni, 2009).

I wasn’t pleased to see that introversion is not included in the list of factors associated with ‘greater post-traumatic growth’ though it’s good to see that ‘turning to religion’ is definitely one. I remain quietly confident that the positive value of introversion will finally be recognised.

Joseph concludes (ibid):

Psychologists are beginning to realise that post-traumatic stress following trauma is not always a sign of disorder. Instead, post-traumatic stress can signal that the person is going through a normal and natural emotional struggle to rebuild their lives and make sense of what has befallen them. Sadly it often takes a tragic event in our lives before we make such changes. Survivors have much to teach those of us who haven’t experienced such traumas about how to live.

Suffering is not all bad

I have been aware for a long time that suffering is not all bad. In 1993 I had read Charles Tart’s Waking Up.

He argues, in the first part of this book, that most of us are to all intents of purposes asleep, or more accurately in a trance (page 106):

Each of us is in a profound trance, consensus consciousness, the state of partly suspended animation, stupor, of inability to function at our maximum level. Automatised and conditioned patterns of perception, thinking, feeling, and behaving dominate our lives.

He discussed ways of breaking this trance. Self-observation is a key tool. In describing its usefulness he also brings in a crucial insight (page 192):

Self observation is to be practised just as devotedly when you are suffering as when you are happy. Not because you hope that self observation may eventually diminish your sufferings – although it will have that effect – but because you have committed yourself to searching for the truth of whatever is, regardless of your preferences or fears. Indeed, suffering often turns out to be one of your best allies once you have committed yourself to awakening, for it may shock you into seeing aspects of yourself and your world you might never notice otherwise.

Dabrowski’s position, though, is far more complex than this, placing suffering in the context of a whole theory of personality development. A fuller explanation of this will have to wait for the next post. For now it is perhaps useful simply to note how Dabrowski’s idea of suffering seems closely related to Tart’s concept of a trance breaker. Sam Mendaglio, in the book he edited on the subject of TPD, writes (page 23):

Intense negative emotions and moods, typically regarded as impediments to growth and development, actually set the stage for advanced development by their disintegrating power. Intensely negative affective experiences begin the process of loosening a tightly integrated mental organisation. Though painful to individuals, negative emotions – the hallmark of inner conflict – allow people to achieve a more advanced level of human development.

His definition of what he feels lies at the end of this path through pain is of intense interest and concern to anyone seeking to gain support for a spiritual perspective on human suffering (page 23):

A developed human being is characterised by such traits as autonomy, authenticity, and altruism.

That seems as good a place as any to pause for now until the next time.

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Consciousness (1/2): mind or matter?

. . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit.

( ‘Abdu’l-Bahá  in Some Answered Questions, page 208)

The sciences evolve, and so do religions. No religion is the same today as it was at the time of its founder. Instead of the bitter conflicts and mutual distrust caused by the materialist worldview, we are entering an era in which sciences and religions may enrich each other through shared explorations.

(Baumeister & Tierney: Willpower, page 340)

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

(George Berkeley)

Consciousness is preposterous. It can’t be possible yet it exists. I know it does because I am writing this. You know it does if you are reading this. Because it exists and we are in a sense (well, five of them at least, actually) the experience of consciousness, we are usually blind to its sheer improbability. So much for the senses, then.

Perhaps this paradox is why it is currently a battle ground between those who believe mind is merely matter and those who believe that mind is much more than matter. This difference, as we will see, has implications for whether our actions are completely determined by unconscious processes or are freely chosen. Yes, there is a push from our unconscious, partly the result of evolution and partly the result of automated memories, as last Tuesday’s Horizon programme on BBC2 illustrated very powerfully. But – and it’s a very important but – there is also a sense of purpose which creates a pull from the future which is mostly mediated through our conscious mind.

In my lifetime I have switched sides in this battle for reasons too many to list here. I used to believe in nothing that I couldn’t directly experience with my ordinary senses. Now I believe there is a spiritual dimension even though it would be fair to say I have never experienced it directly. Other people that I have come to trust have had such experiences though and my earlier conversion to this point of view is constantly reaffirmed by their testimony.

A Physicist’s Personal Testimony

Amit Goswami, the physicist, in an interview about his book, The Self-Aware Universe, which I quoted in a post about three years ago,  confirms the mystic insight and vividly conveys his sense of it:

So then one time — and this is where the breakthrough happened — my wife and I were in Ventura, California and a mystic friend, Joel Morwood, came down from Los Angeles, and we all went to hear Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti, of course, is extremely impressive, a very great mystic. So we heard him and then we came back home. We had dinner and we were talking, and I was giving Joel a spiel about my latest ideas of the quantum theory of consciousness and Joel just challenged me. He said, “Can consciousness be explained?” And I tried to wriggle my way through that but he wouldn’t listen. He said, “You are putting on scientific blinders. You don’t realize that consciousness is the ground of all being.” He didn’t use that particular word, but he said something like, “There is nothing but God.”

And something flipped inside of me which I cannot quite explain. This is the ultimate cognition, that I had at that very moment. There was a complete about-turn in my psyche and I just realized that consciousness is the ground of all being. I remember staying up that night, looking at the sky and having a real mystical feeling about what the world is, and the complete conviction that this is the way the world is, this is the way that reality is, and one can do science. You see, the prevalent notion — even among people like David Bohm — was, “How can you ever do science without assuming that there is reality and material and all this? How can you do science if you let consciousness do things which are ‘arbitrary’?” But I became completely convinced — there has not been a shred of doubt ever since — that one can do science on this basis.

More Mystical Angles on the Matter

Andrew Powell, in Thinking Beyond the Brain, an intriguing book edited by David Lorimer, put me onto Goswami. He concludes, ‘Everything is mind,’ (page 182) and goes on to say (page 186):

. . . there is a more important truth to be discovered, that we are one. If humankind should ever learn that what belongs to one belongs to all, heaven on earth will be assured.

In the same book (pages 128-131) there is an account of a similar but not identical mystical experience. Charles Tart quotes the story of a Doctor S who was an atheist at the time. He was alone, watching the sunset, which was particularly beautiful that evening. All verbal thinking stopped. While what he experienced was, he said, impossible to express, he did try to convey it in words (page 130):

I was certain that the universe was one whole and that it was benign and loving at its ground. . . . . God as experienced in cosmic consciousness is the very ground or beingness of the Universe and has no human characteristics in the usual sense of the word. The Universe could no more be separate from God than my body could separate from its cells. Moreover the only emotion that I would associate with God is love, but it would be more accurate to say that God is love, than that God is loving.

Most religions, and the Bahá’í Faith is no exception, hold that God is more than the universe: they mostly agree also that God permeates the universe in some way. Which means, of course, that He is in us also. Bahá’u’lláh confirms this when He exhorts us to:

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee . . .

(Hidden Words from the Arabic: Number 13)

The implications for the nature of consciousness are immense if, as I do, you believe this to be true. What if you don’t?

Is this the best hard evidence we can get?

Aren’t these just anecdotes and metaphors, carrying no more weight than any other personal opinion? Is this going to help reconcile the differences between faith and science in this all important area?

Fortunately, since I first explored this question much more research has come into the public domain. And I’m not talking about things like Near Death Experiences (see the links at the end of this post), or David Fontana‘s explorations of the reality of the soul and the afterlife. I’m referring to work such as Schwartz‘s that demonstrates that the mind is not easily reducible to the brain but rather can, by force of deliberate willed attention, change the brain. Not quite enough to carry a hard-line materialist with me, though? Not even enough to cause him or her a fleeting doubt?

Well, beyond that, and most recently, there has been Rupert Sheldrake‘s book The Science Delusion. In the next post I will seek to unpack some of the most telling points he makes that should cause us to question too glib an attachment to a materialist explanation of consciousness.

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Consciousness is the Ground of All Being (2/2): the Missing Piece

 

Poets and Mystics

Other posts have talked of the three modes of discourse: instrumental, ethical and aesthetic. We are dangerously too fond of the instrumental and, at considerable but apparently invisible risk, privilege what it teaches us.

Mystics and poets inhabit a world where aesthetics and ethics come strongly into play (and play is the operative word, given how closely play and creativity are related). Modern poetry has tended to turn its back on ethics at least in the sense of the moralising that corrupted much popular Victorian verse, but it is still pretty explicit about what it values. Mystics and poets both still inhabit a world where their best practitioners can see a world in a grain of sand. To say that the naive realism of the worst science, often called scientism, can only see the grains in a world of wonder is not too wide of the mark.

The mystical-poetic mode is what both lumpers and splitters may be missing and, when we are, we can neither of us see the heaven in a wild flower, or at least not very often. We each need to work at developing a different way of seeing, our third eye if you like. 

An Example

I once practised mindfulness using this lump of quartz, which is the same one in the same place as the one shown at the start of this post, though photographed under different light. As I stared at it I eventually became aware that there were tiny areas which broke light into a spectrum (I couldn’t get them to show up in the photograph). I needed a magnifying glass to see them really well but careful watching had revealed them to my naked eye. I had had this piece of stone for years and never noticed that before. Apart from conclusively demonstrating that I’m definitely no mystic, what was the point of that personal anecdote?

It shows that this relationship between the surface of an object and the light that falls on it is far more complex than we think. What’s more disappointing for lumpers and splitters alike is that, even when we’re bouncing photons of light off the waves of quantum flux, we still cannot see to the bottom of things: the particles of light are too big to get through the gaps. Even more importantly though, the light-world relationship has a deeper  significance, a spiritual one, which only a penetrating mystical sensibility could observe and convey:

. . . . . all the variations which the wayfarer in the stages of his journey beholdeth in the realms of being, proceed from his own vision. We shall give an example of this, that its meaning may become fully clear: Consider the visible sun; although it shineth with one radiance upon all things, . . . .  yet in each place it becometh manifest and sheddeth its bounty according to the potentialities of that place. For instance, in a mirror it reflecteth its own disk and shape, and this is due to the sensitivity of the mirror; in a crystal it maketh fire to appear, and in other things it showeth only the effect of its shining, but not its full disk. . . . . 

In like manner, colors become visible in every object according to the nature of that object. For instance, in a yellow globe, the rays shine yellow; in a white the rays are white; and in a red, the red rays are manifest. Then these variations are from the object, not from the shining light. . . . . 

In sum, the differences in objects have now been made plain. Thus when the wayfarer gazeth only upon the place of appearance — that is, when he seeth only the many-colored globes — he beholdeth yellow and red and white; hence it is that conflict hath prevailed among the creatures, and a darksome dust from limited souls hath hid the world. And some do gaze upon the effulgence of the light; and some have drunk of the wine of oneness and these see nothing but the sun itself. 

(Bahá’u'lláh: Seven Valleys: pages 19-21)

The danger when we gloss over or enmesh ourselves in details is that we fail to see the sunburst inside everything. We are so dazzled by the ballet danced by all the shadows and the colours of this world of matter that we miss the intimations that surround us about what holds all this in being. We do not see the lessons Bahá’u'lláh tells us lie hidden in every atom of the universe and we fail to see the oneness of it all, often with drastic and divisive consequences.

Amit Goswami, the physicist, in an interview about his book, The Self-Aware Universe, confirms the mystic insight and vividly conveys his sense of it:

So then one time — and this is where the breakthrough happened — my wife and I were in Ventura, California and a mystic friend, Joel Morwood, came down from Los Angeles, and we all went to hear Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti, of course, is extremely impressive, a very great mystic. So we heard him and then we came back home. We had dinner and we were talking, and I was giving Joel a spiel about my latest ideas of the quantum theory of consciousness and Joel just challenged me. He said, “Can consciousness be explained?” And I tried to wriggle my way through that but he wouldn’t listen. He said, “You are putting on scientific blinders. You don’t realize that consciousness is the ground of all being.” He didn’t use that particular word, but he said something like, “There is nothing but God.”

And something flipped inside of me which I cannot quite explain. This is the ultimate cognition, that I had at that very moment. There was a complete about-turn in my psyche and I just realized that consciousness is the ground of all being. I remember staying up that night, looking at the sky and having a real mystical feeling about what the world is, and the complete conviction that this is the way the world is, this is the way that reality is, and one can do science. You see, the prevalent notion — even among people like David Bohm — was, “How can you ever do science without assuming that there is reality and material and all this? How can you do science if you let consciousness do things which are ‘arbitrary’?” But I became completely convinced — there has not been a shred of doubt ever since — that one can do science on this basis. 

Andrew Powell, in Thinking Beyond the Brain, an intriguing book edited by David Lorimer, put me onto Goswami. He concludes, ‘Everything is mind,’ (page 182) and goes on to say: 

. . . there is a more important truth to be discovered, that we are one. If humankind should ever learn that what belongs to one belongs to all, heaven on earth will be assured.

(page 186)

If this stuff about ‘consciousness’ seems a bit cold, in the same book (pages 128-131) there is an account of a similar but not identical mystical experience. Charles Tart quotes the story of a Doctor S who was an atheist at the time. He was alone, watching the sunset, which was particularly beautiful that evening. All verbal thinking stopped. While what he experienced was, he said, impossible to express, he did try to convey it in words:

I was certain that the universe was one whole and that it was benign and loving at its ground. . . . . God as experienced in cosmic consciousness is the very ground or beingness of the Universe and has no human characteristics in the usual sense of the word. The Universe could no more be separate from God than my body could separate from its cells. Moreover the only emotion that I would associate with God is love, but it would be more accurate to say that God is love, than that God is loving.

(page 130)

Most religions, and the Bahá’í Faith is no exception, hold that God is more than the universe: they mostly agree also that God permeates the universe in some way. Which means, of course, that He is in us also. Bahá’u'lláh confirms this when He exhorts us to:

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee . . . 

(Hidden Words from the Arabic: Number 13)

And again in His mystical work, The Seven Valleys, just before the passage already quoted, Bahá’u'lláh describes what happens when someone travels the spiritual path and arrives at the valley of unity:

He looketh on all things with the eye of oneness, and seeth the brilliant rays of the divine sun shining from the dawning-point of Essence alike on all created things, and the lights of singleness reflected over all creation.

(page 18)

And it’s probably best I leave it there — for now at least. 

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Retired: Sidelined or realigned?

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing . . .

(W.B.Yeats: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’)

An Undiscovered Fraud?

Last March I retired from my job as a Clinical Psychologist in the NHS. I felt a great sense of relief, but not for the obvious reason, I think. I was relieved not to have been found out.

In a job such as mine was, it is so difficult to know whether you personally are making a real difference. You work as part of a team. You deal with complex problems. People take a long time to get their lives back together. So, how can you be sure it was you that helped in that process, and not time or someone else?

I think this kind of scepticism about one’s own effectiveness is better than the arrogant assumption that you are God’s gift to the afflicted. While it brings its own special challenges, self-doubt for instance, it also makes it easier to feel a sense of common humanity with those around you. A sense of superiority can still sneak up on you, but it’s a bubble that usually bursts pretty fast under these conditions.

So, that was why I felt relief, even though I missed working with a supportive team and with the brave people we were hopefully helping overcome extreme and complex difficulties.

Out of the Frying Pan?

Since I retired I’ve faced a different challenge. What am I supposed to be doing now?

You’d think that would be an easy question for me. I love, not in any particular order, reading, walking, films, food, conversation (especially about trivialities like the meaning of life, the uncertain nature of death, the existence of the soul and so on), writing, and my family and friends. I’m active in my faith community, though perhaps not over-active, and derive, as well as hopefully providing,  sustenance from that involvement, in addition to what I glean from my periods of meditation and reflection (I’m not so good at prayer – I don’t know why).

Something was bugging me though. Out of all this welter of interests and activities, what was I especially meant to be doing and in what way?

I had a strong sense that this must involve building relationships with other people that would be spiritually enriching for all parties to the process. What I couldn’t get clear about was how I could develop my own authentic and particular way of doing that: it was no good just going through the motions shallowly.  Just out of the corner of my mind’s eye, when the weather of my inscape was unusually kind, sunlit and temperate, I’d catch a glimpse of a ghost of an idea of it, which I could never quite pin down. (For those who are wondering what on earth if anywhere an inscape is, let me just say, for now, that it’s the landscape inside us, which is vast and mostly unexplored.)

Haifa

A month after I retired, at the beginning of this inner quest, standing on new ground in my mind’s forested interior with a useless map of the old pre-retirement terrain and a compass bent out of shape by the force of my landing, I arrived in Haifa for International Convention. I’m not going to use any adjectives, like ‘awesome’, ‘mind-blowing’ or ‘amazing’, to describe this because the experience is beyond all adjectives to capture. And here, in any case, I’m only going to mention my times in the Shrines where I used my paltry powers of prayer to seek for guidance, get a new map and mend my compass. Towards the end of my time in the Holy Land I had my last visit to the Shrine of Bahá’u'lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith: this was the last of several visits to the various shrines, none of which had so far given me the sense of clear direction I was craving.

Shrine of Bahá’u'lláh

I came out of the quiet Shrine, which had been packed tight with other delegates to Convention from every corner of the world, communing with the spirit in this holiest of places. I was disappointed that its crowded feel had made prayer more difficult than usual for me and that I still had not received some clear and unequivocal sign to point me in exactly or even approximately the right direction. I walked down the path towards the Pilgrim House to the crunching sound of my own footsteps on its broken stones. Just as I got to the benches on either side the path in sight of the Pilgrim House, I found myself in tears. I sat down.

The first faint intimation of an answer to my prayers was slowly dawning but it left me still confused. I felt that my heart, at the deepest level I had access to, was whispering to me that I must give up the persona, the efficient mask, that I use to hide my vulnerability and dare to be myself at a deeper riskier level. The tears came as I was reconnecting more fully with  a deeper self that I had kept exiled out of consciousness most of the time. I still wasn’t clear how to use this new awareness, but at least it felt like a step in the right direction.

It was becoming slightly clearer to me that if I was ever going to  be able to relate to others heart to heart, which is what I yearned to do and what I would need to do if I were to become able to connect with them about the issues I most cared about, I’d have to climb down further from my head when I was with them than I’d so far ever managed to do. What I wanted to be engaged in was not my usual mouth-to-mind conversation, but genuinely heart-to-heart resuscitation.

This does not mean an emotional interaction, at least not in the usual sense of those words. In the Bahá’í Writings the phrase ‘understanding heart’ is used over and over again indicating that this is more to do with insight than feeling, and also, it must be a spiritual process since

[the] heart . . .  is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God.

(Book of Certitude: paragraph 213)

Trance-breaker

It took months of reading, reflection, writing, prayer, experience and experimentation for me slowly to understand what all this meant in a way that enabled me to know what I might do.

It also, sadly, took the death of a close friend and, joyfully, an extraordinary conference of more than 3000 Bahá’ís in London, to get me to the point I am at now, and I still don’t think I’ve reached the end of the journey by any means.

Until the first of those events I was dithering in doubt about my real priorities; my prayers, as I felt it, had been incompletely answered,  my compass was in only slightly better shape and my map still eons out-of-date. It felt like I was using Hereford Cathedral’s medieval Mappa Mundi to sail single-handed to Africa in bad weather.

A Message came on the 20th October from the Bahá’í World Centre which had, and still has, huge implications for the Bahá’ís and the way we work in the world. I was still coming to terms with its implications when the unexpected completely broke my stride yet in the end, to my astonishment, helped me find a truer path.

I saw my good friend in fine fettle at a meeting on the Tuesday. I saw him unconscious in hospital after a massive cerebral bleed on the Friday. A week later he was dead. His family were obviously shocked and distressed. My own feelings were only a pale shadow of their pain and who knows whether, if I had been suffering as much as they were, and still are, this experience of loss would have had so positive a result in the end — or at least achieved it so quickly, even though Bahá’u'lláh does assure us that death is indeed a ‘messenger of joy’ (Hidden Words: No. 32 from the Arabic).

Charles Tart sees pain and suffering as a potential trance breaker. We all become hypnotised by our culture into a trance state that determines our experience of the world. We are blinded by this trance to the true state of reality, particularly social and spiritual reality.  In the end the relatively manageable levels of pain and shock I experienced at my friend’s death, because it helped break down my trance-state further, quickly became more of a blessing than a curse. And Bahá’ís believe that souls who have moved on into this higher realm can and do assist those of us who are left behind.

All I know for sure is I have been a different person in some ways since that event, a better one I hope. I’d never have had the guts to write a blog before, and courage is something my friend had in abundance – how much of a good thing this blog will be remains to be seen, of course. It definitely marks a change though.

I’ll try to explain in a later post more about how that change came about, even though I doubt that I’ll succeed.

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