An Approach to Psychosis: Fitting It All Together (6/6)

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. 

Only Our Simulations to Go  On

At best we never achieve more than a simulation of reality. Even something as apparently clear-cut and concrete as colour is no exception.

To see how Visual Illusions work – go to link

What we perceive as red is really nothing more than a wavelength of light and our experience of red is a coded response that has been allocated quite arbitrarily. We could just as well have experienced the “red “ wavelength as blue! More abstract things are of course even more liable to be the product of construction and elaboration in the brain-mind system which habitually fills in the gaps in experience as best it can to make sense of it all. For present purposes three aspects of this simulation concern us most: experiences, beliefs and flexibility.

Experiences are the raw material of the mind. They are what we access of the inner and outer worlds through our senses, albeit modified by the interpretive activity of the brain. Experiences range from mainstream to the extremely idiosyncratic. Dreams are about as idiosyncratic as experience gets for most of us unless we are placed in strange, extreme and possibly frightening circumstances. For some people however dreams seem to become part of their waking reality.

Beliefs are the ideas we form usually on the basis of experience. We often make heavy emotional investments in our important ideas. These then colour experience in turn and can even distort it at the time it happens or in memory. Again beliefs range from the conventional to the extremely unusual. Even the most middle of the road person can find their way of looking at the world morphing into strange and frightening shapes as a result of such things as prolonged isolation.

Experience suggests that most people manage to negotiate their way through the world without too much of a problem on the basis of the models of the world they have developed. Many people whose experiences and beliefs are well outside the usual run of the mill rub along quite well. There are relatively small numbers of people whose beliefs and experiences are not only unusual but also very troubling. These are often the people mind-workers have to deal with. The majority of them have only short-lived difficulties.

Much of my work, before I retired, was with those who are stuck in their difficulties. Their experiences are unusual, troublesome and intractable. It is in helping people deal with this intractability that the model of mind-work I am proposing here is most useful.

Steering between Rigidity and Chaos

Most of us live somewhere between rigidity and chaos. Our models of the worlds are sufficiently malleable to respond flexibly to the shifts and changes of the world around us. If systems of thinking are too unstable or unformed we will be unable to make sense of our world and make reasonable responses to it. If they are too fixed and too compelling we cannot adapt when circumstances require it. The antidote to such unhelpful fixity is the flexibility which comes from reflection, relatedness and relativity.

Complete fixity, which often though not always in psychosis results from the kind of high emotional investment and simplification of thinking that feelings such as terror can induce, makes therapeutic work of the kind I am describing difficult. Someone who believes that their survival is in doubt is unlikely to see too much point in a leisurely exploration of their inscape! If the terror, or whatever is driving the investment that is creating the fixity, can be somewhat reduced, then conversation becomes possible. I suspect that medication, where it works, achieves its effect by calming someone down.

Increasing our Leverage

Once conversation is possible two powerful tools, implied in all that has been said above, become available. First, some space can be created between consciousness and its contents, and secondly there is a chance for more than one mind to be brought to bear upon the experiences. The space can be used for people to compare notes as equals – as two human beings, both with imperfect simulations of reality at their disposal, exchanging ideas about what is going on, with no one’s version being arbitrarily privileged from the start. There is a wealth of information that suggests most strongly that this process of collaborative conversation (Andersen and Swim), of consultation in the Bahá’í sense (see John Kolstoe), of inquiry (see Senge), of interthinking, can achieve remarkable results: Neil Mercer talks of the crucial function of language and says:

it enables human brains to combine their intellects into a mega-brain, a problem-solving device whose power can be greater than that of its individual components. With language we are able not only to share or exchange information, but also to work together on it. We are able not only to influence the actions of other people, but also to alter their understandings. . . . . Language does not only enable us to interact, it enables us to interthink.

I’d like to slightly alter the wording of one sentence there to capture the essence of what I think I’m describing:

We are able not only to influence the actions of one another, but also to alter one another’s understandings.

I feel that the conditions that I have sought to describe in this sequence of posts go a long way towards making effective interthinking possible. Effective interthinking and mind-work are closely related activities. Neither can happen at their best and most constructive in the absence of good relationships, reflection, relativity and relatedness.

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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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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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Bringing Down Barricades

When I did a post some time ago on the subject of breaking down barricades by means of consultation I wish I could’ve included the recent track by Davy Knowles instead of the picture of a crumbling stone wall at the end. Still, better late than never. Here it is. Enjoy some great blues guitar.

From a religious point of view the lyrics are of some interest as well. The word ‘soul’ comes into a number of tracks on his debut album ‘Coming Up for Air.’ ‘Saving myself’ has very moving lyrics with important spiritual implications. The chorus goes:

Doing what I could for someone else,
Didn’t know that I was saving myself.

Those who have noticed a greater emphasis from me recently on songs and poetry should blame McGilchrist and his brilliant book The Master and his Emissary. I’m trying to draw even more than usual on the right side of my brain (apologies to Betty Edwards for borrowing the title of her book, especially as I never managed to finish the exercises in it many years ago). However, it’ll take some time before I get the hang of it and really lift my game in that respect, assuming I ever do.

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Appearance, Reality and the Choices We Make

David Tennant's Hamlet

When I was away over Christmas I couldn’t watch Dr Who — sorry David Tennant — playing Hamlet at the time of its showing.  I’ve only just got round to watching my recording of this Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production now in the middle of this second big freeze of the winter — its power took me by surprise. At the same time I’m in the middle of reading Peter Taylor’s demanding but rewarding book Chill. Much to my surprise these experiences are for me connected, each echoes the other.

Perhaps I need to clarify from the off that it’s not the ‘bitter cold’ referred to in the first ten lines of Hamlet that I’m thinking about here though it is a strongly common element. It’s to do with seeming, actuality and action. Both Hamlet and Chill at their core share a concern with the relationship between appearance and reality and the implications of that for both understanding what is likely to happen and deciding what to do. In both works there is a political dimension to complicate the way things work themselves out.

I realise of course that there are a small number of trivial differences. The Danish court that Hamlet experiences as a prison is not wracked by angst about its carbon emissions or living in fear of a rising sea disrupting its conspiracies: regicide trumps CO2 for them. Similarly, Chill is not written in blank verse, there are no kings and queens, no ghosts appear and no one, not even the Chair of the IPCC, is poisoned in an orchard while asleep. So, am I forcing the point here a bit?

I don’t think so.

On page 200 of his book Taylor writes:

. . . we need to be clear that it is the duty of science to state clearly the boundary conditions of its knowledge and to draw attention to what currently lies upon the fringe – the place where breaking knowledge will inevitably appear and transform the current view. If science strays from this duty, it becomes a tool of the political or religious order of the day.

In Hamlet, the eponymous hero is confronted with a stark choice: to kill Claudius or not. Whether he does so depends upon what view of appearances he takes. Is the apparition that discloses his father’s murder to him really the ghost of his father or is it the devil come to tempt him to destruction? The wheels of the first two acts of the play revolve around this axle.  After his encounter with the players at the end of Act II and his decision to have them stage a representation of his father’s alleged murder, he knows he has set up an experiment of a kind to determine if at all possible where the truth lies (I’ve always found that those last two words have an interesting double meaning in our language).

. .  . . The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this; the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

(Act II, Scene 2: lines 530-537)

The word ‘relative’ here is used more in the sense of ‘relevant.’

It is interesting to note that it is through a play, not through a controlled scientific experiment, that Hamlet proposes to test for the truth. Jonathan Bate, in his introduction to Hamlet in the carefully researched and beautifully presented RSC edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, points this up very clearly (page 1920):

[Hamlet] comes to the truth through a ‘fiction’ and a ‘dream of passion.’ In this he can only be regarded as an apologist for the art of his creator.

Is there no hard distinction then between imagination and reality? Perhaps it is not as absolute as we would like.

Chris Frith (The Psychologist: October 2009: page 843) reminds us of some fascinating points about the reality/perception issue:

This Helmholtz/Bayes framework had a number of interesting implications, and I suspected that many people might be quite shocked by them.

*Our experience of having a direct perception of the world is an illusion. This illusion is created by our lack of awareness of the inferences being made by our brain.
*There is no qualitative difference between perceptions and beliefs. A perception is a belief about the world that we hold to have extremely high probability.
*Perceptions are created by combining bottom-up, sensory signals with top-down, prior beliefs.
*Our perceptions are an estimate of the state of the world and never the true state of the world. However, we can constantly improve our estimate by making and testing predictions. For survival it is more important to be able to predict the state of the world than to have a very good estimate of what it was in the past. Furthermore, for survival all that matters is that our model of the world makes useful predictions.

But this issue of prediction is a tricky one when we are dealing with complex global phenomena like climate change. Taylor argues (page 220):

We have to ask the question whether there is any value in prediction when the science is so uncertain. In my view the answer is no. In fact, any pretence at prediction may proffer an unreliable knowledge upon which quite counter-productive policies could be based.

But that does not mean we are powerless to act.

. . . it is better to assume no knowledge of the future climate, but to examine current vulnerability to change in any direction. This is the concept of resilience or robustness that ecologists apply to ecosystems. We need to know what a robust human support system looks like. We certainly do not have one now . . .

In terms of possibly counter-productive policy, Taylor feels that there is a high probability that we are in for a period of global cooling which will, for example, have a massive impact on food production exacerbated by such measures as the extensive use of land for the production of bio-fuel. He explains this at some length in the following YouTube video along with the sociopolitical dynamics that in his view are perpetuating the probably erroneous opposite view (more fascinating footage can be found at this link):

There is at least as much at stake here for us as a collective as there was for Hamlet as an individual. Much will depend upon the choices we make as a society. Claudius’ murder of a king who was his brother and Hamlet’s reaction to that crime cost Polonius (Laertes’ father killed by Hamlet, who by that act became as culpable in Laertes’ eyes as Claudius was in his), Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother who married his father’s killer), Claudius, Laertes and Hamlet their lives, and Ophelia (Polonius’ daughter) her sanity as well as her life. The personal scale of these consequences plays to the strengths of our way of processing experience and assessing risk (see Gardner’s excellent book for a full analysis of this).

The havoc we could wreak by responding wrongly to the rise in global temperature experienced in the final two decades of the 20th Century (and Taylor does not dispute that there was such a rise — he simply does not accept the case as proven that CO2 played more than a very minor role in that rise) would dwarf the ‘havoc’ (i.e. mound of bodies) confronting Fortinbras in the final moments of the play (not in the TV version sadly). If so much damage can be done when the situation is basically confined within a court and our stone-age brains are well adapted to calculating the risks involved, just think what we can do when the whole world is our stage and we don’t really have a clue what’s going on.

At this point it is hard to be absolutely sure who is right but the next few years will tell. What I am clear about is that, in confronting the choices we have to make, we need to remain as open-minded as possible. Keats defined an attitude

John Keats

of mind that is very relevant to this. To describe this quality, Keats used the term “negative capability” in a letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817. He says:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Bahá’u'lláh reminds us in the Arabic Hidden Words that our capacity to understand has limits:

O SON OF BEAUTY! By My spirit and by My favor! By My mercy and by My beauty! All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.

(Number 67)

However, as other posts on this blog have attempted to describe (see the link for an example), our understandings are enhanceable by dispassionate and principled consultation, the difficult art of spiritual conference whose usefulness extends to all realms of human discourse including that of science, especially when such consultation is conducted in the light of experience.

So, here we stand at a crucial choice point. Perhaps we can empathise with Hamlet when he groans:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

(Act I, Scene 5: lines 205-206)

Fortunately, we are not bound by the conventions of a Revenge Tragedy and do not have to murder anyone to solve this problem. We just have to do the best we can to make sure that as few people as possible lose their lives as a result of our making a bad situation worse, and making this bad situation situation worse is what we will do if we end up combining a failure to recognise the extent of our ignorance with that most dangerous fuel of all with which to power the juggernaut of human action – an absolute conviction born of panic.

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Review: ‘Revelation & Social Reality’ by Paul Lample

 

Anyone wanting a thorough and stimulating explanation of what the Bahá’í community is currently attempting to do need look no further than this book.  Paul Lample examines in detail not only the purpose of what we are doing (the ‘why’) but also its nature (the ‘what’) and its manner (the ‘how’). He also looks at how our understanding of what we are about has developed over time.

He brings to this task not only the wisdom within the Bahá’í Writings, but also valuable insights from other disciplines such a sociology and philosophy. A central concern is the nature of ‘social reality,’ which, as he reminds us (page 7), is a ‘product of the human mind.’ He goes on to say:

Social reality mediates our engagement with the world, physical and spiritual, and it is this reality that we have the capacity to create anew (ibid).

He explains (page 10) that for Bahá’ís ‘[r]evelation creates consensus around new truths so that we, the co-creators of reality, can begin to transform the existing social order.’ Language is a key component in this process in that it both shapes and is shaped by social reality. There is a crucial distinction, he feels (page 21), between Revelation as the undiluted Word of God and religion as the way the Word is applied. He reminds us (page 23) of the analogy used by Shoghi Effendi that Bahá’í ‘community life’ is ‘an indispensable laboratory’ where we can ‘translate into living and constructive action’ the principles which we ‘imbibe from the Teachings.’

What then follows is a detailed analysis of the implications of this truth for us now as we seek to help rebuild a broken world through our determined and concerted efforts to perfect our understanding of this revelation through a process of study, consultation, action and reflection (page 86). It would be impossible to convey even a faint flavour of this analysis in a short review, covering as it does such major considerations as, for example, the hermeneutical principles of the Bahá’í Faith (page 36), the relationship between science and religion (page 115), objectivism vs. relativism (page 170) and ‘communities of practice’ (page 219).

It is important to stress that this analysis is not a dry-as-dust intellectual exercise but a vibrant and compelling engagement with the day-to-day challenges that confront all of us in our efforts to put into practice the teachings of the Faith which we all love and which we see as being able to make a critical, unique and indispensable contribution to the transformation of society.

Paul Lample also enables us to see the need to do this with humility in a spirit of collaboration with all people of goodwill (page 109):

. . . . emphasis on the contributions Bahá’ís are to make to the civilization-building process is not intended to diminish the significance of efforts being exerted by others. A host of individuals and institutions contribute to the forces that are propelling social transformation.

It is imperative that we not only learn to draw upon the power of divine assistance but also (page 110) to ‘collaborate effectively with like-minded individuals and organisations.’

This is a book that, when you reach the bottom of its last page, you want to go back to the beginning and start it all over again.

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