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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow, though, this was not enough.

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

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

Stepping Back

This diagram will hopefully help.

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

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

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

Temptation Scenario

What does this vignette illustrate in terms of the diagram?

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

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

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

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

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Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self

What is the dust which obscures the mirror? It is attachment to the world, avarice, envy, love of luxury and comfort, haughtiness and self-desire; this is the dust which prevents reflection of the rays of the Sun of Reality in the mirror. The natural emotions are blameworthy and are like rust which deprives the heart of the bounties of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 244)

In the previous two posts I’ve been moaning about how I was robbed when my training in psychology steered me away from the work of thinkers such as FWH Myers as though they had the plague. What I probably need to do to redress the balance is mention how much I was influenced by thinkers who were deeply influenced by Myers. In one case I know that for certain because I still have Roberto Assagioli‘s introductory text on psychosynthesis, which I read in 1976 and which cites Myers in the list of references at the end of Chapter I. Another was a seminal book I borrowed but never bought, so it is impossible to say whether the influence was direct and acknowledged: this was Peter Koestenbaum’s New Images of the Person.

Assagioli explained in his book the importance of what he calls a ‘disidentification exercise’ (page 22):

After having discovered [various elements of our personality], we have to take possession of them and acquire control over them. The most effective method by which we can achieve this is that of disidentification. This is based on a fundamental psychological principle which may be formulated as follows:

We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.

(For the psychosynthesis disidentification exercise see the following link.)

Then, in another exciting moment, I came upon Koestenbaum’s ideas about reflection six years after I had read Assagioli. 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. It is like a mirror learning to see that it is not the same as what is reflected in it. So here was a writer in the existentialist tradition speaking in almost the same terms as psychosynthesis. I had practised Assagioli’s exercise for a long period after reading his book. Now I was triggered into resuming the practice again by what Koestenbaum had written.

I came across Koestenbaum’s book just before I discovered the existence of the Bahá’í Faith (for a fuller account see link). It helped me take what I had found in Assagioli and fuse it with what I had found in the Faith and create an experiential exercise to express that understanding in action in a way that helped me immensely to adjust to spiritual concepts which until that point had been completely alien to me for decades – all my adult life in fact. The Baha’i Writings talk about certain key powers of the soul: loving, knowing and willing as well as introducing me to the idea of the heart, the core of our being, as a mirror. I pulled this into my version of the exercise (see below). What I didn’t realise until later was that Assagioli had corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and had therefore to some degree been influenced by Bahá’í thought. (See Disidentification exercise for the final version that I used myself rather than this one I revised to share for the use of others).

How amazing then to find Emily Kelly, in the book Irreducible Mind, quoting Myers quoting Thomas Reid, an 18th century philosopher (page 74):

The conviction which every man has of his identity . . . needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it.… I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment…; But that Self or I, to which they belong, is permanent…

What I regret therefore now is that the usefulness of this exercise did not make me trace it back to its source and find out more of what Myers thought about this and many other things of great importance to me. So, better late than never, that is what I am about to do now.

Myers’s the self and the Self

The disidentification exercise rattled the cage of my previous ideas about who I was in essence. While I didn’t quite buy into Assagioli’s other ideas about consciousness at that time I felt, both intuitively and from the experiences I was having, that his idea was completely right that there is some form of pure consciousness underpinning our identity.

So, as good a place as any to pick up the thread of Myers’s thinking again is with his ideas of the self and the Self. There are some problems to grapple with before we can move on. Emily Kelly writes (page 83):

These ‘concepts central to his theory’ are undoubtedly difficult, but despite some inconsistency in his usage or spelling Myers was quite clear in his intent to distinguish between a subliminal ‘self’ (a personality alternate or in addition to the normal waking one) and a Subliminal ‘Self’ or ‘Individuality’ (which is his real ‘unifying theoretical principle’). In this book we will try to keep this distinction clear in our readers minds by using the term ‘subliminal consciousness’ to refer to any conscious psychological processes occurring outside ordinary awareness; the term “subliminal self” (lower case) to refer to ‘any chain of memory sufficiently continuous, and embracing sufficient particulars, to acquire what is popularly called a “character” of its own;’ and the term ‘Individuality’ or “’Subliminal Self” (upper case) to refer to the underlying larger Self.

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of supraliminal experiences, used here by me in the sense of things that leak through the membrane from above, is strong enough to warrant serious consideration and he distinguishes between that and subliminal experiences that come, as it were, from underneath (see diagram and footnote at the bottom of the post)[1] (page 87):

Supernormal [ie supraliminal in my sense] processes such as telepathy do seem to occur more frequently while either the recipient or the agent (or both) is asleep, in the states between sleeping and waking, in a state of ill health, or dying; and subliminal [unconscious in my use of terms] functioning in general emerges more readily during altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, hysteria, or even ordinary distraction.

He felt that we needed to find some way of reliably tapping into these levels of consciousness (page 91)

The primary methodological challenge to psychology, therefore, lies in developing methods, or ‘artifices,’ for extending observations of the contents or capacities of mind beyond the visible portion of the psychological spectrum, just as the physical sciences have developed artificial means of extending sensory perception beyond ordinary limits.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thin Partitions

He also has much that is interesting and valuable to say about the implications of a proper understanding of these upper and lower thresholds, especially when they are too porous, for both genius and mental health (page 98):

When there is ‘a lack of liminal stability, an excessive permeability, if I may say so, of the psychical diaphragm that separates the empirical [supraliminal: conscious in my usage] from the latent [subliminal: unconscious in my usage] faculties and man,’ then there may be either an expansion of consciousness (an ‘uprush’ of latent material from the subliminal into the supraliminal) or, conversely, a narrowing of consciousness (a ‘downdraught’ from the supraliminal into the subliminal). The former is genius, the latter is hysteria.

His use of supra- and subliminal is slightly confusing here but the main point is that genius expands what we are aware of, and more comes above the threshold, whereas hysteria narrows our experience so that less comes into consciousness. This is partly clarified by Kelly explaining (page 99):

In short, Myers believed that hysteria, when viewed as a psychological phenomenon, gives ‘striking’ support to ‘my own principal thesis’, namely, that all personality is a filtering or narrowing of the field of consciousness from a larger Self, the rest of which remains latent and capable of emerging only under the appropriate conditions.

Even the expanded consciousness of genius, in this view, is still filtering a lot out – in fact, it still leaves most of potential consciousness untapped.

There is in addition a common quality of excessive porousness which explains why, in Shakespeare’s phrase, the ‘lunatic . . . . . and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ Myers’s view is that (page 100):

Because genius and madness both involve similar psychological mechanisms – namely, a permeability of the psychological boundary – it is to be expected that they might frequently occur in the same person; but any nervous disorders that accompany genius signal, not dissolution, but a ‘perturbation which masks evolution.’

For Myers dreams, though they may indeed be common and frequently discounted, they are nonetheless important sources of data (pages 102-103):

Myers argued [that] dreams provide a readily available means of studying the ‘language’ of the subliminal, a language that may underlie other, less common forms of automatism or subliminal processes. . . . Myers’s model of mind predicts that that if sleep is a state of consciousness in which subliminal processes take over from supraliminal ones, then sleep should facilitate subliminal functioning, not only in the organic or ‘infrared’ region, but also in the “ultraviolet” range of the psychological spectrum, such as the emergence of telepathic impressions in dreams.

This has certainly been my own experience. A post I wrote two years ago will perhaps serve to illustrate that for those who are interested. My dream of the hearth, recounted there, was, incidentally, the only dream I have ever had in which I experienced the presence of God, another reason for my attaching such great importance to it.

An important related topic he also addresses is that of ‘hallucinations.’ People tend to be quite closed minded on this topic, seeing visions and voices as the sign of a mind gone wrong. This is quite unhelpful. There is a mass of evidence that I may come back to some time to indicate that ‘hallucinations’ range from the darkly destructive to the life enhancing and it important to pay close attention to the details of them and the circumstances under which they occur before coming to any conclusion about them. Our society’s default position, the result of exactly the backward step under discussion here that both psychology and psychiatry took in the name of pseudo-science, is harmful rather than helpful quite often (I have explored a more positive approach on this blog – see the six links to An Approach to Psychosis). Pim van Lommel’s research into NDEs replicates the same kind of pattern in that patients whose families and friends were unsympathetic took much longer to integrate their experiences and found it a more painful process than those who were met with support and understanding. He summarises this (page 51):

When someone first tries to disclose the NDE, the other person’s reaction is absolutely crucial. If this initial reaction is negative or skeptical, the process of accepting and integrating the NDE typically presents far greater problems than if this initial reaction is positive, sympathetic, or neutral. Evidence has shown that positive responses facilitate and accelerate the integration process. In fact, without the possibility of communication, the process of coming to terms with the NDE often fails to get under way at all.

We tend to underestimate the frequency of ‘hallucinations’ in the ‘normal’ population, something the Myers was already aware of (page 108):

One of the most important accomplishments of Myers, Guerney, and their colleagues in psychical research was in demonstrating the previously suspected, but as it turns out not infrequent, occurrence of hallucinations in normal, healthy individuals.

Not all them should be dismissed as fantasy (page 109):

These studies and surveys also demonstrated that such hallucinations are not always purely subjective in origin. Some, in fact, are veridical – that is, they involve seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing some event happening at a physically remote location. . . . . Using their own figures for the frequency with which people recall having hallucinations in a waking, healthy state, together with statistics regarding the incidence of death in the United Kingdom, they concluded that hallucinations coinciding with a death happened too frequently to be attributable to chance.

All in all, Myers’s mould-breaking approach to the mind and to the problems of consciousness is refreshing to say the least, and maps onto my own long-standing interests in spirituality, creativity and ‘psychosis.’ It was icing on the cake to find what he said about science and religion, a point to savour and a good note to end this post on (page 113) :

On the one hand, . . . he believed that science could ‘prove the preamble of all religions’ – namely, that the universe extends far beyond the perceptible material world. On the other hand., religion could contribute to ‘the expansion of Science herself until she can satisfy those questions which the human heart will rightly ask, but to which Religion alone has thus far attempted an answer.’

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[1] Unfortunately, Myers uses supraliminal to mean anything that crosses any threshold into consciousness, whether from above or below. This is a perfectly legitimate usage but it then leaves us no straightforward word to describe what lies above us and beyond our upper threshold. I have preferred to use subliminal to mean what lies beneath the lower threshold and supraliminal for what lies beyond our upper threshold, and conscious to describe what crosses either of the thresholds into our awareness. Quotes from or about Myers tend to follow his usage.

The Threshold Issue

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Skilfully Willing (1/2)

Man possesses certain virtues of which nature is deprived. He exercises volition; nature is without will.

(Promise of Universal Peace: page 80)

The Reductionist Position

Daniel Dennett

It is good to see so many books, rooted in good scientific evidence, at last admitting to the reality of will as a human attribute. When I was first studying psychology more than 30 years ago, the whole idea of will power was discredited in academic circles. By the time Dennett was writing his influential tract about consciousness in the early 90s he spoke for many when he dismissed the idea of conscious choice as a genuine initiator of action. He wrote (page 163):

[Libet] found evidence that . . . “conscious decisions” lagged between 350 and 400 msec behind the onset of “readiness potentials” he was able to record from scalp electrodes, which, he claims, tap the neural events that determine the voluntary actions performed. He concludes that “cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously.”

. . . It seems to rule out a real (as opposed to an illusory) “executive role for “the conscious self.”

In other words, we might believe we are deliberately and consciously deciding what to do, but we are not. Brain processes beneath consciousness are performing that trick automatically.

A recent book on what the authors call “biocentrism,” seeks to prove that consciousness, as far as we are concerned, is all there is:

Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

They base their case in physics and I found the validity of their arguments in that area impossible to assess. However, when they trundled out their variation of the Dennet case they lost their credibility with me (page 38):

Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision.

I stopped reading Biocentrism not long after this passage.

Credibility Restored

In earlier posts I had mobilised my arguments against this glib reductionism, focusing mainly on the fact that the evidence is based on button-pressing reaction-time experiments for the most part (see the links to the two posts on The Self and The Soul below).

Then I began to find other books that marshalled strong evidence for the opposite case (see link below to the work of Schwartz for example).

And now a fascinating book has appeared, written by Baumeister and Tierney, that contains further compelling evidence for the reality of the will and argues against the reductionist point at issue here (Kindle references 262 and 267):

Much of self-control operates unconsciously. At a business lunch, you don’t have to consciously restrain yourself from eating meat off your boss’s plate. Your unconscious brain continuously helps you avoid social disaster, and it operates in so many subtly powerful ways that some psychologists have come to view it as the real boss.

. . . . There is no consciousness in that process. Nobody is aware of nerve cells firing. But the will is to be found in connecting units across time. Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern.

The point that Roberto Assagioli makes in his thought-provoking book, The Act of Will can no longer be dismissed as irrational (page 47):

Psychosynthesis Star Diagram

The essential function of the skilful will, which we need to cultivate, is the ability to develop that strategy which is most effective and which entails the greatest economy of effort, rather than the strategy that is most direct and obvious.  . . . . .The most effective and satisfactory role of the will is not as a source of direct power or force, but as that function which, being at our command, can stimulate, regulate, and direct all the other functions and forces of our being so that they may lead us to our predetermined goal.

Willpower – the Basics

So, what do Baumeister and Tierney have to say about will that might resonate strongly with my own feelings and thoughts on the matter?

First, though, I need to repeat a summary of their basic idea. In the last post I made a summary of my own. I now have the benefit of the one they wrote in this month’s edition of The Psychologist:

. . . . self-control is like a muscle that gets tired. People may start the day fresh and rested, but as they exert self-control over the course of the day, their powers may diminish. Many researchers have observed that self-control tends to break down late in the day, especially if it has been a demanding or stressful day. . . .

A series of experiments confirmed that willpower is tied to glucose (Gailliot et al., 2007). After people exert self-control, even on artificial lab tasks, their blood glucose levels drop. Low levels of blood glucose predict poor performance on tests of self- control.

Their book makes an extremely important additional point quite clearly (545):

The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

They emphasise the importance of both standards and self-awareness in maximising the adaptive effects of will power (1715):

Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man.

Why Willpower Matters

Pulp Fiction Cartoon

Relatively late in their book, Baumeister and Tierney turn their attention to religion and make some interesting observations. Before we deal with them in more detail, there is a preparatory point to consider. Before research into will power got off the ground there was a keen desire to find a quality related to success in life that could be significantly and easily improved.

Self-esteem was an early candidate that bit the dust as it fell at the hurdle of systematic study. Their most damning comment about self-esteem needs to be quoted here, I feel. They refer to the “the observation that some people doing truly awful things—like professional hit men and serial rapists—had remarkably high levels of self-esteem.” (2855)

In the end, almost against their will it seems, they stumbled upon self-control (1995):

The initial results caused great excitement among psychologists, because self-control was one of only two traits known to produce a wide spectrum of benefits, and the other trait, intelligence, had turned out to be quite difficult to improve.

With willpower, on the other hand, improvement was relatively easy (2056):

As long as you were motivated to do some kind of exercise, your overall willpower could improve, at least over the course of the experiment.

It also makes you less narcissistic and therefore presumably less likely to kill people (2444):

. . . self-control is not selfish. Willpower enables us to get along with others and override impulses that are based on personal short-term interests.

Now we come to what they write about religion and the interesting observations they make. Dealing with them in more detail will need to wait, though, till next week’s post.

Related articles

• Maximum Willpower: How to master the new science of self-control, by Kelly McGonigal; Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney – review
• The Self & the Soul
• Mind over Matter (a post on the work of Schwartz)

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Willing Change (2/4): lifting our game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aspects of Consciousness in Psychosynthesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Consciousness is the Ground of All Being (1/2): Missing the Point

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.

Bahá’u'lláh: Seven Valleys page 21) 

These next two posts deal with two aspects of experience: the first, in this post, is the nature of our failure to see beneath the material surfaces of our world, and the second, in the next post, points us in the direction of a few people who seem to know better, and one of them is the physicist from whom I borrowed this main title.

Lumpers and Splitters

There are many grand divisions in the human race between one kind of person and another, and few can be of more significance, of course, than that between lumpers and splitters (I owe the sophisticated technical terminology I am using here to a very good friend: thanks, Iain!).

By nature, whatever that means, I’m a lumper. When using my ears and my eyes I instinctively go for the ‘big picture.’ I retain only a general impression and my first reaction is to get the ‘gist’ of things. 

I listen reasonably well — it was a core part of my old job, after all — but I store what I think was meant rather than the words that were actually said. Half a life-time of  verbatim note-taking hasn’t altered that.

When my wife makes some undetectable change around the house, such as completely rearranging the furniture, it is only when I go to sit down on a chair that has been moved that I notice that something is different. (I’m much better at noticing emotional atmospheres from the subtlest small hints and remembering the exact feel of what I’ve handled in some way.)

It’s how my brain works. The words and images may be down there somewhere but I can’t retrieve them. It’s as though my mind says, ‘Detail? Why bother? I’ve got the point.’ When I think I know the layout I don’t bother looking.

There are costs and benefits to this. I can get things done quickly and I generally have a good feel for the overall territory of a task or situation. The downside can be costly though. My blindness to a critical detail can send me crashing to the ground, and, as I’m often sprinting, the fall can be extremely hard sometimes.

Splitters, on the other hand, keep track of the details. They notice and remember the small things. They would remember exactly what was said or see that there was a small picture on the wall under the stairs.

This means that they are unlikely to overlook an important piece of information. However, if I am likely to fall over the detail I haven’t noticed, they are likely to get bogged down in all the details they find hard to ignore, even if they are not relevant to the task in hand.

Something is Missing

I think that both lumpers and splitters have another problem with detail that is disguised by this instrumental view, in which I am looking only at the practical usefulness of the two modes of operation. I think our two styles can blind us to the deeper realities behind material experiences, the kind of deeper realities the two posts on images and eternity have been looking at.

It’s obvious how my style holds me back — I skim too fast and only retain what the needs of the moment require. It’s not so obvious why an attention to detail might be an obstacle as well. I think it’s because it blocks access to the deeper reality: it’s essentially the material aspect of an object whose details are attended to and retained. Lumpers ignore and splitters are distracted by the complexity of such detail.

The tale told by Roberto Assagioli in his book, The Act of Will, illustrates this. 

A new student presented himself to a famous scientist one day, asking to be set to work. The naturalist took a fish from a jar in which it had been preserved and asked the student to observe it carefully, and be ready to report on what he had noticed about the fish. In a half-hour he felt certain that he had observed all about the fish that there was to be seen. It had fins and scales and a mouth and eyes —  oh, and a tail.

But the naturalist remained away.

The student went in search of the teacher but failed to find him. Another hour passed and he knew little more about the fish than he did in the first place. He went out to lunch, and when he returned it was still a case of watching the fish. He wished he had never come there to learn. The teacher was stupid. Then, in order to kill time, he began to count the scales. This completed, he counted the spines of the fins. Then he began to draw a picture of the fish. In drawing the picture he noticed that the fish had no eyelids. 

The teacher returned and was clearly disappointed and left again telling him to keep on looking and maybe he would see something. This put the boy on his mettle and he began to work with his pencil, putting down little details that had escaped him before, but which now seemed very plain to him. He began to catch the secret of observation. Little by little he brought to light objects of interest about the fish. But this did not satisfy his teacher, who kept him at work on the same fish for three whole days. At the end of that time the student really knew something about the fish.  (As I couldn’t find my copy of Assagioli’s Act of Will, I have adapted this from Teuber)

There is of course a huge amount that we can learn from the details we uncover from this kind of dissection. There is, though, at least one small problem here. What we are observing so carefully in this fashion has to be dead, or else, if not dead to begin with, it pretty soon will be.

Moreover, even though we have learnt a lot by systematically observing living systems such as ant colonies in their nests, primate communities in the jungle and bacteria in jars, we need always to remind ourselves that there are aspects of this world we are observing that are lost in that kind of analysis. And what is sacrificed may be of critical significance.

We may still be killing too many bees for this honey and it’s low-grade honey into the bargain. So where do we go from here? I think that will have to wait until the next post.

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The Self and the Soul: Mirrorwork Practice (3/5)

Mirroring the Light

A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

(Bahá’u’lláh ‘The Seven Valleys‘: pages 21-22 which ends with a hadith or tradition about a saying of Muhammad.)

Is the soul a smoke and mirrors job?

There is, in some scientistic quarters where materialism is dogmatic rather than enquiring, a prevailing distrust of any statements of a mystical nature. This scepticism routinely crosses over into suspicions of insanity even when the source of the mystical statement would, on closer investigation, be found to demonstrate a strong, balanced and exemplary character without any other sign of delusion. In fact, in the real world as against in the fantasies of reductionists, mystics are almost invariably very practical people, something that gives their mystical pronouncements added credibility in my view.

Ever since the so-called Enlightenment, our culture has been increasingly losing the ability to discriminate between madness  (seen as meaningless because hallucinatory and delusional, though for reasons I argue elsewhere not necessarily meaningless even so) and mysticism, which is not hallucinatory or delusional in any acceptable sense of those words. I would earnestly request anyone harbouring such a sceptical tendency as I describe, to suspend their habit of disbelief for a few moments for reasons that will become clear as this exploration advances.

Before you read beyond them I would like you ponder on which of the following passages was written by a philosopher and which by a religious person.

Meditation, the first man says:

. . . releases consciousness from its objects and gives us the opportunity to experience our conscious inwardness in all its purity.

The second man states of meditation that it:

. . . frees man from [his] animal nature [and] discerns the reality of things.

Even though I tried to equalise the style you probably got it right. The first statement comes from Peter Koestenbaum (page 99) and the second from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Paris Talks: page 175).

I think you will agree though that they are more complementary than in conflict.

What each goes on to say is even more intriguing. Koestenbaum ends by saying:

The name Western Civilisation has given to . . .  the extreme inward region of consciousness is God.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words are:

[Meditation] puts man in touch with God.

A Plan in The Mind's Mirror

The terms meditation, reflection and contemplation are used almost synonymously in many passages. In discussing what he terms reflection within the existentialist tradition, Koestenbaum speaks of it as ‘separating consciousness from its contents.’  It can be also termed disidentification when it involves separating our consciousness from our ideas of ourselves and leads into the deepest levels of our being.

So, it is not just mystics that find our ability to reflect remarkable. Existentialism, which is not known for a fairytale take on experience, gives it tremendous weight as does the Bahá’í approach. This is not a trivial issue. Both schools of thought, and many therapeutic approaches, see reflection in this strong sense as a key pathway to personal transformation, self-transcendence and the enhancement of society.

The Importance of Experience

We will postpone for a moment whether this entails an acceptance of other things such as the reality of the soul. What it does mean is that this capacity we have is subject to the test of experience by all of us. And when we try it out we may find it leads us in unexpected directions that call into question some of our most cherished assumptions. It will inevitably do so because it separates us at least for a moment from those assumptions, cuts across our identification with them, and enables us to look at them afresh. This is why we need to be prepared to suspend our disbelief long enough to put these ideas to an empirical test.

Our culture embraces its own narrow idea of empiricism. By this it generally means only controlled experimentation and excludes

A Feeling in The Mind's Mirror

personal exploration through experience. There are many things in this world that we can only discover by doing not by reading, talking or thinking about them. Nor can we understand them by a method of scientific exploration that turns people into objects rather than subjects. In ‘objective’ mode, we become like a colour-blind neuropsychologist who knows everything about the way the brain processes colour but can never know what colour is like when we see it (I have adapted this comparison from David J. Chalmers: page 103).

Experiencing our ‘self’, in the fullest and deepest sense of that chameleon word, in order to discover who we really are, is one of those things.

So, I have a challenge for us all. I am suggesting that between now and the next post we all try the following experiment. We need to find a quiet space to do the following exercise at least once a day: it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. It is based on ideas from Psychosynthesis, psychology, Existentialism and the Bahá’í tradition. It is worth persisting with even if it feels somewhat artificial at first. Not to even try is pre-empting the possibility of an experience that could expand our minds. It works best if we approach it with open-minded curiosity as a personal experiment, not as a holy grail or a superstitious ritual.

Separating the Mirror from its Reflections

Sit comfortably and at first simply read the following suggestions several times. When you feel ready, close your eyes, breath slowly and gently, and in your mind repeat the suggestions to yourself at least three times. Put your own ideas into the round brackets if you wish.

I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts. My thoughts change from moment to moment. Just now I was thinking of (money): right now I am thinking of (these words): soon my mind will be preoccupied with (my next meal). So I cannot be my thoughts. I am my capacity to think, the well spring of all my thoughts.

I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. My feelings change from moment to moment. One minute I’m feeling (angry), perhaps; the next moment I’m feeling (sad). So, I cannot be my feelings. I am my capacity to feel from which all other feelings grow.

I have plans, but I am not my plans. My plans change from moment to moment. One minute I plan to be (rich), perhaps; the next moment I plan to be a (poet). So, I cannot be my plans. I am my capacity to will from which all my plans grow.

I am a mirror of pure capacities. I am a mirror created to reflect the highest possible reality. I will do all in my power to cleanse this mirror and turn it towards the highest imaginable realities.

(This exercise is an adaptation of the Disidentification Exercise originally described in `Psychosynthesis’ by Roberto Assagioli: see earlier link.)

Next time we will take a long look at the implications of this. We will look at what the distinction between a mirror and what it reflects suggests about us. In the meantime, happy mirroring!

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