Veils, Words & Values (3/5): competing needs

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh — CLII

Authenticity

When I was confronting my challenges in the 1992 diary entry I quoted in the first post of this sequence, I asked myself ‘How am I to break this vicious circle? Do I risk losing the social ties and work I value? That’s what scares and deters me, stands between me and myself.’

I went on to explore this more deeply:

.  . . . My background programmed me to believe that the cost of being ‘myself’ in the face of disapproval would be some kind of ‘death’ or absolute loss. But is this true? Is it too late to turn this round and refuse to be self-traitor any longer? Can I not find the means to reflect and write within my various roles? . . . To do so I must dare to introduce my differences into my relationships rather than sinking them beyond recovery in a swamp of self-deception.

That scares me. It will also be extremely hard work. There will be no comfortable easy rides. Confrontations, the idea of which shrivels me up inside, will be frequent. I will have to discover my true response in positions where that will be dangerous. I have so far attributed my survival and ‘success’ to my evasion of all such situations. My roles seem to require a dedication to the kind of facts with which the world typically stones to death the metaphors and myths poetry values and relies on.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying that at this point I really didn’t know about the language of the heart and its importance. All I seemed to know was that ‘My life and sanity seem to depend on my finding a workable and sustainable solution.’

I was gifted my Hearth Dream in 1993, triggered by the quotation at the head of this post, and it seems clear now that it started me on my long road out of this impasse. What I didn’t even begin to realise in 1993 was that this priceless source of innumerable insights almost certainly came from my literal heart, and not just ‘heart’ in some metaphorical sense. That clinching insight, as readers of this blog will know by now, came decades later.

There were various other complicating factors at work during this challenging period, above and beyond the role strain and conflicting values. My introversion had been a long-standing contributor to my stress, as previous posts have explored in more detail. What I was probably not factoring in was something that was only clearly explained in a recent book. Adam Robarts in his moving exploration of how he and his wife coped with the premature death of their son touches on a theme which resonated strongly with me and concerned ‘authenticity,’ something that seemed a core quality deeply embedded in his son, Haydn’s, being.

He quotes research published in Scientific American by Jennifer Beer:[1]

Beer notes, “Authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that guests should generate conversation.” The distinctive twist, however, is that “a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to a kind of social conformity.” Specifically, she notes that such conformity is usually applied to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual, and agreeable.

I have grappled since my teenage years with the issue of reconciling my introverted temperament with the need to operate effectively in the social world. I still remember my decision in my mid-teens to fake sociability in order to get on in the world.

The insights Robarts quotes helped me see how the confusion of extraversion with authenticity had made authenticity difficult for me as an introvert.

A relevant Socratic question might be how do I square the value I attach to connectedness with my deep desire for so much solitude? The acting on the latter leaves me feeling guilty while acting on the former creates frustration and drains energy. I am therefore rarely content.

Competing Needs

Grounded in my values, there are competing needs within me, for connection on the one hand and for solitude on the other. The problem is I feel authentic when alone, which can trigger a need to withdraw from company: when alone, though, I feel guilty for neglecting people who value my company, even though I often feel inauthentic when I’m with them.

There is apparently therefore no escaping my need for solitary time most days and usually I can scrape enough of that together. What I consistently fail to do most of the time with most people is to be true to my real self (not my ego but my heart). Part of the reason for this is my sense that who I really am in certain respects would not fit well with “present company” – I might easily upset or anger someone. I’m not so bothered about angering others because, for example, my views or tastes differ, but I hate upsetting or offending anyone.

I have not so far been able to find any way out of this cage. This contributes to a sense of distance from or loneliness with others that feeds my need for the quietness of solitude.

I wonder whether the distinction made by Eliot in his poem, Burnt Norton, which Lyndall Gordon discusses, is a clue:[2]

. . . the end of March, then, was [Hale’s]’s first opportunity to take in the [Eliot’s] detachment from human love. It was certain to shake her trust that this was ‘our’ poem.

Next to the line ‘darkness to purify the soul’, Eliot gives Hale a clue in ink: ‘The Ascent of Mt Carmel’. And next to the passage beginning ‘Descend lower’, he writes, again in ink, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The 16^th century treatises by the Spanish monk St John of the Cross preached a solitary discipline: to divest oneself of natural human affections so as to arrive at the love of God.

His poem’s swing from human love does not deny the validity of the rose-garden moment [they had shared together]. The rationale is that the ‘way up’ in the rose-garden and the ‘way down’ of the saint coexist, as in the epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. These are alternative routes across the frontier of the timeless, and the poem does not lose sight of the route via natural love.

. . . So, for him to shun human love would have been more than expected; how could it not come as a shock and change her willing surrender to shame and disappointment? The first hint that he will turn away from pleasure comes in an otherwise intimate letter on 6 January when he writes that joy does not lie in the things of this world.

Basically, the theory goes that you can pierce the veils and access the timeless either upwards through connection with others or downwards through solitary introspection. Eliot ended up opting for the latter. I am torn between the two: the first seems an inescapable obligation, the latter an inexcusable indulgence. Pursuing either causes conflict and/or a sense of guilt.

My diary entries persistently track other aspects of this, for example, in an entry from Friday 17 June 2022:

Today I have experienced a crucially important epiphany. On the back of a fleeting comment I made recently that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book ‘The Matter with Things’, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a subordinate domain to science and religion – it is their equal. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

This realisation almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way; certainly a lightbulb moment. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E [my acronym for consultation, action, reflection and experience] I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only to by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s purpose.

Star and Care

This moved me onto to a critical question:

Have I really at last reached a proper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life — a question that’s been bugging me for ages?

After years of sometimes invisible struggle, I clearly thought I was coming close to ripping off a few of the veils obscuring my inner vision.

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention. . . .

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways. CARE is largely ‘How?’ and STAR is largely ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’

Of course, I had to bring my bête noire of reductionism into the mix:

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. A destructive ‘science’, ‘art’ or ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

I must keep all three in balance though.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places: what is critical is that destructive dogmatism and fanaticism be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless I’ll know not to trust a word they say.

For me a more difficult task than avoiding reductionism, is keeping the three domains in balance.

I know I am not a polymath, but I really do need to keep all three in balance. Choosing psychology swung me away from the arts but the fire-in-the-car-engine dream helped me redress that imbalance. My conversion to the Bahá’í Faith derailed the arts again in favour of religion. The Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth, that even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that has dispirited me so long and prevented my enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Maybe I again got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[3]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I am determined to do everything I can not to make that same mistake again.

. . . Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others.

Recent reading, which I will touch on in the next post, suggests I need to keep my focus on arts and sciences that explore spirituality in some way, however indirectly. My recent heart insights showed me that, as all three in their highest form are valuable paths towards what is ultimately the same truth, my sense of their being in conflict was a completely misplaced veil blocking my ability to jettison my disabling guilt about following any of them at the imagined expense of the others.

Also, I wrote that I had been ruminating so long on what I was interested in — science, art, consciousness, spirituality etc. — without really looking at how to enact that (except in my blog). That was not enough. I need to use every interaction, every solitary action, to authentically express my deepest self in as constructive a way as possible, regardless of the criticism, and possible contempt it might trigger.

I am trying to hold on to these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, translated from the Arabic:

Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts.

More on all this next time.

Explained at this link

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 36.
[2]. The Hyacinth Girl – pages 227-229.
[3]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

Read Full Post »

The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

Read Full Post »

The Third ‘I’ (1/7): Kahneman revisited – a dilemma

For the source of the picture see link

With some trepidation I am about to embark next Monday on a further exploration of the heart. So, it seemed a good idea to republish this sequence. 

I’ve looked at one example of where Kahneman‘s thinking works at its most powerful. I’d like to dig a bit deeper now. It’s easier to understand more fully the strengths and weaknesses of Kahneman’s model of System 1 and System 2 thinking if we start with a concrete example. So, here’s rather a long – or do I mean tall? – story from sometime in 2008 to get us going.

The young girl slid the tray onto the table and placed the plate and the cafetière side by side.

‘What’s this?’ the man asked, picking up a purple hourglass with pink sand still running through it.

‘Oh, sorry!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m new here. I shouldn’t have brought that. It measures how long the coffee takes to brew.’

‘Ah! I didn’t know that,’ he said as he handed her the hourglass. ‘Can I have some milk instead?’

He stared blankly out of the window at the passers-by in the passageway outside as he waited for the milk. She came back in a couple of minutes and placed it on the table.

‘Sorry about that,’ she giggled.

‘That’s OK,’ he replied, unable to manage a smile.

The Plan Cafe, Cardiff

Jack was really cheesed off. He was sitting in his favourite cafe, with a gleaming cafetière of his much-loved Ethiopian coffee nestling up against a tempting piece of Courgette cake, with his mood completely spoiled by the problem on his mind. It was his damn brother again. Why did Sam think he had a right to get bailed out of his self-inflicted difficulties simply for the asking?

He could hear the email that he had printed out rustling in his pocket as he leant forward to press down the plunger on the cafetière. If only he hadn’t read it yet. Still, he was always hopeful that a good coffee would improve his mood. He watched the stream of steaming coffee mingle with the milk in the white cup.

The first sip helped, though the second pouring would be better now the cup was warm.

His gut reaction to Sam’s request for help troubled him. His brother knew he didn’t drink. He tried to remember the last time he had tasted alcohol. He thought it was the half pint of bitter after his last game of squash. Somehow once he had started meditating, alcohol lost its appeal completely. It mucked your head up anyway so you couldn’t meditate properly, and in any case booze had stopped tasting as good.

But even after all the meditation he had done, he was sitting in the cafe feeling stressed.

Sam had asked for a ‘loan.‘ His tobacconist shop was losing money. He ‘just’ needed £20,000 to tide him over while he closed the tobacconist’s down and opened an off-licence in the next street. It was perfect, he said. The guy was retiring and wanted a quick sale so he could move up north to be with his daughter in time for the birth of his first grand child.  Sam had a buyer in line for his own business and was getting a reasonable price even though the new laws about smoking in public places had hit the trade badly – but the price was not quite enough to cover all the costs of the off-licence. He just needed to pay off his debts and cover the shortfall and he would be fine.

For source of picture see link

Jack had hated Sam’s idea of opening the tobacconist’s in the first place as he regarded smoking as second only to drink as a legal evil. And in a way he was glad it was failing. But he was being asked to help finance a move towards selling drink which he hated even more. With an inward groan he took the email out of his pocket.

‘Hi, Jack. Long time no see. Hope all is OK with you and the family. How’s Stella and the kids?

‘Just needed to touch base with you. I’ve got a slight problem right now and I could do with your help. You know I’ve had this tobacconist’s for a while now. Things have got tight since the law changed and I’m not making enough to make ends meet.’

He could hardly bear to read it again. It had been four years since he had heard anything at all from Sam, and, now he had heard, it was because Sam wanted something. And something his younger brother should have known Jack wouldn’t want to give. He skipped to the end of the explanation.

‘Hope you feel able to lob me the £20,000. I’ll pay you back, you know that. It’s not like when you paid my fees at uni. I knew that was given to me ‘cos you knew how important my education was.’

‘Like hell it was a gift,’ Jack spluttered in his head. ‘I told you right from the start I wanted it back.’ He was aware he was grimacing to himself and tried to compose his face. The woman at the next table was giving him a strange look. He made himself calm down by counting ten breaths very slowly.

It would have been tolerable if Sam had made good use of his time at university. Their parents were both dead by then, and had never been rich enough to leave them anything in any case. They’d had to fend for themselves. Jack felt he had always taken that challenge more seriously than Sam. Instead of studying hard, Sam had spent more time in the pub than in the library and just scraped a third in modern languages, To add insult to injury he then got a job in a pub kitchen and trained to be a chef. That’s probably what made the idea of opening an off-licence so appealing now. He already knew the trade from the inside to some extent, not just from the wrong side of the bar.

Jack made himself read the email to the end.

‘I don’t know whether you know but Bryony’s not working now and we’ve got Jim, Ned and the baby to provide for. I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t really need a hand desperately, and there’s no one else I can ask.’

‘Too right,’ thought Jack. ‘None of the bums he knows has two pounds to rub together.’

He stopped himself. Sam always brought out the worst in him. He remembered how close they were when Jim was born. Though Jack had been bitterly disappointed at Sam’s choice of career, he was fond of Bryony. She was bit scatty and could spend money like there was no tomorrow, but she was a good mother to the kids. She had a warm heart and a great sense of humour. He smiled to himself as he remembered her imitation, almost where he was sitting now, of Meg Ryan’s deli moment in ‘When Harry Met Sally.’ The woman across the way smiled back. He didn’t really notice.

For source of the image see link

He wasn’t quite sure why they had drifted apart. Maybe it was partly because he had stopped drinking and taken up meditation. Sam couldn’t get his head round that, and Jack got very bored spending time with Sam and his friends once they were three sheets to the wind, which was most evenings, even after the kids were born. Bryony just put up with it and was grateful that the money he brought in was usually far more than he spent.

Jack felt caught between a rock and a hard place. Part of him was so narked with Sam for the way he seemed to use people and for the unprincipled choices he made that he just wanted to tell him to get lost. The other part thought of Bryony and the kids: it wasn’t their fault Sam was a waster. He ought to give something at least for their sake. On the other hand Stella would go through the roof if he handed Sam anywhere close to £20,000.

‘Have you gone out of your mind?’ he could hear her now. ‘You might as well start the bonfire with it!’

And the pendulum in his head went back and forth as he sipped his coffee and nibbled on his cake without really tasting either of them.

He tried to step back from his gut feelings into a higher place in his head and think about it more objectively. The problem was that his logical mind was not much better than his gut when it came to this situation. Pragmatism simply said that what mattered really was whether Sam could make a go of it in the off-licence and provide properly for his family. If he could, then supporting him would be justified and, if he couldn’t, Jack should use the leverage the loan would give him to get Sam moving in a better direction. The problem was that the information he’d found on the net about the off-licence trade suggested that it might just provide a good living in the right location and with the right approach.

Not that anything was certain when it came to setting up a business.  He’d read somewhere that two out three small businesses died within five years. On top of that, his knowledge of Sam suggested strongly that he shouldn’t be in business at all because, unless money was growing on trees, he’d never make a go of it.  Yes, maybe he really should try and steer Sam towards some form of paid work within his abilities.

But he knew where that would go.

‘I hate bloody cooking. It’s hard work for next to no money.‘

‘But you’re good at it. And you’ll get promoted pretty quick so the money will be good. You might even be able to start up somewhere like this place eventually.’

Deep down though he wondered whether he would have the heart to withhold the loan if Sam didn’t buy the plan.

For source of image see link

His reading of Buddhist writings had taught him that he needed to go deeper into his mind to find wiser answers but he didn’t seem to be able to get past the blocks at the end of each pendulum swing. Anger versus pity. A good trade he disapproved of combined with Sam’s fecklessness. Don’t give him a penny. Give him a good leg up. There must be a way of getting past the stand off, transcending the conflict.

He found himself fruitlessly analysing the moral issues. What passed for compassion in his head said he should pay, for the kids’ sake. His version of wisdom said he shouldn’t because he’d be indulging Sam, he’d never learn from the consequences of his actions and it’d be throwing good money after bad. In any case it wasn’t fair as Sam hadn’t paid him back a penny of the money he owed for his education.

He shook himself. He tried counting his breaths again. He needed to go deeper, but how?

And that question along with many others will have to wait until tomorrow.

Read Full Post »

Transcending the crocodile inside (2/4): beginning to tame the beast

Given the latest new sequence focusing on Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, her exploration of how she was jolted by a brain bleed into an altogether different experience of reality, made me feel it was worth republishing this sequence from 2018. 

At the end of the last post I asked whether there was no hope for improving our ability to manage our primitive reactions.

One thing that can begin to help is learning to understand how we fail to deal properly with such triggers as they occur. Some of these responses to a trigger are conscious: many are not, or we are at least not fully aware of them. Although our culture influences their exact shape, records suggest that these defective strategies for managing the crocodile inside have been with us from our earliest days.

Some of our responses to a trigger from the crocodile within are more obvious than others. We’ve all seen it or done it ourselves – the traveller who dashes onto the platform in time to see the train pulling out and completely loses their cool, launching into a high decibel rant, or you drop the Clarice Cliff vase your mother gave you onto the tiled kitchen floor and burst into tears as it breaks into pieces, swearing at yourself at the same time.

Others are more hidden. You break the vase but you pretend that you don’t care. You get a dustpan and brush and sweep up the mess, dumping it into the bin along with your feelings, with only a tightening of the lips to hint to an astute observer that you maybe a little bit miffed.

‘Sorry, mum,’ you might whisper to yourself, ‘but I never liked it much anyway.’

An even less obvious sign of crocodile fear and anger blended could be those times when we find ourselves asserting our side of an argument with an absolute sense of superior understanding and justification. It’s as if our grasp of the truth is incontestable. Nothing that anyone else can say will shake our belief in our own rectitude. This stems, I believe, from our sense that our world view is an extension of our self, and any attack on what we think is an attack on us, hence the element of fear, and it must be repelled at all costs, hence the presence of some anger.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy explains this clearly. We need a sceptical attitude towards descriptions especially in relation to descriptions of the self (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy The Guilford Press: 1999 – page 182):

. . . when a person identifies with a particular conceptualisation, alternatives to that conceptualisation can seem almost life-threatening. The . . . frame here seems to be “Me = conceptualisation” [i.e. I am exactly what I think I am] and its entailed derivative “Eliminate conceptualisation = eliminate me” [i.e. If you destroy my idea of myself you destroy me]. [Thus], we are drawn into protecting our conceptualized self as if it were our physical self.

To help people step back from such identifications they liken the mind to a chessboard. We mistakenly identify with the pieces, not realising we are also, perhaps more truly the board (ibid. – page 192):

The point is that thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, memories and so on are pieces: they are not you.

How do we fail to deal with the crocodile?

What are these 4Ds and how do they work?

The acting out of anger on the railway platform is the result of a level of disinhibition, an inability to contain or control the flood of feeling, so it spills out against the world around us, creating a drama that usually impacts unpleasantly on others. Or, perhaps more accurately we willingly throw it at people and things.

It is a close relative of the feeling of drowning in sadness and distress that can be quite overwhelming, such as after breaking a precious object or relationship. We tend to subside into a heap, and, although it is perfectly obvious to everyone around us that something is the matter, we are not deliberately trying to discharge the feeling by throwing over others. It is important to make a distinction here between drowning and emotional blackmail. The latter is a deliberate attempt to manipulate someone else into meeting your demands by showing them how ‘hurt’ you are. People fake illness for the same purpose. The portrait below was triggered after Lowry had looked in the mirror during an exhausting and stressful period of his life, when he was the sole carer of his demanding and by this time bed-bound mother, who had decades of experience in using her apparent illnesses to exact compliance to her every whim from those closest to her.

Head of Man with Red Eyes (Image scanned from L S Lowry: a life by Shelley Rohde)

When we pretend to ourselves we’re not feeling anything we’re in denial, to use the Freudian term: disowning is the existential word for it, and discounting is a variant Transactional Analysis uses quite frequently. They all amount to much the same thing. We try to convince ourselves it’s not there, and sometimes we succeed. Unfortunately attempting to bury it in this way does not prevent its leaking out in other ways to our own and others’ detriment.

Dogmatism concerns the doggedness with which we stick to our opinions and assert them no matter how obtuse or wrong-headed they might be.

In almost every case the cause of all this discontent, whether we act it out, bury it, turn it into an argument or are overwhelmed by it, lies in our inability to unhook ourselves from the brain noise generated by our crocodile inside. We think it’s all we are at that moment in time. In essence, we think it’s who are.

This means that if we have no doubt that our anger justifies any kind of action on our part we will attack without scruple, and may face severe consequences. What else could we do?

If we have doubts about the correctness of hitting someone in the face for stepping in front of us in the queue, we may swallow our anger and pretend that we don’t care, which may pre-empt the possibility of our making a legitimate protest. What other way do we have of resolving the clash between our feeling and our scruples?

If fear or sadness completely overwhelms us, we may convince ourselves we are weak and useless, and miss a whole host of opportunities to improve our lives. That’s inevitable, isn’t it?

What choice have we got?

Our culture makes us all too prone to repression (convincing ourselves we’re not experiencing something when we are), acting out (expressing whatever we are currently experiencing and ignoring the consequences until it is too late), or feeling overwhelmed (caving in under what feels like a tsunami of distress). Any of these can feed into a pattern of dogmatic assertion.

We don’t hear or see much about a more creative way of responding, which is a key to positive change. This other way I’ll call containment.

This means that we can hold an unpleasant feeling in mind without hitting someone, hurting ourselves, pretending it’s not there or arguing a point with undue stubbornness. What’s more we can do this long enough and often enough to think about, reflect on and inspect the feeling from various angles and work out the most constructive response to it. We can do this by realising the feeling is not all that we are, it is not who we really are, it is simply a transient state of mind or underlying influence generated by one archaic aspect of our brain, the inner crocodile, immensely useful to us in times of real danger when we lived in caves but only occasionally of real value now. Nowadays it causes more problems between us and is seldom needed to protect us from tigers, even in India – we’ve exterminated a lot of those dangerous animals outside but left the most dangerous one inside untouched.

So how do we learn to contain and ultimately correct our corrosive reactions? More of this next time.

Read Full Post »

Transcending the crocodile inside (1/4): finding the reptile in the first place

Given the latest new sequence focusing on Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, her exploration of how she was jolted by a brain bleed into an altogether different experience of reality, made me feel it was worth republishing this sequence from 2018. 

Reptilian Rage

When an atrocity occurs we often find ourselves asking, ‘How could people do something like that?’ We seem to have forgotten that we are all wired to a crocodile and that it’s waiting to pounce at any moment. Some of us are better at controlling it than others.

We’ve all been there.

When we’re already slightly stressed trying to fix a leak in the shower, and the plumber fails to turn up, we experience a flood of frustration. We’ve waited in all morning, he’s not answering his mobile and the trickle from the pipe looks to us as though it is turning into a stream. We’re fed up of collecting it in a bucket to water the flowers so that at least it doesn’t go to waste.

‘Where the hell is he? Why doesn’t he ring?’ we bellow.

We have lost a sense of proportion. Compared to the Everest of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia this is less than a pimple. We never consider that the plumber’s mother may have fallen down the stairs or his pregnant wife has had to be rushed to hospital in premature labour, and that our leak was the last thing on his mind.

How do we learn to deal with this kind of over-reaction?

A Recent Pointer

As I explained in a recent post, reading a recent Guardian article by Michele Gelfand triggered a useful insight for me.

Amongst other things she wrote: ‘Analysing hundreds of hunter-gatherer groups, as well as nation-states including the Aztecs and Incas, we found that cultures that experienced existential threats, such as famine and warfare, favoured strong norms and autocratic leaders. Our computer models show a similar effect: threat leads to the evolution of tightness.’ For me ‘tight’ can translate as narrow or shallow in terms of our perspective.

This maps onto my long explored idea that fear, in terms of our perspective on the world, narrows the compass of compassion and shallows the depth of our understanding, making intolerance and prejudice more likely.

I went on to say that the narrower and shallower the container of our perspective, the more likely we are to experience feelings of threat and a strong sense of difference between us and other people. I thought I may have been putting the cart before the horse in seeing the feelings as ultimately causative rather than possibly secondary. The wider we set our compass of compassion, and the deeper our wisdom becomes, the less likely are we to be fearful, threatened and reactively aggressive. When something disturbing happens and it’s a drop in the ocean you feel no fear. When something happens and it’s a drop in a thimble, all hell spills out.

This may be a two-way street, though, in that fear will reduce the size of our container, just as the smallness of the container is conducive to fear.

What is at stake here is not just some general understanding of what may be going on behind the darker events unfolding in our society, it is also a model that we can use to bring the crocodile inside each one of us to account so that we don’t have to keep adding to the tidal discord threatening to engulf us.

A Possible Remedy

I want to pick up from here and explore a simplified model (see diagram above) that I am working on to help me remember how to deal with triggering events that precipitate me into potentially damaging reactions.

I’ll make reference to, but won’t repeat in detail, all the other blog posts I’ve written that relate to this issue.

When you start to examine the neurophysiology of feelings it gets quite hard to separate body from emotion. Most of what we term ‘emotion’ is generated by brain centres that go back to our evolutionary origins and cannot really be separated from our body. It is easier to see them as ‘gut feelings’ rather than anything higher.

The only encounters that I can remember having with my inner crocodile as a child were, first, in the terror I felt as I faced anaesthetization in hospital at about the age of five – that was the face of its fear – and the second was when I was in a fight on the primary school playground and a flood of anger immersed me – that was its face of rage. Interestingly, I ran away from the fight, not because I was scared of being beaten or being punished for fighting, but because I was frightened of my own anger and what I might do next. Possibly the fear of my own anger as a child may have been a conditioned visceral response somehow rooted in my earlier experience of powerlessness in hospital.

Just in case anyone was wondering I am not dealing in some Miltonic paradigm of Satan, replacing his serpent in the garden with a crocodile in the brain. My argument is far less aery faery.

What does the science of the brain have to say about this?

Take a classic text on this subject – Ledoux’s The Emotional Brain. He writes (pages 112-13):

. . . . modern researchers have gone into remote areas of the world to firmly establish with scientific methods that at least some emotions have fairly universal modes of expression, especially in the face. On the basis of this kind of evidence, the late Sylvan Tomkins proposed the existence of eight basic emotions: surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame, and anguish. These are said to represent innate, patterned responses that are controlled by “hardwired” brain systems. . . . Paul Ekman has a shorter list, consisting of six basic emotions with universal and facial expression: surprise, happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness.

Very often if not always the amygdala is involved in all that is going on. Ledoux writes (page 168- 69):

The amygdala is like the hub of a wheel. It receives low-level inputs from sensory-specific regions of the thalamus, higher level information from sensory-specific cortex, and still higher level (sensory independent) information about the general situation from the hippocampal formation. Through such connections, the amygdala is able to process the emotional significance of individual stimuli as well as complex situations. The amygdala is, in essence, involved in the appraisal of emotional meaning. It is where trigger stimuli do their triggering.

Building on the role of the amygdala, Ledoux explains further (page 174):

the remarkable fact is that at the level of behavior, defence against danger is achieved in many different ways in different species, yet the amygdala’s role is constant. It is this correspondence across species that no doubt allows diverse behaviours to achieve the same evolutionary function in different animals. This functional equivalence in neural correspondence applies to many vertebrate brains, including human brains. When it comes to detecting and responding to danger, the brain just hasn’t changed much. In some ways we are emotional lizards. I’m quite confident in telling you that studies of fear reactions in rats tell us a great deal about how fear mechanisms work in our brains as well.

So what?

I may have loaded the dice of my argument rather by placing this quote at the end of the sequence, but I do think there is a case for saying that most of what we regard as our key emotions are reptilian in origin, not even mammalian.

What I am suggesting is that there is this crocodile at the bottom of our mind’s swamp. The evidence is that it has access to events more rapidly than our higher brain centres which lag a few microseconds behind. We are already triggered into a strong feeling before our frontal lobes get a look in.

What makes it more difficult to handle is that there are more nerves passing alarm signals upwards from the amygdala than there are nerves operating to calm things down. And even while we have calmed our conscious mind, we will not necessarily have reduced the power of the reactions in the amygdala, as research in rats has shown.

So is there no hope, then, of improving our ability to manage our primitive reactions?

That will have to wait until next time.

Read Full Post »

My Parliament of Selves: Part 4/18 – Planning a Séance

I am in between switching my focus from one Eliot (Thomas Stearns) to another (George). I need more time to ponder on why Middlemarch, her masterpiece, resonates so much more strongly with me than The Waste Land. Given that George Eliot is praised for the skill with which she conveys the consciousness within, it seems appropriate to republish this sequence which is a fictional attempt to project my inscape into words. 

I’m asleep. At least I think I am. We’re altogether this time, sitting round the glass table in the garden. We are wrestling with the problem of how to find out if my head has any other entities lurking beneath consciousness and if so, how to get in touch with them. We’ve postponed trying to reach agreement on how to reflect more often and more effectively until we’ve sorted this issue out.

‘We don’t seem to be getting very far with our watching brief plan. And I don’t think we’re going to. We need to do something more proactive.’ He paused for a moment and when no one else spoke he added, ‘Why don’t we try using an ouija board?’ Frederick Mires seems slightly embarrassed to be making this suggestion.

‘Good to see a brain scientist prepared to put something so discredited to the test, Fred.’ Christopher Humfreeze finds it hard to conceal his pleasure at scoring such an unlikely point. For once he is not on the receiving end of Mires’s unremitting need to test the validity of his faith in meditation.

‘Too easy to fake, isn’t it?’ comments the pragmatic Emma Pancake dismissively. Anything so flaky is unlikely to receive the support of such a hard-line campaigner in the socio-political sphere.

‘What’s an Ouija board?’ asks the bewildered William Wordless. Exploring and rhapsodising about mountains and forests has obviously given him too little time to explore the esoteric.

I feel it’s time I stepped in.

‘I don’t think we have to explain that to you, Bill, I’m happy to say. I’m not convinced that tables, letter cards and up-turned tumblers are going to get us very far towards solving this problem. We’re not in a material space now but an immaterial one: dreamland requires a different approach, I feel.’

There is a period of silence.

‘I have an idea but it’s unlikely to work,’ Mires muses.

‘We’d be glad to hear it, whatever it is,’ is my attempt at an encouraging response.

‘Well, you know I’ve been investigating consciousness for decades now, and there is one method that in my view, if it can work at all, could just possibly work as well in dreamland as in waking time.’ He pauses dramatically.

‘Come on, Fred. Don’t keep us hanging in suspense.’ Pancake has little patience with anyone’s dramatics except her own.

‘Calm down, Emmie! I’m going to tell you now. If we had access to a psychic, a spirit medium, we could possibly detect and access whatever is there.’

‘That puts the kibosh on that one then,’ gloats Pancake. ‘We haven’t got a medium.’

‘Slow down a moment, folks. Not so hasty.’ Bill clearly doesn’t like Pancake’s knee jerk dismissal of this idea. There’s always been a tension between them. He knows she despises his love of poetry: she sees it as an impractical waste of time. He, on the other hand, distrusts the frantic activity with which she chases her dream of changing the world.

‘Maybe we have someone who doesn’t know they’re a medium.’

‘How likely is that, Bill?’ asks Mires. ‘We’ve been together in here for decades. We know each other really well. I don’t see anyone among us with a secret gift for contacting spirits.’

‘That’s where I think you’re mistaken, Fred. You’ve never been convinced that meditation does what Chris says it can. What if he’s right? What if he is closer to his soul than any of us? What if that means he can tune in to the world of souls and spirits that we can’t sense?’

‘Steady on, Bill, for heaven’s sake,’ Humfreeze butts in. ‘It’s my head you’re talking about here. Don’t let your poetic imagination run away with you. I have never had, and I do not expect ever to have, psychic powers, whatever they are. That’s not why I meditate.’

‘I’m not suggesting that is why you do it, only that it might have helped you be able to do it and not even know. Why don’t you just give it try? We really need to find a way to do this.’

Humfreeze seems to be shrinking with repugnance at the whole idea.

Image adapted from the Taschen edition of Renee Magritte

‘I know this probably cuts across everything you feel you are trying to do,’ Mires interjects sympathetically, ‘and I will respect and understand whatever decision you make in the end. However, I think there is something here that trumps your reluctance. If there is a hidden entity inside Pete’s head and if contacting it results in us all becoming more able to do more good, then there’s no blame attached to your testing the existence of a possible skill you never tried to acquire. It can do no harm and might do a lot of good.’

‘That’s an awful lot of ifs,’ laments Humfreeze. He pauses for a moment as he ponders what to say. We all realise this is a tipping point and keep schtum.

‘OK. This is the deal. I want to hear everyone’s opinion on this insane suggestion. If I end up feeling that all of you are definitely in favour of this plan, I will give it a go. I will try three times and three times only. If nothing happens, I’m not doing it again, do you all understand?’

‘Thank you, Chris. That’s very gracious of you, and we really appreciate how much it cost you to say that. So, what do we all think of the plan, then? You first, Emmie.’ Mires gives Pancake a searching look.

‘Did you have to start with me, Fred?’ Pancake complains. ‘I need more time. Ask someone else.’

Mires’s stops himself from commenting that this is the first occasion to his knowledge that she has wanted more time before deciding to act.

‘I’ll come back to you then. What do you think, Bill. Are you still for the idea?’

‘Definitely. I think we have to give it a go.’

‘Pete, what do you think?’

‘Well, I’m not very happy to go down this road, but I can’t think of a better idea. I have a really strong sense there is some kind of being underneath our awareness that we absolutely need to get in touch with, so I feel we should accept Chris’s generous offer and see if he’s psychic after all.’

‘Back to you then, Emmie. I’m in favour of trying this out even though I’m anything but sure it will work. It can’t do any harm and there’s a lot at stake here, and I’ve been wrong before.’

‘Can I have that in writing, Fred, for use in future arguments?’ quips Pancake. We all laugh, glad to have an excuse to break the tension a little.

‘I’ve had time to think and I agree we should go with this idea. I find it hard to believe it will work but we’ve got nothing to lose by trying.’

‘That’s it then, Chris. I come back to you with a unanimous decision that we ask you to try.’

‘I was afraid that would be how it turned out. I said I would do it if you all agreed and I’ll stick to my word. Can you give me just a bit more time to prepare?’

We all nod and agree to meet as soon as Humfreeze lets us know he’s ready.

Coming through the open window in the heat, the sound of the milkman’s van outside wakes me up. It’s light already but far too early to get up. I turn on my other side mulling over the contents of the dream as the mist of sleep slowly blots out my thoughts.

Read Full Post »