An Angle on Suffering (3/3): the nature of choice

Had the life and growth of the child in the womb been confined to that condition, then the existence of the child in the womb would have proved utterly abortive and unintelligible; as would the life of this world, were its deeds, actions and their results not to appear in the world to come.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith: page 393)

The theme of this much earlier sequence of posts seems to anticipate the next new post’s revisiting of the theme of theodicy, and therefore warrants republishing now.

In the previous two posts, I have been looking at Dabrowski’s Theory of Personal Disintegration (TPD) most particularly for what it has to say about suffering.

Both TPD and a rich and interesting approach to psychotherapy – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – owe much to existentialism. Mendaglio acknowledges his debt in the last chapter of the book he edited on this subject (page 251):

However, there is a great deal of similarity between existential psychology and the theory of positive disintegration. Both emphasise similar key concepts such as values, autonomy, authenticity, and existential emotions such as anxiety and depression. A more fundamental similarity is seen in the philosophical underpinnings of TPD, which is in large measure existentialism.

In spite of my own immense debt to existentialist thinking, only rivalled by my debts to Buddhism and to the Bahá’í Faith, I have certain reservations about Dabrowski’s take on the degree of choice we are able to exercise.

Crucial Caveats

His take on suffering is truly inspiring. Care needs to be taken though that we do not adopt this view in a way that assumes that those who are crushed by their sufferings are somehow to blame.

It is true that his model presupposes that each of us will probably meet a challenging choice point sometime in our lives, where we can either cling to the familiar comfortable half-truths that have failed us or strive to rise about them to higher levels of understanding. It is also true that he feels that many of us are capable of choosing the second option, if we only would.

However, not everyone is so lucky. I include here a brief summary of the life history of Ian – the man whose interview I have quoted extensively in the first three posts on An Approach to Psychosis.

His history shows very clearly that he could only make the second choice at times and then meet the pain and work through it to alleviate his tormenting voices. At other times the voices were preferable to experiencing the guilt and he chose what we might call madness rather than lucidity. Given the horrors he had faced it was clear that he should not be thought a failure. I would probably have done the same had I gone through what he had experienced in his life, from his earliest days.

Dabrowski seems to feel that our capacity to choose is genetically determined. Mendaglio explains (page 250):

Dabrowski . . . . postulated the existence of a third factor of development, representing a powerful autonomous inner force which is rooted in the biological endowment of individuals.

It seems to me that it would have taken a truly exceptional individual to make the choice to experience Ian’s level of pain in order to progress. If that does not seem quite convincing, there is another case history I would like to share very briefly.

Among the sequence of posts related to mental health there is a poem called ‘Voices.’ The woman upon whose experiences that poem is based, was brutally abused by her father, sexually, and by her mother, physically, from her earliest years through her mid-teens.

She came to us to work on her father’s abuse. We developed a safe way of working which involved starting with 15 minutes exploring how things had been since we last met. Then we moved on to 15-20 minutes of carefully calibrated work on the abuse. Then the last half hour of the session was spent helping her regain her ordinary state after mind after the work on her early experiences had intensified her hallucinations.

After almost a year of this work things seemed to be going well. Then came the unexpected. She found herself in a building that closely resembled the building strongly connected with the worst episode of abuse she had experienced at the hands of her father. Just being there was more than she could cope with. She became retraumatised in a way we none of us could have anticipated or prevented. The next time we met she could not stop sobbing.

We discussed what she might do. There were two main options.

She could, if she wished, continue on her current low levels of medication and move into a social services hostel where she would be well supported while we continued our work together, or she could be admitted onto the ward and given higher levels of medication in order to tranquillise her out of all awareness of her pain.

She chose the second option and I could not blame her in any way for doing so. It would be a betrayal of the word’s meaning to suppose she had any real choice at that point but to remain psychotic while the medication kicked in rather than deal with the toxic emotions in which she felt herself to be drowning.

It is when I consider these kinds of situation at my current level of understanding of his theory, that I feel it could leave the door open to destructive attitudes.

He believes, if I have understood him correctly, that some people’s genetic endowment is so robust they will ultimately choose the harder option regardless of the environment in which they grew up. Most of us are in the middle and with an environment that is not too extreme we will do quite well. The endowment of some is so poor, he seems to be saying, that it requires an optimal environment if they are to choose to grow even in a modest way.

This approach, if I have got it right, has two problems. The first, which is less central to the theme of this post, is that it is perhaps unduly deterministic because of the power that is given to inherited ‘endowment’ to determine the life course of any individual. The second problem is more relevant to current considerations in this post, though related to the first point. By placing such a determining role upon heredity, the force of the environment may be unduly discounted.

I am not claiming that he attaches no importance to environment. In fact, education for example is much emphasised in his work and he is clearly aware that limited societies will be limiting most people’s development – and he would include the greedy materialism of Western cultures in that equation. I’m not sure where he would place the impact of natural disasters in his scheme of things.

He may though be minimising the crushing impact of such experiences as the two people I worked with had undergone, in the second case throughout almost all her formative years. Could a strong genetic endowment have endured such hardship and come through significantly less damaged? If you feel so, you may end up not so much thinking ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!’ but more ‘They broke because they were weak.’ Empathy, which Dobrawski values so much, would be impaired because we can start to define people as essentially different from us, not quite part of the same superior species.

More Complexities

This is a truly complex area to consider though, and I will have to restrict myself at this point to a very brief examination of one approach to it which does justice to that complexity.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his description of the various components of our character, suggests that what we inherit is a source of either strength or weakness (Some Answered Questions: page 213):

The variety of inherited qualities comes from strength and weakness of constitution—that is to say, when the two parents are weak, the children will be weak; if they are strong, the children will be robust. . . . . . For example, you see that children born from a weak and feeble father and mother will naturally have a feeble constitution and weak nerves; they will be afflicted and will have neither patience, nor endurance, nor resolution, nor perseverance, and will be hasty; for the children inherit the weakness and debility of their parents.

However, this is not quite the end of the matter. He does not conclude from this that moral qualities, good or bad, stem directly from the inherited temperament of an individual (pages 214-215):

But this is not so, for capacity is of two kinds: natural capacity and acquired capacity. The first, which is the creation of God, is purely good—in the creation of God there is no evil; but the acquired capacity has become the cause of the appearance of evil. For example, God has created all men in such a manner and has given them such a constitution and such capacities that they are benefited by sugar and honey and harmed and destroyed by poison. This nature and constitution is innate, and God has given it equally to all mankind. But man begins little by little to accustom himself to poison by taking a small quantity each day, and gradually increasing it, until he reaches such a point that he cannot live without a gram of opium every day. The natural capacities are thus completely perverted. Observe how much the natural capacity and constitution can be changed, until by different habits and training they become entirely perverted. One does not criticize vicious people because of their innate capacities and nature, but rather for their acquired capacities and nature.

Our habits and choices have a crucial part to play. Due weight though has also to be given to the power of upbringing and the environment (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Sec. 95, pp. 124–25):

It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or vilify him, for the child’s character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.

This theme is taken up most powerfully by the central body of the Bahá’í Faith ((Universal House of Justice: April 2000):

In the current state of society, children face a cruel fate. Millions and millions in country after country are dislocated socially. Children find themselves alienated by parents and other adults whether they live in conditions of wealth or poverty. This alienation has its roots in a selfishness that is born of materialism that is at the core of the godlessness seizing the hearts of people everywhere. The social dislocation of children in our time is a sure mark of a society in decline; this condition is not, however, confined to any race, class, nation or economic condition–it cuts across them all. It grieves our hearts to realise that in so many parts of the world children are employed as soldiers, exploited as labourers, sold into virtual slavery, forced into prostitution, made the objects of pornography, abandoned by parents centred on their own desires, and subjected to other forms of victimisation too numerous to mention. Many such horrors are inflicted by the parents themselves upon their own children. The spiritual and psychological damage defies estimation.

This position allows for the fact that we need to take responsibility for our own development while at the same time acknowledging that we may be too damaged by the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous’ upbringing to do so to any great extent without a huge amount of help from other people. And most of us are the other people who need to exert ourselves to protect all children and nurture every damaged adult who crosses our path to the very best of our ability. Maybe Dabrowski is also saying this, but I haven’t read it yet. Even so his thought-provoking message is well worth studying.

In the end though, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, any consideration of suffering that fails to include a reality beyond the material leaves us appalled at what would seem the pointless horror of the pain humanity endures not only from nature but also from its own hands. I may have to come back to this topic yet again. (I did in fact return to a deeper consideration of Dabrowski’s model in a sequence of posts focused on Jenny Wade’s theory of human consciousness: see embedded links.)

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Becoming a True Upholder of His Oneness (3/4): Reflection and Consultation

To download the complete materials click this link Upholders of His Oneness v2.

It seemed worth republishing this sequence at a point when I will soon be launching into an exploration of how as individuals we can prepare ourselves for working more effectively to create a unified but still diversely creative world. 

At Strathallan, when we were moving between the main hall and the workshop room there was a downpour. This caused us to notice something unusual about the guttering. It was not clear to us at all what purpose was served by the piping that ended up in the trumpet shape pointing towards the sky. The amount of rain such a device captured would make next to no difference to the quantity that cascaded down the sloping roofs into the normal guttering. Nor did it produce any audible melodic sounds. Another of those mysteries!

So, we flourished our umbrellas against the deluge and headed for the workshop where we were due to pick up the trail at the point where it led from the spiritualisation of the individual to the development of the group or community. A useful bridge to help us across the border here is Paul Lample’s observation in Revelation and Social Reality (page 212) that ‘Reflection takes a collective form through consultation.’

How might this be so?

The Power of Speech

First we need to look at speech in itself and what might give it power.

One important consideration is clearly that we have to practice what we preach (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh – CXXVIII)

. . . Unless he teacheth his own self, the words of his mouth will not influence the heart of the seeker. Take heed, O people, lest ye be of them that give good counsel to others but forget to follow it themselves.

In the Tablets revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas Bahá’u’lláh unpacks other crucial factors (page 172-73).

Perhaps most importantly we need to realise that words are a double edged sword, ‘. . . One word is like unto springtime causing the tender saplings of the rose-garden of knowledge to become verdant and flourishing, while another word is even as a deadly poison.’

How do we avoid the poison and maximise the positive effect?

Bahá’u’lláh explains that ‘words and utterances should be both impressive and penetrating’ and adds that they won’t be so unless they are ‘uttered wholly for the sake of God and with due regard unto the exigencies of the occasion and the people.’ We have to combine an absence of ulterior motive with a sensitivity both to the needs of the moment and the needs of the people to whom we are speaking.

In the workshop we discussed the way ideas borrowed from Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) might help us grasp the importance of tuning into what the person we are talking to most needs to hear as against what we would very much like to tell them. NLP talks about the need to match what we say to someone’s understanding and pace our expectations as to what they can take on board next. Lisa Wake describes this as ‘Pacing means to match where someone is currently and work alongside them to develop a process of responsiveness that is based on trust.’

Leather work (for source of image see link)

A participant in the workshop, someone with a beard longer than mine and equally silver, wondered whether the two words impressive and penetrating were chosen by Bahá’u’lláh from leatherwork as an image of how this process works. He explained.

‘I once saw someone tooling and staining leather. First, the leather had to be softened before the carver could begin to work it. Once it is soft he could use a special knife more easily to cut patterns in the leather. After that it could be stained. Spraying water on the leather first helps the dye soak in more deeply. It’s as though impressive describes the work of words uttered in the right spirit on the prepared mind, and penetrating relates to how words of the right kind can sink deep into the heart and become indelible, as dye will do in prepared leather.’

We were all taken with the beauty of that metaphor and his explanation of it.

Moderation

We also need to remember that ‘Human utterance is an essence which aspireth to exert its influence and needeth moderation. . . . [M]oderation . . . hath to be combined with tact and wisdom . . .’

What might such moderation look like?

In the Gleanings we find this from Bahá’u’lláh (CXXXIX): ‘Say: Let truthfulness and courtesy be your adorning,’ and twice in His Tablets we find (page 36 and page 170) ‘This Wronged One exhorteth the peoples of the world to observe tolerance and righteousness, which are two lights amidst the darkness of the world and two educators for the edification of mankind,’ and ‘The heaven of true understanding shineth resplendent with the light of two luminaries: tolerance and righteousness.’

Bearing in mind that the former is linked with a familiar exhortation to ‘Beware, O people of Bahá, lest ye walk in the ways of them whose words differ from their deeds,’ we need also to pay attention to what He links these qualities with next:

Suffer not yourselves to be deprived of the robe of forbearance and justice, that the sweet savours of holiness may be wafted from your hearts upon all created things.

Lamples observes (page 65):

Applying the knowledge for constructive change in the Baha’i community does not involve self-certainty or self-interest, but self-sacrifice. It involves doing what is right, not becoming self-righteous.

We pondered on how we might be truthful while remaining courteous. One member of the group made a penetrating observation. Truthfulness is not always, if ever, the same as honesty. Honesty is saying what we believe to be true, or venting whatever feeling has taken possession of our minds at the time. In either case this may be anything but true.

This sparked someone else to ask, ‘Isn’t it hypocritical to behave sweetly when you’re feeling furious?’

This triggered some soul-searching. We came to the tentative conclusion that reflection resolved this quandary, at least to some extent. If we step back from the brain-noise of the moment, we can hold it in mind, contain it and reflect upon it, rather than pretend to ourselves we aren’t feeling it, which would probably be hypocrisy, or act it out, which might be destructive rather than helpful. It would enable us to continue to hear and understand what others were saying as well as giving us time to think whether the heated reaction of the moment needed to be expressed in a more constructive way or parked for further reflection.

In would also enable us to follow what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) advises and enact our values rather than act out our possibly destructive feelings.

Paving the Way to Consultation

So, truthfulness requires the ability to reflect as an individual, which means stepping back, as we have described, from the immediate contents of our consciousness, so that we can gain a more objective and dispassionate perspective, and as a group it means consulting together as dispassionately as possible in order to lift our understanding to a higher level.

In fact, it is as though truth were, as John Donne wrote, ‘on a huge hill, cragged and steep.’ We are all approaching it from different sides. Just because your path looks nothing like mine it does not mean that, as long as you are moving upwards, it is any less viable than mine as a way to arrive at the truth. I might honestly feel you are completely mistaken and say so in the strongest possible terms. But I would be wrong to do so, even if I’m right. We would both move faster upwards if we compared notes more humbly and carefully. Reflection helps create the necessary humility: consultation makes the comparison of paths possible.

The criteria ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sets as the necessary prerequisites for consultation are extremely high (Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá – p. 87, #43): ‘purity of motive, radiance of spirit, detachment from all else save God, attraction to His Divine Fragrances, humility and lowliness amongst His loved ones, patience and long-suffering in difficulties and servitude to His exalted Threshold.’

We dwelt on those at some length in the workshop. The one I wish to emphasise here, in this context, is detachment.

This is simply because it underpins the process of reflection for us as individuals as well as the process of consultation for us as groups and communities. If I cannot step back from my passing thoughts and feelings, detach myself from them, I won’t be able to consult, and similarly if I am with people who cannot do that also, consultation will be impossible.

The unity necessary to discover truth and act effectively depends upon detachment. Bahá’u’lláh writes in the Hidden Words, ‘Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.’

Once we are striving in this way to exemplify in our actions the values we espouse, to reflect and consult with detachment and in unity, something potentially world-changing can happen. These are Bahá’u’lláh’s words from a Tablet translated from the Persian quoted in The Heaven of Divine Wisdom:

Consultation bestoweth greater awareness and transmuteth conjecture into certitude. It is a shining light which, in a dark world, leadeth the way and guideth. For everything there is and will continue to be a station of perfection and maturity. The maturity of the gift of understanding is made manifest through consultation.

For a clear explanation of what this all means in practice, one of the best places to turn is a document published by the Bahá’í International Community entitled Prosperity of Human Kind:. The quote I’m drawing on comes in Section 2.

At the individual level, justice is that faculty of the human soul that enables each person to distinguish truth from falsehood. In the sight of God, Bahá’u’lláh avers, justice is “the best beloved of all things” since it permits each individual to see with his own eyes rather than the eyes of others, to know through his own knowledge rather than the knowledge of his neighbour or his group. It calls for fair-mindedness in one’s judgments, for equity in one’s treatment of others, and is thus a constant if demanding companion in the daily occasions of life.

At the group level, a concern for justice is the indispensable compass in collective decision making, because it is the only means by which unity of thought and action can be achieved. Far from encouraging the punitive spirit that has often masqueraded under its name in past ages, justice is the practical expression of awareness that, in the achievement of human progress, the interests of the individual and those of society are inextricably linked. To the extent that justice becomes a guiding concern of human interaction, a consultative climate is encouraged that permits options to be examined dispassionately and appropriate courses of action selected. In such a climate the perennial tendencies toward manipulation and partisanship are far less likely to deflect the decision-making process . . . . .

Bahá’u’lláh Himself links justice, unity and consultation as keys to civilisation-building (Bahá’u’lláh, cited in Consultation: A Compilation to be found also in Compilation of Compilations, Vol I, p. 93):

Say: no man can attain his true station except through his justice. No power can exist except through unity. No welfare and no well-being can be attained except through consultation.

There we will have to leave it till next time.

When we returned home that evening the cruiser and its lights had disappeared.

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Mapping Consciousness (1/6): Concerning Distraction and Reflection

My strongest sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are with those artists in whom I see the soul at work most strongly.

Vincent to Theo – March 1884 (Letters of Vincent van Gogh page 272)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, its relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable. Art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, so here it comes again!

Distraction

Last Monday was not my best meditation day.

I was doing quite well till my mind got hooked by my shirt. I found myself suddenly remembering how I thought twice before letting its red corduroy comfort go to the charity shop as part of our current declutter. Red shirt led to blue shirt, which led to blue jacket, blue trousers and Crewe Station. I was there again. Just as I was boarding the train, one foot on the platform and one foot in the air above the step, carrying luggage that should have made it clear I was a passenger, someone tapped me on the shoulder thinking I was a guard and asked me what platform the Liverpool train was leaving from. I turned to look at them and put my foot down between the platform and the train, scraping the skin neatly off my shin as I did so. Fortunately I dropped my bags on the platform and not on the line. I used a tissue to staunch the blood between Crewe and Hereford. Rather than go straight home, I called in on a friend who got out the TCP and Elastoplast. I still remember the sting to this day. I remembered that this was the friend I’d called on once before 20 years earlier, when – and this came vividly back to me despite the span of time – driving home tired down the Callow at the end of a long week, I was overtaking (legally at the time) in the middle lane (they’ve blocked that option since for downhill traffic), when I saw a car coming up the hill doing the same thing. The long lorry I was halfway past was picking up speed. All I could do was brake. As I tried to pull in slightly too soon, I caught the Lada on the back end of the truck. Fortunately the Lada was made of sterner stuff than most cars at the time and didn’t completely cave in or get derailed, but it was pulled out of shape and the near side front tyre was blown. I pulled into the side of the road and, with the help of the lorry driver who had stopped to check I was OK, changed the tyre. The car was slightly wobbly as I drove off and I knew it was not a good idea to drive it all the way home. I was amazed to pass a parked police car on the way with no interest shown on their part. So, I drove to my friend’s and parked the car on his front lawn, the only safe space off the road. He had a bit of a shock when he got home from work. At this point I snapped out of my trance of associations and brought my mind back to the focus of my meditations, shaking of my irritation with myself and my slight reactivation of the Lada-on-the-lawn stress as best I could.

Incidentally, I don’t wear blue anymore when I’m travelling.

Reflection

For this and other reasons I am revisiting an all-too familiar theme: reflection. To bring on board those who might not have read all my earlier posts on this issue I’ll pull in now a brief quotation from some time ago. It comes from a book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Hayes et al. It is attempting to explain that transient states of mind and mere self-descriptions are all too often mistaken for our true self. To help people step back from such identifications the authors liken the mind to a chessboard. We mistakenly identify with the pieces, not realising we are also, perhaps more truly the board (page 192):

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

Peter Koestenbaum makes essentially the same point more abstractly in his excellent book The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy. Reflection, he says (page 99):

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

What he says at another point is even more intriguing (page 49):

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

Personally, while I find the ACT analogy helpful, I prefer the idea of a mirror and its reflections, partly I suppose because it uses the same word in a different but helpful sense. Our mind or consciousness is the mirror and all our experiences, inside and out, are simply reflections in that mirror: they are not who we are, not even the most intense feelings, our most important plans, or the strongest sense of self. We have to learn to see them as simply the contents of consciousness. Only that way can we tune into deeper and wiser levels of our being. Mindfulness at its best can enable us to identify with pure awareness rather than with whatever transient trigger has grabbed our attention.

I have been working fairly hard (not hard enough probably, as the derailed meditation at the start of this post suggests) to put the insights explored in that sequence of posts into action.

Virginia Woolf in 1902 (for source of image see link)

Capturing Consciousness

It has led into me into some interesting territory.

While I was exploring the concept of transliminality even further back in time I came across A Writer’s Diary: being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf edited by her husband Leonard after her death by suicide. I was drawn to examine what she wrote in case it shed light on my attempt to link creativity, thresholds of consciousness and so-called psychotic experiences together.

Long before I could integrate what I found there into my model, my focus of interest had typically moved on: my mind is still more of a butterfly than a bee, despite my best efforts so far.

However, the Woolf issue was still stalking the door of my consciousness, whether I was aware of it or not.

As part of my decluttering, I am in the process, as I have mentioned elsewhere, of checking whether I still need all the books I have bought over the years. I take a book off its shelf at random from time to time, open it and see if I have read it or not. Sometimes there are highlighter pen marks within and I put it back, at least for the time being. Sometimes there aren’t and occasionally it’s not even got my name signed on the flyleaf. In which case I dip into it and read a few random pages. I reported on having done that recently with a biography of Hardy. I repeated the same process with Julia Briggs’ account of the creative life of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: an inner life.

Same outcome: no way that was going to the Oxfam bookshop.

Why not?

Basically her book was a brilliant tour of the writer’s mind. Within that there were a host of insights into aspects of the creative process related to mental health and reflection, or perhaps more accurately in Woolf’s case, creative introspection. Whatever the right term is, part of her genius lies in her capacity to capture in words the subtleties and complexity of consciousness, including the rambling associative networks that can hijack attention at any moment.

Before we tackle that head on, in the next post I’m going to make a detour via some paintings.

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The Understanding Heart (6/6): of mirrors and reflection

Mirroring the Light

Even though it is less than a year since I last republished this sequence it seemed important to nest within it one of the closing posts of my sequence on understanding the heart, which came out last Monday. 

In an attempt to shed light on what is meant by the phrase ‘understanding heart’ in the Bahá’í Writings, it seemed a good idea to use metaphors to explain a metaphor, given that logical language would probably not be up to the task.

I have reflected so far upon two images, used in the same scriptures, which shed some light on the matter: a lamp/candle/fire and the garden. These two images are not all we have to go on though. The mirror image is equally fruitful to contemplate.

O My Brother! 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.”

(Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys: pp 21-22)

In previous posts I have discussed the value of reflection, though not in the sense of the way that mirrors reflect, yet the link is interesting. I have drawn on writers such as Koestenbaum who describes how reflection is a process of separating consciousness from its contents. I have used the analogy of the mirror to illustrate what this might mean. What is reflected in the mirror is not the mirror. In the same way what we are thinking, feeling and planning may not be the essence of our consciousness, simply the ‘objects’ that are reflected in it.

This discussion tended to presuppose that the mirror of our consciousness was clean enough to reflect what it was turned towards. This pins down the two essential aspects of the mirror of the heart that concern us here. Let us side-step for now whether the deepest and usually inaccessible levels of consciousness are what Bahá’u’lláh means by the heart: I will return to that topic again shortly.  Let’s consider instead the issues of dust on the mirror and the direction of its orientation.

In Bahá’í terms, as I understand them, turning the mirror of your heart towards debased objects defiles or dirties it.  It therefore has to be cleansed before it can reflect higher spiritual realities even if it is turned towards them.

The mirror referred to in the quote above is one of the ancient kind made of metal. It would need to be burnished with chains not with a soft cloth and polish – altogether more effortful, even painful. And the burnish is defined as love and detachment from all save God. This suggests that we are back with the idea that all the many different attachments we harbour in our hearts, all the different kinds of meaning systems we have devised as lenses through which to experience reality, are just dirt on the mirror of our heart.

It is fairly obvious then that metaphors such as weeding or purifying by fire, as one can do with metals when they’re mined, all add to our idea of what to do and how to do it in order to further this process that is described in terms of a mirror as ‘burnishing.’ We can set aside time to be mindful and locate in our own being the weeds of hatred and envy, for example, and see refusing to act them out and replacing them with kindness and admiration as a kind of weeding or burnishing depending upon what most vividly makes sense to and motivates us. Our minds all work in different ways and there is no one method that suits all.

Whatever method we use to step back from identifying with what impedes us (see link for one example: Disidentification exercise), I feel it could therefore be argued that if we were able to peel back all this dross that veils our hearts from discerning reality for what it truly is we would in effect be unhooking our consciousness from all the curtains that hide reality from us.

Wert thou to cleanse the mirror of thy heart from the dust of malice, thou wouldst apprehend the meaning of the symbolic terms revealed by the all-embracing Word of God made manifest in every Dispensation, and wouldst discover the mysteries of divine knowledge. Not, however, until thou consumest with the flame of utter detachment those veils of idle learning, that are current amongst men, canst thou behold the resplendent morn of true knowledge.

(Kitáb-i-Íqán: pages 68-69)

It’s intriguing that Bahá’u’lláh seems to be saying there that detachment will enhance our understanding of symbolic terms such as the metaphors we are examining here. If I was more detached I would not need to struggle so hard to understand what the metaphor ‘heart’ means in the first place!

Scott Peck, in spite of his well documented failings as a human being, was one of the first writers I came across who made it clear that love is not just a feeling if it’s a feeling at all in our usual sense of that word. He stated strongly that love is not a feeling: it is a kind of work (The Road Less Travelled pages 116-119):

. . . love is an action, an activity. . . . Love is not a feeling. . . . Genuine love . .  implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. . . . . In a constructive marriage . . . The partners must regularly, routinely and predictably, attend to each other and their relationship no matter how they feel. . .  Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy takes much the same line (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – pages 218-19):

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. The feelings of love are extremely unpredictable. We speak of love as if it were an accident; we say that we fall into and fall out of this emotional state, for example. It should not then be a surprise when we fall into and fall out of marriages in much the same way. . . . Consider how much easier it is to keep a marriage vow if marriage is based on a choice to marry and love is considered to be a choice to value the other and hold the other as special.

They go on to speak of the importance of commitment.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point. Better late than never though.

Obviously now one of the things that bedevils our ability to understand what the heart is in a spiritual sense, apart that is from taking it too literally and piling on too much baggage from our culture, is that we base our idea of the heart on feelings that come from the gut. We discount the possibility that the feelings that originate in the heart as the doorway to moral and spiritual progress may not feel like feelings at all in the same way. The feelings from the gut promise much and are so easy to give expression to, lie so close to what we see as our comfort zone, but they all too frequently fail to deliver on their promises and bring profound discomfort in their wake.

The feelings from the heart, on the other hand, compel us upwards, involve effort and even hardship often, but the rewards are beyond my ability to describe – of course, that applies only as long as it’s not for the rewards that we follow them. They seem more to do with enacted values than emotions in the usual sense of that word. We tend to forget that emotions and motives have the same root in the idea of movement. We all too often feel moved without moving, or else set off in the wrong direction!

We need to remember, not just sometimes but always, the words of Al-Ghazali: ‘You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.’ Near Death Experiences have a similar message. In Lessons from the Light one woman reports that the being of light sent her back and, when she asked what she should do, she was told that she could bring with her to the next world only what she had learned of love and wisdom. This seems a general lesson from such experiences:

One task that NDErs seem to agree on is to learn about love. We do that in a world limited by time and space where we have to make our choices. Many NDErs will agree we have a free will and we are free to choose our way through our world. But since we are part of a Unity Universe our interconnectedness makes that everything we do has an effect somewhere else. All our actions, even the seemingly insignificant ones, ripple through the universe. They have an effect.

So, in the end, it seems that I will only be able to get a better hold of what it means to have an understanding heart by increasing my level of detachment by way of a strenuous and continuous attempt to live in as wise and loving a fashion as I am capable of.

The evidence from research in neuropsychology is clear now that focused and deliberate effort changes the brain, and some research is said to suggest that years of meditation can lead to a synchronisation of the two halves of the brain that creates a very significant change of consciousness. Given that the left-brain is connected with logic and the right-brain with deep intuition, perhaps this gives some idea of the possible physiological substrate of an understanding heart as well as of the prolonged effort that would be necessary to connect with it consistently in consciousness.

Easier said than done, then, but I suspect I have no choice.

So, it has become clear that the heart cannot be the seat of understanding if we coast comfortably along assuming that it is the natural home of feelings in a conventional sense. If it were, how could the understanding heart, for example, protect the flame of love we are encouraged to kindle there from the gusts of negative feeling that blow from the emotional centres of the brain? If we are treating these feelings as though they are what the heart is evolved to house all the time, we’re in trouble. The heart, in the sense we are concerned with here, can’t both harbour the gales of emotion and at the same time shield us from them. The light of love will end up inevitably and rapidly extinguished.

This is where the mirror image is so helpful. It assists us in separating out what is part of the heart in its true sense and what is not. An account of a dream I had many years ago might help here.

There is a lake in the mountains. By its shore a rabbit squats munching leaves or grass. Overhead a hawk flies. A slight breeze wrinkles the surface of the lake so the image of the sky and clouds is crumpled too. Only my eye is there to see this scene: I am not aware of my body at all.

To simplify somewhat, as the dream has other implications as well, after some work on its content I came to see it as an image of my mind. The hawk is my anger, the rabbit my fear, the surface of the lake my superficial consciousness. Not only the sky but the hawk and rabbit are reflected in it.

If I see the surface of the lake as who I truly am I will live my whole life a prey to fear, anger and all the other changes in the mental weather – the clouds, winds, rain and so on of my inscape – that disturb and distress me. But in essence I am not these things. They are only the contents of my consciousness just as they are not the lake itself in the dream, only reflections in or perturbations of its surface.

My mind is the lake itself and the more deeply I allow myself to experience its full reality the closer I get to the ground of my being, where the essence of who I truly am is most closely in touch with the foundation of my existence. If I live my life from this level of awareness I will be authentic, I will be who I really am in essence rather than the person I seem to be in appearance: I will be in touch with my understanding heart. Heaven knows, if I persevere sincerely enough for long enough, one day I might even become capable, before I die, of being my understanding heart, at least for fleeting moments here and there. 

Thanks to all those who have stuck with me this far and I’m sorry if the final conclusion seems disappointingly modest after all the high-flown expectations!

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Re-evaluating Reflection (3/4): Connecting to our Higher Self

Our buddha mind is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind.

Sogyal Rinpoche The Nature of Mind

Buddhism

When I was studying for my MSc in Clinical Psychology, I spent a lot of time in the University Library. The Psychology Section was counterintuitively placed right next to a whole stack of books on Buddhism. I was hugely impressed by what I read of Buddhist literature. Their understanding of the human mind seemed far deeper and subtler than anything to be found on the psychology shelves.

Even though time was in short supply I could not resist frequent trips to the London Buddhist Centre, connected with the society set up by Christmas Humphreys, who died a year or so after my explorations began. I highly valued the lessons there in meditation – basically Following the Breath – but was less impressed by the talks I attended. The arguments in favour of reincarnation failed to convince me so, partly also because of the lack of active engagement with the problematic challenges of the times, I never considered myself a Buddhist. I continued to practise meditation though.

Just before my encounter with Koestenbaum I wrote in my diary:

I have to be honest. The main benefits of meditation that I have achieved so far are a calm state of consciousness, a steady groundedness and an intermittent connection with my subliminal mind. No mystical moments or experience of my Soul – so far as I’m aware at least. I could’ve been bathing in bliss, I suppose, and just not realised it. In any case it wouldn’t count for present purposes if I didn’t know it.

In fact, it seems that nothing much had changed since May 1982, when I wrote in my diary, after about a year of consistent meditation:

I have been astonished at the power of meditation to help me bring about fundamental changes in my thinking and orientation…, and all that without any dramatic experiences within the period of meditation. In fact, even the simplest aspects of meditation are a hard struggle – maintaining the posture, following the breath, passive watchfulness and not fidgeting. It takes all my concentration to achieve any one of those for the briefest period.

I think I might have been selling myself short a bit there.

There seemed to have been a flicker of something more significant a few days later when I commented:

I finally achieved an experience unlike any other. I felt my being forced open by something which dissolved my boundaries, physical and mental. There was, for a brief moment, neither inside nor outside. My self as I knew it shrank to a few fragments clinging to the edges of this something which ‘I’ had become or which had become me or which I always am deep down. I was frightened. I dared not quite let the experience be.

Although there was a repeat of that some weeks later, I came to feel that it was probably an artefact of the way my breathing slowed as my meditation got deeper, and I have never been able to entice any such experience without reducing my breathing in a way that creates a blending sort of buzz in my brain that goes nowhere and perhaps means nothing.

So, when it comes to direct, vivid and sustained experiences of the True Self I have had to rely on the testimony of others even though perhaps the main purpose of meditation for me is to achieve contact with that part of me which is really all that matters about me, if it exists as I believe it does.

When I originally read Assagioli’s book in 1976, not only was I moved to practice his disidentification exercise, but I also highlighted some other key ideas. For example, on page 18, I found:

The changing contents of our consciousness (the sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc.) are one thing, while the “I”, the self, the centre of our consciousness is another.…

In late 1982, I found that Peter Koestenbaum makes essentially the same point more in his excellent book The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy. Reflection, he says:[1]

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

What he says at another point is even more intriguing:[2]

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

My edition of Assagioli’s book came out in 1970: Koestenbaum’s in 1978. As I only have the copious notes I took from Koestenbaum’s book I can’t check whether he made any reference to Assagioli or not. I suspect he did not or I would have registered it.

The Transpersonal Self

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Koestenbuam and Psychosynthesis are in no doubt that there is a transcendent level of unified consciousness to which we can learn to connect:[3]

 . . . we can say here, that once pure consciousness (the personal self) is detached from the ordinary psychological elements which structure it, and increase its density, it has the tendency to rise spontaneously to its origin (the Transpersonal Self). From the discovery of self-reliance and individuality there can be a progressive transition to an all-embracing realisation of universality.

The contaminated conceptualisation of our self which is often called the ‘ego’ can be left behind.

Ferrucci makes it clear that this higher level of Self in priceless:[4]

The Transpersonal Self has been called, among many other names, the ‘Diamond Consciousness,’ the ‘Jewel in the Lotus,’ the ‘unconquerable mind.’

He states later:[5]

The working hypothesis here is that the Transpersonal Self is at the core of the superconscious, just as the personal self, or ‘I,’ is at the core of the ordinary personality.

. . . possibly the most reasonable explanation of transpersonal experiences maintains that they represent the next steps in the course of human evolution.

The idea of a spiritual core is expressed in various ways in mystical writings and its relationship with the outer layers of the self is subtle and important:[6]

As [Rumi] saw that outward forms were only the ‘pith’, through which the seeing eye of the perfected faithful can penetrate and recognise the eternal ‘kernel’, so did he know that ‘forms’ and ‘piths’ have their function in life as well: ‘If you plant in the earth only the kernel of an apricot stone, nothing will grow; if you plant it along with the pith, then it will grow…’

Ferrucci sings from the same hymn sheet as Jill Bolte Taylor when he writes:[7]

In its ordinary state the personality rightly feels itself to be incomplete. Indeed, it is constantly occupied with trying to reach a state of completeness. Its usual condition is a state of perpetual busy-ness. But the Self is in a state of plenitude, and does not need to look outside in order to be fulfilled. The Self is pure being, beyond thoughts, beyond words, beyond actions.

A key insight is the connection between unity and the Higher Self, reminding me of Bahá-u-lláh’s words about how ‘the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment’ can be ‘made manifest’ once we shake off our pride and recognise that dust is our body’s common origin and its destination. Ferrucci writes:[8] ‘. . . as we move towards the Self unity replaces multiplicity.’ And this presumably the ‘multiple identities born of passion and desire’ described by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are left behind once and for all if we can connect consistently with the realm of the transcendent. Divisions between us will also vanish.

There is though a danger which Ferrucci warns us of. If my ego gets carried away with the belief that the exaltation we feel is his creation, then:[9]

Other forms that mental stimulation and emotional exaltation can take are absolutism, militancy, and fanaticism – what Stuart Miller, in his memorable lecture on the Risks of Psychosynthesis, called ‘Stalinism of the spirit’, . . .

Mason Remey, a Hand of the Cause and highly respected within the Bahá’í Faith for decades, would seem to have got carried away by some such fantasy. After Shoghi Effendi, the authentic Guardian of the Faith, passed away leaving no successor, his misplaced pride tempted Remey to illegitimately claim that he was in fact the new ‘Guardian.’

In summary:[10]

What is called personal psychosynthesis represents the necessary foundation of [our] work. The aim is to build a personality which is efficient and relatively free from emotional blocks. …When we have developed such a personality, then we can safely and productively contact the higher regions of our being, and transpersonal or spiritual psychosynthesis becomes possible.

And generally the results are life-enhancing and create a humble sense of connectedness with all life:[11]

At this pitch, love becomes a synthesis of feeling, knowing, and will. Sometimes it attains great heights, seeing all beings as originating from one universal source, and therefore feels a sense of profound unity and kinship with them. Here love is intuitively perceived as a cosmic principle…

The terms he uses there closely correspond with what Julio Savi, in his exploration of the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, describes as core elements of our being.[12]

He begins by saying ‘`Abdu’l-Bahá writes:[13] `… the soul hath limitless manifestations of its own.’  Then goes on to describe in more details what he feels that means:

In fact, the powers of knowledge, love and will are three great categories of qualities expressed by the soul in accomplishing the purpose of its creation. In each of these three categories, many qualities may be recognized. These qualities are reflections of the divine qualities of the world of the Kingdom, and constitutes potential endowments at the disposal of any human soul in its endeavour of approaching, step by step, the goal of its existence: to return conscious into that world of the Kingdom whence it came forth unconscious.

Moreover as knowledge, love and will are closely interrelated, so knowledge, will and action — being their outcome — should be viewed not as three successive and independent steps of a linear process, whose reciprocal relations are univocal cause-effect relations. They should rather be viewed in the light of the concept of unity and of the evolution of reality set forth in the Bahá’í texts. They are the outcome of three aspects of a single reality, the soul, and therefore they interact. Sometimes, in the sight of God there is no difference between intention and action: `Every act ye meditate is as clear to Him as is that act when already accomplished,’^[198] writes Bahá’u’lláh. Knowledge and love influence will, and will is conducive to action. But each one of them is influenced as well by the other. Knowledge is no longer the same, once will has been fulfilled, through the impulse of love, in an action. Any action confirms or denies cognitive or volitional-affective data through a dynamics which is very similar to biological feed-back.^[199]

Moreover, knowledge, love and will are so strictly interrelated that divided from one another they lose their meaning. An unconscious and involuntary action is not the same as a conscious and a voluntary one.^[200]

Whenever knowledge, love and will are not translated into actions, they lose importance. The cognitive, affective, volitional and practical aspects of human reality are therefore closely interrelated and, depending on the circumstances, they confirm or deny one another.

We will be looking at action in more detail in the next post. While I may have decided not to commit to the Buddhist path partly because it seemed to me at the time not to have a sufficiently activist orientation, the Bahá’í Faith attracted me partly for exactly the opposite reason. It combined its deeply spiritual core with clear guidelines pointing towards the nature and value of concerted action to change the world for the better.

ACT makes more tentative but none the less valuable steps in the transcendent direction.

They explain how:[14]

ACT steps back from a personal struggle and examines it openly and nondefensively. It is an inherently spiritual step in the sense that this kind of perspective taking cannot be justified on the basis of logic, but is based on a direct experience of oneness that comes from the self as context for experiential content.

They clearly accept the value of religion at its best:[15]

Some spiritual and religious traditions, for example, are among the best documented sources of physical and psychological health… particularly the more experiential, accepting and mystical practices, such as meditation and prayer.

All of which resonates strongly with Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight which of course is what triggered me into this re-examination of reflection, something which was further consolidated by my joint investigation with three close friends of the concept and its relevance to consultation.

Next time I’ll be taking a look at how all this might translate itself into action, and how such action is exactly what we need if we are to have any hope of halting in time our descent into self-destruction. Reflection is the key to unlocking our optimal potential.

References:

[1]. The New Image of the Person – page 99.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 49.
[3]. What We May Be – page 69.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 70.
[5]. Op. cit. – Page 131.
[6]. Schimmel – The Triumphal Sun – page 31.
[7]. What We May Be – page 133.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 134.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 160.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 161.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 180.
[12]. Chapter 8 The Eternal Quest for God.
[13]. Tablet to Dr. A. Forel, in Bahá’í World, XV – page 38.
[14]. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy – page 273.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 287.

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Re-evaluating Reflection (2/4): Separating Consciousness from its Contents

If metal can be polished
to a mirror like finish,
what polishing might the mirror
of the heart require?

The Rumi Collection – page 42

Digging deeper into the Value of Reflection

If we are to change our society for the better, bringing the kind of detachment and open-mindedness necessary to any process of collective decision-making will be made far easier if participants have already begun to master the art of reflection. In fact, the link is so strong that Paul Lample, in his book Revelation & Social Reality, expresses it as follows:[1] ‘Reflection takes a collective form through consultation.’

What does this mean exactly?

In terms of reflection[2] he quotes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: [3]

‘Through the meditative faculty inventions are made possible, colossal undertakings are carried out; through it governments can run smoothly.’

He goes on to say:

‘Reflection allows one to take account of circumstances, to consider previous experience, to assess the value or strengths of previous action, as well as its flaws and weaknesses, and to overcome challenges in order to advance further. So significant is this capacity for reflection, that Bahá-u-lláh makes it a cornerstone of individual moral progress.’

My own exploration of the Writings was drawn to what Bahá-u-lláh states in the Kitáb-i-Íqán:[4]

‘The wine of renunciation must needs be quaffed, the lofty heights of detachment must needs be attained, and the meditation referred to in the words “One hour’s reflection is preferable to seventy years of pious worship” must needs be observed.’

Psychosynthesis

This is where my encounter with psychosynthesis proved helpful in preparing my mind for what I read in Koestenbaum and discovered in the Bahá’í Writings in late 1982.

Even though at the time I lived in Hendon, only a short distance away from the Psychosynthesis Centre, I did not, in the end, go for training in that form of psychotherapy, though I did consider it. I got derailed instead onto the psychology track. Only later, after I got my BSc, when I went to Surrey to study for my Clinical Psychology qualification did I stumble upon something that took me further along the path towards a deeper understanding of what reflection feels like. More on that later when I take a brief look at Buddhism.

My reading Spinelli in his book about existential therapy had given me a pointer in the right direction:[5]

Existential-phenomenological therapists attempt to explore their clients’ experience of being-in-the-world by seeking to ‘enter into’ their world-view. The main means by which they undertake. this is the process of bracketing those views, biases, assumptions . . . from their own personal experience, so that they may open themselves to the experience of the client as it is being lived.

‘Bracketing’ entails stepping back from our own perspective in all its forms. Almost all psychotherapies and systems of change, if they are to be effective, must contain and rely upon reflective processes like this.

Assagioli uses a different more resonant word. Judging by the highlights I made in his book at the time of my first reading, I was struck by what Assagioli defines as the power and importance of disidentification:[6]

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

What occupies our mind stains it with its own colours:[7]

In his novel La Réponse du Seigneur, Alphonse de Chateaubrillant compares the human mind to one of those butterflies that assumes the colour of the foliage it settles on: ‘We become what we contemplate,’ he says. If our mind is only occupied with gossip, every day worries, telephone bills, resentments, and the like it will assume their hue. If it thinks about joy, infinity or universality, its hue will again correspond. The years earlier, Marcus Arelius made much the same observation when he said, ‘Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts: for the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.’

This sounds close to the advice of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:[8]

The meditative faculty is akin to the mirror; if you put it before earthly objects it will reflect them. Therefore if the spirit of man is contemplating earthly subjects he will be informed of these.

But if you turn the mirror of your spirits heavenwards, the heavenly constellations and the rays of the Sun of Reality will be reflected in your hearts, and the virtues of the Kingdom will be obtained.

I will be drawing more from Ferrucci’s later book, even though Assagioli was the initial powerful trigger towards this aspect of reflection as I have finally come to understand it. Ferrucci has taken my understanding even further in many crucial respects.

In summary, without reflection, and the closely related prerequisite and consequence known as detachment/severance, unity within is impossible, which in turn makes unity with others and effective consultation in the Bahá’í sense also impossible. Disidentification from subpersonalities is as important as disidentification from the contents of and active scripts within our consciousness.

Ferrucci explains the trap clearly:[9]

As long as we are identified, with sensations, feelings, desires, thoughts, it is as if our sense of being were sewed onto them, and therefore, they can submerge us, control us, limit our perceptions of the world, and block the availability of all other feelings, sensations, desires, and opinions. On the other hand, when we are identified with our self, it is easier for us to observe, regulate, direct, or transcend any of our contents of consciousness, because we are dis-identified from them.

. . . Dis-identification does not prevent us from subsequently identifying with any aspect of ourselves, if we so choose. On the contrary, this ability is expanded. What we want to avoid is a continual, unknowing identification with any random process of our personality. This latter kind of identification always brings a thickening or freezing of some sort

In his view, we absolutely have to recognise our divided reality because[10] ‘One of the most harmful illusions that can beguile us is probably the belief that we are an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent being.’

He refers back to the Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, who wrote:[11]

‘We are not unified; we often feel that we are, . . . but. . . [s]everal subpersonalities are continually scuffling: impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle.’

He then describes disidentification’s importance:[12]

When we recognise a subpersonality, we are able to step outside it and observe it. In psychosynthesis we call this process dis-identification. Because we all have a tendency to identify with – to become one with – this or that subpersonality, we come implicitly to believe that we are it. Dis-identification consists of our snapping out of this illusion and returning to our self. It is often accompanied by a sense of insight and liberation.

He goes on to explain:[13]

We dis-identify by observing.… We observe [the contents of consciousness ] objectively, without judging them, without wanting to change them, without interfering with them in anyway.

This attitude of serene observation can be practised at any moment of our life, and its first effect is that of liberation.

Likewise, the Self is the part in us that can watch any content of the psyche without getting caught up in its atmosphere.

The Self as he used the term is obviously not the ego. During a recent meditation prior to a shared exploration of the relationship between consultation and reflection, I suddenly thought of how I might best define ‘ego’: it’s not just a restricted expression of who we are, but a conditioned and contaminated self which we believe ourselves to be. The observing self is far higher.

ACT

Much later another book enriched my understanding even further Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven Hayes et al (2007). They are concerned, in their therapeutic approach, to ensure we do not prolong suffering by avoiding the inescapably pain of existence:[14]

It is life threatening not to feel pain. Similarly, it is life deadening not to feel sadness, anxiety, or anger. . .

When we simply accept the fact that a thought is a thought, and a feeling is a feeling, a wide array of response options immediately become available. We begin to notice the process of thinking and feeling, not just the content of that activity.

Their perspective suggests that what we feel is flagging up something important:[15]

 . . . When feelings are just feelings, they can mean what they do mean: namely, that a bit of a history is being brought into the present by the current context.

They advocate what they call ‘defusing’, another term for how the observer separates themselves from the contents of consciousness. This includes:[16] ‘Learning verbal conventions that separate thought and thinker, emotion and feeler.’

Who we think we are can be a huge barrier against progress along this path:[17]

The conceptualised self can create severe problems. Often consistency can be maintained more easily simply by distorting or reinterpreting events if they are inconsistent with our conceptualised self. If a person believes him- or herself to be kind, for example, there is less room to deal directly and openly with instances of behaviour that could more readily be called cruel. In this way, a conceptualised self becomes resistant to change and variation and foster self-deception.

On more familiar terminological territory they describe the often discounted ‘observing self’:[18]

The final aspect of self – and that which is most often ignored – has been termed the ‘observing self’… From the ACT perspective, the observing self is a core phenomenon that is taken to be at the heart of human spirituality.

They unpack some implication of the term:[19]

Consciousness, awareness, and being are terms frequently used to describe contact with the observing self. Pure consciousness is a reasonable term for it.

And go on to refer to one of my favourite metaphors. They quote from Baba Ram Dass who uses the analogy of sky and clouds to illustrate how its contents can mask the purity of consciousness.

They even use Koestenbaum’s almost exact phrase in Table 7.1[20] when they write ‘Help distinguish consciousness from content of consciousness.’

For them attachment is the trap:[21]

The ACT therapist introduces the idea that it may not be the goodness or badness of beliefs that is the problem, but rather the attachment to the belief itself that is creating the problem.

. . . The point is simply that peace of mind is not possible at the level of content, and thus an attachment to private evaluative thought content will always immediately produce a sense of unease and threat.

They introduce another extremely helpful analogy:[22]

. . . the point is that thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, memories, and so on are pieces [on the chessboard of consciousness]: they are not you.… [T]he fusion with psychological content can overwhelm this awareness.

We may recoil in fear from the experience of the ‘observing self’[23] ‘Because self-as-perspective is not thing-like, it can appear to be literal nothingness or annihilation. In a sense, this is right, because the observing self does annihilate the overattachment to a conceptualised self.’

Next time I’ll take a look at how the experience if Buddhist meditation contributed to further progress, before exploring the higher self in more detail.

References:

[1]. Revelation and Social Reality – page 212.
[2]. In the literature reflection, meditation and contemplation are often used interchangeably.
[3]. Paris Talks – page 175.
[4]. Kitáb-i-Íqán – page 239.
[5]. Demystifying Therapy – page 297
[6]. Psychosynthesis – page 22
[7]. What We May Be – page 103.
[8]. Paris Talks – page 176.
[9]. What We May Be – page 103.
[10]. Op. cit – page 47.
[11]. Op. cit – page 48.
[12]. Op. cit – page 49.
[13]. Op. cit – page 65.
[14]. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – page 73.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 77.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 151.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 182.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 184.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 187.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 188.
[21]. Op. cit. – page 189.
[22]. Op. cit. – page 192.
[23]. Op. cit. – page 200.

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