Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (6/6): lifting our game

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

. . . .even as the human body in this world, which is outwardly composed of different limbs and organs, is in reality a closely integrated, coherent entity, similarly the structure of the physical world is like unto a single being whose limbs and members are inseparably linked together.

(Abdu’l-Bahá, from a previously untranslated Tablet quoted in part in a statement from the Bahá’í International Community Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Baha’i Faith)

Given the current 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 long sequence from 2017. 

The Moral Imagination

As I explained in the previous posts, in his long and enthralling book on altruism, Ricard has used reason brilliantly to advocate altruism as the solution to our personal and global problems. That in itself makes it an essential read for those of us engaged in understanding these issues more deeply.

He would be the first to agree, I hope, that an intellectual conviction in altruism is not going to be sufficient to motivate enough people to rise to the level of sacrifice required for long enough to achieve the necessary effect. In fact, his long examination of the power of Buddhist meditation within its spiritual context shows that it produces greater levels of compassion and altruism than do shorter experiences of meditation divorced from its roots. The necessary devotion to meditate for the periods of time required to achieve this effect would be impossible to sustain, in my view, without the faith in the discipline that goes with it.

He ends his book, it seems to me, rather in the same trap as Rifkin did. And I’m afraid I have the same response, despite my admiration and respect for the compelling case he marshals in the seven hundred pages it took him five years to write.

I understand the strength of Rifkin’s sense that humanity’s progress has put us within reach of Ricard’s hope of a sufficiently widespread altruism. Robert Wright puts the same hope in slightly different terms in his book The Evolution of God.

He states (page 428):

The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.

He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that (page 428-429):

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

He rescues this from cliché by pointing out that the idea of common humanity may be a self-evident point when we read or hear it, but it’s far from obvious if you look at the way we act. This is because we are under the illusion that we are special (page 429):

We all base our daily lives on this premise – that our welfare is more important than the welfare of pretty much anyone else, with the possible exception of close kin. . . . We see our own resentments as bona fide grievances and we see the grievances of others as mere resentments.

He links the progress of humanity with the application of the unifying insight in daily life (page 429):

. . . . the salvation of the global social system entails moral progress not just in the sense of human welfare; there has to be as a prerequisite for that growth, a closer encounter by individual human beings with moral truth.

He feels that it is inevitable that we will either move closer to moral truth or descend into chaos. He feels that (ibid):

. . . history has driven us closer and closer to moral truth, and now our moving still closer to moral truth is the only path to salvation . . .

by which he means salvation of the social structure. He feels (page 430) that religions that have ‘failed to align individual salvation with social salvation have not, in the end, fared well.’

However, I realise that just as it is impossible for Rifkin conclusively to prove that any hope of empathic rescue from our current predicament must come from our material nature because that is all there is, or for Ricard to prove that an intellectual conviction in the value of altruism is the best hope we have, I cannot conclusively prove to everyone’s satisfaction that

(a) these in themselves could never be sufficient, and

(b) that is OK because we can draw upon transcendent powers.

That though is what I believe.

While Bahá’ís have a model for how this task might be accomplished, it is not a task for Bahá’ís alone. It would be impossible. All people of good will across the planet need to play their part according to their sense of what is required of them.

Moving to a Higher Level

While I accept that the capacity for a high degree of empathy is wired into our brains, I also strongly believe that a higher level again can be reached, with proportionately more leverage in terms of sustained action, if we also can internalise a sense of what the Quakers term ‘That of God’ which is in all of us. Then we will not only have a strong sense of our links to one another but we will also have the confidence to act against apparently overwhelming odds that comes from the knowledge that we human beings are not alone. Bahá’u’lláh says (Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic no. 13):

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

Only when we have such a sense of powerful support and shared humanity does it seem to me that we can reach that tipping point, when most of the world of humanity will be prepared and able to put their weight effectively against the wheel of redemptive change, and only then will disaster be averted.

Though I sympathised with Rifkin’s and Ricard’s perspective then as I do now with Klein’s, I am not convinced it will be enough. The changes that need to be made are major, effortful, and must be sustained over decades if not centuries. Possibly, without something extra, we would be like the Hero of Haarlem, trying to save the village by putting our finger in the dike of humanity’s crisis, only this time it is leaking in too many places: we would lack the capacity to fully understand what to do, to take effective action or to endure the necessary strain for the time required.

Perhaps we need to acknowledge that there are spiritual powers upon which we should be prepared to draw to meet the challenges of our complex global industrialised empire – I’d rather not use the word civilisation. Perhaps we need to access the wisdom of a collective Mind or Soul if we are to understand the problems we face in the first place and draw on the strength of a spiritual dimension before we can even dream of implementing the solutions for the required amount of time.

The Importance of Detachment

I have referred throughout this sequence to the importance of reflection for the individual and consultation for communities as trance and pattern breakers that can free us from the shackles of convention and the veils of illusion. What I have not spelled out until now is that for these two disciplines to work for us at their most powerful there has to be a third element present: detachment. Detachment is the essential catalyst. If there is no such detachment then neither reflection nor consultation would achieve more for us outside this spiritual context than would borrowing meditation alone from the Buddhists, as I described earlier.

The translations of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s comments in Paris Talks use the terms reflection, contemplation and meditation almost interchangeably. The full context strongly suggests that reflection depends upon detachment and that detachment connects us with God.

Through the faculty of meditation man attains to eternal life; through it he receives the breath of the Holy Spirit—the bestowal of the Spirit is given in reflection and meditation. . . .

This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God.

The existentialist philosopher, Peter Koestenbaum, comes to a similar conclusion concerning the end result of stepping back from our programmed identifications through the process of reflection.

He explains this in his seminal book The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy (page 73):

The history of philosophy, religion and ethics appears to show that the process of reflection can continue indefinitely . . . . there is no attachment . . . which cannot be withdrawn, no identification which cannot be dislodged.’

By reflection he means something closely related to meditation.

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.

Similarly ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes clear in his writings that one of the key prerequisites for consultation is detachment:

The prime requisites for them that take counsel together are 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.

It is possible to argue that detachment is achievable without any belief in a transcendent dimension or in any power beyond those of the natural world. I would have to agree that a degree of detachment is indeed possible within those constraints.

However, from a Bahá’í point of view, there are two quotations of particular relevance here.

The first is from the Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh (Arabic no. 68):

O Children of Men! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. 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. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

And the second from the Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh (page 155):

The essence of detachment is for man to turn his face towards the courts of the Lord, to enter His Presence, behold His Countenance, and stand as witness before Him.

These clearly suggest that the realisation of the highest degree of detachment is dependent upon an acceptance of and obedience to a spiritual power greater than ourselves.

Conclusions

I have explored at length on this blog from where the motivation can be derived to persevere in the necessary remedial actions for sufficiently long to create a major and enduring paradigm and action pattern shift and why that is necessary not only for our personal wellbeing but also for our collective survival. We need to realise how much we disown and to accept that this disowning in all its forms has to be transcended.

But we need more than that. We need a sense of how best to transcend our disowning.

I have used disowning as my catchword for the ways we blind ourselves to what we do not want to know. Part of the reason for using this word is that it also implies that we are refusing to own up to our neglect. When we own up to it and fully experience the necessary shock and revulsion at our own failures we will then have taken the first step on the road to remedying our defects. I have also argued that we need to not only exert ourselves to put into effect the individual and group skills that will generate viable solutions to the problems that confront us, but we will also have to keep up our efforts at an extremely high level for very long periods of time, over centuries if necessary.

The Universal House of Justice describes it in a letter to the Bahá’ís of Iran dated 2 March 2013:

Yet, however promising the rise in collective consciousness may be, it should be seen as only the first step of a process that will take decades—nay, centuries—to unfold.

This therefore for me entails also recognising that we have to have faith in some form of transcendent power to enhance all we do, to motivate us to persist for as long as necessary, and to lift our endeavours to the necessary heights of creativity and healing. It seems to me that everything we love depends upon our acting in this way from now on and indefinitely.

If not, the chances are we will give up too soon or fail to do as much as we are able.

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (5/6): Biosphere Consciousness, Empathy & Altruism

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

Were one to observe with an eye that discovereth the realities of all things, it would become clear that the greatest relationship that bindeth the world of being together lieth in the range of created things themselves, and that co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or deriveth benefit therefrom, either directly or indirectly.

(Abdu’l-Bahá, from a previously untranslated Tablet quoted in part in a statement from the Bahá’í International Community Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Baha’i Faith)

Post-truth politics also poses a problem for scepticism. A healthy democracy needs to leave plenty of room for doubt. There are lots of good reasons to be doubtful about what the reality of climate change will entail: though there is scientific agreement about the fact of global warming and its source in human activity, the ultimate risks are very uncertain and so are the long-term consequences. There is plenty of scope for disagreement about the most effective next steps. The existence of a very strong scientific consensus does not mean there should be a consensus about the correct political response. But the fact of the scientific consensus has produced an equal and opposite reaction that squeezes the room for reasonable doubt. The certainty among the scientists has engendered the most intolerant kind of scepticism among the doubters.

(From How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous by David Runciman – Guardian Friday 7 July 2017)

Given the current 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 long sequence from 2017. 

At the end of the last post I shared the hope that my helicopter survey of a vast field has done enough to convey clearly my sense that as individuals and communities we are locked into unconsciously determined and potentially destructive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour, until we discover the keys of reflection for individuals and consultation for groups.

What we might do next is the focus of the final two posts.

When people resist therapy the personal price can be high. When cultures resist change the social and environmental costs can be even greater.

At whatever level we consider the matter, counteracting our default patterns requires significant effort, and the more complicated the problem, as in the case of climate change, the greater the effort. Even a simple puzzle can defeat even the best brains if the necessary effort is not taken to solve it. And often no effort is made because no failure in problem-solving is detected. Take this beautiful illustration of the point from Daniel Khaneman’s excellent treatment of what he calls System 1 (rapid fire reaction) and System 2 (careful effortful thinking) in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.I have dealt at length elsewhere with my distaste for the use of the word ‘intuitive’ in this context: I prefer ‘instinctive.’ Now though is not the time to delve into that problem: I’m currently republishing some of the posts dealing with that question.

The main point and its relevance is hopefully clear.

Biosphere Consciousness

Taking on the difficult problems is clearly going to be a challenge when we don’t even recognise or admit that our default reponses are so wide of the mark.

We need to reach at least a basic level of interactive understanding on a global scale if we are to successfully address the problems of our age. But we need more than that.

Rifkin, in his excellent book The Empathic Civilisation argues the case eloquently. He recognizes that to motivate us to make the necessary sacrifices to allow our civilization to survive its entropic processes we need something larger than ourselves to hold onto. By entropic he means all the waste and excessive consumption a growing population generates.

He doesn’t think religion will do the trick though.

For example, he sees the Golden Rule, a central tenant of all the great world religions, as self-interested because, by observing it, according to his version of religion, we buy paradise when we die. Kant, in his view, almost rescued it but not quite (page 175):

Immanuel Kant make the rational case for the Golden Rule in the modern age in his famous categorical imperative. . . . . First, “Act only on that maxim that can at the same time be willed to become a universal law.” Second, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Although Kant eliminated the self-interested aspect of doing good that was so much a part of most religious experiences, he also eliminated the “felt” experience that makes compassion so powerful and compelling.

Rifkin does acknowledge that Judaism endorses the universal application of the Golden Rule (page 214):

Lest some infer that the Golden Rule applies literally to only one’s neighbours and blood kin, the Bible makes clear that it is to be regarded as a universal law. In Leviticus it is written: “[T]he stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (1808), version from the “Butts set” (for source of image see link)

He acknowledges that the Axial Age (page 216) was ‘the first budding of empathic consciousness.’ He feels Christianity has warped this ideal, especially in respect of the existence of Satan, the Fall of man, and the resultant denigration of the body. He is aware that other religious teachings do not fall into what would be for him the same trap. However, he dates from the time of the Enlightenment the demise of religion as an effective force in society.

He feels that he can now locate our redemption in that same physical nature he is convinced that religion is revolted by (page 349):

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behaviour that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature – with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realised. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of human nature.

The question is whether we agree that the way evolution has shaped the brain is also a sufficient condition to produce the necessary levels of self-mastery and altruism and spread them widely and deeply enough across humanity to preserve us in the longer term.

He clearly hopes it does. He describes the exact nature of the challenge our situation creates (page 593):

The challenge before us is how to bring forward all of these historical stages of consciousness that still exist across the human spectrum to a new level of biosphere consciousness in time to break the lock that shackles increasing empathy to increasing entropy. . . .

And he concludes (ibid.):

In a world characterised by increasing individuation and made up of human beings at different stages of consciousness, the biosphere itself maybe the only context encompassing enough to unite the human race as a species.

This position is perhaps an inevitable consequence of his unwillingness to admit the possibility of a theological inspiration. I am astonished even more by a subsequent claim, which is imbued with the same blinkering assumption that Western materialist models of the world have basically got it right. He blurts out, in surprise (page 593-4):

While the new distributed communications technologies – and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. . . .

Does he have no awareness of current trends in holistic thinking, which assert that we are already and have always been interconnected at the deepest possible levels, not simply in terms of these recently emerged material factors? Is he ignoring long-standing spiritual systems such as that of the Native Americans whose foundation stone is this concept of interconnectedness? Does he not know of the empirical evidence being generated by near-death experiences, many of which include reports of just such a sense of nonmaterial interconnectedness? Has he not heard even a whisper of the Bahá’í position, admittedly recently emerged but with a longer history than the roots of holism in physics, that humanity is one and needs to recognise its essential unity if we are to be able to act together to solve the global problems that confront us? The problem is not that no one is offering a reason ‘why we ought to be connected’: the problem is that too few people are accepting the idea, expressed by millions of our fellow human beings in many complementary models of the world, that we are already deeply connected at a spiritual level, not just with each other but with the earth that sustains our material existence.

Naomi Klein makes a powerful case for hoping that the shock of climate change will have just the kind of positive effect that Rifkin looks for in Gaia, though she also is fully aware that shock often narrows our capacity to think, feel and relate and we end up in the tunnel-vision of fight and flight. She is aligned with Rifkin in his hope that identification on our part with the plight of the planet will be a sufficient catalyst to produce the desired shift.

Altruism

Matthieu Ricard takes on these issues from a different angle.

There are major obstacles to addressing our challenges effectively and Ricard is not blind to them (page 580):

. . . . . in a world where politicians aim only to be elected or re-elected, where financial interest groups wield a disproportionate influence on policy makers, where the well-being of future generations is often ignored since their representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, where governments pursue national economic policies that are to the detriment of the global interest, decision-makers have barely any inclination to create institutions whose goal would be to encourage citizens to contribute to collective wealth, which would serve to eradicate poverty.

Snower contends, and Ricard agrees with him and so do I, that reason alone will never get us beyond this point (page 581):

. . . . no one has been able to show that reason alone, without the help of some prosocial motivation, is enough to persuade individuals to widen their sphere of responsibility to include all those who are affected by their actions.

Because he is a Buddhist, in his book Ricard chooses to advocate altruism (ibid):

Combined with the voice of reason, the voice of care can fundamentally change our will to contribute to collective goods. Such ideas echo the Buddhist teachings on uniting wisdom and compassion: without wisdom, compassion can be blind without compassion, wisdom becomes sterile.

Ricard (page 611) raises the issue of ‘altruism for the sake of future generations.’ If we accept the reality of climate change, as most of us now do, our behaviour will unarguably affect our descendants for the worse if we do not change it. Given that evolution has produced a human brain that privileges short term costs and benefits over long-term ones, such that a smoker does not even empathise with his future self sufficiently strongly to overcome in many cases the powerful allure of nicotine addiction, what chance has altruism in itself got of producing the desired effect?

Ricard to his credit faces this head on and quotes the research of Kurzban and Houser (page 631-32). They conclude from their research that:

20% of people are altruists who bear the fortunes of future generations in mind and are disposed to altering their ways of consumption to avoid destroying the environment. . . . . .

[However], around 60% of people follow prevailing trends and opinion leaders, something that highlights the power of the herd instinct in humans. These ‘followers’ are also ‘conditional cooperators:’ they are ready to contribute to the public good on the condition that everyone else does likewise.

The final 20% are not at all inclined to cooperate and want more than anything to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them. They are not opposed to other people’s happiness in principle, but it is not their business.

Shades of Pettigrew again! This clearly indicates that reaching the tipping point, where most people have widened out their unempathic tunnel vision to embrace the whole of humanity and future generations in a wide-angled embrace, is some way off still. He goes on to outline the many practical steps that lie within our reach, such as recycling more of our waste metals and moving to hydrogen powered cars. Enough of us have to want to bring those steps into reality before change will occur at a fast enough rate.

According to Ricard, we must move (page 682) from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

The last post will take a closer look at that amongst other possibilities.

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (4/6): individuals and communities

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

(Shoghi Effendi, Letter to an individual Bahá’í, through his secretary, 17 February 1933.)

Given the current 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 long sequence from 2017. 

The previous post ended with the following point.

Most of us are trapped in our simulations, created by early experience and powerful influences in the present. Reflecting as an individual and consulting as a community are harder to do than we would like to think and need courage and perseverance in equal measure, courage to risk this shift in processing in the first place and perseverance if we are to learn how to master the skills in each case.

For the impact of destructive processes within the individual there is a wealth of evidence, both social and clinical, which I look at straightaway. I will look at the impact on groups and communities later using the work of Zimbardo as a powerful example.

Processes such as the ones I am about to outline are simply examples of the kind of invisible obstacles we might have to deal with when we are trying to shift our perspectives to integrate experiences and evidence against the grain of our programming. Breaking out of our individual or collective trance is not easy. When the evidence is complex, as with climate change, or collides head on with prevailing dogma, as with the reality of the soul, it’s particularly difficult.

Culture and the Individual

First, let’s take a look at some of the negative influences that operate under the surface within the individual. These do overlap with aspects of the wider culture but are worth considering here given their impact upon every single one of us as an individual.

As adults we may often find ourselves behaving in completely counterproductive or even destructive ways in our everyday lives and haven’t a clue why we do so, or even sometimes that we are doing so.

There are all sorts of ways that our culture subliminally shapes our reactions in ways that would shock our conscious mind. A recent study, for example, looked at the reactions of Americans from all parts of the racial spectrum. One of the experiments involved determining how quickly subjects would shoot at a target person in a risk situation. Pictures of different people were flashed up on the screen, some from a white European heritage, some from a black African heritage. It was no surprise that white subjects would take less time to shoot a black person than a white one. What was shocking was that the same was true for black subjects, so deeply had the toxin of racism infected them as well. What none of the subjects would have been aware of was that they were behaving in this way.

Even prominent people within a culture, those with access to the most information and with the most power to change things, succumb to the insidious influences of their society. Many of the founding figures of the United States were slave owners. Their personal investment in slavery conflicted with their avowed principles such as the equality of all men. John Fitzgerald Medina in his excellent book Faith, Physics & Psychology quotes the explanation given by historian Richard Thomas (iBook page 280):

Since America was not about to abandon slave labor or its policy of dispossessing the native peoples of their land, the only real and practical choice was to minimise the nature of its sins: blacks and native peoples (Indians) were not to be considered on the same level of humanity as whites; blacks were heathen and amoral, next to the apes in the scale of evolution. . . .

The technical term for this is resolving cognitive dissonance, and is a process that I was tempted to include in my earlier discussion of disowning, but wasn’t sure it applied directly to climate change. As Saul McLeod explains:

Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.

According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).

This of course only works if we can successfully blind ourselves to the fact that we are doing it.

It’s obvious now to most people that the Americans and the British, in terms of race, hoodwinked themselves with this self-deceptive but profitable ploy. What we may not all fully appreciate is how far the toxic ideology of racism that thus developed spread its poison, for how long, and with how much resulting damage.

When John Fitzgerald Medina claimed in his book that Hitler was influenced by American eugenicists to develop aspects of his genocidal agenda, I had to check this idea out further.

I read Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning in tandem with Ricard’s Altruism, quoted earlier in this sequence. He confirms the extent to which the Nazi vision of extermination to gain land was inspired by America (pages 15-16):

Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonisation of North America and Africa. . . .

In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control. . . . . For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was self-evident. ‘The natives must give way,’ he said. ‘Look at America.’

. . . . When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany’s only opportunity for colonisation was Europe, he discarded as impractical the possibility of a return to Africa. The search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in Eastern Europe as well.

Hitler saw the Soviet Union as a Jewish project and felt (page 20):

[a] second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.

It is deeply ironic therefore that the nation who saw themselves as liberators of Europe at the end of the Second World War should have been part of Hitler’s inspiration in the first place. So do destructive subliminal processes wreak havoc on a massive scale in our world, especially when potentiated by self-interest. Climate change denial should come as no surprise therefore, given the complexity of the issue and the power of the vested interests who would lose out if something really effective were ever done to address the problem.

It’s a moot point in both cases whether those pulling the levers of persuasion, the propagandists, are as unaware of their reality distortion as many of those who come to believe them.

There are many more examples of this kind to illustrate the way that culture warps and biases our perceptions to devastating effect and I won’t attempt to list them here. We’ll come back to the cultural scale later.

Trauma and the Individual

What is also true is that our personal history has a powerful subliminal effect on us as individuals and can wreck our lives and those of the people closest to us. Trauma is the easiest example to use to illustrate this.

We may be completely unaware of the still active impact of early trauma, to whose current significance we are almost completely blind even if we remember anything at all about it.

Many different models of therapy have developed way to explain how this works.

That there is such an effect and that it is relatively widespread can be demonstrated in many ways. In a study carried out in 2010 and quoted by Koenen et al in The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health & Disease: the Hidden Epidemic (page 13-15), out of a sample of 5692 English speaking Americans 2190 (38.48%) reported some kind of traumatic experience prior to the age of 13.

A recent sequence of posts on this blog looked at the work of a Jungian therapist, Joy Schaverian, with people who had been traumatised by their experiences at Boarding School. She graphically explores through case histories the damage that has been done as well as the repressive mechanisms, with their consequences, that had been mobilised to cope.

To give a brief example, Schaverian explains, when she discusses one of her patient’s difficulties dealing with the time a teacher hit him in the face with a cricket bat, how hard it was for him to fully accept what he was saying (page 57):

Theo first told of this incident early in analysis. Then, a few months later, he retold it, this time with more depth of feeling. It was as though he was at first incredulous but then, as I took it seriously, he began to believe himself and to take seriously how abusive this had been. As Theo recounted it for the second time the feelings associated with the event became live in the session. Theo went white; he felt sick; he had trouble breathing and physically regressed.… The emotional impact of this was fully present in the room. Theo was overwhelmed and speechless.

The benefits of revisiting traumatic events in this way , even when they have possibly been forgotten between sessions are priceless (page 118):

. . . if [traumatic events] can be told they are gradually detoxified, thus eventually accepted as part of the person’s personal history. It is then an accessible narrative and no longer unconsciously dominates their life. When there is no such witness the trauma may become embodied, leading to conversion symptoms such as digestive problems, migraines, chronic pain, poor energy and a large number of other physiological indicators. This may be because the event that caused it is remembered in an embodied sense, but not recalled cognitively and so it cannot be consigned to the past.

We’ll be coming back to the idea of embodied memories in a moment.

Other concepts from different traditions are scripts in Transactional Analysis, which I’ve explored elsewhere, archetypes from Jungian therapy, constructs from Personal Construct Therapy, schema etc. the formation and experience of all of which are shaped by early experience as well as culture.

The examples I want to focus on right now I’ve chosen both because they provide dramatic and detailed illustrations of the invisible impact of childhood trauma on adults and are part of my recent reading around trauma and psychosis.

A recent post includes a detailed example, from their 1991 book The Stormy Search for the Self, of what Christina and Stansislav Grof term a spiritual emergency. Those interested in knowing more detail should click the link above. Basically it explores how a traumatised person was helped through her crisis without standard psychiatric treatment and later in the book how what they call Holotropic Breathwork helps people gain access to embodied memories.

They feel that this approach unlocks blocks between our awareness and the contents of the unconscious (page 259):

. . . .  It seems that the nonordinary state of consciousness induced by holotropic breathing is associated with biochemical changes in the brain that make it possible for the contents of the unconscious to surface, to be consciously experienced, and – if necessary – to be physically expressed. In our bodies and in our psyches we carry imprints of various traumatic events that we have not fully digested and assimilated psychologically. Holographic breathing makes them available, so that we can fully experience them and release the emotions that are associated with them.

I want to focus on a couple of examples from their earlier work – Realms of the Human Unconscious: observations from LSD research. The use of LSD in this way has come to seem controversial, so much so it was made illegal 1981, six years after this book was published. Some researchers are recently beginning to think more positively about its potential benefits, but we are a long way from repealing the laws that ban it.

Why the Grofs’ research is worth drawing on in this context is for what it seems to reveal about the accuracy with which inaccessible traumatic memories are stored in the brain. LSD helps a person regain lucid and detailed memories, which can then be integrated.

More than that, the Grofs developed a strong sense of the sequence in which such memories can be retrieved and the way they group into a mutually reinforcing layered networks which they call (page 46) ‘systems of condensed experience,’ COEX systems for short.

Both the detail and the interconnectedness of the memories go a long way to explain their power to shape our experience and behaviour in the present in spite of our routine oblivion to their existence. That such interconnected detail coexists with such intransigent forgetfulness explains the power the past experiences have to impact upon us outside our awareness. The examples I’m giving go a long way towards proving how much changing this impact depends upon bringing the whole network of experiences into consciousness.

The work they report on in this book was done in Prague in the decade leading up to 1965.

The layering effect can be illustrated by Richard’s history (page 57-60). The first layer related to his expulsion from university because of his conflict with the communist orthodoxy of the time. A ‘deeper layer . . . . related to Richard’s experiences with his brutal, despotic, and autocratic father.’ Deeper still were earlier memories from childhood such as a strong electric shock at about age seven. A comically horrific encounter with a cow at about one year old was from the next level down. Finally (page 59), he encountered his birth trauma, which he concluded was ‘the fundamental prototype of all the situations in which he felt absolutely helpless and at the mercy of a destructive force.’

The Grofs later explain that, as a general rule, each more superficial level has to be explored before the deeper levels can be accessed (page 71):

The . . . . most important reason for thinking in terms of memory constellations rather than individual memories is based on the content analysis of consecutive sessions of a psycholytic series. Before the subject can approach and relive a traumatic memory from early childhood (core experience), he usually has to face and work through many situations in later life that have a similar theme and involve the same basic elements.

The final result of this LSD facilitated mental archaeology was positive in Richard’s case (page 60):

After the experiences of rebirth, positive ecstatic feelings of long duration occur in Richard’s sessions. They brought about a far-reaching improvement of the clinical condition. His depressions, anxieties, and psychosomatic symptoms completely disappeared and he felt full of activity and optimism.

The Grofs are keen to substantiate that most of these memories are rooted in reality. They quote case examples. For example, the mother of another patient, Dana, (pages 65-66) ‘was absolutely astonished by the accuracy of the account concerning the traumatic event as well as its physical setting. . . . . The description of the room was photographically accurate, even in the most minute detail, and its authenticity was unquestionable because of the very unusual character of some of the objects involved. . . In this case, there did not seem to exist a possibility that this information could have been transmitted by some other means. Before the patient was two years old, the family left this house; shortly afterward, it was condemned and torn down. . . . Dana’s mother gave away many of the things that formed the setting of the relived incident. There were no photographs of the room or of any of the described pieces, and the mother did not remember ever having mentioned any of the objects in front of the patient.’

So that’s what can happen to an individual.

Group Processes

It may seem a step too far to use examples of this kind, drawn from clinical work with individuals, and imply that group processes are similarly potentially pathological and operate all too often outside our awareness and conscious control.

One dramatic body of evidence will have to suffice for now to illustrate how this comparison might not be so far fetched. Philip Zimbardo provides the evidence in his brilliant analysis, The Lucifer Effect. His perspective is rooted in the study he initiated at Stanford University.

Student volunteers were divided randomly into two groups: prisoners and guards. It did not take long for the guards to descend into abusive behaviours that meant the study had to be halted before serious harm was done. From this, and after examining the behavior of American troops at Abu Ghraib, he came to disturbing conclusions about human behaviour in situations which steer us towards evil. He feels strongly that good people can do bad things not necessarily because they are bad apples who should bear full responsibility for their crimes, but because they are placed in a bad barrel that rots them. More than that, it is too simplistic to then blame the barrel for the whole problem. The barrel maker has to take his share of the responsibility. Corrupt systems can corrupt good people. Only the minority in his experience are able to resist.

Earlier work lends considerable weight to this latter point. For example, when I was studying psychology for the first time in the 1970s I came across the work of Thomas Pettigrew, which is still referred to even now.

To put one set of his findings very simply, whether you were a miner in segregated West Virginia or apartheid South Africa, the culture around you differed depending on whether you were above ground or below it. Below ground discrimination was potentially dangerous so the culture there frowned on it: above ground the culture was discriminatory. What was particularly interesting to me was that 20% of people discriminated all the time regardless of the culture and 20% refused to do so at all: 60% of people shifted from desegregation below ground to segregation above it (the percentages are approximate: the pattern is accurate).

What may seem baffling is how apparently decent people go along with toxic patterns of behavior. The forces that coerce conformity are astonishingly compelling. Haidt talks of the hive effect. In The Righteous Mind (page 247) he asks ‘Why do the students sing, chant, dance, sway, chop, and stomp so enthusiastically during the game?’ For him, ‘It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole.”’ Other experiments such as those by Solomon Asch, have shown how, when the majority in a group identify the wrong line as the matching one, the lone subject of the experiment tends to go long with the majority view at least some of the time: ‘To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed themselves to the ‘obviously erroneous’ answers given by the other group members at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the ‘staged’ trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean [ie average not stingy] subject conformed on 4 of the ‘staged’ trials.’

This video below by Melanie Joy conveys an attempt to unpack some of the detail about how this might work at a cultural level in a context meat eaters may find bizarre. As a vegetarian the validity of her explanation of how collusion is induced is compelling. Meat eaters may have to temporarily suspend their disbelief and step back from their investment in carnism in order to see how her explanation could easily be mapped onto such social toxins as racism and sexism.

Hopefully this helicopter survey of a vast field has done enough to convey clearly my sense that as individuals and communities we are locked into unconsciously determined and potentially destructive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour, until, in my view, we are either painfully jolted out of our trance by a spiritual emergency or we painstakingly discover for ourselves the keys of reflection for individuals and consultation for groups. Only then do we have an opportunity to see what is working on our minds and change it.

In a complex world it is easy to hide from the wider but more distant impact of our individual and collective actions. Because the damage is potentially so great, so much greater than it ever was is the need now for our awareness to widen and embrace not just the daunting complexity within us but also that which stands between and outside us.

I have been considering the implications of this in the context of climate change and the afterlife but it also applies to many other areas of human behavior such as deregulation which removes safeguards in the interests of profit, extractivism that aggressively exploits the earth’s resources without sufficient care for the consequences, and a global economic system that harms not just the environment but the workforce to whose country cheaper production has been exported.

Where we might go next is dealt with slightly more briefly in the final two posts.

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (2/6): where there’s a will . . . .

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

O YE THAT ARE LYING AS DEAD ON THE COUCH OF HEEDLESSNESS! Ages have passed and your precious lives are well-nigh ended, yet not a single breath of purity hath reached Our court of holiness from you. Though immersed in the ocean of misbelief, yet with your lips ye profess the one true faith of God. Him whom I abhor ye have loved, and of My foe ye have made a friend. Notwithstanding, ye walk on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you. Were ye but to open your eyes, ye would, in truth, prefer a myriad griefs unto this joy, and would count death itself better than this life.

(Bahá’u’lláh: Persian Hidden Words, No. 20)

Given the current 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 long sequence from 2017. 

I ended the last post with this point. Our survival now depends not upon our evolutionary heritage of tunnel vision approximations to reality but upon our transcending these limitations as rapidly as possible both as individuals and as a species. If not, extinction beckons.

Where there’s a will

I couldn’t of course say that in any meaningful way if I accepted Dennett’s argument in Consciousness Explained that willpower is an illusion.

By the time Dennett was writing his influential tract about consciousness in the early 90s he spoke for many when he dismissed the idea of conscious choice as a genuine initiator of action. He wrote (page 163):

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

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

An even simpler experiment seemed to point in very much the same direction. W. Grey Walter implanted electrodes into what he suspected were brain areas with arousal related to initiating ‘intentional actions.’ He then asked the subjects in this experiment to press a button when they wanted to see the next slide in a series (page 167):

Unbeknownst to the patient, however, the controller button was a dummy, not attached to the slide projector! What actually advanced the slides was the amplified signal from the electrode implanted in the patient’s motor cortex.

One might suppose that the patients would notice nothing out of the ordinary, but in fact they were startled by the effect, because it seemed to them as if the slide projector was anticipating their decisions. They reported that just as they were “about to” push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so, the projector would advance the slide . . .

There are holes in this argument in so far as it constitutes proof that all experiences of conscious choice and willpower are illusions. For a start there is evidence that even such triggers of action as this was based upon, such as simple basic responses, can be blocked at the last moment. They’re not completely inevitable.

Even more importantly, key clinical research demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the mind can change the brain. It would be impossible to describe all the evidence adduced to support the claim that volition is real and its exercise can change the brain, i.e. mind alters matter in this case and it cannot be explained as one part of the brain working on another part.

One compelling example that will hopefully suffice for now is Schwartz’s work with patients suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) who had agreed to combine the therapy with regular brain scans. This work, which he examines in The Mind and the Brain, showed (page 90) that “self-directed therapy had dramatically and significantly altered brain function.” His model involves four stages. He concludes (page 94):

The changes the Four Steps can produce in the brain offered strong evidence that willful [i.e. willed], mindful effort can alter brain function, and that such self-directed brain changes – neuroplasticity – are a genuine reality.

In case we miss the full implications of this work they spell them out (page 95):

The clinical and physiological results achieved with OCD support the notion that the conscious and willful mind cannot be explained solely and completely by matter, by the material substance of the brain. In other words, the arrow of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional. . . . And as we will see, modern quantum physics provides an empirically validated formalism that can account for the effects of mental processes on brain function.

Even though subliminal influences of the kind I outlined earlier still run the show most of the time when we’re on automatic pilot, as Kahneman has also demonstrated at length in his book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, many of us have also clearly shown the capacity to use our minds to change our brains and make ourselves wiser and more adaptive. This is effortful but possible.

It important though that we do not stop at the level of the individual.

Collective Simulations

Our implicit personal simulations, the ones that trigger instinctive responses, evolved to optimise our individual chances of survival. Our collective simulations in any culture or sub-culture are created by the most powerful prevailing influences at the present time and serve to reinforce its priorities. None of these simulations is correct but we treat them as if they were and they are strongly related to our preferences. This can have serious and widespread consequences.

Klein unpicks these in terms of climate change and the influence of wealthy deniers.

She quotes Dan Kahan in This Changes Everything (pages 36-37):

[He] attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to ‘cultural cognition,’ the process by which all of us – regardless of political leanings – filter new information in ways that will protect our ‘preferred version of the good society.’ . . . .

In other words, it is always ‘easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered.’

In America 69% of those holding strong ‘egalitarian’ views regard climate change as ‘a high risk,’ whereas only 11% of those with strong ‘hierarchical’ views do so. Between 2002 and 2010, according to a Guardian report she quotes (page 45) ‘a network of anonymous U. S. billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to “groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change.”’ We can fairly presume that this was not all they spent on similar purposes: it’s probably the tip of a very large iceberg, of the kind that will become increasingly rare in nature as time goes on if we don’t change our ways. The polling figures she quotes (page 35) show that from 2007 when 71 per cent of Americans ‘believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate’ the figure fell through 51% in 2009 to 44% in 2011. She claims similar trends have been detected in the U.K. and Australia.

Donations from billionaires was probably not the only factor influencing this trend, though it probably helped boost the flood of antagonism that greeted attempts in newspapers and on the web to support the validity of climate change and which resulted in a certain reluctance in some quarters to stick heads above the parapet on this issue. I’ve already blogged about how drug company investment in new markets, largely by targeting potential tablet swallowers, led to doctors being inundated with requests for the new wonder drug. That there should also be a correlation between high levels of spending to persuade a wide audience that climate change is a myth and a predictable widespread negative response to climate change advocates does not surprise me in the least.

Through processes of reflection, which I have explored at length on this blog and will come back to later, we as individuals can step back from our default patterns of belief, thought and behaviour, including our default susceptibility to persuasion, and change them radically for the better. But first of course we have to realise that something is badly wrong and that we need to change.

Through processes of consultation resolutely applied, again something I have explored on this blog and will return to, we can as groups, communities, nations, continents and beyond, reflect upon and modify our default patterns of belief, thought and behaviour, and change them radically for the better. Collectively recognising that something is badly wrong and that we need to change is even more difficult for communities than it is for individuals.

More on this next time.

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (1/6): Global Implications

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

O YE THAT ARE LYING AS DEAD ON THE COUCH OF HEEDLESSNESS! Ages have passed and your precious lives are well-nigh ended, yet not a single breath of purity hath reached Our court of holiness from you. Though immersed in the ocean of misbelief, yet with your lips ye profess the one true faith of God. Him whom I abhor ye have loved, and of My foe ye have made a friend. Notwithstanding, ye walk on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you. Were ye but to open your eyes, ye would, in truth, prefer a myriad griefs unto this joy, and would count death itself better than this life.

(Bahá’u’lláh: Persian Hidden Words, No. 20)

Given the current 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 long sequence from 2017. 

I think this sequence of posts is looking a bit over-ambitious. It’s not because I’m not sure what to say but because I have too much to cram in. It could be difficult to make it clear and coherent. However, the issues involved keep bugging me and won’t shut up in my head so here goes.

Global Responsibility

Setting spiritual reality aside at least for the moment (but not for that long!), there are still so many influences upon us and impacts from our actions that are almost or completely invisible in different ways for different reasons.

As Timothy Morton points out, in a recent Guardian interview:

‘There you are, turning the ignition of your car,’ he writes. ‘And it creeps up on you.’ Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, ‘let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet.’ But ‘harm to Earth is precisely what is happening.’ Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, ‘everything is interconnected.’

Naomi Klein expands the point to deal with why we do nothing as a collective even when many of us are fully aware of the problem as individuals. The measures we require to take (This Changes Everything: page 21) ‘are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.’ We shouldn’t discount, as well though, population growth. It’s unfortunate that the idea of growth focuses so much on either the economy or population and so little, at national and global level, with how we grow and expand our consciousness.

Klein adds:

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

According to Matthieu Ricard in his thought-provoking book on altruism something that should help is a growing awareness that growth cannot continue (page 658):

In the eyes of the politician Anders Wijkman and environmentalist Johann Rockström, there can be nothing more perverse than an economy that grows at the expense of the raw materials that allow it to exist: ‘The world’s population is growing. Consumption is growing. The only problem is that the earth is not growing.’ . . . .

In short, as the English-born American economist Kenneth Boulding said: ‘Those who believe that economic growth can go on forever are either mentally deranged or they are economists.’

Not all economists though fortunately.

There is, for example, a growing trend, Ricard argues, for economists to discard the treacherously misleading GDP as a good guide to whether we are doing all right or not. Because (page 660) ‘[i]t ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality’ it is worse then useless: it is leads to toxic decision-making. Its fundamental insanity is revealed by its inclusion as positives what are in fact evidences of dysfunction (page 667):

If a country has more crime, pollution, war, and disease, GDP increases as a result of financial transactions relating to expenditure in prisons, policing, weapons, and healthcare. This increase enters the accounts as a positive indicator of a growing economy, even though it represents a decline in well-being.’

Ricard acknowledges that (page 679) ‘we must . . . not underestimate the importance of personal transformation.’ From there we must move to the wider society within which we live and, in Ricard’s view (page 681), learn to balance what Mintzberg calls the three-legged stool of a ‘public sector made up of political forces…, a private sector made up of economic forces…, and a plural sector of social forces embodied by robust civilian conveyances.’ It is in the development of the latter that the UK and America, who over-emphasise the private sector, and China, who places too much importance on the public sector, are seriously lacking.

There is yet another step to take.

We must move (page 682) from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

There are obstacles though to the full realisation of the need for this key and our ability to turn it in the lock of obstinate resistance.

Undetected Influences

We may also be subject to undetected external influences that shape our behaviour outside our awareness.

Advertisers have known for decades that subliminal stimuli can influence our behaviour and persuade us to buy a product without any awareness on our part that this has happened. This is why such adverts were banned. This is why drug companies keep spending lavishly on lunch time presentations at GP surgeries, leaving behind lots of innocent looking memorabilia plastered with their logos and drug names to subliminally jolt the memory. Studies comparing surgeries that have been visited in this fashion with those that have not indicate that the beneficiaries of drug company lunches prescribe the drug in question more frequently than they used to whereas the control surgeries do not. The GPs themselves believe their prescribing patterns have not changed.

Hypnotic suggestions, as is widely recognised, can subliminally affect our behaviour long after the trance is over.

Admittedly we do sometimes control our responses to external information but not always in wise or fully conscious ways. Confirmation biases cause us to ignore information that contradicts beliefs we have invested in and swallow uncritically anything we’re told that proves we are right.

Even our memories can’t be trusted. There is a self-serving bias in memory.

For example, when anyone used to ask me to tell them about situations where my declaration as a Bahá’í brought me into conflict with the assumptions of my profession as a psychologist, I was a touch too happy to share the story of the time I went for an informal interview for a clinical post soon after I qualified. I was walking with the neuropsychologist, I would say, down towards her office. She was dressed in a white coat so she looked like a doctor from the back. The only thing missing was a stethoscope.

As we walked she cast a sideways glance at me and said: ‘Thank goodness Blackmore has finally put paid to the idea of God, don’t you agree?’

‘Not really,’ I distinctly remembered saying. ‘I have an idea about God that I believe in.’

She glared at me, as I vividly recalled it, and we walked the rest of the short way to her office in silence.

I come out of that version of events reasonably well and believed, until late last month, that this was exactly what happened, not that I’ve had cause to tell that story in recent years. I believed it until, that is, I read my journal of that period looking for the page reference. Imagine my feelings when I discovered, in my own hand-writing, an almost completely different version of events. First of all it happened in September. I didn’t hear about the Bahá’í Faith until November. First hole below the waterline. I wrote:

She wore a white coat [at least I got that right] with her name written on a badge. My revulsion against psychologists who wish to masquerade as doctors was barely containable. And when I heard her mouthing with obvious contempt such things as ‘. . . .people who don’t realise that the mind is not separate from the brain’ I did not know what to say. . . . .

All I could say was ‘I haven’t thought about it a lot.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that . . . very sorry . . . I’m very sorry to hear that indeed.’

Quite why I couldn’t fight back I don’t know. Perhaps my feelings were running too high – they were certainly strong by this time. I just wanted to get out, I think.

According to my journal I mumbled some jargon strewn with impressive names but basically ducked the point. I believed the mind was not reducible to the brain but couldn’t say so. So, it was nothing to do with God and I copped out anyway. Memory’s junk sunk.

These two accounts, though they have a kernel of common truth, couldn’t be more different. When I had become a Bahá’í I did speak out, but definitely not then and not in the way I convinced myself it had happened. I clearly didn’t want to remember my craven evasion so I backdated my eventual moral courage and believed my own propaganda.

Potential Damage

If we pause to reflect a moment we can clearly see many of these processes at work, some of them in potentially damaging ways.

We now believe the earth both spins, and revolves around the Sun, even though all we experience are the changing seasons, the alternation of day and night and the slow creep of the shadows along the ground.

We now believe that all the solids that we handle and sit on are made of atoms, which, like microscopic planetary systems, are made up of specks and space. More space than specks by far.

We now believe that light is both wave and particle, even though all we see for the most part are constant colours or bright consistent lights.

Most of us in the West do not believe, though, that souls who have passed on can move matter they have left behind, even though the evidence that they can is piled high in libraries worldwide, as David Fontana testifies in his comprehensive survey of the evidence.

Why do we believe the scientist who says most of the chair I’m sitting on is empty space, and not the painstaking investigator who sees a table rise up to the ceiling having proved no human hand or machine could possibly be involved?

Perhaps one of the many possible reasons is that most of us are happy to take the findings of science on trust until we feel they conflict with our perceived material interests.

Is that why climate change and departed souls are met with so much disbelief? To believe in both of those requires us in different ways to step outside our egotistic materialism and accept our interconnectedness, to set aside our personal advantage in the interests of the many, and to make sacrifices for the common good.

In spite of all our blinkers, we behave as though all we do is carefully chosen in full knowledge of the consequences and causes. Such complacency cannot safely be allowed to continue any longer. Our survival now depends not upon our evolutionary heritage of tunnel vision approximations to reality but upon our transcending these limitations as rapidly as possible both as individuals and as a species. If not, extinction beckons.

Can we do that? A consideration of this will have to wait till next time.

 

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Parliament of Selves (11/18): Getting to the heart of the matter

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. 

It was sunny but cold as I waited outside All Saints church. I was five minutes early and looking forward to seeing Daisy after such a long time. The last time I bumped into her briefly was at the Courtyard Theatre after a Death Café meeting. She’d come back from her foreign travels but we hadn’t met since as she was still settling back into some kind of routine.

I kept scanning the crowds in High Town but could see no sign of her. I checked my phone to see if I had her mobile number as well as her email, but I didn’t.

After another five minutes I saw a figure in the middle distance in a burgundy coat waving at me. After greeting each other we moved into the All Saints Café. Some people see this as rather like the money lenders in the Temple, but to be honest it’s hard to see how the church could be kept in good repair without some way such as this of raising large sums of money consistently over long periods of time.

It wasn’t busy and we were soon at a quiet table upstairs with our herbal tea and cappuccino.

I was lost in wonder at the places she had visited, especially in the four months she was on her own. She had even dared to go into the jungle some place I can’t remember, and been carried away by the intense beauty of nature in such a setting. She described it as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ that she was glad she had taken when she had the chance, even though it seemed a bit of a risk beforehand.

When she asked me how things had been for me, the most dramatic development I could think of mentioning was my recent insight into hearticulture as the organising principle of my life from now on. For some reason I didn’t think of mentioning the cruise my wife and I had been on.

The hour we spent together flashed by. I gave her an invite card to our weekly wisdom meetings before I dashed off to walk home and get the car to pick up my wife from work.

As I walked back they started up again in my head.

‘Did you hear all that crap?’ It was Emma Pancake, my inner activist, whinging as usual about anything that might interfere with her incessant urge to be doing something as fast as possible. ‘Hearticulture! It was bad enough when we had the battle over reflection. That was a normal word at least. I’d got some idea what it meant. But he’s even invented his own word for this new fad.’

She sounded really worked up.

‘Calm down, Emmie,’ soothed the meditative Chris Humfreeze. ‘I really think he may be onto something here.’

‘You always take his side with these flaky schemes, Chris. I haven’t got time for all this. The world is going to hell in a hand basket. We’re speeding towards a tipping point with climate change and more species are dying out than when the comet that killed the dinosaurs smashed into us, and you want me to calm down. Grow up for God’s sake!’

‘Don’t bring God into it, Emma,’ Fred Mires, my Dr Psychobabble, chipped in. ‘You don’t really believe in Him – not most of the time, anyway. You’re far too busy to pray. If we want to know what someone really believes, watch what they do.’ He was trying to tease her out of her tantrum but it didn’t work.

‘You can shut up as well, Fred. I may be outnumbered but I won’t be outgunned on this. It’s too important.’

Humfreeze tried to defuse the issue by taking a more reasonable line.

‘What brought this on Emma? You’re usually only this passionate about the equality of women.’

‘The cruise he went on and that stuff he was reading about the earth opened my eyes. I suddenly realised how much as a woman, in this arrogant patriarchy we live in, I have in common with the earth. It patronises and exploits the planet in the same it has done and still does with women. And the potential damage is even worse.’

She was about to take off again into a rant.

I could hear Indie Pindance, who had been rescued from the cloud of oblivion left over from my childhood hospitalisations, murmuring something in the background but no one was listening. She was probably speaking quietly so as not to wake the baby we had exhumed and of which she was the main carer.

William Wordless stepped in.

‘Thanks for sharing that, Emma. I think it would be a good idea if we all stayed calm now and tried to talk about this sensibly. I love nature as much as you do, Emma, as my poems prove, but taking some time to talk this through properly isn’t going to kill many more creatures than we’ve lost already.’

He was sounding tense but managing to stay reasonably calm in the way he spoke. ‘I’m not sure I like this anymore than you do, but I’m not sure I understand it clearly enough yet to be sure.’

‘I agree.’ Pindance made herself heard at last.

I wasn’t pleased to hear Emma at the others’ throats over my insight that hearticulture would be the organising principle of my remaining time and energy in this material world. She clearly didn’t get that this included something important for all of them. I didn’t feel like tackling this as I hurried home. It would have to wait for another time.

* * *

At the wisdom meeting in our place that night there were only four of us there. I hadn’t expected Daisy to come to this so soon after our conversation, so I wasn’t unduly disappointed. The crucial thing was to keep running them every week.

One of the quotations we used included these words: ‘. . . when man does not open his mind and heart to the blessing of the spirit, but turns his soul towards the material side, towards the bodily part of his nature, then is he fallen from his high place.’ This reinforced my desire to win over my parliament of selves to my new plan: as far as I could see it was the best, perhaps the only way of motivating myself to lift my game to the required extent.

After the meeting and before getting ready for bed, I sat in my study and worked on a diagram that captured what hearticulture meant to me in a way that would help me remember and stay focused.

Even while I was doing so I couldn’t help catching fragments of the on-going heated exchange among my parliament of selves.

I remembered how I had felt, five months ago now, when we exhumed my buried neonate self, and I had hoped that my toddler self would be able to mature to the point of joining with the rest of us as we worked at creating a single sense of a unified self that could perhaps become capable, if not of tuning directly into spiritual reality, at least of developing a clearer sense than ever before of the direction that this transcendent reality required me to take for the rest of my remaining days. I felt I had found that clearer sense and what I had to do now was persuade my rabble inside to buy into the plan.

This was not going to be easy. I decided to meditate my way into their conversation. I closed my eyes and tracked my breathing for a short while. I wasn’t deep enough to see them but I could hear what they were saying clearly.

‘We’re going to have to talk to him about this. We need to explain that we’re not happy with yet another change of direction. We haven’t even sorted out what the last upheaval meant.’ Mires was drawing on all his knowledge of conflict management to articulate a way forward they could all agree to.

‘Can I join you for a short while?’ I asked gently.

They couldn’t hear me at first.

‘I’m on board with that,’ chimed Pindance, ‘but I can see that Emma is still chafing at the bit.’

‘Dead right I am. Still, my being furious isn’t going to solve anything. We can only sort this out together, and, though I hate to admit it, we’ll have to involve him as well.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Humfreeze enthused. ‘I really appreciate that because I know it’s not easy for you.’

Pancake grunted something I couldn’t quite catch.

‘Can I join you for a short while?’ I asked again gently but louder.

‘What’s that you’re scribbling? Not another of your stupid flowcharts, is it?’ Emma barked. She might be on board but she was still rocking the boat.

‘’Fraid so,’ I said, wincing slightly at what might come back at me.

Before she could retort, Wordless took over the reins.

‘Listen, Emma. My poems have as much to lose as your potential projects, and I want to check out whether this new brainwave will make room for what we both need to see happen. If not I’d rather dump it. But a ‘kindly tongue,’ as they say, will attract more positive attention than angry rants and insults, so can we agree to cool down the temperature, and treat each other with a bit more respect.’

After a moment’s silence, Emma relented. ‘I’ll try,’ she said.

‘Do you want me to explain what I’m up to or do you want to ask me questions and share your reservations?’

I could hear the low buzz of ideas being exchanged.

‘We don’t need you to explain the model . . .’ Mires paused trying to find the right words.

‘We just want you to tell us how we all fit into your plan,’ Pindance finished his sentence for him. ‘And how is your plan going to help the tiny child inside you that I’m doing my best to look after without much help from this lot?’

‘Steady on,’ Humfreeze broke in. ‘We all take turns to look after him to give you a break.’

‘Yeh, great. But the sum total of the time you all give is less than half the time I spend with him. How fair is that? He’s getting to the age now where he’s learning to talk and he’s asking loads of questions, most of which I can’t answer. Don’t forget, I was shut out of sight for seven decades, while you lot were watching everything that the hearticulture manufacturer over there was aware of, and learning from it. So, be fair. This is just as important an issue as your poems, Bill, and your projects, Emma. And your meditation, Chris and your psychobabble, Fred, if it comes to that.’

The words sounded angry but she was clearly almost in tears.

I was beginning to feel quite daunted by the complexity of fitting all these apparently competing needs into the framework I was working on. I gave a desperate look at my diagrammatic model in the hope of some inspiration.

‘Pete,’ shouted my wife.

I crashed out of the conversation.

‘Yes, love.’

‘Can you switch off my phone when you come to bed.’

‘Will do.’

In a way I was grateful for the interruption. It might give me some more time to think on it over night. I just hoped I wouldn’t meet them all in my dreams just yet.

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