Book Review (2/2): ‘Self and Soul’ by Mark Edmundson – Shakespeare & Freud

Given that a recent post makes reference to the three ideals mentioned in the first post of this sequence, it seemed only appropriate to republish it. This second and final post of a two-parter.

Yesterday I gave a brief account of Mark Edmundson’s disillusioned dissection of our culture based mainly on his introduction. I promised to follow this up with a sampling of two other issues he takes up in his Quixotic attack on the windmills of materialism: the demolition work of Shakespeare and of Freud.

Shakespeare:

Edmundson warned me in his introduction of what I would find when we come to Shakespeare (page 10-11):

What is true is that Shakespeare helps change our sense of human life and human promise through an almost complete rejection of ideals. Like his contemporary, Cervantes, Shakespeare has only contempt for the heroic ideal. . . . . .

Shakespeare, as Arnold Hauser argues, is a poet of the dawning bourgeois age, who has little use for chivalry and the culture of heroic honour.

This was not a problem: the militarily heroic holds few attractions for me. However, as I discovered later Shakespeare, according to Edmundson, is not just attacking heroism, though that is a main target: he is (page 140) writing for

. . . . a class that has little use for deep religion, the religion of compassion. . . . . . And he writes for a class with no real use for high thought – though Shakespeare is from time to time tempted by the ideal of contemplation.’

He then analyses in detail plays including Titus Andronicus, Othello, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Troilus & Cressida that ruthlessly deconstruct the hero.

Interestingly, it is not just Cervantes who influenced Shakespeare away from ideals. Montaigne, it is possible to argue, as James Shapiro does in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, was also an influence on Shakespeare (page 332), as perhaps he was on Freud as we will see, and an influence particularly relevant to Hamlet:

He had surely looked into Montaigne by the time he wrote Hamlet – intuitions of critics stretching back to the 1830s on this question should be trusted – but he didn’t need to paraphrase him or pillage essays for his ideas. . . . . . . There was more than enough scepticism and uncertainty to go round in England in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign . . .

What is more important, perhaps, is the influence of Montaigne on the development of the soliloquy (page 333):

Redefining the relationship between speaker and audience, the essay also suggested to Shakespeare an intimacy between speaker and hearer that no other form, not even the sonnet, offered – except, perhaps, the soliloquy.

This may help explain why the one exception which Edmundson detects to the reductive pattern he has identified, is Hamlet.

One of the reasons for this may be, as Shapiro suggests (ibid.), that:

Probably more than any other character in literature, Hamlet needs to talk; but there is nobody in whom he can confide.

Perhaps this is why Edmundson can find in him (page 174) ‘the free play of intellect’ he values so much. Hamlet can ‘think in quest of the Truth.’ And a truth that holds for everyone across time, not just pragmatically for the specific situation in some particular play.

It may therefore be no coincidence that this is my favourite play.

Edmundson argues that we feel that Shakespeare does not advocate any specific value system because the ones that live in his plays (page 12) ‘simply echo the anti-idealist values of his current audience and of the current world almost perfectly and, so, are nearly invisible.’

In the end, however, I do not accept his contention that Shakespeare does not value compassion, whatever we argue his audience might think and no matter that we can find evidence from his life that he fell short of that ideal in person. For instance, as a grain hoarder himself, his real life position on the 1607 food riots was rather different from the empathy for the rioters that comes across in Coriolanus.[1]

How, though, can the man that wrote,

The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

(Measure for Measure Act 3, Scene 1, lines 76-79)

and

. . . . the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother’d up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again . . .

(Venus & Adonis lines 1033-36)

not understand and value compassion? And I am not equating this with the uncanny empathy that allows him to enter the shadowy mind of an Iago or an Edgar.

So, at this point, I am more or less convinced that he despised the heroic. I can accept that he might not have been strong on contemplation, though I do need to think more on that one. AD Nuttall would apparently not agree, given that he has written a whole book on Shakespeare, the Thinker and clearly feels that his truths are valid across time (page 22):

Shakespeare’s response is, precisely, intelligent rather than a mere cultural reflex. He thinks fundamentally, and this makes him a natural time traveller.

Even so, he may not be a million miles apart from Edmundson, as he also acknowledges that (page 12) ‘we do not know what Shakespeare thought about any major question, in the sense that we have no settled judgements of which we can be sure.’

I absolutely disagree though that he did not value compassion, while I do accept that, as a dramatist, he could have gone a long way to creating his vast range of convincing characters with high levels of cognitive empathy alone.

I am left, though, with a slightly uneasy feeling. Maybe there’s more to Edmundson’s case than I am happy to accept. This nagging doubt goes back as far as my reading of Anne Glynn-Jones’s book, Holding Up a Mirror: how civilisations decline. I am always a touch sceptical about confident claims to explain how complex entities such as civilisations operate, even though I keep getting drawn to reading them, as my posts on Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation testify. Glynn-Jones builds a case against Shakespeare on the basis of Pitirim Sorokin‘s social cycle theory. I would have found it easy to dismiss her case had I not felt that elements of Sorokin’s model made a great deal of sense to me as a Bahá’í.

The core of what she feels relates to Sorokin’s concept of the sensate society. He classified societies according to their ‘cultural mentality’, which can be ‘ideational’ (reality is spiritual), ‘sensate’ (reality is material), or ‘idealistic’ (a synthesis of the two). The relevance of those categories to the current issues is obvious.

She feels the Shakespeare is a dramatist of a sensate society. She quotes many examples of where Shakespeare can clearly be argued to be pandering to the basest sensation-seeking instincts of his audience. She quotes Tolstoy (pages 264-65):

Shakespeare exemplifies the view ‘that no definite religious view of life was necessary for works of art in general, and especially for drama; that for the purpose of the drama the representation of human passions and characters was quite sufficient. . . . . .

And he concludes, ‘The fundamental inner cause of Shakespeare’s fame is . . . . that his dramas . . . . corresponded to the irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time.’

Because I felt that to be a distorted misreading of Shakespeare’s audience as a whole and a very selective reading of his work in its entirety, I dismissed this view of Shakespeare completely at the time, though I could also see what she meant.

I agree he side-steps directly addressing religion but feel this is because it would have been too dangerous – and almost certainly unprofitable of course as well. That does not prove that he did not have a transcendent sense of the value of all life, and I believe he was deeply aware of its interconnectedness.

I accept that he loathed the heroic. He was definitely no philosopher. But a deeply felt compassion, rather than a mercantile value system, is what for me has ensured that he lives on, and continues to attract audiences across the world. It’s just that he does not explicitly teach compassion: he demonstrates it, though, in almost every word that he writes.

And so the pendulum swings on. Enough of that for now.

Freud:

In his introduction Edmundson states (page 12) that ‘Freud takes the enmity with ideals implicit in Shakespeare’s work and renders it explicit.’ He argues (page 14) that ‘Freud stands in the tradition of Montaigne, affirming the belief that the life of sceptical, humane detachment is the best of possible lives.’

Freud, Edmundson claims, takes this to an altogether different level (page 165):

One of the main functions of Shakespeare’s great inheritor, Freud, is to redescribe the ideals of compassion and courage and the exercise of imagination as pathologies and forms of delusion. . . . . Freud makes the middle-class people who live by half measures feel much better, allowing them to understand that the virtues that intimidated them are forms of sickness and that normality – clear-eyed and stable – is the true achievement. What a reversal!

I have read almost no Freud in the original, so strong has been my distaste for his views[2] as they have reached me through secondary sources, many of them his admirers. However, I am aware that it is possible to share my suspicion of his value without seeing him as exactly the kind of reductionist Edmundson identifies.

Take Richard Webster for example in his book Why Freud Was Wrong, in its way as brilliant as Edmundson’s. In his introduction he outlines his case against Freud. After explaining his sense that psychoanalysis is to be valued, if at all, not because it is truly scientific and valid, but because it enshrines imagination, something which has been side-lined by modernist reductionism, he makes a second telling point (page 9):

There is another reason why the vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition should not be taken as confirmation of the validity of Freud’s theories. This is because a great deal of it is owed not to any intellectual factor but to Freud’s own remarkable and charismatic personality and to the heroic myth, which he spun around himself during his own lifetime.

This is intriguing in the light of Edmundson’s case that Freud was a debunker of the heroic, but is not incompatible with it. In fact, it suggests that Freud failed to analyse himself dispassionately.

Webster takes this a step further (ibid.):

Freud himself consciously identified with Moses, and the prophetic and messianic dimensions of his character have been noted again and again even by those who have written sympathetically about psychoanalysis.

So, not just a hero, then, but a quasi-religious figure in his own eyes. Even more intriguing. Webster even goes on to claim that Freud (page 10) ‘went on to use the aura and authority of scientific rationalism in order to create around himself a church whose doctrines sought to subvert the very rationalism they invoked.’

His final point on this thread is hugely ironic in the light of Edmundson’s claims that Freud demolished the cult of the heroic ideal (page 11):

If Freud has not been seen in this light it is perhaps because the very success which he has enjoyed by casting himself in the role of intellectual liberator has brought with it the kind of idealisations and projections to which all messiahs are subject.

Towards the end of his book, Webster draws another conclusion about where this has helped to take us, which resonates with my recent explorations of Shelley, and with Edmundson’s rants against the aridity of much current lyric poetry in Poetry Slam. He argues for redressing the current bias against imagination and states that (page 504-05):

. . . . [u]ntil we have done this it seems likely that we will remain in thrall to the dissociated intellectual culture which we inhabit today, where an austere and politically influential scientific and technological culture, devoid of human sympathy and understanding, exists side by side with a weak literary and artistic culture which, because it has unconsciously internalised the image of its own superfluity, is prepared both to the stand back from the political process and to concede to the natural sciences the exclusive right to explore reality systematically and to pronounce authoritatively upon it.

Returning in more detail to Edmundson’s attack upon Freud, he defines the main focus of psychoanalysis as being on one ideal in particular (page 232):

History (and Shakespeare) have dealt with the myth of courage; history (and the Enlightenment) have dealt with the myth of faith. Love is Freud’s primary antagonist among human ideals, and he attacks it from every plausible direction.

In terms of love’s great exemplars, including Jesus and the Buddha, Freud argues (page 237) that they are ‘asking too much of human beings.’

How can we love our fellow men? Freud asks. Our fellow men, in general, have at best a mild contempt for us; at worst, they nurse murderous rage. . . . . There is only Self. Soul is an illusion.

I have dealt already on this blog with Matthieu Ricard’s utterly convincing refutation of such debasing cynicism in his book Altruism, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt, and on the basis of a huge amount of systematically gathered data, that we are innately capable of developing high levels of altruism, fairness and compassion. My last sequence of posts revisited his brilliant book from a different angle.

Edmundson goes on to quote Karl Kraus (page 243): ‘Psychoanalysis… is the disease of which it purports to be the cure.’ He goes on to explain what he believes this means. Having listed various ways human beings can rescue themselves from meaninglessness, such as love, creativity, compassion, courage or idealistic thought, he rounds his cannon upon Freud’s benighted cul-de-sac (page 244):

… all these activities are out of the bounds. Embracing them, for Freud, causes only trouble.

It is possible that to deny human beings these primary satisfactions makes them sick. It causes a disease, it does not cure it. If you live life without courage, compassion, the true exercise of intellect and creation through love, then you will not feel very well. You may even get quite ill.

before he delivers the coup-de-grace:

Then, when the banishment of ideals has made you ill, Freud can show you, through psychoanalysis and through the ethical program of his thought, how to feel a little better than you do. Psychoanalysis helps the culture of Self create a disease. And this disease psychoanalysis will happily help cure.

He feels the legacy of this, for psychotherapy as a whole, is deeply damaging (page 245):

Therapy can have many values, but they will never be idealistic. All therapies are about learning to live with half a loaf.

He is probably selling psychotherapies such as Psychosynthesis short when he uses that dubious word ‘all.’ But his point is valid for mainstream approaches. Spirituality and idealism are seen by them as suspect.

I hope this all too brief helicopter review inspires you to buy the book and read it, and I hope you then enjoy it as much as I have. Life is a lot richer than our materialistic gurus would have us believe, thank goodness.

Footnote:

[1] This side of Shakespeare was revealed in research done by Dr Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University.

[2] I am aware, from January’s Guardian article by Oliver Burkeman, of the recent study which goes some way toward rehabilitating psychoanalysis as a treatment for depression.

He writes:

. . . . . [R]esearchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals.

So I need to clarify, perhaps, that it is Freud’s quasi-mythical beliefs such as the Oedipus Complex that repelled me as being too absurd to qualify as a universal truth. Other aspects of his thinking, taken over and used by other schools of therapy, have their place, such an projection and denial, as well as the acknowledgement that for some people it can be imperative that they understand their inscape deeply before they can move on, and that this can take years. Even so these are not universally applicable components of an effective therapy at all times. There is no one size fits all panacea – not psychoanalysis, not CBT.

I don’t think Burkeman would disagree with that as he concludes ‘. . . . . many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference. (The name comes from the Dodo’s pronouncement in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”) What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change; if one therapy is better than all others for all or even most problems, it has yet to be discovered.’

Stuck in memory from my first degree in psychology, there was an interesting piece of meta-analysis from 1979 that pulled together all the studies of the efficacy of psychotherapy that had included an advance measure of how credible clients found the therapy they were undertaking. When all other variables were controlled for, the strongest predictor of effectiveness was how much the client believed the therapy would work. Unfortunately I have not been able to track that down recently.

And for me, if it has no place for a spiritual dimension, such as can be found in Jungian analysis and Psychosynthesis, there is still a major defect in the approach.

 

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The Third ‘I’ (6/7): the power of silence

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

The previousThe Third ‘I’ (1/7): Kahneman revisited – a dilemma posts in this sequence have attempted to illustrate the problem that certain kinds of dilemma pose for Kahneman‘s model of decision-making. He explores two basic modes of human cognition, which he labels System 1, which I have short-handed as instinctive, and System 2, which I have short-handed as intellectual. He shows how drawing on the powers of System 2 enhances our decision-making very significantly. He does not seem to consider that there is anywhere else for us to go beyond that.

For my part, I have been arguing that there is evidence, such as the effectiveness of dreamwork, to support the idea of a System 3, a genuine deeply intuitive mode, which draws on right brain and possibly spiritual capacities which are both slower and more holistic than System 1, and less verbal and more visual-kinaesthetic than System 2. I used the powerful image of the heart when referring to this mode of being, and suggested that because it whispers, we cannot hear its wisdom unless the mind is quiet.

This post and the next will examine first of all how silence is key to mobilising System 3 for an individual, and then look at how interthinking/consultation works for a group, especially if its members understand how to connect with their hearts. Both contexts, to my understanding, depend upon a state of what is usually termed ‘detachment’ and a process best captured by the word ‘reflection.’

Those who prefer not to accept the idea of a transcendent spiritual reality can still make use of these concepts up to a point, as the enhancement of cognitive therapy by the addition of mindfulness compellingly testifies. Those who embrace the idea of soul or spirit can, if the evidence of Dossey is to be believed, resort to prayer as a way of further strengthening the process without justifiably being accused of irrationality. Maybe Jack, who has been ruminating on his quandary for six weeks now, could do something with this to break his ties to the pendulum of indecision from which he is suspended.

Participants in ‘The Big Silence‘

How Golden is Silence?

Some time ago I watched a series of television programmes which illustrated how important silence can be in assisting us to gain access to aspects of our being which are extremely elusive. I blogged about it and in the process included what are for me two key quotes from the Baha’i writings on this subject. The first asserts (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh: page 156) that ‘The essence of true safety is to observe silence, to look at the end of things and to renounce the world.’

I cannot pretend to plumb the depths of this statement. I have quoted it because I feel it not only establishes the critical importance of silence but it also links silence with detachment. As we will see in a moment, even at its most basic level, one that does not necessarily challenge a materialist to believe in God or accept the reality of the soul, detachment is a state highly conducive both to accessing our deepest intuitions and to apprehending accurately what others are seeking to communicate to us. More on the second point later.

 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá expands on the possibilities inherent in silence (Paris Talks page 174):

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign (from God) in every phenomenon: the sign of the intellect is contemplation and the sign of contemplation is silence, because it is impossible for a man to do two things at one time—he cannot both speak and meditate. It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.

I have already blogged at length about the difficulties presented by our terminology when discussing mind, soul, spirit, and so on. I will not rehearse all that again here and would request that no one reading this allow themselves to get sidetracked from the essence of what I am seeking to convey here by the fact that the translator of this passage has used the word ‘intellect’ instead of ‘mind.’

Convergence of Approaches

Contemplation, reflection, mindfulness and meditation are words that are often used to mean closely related states of mind and modes of thinking. This is not to say that there are no differences at all between them that could be illustrated by different schools of thought. What I am going to be focusing on, though, is their illuminating common ground.

Almost every exercise in mindfulness involves a process of breaking old distracting patterns of thought and substituting a different mode of consciousness. Whether we are asking ourselves to focus on a candle flame, a raisin (as many psychologists begin by doing), a mantra or a melody, what we are doing is unhooking our consciousness from its usual flow of self-talk and imagery, and choosing instead one thing and one thing alone to concentrate all our attention upon.

It is easy to see how this step shifts us from a cacophony of distractions in the head to a state of relative quiet where the flow of our breathing or of a melody, the taste of a raisin or the glow of a candle, helps us tune out the din.

In describing these exercises I have used a key expression: ‘unhooking our consciousness.’ For me, this is an aspect of detachment. If it is not a pure state of detachment, it is certainly a step towards it. It also suggests that silencing the mind and achieving a state of detachment of some important kind are related, are mutually reinforcing.

It seems to involve stepping back from our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and plans. Psychosynthesis calls this process Disidentification (see link – Disidentification exercise). This approach to psychotherapy believes it is a path towards recognising the essence of our true nature, towards connecting with what we truly are.

In Existentialist Philosophy this process is called reflection. Reflection, in their terms, is the capacity to separate consciousness from its contents (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. We may have been trapped in a mindset. Through using and acquiring the power of reflection, we do not then replace one “fixation” with another: we are provisional and somewhat tentative in our new commitments which remain fluid in their turn. Just as a mirror is not what it reflects, we are not what we think, feel and plan but the capacity to do all those things. Knowing this and being able to act on it frees us up: we are no longer prisoners of our assumptions, models and maps. We come to see we are consciousness not its contents.

The capacity to reflect increases the flexibility of our models in the face of conflict and indecision and opens us up to new experiences, different perspectives: the adaptation and change that this makes possible enhances the potential usefulness of our models and their connected experiences. It is the antithesis of drowning where we are engulfed in our experiences and sink beneath them. As we will see it paves the way for exchanging perspectives with other people and learning from that exchange to find transcendent positions.

Connecting with our Core

That so many different systems of belief converge on this one idea suggests that it is real, implies that it is a powerful way of connecting with the deepest levels of our being.  Koestenbaum is no theist, but the image by which he chooses to summarise this insight speaks volumes.

He explains it as follows in his book ‘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.’ Reflection, he says (page 99): ‘. . . releases consciousness from its objects and gives us the opportunity to experience our conscious inwardness in all its purity.’ This links back to an unexpected core idea he had already presented (page 49): ‘The name Western Civilisation has given to . . . the extreme inward region of consciousness is God.’

We are not so far away from the words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha. ‘It is an axiomatic fact,’ He states, ‘that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.’

‘Abdu’l-Bahá continues:

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

It must say something important when such divergent traditions of thought converge on this one point. Why would we then deny that deep inside us is a source of wisdom it is well worth tapping?

At the bottom of this post is a simple exercise anyone can try that takes a small step in the direction of connecting us with the ground of our being. Hopefully any experiments with this will clear the path for tackling the challenges of the next post which will deal with group processes. It could be that this would also have helped Jack find a way to transcend his dilemma, on the horns of which he has been pinioned uncomfortably for weeks now. Perhaps we’ll see.

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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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Re-evaluating Reflection (1/4): the TA step

‘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.’

(Paul Lample Revelation & Social Reality – page 212)

Counterintuitively, I owe a lot to the two disturbing situations that triggered my revisiting Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight– basically the death of a friend of over 40 years after a period in a coma and the unstable recovery of another friend from a serious brain infection. I felt I needed to comb her insights for anything that might be of help to my friends or their families as they struggled to cope.

I got far more than I bargained for. I dealt with all that at some length in the July posts on this blog. What I had not realised was where that would lead me.

The value of silence as a means of connecting with the deep wisdom of the right hemisphere and the need to step back from the constant chatter of the left hemisphere, which was so important to her, reminded me of the various attempts I had made to explore exactly what the spiritual skill of reflection is, and that I had probably underestimated how far some key earlier experiences had prepared me for my eventual encounter with that word and some of its life-changing implications.

Not only that but interpersonal communication problems involving yet more people close to me suggested that a joint exploration of reflection would be a valuable step to take for all of us.

So three of us joined forces in exploring it more deeply.

As we did so, I realised I’d have to capture what I think I currently understand more clearly and in far more detail if I was to have any hope of holding onto what I thought we had learnt to help me make more consistent use of it in the future.

So, the case I’ll be trying to make here is that reflection, just like introversion and the inscape, is dangerously undervalued in our extraverted, action-focused and matter-obsessed culture. If we don’t shift our focus, our obstinate and mistaken pride will sink our civilisation, just as it did the Titanic and the defective submarine the hubristic tourists ironically used to take a look at the wreck. Lessons like this will be hard to learn but it’s crucial that we learn them none the less.

TA Basics

Where did my journey start?

It was 1975. I’d given up teaching and moved into mental health. I was having problems with people at work in my new job. I needed help to cope. I decided to join a Transactional Analysis (TA) Group, which also mixed in a certain amount of Gestalt therapy as the facilitator felt the somewhat too cognitive approach of TA needed to be balanced with a more emotion-processing approach.

I’ve dealt elsewhere in more detail with the TA model so I’ll just take a quick look at its core elements before picking up the thread of my journey: for a deeper understanding a good place to start would be Stan Woolams and Michael Brown’s TA: the total handbook of transactional analysis.

It helped me see that interactions between people often took the form of a ‘game.’

Games are sequences of interactions with a pay off. One person would be unconsciously trying to hook another person into a kind of social dance to their advantage. This is done by acting in a way that consciously and superficially communicates a harmless message, but which also carries a second message beneath its surface with a potentially destructive effect. For example, ‘Can I help you?’ could be an honest offer of assistance. However, if the speaker holds the unconscious opinion that the person he is speaking to is a worthless loser, this is the potential start of a game.

To do this they would be acting in a way shaped by unconscious negative patterns of acquired behaviour called scripts, which drive them to try and trigger similar states in others.

Scripts are unconscious patterns of action and reaction, either emotional or cognitive, that lead us to feel or think things and which end up with us starting and/or joining in a destructive dance. The aim of the game is for one of the participants to get a pay-off. This confirms that we are bad or useless, or at least that they are better than us, and wins the game. TA defines these kinds of end results as states of being I’m OK: You’re not OK or even, if the instigators are quite damaged themselves I’m not OK: You’re not OK, or even, if their damage is worse still, I’m not OK: You’re OK. The only acceptable position is I’m OK: You’re OK.

Most of us, when we start off, are not in a good place to keep clear of these games. The Adult part of us, as TA describes it, is contaminated by negative messages we have acquired usually in childhood or perhaps from later traumatic undermining experiences. We can’t think clearly or constructively because we have a critical parent shouting at us in our heads and a negative adapted child (ie one who has bought into all this criticism and thinks it’s true) weeping and wailing inside us, drowning out any calm and sensible thoughts and constructive feelings we might have.

From TA’s point of view the first thing we have to do is become aware of this and begin to realise that all this brain-noise is not reality. Then we can begin to quieten it down and tune into our Adult mind so that we can respond to hooks designed to catch us like fish by ignoring them, and choosing to respond in an entirely different way that cuts across the game and leaves us feeling OK, no matter how the other person ends up. We’re not out to destroy them, merely trying not to join them in their folly and damage ourselves.

This is of course easier said than done, and without the TA group I probably wouldn’t have learned to manage the situation as well as I did. Also, it has its limitations, for example about how we learn to enact our highest values in situations that drag us down.

How It Helped

My memory paints the whole TA experience as a pleasant walk up a gentle slope of increasing understanding. Nothing could be further from the truth, it seems.

I didn’t realise I was stepping onto a steep track – one that rose into the mountains towards what I could call my Diamond Mind. I hadn’t even heard of reflection at that point let alone begun to understand the supreme importance of it.

The general descriptions I highlighted at the time in the TA handbook[1] makes it all sound rather easy. For example:

Sometimes a person will indicate how she is functioning in all of her ego states, with nearly a brief statement, as in the following example.

A college student discussing her roommate says: ‘She’s a foolish, irresponsible, silly girl, [Critical Parent], who needs me to smooth the way for her, so I go out of my way to help her [Nurturing Parent]. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a good idea [Adult], but I want to be a helpful person like mother taught me to be [Adapted Child] even though I feel like telling her to leave me alone [Free Child].’

The personal accounts in the book, however, are more similar to mine in terms of the effort involved. For instance, this is what happened on 17 June 1976 (this is a much abbreviated account):

The overriding experience of the day for me was this evening’s group. JR led it in Karen, the facilitator’s absence. I still have undercurrents of resentment against him for the way the group situation under him made me face certain things about myself.

Right from the start, the group was stressful for me. EB very rapidly gave me feedback about my phraseology.

‘You use feel instead of think a lot of the time… I reckon you don’t want to be disagreed with.”

JB reinforced this saying he felt the misuse of feel and think was significant. I said I didn’t know how to use that information even though I agreed it was correct.

DK said he felt that my interaction with EB was competitive.

Much more was said along these lines.

JB, by some mysterious inspiration, fished a contract for me out of this mess.

‘Give a positive genuine/to every member of the group during the course of the evening.’ That was about the most difficult thing he could’ve asked me to do.

And each of my strokes at first was swooped on as containing a discount.

This continued and by the end of the group I was a demoralised mess.

Needless to say I did not remember any of that, or anything similar. Even when I read the diary entry none of it came back. This may, of course, be a biased account fuelled by the hurt I felt, but the pain it captured was real and my rosy perspective has now been dented but not destroyed. Certainly, my TA experience could not have been a purely pleasant and gentle walk. Effort and stress are an inevitable part of learning painful lessons about yourself.

Obviously there were other more positive experiences or I would not have stuck with it for the 18 months I was involved. For instance, slightly earlier in the year (April 1976) this was how it went in part when Karen was present:

What stood out was my confrontation with EB and what followed. I said he cheesed me off big time, that my Child got really uptight at what I took to be his affectation of superiority. M leapt in immediately after, saying he really wanted to hit him. Karen’s intervention at this point was crucial to the whole situation. She turned to M, and asked:

‘Is he really playing Kick Me, do you think?’

The importance of that question for me is that it focused attention, not just upon what EB was doing, but upon what we were doing in response. The TA emphasis on joint responsibility for Games seems crucial.

Thank God, Karen lucidly and tenaciously stuck up for TA in a difficult context.

How does this relate to my journey, exactly?

It’s true that TA enabled me to examine and change my habitual and undesirable patterns of emotional response and behaviour. My increased objectivity and flexibility was invaluable in helping me cope with the work pressures.

A key point, which relates strongly to some kind of reflective ability as we will see, centres around developing the capacity to avoid getting hooked by the behaviour of other people into negative feelings. As Woollams and Brown explain it:[2]

Since each person is ultimately responsible for her own attitudes, feelings and choice of ego states, it is not possible for one person to make another person feel good or bad. This refers to emotions, not physical sensations; of course, it is possible to make another person feel bad by physically striking that person, or to feel good by gently massaging her back. Even so, it is not possible to hook an ego state of another person, unless the latter chooses to allow that to happen. Once a person has accepted the responsibility for staying OK, regardless of what other people say and do, she is exercising her autonomy and taking charge of her destiny. This is an idealistic goal, which one may work towards.

At about the same time I came across another similar idea in another book whose title and author I sadly cannot remember. It was along the lines of ‘in situations short of serious threat, why would you give anyone the power to cause you intense distress?’

This approach can still help me stay calm and interpret what’s going on between people in potentially heated situations.

A recent example was when two close friends were arguing over coffee. Fred, not his real name, had made a suggestion to Jim, also not his real name, to help him solve a family problem. Jim clearly thought the suggestion was rubbish and said so in an acid tone from a derogatory Critical Parent position.

Fred continued to contend in a calm voice, but at extreme length, that his idea might help. While the calm suggested he was responding appropriately from his Adult, the protracted nature of what he went on to say leaked clearly that he felt hurt that he had not been heard more patiently.

Jim attempted to close the topic by saying, Thank you for suggestion. I’ll discuss it with my sister and see what she thinks.’ The words sounded conciliatory and from the Adult, but the tone leaked the same Parent contempt and was clearly conveying that he still thought the idea was a load of nonsense. Fred came back with another long explanation of why he thought the idea was worth considering, indicating the same strong desire not to have his ideas dismissed out of hand.

The main weakness of TA’s undoubtedly brilliant system, however, is that it does not anywhere explicitly include a mention of the place within us upon which we can stand to examine dispassionately the dynamics they go into in such detail, even though it could be argued that it subconsciously relies upon exactly that capacity. The closest they get is the idea of the inner Adult, but that’s not enough, especially as it’s confusingly conflated with the Ego.

Where Next

So, I feel it had subliminally prepared me for what proved to be the next positive step, and therefore I may have owed it more than I realised at the time.

When I came across Psychosynthesis, even before I had given up on TA, the penny began to drop down a bit further. I wrote in my diary on 29 February 1976:

Read Psychosynthesis by Roberto Assagioli. Academic, yes. Some Jargon, yes. Some holes… he’s appalling about music, not as scientific as he’d like to think, and some attitudes come through which I don’t like,… yes. But the sanest, most balanced, optimistic, and apparently potentially effective therapy I’ve read about.

More on that next time.

References:

[1]. TA: the total handbook of transactional analysis – page 23
[2]. Op. cit. – page 73

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Transcending the crocodile inside (4/4): willpower and the true self

. . . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.

(Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 316-317)

This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain: not only the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms and their development by evolution to greater and greater functional complexity; not only the consciousness of some of those organisms and its central role in their lives; but also the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.

(Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos– page 85)

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

Now I come to the question of transcendence.

Transcending the crocodile does not depend upon accepting the existence of a soul, though that’s where this post will be going in the end.

Even if we only consider the brain and see the sense of self as its product, with no ‘true’ or ‘real’ self beyond that, we have ground to stand on which will enable us to shake off the shackles of the crocodile and avoid the swamp it lives in.

I’ve recently been reading Julian Baggini’s book How the World Thinks. His discussion of the No-Self issue addresses this point succinctly and may help me avoid rehashing arguments used elsewhere on this blog. He explores the Buddhist concept of anattā, which denies the reality of the ātman or self (page 178):

There is no ātman that has physical form, sensations, thoughts, perceptions of consciousness. Rather, what we think of as the individual person is merely an assemblage of these things.

He adds an important qualification (page 179):

If anattā seems more radical a view than it is, that is in large part because its usual translation is ‘no-self.’ But all it really means is no ātman: no eternal, immaterial, indivisible self. This is very different from denying there is any kind of self at all.

That Buddhism then encourages the effortful practice of meditative techniques to free us from the prison of this illusion of self clearly indicates that the no-self doctrine is not incompatible with the idea that we can escape the crocodile inside.

So, whether or not we have an immortal soul or self that is not a by-product of the brain, we can use techniques such as reflection or disidentification to rise above the tangle of thoughts, feelings, plans and perspectives with which we weave our convincing patterns on the loom of consciousness.

If I am relying on reason alone there is no way I can prove that the mind is independent of the brain anymore than someone else can prove conclusively it isn’t. Agnosticism is the only position available to reason alone. Many people are content to leave it at that. They may even happily look at the evidence marshaled for soul or no soul and keep their options open. I did that myself for a number of years.

Some of us though prefer in the end to make a choice. We’d rather decide there is or is not a soul, a God and/or an after-life. Either way that’s an act of faith.

I decided, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, to believe we have a soul. I now feel this is the simplest explanation for all the data marshalled by psychologist David Fontana in his rigorous exploration of the evidence, Is There an Afterlife? For those interested in exploring further a more accessible book is Surviving Death by journalist Leslie Kean. Powerful individual testimony also comes from Eben Alexander in his account of his own experience as a sceptical neurosurgeon, Proof of Heaven.

If you prefer not to believe in a soul, the vast body of hard evidence still demands some kind of credible explanation, because trying to write it all off as flawed or fake won’t work. The evidence is in many cases more rigourous than that ‘proving’ the efficacy of the tablets we take when we have a problem with our health.

Anyway, I have come to think it’s easier to accept that our consciousness is not just an emergent property of our brain. If you’d like to stick with it we’ll see where it takes us on this issue.

Mind-Brain Independence

A quote from the middle of Emily Kelly’s chapter in Irreducible Mind on Frederick Myers’s approach (page 76) seems a good place to start from, because the last sentence cuts to the core of the challenge constituted by his position and the evidence that mainstream ‘scientists’ ignore:

This notion of something within us being conscious, even though it is not accessible to our ordinary awareness, is an exceedingly difficult one for most of us to accept, since it is so at variance with our usual assumption that the self of which we are aware comprises the totality of what we are as conscious mental beings. Nevertheless, it is essential to keep in mind Myers’s new and enlarged conception of consciousness if one is to understand his theory of human personality as something far more extensive than our waking self.

The mind-brain data throws up a tough problem, though. Most of us come to think that if you damage the brain you damage the mind because all the evidence we hear about points that way. We are not generally presented with any other model or any of the evidence that might call conventional wisdom into question, at least not by the elder statesmen of the scientific community. There are such models though (page 73):

The first step towards translating the mind-body problem into an empirical problem, therefore, is to recognise that there is more than one way to interpret mind-brain correlation. A few individuals have suggested that the brain may not produce consciousness, as the vast majority of 19^th and 20^th century scientists assumed; the brain may instead filter, or shape, consciousness. In that case consciousness maybe only partly dependent on the brain, and it might therefore conceivably survive the death of the body.

Others are of course now following where he marked out the ground but we have had to wait a long time for people like van Lommel to show up in his book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience with all the perplexities and puzzles of modern physics to draw upon (page 177):

It is now becoming increasingly clear that brain activity in itself cannot explain consciousness. . . . . Composed of “unconscious building blocks,” the brain is certainly capable of facilitating consciousness. But does the brain actually “produce” our consciousness?

The imagery Lommel uses in his introduction is slightly different from that of Myers, as we will see – “The function of the brain can be compared to a transceiver; our brain has a facilitating rather than a producing role: it enables the experience of consciousness” – but the point is essentially the same. Whereas we now can draw upon all the complexities of Quantum Theory to help us define exactly what might be going on behind the screen of consciousness, and Lommel certainly does that, Myers had no such advantage. Nonetheless, he creates a rich and subtle picture of what consciousness might be comprised. He starts with the most basic levels (Kelly – page 73):

. . . . our normal waking consciousness (called by Myers the supraliminal consciousness) reflects simply those relatively few psychological elements and processes that have been selected from that more extensive consciousness (called by Myers the Subliminal Self) in adaptation to the demands of our present environment: and . . . the biological organism, instead of producing consciousness, is the adaptive mechanism that limits and shapes ordinary waking consciousness out of this larger, mostly latent, Self.

This problem is illustrated by Myers’s very helpful original analogy, and it shows just how far he was prepared to go in taking into account disciplines that others would have felt were beyond the pale (page 78):

Our ordinary waking consciousness corresponds only to that small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the naked eye (and varies species to species); but just as the electromagnetic spectrum extends in either direction far beyond the small portion normally visible, so human consciousness extends in either direction beyond the small portion of which we are ordinarily aware. In the ‘infrared’ region of consciousness are older, more primitive processes – processes that are unconscious, automatic, and primarily physiological. Thus, ‘at the red end (so to say) consciousness disappears among the organic processes’ (Myers, 1894-1895). Sleep, for example, and its associated psychophysiological processes are an important manifestation of an older, more primitive state. In contrast, in the ‘ultraviolet’ region of the spectrum are all those mental capacities that the remain latent because they have not yet emerged at a supraliminal level through adaptive evolutionary processes. . . . . Such latent, ‘ultraviolet’ capacities include telepathy, the inspirations of creative genius, mystical perceptions, and other such phenomena that occasionally emerge.

Where does this take us?

Given the mirror used to illustrate the power of reflection, a reasonable description of the effects of sticking with the ego and its crocodile can be found in these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Promulgation of Universal Peace– page 244):

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

To find a close correspondence to the idea of disdentification in the words of an 18^thCentury thinker felt like a further confirmation of its validity. Emily Kelly, in the book Irreducible Mind, quotes Myers quoting Thomas Reid, an 18th century philosopher (page 74):

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

This contradicts my quasi-namesake David Hume’s perception of the situation as quoted by Braggini (pages 185-86):

What you observe are particular thoughts, perceptions and sensations. ‘I never catch myself, distinct from such perception,’ wrote Hume, assuming he was not peculiar.

I noted in the margin at this point, ‘’That’s not my experience.’

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

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

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of supernormal experiences is strong enough to warrant serious consideration (page 87):

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

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

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

He is arguing that the science of psychology needs to investigate these phenomena. I am not suggesting that, as individuals, we need to have had any such experiences if we are to make use of this model of the mind successfully. I personally have not had any. However, my belief that there is a higher self strongly motivates me to work at transcending the influence of my ego and its crocodile, and I suspect that subliminal promptings towards constructive action in complex and difficult circumstances often come from that direction.

This brings us into the territory explored by Roberto Assagioli in the psychotherapeutic approach called Psychosynthesis, with its use of concepts such as the Higher Self, for which I am using the term True Self.

1: Lower Unconscious 2: Middle Unconscious 3: Higher Unconscious 4: Field of Consciousness 5: Conscious Self or “I” 6: Higher Self 7: Collective Unconscious (For the source of the image see link.)

A crucial component in implementing the Psychosynthesis model, in addition to finding it credible, is will power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing ourselves in this way as individuals will ultimately change the world in which we live.

I am not arguing that transcending the crocodile is easy, nor am I saying that one particular way of achieving this will suit everyone. It is an effortful path and we each have to find our own. It is important that we do not mistake a credible looking path for the destination itself. If the path is not moving us towards our goal we must find another one. Nonetheless I am convinced the goal is within our grasp if we can believe in it enough to make the effort.

The Higher Good

There is one last important point for those of us who wish to believe in a God of some kind.

My very battered copy of this classic.

In his attempt to understand the horrors of Nazism, Erich Fromm writes in his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a dog-eared disintegrating paperback copy of which I bought in 1976 and still cling onto, something which deserves quoting at length (pages 260-61):

The intensity of the need for a frame of orientation explains a fact that has puzzled many students of man, namely the ease with which people fall under the spell of irrational doctrines, either political or religious or of any other nature, when to the one who is not under their influence it seems obvious that they are worthless constructs. . . . . Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital. The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men.

But a map is not enough as a guide for action; man also needs a goal that tells him where to go. . . . man, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits him to think of many directions in which he could go, needs an object of total devotion; he needs an object of devotion to be the focal point of all his strivings and the basis for all his effective – and not only proclaimed – values. . . . In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity.

The objects of man’s devotion vary. He can be devoted to an idol which requires him to kill his children or to an ideal the makes him protect children; he can be devoted to the growth of life or to its destruction. He can be devoted to the goal of amassing a fortune, of acquiring power, of destruction, or to that of loving and being productive and courageous. He can be devoted to the most diverse goals and idols; yet while the difference in the objects of devotion are of immense importance, the need for devotion itself is a primary, existential need demanding fulfilment regardless of how this need is fulfilled.

When we choose the wrong object of devotion the price can be terrifying.

Eric Reitan makes essentially the same point. He warns us that we need to take care that the object of devotion we choose needs to be worthy of our trust. In his book, Is God a delusion?, he explains a key premise that our concept of God, who is in essence entirely unknowable, needs to show Him as deserving of worship: any concept of God that does not fulfil that criterion should be regarded with suspicion.  Our idealism, our ideology, will then, in my view, build an identity on the crumbling and treacherous sand of some kind of idolatry, including the secular variations such a Fascism and Nazism.

The way forward, I believe, lies in recognising a higher and inspiring source of value that will help us lift our game in a way that can be sustained throughout our lifetime. For many of us that is God (from Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá – page 76):

Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

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