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

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

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

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, it’s relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable, so here it comes again!

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

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

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

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

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

Then, in another exciting moment, I came upon Koestenbaum’s ideas about reflection six years after I had read Assagioli. Reflection is the ‘capacity to separate consciousness from its contents’ (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. It is like a mirror learning to see that it is not the same as what is reflected in it. So here was a writer in the existentialist tradition speaking in almost the same terms as psychosynthesis. I had practised Assagioli’s exercise for a long period after reading his book. Now I was triggered into resuming the practice again by what Koestenbaum had written.

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

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

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

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

Myers’s the self and the Self

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

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

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

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of transcendent experiences, used here by me in the sense of things that leak through the membrane from above, is strong enough to warrant serious consideration and he distinguishes between that and basic subliminal experiences that come, as it were, from underneath (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.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thin Partitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Book Review (2/3): ‘My Stroke of Insight’ revisited — Steps Towards Recovery and Transcendence

Both Jill Bolte Taylor and Iain McGilchrist emphasise how important it is to get the balance right (no pun intended!) between the two hemispheres. She is confronted after her stroke by the challenges of learning how to reshape the inscape, which is effortful enough to deter most of us: imagine how difficult it is going to be, in the industrialised world at least, to recalibrate our culture’s way of functioning. I’ve addressed that problem in various ways often enough elsewhere. Let’s stick with rewiring the brain for now.

The Value of a Slow Silent Walk

In order to convey the exact nature of the task Jill Bolte Taylor starts with a look at the crocodile inside, as I call it. She writes:[1] ‘It is interesting to note that, although our limbic system functions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature.’ It works on the automatic pilot system throughout our lives, it seems. We therefore need to make unceasing conscious efforts to control it:[2]

When we compare the new information of our thinking mind with the automatic reactivity of our limbic mind, we can reevaluate the current situation and purposely choose a more mature response.

What she later says on this subject resonates with other sources I have looked at:[3]

The try is everything. The try is me saying to my brain, hey, I value this connection and I want it to happen. I may have to try, try, and try again with no results for a thousand times before I get even an inkling of a result, but if I don’t try, it may never happen.

Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s work pointed in the same direction and showed[4] that ‘self-directed therapy had dramatically and significantly altered brain function.’ His model involves four stages. He concludes:[5]

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.

He concurs with Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience that it can take 1000s of repetitions before the brain completely rewires.

To help her along this track Jill Bolte Taylor relied heavily on her mother’s support:[6]

We celebrated all my accomplishments. She helped me clearly define what was next and helped me understand what I needed to do to get there. She kept me on track by paying attention to my details. A lot of stroke survivors complain that they are no longer recovering. I often wonder if the real problem is that no one is paying attention to the little accomplishments that are being made. . . . Recovery can be derailed by hopelessness.

She gives examples of the techniques they employed.[7] One of the most fascinating contributions her mother’s approach made to her recovery was in the use of multiple options.[8] There is a superb example of the power of this on page 96. It concerns deciding what she is going to have for lunch. “Minestrone?’ Jill struggled to retrieve her sense of what that meant and then indicated she had understood. Then came ‘Grilled cheese sandwich?’ Another search around the hidden archives until this one was found. Next? ‘Tuna salad?’ A blank. An explanation. Still blank.  So, that’s what she had for lunch. ‘That was our strategy if I couldn’t find the old file; we made it a point to make a new one.’

It was not an easy road to travel:[9] ‘Just trying exhausted me, but slowly, word by a hard-fought word, files were opened, and I was re-introduced to the life of the woman I had been.’

It was a process that needed careful planning too:[10]

Each new day brought new challenges and insights. The more I recovered my old files, the more my old emotional baggage surfaced, and the more I needed to evaluate the usefulness of preserving its underlying neural circuitry.

The meticulous care proved justified by her experience:[11]

I have been very fussy this time around about which emotional programs I am interested in retaining, and which ones I have no interest in giving voice to again (impatience, criticism, unkindness).… Since the haemorrhage, my eyes have been opened to how much choice I actually have about what goes on between my ears.

In the end her success depended not just on her own efforts but on the efficacy of the available support:[12]

Recovery was a decision I had to make a million times a day… Because it was a conscious decision for me to try, it was critically important that I be surrounded by competent and attentive caregivers.

Sadly such caregivers are only rarely on hand at all or, if they are, not for sufficient lengths of time.

What Else Did She Learn

There were crucial realisations that she needed to hold on to. For example:[13] ‘My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of a dominating left mind.’

Which can of course be a lifelong struggle.

As with much else she writes, this resonates strongly with what I have learnt from the Bahá’í Writings. In the Gleanings we find these words of Bahá-u-lláh:

Considering what God hath revealed, that “We are closer to man than his life-vein,” the poet hath, in allusion to this verse, stated that, though the revelation of my Best-Beloved hath so permeated my being that He is closer to me than my life-vein, yet, notwithstanding my certitude of its reality and my recognition of my station, I am still so far removed from Him.’

Though the poet also emphasises that we are more often than not blind to that reality. And in the Hidden Words we find ‘Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.’

It was inevitable that we would come back at some point to discussing what is needed to control and transcend the limbic system’s reactions. Not surprisingly the 90 second rule is important – this is waiting for the strong initial reaction to subside:[14]

When my brain runs loops that feel harshly judgemental, counter-productive, or out of control, I wait 90 seconds for the emotional/physiological response to dissipate… I [consciously ask] my brain to stop hooking into specific thought patterns.

Unfortunately aspects of left hemisphere functioning make this more difficult:

. . .[There] are . . . cells in our verbal mind that are totally resourceful in their ability to run our loops of doom and gloom. These cells tap into our negative attributes of jealousy, fear, and rage. They thrive when they are whining, complaining, and sharing with everyone about how awful everything is.

She highlights an interesting technique that I first discovered in a book about managing depression but which I also found worked, for some people at least, in quietening tormenting voices:[15]

 . . . I give my storyteller full permission to whine rampantly between 9-9:30 am and then again between 9-9:30 pm. If it accidentally misses whine time, it is not allowed to re-engage in that behaviour until its next allotted appointment.

It was important that the person did not break their promise to allow whining time for their depression or voices.

There is an upside to this picture of the power of negativity (my emphasis):[16]

 . . . making the decision that internal verbal abuse is not acceptable behaviour, is the first step toward finding deep inner peace. It has been extremely empowering for me to realise that the negative storyteller portion of my brain is only about the size of a peanut!

She spells out powerful steps we can all take to weed out the whining:[17]

Once asked to be silent, [these cells] tend to pause for a moment, and then immediately re-engage those forbidden loops. If I am not persistent with my desire to think about other things, and consciously initiate new circuits of thought, then those uninvited loops can generate new strength, and begin monopolising my mind again. To counter their activities, I keep a handy list of three things available for me to turn my consciousness toward when I am in a state of need: 1) I remember something I find fascinating that I would like to ponder more deeply, 2) I think about something that brings me terrific joy, or 3) I think about something I would like to do.

This advice is almost a mirror image of what Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley recommend in The Mind & the Brain. While the book deals with really serious mental health problems such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) its applications extend more widely. I describe their Four Step method of managing obsessions and compulsions[18] more fully in the link. It can be used to dispel almost all intrusive and undesirable patterns of thought and feeling. The mnemonic I use for this series of steps is Spot It, Step Back, Stop It, and Swap It. If we compare our hearts and minds to a garden in need of clearing, this process is analogous to weeding. (I may have been subliminally prompted to use that analogy as I read her book before I reviewed his). The approach she mentions in her counter offensive map onto the idea of swapping in the four step model.

In Bahá’í terms in Paris Talks ‘Abdu’l-Bahá recommends that ‘When a thought of war comes’ we ‘oppose it by a stronger thought of peace, and ‘A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.’

Then we get back to gardening again when Jill Bolte Taylor writes:[19]

If I want to retain my inner peace, I must be willing to consistently and persistently tend to the garden of my mind moment by moment, and be willing to make the decision a thousand times a day.

This kind of image keeps cropping up in the Bahá’í Writings, for example in the Hidden Words Bahá-u-lláh urges that ‘In the garden of [the] heart’ we should ‘plant naught but the rose of love.’ It triggered me to write a whole sequence on the subject on the back of some workshops I ran, and to coin the term Hearticulture to label the practice.

At this point Jill Bolte Taylor moves onto to a distinction whose importance I have examined over and over again on this blog, my perspective on it deriving from Buddhist meditative practice, from an existential thinker, from Psychosynthesis and by emphasis on the value of reflection. She stresses that[20] ‘Finding the balance between observing our circuitry and engaging with our circuitry is essential for our healing.’

Zen Buddhism makes a distinction between the thinking and the observing mind. 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. 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 our consciousness not its contents.

Assagioli advocated an almost identical process he labelled Disidentification, whereby we experience what Koestenbaum describes as the painful process of withdrawing our identifications with the contents of consciousness. They both conclude that by succeeding in this we can gain access to our highest Self. Which is basically in line with what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also describes when he explains:

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.

And we are back again with the importance of silencing the chatter of the mind if we are to get in touch with the deepest levels of our being. In the end all these thinkers, including Jill Bolte Taylor by implication, come to this same conclusion, expressed here in the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (see previous link): ‘This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God.’

In case some are finding this a touch confusing it may be important to suggest that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá  is using the words ‘contemplation’ and ‘meditation’ in a similar sense to the term ‘reflection’, which, as the hadith quoted by Bahá-u-lláh in the Kitáb-i-Íqán ‘is preferable to seventy years pious worship.’ Interestingly, as far as I can establish, the word that has been translated as ‘reflection’ is Dhikr, a form of Islamic prayer in which phrases or prayers are repeatedly chanted in order to remember God. This can be seen as replacing or silencing brain noise by substituting words with a sacred meaning and thereby giving oneself the chance of connecting with an emanation of the Divine.

And it is intriguing to find that Jill Bolte Taylor’s suggestions end up along the same lines. As well as slowing down our minds,[21] shifting ‘away from those cognitive loops that distract you from what is happening right now,’ thinking about our breathing, being mindfully present or listening to music, we read[22] ‘I find that using repetitious sound patterns such as mantra (which literally means “place to rest the mind”) is very helpful.’

She also advocates prayer:[23]

Prayer, whereby we use our mind to intentionally replace unwanted thought patterns with a chosen set of thought patterns, is another way to consciously guide one’s mind away from the incessant squirrel cage of a verbal repetition into a more peaceful place.

Next time I’ll take a brief look at some of the conclusions she has reached as a result of her experiences, and why I feel my re-reading of her book has shifted my understanding up a notch of two..

References:

[1]. My Stroke of Insight – page 18. Unless otherwise indicated all quotations in the footnotes are from this book.
[2]. Page 18.
[3]. Page 94.
[4]. The Mind & the Brain – page 90.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 94.
[6]. My Stroke of Insight – page 95.
[7]. Page 96.
[8]. Page 114.
[9]. Page 117.
[10]. Page 121.
[11]. Page 123.
[12]. Page 110.
[13]. Page 11.
[14]. Pages 151-2.
[15]. Pages 152-53.
[16]. Page 153.
[17]. Pages 153-54.
[18]. The Mind & the Brain – pages 79-91.
[19]. Page 154.
[20]. Page 155.
[21]. Pages 160-62.
[22]. Page 169.
[23]. Page 170.

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