UNDERWATER PICTURE
The teacher unexpectedly announced, one day, that she had brought to class some crayons, paints and paper, but only five paint brushes. There were 23 of us in the Std 1 class at Golden Grove Primary, so she said the first five to get all their sums right, could paint. We had to do sums every day, and I was not quite sure what we had to do with them, but I had learnt that, if you kept working and didn’t make a noise, you didn’t get into trouble even if you never finished. And the next day, you had fresh sums and could start all over again, and not finish, and no one ever worried about what you had not done the previous day. So I was not expecting to be one of the first five to get all my sums right, and just set down to plod along in my usual way until the bell rang and we moved into whatever it was that happened next. But today, I found I ran out of sums! I was surprised, but thought I had better go and ask for some more. Turned out, I had got them all right, and I was given one of the five paint brushes, and not even the fifth, about third.
Well, none of this made a lot of sense to me, because everyone knew I could not do sums, and because the teacher had not quite figured out how this painting was supposed to work anyway. It was, in retrospect, one of those techniques where you draw fish in crayon and then brush watercolour over the whole drawing, and the watercolour does not stick to the wax crayon, but looks like water, and you have painted an underwater scene, especially if you drew fish in the first place. Probably one of her little friends had shown it to her over the weekend and she thought she would try it out on Monday. I can distinctly remember her saying that something was supposed to happen, she was not sure what. Of course, the cherry on top was that you were not painting with the brushes, you were drawing in crayon, and she put the paint on herself, so everyone could have had a turn and not only the first five, but I suppose if she didn’t know how to teach people to do their sums, she couldn’t be expected to work that one out.
I found the drawing interesting, and I think I was pretty chuffed to find that I could do these sums, and at being one of the first three in the class, so the next day I was all keen to do sums again, and enjoy my new-found mastery over these things that had withstood my earnest endeavours for so long. I honestly was not consciously concerned with the painting bit so much as to see how on earth I had managed to get those sums right when I wasn’t even expecting to be able to do any of them.
The next day there were no paints or paper or crayons. Either it was a ‘one day only offer’, or she still hadn’t figured out how it worked and was too scared to try it again. I didn’t mind though, I was keen to do the sums, and confident that I could do them easily. But this time, it wouldn’t work. I just could not do the sums, and went right back to my old pattern of struggling away until the bell went, and never finishing.
There is a beautifully made cartoon called ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. Sparky just can’t learn to play the piano, and then he discovers this magic piano that enables him to become a concert pianist while just running his fingers randomly over the keys. But then one day the magic vanishes. He tries to run his fingers over the keys as before, but it will not work. ‘Oh no, Sparky’, says the piano, the magic has gone. I felt such resonance with that cartoon when I saw it. But I know the magic is still there to be found.
Apart from the obvious stupidity of the teacher, who never asked herself why I could do them one day and not the next, the event is an intriguing insight into the supposed freedom of our will, and that wonderful word that has made so many undeserving people so much money: ‘motivation’. Clearly, I had the ability to do the sums. A half-informed teacher, someone who was awake, but still didn’t understand how these things work, might have concluded that I was ‘naughty’, or ‘lazy’ because, ‘he can do them when he wants to’. Well, yes, but then which part of me wants to? And how do I get to turn that part on? I certainly believed I wanted to do all my sums and get them all right on the second day, but I couldn’t. And I had not expected to finish or get them right on the first day, and I did.
Surprise is always significant in terms of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. We may be ticklish when other people tickle us, but research has shown that we are unable to tickle ourselves because tickling involves an element of surprise from an external source. As soon as we decide to tickle ourselves, our nervous system already knows about it, even before we have time to move our fingers, and has discounted it as an external stimulus. So how did my unconscious mind surprise me? The first day I was definitely not consciously motivated by the painting, because I was certain that I was not in the running. I had no idea that I could even do the sums, and only a vague notion of what we were supposed to be doing with them anyway. Yet another aspect of my consciousness not only chose to do the sums, but had somehow gained the knowledge of how to do them and get them right. So it was not only a question of ‘motivation’ in the sense of wanting to try, but a motivation that could access a part of my unconscious mind that had learnt how to do the sums, even though I could not access that knowledge intentionally.
And how much free will did I exhibit? The first day I chose not to try any harder than usual, and I succeeded. The second day, although I believed my motivation was independent of the painting, (though I did expect that she would be bright enough to try it a second time), I was completely unable to do the sums, even though I wanted to and I believed that I could do them! And there is no question of the sums being any easier the previous day, because I was the third to finish. If they had been easier than usual for me, they would have been easier for everyone else too, and at least more than three people would have beaten me. Nor was I trying too hard. I expected it to be as effortless as it had been on the first day.
This is why I am suspicious of setting oneself goals. Whoever is choosing those goals is obviously the limited side of ourselves. Goals can be initially liberating, but ultimately confining. How do we know what goals to choose, what are good goals and what are bad goals? And who determines the realistic limit to what is attainable? There is a bit of a conundrum when the doctor gives you three months left to live. Some people refuse to accept the verdict, and go on to miraculous recoveries. Others go on to die in three months as predicted, whether they accept the verdict or not. Where is the real boundary to our possibilities, and where does the reality lie?
I prefer to work on a process of clarification, rather than adding more layers of goals to achieve. Certainly, in a micro sense, goals can be effective. I did three push-ups today, tomorrow I’ll do four. That works. But I mean life-goals, the big things we are looking for. I don’t believe we can even imagine them consciously in the first place. I don’t believe most of us really do know what we want. But I believe that there is a part of us, a part which is still inaccessible to us, which does know. And I think we can move steadily towards uncovering that part.
How do we do it? Whenever someone lives to be 100, people ask them the secret to their success. Some have exercised daily, eaten raw vegetables and never smoked. Others have done just the opposite and contribute their longevity to half a bottle of brandy a day. The best I heard, though, was the old man who said simply, ‘You have to want to live.’ That is the first and most difficult step. Like the alcoholic who first has to acknowledge his condition before he can begin to heal, something in us has to be awakened to the fact of our spiritual life, and for the constant need of each of us to bring our psyche back to balance and maintain it in good health. And then you have to want it. There are only really two ways that I find you come to want it. One is where the day-to-day experience of life is so uncomfortable that it becomes attractive to face down our fears and our feelings of sadness, anger and shame as a way to get beyond the pain we are in.
The other way is when we are able to recognise one of those frequent moments of insight that do occur in our daily lives, as more than just a trick of the light, but rather a chink through the boundaries of our consciousness, a view through the looking glass into what is possible. And then we can come to want to find more of it. There is a Buddhist saying about this search: ‘Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.’ It is a long and demanding road to seek out, confront, and relinquish our delusions. If you are comfortable where you are, better to stay there.
A professor of business finance recently gave the example of his dog hunting rabbits in pepper grass, a tall grass that grows somewhere in north America. He could only see the rabbits when he leapt up out of the grass, then he had to loose sight of them again as he ploughed through the grass to where he last saw them. I first heard of this in a less polite form with the Fakawi bird that used to fly up above the grass and cry, ‘Where the fuck are we?’. Both work for me. We have to get these momentary glimpses of what lies beyond the mundane, and then return to the material plane of our daily perception and try to work our way towards that brief insight.
It is a world of endeavour, though, and few of us go through life without it presenting us with major challenges. Something always forces us to catch a glimpse of our self, no matter how fleeting. How we respond to the opportunity is a constrained choice. As I have indicated at the beginning, or will is not yet as free as we would like it to be. Our lives, perhaps, are essentially about the process of freeing our will.
The more rigorous and disciplined people have the harder time of it. They are committed to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. (The only thing that can actually do this is a computer – that is where the term ‘boot up’ comes from.) It is a risky process though, because we have to be willing to loosen our certain hold on ‘reality’ in order to be able to find a more tenuous reality of a different nature. We have to be willing to retain our belief in science and embrace the knowledge of art, without becoming schizophrenic in the process. We have to risk becoming further deluded in order to enhance our grasp of reality. Better to stay as we are.
Some people believe that, ‘We are born alone and we die alone’. This is so obviously not true. No one is born alone. There is always a mother or at least a Petrie dish present. And if we are abandoned after birth then surely we do very quickly die alone. We may achieve materially as loners, but we need to feel the love of at least one other person for that spirit to be awakened in us. Then we become receptive to those frequent moments of insight with which we are continually being bombarded like cosmic rays.
There is a Taoist story of a wood carver who meditates for many weeks before going out into the forest to find the piece of wood which contains the sculpture he has envisaged. When he finds the piece of wood, he simply chips away the outer covering, revealing the sculpture that is already there. It is nice that African carvings often show these Taoist sculptures, a face unmasked from within a rough log, the rest of the branch remaining. I like the idea that the sculptor does not impose his own ideas on the wood, but simply reveals what is already there. I think that is the approach we need to have to educating our children. (After all, the word does come from the Latin e-duco, to lead out, not to push in). Socrates described the process of education as ‘maieutikos’, (we say ‘maieutic’ in English). It comes from ‘maia’ – a midwife. He said that the role of the educator was to act as a midwife in giving birth to the knowledge already contained within the person.
Instead of setting myself goals, I prefer to chip away at what inhibits my energy, the limitations of my ability to conceive of things, or to allow myself to have them or even to want them. I am sure the goals are already there, far better ones than I could ever imagine, so I wouldn’t want to limit them. What I do need to do, and to work on actively, is to seek out those limitations and wash them away in the light of awareness.
There is a forgotten value in looking into the origins of words, not just for the fun of it, or to help remember its meaning, which is the effect it has, but more to expand the range of our understanding and to provide a deeper insight into what we should do with the idea. For example our word, ‘heal’, in the sense of curing someone of an illness, comes from the word ‘whole’ – when you heal someone, you make them whole again. Instead of setting ourselves goals to achieve, or worse, having them set upon us by someone outside of ourselves, we need to realise that there is an essential wholeness to our being and the goal is already set for us – to become what we essentially already are. To find who we are is not a goal set from outside us, but simply the sprouting of a seed which is seeking the light.
In Physics there are only two types of energy, kinetic, (movement), and potential, (stored energy). We sometimes get confused when people talk of psychic or human energy, because we think in terms of physics. When we refer to the human or the spiritual world, and we speak of energy, we are using an analogy. The energy in the personal context is neither kinetic nor potential. It is ‘like’ energy. If you pass an electrically charged rod over your arm, you will feel your hairs raise – that is one of the ‘sensations’ of energy. That is not what it is, it is what it is like.
We use the term ‘energy’ because some people do actually experience something that our quotidian vocabulary is not equipped to name. And ‘energy’ is the closest thing in our common experience to what it feels like. There is a caution. People can be deluded. If enough people hold the delusion in common, then it is considered truth for a while, until people become disillusioned. John Kenneth Galbraith in ‘The Affluent Society’ coined the term ‘the conventional wisdom’. Someone in a high status position pronounces that the economy is flourishing and then people go around quoting this statement until it becomes something that it is unthinkable to question. Then the bottom falls out of the market, and a new high profile person pronounces that the economy will never recover, and the flock changes direction.
But it is true that the psychology can become damaged, just as the brain can become damaged and we can suffer from, say, amnesia. With amnesia, many of our faculties like speech and dressing ourselves, can operate normally. But other aspects of our ‘mind’ do not operate because the machine of the brain is broken. On the other hand, we can have damage to the mechanism of our personality that can also occur without any physical damage to the body. We can see pink elephants which are not consistent with the rest of our sensory apparatus. We can believe there is a conspiracy against us when there is none. So not everyone who believes they have a deeper insight into the reality behind the reality is functioning properly.
But some are. Just because some doctors are quacks does not mean that western medicine cannot be successful.
And not everyone who says that there is nothing to be found behind the sensory reality, is functioning properly either. There is no easy ‘one rule fits all’. Sometimes we see beyond the illusion to a clearer reality, sometimes we just get more illusion and there is no rule to tell for certain which is which. This is our uncertainty, that we have to keep deciding for ourselves each moment between reality and illusion. It is tempting to seek relief from this constant process of existential doubt, select a package of rules, and, having made that one decision, be relieved of having to decide again. Time Magazine, many years ago, called it ‘decidophobia’. We buy a house and then we have to spend the rest of our life paying off the mortgage. There is no further choice. We have to keep our jobs because we have to pay off the mortgage. After that one decision, everything else becomes a rational necessity. Until the world intrudes, until we get retrenched or until our spouse leaves us and we sit with an empty house.
My arithmetic example shows what many people have often said: that we have far more potential than we actually use. There is a wealth of energy within each of us and all we have to do is learn how to release it. I don’t choose to try to direct and control that energy, especially in using it to get material things: have a picture of a Porsche on the wall next to your mirror and visualise it. I am sure it can work, and can materialise, but I think that is a fine example of limiting our choice. Is a Porsche really equal to eternal bliss? Is it not better to let go of hankering after things, and simply to let things come to us, and enjoy them in passing? It was not the fun of painting that I was hoping for on that second day, it was to experience my ability to do the sums, to use my mind and enjoy my own intelligence. That to me, is something worth wanting, though even that, you cannot hold on to.
From that day I have known for sure that there is a greater potential that we can attain than the limits we are accustomed to accept. I have no idea of the limit or extent of that greater potential, only that it is greater than my everyday experience. That it is unconscious there is no doubt – Jung said that we do not know what is contained in the unconscious mind – that is why we call it the ‘unconscious’. What I am also fairly sure of, is that the mechanism of the psychology of our personality can be either damaged or in good working order, just as our body can be healthy or unhealthy. In order to access that unconscious potential, and to survive the contact with it, we need to have our psychology and our body as fit as possible. Those are the tools we have to enable us to climb the mountain and find what there is to see on the other side of the clouds of forgetfulness.
If I were to say that within that area of which we are not conscious, there is a realm which has a greater reality than this, I would be saying what I believe to be true from my own experience. Plato famously described our view of the world as seeing only the shadows on the wall of a cave while the real activity was taking place between ourselves and the fire at the far end of the cave. We need a healthy psychology to be able to make forays into the unconscious and bring back little icons of reality which we can decipher, like dust from the moon, and thereby increase our access to what lies there. I am also fairly sure that what we shall find will involve a complete conceptual remake of the world. This is not as bizarre as it sounds. Physics has done this to us often, from when it was first proposed that the world was round, or that Newtonian physics was not a total description.
Peter Weir, an Australian film maker, illustrated it beautifully in ‘The Last Wave’. The Aboriginal in the movie explained that when they dreamed, they went to the far side and saw what was happening in this life, from a different perspective. They brought back memories from their dreams which helped them understand how to continue in the waking state.
We generally prefer to think on a linear progression and to try to continue to interpret the world in the way that is familiar to us. In psychology they call this ‘cognitive dissonance’. If we wear glasses that turn the world upside down, after a while, we shall see it right way up again because our mind knows which way it should be. It is a good idea. When you start up your car, the petrol gauge takes a while to move into position, it doesn’t jump to the correct level immediately. This slowing down is purposeful, so that we do not believe that we are running out of petrol every time we go over a bump. Interestingly, bond rating agencies do this too, but sometimes their adjustment is too slow and reality overtakes them. We have a built in smoothing mechanism that limits the jolts to our view of reality, and sometimes our responses are too slow, and we miss the opportunities to re-think our view of the world.
It takes courage to let go of our confirmed perceptions and still get up and brush our teeth in the morning. But there is some reward. As we learn to become familiar with the other side of the world, we gain access to this great energy which enables us to accomplish what we did not even know we wanted to accomplish, to feel that we are at last where we belong, when we never really knew how out of place we were. Once we are aware of the concept, we can begin to let go of the beliefs that tell us we can’t do things, or don’t want to do things, or should be doing other things we don’t really want to do. But we have to know and believe that when we do chip away the outer covering, there will indeed be a sculpture inside the wood, and like the Taoist sculptor, we have to spend many years meditating and wandering through the forest in search of that piece of wood that contains our being. We have to want to find it. And we have to keep doing our sums, even if we have no hope of ever getting them right.
© John Mitchell 22 08 08
The teacher unexpectedly announced, one day, that she had brought to class some crayons, paints and paper, but only five paint brushes. There were 23 of us in the Std 1 class at Golden Grove Primary, so she said the first five to get all their sums right, could paint. We had to do sums every day, and I was not quite sure what we had to do with them, but I had learnt that, if you kept working and didn’t make a noise, you didn’t get into trouble even if you never finished. And the next day, you had fresh sums and could start all over again, and not finish, and no one ever worried about what you had not done the previous day. So I was not expecting to be one of the first five to get all my sums right, and just set down to plod along in my usual way until the bell rang and we moved into whatever it was that happened next. But today, I found I ran out of sums! I was surprised, but thought I had better go and ask for some more. Turned out, I had got them all right, and I was given one of the five paint brushes, and not even the fifth, about third.
Well, none of this made a lot of sense to me, because everyone knew I could not do sums, and because the teacher had not quite figured out how this painting was supposed to work anyway. It was, in retrospect, one of those techniques where you draw fish in crayon and then brush watercolour over the whole drawing, and the watercolour does not stick to the wax crayon, but looks like water, and you have painted an underwater scene, especially if you drew fish in the first place. Probably one of her little friends had shown it to her over the weekend and she thought she would try it out on Monday. I can distinctly remember her saying that something was supposed to happen, she was not sure what. Of course, the cherry on top was that you were not painting with the brushes, you were drawing in crayon, and she put the paint on herself, so everyone could have had a turn and not only the first five, but I suppose if she didn’t know how to teach people to do their sums, she couldn’t be expected to work that one out.
I found the drawing interesting, and I think I was pretty chuffed to find that I could do these sums, and at being one of the first three in the class, so the next day I was all keen to do sums again, and enjoy my new-found mastery over these things that had withstood my earnest endeavours for so long. I honestly was not consciously concerned with the painting bit so much as to see how on earth I had managed to get those sums right when I wasn’t even expecting to be able to do any of them.
The next day there were no paints or paper or crayons. Either it was a ‘one day only offer’, or she still hadn’t figured out how it worked and was too scared to try it again. I didn’t mind though, I was keen to do the sums, and confident that I could do them easily. But this time, it wouldn’t work. I just could not do the sums, and went right back to my old pattern of struggling away until the bell went, and never finishing.
There is a beautifully made cartoon called ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. Sparky just can’t learn to play the piano, and then he discovers this magic piano that enables him to become a concert pianist while just running his fingers randomly over the keys. But then one day the magic vanishes. He tries to run his fingers over the keys as before, but it will not work. ‘Oh no, Sparky’, says the piano, the magic has gone. I felt such resonance with that cartoon when I saw it. But I know the magic is still there to be found.
Apart from the obvious stupidity of the teacher, who never asked herself why I could do them one day and not the next, the event is an intriguing insight into the supposed freedom of our will, and that wonderful word that has made so many undeserving people so much money: ‘motivation’. Clearly, I had the ability to do the sums. A half-informed teacher, someone who was awake, but still didn’t understand how these things work, might have concluded that I was ‘naughty’, or ‘lazy’ because, ‘he can do them when he wants to’. Well, yes, but then which part of me wants to? And how do I get to turn that part on? I certainly believed I wanted to do all my sums and get them all right on the second day, but I couldn’t. And I had not expected to finish or get them right on the first day, and I did.
Surprise is always significant in terms of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. We may be ticklish when other people tickle us, but research has shown that we are unable to tickle ourselves because tickling involves an element of surprise from an external source. As soon as we decide to tickle ourselves, our nervous system already knows about it, even before we have time to move our fingers, and has discounted it as an external stimulus. So how did my unconscious mind surprise me? The first day I was definitely not consciously motivated by the painting, because I was certain that I was not in the running. I had no idea that I could even do the sums, and only a vague notion of what we were supposed to be doing with them anyway. Yet another aspect of my consciousness not only chose to do the sums, but had somehow gained the knowledge of how to do them and get them right. So it was not only a question of ‘motivation’ in the sense of wanting to try, but a motivation that could access a part of my unconscious mind that had learnt how to do the sums, even though I could not access that knowledge intentionally.
And how much free will did I exhibit? The first day I chose not to try any harder than usual, and I succeeded. The second day, although I believed my motivation was independent of the painting, (though I did expect that she would be bright enough to try it a second time), I was completely unable to do the sums, even though I wanted to and I believed that I could do them! And there is no question of the sums being any easier the previous day, because I was the third to finish. If they had been easier than usual for me, they would have been easier for everyone else too, and at least more than three people would have beaten me. Nor was I trying too hard. I expected it to be as effortless as it had been on the first day.
This is why I am suspicious of setting oneself goals. Whoever is choosing those goals is obviously the limited side of ourselves. Goals can be initially liberating, but ultimately confining. How do we know what goals to choose, what are good goals and what are bad goals? And who determines the realistic limit to what is attainable? There is a bit of a conundrum when the doctor gives you three months left to live. Some people refuse to accept the verdict, and go on to miraculous recoveries. Others go on to die in three months as predicted, whether they accept the verdict or not. Where is the real boundary to our possibilities, and where does the reality lie?
I prefer to work on a process of clarification, rather than adding more layers of goals to achieve. Certainly, in a micro sense, goals can be effective. I did three push-ups today, tomorrow I’ll do four. That works. But I mean life-goals, the big things we are looking for. I don’t believe we can even imagine them consciously in the first place. I don’t believe most of us really do know what we want. But I believe that there is a part of us, a part which is still inaccessible to us, which does know. And I think we can move steadily towards uncovering that part.
How do we do it? Whenever someone lives to be 100, people ask them the secret to their success. Some have exercised daily, eaten raw vegetables and never smoked. Others have done just the opposite and contribute their longevity to half a bottle of brandy a day. The best I heard, though, was the old man who said simply, ‘You have to want to live.’ That is the first and most difficult step. Like the alcoholic who first has to acknowledge his condition before he can begin to heal, something in us has to be awakened to the fact of our spiritual life, and for the constant need of each of us to bring our psyche back to balance and maintain it in good health. And then you have to want it. There are only really two ways that I find you come to want it. One is where the day-to-day experience of life is so uncomfortable that it becomes attractive to face down our fears and our feelings of sadness, anger and shame as a way to get beyond the pain we are in.
The other way is when we are able to recognise one of those frequent moments of insight that do occur in our daily lives, as more than just a trick of the light, but rather a chink through the boundaries of our consciousness, a view through the looking glass into what is possible. And then we can come to want to find more of it. There is a Buddhist saying about this search: ‘Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.’ It is a long and demanding road to seek out, confront, and relinquish our delusions. If you are comfortable where you are, better to stay there.
A professor of business finance recently gave the example of his dog hunting rabbits in pepper grass, a tall grass that grows somewhere in north America. He could only see the rabbits when he leapt up out of the grass, then he had to loose sight of them again as he ploughed through the grass to where he last saw them. I first heard of this in a less polite form with the Fakawi bird that used to fly up above the grass and cry, ‘Where the fuck are we?’. Both work for me. We have to get these momentary glimpses of what lies beyond the mundane, and then return to the material plane of our daily perception and try to work our way towards that brief insight.
It is a world of endeavour, though, and few of us go through life without it presenting us with major challenges. Something always forces us to catch a glimpse of our self, no matter how fleeting. How we respond to the opportunity is a constrained choice. As I have indicated at the beginning, or will is not yet as free as we would like it to be. Our lives, perhaps, are essentially about the process of freeing our will.
The more rigorous and disciplined people have the harder time of it. They are committed to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. (The only thing that can actually do this is a computer – that is where the term ‘boot up’ comes from.) It is a risky process though, because we have to be willing to loosen our certain hold on ‘reality’ in order to be able to find a more tenuous reality of a different nature. We have to be willing to retain our belief in science and embrace the knowledge of art, without becoming schizophrenic in the process. We have to risk becoming further deluded in order to enhance our grasp of reality. Better to stay as we are.
Some people believe that, ‘We are born alone and we die alone’. This is so obviously not true. No one is born alone. There is always a mother or at least a Petrie dish present. And if we are abandoned after birth then surely we do very quickly die alone. We may achieve materially as loners, but we need to feel the love of at least one other person for that spirit to be awakened in us. Then we become receptive to those frequent moments of insight with which we are continually being bombarded like cosmic rays.
There is a Taoist story of a wood carver who meditates for many weeks before going out into the forest to find the piece of wood which contains the sculpture he has envisaged. When he finds the piece of wood, he simply chips away the outer covering, revealing the sculpture that is already there. It is nice that African carvings often show these Taoist sculptures, a face unmasked from within a rough log, the rest of the branch remaining. I like the idea that the sculptor does not impose his own ideas on the wood, but simply reveals what is already there. I think that is the approach we need to have to educating our children. (After all, the word does come from the Latin e-duco, to lead out, not to push in). Socrates described the process of education as ‘maieutikos’, (we say ‘maieutic’ in English). It comes from ‘maia’ – a midwife. He said that the role of the educator was to act as a midwife in giving birth to the knowledge already contained within the person.
Instead of setting myself goals, I prefer to chip away at what inhibits my energy, the limitations of my ability to conceive of things, or to allow myself to have them or even to want them. I am sure the goals are already there, far better ones than I could ever imagine, so I wouldn’t want to limit them. What I do need to do, and to work on actively, is to seek out those limitations and wash them away in the light of awareness.
There is a forgotten value in looking into the origins of words, not just for the fun of it, or to help remember its meaning, which is the effect it has, but more to expand the range of our understanding and to provide a deeper insight into what we should do with the idea. For example our word, ‘heal’, in the sense of curing someone of an illness, comes from the word ‘whole’ – when you heal someone, you make them whole again. Instead of setting ourselves goals to achieve, or worse, having them set upon us by someone outside of ourselves, we need to realise that there is an essential wholeness to our being and the goal is already set for us – to become what we essentially already are. To find who we are is not a goal set from outside us, but simply the sprouting of a seed which is seeking the light.
In Physics there are only two types of energy, kinetic, (movement), and potential, (stored energy). We sometimes get confused when people talk of psychic or human energy, because we think in terms of physics. When we refer to the human or the spiritual world, and we speak of energy, we are using an analogy. The energy in the personal context is neither kinetic nor potential. It is ‘like’ energy. If you pass an electrically charged rod over your arm, you will feel your hairs raise – that is one of the ‘sensations’ of energy. That is not what it is, it is what it is like.
We use the term ‘energy’ because some people do actually experience something that our quotidian vocabulary is not equipped to name. And ‘energy’ is the closest thing in our common experience to what it feels like. There is a caution. People can be deluded. If enough people hold the delusion in common, then it is considered truth for a while, until people become disillusioned. John Kenneth Galbraith in ‘The Affluent Society’ coined the term ‘the conventional wisdom’. Someone in a high status position pronounces that the economy is flourishing and then people go around quoting this statement until it becomes something that it is unthinkable to question. Then the bottom falls out of the market, and a new high profile person pronounces that the economy will never recover, and the flock changes direction.
But it is true that the psychology can become damaged, just as the brain can become damaged and we can suffer from, say, amnesia. With amnesia, many of our faculties like speech and dressing ourselves, can operate normally. But other aspects of our ‘mind’ do not operate because the machine of the brain is broken. On the other hand, we can have damage to the mechanism of our personality that can also occur without any physical damage to the body. We can see pink elephants which are not consistent with the rest of our sensory apparatus. We can believe there is a conspiracy against us when there is none. So not everyone who believes they have a deeper insight into the reality behind the reality is functioning properly.
But some are. Just because some doctors are quacks does not mean that western medicine cannot be successful.
And not everyone who says that there is nothing to be found behind the sensory reality, is functioning properly either. There is no easy ‘one rule fits all’. Sometimes we see beyond the illusion to a clearer reality, sometimes we just get more illusion and there is no rule to tell for certain which is which. This is our uncertainty, that we have to keep deciding for ourselves each moment between reality and illusion. It is tempting to seek relief from this constant process of existential doubt, select a package of rules, and, having made that one decision, be relieved of having to decide again. Time Magazine, many years ago, called it ‘decidophobia’. We buy a house and then we have to spend the rest of our life paying off the mortgage. There is no further choice. We have to keep our jobs because we have to pay off the mortgage. After that one decision, everything else becomes a rational necessity. Until the world intrudes, until we get retrenched or until our spouse leaves us and we sit with an empty house.
My arithmetic example shows what many people have often said: that we have far more potential than we actually use. There is a wealth of energy within each of us and all we have to do is learn how to release it. I don’t choose to try to direct and control that energy, especially in using it to get material things: have a picture of a Porsche on the wall next to your mirror and visualise it. I am sure it can work, and can materialise, but I think that is a fine example of limiting our choice. Is a Porsche really equal to eternal bliss? Is it not better to let go of hankering after things, and simply to let things come to us, and enjoy them in passing? It was not the fun of painting that I was hoping for on that second day, it was to experience my ability to do the sums, to use my mind and enjoy my own intelligence. That to me, is something worth wanting, though even that, you cannot hold on to.
From that day I have known for sure that there is a greater potential that we can attain than the limits we are accustomed to accept. I have no idea of the limit or extent of that greater potential, only that it is greater than my everyday experience. That it is unconscious there is no doubt – Jung said that we do not know what is contained in the unconscious mind – that is why we call it the ‘unconscious’. What I am also fairly sure of, is that the mechanism of the psychology of our personality can be either damaged or in good working order, just as our body can be healthy or unhealthy. In order to access that unconscious potential, and to survive the contact with it, we need to have our psychology and our body as fit as possible. Those are the tools we have to enable us to climb the mountain and find what there is to see on the other side of the clouds of forgetfulness.
If I were to say that within that area of which we are not conscious, there is a realm which has a greater reality than this, I would be saying what I believe to be true from my own experience. Plato famously described our view of the world as seeing only the shadows on the wall of a cave while the real activity was taking place between ourselves and the fire at the far end of the cave. We need a healthy psychology to be able to make forays into the unconscious and bring back little icons of reality which we can decipher, like dust from the moon, and thereby increase our access to what lies there. I am also fairly sure that what we shall find will involve a complete conceptual remake of the world. This is not as bizarre as it sounds. Physics has done this to us often, from when it was first proposed that the world was round, or that Newtonian physics was not a total description.
Peter Weir, an Australian film maker, illustrated it beautifully in ‘The Last Wave’. The Aboriginal in the movie explained that when they dreamed, they went to the far side and saw what was happening in this life, from a different perspective. They brought back memories from their dreams which helped them understand how to continue in the waking state.
We generally prefer to think on a linear progression and to try to continue to interpret the world in the way that is familiar to us. In psychology they call this ‘cognitive dissonance’. If we wear glasses that turn the world upside down, after a while, we shall see it right way up again because our mind knows which way it should be. It is a good idea. When you start up your car, the petrol gauge takes a while to move into position, it doesn’t jump to the correct level immediately. This slowing down is purposeful, so that we do not believe that we are running out of petrol every time we go over a bump. Interestingly, bond rating agencies do this too, but sometimes their adjustment is too slow and reality overtakes them. We have a built in smoothing mechanism that limits the jolts to our view of reality, and sometimes our responses are too slow, and we miss the opportunities to re-think our view of the world.
It takes courage to let go of our confirmed perceptions and still get up and brush our teeth in the morning. But there is some reward. As we learn to become familiar with the other side of the world, we gain access to this great energy which enables us to accomplish what we did not even know we wanted to accomplish, to feel that we are at last where we belong, when we never really knew how out of place we were. Once we are aware of the concept, we can begin to let go of the beliefs that tell us we can’t do things, or don’t want to do things, or should be doing other things we don’t really want to do. But we have to know and believe that when we do chip away the outer covering, there will indeed be a sculpture inside the wood, and like the Taoist sculptor, we have to spend many years meditating and wandering through the forest in search of that piece of wood that contains our being. We have to want to find it. And we have to keep doing our sums, even if we have no hope of ever getting them right.
© John Mitchell 22 08 08
