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 CHIEF PETTY OFFICER

Sometimes, when I had work to do in Cape Town, I would arrange to stay over and visit my mother in Onrust. Errol would come to fetch me from the airport where I dropped the hired car, and drive me through in the old Chevair which is now only three years short of the 30 years that qualifies it as ‘vintage’. That was before I had had the engine reconditioned, and there were times along the coast road, or over Sir Lowry’s pass, when we thought we might not make it, but we did.

Errol would chat, frequently on his strong belief that all young men should undergo military training to learn discipline. Of course, in the sixties, military training was the initiation process for white males when you became ‘a man at 16’, (as a British army recruitment poster liked to put it), and as Errol fervently believed.

It is not the discipline or the ‘machismo’ of the army that makes a boy a man. There seem to be moments of decision in our lives, and when we are able to make those decisions we move from childhood into adulthood. Sometimes adulthood is forced on us before we are ready, such as orphans who have to take adult responsibility for raising the younger members of the family before they have had the full support they need to reach their own maturity. The mould is cast before the sculpture is complete. When it happens timeously, we move from being the receptive child to the interactive adult, and certainly manhood is linked to the male becoming an adult. A military environment can be the catalyst to precipitate the onset of manhood because it provides situations that demand decisions. Where there is danger, our confrontation with death can set the mould. Where there is action, we learn to make decisions quickly and to act with resolve.

Timing is important. There is a risk of the boy being too eager to don the armour of manhood and, like the orphan, being forced into the role before completing the process. Manhood should be the start of a continuing process, not just the end of boyhood. There is a danger that insecurity will produce inflexibility to create the appearance of certainty. When the change occurs too abruptly, when the boy adopts the behaviour without attaining the personal insight, you have the Stunted Male that is the stereotype of manhood, the machismo without the man. The paradox of adulthood is to cross the threshold without closing the door behind us. The child we were, remains, and the adult we become must continue to grow. To be an adult, man or woman, means that we have reached a state where we continuously turn our experience into insight, and increase our capacity as we age. We start in youth with a high level of energy and little experience. If we live our lives well, as our energy depletes, our wisdom increases and we are able to accomplish more with less energy.

Carl Rogers famously wrote a book called, ‘On becoming a person’. I wonder how ‘On becoming a man’ would be very different. If the person you are is a man or a woman, when you become a person, you become the man or the woman that you were born to be.

And yet there is a difference. While each of us is unique, we share a common humanity. And within that humanity, we have one sex or the other. To be human is to be different from all other animals. To be a man is to be different from being a woman.

It may be that, as a man, or as a woman, we play different roles in this life. It may be, but it is not the role we play that defines our sex. Neither do the roles we play determine the person that we are. One person may play many roles. Sometimes the role takes us over completely. George Orwell described in, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, an experience he had as a Civil Servant in India. The villagers claimed that an elephant was threatening the village and he, as the British Representative, had to come and shoot it. When he arrived at the scene, he realised that the beast was in no way a threat to the village. But the entire population was gathered to witness the British Empire in action. There was an expectation of his role. Not to shoot the elephant became impossible. He had to fulfil his role. And yet, I feel, he lost a part of himself in doing so.

To know what it is to be a man, and this I can only say from one point of view, you have to be the man. Exactly as, to know yourself, you have to be yourself. Once you are a man, you can, through mindfulness, become more aware of what it means to be a man, and develop your ability to relate as a man, to other men and to women. These are things you learn, or fail to learn, as you do with all the other developmental opportunities that your life places in your path. But how to become a man in the first place, is the difficulty, as it is to become a person. You have to defend yourself against the roles, against the ideas of others, against their own agendas and their own ignorance.

It is in fact, the way of Tao. You do not decide from the mind what it is you would like to become. The becoming unfolds itself. The decision comes in choosing to recognise what is unfolding. Just as an infant will learn to walk and to talk if the world does not do too much damage to it, so will you become a man, (if the world does not do too much damage to you). The way to teach a child to talk, is to listen, to pay the child attention, to be mindful and to show that you hear what is said. The way to make a boy into a man, is to listen, to pay the boy attention, and to show that you recognise the man in him.

Nothing can be spoiled by paying attention. Pretending to pay attention can do harm. Not paying attention, does harm. But holding your attention effects change. Holding your attention means being still. When the mind is still, and not chattering, then life moves forward. When there is chattering, life is on pause.

Errol had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy at Simonstown, and had specific responsibility for training the raw recruits, so he spoke from experience. I think he dealt with the permanent force recruits, and not the white males whose wealthy parents had managed to get them into the Navy rather than risk being sent to the Border. Errol definitely felt a paternal responsibility towards his charges. He was the Older Man Robert Bly describes in ‘Iron John’, who leads the boy into manhood. It was a role he practised consciously, and from his description it seemed to be effective. It may well be that those particular recruits came to the Navy in the first place because they did not have an Older Man in their environment. The Navy itself was their Older Man. When you find an Older Man, and recognise each other, you feel respect and love, both for yourself and for him. The passing of time of itself, does not make you an Older Man as it makes the Chevair into a Vintage Car. It is something you have to do. In our society, there is frequently a shortage of Older Men.

And yet Errol’s own story is a little different. In retrospect, I would have asked some more questions to see how it all pieced together, but I was not paying full attention, allowing the stories to wash over me as I enjoyed the view of the fynbos and said good bye to the mountains I loved when he drove me back to the airport at the end of my stay. The stories gained a familiarity over time, and seemed to elide into one another.

There was something I did hear. Errol told me he had been an alcoholic, and I asked him how he had freed himself from the drug. Somehow, all must not have been well on the quarterdeck. He had left the navy, perhaps because of alcohol, he did not say, but he was in the habit of regular heavy drinking, and he still wore ‘his coat of navy blue’.

One morning, waking up in the cells, having been arrested the night before by the Sergeant who was also a good friend of his, he was paraded before the Superintendent of the police station. This man, noticing, Errol told me, that he wore the remnants of a Navy Uniform, told Errol that he was too good for the way he was living. He said that a man who could reach the level of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy could do better for himself than drink himself to death, and gave him a thorough ‘pep’ talk, of the kind that most people would consider a waste of good words. How could anything anyone said, change an alcoholic?

Well, Errol heard him out, and was then discharged, and he and his buddy, the Sergeant who was now off-duty, went round to the off-sales to get a flagon of wine. They went up to Errol’s first floor flat which he shared with his wife, who worked as a nurse, and they were about to set down and have a drink together. Then Errol got to thinking. He was amazed that so important a person as the Superintendent of the Simonstown Police Station should take the trouble to call him in and talk to him personally. He figured that if that person could take the trouble to show that much interest in him, and recognise what he had achieved in the past, then he must be worth something. At that very moment, he made a decision, grabbed the flagon of wine, and threw it out the window.

Gilbert Ryle wrote a book called ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, in which he argued about free-will, and especially called into question our ability to make a decision. He believed, and not without some merit, that what we perceive as decisions have already been made, (I never did find out where he thought they were made. In those days, philosophers, amongst whom he was numbered, would not mix with psychologists. The academic disciplines were more in competition for tenure than co-operation for truth. He would not consider such a notion as the unconscious, but I think that is what he meant). He ridiculed the idea of actually making a decision and asked, ‘when did I make this decision, before breakfast, or after breakfast?’ I longed to write back to him and say, ‘I made it before breakfast’. He forgot that a question is not a statement and that he had proved nothing.

Errol made his moment of decision quite clear by his action of throwing out the flagon from the first story window. I think that the window must have been open at the time, though it could just as easily not have been, and I like to believe that it landed safely. He followed it with another action. He phoned his wife at the hospital and told her of his decision. She believed him. She believed him to such an extent that she spoke to one of the doctors on her ward who dealt with such things, and he agreed to see Errol right away, and to prescribe some medication and therapy to help him get through it. So the Superintendent had put something in motion which rippled through his life and was picked up by his wife and by the doctor, all of whom supported him when he needed it. It would make sense to say that his stars were positively aligned. Sometimes there is just a break in the negative energy with which we surround ourselves, and the positive energy, when everything is correctly aligned, just comes through.

EM Forster, in ‘Passage to India’, describes a young army officer riding in the carriage of a train with a fellow officer. He asks his friend what he would do if he found that he had Indian blood in him. The British Officer, young and unthinking, replied majestically, ‘But, my dear fellow, I would simply shoot myself. What else could one do?’ His friend thanked him, and they went on to chat of other things to the end of their journey. Later, the British Officer heard that his friend had gone from the station and shot himself. He had Indian blood. He was devastated. He did not know the power of ‘vash’, the power of words, and the need to be mindful at all times. As the posters on the walls used to warn people in the First World War, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.

In Errol’s case, it was careful talk that saved a life. What did prompt the Superintendent of that police station to take that trouble on that day, when so many damaged people pass through his cells so regularly, and he knows how seldom anything he says will be heard? We are not responsible for how people receive our good acts, we are only responsible for doing them well. We have to guard against the excuse of futility. In this case, the futile gesture did not fall on stony ground, but fertile soil. The momentary spark was able to ignite the tinder.1 Errol was able to form his resolve, strangely, to live up to someone else’s expectations of him! Yet it remained his resolve, and I suspect that his act of decision was also his initiation into manhood.

Note 1. A tinder box was a box containing dry flammable matter, and a flint and steel, used before matches were invented, to ignite the tinder by striking the steel with the flint.

© John Mitchell 07 08 08

THE DEBT

Arriving home late one night, we saw a plastic bag at the foot of the gate post, tied up, with something inside. I thought I saw it move. Cautious as South Africans have learned to be in approaching their homes, I watched, and saw it move again. After parking the car and scouting around, I approached. Inside I found a bottle of Vodka, and a live chicken. A vagrant’s party, mislaid.

There is no certain way of working out who ‘deserves’ help in this life and who does not. If a man asks you for money at a street corner, do you interrogate him about his life history and set yourself to judge his worthiness as a recipient of your largesse? The Victorians spoke of ‘the deserving poor’. Not that they deserved to be poor, but that they judged them deserving of help. We have since learnt that life is not so straightforward, and the rules that determine worthiness have often failed us. Who is the greater criminal, the housebreaker who steals your television or the company boss who runs poisonous chemicals into the lake? In our meritocracy, we want to help people ‘who have talent’, yet that talent is no less an accident of birth than wealth. What about helping the people who have no talent? Do they not need even more assistance?

The truth is that in this life, there is suffering. We are on this earth plane because we are ignorant of our true nature, which is free of suffering. As long as we are here, we are all suffering in some way, and we are all deserving of all the help we can give each other. So I have chosen that I will help anyone who asks me for help, and I will accept responsibility to help those whom life places in my path, guided always by my feelings. There is a need to protect ourselves, to sustain ourselves, so that we can continue with our life tasks. My decisions are based, not on a rule, but on an awareness of what is really happening, of the underlying truth behind the appearance.

How well can I see this? Only as best I can. My responsibility lies in being constantly mindful, paying attention to being here, allowing life to teach me its lessons.

I know I cannot judge who deserves to be helped and who does not, so I rely on my feelings. This is not as arbitrary as it sounds. The real question is whether your feelings are in working order, or malfunctioning. If you hold prejudices where fear distorts your perception, if you mistake thoughts and dogma for feeling, or have never learnt to empathise or to love another, start by fixing your feelings. They are no use to you as a guide to truth because they are damaged. But if you have lived a life of self-awareness, holding a constant dialogue between your thoughts and your feelings, and testing that against your experience of the world, you have added an extra dimension to turn a flat and lifeless world into a three-dimensional one. You have developed the ability to break through when reasoning gets stuck. It is apt to do this at crucial moments, especially when time is short and a decision needs to be made quickly. And if you say, ‘But my feelings always lead me to selfish acts’, then know that that is who you are, a selfish person who has not yet evolved beyond that limitation. The selfish act is a problem. Having fundamentally selfish feelings is a bigger problem. Better look to who you are and who you are becoming than to have some rule that allows you to deceive yourself.

And so I opened the bag and took out the thinnest, most abused chicken I have ever seen. It could hardly be worth the eating, and had almost no feathers, probably as a result of having had no space to move. Life had placed it in my path, and I also felt a natural compassion for it. For no good reason, I felt I had some deeper connection with this particular chicken than the mere happenstance of it landing at my door. I put it in the shed, gave it whole mielies and water, and left if for the night.

We had the grain because we had raised chickens before, from baby chicks to full grown hens. (We did not live on a farm, but were hybrid suburbanites, living a farmyard life in the city.) We had been surprised because we found one of the chicks becoming more aggressive than the others, and defending them against the ducks and any other intruders. And then one day, it crowed, and the secret was out. We had thought them all to be hens, and as little fluffy chicks they were not differentiated, but at puberty, the male took on traditional masculine traits – at least for roosters. Sadly, we could not keep him for fear his crowing would awaken the suburban somnolence of our neighbours and bring in the Rules. However, in his absence, one of the hens took the lead role and proved perhaps to be more aggressive than ever he would have been. She would leave what she was eating just to run to some nearby hen and peck it on the head to ensure its continued submission.

Once, when she was much older, I heard a strangled cry, and came to see her beating her wings and crowing. She was one tough chicken. And over time, the other hens died their natural deaths, but she lived on. I wonder sometimes whether there is a connection between male hormones in women, and their longevity, and how their sons survive both their masculinity and their perpetuity. Think of Prince Charles and his mother.

In the morning, the new chicken was much revived, and I had visions of her growing feathers and returning to a sleek and good-looking health. The black hen, who by now was the sole survivor of the flock, did not take kindly to the novice. However, scrawny as she was, the new one had survived a tough upbringing, and stood her ground firmly against the black hen, who stalked off and bided her time. We let the foundling roam in the garden so it could enjoy its freedom, and forage for some greens and some insects.

She must have felt some connection with me, the same as I did with her. If there was a previous life, we must have known each other. It felt like that. I felt it even more when she chose me out of the group of us who were sitting socialising on the patio, and with featherless wings beating, scrambled up onto my lap. We shared a few moments of affection, perhaps of resolution? Then she went her way, and scratched about in the garden.

When I returned from work the next day, my visitor had left. I searched for her, but she had gone. I know that chickens do not smile, but the black hen had a look that was definitely smug. Life for her had been restored to normal. She was not one to share.

I had not foreseen this danger. Our dogs were no threat, and the garden was generally enclosed. I wondered if I had failed in my responsibility to the ‘vagrant’s meal’, but I think not. Whatever debt I owed her from this or another life, had been paid, by me to her, or by her to me. I am not sure. She brought in that brief time with me a knowingness, a sharing, and an awakening which remains with me. And she set me an example – she gave more than she received.
© John Mitchell 11 07 08

THE LIFTING OF DEPRESSION

Many people have described their experience of depression. Few remember to look back once they are free, and to share the benefit of their liberation with others. When depression lifts, by itself, permanently, only then can we really begin to understand what it was that afflicted us. Through the transition and the comparison, we can start to understand more deeply both the natural state of our being, and its distortion.

When we feel the veil lifting, (the description of St Paul at his conversion, of ‘scales falling from his eyes’, would as well fit this experience), we are freed to see what we could not see before. Depression is a kind of hard-wired, structural, constriction of our experience of the world. Part of that constriction prevents us from looking directly at the depression itself, like the Gorgon Medusa in Greek mythology that turned anyone to stone that looked on her face. It is like a dimming of the light that prevents us from seeing. Only when it lifts, can we begin to see. What we begin to see and feel is ourselves.

We have to have a sense of self in this life. The sense of self may be an illusion, but within the illusion of this life, it is necessary. It is only through the medium of our sense of self that we can navigate through the challenges this life presents. When depression lifts, we find the sense of self has survived under its cloud and is now released, like the bulb of a flower that has sprouted under a stone, and is now exposed to the light. Instead of a medium of discomfort, we start to find assurance in our sense of self. What seemed to be the enemy is found to be an ally. The sense of our own being imbues our experience with meaning. The new-found sense of meaning liberates our will, gives it movement and purpose. We can start to find our direction.

It is important to know that depression can lift. We can change the experience of depression by, for example, physical activity, chemical intervention in the brain, or insight therapy. But that is not the same as its spontaneous lifting.

One morning, you may awaken and know that things are different, different in a way that you are not able to recognise because you have never experienced them like that before. Yet, in the same way that you know you are awake, you know that some unaccountable thing has changed. Something that was there has simply gone, and yet you cannot quite remember what it was that has departed. You know that you have a lightness of being, though it is not an identifiable feeling of joy or happiness, it is simply an upward release. (Interesting that the sensation is upward, whereas before we might have said we felt ‘down in the dumps’.) We realise that something that was pressing on us has been taken off, as though we have carried a heavy burden for so long that we considered it part of ourselves, and now that part of ourselves is gone, and yet, we feel more present, and no loss.

The world looks different. This is important. The way a depressed person behaves is perfectly rational within the context of their experience of the world. But it is a different world that they are inhabiting from the un-depressed. Neither more nor less real or valid. There is nothing to say that the un-depressed state is the final state of emancipation of the mind. It is just a step. But being released from depression, apart from the obvious ‘housekeeping’ aspects of coping with the challenges of everyday life, releases you to experience the naturalness of your own being. It is a step closer to yourself.

Gradually it dawns on you that what pressed on you before was your depression, and that it has gone. You have known about the depression, but you could never look it squarely in the eye. Your depression was a ‘condition’, a set of symptoms, but you could never grab it by the throat and confront it. It was just a shadow looking over your shoulder that moved away no matter how quickly you tried to turn and catch it. And now it is gone. And now you can feel who you are with that ‘hump that is black and blue’ as Kipling described it, safely out of the way. Now you have a sense of awakening, just like the sense of awakening in the morning, only a second awakening on top of the first. And now you are pleased and joyful – pleased that you are no longer depressed, that life can now begin. The myth of Sleeping Beauty, when she awakens, describes the sensation. You have been asleep for 100 years, caught in a permanent dream, and now that you are awake, the world in which you have been for so long, seems strange.

But you never for a moment doubt that the new sensation is preferable. You may, however, catch yourself missing the habit of depression, strangely enough. Freedom is not something we adjust to immediately. And you may, from your new position of freedom, recognise that there was some element of addiction to your depression. There was. And even your new state of enlightenment is only another level of addiction, just one that is more common and easier to cope with. But it is only a step along the road. You are free-er, not free. By comparison, it seems you have reached the ultimate. You know, though, that there was no exercise of will that could have changed your condition, because there was no fulcrum against which you could lever your will. You did not have that sound, solid, sense of self you now have. Whatever you pressed against, gave way. There was no secure footing on which you could base your sense of self, only a continuing unease and a listlessness that held your mind in thrall. Now that you have awoken, your will feels active and confident. But that war has been won. You cannot return with your new-found will and fight it over again. If ever you were to return to that state of being, you would be no more powerful to overcome it than you were before. That’s the pathology!

You know you will never return whence you have come. But you had no choice to heal yourself by a resolute act of will. Your only choice was gradually to learn to turn towards the depression, to embrace it and recognise it as your own. Paradoxically, you had to learn to feel the depression. Strange to think of depression as something you might feel, like sadness. It seems more like an absence of feeling. That is its power and its deception. Behind the symptoms of depression lies the feeling of depression. And the only way out is through. And the only way through is to allow yourself to open to the feeling you least want. Perhaps that is the way of the Tao – the yielding that overcomes.

Depression conditions the entire framework within which we experience everything else. We look through different glasses and see the world differently. When depression lifts, there is a moment of surprise. Something familiar is gone. It is interesting to note that it is not a feeling of something having been added, but of a restriction that has been lifted. A shadow has passed from your world. It is the same world, but now you see it in sunlight instead of shade. You have a sense of having woken from a trance. Perhaps you have.

In the absence of feeling lies the deadness of depression, upon which foundations the mind then builds its rational castles of interpretation, all consistent with their foundations. Foundations laid in air. And yet you know that you are somehow the richer for having had the experience. It has given you a humility, an empathy with the sufferings of others that you would never have had otherwise. Twenty-eight years in prison can do that to a man. So can 28 years of depression.

What the depression has done for you is to make you aware, make you able to discern that your perception of reality can be so convincingly distorted that it seems certain. And it has enabled you to know that it is possible to awaken from that certainty, and see beyond it. And from that experience you might, if you are fortunate, start to believe that you might also wake up from your current state, and continue in a series of awakenings until you are fully awake. Or you might simply decide to camp where you are. How far do you have to journey in one lifetime?

The shadow that darkened your mind and dimmed your perception, has passed suddenly away. The webs of reasoning that you endlessly wove to hold together the fragments of reality, have evaporated. You feel the world directly and have no need of explanation.

From infancy we develop our conceptual structure – we learn to perceive space and time.[1] In our very early stages we develop the conceptual structure which we experience as ‘reality’. This process of development, if undamaged, occurs from within the child. Children learn to speak and to walk without adult intervention. An environment can be supportive or hostile. Supportive does not mean intrusive. A supportive environment means that the process will unfold naturally and operate as it was designed to operate. And we are generally designed to operate positively. Only traumatic events, such as the death of a parent, or a hostile environment such as malnourishment, or destructively intrusive adults, will cause a distortion in how your reality if formed.

One such distortion is depression. We are not designed to be depressed, as a species. There may be more than one set of causes of depression. What is important is that it structures the way we experience the world just as extensively as our sense of space and time do. And the perception is just as convincing.

What is even more important, is that that structure, primary as it is, can still be healed. The depression can lift, and your life can continue its natural course. And the course of life is a movement, however gradual, to a clearer perception of reality. We do not have to do anything to improve on reality. We have to learn to recognise and acknowledge it as it is, rather than through our distorted perception.

One of the key elements in awakening from depression is time. And time is linked to reality because reality is always in the present. [2] We are strongly bound to our memories of the past as constituting reality. Is this not part of what is called karma? Even when we think we live in the present, we are still trailing far behind. When we wake from depression, it is as though we have leapt forward in time, closer to the present. There is an immediacy to our experience of the world that was never there before. A septum, or membrane, that stood between ourselves and the world, has been removed. Through this change we may become aware that, though we are closer to the present, we are not yet fully there. Now we may choose to stop and rest – or continue. © John Mitchell 21 06 08
[1] In an experiment with a sheet of glass laid over a table, a baby below a certain age would crawl over the edge of the visible table beneath the glass. Above that age, it would stop at the edge of the table. What had changed is that it had developed ‘depth-perception’. Before that age, it simply did not have the capacity to know that it would fall off the edge of the table.
[2] Bertrand Russell said that, if we believed in creation, then there was no logical reason why the world could not have been created, complete with records, history and memory, half a second ago.

LETTING GO OF SUFFERING

In the UCT medical museum there is a tumour, preserved in a bottle, and it is the size of a melon, as the accompanying newspaper article describes it. At least, it was there when I visited in 1970 as a young philosophy student, eager to discover more about the world.

The story tells of a young woman in her late 20’s who was visited by a social worker in connection with some other problem. She discovered that the young woman had a huge tumour on her bottom, and was unable to sit comfortably because of it. The social worker explained to her that she could have the tumour removed. But the young woman resisted. It was a part of her. She had adjusted her life to it. It had always been there and in fact, she had absorbed it into her self-concept. It took a lot of persuading and counselling for her to agree to let go of her affliction. Afterwards, she rejoiced in her new found freedom, able to wear normal clothes, a bathing costume, go at last to the beach. It was a true release.

When people say we choose and are attached to our suffering, it sounds ridiculous. Who would choose to suffer? But the way we choose our suffering, and the way we hold on to it, is much more subtle. It is a Buddhist precept that there is suffering. What is meant by this is much more than the mundane fact of earthquakes and famine that we can all see. It means that we are all in a state of suffering merely by virtue of the fact that we are on this earth. And we suffer because we are ignorant, as the young lady was, that we can be released from our suffering. We suffer because we have absorbed this level of suffering into our self-concept. It has always been there, and we cope with it as best we can. But we do not really know how to let go of it. Most of our attempts to escape our suffering just lead to greater enmeshment within the web that holds us.

We may claim that we are not suffering. It is just ‘life’, and the defenders of the position are just being ‘realistic’. All too often, ‘realists’ are just closet pessimists, no closer to reality than anyone else. If only they could be real instead of realistic!

What we can see is relative suffering. The body of the Meths drinker in the street reflects the deep level of his suffering on the ‘blue Train’. There is a numbness to his senses, beyond that induced by his imbibing. Without that numbness he could not survive. He would be screaming and writhing in pain. In fact, of course, some people who breach the limits of endurance do exactly that, and we call them ‘insane’. But for ourselves we feel relatively less pain, and we tend to take ourselves quite comfortably as the ‘norm’. But the same situation applies to us. As Aldous Huxley discovered in ‘The Doors of Perception’, if our senses were fully operative we would be overwhelmed with information. We can survive in this world because there is a filter on our senses which limits the extent to which we can perceive the world, and of course, to which we feel our pain. ‘Pink Floyd’ described it as, ‘comfortably numb’. People who suffer from hyperacussis hear sounds abnormally loudly, and loud noises actually cause them physical pain. What we regard as a ‘normal’ level of hearing ability, is way below what is possible for humans, let alone for other animals.

Some people are living in a constant state of suffering compared to which we are relatively well off. If their ability to endure this is made possible by a filter which limits the pain, we cannot claim with any certainty that we are not in exactly the same situation relative to some other state of being. Compared to that, we are the Meths drinkers. And so on up to some potential state of being which is completely free of suffering. Could be.

If a person can be reluctant to loose a source of physical discomfort, might we not also be clinging to a view of reality which is limiting? It could be quite threatening to us to let go of all we have deemed certain to face the hope and risk the disappointment of release. How clearly do we want to see reality?

We can see this process of release from longstanding suffering in psychotherapy. When a person experiences a cathartic release or attains a significant insight, they feel relieved and released from a discomfort they have endured all their lives. This release can be permanent, and it can be succeeded by other releases. On what grounds can we posit a limit to the extent that this process can continue? Until we actually confront the limiting factor, we cannot know its extent, nor what might lie beyond.

Let us look at how we can release our attachment to our suffering. There is no mystery in this, and no arcane belief required: just a step by step plodding towards reality. But as we approach reality, (whatever reality turns out to be for each of us as we uncover it), the intensity of the fear which holds us in thrall, increases. When we finally acknowledge the reality, the ‘charge’ in that aspect of our psyche is released. It is like bringing a rod charged with static electricity towards an Electroscope. As you approach the electroscope, the charge in the rod causes the gold leaves in the device to repel each other and move apart. But when you bring the rod so close that it actually touches the electrode, the charge is released, and the gold leaves collapse.

Our fear and the unpleasant feelings that hold the blockage, increase in intensity as we approach the confrontation with our reality. Once we acknowledge the underlying truth, we are released from one more illusion, one more predisposition to choose and hold on to our suffering, and we move a little closer to the discovery of our true nature.

Socrates said that the first state of knowledge is to know that we do not know. The difficulty is exactly that we have so absorbed our habitual state of being into our perception of ‘reality’ that we really believe it is real. We really believe we have to live with our tumours. To start to doubt that is to start to doubt the whole fabric of our reality. Once we wake up from the anaesthetic, it can be dangerous. The process of liberation is not to be undertaken lightly. Often it is useful to have a supportive structure, a group of trusted friends, or at least a routine to return to, to let you get your bearings again before venturing into more discovery. Once you have let go of the handrail of your regular limitations, it is difficult to judge with certainty which is a new reality, and which, a new illusion. This can be the role of ritual: like a fire drill, something that can guide us in coping with daily life when panic, or unusual experiences, have removed the familiar. When we judge a ritual ‘meaningless’, we have to be able to say by what measure we are sure of our own meaning.

Simply to argue that we cannot see any meaning in it, is dangerous and foolish. Sartre wrote of going to a café to meet Pierre. He could not find him there. But the mere fact that he could not see him did not allow him to claim that Pierre was not there, with the same certainty that he would have called him ‘present’ if he had seen him. He might have been in a corner of the room that was dimly lit. It is dangerous to draw conclusions on the basis of what we cannot see. Better to keep looking, and draw our conclusions from what we can see. And if we find that the longer we look, the more we see, better to keep looking, to keep letting go of old presumptions, to refresh the screen of our perception and keep living with the uncertainty of knowing that we do not know.
© John Mitchell 06 06 08

FAITH, TRUST, AND REALITY

The biggest mistake is to try to have faith. We can no more make ourselves have faith than we can make ourselves fall in love with someone, or make ourselves feel what we do not feel. We can convince ourselves that we feel it, and we can open our minds to the possibility, so that we do not block it. So that we recognise it when it happens. But we cannot plan to be spontaneous.

So it does help to tell people about having faith. Someone who may never have experienced faith, or know that it exists, can be assisted by having the cognitive groundwork laid. The relationship between what we feel and what we think is essential to our sanity. We create that relationship when we recognise what we are feeling. It takes time for an infant to recognise that what it is feeling is thirst, and time for a teenage to recognise that water satisfies thirst, Coca-Cola satisfies pleasure. So, if you are thirsty, drink some water. If you still feel like it, have a Coke for pleasure. But imbibing sugar will only increase your thirst. You need to understand what is going on inside in order to take appropriate action outside.

It does help to explain to people that what they are feeling is sadness, because they may be thinking it is anger at the person they hold responsible for their sadness. People do not automatically recognise their own feelings. They do not always have the courage to take the responsibility of acknowledging them. They may know they want to break something or hurt someone, and they may think that is an expression of anger. Sometimes it is. But feeling your anger is a whole different experience and once you have learnt to do that, you no longer indulge in destructive behaviour. But you have to have discovered how to recognise that feeling. You have to have discovered what it really means to feel a feeling – without having to externalise or express it. Hitting pillows and shouting as is sometimes done in therapy sessions, is a teaching process, to enable the person to learn to make the connection. But it is not the end of the process, but the process itself.

So where does faith come in? Faith, like recognising your feelings, occurs after the fact. First you have faith, then you recognise that you have it. Faith arises from knowledge. A person who knows his science, has faith that the experiment will prove his theory. If his knowledge is insufficient or faulty, the experiment will show this. But if he really knows what he knows, he has faith. Einstein was asked what he would have done, had a crucial experiment not validated his theory. He replied that the experiment would have to be repeated because the experimenters had made an error. And he was right.

When does knowledge become arrogance, when does faith become insanity? We have constantly to judge our own grasp of reality for ourselves. Occasionally, the universe nudges us back to reality when, for example, we reverse our car into a pole that was not there. But one of the things we are doing in this life is learning to recognise what is our imagination, and what is the underlying reality. When a doctor tells you that you only have one month to live, do you make your will and prepare to die, or do you ‘…not go gentle into that good night, Fight, fight, against the dying of the light’ as Dylan Thomas wrote to his father? Sometimes the doctor is right. Sometimes the will to live can change the outcome.

A study done in New York showed that there was a drop in the average rate of deaths of old Chinese people prior to an important annual festival. It was followed by an increase in the rate of deaths after the festival so that overall, the average was maintained. The theory they were testing was that people could influence their time of death by their will to be present at this important festival.

This is where the active influence of faith comes in. As I have said, we cannot try to have faith, and it is pointless fooling ourselves into thinking what we do not feel. On the other hand, if our knowledge of how things work is sufficient and accurate, the cognitive recognition of what is already the case, does reinforce it. Once we begin to discover that we are actually in a universe that is on our side, we can gradually open our minds to recognise the events in our lives that confirm this. That is when we begin to trust.

Trust is not an abdication of will or of responsibility. Trust requires will and responsibility. But it is a change in the ground rules. It is a recognition that changes the relationship, just as it changes our personal relationships. If you do not know what it means to trust another person, that is a place to start to find out what trust means. Then, by analogy, you can begin to recognise a trusting relationship with, let us say, the universe, or the higher self, or the unconscious. Whatever it may be, it is a trusting relationship with something beyond our most limited perception of our mundane experience.

It takes courage to trust because, once we begin to question the taboo on looking beyond the sensory existence, we court insanity. It is possible to become completely deluded, so out of line with the material world that we keep on bumping into things that are not there. And this is the risk we have to take to move beyond the limitations of our mundane world.

A baby elephant is traditionally hobbled with a rope on its foreleg. Eventually it learns to accept this restriction. As an adult, it is as effectively hobbled by a piece of string which it could easily break. Or experience of life from infancy structures our world, often for the good. And sometimes we outgrow those experiences. This can be simple, or more extensive. We might have been bitten by a dog, and believe that all dogs are fierce. We can challenge that taboo and learn to distinguish between those that are fierce and those that are friendly. This is a step towards a clearer perception of reality. It requires suspending our belief in what we are sure of. All learning does so. If that taboo was a mistaken belief, there might be others. But there is no certainty in choosing between them. Only gradually, can we start to build up our knowledge of a universe that we can trust, of a reality that exists prior to, and beyond our experience to date, of a mystery which is constantly available to reveal itself, as soon as we are available to receive it.

Trust is the foundation. Once you can gain the insight that allows you to trust the universe, and recognise that there is, both psychologically and psychically, an unforced tendency towards health, just as the body tends towards healing itself, then you can begin to look toward faith. Not faith in this or that. That would be to introduce restriction, rather than release the constraints. But faith that moves your whole body and being into the light. When you have faith, there is a cognitive reinforcement of the trust. Your mind is now predisposed to recognising the new insights into reality, as the mystery reveals itself, whereas before, you looked to send them away. Naturally, as an inevitable consequence of faith, comes joy and love as you begin to feel the positive nature of the universe. There is still adversity, there are still challenges to overcome, there is still work to be done. We eat when hungry and sleep when tired. But the context is different. It is like a move from winter to spring. Rain in spring feels different from a rainy day in winter.

Once we have trust and are developing faith, we can begin to look at the way in which we perceive reality. After all, underlying everything is reality. Who knows what reality is? We all do. Of necessity. If we exist at all, we exist in reality. Even if we do not exist, then that conclusion is the reality. But we are arrogant if we think we know everything about reality. We only have to look back to the seventeenth century, when people were beginning to get excited about the physical sciences and discover that blood circulated within the body, and that planets orbited on predictable paths, to see that we have a long way to go before we can say that everything has been invented that can be invented, and that everything has been discovered that there is to discover. That reality might extend beyond what we now know about it is as simple and true a proposition now as it was in the 17th century, as it ever was.

What is important now is to develop the trust, and grow the faith, to loosen our hold on the brilliant discoveries of the past, and have the courage to learn to recognise new aspects, to develop new concepts, of reality, ourselves, on a daily basis.


A note on time.
It is consistent with this view, and consistent with our doubts about an unknown universe, that the future might reliably be predicted. People who do predict future events reliably generally say that ‘time is different on the other side’. There is a logic to this which is quite simple.

Our experience of time is sequential. Someone once compared it to watching a movie frame by frame, even though the whole movie had already been recorded. If anyone were to be able to ‘experience’ the future in the present, their whole sense of temporal sequence, time as we know it, must have been suspended. To be able to jump ahead in time, you have to be free of the constraints of time. That is why, though they can tell you what will happen, they cannot reliably tell you when it will happen. You cannot have time outside the constraints of time.
© John Mitchell 02 06 08

If reality were to exist, what would it be like?

Most people are pretty confident that they know what reality is. Many, however, do not believe that others know what they know. Some say there is no reality. This, of course, just translates into the statement, ‘In reality, there is no reality’. Really?

On the other hand, people who would blush at not knowing the name of the captain of some football team, are quite confident to ask, ‘What is reality? Who can say?’ and be content to leave it as an open question. This is fine, so long as the question does not intrude itself.

But sometimes the question of reality does intrude itself. ‘Does she really love me?’ If we have ever had a misperception, and realised our mistake, we have established a relativity of reality. We have accepted that what we thought was real, was not. We measure this against some more certain standard of reality. Once we have yielded to this temptation, we can no longer assert with any assurance that we may not have replaced one error with another. We are certain of this reality. But we were certain of the previous reality, until something changed our mind. With what greater certainty can we assert this current view?

Alan Watts entitled one of his books, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’. I confess I bought the book, then lost it before I could read it. But the title remains. Once we have passed through the portal of doubt, and are able to question our own perception of reality, we have reached the first stage of Socratic Knowledge: we know that we do not know. Really to feel this sense of doubt, called Existential Doubt, is a terrifying experience. Better just to think about it.

Reality is closely linked to truth. In fact, it is the search for certainty, (and if there is an ultimate reality, certainty must surely be one of its attributes), that gives truth its urgency. It is not just about keeping your word, or telling the truth, or not actually breaking the law. As we approach truth, (perhaps on an asymptotic curve), so do we approach reality. We have discussed that our perception might be mistaken. Even if we do not go so far as to believe that all that we experience is a fabrication of the mind, we must surely admit that we retain some illusions. As my squint, Belgian, Philosophy professor used to say to me, his good eye enlarged by his monocle, ‘But Meester Meetchelle, I ‘ave my prejudices’. Truth dispels illusion, just as paper trumps rock, or scissors, paper. Even the most conceited of atheists, Bertrand Russell, confessed that, if we accepted the idea of creation, there would be no logical refutation of the proposition that the entire universe was created a moment ago, complete with records. There really is no proof that things exist independently of our perception of them, because all proof is filtered via our perception.

Russell’s observation is nicely illustrated in the making of the film ‘The Ten Commandments’. The set was created, complete with Pyramids and Sphinx, in the Arizona desert. When the film was complete, the set was abandoned. About 30 years later, archaeology students excavated the site, discovering historical records which were created in modern times. In the same way, we may ‘remember’ memories which our own minds have constructed. Just kidding. Or maybe not.

Carlos Castaneda in ‘A Separate Reality’, talked about a warrior’s folly. The warrior understood that he could not change the way things were, understood that his perception of reality was just a perception, but he still behaved as though things were real. We have to. It is the only way to remain sane. The courage comes in doing so, knowing that they are not.

Questions of the nature of reality lead to questions of existence and quickly devolve to questions about time. This is because we perceive reality sequentially, like the frames of a reel of film. Interesting that the film has already been shot before we view it, and that our perception of the film is simply a matter of seeing the light pass through it, like Plato’s cave. But as soon as we think of existence, we have to think of some sort of time frame. What was there before things existed? This is why Kant began with space and time as the two accepted starting points of his cosmology. Of course, our subjective experience of time varies vastly against chronology. Studies have been done on ‘expected duration’. If we wait more than five seconds for a dial tone, we put down the phone and start again. For an elevator, we’ll wait, say, forty five seconds before we press the button a second time. For a tax refund, we’ll wait a year.

To quote William Blake:

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

If life hereafter is eternal, then, since eternity has no beginning, we were already in existence before this life. How that life was, we may not remember, but we cannot confirm its absence.

Macbeth said,
….‘that but this
Blow might be the be-all and the end-all -; here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor.’….

There is a bit of an unresolved paradox for me in the view that we exist but in this fleeting moment on the earth. To say that a belief in eternal life is a comfort, is no comfort. If life were to end with our mortal death, there would be no consequences of our actions beyond what judgements may be made here, on this bank and shoal of time. Eternal life is far more terrifying because there is no escape. If our consciousness ended with our death, we could choose a good day, and die. There would be an end to it. We could have no regrets and, provided our passing were tranquil, there would be no loss. But if our awareness is eternal, there can be no escape.

Interestingly, Rupert the Bear was created by the wife of the editor of ‘The Times.’ Although the cartoon was popular, people began to complain that, whenever Rupert got into a tight spot, a magic genie would whisk him away. People could not believe in that, and the writing of the stories was handed over to another. In Greek tragedies the ‘deus ex machina’ – the god hiding in a box on the stage – would come and rescue the hero. Yet, people who do believe that consciousness ends with death, have a tenacity to life that denies them this escape, and to some extent, denies their belief.

If I remember it correctly, Spinoza said, ‘We feel and we know that we are eternal’. I do not claim he is right, but what he says is nicely illustrated in the film, ‘The Matrix’. Even though Neo’s whole experience of his consciousness is a computer-created fantasy, something within him stirs to make him uneasy. He feels, and he knows, that there is a greater reality behind the one he experiences on a daily basis. He has an involuntary impulse to move towards the discovery of that more real reality.

From infancy, we first learn to perceive the illusion. That gives us the tools to start to clarify our perception. In adolescence we have a second chance to re-organize our perceptions. For the rest of our lives, we can continue to clarify our perception of reality, if we want.

How do I define ‘reality’? A definition is merely a boundary put around something you know is there. No definition will enable you to know what is there. It is not a matter of defining reality, but of being real, of learning to see it for yourself. If you ask me who I am, I cannot tell you. If you really want to know who I am you must spend time with me.

A final quote from G Spence Brown in ‘Laws of Form’:

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not busy behaviour of any kind . Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know ….’

And that’s the Truth.

© John Mitchell 08 05 08