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

The carrot and stick heresy.

How people love this analogy, the carrot to reward and the stick to punish. The visual image appeals, the dichotomy between reward and punishment is clear, and somewhere in their semi-conscious minds, there is an image of a child on a donkey, dangling a carrot before it, promising a reward that never has to be delivered.

If people are to base their philosophies on seaside amusements, they should at least look at the picture they are using. How does the carrot stay just in front of the donkey? On the end of the stick. The stick is not there as an instrument of punishment, but to support the reward. Negative reinforcement never works as well as positive. Of course, to retain your credibility with human beings, you have at some time to deliver the carrot. (There is a story of a greyhound who caught the mechanical rabbit and was electrocuted. It is not a reward, but a ‘promise’ of a reward, some might say.)

The desire to punish is deeply rooted in our collective, Puritan, unconscious. If we can show that someone else is bad, then we must be less bad. Jung explained well that we project the bad we feel within ourselves, outward to others.

Remember that guilt is not about feeling bad when you have broken a rule. It is the existential angst which might arise, for example, in a child feeling responsible for the divorce of its parents. In fact, there is in Germany a group of individuals struggling so terribly with their sense of Nazi guilt, that they can barely cope with life. They are the children of Nazi war criminals who were themselves too young at the time the war ended to be held in any way accountable for what their parents did. Yet they feel the guilt.

From guilt, follows the desire to punish oneself, and through punishment, the hope of expiation or forgiveness. How nice to be able to project that guilt and that punishment onto someone else, and keep only the forgiveness for yourself.

Everyone wants peace, it is only the terms of the peace people disagree on, (i.e. capitulation of the other side). Well, almost everyone. Sometimes war arises simply because enough people want it. For some, it is the only job they know. Ever heard of an ‘Offence Force’? All armies exist purely for defence.

In the classic Western novel, which includes most of them, the hero’s life is given meaning by the desire for revenge. He has a purpose in life, and to that purpose he can subordinate all other desires. It relieves him of ever having to confront his own mortality. As van Morrison sings, ‘you breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out, you never, never, never wonder why though’. Revenge is not a popular notion nowadays, so now we ‘focus’.

We are enamoured of the idea of war. We have of course, sublimated it, to a war on poverty, a war on crime, a war on drugs, and, forget not, the virtual war on terrorism.

A few years ago the United States spent $50 billion on a war on drugs. A real war, with lots of helicopters, guns and troops in Columbia. At the end of it, they had to admit, they had achieved nothing. They then brought out the stick, (the Columbians having swallowed the carrot), and threatened Columbia with trade sanctions. The response was simple. ‘You stop buying, we’ll stop selling’. Spend $50 billion on counselling drug users?

In my favourite movie, Hopscotch, the CIA agent has an insight. ‘Perhaps we are going about this the wrong way’, he says, ‘sometimes bullying people doesn’t work’. That soft approach might work for the CIA, but not for the rest of us. But perhaps we are going about things the wrong way. Despite what people say, children do not have high status in our society. This is because it will be many years before they earn money.

Add to that Freud’s very accurate description in ‘Totem and Taboo’ of why adults feel threatened by the young bulls, the myth of over-population, (some countries are now actually concerned about under-population), and the focus of attention adults have put on re-defining their roles as males and females, and no wonder the children are left behind.

An amendment to the child-abuse law, limiting the number of strokes a parent may belabour their child per day, and also excluding the breaking of bones or raising of blood from the welts, met with loud outcry from law-abiding parents who feared that their children would become so unruly that they could not be controlled. A social-worker explained that these, (still horrendous), limits had to be imposed because, whenever a case of child abuse was brought to court, the parents simply claimed they were exercising their parental duty to discipline their child, and the case was dropped.

So we focus on hunting down criminals after they have become adults, and spend vast sums on punishing them, putting them in jails, and releasing them with little chance of survival, only to catch them again. Yet most criminals of almost any strain, have had horrendous childhoods. This does not excuse, but it might explain.

There is a syllogism that runs, “What this person has done is unforgiveable. If I were to understand what drove him to do it, I might be tempted to forgive him. Therefore I will not try to understand what drove him to do it.’ Logically true, perhaps, but practically disastrous.

We approach the problem from the wrong end of the telescope because we do not want, enough, to solve the problem. We want to have bad people to punish. And anyway, the political implications of interfering with an adult’s right to raise it’s child as it pleases is far too controversial to approach. So we do very little to restore the inner balance of the unbalanced child, to protect them from trauma or support their emotional healing. But we all agree that criminals should be punished.

We can see the absurdity of the notion that we have to use a stick to raise a child when we look back at past accepted uses of the stick – to discipline slaves, employees, and of course, wives. All we ever teach by using the stick is that violence is an acceptable solution to conflict – which it is not.
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Sassenha and other names

NAMES

A description is not a name, though some names may also be descriptive.

The gate to our house was painted green. We called it ‘the green gate’. Later, we painted it red. We still called it, ‘the green gate’, because that was its name. Now it has been painted once more, this time green. We call it, ‘the green gate’. Is that a name, or a description?

We have lost our facility for naming things. Instead, we allocate initial letters (AIL), even if we never use those initial letters again in the article. Why do we do this? One reason is that many of the names that we do have, like telephone, television and telescope, actually come from Greek. In fact, they were never really names, but descriptions in another language.

Another we avoid names and replace them with descriptions, is that we want to deny the reality of what we referring to. Political riots were described as ‘unrest’, blackouts are described as ‘outages’, and a dwarf is a ‘person of limited growth potential’. Is that any better than the name itself? What we overlook is that we only use circumlocutions, (walking around the word), where we actually believe that there is something wrong with what we are referring to. Where there is no problem, we just use the name.

Some people dislike lawyers. When lawyers start referring to themselves as ‘members of the legal profession’, or ‘defenders of justice through argument’, we shall know that they, themselves, have doubts about their profession. As long as they describe themselves as lawyers, we know that they are comfortable with who they are.

Sometimes descriptions intended as insults are adopted with pride, as names. This has often happened in the history of Christian religions: Quakers, Methodists and Doppers. (The Doppers were so named because it was claimed they were ‘Snuffers’ snuffing out the light of religion).

In the wilderness of namelessness in which we have been languishing for a number of years now, we began with acronyms and quickly degenerated into jumbles of incoherent sequences of letters. (An acronym should properly make a pronounceable word. ‘AIDS’ is an example.) Could there be any connection between an absence of meaning in the name, and a corresponding lack of meaning in the named?

We are gradually returning from our bout of acronyms to the previous method of using descriptions in other languages as names. Thus Hans Strydom highway becomes ‘Malibongwe’ which means ‘we are thankful’. Toyota calls its taxis ‘Siayaya’ which is, in a word, ‘we are getting there’. Optimistic, but appropriate.

We forget that our life spans are short. New generations rise in our place, and learn language by direct connection between the name (no matter how obscure), and what it really refers to. We can hide the truth from ourselves, but our descendents will see us as we are.

Tolkien wrote an enlightening piece on the importance of naming things in ‘Lord of the Rings’, when he described the Ents and the importance they placed on naming things correctly. He was on to something. When we name something honestly and appropriately we are acknowledging its reality. We acknowledge the truth of what it is. This is particularly important in dealing with our feelings.

There is a lot of confusion about ‘being in your head’ or ‘head-stuff’ which tries to break the connection between our feeling, and our cognitive self. When we name what we are feeling, we create the connection between our thoughts and our feelings, and can then move to resolve the feeling and express it appropriately. Amazingly, people who refer to ‘head-stuff’ usually point to their heads at the same time, as though the word were not sufficient and they have to remind themselves physically what the word ‘head’ refers to. The truth is, you cannot engage your feelings without using your thoughts. Just not thinking does not make you more honest in your feelings.

And so to Sassenha. By an ironic twist of fate, this name is derived from the initial letters of a description, Sassenha comes from ‘Suid Afrikaanse Spoorwee en Hawens'. My first job was on the Cape Town docks where I went to discover ‘the real world’, (it was not there). On night duty, I had the steam locomotives parked and fuming quietly but restlessly, outside my office and I promised myself that, if I ever wrote anything, I would call it ‘Sassenha’.

And so I have.

The original always beats the replica

What is the significant difference between an original and a replica?

In short, an original was created by someone who was doing the best that they could possibly achieve, working within the constraints of the knowledge and materials available at the time. They were also working to fulfil both psychic and material needs directly connected to the outcome of what they were doing.

Compare that to the replica. Exclude any considerations of how well the replica is actually made, whether someone is simply trying to cash in on a cheap imitation, or is going to great lengths to be as authentic as possible in both the choice of materials and the methods. No matter how authentic, the replica does not have the urgency of the originator to create to fulfil his personal need, neither is he working within the constraints of knowledge that the originator used. It is the difference between trying to solve a riddle, and doing so after having read the answer at the end of the book. You can get there, bet never with the same sense of discovery as when you work it through for yourself.

Jimmy Carter, ex-president of America, spends his time building replicas of early American furniture, using the exact methods and materials of the time and doing so with great accuracy. This is interesting, because he makes each one himself, personally, and is not employing underlings to do part of the work. This highlights the paradox because each piece of furniture is at the same time both a replica and an original – an original of the new series ‘hand-made by Jimmy Carter, ex President’. It is possible to imagine a counterfeiter making an identical piece of furniture and selling it as: ‘hand-made by Jimmy Carter, ex President’. That would be a copy of an original replica!

Why is it important to consider the difference between the two? It is important because, if we pursue the replica without knowing what makes it different from the original, we shall not fulfil our personal and psychic needs. It is simply a matter of being in error, to mistake the imitation for the original, and this means we are moving further away from a clear perception of reality. We continue in the world of illusion.

Earnest hippies in the sixties set out to become subsistence farmers and craftsmen, (one of the reason that the cutler’s art is so well developed in America – people who might otherwise have gone into nuclear physics applied their abilities to making knives). They hoped by this to attain some of the sense of connection with the earth, some of the sense of wisdom and authenticity that they saw in other craftsmen and other subsistence farmers. But they themselves were replicas, no matter how faithfully they stuck to the original processes.

The lifestyles they were following did not arise from necessity, but from choice. Go back to my original differentiation between the original and the replica. The originals were farming to the best of their ability, struggling to survive in a situation in which they could see no alternative, no answer at the back of the book. The craftsmen were working to the limit of their capacity, doing what they had learned, the best they knew how. They did not have degrees in engineering which enabled them to understand the transfer of forces in what they were making. They learned through trial and error and through a constant battle against failure. The were groping in the dark, not working under floodlights. And so they had their personal interaction with their challenges in life. It is this process which gave them that sense of vitality and authenticity that their imitators were looking for.

Can you really imitate authenticity, no matter how honest your intentions? It is an oxymoron.