Another View of the Unconscious

In western psychotherapy—and very prominently in Freudian and Jungian analysis—the “unconscious” plays a rather major role. It is also present in the work of Milton H. Erickson, a remarkable therapist—but there it has a quite different flavor. The following quotation comes from Volume 1 of a fascinating book: Conversations with Milton H. Erickson, M.D., edited by Jay Haley, himself a psychiatrist (p 106-107):

Haley: Talking about metaphors or analogies or stories, you have said you reach the unconscious with them.

Erickson: Yes.

H: Now you chose the word “unconscious” as a description of this process. I wonder if it is really essential, or if you could deal with it in terms of how to get someone to follow a suggestion which they cannot resist because they are not aware of it. They are not aware they are receiving the suggestion. An awareness difference, rather than an unconscious-conscious difference.

E: I’m trying to think of a patient. She told me about her horrible self-consciousness in a bathing suit because it seemed to her that whenever she wore a bathing suit her genitals were too prominent and everybody looked at that area of her body. She didn’t like to go swimming for that reason. Another thing she mentioned was the question that had come to her, whether or not at the age of 35 she should relinquish her virginity. She wasn’t willing to talk about that, and she only talked about the temptations she had had. But she was utterly indefinite, and so I steered her away from the subject. I knew that she was self-conscious in a bathing suit, everybody looked at her genitals, and that she had, at the age of 35, wondered about the desirability of keeping her virginity. She was a decidedly attractive woman. Of course, if she wanted to wonder about the desirability of keeping her virginity, she mentioned the age of 35—well, I drew my own conclusions. So one day I told her, “You know, Eisenhower, and Patton, and—who was the other general? Suppose you tell me about the Battle of the Bulge?” And I got the whole story about the time she went to bed with a man and then wondered and wondered and fought the man off on the battle of the bulge.

H: Milton, that’s a remarkable metaphor. But suppose the idea of conscious and unconscious had never been proposed. Now, how else would you explain what you did in that example? If there was no such concept as the unconscious.

E: Are you going to get rid of the back of the mind?

This comes from a chapter concerned with the Unconscious, Insight, and the Use of Analogies. This segment powerfully reminded me of Sufi teaching methods—which use stories, metaphors, and analogies. But why? Because in Sufi doctrine the ordinary self is a habit self, a structure produced by social conditioning. It reacts to straightforward, linear presentations reflexively. Stories, and humor, however, are able to penetrate this mask and reach the real, read higher, self and stir it into awareness.

The thought then occurred to me that the really unconscious mind is our habitual mind—and that what psychiatry calls the “unconscious” is actually the higher mind. Erickson, famed for his uses of hypnosis—albeit he rarely had to use it in practice—had a way of getting past the superficial but stubborn surface layer society builds to stir up a deeper layer. In his methods, that deeper layer is not the accumulation of detritus and of repressions but a potential—awakening which leads to insight and healing.

The Flaw in the Robot

Before I ever properly awoke this morning (it’s 8:30 am as I write this but I was up before 7), I experienced the way the Internet distracts. A comment on another blog, signaled by e-mail overnight, got lost as I attempted to approve it—which led to a mesmerizing process of trying to discover why. I lost track of time.

Any kind of feedback system that appears to be alive captures the body. It’s much harder to find distraction just staring at an old-fashioned writing desk—although, as I’ve discovered, excessive disorder has occasionally captured me, now and then leading to an hour’s order-making, rising to such outrages as fetching a vacuum cleaner, etc. That’s the same basic process—but the computer is so much better at delivering distraction.

Now I am retired, so this happens with less resistance. A busy life in which the outer is constantly demanding attention keeps people focused on tasks; the utterly trivial has less power. But then the tasks themselves, however nobly sanctioned by society, can become hypnotic so that the day rolls on, like an avalanche. In retrospect, thus observed from a slightly surprised point in time in the evening, the surprise arising because true awareness, for the first time, has managed to fight its way to the top, the person marvels at the scene: the day seems quite like a dream in its turn.

What I want to note here is that consciousness is a deeply layered phenomenon in which many quite deliberate actions—not least rather complex thinking—can take place above the merely waking state. At lowest levels are, say, the routine of breakfast, then a kind of noodling. The noodling can become obsessive, as it did today. Above that layer daily routines dictate the thoughts, action, planning, and the like—but blinkered by the tasks themselves. In midst of those—say while driving—the day-dream-like process returns. The news on the radio milks us of reflexive emotings. Now and then the traffic patterns cause tension and attention—but not real consciousness. In a long active day, there may never come a moment when we are genuinely present. And that moment may not last. Making it last is, as it were, the important task of the day, given our mission here on earth. But, of course, that moment of wakefulness, self-awareness, itself appears, in the context of the flux, as an unwelcome distraction from the compelling urge to obey the demands of our reflexes.

The higher urge, one might say, is a flaw in the robot—which can do great wonders, intelligent as it is, without any help. Real awareness stops the machine. Goodness! If allowed to stick around, it produces shudders—as tensions in the muscles are released. And then what? What is there to do? It’s a puzzlement that rises as we glimpse the borderzone.

Mystical Jargon

Over the years I’ve accumulated sheets with scribbled or marginal definitions of a lot of words thickening texts that form the scholarly literature on the mystical. I thought I’d consolidate them in one place. This listing will remain “active” in that I’ll keep on adding to it as new ones make me reach for the dictionary.

docetism: From Greek dokein, meaning to “seem, to appear to be,” therefore the belief that the body of Jesus was not really a body, but merely an appearance, a phantom, thus the denial of Jesus as simultaneously being both God and man.

eschatology: eskhatos from the Greek, “last, furthest, uttermost, extreme, most remote”; then the added -ology, from -logy, from Greek logia, Latin legein, “to speak,” hence teaching, doctrine science of — whatever—in this case of the End Times.

epiphany: Greek phainein, “to show,” and epi meaning “on or in.” Therefore “showing forth,” manifestation, appearance.

Now there are several other kinds of -phany. Hierophany is from Greek hieros, holy, sacred—the manifestation of something holy. Theophany where the subject is theos, God. Other such formations sometimes occur, and when they do the initial leading word must be understood to see who or what is “manifesting.”

Authors then tend to turns these words into adjectives (hierophanic, theophanic) to modify words like vision or imagination or experience, by which time the meaning begins to fray because the visceral meaning of the words is, to begin with, something very rarely experienced.

haecceity, hexeity: From Medieval Latin (actually Duns Scotus), haec, “this,” therefore thisness, meaning the quality that makes something, e.g. God, absolutely unique. Its rendering as hexeity is linguistically confusing although it makes spelling the word a lot easier. Hex of course refers to “six” in Greek, but the meaning is the very opposite: unique one-ness.

homologation: Greek root is homologeo, “to agree.” Therefore the word carries the meaning of accreditation or proof or qualification.

hypostasis: From the Greek hypo, “under,” a word that means “that which is underneath,” therefore its substance. The plural is hypostases.

ipseity: A word meaning “self” or “selfhood” using the Latin ipse for self. The reference is often to divine ipseity, or selfness, presumably a way of pointing to “self” writ super large. The word’s root is used in the phrase ipse dixit, attributed to Cicero (106-43 BC), who was castigating appeals to personal authority. The phrase means “he said it himself.” The origin of that was the Greek autos ephā, meaning the same thing, used as “authority” by students of Pythagoras. 

philoxenia: The easiest way to parse this word is by comparing it to its opposite, xenophobia. The last is “fear of strangers, foreigners”; the word here is “love of strangers, foreigners.”

soteriology: From Green soteria, “salvation, preservation.” Also used as soteriological.

syzygy: From Greek syzygia meaning “a union of two, a pairing, yoking, conjunction.” Implied is twinning—and in mystical literature referring to a “heavenly twin” corresponding to the earthly soul. This then widens and thins even to include the concept of the guardian angel.

thaumaturgy: Greek thauma for “wonder, miracle” and ergon for “work”. Miracle-working.

theogony: From the Greek theos and agonia, “struggle, suffering.” God’s sufferings.

theosophy: Greek, theos and sophos, “wise, learned.” Knowledge of God.

The curious effect of using principally Greek words in scholarly discussions of mysticism is to cause a veiling the subject behind a kind of sacred language. Putting these concepts in plain English exposes the scholar to dismissal or attack because the presentation would then have a strongly fundamentalist sound.

The First Six Oxen

Reading again last night one of the books of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian founder of Logotherapy,  a psychotherapy centered on Meaning, I was surprised to wake up this morning reminded of the famous ox-herding pictures of Zen Buddhism. That puzzled me for a while until the association began to make sense. On that in a moment.

The ten ox-herding pictures are an important part of Zen teaching, almost unavoidable for anyone who looks into the subject. They represent the soul’s development in stages, in which the ox represents the quest itself—but only for a while. The pictures we now have came from a Chinese artist, Kakuan Shien; he lived in the twelfth century and himself copied some even earlier depictions. What the ox actually represents is not defined in the original verses that accompany the images. Perhaps it is the quest itself, becoming more and more dominant. I provide this link to a site where the images are shown with the traditional verses beneath. The essence is that the ox must be found, caught, tamed, and finally ridden—and after that it is forgotten but—and it is an important but—the final source (of something) is ultimately reached. After that, in the last image, the disciple once more returns to society. The eighth picture, when both the ox and the self have been transcended, is blank.

Now for my association. I am a great admirer of Frankl’s psychotherapy. It is the only one that encompasses the whole human being, including the soul, the human being’s transcending core. But Frankl (1905-1997) was a transitional figure. Freudian and Adlerian analysis were dominant as he forged his own views. The Freudian is based on the pleasure principle, the Adlerian on the will to power or status. They are lower drives which, when frustrated, can produce psychiatric problems. Frankl sternly critiqued both. His own view was that the deepest human drive is to discover meaning. But in the process of ministering to the human need for the transcending, a border, you might say, must be crossed—between the physical, where medicine mostly operates, and the spiritual, where the cry for meaning arises. And Frankl had to stand astride that divide. He wished to help his patients but could not enter the religious ranges that open up as soon as Meaning is written with a leading cap.

Therefore, in light of Kakuan’s ten ox-herding pictures, Frankl could only deal with the first six—wherein the patient is searching, first without knowing much but in agitation, then by following tracks, then sighting the ox, and so on. But Frankl had to stay with the ox until the patient could ride it. He could not go beyond that stage. Whatever follows then is up to the patient, helped by religious guides. Therefore Frankl’s own series ends a little prematurely—and reading his book, his hesitation to go on had reached me consciously. And then, while sleeping, my hidden self produced the images that explained my sense of unease. There are ranges where the MD can no longer help you.

The Pressure of Time

Our relationships with time are a good indicator that we are creatures of eternity. We don’t like to be governed by time. “Plenty of time,” has a reassuring sound, so does “No hurry.” The person who is “never in a hurry but always on time” seems like a paragon. We resist deadlines, hate waiting in lines. When we want it, we want it now. When in pain, we want it to stop instantly.

The pressure of time has everything to do with bodies. Resisting the pressure is functionally identical with resisting our urges. Doing so we rise above them—and outside of time. As always, in such matters, obeying the pressure in order to help others appears to be the exception to the rule. When someone is hurt, when the house catches fire—the sirens will sound. But helping others, and in quicktime, is also to transcend time. It demands that we put aside our narrower aims for a higher one.

Here also we find the logic for the Catholic concept of the mortification of the flesh. Modernity views that sort of thing with revulsion and contempt—in part because over-zealous and excessive practices in the past have left lurid images. To be sure. It’s possible to overdo everything, even the good and needful. Nevertheless, when we look at any kind of spiritual endeavor, we shall discover in it an effort to transcend the material realm; it is nearest to us in our bodies.

We have a wonderful little Sunbeam water heater—obtained because the %@#$ microwave oven took ever so long to heat a cup’s worth of water. Our Sunbeam produces a cupful of boiling water in about a minute and fifteen seconds. My days start by using it. And, ridiculous as this may sound, that minute causes me daily aggravation. Why? Well, the freeze-dried Taster’s Choice is in the cup with cream and sweetener in much less than that minute, and then I have to endure the agony of waiting!! Therefore, daily, I engage in resisting time. Plenty more opportunities, every day, to practice virtue. Almost anything at all gives me opportunities. I don’t need a pole to stand and live on—nor lashes on my naked back with leather thongs. Time itself provides unending stimulus to fight its downward pull.

Managing Dreams

I went to sleep last night giving myself a strong instruction: None of those horrid waking dreams, please! Such dreams are always about “going home,” but I’m usually lost in an urban landscape, and the landscape always gets ever more horrid. Then, as bad conditions escalate, I wake up in an effort to get away. The process is more fully described here.

Well, during the night that followed I had only one waking dream. In it I was at home and heard the doorbell ring. It had a single chime, meaning the back door—where craftsmen usually ring the bell—rather than multiple chimes, meaning the front door. Then I had the image of a huge yellow, big-wheeled shovel on the driveway. This woke me up.

Evidently “myself” had gotten the message—and when the time had come for me to wake up, it woke me up without the help of horror stories. You might say. Having such a shovel put to work in my yard would, of course, be a bit of a tale of woe!

Weak, Paradoxical Terminology

When we try to describe transcending experiences, we use words rooted in matter. Such experiences have the character of invisibility, intangibility—to others. We then insist that what we experienced was real, using a word that comes from the Latin res, meaning “thing” or “matter.” But, of course, what we assert, using that word, is the thingishness of something that isn’t—a thing.

Personal experiences are labeled subjective, a word that has a strong tinge of unreality—because experiences cannot be shared. But when we insist that, to the contrary, our experiences are objectively real, we are using the Latin for something “tangible,” placed right in front of us, visible, graspable. But others can neither see nor grasp these experiences.

In German reality is Wirklichkeit, derived from the verb wirken, “to effect, to act,” hence in English “actuality.” Now that is better than “reality” because it is more descriptive of what we experience, which is a kind of power. Is energy a thing? Or is, rather, matter a kind of solidified energy?

These thoughts arose when, greatly amusing me with its truth, I read a post by The Zenist last Thursday (link) in which he suggests that first-person (“subjective”) experiences may be defined as paranormal—because “the dictionary essentially said paranormal was beyond the range of science and recognizable phenomena.” Right on. My own view has long been that life itself, never mind Mind, is the radical discontinuity in reality. (I can’t get along without that word.)

Paradox also arises because the closest we can actually get to the real Real is by examining our own experience of being aware of being—but that is subjective and therefore to be dismissed. The objective manifestations of our selves are bodies that we’ll leave behind. And rooted here are some Sufi teachings suggesting that, in this realm, we’re upside down. We think that res makes Mind whereas, in actuality, Mind makes res. Turning things right side up, we are prior to things and superior to them. Therefore if we want to use words perversely to mean their exact opposites, that’s Okay. We are the boss.

Precision and Pattern

The philosophical and the scientific ways of looking at the world seem closely related. Both aim at precision. The philosophical aims at precision in the management of concepts, the scientific at precision in measuring phenomena. There are problems in both encampments. Concepts are damnably fluid and heavily dependent on the cultural atmospherics present where they arise and, for a while, abide. Nature is very coy and hides herself from measurement at the extremes—yet it is at the extremes where the doubts are: quantum physics and astronomy.

By contrast the poetic way of perceiving reality seeks meaning in patterns. Its operant faculty is intuition and imagination. In all three of these categories, needless to say, intellect, imagination, and intuition are at work, and if one of these faculties is weak, the results are merely so-so. But there is what might be viewed as a temperamental difference or leaning involved; some people are comfortable with precision, others with a much fuzzier gnosis. The great merit of the poetic view is that it produces a sense of certainty—its chief drawback that the poet can’t turn his insights into dogma or into technology; no money in it, you might say. The reason is that the poet is denied precision. The philosopher cannot reach closure; he or she might stare at the inaccessible noumenon, as Kant did—but the poet is right at home with Noumy. The scientist is denied meaning, but in seeking the mechanics of reality, his horizons keep expanding just like the universe is supposed to do; back to the drawing board is a recurring theme.

Borrowing brings happiness to all. Borrow a little science to enlarge the patterns, a little poetry to admire the shifting phenomena of nature, a little science to bolster concepts, a few eternal ideas to give them radiance.

Dreaming Unemployment

A harrowing dream reminded me how difficult detachment  really is if something harsh disturbs our life—like unemployment. In my dream I had been laid off from a huge corporation. My dream-self felt middle-aged and therefore  I was without hope of ever getting a job again. As the dream was ending, I was heading home, dreading to have to share the news—yet the sky was sunny and great office towers glittered in the distance. My dream memory then produced my actual age—an age when almost no one works any more. That woke me up—but the residual feelings were still unpleasantly there.

Was my ill-named Unconscious compensating for my frequently repeated praises of “detachment” as a kind of cure-all? The dream seemed to say: “Wake up already! Have a taste of the real thing!” In dreams the conscious mind is absent; the emotions have free reign. Yes. I tend to understate the difficulties when the challenges are harsh. When we are young detachment takes a much more active form: Grin and bear it, Stiff upper lip, When things get tough the tough get going. Yes. Detachment is too technical a word. Mindfulness is better. Getting hold of one’s emotions is what’s indicated. While in this valley we can’t really detach completely. Never mind sovereignty. Can’t have it here. Other people are involved, the good of the community. What we can do is act responsibly—while practicing stoicism and holding fast to our faith in the reality beyond us, even when it shows no sign of presence. What we often need is prayer—and faith that it will all work out.

I hope I got the message. I don’t want that dream recurring. I’d better face the bitter cold out there, the treacherously slippery sidewalks, and go out on a long walk, not the wimpy short one. Then next time I might dream of Florida in February, the highlight of our 2012.

Ivory Coast

Horrid intrusions of the random serve as reminders of our condition in this pocket of existence. Some sixty people, many of them young, were crushed to death in a stampede in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, as a fireworks event ended and people were heading home through narrow streets. Life is about meaning, but such events are a tremendous challenge to that intuitively felt conviction. It reminds me that, here, we’re not at home. We may be here for a purpose, but that that purpose is beyond the three dimensions moving through time. The sixty or sixty-one dead (the final number has not yet emerged), may be home now, or maybe not. Some may be born again; others have passed on.

The very setting and nature of this event—where we find it difficult to console ourselves by blaming somebody, where the victims were clearly innocent, just attending a festive event—underlines the precarious nature of our reality. It is illogical to assume that it was arranged, somehow, by divine sanction from above. At the human level, the event was massively policed; the disaster took place as the authorities relaxed; the actual triggering cause of it will probably never be discovered: just someone panicking.

But what needs remembering is that those sixty or more people—they are still with us, if invisibly. Their journey in this dimension may be over or may resume. What this realm of ours actually is, how it relates to the whole, that remains a subject of contemplation. But for the stout of heart such events serve as a corrective to the sleep that usually holds us. The lamps must be kept lit, the eyes must be kept open, even as we contemplate souls leaping out of crushed bodies somewhere in Africa. Our prayers go out to those they’ve left behind.