Inquiring Deeply Newsletters

Inquiring Deeply About Inquiring Deeply

Someone asked me recently to explain what INQUIRING DEEPLY was and how I came to be interested in it.   Answering these questions, I was able to see the long arc of the path of awareness practice I have been following since I was a young child.

Inquiry in spiritual practice is the process of asking ourselves deep questions about the nature of our existence:  questions such as “WHO AM I?”  or “WHAT IS REAL?”    In contrast with spiritual inquiry,  INQUIRING DEEPLY begins with exploring  the painful psychological dramas and stories in the psychological world of lived experience.  Its fundamental assumption is that wisdom is inherent in whatever is arising, dual and non-dual experience alike [i], and that we can open to that wisdom through investigation and inquiry.

The stories that we tell— about ourselves, about others, and about what we consider to be real— comprise the system of meaning in which we live.  In my view, not only are these stories not “beside the point”, as Buddhist teachings often suggest, they are vital to self-understanding.  As writer David Loy puts it, our world is made of stories.[ii]

INQUIRING DEEPLY came about in me in response to my efforts to create a conceptual “home” which would honor both my psychodynamic and spiritual interests.  Self-reflective and philosophical by nature, I have “inquired deeply” as the natural expression of my being throughout my lifetime.   The long version of my personal story about INQUIRING DEEPLY need not be repeated here, except to quote my own punchline, which was, “inquiring deeply is me.”  (The joke, in case it is not obvious, is that seeing through identification with “me” is the entire point of inquiry practice!)

The autobiographical flavor of INQUIRING DEEPLY is conveyed by the following early memories that come to mind:

• I am about two years old and I am standing in the sunshine, aware for the first time I can remember that I am aware. I think of this moment as my birth into self-reflective awareness.  (A photograph taken of me in that moment has always been in my possession, so perhaps that image is what framed the significance of that particular moment.)
• I am sitting on the sandy bottom of a beautiful brook in Connecticut, with my head beneath the surface of the water. I am three years old.  I have a stone in each hand and I am clinking them together, deeply fascinated by the way the sound reverberates in my ears.  I am in a state of consciousness in which there seems to be little need to breathe.
• I am sitting on the bed in the bedroom of my childhood, looking out the window. There is a diamond-shaped metal grating/ guardrail on the window and as I gaze out with soft focus, the diamond pattern telescopes out and expands into a deep three-dimensional space.  The experience is compelling.  I repeat it often.
• Not yet five years old, I wonder often where I was before I was born.

When I told these experiences to a meditation teacher many years later, he told me that I had been a Zen child!   Be that as it may, these memories are emblematic of many similar experiences which informed my life and set me on the path of awareness practice.   What I yearned for was the expansive freedom that seemed inherent in these altered states of consciousness.

Apart from its autobiographical roots, what seems most important to say about the origin of INQUIRING DEEPLY is that it emerged in me.   I often liken inquiry to an extended ‘conversation’ that takes place both within myself and in the external world simultaneously.   And, just as we may often have no idea what we will say until we open our mouths to say it, it often seemed to me that insights emerged unbidden— arising in response to unseen forces or through synchronous events.  When this happens, it feels to me as though life is alive and responsive to my questions, and that answers are called forth by my intention to find them.

The cartoon in the header, originally entitled “The Human Condition”,  is a good example of an emergent answer.  It was passed along to me by a friend at a time when I had hit an impasse in a paper I was writing about spiritual seeking.  For my purposes at that time I changed the caption to “to free the spirit from its cell.” [iii]  The cartoon expressed better than words what I had been struggling to say:  (1) our spiritual predicament is that we fail to recognize that the freedom we seek is already present;  and (2) the realization we seek is often impeded by our own limiting assumptions, views, and beliefs.

Contemplating the picture of the bird in its cage while writing these words,  it occurred to me to inquire deeply: “what have  I  held onto that has kept me trapped in ordinary states of consciousness?”

The first answer that occurred to me was how hard I have tended to work at my spiritual practice.     My character is such that I hold tight to my need to know!  Given the way my mind is organized around knowing, wise effort—not too tight, not too loose— has been challenging for me.

Next, I saw that I had regarded “ordinary states of consciousness” as a booby  prize in meditation practice.  I was always striving to recreate the expansive experiences I had heard about or read about in spiritual literature and which had spontaneously occurred when I was a child.  This pursuit of peak experiences was in the way of my simply being with things as they actually were.

On yet another level, I held to the belief that in order to attain “higher states” I needed to change or fix something about my mind and that this fix involved more thinking and/or doing.  Identifying with being the Do-er was definitely not helpful to my spiritual quest!

Eventually, I came to relinquish looking for transcendence in meditation in favor of a simple preference to relax/receive/ and allow whatever was unfolding in my experience.    As I meditated in this receptive way, I found my awareness increasingly drawn into a state of deep inner silence, and I saw for myself that access to inner freedom was based in this embodied experience of relaxation and letting go.    I learned to put my attention on the background field of awareness from which experience continually arises and disappears.

I have called INQUIRING DEEPLY the path of  “practicing with problems” because I found that my problems often seemed to be the leading edge of change in my life.  Analogous to the role of pain in the body, problems always seemed to point me toward I most needed to see. [iv]  For example, during the time that I was writing my 2023 book about problems [v]  I went through a period of very familiar agita that often shows up when I am writing.  The agita, itself, has long lived in my mind as a multifaceted “problem”.   It is a rather uncomfortable experience which “I do not prefer”, to borrow an understated phrase from a good friend of mine.  In the midst of inquiring deeply about it, an important  “aha moment” occurred:  I recognized that the problem was the problem!

I came to regard this insight as an inquiry unto itself;  (or, as a Zen practitioner might say, as a koan.)   There is no such “thing” as a problem!   “Problem” is a label or a concept we put on something we would rather not have to deal with;  something that we would prefer to make disappear.  But once you recognize that a “problem” doesn’t connote that something is wrong, the entire situation is poised to turn upside down.  Now, “problem” means, instead, something needs attention;  or something needs to be better understood.   It is a process: “probleming”.

What most of us tend to do when encountering a problem is to try to figure out what caused it and what to do about it or how to make it go away.   Instead, Inquiring Deeply changes problems into valuable (and ineluctable) opportunities for awareness practice.  And, in that space of deep inner listening, insight and breakthrough often emerge.

Coming full circle now,  INQUIRING DEEPLY unfolded organically in my life as a function of many moments of insight that came about as I followed along in the slipstream of my awareness and curiosity about problems.  I came to believe that there is a subjective intelligence in life that I can access by dropping down into experience and allowing it to reveal itself.   Inquiring Deeply creates a kind of radical openness in which we may be able to see where we have shut down, where we need to wake up, and where we need to grow—and, in special moments, it may free our spirit from its cell.

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[i]  “Dual experience” refers to the ordinary perception of reality as consisting of subjects and objects, whereas  “non-dual experience” is the perception of a unified reality where there is no separation between self and other, essentially experiencing everything as interconnected and one whole.

[ii] Loy, David (2010)   The World Is Made of Stories.  Wisdom Publications, Somerville, MA.

[iii] I borrowed this phrase from a paper written by the well known psychoanalyst, Bernard Brandschaft (2010). In Brandschaft, B. (2010)  Towards an emancipatory psychoanalysis:  Brandschaft’s intersubjective  vision.  Routledge Press, New York.

[iv]   Schuman, M. (2023)   )  Inquiring Deeply:  Problems as a Path to Awareness.    Inquiring Deeply Press, Santa Barbara, CA.

 

Some Reflections on Cultivating Subjectivity

 

INTRODUCTION

As readers of this Newsletter likely know,  I have spent a good part of both my personal and professional life inquiring deeply about subjectivity and the experience of self.    My inquiry has been grounded both in the Buddhist meditation and psychoanalysis.    In my 2017 text, I wrote about these subjects in depth in an academic vein.  But just recently,  I have been reflecting deeply about my personal views about the cultivation of subjectivity. I will by-pass complex definitions here in favor of the simple idea of subjectivity as the experience of ourselves as a conscious thinker and feeler.

From a Buddhist perspective, the goal for subjective development is centered around calmness, stability, and clarity of mind, and the method prescribed for cultivating those qualities is meditation.   In different traditions of practice, meditation may be focused and concentrative, open and contemplative, or heart-centered and compassionate.  Regardless of the emphasis in a particular practice, Buddhism teaches that through mindful observation of sensations, thoughts, and emotions,  a deeper and more precise awareness of mind and body is cultivated,  allowing practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of existence.

But although I have practiced Buddhist meditation for many years,  my comments here are not about Buddhist practice per se but rather about how meditation has shaped my way of being with my ordinary, everyday mind.  I am not interested here in liberated, enlightened, or transcendent subjectivity, nor in particular qualities such as equanimity and compassion which are cultivated on the Buddha’s eightfold noble path.  Rather, my focus here is on how to cultivate growth, authenticity and vitality.   My subjective “goal” is to become more and more comfortable living in my own skin, and everything that entails, especially the quality of my connections with others.

What seems evident to me is that when we spend dedicated time connecting with and observing the inner world of our experience (in meditation, psychotherapy, or in whatever way), subjectivity begins to evolve and change as a function of the attention that we bring to it.  This process of connecting with our inner world has been called “minding the mind”. [i]

SUBJECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND MINDING THE MIND

For me, “minding the mind” means simply paying attention to the inner world of thoughts and feelings.   It includes conscious attention to the entire range of subjective experience:  body, heart, and mind (of course), but not limited to the present moment.  In short, minding the mind is best described as self-reflective awareness practice.  It is deliberately inclusive of the multiple layers of narrative meaning in which our awareness is embedded.

Analogous to the concept of emotional intelligence as the ability to understand, use, and manage our emotions in positive ways, people vary in their subjective intelligence about the inner world of thoughts and feelings.  Some people are by nature more psychologically minded, more self-reflective, and more alert to nuances in subjective meanings than others tend to be.  Although self-reflective awareness is often considered to be an aspect of emotional intelligence, it seems to me that subjective intelligence—how we think about and reflect on our own mental processes— should be considered a category unto itself.  It includes what in psychology is called  “mentalization”: our ability to understand how people behave based our interpretation of their probable feelings, beliefs, needs, and goals.

Everyone’s subjective intelligence is unique.  In my own inquiry about “subjective intelligence”,  what has had the greatest impact on me has been the deep felt sense of truth in the recognition that subjectivity is intelligent.  Minding the mind cultivates intuitive wisdom.

The concept and practice for which I coined the term “Inquiring Deeply” emerged from subjective intelligence.  Although the underlying ideas are by no means original to me, what I discovered organically over time was that there was power in my self-reflective awareness, and that this power was amplified in deep conversation with others.   (The interested reader is referred to my 2023 book Inquiring Deeply:  Problems as a Path to Awareness.[ii])

WHAT ARE YOU CULTIVATING?

At any given moment, we are always “practicing something”.    [Whatever we are doing, that is what we are practicing.]   Some of what we are practicing can be readily observed with self-reflection.   Other aspects of ourselves have unconscious roots that make them opaque or even impossible to see.

In addition, many of us also have some idea about what aspect of our subjectivity might usefully be improved.  In this regard, it can be helpful to inquire deeply both about what we wish to cultivate and about what is in the way.

To illustrate with a simple example from my own experience,  quite often I find myself unwittingly practicing being in a hurry.  It is abundantly clear to me that I would benefit from slow downing.  And yet, the habit of hurrying is deeply ingrained (and characterological!)   I recognize that staying busy is a psychological defense that keeps me from feeling what is underneath.  And so, slowly down has been a lifelong and ongoing project.  Inquiring more deeply, my underlying aspiration is to be able to relax and enjoy greater peace of mind.

 LIFE HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN

We can best access subjective intelligence by dropping into experience and allowing it to reveal itself.  A direction or instruction I often give myself is to receive experience;  to soften, relax and allow.

My embodied experience of Receiving sometimes takes the form of a kinesthetic experience of flowing or gliding.  In my deepest moments, I have a sense of surrender into this somatic experience or sometimes even a sense of dissolving at my body boundaries altogether.   To “go with the flow” means literally to aspire to be like water— to flow in and around the events of life.  In this way, we align ourselves with the organic intelligence of life.

AMOR FATI

An additional dimension of subjective intelligence that interests me greatly is the process of Becoming.   Self-reflection inevitably engages our thoughts and feelings about who we are and who we wish to become.  It can be skillful to ponder and/or envision that which we wish to make real. Becoming is aided and abetted by awareness and guided by conceptual understanding.

The stoic philosophers advocated an attitude of amor fati, a latin phrase that translates to “love of one’s fate”.  Amor fati is the attitude of accepting and embracing everything that happens in life, including suffering and loss, as good or at least necessary. (It also entails the understanding that change is a natural part of the universe, and that without it, we wouldn’t exist).

CONCLUSION

 As I have written elsewhere, there is wisdom in problems and opportunities for growth contained within them. Problems are the leading edge or horizon of change in our lives. They call our attention to what we most need to see.  Like an extended conversation that takes place both within ourselves and in the external world simultaneously, deep inquiry about problems shows us where we have shut down, where we need to wake up, and where we need to grow.  By following the natural path provided by what surfaces in our lives, our problems, struggles, and unanswered questions become catalysts for the development of wisdom.

As a colleague pointed out to me, structures of self are organized both to communicate with others and, via self-reflection, to communicate with itself towards its own greater good. [iii]  In other words, the self is built to know itself.  We need only follow along in the slipstream of awareness, paying attention to the inner guidance provided by subjective intelligence.

 

ENDNOTES:

[i] Buksbazen, J.  (2006).    Personal communication.

[ii] Schuman, M. (2023)  Inquiring Deeply:  Problems As A Path To Awareness.    Inquiring Deeply Press.

[iii] Sherman, Gary (2023)   Personal communication

 

 

Some Reflections on Drumming as Awareness Practice

I have been actively involved with studying rhythm since my late twenties.  For most of that time,  drumming was one of my chief recreational passions in life:  a way I enjoyed relating to music and  a very pleasurable way to interact with others.  In hindsight, I can see that there has actually been much more to it than that.  Drumming, for me,  has been a form of awareness practice.

I can best convey the quality of my relationship with drumming by describing my first experience; an astonishing event that I think of as a kind of “initiation”.   I had gone to a party where, as it happened,  there was a woman drumming to some R & B music.  I was totally transfixed by both the woman and by what she was doing.   To begin with, she looked like a taller, more lithe version of me: similar hair and deep set eyes.  The fluid beauty of her hands dancing back and forth on the drums was mesmerizing to watch.

She must have noticed the intensity of my attention, I suppose, because she offered the drums to me.  Shy though I was, the invitation was irresistible.  What happened next knocked my socks off!   After striking a few tentative beats on the skins, the next thing I knew my hands were fluidly executing a fairly complex rhythm. Looking down at my hands,  my amazement took the form of a question:  who is doing this?  I can vividly remember the feeling of it even now.

In many indigenous cultures, it is believed that rhythm is a language that connects people to the spirit world, a language which can reveal deep resources of ancient wisdom.  Fascinating though I found this idea to be,  I sought a less spiritual, more agnostic way to understand what had occurred.  I settled on the idea of epiphany:  an illuminating discovery that revealed a dimension of reality which theretofore had been totally unknown to me.  Regardless,  after that first experience I was hooked on drumming,   I purchased conga drums and spent many thousands of hours over the next decades learning to play them;  hundreds of hours lost in the ecstasy of rhythm.

There was a subjective magic in this feeling that the music was playing me.  For one thing, it was the very first time I had ever experienced my sense of agency turning inside out in this way.   I felt myself to be both playing the drums and yet doing nothing other than receiving what was arising. It reminded me of the artist M. C. Escher’s depiction of two hands each engaged in drawing the other with a pencil.   “Channeling music” seemed a good description.

This experience subsequently generalized to other situations. While meditating on the breath, for example, there often came a moment when I began to feel that the breath was breathing me.   For me, this shift in consciousness was a hallmark of entering a flow state [i] : a state in which action and awareness somehow synch to create an effortless momentum— what is colloquially termed  “being in the zone”.  Such states are marked by a subjective experience of being deeply focused and absorbed.  When rhythmic flow is happening, it engendered (at least in me) a kind of ecstatic state in which ordinary boundaries of self-experience were transcended.

The concentration required to execute patterns of rhythm is one of the essential meditative elements of drumming.   Another has to do with the fact that rhythmic grooves are of the nature to fall apart, and so one must continually re-create the groove first by listening deeply and then by letting go into the music.  This, too, is akin to what happens during meditation.

When I was first studying percussion,  I combed the scientific literature in search of an understanding of the neurobiology of this experience.  I learned that, in a process known as neural entrainment, brainwaves (large-scale electrical oscillations in the brain) will naturally synchronize to the rhythm of periodic external stimuli, such as flickering lights, speech, music, or tactile stimuli. Neural entrainment underpins sensorimotor synchronization to dynamic rhythmic stimuli.

It seems likely that synchronized neural entrainment also occurs when a rhythmic ensemble of drummers play together.  My speculation is that there are two ways that this occurs:  first, as each drummer engages with the rhythm.  And second, through the interaction between players, as their mirror neuron systems perceive and interact with one another.  In other words, there is interpersonal rhythmic entrainment in the group.  Regardless, something of this nature underlies ancient and widespread shamanistic practices  in which ecstatic dance and rhythmic drumming are used to alter consciousness and create/ entrain harmonic resonance among the members of the tribal community.

It has been claimed that different rhythms entrain the brain differently dependent on the frequency (tempo) of the dominant beat.  For example, rhythms in the 4 to 7 hz range are said to entrain the brain into theta, rhythms in the range of 8-12 hz entrain alpha waves, etc. The musical complexity of the rhythmic pattern also has an important influence on how the brain responds.  [ii]  [Independent of the influence of rhythmic entrainment,  it has been shown that the experience of flow is correlated with a combination of increased theta waves in the frontal cortex along with moderate frontocentral alpha rhythm.[iii] ]

Be that as it may, what stands out for me is the idea that drumming, like meditation generally, is a form of awareness practice based on the systematic focus of attention. Concentration and deep listening are both required; attention needs to focus both on foreground (the pattern which the drummer is playing) and on surround (the rhythmic context into which the focal pattern needs to fit).  The altered state of consciousness that sometimes occurred for me while I was drumming signalled to me that I was at the liminal threshold where flow was arising in my experience.  It was a subjective cue to surrender to the rhythm; to let go.  And, it reminded me that the vitality of rhythm could only be accessed by attending directly to experience as it was happening.

In short, drumming taught me that rhythm can be a portal into another dimension of reality and that letting go/flow is just a shift of consciousness away.

The emergence of rhythm within a confluence of percussive voices may be likened to the idea that the “music of the mind”  is an emergent pattern which arises within a neural network.   As Buddhist scholar Andrew Olendzki explains [iv], “mind” is not a thing but rather a set of events that occur within the neural network.  Mind arises from an interdependent confluence of factors which repeatedly and reliably unfold despite the fact that “the mind” doesn’t actually exist. (In other words, mind arises co-dependently.)   Similarly, though the neurons of the brain may be the stage upon which the human drama [rhythm] unfolds, it is the pattern of their firing, changing millisecond by millisecond, that brings the mind [rhythm] to life.

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[i] Csikszentmihalyi, M.   (2008)   Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.   Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

 

[ii]  Although I could not find confirmatory empirical data, novel sound healing treatments based on rhythmic entrainment are being used to repattern neurological function as a means of effecting behavioral and cognitive change. For example,  Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention™ (REI) is an auditory brain stimulation program that uses musical rhythm to stimulate and re-pattern neurological function. REI is said to facilitate long-term behavioral and cognitive improvement in individuals with neurological disorders. https://www.stronginstitute.com/

[iii]  Katahira, K. et.al. (2018) EEG Correlates of the Flow State: A Combination of Increased Frontal Theta and Moderate Frontocentral Alpha Rhythm in the Mental Arithmetic Task.  Front Psychol. 9: 300.

[iv] Olendzki, A. (2015) The Music of the Mind:  Examining the mind’s irreducibility.  Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2015.

 

Photo credit, Luz Mendoza, UNSPLASH.

Sleepwalking To Extinction?

                     "Hope is not an appetite for this or that concocted future 
                      It is the present seeking itself, the present-- 
                      unlearning the past, agnostic of the future-- 
                      breathing, in its chains, like the sea.” 
                                             ...Richard Schiffman

I know I am not alone in feeling that the future of our world looks bleak,  and I have been pondering what view of the circumstances might be most helpful and “right.”

Needless to say, there is much which is abhorrent, distressing, and nerve-wracking in current events.   Our dying planet, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine,  the rise of authoritarianism and the assault on democracy, the breakdown of social norms and the rise of hate crimes, and the prevalence of Orwellian doublespeak are at the top of my personal list.

Adding to the horror of it all,  the wide arc of human history reveals that these kinds of events are normative rather than aberrational.  War is ubiquitous. Genocide is a uniquely human and not infrequent occurrence.  Social inequity, oppression, and the corrupt exercise of power are pervasive. Civilizations rise and fall.

It seems oddly comforting to me to recognize that the proliferating miseries in present day reality reflect basic aspects of human nature (albeit not the entirety of human nature!). In the context that there have been five major extinctions in the history of life on earth, it is somehow easier to accept that it is in the nature of things to fall apart.  Apparently, where we find ourselves is nothing less the human predicament.

The Buddha had deep insight into the flaws that beset human beings.  He identified the primary roots of human difficulties as our tendencies toward hatred, greed and delusion (the “three poisons”).  Even a moment’s reflection while watching the evening news will reveal that the entire gamut of ills in today’s world can be directly traced to one or more of these basic causes. Beyond these motivations, collective human behavior calls to mind the instinctual behavior of lemmings [i], blindly following the crowd of its fellow creatures as they careen off a cliff.

For many complex reasons, it is challenging for human beings to find rational and coordinated responses in the face of existential threats.   As a result, as Deepak Chopra puts it, humanity seems to be sleepwalking to extinction. (And analogously, as Liz Cheney says in her recent book,  America seems to be sleepwalking to dictatorship).

Though undoubtedly there are people who may indeed be sleepwalking— in denial or otherwise blind to the gravity of the situations we are facing— a good many others (myself included) are not oblivious but rather stymied by the complexity of the problems.  In my psychotherapy practice, many people report that current events are having an adverse impact on their mental health. There doesn’t seem to be anything to be done to ameliorate their angst.   So where to go from here?  What is a wise view?  What is humanity’s best hope?

In what follows, I offer a few of my reflections.

Wisdom premise #1:   Serenity Prayer

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

the courage to change the things I can, 

and the wisdom to know the difference.”

                    …..Reinhold Niebuhr

           

The causes and conditions of the predicaments identified in the opening section of this Newsletter are complex.  I think the first step in addressing what’s so is being able to discern what we can change and what we cannot.

My contemplation starts from a place of recognition that none of us has the power to change the world, much less the power to save it.    Truth be told, there is no “the world”!    Each of us lives in a somewhat different one.   The only power we have is our power within our own sphere of influence; within our own world of lived experience.   What will unfold in the future depends upon how we relate to what is happening now and to the creative intelligence we bring to our experience.

In my inquiry around The Serenity Prayer,  I have found it valuable to reflect on what is personally most difficult for me to accept, what possible outcomes I find most frightening.   Although there are endless variations to the nightmare scenarios people can and do imagine, the potential to experience  “hell realms” seems to be programmed into the human psyche.

Although we may not be able to change the outcome, what we can take responsibility for is how we relate to what is happening.   We can focus on our subjective reality and endeavor to be the change we want to see in the world.  We can look for ways to lean more heavily into what we can change.   We can cultivate a ground of being of acceptance, equanimity and compassion.

Wisdom premise #2:  It is whatever you happen to think it is.

This wisdom premise is a bumper sticker version of what the Buddha taught:  mind is the forerunner of all things.

Realities are not independent of our thoughts; they are the outcomes of them.

I hold to the view that there is transformational power in what we believe. I do not mean this in the magical sense of the Peter Pan story, in which Tinkerbell could be kept alive through sincere belief and the clapping of hands.  Rather, beliefs are important in part because they are a foundation upon which our life experience is constructed. Our beliefs define for us what sort of a universe we live in; what makes sense, or doesn’t;  where meaning is to be found.

Wisdom Premise #3: “We do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

As I ponder our current day predicaments, my thoughts center around the importance of negativity, both conscious and unconscious, and the need to transform it.  As a psychologist, I have had abundant opportunities to see how the world of lived human experience is shaped by our tendencies, individually and collectively, to project and/or act out our pain.  This is perhaps most abundantly clear in the example of war, in which disowned aspects of ourselves get assigned to external enemies:  “others” whom we then attempt to vanquish.  This is the general blueprint for human life:  truly a theater of the mind.  For this reason, it is essential to be as aware as possible of the psychological “shadow” of what is unconscious in us and how it gets expressed. Transforming negativity wherever we can is a meaningful action each of us can aspire to.

Wisdom Premise #4:  It hasn’t happened yet.

When I feel depressed about the news I hear on TV or on-line, I try to remind myself (and others) that however bleak things may look – however bleak things may be— this is not “the way it turned out” but rather a perception at a particular point in time and from a particular point of view.

For me, personally, responding to the complex predicaments in our world comes down to finding a way to make hope real for myself. This involves the search to find and articulate an optimistic point of view that acknowledges the truth of what is without imposing prematurely pessimistic conclusions.

I am heartened by the words of the poet Vaclev Havel, who said that “hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

[i] Serge Prengel https://activepause.com/mindful-lemming/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On The Felt Sense of Emergent Meaning

“Reality lies at the frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.” 

….. David Whyte

PREAMBLE/ CONTEXT:

A friend recently gifted me with a 2023 book written by psychotherapist and meditation teacher Gary Sherman:  Tales From A Committed Visitor:  Living and Learning As Spirit In Form.   Inner Harmonics Press, Sebastopol, CA.   (Available on Amazon).

The book stirred strong waves of interest and excitement within me and generated an unusually strong impulse to write about my experience of reading the book.  Adding to the impact, my writing creatively unfolded in a way which itself surprised me.   It took shape as a kind of open-letter to the book’s author (whom I have never met).  The letter follows below.

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Dear Gary Sherman,

Your recent book Tales From A Committed Visitor struck a deep chord in me.  The resonance I felt was so strong that I read through the book a second time to take notes.

Apart from being amused at seeing myself in student mode, what felt very important in my reading of your book was the felt sense that your words evoked in me.  As I searched for language which might convey this felt sense, punctuation seemed the best way to express what I was feeling:    “ !! ” .   There was a sense of great interest and excitement.  In moments my skin tingled with goosebumps.

Maybe I could say it this way:  “ !! ” expresses the felt sense of new meaning emerging from someplace deep within me.

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Perhaps I should acknowledge here that  “ !! ” is a familiar subjective experience for me.   I think generally it reflects a feeling that I am in proximity to something which feels both True and important (somewhere in the neighborhood of epiphany).    In “ !! ” I sometimes feel that I now Know something more deeply than ever before; or, I have the sense of discovering something previously unknown.

As you describe in your book, there can be transformative power in the recognition of new meanings.   The one idea in Tales  From A Committed Visitor that had the most important meaning for me – the strongest experience of “ !! ” – was the following:

“The inside of you waits to be explored. It is open and accessible to direct perception. This is where you will find what you were looking for, the completion of the self you know.“

This, I now recognize, has always been the core quest at the heart of my spiritual practice.

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In your book, you describe how the lived world of experience is created from constituent elements:  bodily sensation, words, pictures, and attention.   You also describe at length a process which you call the “everyday magic of speaking.”  “Speaking into being” is a wonderfully descriptive phrase:  in short, the idea that language is integrally involved in manifestation.

The language we use gives meaning and coherence to our experiences, thereby influencing our perception of reality and the possibilities within it.

For me, there is everyday magic in your book.   Most salient is the impact I feel in naming the longing to connect with deeper layers of myself and the longing for completion.   In addition, Tales From A Committed Visitor reminds me of my lifelong quest to discover the “multidimensional nature of reality”  which you so vividly described in your book.    “ !! ” expresses the power of these longings.

Writing these words, it now dawns on me that the deeply embodied felt sense of  “ !! ” is itself a connection to those deeper layers of myself that I long for–   A small instance, perhaps, of everyday magic in action!

For whatever reason, the way you articulate your own authentically felt Truth resonates deeply within me.   “ !! ” is, perhaps, my felt sense of an emergent integration among many layers of myself;  the coming into being of a new and deepening level self-knowledge.

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As I have contemplated my experience of reading Tales From A Committed Visitor and its impact on me,  I am also struck by your description of the process you call “inspiration”,  which for you manifests as the presence of an unfamiliar voice within yourself.

Quoting here from your book:

“I became aware of receiving knowledge and wisdom within my self.  I received inspirational thought directly into my mind without any prior cognition and into my body without any physical sensory stimulus …These were the portals through which I first became aware of the presence of the unfamiliar voice.”

….

“I started naming for myself where in my self-experience the inspiration would appear”….                               The unfamiliar inner voice announced itself with  “a feeling that appeared out of nowhere.  I would have a thought that inspired a new feeling, or a feeling that generated a new thought.”

The process you call inspiration is one that I too experience – indeed,  am experiencing now—but rather than appearing as an unfamiliar voice in my mind, it tends to come to me in conversation with others or in writing, when many times I find myself articulating ideas which previously I had not known that I thought.

You designate such experiences as “self-expressed inspiration”.   I think of them as channeling wisdom.   Not infrequently, the emergence of channeled wisdom announces itself with a felt sense of “ !! ”.   Having read Tales From A Committed Visitor, I now recognize that in such moments I may actually be opening to the deeper portal that you call “multidimensional inspiration.” 

As you suggest in your book, we prime the conscious mind to receive inspiration by recognizing it, welcoming it, desiring it, and granting it validity through the meaning we assign to it.  As I am thinking of it now,  “ !! ” is an embodied experience of my intention to open myself to deeper levels of multidimensional inspiration.

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Pausing in the process of writing this piece, I take what in Zen might be called a “backward step” in order to see more clearly what else wants to be said.

What strikes me is that, in my experience, channeling wisdom is often paired with experiences of synchronicity, another portal into multidimensional inspiration.  From this angle of view,  it feels significant to me that your book arrived into my reality at the moment that it did, as it seems woven seamlessly together with other current events in my inner life.  From a multidimensional view, messages arrive when we most need to hear them, and in hindsight, it does appear to me that Tales From A Committed Visitor has provided exactly the frame I need for an emergent new view of reality and my place within it.

 

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PS:   Apart from reading Tales From A Committed Visitor, readers of this Newsletter whose may be interested in checking out a forthcoming workshop which will explore the themes in the book and how to work with them.   For further information, contact Dr. Bruce Gibbs, [email protected]

 

 

The Slinky Principle

The cycles of my emotional experience have always reminded me of a slinky:  the coiled spring toy which fascinated me as a child.   Kinetic energy animates a slinky in ways that makes it bounce and jiggle and, more to the point, able to walk itself down stairs.  Each wave of its energy builds up and then catapults the next movement forward.

I am reminded of the changes in my mood that often occur when I engage in Inquiring Deeply about something.  In the first phase of an Inquiry,  a question or issue galvanizes my attention.  As I begin writing, I am often aware of a felt sense of struggle, of something within me that needs to get resolved. Writing is one of the ways that I am able to work out such issues.  Regardless of the particular content, the cycle feels predictable:  The writing moves forward in fits and starts as the energy of the inquiry builds towards a change that, slinky-like,  eventually propels my psyche forward towards clarity and resolution.

This pattern of energy, I have observed, happens with many kinds of problems:  struggle is followed by letting go.   Perhaps this reflects a more general underlying principle of how psyche—how life— is organized:  breakdown is followed by breakthrough.  In bipolar disorder,  depression rebounds into mania.  Death is followed by rebirth.

Many people experience such cycles during critical phases in their lives, often following a traumatic event, loss, or change.   A common example is found in recovery from addiction:  Typically, it is only after a crisis of “hitting bottom” that renewal and growth occurs.  This is the cycle of transformation.

In Jungian theory, such bipolarity is thought to be the dialectical essence of phenomena:  opposites are required for the definition of any entity or process. One end of a continuum helps to define the other.  The dynamic tension of opposites leads to an alternating pattern between progression and regression; in common vernacular, two steps forward are followed by one step back.  Impasse is followed by letting go.

The medieval Sufi mystic Rumi states the basic idea in several lines of poetry: “All action sways between contraction and expansion, both as important as the opening and closing of the wings of a bird in flight”.

Inquiring Deeply About Transformative Conversation

 

Since I wrote The Hunger For Deep Conversation (Inquiring Deeply Newsletter, May, 2022),        I have been paying close attention to which conversations  feel “deep” to me, and why.    What I found was that depth has several different dimensions.   For example, sometimes “deep” connoted a conversation in which I felt safe to be very open and self-revealing; a conversation which felt intensely personal.  At other times, “deep” referred to the emotional resonance I felt with the other.  But the kind of “deep” I am writing about here—the kind of “deep” that I am most hungry for—is deep in the sense of wise or profound, philosophical.   To distinguish this dimension of depth from the others,  I have decided to use the term “transformative conversation”.

I have spent my life seeking out such conversations and have been fortunate to find friends with whom to have them.  In the end, I have come to see that, for me, transformative conversation is a kind of wisdom practice; a relational form of deep inquiry.

 The Relational field [i]

A good place to begin a discussion of transformative conversation is with the concept of the relational field :  the invisible yet palpable field of energy that connects us when we are present with someone.

Depth reflects mutual Presence in the relational field:  the quality of focused, receptive attention we bring to the present moment.  When we slow down and attune to each other in conversation— coming into presence with one another— our mutual presence creates a synergy which amplifies our experience of depth in the relational field.  Through this interpenetrating interpersonal resonance, depth of awareness can be a shared experience.

Depth also reflects the interpersonal chemistry involved in our connections with others.

Such chemistry may be a function of human neurobiology:  whenever we engage intently in seeing and listening to another—eye contact is important in this—there is an inter-brain synchronization that occurs, aligning our somatic and affective states[ii].  In this way, we nonverbally perceive, communicate, and mutually regulate each other’s subjective states. Through this interpenetrating interpersonal resonance, depth of awareness can be shared.

Deep awareness is the foundation of transformative conversation.

Deep Listening

The relational field we experience in any conversational context is a function of the field of our mutual listening.   Similar to meditative listening, the heart of such listening is receptive attention to whatever is arising.  It is enhanced by paying attention to the deep silence which can be found in the subjective background as we interact, sustaining attention to what is emergent.

In addition to this nonverbal awareness,  how we listen to the content of what is spoken also plays a key role in experiencing depth.  Meaning is expressed both in the music and in the words of what is said.

Actually,  deep listening involves paying attention both to what is spoken and to what is not spoken.  We listen to the listening of the other, and we also listen within for our felt sense of the conversational moment[iii].

What I want to emphasize here is that the symbolic meanings conveyed in language are not separate from the entire field of reactivity in the minds of both speaker and listener.   We shape the relational field with our state of mind as well as with the thoughts, imagery, and feelings we bring to the conversation.  Each of us has our own language, our own idiom.  Meanings are created with the word pictures we paint in the relational field of conversation.

Deep listening is the backbone of transformative conversation.

Deep Understanding

Transformative conversation often involves the enactment of self-reflection.  In speaking our thoughts out loud— held in the deep listening of the other— we can discover what we may not have known we thought; what has been “pre-reflectively unconscious”.    And– in feeling deeply seen and heard, deeply received and understood— we can expand upon our self-understanding.

This is not meant to suggest that deep conversation consists of fully formulated thoughts simply waiting to be discovered or elucidated.  Rather, it often has to do with unformulated experience : experience not yet put into words.  New meanings emerge at this boundary between what is unformulated and what is formulated;  between what is unknown and what is becoming known.  If we pay close attention, we may even be able to find the “felt sense” of emergent meaning—some kind of “intriguing confusion”, or perhaps struggle,  which we are wanting to make sense of.

Intellectual though this description may sound, the articulation of meaning in deep conversation is not primarily a conceptual process.     Rather, it is comprehension grounded in intuition and empathy.   Deep understanding is a process of feeling our way towards whatever meaning is unfolding.   In the shared field of deep listening and understanding, the mind is enabled to tap into deep layers of the psyche and the knowledge that the unconscious holds.

Deep understanding is a relational act.

Transformative Conversation:  Inquiring Deeply in the Relational Field 

Many transformative conversations come about with no explicit intention or agenda beyond the desire to connect and talk, to “mix minds” with someone simply for the pleasure of it.  Such conversations simply follow the thread of ideas which present themselves to be spoken.   This may be likened to rowing a boat down a river, where the current of our deep mutual listening carries the conversation effortlessly along.

But, at least for me, there is another kind of transformative conversation:  one which is pre-meditated, undertaken with the purpose of deepening my understanding of something.  I most often seek out such conversations when I am deeply engaged in inquiring deeply about something.  For example, in recent weeks I have had several conversations with others about the subjective experience of Depth.  Such conversations are deliberate, if not strategic; undertaken with the intention to resolve a question or simply to create space to discover  meanings which are incubating within.

I also seek out transformative l conversations when I want to explore something which is at the leading edge of what is unfolding in my life.   In the conversational mirror of the other, it is often possible to see our struggles and difficulties more clearly.  It has been my experience that there is always wisdom available when we turn towards rather than away from what we are resisting or where we are “stuck”, and transformative conversations allow us to deeply encounter these places within ourselves.  What crops up in our lives is neither incidental nor accidental;  it is the substance we think with and the forward face of what we will become. [iv]

In short, transformative conversation provides a space in which we may be able to gain relational freedom[v]: the freedom to think new thoughts and to see ourselves in new ways.

Transformative conversation is, I think,  in service to the experience of depth itself.

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Endnotes

[i] The relational field is explored in my book,  Schuman, M. (2017) “Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Inquiring Deeply  Routledge Press, New York.
[ii] See for example Schore, A.N. (2021)  Front. Psychol.  Vol. 12

[iii] In early psychoanalysis,  this quality of attention was called “listening with the third ear”  [Reik,T. (1949) Listening With The Third Ear.  Farrar, Strauss & Co.  New York]

[iv] Hirschfield, J. (1998)  Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry.   Harper Perennial, New York

[v] Stern, Donnel (2017)   Relational Freedom.  Routledge Press, New York

If There Is No Self, How Can I Actualize it?

 

If There Is No Self, How Can I Actualize It?

                                               “Today you are You, that is truer than true.

                                               There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”    

                                                                ― Dr. Seuss

 

The aspect of Buddhist teachings which is often the most challenging for Western psychotherapists is the concept of non-self. Both “self” and “non-self” are complex concepts.  However, once their meanings are appropriately unpacked, it becomes clear how psychological inquiry can contribute to dharma practice and how mindfulness meditation can enhance psychodynamic work.

Buddhist meditation practices are designed to allow us to discover directly—experientially, not conceptually—  that experience arises and vanishes without there being any individualized core being to whom it is happening.  The emphasis in this view is that the experience of self is constructed as a function of the particular causes and conditions in a particular moment.  Because self has no existence independent of causes and conditions, it is termed “no-self” or “non-self”.  In order to convey the constructed nature of self,  Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein uses the metaphor of self as a rainbow—an appearance which arises out of various elements of mind and body.

In the absence of any direct experience to the contrary,  each of us naively assumes the view that my ‘self’ sits safely in my body, looking out through its senses on a universe which is other than itself.  This idea is philosophically untenable; it has been termed the myth of the isolated mind.  We as individuals cannot and do not exist independently from the entire natural world, culture, and other individuals with whom we engage.

We have additional misleading psychological assumptions as well.   For example, people tend to assume that “the self” is singular, integral, and continuous, even though this is demonstrably untrue.  There are many different facets of subjectivity that must be functionally integrated in order to create the more or less cohesive experience that is referenced in common parlance as “the self.”

In addition to general ideas and assumptions about “self”, people develop all kinds of self-identifications: conclusions about ‘who they are’  based on life experience (including reflections from others).   People get very invested in these images and concepts of self and spend a good amount of their life energy trying to confirm and sustain them.  In action language, we can call this “selfing”.   Selfing often arises as a defensive response to narcissistic injury or threat.  It has the function of protecting the vulnerable psyche from psychological pain.  By learning to recognize selfing in action – sometimes in the moment, but more often after-the-fact – we can begin to work through any over- investments in self-view.

One of the primary goals of Buddhist practice is to disidentify with what we take to be “self” by recognizing that self is an impermanent composite of interdependent physical, emotional and cognitive components. In everyday and practical terms, this can best be accomplished by learning to recognize how “selfing” lives in our narratives about ourselves and in our behavior with others.

In psychological terms, the key distinction is between healthy and unhealthy narcissism.  Healthy narcissism promotes self-actualization – the realization of one’s talents and potentialities.  Healthy narcissism is associated with positive self-esteem,  accurate reality-testing, and comfortable acceptance of self and others. It allows us to be authentic and to feel comfortable in our own skins, enhancing capacities for autonomy, spontaneity, and creativity.   In contrast, unhealthy narcissism manifests as sensitivity to criticism and rebuff and often interferes with the ability to get along with others.  It is associated with self-centeredness, defensiveness, arrogance, and grandiosity.

In the framework of Buddhist practice, healthy narcissism facilitates the ability to hold self-view lightly.  Unhealthy narcissism, on the other hand, causes people to cling defensively to particular views of self and other,  impeding the ability to let go of views which are incongruent with other cues in the flow of experience.   By inquiring deeply into the differences between authentic self-experience and defensive forms of selfing, we can begin to discern self-views which are obstacles on the path to realization of non-self.

Such self-reflective inquiry engenders an opportunity to reconstruct our psychological narratives about who we are,   including the narrative account of self itself.  As the psychoanalyst Roy Schafer has said, “the self is a story – it is the story that there is a self to tell a story to.”  Each time we inquire deeply and live into what is unknown, this new awareness begins to reorganize the sense of self as it was previously known.  By recognizing that self is not fixed but, rather, consists of patterns of experience that can and do change from situation to situation, self-inquiry optimizes the possibility of pursuing and fulfilling our deepest potentialities, including the Buddhist realization of non-self.

What Is Life For? Some Reflections on Purpose

                                               

There is a ritual I enact each year during the New Year’s holiday:  taking a day of silence to reflect on where I’m at and where I’m going.   I spend contemplative time meditating and looking back over the past year, I consider my intentions for the year to come, and I write in my journal.  I spend time in front of my bookshelves, considering what I feel drawn to reading (or re-reading) at this time.  My particular mind having the nature that it does, I often make lists.  I think about the people I care most about and about the state of our world.   I do what 12 step programs call a moral inventory of the areas of reactivity that still trip me up.  That said, there is no prescribed practice I follow beyond the simple intention to reflect on what’s so in my life.

One thing I do NOT do during this time is make New Year’s resolutions.  If not that,  I asked myself, what was my purpose for this day of self-retreat?

This simple question unfolded into a deep inquiry about PURPOSE.   As I began to write about it, I recognized that it was actually not such a simple question, and reflecting about it has been illuminating.  I hope that what I write here will be generative for you as well.

In general terms, looking for purpose is an aspect of the basic human drive for meaning.  Looking up at the stars and the vastness of space, it is natural for questions to arise about our place in the universe.  Is anyone else out there? What happens to us when we die? What is life for?  But in addition to Big Questions, we also seek purpose in the down-to-earth situations we encounter in life.  I resonate with an idea expressed by Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist at Auschwitz,  that the perception of meaning boils down to becoming aware of the specific possibilities available to each of us in each situation we encounter in our lives.

With this in mind, we can view Purpose as a meaning we assign to whatever it is.

What follows is a summary of my further reflections, organized around both the personal and existential aspects of PURPOSE.

What is life for? 

One basic premise in the most commonly held view is that the purpose of life is to fulfill one’s given nature.   I believe it was Aristotle who first stated this idea in the form  “essence precedes existence”.  How we view our “essence” determines and defines the purposes we embrace.  This view also has deep roots in the liberal/ humanist values I grew up with.   Elaborated in the work of the psychologists Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and many others, life is about the full realization of one’s potential.

Similarly, in a biological/evolutionary frame we might also say that the purpose of life is to evolve, to manifest the blueprint represented in our DNA.   Our genetic code directs how we come into form (viz genetic “in-formation”), and the purpose of life may be formulated as aligning with our biological design.   A similar idea in theological terms is that our purpose is to become what God has created us to be.

Here I’ll go with the general idea that the purpose and meaning of life are subjectively created rather than given.   I agree with the existential philosophers that it is up to each of us to find our own individual path towards a higher purpose.  How we view the purpose of our lives rests on our perceptions, beliefs, values, and philosophy.  Personally, I resonate with the view that the purpose of living is to develop and evolve into greater maturity and wisdom.  And, along similar lines, I would like to believe that the evolution of complex brains serves a purpose of creating increasingly higher forms of awareness in the universe.

Regardless of how we view our own purpose in living,  purpose is realized through our choices and actions.

I do not mean to imply that finding purpose comes about only as a result of conscious inquiry of this sort.  While some people feel a sense of calling to their purpose in living, many others  seem to just stumble along, defining their path along the way.  In any event, our notions about our purpose in living cannot be defined in any frame which is linear, constant, or exclusively cognitive.

And, as the saying goes, life often happens while you’re busy making other plans.

What is the purpose of your life?

You can’t inquire deeply about your purpose in living without bumping into your basic ideas of who you are.  Indeed, purpose is one of the defining dimensions of someone’s self-view.   In accordance with the ideas described in the preceding section, defining one’s purpose is an integral part of what we might call the project of self:  delineating and expressing who we are. (We could also call this our life project.)   In this view, the purpose of one’s life is self-actualization: the realization or fulfillment of our individual talents and potentialities.

In my younger years, my inquiry about these matters took the general form of the question “what is a Marjorie for” ?  This question directed my life energies towards study, teaching and writing; towards helping others work through their psychological roblems; and towards philosophical inquiry.    Although there were many permutations of self-identity along the way, eventually my purpose settled into the writing of INQUIRING DEEPLY NEWSLETTER as a form through which I could express myself.

Despite the circuitous path I travelled in my quest for self-identity,  in hindsight I can clearly see that there was always a coherent path of purpose underneath.    “Becoming myself”, as I think of it, happened bit by bit as a by-product of finding my written voice and bringing it forth into world.   Birth seems the best metaphor for this emergence, as there is often a period of painful labor that accompanies the creation of new work.

Beyond the doing involved on this path of purpose, the project of self is fulfilled through every advance of self-knowledge, through increasing degrees of psychological integration, and through greater capacity for authentic and spontaneous self-expression.  We become who we are when we live a life which is congruent with our values and ideals.

The Evolving Purpose of Purpose

Purpose has always been, and still remains, a central organizing principle for me.  But what I recognize now is that the way I relate to purpose has, slowly but surely, been changing.

Historically, my “assumptive paradigm”  was that life was a complex project that I was in charge of,  entailing the job to manage, control, and make things happen. And because it seemed evident to me that the foundation of any successful project was a clearly delineated mission,  defining my own purpose in living became something I inquired deeply about over the years.  My priority in life was to actualize my identity, and that project involved a lot of doing.  I became a worker-bee.   (Truth be told, I remain one).

These days I find more purpose and meaning in my state of being than in what I am doing.   This evolving sense of purpose seems to me to be a direct result of the practice of inquiry itself.

Each time I choose a new topic of inquiry – or does it choose me? –  I have the sense of embarking upon a new chapter of subjective experience.   Once I get involved with a question, it owns me.   As I sometimes express it,  this process feels akin to getting pregnant with a question.  The conception, gestation, and subsequent birth of a new INQUIRING DEEPLY NEWSLETTER have their own timing.   The process requires giving myself over to what is emerging as best I am able.  The only thing I “do” is bring intuitive openmindness to what is unfolding at the surface of my experience.

The receptive quality of this process of inquiry is the total obverse of “managing, controlling, and making things happen”.   Privileging process over content in this way, purpose becomes less about an end-point, some goal I am trying to get to, and more about the dynamic quality of my experience.

Looking back at my New Year’s ritual from this perspective, I can now see quite clearly that its purpose was simply to create space for listening deeply within.   In contemplation I endeavor to connect with whatever deeper purposes may operate in me that go beyond what I may as yet know.  Engaging with inquiry demonstrates to me again and again that life has a mind of its own.  In this way, inquiry is itself an enactment of my central life purpose:  the deepening of my experience of being.