I Found a Reason

One of the advantages of Buddhism (and similar religions/philosophies) is that Buddhists are able to view themselves as Buddhists, and are therefore able to act accordingly.

e.g. I am a Buddhist, and my outlook is altruistic; therefore, in this situation, as with all other situations, I shall endeavour to act altruistically.

Buddhism gives the Buddhist the excuse to become something, and to act and think in certain ways. It provides a reason, a reason that, significantly, comes from outside.

The non-Buddhist who wanted to act altruistically may find their will faltering at a crucial point, and, not having the backing of a wise and formidable institution - not having a good enough reason - may find themselves unable to act as they, in their stronger moments, would have liked to.

Non-Buddhists have to construct their own reasons - their own Buddhism - from shards of philosophy, psychology, etc.

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Outer Supports

All four of the natural elements are used as reminders - the wind to flutter prayer flags, the fire of a lamp flame from which the rising hot air turns prayer wheels, the rocks on which mantras are carved, and the water of a stream to turn the paddles of a water-driven prayer wheel - so that everything we do, every element of nature, whatever happens to be within our sight, can incite us to inner prayer, to altruistic thoughts.

Prayer flags

When a Tibetan prints those prayers and hangs them up to flutter in the wind, he thinks, 'Wherever the wind passing over these prayers may go, may all living beings there be freed from their suffering and the causes of suffering. May they experience happiness and the causes of happiness.'

Merit

'Merit' is a positive state arising for a while in the mind that helps to counteract negative states of mind. I think that the predominant idea for [Buddhists] is therefore that of purifying the stream of their consciousness by an 'accumulation of merit', to reinforce the positive stream that flows toward wisdom. That's why people do prostrations, walk respectfully around sacred monuments, and make offerings of light in the temples.

Mantra

... 'mantra' means 'what protects the mind' - not from some calamity or other but from getting distracted and from mental confusion. A mantra is a short formula that's repeated numerous times, like the Prayer of the Heart in Orthodox Christianity, which is accompanied by constant repetition of the name of Jesus. Such techniques of repetition are found in all religious traditions.

Reciting helps to calm the superficial movements of the mind and thus to see its underlying nature more clearly.

You use the support of things outside yourself so that everything you see, everything you hear, brings back to mind [an] altruistic attitude and provides material for reflection. Nature itself then becomes a book of teachings. Everything incites us to spiritual practice.

... such customs are far from superstitious. They simply reflect the richness of the means employed by Buddhism to keep on reviving our presence of mind ... [they] are useful outer supports allowing believers to communicate with an inner truth.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.38-41

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Mind-expanding Knowledge?

It's true that biology and theoretical physics have brought us some fascinating knowledge about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But does knowing such things help us elucidate the basic mechanisms of happiness and suffering?

It's important not to lose sight of the goals that we set ourselves. To know the exact shape and dimensions of the Earth is undeniably progress. But whether it's round or flat doesn't make a great deal of difference to the meaning of existence. Whatever progress is made in medicine, we can only temporarily treat sufferings that never stop coming back, and culminate in death.

We can end a conflict, or a war, but there will always be more, unless people's minds change.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.17

Forever Becoming

Becoming

These becomings animate the possibilities of life, constantly moving through what we know to be real or true and running beyond the limits, boundaries and constraints that make those realities and truths what they seem to be.

Becoming explodes the ideas about what we are and what we can be beyond the categories that seem to contain us: beyond the boundaries seperating human being from animal, man from woman, child from adult, micro from macro, and even perceptible and understandable from imperceptible and incomprehensible.

Becoming moves beyond our need to know (the truth,what is real, what makes us human); beyond our determination to control (life, nature, the universe); and beyond our desire to consume or possess (pleasure, beauty, goodness, innocence).

So becoming offers a radical conception of what a life does.

Positive ontology

Deleuze's work is often applauded for the "positive ontology" it pursues. By this, scholars acknowledge that Deleuze is concerned with unfettering possibility to experiment with that a life can do and where a life might go. In other words, Delueze affirms the possibilities of becoming something else, beyond the avenues, relations, values and meanings that seem to be laid out for us by our biological make-up, our evolutionary heritages, our historical/political/familial allegiances, and the social and cultural structures of civilized living.

There is in this a radical affirmation of the sort of possibilities for becoming that we cannot think of in logical or moralistic terms: becomings that can only be felt or sensed or conjured, that require us to take risks and experiment in ways that affirm the vitality, the energies and the creative animations of existence.

The block of becoming

We might be tempted to think of becoming in terms of where or who we were when we started and where or who we are when we end up. But becoming is not about origins, progressions and ends; rather it is about lines and intensities ...

Deleuze and Guattari have described the movement of becoming as "rhizomatic", a term that refers to underground root growth, the rampant, dense propagation of roots that characterizes such plants as mint or crabgrass. Each rhizomatic root may take off in its own singular direction and make its own connections with other roots, with worms, insects, rocks or whatever, forming a dynamic composition of "interkingdoms [and] unnatural participations" that has no prescribed form or end.

Thresholds

As Deleuze and Guattari observe, "the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities". While we might think of the self as that which is ours, the site of our uniqueness and that which most distinguishes us from others, in this observation Deleuze and Guattari cast the self as preceding these forms and functions of self-organization.

So the importance of thresholds is that these "in-betweens" are becomings. When we are "in-between", on the threshold, what keeps us distinct from this or that can become indiscernible or indistinct or imperceptible.

Immanence

Deleuze's philosophy is often called a philosophy of immanence because it is concerned with what a life can do, what a body can do when we think in terms of becomings, multiplicities, lines and intensities rather than essential forms, predetermined subjects, structured functions or transcendent values.

... a plane of immanence has no structure and does not produce predetermined forms or subjects; instead, there are "relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness ... molecules and particles of all kinds".

Becoming-woman

Becoming-woman disrupts the rigid hierarchies of sexual binaries such as male/female, heterosexuality/homosexuality, masculinity/femininity that organizes our bodies, our experiences, our institutions and our histories.

Both men and women must become-woman, Deleuze and Guattari argue, in order to deterritorialize the binary organization of sexuality; sexuality then becomes "the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings". This is the unleashing of desire, the opening of a life, and the threshold to imperceptibility.

... "knowing how to love" is the "immanent end of becoming". And since everybody and everything is the aggregate of molar entities, becoming everybody and everything, that is, becoming-imperceptible and indiscernibly in-between, is to make a different world.

As philosophical concepts, becoming-woman and the girl allow us to think differently, imagine new modes of becomings, animate forces of desire, and open doors and thresholds into new worlds.

[Patty Sotirin]
Gilles Deleuze, Key Concepts, p.99, 100-1, 103, 108-9

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Fiction from Fiction

Whilst watching Synecdoche: New York I became aware that I was looking for a message; or rather, the message. 'What is this all about?' a worried voice within me urged. 'What can it all mean? ... maybe becoming aware of looking for a message is in fact the message ... '

Synecdoche is a bewildering experience, due in part to the way it consistently pulls the rug from under your feet, time and again denying the passive comfort of an overarching 'message' to make sense of things. It made me think of how often we watch a film with this expectation; that, when the film ends, we will have had some kind of truth imparted to us: from the film - the active party, the one with something to say, something to tell - to us, the undergraduate, eager to receive. Which isn't to say that Synecdoche is lacking in truth; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case - it feels like it is bursting with truths (as many truths as it has characters, which, including extras, is a lot), firing off in all directions, and often cancelling each other out.

Synecdoche is a time bomb for the mind, its detonation sending thoughts colliding into other thoughts in an ever-increasing flurry of synapses. It left me feeling excited and full of energy and ideas. Through refusing to pin down a meaning, to point towards one path and say 'here, this is it!', it entertained possibilities, allowing the mind to explore numerous avenues of thought. Its possibilities engendered discussion, and the chance of more doors being flung open.

Its characters think, but they think for themselves, not for us. In this sense, the creation of meaning is in our hands; fiction compelling fiction.

Psychologist James Hillman describes this refusal to pin down meaning - to make it practical - as 'entertaining ideas': "For ideas to be therapeutic, that is, beneficial to the soul and body politic, they must gather into themselves, garnering force, building strength, like great movers of the mind's furniture, so that the space we inhabit is rearranged. Your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories have to move around in new ways, because the furniture has been moved." The film facilitates this rearranging, providing the energy we may need for the move, whilst refusing to dictate what gets moved where: what we move, what we make, is our decision.


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Opinion Piece

Every day we are faced with political decisions; to give money to a beggar, or to not; to smile at the person passing us by, or to keep ourselves to ourselves; to intervene in the scuffle, or to stay out of it. We cannot know the implications of our decisions without giving thought to these moments; without, in fact, building our own philosophy of life - a world view that encompasses all possible political junctures.

We could spend a lifetime working this out. To make an informed decision on everyday situations like these necessitates a certain amount of sustained thought; it may even require insight that is simply beyond our reach; what, after all, are the political implications of acting one way or another? And the moral implications? And how far back do these decisions reach? What do you know about how society works? And the long-sighted implications of your actions, beyond their affects within your own vicinity?

No wonder we rely so much on guidance, on the opinions of others. No wonder we have to trust those that have devoted their lives to thinking these junctures through. In most things we are ignorant, and in most situations we make do with speculation. We cannot know it all; from this realization onwards we are reliant on others, and the perspective and insight they can offer us.


................................................................................................................................................................................

After pointing out that we must often act upon probabilities that fall short of certainty, he says that the right use of this consideration 'is mutual charity and forebearance.

Since therefore it is unavoidable to the greatest part of men, if not all, to have several opinions, without certain and indubitable proofs of their truth;

and it carries too great an imputation of ignorance, lightness, or folly, for men to quit and renounce their former tenets presently upon the offer of an argument which they cannot immediately answer and show the insufficiency of;

it would, methinks, become all men to maintain peace and the common offices of humanity and friendship in the diversity of opinions, since we cannot reasonably expect that any one should readily and osequiously quit his own opinion, and embrace ours with a blind resignation to an authority which the understanding of man acknowledges not. For, however it may often mistake, it can own no other guide but reason, nor blindly submit to the will and dictates of another.

If he you would bring over to your sentiments be one that examines before he assents, you must give him leave at his leisure to go over the account again, and, recalling what is out of his mind, examine the particulars, to see on which side the advantage lies;

and if he will not think over arguments of weight enough to engage him anew in so much pains, it is but what we do often ourselves in the like case;

and we should take it amiss if others should prescribe to us what points we should study:

and if he be one who wishes to take his opinions upon trust, how can we imagine that he should renounce those tenets which time and custom have so settled in his mind that he thinks them self-evident, and of an unquestionable certainty;

... How can we expect, I say, that opinions thus settled should be given up to the arguments or authority of a stranger or adversary? especially if there be any suspicion of interest or design, as there never fails to be where men find themselves ill treated.

We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others as ill as obstinate and perverse because they will not renounce their own and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs.

For where is the man that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all that he condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men's opinions?

The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others ... There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.'

[Bertrand Russell]
with quote from John Locke (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chap, xvi, sec. 4.
Found in Russell's, History of Western Philosophy, p. 554-5

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To be Found, or to Find?

All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects.

This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien.

The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self know that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods.

In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self; like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves.

There is a widespread philosophic tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us.

This view ... has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like the man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.

Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks.

[Bertrand Russell]
The Problems of Philosophy, p.92-3

Citizens of the Universe

Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge ... the kind which results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs.

There are many questions - and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life - which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now.

Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived form common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.

To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they might be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value - perhaps its chief value - through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation.

The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.

The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge - knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for a man to attain.

The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable.

Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions ... but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation ...

[Bertrand Russell]
The Problems of Philosophy, p.90-4

Alone with my Self

Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day.

In order to continue to feel solitary, [the romantic] must be able to prevent those who serve him from impinging upon his ego, which is best accomplished if they are slaves. Passionate love, however, is a more difficult matter. So long as passionate lovers are regarded as in revolt against social trammels, they are admired; but in real life the love-relation itself quickly becomes a social trammel, and the partner in love comes to be hated, all the more vehemently if the love is strong enough to make the bond difficult to break.

Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of one's own Self.

By encouraging a new lawless Ego [the romantic movement] made social co-operation impossible, and left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism.

Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness; but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred and violence. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('The Romantic Movement'), p.620-2

Nobody knows, and nobody can ever know

Scepticism, as a doctrine of the schools, was first proclaimed by Pyrrho ...

Scepticism with regard to the senses had troubled Greek philosophers from a very early stage ... Pyrrho seems to have added moral and logical scepticism to scepticism as to the senses. He is said to have maintained that there could never be any rational ground for preferring one course of action to another. In practice, this meant that one conformed to the customs of whatever country one inhabited.

A modern disciple would go to church on Sundays and perform the correct genuflections, but without any of the religious beliefs that are supposed to inspire these actions. Ancient Sceptics went through the whole pagan ritual, and were even sometimes priests; their Scepticism assured them that this behaviour could not be proved wrong, and their common sense (which survived their philosophy) assured them that it was convenient.

'We sceptics follow in practice the way of the world, but without holding any opinion about it. We speak of the Gods as existing and offer worship to the Gods and say that they exercise providence, but in saying this we express no belief, and avoid the rashness of the dogmatizers.'

Scepticism naturally made an appeal to many unphilosophic minds. People observed the diversity of schools and the acerbity of their disputes, and decided that all alike were pretending to knowledge which was in fact unattainable. Scepticism was a lazy man's consolation, since it showed the ignorant to be as wise as the reputed men of learning.

To men who, by temperament, required a gospel, it might seem unsatisfying, but like every doctrine of the Hellenistic period it recommended itself as an antidote to worry. Why trouble about the future? It is wholly uncertain. You may as well enjoy the present; 'what's to come is still unsure.' For these reasons, Scepticism enjoyed a considerable popular success.

It should be observed that Scepticism as a philosophy is not merely doubt, but what might be called dogmatic doubt. The man of science says 'I think it is so-and-so, but I am not sure.' The man of intellectual curiosity says 'I don't know how it is, but I hope to find out.' The philosophical Sceptic says 'nobody knows, and nobody ever can know.' It is this element of dogmatism that makes the system vulnerable. Sceptics, of course, deny that they assert the impossibility of knowledge dogmatically, but their denials are not very convincing.

The only logic admitted by the Greeks was deductive, and all deduction had to start, like Euclid, form general principles regarded as self-evident. Timon denied the possibility of finding such principles. Everything, therefore, will have to be proved by means of something else, and all argument will be either circular or an endless chain hanging from nothing. In either case nothing can be proved.

The manner in which Arcesilaus taught would have had much to commend it, if the young men who learnt from him had been able to avoid being paralysed by it. He maintained no thesis, but would refute any thesis set up by a pupil. Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either.

A pupil sufficiently vigorous to rebel might have learnt dexterity and the avoidance of fallacies; in fact, none seem to have learnt anything except cleverness and indifference to truth.

Scepticism had enough force to make educated men dissatisfied with the State religions, but it had nothing positive, even in the purely intellectual sphere, to offer in their place. From the Renaissance onwards, theological scepticism has been supplanted, in most of its advocates, by an enthusiastic belief in science, but in antiquity there was no such supplement.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('Cynics and Sceptics'), p.224-6, 228-9

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Psychology for the Soul

Psyche is an intelligence that wants an intelligent psychology in response. Its native inferiority does not imply stupidity; it cannot live on the clichés of inferior psychology or even on the superior ideas when simply taken over from masters.

Remember the voice that said, "I like your mistakes;" the voice that said, "I obey no laws of compensation." The psyche's therapy wants one to work out the psyche's logos, each individual a psychologist.

If the soul's want is a priori, then loss is a permanent possibility of soul. We may most have soul or be in soul [esse in anima] when we sense most its loss. Then the sense of want belongs to the ontology of soul and to what we mean by 'being psychological.'No psychological act can fully satisfy, no interpretation truly click like a key in a lock, no relationship of souls complete the lack and failure that reflects the essence of psyche. Imperfection is in its essence, and we are complete only by being in want.

Psychology must be gained for it is not given, and without psychological education we do not understand ourselves and we make our daimons suffer. This suggests that a reason for psychotherapy of whatever school and for whatever complaint is to gain psychology - a logos of soul that is at the same moment a therapeia of soul.

We need to gain the intelligent response that makes the soul intelligible, a craft and order that understands it, a knowledgeable deftness that cares for its wants in speech. And if logos is its therapy, because it articulates the psyche's wants, then one answer to what the soul wants is psychology.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.94, 127-8

Stuck In Words

He: But aren't you supposed to be inside? My interior person?

Chest-Voice: You are stuck in words. Interior simply means deeper. Going inward simply means going more deeply into things, into their heart and soul. Interior is a sense of inward chambers, the hollow in the chest that resounds. It isn't a place to go and it doesn't mean all those things you've learned and taken so literalistically: introverting, introspecting, internalizing.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.122

You laugh at my back, and I'll laugh at yours

The fourth major component of Adlerian theory is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, communal feeling or social interest.

So when we ask Adler one more time, what does the soul want? What is its innate intention? We now hear him reply: it wants community. It wants to live with reason in a world that reflects cosmic meaning, then, now, and forever, where the soul as the potential of this order strives with purpose and gives meaning to each act 'contributed' to life, moving it toward communal and cosmic perfection. "Contribution is the true meaning of life."

But - and the but is big indeed - "the realm of meanings," says Adler, "is the realm of mistakes", so that each meaning we attribute to what the soul wants, and he says there are as many meanings as there are human beings, "involves more or less of a mistake." Hence, what the soul wants must be a fictional mistaken understanding of every meaning it proposes. This can be the only way that allows human community the very perfection Adler envisions.

We cannot answer the soul's wanting by any certainty, any goal, without realizing at the same moment that this goal is a fiction and that to literalize it is a mistake - even if a necessary mistake.

Certainty is an identification with a single meaning, one posits one's own private meaning as a "position of finality," which serves only to isolate oneself, defeating our innate altruism and alienating us from the community of humankind.

Gemeinschaftsgefühl cannot answer what the soul wants or present its goal; it can serve only as an instrument for reflecting all our goals. Do they contribute, do they embody feeling for others? Gemeinschaftsgefühl thus offers a mode of discovering our isolating fictions and our mistakes.

If we commune at all, it is in the empathy of our mistakes and the humorous tolerance given by the sense of fiction. We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority. So the sense of imperfection, Jung's shadow, is the only possible base for Adler's goal of Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Jung said the same: "Relationship is not based on ... perfection ... it is based, rather, on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless ... the very ground and motive for dependence."

The shadow of weakness is not only moral, it is also humorous. The best entry into imperfection is humour, self-irony, dissolving into laughter, the acceptable humiliation that requires no after-compensation upwards. The sense of imperfection may be one way into communal feeling: another surer one is the all-too-human bond of the sense of humour.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.106-9

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Per-Fiction

The main damaging movement away from the soul's double nature Adler calls "the masculine protest," the need to win, to come out on top. He also called this the "striving for perfection" or "superiority."

The psyche constructs; it invents images and the mind follows them as its guides; "guiding fictions," Adler calls them.

So, perfection is a necessary fiction, pragmatically necessary just as truth is "merely the most expedient error." When we realize the goal of perfection toward which we strive as an impossibility in every objective and literal sense, then we are also able to recognize how necessary is this fictional perfection.

Goals are thrown up by the psyche as bait to catch the living fish, fictions to instigate and guide action. As Jung said, "A spiritual goal that points beyond ... is an absolute necessity for the health of the soul."

One feels purposefulness, that there is a way and one is moving on a way, a process of towardness, called by Adler striving for perfection, by Jung individuation.

We can keep this way moving only by keeping purposefulness from becoming literalized into definite goals. Goals, especially the highest and finest, work like overvalued ideas, the roots of delusions that nourish great canopies of sheltering paranoia, those spreading ideals of size and import which characterize the positive goals of so many schools of therapy today.

We see enough of the disastrous effect of goals in daily life, where the belief in an overriding idea about one's purpose in life, what one has to do, the raison d'etre for one's existence turns out to be the very goal which blocks the way.

'To be healed' is the goal which takes one into therapy, and we are healed of that goal when we recognize it as a fiction.

So the best psychotherapy can do is attune the fictional sense. Then the goals toward which therapy strives - maturity, completion, wholeness, actualization - can be seen through as guiding fictions. Then they do not close the way. Therapy becomes less a support of the "great upward drive" than it is a job of deliteralizing the fictions in which purpose is fixed and where one is actually defending oneself against the soul's innate 'towardness' by means of one's goals.

This suggests that the only possible perfection that the soul can want is perfection of its fictional understanding, the realization of itself in images, itself a fiction among fictions.

This method of as-if keeps the way open, and it seems to be where the Adlerian approach comes closest to the religious idea that the final goal is the way itself, in this case, the way of fiction.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.103-6

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Psychic Hermaphrodite

Inferiority shows itself in our thinking style. Because of feelings of inferiority and insecurity we devise mental constructs to keep these feelings at bay. These constructs act as guiding fictions, governing fantasies, by means of which we apperceive the world.

The most basic of these neurotic protections, perhaps the one to which all others can be reduced, Adler calls "antithetical thinking," "which works according to the principle of opposites".

The mind sets up opposite poles: strong/weak, up/down, male/female - and these guiding fictions determine how we experience. Antitheses divide the world sharply, giving opportunity for exerting power in forceful actions, saving us from feeling weak and incapacitated.

More important even than these pairs is that oppositional thinking itself is a pampering safeguard against the true reality of the world, which in Adler's view is one of shaded differentiations and not oppositions.

For him, to think that abstract opposites reflect reality is to think neurotically, since all antitheses ultimately refer to the power construct of superior/inferior embodied in society as male and female.

The ultimate ground of thinking in opposites is the male/female pair, "the only real antithesis", which in turn can be pushed back to its early childhood experience in "psychic hermaphroditism." "The psyche partakes of both feminine and masculine traits", and from childhood on we identify not only weakness and inferiority with female, but also the ambivalence caused by the weakness. Moreover, hermaphroditic ambivalence itself indicates inferiority and is "apperceived in a strongly antithetical manner," which safeguards us from it.

We are convinced by society that "there are only two sex roles possible," and a "dissection" occurs. Uncertainty is met with a clear-cut either/or, that same either/or thinking which Jung connected both with ego-consciousness and with the one-sidedness of neurosis.

If restoring psychic hermaphroditism in one way or another is essential to the notion of cure in all three depth therapies [Freud, Jung, and Adler], then any disjunctive move is contra-indicated. We may not look to the ego as modelled on the hero, with his sword of decision, to lead us to healing. He is but one more divisive form of the masculine protest against inferiority, and his Oedipus foot, Achilles heel, and Hercules dress are signs of his innate hermaphroditism.

Psychic hermaphroditism holds juxtapositions without feeling them as oppositions. Oppositions between conscious and unconscious, masculine and feminine, positive and negative, private soul and public world sever the ambivalence natural to the hermaphrodite.

For Hermaphroditus presents an image in which what is natural is the unnatural, a primordial image of contra naturam. The physical attitude of natural bodies and biological sexes is revalued by the configuration of non-natural fantasy. Nature is transformed by imaginative deformation, physis by poiesis.

This tells us what kind of fictions heal: preposterous, unrealizable, non-literal, from which singleness of meaning is organically banned.

If Asclepius is archetypal figure of the healer, Hermaphroditus is the archetypal figure of healing, the psychic healing of imagination, the healing fiction, the fictional healer for whom no personal pronoun fits, impossible in life and necessary in imagination.

So when we meet antithetical thinking, our question will no longer be how to conjunct, transcend, find a synthetic third, or breed an androgyne. For such moves take the antithesis literally, preventing the mind from moving from its neurotic constructs, from moving from Freudian facts to Adlerian fictions.

Instead our question will be: what have we already done to lose our twin who was given with the soul: the ambivalent, inferior, even shameful feeling of our psychic hermaphrodite. That figure, concealed in 'the opposites' (which are used as a defense against it), is also the figure embodied as goal by therapy in its own work - an odd, most unnatural and fantastic, even shameful, work indeed.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.100-3

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Active Imagination

Active imagination as theurgic divination would work on the Gods rather than recognizing their working in us. We reach too far, missing the daimons that are present every day, and each night too. As Plotinus said: "It is for them to come to me, not for me to go to them."

So, Jung's method of interior imagining is for none of these reasons - spiritual discipline, artistic creativity, transcendence of the worldly, mystical vision or union, personal betterment, or magical effect. Then what for? What is the aim?

Primarily, it aims at healing the psyche by re-establishing it in the metaxy from which it had fallen into the disease of literalism. Finding the way back to the metaxy calls up a mythical mode of imagining such as the Platonic Socrates employed as a healer of souls.

This return to the middle realm of fiction, of myth carries one into conversational familiarity with the cosmos one inhabits. Healing thus means Return and psychic consciousness means Conversation, and a 'healed consciousness' lives fictionally, just as healing figures like Jung and Freud become under our very eyes fictional personages, their factual biographies dissolving and coagulating into myths, becoming fictions so they can go on healing.

One may aesthetically give form to the images - indeed one should try as best one can aesthetically - though this is for the sake of the figures, in dedication to them and to realize their beauty, and not for the sake of art.

Therefore active imagination, so close to art in procedure, is distinct from it in aim. This is not only because active imagination foregoes an end result in a physical product, but more because its intention is Know Thyself, self-understanding, which is as well its limit ...

We may fiction connections between the revelatory moments, but these connections are hidden like the spaces between the sparks or the dark seas around the luminous fishes's eyes, images Jung employs to account for images. Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself.

Know Thyself is its own end and has no end.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.78-80

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All ego?

Introspection's course and limits were set by a consciousness that insisted on unity. To hear the deeps not only affronted Christian tradition; it invited what had been declared the Devil, Hell, and madness.

Today we call the internal policing of the psyche by an inspectio become inspector general 'mind control.' Here we begin to see the staggering consequences of denial of the daimons: it leaves the psyche bereft of all persons but the ego, the controller who becomes super-ego.

No spontaneous fantasy, image, or feeling may be independent of this unified ego. Every psychic happening becomes 'mine.' Know Thyself shifts to Know Myself.

What Philemon taught Jung, however, was that there are things in the psyche that are no more "mine" than animals in the forest ... or birds in the air." Moreover, without images, the imaginative perspective itself withers, only reinforcing the ego's literalism.

The images which could teach the ego its limits, as Philemon taught Jung, having been repressed, only return unimaged as archetypal delusions in the midst of subjective consciousness itself. The ego becomes demonic. It fully believes in its own power.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.65

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[...] when you are suffering, when there's failure, dejection, and you are cast down, thrown back on yourself, left alone, wet, in one way or another - then you begin to feel, Who am I? What is going on? Why can't I? Why doesn't my will work?

The Great Western Will - that I have been trained ever since I was a child to know what I want, to get it, and do it. To be independent! It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman here. You're taught to be independent, to stand on your own two feet, to take what you need, to know what you want, and to know where you're going.

Now all of that gets defeated by the syndromes or the symptoms I'm talking about, the pathologizing. Suicide is one. Betrayal is one. Masturbation is another one [...]

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.12

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There's a necessary inferiority when you're in psychic reality.

[...] soul means inferiority - something sensitive, something ... well ... pathologized. Soul makes the ego feel uncomfortable, uncertain, lost. And that lostness is a sign of soul. You couldn't have soul or be a soul if you couldn't feel that you have lost it.

The person is the strong ego, as it's called, doesn't feel that he's lost anything. That's one reason I question the psychiatric process of developing a strong ego. That seems to me a monstrous goal for psychotherapy because it attempts to overcome the sense of soul which appears as weakness, a weakness that seems almost to require symptoms.

Violence or power or sadism or domination keep us from sensing soul, and until they crack from inside, don't work anymore, fall apart, as I have called it, we can't work with them.

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.17

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Case History

[...] a trauma is not what happened but the way we see what happened. A trauma is not a pathological event but a pathologized image, an image that has become "intolerable" as Lopez-Pedraza puts it.

If we are ill because of these intolerable images, we get well because of imagination. Poesis as therapy.

The person having had his stories early has had his imagination exercised as an activity. He can imagine life, and not only think, feel, perceive, or learn it. And he recognizes that imagination is a place where one can be, a kind of being.

Therapy is one way to revivify the imagination and exercise it. The entire therapeutic business is this sort of imaginative exercise. It picks up again the oral tradition of telling stories; therapy re-stories life.

Of course we have to go back to childhood to do this, for that is where our society and we each have placed imagination. Therapy has to be so concerned with the childish part of us in order to recreate and exercise the imagination.

Case history is not the place of hang-ups left behind; it too is a waking dream giving as many marvels as any descent into the cavern of the dragon or walk through the paradise gardens. One need but read each literal sentence of one's life metaphorically, see each picture of the past as an image.

[Case histories] are subjective phenomena, soul stories. Their chief importance is for the character about whom they are written, you and me. They give us a narrative, a literary fiction that deliteralizes our life from its projective obsession with outwardness by putting it into a story. They move us from the fiction of reality to the reality of fiction.

They present us with the chance to recognize ourselves in the mess of the world as having been engaged and always being engaged in soul-making, where 'making' returns to its original meaning of poesis. Soul-making as psychological poesis, the making of soul through the imagination of words.

Perhaps we go [to analysis] to be given a case history, to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by. This is the gift of case history, the gift of finding oneself in myth. In myths Gods and humans meet.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.47-9

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Looking Back

... remembering-what-never-happened must rightly be called imagining, and this sort of memory is imagination. Memoria was the old term for both. It referred to an activity and a place that today we call variously memory, imagination and the unconscious.

Memoria was described as a great hall, a storehouse, a theatre packed with images. And the only difference between remembering and imagining was that memory images were those to which a sense of time had been added, that curious conviction that they had once happened.

The way into these memorial halls is personal; we each have our own doorways which make us believe that memoria itself is personal, our very own. The psychoanalytical couch is one such door; the poet's notebook, the writer's table are others.

Yet the memorability of specific images - the little neighbourhood girl in a yellow sunsuit digging to China on the July beach; the lost bloodied tooth in the party cake - that precisely these images, and these images so precisely, have been selected, retrieved, recounted tells that their vital stuff is archetypally memorable.

Memory infuses images with memorability, making the images more 'real' to us by adding to them the sense of the time past, giving them historical reality. But the historical reality is only a cover for soul significance, only a way of adapting the archetypal sense of mystery and importance to a consciousness engrossed in historical facts. If the image doesn't come as history, we might not take it for real.

Remembering is thus a commemoration, a ritual recall of our lives to the images in the background of the soul. By remembering, we give a kind of commemorative legend, a founding image to our present lives ...

I need to remember my stories not because I need to find out about myself but because I need to found myself in a story I can hold to be 'mine.'

As we muse over a memory, it becomes an image, shedding its literal historical facticity, slipping its causal chains, and opening into the stuff of which art is made. The art of healing is healing into art.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.41-3

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I guess the difference there with "ossessione," the obsessional part, is if that repetition, that rhythm doesn't deepen by return, if it doesn't turn by return, if it doesn't revision, or echo, then there is something merely obsessional. But the obsession is an attempt to get to that deepening. To rework it again.

If you watch anyone doing handwork, it's all obsessional. You can't make lace without an obsession. You can't turn a pot. Art has that constant fussing with the same little place. Now that's exactly what we do with a symptom. We keep going back and fussing with it.

You are jealous, and you go back fussing and fussing over a little suspicion, working it over a thousand times. The obsessive jealous thought can also be seen as a way of making something happen. It isn't just "working it through" as the psychoanalysts say: actually, you maybe making something out of it, making something up, making a fiction, an imagination, and the fussing in jealousy can be polishing the image, so to speak.

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.22

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Dreams from Dreams

Imaginative art forfeits interpretation and calls instead for a comparable act of imagination.

Your dream evokes a dream in me, mine in you - not literally as such, not mutual sharing and confession (which loses the image in personal subjectivism) - but dream as reveries, fantasy, imaginative response, a piece of soul-making whose aim is not hermeneutic, not a gesture of understanding.

Along the mirrored border one does not hear the language of meaning; understanding each other is not the aim and so translation falls away. There is instead a miming dance back and forth of the border guards, the greetings of images, exchange of gifts, ceremonies.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.30

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Soul-Making

Outside and inside, life and soul, appear as parallels in 'case history' and 'soul history.'

A case history is a biography of historical events in which one took part: family, school, work, illness, war, love. The soul history often neglects entirely some or many of these events, and spontaneously invents fictions and 'inscapes' without major outer correlations.

The experiences arising from major dreams, crises, and insights give definition to the personality. They too have 'names' and 'dates' like the outer events of case history; they are like boundary-stones which mark out one's own individual ground.

Case history reports on the achievements and failures of life with the world of facts. But the soul has neither achieved nor failed in the same way ... The soul imagines and plays - and play is not chronicled by report.

A love story is but an histoire, one of mille e tre, only the outer history of emotional events, like a crowd of yellow daffodils , unless it be recollected in tranquility, put through a psychological operation, such as the soul itself compels to - love letters, anxieties, poems, confidences, hazardous assignations, tumescent fantasies.

Dreams, visions, and feelings - so entirely inner and mine - have nothing to do with soul unless they be recollected, recorded, entered into history. Inner images and feelings (so-called soul-stuff) are free for grabs, nightly at the oneiric fair, simply giveaways form the tunnel of love and the chamber of horrors unless they be put through the qualifying intelligence, the history-making of the psyche, sifted and weighted in the disciplined reflection of loving, of ritual, of dialectics, of an art - or of a psychological analysis with its therapeutic plot.

Outer means simply we are outside looking at it; it is closed in its factual literalism. This and this happened, and then this. Inner means we are taking it in; it is open to insight. Ingestion slows down the happenings for the sake of the chewing.

What we do not experience becomes only case material or world history, hastening the pace of events both in my soul and in the world. All haste comes from the devil, as an old saying goes, which psychologically means that one's devil is to be found in one's indigestion, in having more events than are experienced.

What we do experience by putting events through an imaginative process is taken off the streets of time and out of the ignorant sea of my mental turbulence. We beat the devil by simply standing still.

Or going backwards - regression belongs to the digestive mode of soul-making, so that a good deal of remembering, its pain, its shame, is recapitulation, revising the chapter again before it can close.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.24, 27, 28

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Satisfying Narratives

The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives. For the manner in which we tell ourselves about what is going on is the genre through which events become experiences. There are no bare events, plain facts, simple data - or rather this too is an archetypal fantasy: the simplistics of brute (or dead) nature.

... our fundamental unease with Freud's theory is not that it cannot be verified but that it does not satisfy. We fail to fall for it not because it empirically fails as a hypothesis about human nature, but because it fails poetically, as a deep enough, embracing enough, aesthetic enough plot for providing dynamic coherence and meaning to the dispersed narratives of our lives.

We see what our ideas ... allow us to see.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.11, 23, 36

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Keep it real

[...] I lived like a blind man in the position in which I had been put, without considering what it was, because in that position I had been born and had grown up and it was therefore natural for me [...]

And it must always necessarily seem to us that the others are mistaken, thinking that a given form, a given act is not this and is not thus. But inevitably, a little later, if we shift one degree, we realize we were also mistaken, and it isn't this and it isn't thus; so in the end we are obliged to recognize that it will never be this or thus in any stable, sure way; but first one way, then another, and at a certain point all will seem to us mistaken, or all true, which amounts to the same thing; because a reality wasn't assigned to us and doesn't exist, and we have to make it ourselves, if we want it to be [...]

What sort of reality can the majority of men manage to establish in themselves? Wretched, unsteady, uncertain. And oppressors, of course, take advantage! Or rather, they deceive themselves that they can take advantage, making others undergo or accept the meaning and value they assign themselves, to the others, to things, so all will see and feel, think and speak in their way.

But everything that can be imagined about us is really possible, even if it isn't true for us. The others don't care whether or not it's true for us. It's true for them. So true that the others, if you don't cling fast to the the reality you have given yourself, can actually lead you to grant that even truer than the reality you have given yourself is the one they give you.

[Luigi Pirandello]
One, No One & One Hundred Thousand, p.59, 62, 85, 86, 135

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Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don't somehow construct yourselves? ... We can only know what we succeed in giving form to.

Ah, you believe only houses are constructed? I construct myself continually and I construct you, and you do the same. And the construction lasts as long as the material of our feelings doesn't crumble and as long as the cement of our will lasts. Why do you believe firmness of will is so highly touted, and constancy of feelings? The former has only to waver a little, and the latter has only to be altered by one degree or change ever so slightly, and it's goodbye to our reality! We realize immediately that it was only our delusion.

Firmness of will, then. Constancy of feelings. Hang on, hang on, to avoid these plunges into the void, to keep from encountering these unwelcome surprises.

But, oh! what fine constructions result.

[Luigi Pirandello]
One, No One & One Hundred Thousand, p.41, 42

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The Medicalisation of Everyday Life

Glossy magazines told stories about couples with relationship problems who went to their GP, and the GP didn’t understand their problem (the first paragraph of any medical story in the media). Then they went to the specialist, and he didn’t help either. But then they went to a private clinic. Here they did blood tests - hormone profiles, esoteric imaging studies of clitoral bloodflow - and then they understood. The solution was in a pill, but that was only half the story, and the diagnosis was almost more important: she had a mechanical problem. Rarely was there a mention of any other factors, that she was feeling tired from overwork, that he was exhausted from being a new father, or finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that his wife was now the milky mother of his children, and no longer the nubile sex vixen he first snogged on the floor of the student union building to the sound of Don’t You Want Me? by the Human League in 1983.

This is because we don’t want to talk about these issues, any more than we want to talk about social inequality, the disintegration of local communities, the breakdown of the family, the impact of employment uncertainty, changing expectations and notions of personhood, or any of the other complex, difficult factors that play into the apparent rise of antisocial behaviour in schools.

This wishful deafness to the clamour of reality reaches its purest form in our newfound obsession with food, as if it was the most important lifestyle risk factor for ill health, as if every technical detail should be devoured and acted on, for the promise of eternal zest. From the Daily Mail’s ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or cure cancer, to daytime television’s obsession with the healing power of this week’s magic berry, there is no end to this material. Should you believe it? No. I have demonstrated time and again how these claims are flawed in their own specific cases. But something more interesting is being ignored in the background.

The World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health reported this week, and it contained some chilling figures. Life expectancy in the poorest area of Glasgow - Calton - is 28 years less than in Lenzie, a middle-class area just eight miles away. That is a lot less life, and it isn’t just because the people in Lenzie are careful to eat goji berries for extra antioxidants, and a handful of brazil nuts every day, thus ensuring they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice.

People die at different rates because of a complex nexus of interlocking social and political issues including work life, employment status, social stability, family support, housing, smoking, drugs, and possibly diet, although the evidence on that, frankly, is pretty thin, and you certainly wouldn’t start there.

But we do, because it’s such a delicious fantasy, because it’s commodifiable and pushed by expert PR agencies, and in some respects this is one of the most destructive features of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by figures such as Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. Food has become a distraction from the real causes of ill health, and also, in some respects, a manifesto of rightwing individualism. You are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. You hear it from people as they walk past the local council estate and point at a mother feeding her child crisps: “Well, when you look at what they feed them,” they say, “it’s got to be diet, hasn’t it?” They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 80. You deserve it. Not like them.

Genuine public-health interventions to address the social and lifestyle causes of disease are far less lucrative, and far less of a spectacle, than anything a lifestyle magazine editor or television commissioner would dare to touch.

There is no glamour in “enabling environments” that naturally promote exercise, or urban planning measures that prioritise cyclists, pedestrians and public transport over the car. There are no votes, it seems, in reducing the ever-increasing inequality between senior executive and shop-floor pay. When do you ever hear about elegant ideas like “walking school buses”? Somewhere near you, a softly spoken public-health official has probably tried to interest your local paper in a story on them; presumably the latest urgent food-fad news left no space.

We love this stuff. It isn’t done to us, we invite it, and we buy it, because we want to live in a simple universe of rules with justice, easy answers and predictable consequences. We want pills to solve complex social problems like school performance. We want berries to stop us from dying and to delineate the difference between us and the lumpen peasants around us. We want nice simple stories that make sense of the world and if you make us think about anything else more complicated, we will open our mouths, let out a bubble or two, and float off - bored and entirely unphased - to huddle at the other end of our shiny little fishbowl eating goji berries.

[Ben Goldacre]
Bad Science, extract can be found here

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