Hasty Sketch Map

Posted on Jun 17th , ’14 by Vincent

hasty sketch-map

Dear S

I am starting to form the impression that the “preoccupied and dreamy boy” contains the real you, and that what you write operates as a kind of mask through which to address the world.

This “real you” has not yet evolved the capacity to interact with everything that the present moment throws at you. That is why it shows the appearance of being preoccupied and dreamy. The task is to integrate the different parts of you so that a sense of being fully present and fulfilled in the moment takes over your inner life, and is reflected in your outer expression.

In order to lend some credence to the view I intend to put forward in this and further instalments, let me hasten to add that it won’t be derived from a Freudian or any other recognized view of the unconscious. I note, in the latest instalment of your introspective investigation, that you refer to some people’s view, picked up from psychoanalytical ideas, that the subconscious is trying to fool someone. It sounds as though you don’t concur with that view. That is not my idea of the subconscious or unconscious mind either.

It is surely the conscious mind which is perfectly able to fool itself, all our waking hours. So the question is, how can that be fixed? What I have to say doesn’t come from a Freudian perspective. It is elaborated from personal experience and illuminated by what I was taught, in the context of being cured of a 30-year susceptibility to ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The principles I learned, and grew to depend on more and more, have wider application than a particular “significantly debilitating medical condition” (Wikipedia).

My own cure came instantaneously about half-way through an initial 2-hour session. The first hour consisted of history-taking, which seems to be a common feature of alternative therapies. So we’d hardly touched on the theory when something clicked: not in my conscious understanding but actually in my body. If miracles of healing may be said to occur, that was an example. A rational medical explanation may be spelled out one day, but the label “miracle” doesn’t have to invoke supernatural causes. Suddenness is the thing. Quite a few things happen to me in this way, instantaneously. I guess it makes up for the too-many decades in which I blundered, obstinately persevering in tragi-comically wrong directions. Whether this gives me any authority to pontificate is for you to judge. Enough about my own case. I concur with what you say: “there’s no point in fooling yourself.”

Let us get to what is the point, with all possible rapidity. There is such a thing as “body-wisdom”. It could be called other things, but I think this the best, for with this naming, it declares itself openly. You could look up the model of the Triune Brain in Wikipedia, and see that some neurologist analysed the human brain into three complexes: reptilian, limbic and neocortical. It is the latter which confers the ability for language, abstraction, planning and perception. I would add that it commonly calls itself “I”, without conscious acknowledgement of the backroom members of the team. With that quick nod to neurology, let us move on.

My current viewpoint was first guided by a little instruction, but from then on has been experiential, based on our common capacity for subjective awareness. Since my moment of enlightenment, in which 30 years of chronic fatigue symptoms were instantly switched off at the mains, I’ve had respect for body-wisdom, and the fact that it never gave up on me, until finally I listened. When I say “I” these days, I am more aware that the “I” is merely the spokesman for the whole human being who bears my name. We, the three components of one triune brain plus this body, which together preserve continuity with a baby of the same name born 72 years ago, have begun to establish ourselves as an harmonious team, a band listening to one another, improvising together.

What is body-wisdom?

It’s older than thought, older than the sense of “I”. It certainly doesn’t try to fool us, though like all of nature, it is imperfect and liable to be unwittingly fooled. It has a main purpose, to support individual survival; that is, to protect me from physical & psychological danger. It is more dynamic than instinct, for example the instinct to “go forth and multiply” with all its complexities & cultural conditioning. I think of body-wisdom as a faithful dog, endowed with sharper senses and often more down-to-earth common sense than its master. Body-wisdom is constantly alert, so that whatever we might be engaged in with our overdeveloped intellects, it’s ready to cut in and remind us of priorities. It does this through the senses, such as pain, the smell of burning, an unusual noise filtered from all the usual ones, that wakes us up with a start in in the night. It does it through emotions, which originate chemically and get interpreted by the discriminating brain, like aromas. It does it through phobias and obsessions, though these by definition are instances where its messages get out of hand. The main point is, body-wisdom constantly makes assessments, and sends messages as needed to consciousness—like a faithful dog, which communicates through barking or other form of intervention.

Body-wisdom is associated with those functions which maintain homœostasis within our biological systems—gastric, endocrine, autonomic nervous system & so on. Body-wisdom is always our friend though its messages may cause us pain or irritation. When we do not heed these messages, trouble multiplies. Every one of its messages requires an action in response. In health matters, the message is called a symptom. Though there are ways to mask the symptom, medical and otherwise, these are short-term fixes which are likely to exacerbate the problem if prolonged. Body-wisdom does not give up. It steps up the severity of its alerts. In chronic fatigue syndrome, the patient’s muscular and other systems are held in a constant state of hyper-alert, leaving little energy for normal activity. I speak as a layman. Anxiety, depression, panic attack are a few other examples of what happens when body-wisdom’s messages are overridden.

(I believe that in a similar manner, body-wisdom or something akin to it will nag and prompt us if there is something that our life-experience has never yet taught us, but that we need to learn to deal adequately today. This perhaps I will try and deal with in another instalment.)

Our centre of consciousness is capable of any kind of foolishness, as we know from our own case and from looking at the world—locally through our own eyes or globally via the media. By foolishness I mean going against our own interests. We are sophisticated in our ability to think, to use language, to absorb learning and cultural behaviour and discriminate: for this, against that. But by far the more important thing is, “how can I know myself?” In matters of physical health it’s easy enough to see, when we set aside all the propaganda that passes as culture, that body-wisdom is our best defence against illness and malfunction.

In mental health, the value of a hotline between body-wisdom and consciousness is even more vital. Actually, to speak of mental and physical health as different realms is woefully misleading. It is only the symptoms which fall into different categories. Symptoms are messages so we should be always grateful for them, even when they are painful. In fact, when we heed them promptly, they go away; furthermore, gaining in confidence that we are alert to their meaning, they may in time be less strident and intense.

The placebo effect is an example of the interaction between body-wisdom messages and the action we take in response. When I go to the doctor his reassuring words, or even the prescription slip he hands over, often give me immediate symptomatic relief. My body-wisdom gives my action (of going to the surgery) the benefit of the doubt. The symptoms will return soon enough if the treatment I received was ineffective.

There’s a two-way communication between consciousness and body-wisdom, but it cannot take place using language, since the body, like a faithful dog, doesn’t speak it. It responds to tone of voice and gesture. So this is the way to talk to our body: with kindness, appreciation, understanding. When I was suffering from backache recently, the doctor who helped me to that miracle cure suggested that I speak soothingly to my back whilst doing certain stretches. The pain was my back’s way of screaming out, “Don’t do this, boss! This kind of abuse is what caused the trauma in the first place, remember?” Once bitten, twice shy. It is in the nature of body-wisdom to remember trauma, and protect us from repetition of same. Thus we acquire irrational phobias. The way to get over them is to proceed gently and sympathetically. Body-wisdom is crude but effective. We can over-ride when we really do know better, so long as we acknowledge the message with gratitude, and thank our faithful friend for its warning.

When we start to have a sense of our multi-dimensionality—that there is wisdom below the surface, waiting patiently for its moment—we may perhaps be less impatient, less annoyed with ourselves, less intolerant of the world. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” says Walt Whitman. If we listen to our consciousness overmuch, and the strident voices from the consciousness of others, neither of them mediated by body-wisdom, we can become isolated in our own madness, subject to a million fleeting fancies, few of which will do us any good.

to be continued

5 comments :

Tom said…

Most interesting. Re para 3, but does consciousness exist in grand isolation? I think not. Consciousness has its roots hidden in the sub/unconscious, in the “treasure house of images” as the Mystical Qabalah describes it. One might therefore pose the question, “Would consciousness choose to fool itself unless pressured into so going by the unconscious roots of the ego?”

June 17, 2014 8:38 am

Vincent said…

You are right I’m sure, Tom in that what I lumped together as consciousness is a Babel of voices and an Alexandrian Library of memories, not arranged according to the Dewey Decimal system, but in labyrinths of levels.

One might indeed pose the question you pose, but I’d like the same “one” to answer it too. You seem to have partially answered it anyway, in which case I wish you may elaborate it in due course.

The question of which parts do the fooling and which parts are fooled is one deserving investigation but I think we are most likely here to be fooled by our own language and logic.

And so I turn again to body-wisdom which doesn’t use language at all, and only understands tone of voice!

June 17, 2014 9:13 am

S said…
Dear Vincent
I understand, I think, what you mean and agree with much of what you say. I wonder though how much application it has beyond physical symptoms? I can easily see how it makes sense to ‘listen to your body’ when it comes to back ache, indigestion, tiredness and so on, and perhaps ME comes under that heading too. Perhaps my migraines and allergies come under that heading.However… the interactions between the parts of the mind, the body and the world are massively more complicated than that. What pains and scares us can be just as easily an illusion as anything. What you seem to dismiss as ‘phobias and obsessions’ brought on by ‘the propaganda that passes as culture’ are exactly the point. Habits, taboos, common sense, dogma, moral panics, witch-hunts – anything where questioning is resisted. That’s just how it’s done they say. These things are not so easily dismissed, and often we are not even aware that they are there. We take them for granted. Probably they are necessary. Probably one can’t be human without them.

In fact this whole sentence “In matters of physical health it’s easy enough to see, when we set aside all the propaganda that passes as culture, that body-wisdom is our best defence against illness and malfunction” pretty much summarises your position but I think it wildly underestimates the difficulties of this ‘setting aside’. One simply ignores the propaganda, listens to ones body and there we are.
But it’s not as simple as that – the normal everyday things we were brought up with, as if they were universal and obvious, the local assumptions and attitudes of the area we grew up in, the period of history we witnessed, all the things we take for granted. Reading and travelling, thinking and communicating and just living modify or entrench these basic ‘truths’ when they come up against contradictions but only substitute other ‘truths’ (or uncertainty). Nothing that I know of (except perhaps science) substitutes any kind of objective truth (and then only in a limited way). You talk as if the ‘propaganda’ of the world can be easily distinguished from the truth of ‘body wisdom’ but I can’t help seeing this as just another sort of dogma.

Looking back over this it occurs to me that perhaps you are only talking about physical health, in which case I’m beside the point, but then it seems that you want to make some wider point about mental health. In retrospect I confess I’m a bit confused.

Conscious/unconscious/preconscious etc – I think the most insidious effect here is the censor. Some part of the mind knows something unacceptable is about to be uttered and it steps in and stops it. Often what we call the conscious mind is unaware of what has happened, but sometimes it suspects, or others may suspect and some part of the mind goes to great lengths to conceal, deny or draw attention away from what was nearly revealed. That’s what I mean by ‘fooling ourselves’.

Compassion – I’m going to talk elsewhere about this much more but I think it is the most crucial thing.

S June 30, 2014 1:25 pm

Vincent said…

I have to face up to the possibility of not being any good at answering you, but I’ll try anyhow, trusting to imperfect intuition.

It certainly isn’t simple to separate oneself from the propaganda—amongst which in any case I include science. I don’t think being true to oneself can be about objective truth. It is about subjective truth (as believing in God or not ought to be), and being able to hold on to one’s subjectivity as intrinsically true in all circumstance, just because . . .

If the child is frightened of its grandfather, and decides it doesn’t like him, then that is the child’s truth, not to be argued with.

If the adult decides that the world in general is hostile to his existence unless he conforms to its seemingly arbitrary rules, I will say that this adult is the victim of an illusion. (I don’t speak here of the convicted child-molester. It is probably true that the world actually is hostile to his existence, precisely because he has broken its rules.)

Yet, “What pains and scares us” is never illusion. No, I shall correct this. Our subjective experience is to feel pain and fear, no matter what kind of pain. What we feel as psychological pain is actually physical pain because our emotions cause changes in the body. If a child is scared in the night, that’s real. What scares the child? It may not be easy to say. Perhaps a shadow imagined as a monster. Perhaps an actual rat which might do it harm.

I think you are right. I overdid that expression, “body-wisdom”. Suppose I say that regardless of our advanced capacity to think independently of immediate stimuli, peculiar to homo sapiens, we are still animals, still wired to behave in certain ways which would originally have evolved for the survival of our genes, even though they may now be irrational or illegal. And these behaviours can go wrong.

In your penultimate para you are right, that the insidious thing is the censor, for repressing, for deciding what is unacceptable. Of course, some public behaviours are unacceptable and it is perfectly right to suppress them, to avoid public consequences. It’s only if I am the censor to my own thoughts that I harm myself. If I am physically imprisoned, it’s not too healthy. But if I am judge and jury on my own self and give myself a long sentence in a self-imposed psychological jail, surely it is far worse?

I heard a snippet on the Andrew Marr programme on this morning’s radio, in which someone said that neurologists in a way may be able to “cure suicide”—not by a physical intervention, but helping people understand that chemical states (however originally induced) may be partly responsible for their forgetfulness of positive things about their character & actions. They can be more tolerant of themselves by seeing that some things just happen. And this knowledge may stop them pouring petrol on the flames of their self-destructive urges.

“Only talking about physical health”: no, I don’t acknowledge that distinction between physical and mental. I might almost go as far as to say, between friends, that mental activity is an illusion of the physical, mind is an illusion of brain. Needless to say a very necessary one. We cannot turn the evolutionary clock back now.

June 30, 2014 8:26 pm  

Vincent said…

I’m not sure whether my reference to “the convicted child-molester” would have been included, if it had not been written the same day as the sentence passed on “the boy from Bassendean”.

By an odd twist of fate, I spent my earliest years in Bassendean myself at this house, though it was a wooden bungalow with a veranda then. So like the locals there, I feel that the suburb’s name has been rather besmirched. But such is human nature.

July 01, 2014 1:10 pm