Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.
What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.
Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:
All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]
Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.
Tagged as:
Noumenal Field,
Psychotherapy
Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!
Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.
Tagged as:
Adyashanti,
Psychotherapy
More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.
Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)
Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.
And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.
And as she says later:
Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)
Tagged as:
Bernadette Roberts,
Psychotherapy
A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:
Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.
Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper
There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.
(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)
It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.
Tagged as:
Joan Rodriquez,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).
The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.
Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.
Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…
We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…
The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…
The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…
What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.
Tagged as:
James Hillman,
Psychotherapy
Woke this morning to an email from James F. Kadlec requesting me link to the Psyche and Art exhibition project of the World Psychiatric Association, which I’m very happy to do. According to the prospectus, this was:
An exhibition for the World Psychiatric Association 11th International Congress commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the organization, this extraordinary collection of approximately 90 images includes art from museums and private collections of more than thirty artists from three continents. It has drawn international press when shown in museums in Hamburg, and Düsseldorf. In Vienna its exhibition was at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art. Parts of the Psyche and Art have been included in exhibitions in Yokohama, St. Petersburg, Washington D.C. and New York.
From what I can see, it toured in 2005. What a wonderful collection of psychic energy and self-valuation.
You can read more of the prospectus here (PDF). I suggest checking out the thumbnail images page, as the images themselves are large, and you can get to them from the thumbnails.
They’re pretty much all wonderful, but two that caught my eye this brilliant Spring morning in Sydney are:
Heinrich Reisenbauer (b 1938)
Sonnen (Sun), 1997
Pencil and crayon on paper
Oswald Tschirtner (b 1938)
Schlafende (Sleeping), undated
Ink on paper (21 x 15 cm)
Tagged as:
Art,
Heinrich Reisenbauer,
Oswald Tschirtner,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
I attended the ANZAP seminar Understanding the Emotional Brain recently, a stimulating talk by Lea Williams and Russell Meares followed by discussion.
Lea Williams presented some of the recent work by her and her group on, amongst other things, the brain’s response to fear and its bias towards negativity. Our brains, from current research, evidently need five positive experiences to counter each single negative experience, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium. And the fear response in the brain is complex and exhibits a dual pathway – the so-called “low road” and “high road”. In the primitive low road, the thalamus quickly prompts the amygdala into a fight-or-flight response (say, in reaction to seeing a snake on the path before me). However the slower high road, via the visual cortex, enables a more potentially more considered response (I realise it’s dead).
It’s not all bad news on negativity – research suggests that the plasticity of the brain is much higher than previously thought, and there’s potential for retraining negative brains in positive ways. And such positive ways tend to use the high road, rather than the immediate “triggering” of the low road. New strategies for retraining is a hope for psychotherapy.
Which is background to the point of this post: A lovely response from Russell Meares to a question from the audience, along the lines “Could a person’s dreams indicate which road was being used?” I was struck by Meares’ answer, in his typically poetic and reflective manner: “There needs to be a taxonomy of dreams” – a poetic statement that stands complete in itself, for me.
Mears went on to quote Russel Hobson (originator of the Conversational Model), that we can treat the dream as a psychotherapeutic session, adding that we can also treat the psychotherapeutic session as a dream.
Despite all this academic brain talk we still come back to poetics, to metaphors of the high road and the low road, finding ourselves wondering about the tales we could tell ourselves as we take our journeys. The heart can’t help but make its stories.
Tagged as:
Psychotherapy
by Ron Dowd on July 19, 2009
in Photo
I came across this intriguing slide show Ready, Aim—Dream! Has photography blinded us to the reality of the American West? on slate.com and it raises the question yet again of what the photograph says and what it hides. As Sarah Boxer says:
Whatever image you chose [after bringing to mind images of the American West], you can blame photography, which has done more than anything to construct our vision of the West, whether it’s cowboys and Indians or parking lots and strip malls. If you have any doubt about this, check out “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West,” an exhibition at MoMA.
We can’t help but “construct our vision” with and from the photograph – as John Berger has been telling us for many years, and as Boxer agrees with when she says “once you allow figures into a landscape, it’s hard to lock all narrative out”.
In fact, for Berger, better to immerse the photograph in an explicit textual narrative rather than leave it to a viewer-constructed one – as he discusses in his essay Uses of Photography, in About Looking:
The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.
It’s interesting to contrast this view with that of Gary Winogrand, a photographer who came down strongly on the side of the photo being “complete in the frame”. Here’s a teaching video that features Winogrand in interview and the man on the street, doing what he did so sublimely, capturing those “complete in the frame” moments.
And Boxer in the above-mentioned slide show is attracted to the enigma in a Winogrand image:
One photograph I find difficult to place on the fantasy-reality-irony spectrum—which is therefore one of my favorites—is Garry Winogrand’s 1957 picture of a suburban house in New Mexico… there’s something aesthetically true about this picture.
This is, for me too, a great picture, and here it is:
And some quotes from Winogrand in the teaching video:
there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability… the minute you relate this thing [the photograph] to what was photographed, it’s a lie… the thing has to be complete in the frame, it’s a picture problem… all there is is light on surface…
But so much context is inevitably left out of the single photograph. Here are some telling stills from the teaching video, showing the gestalt of a single picture event in the street life of Winogrand. I’m especially interested in the woman in red and the complex psychodynamics that are going on for her, as a stranger snaps her and her friend. Is it exploitative? – I’m not sure (but I know it’s not what I like doing) – but the point is there’s a complex dynamic that occurs over a short time period and that’s most probably not recorded in the image.
I guess it’s this gestalt that is intriguing for me, and how to allow it to be a part of the picture-making process.
Tagged as:
Art,
Photography,
Psychotherapy
Here’s an article, A Tailor In The Cyclops’ Cave?, by Steve Silverton, that I’ve just enjoyed reading. It’s a good reminder of what really works in psychotherapy, and a reality-check on notions that mechanical approaches can in some way address the poetic, relational worlds that we create, as they contemporaneously creates us.
… we humans tend to make ourselves up as we go along, not only our present but our past and our future as well. We are always re-writing ourselves and whatever the current story or pre-occupation is tends to change our sense of our past, present and future selves. The figure creates the ground and the ground creates the figure.
Steve Silverton’s writing comes with the clear mark of personal experience. His reflection on the question “How do you work?” (posed to the therapist by a potential client) moves not only into the nature of the relational venture of client and therapist, but raises the subject of how we potentially are limited by the words at our disposal (the words in that question), by collective sub-texts behind our endeavours and inquiries; how these endeavours can be limited by that sub-text.
Tagged as:
Gestalt,
Poetry,
Psychotherapy
In this recent Counselor Magazine article – Spirituality Around the World, Culturally Diverse Approaches to 12-Step, are thoughtful cross-denominational views of approaches to 12-Step recovery for addictions – the approaches being Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Here are gems from the Buddhist Rev. Koyo S. Kubose:
There is no sin in Buddhism, only ignorance. The greatest ignorance is ignorance of oneself; namely, thinking that one exists as an independent entity in the world and that everything revolves around oneself.
Liberation comes from loosening the grip of one’s self-centered and self-created existence.
Which evoke for me a poem I wrote in 2004:
wicca
perhaps one night they will take you
from your home
to a place out of doors
and in the darkness
on bare ground
before a pitch painted shed
begin to tell you who you are –
and realise something
for which even they were not ready –
that its only
that in the black shed
(its closed door hiding a mystery
terrifying even to them)
of which you are worthy
Tagged as:
Place,
Poetry,
Psychotherapy
