Posts Tagged ‘healing from core’

Movement to Wholeness

 

Liberating the Body

Chapter Three

MOVEMENT TO WHOLENESS

Discovering Your Power of Growth

Although another approach to inner-directed movement will be described below, this is not a suggestion to avoid using the previous approaches. Using the water movements or yawning, even if employed dozens of times, will still bring new facets and freshness. Each approach does produce slightly different results however. This is what was meant above by the dimensions of experience. The yawning method of starting for instance, appears to lead more to release of physical tension – the water method leads more to expression of feelings. The latter aids in expressing yourself in movement and harmonising your body and feelings. It is no exaggeration to say the next method, if used a number of times, helps you to fuller self expression. It brings to the surface qualities and energy that may have been sleeping in you.

To make this clear, it is easy to see that an acorn has within itself the potential of a full grown oak tree. Even if the acorn is planted and the emerging tree is a metre high, you can still believe there is a lot more to emerge. As a human being, even though you are physically mature, there may still be a great deal more of yourself which has not yet become realised externally.

The Seed

Create your environment again, with sufficient space, clothing allowing mobility – loose and soft if possible, without tight undergarments. This time you will need music played quite softly. Again it should be music that does not grab the attention too much. Warm up with two or three of the movements already described. Give yourself up to three-quarters of an hour for the whole session.

The important thing about the ‘seed’ practice is that you are purposely not imagining a specific movement for your body to follow. You are only holding an idea, an outline, and to follow it your body and feelings must move into the unknown and play creatively with the idea of the seed to produce any result. So let your body feel its way slowly into finding its posture or movement. Don’t get frustrated if in this first practise little happens. Remember that inner-directed movement is a learnt skill, and you are still learning.

Not only is this an exercise for your feeling sense, but it is also a way the process of inner-directed movement can express. You can consider it a success if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. So at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings mean you are sensing what is happening, and you can thereby refine your technique with their help. By letting go of the controlling urge, you can let the spontaneous and creative part of you express.

1 –        Stand in the centre of your space and raise your arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended.

2 –        With eyes closed, bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed.

3 –        Notice whether your body in its present posture feels as if it is expressing the form and condition of the seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea and sense you have of the seed. Many people find, for instance, that having the arms extended does not `feel’ like an unplanted seed. Don’t struggle with this. It is just an experiment, play with it, have fun.

4 –        If you do not notice such feelings of difference between your extended posture and the idea of a seed, try another approach. Remember the experiment in which, after raising your arms above your head several times, you let your arms find their own way to move. Once more follow the subtle urges of your being. Play with the feelings of what it would be like to have the shape of the seed; to be waiting for the right conditions to grow and express all your hidden potential of leaves and flowers. Let your body play with these ideas or feelings, just as you let it move when you allowed your arms to find their own way upwards. Do not make this an intellectual inquiry. Use your body and feelings, even if this is a new for you. Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is satisfying. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, or waiting? See if you can find an inner mood which for you feels like a seed. Do not attempt to think the whole thing out or consider it scientifically. Let whatever feeling sense you have guide you.

5 –        When you find a position and inner feeling that suit you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, with body movements, postures, and awareness of your feelings, what might happen when you as the seed are planted in warm moist soil and begin to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find what will occur when you as the seed grow, put out leaves, blossoms and fulfil your cycle. Explore the whole cycle of the seed’s expression. Don’t hold a rigid idea of what the growth of the seed means. What you are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the seed’s growth.

6 –        It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is finished.

7 –        When you sense the experience has finished, rest quietly for about five minutes and end the session.

The following quote from a letter I received gives an idea of the wide range of experience which can arise from this exercise. Judith describes her use of this ‘seed’ approach to inner-directed movement as follows:

“I am a trainee yoga teacher and have been teaching for three years. I have a small class of fourteen students who are keen and attend regularly. I decided to have my students try the seed approach to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was as follows – A man in his thirties said, `I felt I was in a womb. It was very comfortable, cosy and dark. I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come away – it was so peaceful. I have never experienced anything like it before’. He was very impressed.

“A woman in her thirties felt like throwing her arms around and kicking her legs. `I felt I wanted to give birth and was about to deliver’. She didn’t fling herself about, but held back. I think it was a pity she didn’t let go. Perhaps I didn’t explain the whole procedure clearly enough for them to understand that it was entirely free movements. The majority acted out being flowers. Only one in the class thought it was a lot of `bloody rubbish’, her words. She didn’t even try. She thought she would feel stupid acting out a seed.

“I was surprised at the outcome, that so much should happen first time. I personally felt as if I became the bud of a crocus. I seemed to be slowly unfolding with difficulty. Not until I fully opened did I feel a great relief. The results of this have made me feel very positive in my outlook, and far happier.”

Experiencing your growth as the seed is enjoyable without any concern about what it might do or be beneficial for. Its possibilities are worth understanding though. Judith’s experience of feeling difficulty in opening, and great relief when opened, typifies its action.

What this means is made clear by the experience of a man, Graham, whom I worked with personally. He found that while being the seed he had no urge whatsoever to grow. He lay on the ground for the whole period and felt how wonderful it was that he didn’t have to actively express.

When we talked this over Graham told me he could easily see the connection this had with his life. He said that although he was energetic, and as a male nurse had to deal actively with people all day, he never felt he was really present as himself. As a person he hid behind his role as a nurse and seldom exposed his real feelings with other people. In fact he wondered if he had ever really expressed in activity what he felt or believed.

Graham then used the seed approach again. This time he felt the urge to grow and emerge from his non expression. He gradually opened out from a curled up position and slowly moved, with hesitations, to a kneeling position. At that point he stopped. He explained that standing up – being present with his own feelings and potential with other people – was so new to him, that the half way position was as far as he could grow at that time. Nevertheless, it gave him an exultant feeling to be at last, for what he felt as the first time in his life, daring to go into the world as a real human being. He felt sure that in following sessions of the seed approach he would progressively emerge more fully.

The seed approach deals specifically with your growth as a person. It helps you work out, through creative movement, any restriction in expressing your potential and your physical energy. People who have not lived out their own inner needs, or are unexpressive physically, will find this helpful.

The Seed Group

 

Part of the pleasure of inner-directed movement is sharing it with others. I still enjoy seeing how much pleasure people who have used inner-directed movement for the first time have when they see what wonderful experience they create with their movements. Because it is a pleasure, and because there is support and a more powerful atmosphere or ‘space’ is created when sharing, it is worth considering whether a friend or friends would join with you.

The seed approach can also be used with others. If so, one person is the seed, the supporting people – two to three at the most – can be earth and water. The aim is to support the growth of whoever is the seed by physical and emotional contact.

If you want to use this, whoever is the Seed starts by standing in the middle of the others, who take time to make contact with her/him. They allow time to find an attitude that enables them to get closer physically and emotionally than in usual social roles. So without forcing or acting mechanically, the members touch and draw near to the Seed. When this is established the Seed curls up on a prepared space – with blanket or cushions – on the floor. The members draw near and make contact again. Get close, cover the Seed’s body with yours, penetrate with your touch, as does earth and water.

Liberating the Body – Phase Four

The approaches to inner-directed movement described in the first three phases, although different, all revolve around the allowing of spontaneous movement. Through the use of these varied approaches you gain direct experience of your own creativity in working with your body and discovering its links with your language of posture, gesture and movement. You begin to discover the emergence also of spontaneous creative fantasy. It is creative because each of the approaches allow expression of something slightly different – and each session is itself unique in some way.

The next approach to be described is the cornerstone of inner-directed movement. It is presented as the fourth because through the other approaches you will have become more practised in the technique. This enables you now to use the great simplicity of the ‘open’ approach. With the previous approaches there was either a physical activity or theme, such as water, which gave direction for the practice. These structures are absent in the next approach.

The Open Approach

Most of the great traditional approaches, such as Shaktipat, Seitai, Qi Gong or Subud use this open approach, though they each explain it differently. Its special quality is that it reduces limitations. The other approaches, because they have more structure, direct what arises for you in some measure. It is like walking into a library and saying, ‘I am looking for some information on my health’ or ‘I am looking for something about personal growth’. That would limit your search. If you walked into the library with the attitude – ‘I am open to discovering anything relevant to my life’ – then the limitations are fewer.

The open approach is an access to your whole self. Because much of yourself still awaits discovery, is still unknown to you, it is impossible to know just where to look to find your own wholeness and health. You are unique. You have a different background in family or cultural traditions than many others. You have personal and particular life experiences and different personal qualities of mind and body which make your needs distinctive. Allowing your being freedom of expression during inner-directed movement empowers your ability to work at and express your own special needs.

Despite the fact that virtually all the healing or helping professions or techniques attempt to apply cures or methods to our being, it is obvious that we know our own needs and are largely self-righting or self-regulating. This is meant in the most down to earth and observable manner. Expressed in its simplest form, if you are hungry you have an urge to eat. Beliefs or fears may degrade that pure urge into other forms. Worries about weight gain; ideas about what is healthy food; habits perverted by trying to be ‘one of the boys – or girls’ – at business / club dinners, may achieve this degrading process.

By opening to inner-directed movement without structure you allow your being to gradually shed such degradations and return to an expression and recognition of your real needs. Because you are always feeling your own personal needs – as in the example of hunger – the open approach to inner-directed movement helps the dropping of preconceived ideas and social pressures. There may even be a process of clearing out the habits, fears and pains that have stood in the way of your own healthy self. Then comes the experience of meeting and accepting the real you. The you that is both ordinary and extraordinary.

The adventure of truly integrating the culture you have taken in, and forming it into your own personal and living self takes time. It is not going to happen in just four or five sessions of inner-directed movement. But if used for an hour once or twice a week for a year, very real changes will be seen.

Movement Toward Wholeness

Although use of the voice was mentioned, and exercises given in Phase One, it is worth remembering the healing value of this. Your voice, your body and your emotions are linked. Restraint in one restrains the others. So working with the voice can help free and mobilise the body and emotions. Tense or rigid emotions are just as difficult to live with as a tense and rigid body. Just as physical pain and restriction arises from muscular tension, emotional pain and limitation derives from emotional blocks.

If there are changes in pace during the period of practice, allow them. The range of possible movements and forms of expression are so enormous it would be boring to list them. They include all tones of feeling from angry to loving and exalted – all vocal expressions from deep crying to imitation of the sound and feeling of foreign languages – all types of movement from the most exquisite stillness to frantic tribal dancing. These are some of the spectrum of inner qualities you are healthily capable of as a whole human being. Sometimes people say ‘I have never expressed myself like this before, I wonder if I am bizarre’. The answer is that only whole human beings are capable of a wide range of expression which they can choose to end at any moment. It is the unhealthy person who is locked into compulsive and limited patterns of behaviour. Liberation of the body is a sign of health.

1 –        Prepare your environment of space, clothing, mood and music.

2 –        Put on some music which has energy but does not grab your attention too much. Use a couple of warm up movements to get your circulation more active and your body loosened.

3 –        Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next half hour you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your being to express its own needs in its own way by opening to the WHOLE you.

4 –        Get the ‘keyboard’ feeling in yourself. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.

5 –        Allow spontaneous movements to develop. Take an open, observing state of mind.

6 –        If movements are tardy in emerging, start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.

7 –        When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your finger tips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed which satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.

8 –        When you are ready to finish the session, stop the movements and relax on the floor or in an easy chair for a few minutes. There is often a natural sense of an end of the theme that has arisen.

 

Using the open approach you will experience movements, themes, emotional expression and insights particular to your personal bodily, mental and spiritual needs. The more fully you express the more you learn to command the whole of your being. Liberating the body is movement to wholeness.

 

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Link to Chapter four – Link to Chapter List

Mind and Movement 3 – Honouring Yourself

When attempting to use coex we must remember that we are dealing with natural processes, and they have the possibility of entering into our conscious life when, and as they need. However, because of the way our personality relates to spontaneous drives, and perhaps also because of our social training as children, the self regulatory process of coex does not work spontaneously in most people. Nevertheless, the movements and techniques given in chapter three, and those about to be explained in this chapter, must be seen as exercises to re-establish our natural spontaneity. Therefore, when we use coex in a situation where we have chosen to apply it, to be clear, we need to recognise that we are choosing to allow it, or are ‘practising’ it rather than it is emerging in its own way. Practising coex, or allowing it to emerge are both valid ways of experiencing it. The need to be clear about this point however, arises from that fact that if we ‘practise’ coex, it will gradually begin to ‘emerge’ in ones life anyway, and that is natural and good.

Some examples will illustrate how this works in everyday life. But I want to set the scene a little to bring out certain aspects of what we will look at. So Peter and Adelaide, who we are going to consider, need to be seen as human animals. As physical animals they have certain very real needs such as a reasonable amount of food, air to breathe, sexual expression and protection from the extremes of temperature. Physically they feel these needs and respond to there absence or their fulfilment. This response can be by feeling well and happy, or feeling ill and dying. But their organism as a whole responds in a whole range of ways to many more things than food, air and temperature. Having conscious personalities which are named Peter and Adelaide extend this range of response enormously, and make it more complex also. For instance Peter’s father may be ill in hospital. At a physical level Peter’s body was looked after by his father while Peter was too young to fend for himself. From purely basic animal kinship feelings Peter has a drive to return that caring, but because of personality clashes between the two males, Peter doesn’t visit his father while he is ill. He suppresses any feelings of wanting to care with memories of past arguments.

In this situation Peter’s psychological self-regulatory process would attempt to find some sort of balance between the kinship drive and the hurt feelings in the personality. Biologically the kinship drive is more important than a hurt pride, so the drive would attempt to express into conscious life. If Peter had learnt to suppress such feelings however, they would remain unconscious. If Peter suppressed such attempts at self regulation over a period of time, then a growing feeling of dis-ease would occur, with Peter unaware of its cause.

That is purely a ‘suppose’ situation created to illustrate how coex can be suppressed from spontaneous emergence. But let us look at a real situation existing with Adelaide. She is 42, a good looking woman with a strong drive toward sex, (i.e. relating to a man, procreating, raising children). Adelaide’s mother recently died, and this triggered an emotional breakdown, causing Adelaide to withdraw from caring for her children, caring for her home or herself. Her husband left her during this period and Adelaide found another man who lived with her. Normal conversation was difficult with her because she spoke on and on in a long blurt about sex, her children, other people, her work. After a few months her new man left her. Adelaide was hospitalised several times.

From the intensity and length Adelaide spoke about love making, having a man, and suicide, her organism had very powerful responses to these areas, yet her expression in regard to them was not organismic. I mean that if an organism, a cell, a creature, a human animal, is hurt or pleasured, it responds in a physical way and with obvious feelings. The reaction might be sexual erection, deep sobbing or any other straight response. But Adelaide’s was almost wholly verbal. This suggests that Adelaide had a powerful suppression on her self-regulatory process, preventing the experience of emotions flowing from her real inner fears and pains. Yet why would a person suppress the very things which would balance their being and bring about greater ease?

The answer could be linked with how Adelaide is structured as a personality, and how her personality relates to the processes of her body. Clues to this lie in her age, that her breakdown occurred after her mothers death, and her preoccupation with procreation. One of her statements was that the man she lived with couldn’t give her a baby, and this was the only real form of love. So we can see that the structure of her personality is deeply bound up with being capable of childbirth. That she is 42, faced with losing her procreative ability, confronted by death and the loss of two men, must not only threaten to destroy her personality as it is, but cause many inner responses to occur which she is not allowing to express. If she allowed the responses to emerge into consciousness, she, Adelaide, would have to meet and integrate the very facts of life she most rejects – meet them WITHIN HERSELF!!!

Peter is in his late forties in his second marriage, and has attempted to honour self regulation in his life for some years. What follows is his description of how this emerges into his life spontaneously now.

 “After some years of gradually learning to let myself meet the sort of feelings I used to hold inside, I now meet the self regulatory activities in quite gentle yet effective ways. For instance this morning I woke feeling good, but knowing that I needed a sexual meeting with my wife Eileen. When I got close to her though I could feel her withdrawal and lack of physical excitement, so I didn’t push my need. As I was dressing the conversation revolved around how Eileen related to her first husband who was more sexually active than I, – a topic she initiated – and how we were relating which was not very active – initiated by myself. We had not reached any satisfying conclusion by the time I was ready to start the day by visiting the post office, and I left feeling I wasn’t going to be pulled down by her mood, and determined to be independent. As I left I had an uneasy feeling inside. I started to push it down but realised that my attitude to Eileen only satisfied my independent self, and there was another part of me which was upset by what had happened. By the time I was walking back from the post office the feeling was clear enough for me to see that although it was fine to be independent, I was attempting to achieve it at the expense of my feelings of care and connection I had built with Eileen over the years. When I arrived back Eileen was sitting playing with her granddaughter. She looked okay but I went to her, hugged her and said, ‘It’s a big world out there, and I don’t want to go it alone.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, so I saw she had been trying to play silly buggers just as I had. Then the tension which had existed between us vanished.

“Maybe that sounds like a very small incident, but I know that in the past I let those small things mount up until they were huge grudges inside. Now I can allow the feelings which arise, and so I let my whole self have a say in how I live, instead of being the sort of dictator I used to be.”

The simplest way of allowing coex to enter our life is to honour what we feel. While working with a man – Andy – recently, one of the common errors connected with this was demonstrated to me again. Andy had allowed spontaneous movements and feeling while working alone, and had arrived at a sense of confusion and failure. In his words, “I feel blitzed”. When I asked him to explain what he meant he said that he just couldn’t do whatever was necessary to succeed with coex, and felt devastated. In other words, Andy was looking for a feeling of success and confidence as the thing he should have found. When I suggested he allow himself to experience the ‘blitzed’ feeling instead of searching elsewhere, he cried with real emotion, and could directly see how the feelings were related to his childhood when he was put in an orphanage. In his very search he had been avoiding the things most meaningful by only wanting to see the positive side of himself. Allowing the tears enabled him to acknowledge how important his ‘orphanage’ feelings were in influencing his life. Letting them be felt was the beginning of their integration into his conscious life.

This integration would let them grow and change instead of being locked unconsciously into him in the same form they were in his childhood.

HONOURING OUR FEELING SENSE

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Apart from our well known five senses such as seeing and hearing, we have other senses, equally as well known to us through experience, but seldom mentioned or defined. We have a sense of balance, a moral sense, a musical sense and a feeling sense. When using coex the feeling sense is particularly important, and the experiences of Peter and Andy show how this sense worked for them. Long before the development of language in the human race, or in our childhood, the feeling sense was the urge or means by which the complexities of life were dealt with. When we watch animals in the wild deal with difficult situations and survive without being able to think as we do, it is obvious how practical the feeling sense is. It becomes understandable when we remember that most of our memories and experience are unconscious. Also, many impressions we gather, and many of our mental functions such as cross referencing information, take place outside of our waking awareness. Information arising from these sources and expressing through the feeling sense has been given a variety of names such as hunches, intuition, presentiment, and so forth. Obviously, what some people call premonition or a hunch is simply their own anxieties or prejudices. My mother in law, before I married my second wife, told us she had experienced an intuitive insight that our marriage would only last eighteen months before it failed. Our marriage is now in its seventh year, and what was claimed as intuition was obviously an expression of hidden desire.

Most of us have correct hunches arising from our feeling sense though. Such hunches or insights can be about our own internal psychology, such as Peter and Andy experienced, or about any aspect of our life. Years ago while I was running a book business and was only beginning to learn how to use my feeling sense, I read a book about Edgar Cayce. For two days I had a powerful urge to write to people who were continuing his work in America, and make contact with them. I did this but still the feeling persisted. It subsided only when I wrote again and offered the services of my book business if they needed it. A week later two letters arrived from Virginia Beach. The one with the earliest postmark explained the work of the organisation – A.R.E. – and then asked if I knew of someone who would stock their books, as they had a lecture tour planned, and needed someone to act as agent for them. The second letter simply said, “We must be working a fine case of telepathy here. Thanks. The books are on their way, and our lecturer, Col. Adams, will arrive soon.” The results are seldom that dramatic, but are nevertheless generally helpful.

Memories and processes occurring outside of verbalisation and conscious thinking, have often never been formatted into words or clear concepts. Therefore they cannot be conceptualised – but they can be FELT! Our subtle feelings and senses enable the unconceptualised material to be presented to our conscious mind. Feelings form a link between our thinking, verbal self, and the deep unconscious self. If, like my mother in law in her response to my marrying her daughter, one is the victim of ones feelings and anxieties rather than the observer of them, hunches are confusing rather than helpful. But there are very clear techniques which enable us to meet our feeling sense in a constructive way. These techniques form an excellent introduction to the ‘practice’ of coex.

NONE OF THE FOLLOWING METHODS ARE ‘BETTER’ OR ‘WORSE’ THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS.

I THEREFORE SUGGEST YOU TRY THEM IN THE ORDER EXPLAINED, AND FIND WHICH MOST SUIT YOUR NEEDS AND ENVIRONMENT.

DISCOVERING THE SEED OF GROWTH

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There are exercises of mind and body one needs to practise to develop acquaintance with the feeling sense. Each of us have a feeling sense, but often we have not developed it or learnt to use it consciously. So these exercises are rather like an artist learning to use their sight for their art. Eugene Gendlin, in his excellent book FOCUSING, (Bantam Books) calls it the ‘felt sense’, and says that it is what we experience before we speak. We seldom know beforehand the words we are going to use, except in a formal situation, but we do have a ‘felt sense’ of what we are going to say. This then becomes verbalised when we say it. Also, if we think of two friends, if we move from one to the other in our mind, we have a feeling sense of how different each one is. We have these feeling responses about everybody we meet, everything we think, and everything we do. They underlie our whole life, but very often we fail to notice them. In the following exercises we are going to spend time considering, exploring and learning to work with them.

To begin this first practice you need to create the right setting and situation. You need to wear comfortable clothes which you can easily move and relax in. Take your shoes off, put a blanket on the floor area you choose to practice on, and clear a space big enough for you to stretch out in and spread arms and legs. Create a space in time also. It is important to give yourself about half an hour without other pressing issues to properly meet your inner feelings. Drop self criticism and give yourself permission to express sounds and movement freely.

When you are ready to begin, stand or lie in the centre or your space and raise you arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended. Then bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed. Now notice whether your body in its present posture feels as if it is expressing the form and condition of the seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea and sense you have of the seed.

Many people find, for instance, that having the arms extended does not ‘feel’ like an unplanted seed. Don’t struggle with this. It is just an experiment, play with it, have fun. So if you do not feel your being is expressive of the seed, move about, explore different postures until you begin to feel more satisfied.  Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is right. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, waiting? See if you can find an inner feeling which for you feels like a seed. Do not attempt to think the whole thing out or consider it scientifically. Let whatever feeling sense you have guide you. If you get lost, come back to arms and legs extended and spread and again consider whether that FEELS like a dry unplanted seed. If not, work with that feeling of ‘not right’ until it gets to be ‘right’.

When you find a position and inner feeling which suits you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, in just the same way, what happens when the seed is planted in warm moist soil and begins to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find out what will occur when the seed grows, puts out leaves, blossoms and fulfils its cycle. Explore the whole cycle of the seed’s expression. Don’t hold a rigid idea of what the growth of the seed means. What we are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the thought of the seed’s growth. It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case simply remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is up.

Not only is this an exercise for our feeling sense, but it is also a way the process of coex can express. The concept of the seed structures what happens, but it is still a channel for self regulation to occur. You can consider it a successful coex experience if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. Even if the unexpected does not emerge in the first session, it will do so as you learn to let go of thinking and critical appraisal of what is happening, and leave the body open to free expression. So at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings means you are sensing what is happening, and you can thereby refine your technique with their help. By letting go of the controlling urge, you can let the spontaneous and creative part of you express.

It is helpful to use this form of coex once or twice a week for a full half hour or longer each time. What happens may differ each time, for the unconscious is very creative. In symbols, or in direct experience, something of your own nature will be expressed in the drama of growing. As you practice, any stiffness of feelings or hesitancy will lessen. The theme of what emerges will become clearer and more fully felt. As this happens you can use different starting points. Instead of the seed, use the image of WATER, of AIR, of EARTH, or the SUN. Just thinking about them they may seem very abstract, but my experience is that very few people are unable to enter into them quite deeply through their feeling sense and coex.

Judith, who teaches a yoga class, describes her use of this approach to coex as follows:

 “….I felt as if I were the bud of a crocus. I seemed to be slowly unfolding with difficulty. Not until I fully opened did I feel a great relief. The results of this have made me feel very positive in my outlook, and far happier…..I am a trainee yoga teacher and have been teaching for three years. I have a small class of fourteen students who are keen and attend regularly. I decided to have my students try coex to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was:- A man in his thirties said, ‘I felt I was in a womb. It was very comfortable, cosy and dark. I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come away – it was so peaceful. I have never experienced anything like it before.’ He was very impressed. A woman in her thirties felt like throwing her arms around and kicking her legs.  ‘I felt I wanted to give birth and was about to deliver.’ She didn’t fling herself about, but held back. I think it was a pity she didn’t let go. Perhaps I didn’t explain the whole procedure clearly enough for them to understand that it was entirely free movements. The majority acted out being flowers.  Only one in the class thought it was a lot of ‘bloody rubbish’, her words. She didn’t even try. She thought she would feel stupid acting out a seed. I personally was surprised at the outcome, that so much should happen first time.”

When using the starting point of the seed, or water, etc., we are giving the unconscious a ready made structure to work with. Because we may be unfamiliar with a completely unstructured approach to our inner processes, such a structure gives at least some sense of familiarity and confidence. Even so, some people find they want everything fully described, scripted or choreographed. The very point of coex however, is to begin moving beyond the known in ourselves, towards creative newness and the unexpected. So even if some anxiety is felt, as with the woman Judith describes who defends her anxiety of the unknown by calling the exercise ‘bloody rubbish’, one needs to gradually move beyond such resistant feelings.

With the structured approach one also needs to leave the result open ended. With the man in Judith’s group, for instance, although he started with the structure of the seed, his experience was one of being in a womb, in a peaceful feeling state, and the woman felt as if she was about to give birth. With a large enough sample, the results would be enormously varied. Many people would go through the whole cycle of the plant’s life; some would find they grew to a certain place and stopped; some would have no impulse to grow at all; some would move quickly from the seed structure to personal feelings. So in your own practice leave yourself open to what emerges. If you stay with the seed and its growth that’s fine, but if you find you inner process diverging, let it express what it wants to.

 

IF FEELINGS ARE A NEW WORLD

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Eugene Gendlin suggests exercises which are less active physically than the seed structure, and are helpful if you are uncertain whether you have feelings or not. People often tell me that they are not sure if what they are observing in themselves is a feeling or a thought, and Gendlin’s approach is helpful. He suggests:-

1] When in a time of quiet, think of something or someone you love or think is beautiful. It can be a pet, an object, a person, anything.

2]Consider why you love what you have chosen, or why it is beautiful.

3] Notice what different feelings arise in you, how your body feels, when you consider what you have chosen, than when you think of something else.

I find it helpful to think of the body as a T.V. screen you are watching. Before you think about your beautiful thing, notice what tensions or peace are on the screen. Take note of any aches and pains, any sense of tiredness or energy, and any attitudes such as boredom, or being pleased, which are there. Don’t try to banish these, just note them. Then bring to mind your chosen object and note what changes take place on the screen of your being.

4] See if you can find any words which fit what you can observe or feel. Let yourself feel what the words are about, and note whether what is on your screen changes, and what it is expressing.

A series of exercises I devised which help to define this important feeling sense, is an extension of considering oneself as a screen. With a similar sort of setting as used for the seed exercise, stand and relax unnecessary tension. Take note of what is then happening on ones ‘screen’. Simply note, do not alter. Then think of a word such as ashamed. Hold the word in mind and note what changes occur on the ‘screen’, and what changes in body posture. Give this some minutes, then change the word to unashamed and note the difference.

Try this with different words such as depressed/happy, failure/success, etc.

Most people, but not everyone, can find an easily noticeable change with the different words. Even the body posture alters. And the exercise not only help us to note the different feeling qualities we have with each word, but also demonstrates how just holding a thought can alter our whole body and feeling situation.

Because the ability to consciously verbalise or be able to clearly think about what one is considering, is the last and integrating stage in levels of awareness, it is important to express what one experiences in these experiments. I believe a good test of integration is that what one describes is understandable not only to oneself, but also to any casual listener. For some people the word and the feeling are very much connected. Something which is very important is that when we look at the ‘screen’ and note what is happening, some parts of what are being experienced will be clear and easily put into words. But there will also be an area which is not yet clear, not yet capable of being expressed. You are looking into a place in yourself which is beyond words. If you continue to observe it however, it begins to open up, to grow, as it were, and gradually becomes clear enough to join with words. That is the most important area. In watching it we are looking into the unconscious. When it ‘opens’ the unconscious emerges into consciousness where it can be verbalised. WHEN YOU ALLOW THE FREE EXPRESSION OF COEX TO UNITE WITH THE OBSERVATION OF THE WORDLESS PLACE IN ONESELF, A NEW AND WONDERFUL LIFE SKILL HAS BEGUN. The process of coex can begin to release into consciousness important experiences which were previously unavailable. Our observation of the place beyond words allow a communication between our deep unconscious and our conscious sense of self. If these exercises in contacting the feeling sense are used, and the greater facility in this area is brought into the seed approach to coex, a much fuller experience will result.

THE UNSTRUCTURED APPROACH

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Because there are so many facets to human nature, ranging from nameless anxieties to insights into the nature of life, any structure we place on coex may limit it. I have noticed with groups which approach coex from a particular standpoint, such as psychotherapy or religion, that although the basic functioning is the same, the experience in the group is largely within that heading. In Primal Therapy for instance, even when the feelings arising are spontaneous and unexpected, they are nearly always about childhood pain. In Subud groups however, which is a spiritual brotherhood, although the activity is obviously self regulatory, what arises is mostly idealistic and to do with moral development. Barter for example, describing his early experiences in Subud, says it was like being baptised in a flow of water. Participants in Primal Therapy describe their experiences as reliving the pain of being born, etc.

W.V. Caldwell, writing about the findings arising from LSD psychotherapy says, “The kaleidoscopic patterns and heightened sensory perceptions; the sumptuous and exotic fantasies that seem to bear no personal application, the symbolic myths and rituals that do; the experiences of fusion, Samadhi, and psychosis; the physiological urges to squeeze, or bite, or throw; the passage of protoplasmic disorganisation; the historical recalls of childhood; the splendid religious and philosophical revelations – how can one make sense of them all? If the psychedelic experience had confirmed the theories of Freud, or Jung, or anybody else we might have been relieved. Instead it has confirmed them all and added a few more besides.”

We must beware of putting any rigid conceptual framework onto what it is to be a human being, especially in regard to our unconscious life. If we feel naked and anxious without such firm theories, then by all means use what is necessary. But recognise at least that your approach will limit what you allow yourself to find. It is easy to see that our being spans the distance between solid physical substances, such as our bones, to the most extraordinary subtleties of mind. All of these are ourselves. To open to only a part of what we are is to miss a great deal of the wonder.

The approach to coex in this unstructured form needs the same sort of approach we used in the structure of the seed – i.e. sufficient floor space, etc. You start by standing in the middle of your floor space, giving yourself the same sort of time and attitude as before. This time, instead of holding your arms above your head as with starting the seed, start by circling the arms. Take the arms above the head, down the opposite sides of the body with the arms fully extended, then upward crossing the front of the trunk. In the full movement the hands are then forming wide circles which cross the front of body. This arm circling, just like the arms stretched above the head in the structured approach, is simply to help you begin coex. Dispense with it as soon as you can allow coex without it.

Meanwhile, circle the arms with the eyes closed and bring your awareness to the shape your hands are making in space. As you become aware of the shapes the hands are carving in space, watch what feelings you have as to how you would like to move. Give yourself permission to ‘doodle’, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body incline you to. Allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like. Allow sounds to accompany the movements if there is an urge to, and allow whatever feelings accompany them. Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn’t have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express. With a non critical watching attitude, relax and let your body and feeling sense direct what happens. There is no need to fiercely concentrate in order to wipe the mind clear of other influences. But you may need to relax the part of the mind that always needs to know beforehand what you are going to do. This is not like creative dance, in which there may exist a need to produce something pleasing for others to watch. With coex you need an open area in which your being can make its own adjustments, and movement and feeling has a chance to express outside of rational criticism and demands of everyday life.

Give yourself at least half an hour in which to explore what spontaneous movements and feelings emerge. Below is a summary of what may happen in this practice.

1] Although the movements may at first appear haphazard and irrational, if you allow them to continue without criticism, they usually express – perhaps only over a period of several sessions – a particular theme or point.

2] Like a dream, the theme or drama often symbolises ones life situation, or something within oneself, such as the remaining emotions or attitudes from past experience, or a creative realisation. Or the movements may be expressive of the body’s own need to release energy or mobilise itself and its urges.

3] There are obvious stages or depths to the experience. Movement is often the first. Feelings and fantasy can then combine with the movement. Only with a few people do they occur without each other. If met in the right way these can lead to insight into what is being expressed. In other words the symbolic movements, if that is what they are, can give way to rational understanding. This is not because one has thought out a plausible explanation for what happens. An example given by Barbara will make this plain.

“For several sessions in the group I was practising with, my hands had made complicated movements as if I were making something. I realised as I observed that my hands were working at something, operating on someone in a healing way. As this happened I had strong sensations of energy and feelings streaming along my arms into my hands. There was a woman in our group who had cataracts of the eyes, and what my hands were doing was a psychic or spiritual healing on her eyes.

The physical sensations and feelings were strong enough to make me wonder what would happen. I didn’t tell the woman, but watched to see if her eyes improved. Each week the same thing occurred, but the woman’s eyes did not improve. This left me with the question, ‘What on earth am I doing?’ Leaving this question in mind I allowed the thing to continue. As I was watching it during the session straight after I had considered the question I suddenly had a memory of my teenage, when I read a lot of books about spiritual healing. I felt again something of the intensity of desire which I had felt in wanting to be a healer myself. Suddenly the answer popped into my head. My urge to heal had set up a message in my unconscious to satisfy my ideals. There was something like a ‘program’ in me which diverted some of my energies toward healing, or at least, acting it out. As soon as I realised what was happening my hands stopped their movements and they never occurred again. Up until that point I had thought my inner self was lying to me. It was saying I could heal when I couldn’t. But with the new realisation I realised it wasn’t lying at all. It was simply expressing energy in ways I had set up in the past. That such expression was non-realistic had now become evident, and so I could let go of that old pattern.”

Barbara’s description shows that her understanding came out of observation, a ‘floating’ – not a forcefully searched – question, and by allowing the continuing process to respond to her question. Also, what she says illustrates another point about coex. Namely that some themes in coex express habitual patterns of energy use or attitudes. For instance if we have a habitual pattern of turning our anger inwards, our coex movements or theme might express as banging our own chest aggressively. Our awareness of such habits enables us to begin changing them.  5] The basic action in our sessions is self regulatory. In these movements, themes and fantasies, our organism attempts its own healing and balancing. But a part of self regulation is the process of physical and/or psychological growth. So some parts of what emerge are to do with adding to our psychic experience and stature.  6] The process is amenable to direction. It is a learnt skill, allowing the unconscious to express in a way that is meaningful and integrative with consciousness. Some of the possibilities of this direction will be explained in other chapters. 7] What arises, if we are open, comes from many facets of ourselves. Overall there is a uniting of the light and dark sides of ourselves. Caldwell describes this as follows:

One person, “looking for herself, came upon a tightly closed box. Tearing it open – in her fantasy – she found inside a lovely rose, and realised that she had been enclosed in a box of Puritanism, of self denial and physical shame. The outer petals of the rose, pink and mauve, seemed to whirl and dance; they sent her fancy spinning off like a ballerina into flowered landscapes of delicious femininity. The inner petals were shaded from the light, obscure and mysterious. Here the colours darkened to deep crimson and velvet purple. They reflected her deep animality. These she avoided, until she realised that it took both the light and the dark to make a lovely rose. She could not have one without the other. Gradually the rose became a nourishing symbol in her life and growth.”

TWO’S A POWER GREATER THAN ONE

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Anyone who has practised coex alone and then has the chance to experience it with another person, or other people with whom they feel safe, knows what tremendous amplification or added power is brought to it. Such a person or group need to have the same absence of destructive criticism and judgement, the same open curiosity that one brings to oneself in the practise. When this happens you may be able to enter areas of experience previously closed. Even though I have been using coex for many years, having a good partner or group who will witness my work is still an enormous stimulus.

A simple way to work in a group of two or more is to find a room or space that is suitable and start off just as one would if practising alone. Use the arm circling if you have never practised coex before – or if you can allow coex easily, start by standing together for a few moments to drop what has been happening in everyday life. Get into the feeling of an open body and non-judgement. Then stand apart and allow coex for the time allotted. This format can handle a group of two or a hundred. Size doesn’t matter. But by having other people with you, a good environment in which the action of coex can express is formed through mutual support. In such a setting it does not matter if very little or a great deal happens. Being in close proximity to other people allowing coex is helpful even if little outwardly occurs. It establishes in one the realisation that people can allow the irrational and be none the worse afterwards. So a sense of trust in ones own unconscious builds.

For some people coex will not occur until this trust is established, so they may need an ongoing group which will allow them to witness coex in action. Ursula began reasonably quickly, practising with Krysia who had learnt coex in a group with myself. She here describes her first three sessions:

The first time we met I was active in a pleasant mild way with the odd disturbance thrown in.

The second time was also quite contained and at the end I sat as in a meditation but aware of what was going on around me. Then Krysia came to me to let me know time was up. She knelt before me. I did not move. She touched me and it was like a dam breaking and release happened. I cried a strange cry. As I cried I was happy to the same measure as I was sad I had well-being in me to the same degree I was involved in it.

The coex after that started with yawning which could not be satisfied no matter how much the body helped the momentum of the yawn, or how loud the sighs were. Then the yawns became shouts and screams. I wanted to give the final yawn as I did not see much sense in spending an hour yawning. But then came a final piercing scream which only vaguely seemed to come from me; as I heard it more than did it. As it happened I was no longer looking out of the window of that room, but saw my mother’s portrait etched against the window, as I saw her once when I was a child. She was fighting an angina attack and screaming with pain, losing control of her body functions and senses almost. Then I broke into sobs and tears. Strange sobs to me, as I felt all the panic, yet all compassion, all the lies with which she held me, the negative lies, and I felt love for her too. Yet I was also watching myself sobbing; ‘Oh mum. Oh mum.’ And ‘Let go. Let Go.’ And later I felt freed and quiet after the storm. As my hands smoothed over my body it felt so good. As the sound ‘U’ came out on breathing deeply it made a warm vibration in the small of my back which radiated up to the ribs and down to the tailbone. During the period of quiet which followed I saw that place in me filled with light. I was coated in the light, and a counterpart of me, made of light, penetrated me and extended beyond me. I also felt my posture in that area had changed and I had no more difficulty with being comfortable in certain sitting positions.”

Ursula managed to allow herself greater freedom of expression in just three sessions. Although she was applying judgement to her yawns, she nevertheless allowed them until they became sounds which incorporated feelings. Her flowing energy could then clear a source of stress which had remained in her for years. When that cleared Ursula was able to allow feelings of pleasure which incorporated a sense of light. The result of this was an immediate change in her posture.

Another way of working is with just one partner, where one allows coex and the other witnesses. Although this may sound little different to the way Ursula was practising, where both people allow coex, in use there is a great difference. The witness acts as an unspoken question which stimulates our process to respond more fully. It is the format most often used in therapeutic situations, and in groups such as Co-Counselling. Its advantages are that the witness can give feedback to the worker, and with experience, can point out what the worker may have missed. But perhaps the fundamental strength is that when we have someone else’s attention our being is much more expressive. After all, it is the basic form in which communication takes place. Even if one regularly works with a therapist using Gestalt or Co-counselling approach, I find it an advantage to bring to them the freedom of movement and expression coex allows.

During a recent course I taught, I took advantage of being able to work with a partner and had a very helpful session with Barry, one of the students. Afterwards he said he had felt helpless at times because he didn’t know what to do or what to say. From my point of view that wasn’t true at all. Just by being there Barry had been a great help. Also, at no point did he judge what I was doing as good or bad. I felt an active sympathy and involvement from him, and that was enough. However, learning creative listening can aid the process still further. So below some useful points are listed.

1) There is no need to respond to what the worker says or does. It is their work session. They are working on themselves. Your main function is to witness, so do not be tempted to begin a conversation. In one class in which I was teaching creative listening, Di, a rather motherly woman, could not stop herself responding every time her partner spoke. Di had years of caring motherhood behind her, and she couldn’t get out of the role. So when her partner said something like, “Last week I had a real bust up with my wife”, Di would respond with something like, “What a pity. You shouldn’t row with your wife like that. It doesn’t do any good”.

Such responses are highly judgmental and are value judgements at that. If you are on the receiving end of such comments, they either irritate or lead you to feel you do not wish to expose you inner life to such a person.

2) Some of the most helpful responses  are:

3) A summary of what the worker did physically given at opportune times. Thus you might say, ‘At first you were quite still, then you crumpled to the ground.’ If you can gain an impression of what such movements describe in a dramatic sense that is helpful too. So in the already stated movements we might add, ‘When you crumpled I felt you were expressing despair. You remained quiet for a while then got up with what seemed like a new strength.’ If such information is given as an opinion rather than a fact, it allows the worker to find their own response, and to see whether it fits their experience.

4) A statement of any overall theme you notice. So you might say, ‘Many of the movements you made were backwards as if retreating.’ Or, Almost all you said seemed to have a note of complaint, as if you felt a victim.’ While using coex there is no need for the worker to respond to these comments as in a conversation. It is enough to hear them and let their inner process respond.

5) Questions are a very powerful tool in such a relationship and should be used with great care. If a worker is in the middle of a session in which subtle feelings are emerging, and you suddenly ask, ‘Has this got something to do with your mother?’ could draw them straight into an intellectual consideration of the question, inviting them to respond verbally. It would be much better to put the information as a suggestion, such as, ‘My feeling is that this has something to do with your mother.’ This does not call for an immediate response and so allows the worker to carry on with their experience.

6) Beware of preconceived opinions about what the worker is dealing with. I remember in one of my early experiences as a witness the worker, a woman, kept rubbing her vagina. I felt sure it must have something to do with a repressed urge to masturbate. Fortunately I kept my opinion to myself, and it turned out to be childbirth. If we do get stuck in an opinion, and pin it on the worker, it can cause a powerful conflict between what is arising within them, and what we are pushing on them from outside. It help to remember that our opinions on what someone else is experiencing are just that, OPINIONS. With experience our statements can be enormously helpful, but not until we have learnt some humility and discipline.

7) There are important questions, however, and these should be used at the end of a session. For instance, if the session is symbolic in some way, it is helpful to ask what the worker feels it expresses. For instance they may act out being locked up in a small space, and when asked for opinions of what it expresses, say it feels just like their work situation, where they feel stifled and cramped. Having moved from symbol to life situation the next step is ask the worker to explore via coex how they might satisfyingly get out of the trap. At first this might once more be in symbols, but can be brought into everyday terms by discussion.

If the worker uncovers an area of childhood experience that was painful, or any other important event, it is bound to have left certain habit patterns in them. Even when the stress of the event has been released, the habits will remain unless made conscious. Eddie had released the shock of being put in a hospital and separated from his mother at three. He went on to re-enact the scene where his mother used the threat of putting him in a ‘home’ in order to make him obedient. The tensions had been released, but when Eddie was asked what the experience left him with, how it influenced his life ‘now’, he discovered previously unconscious habits. Namely, he had made an unconscious decision as a child never to trust a woman with his love again. This meant that in his marriage Eddie always kept a lot of his feeling cut off from his wife to avoid the possibility of getting hurt again, as he was in childhood. Being aware of this pattern enabled Eddie to gradually take the risk of sharing more of himself with his wife.

Therefore the questions need to lead 1) from symbols to insight. 2) From past experience to what habits the experience left. From the awareness of the habit(s) to a re-assessment of what the person wants to do with that part of themselves now.

If the worker contacts feelings which are not clear, they need to look at what they are experiencing to see if they can recognise having felt it at any time in their life. Andy, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, from his unclear ‘blitzed’ feelings became clear when he saw them as results of being in an orphanage. One cannot always make this sort of connection with feelings, but if you can it integrates them much faster.

9) Discussion of the session is useful in nearly every case, whether as witness and worker, or as a co-practising group. It helps to clarify and define what occurred. It also means the person exposes to other people what may have been hidden even from themselves, which in a sympathetic setting can be healing.

THE SEED GROUP

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The structured seed approach can be used in a group form as well as alone. In group form it has a slightly different framework and a lot more possibilities than when practised alone. It needs three or four people, with or without experience of coex. It is best if at least one person has used coex though, and probably best if each person has used the ‘alone seed’ at least once.

To start the group, one of the members chooses to be the Seed. This person is the worker. The other members take on the roles of earth and water. But these latter roles are only loose guides, and I am not suggesting any attempt to act them out rigidly should be made. Basically they are witnesses, but in a slightly different form to the one-to-one work. Whoever is the Seed starts by standing in the middle of the others, who take time to make contact with her/him. They allow time to find an attitude which enables them to get closer physically and emotionally than usual social roles. So without forcing or acting mechanically, the members touch and draw near to the Seed. When this is established the Seed curls up on a prepared space – with blanket or cushions – on the floor. The members draw near and make contact again. Get close, cover the Seed’s body with yours, penetrate with your touch, as does earth and water.

As a guide to this, it is helpful to consider in human terms, if you are in the water role, how you would penetrate the seed to stimulate its growth process? If you are in the earth role, again in human terms, how would you relate to the seed to give it a medium in which or from which to grow? If you are in the seed role, then you allow your spontaneous reaction to this. Allow the process of coex to move you without considering what you should do. Trust your inner process. The group is an intimate one. It has many dimensions of experience possible. Not only is it a meeting of people in a way not usually possible socially, but it is also a place to learn human contact, how to give caring and support to another human being, and how to communicate with others non verbally.

Because there are so many different ways people experience the seed group, I will quote a few responses. “I’ve never been with people in that way before. I think it was the first time I really relaxed with a group.”—”When I was the seed I didn’t have any urge to move or grow at all. At first this worried me. I kept wondering if the others would be bored or disappointed. When I told them, the worry disappeared; they were all just enjoying being close.” — “Being the helper was great. I got so much pleasure from supporting and being near the Seed and the others in the group. But when it was my turn to be the Seed I didn’t enjoy that at all. I felt restless and claustrophobic and quickly pulled out. It has made me realise for the first time in my life that I find it difficult to receive that sort of closeness from others. I have to be the giver.”— “Until I became the seed I had never realised how hungry I was to have other people near me. I wanted to hold and touch in a way I had never allowed myself before. Since then it has been easy for me to hold people, babies, my wife, with more giving than I could in the past.”— “First I was just curled up. I felt comfortable, and relaxed into it while the others completely covered my body with theirs. It really was like being planted. After a while a flicker of movement arose pushing my head out. This came in waves, increasing in strength, until my head was pushing out and up like a plant growing. I didn’t try to think what I ought to do, just went with the pleasure of it. In the early stages this didn’t seem to involve the others, although I could feel them close. But by the time I was up on my knees there was such pleasure flowing through me, such joy at being close, being able to feel the soft skin of a face against mine, that my pleasure involved the others. It is the nearest thing to making love without sex I have ever come across. I felt all the flow, the contact, without in any way going into areas that are unacceptable. When I was standing, growing from the sheer energy of movement welling up from within, we all seemed to be one moving, living process. I felt I had given something of myself to the others without saying one word. And I also experienced them as distinct qualities around me. At the end I could sit with them for a long time, holding hands, head on them, without the need to speak.”

Although we start with the structure of the seed and its growth, you do not need to stay within that structure if your own experience takes you out of it. Some people feel they are a baby being born. Others have a direct here and now relationship with the group which needs to be explored. But basically one is setting up the group as an environment in which to allow coex to occur. The coex action might take up the seed image and use it, or express in another way. Because other people are so near, what emerges may be quite different to what arises alone. Like the person who found it difficult to receive, ones theme might be about the difficulty or pleasure in relating to others.

The notes given about the creative listening or witnessing also apply with the seed group. As a helper we are supporting the Seed in their work. The Seed is the one to say when they are ready to finish the session, but as a witness you may be able to give them an assisted passage by careful feedback. Also, discussion and feedback are important at the end of each session. There is a great deal to learn about ourselves, the way we relate, and what emerged in the seed group. It is an unusual social setting and we may have reached beyond boundaries we usually erect. To know how others felt about you laughing, touching, not moving, expressing deep feelings, etc., is vital to your realistic appraisal of future relationships. Again, this is something which although important, we do not experience often enough. The experience of Jane quoted below shows another side of the need to complete, through discussion and careful witnessing, what began in a non verbal way.

“When I got back – from the seed group – I felt quite ill, and dragged around for a few weeks feeling like death. I even went to the doctor, but all he could find was mild anaemia. This feeling developed into a period of absolutely compulsive eating, with an awful feeling of never feeling satisfied by what I ate, and guilt at eating too much. This went on for a couple of weeks until, trying to find out what was causing it, I remembered that after my birth experience in the seed group, I had a tremendously strong urge to suck. I checked with my mother and found she didn’t feed me as soon as I was born – so a possible explanation is that I’d gone back to this infantile experience of wanting to suck and not being able to. It certainly explains a lot – like my thumb sucking in particular and, more generally, my strong and continued dissatisfaction with everything, that nothing is quite right. After all, it was the first thing I ever wanted, and I didn’t get it. It seems to me I’ve been looking for that all my life. Anyway, once I’d realised this and thought about it the obsession for eating just disappeared, and I felt much better straight away.”

This situation could have been speeded up by attempting to see where the feelings had been experienced in the past; or by having another session with the question held as to where the continuous urge to eat arose from. Also, the woman was not regularly using coex, so it took her longer to clear what arose in the one session.

As was said at the beginning of this chapter, coex is a natural process. As such it does not need any techniques or special settings. But like any natural force, such as electricity, different structures cause it to express different qualities. These structures are ones I have found useful. You need to find which is most suitable for yourself.

Mind and Movement 7 – Teaching Coex

Coex can be as easily taught as relaxation, yoga or aerobics are at present. The concept of mental and physical health being achieved through an inner process being allowed expression is certainly not a widespread one in our culture. But for those who are ready to work with coex, I want to describe how they can teach it.

To teach coex well, one needs to have some background in practical psychological phenomena such as projection, resistances, and symbol formation. Useful books in this area are: The Barefoot Psychoanalyst by John Southgate and Rosemary Randall; Getting Clear by Anne Kent Rush; Myself and I by Constance Newland; Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung; and LSD Psychotherapy by W.V. Caldwell. Just these few books are mentioned because if they are all read, a clear and broad view of human inner life is met. They deal not only with the wide variety of forces and factors which one might confront, but also give very clear and direct ways to deal with them.

I have known people who taught coex extremely well, who themselves never experienced its spontaneous release. Nevertheless, a deeper insight is achieved if one has used the process over a period of a year or more. There are, however, several ways you can present coex to others. My own first learning experience was in a peer group in which each person took responsibility for themselves. There was no ‘teacher’ in the sense of someone with experience who was showing the rest how to use the process. This approach is extremely useful with people who understand some­thing of coex, and who wish to support each other in their use of it.

If you are already a teacher of a class which includes relaxation, dance, free movement, bioenergetics, or keep-fit exercises, coex can be usefully introduced into the programme. If the presentation is done carefully, the practitioners can find a helpful release of tension and self expres­sion, without entering into a depth of self exploration they do not seek. Even if you are organising a group specifically for the use of coex, the following guidelines are still useful.

Teaching Body Skills

1 For a useful and yet light-hearted approach to coex in a class situation, first explain that although most of our movements are deliberately made, our body also has a need to express itself spontaneously, as when we yawn and sneeze. Then introduce the technique of finding spontane­ous arm movements, as described in chapter two. This is where a hand is pressed against a wall.

Have the group use this several times and have fun with it, feeling their arm or arms float upwards. To help the group make more contact with each other and drop some of their inhibition about being together, have them try the experiment with a partner. The person who is trying the experiment stands with their arms by their side. The partner then holds their arms close to their side while they try to raise both arms. In this way they can try the experi­ment with both arms. After about thirty seconds, the experimenter relaxes, and the partner releases their hold.

If the group is new to coex, it is best to introduce one thing at a time, separated by the gap in time between the class meeting. It can be said to the class that what is being taught is a way of learning relaxation which is more helpful than the general ‘lying on floor quietly’ type. So after the group members have enjoyed having their arms rise, have them be aware of how their body ‘feels’ when they let their arms rise. In other words, there is a different feeling in their body from resisting the movement than allowing it. Have them explore the difference by resisting, then allowing, the movement. Then use what they have learnt by asking them to created the feeling of ‘allowing’ in their whole body, and slowly, without losing the feeling, find a position of rest in which they can let themselves drop into that feeling more fully.

2 What is being presented is an integrated approach to re­laxation and stress release. Also the class are gently learn­ing to listen t9 their feeling sense and follow it to their own benefit. Therefore, the next step to build in their aware­ness of coex is to have the group work as pairs to deepen the experience of allowing or letting go. This will be called ‘allowing’ or the ‘open state’ for ease of explanation.

Because many tensions are habitual and unconscious, it is a great aid to work with a partner to learn the type of relaxation mentioned above. It helps us drop tensions we might otherwise miss. To start, ask the class to choose a partner and have one person lie down with their partner kneeling by their side. Have the person who is the subject take time to settle, and bring awareness in turn to the legs, trunk, arms, neck and head to let go of unnecessary tension. Ask them to tell their partner when they feel relaxed.

The partner should then help deepen the awareness of the relaxed state by taking one of the subject’s hands and. lifting it. This should be done with attention as to whether:

a] The arm is completely free and limp. [b] The arm is reasonably relaxed but at times the person either uncon­sciously tries to help in making the movement, or tenses against what you are doing. [c] The arm is very tense and resists movement.

The aim of the helper is to increase the awareness of the subject, and sometimes act as a mirror for what is happen­ing. As already stated, many tensions are unconscious. This means that they are occurring spontaneously outside the direction of the conscious mind. So, when the helper takes the subject’s hand, and moves their arm, the subject’s attempt to help, or their tension against the movement may happen whether they will it or not. The subject will probably not be able to let go of these tensions even if they attempt to – that is, not at first. Because these tensions are unconscious habits, happening outside conscious direct­ion, the first aim is to help in bringing them to the awareness of the subject.

As the group leader it is helpful to demonstrate the technique first. So if the subject is able to relax their arm easily, you need to say something like, “Are you aware of how fully you are relaxing your arm? Can you allow that feeling of letting-go to pervade the rest of your body?” If the subject attempts to help the movement, or blocks at certain points, then say, “As I move your arm are you aware of the attempt to help me make the movement?” Or, “Can you feel the tension at this point as I move your arm?” The same applies if the arm is very tense. The subject may be quite sure they are very relaxed until you move their arm. Even then they may not immediately know the degree of their tension. Therefore, you must help them gain awareness of it – really feel the tension.

It helps to move the arm through it’s whole range of movement, pointing out areas of tension, and focusing on the area until the subject becomes aware of where the tension exists. Once you have worked with each arm separately, move both arms together in random activity, giving the subject time to gradually experience some of their tensions during the movement. Or if there is no resistance, let them deepen their ability to relax during movement. Give people a chance to talk about what they have experienced and how they view it. When you bring the subject’s attention to points of resistance, the resistance or rigid tension will not immediately go. Tensions are rooted a lot deeper than our conscious will, often growing out of previous experience and unconscious reactions to past events. They are habits, and as such need to be gradually transformed. The first step is to become aware of the tension(s). Secondly, through subject and helper working together, the subject can practice the feeling of letting-go. The growth in this is measurable in how much one resists movement made by the helper. Therefore, through this simple technique we can teach members of a group how to have an immediate insight into how well they have learnt to relax. Through practice the ability to ‘allow’ is increased. Learning this is a body skill. The practitioners feel in their bodies, they learn in their muscles, how to drop tension. It is not simply a mental event. Therefore, if you are the teacher, in giving information to the subject, you are partly aiming at leading them to feel/learn in their body, what it is like to let go of resistances while being moved. Sometimes a tension is holding back a lot of energy/emotion. As the tension is melted, the energy will be released in the form of muscular twitches, movements, shivering, feelings, or imagery.

It helps the class to learn the new body feeling of allowing if contrasts are given. Therefore, after moving the arms in the way described, have the subject now actively resist while the helper moves both arms. The resistance should not be so strong as to become a great struggle, just enough to allow the person to compare the feeling of letting-go, to that of active resistance. Get the subject to swing between resisting and letting-go. This helps to define as a body skill the ability to let go of resistance. Ask the subject and helper to work together having the subject swing between the feeling of allowing and active resistance. The subject should particularly note the different feel of this in their body. Practising these types of ‘body feeling’ helps the subject to be much more aware of them. They are brought more fully into conscious direction, and are a powerful beginning to developing the sense of ease in using coex.

Although it has taken some time to describe this, the use of it in class, once it has been learnt, need only take about ten minutes. Then the helper should change roles with the subject. The aim is still to increase awareness of the feeling sense and the experience of ‘allowing’. Just as this was carried into use in finding a relaxed position of rest, so the same should be done at the end of this teaching session also.

3 The next stage in teaching this is to bring what has been learnt into everyday activities, and is best given after the previous stage has been practised for a couple of weeks. It too, needs a helper/subject situation. The aim of this step is to maintain the sense of the body letting-go of unnecessary tension, and learning to hold it while being active physically. In this stage we start from a standing position. The subject at first closes their eyes and the helper moves their arms as in the previous exercise, while the subject relaxes. This is simply to re-activate the sense of ‘allowing’ in this new position. To stand, the subject needs enough strength and tension in the body to maintain posture. Yet many muscles need not work, so can be relaxed.

As in the previous exercise, it is best if you as the teacher, demonstrate this to the class before asking them to pair off. Take a firm hold on the subject’s shoulders and move the whole body forward and backward slowly. As this is being done have the subject be aware of how their body feels, and how it responds to the movement. Make the movement a few times, making sure the subject can trust you to move them without dropping them. They need only go about four inches or so in either direction. What will probably happen is that the subject will hinge from the ankles, and their body will move back and forth rather plank-like. If this is so, have the subject be aware of it, and that if it were not for your firm grip, they would have fallen backwards or forwards.

What is done from here on needs to be approached slowly and carefully. The subject needs to be told that you are now going to move them again, but this time they should be aware that their body is plank-like because of the habitual tensions locking their muscles. After this you are going to work together to learn a new habit in standing and moving.

To do this ask the person to be aware of their behind and imagine it capable of easy movement backwards, hinging with their legs. To test whether they can manage this, take a firm hold on the shoulders, (i.e. hold the upper arms), and press gently downwards and slightly forwards. If the pelvis is still locked they will remain plank-like. If the pelvis now begins to relax, the behind will move backwards as the shoulders are pressed down and forwards. Explain to the subject that they need to have a feeling which allows them to respond to being moved, but springs their body gently back into its own upright posture when any pressure is removed. So it is a feeling of balanced yet sensitive poise. If the subject finds it hard to let go of the tensions holding their pelvis rigid, place your hand on their behind to bring awareness to that area, and have them push backwards with their behind towards your hand, while letting the shoulders and head go forwards.

Practice this and then try the same thing with the knees. Ask the subject to have the feeling that their knees are fastened to the pelvis by elastic – the muscles are elastic.

Let them imagine that the knees can easily move forward and spring back into place because of this elastic. To test this push downwards on the shoulders. It might be that they remain rigid; their knees bend but their pelvis locks again; or pelvis and knees now begin to respond easily. Perhaps when pushed down they stay down because they cannot, at the same time, keep the feeling of being like a blade of grass that bends in the wind, but springs upright as soon as the wind stops. This is a part of learning the body skill of ‘allowing’ while the body is moving. So have the class practice until this skill begins to emerge. Do not expect it to become well established in one session. It will need a number of practice sessions to learn this new habit. To begin with it is enough to press the shoulders down then release, so the subject can learn to let the body maintain its own centre of gravity and balance, yet respond by squatting down and rising up again. When this is fairly well established, then start taking the subject into more complex movements. Take them forwards until they walk, then down, twist and up; backwards, side­ways, down and twist, and so on until it is like an easy flowing dance. The helper, or you as the teacher, lead the dance, and the subject finds a body feeling which allows them to easily follow direction with eyes open or closed.

In order to accomplish this the subject has to learn to maintain the same sort of body feeling while lying down and allowing their arms to be moved. Bringing this into movement begins to link it with everyday activities. This is where it becomes a much more dynamic tool in teaching coex and relaxation than when the subject simply learns to relax while prone and inert. They may not otherwise bridge the gap between the open ‘allowing’ state and their daily actions.

As with the other lessons, this is most helpful if prac­tised for several weeks. It thereby establishes the new body skill being learnt. It is worthwhile helping the members of the class do this by having them maintain the open state while they are no longer directed by their helper. This can be taught in a future class as below.

4 The subject now has to take what their helper enabled them to define and use it alone in their own self directed movements. Help them to do this by starting with some­thing simple. While they are standing, ask the class to created the open state, and while maintaining it take a few steps forward. Tell them to start again if they lose the body sense of ‘allowing’. Ask them to take particular notice of face, chest, and anal/genital areas. These are where tensions often show. In the face it is felt as a tense or false expression. In the chest it is experienced as holding the breath or restraining it in some way. In the anal/genital area it is felt as a tense closing up. In this last area aware­ness can be increased by tensing the area and then drop­ping the tension.

Do not be surprised if members of the class find it dif­ficult to perform simple movements such as walking with the awareness they have been learning. It is quite normal for people to stumble or falter in just taking a step forward while they maintain the open state. The class should be allowed time to gradually develop past this stumbling point to a surer more pleasurable movement. When they can maintain the open state reasonably well while walking, try more varied movements. Let them practice until it becomes easier. If necessary, let them work with the helper again to re-define the experience of the open state. Depending upon the main structure of the class, it can be used during dancing, exercise, etc. In using it in this way, create the open state and let it’s pleasure flow into the very exertion needed. Keep the genitals, face and chest open even though a lot of muscles are being used. As people feel the pleasure of moving in this way, allow the good feeling to flow with the breath. What is meant by this is that the open state causes a gentle pleasure to be felt in oneself, even in a strenuous posture or movement. When there is awareness of this pleasure let the in-breath enhance it, almost as if one were breathing-in pleasure. Then let that feeling permeate the body.

Daring to be free and the fear of being Oneself

I believe that the single most difficult aspect of teaching coex is that if offers a person freedom. Teaching how to create the ‘open’ state is comparatively easy. One is telling the person or class just what to do, and giving them easy to follow steps. When it comes to exploring their own spontaneous movement, however, many people pull back. They face the freedom of decision, but also they face the unknown. If you give the whole class a particular move­ment to do – even if quite a funny one – everyone is doing it, so the end result and performance do not matter. But if a person has to rely on themselves for creative expression, they may not remain unselfconscious. They wonder whether what they do will be RIGHT? After all, no end goal or model has been set, so what they do may not be acceptable. How are they to find out without risking ex­pressing themselves? Most of our pupil/teacher relation­ship is based on copying or repeating what the teacher does or says.

I find it helpful to use one of the movements described in chapter three to begin the exploration of coex. This can be practised without using the helper/subject situation. Each person should stand in their own space, preferably on a carpet or mat. Ask them to create the open state in themselves, and carry it into the movement where the head and arms are taken slightly backwards on the in-breath, and the body taken into a squatting position on the out-breath. Ask them to repeat the movement a few times to familiarise themselves with it. When they have done this, lead them into being aware of the difference in feeling between the ‘up’ position and the ‘down’.

The ‘down’ and ‘up’ are opposite poles of how we ex­press ourselves not only physically but psychologically. The down expresses sleep, rest, withdrawal and non­involvement. The up expresses activity, involvement and confrontation. When we emerge from the womb, our being is confronted by a different world. In the womb there was little change. There was no otherness such as other objects or people to deal with. There was no need to reach out for ones needs because food came automatically. In life outside the womb, food does not come automati­cally, certainly not as we mature. There are other people and objects to deal with. Change is occurring all the time. If as a baby we found no comfort or love when we were born, it could be that we did not develop any urge to adapt to this new life. Perhaps we did not want to be involved in its change, its opposites, its necessity to find our own needs and to cope with other people. We may have wished to stay in the womb condition because there was no re­ward in emerging from it. So although our body matures, we might not have developed into an outgoing explorative person. With those feelings some people might ‘drop out’, or withdraw into alcoholism. In milder forms we might be quiet and unexpressive, not wishing to be involved in what is going on around us. The squat posture is expressive of this type of non involvement with the exterior world. But of course there is another side to withdrawal – it is also an aspect of a healthy life. If we do not honour our healthy need to sleep, to have times of privacy or cycles of lessened outer expression, then we suffer stress. So the squat also represents our ability to rest and to allow ourselves the attainment of relaxed, non-active pleasurable feelings. This could be called our ‘warm comfortable place’.

The standing position expresses our involvement in the exterior world of change, opposites, and needs which require expenditure of effort. It would be ideal if each of us could move easily between these antipodes of our being. We tend to have a greater ease in one or the other though, and this is expressed in our feeling sense of each posture. It is because of this the postures can be used as an intro­duction to coex. Through the posture the class can be led to awareness of the feeling sense. Then from that they can learn to allow their unconscious to express what relation­ship they have with being down or up.

So, from having the class be aware of the difference they feel between standing and squatting, now say something like: “Now that you have become familiar with the move­ment, and have noticed the difference between being down and up, I would like to hear how you describe that difference.”

Feeling Low – Feeling High

At this point give people a chance to say what they have experienced, without necessarily asking everyone to talk. Then say:

Okay, we are now going to continue the exercise a little further. When I suggested you do the movement, you were going up and down because you were willing to follow my instructions. Having accepted what I asked you, the movements you made were partly automatic. What I want you to do now is to discover how your feelings respond to the movement. Some of you described feeling more comfortable while down, and some of you preferred to be up. These preferences are part of the way your feelings react to everyday life, often unconsciously. What we are going to do is to honour those feelings and find out what they are telling you. So start from the standing posture, go down into the squat, and this time, if you feel no impulse to get up, stay down. Follow the impulse with your body. In other words, if you feel like going right down onto the floor, do so. It might be that during the time of the exercise, to which we are going to give ten/twenty minutes, you will not feel any feelings to get up at all, in which case stay with whatever position or movement your impulse leads you to. It might be that your feeling changes, and after a while you have an urge to stand. Or perhaps you do not have a nice feeling about being down, and have an impulse to stand right away. Therefore, think of what we are doing as an exercise in being aware of, and expressing your subtle feelings. This is helpful because often we automatically do things without having the full backing of our feelings, and this causes some degree of tension or conflict. In listening to our feelings and giving them an opportunity to express themselves we are reducing the tension, and also learning what our feeling-needs are. Give yourself time now, to explore what you feel about standing and going down.

Each person will have their own personal reaction to this exercise. In general there are three basics: [A] Not wanting to stand. [B] Not wanting to go down. [C] Moving reasonably well between the opposites.

At the end of the exercise, let people say what they felt. Whatever it is, it will almost certainly be relevant to their own situation in life. This is important, so do not think this is merely a loosening up exercise. The process of coex can be expressed through this method very capably, and although it is gentle, what people meet is a part of their own healing and self-regulatory activity. At a recent work­shop one man found his feelings led him to a rather tense standing position. It seemed to express an attempt to avoid going down. It turned out that he had experienced a loss of self confidence which he had only recently moved out of, and he was anxious that he might drop back into it. The exercise showed, however, that his anxiety was causing tension, which he needed to move beyond.

A woman in the workshop felt loath to get up. It felt to her as if standing would require a great deal of strength, even aggression. This expressed her sense of difficulty in expressing herself as a woman, and her feeling of being in competition with men.

Just these two examples show that the person was facing important issues in their life. This approach to coex can be an available avenue for many people to meet and resolve such difficult feeling areas and aspects of their growth as a person. It does not need high intellectual attainment to be of real service in helping them toward such resolution. But it does need the strength of the teacher’s support and their skill in creating an environment where such healing can take place. The notes already given on creative listening should be carefully read. Also, the exercise should be used in an alternating manner. What is meant by that is, after using the exercise the person should be given an opportunity to discuss the connection between what they experi­enced during the exercise and its link with their everyday life. The aim is not to find answers to the persons life situation but to bring greater awareness to it.

 

The Earth the Seed and the Sun

If you are teaching an individual or group and the time factor is not restricted, it is beneficial to use the Seed, Earth, Water and Sun meditations as exercises. There is a lot to gain from them in the way of discovering expressive body movements and creativity. Their use is described quite fully in chapter two. If you are teaching a group, you obviously need to set the mood, have participants find sufficient space, and especially, to realise they have a period of time in which they have the luxury of listening to their own being.

Awareness Transforms

When we bring awareness to any area of ourselves, whether that is to do with the way we walk, or how we feel about work or love, the quality of what is looked at changes. A woman, Hanna, felt depressed and trapped by her work situation. She had agreed with a friend to become a business partner producing baskets. After a period of time she felt unhappy, but could not determine why. She gave time to be aware of her feelings and ideas about what was happening however, and saw that she had lost her enthusiasm to run the business, but held-on-in because she believed she would be letting her partner down by leaving. It became obvious in her self consideration though, that her partner could easily manage the business if the break was planned carefully. Hanna in fact was trapped by her own feelings of what people would think of her if she went back on her agreement. Seeing this enabled her to easily make the changes she wanted. Awareness had transformed the way she SAW the situation, and so enabled her to approach it differently.

In teaching people the process of coex, it is helpful to remember that its two most frequent actions are that it expands awareness and it expresses the habitual ways our energy flows. Our awareness penetrates areas of our feel­ing and motivation which usually remain unconscious. When these parts of our being become known we can relate to them in a way we could not when they were unknown. Although this is a simple process in itself it is very effective. It also faces one with experience which needs perseverance and strength to meet.

This might be clearer if we understand that tension is most often a defensive or protective reaction. In taking an open allowing feeling state we temporarily drop our protective tensions. Supposing we are in an open condition while in a room with several people, one of whom we would like to get near and embrace. Usually such an urge would be suppressed if it were felt to be in disagreement with ‘proper’ social action. Or it might be channeled through learnt social responses toward some level of satis­faction. Perhaps we had previously been deeply hurt in openly expressing our affection as a child. So the urge to embrace could have social conditioning and also pain attached to it. Therefore, if we create an ‘allowing’ state, our spontaneous feelings are free to move toward being felt by us consciously. But because conditioning and pain may be attached to them, these are the first things which are felt by us.

In helping someone to become free of such conditioning and pain, there is no need to erect goals such as ‘curing’ or ‘healing’ the person. The aim is to help them achieve awareness in a way that will transform them. They need the encouragement and support to feel that meeting any conditioning and pain encountered in the process of gaining awareness, is transformative rather than threatening.

Standing and Walking

If we realise that ‘standing up’ means more than simply straightening ones legs, we gain an insight into what can be achieved through the use of the squatting and standing exercise. In this, standing means that from the introverted experience of babyhood we have gradually exteriorised ourselves more fully, and developed a reasonable degree of confidence about our own identity in contact with others. This confidence and exteriorisation may have met difficul­ties or points of crisis in its growth. So although we can stand up well physically, as a psychological or feeling person we may not be standing very high or straight. A man who is confident in a pub, may be shy and withdrawn in a dancehall. A woman who is sure of herself with her children may feel inferior and inefficient in a business.

When we give awareness to whether we have any moti­vation to stand, we are looking at this subtler side of our nature and observing how much inner strength is behind our act of physical standing.

In one workshop a young man who had never done the exercise before found that he had no impulse at all to stand. In fact when he moved toward rising he felt threatened. On talking this out with him he said that expressing himself in everyday life was always a great struggle. He as a person never really ‘stood up’. The reason for this we discovered to be that his social and family training had not taken account of how he felt and his own impulses. His parents expected him to act in certain ways whether he wished to or not, and whether he was frightened or not. So he had developed an inner at­titude of doing things automatically, without any enthusiasm or creative feeling.

To help this man we told him that he was now in an unusual environment where his feeling self had time to explore the act of standing. He was encouraged to express what the feeling part of him wanted to do without criticism or should’s and should not’s being imposed. Thus a direct communication with his ‘with­drawn’ feeling-self commenced. It was made plain that the enthusiasm and support of his feelings were needed in everyday life. Without them the man had felt inwardly weak. But this time the feeling self was allowed time to ‘sniff out’ its environment like any natural creature does before it feels sure of its ground.

Slowly and cautiously the man stood. He wept because he had never stood up in that way before. But in that first session he only rose to a kneeling position, that was as far as he wished to go. It was sufficient for him to have stood up that much – anything further needed to come slowly.

This gives an idea how to work with this technique. The person must be allowed to remain at any level with which they feel comfortable. Here again, awareness transforms. Although they may find themselves stuck in sonic level of withdrawal, it is sufficient for them to remain in that feeling with awareness for it to gradually change. The dialogue between the feeling self and the adult/social self helps this, but transformation can arise from awareness alone.

If the person manages to stand with a good feeling of motivation and enthusiasm, then they can try LEADING THOSE FEELINGS INTO THE ACT OF WALKING. The same ways of working apply to this as to the standing.

The Seed Group

If you are working with a group of people who are explorative in their relationship with coex, the seed group structure is an excellent one to take them further. It allows aspects of self regulation which might not surface outside a group interaction. As the teacher though, it is important that you experience both types of role offered by the seed group. That is, being the central character as the seed, and being a supportive helper. Use of the seed group is described in chapter two.

Daring to be Yourself

When we allow our deepest feelings and insight to be ex­pressed consciously, we are daring to be ourselves more fully than usual. The meeting between our deeply uncon­scious drives and wisdom and our waking personality makes of us a different sort of human being. True we are not unique in linking these two divergent aspects of our­selves. There are many other men and women who have done so in varying degrees. Nevertheless, the numbers are comparatively few, and it i~ a new human development. When teaching it we are helping the pupil learn and explore a new human experience.

If you have led someone through the exercises given so far, they are now ready to use coex without the structure given by the squatting and standing technique. The methods already described in chapter two can be used to do this. Also, using coex to deal with particular questions is an approach appreciated by most people.

To summarise:

1 TENSING AND RELAXING ARMS. This is principally for helping people new to coex to learn how to relate to their being in an ‘allowing’ and ‘open’ manner. It gives them the experience of letting go and of spontaneous movement. Also, in working with a partner a feedback situation is developed in which the person can discover areas of ten­sion previously unknown. Although this is a helpful place to start when teaching, the techniques used actually have a wider application than a starting point for coex. They form an excellent series of exercises which can be used to learn fuller relaxation in everyday life.

2 SQUATTING AND STANDING. I sometimes call this ‘standing and walking’ because it leads to walking with greater motivation. This is a structured approach to coex. The action of coex arises fairly easily within it, especially if the practitioner has already practised preparatory exercises in regard to their feeling sense and the open state. However, it can be used by itself to help the practitioner to find greater motivation and pleasure.

3 THE SEED, EARTH, WATER AND SUN. These are exercises in structured coex, and are very useful and gentle. They are adaptable for use in such environments as a yoga class; as a form of moving meditation; or as a form of relaxation in exercise classes. Children could helpfully use them in drama study, or in creative self expression.

4 THE SEED GROUP. Outside an unstructured approach to coex, this is the most powerful environment for the experience of coex’s possibilities. It has so many facets it is difficult to summaries them. It is a situation in which a beginner can gently allow the very minimal level of their self regulatory experience to surface. It can be almost an experience of playing. It creates a social environment in which body contact and varied aspects of relationship can be explored in a way not usually available. For many people the caring quality of the seed group allows them expression of feelings which in todays world are often repressed. Because of the support and contact in the group, the self-regulatory process surfaces with a strength seldom found in other techniques. This form of working is so multifaceted, it can be used weekly over a period of time without going stale.

 

5 UNSTRUCTURED COEX. This is the simplest format, and certainly the most available in terms of where, how and when it can be used. Nevertheless, because of its simplicity it is unacceptable to people who need boundaries and directions to feel safe. Because of this, if the unstructured practice is approached too quickly, some people will act- out a self-regulatory activity to comply with the needs of the situation. To do nothing and wait, to be patient with ones own internal creative process is not a quality highly developed in many personalities in today’s world.

The unstructured approach does open the door for areas of inner experience which one does not have a concept for, or expectation of, because they arc outside ones present awareness. Leaving oneself open, without expectation and concept therefore heightens the possibility that new aspects of our being can express themselves.

 

Mind and Movement 8 – Individual and Social Implications

In this present century there has been an explosion in the number of people who have in some way explored their inner world. This was partly due to the discovery and public use of L.S.D. and other psychedelics, but also because of other factors. Millions of people who had never used a consciousness-changing drug started meditating, or practising yoga, or became involved in group activities such as co-counseling, the growth movement and modern psychotherapy. All of these have introduced people to other viewpoints regard­ing life, sex, work, society and death, than given them by parents and the society they grew up in. When such a number of people realise there are many ways of dealing with the world, there cannot help but be social and indivi­dual implications.

Because the process of coex, connecting as it does with the self-regulatory and self revealing activities in individ­uals, is fundamental to the practices and changes mentioned above, I see coex as central to the change. If this is under­stood, the birth of the changes working in the world at the moment can be assisted more easily. If not, there can only be added conflict with the forces pressing for recognition from within countless individuals.

I believe it is clear from what has already been described that through conscious cooperation with coex, the con­scious personality can receive and integrate experience from what are usually unconscious life processes. For consciousness to take light into what had been the dark night of inner life process, is akin to the discovery of a completely new culture or civilised race. Just as the contact between Japan and the Western world in the last hundred years has produced radical change, so this is happening through the unveiling of the strange inner world of humanity. The similarity is quite inclusive. Just as the inter-flow between East and West has occurred despite the fact that comparatively few Easterners have been to the West, and few from the West traveled to the East, nevertheless the interchange of culture and commerce is immense. So too, although comparatively few have made any extensive exploration and study of their inner world, the few that have are influential. Many of the new attitudes in women, and new ideas and urges in regard to world politics, reli­gion, family life, music and art, have arisen originally in a few individuals who found a creative relationship with their own inner life. They were able to see through the constricting views and standards in which they were raised. Their own inner frustration and pain demanded to be heard and they listened. Out of that arose the new themes we can now see in the theatre, films, music and social reform.

Perhaps the major point of these changes is the swing from a relationship with the world and an evaluation of it based on objective and exterior observation – such as through the microscope and telescope – to one reached through subjective inner experience – such as through intuition, feelings, imagery and dreams. While talking with me recently, the poetess Joan Ruvinsky told me of her own experience of this move from one world view to another. She was raised in a family dominated by her father’s scientific work with time and the quartz crystal. Her early work was overshadowed by the standards of experimental science until her own inner life shouted to her for acknowledgement. She listened to it, noted its theme, accepted its validity, then promptly forgot it again for some years. To move from one paradigm to another is not easy. Joan is still exploring and evaluating, and in this she is representative of many of us.

For many Westerners there is a profound temptation, when the urgent call of their inner life is first felt, to leave the rational and scientific world entirely. Often they asso­ciate with an Eastern religion or guru, or try to drop their entire occidental identity. Fortunately this cannot be done in a satisfying way. The positive elements of ones own culture come knocking on the door of awareness to be included. The rational, questioning, scientific and experimental aspects of our Western identity have a great deal to offer to the unfocused, intuitive, evolutionary drive of the unconscious. Also much of the structure of our inner world is focused around the cultural symbols of Chris­tianity and Western literature art and music. Nevertheless, because the West has entered and in some ways raped the East, it has opened itself to a cultural back flow. We can no longer live in splendid cultural isolation. Our psyche is faced with the integration not only of the Cross and the microscope, but also the Void of the East. In fact we are faced externally, and within ourselves, with otherness.

I was born in 1937 from parents of different cultural backgrounds. My mother’s maiden name was Banning. She grew up in Amersham, a small town in Buckinghamshire, having an English, Protestant background. My father’s name was Alfredo Criscuolo. He was born in London from two Italian parents. When christened I was initiated into the Catholic Church, and, to be on the safe side, the Church of England as well.

Although not an avid follower of astrology, I believe it evident that the time, place and circumstances of our birth are powerfully imprinted on us. Arriving as I did three years before the greatest international conflict the world has yet seen, and with the name of Criscuolo, I was placed in a particular relationship with people around me. Italy joining forces with Germany against the allies caused me to be treated by some as an alien and an enemy. At three however, I posed little threat even to our local Home Guard.

At that early age I had no clear concept of war or international politics. The turmoil of war around me was beyond my ken. What was a part of my understandable experience however, was the intolerances, judgements and persecutions which came from having the name Criscuolo. I remember being stood in front of the whole assembled school without any pre-warning. It was then announced that I, Anthony Thomas Criscuolo, because my parents had decided to change our name, would from that time forward be known as Anthony Crisp. I had not realised until then that a name could be a problem. For some time afterwards though, the ring of voices followed me at play­time shouting Criscuoly-oly-oly. Also, while myself and other children were running behind a horse-drawn farm cart going to the harvest field, I was hit in the face with a horse whip by the farmer – who lived three houses away from myself – and accused of being a ‘little Mussolini’. I did not know at that time PRECISELY what that meant, but I got the general idea.

Compared with the treatment received by many people who, for one reason or another, are not considered as be­longing to the dominant group, what happened to me was mild. Even so, such experiences left their mark. The effect became noticeable during my adolescence when I uncon­sciously felt alienated from the structure and attitudes of the country in which I was born and lived. The morals and goals of Britons, individually and collectively seemed strange to me. In many ways I was a stranger to the land of my birth, feeling sometimes like an Italian Roman Catho­lic living abroad.

With an alteration of details, the overall plot of my story is also true for a huge number of people living in the U.K. today. The number is so large it brings threat of national splintering to the point where it needs recognition. It pro­duces a situation where the efforts of many peoples lives are other than toward a national cooperation. The problem is not simply one of foreigners or children of foreigners living in Britain. Alienation occurs beyond those boun­daries today. In a country where the child of parents whose identity largely arose out of a lifetime of work, cannot obtain work, a sense of alienation and identity crisis can arise. It can occur between child and family, and child and society. The development of rapid international busi­ness activity and travel also places us regularly in direct confrontation with aliens.

In 1983 I visited Belfast and Israel for the first time. The open aggression and carrying of arms forced me to face the potentially lethal effects of alienation. In Belfast I saw whole groups of people housed within strong wire mesh cages. In Israel I witnessed Israeli holiday-makers, com­plete with cameras, shorts and knapsacks, carrying automatic weapons. The guns, the fought over boundaries and the stout wire mesh cages, appear to me to arise out of the same sources as my own sense of alienation – religious and political differences, anger and fears, and nationalism. When I look at Belfast and the Middle East, the message I read from the situations seems very clear. It is that if human beings are not capable of transcending the hurts and atti­tudes their birth environment has imprinted on them, con­flict and alienation, with their consequences of international conflict, are impossible to avoid. Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight over the past twenty years, I can see that the urge to such transcendence has been the motiva­tion to much that has happened in the Western World and in my own life.

Many people wish to transcend the barriers of per­sonality and nationality which create for them conflict individually and socially. Millions have been attracted to organisations which appear to offer this. In fact, in the West we have seen the development of what can be called ‘supermarkets for transcendence’. But if I read my own condition rightly, and recognise the need of others like me, such organisations have been inadequate flirtations with a huge need. They have been too Oriental, too centred on the charisma of the leader, and catering to the uncertainty and fear in people, which looks for an appar­ently divinely inspired leader who knows the ‘truth’ and offers certainty in the midst of uncertain change.

One can liken this to a sort of ballooning. The person who aspires to transcend their imprinted limitations rises above them. The sixties and seventies saw the spiritual sky full of transcendental balloonists who had escaped the limited moorings of their British phlegm. Their boun­daries of nationality, even of sexuality, had been tran­scended, but to what purpose? This led to an epidemic of people who had found liberation from the limitations of their native religion, but who dived into the nearest un­familiar one. Thousands became Moslems, Sanyassins or Buddhists – achieving a new set of prejudices and means of alienation.

Many of us are capable of stepping outside the anxieties and tensions which lead US to draw guns on each other. But it is a skill which needs to be learnt, just like walking. Perhaps it is time we began to learn, and to recognise the need for a home centred program of education in a the art of transcending. To be able to do this well we need an understanding both of the urge to transcend, and of the forces with which we are working.

Observing the action of coex in many people, I believe it has rather an organic way of functioning. It is like a plant which takes the varied minerals surrounding it, and through its living process transforms them into its own integrated being. The plant does not become the mineral. Neither is it shaped by the forms of what it takes up. It is influenced, it is coloured, but its process transforms. The healthy human being can do likewise. A major part of unconscious mental process is to do with taking experience and integ­rating it into a meaningful whole. If we could trace how the development of such mental activity arose, we might find that it is a reappearance at another level of the process of digestion and absorption. But events need to be experi­enced to become integrated. We are an enormously sensi­tive and responsive living process. Our whole being can respond to what we experience or learn – words too have tremendous power within us. Often, however, we have unconsciously deadened our emotions and sensitivities, and we do not therefore properly ‘take in’ what we have experienced. Sam, working in a hotel as a cook, describes an experience which illustrates this point.

 

I had worked in the hotel for some years during the holiday season, and so was used to the crowds of people on the streets. In the middle of last season though, after having practised coex for some time, I walked out onto the street after work one day and felt a rush of fear. People thronged the pavements in such numbers many spilled off into the road. They were of all ages, all sizes and all conditions. Not only fat and thin, but occasional cripples and mentally retarded or mongoloid people too. I thought to myself, ‘My God! It’s all too much. I’m just a helpless ant in the midst of all these other ants’.

From that time on, although I had lived in London for many years, I began to feel fear on the streets. I was aware of the aggression, the loneliness, the broken spirit, the joy in people, and it produced feelings in me I had never experienced before. Through the use of coex I gradually saw I had felt all these things as a child confronted by the world, but I had unconsciously sup­pressed the experience. The examples given by adults was that feeling responses to life were out of place and infantile. But life in London had confronted me with people dying of cancer; T.B. was rife at that time too; prostitutes openly walked the streets; I was often accosted by homosexuals as a child; and instead of allowing myself to feel the enormity of what it said about human beings, I had shut the pain and wonder of it out. Now, as I began to feel this through opening up in coex, it first spoke to me as fear. Since then it has spoken in different voices.

 

The voice Sam is talking about is that of his own living being as it learns through direct experience. It is the voice of his own learning process as it picks up real knowledge, not from books, but out on the street, in the midst of his family life, at the death of his dog, while washing his mothers back in the bath and seeing her naked, and as life itself being born and living within the whole amazing condition of humanity and this planet. What Sam learnt is explained in these further comments.

 

What I find is a big boost is that I was thrown out of school, bottom of my class in most subjects, yet I dis­cover inside myself the most amazing form of intel­ligence and vision. It seems to me from what I have been experiencing in coex, that part of me is like a computer. All the things my senses and emotions have experienced are carefully recorded and then scanned for information. Practising coex is a way of listening to what the com­puter has gathered from all the experience. Some of that is very much about me personally, but a lot of it is about life in general, and even political and religious issues. So what I learn in this way makes me even more unique as a person because no one else, nothing else in the universe, has experienced or seen things quite from the time, place and situation that I have. But also I learn things that are universal, that are general to everybody, and enable me to see how much a part of everything else I am.

To be more specific – because I grew up in a world with many prostitutes and homosexuals something hap­pened inside myself which I was completely unaware of until I listened to this inner information. The scan­ning process saw what a huge percentage of people were manipulated through their sexual urge. Put rather crudely it was similar to the way humans trap animals or farm them. We know that if we put food in a trap an animal will be led into it by its urge to eat. We know that if we put a ram with the sheep, they will mate. Sexual hunger can be used to get people to part with their money, or to lead them where you want them to go. I recognised those things from the many bits of ex­perience scanned, but I didn’t have the courage to listen to what I had inwardly learnt until recently. On listen­ing I saw how, deep inside, I had decided to discipline my sexuality so I would not be so easily manipulated. That unconscious decision influenced whole areas of how I developed relationships, yet I hadn’t even known I had made such a decision.

What may be even more important is that out of that scanning, realisations about the social conditions in the country I live in had also been formed. For instance, what attitudes within us create prostitution anyway, and what leads us to manipulate each other? When we are so manipulated, often en-masse by political and commer­cial forces, why do we remain so sheep-like and follow? When we do that we are like cattle, having no self awareness at all. What sexual and social codes have we adopted, or been led to adopt through the manipulation by church and state, that place us in this sleep-like con­dition in which we can be farmed by people shrewd enough to do it? As far as I am concerned one of the major reasons is that WE HAVEN’T GOT GUTS ENOUGH TO LOOK AT WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US. We prefer to remain unconscious, and so avoid feeling the heightened emo­tions which allow us insight into ourselves and the world. We are far too busy congratulating ourselves on how well we are doing; how stupid the other person is, to really see who we are, and what the world around us is doing. And, quite frankly, that’s just the way the manipulators want it. I personally want to wake up. I want to increase the understanding I have gained about myself and my environment, even if it hurts or shocks me sometimes. It is the most exciting and adventurous thing that has ever happened to me, and I’m certainly not going to give it up.

 

Sam is talking about awareness. He is also showing how awareness transformed his view of himself and his world. The insights which arise for Sam and others who work with the process of coex are not limited to sex, politics and manipulation. They cover every aspect of human activity and speculation, but are particularly concerned with hu­man life, and the relationship we have with each other and the cosmos. To give an idea of the range and depth of these experiences I will quote some of them and summarise others.

 

 

Life Before Birth

As the experience deepened I realised I was knowing myself as I was before birth. No, even that is wrong. At first it seemed as if it was prior to conception. The world before conception was one in which I didn’t have any sense of myself at all, so is difficult to describe. Yet I was aware of many different types of energy, each with its own very different character, and each doing its own thing quite without concern for anything else. It may sound strange, but it reminded me in some odd way of the world described in Lord of The Rings. When things moved on to me being an unborn baby, some sort of decision had been made. I felt this strongly, al­though even at the time I felt what an odd thing it was. Nevertheless, it seemed as if the decision had entered my own little life, on a direction or track of develop­ment which I realised was my body and its growth. I don’t know if babies can be infected in the womb, but at one point I had the powerful experience of being attacked. I felt like a tree attacked by caterpillars. I don’t mean I thought I was a tree. As an unborn baby I had no conception of myself. I experienced myself simply as a living organism, a separate thing which was threatened by some other life form. It seemed as if the waters I was in dealt with the infection though. But when I came out of the experience I cried with the shock of the attack. (Abie C.)

 

Freud, Jung and Reich have all attested to the importance and validity of psychic or subjective experience. Such experience does not always relate to actual physical events, but it does express the dynamics of ones inner life. In many cases though it also expresses the truth of physical experience. Therefore, the things that Abie and others who have looked to their inner life tell us are important. If we learn from them that we can raise the quality of the way we care for unborn babies and children.

So, to summarise what I have gathered from peoples statements about pre-birth experiences during coex, there is awareness for unborn babies. Consciousness does not magically start with the first breath. Nor does it have its beginning at some particular prenatal stage of develop­ment. It seems to be a principle of life itself, always present, but increasing in complexity and focus as the form in which it exists develops. The unborn baby does not have personality as we know it, but it does have a sense of exis­tence. From this it identifies deeply with the mother and is greatly influenced by her acceptance or rejection of it. These responses to its situation that it feels very acutely, become the fundamental patterns of reaction which underlie the later development of its conscious personality. This level of its being is also formed out of the original act of love/sex which led to its conception. In some way that still needs further definition, it is a triangle of the attitudes, love, anger and blending personalities of its two parents. But the mother particularly carries within herself, usually without awareness, an image of maleness or femaleness, which influences the baby – but not necessarily while still in the womb.

 

 

Life is a Love Affair

When we remember that as baby we were in the most intimate relationship possible with a woman – our mother- the words love affair make sense. In no other way can one have the intimacy of being a part of someone else’s body. As a baby we also shared the binding experience of meeting the crisis of birth with our mother. There is also intimacy in helplessness. Therefore, as a baby we had a love affair with our mother. But the love may have at times turned to all the agony, the anger, the loneliness and despair so often seen in adult love. During coex people recapture the early experience of this love affair, its wonder and its turmoil.

This love affair – our very first – cannot help but leave a deep impression on us. It will etch into us experiences which will determine the way we relate to other people for the rest of our life. Overall patterns of how we love, hate and feel began then, in our first love affair. Any inability to relate to the opposite sex, may have begun with our early love for mother or father.

Here is Mark’s description of his own memories in this area.

 

Feelings began to arise while my wife was away, which I recognised as being connected with the time when I was put in a convalescent hospital at three years of age. My wife being away for so long had triggered the feel­ings into operation again, and in coex I was able to ex­plore and deal with them.

I realised that as a three year old I had an almost in­stinctive emotional bond with my mother. When she allowed me to be taken from her this instinctive part of me could not understand how the very person you loved the most, and were most deeply bonded with, could let go of you. To the feelings of love inside me that was impossible. It must therefore mean, those feelings res­ponded, that she didn’t love me. This brought about two conflicting storms of emotion which although I was now realising them consciously, had influenced the way I related to women all my life. First I was murderously angry. She – my mother – might be able to cast me off without care, but I couldn’t let go of her. Just being separated was therefore agony. My bond was being torn

– a bond created of the deepest emotions and feelings I had – so I was being torn. And I also felt lost in timeless­ness. As a child I had no concept of time. I and all child­ren live in a sense of eternity, and in that foreverness I was alone, not knowing whether the person I loved would ever come back. My pain and anger were forever.

Because this influenced the way I felt about women, it naturally tore at my marriage. I could understand why some people murder their wife or husband when an event triggers this childhood pain and rage. Such rage attaches to the person you presently love, creating the most awful things. I was confronted by the fact that I must either – from these deepest and agonised feelings -learn to forgive my mother by seeing her as a human being trying to deal with the adult world, or my marriage was finished. For in the present situation I could not forgive my wife for going away and acting in such a way as to resurrect these murderous feelings, and this eternal agony.

By allowing the deep and previously unconscious part of me to be released and find a merging with the adult conscious part of me, I did manage to find forgiveness and understanding. It saved my marriage. It also en­abled me to live with myself more easily and peacefully.

 

Mark has already clearly stated the social implication of his up-bringing – divorce, violence, possibly murder. He had already been divorced once. His awareness of the forces behind the break-up enabled him to prevent its repetition. The social implication of not knowing the sort of agonies and conflicts we sow in children through ‘adult’ behaviour, is much wider though. Mark’s mother was not the only one who did not know – in her head, she knew in her heart – what lonely hospitalization would do to her child. Tens of thousand of children were hospitalized under similar conditions in the past. The result is a huge number of people who have relationship problems, sexual difficulties, and may show anti-social behaviour. If we also see that insensitive hospitalization is only one tiny aspect of what we do to children, and each of these adds up to social disorientation in some form, then difficulties in parenting can be seen as one of the fundamental causes of social and individual stress.

 

 

Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am

Whether we realise it or not each of us is born with a culturally implanted idea of who or what we are. A few hundred years ago for instance, it was commonly accepted throughout Europe that a human being was, or had the possibility of, an immortal soul. Social position also made it clear whether one was a noble or serf, master or slave. In today’s world we have more of a dilemma about who and what we are. There are so many different viewpoints today, and as a group we have not dismissed the immortal soul concept, but have added some more such as the mate­rialist view of identity beginning at birth and finishing at death. For most of us it is certainly easy to observe though, that our identity is largely relevant to our up­bringing. If we were raised in China our view of life and reactions to situations would be quite different to what it would be if we were raised in Los Angeles in the U.S.A. There would be much less likelihood of our seeking a divorce as a Chinese for instance, or committing a crime.

Nevertheless, despite these marked differences in atti­tudes, skin colour, and even food eaten, there is a level at which we are all very similar. We all as a group reproduce sexually, we all eat and breathe, we all have a liver and a heart. Compared with our culturally imprinted self, this biological level is far older, less changeable, and more basic. When talking about our own likes and dislikes, we tend to mention clothes, music, a way of life and attitudes, yet these are all fairly superficial. Our being has more fun­damental likes, dislikes and patterns of behaviour which arise from body needs and instincts. Young males the world over have a tendency to go through a period of cata­pults, air rifles and other means of hunting. They, along with female teenagers, have a drive to break loose from previous connections and make a life of their own, some­times with a lot of aggression. During the use of coex, these basic drives become very apparent, and it is often noticeable how they have been repressed producing inner conflict. This repression is not only a consequence of the imprinted personality not understanding its own founda­tions, but also because the social world which imprinted the personality is itself in conflict with basic human drives. That social structure itself creates massive conflicts in the children and adults it is supposed to represent, is a sign of the sickness of our times. Seen in this light, some social attitudes and organisations are like a huge factory producing disturbed human beings – disturbed by city and work environments which are so foreign to deep needs that people break down. The breakdown may be in ob­vious ways such as mental illness, crime or physical health, but it is more frequently in subtler ways such as the inabi­lity to warmly parent children, or be a socially creative individual.

The people using the many different approaches to coex are gradually laying bare these areas of conflict in their own lives and within social organisations. Such awareness highlights the tremendous struggles and confusion that are occurring in connection with identity and its relationship with sexual drive, gender and up-bringing. Because a woman declares herself free of old sexual roles, it does not mean the deeper layer of her being will agree, and quietly withdraw its procreative drive and desire to nurture children. Because a man can be easily sterilised it does not mean he can so easily escape the natural bonding that takes place during sexual intercourse. He might escape it physi­cally, but the living, feeling drives in him will not let him so easily escape psychically. These basic living forces in us, inseparable from consciousness, have inbuilt sexual, kin­ship, and self giving needs.

Beryl tells of her own discoveries about this:

 

After I had my second son Frank and I decided two children were enough. I felt fully in agreement with that, although it was Frank who took the step of having a vasectomy. As Brian and Eddie started school I began work again and felt a real need to become independent financially. I managed this through my work in pro­perty sales. I began to feel ill at ease physically though and thought it was stress at work. With hindsight it all seems so obvious now, but at the time I felt confused about what was happening. I remember how much pleasure I got out of having a dog and how ill I was when it died. A lot of my hair fell out.

I believe a seed was sown when my son started keep­ing ferrets. He had a female and when it got a year old he told me it must be mated soon or it would die. I had never known that an animal can die if it doesn’t have young. Then I started attending a group practice of coex. It was another first, because I had not mixed with people who so openly talked about their inner feelings and acknowledged they were human. I realised then how hungry for that sort of companionship I had been. As my ability to use coex developed a part of myself was unveiled to view that I had never really dared accept before. I saw that I am an animal, a female one. That gives me a link with all female creatures of whatever species. I had not admitted that and had cut off in full flood my torrential drive to have children. It couldn’t just neatly stop itself and do something else, and in my ignorance I didn’t help it. So it built up inside like stag­nant water and led to my feelings of tension and even to physical illness.

When I let that stream flow again I thought I was going to go wild for a baby. For a while I was – a week or so, but the drive gradually flowed into the way I was relating to my family and friends. I found a lot more caring and love come into the way I talked to people or felt about them. Even selling property has altered be­cause I now have a feel for peoples personal needs in a building rather than just their business and financial needs. In a way I find hard to describe, I have also found out what religion is – it is knowing that you are con­nected with life itself and that it flows through you.

 

I believe that during this period of history humans are having to face the business of growing up and accepting responsibility for themselves and each other. The history of humankind is full of placing blame or power elsewhere. People have constantly surrounded themselves with gods and demons who directed their fate, physical well being, and even their creation. As time has gone on it has become easier to see the devils as projections of our own fears con­cerning our sexuality, and repressed parts of our own nature; and the gods as projections of our own latent abili­ties and power to create. As we recognise these angelic and demonic figures as shadows cast on the walls of our own awareness by our fear, our hopes, our transcendent beauty, and our unwillingness to accept our aloneness and creative power, we are confronted by the terrible responsibility of what we are doing to each other and the world. l) Despite waiting for centuries the Messiah has never come; the Christ has not returned; the splendid space people who will banish war and want have not kept their appointments. In the end there is only you and I left, perhaps looking to the sky hoping. If we want our dreams of a Messiah or great leader to come true, then we must take over the part and live it out.

But perhaps great leaders have had their day, like the shadows of demons. Just as the hazel twig used by the dowser is lifeless and useless out of their hands, so leaders have no power except that given them by the belief and support of ordinary (?) human beings. In a vacuum leaders are as empty and without life as the twig. You and I are the Christ, the Buddha Maitreya, the expected Messiah. We are the power we give to leaders. We create each other every day. Human babies reared by animals never develop human personality or self awareness. We have to accept the responsibility for that too, and not avoid it by saying an unseen and mysterious God gives us being. We create human souls through our belief, our name giving, our communication with the wonder that is a baby. The visi­ble, wonderful God called Human Beings creates other human beings. It is a miracle we are still not taking full responsibility for. When are we going to wake up to who we are?

The expanding awareness which occurs in the process of coex reveals these things. It is as if we have lived in a room and watched scenes which we took to be real, and gradual­ly we learn how to walk into other rooms of our own house, and see the magic lanterns projecting the images. In other words we gradually become aware of our own phy­sical and psychic functions which are responsible for the phenomena for which we blamed gods, spirits and space-men. We see the very buttons and levers in ourselves which heal our bodies, produce happiness or depression, clarity or confusion, phantoms and gods. Not that the human personality is so godlike – far from it. But our being is itself the process of LIFE. It is the very miracle of creation bringing about human experience. God is a pro­jection of what we are in our own being. That we have not yet fully woken up; not learnt to flex the sinews of our­selves is by the by. We are life with consciousness and a fragile sense of separateness – separateness so vulnerable it disappears in sleep, in sense deprivation, during shock, and perhaps in death.

Once we begin to recognise this action of growing awareness, of awakening, in the human soul, we can look back through past ages and see clear records of how other men and women experienced it. It is symbolised in folklore or spoken of directly in all cultures, and there are certain things common to these records. They nearly always include a sense of meeting something divine or transcen­dent. Yet it is realised that the transcendent is ones own being. The person breaks through the pains, fears and limitations of their own individual life experience and achieves a view which sees their separate life as part of an awesome process – the cosmos. This vastness, this time­less expanse, without apparent beginning or end, this careless everything, has no right or wrong in it; no up or down; no start or final destination. As humans beings we have always lived in this AMEN, but we usually keep our windows closed, a roof over our heads, the doors shut, so we are not confronted by the immensity of which we are a part. This is the Void spoken of in the East. It is the Wil­derness so often mentioned in Western religion. Having no pathways, no destinations, people have created rules and regulations, destinations and beginnings to help them fend off the sense of awfulness, the feeling of aloneness, the inability to make decisions – fear! How much easier to have a God to tell us what to do and what direction to take in this directionless desert. How much less stressful than facing the infinity of choice and deciding, for no other reason than it being our wish deduced from what we are aware. “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mat. 8:20.) says the voice of mankind.

 

 

Summary

Consciousness is fundamental to the universe. We have never been without consciousness, even though our experience of it changes. In human life consciousness becomes self awareness. In this condition there is often a sense of vulnerability when confronted by the immensity of consciousness itself. In the Old Testament this is expressed by Adam and Eve hiding when God walked in the Garden. People usually hide within veils of self deception as to who they are and of what they are capable – both in a negative and positive sense. They avoid being aware of the tragedy of human existence, but also its transcendent nature. By allowing the process of coex to expand awareness these veils are dissolved. The person then realises their alone­ness, their responsibility as a co-creator, and their life in eternity.

This self-revealing which occurs with expanded aware­ness, allows the person to look back along the pathway of evolution – especially the evolution of consciousness. Each person holds within them the physiological and psycho­logical record of this journey that life has made. At first it is ‘unconscious’, meaning it is not accessible to waking awareness. As it becomes so through expanding awareness – coex – the individual sees how, before human beings became self aware in the sense they are today, it was natural and helpful for survival to grab for oneself, to follow a leader, to have a certain type of male/female re­lationship. With self awareness came enormous changes in the size of groups living together, and the possibilities of relating. The patterns of domination, manipulation, grab­bing for oneself, no longer worked in this new setting. In fact they led to terrible human suffering as seen in slavery, war, racial and international conflict, and political and religious manipulation. Humanity, as transcendent beings had within themselves the potential to overcome this tragedy. They intuited it and projected their wisdom onto figures known as Buddha, Christ, Krishna, etc. This is another tragedy because it abdicates responsibility and allows other human beings to manipulate, through be­coming symbols, for ones own power and insight. Thus we have popes, kings, dictators and presidents.

The escalating results of this abdication from respon­sibility place humanity in confrontation with the threat of extinction. Despite prayers and cries for divine help, there is no other divine than that resident within ourselves. If we fail to use it to transform our old self-centred drives to ones of self giving, we are ourselves the creators of our own unhappy fate. There is an old saying that the ‘truth shall set you free’. We often take it that the word ‘truth’ means some transcendent revelation. Perhaps some people even see it referring to a political truth such as Commun­ism or Capitalism. We may hope that the truth is, that through some sort of therapy or process of meditation, we find our hurts healed and our problems solved, leaving us feeling GOOD. History has proven this to be an unrealistic hope. Hurts can be healed, pains can be melted, but in the end we are still left with our humanness, our vulnerability

—     we are still confronted with unresolved problems. If a car accident has robbed us of our legs, our healing may release the anger at our fate, allow the scream we held back as the car hit us, but we are still without legs. Despite successful therapy we are still confronted by the question of how to make love; how to get on and off buses; what we are going to do with our lives. Those questions can only be resolved by experiment and honest communication with other human beings. If I have been crippled sexually rather than physically the situation is the same. The TRUTH is our own personal humanness. Knowing and acknowledging that I am sexually crippled sets me free of it. It does this because we can only acknowledge such degrees of our own humanity by allowing love and forgiveness to be felt toward our own being and to the world around us. To love and accept oneself in this way means one has begun to accept the world AS IT IS. This love has in it the power to transcend old hurts, reach across boundaries. Maybe it would be easier if the answer to human problems were a set of rules such as a government uses. As this is not so, we will have to meet ourselves on the road to survival. Our awareness of this situation and of our own humanity is itself a point of transformation.

 

Mind and Movement 9 – The Secret Power

Although this chapter starts by dealing with very physical processes, it is in fact about a very metaphysical or transcendent process. It is, as far as my own understanding has allowed me to penetrate, the process by which the very highest in human life expresses itself into the mental, emotional and physical. I believe it should be understood by all people dealing with so called spiritual or psychic phenomena.

 If the self regulatory processes of your being ceased its action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse.

The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimeters of mercury). It can drop to 70—80 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain. If that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they arc eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.

Keeping balance during change – dealing with stress

Such functions are usually listed under the heading ‘homeostasis’. The word means to ‘keep level or balanced during change’. The ball cock in a toilet is an excellent example of mechanical homeostasis. As soon as we flush the toilet the ball-cock descends allowing water to pour into the cistern. When the water reaches a certain height the water entering is stopped, thus a level is maintained despite change. To quote from Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology (Mosby), The principle of homeostasis is one of the most fundamental of all physiological principles. It may be stated in this way: the body must maintain relative constancy of its chemicals and processes in order to survive. Or stated even more briefly: health ad survival depend upon the body’s maintaining or quickly restoring homeostasis.

In 1885 the Belgian physiologist Leon Fredericq described it this way:

The living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralise or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more numerous, the more perfect and the more complicated do these regulatory activities become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.

In 1900 Charles Richet a French physiologist went further by saying:

The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its responses to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable — the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.

The wisdom of the body

In 1933 Walter B. Cannon published his remarkable book The Wisdom Of The Body (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.). Through his years of research and experiment he added enormously to the understanding of physiological homeostasis. He points out that the self— regulatory process not only has to adapt the body to outer influences, “There is also resistances to disturbance from within. For example the heat produced in maximal muscular effort, continued for twenty minutes, would be so great that, if it were not properly dissipated, it would cause some of the albuminous substances of the body to become stiff, like a hard boiled egg”. He points out that such processes are not originally given naturally, but are slowly developed by organisms as they evolve. Thus the frog cannot prevent free evaporation of water from its body, so cannot be long free of its home pond. Nor can it effectively regulate its temperature, so becomes torpid and sluggish in cold weather.

This helps in understanding what Fredericq meant in saying the “regulatory agencies. . . free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.” Obviously this is only partly true, and humans have much greater freedom from environment than the frog. Nevertheless we cannot survive in anything except small changes of temperature, outside or inside, but must use special equipment in, what is for us, extreme heat and cold. Also, in the airlessness of space, and while submerged in water, we must again use special ‘clothing’. These things we create by our mental ingenuity. Therefore, we can say that self-regulation is not a fixed ability, and our conscious use of intelligence and experience are also aspects of the homeostatic process. Through expanding our ability to adapt to outer and inner environments we have expanding freedom. If our ability to adapt lessens, then our freedom lessens also.

Learning to keep balance in a changing world

This learning process even takes place in such major homeostatic features as heat control and regulation of blood sugar level. During this century it was found that for quite a long period after birth babies have little control of temperature regulation. When exposed to cold their temperature drops with hardly any reaction to prevent it, rather like a frog. There are also much greater swings in a baby’s blood sugar level than in an adult. The baby only gradually ‘learns’ to respond to these new features of inner and outer change after the steady temperature and blood sugar of its prenatal life in the internal sea of its mother.

We could perhaps say the baby learned such regulation unconsciously, or without conscious deliberation. In order to gain greater ‘freedom’ though, even the baby is faced by the need to learn. The unconscious wisdom which enables it to learn complicated bodily adaptations also operates in adults and in other ways. Walter Cannon describes this as follows:

Many years ago Murphy and I observed with X rays a curious phenomena after the first part of the small intestine (the duodenum) had been cut across and sewed together again. Although peristaltic waves were passing routinely over the stomach, the sphincter at the outlet (the pyloric sphincter) held tight against them, and only after about five hours did it relax and permit the gastric contents to enter the injured gut. The interest here lies in the relation of the delay to the process of healing; according to surgical observation, about four hours are required after an intestinal suture for a plastic exudate to form and make a tight joint. It was after the proper time had elapsed for that process to come to completion, therefore, that the chyme from the stomach was allowed to advance. Similar results were obtained when the section and suture were made further along the alimentary canal.

Such unconscious though purposeful activities are expressions of this inner wisdom our being has, and are all part of our self-regulatory process. The urge to eat and drink, to work, play and learn, the longing to hold someone and be held, to make love; to sleep and wake, are all ways we keep the balance of our nature. If any of these are severely curtailed our nature may become unbalanced and even crippled in its ability to freely extend itself in reasonable freedom.

The enormous drive to grow

Caron Kent adds to the usually mentioned instincts what he sees as one of the most fundamental — the urge to grow. From conception onwards this urge is powerfully manifest. From conception until birth the growing organism increases its weight alone up to 27 million times. So it is an energetic urge, but also one which brings detailed control over the miracle of forming a living human body. This comes about by stage after stage of formative forces acting in the construction of our being. As an egg and sperm we are tiny single celled creatures. The next two stages of development as the cells increase in size and number resembles the activities found in many simple living things such as plants. The twenty day old embryo develops four brachial grooves, which in the embryo of a fish grow into gills. At this point the formative forces which produce a fish are active, as were the formative forces of a plant at an earlier stage. These are then supplanted by forces which bring about features of the mammalian upright animal we are. As one textbook states, “A human is not constructed like a modern office building, as cheaply and efficiently as possible. . .but rather like an ancient historic edifice to which wings and sections were added at different times and which was not modernised until it was almost completed.”

If we recall Richet’s statement that instability is the necessary condition for true stability, and consider how this works in the realm of the personality, we have some idea of psychological as well as physiological homeostasis. In a very simplistic sense if we are overcome by fear and feel unable to move, unless we are capable of releasing the traumatic feelings behind the fear we will remain paralysed. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory shift cannot take place. These shifts, between the dynamic opposites of our nature — tension and relaxation; pain and pleasure; spontaneity and control, are vital for our healthy psychological survival. Factors preventing such mobility are causes for illness and even death. Locked feelings of guilt, shock or stress are recognised as productive of major illness. So part of the healthy homeostatic action is to actually be ‘mobile’ enough to deeply grieve or release emotion, instead of being rigidly controlled or coping. The ‘control’ and the ‘out of control’ balance each other. If we are so controlled that we become ill through suppressed anger or grief, we are less in control of our life and well being than someone who can let themselves cry uncontrollably for a while.

It is partly this ability to have a wide range of choices or opposites available to us that makes human survival and self-regulation more efficient than in other animals. In Africa for instance, herds of deer are being driven from the open grasslands because of human use of the land. The instincts of the deer lead them to always seek survival on the open plains, because this has always been their habitat. It is ‘natural’ for them to hide from enemies on the plain. But on the plains they are killed, and it would be better for their survival to hide in the forested areas. To manage that, however, they would have to be capable of suppressing their instinctive ‘natural’ drive, and acting in a new way.

New areas of the brain had to be developed

Perhaps human beings faced a similar conflict in the past. When forests dwindled their only chance of survival was in open country which was an ‘unnatural’ habitat for them. So to survive they had to deny their instinctive inner urge. Perhaps this is where the idea of original sin arose, when humans denied the voice of God/instinct within them. However it happened, humans can now question their own drives and evaluate them against survival and achievement. They thereby have extended their homeostatic functions. Ling and Buckman, in their book Lysergic Acid and Ritalin in The Treatment of Neurosis, say:

“New areas of the brain had to be developed not only to integrate, but also to inhibit primitive survival oriented impulses and to enable them to store stimuli to act on them later. It is this ability to defer action and to act in a purposeful and objective rather than instinctive way that distinguishes the well integrated adult from the child, the primitive from the neurotic.”

Ron Hubbard looked at human beings as if they were an engineering problem. Although this gives a different view from someone like Jung, it does have a lot of helpful information. Writing about the human computer, which he calls the Analyser, Hubbard describes it as capable of computing on any problem and arriving at a correct conclusion if the information it has is sound. It can work extremely quickly and can handle large numbers of problems simultaneously, as occurs when we drive a car. It can re-evaluate its past memories and conclusions, and come to new conclusions. It has a nearly infinite memory bank. It is self— determining and does not need an outside operator. It is also self-regulating and avoids, through estimating probable outcomes, future damage. Through the senses it contacts the objective world, and has a sense of self. Its memories arc stored in time sequence, with full colour, movement, sound, smell, feeling, and self awareness. It has the faculty of imagination to enable it to compute on probabilities or create new survival aids. It is also portable.

Hubbard recognised that anyone with a healthy body who did not have brain damage through injury or surgery, had all the above abilities. Nevertheless, despite the fact the human computer is self-regulating, Hubbard had to admit that with all its faculties, the computer was frequently ill or malfunctioning. Experimenting with hypnosis on a patient who was colour blind and could not remember sounds or images, Hubbard found the person could be relaxed to a point where the problems disappeared. At this level the person could think clearly, had no colour blindness, had consideration for his wife, all of which were usually missing, but were again absent on the patient’s return to ‘normal’ consciousness. So Hubbard’s conclusion from this and other experiments was that underneath the functional aberrations was a whole and healthy person. This left the question though as to how the aberrations got into the computer.

Further experiment showed that any sort of aberration such as stuttering, hallucinations, phobias, compulsions, schizophrenia, fears, hysterical blindness, paralysis, could all be brought about in healthy hypnotic subjects simply by suggesting it. Such suggestions as: “When you awake you will not be able to hear/feel anything in your arm/ remember who you are. You will be sick every time you eat an apple/frightened when you get near women/etc,” brought about the aberration it described. With hypnosis however, the suggested deafness or fear faded fairly quickly, simply because the ‘human computer’ is self-regulating. So what causes the aberrations which haunt people for years to stay in place?

Do you have a held down 7?

Hubbard’s work led him to see that the non-hypnotic aberrations get in from the outside world. The only reasons aberrations could stay in place in the human computer would be if, unlike general experience, their causative experience had got past the Analyser, could not be recalled, and so could not be re-evaluated. He gives the example of an adding machine which works perfectly unless we hold down the number seven. When the seven is held down all future calculations are wrong. The machine then seems insane. Allow the seven up and sanity returns, just as it does when the hypnotic suggestion is removed. In his book ‘Dianetics – The Evolution of A Science’, Hubbard explains what he discovered to be the cause of the ‘held down seven’. It was PAIN. During a painful life experience such as an accident or frightening surgical operation in childhood, our analyser is knocked out of operation. A lump of experience enters us unassessed. It is not our analyser which operates when we put our hand on a hot stove, crash in a car, fall under a blow from dad, or feel the agony of mum apparently having deserted us. It is the reactive or instinctive mind.

Our memory is a full experience of sound, sight, emotions and pain! Once we have felt the pain of being burnt, next time our hand gets even near such heat an automatic action pulls our body away. The same happens with emotional pain. To pull away is reactive and seems necessary for survival. So we automatically pull away not only from painful and frightening things in the outer world, but also from any part of our inner memory and feelings which are painful or frightening. Pulling our consciousness away from a memory means we cannot recall or evaluate and integrate it. We may remember the event, but when it comes to recalling the painful emotions and fears we pull back. Therefore many areas of vitally important experience, decisions and thoughts connected with it, wisdom learned from it, are HELD DOWN SEVENS.

Also, suggestions may have entered the memory at the same time. If a man is involved in a car accident, and during it someone shouts — “DON’T MOVE!”, this is just as active as any hypnotic suggestion. Because it is held back from the self-regulating activity of remembrance and evaluation though, it can remain active. Therefore the man may literally not move, not take chances in life, always be worried something is going to hurt him.

Hubbard called these moments of painful unevaluated experience ‘engrams’. These not only caused aberrations in the person but were also contagious. They lead to an acting out of our pain on our children or others. A mother lost a baby and nearly died. Her pain and fear are now engrams. This leads her to irrational behaviour. So when her daughter shows affection for boyfriends mother hits or threatens her because of her own fear of pregnancy. Her daughter grows up with a fear of sex. Some such reactive behaviour is passed on for generation after generation unless it is re-evaluated. Wilhelm Reich called it the THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE. War, political murder, religious carnage, social discrimination, go on through the centuries despite human ability to reason and see them as evils. As Reich says, “If you live in a cellar too long, you will hate the sunshine.” There can be no real change in individual and social conditions at an emotional and feeling level unless individuals agree to re-evaluate their own unconscious pains, longings and values.

In Europe and the U.S.A. today so many babies are battered to death that infants have a high probability of being battered rather than being sick from normal causes. Also, parents who have not re-evaluated the pains of several wars have passed their aberrations to children who now are themselves raising families. This means more individual and social sickness, which in turn means more broken homes, which produces more children who will pass on their own pain.

It goes on and on. To stop it we need, as adults with egos, to learn how to extend our self-regulating process. We need to do this with awareness of our natural avoidance of pain and fear. As Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols, we “must get rid of purposive and wishful aims. The ego must be able to listen.”

What will happen then? The pieces of experience that have been ‘held down’ can be released for integration and understanding. This can only occur if we let ourselves ‘experience’ what is released. During reactive behaviour we are seldom coolly intellectual. Most of what occurs is deeply emotional or physical. Therefore to calmly have an intellectual view of the experience is not enough. To experience it is to feel its deeply emotional or physical quality.

Homeostasis Dreams and the Unconscious

It is easy for us to understand many of the physiological processes of self-regulation, but our culture is sadly lacking in understanding how deeply self-regulation penetrates our psychology and the processes of the mind.

Doctors and therapists who supervised LSD sessions in the 1960’s, noted the conflict between the two reactions of defence/control and surrender. They felt this conflict may be the source of the severe anxiety experienced by some people as they face their own internal traumas. The conflict is sometimes resolved by a collapse of the ego defences, and the subject then feels a terrible sense of disintegration. This is usually experienced as a distortion of the body image (the physical awareness of self), so that the patient feels his flesh is falling away from his bones, that time and space have disintegrated, that he is nothing but a sound or a colour or an emotion. This is called ‘depersonalisation,’ and it may seem to the patient that he has gone completely mad or even died.

Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force (self-regulation); though an individual may be overwhelmed by the LSD experience, some part of his mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life. This may disappear for brief periods, when the fear of insanity or death supervenes, but for most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy, a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. Lawrence Lessing, in a Fortune article on recent sleep research, has written: ‘At the same time recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’ (Abstracted from Dreams and Dreaming by Norman Mackenzie.)

 

Although the massive experimental and experiential entrance into the usually hidden facets of human awareness provided by LSD psychotherapy confirmed and deepened the insight and understanding of the basic tenets Freud had proposed, other processes were revealed that Freud had never mentioned. One of these Grof called COEX Systems. He defined this as a collection or nexus of memories. These linked memories and associated fantasies when experienced express particular situations or problems in the person meeting them. What was seen in people’s experience of this was that as one COEX system spontaneously arose and was dealt with the next would be waiting in line and present itself without any technique or therapeutic pressure. W. V. Caldwell says of this, “During the course of therapy, emotional complexes present themselves one after another, as though waiting in line for release. There is seldom any hiatus between the solution of the old and the appearance of the new.”

This spontaneous presentation of new material to deal with, and the actual automatic healing process occurring as the old memories and emotions are met, is a very clear example of the self-regulatory process. The problems we hold within us are lined up waiting to be dealt with. Our being is all the time trying to present these to our awareness for us to integrate. It does this in any way that is possible, and as soon as something unblocks the resistances holding this back, the healing process can begin.

Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is one of the main self-regulatory processes in the psyche. See Man and His Symbols, Jung – Dreams and Nightmares, Hadfield – Mind and Movement, Liberating The Body; Crisp. This means that the process underlying dream production helps keep psychological balance, just as homeostasis keeps body functions balanced by producing perspiration when hot, shivering when cold, and the almost miraculous minutiae of internal changes. Despite self-regulation or homeostasis being an obvious and fundamental process in the body, in nature and the cosmos as a whole, it still appears difficult for many people investigating the mind to accept a similar function psychologically.

In his book Dreams and Nightmares, (Pelican 1954) J. A. Hadfield puts forward what he calls a Biological Theory of Dreams. He says the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a solving or resolution of the problems. He gives the example of a man climbing a cliff who slips fractionally. He then may dream of actually falling and waking terrified. Subsequently the dream recurs, but in each the dreamer tries out a different behaviour, such as clasping for a branch, until he manages to act appropriately to avert the disaster. Hadfield sums up by saying dreams stand in the place of experience. They make us relive areas of anxious or difficult experience. They thus help problem solving. But they not only look back at past behaviour, they act just like thinking in considering future plans and needs.

Morrison’s findings with animal dreams, (see movements during sleep) opens the possibility that practising and developing skills and strategies may be the function dreams performed in early animal forms. They may enable us to economically learn from experience, and to play with experience in untidy or irrational ways. This ‘untidiness’ enables experience to be juxtapositioned in so many ways, useful new behaviour could arise from the occasional creative juxtapositioning. See: Evans, Christopher.

Dr. J. A. Hadfield, in his book Dreams and Nightmares (Penguin) describes this process as follows:

If a branch of a tree is cut, new shoots spring out; if you injure your hand, all the forces of the blood are mobilised until that wound is healed and you are made whole. It is a law of nature. So it is psychologically: every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which serve the functions of the personality as a whole. Our personality as a whole, like every organism, is working towards its own fulfillment.

Hadfield connects this even more directly with the overall self-regulatory physical processes in saying:

There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.’ The difference between Jung is that Hadfield is saying the dream is not merely ‘compensating’ for something the conscious personality is doing but is being purposive in pushing toward healing or growth. As with the physical process of self-regulation, which overall supports growth and stability, this psychological process in dreams appears to have much the same function.

To make this psychological self-regulatory process more understandable, let us remember some of the main physiological processes. Richet said ‘instability is the necessary condition for true stability, and our being must be able to modify itself in relationship to the external stimuli. In a very simplistic sense this means that if we are overcome by fear we must be capable of feeling courage to compensate. Without this compensation we remain paralysed with fear. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory release cannot occur.

Freud and Jung join the Discussion

Freud showed modern man that apart from their everyday waking life, they also had an obscure or hidden inner life taking place unconsciously. He showed that people had tendencies or desires they would not admit even to themselves. These desires or impulses were held back or repressed from conscious recognition and expression, and dreams portrayed some of these hidden longings or traumas. These longings were mostly childhood urges that were natural at the time, and expressive of the stage of development the child was going through. They had never been fulfilled because the child had gained the impression from adults that such things were either wrong, would cause people to withdraw love or support, or were very injurious. As an example, a mother might withdraw love every time the child sucked its thumb, or be terribly shocked on finding the child masturbating. Thus, the drives to gain pleasure in the thumb, or to fulfil the need to release a sexual tension, would be repressed. As further growth can only arise out of the fulfilled activity of early growth processes, and as such drives are parts of physical and psychological growth, further growth is thereby blocked. Dreams would show, by the energy drive – to masturbate – and the factor that blocked it – the fear of disapproval or being unwhole. The self-regulatory process of energy release is thereby stopped, and degrees of illness in body and soul would be experienced.

Freud also brought to light that the emotions of an earlier injury, such as being nearly drowned , or bitten by a dog, or being beaten or unloved by a parent, could be repressed and cause present illness or neurotic behaviour. But Freud never seemed to clearly express the self-regulatory aspect of the unconscious processes such as dreams. As Caron Kent says, “In Freudian analysis the emphasis is still placed on the ego and its conflicts. It is held that the ego is in conflict with its instincts or some other obscure forces. That the unconscious itself was a spontaneous source from which the ego as well as the organism unfolded, was not conceived. Freud did not see that before man can say “I am” – “I will” – “I think” – he has to grow, to breath, to digest and to metabolise. The mysterious force in our being is the growth force.”

In modern times, Jung has been the great explorer of this side of human nature in regard to the unconscious, and Wilhelm Reich in regard to the body. Through long years of study, Jung showed that dreams do not simply express the conflict between our conscious self and our instincts. They are also an expression, capable of being recognised by consciousness, of the wisdom underlying our existence. The wisdom that forms a baby, that holds the stomach sphincter closed while the intestine heals, that unfolds human personality, pre-exists our ego. This wisdom, expressing as it does in the growth forces, and the self-regulatory process of everyday life, lies deeper than our personal awareness, existed before it, and communicates with it. It is from this source the compensatory and growth forces of our being emerge, and if we have cut them off, our ability to meet our inner and outer life, our freedom, is diminished.

This deep centre of our being, from which our body, its structure, its functioning and our conscious ego or soul arise, Jung named the ‘Self’. In past ages it has been called Spirit or Atman. Writing of this, and the way dreams express it, Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols (Aldus)

Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which, individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth – the process of individuation.

Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and, by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern.

But this creative nucleus of the psychic growth – the Self – can only come into play when the ego gets rid of purposive and wishful aims, and tries to go to a deeper, more basic form of existence. The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any desire or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth.

Von Franz, here explaining the Jungian attitude, expresses one polarity of our relationship with our own source – that of surrender to it. Other schools express the other polarity of making the ego so strong and defended it can dominate its source and instincts. There is a middle way, but before commenting on this, what has been said of body and soul is brought into clear relief by recent research into sleep and dreams. It was found that “every normal adult and child over a certain, as yet undetermined, but very tender, age, have hallucinatory experiences of dreaming, as a regular, repetitive concomitant of natural sleep.” That is, every person tested, dreams in cycles throughout sleep.

“This nightly pattern is as universal as sleep – and as regular as the motions of the planetary bodies. At first one falls into a deep dreamless sleep. After about sixty or seventy minutes there is a rising up toward waking consciousness and one dreams for about nine minute. Down into dreamless sleep again, but not as deep. After ninety minutes, up toward waking consciousness again, and about nineteen minutes of dreaming. Now a shallower trough of dreamless sleep for another ninety minutes, up, and this time twenty four minutes dreaming. Down, and up after ninety minutes for twenty-eight minutes. The fifth period of dreaming then continues until fully waking. People who were woken as dreams began, and thus were prevented from dreaming, after a few days showed signs of mental’ and physical breakdown.

There are several important points to note regarding these findings about the psychological process of self-regulation or homeostasis. For instance, Freud made it quite plain that many contents of the unconscious cannot, or do not, easily rise into awareness. Therefore such things as sexual urges were symbolised in dreams instead of being directly felt. This means that even while asleep and dreaming the process of repression or control continues. So although there is an attempt, on the part of one’s unconscious processes, to deal with conflicts, to release and integrate past trauma, there is an opposition to this through repression and the avoidance of pain. As Ron Hubbard puts it, we have a held down 7.

Because of this, the conscious decision to face our own internal contents has to be made. This decision must include being ready to meet pain, disorientation, and the distorted feelings that arise from past trauma. Even with such a decision the journey is still not an easy one, for the release does not then occur spontaneously. We still have to persist, because at each step we are, as Freud puts it, resisting our own move toward health.

You can sail the seas of a stormy life

Dr. Oliver Sacks worked with the drug L. Dopa with patients who had lain in a coma-like state for years. This led them to wake and once more consciously face the world of objective and subjective experience. He says of these ‘awakenings’ “all the operations in coming to terms with oneself and the world, in face of continual changes in both, are subsumed in Claud Bernard’s fundamental concept of ‘homeostasis’ . . . We have to recognise homeostatic endeavours at all levels of being, from molecular and cellular to social and cultural, all in infinite relation to each other.”

His patients, often severely diseased physically and emotionally, sometimes managed, he says, to become astute and expert navigators, steering themselves through seas of trouble which would have caused less expert patients to founder on the spot. “Thus some patients with severe illnesses got well and remained so, and some less ill never managed. They had obviously learned or not learned to work with their own nature.”

He goes on to say that we must concede the possibility that nature, and, therefore, human nature, has an almost limitless ability to reorganise itself at chemical, cellular and hormonal levels. This is seen in action where, with the ‘will to get well’ patients inexplicably recover from the most serious of illnesses. “One must allow,” he writes “with surprise, with delight, that such things happen. Health goes deeper than any disease.”

Opening the Doors to the Self

So far it has been pointed out that the self-regulatory process is fundamental in body and mind. It has also been shown that we may unconsciously resist the action of that because of the pain or disorientation it might temporarily cause in its healing action. Dreams have been described as one of the main processes of self-regulation in the psyche, but once again, their action of healing can be resisted. Physiologically the process of vomiting is a self-regulatory process, ridding the body of poisons or harmful bacteria. Psychologically, powerful spontaneous body movements and emotions are also ways the self-regulatory process deals with harmful experience. Because this is so important, it is helpful to understand something of its action.

As almost anybody can observe, sometimes during sleep and dreaming, we call out, or our body moves expressive of what is happening in the dream. Adrian Morrison at the University of Pennsylvania, uncovered some interesting information in connection with this. Usually, in animals and humans, a small area of the pons in the brain prevents our muscular system from responding to signals from the brain while we are dreaming. If this were not so we would make full body movements while asleep as we do in the dream. As it happens, only a tiny fraction of these movements break through, except for the rapid eye movement of dreaming. But Morrison noticed that in mammals in which the pons is damaged, full body movements are made during REM sleep.

Although this has already been described elsewhere in the book, because of its importance I repeat that this shows not only can the dream process create a spontaneous fantasy or experience we call a dream, not only can it invest the dream with deeply felt emotions or creative ideas, it also expresses as full body movement. Such body activities are prevented by the pons from being expressed except perhaps in small jerks or movements. Nevertheless, speech, walking, dancing, fighting and making love, are all frequent dream subjects.

So human beings have at least two centres that can direct body processes. We are used to making conscious decisions about walking or moving our hands, but few of us suspect that another part of our being outside our conscious volition is capable and practised in making full body movements and expressing in complex speech.

I believe that by letting things happen without criticism or interference, we can actually allow the dream process to break through into waking life and express in full body movements, speech, a dramatic theme, and deeply felt emotions. We begin to be aware of things that usually happen to our psyche only while we sleep. Our consciousness is expanded to the point where it includes a realm of experience that is in many ways different from our waking world. In quite a real sense we begin to ‘wake up’ in what was sleep. We start to become explorers of the unconscious. As exciting as that is, it might not have much point, apart from a novelty, if it were not for the many possibilities the awakening holds.

Many therapeutic approaches completely overlook this fundamental process of self-healing through physical movement. Neither Freud nor Jung really dealt with this. Only Reich and the approaches emerging from him fully appreciated it. Yet many traumatic experiences, from birth through to medical operations, are deeply physical. Tensions in our body do no simply melt away. Often the desires, anger and movements that are linked with the original episode need to be expressed and released in some way. Apart from that, body and mind are not separate. They are intimately meshed, and what needs to be felt with one is expressed with the other.

Ancient cultures all recognised this, and many of them developed techniques in which an environment in which this could occur were developed. We are not simply a body, nor simply a mind. We are not simply a creature of time and death, but also a creature of those aspects of the universe that lie beyond time and space. So when a therapist only talks and debates with us, they are only dealing with thinking. You need an acknowledgement of your body and your spirit to become whole. Accept nothing less.

Therefore, the opening to this process of self-regulation takes you into and through the jungle of your inner fears and strengths. But more important than anything else, it opens you to the influence of the transcendent principle that is at your core. That transcendent influence leads you into becoming a new being.

Summary

• Self-regulation is fundamental to all cosmic activities and life forms.
• In humans it acts both at a physical and a psychological level.
• It assures survival.
• It is partly a spontaneous process and is partly learned.
• Most self-regulation occurs unconsciously, and learning to cooperate with its action is a learned skill.
• Such skill enlarges ones possibilities.
• Vomiting and digestion are functions of physical self-regulation.
• The rising into consciousness of emotions and experience for integration and re-evaluation are functions of psychological self-regulation.
• The process of self regulation is constantly attempting to present past traumas and ‘held down 7’s’ for integration and healing. However, there are forces of resistance to this active in us, and these have to be overcome if we are to succeed in becoming whole.
• Pain and such feelings as fear and guilt frequently cause us to prevent experience and emotions from emerging into consciousness.
• Freud showed that if a person is afraid of sexual feelings their sexuality is repressed even in their dreams.
• Such deeply repressed feelings cause psychological and physical tension and illness.
• Allowing spontaneous body and feeling fantasy allows the emotions and experience held in the unconscious to be released, evaluated and integrated.
• At points where fear or pain usually block the process one can decisively allow the self-regulatory process to continue.
• Because this allows previously unrealised experience to be known, an enlargement of our personal self awareness occurs.

The Ancient Mystery of Baptism

The act of baptism long pre-dated the Christian community. One can find water for purification outside very ancient temples. Therefore the tradition of baptism is older than the historical Christian church. It had its ascendance in the love a mother felt for her children, and beyond that the love she felt and gave to other children. Beyond that still, a loving woman might suckle a creature and extend her love beyond the normal boundaries. She might hold that other child, or that creature, with the same tenderness that she held her own baby. In such a moment she would know something that was beyond herself. It is something that flows through all of us. We symbolise it as the water, the milk, the wine, or the blood. It is the flow of love that comes from beyond our own small personality.

The urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal life and consciousness that pervades all things. It is an expression of the Mystery that we can perhaps never understand, that is Life.

Baptism represents a conscious opening or an introduction to that Life. It is an experience of that life flowing into and through us. It is also an entrance into the recognition of the wider family; of that mysterious body we call Christ. We become brothers and sisters in a wider community. It takes some skill to recognise who these brothers and sisters are, and what part they might play in our life. Calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily mean you have been truly baptised in that spirit of life and love. In fact you might still be imprisoned by attitudes of class, creed, skin colour or gender.

Fundamentally baptism means a change in the stance or condition of your inner attitudes. It means relinquishing fixed opinions and having an open mind. It means opening the doors of your being to new experiences, to new possibilities, pleasurable and painful. It means learning to love without bending others to your will, without grasping them for your own needs. It also means becoming a channel for that river of Life to flow through. This path does not dangle a carrot of eternal bliss, or the resolution of all human problems. “I come”, that flow of Life in us says, “not to bring peace, but a sword…. take up your cross and follow me.” What is offered is participation in everyday life and death in a new way. We can become workers in the vineyard – that is, co-workers with the processes of growth and evolution in the worlds of nature.

From a scientific view we are all of the same kin. We all started our journey toward humanity as a single celled creature. We go back to that beginning when we reproduce and start our growth for the sexual ovum. Also it is now known that virtually everyone had the same mother – this has been shown through the analysis of our genes. Countless generations ago a woman gave birth to children that became our present race. Some us changed skin colour as we moved into darker climates because vitamin D was essential to our health, and with dark skins we could not absorb enough of it. Unfortunately we also inherited the tribal tendency to look at a slightly different sister and brother as alien and enemies. See archetype of baptism.

Artists and Dreams

We are constantly giving meaning to a torrent of impressions that we meet through our senses and from within us. We give form to raw experience. We scan our enormous wealth of words, phrases, context, to arrive at an understanding of what is communicated verbally or in writing. If we could watch this process taking place, we would observe a constant searching and rejection of non-hits, a lining up of possibilities, and a bringing to the forefront of what we sense are highest probabilities.

Our mind/brain is a flashing loom of connections, a constantly moving wonderful network of links between billions of cells. This flashing creative network that constitutes the miraculous background to our responses, our feelings, our thoughts and spontaneous fantasies and dreams, is constantly forming patterns from the multitude of experiences we have. It constantly tries to match these patterns against what is already known or learnt. It draws out from the chaos of memory and incoming experience whatever it can liken to what was met in the past. What it can’t match it tries to put into some sort of order or to give a form to. And within all this constant activity the search for personal meaning goes on – Who or what am I? How can I survive? Is there a way ….?

Out of such a profoundly integral search for meaning, as artist, writer, musician, we may project the subtle forms of our inner meanings into the art form we use. We may create shapes, places, people, and feelings. Out of the flashing web of our own sentience we create life – our life – with its own conceptions of what it is to exist, what it is to love or hate, to strive or fail.

Even the most modern of dream theories agree that it is out of the fathomless depths of our drive to give meaning to impressions, that we create dreams. It is out of the barely formed impressions and understanding of the dreaming impulse that we create and live. In fact many artists of every discipline – and I now use the word to include musicians, painters, writers and architects – have directly drawn from their dream life.

What we cannot quite grasp – what is too vast and many sided for us to hold entirely in our thoughts, we give form to in paintings, in carvings, in sound, in piling rocks one upon another to form a monument. We may then venerate or hold as of immense value such art forms. They hold in them for us the vast dimension of the ungraspable, of the infinity of our own within. They stand before us as represent a journey of lives of the alien in our midst, in ourselves. They remind us of what we are not masters of, and what may take hold of our life. See

In past times tribal people stood in awe of their own existence. They recognised, even if it were unconsciously, the incredible journey they had made from being an unconscious animal, to the attainment of personal awareness and human society. They represented this awe-full experience in rituals, and symbolic paintings and sculptures such as the totem. They also recognised in their art the immense journey ahead, of claiming the possibilities of human life, and put this into their art. How do we deal with the powers that overwhelm us and drag us into mass murder in war and social upheaval? How do we create a personal and social world that we can be proud of?

 

In writing about Symbolism In The Visual Arts, (Page 255 in Man And His Symbols, Jung)

Aniela Jaffe mentions the drawing of Klee, interestingly called The Limits of Understanding, which expresses this attempt to put into form what cannot be thought. Jung said that a true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.

The great artists of any culture give to us what we may have failed to see ourselves. They portray to us the spirit of our times, and our predicament, and perhaps even a passage through the dilemmas we face. Sometimes they manage to break through the cultural plethora and froth of everyday life and display an insight into the fundamental forces of life, renewing our own connection. To do this they face a personal death into the unconscious. They experience darkness and light that many of us may not dare to face. They live within the great forces of their dreams more intensely, more fully than those of us whose awareness is centred on the everyday surface produced by the concepts of life generally agreed upon.

When an artist manages to meet and give birth to one of the spirits of our age, whether it is a terrible demon of our times, or a healing angel, it speaks to us beyond our reasoning. It draws crowds, it holds attention. In the early part of this century the artist Kandinsky wrote that ‘The art of today embodies the spiritual matured to the point of revelation.

Something that we must recognise as an enormous shift in human awareness that has taken place in our own times, and which must influence art from here forwards, is the attainment of self-awareness we have been helped toward by the findings of modern psychotherapeutic schools. This form of self examination has enabled us to explore the wealth of pain and wonder usually forgotten in the mists of childhood. But it also lays bare the struggle, the enormity of the evolutionary movement toward consciousness, toward being human. And there is tremendous art here when it is discovered; art expressing the meeting between the social individual we try to be, and the animal we are still largely immersed in within the depths of our mind and body. In fact we are the whole spectrum of things from sub-atomic particles, through molecular survival and interactions, on into the basic living organisms and creatures up through the lizard, the mammal and the human. All these things are active in us, in harmony, in conflict, in process of becoming. Out of this weaving loom of life all art and music arise; all life experiences an expression of it.

As an example, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater describes his fantastic dream life over a period of years. De Quincey started to take opium as a sedative. It led to a heightened awareness of how the mind can produce powerful images and memories. He writes that ‘In the middle of 1817, this faculty became increasingly distressing to me.’ Not only did his inner visions present ‘… nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.’ But also ‘…. vast processions moved along continually in mournful pomp. Concurrently with this, a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted within my brain.’ Such experiences led De Quincey to feel ‘deep-seated anxiety and funereal melancholy.’ At times he might recall the ‘minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived.’ ‘I could not be said to recollect them; for, if I had been told of them waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience.’ In his visionary state however, he says ‘I recognised them instantaneously . . . I feel assured that there is no such thing as an ultimate forgetting.’

De Quincey’s deep seated anxiety and melancholy, in our present times, would be signs of an underlying neurosis which could have been dealt with by exploring his fantasies to their roots in his personal history – already being touched on spontaneously by him. Whether we take the example of De Quincey’s opium aided fantasies, or the visions of Christian mystics such as the temptations of St. Antony, art and religion has at least a facet of being a symbolic way of meeting a neurosis. It is only when we reach through the symbol into what it depicts about us personally, that we move from this historical symbolic form of healing and representation.

One cannot of course limit the definition of art and dreams to that of dealing with hidden neurosis, or even of the move toward wholeness. Therefore it is interesting to remember some of the artists who directly used dreams as part of their work. William Blake for instance purposefully made use of dreams not only as sources for his art, but also for invention – his method of printing for instance. He particularly tells of the man who taught him painting in his dreams. Blake actually drew the face of this character.

In the 1950’s the painter Jasper Johns was working as a window dresser in New York. In a dream he saw himself painting an American flag. In waking he painted the flag from his vision of it in the dream. The painting became a powerful force in an American revolution in art.

Salvador Dali consistently used dreams as a basis for his paintings. He tried to preserve his dream imagery in his art, and particularly to portray the subtleties of time and space. He referred to his paintings as ‘hand painted dream photographs.’

A number of film directors also used their dreams in the art. Ingmar Bergman tried to portray episodes from his dreams as accurately as possible. He felt that dreams have the ability to help people find points of connection, to link people. Carlos Saura used fragments from his dreams to capture atmosphere and environment.

For each of us, our dreams are our own studio in which we nightly create beyond our waking talent to produce the new, the novel, the unexpected and the deeply true. We are each visionaries, artists of the night and live in another dimension than that of the body.  See: archetype of the artist; compensation theory; creativity and problem solving; hallucinations and hallucinogens; hallucinations and visions.

Archetype of Christ

Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, as a human experience he depicts powerful influences acting upon your personality. For a start, Christianity is a huge social and political force in the world. Many of us as children are educated to accept its beliefs or we meet its influence in one way or another. Therefore Christ in our dreams often depicts this enormous influence and how we relate to it – the influence can be many sided, from a recognition of the best in oneself to the hatred and anger about what organised Christianity has done to many.

Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, Christ is never that – even though pictures and paintings depict Christ as a human being. That is because we have been taught that Jesus and Christ are the same person. But it clearly says that when Jesus was baptised something immense happened to him. “Now when all the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also was baptised – of John in Jordan – and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son: in thee I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22).”

It tells us that the heavens opened and something from the cosmos entered Jesus and transformed him into having Christ Consciousness. For Christ was an aspect of Godness and had always existed. It is easier to see it rather like our growth. When we were babies we grew and entered another level of awareness and ability called childhood. Later another huge change entered us and we became adolescents – again with a different mental and emotional state.

Many people have attained the change of Christ consciousness. It is a further stage of human growth. As an example Siddartha became the Buddha when he experienced such a great change. In different languages this change has different names such as Krishna Consciousness. It might shock some people to see Christ linked with Buddha and Krishna – if so you have a lot of growing to do and if you do you too can enter Christ consciousness.

Like any of the world’s great religious figures, Christ can also be a very potent compensatory symbol. Each of us have feeling responses to events. Some events lead to a pleasurable response, others to a painful response. As children, and often as adults, we are largely at the mercy of events as to whether our life is experienced as painful or pleasurable. But there is also a way of creating our own response that a few of us use consciously. If we are lonely or depressed for instance, we may read a book, go out with a friend or watch a film, stimulating feelings that displace the loneliness or despair. This ability to produce positive or different feelings is often seen in the dream process. By holding in mind an image connected with hope and love, feelings will be produced that will compensate in some measure for pain or depression we may be feeling.

But Christ is used to compensate for what may be felt as crushing or defeating life circumstances or inner despair. Such compensation may also be used to deal with things missing from ones life, such as a sexual partner or social achievement.

However, being able to achieve Christ Consciousness, or Buddha Consciousness, or even Krishna Consciousness, is much more that a compensation, it is a transformation of ones life from one in which misery is often a part to one of which is symbolised in the New Testament as walking on water. If we take it out of its symbolism it tells us that our emotions that can be stormy and difficult to deal with can be dealt with and even tamed by the immense power we hold within us, which most of us have lost contact with. I am talking about a huge force that can be contacted or allowed into ones life. Without it we are often powerless to deal with negative feelings, and so many people take the path of suicide. But with it we can meet them easily, walking over the surface of such stormy emotions.

The fundamental power of Christ as an archetypal force lies in a that direction however. As an archetype Christ enters our life with powers of redemption, of transformation, as an aid to lead us out of awful life situations, and a type of love transcending the human limitations of jealousy and dependence.

It it is a universal consciousness which is a part of every person, whatever their beliefs. To become aware of it we must somehow have broken our heart and self so be aware of such a huge awareness. See Ages of Love.

Example: It is difficult to convey the immediacy of these experiences deep in the sleep state. Over and over I experienced fantasies, the drama, of being a sacrifice. As one who expressed the new ideas, the new consciousness, I was beaten and smashed to death because I was a threat to the old instinctive order. But the fragments of my strewn body, my flesh, were eaten by those who had killed me. And my flesh was like Seeds that grew within those who devoured, and became in them the new awareness they had sought to destroy. In another of the series I was a willing sacrifice. Through the stress and ritual of being willingly lead to death, I would receive the new consciousness and in some way bring it to my people.

I am going through masses of evolutionary feelings. The struggle to develop self-consciousness, and how the Messiah was first of all a fantasy, then an embodiment of this by individuals. Then how other people lived certain aspects of it, and were taken to be the Messiah, the Krishna, whatever. They did bring into the body another type of awareness, that mankind had been struggling toward for so long. This is where the mystery of the birth of Christ comes from. Why there is no real historical person. Why there is so much myth and legends surrounding such events. It is the embodiment of something mankind needed so much, to help them out of their crisis into the next revolutionary level.

Often overlooked in this influence is the power to look at oneself and life very clearly, very honestly, without hiding behind excuses or self deceptions. Perhaps more than anything else though, Christ is a cultural image depicting the power of our own highest possibilities. It is the outreach to us of collective human love.

Christ is not the only historical figure with these associations. Krishna and Shiva in the Indian culture, Mohammed in Islamic culture, Odin in the Viking age, and Quetzalcoatl/ Kukulkán/ Gukumatz in the South American culture have the same sort of power. Some aspects of the Buddha are approached for redemption and there are many saviour heroes from other cultures such as Anansi in Africa, Cúchulainn in Eire, Osiris in Egypt and Hercules in Greece. Apollonius of Tyana is also recorded as living a sacred life. But Christianity is simply a new expression of an ancient theme.

Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. He was born of a Virgin. He travelled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples (the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.

Osiris was born on the 361st day of the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveller. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and “tamed them by music and gentleness, not by force of arms”; he was the discoverer of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness, and slain and dismembered. “This happened,”says Plutarch, “on the 17th of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion” (the sign of the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the worshippers and saluted with glad cries of “Osiris is risen.” “His sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos.” Quoted from Pagan and Christain Creeds by Edward Carpenter

“Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

I know I hung on the wind-swept tree Nine nights through, Pierced by a spear, dedicated to Odin, I myself to myself.

There is, above all, the self-sacrifice of the hero-saviour: as Toynbee puts it in A Study of History,  ‘A very god who dies for different worlds under diverse names-for a Minoan World as Zagreus, for a Sumeric World as Tammuz, for a Hittite World as Attis, for a Scandinavian World as Balder, for a Syriac World as Adonis (“Our Lord”), for an Egyptian World as Osiris, for a Shi’i World as Husayn, for a Christian World as Christ.’

Depending upon the culture we were raised in, we will unconsciously put an image to the power of change and transformation that we experience. People in all ages, all cultures and all social circumstances have experienced what is often felt to be a divine influence touching them in some way.

I believe through observation that such long held and powerful traditional beliefs are based on something functional. The description of compensation above is an example of this. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. But the archetype links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of us and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.

To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the image of Christ is a graphic presentation of our own innate wonder. The patterns of love and strength mentioned above, and other behaviours lived by past individuals that remain in collective memory, offer keys or clues as to how to release this innate potential. That such keys, as well as ones innate potential, are often clothed in symbols and traditional imagery, is simply because we have not made such parts of our potential or heritage clearly conscious. They thus emerge from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow. See The Inner Path of Christ.

So what does the archetype of Christ the Redeemer and Good Shepherd mean in this sense?

To understand this we must first remember that our ego, the sense that we have of being a distinct person, is not one and the same thing as our body’s biological processes, or of our deep psychological processes. We all have some understanding of this because we can observe in ourselves or in others, that we – our personality – may want something that is very much against what our body wants. People with eating disorders for instance may actually die from malnutrition. People who have a fear of sex may constantly fight or repress their sexual urge. A person is often at odds with the natural processes and urges that underlie their conscious ego.

Norman MacKenzie explains this very well in his book . Dreams and Dreaming. Writing about the clinical use of LSD to help patients deal with various forms of neurosis, he says that the drug enabled a massive observation of how people’s mind worked, and how people related to their unconscious drives. When a patient first took LSD one of the commonest reactions was massive anxiety. This degree of anxiety usually arises only when we are threatened physically or mentally. The patient fears the drug is robbing them of control and will overwhelm them. In fact what is happening is that the repressive defences the person uses to keep their inner drives and processes under control are being relaxed. See The Two Powers Explained.

People relate to this threat in two major ways. They either fight to keep control, and employ all manner of techniques such as keeping their attention focused outwardly by such things as talking, walking about, drawing, holding their breath or dancing – or they surrender to what is being experienced. To meet the parts of ones nature that have previously been pushed into unconsciousness, one needs to surrender in some degree. If the person fights the loss of control as the new material from within is emerging, it sometimes feels as if they are disintegrating. Their body may feel as if it is changing or dying, and they are losing themselves.

Below are two descriptions from people who used LSD therapeutically that illustrates these different responses.

It didn’t happen at first, but gradually I began to feel that if I relaxed I would not be able to hold back my emotions, that I would do something that would be seen as crazy. So I sat holding onto myself, literally tensing my muscles to hold back whatever might happen to me. Time seemed to stretch and I felt as if I would never get out of this tension and difficulty. I just had to sit through it, live through it, and hope there would be an end. I also wanted to get away, but I was frightened I would get lost, like I was a child of four or five. Maybe that’s how I felt at that age, so I had to stop myself from doing what I wanted to do. A.K.

Here is someone else’s description of a similar situation.

Early in the session I started having fantasies about being attacked. Each time it happened I put the fantasy aside because I couldn’t see why I would be having these feelings that I was being attacked. There were a lot of images flowing into my mind also about the horror of life in general – babies abused, children murdered, men and women shot or tortured. The fantasies returned and several men attacked me and were trying to drag me off somewhere against my will. As the fantasy progressed, or replayed, I began to realise that it only appeared like an attack because I was resisting the process. In fact the men wanted to show me something that was important to me. They were being quite gentle, but because of my resistance, it felt to me like an aggressive act. I then let myself be carried off by the men, and began to feel as if a great chunk of my nature has been held back since childhood because of anxiety. In fact I had been frightened to ‘live’ this part of me. I had held so much of myself back throughout most of my life that I constantly felt there was something I was missing and had to search for. But it wasn’t an external thing – it was the me I had denied. B.M.

AK was using tensions and experiencing fears he had developed in childhood to hold back feelings that he had been taught were not acceptable. In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears.

In observing such struggles in thousands of people, the doctors and clinicians working with them saw that no matter what the patient was experiencing, even if they felt completely overwhelmed for a while and were lost in their fears and emotions, something within them was learning from the experience and attempting to integrate not only the insights gained, but also the various parts of their nature that were in conflict or split. Mackenzie says, ‘No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy – a kind of bridge between two types of mental process.’

Jung observed something similar in the psyche. He called it the Transforming Principle, or the self-regulating action, which constantly attempts psychic growth. He stated that one can watch this at work by noting many dreams from the same individual over a period of time. When one does this ‘tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. …… one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.’

Most religions call it the power of God at work in ones life, and many of them teach that if one surrenders to it, one will be healed and made whole. Different people and cultures represent or depict this transforming power within them in their own way. It is often represented as Christ, but equally as well as something more abstract. However, whatever we wish to name it, there is in us a potential that has in it more than we presently know of ourselves, and it has the power to heal and transform. It is observable that healing or therapy proceeds by a series of problem-solving move­ments. As soon as one difficulty is reviewed and removed, another appears, waiting in line to take its place.

In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears. But also he says something that is at the heart of what this archetype brings. He says, “It wasn’t an external thing – It was the ‘me’ I had denied.”

That is the heart of the Christ archetype. It holds in it the you that may have been crushed, denied, traumatised, repressed, in some way held back from emerging as a reality in your life. It is the potential you hold within you that has not been allowed to flower. It is the very best of what you are, not some distant possibility that you have to get from outside yourself. See: life’s little secrets; compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy;.

Here is another personal description. This time not from an LSD session, but from a man allowing the transforming action to take place while fully awake and without drugs. This makes clear what it is like to confront the power of transformation within.

In the previous week I had met a feeling I could not account for, which had left me wondering what was happening. I had the very strong impression that I had killed a man and now had the guilt of blood on my hands. This time in the group, when I surrendered, something I could never have suspected happened. I was standing with my eyes closed, but it seemed I could see, because the spontaneous mental imagery was so clear, that I was standing under a clear night sky, with the stars brilliant above. But there was a star more brilliant than the others that fell to Earth, and I knew it was something wonderful and special so hurried to see what it was. Others had also seen it, simple rural people like myself. What we found was a baby. But the wonder of it was so much I fell on my knees and couldn’t stop myself crying out again and again – A baby! A baby!

The tears and the cries were because I had the clear feeling or knowledge, a direct knowing, that all of the heavens, all of life’s mystery, had come to life in this baby. And to actually know this, to feel the impact of it, was almost more than I could bear. But part of the amazement was that this was every baby born. It wasn’t just one special baby. It was my own birth too! All the mystery of life was born in me. I sobbed with the pain and wonder of it.

Then the scene changed and I was standing by a dirt road. There were lots of people lining the road waiting. I didn’t know what for. Then excitement rose as a man came walking along the road toward us. He looked very ordinary to me. But as he got near he looked right at me and a huge feeling of love swept through me. I knew this man loved me in a way I had never been loved before. Then he walked directly to me and took hold of my hands and said, ‘You are my disciple’.

I stumbled backwards away from him. The love was too much, too painful. Looking into his eyes I knew I had been born with all that love, but I had killed it in myself. The blood on my hands was because I had murdered Him/myself. I had crushed the flower of my sexuality through fear. I had denied my own wonder and value in the world, looking to others for guidance. I had killed Christ in me – Christ who was the splendour of my own life and love if I dared to live it – my own birthright. But he had touched my hands, and I went to each of the people in the group and put my hands on them, trying to rub some of that magic onto them. Thomas.

As can be seen from Thomas’s description, the image of Christ holds in it not only the power of self-revelation for him, but also the relationship of teacher to disciple, and transforming love for one in need of wholeness. Thomas cannot help but think of Christ as separate from himself, even though at the same time he realises with deep emotion, that he is gazing at and being touched by his own wholeness, his own potential. See: compensation theory; the fundamental process.

This paradox needs to be remembered not only when meeting the Redeemer archetype, but almost any archetype. Also implicit in this meeting is the possibility that because confronting ones own wholeness and seeing ones own guilt, or the smallness of oneself, can lead to great personal transformation, it may lead the present personality, as it is at the moment, to dying and being left behind. Thus the meeting with Christ may include a personal experience of death and resurrection.

So the experience of meeting Christ may be a representation of the denied force of joyous life within – denied out of attempting to live social or religious rules and regulations, or social pressure to conform. Therefore, because ultimately we are an integral part of the universe, and have no existence outside of it, when we meet Christ/our wholeness and potential, we also become aware in some degree of the hugeness we are a part of or an expression of. We meet a sense of eternity, an awareness of the symbiotic – or cooperative processes or forces – operative in human life and the cosmos.

The Sunday School or Church Christ

This is another aspect of the Christ archetype and depicts social norms, the generally accepted morals and social rules. This ‘Christ’ comes about because the church tends to represent traditional values and national history, and attempts to press people to live these values. The dreamer may have a child-like relationship with this Christ, or if attempting to be self responsible, be in conflict with it. Some people find this Christ has a castrating role in their life, and flee in horror. In fact this aspect of social indoctrination may lead to such a burden of guilt and suppression that it can create psychic cripples. Trying to do all the ‘right’ things may lead us to the point where ‘we can’t say no to a glass of water without a pang of guilt.’

Two of the great forces that push at the human soul or psyche are, firstly, social pressure, such as the moral norm; and secondly, biological pressures such as the sex drive. Individuals may fight a lifelong battle with one or the other of these. The social criminal typifies battle with social authority pressures and rules; the ascetic and the bulimic battle with biological drives.

These two forces can be seen in the symbols of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The battle of these two immense forces is not really won until there is the marriage or unity between the two. The following dream and its exploration illustrate this dynamically.

I was in the basement of the house where I lived in London. I had taken some floorboards up because they were rotten. Underneath I saw a large white serpent or worm, somehow connected with a dead evil woman like a force of destruction and evil. I seemed to understand the evil could corrupt all of London, that it lived in a great underground lake that existed under all of London. I poked at the serpent with a piece of wood and it came to life and plunged into the earth. There seemed to be an air filled hole that I poked into and the wood I was using was wrenched away from my hands.

My family thought I was crazy because I was trying to tell them about this and sent for a doctor. I was very pleased to see him because he was very unbiased though, not believing – nor disbelieving. I explained my experience and feelings. With him there I dared to poke at the floor with a long scaffold pole. The pole was ripped from my grasp by some force below. Then we tied the pole to a beam and it ripped part of the beam off. I felt there was enough power to tear down my house if I had used it as an anchor. Then I saw Christ standing on my right, and the terrifying woman on my left, and they came together and the evil was neutralised – but so was the power of Christ. Mathew

Mathew saw the Christ figure as the moral norm in the society he was raised; a morality he had struggled with all his life. The woman he experienced as the urges such as his sexual needs, with which he had also struggled. When Christ and the woman merged he felt enormous peace.

The positive aspect of ‘Sunday School Christ’ is that prior to maturing enough to take realistic self and social responsibility, people need guidelines for behaviour. They often yearn for security or certainty. Religion in the form of powerful positive declarations of ‘truth’, supply this need for many people. For such people, making personal decisions in the face of the ever shifting external situations is enormously stressful. So organised and dogmatic religion is of great strength to them.

The Ideal Christ

This is yet another facet of this archetype, and is the psychological process which causes us not to take responsibility for our own highest ideals; our own yearnings for the good; our own most powerful urges arising against what we see as evils in the world. This influences us to wait for a sign from Christ or God in our dream or waking life in order to gain authority, or to overcome the anxiety associated with the urges. We want God to say we should act in a certain way because we are not willing to be self responsible. We deny in ourselves the core self and its divinity.

Example: ‘I stood outside a castle. It was closed and guarded by soldiers in armour. Wondering how to get in I thought that if I dressed and acted as a soldier I would be allowed entrance. It worked and inside Christ met me and said he had important work for me to do.’ Sonia.

The closely guarded secret is Sonia’s own impulses to do some sort of socially creative work. She doesn’t want to own them as her own. It is much easier if she can say ‘Christ told me to do this.’ In this way she avoids direct encounter with opposition and has a feeling that she has greater authority than her own. Joan of Arc might well be seen in this light.

 

The Healing Christ

The Christ archetype has powerful healing influence for many people.

Example: ‘A fierce battle was raging with bullets flying. I immediately fell down and ‘played dead’. It wasn’t that I was hurt in any way, but I didn’t want to be at any risk in the fight. As I lay there I saw a tall well built man in soldiers uniform walk to me. He gave no sign of any fear concerning the bullets, and quietly knelt beside me. I felt he was Christ, but was confused by him being a soldier. He placed a hand on my back and gradually worked his fingers under the shell of a large limpet type creature that I had never before known was parasitically attached to my back. I could feel him pull it away, but knew its tentacles still ran right into my chest. It seemed and alien had entered me. He then sat me up and told me how I could rid myself of the tentacles and so be healed.’ Peter Y.

Peter, whose dream this was, had a debilitating psychosomatic illness at the time of the dream, causing pain where the tentacles ran. The shell is his defences against feeling his own hurts and inner conflicts. The dream shows him contacting a strength which is not afraid of his internal battlefield or conflicts, and can show ways of healing real human problems. The healing rests upon the dreamer’s conscious action, not Christ’s, suggesting the dreamer taking responsibility for his own situation. Peter realised he had been avoiding his own internal battles, but felt he had found a strength – in the Big Man – which would support his efforts to find healing. In fact he met his conflicts and grew beyond his ailments.

Peter’s conflicts were between his love for his children and his love for another woman. The Christ he met was his own undammed life, the flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity.

The Integral or Cosmic Christ

Each of us have, perhaps deep in their unconscious, a sense of connectedness with the whole, with the cosmos. Perhaps it is best to call this our own wholeness, which incorporates all the light and darkness in us, all the expressed and the potential. We may be little aware of this. We may be denying it sceptically as Lester is in the example below.

Example: ‘I am a journalist reporting on the return of Christ. He is expected on a paddle steamer going upstream on a large river. I am very sceptical and watch disciples and followers gather on the rear deck. The guru arrives, dressed in simple white robes. He has long, beautiful auburn hair and beard, and a gentle wise face. He begins to tap a simple rhythm on a tabla or Indian drum. It develops into complex intermingling of orchestral rhythms as everyone joins in. I now realise he is Christ, and feel overwhelmed with awe as I try to play my part in the music. I’m tapping with a pen and find myself fumbling. A bottle or can opener comes to me from the direction of Christ. I try to beat a complementary rhythm, a small part of a greater, universal music.’ Lester S.

Finding this inner connection with things can enrich all that we do in life, even if it is a very humble thing like Lester’s can opener. The awareness of connectedness and wholeness brings with it a realisation of taking part in the unimaginably grand drama of life. It gives a feeling, no matter what the state of our body, crippled or healthy, that we have something that makes any faults insignificant. It doesn’t take all the difficulties out of life, but it is a wonderful companion on the way. We come to know that at base we are a wonderful shining being, and that life and its circumstances and events, are a way in which we are learning to let that internal wonder shine out.

Another way of looking at this is by seeing Christ as a process. Christ might then be seen as a collective identity arising in the consciousness of humanity. This relates to us as individuals much as our identity relates to the cells of our body. Just as our identity survives the death of billions of cells in our lifetime, so the Christ consciousness survives our death and change, integrates our experience, transcends our function, and has a personal relationship with us.

Example: We are each living that mystery play – that mysterious drama of which the Christian myth is a summary.  Each in our own way play out that drama we call life.  Each of us give birth to or abort the divine in us.  Each of us chooses whether we are going to wash our hands of meeting that splendid call of our own being, or whether we will crucify it on our own political, monetary, or power hungry demands.  Each of us makes the decision of whether we will denounce our relationship with the love that is in our own heart.

We don’t have to be a saint to live that Mystery.  We are living it now!  We live every tiny part of the story.  For some of us, one tiny part of that grand story becomes a central theme for us — motherhood, the loss of the lover, the departed parents, the betrayal, the struggle with the forces of evil, or that grand search for the beloved.

What part of the story are you experiencing?  Is it the raising of the dead?  The healing of personal blindness?  Feeding the hunger of the multitude?  Working in the garden of life? Being a shepherd?

In dreams and religion Christ is also represented as the son of the Cosmos or God. This aspect of Christ possibly comes about because of a sense many people have that the origin of their personal life is from beyond the Earth. This powerful urge to see oneself as more than a physical body is symbolised by Christ, a being who transcends physical boundaries. Perhaps this is why the film ET is so moving for many.

Human beings of all ages have, when opening to the influence of their larger perceptions during meditation, trance, prayer, or drug use, experienced awareness of love existing behind the creation of things, a love that is the source of the big-bang itself, a love that willingly died that we might exist. Humanity became aware of this at a particular stage of the development of self-awareness. The arrival at this stage of self-awareness was expressed in what we know as the historical Jesus. The internal awareness of the love that gave us being was projected outwardly and became the Christian Myth.

As one man who encountered Christ said, “Christ is like the sun, a principle of nature. No one can own it, although different individuals or groups can relate to it or use it in various ways, as happens with electricity. The Roman Catholic Church cornered the market so to speak. Prior to the Council of Nicaea there was a free market. You could say the church fenced off a beach and started charging people to go to it on Sundays. And there are different names for this natural principle in different languages.”

See: meetings with Christ; religion and dreams; Archetype of the self.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

What aspects of the Christ archetype, if any, am I influenced by?

Am I repulsed or held by the influence of the ‘live by these rules’ pressure?

Am I helped by the belief there is a divine loving presence?

Do I feel the power of an inner wonder and potential I am allowing into my life?

In recognising my relationship with Christ, can I evolve it to something more satisfying?

Try Talking with a Dream Character.