Posts Tagged ‘homeostasis’

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.

Mind and Movement 10 – The History of Physical and Spiritual Healing in Different Cultures

A knowledge of history helps us have a wider and more tolerant view of ourselves and others. In connection with coex it helps us to have a more educated approach to the sort of claims made by groups such as Subud, that they have a unique power they are sharing with the world. In fact, their unique ‘force’ has appeared many times before in slightly different guises, but also obvious forms of coex.

Although the use of the self-regulatory forces in the human being is not new to our own times, it has waxed and waned with each culture. Each culture and period in history has also developed a slightly different theoretical explanation, and different approach. The overall change has been that the further back one looks, the more relig­ious and symbolic the approach – the nearer we come to our own times the more empirical and rational it has been.

Even from the earliest historical times there is evidence that humans used medical and psychological skills to deal with physical and psychic disorders. Shamans, witch-doctors, priests and priestesses were the early administra­tors of such help. Although some of their techniques were originally judged as ineffective, the growth of psychobiological knowledge has shown them to incorporate elements of hypnosis, suggestion treatment, use of the dream process, with herbal knowledge.

Psychologists like Patricia Norris, clinical director of the Biofeedback and Psychophysiology Centre at the Meninger Foundation, are experimenting with such techniques and finding they work. Norris uses imaging or visualisation methods to help people heal serious illness such as cancer. Whether we look at shamanic or modern psycho­logical usage, what we find is that the technique helps the patient develop a more positive inner feeling state in regard to their physical illness or fears. The self-regulatory process attempts this sort of shift itself in dreaming, and the techniques such as the dramatic rituals of shamanism, produced an environment where the coex linked dramatisation already described in other chapters could be ex­pressed. Modern research suggests that this may actually lead the activity of the immune system to greater efficiency.

Whether we look at the approach used by the Hindus, Chinese, Celts, Red Indians, Africans or Aborigines, they were very holistic. They were aimed at producing not only physical and psychological changes, but also to bring the patient into a more satisfying relationship with their environment and their social group. In this sense they linked physical mental and spiritual aspects of the person.

Looking at the details of some of these approaches it can be seen that amongst the ‘stone age’ type races, most had a powerful relationship with their dream life. The energies and emotions in a dream were often given expression. This was done in a variety of ways. Sometimes they were acted out in a group drama or dance. The Seneca Indians said that the soul often has desires it has been unable to express consciously. The Hurons believed that if these hidden desires were kept unexpressed the soul might be­come angry, and it might revolt ‘against the body, causing various diseases, and even death. . .’ To quote from my book Do You Dream:

 

The Indian tribes mentioned often had a sort of social psychiatry in which dreamers were allowed to live out their hidden (unconscious) desires that were threatening health and well being. Thus a dreamer would be allowed sexual freedoms with others; unlawful actions; objects desired; or feasts, etc. . Although these people as a society were usually modest and shy, and chastity and marital fidelity were public ideals.

This very direct admittance and expression of real needs is not common, either in the past or present. Most often the energies were given religious, dance, or ritualistic expression. One tribe, the Masai, came near to it however. The men form a group which shout, sing, cry, scream, dance and move to express their bottled-up feelings, fears and energy. No doubt this provides an environment for spontaneous action to erupt.

Sex and Coex in New Guinea

Michaela Denis, in her book Leopard In My Lap, tells of an interesting practise used by the Chimbu people of New Guinea. One of their ‘dances’ takes the form of the men and women sitting around the edge of a large hut. They are arranged alternately male and female, the men facing the women. With accompanying drumming they gradual­ly draw close and the men passionately rub noses and faces with the woman on their right, then the one on their left. This carries on for a long period and with obvious pleasure and ardour. The dance seems to be a way of safely allowing the sexual feelings within a group to find expression.

In the ancient world a great many of the ways people used coex was within a religious framework. The unconscious was allowed to express within accepted symbols and boundaries. Frequently the practitioner held the belief structure that it was a god or a spirit which expressed through them. Given the manner in which the unconscious expresses itself in symbols and readily takes up and uses any available belief system, such practices still obviously remain as self regulatory. In Man and His Symbols Jung tells of a Hindu widow who capably directed her household and employees by going into a trance and speaking with the same confidence, voice and authority as her dead husband. After all, she had lived with him many years, and his mannerisms and attitudes were well recorded in her un­conscious. By allowing her being to express itself in that way, she maintained an equilibrium which might other­wise have been difficult.

Shaktipat- The Indian Way to Enlightenment

In his article Between Coma and Convulsion, in Energy and Character, David Boadella quotes the report of a person studying the self-regulatory practices in India. Although this is a recent account, the yoga practice it describes has been used for many centuries in India:

I have been in India for about four months now and I thought the readers of Energy and Character might be interested in the similarities between Reichian work and Shaktipat or Kriya Yoga. The Sanscrit word ‘shakti’ means energy, bio-energy, or more correctly, bio- cosmic energy. Shaktipat is a practice which is described as the loosening of this energy by a guru from the way it may be blocked in us. When this shakti energy is loosened and no longer tightly bound by the control of the conscious mind it begins to circulate in the body. It is then said to open up energy channels or pathways, and usually begins to manifest in what are known as ‘kriya’. Kriyas are spontaneous movements of the body and of the respiratory system. One interesting aspect of kriyas, which resemble Reichian abreaction, is that they very often manifest as highly involved asanas (body postures) and as mudras (meditational postures involving the hands). I have seen many persons who practice shakipat enter a phase of intense energy flow in which breathing becomes rapid and involuntary and in which people begin with great rapidity to do asanas they never knew and which they ordinarily would never have been able to perform. Although the conscious practice of asanas facilitates this process, true hatha yoga (Indian techniques using physiological processes to integrate ones being) occurs involuntarily in this kriya phase. The burst of energy that results is sometimes astounding and may continue for well over an hour. The movements in some individuals are so intense and frantic they appear dangerous. In other persons the movements are soft, delicate and flowing. Thus some persons may breathe like locomotives, beat themselves repeatedly, stand on their heads, bellow, twist their limbs in the most unbelievable postures; others begin to dance harmoniously, to sing softly in languages they have never learned, to be­come playful and flirtatious and to utter strange sounds.

The explanation for this is that the shakti is opening or purifying obstructions in the energy pathways, that the individual is working out the results of past actions and experience, and that an evolutionary process is allowed to unfold which eventually will result in an expansion of awareness.

In this kind of meditation the individual sits still, but not rigidly; he doesn’t concentrate in any way, but simply relaxes as much as possible and permits the energy to do its thing. The energy is of course thought of as ultimately cosmic or divine. Hence the path of enlighten­ment lies in relinquishing ego control and identifications and allowing this bio-cosmic energy to express itself and lead us. The final results of this process is the opening of the highest brain centres in a new type of consciousness in which the individual merges with the universal consciousness. The total process takes a very long time but this should not dissuade us as each stage has its own rewards. The bodily spasms, automatic breathing, asanas, contortions and reflex patterns that manifest spontaneously as the energy gains momentum all serve to purify the organism. Though some of these phenomena may sound strange they are not experienced as unpleasant once the practitioner no longer totally identifies with bodily processes. Thus the meditator can be totally in their body without identifying totally with its experiences.

Hallucination – or is it My Unconscious Speaking?

This very precise description shows that Shaktipat is quite clearly of the spiritualistic belief structure mentioned else­where. In spiritualistic trances of the stone age races and of today, similar processes to the above are being expressed, but within different boundaries and limitations. Modern day spiritualists still use this approach to the self-regulatory process of the unconscious. The unconscious has no dif­ficulty in speaking in different ‘languages’, or expressing different racial types, personalities, or even animals.

In any attempt to understand the type of experiences described above, one needs to know a little about the vari­ous functions of the unconscious. The process of dream making and waking drama formation have already been covered, but one other aspect is important. It is the function which deals with body language. Humans have an ability to ‘read’ body language, but it usually takes place unconsciously. It was probably developed in the human race prior to the emergence of spoken language as we know it today. Now it remains as an almost unused func­tion, but operates at times during shock or ‘trance’ conditions – i.e., when the conscious personality surrenders its decision making arid critical faculties. Philip Zimbardo, in the tenth edition of Psychology and Life (Scott, Foresman & Co.), gives a fascinating example of this from his own experience. “It was my first day back to work after recover­ing from a traumatic automobile accident. I was lucky to be alive with only torn ligaments in my leg and a concussion: the driver had been killed by the impact of a head-on collision. As I hobbled up the three flights of stairs sup­ported by a crutch, my initial joy of returning to school was suddenly suspended. With each step I took a strange sensa­tion occurred: I could ‘feel’ myself BECOMING my younger brother, George. Not IMAGINE ‘as if’ I were George, but being transformed physically to be him.

I perceived my face changing to he his face and my body doing likewise. My limp became more pronounced, and it took great strength to climb the last flight. In a panic, I shut myself in my office, not wanting anyone to wit­ness this strange transformation. I avoided looking at my reflection in the window for fear I would see his face and hot mimic. Had I really become my brother or was I MERELY hallucinating?

Time passed during which I tried frantically to relax, ‘to pull myself together,’ and make sense of my distorted sense impressions. After all, I was a normal, serious scientist type not given to such flights of fancy. I lived by the reality principle.

My secretary and colleagues knocked and came into the office before I could say I was busy. They were worried by my abrupt disappearing act. They were relieved to see I was ‘my old self again,’ and I was relieved to see them responding to me as if I were Phil and not George. A glance at my reflection confirmed my hope. I had changed back, ‘or was no longer George

• or George was no longer manifesting himself in me.’ Whatever? Weird, no? But why?

When we were children, George had infantile paraly­sis and for a time had to wear leg braces and walk with crutches. I would accompany him to therapy sessions and observe his frustration, embarrassment, and anger at not being able to function normally. Since we were only eighteen months apart in age, I could readily empathise with his feelings. I may have also felt guilty at being glad I too was not crippled. Once I recall volun­teering to exchange places with him in the swimming pool exercises, but the nurse chided me, ‘being crippled is not fun and games young man.’ I was about four at the time.

As I hobbled up the stairs to my office some twenty five years later, the pattern of feedback sensory stimula­tion reactivated this prerecorded motor action plan. Memories of George’s posture and movement were enacted. I had retained mimicry responses of his motor activity that I had observed so intensely. Now I was changing places with him, but not consciously and not volitionally. The suddenness and vividness of the hallucination was frightening because it was so real, yet at the same time contradicted my knowledge of reality.

Philip Zimbardo calls his experience an hallucination, perhaps because he felt fear. However, if we remember something we do not call it an hallucination but a memory. Realising that we remember via body feelings, posture, emotion as well as images and words, enables us to see that Philip, because he was in a similar situation to that which his brother had been, remembered a whole set of responses. During coex such experiences are not unusual. When they are not seen as abnormal we can accept them without anxiety and they add to our range of information and experience. In fact, if Philip had not been disturbed by his experience, but had sought it as a means of understanding his brother, he could have gathered a great deal of inform­ation from it. If we realise that we gather such information from everybody we contact, we can see that we have a very rich source of insight into the lives of those around us. These are important points to understand because we are looking at historical approaches to coex. They help to explain why some uses of coex, which appear fantastic or irrational to us, were in fact extremely useful in sonic settings.

Trances Spirit Healing and Possession

Carol Laderman, an anthropologist who went to study childbirth practices in Malaysia, found that shamanic healers, who it was thought had disappeared 75 years ago, were still an everyday part of village life, (Science Digest July 1983, Trances That Heal-Rites Rituals and Brain Chemicals). To study their methods she became the apprentice of Pak Long Awang, himself a traditional shamanic healer. It is interesting that although she is highly educated in Western thought, she has the same fear of the unconscious as Philip Zimbardo. She says,

For almost two years after my arrival in the village, I refused to undergo one of the shaman’s trances. Having become a member of Pak Long’s entourage, I had attended healing ceremonies with growing regularity; the shaman had even adopted me as his own daughter. Still, as a Westerner and a scientist, I was afraid to enter trances – afraid I might embarrass myself or, worse, never come out at all. My reluctance became a standing joke among the villagers.

She goes on to say what some of the healing sessions she attended were like. A very fat woman for instance, who regularly experienced depression because of her awkward­ness and girth, while ‘entranced’ by the music of drums and gongs, and Pak Long’s chants, rose from her ‘sleeping mat’ with the grace of a lithe young girl and danced the role of the beautiful princess in the Malay Opera before a delighted audience of friends and neighbours. Afterwards her ailment disappeared.

Eventually Carol took the plunge herself.

As the vibrations of the drums and gongs entered my body, my eyes seemed to glaze over. As the music became louder my mouth opened, trembling uncon­trollably. I began to feel cold winds blowing inside my chest, winds that increased in intensity as the music swelled and accelerated until it felt as if a hurricane was raging within my heart. I put my hands on my chest to try to calm it, but instead I began to move my shoulders and then the upper part of my body as if I were about to get up and dance. With the last vestiges of my self control, I prevented myself; I still feared embarrassment But as the music swelled to a climax I began to move my head so quickly and violently that, had I not been in trance, my neck would undoubtedly have snapped.

What Carol Laderman describes appears to be just the same sort of movements as those experienced in ‘Shakti­pat’ and in modern coex. The approach, however, is quite different. In Shaktipat ‘trance’ is achieved by the individual sitting “still, but not rigidly; he does not concentrate in any way, but simply relaxes.” In Malaysian shamanism, trance is entered “through cultural cues, ritual props, incantations, songs and stories. Percussive music, a steady, musical pulse.” In modern coex similar states can be ex­perienced simply by allowing spontaneous movement. So it seems as if all that is important is that the persons own fears, cultural theories and needs are respected. For instance in Haiti, the trance is often accompanied by ‘possession’ by the god Ghede, which is manifested by a particular phy­sical posture.

Buddhism and the Way of Liberation

Ancient approaches to coex were not always in the form of trance or possession though. Two thousand five hundred years ago Guatama the Buddha gave an impulse to the world which has developed a quite different relationship with self regulatory processes. In terms of coex we can see these as Zen meditation. Tibetan Buddhism, the Chinese meditation described in the book The Secret of The Golden Flower, and Vipassana meditation. In these an open permit­ting state of consciousness is held. Thus the experiences described under Shaktipat may arise into consciousness. In the Buddhist tradition though, these are held back from physical expression and seen as illusory aspects of self which will pass away. As with Shaktipat and most of the older approaches, one seldom hears of people experiencing and transforming childhood experience. The direct experience of ourselves in this way is more Western than Eastern, though definitely not our exclusive property. What is noticeable in the Buddhist tradition is more of an em­phasis on introversion and withdrawal from the external activity. Thus, what is discovered within is seldom used to change social structure in the way described in chapter seven. But in its essence, Buddhism does not suggest this one sidedness of retreat. And in the techniques of Zen and Vipassana, especially in their Western adaptations, a really helpful approach to coex is seen. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the training is in the opening and letting go of the ego, yet learning not to be lost in the forces and images which arise.

A very clear example of this is given in Tibetan Bud­dhism. Such teachings are very old. In her book Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects, Alexandra David-Neal writes:

Liberation is achieved by the practice of non-activity,

say the Masters of the Secret Teachings.

What is, according to them, non-activity? Let us first of all notice that it has nothing in common with the quietism of certain Christian or oriental mystics. Ought one to believe that it consists in inertia and that the disciples of the Masters who honour it are exhorted to abstain from doing anything whatever? Certainly not. In the first place it is impossible for a living being to do nothing. To exist is, in itself, a kind of activity. The doctrine of non-action does not in any way aim at those actions which are habitual in life such as eating, sleeping, walking, speaking, reading, studying, etc. In contradistinction to the Taoist mystics who, in general, consider that the practice of non-activity requires com­plete isolation in a hermitage, the Masters of the Secret Teachings, although prone to appreciate the ‘joys of solitude’, do not consider them in any way indispen­sable. As for the practice of non-activity itself, they judge it as absolutely necessary for the production of the state of deliverance.

What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

In the Buddhist meditation called Vipassana, the process of self regulation is allowed to let the flow of consciousness present ones innate images, fears, hopes and imaginings about life and death, and to recognise them for what they are – images, fears, hopes and ideas. In this way the attach­ment and even pain we experienced in connection with them falls away in some degree. That is liberation.

Christianity’s Unwanted Secret

Another impulse more embedded in Western culture, but perhaps less accepted today, is that begun by the early Christians. This is very definitely an example of a group of people permitting the self-regulatory action to express itself consciously. It is what we call Pentecostalism, and from the point of view of coex, is in may ways similar to Shaktipat. The guru, Jesus, was the means of stimulating the release, or giving ‘grace’. Because we are acquainted with the dogmas and belief structure of Christianity in sonic measure, we can more readily see how a natural process, self regulation, can become deified and surround­ed by religious symbols and ritual. Just as the views of Buddhism and shamanism edited what aspects of the un­conscious were permissible, (i.e. in Vipassana it is not acceptable to go into ‘trance’ or be ‘possessed’. In shamanism it is thought ineffective if one only sits and remains aware of the flow of arising images) so in the Pentecostal approach, what is allowed must in some way link with Christ, God or biblical statements. Nevertheless, the ‘drunkenness’, speaking in ‘tongues’, the flow of cosmic energy – holy ghost – are all akin to Shaktipat and modern coex.

Pentecostal Christianity speaks of gifts of the spirit. These are listed as the gift of: the word of wisdom; the word of knowledge; faith healing; the working of mira­cles; prophecy; the discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and interpretation of tongues.

Most of these are easily recognizable descriptions of faculties of the unconscious. The unconscious is constantly scanning information and considering the highest probable outcome – thus prophecy. Access to universal aspects of consciousness allow the gaining of insights which might also account for prophecy, wisdom and words of knowl­edge. Speaking in tongues is a common way in which the

unconscious expresses its feelings and insights. It is a level three expression in Van Rhijn/Caldwell’s levels of con­sciousness. When the ‘tongues’ are considered as symbolic expression they transform into meaningful words, just as dream symbols do. My experiments with such phenomena convincingly show the common link between these often considered unrelated phenomena and coex.

Discerning of spirits means the ability to look into a human heart and see what is hidden there. Considering how much we can learn subliminally through body langu­age and verbal cues, this is another straightforward uncon­scious faculty. But imagine a group of people all ‘worship­ping’ as is described of Pentecost, when the disciples were taken to be drunk. (Acts 1:12 to 2:13) There were 120 gathered in a room, men and women being equals – “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Considering present day Pentecos­talism and other forms of coex, this large group would include people who would be shouting in tongues, others would be crying, moving their bodies, discerning spirits, and generally creating a bedlam of noise. Any newcomer to the group, not having had explained what was being attempted – that each be open to the Spirit and be moved by it – might think the people were crazy or drunk.

Saint Paul – Killer of the Spontaneous

Because of the obvious cultural fear we have regarding spontaneous expression, it is interesting to remind our­selves of what Paul said to the early Christians (Cor 1.14:26 to 40)

If therefore the whole church assembles and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say you are mad?

If any speak in a tongue, let there be two or at the most three, and each in turn; and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret let each of them keep silence in church and speak to himself and God.

•  . . As in all the churches of the saints, the women

should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate as even the law (Jewish law?) says. . . For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

Comparing the original Pentecost with the church services of today, I believe it is obvious where Paul’s advice, still rooted in Jewish male authoritarianism, led Christianity. The church gained converts, but as for helping it to experience the calm love of life the guru who consorted with prostitutes had, Paul played the role of murderer.

Mesmer – Father of Modern Psychotherapy

Coming nearer to our own times we find a connecting link between past and present in Franz Anton Mesmer. In about the year 1775 Mesmer, a qualified doctor three times over, began to experiment with magnets. He found that patients who had previously been incurable were healed when these were placed on their bodies. For a year he had a mania for experimenting with magnets in quite extra­ordinary ways. But within that period he realised the same healing results could be obtained without using the magnets. He found that simply by stroking or touching the patient along the line of the nerves, the muscles would begin to twitch. This twitching, he said, should not cause alarm, even if it led, as it usually did, to an intensification of the patients symptoms or even convulsive movements. Throughout these releases, noisy and explosive though they were, he saw how patients could experience a healing of the distressing symptoms.

Prior to this time these convulsive releases were considered to be the work of devils or spirits. This attitude arose out of Christian belief, and Jesus and the disciples clearly used the same technique. In the New Testament are descriptions of people cured by these convulsive releases. Mesmer is a transforming link with our own times because his approach to this phenomena was an experimental and evaluative one. Nevertheless he was still bound to the past by his belief that another human beings presence was necessary to act as a channel for a cosmic energy to reach the sick person. Thus he still remained, in this aspect, in connection with the guru as agent of change tradition.

Stefan Zweig, in his book Mental Healers, describes Mesmer’s way of working as follows:

With a serious and dignified mien, calmly, slowly, radi­ating tranquility he would draw near to the patients. At his proximity a gentle fit of trembling would spread through the assembly. He wore a lilac robe, thus calling up the image of a Zoroastrian or Indian magician.

Usually no great time elapsed before one or the other of the company would begin to tremble, then the limbs would twitch convulsively, and the patient would break out in perspiration, scream or groan. No sooner had such tokens manifested themselves in one member of the chain, than the others too, would feel the onset of the famous crisis which was to bring relief. Sonic would fall to the ground and go into convulsions, others would laugh shrilly, others would scream, and choke, and dance like dervishes, others would appear to faint or sink into a hypnotic sleep. According to Mesmer’s ‘theory of crisis’ the malady had to be provoked into its utmost marge of development, it had so to speak to be sweated out of the organism if the body was to retain healthy.

The importance of Mesmer to the history of coex is that, to the individuals who claim to have ‘discovered’ a new approach to human ills via abreaction, or say they have channeled a new cosmic force for the use of humanity, Mesmer stands as a direct contradiction. Three hundred years ago, despite his exotic dress and manlier, he ran in­dividual and group psychotherapy of a very successful nature. Although he thought of himself as a channel for a cosmic energy, he nevertheless recognised an agent other than technical psychiatric skill at work. Perhaps the ‘cosmic energy’ theory was not so far out either, as Reich revived it in new form in our own century. The work of Mesmer gradually moved into greater and greater complication -people dancing around trees for instance – instead of simplification and clarity. Out of it came Mesmerism which took the form of positive suggestion, completely leaving behind the aspect of allowing the organism to dis­charge its own tension and negativity. The spontaneous forces capable of self healing were ignored – even suppressed. The vainglorious power or forceful skill of the mesmerist or therapist took its place.

The approach started by Mesmer has never completely died out. While living in Russia in 1912 Sir Paul Dukes met Lev Lvovitch who used a self regulatory method to deal with a variety of illnesses. He would stroke patients limbs and induce shaking and trembling. In his book Unending Quest he describes the case of a boy whose legs were paralysed. “There was a broken exclamation from the boy in the middle of the room. ‘It’s b-b-beginning!’ The lad was quivering from head to foot so much that he had to hold oil to his chair.” After several treatments Dukes ob­served that the boy’s condition improved, and in a few weeks he was cured.

Only in very recent years has any serious scientific work been done in understanding what takes place in this healing which arises from within – with or without the help of an outside agent. Despite this research there is still virtually no socially established ways in which individuals are taught to trust their own internal processes. People in the West, and especially those trained in the helping professions, are forever committing the crime against human nature of ‘doing something’ to it, and seldom letting ‘It’ do some­thing to them. Nevertheless some individuals and groups have done a tremendous amount to make us aware of our lack, and point out ways of overcoming it. Freud does not leave us with any sense of there being a powerful and help­ful self-regulatory action in us. He gives no sense of finding a transformative power with which one can work toward spontaneous analysis and self help. But in Jung we find again and again very clear reference to what has been named in this book as coex.

Car/Jung Linking East and West

In Psychological Commentary On Time Tibetan Book’ f Time Great Liberation, Jung says:

If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that ‘everything good is outside’ whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. . . We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. Because of these resis­tances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the SELF LIBERATING POWER OF THE INTROVERTED MIND. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious.

• . . The whole process is called the ‘transcendent function’. It is a process arid a method at the same time. The production of unconscious compensation (self-regulation) is a spontaneous PROCESS; the conscious realisation is a METHOD.

 

In Jung we find something of the reverence for what is met within a human being – a reverence for life itself. A great deal of Jung’s attitudes and thoughts have already been quoted iii other chapters, enough to show that he did not use the self-regulatory process in such a cathartic way as Mesmer.

Aurobindo and Integral Yoga

During the early part of this century another great figure, in a field other than psychology, was exploring what resulted from consciousness opening to the self-regulating ‘evolutionary energy’. Writing and working from the dual standpoint of an Eastern yogi and Western thinker Aurobindo explains what he found in forty years of investigating the depths and heights of inner experience. In some approaches to coex such as Pentecostalism, there is an emphasis on the transcendental, the higher potential of human nature. In other approaches the emphasis is on tile cleansing or catharsis of past experience, pain and conditioning. Aurobindo finds a balance between these two which well suits the name of Integral Yoga which lie gave to his system. In the book The Adventure of Consciousness, Satprem describes Aurobindo’s statement of how the ‘evolutionary force’ acts on one who opens to it. “We feel around the head” he says, “and more particularly around the nape of the neck, an unusual pressure which may give the sensation of a false headache. At the beginning we can scarcely endure it for long and shake it off. Gradually this pressure takes a more distinct form and we feel a veritable current which descends – a current of force not like an unpleasant electric current but rather like a fluid mass.”

To allow this spontaneously active force to work in us, Aurobindo tells us we must be quiet and open our restless mind or consciousness. In Aurobindo’s own words, “When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates inner mind centres, then into the heart centre, then into the navel and other vital centres, them into the sacral region and below. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation. It takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonizes, establishes a new rhythm in the nature.

• . • The surest way toward this integral fulfillment is to find the Master of the Secret who dwells within us, open ourselves constantly to the Divine Power which is also the Divine Wisdom and Love, and trust it to effect the conversion. But it is difficult for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning. And, if done at all, it is still difficult to do it perfectly and in every strand of our nature. It is difficult at first because of our egoistic habits of thought, of sensation, of feelings blocking up the avenues by which we arrive at the perception that is needed. It is difficult afterwards because the faith, the surrender, the courage requisite in this path are not easy to the ego clouded soul. The divine working is not the working the egoistic mind desires or approves, for it uses error to arrive at truth, suffering in order to arrive at perfection. The ego cannot see where it is being led; it revolts against the leading, loses confidence, loses courage. These failings would not matter; for the Divine Guide within is not offended by our revolt, riot discouraged by our want of faith or repelled by our weakness; it has the entire love of the mother and the entire patience of the teacher. But by withdrawing our assent from the guidance we lose the consciousness, though hot all the actuality of its benefit.”

Reich – Cosmic Energy and the Death of Guru’s

Dr. Wilhelm Reich offers us a very different approach to this world of experience. In the 1920’s Reich gradually felt his way from an orthodox use of Freudian psycho-analysis to a more biological, physiological or energetic point of View. Not that he lost sight of the human soul, but he realised how much body, energy and personality are uni­fied. By working with body attitudes or postures he found he could help the patient melt tensions and emotional blocks. By relaxing muscular tensions, flows of energy, movement and feeling were unblocked. Perhaps more than any other clinical therapist or doctor of his time, he recognised that a spontaneous, self-regulating activity or energy was at work in all living organisms. He says of this energy, which he eventually called orgone:

Contrary to galvanic electricity – it would function on organic material which is a non-conductor for electri­city, and on animal tissues. Its function would not be restricted to isolated nerve cells or cell groups, but would permeate and govern the total organism. It would have to explain in a simple way, the pulsating basic function of the living , contraction and expansion, as it is expressed in respiration and orgasm. It would express itself in the production of heat, a characteristic of most living organisms. It would definitely explain the sexual function, i.e. it would make sexual attraction understandable. It would explain what has been added to the chemically complicated protein in order to make it alive. It would, finally, have to show us the mechanism of the symmetry of form development in general.

Gradually Reich developed very definite techniques, working with respiration, muscular tension and character attitudes. He particularly explored the place of sexuality individual, social and political structures. He helped people release their own self-regulatory process and work with it toward health and wholeness. As people learnt this they experienced spontaneous movement, trembling, changed feeling states and emotional and sexual release. The actual results, as compared with those already mentioned in this short history, were no different to those in Shaktipat or in Mesmer’s work. Nevertheless Reich brought a new open­ness, a new technical understanding to the subject with his genius. Unlike Mesmer he did not rest until he had pin­pointed clearly what released self-regulatory action into conscious operation. He did not stop, as Mesmer and the gurus did, in believing himself and certain other special men and women were the channels of a cosmic energy which healed. Reich made the tremendous step, while yet remaining a scientist and clinical therapist, of seeing an integral law of human nature at work, and active in indi­viduals quite apart from his personal influence. In this Reich helped people in the present to begin a link with their spontaneous energies which earlier peoples had known only in a religious context. The deeply religious, surrendered attitudes so prevalent in the past are seldom found today in the West. Certainly not in the way demon­strated by the original Christians who surrendered body and mind to a force they trusted. Looked at in this way, even the Godly in the West are frightened of God’s power. Jung makes the statement that people in the West cannot find God because none of us can bow low enough. Philip Zimbardo and Carol Laderman are more typical of the fear we have as Westerners of the unconscious. We see in it possible madness, loss of self, and possession by unnamed urges and forces. Being unable to form the trust out of our religious convictions, Reich enabled people to meet this vital part of themselves from a different more acceptable starting point. The new standpoint is that which includes our critical and analytical intellect. To deny it in an attempt to emulate the East in approaching their inner life uncriti­cally, would be to do ourselves a great disservice. Reich proved that as Westerners we can still touch our deep spontaneous energies while retaining our new-found intellect.

God’s Chosen People – The Way of Subud

Considering Reich’s work it is interesting now to look at the influence of Muhammed Subuh. He was born and lived in Indonesia, working as an accountant for many years. His main interest in life was to seek out some of the many gurus in his country, and attempt a deeper aware­ness of life’s mysteries and the nature of God. In his late twenties, in the year 1925, he experienced a vision while out walking. It seemed to him that a ball of light or fire rushed across the sky and descended on his head. He began to shake and tremble, and felt a powerful and divine energy had begun to work in his being. On reaching home he opened himself to the influence of this power and found spontaneous movements and experiences occurred. From that time onwards he frequently ‘opened’ himself to what he felt to come from God, and found that each time move­ments, sounds, and a wide variety of inner experience arose. He observed that the movements and experiences were ways in which his being was gradually cleansed and made whole. It was as if some influence were gradually guiding him through experiences in a direction he could not preconceive, but IT could. Also, his physical health improved, his experiences educated him regarding his and other peoples life on Earth, and he found his intuitive faculties enormously enlarged. Often he could also be instrumental in helping other people to experience healing. The film star Eva Bartok told her story in the newspapers at the time of her own healing in connection with Pak Subuh and her baby.

By 1932 Pak Subuh had discovered that other people who relaxed in his presence could also receive the same experience and be led through cleansing and integration. Groups of people in Indonesia began to practice this ‘opening’ to what they felt to be the grace of God working in their lives. The manner of these group experiences is like that described under Shaktipat. People found their bodies making spontaneous movements; they experienced themselves in a wide variety of ways, were led through catharsis and great inspirational insights. Like the Pente­costal approach, there was a tendency toward remaining on the symbolic level, and editing all but the transcendental.

The experience of being moved from within was called ‘Latihan’, which in Indonesian means to be moved, cleansed and disciplined by the power of God. But until 1957 comparatively few people were in these groups doing latihan. Those who were had mostly been using latihan several times a week for many years. Sometimes the length of practice was ten or fifteen years. These practi­tioners had found that their nature and body had been gradually changed by the practice. Their awareness and sympathies had widened. Problems had shifted, and in general they felt more in touch with the force or meaning behind their existence. At this point a European working in Indonesia – Rofe – asked to be introduced to the lati­han. Rofe taught it to people in England who started an international centre at Coombe Springs. From there the practice went world-wide, and at one time the followers numbers were claimed to be 200,000. People of all nation­alities, religious belief, political views and social status found they could experience the latihan. The lives of many were deeply changed by it.

If we are to understand how modern men and women relate to coex there are things we must be aware of in re­gard to the latihan, and the organisation named Subud. J.P. Barter, for instance, writing about his involvement in the latihan says, “We do not know for any certainty why the force which is received in Subud has been made uni­quely available to mankind today rather than at some earlier period in history.” The statement is typical of the sort of historical blindness and spiritual pomposity that is common in the practice. Pak Subuh states that the experi­ence is unique to him and new in the world. When I myself started a coex group many years ago, based on Reichian work and Mesmer’s groups, a spy was sent from a Subud group in a nearby town to find out where or how I had stolen their latihan. That people like J.G. Bennet, a well educated man, and Barter, bright enough to write an orderly account of Subud, can accept such statements is a warning that the Western mind, in attempting to re­establish connection with the deeper layers of the psyche, can often revert to primitive attitudes, ignoring or discarding information and lessons learnt through hard experi­ence.

Burying Old Dogmas

Another dogma in Subud, which links the organisation with the ancient guru tradition, is that no one can experience latihan without it being passed to them by someone who had received it via Pak Subuh and Subud members. It is, therefore, implied that this is not a natural occurrence, or a part of everyone’s inner equipment, but is a special dispensation, a sort of occult power given just to Pak Subuh and members of Subud by God. The hard lessons I mentioned above are how deadly such attitudes have proved themselves to be in the past. How many millions died because sects fought each other over who had the REAL access to God and the truth? Placing the latihan in the realm of the occult and sectarian as this does, is a factor which kills its general applicability.

This reversion on the part of Westerners when meeting the unconscious is illustrated by two examples. Michael Manger visited Swami Muktananda – a Shaktipat guru – at Ganeshpuri, N.E. of Bombay. He says, “I am not sure exactly when or how I received Shaktipat as there was no formal external initiation, but it manifested itself in three ways. First an intense, wonderful and surprising tranquility of mind and body whilst sitting in the house where Babaji – the guru – was staying. Secondly, an increase in emotional and physical excitement by being in Babaji’s presence and hearing him lecture. I had a pain at the base of my spine, flushed cheeks and bright eyes, despite my dis­agreement with the burden of Babaji’s lecture – the need for a guru. Thirdly, and most important, I awoke in the middle of the night doing spontaneous breathing exer­cises, followed by a series of dynamic yoga postures, some known and some unknown to me. Then there were twenty minutes in which a beautiful voice emanated from my throat singing in Sanscrit – it came in verse which I wrote down and showed to Babaji the next morning.

These external happenings had two very significant in­ternal accompaniments. Firstly an intense fire of love and light in my heart, indescribably stronger than any­thing I had felt previously; and secondly, direct intuitive knowledge that all this came from Babaji. It came also to a man with a communist atheist up-bringing, with but little experience of yoga or meditation and a very active belief in self help rather than guru help.

The second man, William Groom, does not make it plain whether he had planned to visit Jogeshwari to meet the guru of whether it was by chance. He says that

before long a very old man appeared, and Tamhane, one of my companions presented me to him. He was Sivrao Nileshwar a Bhakti yogi who lived at Jogeshwari, about 73 years of age and dignified in his approach. He stood in front of me with arms outstretched and took hold of my hands, the effect on me was instantan­eous and electrifying. My head spun, my senses reeled, and almost immediately I became oblivious of my surroundings. Sivrao was in a deep trance from the moment he took my hands. From his throat emanated choking sounds as though he were unable to speak, whilst at the same time I could feel this powerful force flowing through his hands. This mystical experience was to become the foundation of many others which still continue with me wherever I go. I had received from the Holy Man a force or power which devotees told me is called Pare Sattva, a gift from God which they said would be with me for the rest of my life.

As can be seen from these descriptions it does riot occur to these men that their experience was in any way a product of their own unconscious, despite the fact that Michael’s first arose from a sleep state. The ‘guru’ in these cases is certainly a catalyst, helping the person to accept and trust, even believe in an inner spontaneous process. Michael’s statement about his background of rational communism is almost humorous, as if communists or people with a scientific rational mind do not have an unconscious and dream life, or religious feelings. Dr. Heyer, in Organism of the Mind, tells of a young scientist who went for psycho-analysis because of great personal tension. As soon as he lay on the couch he burst forth in singing a hymn. By not accepting his ‘irrational’ nature with its religious feelings he had experienced conflict. This was resolved by allowing such feelings to be expressed.

Dianetics – Co-counseling and Accessible Coex

In the 50’s Ron Hubbard published a book about his work called Dianetics. It was revolutionary in its claims of self- help psychotherapy, because until then such healing had been firmly in the hands of specialists or cults such as Subud – both being jealous of their field and requiring either high fees or membership. In a readily under­standable book Hubbard described how people could help themselves. The book gave details about re-experiencing childhood trauma, of remembering life in the womb, of full memory, and how childhood pain causes the person to function inefficiently. Unfortunately his work led to the formation of The Church of Scientology, which has signs of being another cult.

One of the offshoots of Dianetics, even though it fails to claim itself as such, is Re-Evaluation Counseling or Co-Counseling, which unlike Scientology, makes itself available to the public easily and at little or no cost. Also it clearly works with the process of self-regulation. In 1964 Harvey Jackins published a pamphlet called The Postulates of Re-Evaluation Counseling. In summary these postulates say that

•  . . the essence of rational human behaviour consists of responding to each instant of living with a new response, created afresh at that moment to precisely fit and handle the situation of that moment as that situation is defined by the information received through the senses of the person. . . Each human with a physically undamaged brain has a large inherent capacity for this kind of behaviour. . .The natural emotional tone of a human being is zestful enjoyment of life. The natural relationship between any two human beings is loving affection, communication and cooperation. The special human capacity for rational response is interrupted by an experience of physical or emotional distress. Infor­mation input through the senses then stores as an unevaluated and rigid accumulation, exhibiting the characteristics of a very complete, literal recording of all aspects of the incident.

Immediately after the distress experience is concluded or at the first opportunity thereafter, the distressed human spontaneously seeks to claim the attention of another human. If they are successful in claiming this aware attention of the other person, a process of what has been called ‘discharge’ ensues.

Discharge is signaled externally by one or more of a precise set of physical processes. These are: crying or sobbing (with tears), trembling with cold perspiration, laughter, angry shouting and vigorous movement with warm perspiration, live interested talking; and in a slightly different way, yawning, often with scratching or stretching. Discharge requires considerable time for completion.

In actual practise two people contract to work together. One listens while the other talks over areas of pain or deep feeling and enters into discharge. They then swap roles. It is a very simple and effective technique. As such it cuts out all the negative aspects attendant on gurus and cults, while remaining highly effective and much more available.

The work of Dr. Caron Kent, as summarised by his book The Puzzled Body, while not as influential as some of the approaches mentioned, is nevertheless important. He began to explore coex because of his own need by giving himself regular time at a typewriter and writing sponta­neously whatever came to mind. In this way he found he began to contact areas of experience and feeling previously unavailable. He developed this in his practice as a psycho­therapist into working with the body and feelings directly. He writes of his work as dealing with the self-regulatory forces, and deplores physicians and therapists who are blind to their importance. One of the interesting aspects of his work is that he took careful measurements of his patients and found that as they were able to allow their being to release its own self-regulatory process, their bodies achieved their growth potential. In adults head size changed radically, as with feet, chest, etc. Kent concluded that painful or non integrated experience interfered with the growth processes in body and personality. When such experiences were released and integrated, the growth processes were released to complete their work.

Ronnie Laing Daring to Care

Someone who has had a very widespread and revolution­ary influence on psychiatric and non-clinical therapy is R.D. Laing. His book Time Politics of Experience, published in 1967, sums up his view of how the sane and the so-called insane can be helped by forming a supportive envi­ronment in which self-regulation can take place. He says in the book:

No age in the history of humanity has perhaps so host touch with this natural ‘healing’ process, that implicates some of the people whom we label schizophrenic. No age has so developed it, no age had imposed such prohibitions and deterrences against it, as our own. Instead of the mental hospital, which is a sort of re-servicing factory for human breakdowns, we need a place where people who have traveled further and, consequently, may be more lost than psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way ‘further’ into inner space and time, and back again. Instead of the ‘degradation’ ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it, an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction, into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back again. Psychiatrically this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.

What is entailed then is:

i A voyage from outer to inner,

ii  from life to a kind of death,

iii    from going forward to going back,

iv    from temporal movement to temporal standstill,

v  from mundane time to aeonic time,

vi    from the ego to the self,

vii   from being outside (post birth) back into the womb of all things (pre birth).

And then subsequently a return voyage from:

1 Inner to outer,

2 from death to life,

3 from the movement back to a movement forward,

4 from immortality back to mortality,

5 from eternity back to time,

6 from self to a new ego,

7 from a cosmic foetalisation to an existential rebirth.

This process may be one that all of us need, in one form or another. The process could have a central function in a truly sane society.

The Japanese Have Seitai

While teaching coex in Japan I was introduced to another Oriental approach to self-regulation which is widely used in that country. It is called Seitai and was taught in its present form by Haruchika Noguchi. In Japan Seitai is thought of as a way of keeping healthy, but it has a particular quality about it which comes out in Noguchi’s teachings. He constantly stressed that you cannot under­stand what a human being is by dissecting one, or by trying to understand the function of separate organs such as the liver or brain.

For instance, he said that,

One person may find his appetite increases when he is in love, another may find that his heart rather than his stomach responds. Similarly, the same stressful situation may result in rheumatism in one person and dia­betes in another. What causes these differences? Sonic individuals are so tough they are calm even with a million pound debt, while others become ill over obli­gations of only ten pounds. The physical tendencies of each person are different, and unless one takes ones stand on this fact the health problems of different people cannot be grasped.

Seitai’s starting point is from a completely different con­cept of health to that of a keep-fit class. In keep-fit, and in just about every form of exercise from yoga to weight training, there are certain movements or postures which are said to exercise particular muscles, or to be ‘good’ for the thighs, abdomen, etc. These are then applied or prac­tised from outside, as it were. Seitai has the concept that our life process knows what sort, and how much exercise we need, and the exercise arises from within. In other

words it is stimulated by our unconscious sense of our own needs, just as a sneeze is.

Let me quote Noguchi again to explain this. He says,

In my teens I started to guide people to health by means of what we now call Seitai Soho and Katsugen Undo, though at that time I had no knowledge of medicine or of the body’s anatomical structure. I did not know anything about the kind of food we should eat, yet I was able to lead people to health.

What was the basis for the guidance? It was that I asked myself why human beings stayed alive and what should be done to activate their strength to live. . . We find various excuses for suppressing ourselves and, wit­hout realising we are putting our innate powers for health asleep, we convince ourselves that we are weak and blame it on our surroundings, the food we eat or the hours we sleep, unaware that the real responsibility lies with us.

So Seitai creates a situation in which we listen and allow response. Noguchi taught that the spontaneous move­ments which arise as the response are the same as those occurring during sleep. Seitai considers whether our vitality and enthusiasm for life is active or withdrawn. If withdrawn, then it is encouraged to express itself again. Because a great deal of the suppressive factors in us are mental and emotional, Seitai encourages a strong and healthy confidence in ones ability to survive. If we fear we will become ill if a night’s sleep is missed, the anxiety creates tension which suppresses the defence systems of the body. If illness then occurred, would it mean one was naturally sickly?

Put in another way, we are learning to allow the body’s own natural mechanisms, such as the eyes watering if dust enters them, and other such more subtle reactions, to function more vitally. Noguchi stresses that it is not the movements of Seitai which heal us. The symptoms of illness are the body’s own attempts to heal itself, and Seitai helps us work with that process. To do the movements mechanically as if they were the thing which healed, is to miss the point and would be a return to keep-fit. But once

you have learnt to allow your body to heal itself more vigorously, you do not need to practise it any more.

Coming right up to the present, Rolfing, Primal Therapy, EST, Re-Birthing, Bioenergetics, all offer their particular genius to a culture convulsing with activity to become whole. Unfortunately most of these approaches offer their help through highly paid experts to those who feel in need of paying for it. The Expert/Patient relation­ship is something which is badly in need of renovation. As Laing suggests, what we need is not more experts and organisations, but something seen as a central function in a sane society. We need courage and faith in our own ability to move toward wholeness – and companions who will be with us while we experience the Journey.

The Work of Herman Weiner

One of the problems with the development of self determinism in therapy is the changed social and financial situation of the therapists themselves. In an article called ‘Working With Groups’ Herman Weiner says:

As a psychoanalytically trained therapist, I conducted analytically oriented groups for several years during the sixties and I duly had my share of ‘success’. Try as I might to be open and free-feeling, I would end up at sonic point in the group process somewhat more guarded. I also observed that this pulling back was periodically reached by my patients. . . It became dif­ficult to feel less neurotic than my patients seemed to be. A very humbling experience! I ultimately decided to give up groups and to work on a one-to-one basis.

Returning to group work later he organised a different group dynamics, which he describes as the

patients enter a semi-darkened well padded, sound dampened set of adjoining rooms. . . They already know what to do for themselves from an initial series of individual preparatory sessions. They are beginning to know that courage to let themselves sense, move, fantasise and feel without restraint, is both liberating and healing. In the initial sessions they have been encouraged to surrender themselves to themselves in this manner. Now, in the semi-darkness, I move from one mat to another giving support, courage, and contact where necessary, so as to facilitate their descent into themselves.

Without the historical background to Herman Weiner’s work, we would not realise that he is doing nothing new. 1mm fact he is still attempting to play the central role for his ‘patients’. Even Subud gives more autonomy, and Co-Counseling exhibits the deep trust of help in healing to whoever can give ‘aware attention’.

Love is the Key to Changing Lives

While Janov’s work has reminded the world of the need to discharge pain and anger, from our consideration of coex it does riot have a great deal to say. With Bioenergetics also, though Lowen’s writings are full of self-regulatory principles, based as they are on Reich’s work, it is still a therapist/patient oriented technique.

Something which enters more deeply into general social applicability is the work being done by Jacques Schiff in U.S.A. A person of obviously great love and wisdom, she and her husband adopted several teenage ‘children’ and allowed them full opportunity to self-regulate right in their home. These children were often the apparently hopeless cases from mental hospitals, and were allowed to regress to being in nappies again, bottle feeding, and to work through their stages of growth in a healthier way than had originally occurred. As she shows clearly in her book – All My Children – the self-regulatory release these young adults had was only half what was needed in their healing. The other half, as Jackins points out, comes through consciously re-evaluating the experience released in coex.

Once she had brought several of her ‘children’ through to health, although she and her husband are psychiatrists, she encouraged other families to use the same methods. Some of the ‘children’ now adult, have set up their own fostering family setting. These new family groups are likewise raising healthy children out of sick adults.

LSD and the ‘Heavy’ Drug Scene

Because of the struggle our culture is having with drug abuse, it is necessary here to point out that a few of the ‘drugs’, notably psilocybin, LSD and Cannabis, all release self-regulatory experience. However, if the person does not integrate what is released by the drug, marked disorientation occurs. What have been called ‘flash backs’ are exactly the same as what is described by William Groom after meeting his guru – “still continue with me wherever I go.” In his case he wanted these inner eruptions of experience. If a person were frightened of the uncon­scious, as Philip Zimbardo describes, the ‘flash backs’ can be very disturbing.

Some of the most effective work with the principle of coex was done with LSD prior to its banishment. A number of psychiatrists were registered to work with it. To understand this positive side to these drugs, it is useful to read such books as Myself and I by Constance Newland; and LSD Psychotherapy by W.V. Caldwell. When com­pared with the literature on ‘tripping’, the tremendous difference can be seen between playing with and working with, the inner process of coex.

Summary

In the widest sense self-regulation is an integral part of all human experience. It is particularly noticeable historically in the religions of humanity. The ball of fire Pak Subuh mentions has been described by many other religious leaders. It appeared to the disciples at Pentecost. When we realise that the dream process in the coex experience pro­duces just such waking subjective impressions, it becomes obvious that a similar and universal psychobiological process underlies such human activities.

In different ages humans have met with, used and directed the self-regulatory process in different ways. We have given the experience of consciously working with such processes the name coex, and in the past it has been given many names and many explanations. The physical and subjective experiences which occur in coex, because of their connection with the dream process, frequently produce a sense of touching the divine. This is the way our internal interpretative process, expresses contact between our conscious personality and the universal life forces which give rise to it. Unfortunately, groups gathered around leaders who give their experience of coex different names such as Christianity, Buddhism, Subud and Mes­merism, frequently argue for their own uniqueness. In most cases however, as with Christianity, the original direct experience is quickly suppressed.

The historical perspective shows us not only how people lay claim to ownership of a natural principle, but also how they have a tendency to limit it to their own hori­zons and belief systems. Even Reich was guilty of claiming himself as the first man in history to use the process. But few have, indeed, dared to spell out its political and social implications as clearly as he. The released inner response of our being is revolutionary in nature. This is probably why established traditions of religion, medicine and politics often suppress any signs of its appearance. There is a lesson to be learned from Mesmer’s clash with his fellow phy­sicians. As hundreds received relief from pain, thousands more came. This led Mesmer to ‘magnetise’ anything that was handy, such as a tree, so people would be free of his counseling rooms. His popularity and excess led the French Academy of Science to set up a commission to examine Mesmer’s claims. They concluded that “Nothing proves the existence of magnetic animal fluid: imagination without magnetism may produce conversions: magnetism without imagination produces nothing.” While that may be true, Mesmer was discredited, and none of his critics managed to mobilise peoples ‘imagination’ sufficiently to cure the ills of the public in his place. . . Reich died in a prison cell.

Mind and Movement 11 – Appendix

Freud said that dreams were the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. Having explored and worked with the possibilities of dreams for the last seventeen years, it is my feeling that dreams are only a readily available doorway to our inner world. Jung suggests that what he called ‘active imagination’ gave one a fuller access. His description of using a fantasy with the hands is one of the ways he suggests of using active imagination. It involves the principle of coex which gives a much fuller entrance to the ‘more’ in us. When other doorways to the unconscious, such as dream work or meditation, are allied with the function of self regulation, they become more powerful tools.

 Because coex does provide such a full entrance into the unconscious, one needs to learn some of the basic principles which apply to the inner world of the mind. Meeting the contents of this part of ourselves are in many ways quite different from confronting events outside of us. Without realising it we have developed finely tuned responses to thousands of things and situations in our outer environment. Depending upon where one lives, from earliest childhood one begins to learn how to watch roads, avoid certain plants, eat others, respond to some people in one way and others in another. All these responses enable us to survive . If just one or two of those responses lapsed for a few minutes we could be killed. People often ask me if there are any dangers in using coex. Yes, there are dangers. But life itself is dangerous, driving a car is dangerous. In some areas walking down a street could be suicidal.

 The dangers of coex do not seem to me as possibly fatal as those of driving a car. As with driving a car however, if we learn certain rules and use them, the dangers become negligible.

 The first rule is to avoid carrying pride or overconfidence into the use of coex. This would be like believing that because you have survived the streets of London or New York, you can safely climb a mountain. Different rules apply, and different skills are needed. So if you have not made contact with your unconscious before, recognise that you are a novice. Start slowly and take your time working through the exercises and techniques given in this book. Start from the beginning and go step by step.

 The second rule is to clearly remember the nature of the process you are dealing with. It is self regulatory and it is the dream process. As such it has something of a direction of its own. Given any opportunity of expressing to consciousness, it will begin to work on its business in hand. For instance, supposing you had been attacked by a dog in childhood, and in your shock you had held back a lot of the emotions resulting from the attack. Perhaps you parents had even said something like, “Don’t cry. The dog’s gone now. It’s all okay now.” Of course in the realm of your body and inner life it isn’t okay. Perhaps a powerful urge to run was stifled by fear. Maybe anger and shocked emotions were suppressed. It could be that you wanted to scream at your parents asking why they weren’t there to protect you. Many such impulses are stored in each of us. They need to be discharged or allowed in order to release the inner pressure and tension they cause. If such impulses are not released or re-evaluated they can be stored in our being for a lifetime, contributing to such illnesses as arthritis and cancer. Many people experience coex without such scenes of childhood arising. But if we are going to use coex we need to realise that they may, and deal with them understandingly if they do.

 If such an event arises it is somewhat like childbirth. There are events presaging it; there is a middle; and there is a completion. It could take several sessions of practice to get the whole event expressed and integrated. To stop in the middle simply leaves one in an uncomfortable feeling. It is wiser to carry on in the next session, and arrive at the completed experience sooner. What was suppressed inside oneself is, during coex, bulging up into consciousness, into ones very personality, not safely exterior to oneself. Jane’s desires for compulsive eating, quoted at the end of chapter four are a good example of this. By meeting the feelings in another session, Jane could have cleared it more quickly.

 Because we are also dealing with the dream process, what arises may be presented in symbols of movement or experience. This has already been fairly well covered in previous chapters. Nevertheless it must be remembered. As human beings we have strong desires to see our pet theories ‘proved’ by what emerges from our own mysterious within. Recently, in an Arthur C. Clarke program about reincarnation, time was given to a subject apparently re-living a past life as a British soldier. The man, under hypnosis, cried out and jerked as he was wounded in the arm. The question from the hypnotist was, how could anyone express such things with such drama unless they were from real experience? Measured against what one experiences in dreams, and what I have witnessed people expressing during coex, the subjects dramatic expression was flaccid and without depth. The dream process can create a drama around any given theme. But it has a tendency to use scenes or characters from history or literature to express what situations occur within us. While Arthur Clarke was rightly sceptical of the claims for the validity of the hypnotised subjects experience, he misses the above point, that ones unconscious expresses its own internal conflicts in such themes.

 This is so important I will quote an edited version of Brian’s experiences with such symbolised events, which appeared originally in my INSTANT DREAM BOOK.

“It started with a dream in which I was in the First World War in Germany. The Germans had taken a hill we had been defending, and I had been captured. I had learnt to allow fantasy which included my body and feelings – coex – and when I continued the dream in this way I experienced in a very deep sense being a prisoner and being tied to a bed. German officers tortured me by crushing my left foot, but I wouldn’t give information. During the fantasy my body actually took on the position of being tied and tortured and I cried out. It all seemed real to me. I didn’t go through the physical pain of being tortured, but I certainly couldn’t see how I could make up such a thing. I even knew my name as that soldier, so I thought it must be memories of a past life. 

 “Because I couldn’t understand or feel conclusive about the first coex session I took another. The fantasy continued as if having a real and orderly source. Because I would not talk I was strapped on the bed face down and a line of German soldiers came and, one after the other buggered me. “

 Brian took two more sessions in which he began to break through the symbols. In one he felt attacked by two youths. In the second he realises the attack is to do with his own teenage sexuality. He goes on to say:-

“From that explosion of realisation all the other things fell into place. I remembered that as a teenager my uncle had given me a set of volumes about the First World War. I used to sit and look through the photos for ages. My dream and fantasy had taken the war as an expression of my own terrible inner conflict about sex. I had been a prisoner of that conflict, and had been tortured by it. My left foot represented my inner feelings of confidence to stand up or support myself as a man. The buggery and the attack by the youths were one and the same. Because I had never masturbated, never allowed myself a wet dream, or any flow of sexuality, the pressure of sexual drive had been introverted. Again and again I had felt that pressure as an attack – inside myself – which I had resisted, until I was buggered as a youthful personality.”

Back Cover:

MIND AND MOVEMENT

THE PRACTICE OF COEX

 By using body movements and postures as doorways to our own natural healing process, we can actively release tension; find balance between the mind and body; learn to dream creatively while wide awake; and tap areas of the unconscious thought inaccessible.

 Most physical movements and exercise are disconnected from our deepest drives, feelings and sources of healing. MIND AND MOVEMENT shows bow to find a natural way to healthy exercise and spiritual growth. The method of co-operating with our own internal healing and creativity has been known and used for centuries. In Japan it is called Seitai, in India Shaktipat; even the early Christian used this simple form of inner and outer hygiene.

 Recent research has linked this activity with the selfregulatory and dream process within us. But, no other book

has made plain to the public how to co-operate with these internal functions for one’s own benefit.

Tony Crisp has been writing about natural health and self

help for thirty years. His special interest in the healing

potential of the dream process led him to work as a therapist

during the past fourteen years. It is out of this experience

MIND AND MOVEMENT was written.

 Cover design: Tina Dutton Photograph: by the Author.

 0 85207 182 5

  THE C. W. DANIEL

COMPANY LTD

1 CHURCH PATH SAFFRON WALDEN

ESSEX CBlO IJP ENGLAND

Dream Deprivation

A factor that is missing in many scientific arguments and even therapeutic arguments about whether dreams are functional and meaningful rather than random pieces of flotsam, is the question of their possible self-regulatory function. After the first and second world wars, hundreds of ex-soldiers suffered recurring nightmares about battle scenes. The dreams re-presented the original experience, often accompanied by the original body movements made to escape the horror being faced. Charles Rycroft, in his book anxiety and Neurosis, describes the observed results on people of unexpected disasters such as earthquakes and train accidents. Among other things they have a tendency to ‘waking actions and dreams in which the traumatic experience is repeated.’ He goes on to say that these repetitions in dreams or actions can be ‘thought of as manifestations of the healing process. By repeating the trauma the traumatised person is, as it were, trying to get it in front of himself again so that he can anticipate it, react anxiously to it and then assimilate or ‘get over’ it in the way he would any other distressing experience.’

Working with such dreams leads to the view that there is a self-regulatory process within our psyche, which attempts to find healing through the presentation of such traumatic incidents in dreams. Jung and Hadfield in particular supported this view of dreaming. See Life’s Little Secrets

The findings in researching also link with this self-regulatory theory. Dr. Dement and others experimented with dream deprivation with many subjects. The most obvious finding was that if the REM – dreaming – period of sleep is disturbed or prevented by waking the subject each time the REM activity begins, the REM periods of dreaming quickly became more and more frequent. The experiments had to be abandoned because without the use of force it became impossible to stop REM sleep, and the subjects were becoming seriously effected. (6)

When the subjects were awoken during their normal sleep for similar periods of time, these critical effects did not arise. While such findings might be explained in a purely physiological way, the mind body unity prevents us from saying, ‘Yes but that is only the result of brain chemicals’. There is obviously a great need on the part of the body/mind to dream. If for no other reason, dreams thereby have a meaningful function.

When the subjects whose REM sleep had been prevented, were allowed normal undisturbed REM dreaming, a massive increase in REM dreaming occurred. This suggested to researchers that the brain has some real need for dreaming, and when deprived will later fulfil its need by increased activity. In the 1970’s research by Ramon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman suggested that REM sleep was an important ingredient in learning from experience. They deprived rats and mice of REM sleep and observed their performance while running a variety of mazes. It was found that loss of REM sleep – no loss of sleep altogether – hardly impaired the performance of running mazes already learnt. However, there was a marked drop in performance of learning new a new maze or performing new tasks of any complexity.

Similar research was later performed with human subjects and showed similar results. These findings led psychiatrists to believe our mind is doing serious work while we dream. It is integrating what has recently been learnt into our long-term memory and possibly practising how to use this in enhancing personal skills. REM may therefore be important in stimulating the development of connective links of thought in infants and young children. The theory would explain why humans, who are constantly adapting to meet new challenges, exhibit so much REM activity.

That dreams occur more frequently after a period of deprivation certainly shows their link with a regulatory process. Learning is also a part of our survival needs, and much of it would appear to occur in a self-regulatory way.

(1) The initials REM stand for ‘rapid eye movement’. This refers to the fact detailed later in the book, that in 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman found rapid eye movements occurred while people slept. In 1957 the REM were linked with dreaming. Therefore sleep was observed to have two different phases, REM and NREM – non rapid eye movement, or non-REM. Later it was found that even during NREM sleep, a form of dreaming took place that is different to the REM dream with its pronounced imagery and drama.

(2) Van de Castle, Robert L. Our Dreaming Mind. Aquarian. London 1994.

(3) For instance Jules Verne wrote about submarines before they became a reality. Flying machines had been drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

(4) In the USA by Basic Books, Inc., New York 1988. Published in UK by Penguin Books 1990.

• c(5) An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream. See: body.
• A link between the sleeping mind and what is occurring externally. A person may be falling out of bed and dream of flying or falling for instance.
• A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, a breakdown in mind and body quickly occurs. This type of dreaming can often be a safety valve releasing tension and emotion not dealt with in waking life. See: compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; science and dreams.
• An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held in our unconscious to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present to us summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb. See: creativity and problem solving in dreams.

• A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and as a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness.
• In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are gradually upgraded.
• Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built.
• An means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfil this need.
• An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. Humans have an unimaginable ability to absorb information, not simply from books, but from everyday events. With it they constantly arrive at new insights and realisations. Humans frequently correctly predict the future – not out of a bizarre ability, but from the information gathered about the present. All these abilities and more show in our dreams. See: esp in dreams.
• A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams.
• A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change. See: abreaction; compensation theory; nightmares.
• In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness. See: Individuation.
• A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. This type of dream may indicate a link between the present person and people who had lived in the distant past; or between the dreamer and all existing life. Some of these dreams present powerful insights into how the transitory human personality may arise out of an eternal consciousness. They thus deal with the spiritual aspects of human nature.

(6) In the mid-1960s, a psychiatrist named Howard Roffwarg, at Columbia University in New York, suggested that nervous activity during REM sleep helps to stimulate the developing brain in very young children, thus promoting the growth of neural connections necessary for learning. In adults, according to Roffwarg, REM serves, like physical exercise, to maintain tone in the central nervous system.

The notion that REM could be a crucial ingredient in the learning process gained momentum during the 1970’s following the work of Boston psychiatrists Ramon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman. In the laboratory, Greenberg and Pearlman deprived rats and mice of REM sleep while training the animals to run through a variety of mazes. The researchers discovered that while REM loss caused test rodents to perform only slightly worse on simple routines that they had already mastered, it had a markedly adverse impact on the animals’ ability to carry out more complex tasks or to learn new ones, of whatever degree of complexity.

Greenberg and Pearlman noted that the same pattern appeared to be true with people. Human volunteers who went without REM sleep could per-form routine activities without much trouble but had much greater difficulty tackling complicated word-memorising tasks. This finding led the psychiatrists to conclude that the mind is doing serious work when it dreams-specifically, it is incorporating newly learned information into a long-term memory bank. According to this theory, REM may thus be critical in stimulating the development of associative thought in infants and young children. The theory would also explain why humans, who must constantly adapt to meet new challenges, exhibit so much REM activity. See The Secret Power

The Many Facets Of Dreaming

Although there is no final agreement on what dreams are and what their value is, if we look at the various findings, dreams can be seen to hold in them something of all the many aspects of human life. Just as society overall has hospitals and churches, schools, libraries and sports facilities to cater for the physical, spiritual, mental and recreational needs of people, so dreams express these departments of ourselves.

· Body Dreams – Bernard S. Seigal, M.D., assistant clinical professor of surgery, Yale University School of Medicine originated the ‘Exceptional Cancer Patient’ group therapy. Through encouraging his patients to tell their dreams and express their feelings via paintings, he found that patients often dreamt clearly about the condition of their body long before normal diagnostic methods could define the illness or healing. Other physicians, such as Kasatkin in Russia, have also drawn notice to this aspect of dreaming, and kept careful records of such dreams in patients.

· Virtual Reality – Sigmund Freud recognised that dreams are different in quality to waking fantasies or daydreams. While dreaming we are usually convinced that our surroundings and what is happening, is completely real. This sense of complete immersion in the dream does not pervade our fantasies. Although during a nightmare this feeling of reality can cause us to be very frightened, the positive side to it is that dreams give us experience as full of impact, and therefore as educational as waking life.

· Regulating – In experiments where volunteers were woken each time they began to dream, a breakdown in the efficiency of mind and body soon became apparent. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described dreams as compensatory. He was particularly referring to the way dreams help balance our conscious personality. According to this view, any extreme is compensated for by an expression of the opposite in our dreams. In this way, lack of love or success in our life may be compensated for by a very powerful release of dream imagery and experience. One may have a vision of ones dead mother or Christ for instance. Without such compensatory experience, continuing life in the face of failure and loneliness might be extremely difficult.

· Personal Growth – The growth of our personality from infancy is a very complex interplay between largely unconscious factors in our body, our experience of our environment, and the way we integrate and deal with these different influences. Dreams do appear to present clear indications of what is emerging as transforming forces in oneself. They also definitely reveal past experience that through trauma may need to be met in order to live ones life more satisfyingly or efficiently. This is why they are so often used in psychotherapy. Because our mind integrates experience, as described below under Creativity, some investigators believe that during our dreaming we ‘upgrade’ such skills as social interaction, speech, etc., which also leads to personal growth. There is neurological evidence that brain cells undergo a learning process during dreaming. Also in the area of personal growth, inquiry into dreams such as recurring nightmares, shows them to be an attempt, occasionally successful, to bring to consciousness and release past traumas such as childhood abandonment, involvement in war environments, or car accidents.

· Creativity – In 1912 Gestalt psychology was launched in Germany when Max Wertheimer published a paper on a visual illusion called apparent motion. Wertheimer had noticed that when we view a sequence of still pictures, as happens watching a film, we have the illusion of seeing movement. This perception of movement was different to the perception of its components – the many static images. This led to the understanding that many of the perceptions we have of the world around us, and many of the concepts we build, are radically different to the many pieces of information or experience they arise from. The sum is therefore different or greater than the parts. Sudden inspirations and creative leaps, when seen from this point of view, are usually a new ‘whole’ formed out of many parts which previously had no connection. The symbols and drama of dreams particularly express this creative forming of new experience and new realisations, new gestalts, out of the mass of separate pieces of experience or information.

· Imagination – This has been listed separately to creativity because they are not necessarily the same. Imagination has been described as the “ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.” To be creative or resourceful is considered highly admirable, yet being imaginative is frequently put down as a time waster. Most of the greatest things in the external world arose out of imagination. Such things as vacuum cleaners and pictures that could be sent through the air – TV – seemed outlandish to logical rational people when they were first mentioned. Dreams are possibly the most powerfully imaginative experiences we can have. Through them we can break free of the restrictions and lack of perception the logical mind has.

· Exercise For The Psyche – Freud believed that dreams expressed repressed sexual desires such as sex and anger. Jung said that in dreams we compensate for what is not experienced in our life. Seen in a more positive light, we can each see that our daily life only allows us to live a small range of the things we would like to do or feel. The circumstances of our life may lead us to prevent ourselves from expressing openly the intensity of the love, the pain, the anger, the creativity we have inside us. In dreams such restrictions fall away to some degree, and our mind, our emotions and sexuality can unfold and we can discover our fuller range of expression and capability. Howard Roffwarg, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, suggested that nervous activity during REM sleep helps to stimulate the developing brain in very young children, thus promoting the growth of neural connections necessary for learning. In adults, according to Roffwarg, REM serves, like physical exercise, to maintain tone in the central nervous system.

· The Supersenses – Even if we cannot accept there are aspects of life that our senses and sensitive instruments do not show us, most of us agree that our mind, through our senses and emotions, can extrapolate from the thousands of bits of information we take in. For instance is we look at a person for a few minutes we might have few thoughts about what type of person they are. But if questioned carefully, we will realise that we have very definite impressions about them from the way they dress, stand, talk and move. In fact we ‘know’ a great deal about them. In our dreams we not only browse through the huge amount of information we have taken in and build insight or knowledge out of it, but sometimes we leap right beyond what our senses have enables us to gather, and arrive at true intuitive perception.

(2)What a waste of a wonderful resource, what criminal negligence it is if we therefore fail to remember dreams and gain enrichment from their fresh and unique perspectives, their ability to give pungent comments on our relationships and their possible outcome, and the opportunities dreams present to explore new approaches to our everyday life. What a loss if we do not discover the many splendored facets of our own mind and consciousness. As Robert Van De Castle says – You were issued a lifetime pass to free dreams at birth. Why not take advantage of it? (3)

Functions of Dreams

Over the years many theories to explain the ‘why’ of dreams have been put forward. These range from dreams being messages from spirits; being results of food eaten prior to sleep; the mind freewheeling nonsensically; the garbage disposal system of the mind; suggestions from waking experience; a computer re-programming for the brain; to Freud’s wish fulfilment and Jung’s compensation theory.

But I feel I know the function of dreams, and it isn’t knowledge gained through neurological experiment or scientific thinking. It is through years spent in delving into what is usually unconscious. My experience of this started in 1953, when I was sixteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation.

I practiced every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would leave my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost any awareness of my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the huge space. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness.

As I could pass into that state quite often after that I wondered what had happened and what the possibilities of it were. What I eventually, after much more experience realised, is that I had fallen into deep dreamless sleep and yet held onto awareness. Usually we are unconscious in sleep, so I was exploring what was for me a new world of experience. Of course I realised later that most ancient cultures had already written about this.

You might be able to get a sense of this by trying an experiment. Before going to sleep while lying in bed, make yourself comfortable and with eyes closed imagine yourself standing on the lip or an active volcano. It is not erupting but the hot lava is shining below you. When you are ready jump into the hot lava.

If you are not experienced in dreaming you may have fears or hesitations about doing this – but nothing can hurt you and you are only experiencing your imagination. So as you fall into the hot lava feel your flesh and bones disappear until you know yourself as naked awareness.

That naked awareness without the sense of space and direction is what we are basically – naked awareness. That awareness is enormous because there are no boundaries of size and body, and many people in dreams are very frightened as they even brush by their hugeness. That naked awareness feels like nothing and people who have not experienced it therefore say that at death we are nothing. True it is the polar opposite to focussed body awareness, but it is far from nothing – it is everything, for everything arises from it. Because it is everything we cannot think of it as something, for it cannot take shape. That would be something.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

The next step

About two years later I experienced another inner wonder. I had an amazing experience of my awareness leaving my body – I had an extraordinary out of body experience. I was in the RAF living in Germany, and one night I had gone to bed early. I must have fallen asleep when suddenly I felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying). Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through the release from terror. Then I was flying across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, looking down at the countryside beneath me. I noticed as I passed over the rural countryside what looked like radiations emerging from several places; they were a bit like ripples on the surface of water when a stone has been thrown into it. But these ripples were three dimensional, and I wondered it they were emerging from people, perhaps praying.

Then I was over the sea and saw many ships below, but suddenly I was standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand. My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pyjamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake in a way I had never experienced before. So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”.

There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love.

Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy. I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around behind the settee, where I stood, for no apparent reason

My dog Vincent in front of the gas fire – 1956

I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I realised that having no physical body the living cannot usually hear us. They need physical sound to know we are present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts. I also learnt that I had an inner life as real to me as the ordinary waking life. This inner life was a fusion of the bodiless awareness and the life of form we experience in the body. This was obvious because my sleeping body was dressed in pyjamas, and my body I knew in the experience was dressed in outdoor clothes. Also it was not limited to space and time as the physical body is – shown by my sudden shift across mile to my home in London. Somehow it stood between two very different worlds of experience. I say that because although I was invisible to my mother, I was visible to my dog with much finer senses. Remember that humans can only see 1% of visible light, and hear only1% of sound so are virtually blind and deaf. See Inner World – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

 

Another step

 

Having realised that we have a core self which is felt by some to be nothingness, it is important to realise that during dreaming (REM sleep) our voluntary muscles are paralyzed – except for our eyes. It is thought this was developed during a period when our forebears were sleeping in trees. Any movement would have made them fall. The eye movements were of course not dangerous.

An important fact about dreaming is that all the signals for movement while we dream are sent by the sleeping brain to the muscles but are blocked by a part of the brain called the pons. See Sleep paralysis

But this block can be bypassed by having a passive attitude while awake (See The Keyboard Condition). This allows for a little recognised phenomenon which, while awake and in a passive state, allows the dream process to break through as spontaneous movement, sound and emotion, exactly as with dreams. In the past, and still in the present, this spontaneous movements and speech are all things that happen when this dream process breaks through into consciousness. Things like Seitai, Subud, Chi Gong, Shaktipat, Pentecostalism, and Reichian therapy, where spontaneous movement is practiced by thousands of people.

Remember that our life depends and arises from our core self, whereas our ego and personalit are all the time upheld and given life by what flow from what is largely unconscious. So the movements that the dream process give rise to are for our benefit, and are not a threat. But when this spontaneous movement breaks through to consciousness many people are frightened of it and rush to the doctor to sedate it. See Life’s Little Secrets; Reaction to the unconscious

So here is real lucid dreaming because it happens while you are awake. Apart from that it is very clear and can be seen to stay on a theme unitl it works out. As such you can witness the ‘dream process’ coming slowly from a formless begiing and making its way to conscious awareness.

Linking it all up

 

It is worth reading the piece How it Flows.

 

A couple of examples may help to make this clear.

Example: I felt as if I were falling down a long hole, like Alice in Wonderland. The observing part of me understood that I was dropping backwards through my whole life. At times I seemed to bang into things, or bump off things, and these were the painful times in my history. At one point I wondered if I were experiencing some sort of healing regression, but I only touched the events of my life as I fell back.

Eventually I came to rest. It was wonderfully peaceful and even my thinking had stopped. I didn’t have any feelings of having a body or shape. I simply existed. Again the observing part of me wondered if this was the womb, but it quickly became apparent, or I knew, that this wasn’t the womb, it was the basic level of my awareness, how it felt to be before thinking and speech. I began to feel afraid as I realised that if I dropped any further back I would cease to exist. Then I knew the fear was unnecessary as every time we go to sleep we drop back into the condition where we lose any sense of personal existence, yet we emerge none the worse the next day. So I let myself drop.

I fell into immensity, black and without features. Suddenly I was aware that something held me. It was the process that had grown me from seed in the first place. My ego had not created me or grown me. But now this deep part of me was unfolding me again, like a plant opening. I understood that we each have this force at our centre, and as I watched it working in my body and life, it seemed to communicate with me. At least I understood from it that if I opened to it each day, if I surrendered to its action, then it would grow me to a fuller life and realise itself in me. This felt like a holy gift, that the mystery of life would live in me.

Here he touches or experiences his centre – his core self – which was without features and yet held him. He also felt that although he had fallen into nothingness yet it communicated with him. He also understood that we all have this force at our centre out of which our growth comes – and it brings understanding of ones life and purpose. He says later on about his purpose, “I was lying on my back as I was experieincng these things, and it felt, directed by that inner force, that my hands and feet were like roots into the earth, and my penis was a tree, and when it was full of branches and leaves it could give shelter to other beings who sought to grow.” See The Sacred Tree

 

The Age Old Secret

To show you examples of this I will quote from peoples experience of the different ways this has been used throught history.

Shaktipat

I am not sure What one came first, but considering Buddha was known to have lives around 500 BC, Shaktipat may have been practised long before the Pentcostal experience.

In his article Between Coma and Convulsion, in Energy and Character, David Boadella quotes the report of a person studying the self regulatory practices in India. Although this is a recent account, the yoga practice it describes has been used for many centuries in India:

I have been in India for about four months now and I thought the readers of Energy and Character might be interested in the similarities between Reichian work and Shaktipat or Kriya Yoga. The Sanscrit word ‘shakti’ means energy, bio-energy, or more correctly, bio— cosmic energy. Shaktipat is a practice which is described as the loosening of this energy by a guru from the way it may be blocked in us. When this shakti energy is loosened and no longer tightly bound by the control of the conscious mind it begins to circulate in the body. It is then said to open up energy channels or pathways, and usually begins to manifest in what are known as ‘kriya’. Kriyas are spontaneous movements of the body and of the respiratory system. One interesting aspect of kriyas, which resemble Reichian abreaction, is that they very often manifest as highly involved asanas (body postures) and as mudras (meditational postures involving the hands). I have seen many persons who practice shakipat enter a phase of intense energy flow in which breathing becomes rapid and involuntary and in which people begin with great rapidity to do asanas they never knew and which they ordinarily would never have been able to perform.

Although the conscious practice of asanas facilitates this process, true hatha yoga (Indian techniques using physiological processes to integrate ones being) occurs involuntarily in this kriya phase. The burst of energy that results is sometimes astounding and may continue for well over an hour. The movements in some individuals are so intense and frantic they appear dangerous. In other persons the movements are soft, delicate and flowing. Thus some persons may breathe like locomotives, beat themselves repeatedly, stand on their heads, bellow, twist their limbs in the most unbelievable postures; others begin to dance harmoniously, to sing softly in languages they have never learned, to become playful and flirtatious and to utter strange sounds.

The explanation for this is that the shakti is opening or purifying obstructions in the energy pathways, that the individual is working out the results of past actions and experience, and that an evolutionary process is allowed to unfold which eventually will result in an expansion of awareness.

In this kind of meditation the individual sits still, but not rigidly; he doesn’t concentrate in any way, but simply relaxes as much as possible and permits the energy to do its thing. The energy is of course thought of as ultimately cosmic or divine. Hence the path of enlightenment lies in relinquishing ego control and identifications and allowing this bio—cosmic energy to express itself and lead us. The final results of this process is the opening of the highest brain centres in a new type of consciousness in which the individual merges with the universal consciousness. The total process takes a very long time but this should not dissuade us as each stage has its own rewards. The bodily spasms, automatic breathing, asanas, contortions and reflex patterns that manifest spontaneously as the energy gains momentum all serve to purify the organism. Though some of these phenomena may sound strange they are not experienced as unpleasant once the practitioner no longer totally identifies with bodily processes. Thus the meditator can be totally in their body without identifying totally with its experiences.

Pentecost

Pentecostal Christianity speaks of gifts of the spirit. These are listed as the gift of: the word of wisdom; the word of knowledge; faith healing; the working of mira­cles; prophecy; the discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and interpretation of tongues.

Most of these are easily recognizable descriptions of faculties of the unconscious. The unconscious is constantly scanning information and considering the highest probable outcome – thus prophecy. Access to universal aspects of consciousness allow the gaining of insights which might also account for prophecy, wisdom and words of knowl­edge. See Edgar Cayce

Speaking in tongues is a common way in which the unconscious expresses its feelings and insights. It is a level three expression in Van Rhijn/Caldwell’s levels of con­sciousness. When the ‘tongues’ are considered as symbolic expression they transform into meaningful words, just as dream symbols do. My experiments with such phenomena convincingly show the common link between these often considered unrelated phenomena and coex. See How it Flows

Discerning of spirits means the ability to look into a human heart and see what is hidden there. Considering how much we can learn subliminally through body langu­age and verbal cues, this is another straightforward uncon­scious faculty.

But imagine a group of people all ‘worship­ping’ as is described of Pentecost, when the disciples were taken to be drunk. (Acts 1:12 to 2:13) There were 120 gathered in a room, men and women being equals – “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Considering present day Pentecos­talism and other forms of coex, this large group would include people who would be shouting in tongues, others would be crying, moving their bodies, discerning spirits, and generally creating a bedlam of noise. Any newcomer to the group, not having had explained what was being attempted – that each be open to the Spirit and be moved by it – might think the people were crazy or drunk.

Franz Mesmer

Coming nearer to our own times we find a connecting link between past and present in Franz Anton Mesmer. In about the year 1775 Mesmer, a qualified doctor three times over, began to experiment with magnets. He found that patients who had previously been incurable were healed when these were placed on their bodies. For a year he had a mania for experimenting with magnets in quite extraordinary ways. But within that period he realised the same healing results could be obtained without using the magnets. He found that simply by stroking or touching the patient along the line of the nerves, the muscles would begin to twitch. This twitching, he said, should not cause alarm, even if it led, as it usually did, to an intensification of the patients symptoms or even convulsive movements. Throughout these releases, noisy and explosive though they were, he saw how patients could experience a healing of the distressing symptoms.

Prior to this time these convulsive releases were considered to be the work of devils or spirits. This attitude arose out of Christian belief, and Jesus and the disciples clearly used the same technique. In the New Testament are descriptions of people cured by these convulsive releases. Mesmer is a transforming link with our own times because his approach to this phenomena was an experimental and evaluative one. Nevertheless he was still bound to the past by his belief that another human beings presence was necessary to act as a channel for a cosmic energy to reach the sick person. Thus he still remained, in this aspect, in connection with the guru as agent of change tradition.

Stefan Zweig, in his book Mental Healers, describes Mesmer’s way of working as follows:

With a serious and dignified mien, calmly, slowly, radiating tranquility he would draw near to the patients. At his proximity a gentle fit of trembling would spread through the assembly. He wore a lilac robe, thus calling up the image of a Zoroastrian or Indian magician.

Usually no great time elapsed before one or the other of the company would begin to tremble, then the limbs would twitch convulsively, and the patient would break out in perspiration, scream or groan. No sooner had such tokens manifested themselves in one member of the chain, than the others too, would feel the onset of the famous crisis which was to bring relief. Some would fall to the ground and go into convulsions, others would laugh shrilly, others would scream, and choke, and dance like dervishes, others would appear to faint or sink into a hypnotic sleep. According to Mesmer’s ‘theory of crisis’ the malady had to be provoked into its utmost marge of development, it had so to speak to be sweated out of the organism if the body was to retain healthy.

The importance of Mesmer to the history of homeostasis is that, to the individuals who claim to have ‘discovered’ a new approach to human ills via abreaction, or say they have channeled a new cosmic force for the use of humanity, Mesmer stands as a direct contradiction. Three hundred years ago, despite his exotic dress and manner, he ran individual and group psychotherapy of a very successful nature. Although he thought of himself as a channel for a cosmic energy, he nevertheless recognised an agent other than technical psychiatric skill at work. Perhaps the ‘cosmic energy’ theory was not so far out either, as Reich revived it in new form in our own century. The work of Mesmer gradually moved into greater and greater complication — people dancing around trees for instance — instead of simplification and clarity. Out of it came Mesmerism which took the form of positive suggestion, completely leaving behind the aspect of allowing the organism to discharge its own tension and negativity. The spontaneous forces capable of self healing were ignored — even suppressed. The vainglorious power or forceful skill of the mesmerist or therapist took its place.

 

The Method Never quite Dies

The approach started by Mesmer has never completely died out. While living in Russia in 1912 Sir Paul Dukes met Lev Lvovitch who used a self regulatory method to deal with a variety of illnesses. He would stroke patients limbs and induce shaking and trembling. In his book Unending Quest he describes the case of a boy whose legs were paralysed. “There was a broken exclamation from the boy in the middle of the room. ‘It’s b-b—beginning!’ The lad was quivering from head to foot so much that he had to hold on to his chair.” After several treatments Dukes observed that the boy’s condition improved, and in a few weeks he was cured.

Only in very recent years has any serious scientific work been done in understanding what takes place in this healing which arises from within — with or without the help of an outside agent. Despite this research there is still virtually no socially established ways in which individuals are taught to trust their own internal processes. People in the West, and especially those trained in the helping professions, are forever committing the crime against human nature of ‘doing something’ to it, and seldom letting ‘It’ do something to them. Nevertheless some individuals and groups have done a tremendous amount to make us aware of our lack, and point out ways of overcoming it. Freud does not leave us with any sense of there being a powerful and helpful self—regulatory action in us. He gives no sense of finding a transformative power with which one can work toward spontaneous analysis and self help. But in Jung we find again and again very clear reference to what has been named in this book as homeostasis.

Carl Jung Linking East and West

In Psychological Commentary On The Tibetan Book of The Great Liberation, Jung says:

“If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that ‘everything good is outside’ whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. . . We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. Because of these resis­tances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the SELF LIBERATING POWER OF THE INTROVERTED MIND. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious.

The whole process is called the ‘transcendent function’. It is a process arid a method at the same time. The production of unconscious compensation (self-regulation) is a spontaneous PROCESS; the conscious realisation is a METHOD.

In Jung we find something of the reverence for what is met within a human being – a reverence for life itself. A great deal of Jung’s attitudes and thoughts have already been quoted, enough to show that he did not use the self-regulatory process in such a cathartic way as Mesmer.

 

Reich – Cosmic Energy and the Death of Guru’s

Dr. Wilhelm Reich offers us a very different approach to this world of experience. In the 1920’s Reich gradually felt his way from an orthodox use of Freudian psycho-analysis to a more biological, physiological or energetic point of view. Not that he lost sight of the human soul, but he realised how much body, energy and personality are uni­fied. By working with body attitudes or postures he found he could help the patient melt tensions and emotional blocks. By relaxing muscular tensions, flows of energy, movement and feeling were unblocked. Perhaps more than any other clinical therapist or doctor of his time, he recognised that a spontaneous, self-regulating activity or energy was at work in all living organisms. He says of this energy, which he eventually called orgone that it was cosmic and acts on the human being.

Gradually Reich developed very definite techniques, working with respiration, muscular tension and character attitudes. He particularly explored the place of sexuality individual, social and political structures. He helped people release their own self-regulatory process and work with it toward health and wholeness. As people learnt this they experienced spontaneous movement, trembling, changed feeling states and emotional and sexual release.

The actual results, as compared with those already mentioned in this short history, were no different to those in Shaktipat or in Mesmer’s work. Nevertheless Reich brought a new open­ness, a new technical understanding to the subject with his genius. Unlike Mesmer he did not rest until he had pin­pointed clearly what released self-regulatory action into conscious operation. He did not stop, as Mesmer and the gurus did, in believing himself and certain other special men and women were the channels of a cosmic energy which healed. Reich made the tremendous step, while yet remaining a scientist and clinical therapist, of seeing an integral law of human nature at work, and active in indi­viduals quite apart from his personal influence.

In this Reich helped people in the present to begin a link with their spontaneous energies which earlier peoples had known only in a religious context. The deeply religious, surrendered attitudes so prevalent in the past are seldom found today in the West. Certainly not in the way demon­strated by the original Christians who surrendered body and mind to a force they trusted. Looked at in this way, even the Godly in the West are frightened of God’s power. Jung makes the statement that people in the West cannot find God because none of us can bow low enough. Being unable to form the trust out of our religious convictions, Reich enabled people to meet this vital part of themselves from a different more acceptable starting point. The new standpoint is that which includes our critical and analytical intellect. To deny it in an attempt to emulate the East in approaching their inner life uncriti­cally, would be to do ourselves a great disservice. Reich proved that as Westerners we can still touch our deep spontaneous energies while retaining our new-found intellect.

Also a person close to Reich is reported to have said that Reich told him that cosmic consciousness was available via this method.

 

The Way of Subud

Considering Reich’s work it is interesting now to look at the influence of Muhammed Subuh. He was born and lived in Indonesia, working as an accountant for many years. His main interest in life was to seek out some of the many gurus in his country, and attempt a deeper aware­ness of life’s mysteries and the nature of God. In his late twenties, in the year 1925, he experienced a vision while out walking. It seemed to him that a ball of light or fire rushed across the sky and descended on his head. He began to shake and tremble, and felt a powerful and divine energy had begun to work in his being. On reaching home he opened himself to the influence of this power and found spontaneous movements and experiences occurred.

From that time onwards he frequently ‘opened’ himself to what he felt to come from God, and found that each time move­ments, sounds, and a wide variety of inner experience arose. He observed that the movements and experiences were ways in which his being was gradually cleansed and made whole. It was as if some influence were gradually guiding him through experiences in a direction he could not preconceive, but IT could. Also, his physical health improved, his experiences educated him regarding his and other peoples life on Earth, and he found his intuitive faculties enormously enlarged. Often he could also be instrumental in helping other people to experience healing. The film star Eva Bartok told her story in the newspapers at the time of her own healing in connection with Pak Subuh and her baby.

By 1932 Pak Subuh had discovered that other people who relaxed in his presence could also receive the same experience and be led through cleansing and integration. Groups of people in Indonesia began to practice this ‘opening’ to what they felt to be the grace of God working in their lives. The manner of these group experiences is like that described under Shaktipat. People found their bodies making spontaneous movements; they experienced themselves in a wide variety of ways, were led through catharsis and great inspirational insights. Like the Pente­costal approach, there was a tendency toward remaining on the symbolic level, and editing all but the transcendental.

The experience of being moved from within was called ‘Latihan’, which in Indonesian means to be moved, cleansed and disciplined by the power of God. But until 1957 comparatively few people were in these groups doing latihan. Those who were had mostly been using latihan several times a week for many years. Sometimes the length of practice was ten or fifteen years. These practi­tioners had found that their nature and body had been gradually changed by the practice. Their awareness and sympathies had widened. Problems had shifted, and in general they felt more in touch with the force or meaning behind their existence.

At this point a European working in Indonesia – Rofe – asked to be introduced to the lati­han. Rofe taught it to people in England who started an international centre at Coombe Springs. From there the practice went world-wide, and at one time the followers numbers were claimed to be 200,000. People of all nation­alities, religious belief, political views and social status found they could experience the latihan. The lives of many were deeply changed by it.

If we are to understand how modern men and women relate to their core self there are things we must be aware of in re­gard to the latihan, and the organisation named Subud. J.P. Barter, for instance, writing about his involvement in the latihan says, “We do not know for any certainty why the force which is received in Subud has been made uni­quely available to mankind today rather than at some earlier period in history.” The statement is typical of the sort of historical blindness and spiritual pomposity that is common in the practice. Pak Subuh states that the experi­ence is unique to him and new in the world. When I myself started a coex group many years ago, based on Reichian work and Mesmer’s groups, a spy was sent from a Subud group in a nearby town to find out where or how I had stolen their latihan. That people like J.G. Bennet, a well educated man, and Barter, bright enough to write an orderly account of Subud, can accept such statements is a warning that the Western mind, in attempting to re­establish connection with the deeper layers of the psyche, can often revert to primitive attitudes, ignoring or discarding information and lessons learnt through hard experi­ence.

In later years Pak Subuh told his followers that the experience was not unique.

 

Summary

A lot of words, but I hope it clearly shows how we each have an inner life which owes its existence to our core self. I believe I have given enough examples of how our core self works, and how it is the polar opposite to our conscious personality. I hope too that it can be seen that dreams arise from our core self and are a half way house between the formless core self and our conscious mind, and how dreams are part of the action of our growth and well being from the deep well of our innermost self.

See: compensation theory; movements during sleep; the dream process as computer; Adler; Freud; Jung.

Compensation Theory of Dreaming

Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is linked with homeostasis or self-regulation – the sort of self-regulation indicated in the observations of MacKenzie, 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. See: biological dream theory;computers and dreams; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; science sleep and dreams; sleep walking; LifeStream; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Opening to Life

All our lives we try to achieve a balance of the contradictory opposites within us, and whether in our egos we succeed or fail, every function claimed by the ego is balanced by its opposite in the subconscious. Only in the fusion of infancy, or of sexual orgasm, or in religious ecstasy do we escape the psychic wound of division.

Put bluntly, dreams are said to compensate for conscious attitudes and personality traits. So the coldly intellectual man would have dreams expressive of feelings and the irrational as part of a compensatory process. The ascetic might dream of sensuous pleasures, and the lonely unloved child dream of affection and comfort. But this is only the most basic aspect of compensation and is demonstrated in the example below.

Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force; though an individual may be overwhelmed by their life experience, some part of one’s 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 fears or pain occurs, 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.’

Example: In his book Psychology in Service of The Soul, Leslie Weatherhead tells the story of a little girl who while on a visit to a zoo was given a coin to get a small chocolate bar from a vending machine. She eagerly asked for more coins to obtain all the bars in the machine. The mother refused. The next morning the girl said she dreamt her mother had come into her bedroom and thrown a lot of chocolate bars under her bed.

Jung’s view of compensation was far more inclusive however. He quotes, as an example the dream of an elderly general he met while sitting opposite him on a train journey. The general told Jung that he had dreamt he was on parade with younger officers while being inspected by the commander in chief. On reaching the general the commander asked him to define beauty. This surprised the general as he expected to be asked technical questions regarding his service. He was embarrassed and could not give a clear answer. The commander in chief then asked a young major the same question and received a clearer answer. The general experienced feelings of failure and his grief woke him. Jung’s questioning led the general to realise that the young major who successfully answered the query about beauty actually looked just like himself when he was that age and a major. Further questioning led to the information that at that age the general had been interested in art, but the pressure of work and the rigidity of the military life had eroded the interest. Jung goes on to suggest that the dream in his late life was helping to compensate for the one sided development necessitated by his army career. The dream in fact reminded the general of this neglected side of himself.

This concept of wholeness, linked with the Self, which such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collection of many years dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn. The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation. A man who was investigating a feeling of lack in regard to his marriage, gives the following account.

Example: As I was exploring my feeling I suddenly began to change direction and realised that from the very earliest period of my life I had certain filters in place that influenced incoming sensory information. This had come about because I noticed how critical I was of our next-door – upstairs – neighbours, and in examining it saw that I had filters to search all information for danger. This burst open in intense feelings and awareness of being a ‘weak chick’. A powerful internal struggle and something like an ‘oh God no!’ feeling accompanied it. I then experienced what it was like to be a premature baby and so weak. Being born two months prematurely had thrown my infant self into a high state of anxious survival where everything was felt as a potential danger. So my filters were examining everything for danger. Everything that moved or made a noise was a potential threat to my existence.

At first with laughter, then with pain I saw that this had made me suspicious of my own mother. I had not fitted the ‘norm’ in terms of size, strength or behaviour, so not only had I lived with a ‘danger alert’ process going all the time, but also with the realisation I was not up to scratch. Instead of the full term child who is more adjusted to the environment I had emerged still in a condition adjusted to the womb. My psychological state was also, I felt, quite different, a sort of experience of the death world, the world before birth and after death.

Society, I felt, has a sort of labelling or measuring system. It has emerged out of biological criteria of survival and fitness, and is largely unconscious. People haven’t even acknowledged they are acting under such drives. ‘My genes are best, and everybody else’s are abnormal. But only the best of mine are going to get through’. Out of this I sensed that mothers who have children who are not ‘the best’ suffer a great internal struggle about their child. Part of them cries out, ‘That is no child of mine!’

So the people who are not seen as ‘fit’ are not given social rewards, starting with such rewards as recognition and warmth from ones own parents, and escalating from there into recognition and rewards from social groups and organisations. I personally felt as if I were not seen as fit for several reasons. My premature birth led me to be slightly less robust, and also my mixed cultural background during a time of war made me less fit. I didn’t have the right label attached. Christy D.

As can be seen, Christy feels himself much less capable and accepted by his mother than someone who has had a normal birth. He feels his premature birth left him always paces behind those born full term. He sums this up by saying:

Example: Due to constantly searching for something I had lost too soon – the security of my mother’s womb – due to feeling I never bonded with my mother, I had felt agonised most of my life that I couldn’t be an ordinary husband emotionally and sexually. I pushed and pushed to see if I could grow to this ordinariness and finally felt that I had arrived, only to find that I was too late. Not only had my wife entered the menopause and lost interest in a sexual relationship, but also my children had grown up and I had lost the huge satisfaction of being with them as youngsters. So here I am in my late fifties without a sexual relationship and without the loving contact of youngsters.

The gaps in Christy’s life are obvious, and the urge or need to compensate is also plain to see. In fact Christy has an experience that he describes as follows:

Example: I realised that because I had always felt inadequate in a certain degree, I had used religion as a means of compensation. Suddenly I saw the need for hero figures to use for compensatory purposes for individuals and groups. The person may not be able to live out some aspect of their life. They may not get a sexual partner; they may not get recognition in their work; perhaps people treat them as of no account. For some people an actual physical disability stops them from living out their life fully. The hero/ine figure is then used as an image that has several functions.

For instance nuns in a convent will not live out their ability to get married or have a child. The figure of Christ is used as a compensatory symbol for this in that they marry Christ and their passion is through meditation on his being. In this way people use a hero/ine figure to compensate for what is missing in their own life. They can live their unlived soul through the passion of Christ for instance.

The figure such as Christ represents our own wholeness and complete potential. To compensate for our own unlived areas we look to this figure and have a taste of what we are not expressing outwardly through identifying with the hero/ine. Meditations on the figure might produce great feelings of love, pain, wonder, and recognition – in fact whatever is missing in everyday relationships. The Christian festivals appear to be a way of living out via the image of Christ the passions of life that we might not meet in our everyday life. The birth, the struggle, the love, the death, can all be partaken of. We can share the passionate experience of living in this way, even though in our own actual life we might not be able to live such a passionate and eventful existence. And I suppose television does this for many people today.

At first I had a strong feeling this sort of compensation was used by people who are inadequate in some way, a path for the weak, and a path that I had taken myself. This suggested by inference that I was less capable of living a full life than most. I had a sneering feeling about how people use this as a crutch, but then realised I was judging once more. ‘I need a kick in the arse. I’ve got an ability to see, but I put all these judgements on things.’

As I looked at the situation more fully though I saw that in fact nobody lives a complete life. No one is completely whole, expressing every aspect of their potential. So in fact we all relate in some way to the Christ or other such figures who represents, or in some way ARE the total potential of human existence; a mighty example of what human life can achieve.

Now I came face to face with Christ. I felt knocked over emotionally by it. It was an experience of meeting the most amazing creature or being one could imagine. I stood in front of a god, something that totally transcended human existence. Gods are often depicted as having some great power of destruction or creativity. They might be like a human being magnified many times, with loves and hates, huge powers, throwing lightning bolts and so on. My experience didn’t show Christ as anything like this. The transcendence was in the manner of Christ’s consciousness. Here was a being with no real power in a worldly sense. This being hadn’t created the world and couldn’t influence world history through power.

The consciousness, the being of Christ, existed by a form of love so magnificent I could barely look upon it. If love is the right word, this love penetrated every living thing and absorbed their most intimate life experience. The Christ took in every aspect of existence without any judgement whatsoever. This was its life and sustenance. So one could say this wondrous creature was a sort of parasite living off the energy of life forms. But this is only a part of what I experienced. Through total acceptance it took in all. It took every tiny memory of each individual. But in return, if we can share its immense passion it offers us its own life that compared with our own is eternal.

I experienced that not only does one inherit the gift of eternal life through identification with Christ, but also we share the awareness of all life forms. Through this we participate in the life and passion of all beings present and past. As I met this I was on my knees as it were because I couldn’t help loving this wondrous being. I couldn’t help feeling my own smallness. I wanted to lose myself in this being and be washed through by its radiance and hugeness. To be in its presence was the most amazing thing. If you can imagine standing before a cosmic being that had arrived from some other galaxy, and was millions of years old, perhaps ageless, had no physical form except our own teeming lives, radiated love so much that you were engulfed in it, and simply by being in its presence shared its magnificent awareness, this might give some idea. Christy D.

Christy acknowledges his own need for compensation due to feelings of inadequacy. But he goes beyond this to see that each of us are in some measure incomplete and compensation in its largest sense is about finding awareness of the wholeness underlying our own life.

The description of compensation above is an example of something functional. 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. The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity 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 compenstaory image is a graphic presentation of our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams. It can also be evoked by using such images in a compensatory way.

See: – LifeStream; biological dream theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Introduction to Dreams

 

Biological Dream Theory

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.

Adrian Morrison’s findings with animal dreams, (see movements during sleep) opens the possibility that practicing and developing skills and strategies may be the function dreams performed in early animals. 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 that it enables useful new behaviour to arise from the occasional creative juxtapositioning. See: Evans, Christopher.

Hadfield also emphasises a slightly different aspect of the compensatory process in dreams than Jung, although there is great similarity. He writes in Dreams and Nightmares, ‘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 fulfilment.’

He 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 and Hadfield 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. See Life’s Little Secrets and LifeStream.

One might argue that any growth arising from the self-regulatory process might come spontaneously from the integration of experience. Caron Kent, in his book The Puzzled Body, argues that in fact the internal process of adjustment presses for growth. I believe that the unexpressed potential for growth is both physical and psychological, and if it is not fulfilled, manifests as an internal sense of dissatisfaction. The body and the mind therefore drive to find a fuller measure of satisfaction as well as they can. Because the area of dreams is so plastic and formative, this is exactly the area that these often subtle and deeply unconscious urges toward growth can manifest. See: compensation theory; self-regulation and fantasy.

Baby Dreams

What do babies dream about?

From your baby’s perspective, birth and the experience of life outside the womb is probably like waking from a long and unbroken dream into an entirely new world.

The science of modern dream and sleep research really leapt forward when Eugene Aserinsky, working as a researcher in a sleep laboratory, noticed that his eight year old son’s eyes moved while he slept. Later it was found this was due to the eyes following activities taking place in a dream, and that these rapid eye movements (REM) were a sign of dreaming.

From this it was seen that even newborn babies dream. In fact, although adults only spend about a third of their sleep period dreaming, babies spend 50 to 80 percent of sleep in dreams. Some researchers, carrying their investigation into the womb, state that at 24-30 weeks gestational age the unborn baby dreams a 100 percent.

Because most researchers investigate dreaming from a physiological or neurological standpoint, they are not very good at telling us why babies, or we adults, spend so much time dreaming. This is because dreams are more connected with the passionate drive to survive, to relate, to learn and grow. When we see a child go into a frenzy when they are lost, we can understand just how passionate the emotional level of dreams are. It is this level of feeling that dreams deal with. But an interesting study done by Nathaniel Kleitman showed that he observed a regular breathing cycle in infants which lasted 50 minutes. He felt that this was probably to wake the baby at these intervals to see if it was in need of feeding. It would signal this by waking up and crying. The child would therefore get adequate nutrition.

Likening a dream to one of the monitors we see at the side of a patient in a hospital is perhaps the easiest way to understand what a dream is. Just as the monitor presents a visual image of the patients heartbeat, their blood pressure and temperature, a dream puts into drama and images the processes, feelings and fears that lie behind our personal awareness. In a baby, an unimaginable amount of learning, adjustment, development of responses and body skills is taking place. We usually take this for granted. But like a television show or film, it is only when we see the credits at the end of such a film that we realise just how much behind the scenes work has taken place to produce the film. And this is precisely what dreams show – the behind the scenes activities and dramas.

Understanding this, and realising that a baby and young child lives in a completely different world than we do as an adult, helps us support them toward a healthy and happy adulthood. For instance a baby and child who have not learned to speak cannot think. We think with words. So during pre-speech there are only feeling responses or instinctive urges and fears to guide the child. The development of thinking only phases in gradually, and prior to that we learn from events and relationships, not ideas. See Animal Children to understand the part speech plays in a child’s life.

For instance, a woman I met, Tina, as a child was told she was being taken to a party, but in fact she was being taken to an orphanage. She was given a bar of chocolate. She never ate it. Since then she has never been able to eat sweets, and she still has an eating problem while with other people. When she got to the orphanage she immediately went to the toilets and hid there, feeling she couldn’t speak. She still has difficulty speaking to groups of people. Tina had experienced massive feeling responses to what had been done to her. Those feelings are still active ‘behind the scenes’ of her life.

Dreams depict all the aspects of what is taking place within the child. Sometimes, just for the child to tell or draw a dream helps them integrate the underlying feelings and processes. Another thing they can do is to model their dream. In this way the awful dream event or creature can be put outside them and they can manipulate the frightening things – for instance they can put the creature in a cage where it cannot hurt them.

If you yourself can understand that whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. And if you can therefore understand that dream fears are all about fears, hurts and threats that threaten the person or child’s confidence in their on coping strategies and aid them towards confidence and coping, you will do wonders.

Remember that a child’s greatest fears are to be abandoned or threatened by what they see or hear – television and films for a child are almost the same as the real world.

While small, my youngest son told me he dreamt his pet baby mice had opened their eyes. When I asked him what it means for a baby mouse to open its eyes, he told me that it showed they were ready to become independent. I then asked him what it might be like to be a pet, and he said a pet couldn’t do anything for itself, not even get its own water or food. He went on to say that because he was small, he sometimes felt like a pet. So we talked this over and he decided he could start getting his own glass of water by putting a chair near the sink. He was moving toward independence.

Although you cannot have a conversation with your baby in the same way I did with my young son, if you see your baby is having disturbing dreams you can still talk to her or him, even while they are asleep. Your baby is incredibly sensitive to the sound of your voice, and your own state of calm or agitation lying behind the way your voice sounds. Therefore you can sit with your baby and imagine a situation in which you feel calm and loving. When you feel calm and strong, gently talk to your baby telling it you are holding it close in your love, and you are with it while it meets whatever is disturbing it. Tell it your love is the strength it can use, and imagine wrapping your baby in your calm and love.

Most nightmares are an expression of a healing process. They are attempts to meet and discharge the feelings in difficult events we have faced. Because your child is so dependent upon you and is vulnerable, it is more prone to nightmares than adults are. A common nightmare for children is that a lion or some other scary creature is chasing it. There is good evidence to show that the lion might represent the child’s anger, which it has been told is wrong or bad, so the child is scared of it and tries to run away from its own feelings

Whether this theory is right or not, an easy way to help your child deal with its nightmare is to encourage him or her to draw or model the dream. In this way the child gets the frightening thing out in front of it where the scary thing can be seen and controlled. Once it has done this, ask it what it wants to do with the scary creature or thing. For instance it might wish to put it in a cage, or to make friends with it. In either case the child begins to feel more in control. Allowing your child to talk about such disturbing dreams also is very healing. It allows the child to voice its fears, and to know you will listen without criticism or judgement. But nightmares are exceptions. Most dreams are about your child’s personal growth, what it is learning, what it is feeling about the world around it, and the ways it is expressing or denying its own creative centre. So drawing, modelling and talking about these everyday dreams is tremendously creative and growth promoting for your child.

Here is an example of what a child faces and learns. True it is from an adults dream, but we carry the child in us.

I worked on the dream with my wife. The whole centre of the dream seemed to be the little girl. As I came in to land, because I had been gliding high above, she saw me and ran away very frightened. I was gliding in the same direction she was running and called out to her not be frightened. She stopped and I landed. In amazement she looked at me and said, “How did you get to be up there?”

As the young girl I had walked from the back door of my house, along the garden path, across a footpath behind the houses, into the field. As I looked through her eyes and feelings, I realised what a long journey it was for me to get into the field. Not a long journey physically in distance, but an enormous journey within myself. To be able to go from the door to the field, I had gone through the long process of learning to walk; I had learned the confidence to be alone; through language and understanding what my parents had passed to me, I had found out how to avoid stinging nettles, and how not to be overcome by my fears of them and of the huge creatures that I knew as cows. This had all taken ages, and so walking into the field was an enormous achievement, especially as I was doing it by myself. Learning to walk itself had taken an tremendous practice and perseverance. Learning to be independent of my mother was also something I had had to learn. I had made the inner journey of acquiring an immense stock of information and conditioning regarding the external environment I was facing too. I had slowly learned survival responses to nettles, walking alone, nests, birds, the sun, trees, spiders, stones, the wind, children, adults, worms, leaves on the trees, cars, etc, etc, etc, etc, and so on. See: Pregnancy; individuation.

Although it is difficult to theorise about the subject of babies dreams without their ability to report their experiences, evidence gained from the study of animal dreams probably applies to infants too. Michel Jouvet, while observing dreaming in cats, devised a way to avoid the usual paralysis of voluntary muscles during dreaming. This allowed the cat to actually make full movements while dreaming instead of the usual jerks or subdued movements. The cat would then live out its dream through the movements it made. Jouvet then noted the cats dreams were largely centred around crouching and stalking prey or play fighting. Adrian Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania noted the same behaviour in cats while investigating narcolepsy in animals. Because the area of the brain which usually stopped the dream movements from being expressed fully was injured, the cats Morrison was observing lived out their dreams in the same way Jouvet observed.

Jouvet, and later Nicholas Humphries, reasoned from this evidence that at the beginning of a mammal’s life, an enormous amount of time is spent in practising necessary survival skills in dreams. With cats the survival skill is defence and hunting. With a human infant it has more to do with socialisation, easily expressing its feeling and anger. Estimates have been made of what period of time the baby dreams in the womb, and the figures are that it dreams at 24-30 gestational age weeks a100%.

Taking this further, Christopher Evans, in his book Landscapes of The Night, says that this need to dream about social interactions and adapting to the social rules of their culture and thereby practice them, explains why children who have just started school need a lot of sleep.

The work of Stanislav Grof, which dealt a great deal with the remembrance of the birth experience in adults, and the recovery of memories and fantasies connected with it, also suggests that the dreaming baby is not only practising social skills and preparing for action in the external world, but also trying to balance and perhaps heal the internal memories it already carries from its uterine life, trauma of birth, and post-natal relationships. This type of dreaming may account for the nightmares suffered by some babies and young children. The function of such dreams or the process behind them appears to be that of attempted integration of experience, or means of finding an adaptation to its containment. See: children’s dreams; individuation.