FALLEN ANGELS
The Illusion of Self Improvement
A Proposal
Maurice Rowdon and Karen McChrystal
Please contact the au thors at:
CREATIVE PROCESS CONSULTANTS
3237 Sacramento
SAN FRANCISCO


CONTENTS
FOREWORD.
SUICIDE AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS.
FALLEN ANGELS.
III. I THINK THEREFORE I AM.
ART AS A VISION.
THE MYTH OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS.
'BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE'.
VII.
IS ART A SKILL?.
VIII. CREATIVITY AS VENGEANCE.
A DREAM DEFERRED.
THE LOST IDENTITY.
THE 'ANTENNA' EFFECT.
XII. A DIALOGUE WITH DEATH.


FOREWORD
The substance of FALLEN ANGELS is drawn from the work of
the two authors in their San Francisco company, Creative Process
Consultants.
Karen McChrystal works in psychotherapy, Maurice
Rowdon in a non-verbal therapy called Oxygenesis.
Most clients came to us interested in the creative process.
That is to say, their models were usually creative or artistic
geniuses.
But early in our work we came to realize that what
they were really looking for was a self-improvement program,
much as if they had gone to a spiritual master or an enlighten-
ment group. They saw 'becoming more creative' as the way to
overcome psychological conflicts and discomforts in their lives.
More surprisingly, we began to see that the self they
wished to improve was the last thing they were willing or able
to recognise, so that their deepest desires were left out of
account, and remained largely unknown even to themselves.
Indeed, the very program of self-improvement which they wished
to pursue seemed more an obstacle than a benefit. It was a
source of new anxiety, because it set up goals, prohibitions
and a chain of self-reproaches often worse than the original
state.
Frequently clients felt that they were creative geniuses
without ever having written or painted a line or taken more
than a perfunctory interest in books and art.
But they rarely
wished to examine their real aptitude for the chosen art form,
or the question of whether their feeling of being a genius was
truthfully related to artistic desires at all.
Similarly, people who attend prosperity seminars sometimes
report that afterwards they get into worse financial troubles
than ever before.
Many who undergo forms of 'spiritual training'
say they experience the worst upheavals of their lives.
Meditators report that their medita tion is sometimes followed
not by feelings of bliss or repose but rage and irritation, or
acute depression. Is there something in the self-improvement
program that sets up such anxiety that the self is hidden even
more effectively than before?
We certainly weren't inclined to say that the search for
self-improvement was itselt wrong, that creative effort or
meditational procedures were wrong, that spiritual masters
whose devotees went through difficulties were inadequate
masters.
Nevertheless, we were struck forcibly by the fact
that the structure of these people's lives was no different


from before, but simply had a new terminology. Depressions,
negativity and discouragement tended to con tinue, if not increase.
In fact we began to notice that almost every client
revealed strong suicidal drives of which they had previously
been unaware. These drives were usually artfully concealed,
and often masqueraded as worthy and life-affirming programs.
In most of our clients the very desire to be 'creative'
seemed to exacerbate the suicidal drive, and began to appear to
us only an ill-informed attempt to counteract the deep self-
destructive process.
'I feel worthless' often came in the
same breath as 'I feel I'm really a writer'. The very desire
to create an imaginative structure (in the form of a book)
implied a need to vindicate the author's life, and was, in that,
a clear acknowledgement that this wasn't worth living. More,
it was a disguised attempt to perpetua te that state of affairs.
The book served as a clear 'deferral stra tagem' whereby the
suicide was postponed, wi thout the drive behind it having been
detected, much less examined. A long autobiographical novel
often exacerbated family problems for the au thor, and the
confessional element in the writing secured no release whatever.
Was the very desire for self-improvement a concealed flight
from the self? Did a certain extreme form of anxiety crave
for concealments, literary, artistic or spiritual, in order
never to expose the deepest drive of all, namely the suicidal
one?
Certainly, strong anxiety creates an anxious desire to
avoid the effects of anxiety in one's daily life. It is this
that drives people to seek some form of program which will
remove these effects, though the removal simply enhances and
strengthens the cause of the anxiety.
Indeed, people often cling to the neurotic structure by
adopting therapies which they secretly know (or secretly hope)
will be ineffective. 'Being a writer' may be a neurotic
structure, and the book itself the ineffective therapy.
Another form of this system, adopted by many, is continually
to change one therapy for another, with the hidden design
never to examine the original suicidal impulse. This is
especially the case with depressive people (most of mankind?)
because of the great pain involved in uncovering the original
source of discouragement.
Success is a universally adopted
therapy in this respect.
It was further demonstrated to us (with more conclusive-
ness than we thought possible) that the anxieties we observed
were not simply a ma tter of personal problems, but some thing
more dynamic, certainly more universal,which could not be dealt
with on the lines of classical psychology alone.
We saw the
same syndromes repea ted with only minor variations due to
specific individual backgrounds.
The suicidal impulse seemed to be the result of a profound
discouragement, felt not only in childhood, at the hands of
parents and schools, but more generally and enduringly, in the
very culture which pervaded everyday life.
To treat the
individual in relation only to his past, his family or lover


was to leave unexamined the thousands of daily reinforcements
to his or her discouragement, which were encountered everywhere,
even in the myriad self-improvement programs, which advertised
the message 'You have no one to blame but yourself'.
Verbal psychotherapy was useful in helping the individual
to clear up strictly personal aspects, but a further procedure
was clearly needed to take the individual beyond everyday
consciousness, in an experience which involved neither language
nor the reasoning faculty.
Unless there was a technique for
locating the self as essentially non-private in nature, the
problem could not be solved.
Though we have found eastern enlightenment models
interesting for what they reveal about the anat tomy of bliss,
we became convinced that the western importation of enlightenment
techniques has failed to impart any genuine knowledge of how
to attain bliss, or what might be called cellular repose,
because of their failure to tackle the problem of the sheer
tenacity of the western mind, and its tendency to translate
eastern disciplines into further intellectual programs.
We felt that under these programs, however much accompanied
by meditation and chanting, the most extreme psychosis or
schizophrenia could survive and flourish.
It was somehow
necessary to break these intellectual programs at the root,
and to discover the mysterious connection be tween these
programs and the suicidal drive. We found the 'creative
genius' model useful to study precisely because it contained
within it the effort to come to terms with the stresses and
upheavals of daily life without either withdrawal or self-
bifurcation.
But, more than this, we began to feel that something had
fallen out of human history, some essential faculty or experience
which had once (perhaps in the civilisations previous to the
Graeco-Homan world) guided human beings and put them in touch
with a knowledge no less rational than the one we achieve
through deduction but of a deeper and more exhaustive na ture.
We thought that the intense rationality of the post-Roman
world was perhaps due to the loss of that faculty rather than
to the acquisition of anything new, and that if today we are
confronted by an unworkable world it is because of the failure
of the rational faculty to produce a full picture of experience,
so that its blueprints work only partially, and contain a
large element of destruction.
The more we encountered helplessness in people, the more
strikingly distinct we found the 'creative genius' whom they
wished to study or emulate.
Was the creative genius a
throwback to the earlier state, however unwittingly so, and
however erratic his life? Did he preserve in some form
the faculty which the generali ity of mankind had lost? Was
it possible to retrieve that faculty? Above all, was the
loss of that faculty connected with the suicidal drive we
noticed So often?
It seemed to us useless, in the long run, to work wi th
people unless we could remove that suicidal drive.
But we


also concluded that we could never do this unless we revived,
or attempted to revive, the faculty which we felt to be so
deeply and tragically missing in people, and which amounted
to a deep-laid principle of inner guidance. This is what we
set out to do, and FALLEN ANGELS is an account of our efforts.


SUICIDE AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Clients who wake up with fear clutching the heart
(sometimes in panic sweat) have a number of specific fears:
Will I survive (emotionally, financially?)
I'm not loved, therefore do not feel I exist.
The future is bleak, if a repetition of the past.
I can't make it.
I can't make it alone.
I'm totally alone.
I'm not understood.
Who am I?
Here are a number of statements on the same theme:
"I enjoy nothing, I have no feelings, I only think."
"I feel good when I see a film some times or drink or smoke
pot or flirt but not when I'm working, making love, having a
relationship, being domestic."
"Sometimes I feel on the side of the murderers, thieves,
criminals---it makes life seem colourful and free and adventure-
ous---the three things my life lacks."
"I want to write a long letter full of my dreams until it
becomes the size of a book---my letters get to the bottom of who
I am---listening to myself for the first time---no one ever
listened or was interested---the bank page is my first listener."
"I haven't the courage to commit suicide.
I feel dead
already so there's no need,"
"The whole world's messed up and no one's doing anything
about it, So what's the use of living? So I just want to
write and be on my own, get money that way, and influence
people without moving from my apartment."
"I'm depressed and this one won't go away."
"Everything's war---were at war all the time---this is
no peace---it doesn't need bullets."
"I don't know who I am. I don't know who or whether I
love. I don't know what love is. I don't belong to myself.
I want to write so that I can see myself from outside, from
a distance."
"It isn't that I hate myself---I just don't feel SEEN,
even by myself."
"I don't know what to eat, how much to eat, where to go,
what to think.
If I could paint it would make me feel calm,
and maybe I could sell my paintings."
"I feel guilty all the time."
"I'm in a battle of hand to hand combat. I must win---
it's my life I'm fighting for. I can't lose this time --give


up, or give in, or lay passively defeated on the mat so my
physical self will not die---for my soul will. I must fight---
harder and harder.
I've been avoiding going to work---"
(Her work was hospice work among the aged)---"I can't fight
for others when I'm in this battle for myself." (This was
written during a session by a woman who, as a first step to
becoming a writer, bought an expensive word-processor).
An architect said, "There's no meaning in my work. It
used to be personally meaningful for me---deeply so. But
that's clouded over by feelings of guilt and shame now.' If
(His mother had smo thered him with over-protective kindness.
He claimed that whenever as a child he had revealed any
spon ntaneity and sense of adventure his mother had disapproved).
"My mother was threatened by my spontaneity and adventuresome-
ness. She seemed very much to need me to be a perfect
achiever, which impossible goal I strove to fulfil but never
could. Each attempt resulted in the shame of not having
really made it, however well I did."
A bright, successful young woman said repeatedly,
"There's something wrong with me. I feel I'm a fraud. I'm
continually guilty. Under the guilt there's a feeling that
I'm resposnsible for my mother's decline into hysteria and
alcoholism."
This client ultimately felt that her success was won a t
the ex "pense of her mother, and fervently believed that her
mother would be jealous and threatened by it.
Another basically robust woman felt ill every time she
had the chance to realise some personal success.
It was
apparent that the illness had a deep psychological significance,
because in every other respect she was strikingly healthy.
It was later revealed that in the family of alcoholics in which
she grew up she had never been allowed to express her feelings
or be heard except when she was sick.
That was the only time
it was permissible to 'be herself'.
A gifted professional writer said, "I've always lived in
terms of other people's expectations---I've lived a double life
and I don't want to any more."
Many clients felt even in childhood that their parents
were weak, incompetent, anxious or neurotic.
But until
undergoing therapy they hid this from themselves (thus never
questioning its truth).
The young of our species react very protectively toward
the parent, because, since they depend on the parent for
survival, they cannot afford to admit to the weakness of the
parent: it would mean admitting to the perilousness of the
environment, that is, to the possible collapse of their own
security. The child then constructs a securi ty system by
picturing himself as protector of the parent. The way in
which he does this is by identifying himself wi th, or behaving
like, the parent, thus providing reinforcement. For example,


the child of an anxious mother will adopt an attitude of anxiety;
the child of an hysterical mother will adopt a style of
hysteria; the child of a depressive mo ther will adopt a
depressive orientation to life.
(It was not until twenty
years after the death of her depressive alcoholic mother tha t
one client was able to retrieve a sense of her own life,
which had been 'deferred', through recognising that she had been
living as though half alive).
In 'protecting the parent' or 'reinforcing the parent'
the child seems to be saying to the parent "I shall not abandon
you in your weakness." But truly what t the child fears is that
he will be abandoned in his weakness, and so he makes this
secret compact.
As a result of these identifications the child's own life,
his innate spontaneity, brilliance, sens e of adventure, his
basic ability to be here-and-now, may be deferred. It is
usually only later, in adult life, when the child has outgrown
the actual childhood condition of vulnerability, that he may
lay to rest his concern about the parent and reclaim his life.
We frequently see cases where clients have dreamed of or
actually begun writing a book which puts to rights all the
childhood perceptions hitherto foregone.
These clients have
used a creative process (in the form of a novel) as a vehicle
for expressing the complete body and fabric of the life they
have been obliged to deny in themselves.
However, these
clients have either not begun or not completed their manuscript
out of a continuing fear that to expose their parents, to reveal
what actually they have felt all these years, would somehow
be devastating for the parents, whom they still perceive to
be weak and vulnerable.
But in fact it is the clients themselves who still believe
themselves to be vulnerable, even though they have 'rewritten'
their history in a vein which seems truer to their real selves
than the history they duplicitously lived in their earlier
years as victims.
Their belief in their parents' vulnerability
is actually a screen for their own guilt about being stronger
than the parents.
Thus there remains for these clients further
work to do in establishing the 'facts' about their existence.
The last ghosts of discouragement have to be laid to rest.
And this depends on the ability to recognise the value, indeed
perfection, of the self. This recognition (which depends on
a long process) of itself overcomes the fear that other people
will be threatened by it.
One of these clients in fact finished the sixth version
of her long autobiographical novel, which gave portraits of
her parents and husband, but not of the 'I' of the book,
which was clearly herself. She was reluctant to submit the
manuscript to publishers, despite its being a first-class
piece of work; and when she did submit it, she invariably
recalled it 'for further revision'.
She believed she would
hurt her parents.
Six times she produced a clean manuscript
without visible corrections, as if to wipe out the previous
one.
But a common thread ran through these versions---the


fact that she herself was left out of the narrative as a
strong personali ty motivating others.
Her reluctance to
publish and her fear of hurting her paren ts were clearly a
screen for her belief in her own weakness and vulnerability
rather than belief in her strength.
She wasn't able to
affirm her worth as a person until she'd relinquished a basic
feeling that she was guilty for her parents' suffering and
her husband's death.
Her belief in her guilt prevented her
from stat ting the degree of her participation in any 'bad'
situation she might be describing.
A young woman who wrote and published poe try told us
during therapy, "All I ever looked for in any literary
situation---public readings, publication parties, discussion
groups or interviews---was a possible sexual contact. When,
as a result of therapy, this appetite fell away, I felt that
life had become completely empty." This wasn't all.
Her
desire to write collapsed along with the collapse of the
sexual drive, though she didn't connect the two.
There are manifold ways of sabotaging our actual powers,
screening them over by claiming powers we only wish to possess,
or which we think it would bring us kudos to display, in a
continuance of the childhood effort to live according to the
supposed needs and demands of other people, that is to some
program external to ourselves.
But real creativit ty follows our recognition of our innate
capacities, not those we would like to have because the program
looks acceptable, socially or otherwise.
II. FALLEN ANGELS
We thought tha t with increasing stress and personal
misery the drive for celebrity, wealth and creative genius
would increase proportionately, and on a global scale.
In an African village, once the technology arrives, the
desire for a protective cultural structure must sooner or later
follow. Manuscripts start to be written, pictures painted.
Drama schools are established.
The capi tals of media technology--
New York, Los Angeles, London, Munich etc---quickly become
Meccas. Places which never aspired to having a literature
for the simple reason that nobody ever read or wrote, are
now subsidised in dollars, pounds or francs to produce one.
A great literature becomes an inalienable social right along
with airports, credit cards and paid vacations. New universities
get their creative writing departments, and it will be obvious
to everyone that the nation only lacked a literature because
it didn't nave the cash.
Under this prestige program the idea soon gets around,
often with the support of the media, arts councils and creative
writing departments, that being a creative genius can be made


comfortable in the technological world.
However, most of the creative geniuses we know about not
only suffered monstrously but were mostly unheard of when not
publicly despised, persecuted and deprived.
Mozart was a
classic example.
Yet the desire to imitate the creative genius isn't just
an idle wish for prestige or money. Nor even is the desire
to have a literature. Perhaps people recognise in the crea tive
genius some stamina or extra force which survives the daily
blasts of discouragement and which makes him peculiarly
satisfied with being himself.
And he seems to derive from the
darkest scenes in his work a sense of bliss.
He is in some
way an angel, if a fallen one.
Is it this suggestion of an angelic immunity in the
creative genius that tempts the technological victim to imi ta te
him? How was it possible for Edgar Allan Poe to write so
persistently and with such evident pleasure and momentum,
though he remained neglected in his own country, and died a
drunkard and a pauper?
If we look back on the imaginative works of mankind we
see a dramatization of unthinkable misery, frustration and
disappointment, in other words a thousand variations on the
theme of human suicide. Is it possible that every one of
us, not simply the lone genius, has been the victim of a
pervasive discouragement at the core of social life, which we
translate, for fear of facing the true reality, into a drama
going on with the parents and in terms of what Freud called
the 'primal scene'?
Is it that the lone artist was (in the days before social
security) singled out for particular and spectacular discourage-
ment while in fact the discouragement was general, if unexpressed
and unlocated by the majority---including the upper classes who
only saw themselves fortunate by comparison with those lower
down in the social scale? Has the west tern world specialised
in a subtle torture of its inhabitants, robbing them of their
inner resources while urging them in the name of high moral
endeavour ('creativity' is part of that call, today) to lift
themselves out of the mire?
In psychotherapeutic sessions the questions arise again
and again, first, how did such utter self-rejection come about;
second, how did it manage to hide itself under such convincing
displays of self-acceptance---to hide even from the client
himself; third, where does the energy come from to go on?
Energy there certainly is, and it seems to come from the
awareness in almost everyone of some inimitable uniqueness
in themselves which cannot be quenched but which, on the contrary,
makes material for hope out of discouragement.
The 'creativity' in today's world is enormous. For
every book published there are thousands that never get beyond
manuscript form.
The cost of publishing escalates to the
point where a manuscript is judged first for its market appeal
and second for its value (the one must not be overwhelmingly


disproportionate to the other). Every year thousands of
plays pour into the theaters and the dramatic agencies---
as theaters go bankrupt and the cost of the normal show
makes even a three-month run at 95% capacity audiences a
mere breakeven project.
Gallery owners, to survive heavy
rents and small sales, ask for as much as 80% in commission
from their artists. Filmscripts go the rounds of the
companies and agencies that don't even look at them or return
them for the simple reason that films come about largely as
pre-arranged packages wi thin the industry, or from a best-
selling novel.
But nothing daunts the creative'---rejection
slips, gallery rents, dark thea ters, the collapse of the film
industry, the indifference of the TV companies: these things
are grist to the mill. People paper rooms with rejection
slips---remembering that Beckett got thirty or forty for his
first prose work.
III.
I .THINK THEREFORE I AM
Does the deep inner discouragement we find so often
in ourselves (if we allow ourselves a long look) have a
historical basis? Is it more than the work of a few
technological decades, more even than the work of two
centuries of industrialization?
In the mediaeval period we see the Christian so humbled,
compared wit th his Greek and Roman forbear, that we must wonder
whether in Christianity there hasn't been a systema atic dis-
couragement of the human being from the beginning, and
whether this essentially Christian structure of ideas doesn't
continue to underpin our lives, though transmuted now into
quite untheological terms.
(Oddly enough, Christ himself
has little place in this discussion because it is difficult
to find a breath of discouragement in anything he said).
The doctrine of renunciation was so pervasive in
mediaeval times that we might well wonder whether buried in
it was a powerful suicidal drive---so great is the contrast
with the joy and forgiveness of the original Christian teach-
ing as it was expounded in Christian Alexandria under the
gnostics and neo-platonists. Was the morbid awareness of
death in mediaeval times, the sense of reward or punishment
on the other side of death, so deep as to incur a virtual
collapse of the human auto-immune system in the form of
deadly plagues?
The Renaissance has been so called because it ended this
period by harking once more back to the ancient world and its
doctrine of the perfect man', that is the uniqueness of every
creature that made him an image (for the neo-platonists) of
that most perfect of all men, Christ himself.
But tha t 'rebirth' was abortive. Or rather, the child
was certainly born but stifled before it came of age. First
Rome, then Florence was sacked---Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor
using Spanish troops, Florence by a Florentine and a de' Medici,
Pope Clement VII, who also used Spanish troops.
The 'Spanish


occupation' of Italy began, cauterizing the artistic
imagination for centuries. What Spanish soldiers didn't
do in the public squares, another Spanish army, the new
Jesuit order, with its General, did in the conscience and
the heart.
There were other revolutions, largely political---the
Protestant revolution in Germany, the French revolution,
the American revolution, all three in a large sense against
the inner discouragement of privilege, and connected with
each other. But they too failed to stem the tide.
Albert Camus said about suicide, 'An act like this is
prepared in the silence of the heart, as is the great work
of art.' Is it possible that suicide can also be prepared
racially, and that our situation today is the result of
millenia of clever preparation, with the result that the
atomic theory of the ancient Greeks grew by some terrible
compulsion into the lethal radiation of our day?
One aspect of Christian civilisation separates it from
its ancient predecessors and that is its well-nigh obsessive
intellectuality. Were Greek rationalism and the Christian
intellectuality which it parented the result of a loss of bliss
in the human psyche, amounting to a loss of identity?
Certainly there is a striking difference between the
quiet, ecstatic smile of the early Greek stone head and the
tragic mask of the late period.
The Etruscans too differed
sharply from the Romans in this respect, as if they still had
contact with an earlier, more blissful consciousness.
The
Egyptian face too had that smile.
And we know that Pythagoras,
when he went to Egypt for his enlightenment, was told by a
priest to give up his 'knowledge', that is the very reasoning
faculty tha t was Greece's pride.
Aristotelian thinking, too, with its emphasis on system,
analysis and the need for continual effort to achieve perfection
was a departure from the former consciousness.
It entered
Christian thought at its germination, with the result that
St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas appear to us more scholars
than mystics.
They gave rise to a scholastic tradition tha t
dominated the mediaeval monasteries to the point of obsession.
The cartesian doctrine was necessary for the modern
scientific process.
It rescued the Christian mind from
superstition, undefinable fears and scholastic absurdities
by continuing the best traditions of the mediaeval schools
of mechanics and ma thematics. It firmly established a
universe operating according to objective and unchangeable
law.
But with this new approach came the collapse of whatever
eluded law, analysis and formulation, namely, most of the
human being's life. Thought, it seemed, could not account
for more than a fraction of experience, and art now tended
to supply the rest.


IV. ART AS A VISION
To Art now fell the task of describing and in some sense
explaining human experience, almost to replace a lost religion.
However subjective and private it might be declared to be by
science, its products continued to pour forth---and to create
resistance by celebrating the very things society was less and
less concerned about, namely love as opposed to money, doubts
and guesses and fears as opposed to the certainties of empirical
knowledge, tragedy and pessimi sm as opposed to the positivist
vigor of the men who increasingly saw society in ma thematical,
functional, secular terms and were actually bringing it about.
The nineteenth century philosophy of the lone creative
genius, the I great' man, maintained that there was something
born in him, a unique and inimitable facet which other men
lacked. A theme ran through his life from early childhood
marking him out for a path quite different from others.
As society became more indus trial and the human being more
narrowly defined in terms of his work, so the lone genius
stood outside it all as a challenge, often a judge or prophet
who dazzled and inspired in order to be heard. At work in
him was a tumultuous unconscious activity which in some way
put the current rationalism to shame, and which no amount of
striving or training by other men could reproduce.
THE MYTH OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As soon as we look at the process by which the so-called
crea tive genius produces a work of art we find it extremely
difficult to locate the creative element.
Who exactly is the creator? Behind the artist's 'flash
of recognition', his 'inspiration', there seems to lie an
automatic zone over which the conscious or trained mind has
little control.
The material for his work comes largely
in the form of memories (and these in the form of images),
though paradoxically these are memories of things tha t never
happened. They arrive in the mind already packaged.
Thus
we have constant declarations by writers, painters, sculptors
('I simply carve it out of the stone, it's already in there')
and composers that they are more spectators, receptors,
witnesses of their work than creators in the deliberate sense.
The memories or images are already packaged for the artist
1) in respect of their being endowed with an aura of pain,
anguish or pleasure and 2) in their being precisely physical
or figurative. The same applies to every medium including
music.
It is like a genetic choice, far below the level of
the conscious mind, over which the artist has no pre-control
whatever.
Creative writing schools can teach techniques, and
identify these through comparison, but they cannot charge
memories with overwhelming force or reorganise the perceptive
packages of a whole lifetime.
Nor can they crea te that


peculiarly organic self-identification with his medium that
we find in the born artist. Right back in Berthold Brecht's
childhood we shall find the aptitude to dramatise every thing,
in Henry Moore's the love of touching and changing surfaces,
in Kokoshka's a powerful sense of colour and form.
Yet no aptitude for writing, painting or whatever it is
will be enough either.
For in the born artists, if we are
to trust their almost universal accounts, their work never begins
from apti itude but from a certain inner charge that demands
expression at all costs and even defies the lack of aptitude,
training, technique and knowledge.
Thomas Mann once said -
that he began as a writer because of his painful inability to
form German sentences. It is compulsion ra ther than design
that gives the final work its hypnotic and durable quality,
and the lack of it which makes lesser work fashionable for a
day. It is the hypnosis of the 'compelled' work tha t enables
it to cross geographical frontiers and to survive translation.
It may be even more striking in validity centuries after its
author's death.
VI. 'BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE'
It is difficult when reading biographical accounts of
great t artists to avoid the impression that an ecstatic element
pervaded their lives with singularly little interference from
hardship or even destitution.
Again and again we read of ecstasies interpolating
themselves with no explanai tion or preamble into periods of
suffering, in an artist's life. No one could have had more
daily and consistent (and escalating) disappointment than
William Blake: but here is England's most visionary and
blissful artist and poet of the nineteenth century.
It is as though a memory of some lost racial bliss were
alive in the artist from birth.
He can plunge into the darkest
experiences for his material and yet come up sane. The power-
ful unconscious charge of the enduring work of art, the blissful
element that transfuses it, both seem to be connected wit th the
artist's identification with an inner perfection immune to
moral judgement, pain or self-destruction.
VII.
IS ART A SKILL?
The nineteenth century philosophy of the lone genius
became unpopular this century with universal education; and
art came to be seen as a skill like any other. It was thus
that the 'creative process' came to be analysed and discussed.
There was a great need in people, now that their right
to express themselves had been acknowledged, to go to art for
that very element of bliss which they felt in the artist's


personality and which emanated indirectly from his work.
Audiences say of Charles Bukovsky that he looks and sounds
hideously ugly at his readings until he reads his verse and
then he becomes 'an angel'. It is this peculiar self-
transmutation in the artistic process that fascinates and
allures. Something ther rapeutic seems to be at work in the
most offensive artistic productions; and na turally enough
the idea comes about that if you could train yourself to be
an artist you could thereby get the bliss and the therapeutic
effect.
But for the artist it works the other way round.
The
bliss is what moves him to work, not vice versa.
He can
perceive it in the pain, the darkness.
Basically there is no
darkness for him. Pain and darkness are so to speak the
inner core of the bliss, and the bliss the inner core of the
pain, in an endless unfolding of the 'veils of illusion' tha t
the Indians describe as maya. He never entered the so-called
creative process as a deferral system, namely to defer the
suicide or the feelings of misery or failure.
He was led
into it by a great constructive sense of his inborn powers,
a forceful conviction of his capacity to overcome obs tacles
and render even destitution bearable by the absurd means of
working day and night at something he might not be able to
sell. How William Blake found the money to print his own
books and lithographs was a source of wonderment to his
friends and not least to his wife.
The democratic interest in the creative proce SS seems,
however, quite as much a search for identity as for bliss.
Many of the books published today are efforts to objectify a
life felt not to have properly existed.
We must expect that
as society becomes fragmented, and ethnic, family, religious
and sexual ties break down, more and more people will feel
that unless they have a book to their name they aren't fully
alive.
Such people frequently describe their first efforts as
'taking the lid off the garbage'.
These words fitly reveal
the suicidal or self-rejective mood.
Again and again in therapeutic sessions people say,
"I realize I've never been fully alive" or "It was always
dangerous for me to be myself" or "If I revealed who I was,
I would not be liked". It is here that a secret conviction
may arise, "I am a creative genius and deeply unhappy because
unrecognised." It may be a false assumption but this isn't
the point: it enables one to defer genuine self-confrontation.
VIII.
CREATIVITY AS VENGEANCE
At this point the creative effort becomes an exquisi te
act of vengeance.
The parents, relatives and friends of the
writer, on behalf of whom the original self was abandoned,
become, once the book is published, a slavish audience.


One enters a 'hall of fame', ridiculous though the idea may
be, and hopefully one may occupy this hall for many years
after one's death, quite as if one were to be embalmed.
Sometimes these pseudo-programs are rejected. One of
our clients, in a book on her experiences as a Hollywood star,
writes that the real joys of her life in Hollywood were her
home, her husband and her children.
She took. a long time
convincing her publishers that she could hardly pervert her
happy story into an unhappy one, which they seemed to want on
the grounds of market appeal.
The unique thing about her
book was indeed the fact that it didn't embrace the pseudo-
programs of Hollywood life and therefore the unhappiness
which these entail.
That is, she didn't defer her life.
She was like a
roulette player who makes a big win and then avoids the casinos.
But the usual story is that the hunger for success, far from
abating with success, is further stimulated by it. What the
success was designed to defer continues to be deferred, until,
quite frequently, a surfeit of success brings the whole structure
down in ruin and the suicide can no longer be put off: there
is either physical suicide, nervous breakdown or a collapse of
talent.
The writer or artist or actor begins to repeat early
formulae and even to look back on the days of obscurity with
nostalgia.
The bad days become good days, because failure
may in the end be a more effective deferral than success,
as it is forever striving.
Since the evidence for all this is so striking and
universal, the question arises, is a deferral system inheri ted,
namely, built into our mental structure from early childhood?
Certainly the Christian religion might be called a deferral
religion, however little support it may have received for the
deferral idea from Christ himself. That is, heaven and hell,
in the Christian cosmology, take place after death, and life
is seen as a struggle to attain the one and avoid the other,
rather than something to be lived for itself.
Today we
unknowingly accept mental structures that derive from the
deferral heri tage.
In this heritage, bliss was early to disappear, to be
labeled heresy. Ecstasies in the religious sense were
becoming extremely unpopular in power circles in the sixteenth
century. Philip II of Spain, the greatest power in Europe
and the strongest influence on the pope, instigated the
persecution of the adumbrados, for whom ecstatic states were
the substance of devotion.
Yet Philip II's fa ther, Charles
v, Holy Roman Emperor, had ecstasies and considered them a
normal part of the devout life.
This conflict---between ecstasy and dogma---was precisely
the same as that between the Renaissance, wit th its concern for
the 'perfect man' in everyone, and the Counter Reforma tion which
followed it, which saw grace as something that had to be won
wi th pain and anguish.
Jesuits were disciplined to imagine
themselves burning in hellfire, being licked by the flames.
In this conflict one side wanted (and claimed to experience)


perfection and ecstasy now, the other side wanted it deferred.
One side marvelled at the miracles and splendours of life, the
other scorned this 'vale of tears'.
It was the same in the
Hindu world.
One side celebrated life as a manifestation of
love in all its forms (bhakta); the other called it maya, or
veils of illusion, to be cast aside as soon as possible.
What could reveal more ofa suicidal drive than this life-
deferral sys tem at work in people's minds for so many centuries,
in both east and west?
Is it why people couldn't expect to live more than an
average thirty or forty years in Europe before the eighteenth
century (when theology began to lose its hold on the western
mind)? For the impression na turally grew up, under the life-
deferral system, that life was a sort of conveyor belt rushing
us all precipitately from birth to death in order to get us
enrolled either in heaven or hell.
Today's secular society still contains the shadows of the
early cosmologies.
Our minds continue in the same depressive
mode.
And modern self-improvement therapies are frequently
reassertions of the deferral system, perpetuating. the depressive
state simply by declaring that the self is anything but perfect.
With the collapse of any serious belief in heaven and hell
today, we are left wi th a. sense of life as a mad conveyor belt
over which we have no control, and which seems to have no reason
at all for existing, except as a mechanism for rushing us from
one place to another as fast as possible (and filling us with
the terror of arriving).
It may seem absurd to expect that the publication of
a book, our names on the credits of a film, or an exhibit tion
of canvases with colours on them could in some way halt the
conveyor belt, but at this point, especially with the end of
the world facing us every day as a plausible fact, we snatch
at small mercies.
The deferral of 'real' life (in the religious sense)
until after death has meant the deferral of life here and
now, within the organism, so that we seem to be watching
ourselves, our feelings, from a distance---and it is the
cortical part of the brain-system that does the watching.
IX. A DREAM DEFERRED
Is there some guiding principle in bliss which, once
it lapses, leaves the organism peculiarly undefended, SO
that an extra defence of over-cortical activity is now
required to redress the balance?


The idea grew up in eighteenth century Europe (the
epoch of encyclopedism) that we govern our lives consciously.
But, apart from the fact that the working of our organisms
is largely autonomic, the thre e parts of the cerebral
or outer brain---namely, the sensory, the mo tor and the
associative or judgemental---are largely receivers of
information, and more sifters, analysers, organisers and
judges than initiators (even motor initiation is determined
by needs and motives outside that area).
But, despite
the facts, the idea that we govern and determine our lives
consciously has a much stronger hold today than ever before.
Current brain researches tell us more.
They demonstrate
tha t the amygdala and the hippocampus, the two memory areas
in the limbic system, supply the cortex or conscious part of
the mind wi ith memories that are already packaged, both as to
their durability (namely, whether they are to be long-term or
short-term memories) and their flavor, quality and meaning.
For ins tance, a memory may appear suddenly to the conscious
mind wi thout any conscious provocation.
It may, for no good
reason that the conscious mind can see, appear poignant and
significant. It may return to the mind again and again, yet
never signify its inner meaning or the reason for its regular
appearance. Its a tmosphere may be one of anxiety. Yet
there may be an inexplicable admixture of pleasure or mystery.
A certain street, a certain shop perhaps, at a certain period
of childhood: but few other details. There are no surround-
ing thoughts or associations.
The memory is simply there,
significant but without apparent meaning.
Now who is processing these memories, behind the conscious
mind, and delivering them from time to time to that conscious
mind, without warning or prior consultation?
Obviously there is a vast world of invisible activity
going on behind the conscious self which nevertheless takes
decisions and makes connections long before the cortex is
aware of it (if it ever becomes aware of it).
We are obliged to believe that a thinking individual
isat work behind the conscious mind.
For some times memories appear precisely when they are
needed. They 'come from nowhere'.
They are 'brainwaves'
or 'flashes of inspiration'. They happen even to the scientists
who don't believe in them. Major breakthroughs of this kind,
from Kekule's demonstration of the benzene molecule to Otto
Loewi's first demonstration that chemicals are involved in
neural action, have been happening inscience since the first
mediaeval guidelines for scientific procedure were laid down.
Who is this 'thinking individual' of whom we are largely
unconscious, though he is our very self?
Do we have access to it through bliss? Does this account
for that 'compelling' action we find in the genuine artistic
imagination? Is the reason that over-cortical activity
creates confusion in the nervous system the fact that the
blissful connection has been lost?


X. THE LOST IDENTITY
The blissful smile we see on the Etruscan, early Greek
and Egyptian heads can be seen today, from time to time, on
the faces of those who meditate. A blissful feeling is
unquestionably one of the effects of 'successful' meditation.
But is this more than a feeling of repos se? Could we obtain
as much by sitting quietly in a chair ra ther than in the
prescribed lotus position? What is the function of the
straightened spine in the classic meditation posture? Why
should the eyes be closed?
Actually not all types of meditation require the eyes to
be closed.
There is a tantric meditation requiring one to
stare into the flame of a candle until its outlines are blurred
and finally disappear. Yet the effect is not so different
from having the eyes closed, since the mind undergoes the same
kind of change. That is, the cerebral cortex seems to with-
draw, fall into a slower rhythm.
The question here is, does it
do so in order to make repose possible? Does a 'successful'
medit tation involve the dethronement of the conscious, thinking
mind?
Certainly the Indian yogi advises the meditator to 'let
go of the mind'.
But the word 'meditation' comes from
medit tare, which means to ponder or think.
That is quite
confusing for a westerner---he must sit down and ponder or
think wi thout thinking. He sits in the lotus posi tion and
finally may reach a state of great repose. But he is still
thinking, perceiving.
There is simply no way in which the
conscious mind, while conscious, cannot think.
Also the westerner, compared with the oriental, is over-
active and over-mental. The moment he sits down his thoughts
begin to race (unless he can ca tch himself very early in the
morning).
Is that medita tion? Or has he misunderstood?
Should he be thinking nothing at all? So he tries to think
nothing at all and this isn't possible because while trying
to think nothing at all he is thinking about not thinking,
and therefore thinking rather harder than usual.
Sometimes
he emerges from his meditation confused, if not irritable or
downright angry.
The object of meditation is dhyana, which means the
cessation of all outward impressions. And this means roughly
the equivalent of wha t for us would be unconsciousness or
fainting, though of a highly specialised kind. Special
effects require special techniques. It cannot be done alone.
This is why oriental tradition lays so much emphasis on the
guru. A teacher is required not only to guide the subject
but to create the trust needed for deep relaxa tion.
This
is why dhyana is called 'the easy way', as opposed to the
'hard way' of total renunciation. In dhyana you simply cease
to be aware of what is going on around you. You cease
breathing.
When you stir again you feel 'I don't know where
I've been'.
The subject soon recognises that it is the most
remedial state he has ever been in. And during these brief
'absences' extraordinary changes take place in the organism.


Some of the changes will be subtle, others dramatic.
A promiscuous person may find himself celibate for a long
period of time while a celibate person may suddenly find a
ma te. When the dhyanic experience is repeated over a period
of weeks or months the subject may have the strange sensation
that a new life is coming about before his eyes, yet emana ting
from inside him, so that, while participating in it, he is
also a spectator or witness.
The conscious processes have
little or nothing to do with it.
Sometimes it will appear
to him, if he is sensitive, that for the first time he is
getting the life he always needed (rather than 'wanted').
Our clients who undergo this process (we ourselves use
a finely modulated breathing technique) experience first a
destructuring of their goals and programs, 9 second the collapse
of suicidal 'plots' rooted deep in the past and hitherto
largely unconscious, third an ability to receive information
not indicated or prepared for by the cortex.
In the words
of one client, "Five years of psychoanalysis seem to have
taken place in a few weeks, wi thout verbal exchange".
A remarkable rejuvenation may take place.
When the
cortex has become used to not demanding explana tions, devising
strategies or clinging to struc tures, a repose begins to govern
the organism which manifests in new breathing patterns, and
subjec cts say they feel they 'fit into their skins' for the
first time. They are content to be themselves.
Dhyana can only come about in silence and seclusion,
and its very subtlety may be the reason why it failed to
survive the upheavals of the Graeco-Roman world, and was
thus unknown to the desert fathers. Pythagoras may well
have undergone such an initiation in Egypt. It would explain
why he was told by the priest to 'let go of the mind'.
Was the loss of this tec chnique in ancient Greece the
cause of that civilisation's intellectual philosophies,
which dominated first Roman and then Christian thought?
Did its loss allow the over-development of the cortex to the
point where, today, over two thousand years after the dhyanic
process ceased among the generality of mankind, we have a
situation in which the individual is entirely helpless, and
a science so theoretical that it has actually worked against
na tural law and produced an endangered environment?
The most difficult thing for anyone undergoing the
dhyanic process is to believe that his mind doesn't have to
monitor or register, much less motivate, the changes taking
place in his organism and his life: so deeply has the
cartesian I think therefore I am penetrated our beings.
XI. THE 'ANTENNA I EFFECT
It seems that the creative genius can recall that state


of 'second birth' without having experienced the dhyanic
process directly and without, certainly, knowing its benefits.
The bliss experienced as a result of that process is, in him,
a spasmodic occurrence.
But there is another dhyanic feature which he shares
unknowingly, and this is the 'antenna effect' which many,
though not all, dhyanic subjects experience in the course of
their initiation: they become aware of receiving informa tion
which is paradoxically 'from outside' and yet intimately
apposite to their own situation, so that they may suddenly be
shown (usually in the course of a dhyanic session) how to
resolve a work problem, or enhance a relationship; or an
unexpected new pa th may be indicated.
The 'antenna' (noticed
by Itzhak Bentov in his ballistocardiographical researches wi th
meditational subjects) simply picks up a strong current of
ini tiative and courage which might hitherto have been lacking
in a certain area. Here we are very close to the ranging
intuition of the creative genius which takes him as if by
accident to scenes and spectacles unknown to his conscious
mind.
Are our clients who ask to know more about the creative
process really asking for this 'antenna', and for the other
benefi its of the dhyanic process which they may dimly perceive?
The 'antenna' need not operate consciously. Some
subjects never become aware of it.
But in either case there
is a strong sense of being guided.
The statements quoted in the first section of this proposal
are those of people searching for guidance inside themselves.
They expect it, try to assert it but do not find it. An
unpleasant inner process has taken hold of them---fears and
anxieties and unaccountable sorrows---over which the cerebral
cortex cannot exercise control, though continually we are told
that it is the only control we have.
If we as a race have been without the 'information service'
and guidance from inside our OW n nervous systems for the past
two thousand years, is it a surprise that those two thousand
years present a cat taclysmic picture of continual massacres,
plagues, persecutions, pogroms and diasporas, decimations and
torturings, coups d'etat, financial crises, famines involving
millions of people, riots and revolutions and bitter patricidal
feuds?
We may believe in the nineteenth century idea of progress
but the fact is that history in those two millenia has repeated
itself wi th tiresome regulari ty. Fifteenth century Florence,
the first embryo democratic state, was hit by the same kind
of financial crisis and unemployment that bedevils modern
government. It is why the cathedral remained unfinished.
XII. A DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
Is this the picture of a race intent on doing away with
itself at all costs?
We began to suspect, in our work with clients, tha t this


might have something to with the suicidal tendencies we were
observing almost every day, and which psychotherapies typically
attribute to personal problems.
When the cortex is constantly claiming control, though
manifestly unable to exercise it, it seems to create a deep
imbalance in the human cell not unlike the working of cancer.
The organism appears decidedly confused---and it would not be
surprising if, in this confusion, unable to find in life any
of the promised pleasures (even the most publicised ones, the
sexual), it should want to do away with itself. And escape
is difficult.
Any attempt to reconstruct life, any venture
into 'creativity' will, when the directives come from the
cortex, exacerba te the difficulty and drive the suicide
deeper, often by simply hiding it.
Guided by the cortex tentatively, absurdly, spasmodically
and erratically, the organism, because unable to work accord-
ing to its own pregeni tally established functions, rejects
itself.
It may do so in one desperate physical act, but
more commonly it is a moment-by-moment self-rejection which
may express itself in continual guilt.
This guilt may lie
at the tail-end of every thought, decision, pleasure.
A British actress: 'I feel guilty about everything I do.
If I'm reading a part for a future production I feel underneath
I should be learning my lines for a current production, but if
I do that I then feel I should be doing the other. If I'm
lecturing in Iowa about Shakespeare I feel I should be on the
stage doing my proper job, though in fact I will be on the
stage in a couple of weeks.
It seems I just can't let myself
alone, whatever I'm doing.
Today medicine is moving out of what might be called
its theological phase---from the idea that infections simply
seize the body in the form of a hostile and implacable
Providence, into a lively sense of the body's auto-immune
system.
Dr MacFarlane Burnet's theory of 'immunological
surveillance' says tha t we are surrounded, indeed bombarded
by all possible diseases every moment, but our auto-immune
system surveys these cons tantly and pro tects the organism
against them.
Sometimes that immune system breaks down,
either wholly or in relation to certain diseases. It is
possible that senility and 'nat tural' death long be fore the
Hayflick limit' of 110/120 years of age may be due to such
a breakdown.
In the dhyanic process, however, the immune system seems
to become revitalised, and Burnet's theory seems closely
related to the 'electrical scanning' that goes on in dhyanic
sessions.
If much greater longevity was achieved in certain
ancient societies, was it due to knowledge of this process?
More than this, does the rejection of the self involve
a lapse or weakening of the immune system, much as a shock
or disappointment will sometimes induce an infection? Is
it possible to envisage such total self-rejection that the
immune system breaks down altogether?


We have a dramatic example of the collapse of the immune
system in the so-called - gay plague'.
The medical name for
this is AIDS, that is to say, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
Two diseases under this heading are a cancer called Kaposi's
sarcoma and a lung disease called pneumocystis carinii pneumonia,
both of which tend to be lethal.
In choosing the name AIDS the medical profession is saying
that the disease or group of diseases is not contagious except
for people who for one reason or another have lost their power
to immunise themselves against disease.
Secondly, it is say-
ing that homosexuals in particular are prone to a breakdown in
the auto-immune system.
There have been to date about 1400 cases of AIDS, thirty
or forty percent of which have been fatal.
Some victims die
with remarkable speed, in a few days, others over a period of
months.
Only medication that could miraculously revive the
immune system would save those cases.
But such a medication
doesn't exist.
AIDS started in New York, and spread. Among
the cities it spread to was San Francisco, which has a very
large homosexual community. Out of the 1400 cases 236
have occurred in San Francisco, 71 of them fatal.
When doctors in San Francisco have tried to discuss the
dangers of the situation in the gay communi ty they have often
met with anger, especially af ter suggesting that casual sex,
under present circumstances, is dangerous and to be avoided
at all costs.
Wha t is interesting for our purposes is that
some doctors are saying, despite newspaper reports to the
contrary, that casual or street sex among homosexuals has
escalated since the scare began.
Here we see not simply an immune deficiency at work but
a suicide syndrome in full and overt operation, and we may
not be unjustified in connecting the two, not simply for
for homosexuals but for the human race.
Herpes is rarely fatal, but in some ways it presents
as many hazards for heterosexuals as AIDS does for homosexuals,
and the connection with casual sex remains valid in both cases.
Herpes has a way of lingering, especially in the female
organism, for many years, and so distressing are its effects,
so painful its connection with the sex-act, tha t it may be no
less a 'plague' than AIDS, particularly if it continues to
spread at the present rate.
Now the sex-act is frequently an antidote to fear,
indecision, guilt. It is, as the classical psychologists
point out, incompatible with a state of anxiety, but once this
state diminishes sexual activity appears not simply a source
of release in a pent-up situation but a balm and comfort much
like a regression to the security of the mother's arms.
The
sex-act may also be the last resort of an organism unable to
find comfort, pleasure or repose in anything else.
At the ana tomical source, 8o to speak, the suicidal
element seems to be working quite as much as in the mind.
And the operation is racial rather than personal, that is to
say in terms that invite the use of the word 'plague', rather
than conditions that invite personal analysis of the kind
undertaken by the classical psychologists.
Again and again, in psychology, we return to the personal
problem as if it were the crux of the matter. Millions of


people engage in workshops, priva ate analysis, group therapy,
to get at the root of a ma tter which may not be personal at all.
While we continue to disregard the racial suicide at work in
each one of us, that suicide must surely not only remain but,
because more and more deeply hidden, intensify until it comes
about physically in the form of a 'global accident' or a
'natural ca tastrophe'.
We are helpless before our racial problem because all we
can do, in our intellectual tradition, is to produce more
intellectual blueprints on the matter, that is, encapsulate
all our distresses into theory, which then exacerbates the
suicide no one is looking at.
The organi sm seems to repair itself most efficiently
at times of deep, and if possible blissful, repose. Dr
Richard Cutler in his gerontological researches is finding
that deep relaxation and the 'storing' of superoxide dismutase
(and thus optimal functioning in the immune system) may be
connected. Without repose the immune system is both deprived
and over-taxed.
The individual is cast about in a sea of
relentless undercurrents which then require continual analysis
and strategizing.
But repose is by no means an easy matter. It cannot be
defined as muscular relaxation, much less as sleep, but as a
natural function of the organism when under its 'proper guidance',
that is when optimal oxygen-utilisation at the cellular level
is taking place.
The dhyanic process could be defined as allowing the
auto-immune system to take the organism over, without interruption
of hindrance from the outer brain.
But there is a way in
which that immune system may be connected with the sense of a
perfect self, in an echo of the humanistic 'perfect man' and
the Hindu 'I am God'.
Essentially, it means seeing any
situation into which the organism falls---from depression to
physical distress---as remediable, indeed as a preliminary to
the solution that will follow if there is no undue cortical
organization. No one studying the human organism, particularly
the brain, can fail to see what a miraculously self-sufficient
system we have. Over four hundred different chemicals, or
rather electro-chemicals, have been discovered to operate in
neurotransmissions. Thousands of instructions, perhaps
millions, are transmitted in our bodies every day to make
balance and disease-resistance possible. To take one tiny
example, when we ingest salt our brains secrete an extra
supply of vasopressin, and this conveys an instruction to the
kidneys to retain water.
It is we who do the instructing, though we are hardly
conscious of it. Our instinctive resistance to this idea--
namely tha t we are instructing our kidneys chemically to
re tain water---is due to.centuries of tradition which said
tha t 'I' or 'we' means the conscious mind.


That is, we have theorised ourselves So far away from
our own processes that we are even in fear of them. The
here-and-now is one of the things emphasised by self-improvemen t
programs. But unless it goes beyond an intellectual or
verbal formulation, no program can induce that state of
invulnerable well-being which is what we mean by a sense of
the here-and-now.
Blocking this state is the obsession
with intellectuality which has bedeviled our civilisation
from the beginning.
This intellectuality is in fact an
improper use of the intellect based on significant scientific
errors.
It derives from a major mistake about the na1 ture
of the human organism---namely that we control our lives,
and our environment, exclusively by conscious and deliberate
thought.
The result of that mistake is that we have
decidedly lost control of both.
A few days ago a client who had just sent her first
manuscript out to publishers reported the following:
"My friend said in a letter to me that the
letters I'd written him had suicidal overtones.
My reaction to that was one of indignation---
I'd already been through that one; a couple
of years ago I thought of suicide. I know
I'm not going to kill myself..." (Tears
appeared in her eyes, then, after a pause,
she went on:) "I've been living according
to resolve, not according to what's pleasure-
Then she told us that she had recently developed a
condition approaching leukemia and AIDS: her red blood
count had dropped to around 1500 to 5000 ratio to the
white blood cells.
This was told with nervous smiling.
LENGTH: 80.000 words.