Category Archives: Psychology

Jung’s Red Book 2: The God of experience

Books, Great Thinkers, Jung, Meaning, Myth, Religion, spirituality,

Though in many ways Jung’s Red Book is a unique text, the closest thing it reminds me of is the texts of Christian mystics who wrestled with God in their own inner experience: people like Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, or the anonymous author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’. These mystics, writing in the late Middle Ages, could not distance themselves explicitly from orthodox Christian theology in the way Jung could, but it nevertheless seems obvious to me that metaphysical beliefs really didn’t matter much to them. What really mattered was the living God they encountered within. One thing that disturbs me about the language of naturalists and so-called ‘skeptics’ is that they tend to use ‘mystic’ as a pejorative word. But if you genuinely value experience over dogma, mystics are worthy of the highest respect, and Jung is perhaps the most recent and the most striking of them: a man who tried to take scientific method and the experiential God seriously at the same time, whilst being critical of dogma, including the dogmas about God that atheists are rightly critical of. I find the same spirit of objectivity in the mystical Jung of the Red Book as I do in his psychological works.Mandala_from_Jung's_Red_Book_Joanna Penn CCA2-0

The apparent contradiction for the mystic is that God remains supremely powerful whilst being inner. It might be assumed that those who treat God as something within one’s own mind (remaining at least practically agnostic about claims of God beyond the mind) thus reduce God to a kind of powerless abstraction, and indeed some post-modern theology can apparently end up doing this. But this misunderstanding of the implications of an inner focus confuses wider inner experience with mere intellectualisation.   God does not become a mere abstraction when we treat him as an experience, because experience is recognised through the right hemisphere of the brain, and it is the over-dominant left hemisphere that creates mere abstractions unconnected to experience. Jung is very obviously not just engaged in an intellectual reduction of God to left-hemisphere terms. One of the indications of this the power of God as Jung encounters him. We’re talking about a full-blooded God here, not some sort of ‘mitigated’ God. A God who is, indeed, terrifying, in the spirit of the holy awe felt by the ancient Israelites.

Jung’s accounts of his visions bring this tension vividly to life. In the section headed ‘First Day’, Jung encounters God on a mountain path. He is terrified, but oddly enough the God himself also seems to be terrified.

As I approach the top, a mighty booming resounds from the other side of the mountain like ore being pounded. The sound gradually swells, and echoes thunderously in the mountain. As I reach the pass, I see an enormous man approach from the other side.

Two bull horns rise from his great head, and a rattling suit of armour covers his chest. His black beard is ruffled and decked with exquisite stones. The giant is carrying a sparkling double axe in his hand, like those used to strike bulls. Before I can recover from my amazed fright, the giant is standing before me. I look at his face: it is faint and pale and deeply wrinkled. HIs almond-shaped eyes look at me astonished. Horror takes hold of me: this is Izdubar, the mighty bull-man. He stands and looks at me: his face speaks of consuming inner fear, and his hands and knees tremble. Izdubar, the powerful bull trembling? Is he frightened? (p.277-8)

Jung then has a conversation with Izdubar, in which he tells him he comes from ‘the West’, with its science and rationality. On learning this, Izdubar is dismayed. He flings away his useless weapon and falls ill. This seems to reflect the initial impact of the modern outlook on God, which at first looks likely to kill him: the function of God undermined in the human psyche by the left-brain dominant explanation of the ‘natural’ world.

In ‘Second Day’ Jung finds himself on a mountain ridge with a sick Izdubar, whom he realises he loves and wants to save. But Izdubar cannot move, and is too heavy to be carried to safety. Then Jung has an idea.

I: My prince, Powerful One, listen: a thought came to me that might save us. I think that you are not at all real, only a fantasy.

Izdubar: I am terrified by this thought. It is murderous. Do you mean to declare me unreal – now that you have lamed me so pitifully?

I: Perhaps I have not made myself clear enough, and have spoken too much in the language of Western lands. I do not mean to say that you are not real at all, of course, but only as real as a fantasy. If you could accept this, much could be gained. (p.293)

Eventually he persuades Izdubar to accept that he is only as real as a fantasy “if it helps”, and Jung is then able to pick up Izdubar, who becomes “lighter than air” and carry him home. This is an extraordinary recognition, not just that God remains valuable when recognised as a human construction, but of the incrementality of the ‘reality’ involved: it is not just a question of being real or unreal, but rather of having more or less of the qualities we associate with ‘reality’, such as tangibility, extension in space, causal effectiveness, and so on.

When he gets home, despite being light, Izdubar will not fit through the door. So Jung squashes him into the size of an egg (p.295). Yet, despite being squashed into the size of an egg, God has lost none of his meaning and importance. Jung sings moving ‘Incantations’ over the egg containing God.

Oh

light of the middle way

enclosed in the egg

embryonic,

full of ardour, oppressed…. (p.300)

Come to us, we who are willing from our own will.

Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit.

Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire.

Come to us, we who will heal you with our own art.

Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body.

Come, child, to father and mother. (p.303)

Jung conveys a wonderfully integrated experience here, at one and the same time recognising that we create God, that God is not something threatening us from without, and that God is nevertheless a matter of overwhelming yearning. But nevertheless, such an encapsulated God, without power, cannot fulfil all the functions of God, and Jung wishes to restore him to his former splendour. In ‘The Opening of the Egg’, Izdubar bursts out of the egg.

I: “Oh Izdubar! Divine One! How wonderful! You are healed!”

“Healed? Was I ever sick? Who speaks of sickness? I was sun, completely sun. I am the sun”.

An inexpressible light breaks from his body, a light that my eyes cannot grasp. I must cover my face and cast my gaze to the ground.

I: “You are the sun, the eternal light – most powerful one, forgive me for carrying you.” (p.307-8)

This to me conveys a powerful message about God as meaning. A meaningful God is not an inch less impressive and powerful than a real God. He remains perfect, omnipotent, omniscient and eternal in meaning. But such a God and his infinite qualities should not be an object of belief – for that would fix the nature and qualities of God in relation to everything else. Since God has the archetypal function of projecting forward a complete integration of the psyche, the form taken can vary with each person or each group sharing ideas about that supreme meaningfulness, it being only his function that creates universal consistency.

Elsewhere, Jung describes God as the supreme meaning.

But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the image of the supreme meaning. (p.120)

This meaningfulness becomes all the more intelligible if we interpret it in the light of embodied meaning. The meaning of God does not have to be tied to beliefs about the circumstances in which propositions about him would be true, as analytic philosophers would have it. It is this representationalist assumption that makes most philosophy of religion a waste of time. Instead, the meaning of God, like the meanings of all other words and symbols, consists in synaptic links formed by associations with our active experience, and built up through inter-related metaphors that connect different areas of that experience. God does indeed reside in our bodies, but no one metaphor is solely adequate to describe him: rather it would require the synthesis of all metaphors into the widest possible meaningful experience. To ‘worship’ God should surely be to try to connect with that supreme meaning – not to reify it, but to get as far as we can in experiencing it.

Personally I find this portrayal of God in the Red Book both liberating and inspiring. One thing I have in common with Jung is a Christian background, indeed being like him the son of a pastor. In earlier life I have tried to evade God and think of him as irrelevant, but, as Jung writes:

God is unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand. (p.164)

God is unavoidable, not just for those of us who have an image of God etched into our childhood experience, but even in a sense for others, since the God archetype is a dimension of human experience that may manifest in other ways using other labels, but nevertheless have the same function.

Reading the Red Book has reminded me of how important that function is to me, but it leaves me nevertheless in a continuing indecision about my practical relationship to Christianity that becomes, if anything, more loaded than it was before. Churches are rich sources of archetypal experience, but overwhelmingly still filled with people who externalise and absolutise that experience. Sometimes I encounter the wish to worship God, but any such worship seems destined to be solitary. Perhaps one day there will be a Jungian church led by people who explicitly acknowledge the archetypal  nature of God at every turn: but until that day, it is only churches empty of people that I, perversely, find attractive, and where it seems possible to explore Jungian interpretations of what one encounters in solitude.

 

Link to the first blog in this series: The Jungian Middle Way

Picture: Mandala from Jung’s Red Book: Joanna Penn CCA2.0

Jung’s Red Book 1: The Jungian Middle Way

Books, Great Thinkers, Jung, Myth, Religion, spirituality

I have just finished reading Jung’s Red Book, which is an extraordinary text. Only published since 2009, the Red Book is Jung’s personal record of a series of self-induced visions, which mainly took place between 1913 and 1917, together with Jung’s reflections and interpretations of them, which he continued to refine until about 1930. This book takes us to the core of the personal experience on which Jung drew more circumspectly in his psychological works. That experience is centrally one of integration, as Jung confronts the archetypal expressions of different aspects of himself – sometimes in reverence, sometimes in anger, but always with acceptance of his own multiplicity. The record of that experience often reads like a prophetic or religious text, and the religious language is full-throated and unabashed, but at the same time clearly placed in the framework of an ‘inner’ psychological rather than an ‘outer’ supernatural process.Jung's Red Book

I had at first thought to write a conventional review of the book, but on further consideration decided that this was not the best way of writing about it. For one thing, it is not a philosophical or scientific text: there is no argument in it. It is the record of an experience, and the main way I can assess that experience is by trying to share some of what I experienced as an incredible richness when reading it. It’s not so much a book that can be readily judged right or wrong in itself in any given respect, as one that you can engage in and find useful to a given degree in deepening your experiential understanding of integration and the Middle Way. So I don’t want to review it so much as share some readings of it. My plan is, instead, to write a series of blogs on different aspects of it. It is full of rich quotations, but ones that will nevertheless probably need interpretation.

This will be very much my reading of the Red Book rather than the one I would necessarily expect you to have. Obviously the meaning of any text varies with the reader, but this one most markedly so. I do think some readings are more helpful than others, but it is also easy to understand how such a rich and ambiguous text can give rise to very different readings. Jung’s own words reinforce such an impression:

There is only one way and that is your way.

You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way. (p.125)

I do not interpret such words in terms of relativism. Some paths can be better for us than others, but Jung warns us against the assumption that we know what the best path is for someone else, or that we should assume someone else’s path is best for us. Jung was born in the nineteenth century, the son of a Swiss pastor, and it is unlikely that his path will very closely resemble most other people’s today. Nevertheless we can learn a good deal from it.

For the rest of this first blog I want to explore the central question of how far the Red Book reflects the Middle Way. I think the answer, obviously based on my own reading, is ‘quite closely’, though not without some caveats. The most important reason that it is about the Middle Way is that the whole text is about a process of integration (even though Jung does not use the word ‘integration’), and one cannot integrate two opposed beliefs or desires if one sees them in absolute terms. In a way the whole book wrestles with the question ‘What do God, the soul, the devil, the dead etc. mean when they are not absolute’? Simply by being recognised as aspects of the psyche subject to integration, they can no longer be absolute.

But I was also gratified to find several explicit mentions of the Middle Way in the text, all of which suggest that the Middle Way was central to Jung’s thinking, even if he did not develop it formally or philosophically in his other writings. There are three explicit mentions, plus of course a great many other points where the Middle Way is implicit.

The first explicit mention is very much in terms of the Christian Middle Way:

Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way: whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine. (p.289)

Here Christ is in a symbolic role as mediator between the absoluteness of the idea of God and the embodied situation of humans. Elsewhere Jung stresses the story of Christ ‘harrowing hell’ between his crucifixion and resurrection, to indicate the ways he symbolically unites heaven and hell, the heights and depths with human experience. If we can hold ideals in mind as meaningful at the same time as addressing the ordinary conditions of human life, we can internalise this symbolic Christ.

The second mention occurs in Jung’s conversation with a librarian, who represents the analytically-bound, scholarly, left-hemisphere-dominant aspect of Jung. Jung tries to moderate some of the librarian’s Nietzschean anti-Christian approach:

“…Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor.” [Jung said]

“I really had no idea that you take such a mediating position.” [The librarian replied]

“Neither did I – my position is not entirely clear to me. If I mediate, I certainly mediate in a very peculiar manner.”

This suggests to me that, although Jung assumes the Middle Way a lot of the time, he never actually developed it explicitly in the way he is using it here (to avoid both extremes of a polarised intellectual debate). Perhaps he was afraid that public development of it was incompatible with the public reputation he wanted to cultivate as a scientist. But Jung’s corpus of writings is large and I have certainly not read it all, so I’d be happy to hear from anyone who’s come across a more explicit development of the Middle Way in Jung elsewhere.

The third explicit mention occurs in a discussion of ‘stretched hanging’ which Jung had experienced in a vision, hanging between heaven and hell. Again, Christ is the symbol of it.

To deliver the men of his time from the stretched hanging, Christ effectively took this torment upon himself and taught them “Be crafty like serpents and guileless like doves.” For craftiness counsels against chaos, and guilelessness veils its terrible aspect. Thus men could take the safe middle path, hedged both upward and downward.

But the dead of the Above and the Below mounted, and their demands grew ever louder. And both the noble and the wicked rose up again and , unaware, broke the law of the mediator. They flung open doors both above and below. They drew many after them to higher and lower madness, thereby sowing confusion and preparing the way that is to come. (p. 357)

The madness of the above here could be identified with what Buddhists call eternalism: the belief in positive absolutes such as God’s absolute existence and absolute command. The madness of the below, on the other hand, would involve nihilism, or the rejection of any moral judgement being better than another. The Middle Way requires craftiness not only in avoiding chaos, but also in avoiding rigid order, but guilelessness in making a straightforward response to the Middle Way itself.

‘The way that is to come’ here may be a reference to a recurring theme in the Red Book, which is the First World War (hardly surprising, since Jung’s visions either anticipated it or occurred during it). Jung clearly blames the ideological madness of the First World War on this kind of polarisation, and was well aware that Christians fought on both sides in absolute belief that God was on their side. Jung also writes elsewhere that “What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect” (p.266), very much suggesting his moral commitment to avoiding this polarisation.

However, before leaving you with too unequivocal an impression of Jung’s relationship with the Middle Way, I must also mention some caveats. Obviously it is one thing to use the term ‘middle way’, and another to develop and apply a strong understanding of it which avoids any kind of appropriation by creeping metaphysical assumptions. As I’ve already mentioned, my impression so far is that although Jung’s understanding of integration was both profound and pioneering, its relationship to the Middle Way in his thinking was probably sketchier. The Red Book is also a very ambiguous text, which makes it pretty wide open to metaphysical readings, and I’m sure that the metaphysicians will already have been at work on it. In the comments section of my earlier ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ blog post on Jung, I have already had a discussion with ‘Gregory Wonderwheel’ who wanted to interpret Jung metaphysically.

It also has to be said that some of Jung’s own tendencies encourage such metaphysical readings. He is pretty incautious with the terms he uses throughout – basically he will take almost any terms from traditional religion (including ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘redemption’ and ‘revelation’) and trust entirely that the context will safeguard such language against absolutizing interpretation. For this reason, beware of apparently absolutizing Jung quotes taken out of context. Near the end of the book, too, his ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’ seem to come close to offering us a metaphysical scheme (of the ‘Pleroma’, which is nothing and everything) based on that of Gnosticism, most of which seems to bear no relationship to any practical application. At the same time, these sermons are hedged around with the kind of disavowals that seem familiar from Buddhism (‘It is fruitless to think about the Pleroma’ – p.510). As with Emptiness talk in Buddhism, I often just want to shout back in frustration, ‘Well, why are you thinking about it then?’ Whether Jung’s gnostic cosmology is metaphysical or not is entirely a matter of contextual judgement, but it certainly threatens to turn into a diversion if one wants to use the Red Book as a text supportive of the Middle Way.

Such caveats should not be off-putting on balance. The Red Book is overwhelmingly experiential in most of its course, and there is a great deal more to say about it – for example, about the riches of its approach to God, to evil, to gender, to death, to Christianity, to the eucharist, to pride and humility, to power, to the individual and the group, to embodiment, to language, and to symbols. But all of these other themes will have to wait for other blogs.

Psychic energy

Brain, Middle Way Philosophy, Psychology, , ,

I’ve been asked from time to time about psychic energy, which is an underlying concept that can be used to help understand repression, and thus helps to explain how absolutizing beliefs can create repression. The principle of ‘conservation of psychic energy’ in Jung, which I mentioned in Migglism, has particularly raised a few doubtful questions, so I thought it was worth a fuller discussion.

Psychic energy can be seen from one point of view as just physical energy in the brain. All our mental activity has to be driven by energy, in the form of glucose. When we start running out of glucose in the brain we tend to feel  what psychologists call ‘ego depletion’ – it becomes harder to do anything effortful, like breaking a habit or understanding a new concept. Energy in the brain obviously comes from food processed by the body, and is part of a wider system of energy. Obviously in those wider terms, energy is not ‘conserved’ within the brain: it could be used up by the brain and turn into heat or motion which go elsewhere, without necessarily being replenished.Brain_power aboutmodafinil-com

What Jung meant by ‘psychic energy’, however, is a particular subset of that wider physical energy. It’s the energy of our desires for particular goals, whether actual or potential. Those desires may take a conscious and immediate form where physical energy seems to be motivating us. Thus, for example, we may feel sexual desire for someone else, which motivates us towards sexual behaviour. However we can also feel that desire without acting on it, being aware that it is socially inappropriate to do so. Or we may not even be aware of the ways that such a desire is influencing us.

Such desires can gradually change their focus (for example, I might sublimate sexual desire into art). Desire, after all, is just energy, and energy can power all sorts of different processes. What we can’t do, however much we may desire it, is to instantaneously block psychic energy. If we do try to block it, it is liable to take a different form and re-emerge, just as when you try to dam the energy of a stream. It may flow somewhere else, or it may eventually flow around the blockage towards its original destination. The key thing I take from Jung’s idea of the ‘conservation of psychic energy’ is just that insight: that energy cannot be removed from the psyche at will – it has to go somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear.

The attempt to block psychic energy could take two possible forms. In repression, we really believe that we can stop the flow of energy for ever just by blocking it, and we don’t even consider the question of where that energy is going to go. In suppression, however, we recognise that the energy is there, even if we don’t want it to flow in a particular direction at the moment. Thus, if we start feeling sexual desire towards someone inappropriate, that doesn’t mean we have to try to eliminate the desire. Rather we can block it temporarily, remain aware of it, and send it somewhere else in the longer term. Absolutisation creates repression here, taking the form of a belief that we assume can simply eliminate a desire: for example, the belief that the sexual desire is just ‘wrong’. So the practice of the Middle Way involves avoiding absolutisation by trying to maintain awareness of our energies when we find it necessary to block them.

When we repress a desire, of course we do stop being aware of it for the moment. In terms of energy, we can see this in terms of a conversion from actual to potential energy. The flow of energy in your brain has already created a synaptic channel, and that channel will still be there even if nothing is flowing down it for now. That channel will be reactivated in certain conditions that bring it back into use, and in those circumstances it will be much easier for the energy to flow down the old channel than to form a new one. The ‘potential’ energy of the repressed desire thus takes the form of greater ease for the flow of future actual energy. To be released it might just need a trickle to break through the dam of repression, but because of all that potential the trickle can become a torrent much more quickly than one would otherwise expect.

But how does physical energy relate to psychic energy? Well, I don’t think they’re ultimately distinct: they’re just different ways of experiencing and labelling the same phenomena. The psychic energy in our mental system depends on the condition of our bodies, so it could hardly be independent of the physical energy system. That’s just another respect in which ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ are not ultimate or metaphysical qualities, just different contexts for experience. The total amount of energy in the psychic system can obviously change depending on the surrounding conditions, but nevertheless, much less energy may be ‘lost’ from the psychic system than we generally expect at times when we feel depleted. Instead it’s just been ‘stored’ in potential form.

So, the ‘conservation of psychic energy’ cannot be an absolute rule, nor can it even be as clear and measurable a tendency as can be documented in the case of physical energy. I don’t think the psyche can be a completely closed system within which energy is eternally conserved. Rather than ‘conservation’ of psychic energy, perhaps it would be more precise to talk about how the psychic energy system can only change incrementally rather than suddenly or absolutely. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the ways in which energy can take unexpected potential forms in the brain, just as it can in other matter. Before the development of nuclear physics, who would have guessed that potential energy in an atom could be released by splitting it? Similarly, how can an individual guess at the unexpected energy that might be released by engaging with archetypes through love, spirituality, or art, before we experience it? We can find forms of potential energy in ourselves that we previously thought lost or impossible, and perhaps ‘potential energy’ is just a slightly less problematic term for what is often referred to as ‘the unconscious’.

Picture: ‘Brain Power’ CCA2.0 by aboutmodafinil.com

The happiness delusion

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology

Everyone wants to be happy, it seems – except that we have very little idea what that actually means. We know it’s good, whatever it is, and we associate it with whatever’s ultimately good for us – whatever that is. It’s apparently not just pleasure, but then it’s not moral good either. Perhaps at our most deluded, we think that consumer goods will make us happy – and judging by the shopping rampage likely to be going on today across much of the Western world, a lot of people do still think this. If we’re slightly less deluded, we might think that mindfulness, or creativity, or loving relationships, or a politically reformed society will make us more truly happy. But do they? Does happiness mean anything genuine in our experience at all, or is it just an endlessly manipulable word to be attached to anything we want to sell? A lot of psychological investigations of happiness depend on self-reporting of how happy people feel – but what scientific use could this possibly be if what is being reported may be largely or entirely delusory?Goethe-Schiller-Denkmal Ludwig Silvio CCSA3-0

Let’s apply a Middle Way analysis here, by identifying positive and negative extreme beliefs that can be associated with happiness, which will then hopefully help us to find more integrated experience somewhere in between. On the one hand we could believe that happiness is just what I identify with as pleasant right now. A cold beer on a hot day, or a reassuring hug, or an orgasm, or caffeine rush hitting a dopey brain – all of these can be felt as pleasant in slightly different ways. But mere pleasure does not make us sustainably happy, because the pleasure will end, and in some cases we may even have to pay a painful price for it. At the other extreme, then, we can identify happiness with permanence: the ultimate happiness of heaven, or of nirvana, or of the ultimate Communist eco-society that will mark the end of history. But these idealisations of happiness are in practice beyond our experience, and have nothing to do with happiness itself as we might experience it.

In between the belief in momentary happiness and the belief in eternal happiness is the incremental experience of degrees of happiness. In general, I’d suggest, we are happier when we are more integrated, just because integrated beliefs and desires no longer conflict with each other and are more stable, so anything that makes us happy at one time is more likely to continue. At the same time we are likely to have modified our appreciation of what makes us happy to longer-term and more sustainable experiences: for example, long-term relationships rather than just one-night flings, sustained works rather than just flashes of creativity, and actions that are broadly compatible with the good of society rather than just thrilling transgressions.

But if someone asks “Do these things make you truly happy?” there is no answer. There is also no clear answer to the question of what makes happiness different from pleasure – the degree of happiness I’m describing here might just as well be described as sustainable pleasure, or just as the fulfilment of desire. In fact the whole idea of ‘true’ happiness involves a delusion – the assumption that happiness is somehow separate from and beyond our experience of it. You don’t know in advance what is likely to make you happy, and both philosophers and psychologists have noted the ‘hedonic paradox’ – that the more closely we pursue our desires, the more the fulfilment of those desires in the form of pleasure or happiness tends to elude us.

That’s why I really don’t sign up to the happiness industry. The more people’s belief in traditional morality crumbles, the more they seem to seek alternatives in ideas of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is doomed: firstly, people don’t know what they’re seeking; secondly, the conditions around and within them keep changing, so any happiness they achieve is likely to be short-lived; and thirdly, even if they get it, we can always reasonably ask whether such happiness is a good thing. If we manage to create a bubble of happiness, isn’t that often at the expense of addressing wider conditions of suffering – like an exclusive beach resort in the middle of a third world country, or an alcoholic on a bender?

Integration seems to me a much better incremental goal to maintain than happiness. The more integrated you become, the greater the potential to address conditions, because the blockages to your understanding of the world will have been loosened, your energies more unified, and interfering conflicts (both internal and external) lessened or removed. Whatever you want, more of you needs to want it, in a more sustainable fashion. That also means that your beliefs need to be more adequate to make those fulfilments possible. The more integrated you become, the more likely you are to start moving beyond the narrow limitations of your previous obsessions: whether those are with yourself, with certain others, with possessions, or with a narrowly defined cause.

More happiness, on the whole, may well follow from that. But there are no guarantees: you cannot rely on a law of karma to ensure that your efforts will necessarily pay off. In any case, if you become more integrated, your ideas about happiness and fulfilment will probably change. The ‘happiness’ you find, if any, may be totally unexpected in nature from your present perspective.

The other Important advantage of prioritising integration rather than seeking happiness is that it removes the widespread alienation from ethics. Instead of ethics being a disregarded abstraction in the distance, the object of irrelevant social expectations or parental naggings, the pursuit of integration can also make ethics a genuine part of our experience. As our judgements become more integrated, they also become better, increasingly taking into account the conditions both of our own situation and of the wider world. Again, it does not become so through the finding of an absolute ‘true’ ethics: only from the recognition that ethics consists in an incremental improvement we can actually experience.

Happiness itself is not necessarily a delusion: just, a vague, ambiguous and uncertain element of experience. But it can very easily be absolutised, whether into momentary pleasure, ethical truth, or pseudo-scientific statistics. There’s nothing wrong with using the word as long as we take that uncertainty into account. The belief that happiness is the prime value that should be pursued, however, does seem to be a delusion of confirmation bias, in which we pursue what we think happiness is and in the process confirm to ourselves that it is worth pursuing. Happiness is just not an end in itself, but rather a potential side-effect of integration and accompanying moral development. Integration, in contrast to happiness, always offers an element of the unknown and uncertain – also entailing the possibility of pain and frustration. Intuitively, we often recognise that dwelling on happiness involves the likelihood of falsity, and it is in adversity that integration is more likely to advance. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears” said Churchill during the Second World War – a period fraught with unhappiness in most respects, but often looked back at by those who experienced it as their time of greatest fulfilment nevertheless.

Picture of Goethe and Schiller monuments by Ludwig & Silvio, CCSA3.0

Combining psychological models in the Middle Way

Brain, Middle Way Philosophy, Psychology

The range of impressive developments in psychology and neuroscience in the last few decades is astonishing, and I’m personally excited to keep discovering new ones. It is a challenge to keep an overview of them, to see how they relate to each other, how they relate to various philosophical and religious assumptions, how they relate to morality, and how they relate to practice.

The more specialised work goes on and the more academic specialists artificially limit their horizons to make progress in one area, the harder it becomes for other people to keep up with them, to synthesise and to digest the implications. But we need to try – for the results are often potentially revolutionary, amounting to a third phase of scientific development (as I have put it before) – a phase where, for the first time, uncertainty is really taken into account. So that’s what I’ve made it my business to try and do, and where I think the Middle Way as a co-ordinating model can be valuable.Human_head_and_brain_diagram PatrickLynch CCBY2-5

Let me list some of the potentially helpful psychological/ neuroscientific models that have excited me in recent years:

  1. The recognition of the brain as a network of connecting neurones of incredible complexity (trillions of connections) and astonishing plasticity throughout life, related to network theory.
  2. The cyclic process of reinforcement between cognitive models in the frontal cortex (‘new’ brain) and a process of desire or anxiety in the ‘old’ brain, leading to the entrenchment of unhelpful emotional habits – unless we can use our ‘soothing system’ to soften them. (e.g. see Paul Gilbert and Marc Lewis)
  3. Brain lateralisation: the specialised role of the left hemisphere in maintaining goals and representations, while the right hemisphere is open to new stimuli and can relate different representational models (Iain McGilchrist)
  4. Cognitive bias theory: the recognition of a whole range of particular ways that our judgements about the world can be blocked and made inadequate by faulty assumptions (Daniel Kahneman and many others)
  5. Ellen Langer’s ‘Mindfulness’: the way that making active distinctions can both energise our judgements and make them more adequate
  6. Embodied meaning: The philosophical development of an account of meaning based on the neural networks created by our bodily interaction with our environment throughout life, based on psychological and linguistic evidence (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson)
  7. The integration of reason and emotion: recent studies have found strong neurological grounds for doubting the traditional distinction (e.g. Storbeck & Clore 2008)
  8. Repression: An older model found in psychoanalysis, recognising plurality in ourselves and the potential for failing to recognise unconscious and rejected beliefs, even whilst these still have an unconscious effect on us and tend to re-emerge. The potential for integration is also recognised here when repression is overcome. (initially Freud, but also Jung and later Jungians)
  9. Archetype theory: the recognition of common patterns of symbolisation in individual experience of both repression and integration (Jung)

So how can all these fit together? I’ll try to be as brief as I can. For the sake of brevity I’ll refer to the psychological insights listed above by their numbers.

Let’s start with the Middle Way. The basic principle of the Middle Way is that our judgements are improved by avoiding absolute or metaphysical claims, whether these are positive or negative in form. That leaves us in a realm of uncertainty, provisionality, and incrementality, a messiness in the middle in which we stand a much better chance of developing more adequate beliefs and values.

Central to engaging with that messiness in the middle is the positive recognition that we are bodies, that our operation depends on brain connections (1), and that the whole meaning of the language we use depends on our bodies (6). Making this recognition is not in any way reductionist or materialist. On the contrary, it allows us to relate our theoretical models to our wider embodied experience, rather than allowing an over-dominant left hemisphere perspective (3) to maintain false certainties. The Middle Way is about understanding and changing the way we think, not finding a new total explanation.

All these psychological developments can be focused on the key point of recognising uncertainty and following through its implications. Our responses to uncertainty, and fruitless attempts to grasp certainty, are just as much emotional processes as rational ones (7). Our habitual beliefs are closely tied to our emotional needs and histories (2), and the extent of their entrenchment needs to be recognised, but there is always hope – they can also be changed (1).

The rigidification of our beliefs makes us less flexible in changing circumstances, that rigidity being associated with over-dominant left hemisphere goals and models (3). Our over-certainty makes us liable to all sorts of identifiable specific kinds of error (4), and can also make us ‘mindless’: acting automatically, alienated and demotivated (5). We remain unaware of the ways we do this (8), and the absolutised beliefs that maintain that repression can be socially maintained through unintegrated use of archetypes projected onto people, abstractions or supernatural entities (9).

But there is hope. Addicts and neurotics can and do recover, and meditation and associated practices allow us to use our soothing systems (2). We all have right hemispheres which are capable of taking a pivotal role in integrating the potentially discontinuous and absolutised beliefs of the over-dominant left hemisphere, allowing the left hemisphere to play its equally vital role with more open and balanced beliefs (3). Some aspects of cognitive biases are just part of the condition of being human, but there are also many aspects that can be worked with and improved on (4) – all the more effectively when they are not just seen as ‘irrationality’ but in a wider context. We can develop mindfulness both in Langer’s sense (5) and the more common sense through practice. Different kinds of integration can support and stimulate each other, and archetypes do not necessarily have to be used repressively (9): they can be separated from metaphysical beliefs and positively cultivated to support the integration of meaning.

You don’t necessarily have to have engaged with all these different psychological models to recognise this overall process, but each one helps to contribute to the gathering evidence. It really helps to have sampled one or two, though, and Ellen Langer and Iain McGilchrist are probably the two most impressive individual figures I’ve come across, whose work is both accessible and fascinating. Whatever psychological model you use, remember it’s not going to tell you the whole story, but it can contribute enormously. Psychology at the moment seems to me to be the leading discipline, some way ahead of any other in terms of engaging with the Middle Way, but traditional psychological assumptions can also get in the way (for example, the belief in value-neutrality in science). In the end, psychologists also need philosophers, artists, practitioners and others to provide a wider context. But nevertheless their work is providing the most exciting pointers towards the Middle Way in today’s world.