Rani and Bagheera

Rani is a brown dog who lives outside my house. She is about 7 years old.

I made friends with Rani when I moved to this neighbourhood three years ago. She was scared at first, watching me warily as I made ‘tch tch tch’ sounds at her, but we were friends soon.

It is not difficult to make friends with a dog. Smile at the dog, make some inviting sounds, hold out your hand to her, offering it to be sniffed, and licked if the dog so wishes. The dog will sniff your hand, and your energy and intentions. She will understand the lack of fear and fearful aggression in you, and the presence of affection for her. If required, repeat a few more times. That should be enough to make the two of you friends.

When it rains, Rani comes to the door of my first floor house to take shelter from the rain. At times, she sleeps at night outside my door. A kind neighbour, a young man who we can call A, feeds her while I keep a bowl of water for her and other birds and animals outside my door. Another neighbour, a young woman, M, is friends with her. Rani goes scampering to M whenever she sees her.

These days, A is not in town, so M is taking care of Rani’s meals. Rani has a skin condition for which M and me are give her homeopathic medicine everyday, mixed in her food.

The reason I know Rani is about 7 years old is that A told me she came to our neighbourhood about 6 years ago, when I was not living here. Rani was a small dog at that time, not a puppy but not an adult either. She would play with a golden retriever who was the pet of A’s neighbours. Like many dogs who go large distances just for a piece of bread and a safe space where they will not be attacked, Rani had come wandering in, scared. A’s neighbours took a liking to her and started to give her food. She became friends with them and their dog.

A year later, those humans and their pet dog left this neighbourhood. At that time, A decided to feed Rani, and continues to do so now, five years later.

Rani comes across as smart and courageous. When I walk from my house to my car, which is parked about a minute’s walk away, and Rani is around, she walks with me, or rather, scampers with me. When I open the door of the car, she looks in and sniffs, as if to check if everything is alright.

She is happiest when I lift her front legs with my hands and move them left and right, as if dancing with her. Her tail moves rapidly from left to right and back as we do this. Sometimes, when I am walking, she comes scampering from behind and quickly licks my finger, or touches it with her moist nose, which is when I turn back and see it’s her. It’s a gentle kiss, a surprise.

There are people in the neighbourhood who don’t like dogs, and there have been times when dogs have been forcibly removed from this area.

I worry about Rani. She has had a traumatic past. After dark, she feels scared of strangers and barks at them. A few people complain about her. I worry that she may be removed like other dogs in the past and dropped away in a new area, where she will have to fend off other dogs and find a new source of food. Perhaps it is after one such trauma that she, separated from her mother and siblings, first came to our neighbourhood.

Every time I meet Rani, I pet her head, her back, and I ruffle her fur. As I do this, I tell her three things –

  • Never bark at any humans, whether residents or outsiders.
  • Never bite any humans, residents or outsiders.
  • Communicate to other doggies far away through your barking, but not when humans are standing around.

    This is how you will remain safe, and continue to spread your love and gifts.

Those who like dogs are few in number. We are able to take care of these dogs’ needs for food and water, at times reflective collars so that they can be seen by car drivers in the night, at times jackets for the winter.

We aren’t however, able to ensure that these dogs will spend the rest of their lives without being hurt by others who are far more in number. The dogs and their carers, therefore, have to accept the insecurity of these creatures’ lives.

***

Bagheera is a small black dog who lives about 30 feet away from my house, in the same lane. Rani and Bagheera are friends. Bagheera is about 2/3rds the size of Rani.

He is also about 7 years old, neighbours say, but to me he always looks like a child dog. His body is small, his tail is always curved and pointing upwards. His body is small and cute, but the look in his eyes is always very serious.

When I go close to him, he comes very seriously to me, wanting to be petted, and says an elongated, “aow waowwww”, very intently wanting to tell me just this. Sometimes I feel I am the first human who has petted him or played with him. He always scampers to me when I am walking on the street, but when I pet him for beyond a few seconds he looks at me suspiciously and steps back. Then he comes forward again, his body wiggling, his upturned tail moving playfully like a curvy antenna behind him.

He was probably a cat in his previous life. He is small, solitary, serious, curious, and confident, like a cat.

Bagheera doesn’t have one feeder like Rani. People in a few different houses leave scraps for him, and that is enough for him to get by. Unfortunately, not everyone in the buildings around which Bagheera lives is friendly to animals.

***

Who are Rani and Bagheera?

Rani and Bagheera are part of a living web of energy that we call the earth. This earth, our earth, is a part of a larger living web of energy that is the cosmos.

This energy presents itself to us as a harmony. Early in the morning, as the darkness of night subsides, Rani wakes up from her sleep and scampers down the stairs, her ears flopping as she goes. She gets out on the street and looks around, looking up at the sky, absorbing the new day that is beginning.

Bagheera is already awake, his serious eyes inspecting the light of dawn as it falls on the street and the on cars on it. Bagheera sniffs Rani and gives her a kiss under her ear. Rani moves on, continuing to scamper around her part of the neighbourhood, while Bagheera quietly watches dawn.

As the sun rises higher in the sky, they find beams of sunlight and lie down in them, taking in the life, warmth and light that the sun gives to us. They look so deeply content in this sunbath, as if the sun is giving them the love that they couldn’t get in this world of humans in the middle of which they have to live.

At the end of the day, when it is dark, they sit silently on the ground, sometimes lie down, simply being with themselves, in their bodies, taking in the silence of the night.

We imagine that Rani and Bageera are isolated beings like us, but they are not.

When they roll in the grass, when they simply sit in the moonlight, when they sniff every nook and corner, when they chase the squirrels, when they curl into themselves, shut their eyes and sleep like they have totally forgotten the world and its struggles – in all this, they are part of the living web of energy that the cosmos is. They live in tune with its elements, and in pulsate by its rhythms, if not perfectly, then far more than us humans.

The same can be said of their companions in this cosmos – the squirrels and the pigeons that come to my balcony, the trees in the park and the koels that sit on their branches.

The only isolated beings are human beings. They are the ones who usually drop out of this web, of which these dogs are only the form that comes closest to us, to sniff us, lick us, bark at us.

Our responses to these animals are thus not at all responses to dogs, they are responses to that entire web of energy that emanates through them. We can take a position of isolation and fear towards the cosmos as it meets us in these creatures, or we can take a position of connection and compassion.

***


Possibly the most significant event in the 300,000 year old history of humans on the earth is taking place in front of our eyes, even if we do not register it. The following is a partial description of the structure of this event.

The upturning of the earth’s surface layer and the burning away of matter dug out to construct our industrial civilisation; the destruction of forests and green areas to replace them with concrete structures in which you and I live; the consequent heating up of the earth; the melting of ice on the north and south poles leading to a gradual submerging of coastal cities and countries; the changes in temperature affecting the speed and directions of the wind, causing cyclones and tornados; the same changes in temperature causing excess rainfall as the oceans heat up and evaporate; as also forest fires when forests become a hot box; as also melting glaciers and subsequent floods.

These, to scientists, seem to be inevitable events that will occur with increasing frequency by the middle of the 21st century. These will lead to inevitable shortages of food, drinkable water and livable space, thus causing illness and violent competition for resources.

As this unfolds over the coming decades, by the end of it, we may not have a human species left at all, or if we do, the civilisation it inhabits will not look anything like the industrial, urban civilisation which put into motion the above chain of events, and which houses, or seeks to house, 8 billion people today. When a few thousand humans decided to move out of Africa, 60,000 years ago, they didn’t know that one day they will be 8 billion in number, and would have colonised the earth, having destroyed natural habitats wherever they went, and with exceeding speed in the last three hundred years.

Yet, in what Amitav Ghosh calls the ‘The Great Derangement’, a very, very small proportion of the human population is concerned about any of this. None of this is the topic of elections, which determine our collective policies in the technological, economic and social spheres. Very few of us experience this as a daily concern in our everyday, ordinary lives. If there are human beings in the 22nd century, says Ghosh, they will look back at us – inhabitants of the 21st, pre-occupied with war, nationalism, religion, ‘development’, or just trying to secure an income for our future – and consider us deranged.

***

What do Rani and Bagheera have to do with all this?

Think of the experience of commuting in a city. You enter a car, and drive it on the roads of the city, with several other such cars around you. There are horns. There are traffic jams where you restlessly wait for the cars to move so you can reach home and step out of this little box of steel and glass. Around you are concrete roads, concrete buildings. You play music to feel less suffocated and constricted in this experience. Or worse, your taxi driver plays music which grates on your ears.

Somewhere in the human journey, something has gone deeply wrong.

In this commute, there is an absence of any intimate relationship with the earth on which we travel, with the trees that grow around us, with the sky and its changing colours.

That web of energy that is the whole cosmos, and which presents itself to us as nature, as the sky, the trees, and as Rani, Bagheera and their friends, finds little place here.

The capacity to take a deep breath, to feel an aching longing for the vast expanses of the silent dark night sky, to soak in the stillness of the moon, to playfully tune into the restless joy of a puppy who waits at home for you – these give way to a focus on getting to one’s destination as quickly as possible, to putting one’s energies into sitting on a desk eight hours a day for forty years, to earn enough money to survive when one is too old to earn, and when back home, to scrolling on social media until something can grab one’s attention.

The construction of a civilisation that rests on such an experience is the result of a particular consciousness.

The deconstruction of it, which is what is required to avert climate collapse, if at all averting it is possible anymore, will require a change in consciousness.

The new consciousness would be one that experiences an intimate relationship with nature. It will be one that has stepped away from this place of isolation, faced the pain that made it harden up into isolation in the first place, and experience the cosmos as a living web of energy.

Only then can we see that the earth is not a resource to be dug out, but a sacred expression of a sacred cosmos, to be lived in harmony with. Trees are not resources to be cut and turned into buildings and paper, and the land cleared for new apartment complexes. They are an expression of the earth, and they form a living network which is home to pigeons, squirrels, ants and thousands of other creatures whose consent we do not have to deface the earth. The sparrow and the squirrel have as much right to this earth as we do.

The new consciousness is not about an emotional attachment to a particular dog or a particular park or beach. It means experiencing oneself in the innocence, curiosity, love that that dog experiences; of feeling the green gentleness of the trees in the park and the evening light that falls on them, softly caressing them in its golden hues; of experiencing in oneself, un-separated, the vastness of the ocean, its deep silence, and yet, its rhythmic sounds.

 Rani and Bagheera have not lost this. We have.

***

The conditions on earth do not allow for all 8 billion human beings to live as healthy, soulful, connected persons. The struggle for resources is too strong, the fight for survival too traumatic. Populated by struggling and traumatised people, the institutions of traditional society, once sacred acts renewed every moment, are falling apart – marriage, parenthood, community, school. Most of us, through these institutions, have experienced trauma, often having repressed and forgotten it in order to continue living.

We thus experience a mental health epidemic that is only a sign that the old consciousness is crashing, and a new one hatching out. Our symptoms may have a personal story, being linked to our childhood, our adolescence, our parents and teachers. But they are also only sub-plots that deepen a larger, epic story, which is that of an old consciousness having created decaying institutions, and now collapsing.

As the symbol of Noah’s Ark tells us, only a few will try to live with a new consciousness, in a way that is loving, harmonious, and in surrender to the immensity of sacred cosmos as it meets us in every animal and every plant.

How will this pan out in our lifetime, and the lifetime of our children? Will the new consciousness create a new civilisation, or will it be wiped away in this destruction, so that the earth can start from scratch again? No human being knows. Even the most far-sighted of us are humbled by this mystery.  

What we do know is that this is the story of humanity.

Like the Mahabharata, which is also the story of humanity. At the end of that story, the earth is scorched and destroyed from the violence wrecked upon it and on each other by human beings. The trees are burnt, the waters poisoned, the earth rendered dry and infertile. The air is all smoke. Only a few humans are left. The five brothers who are the story’s central protagonists walk to the peak of the highest mountains, hoping to be able to leave the earth for a better place, heaven. On the way, one by one, four of them fall and die, leaving only one – Yudhishthira.

Through the journey, a black dog has faithfully accompanied Yudhishthira. As man and dog reach the highest peak, the deities ask Yudhishthira to leave the dog behind so that Yudhishthira can enter heaven. Yudhishthira says he wants to enter heaven with his dog. The gods do not allow this, saying that the dog is a lowly animal, dirty and wild. Yudhishthira says, “I will not leave my dog friend behind, he has been my loving companion through this long journey.” While the dog looks on anxiously at the conversation that is deciding his fate, Yudhishthira refuses to enter heaven and leave his friend alone on this destroyed, brutalised earth, where he may not survive.

There is a twist in the tale. The gods are impressed. They tell Yudhishthira that the they were testing him to see if, after all the pain he has seen, he still has an alive heart beating in his chest. They welcome both Yudhishthira and his dog friend into heaven.

Yudhishthira chooses compassion over personal security and ambition. The opposite choice is what has led to the creation of industrial civilisation.

Yudhishthira, war-worn, tired, wounded, but having experienced remorse and learnt his lessons, is new consciousness.

In such ways, the sacred traditions of humanity have long told us of the event that is unfolding today in front of our eyes.

Rani, Bagheera and their friends are witnesses to it, and we are protagonists. Rani and Bagheera, to use another ancient symbol, from a parable by Jesus, never walked away from home like the prodigal son who forgets his roots, never lost their way and fell into bad times and bad habits, and thus, they will never need to return. They suffer our civilisation, which makes their lives so precarious, but their hearts are pure, their conscience clear, their souls loving and connected – something all of us have to gradually work towards.

They are thus, both our teachers, and also our comrades, in our transition to new consciousness.

Psychotherapy as a political practice


For any idea to mean something substantial for a human being, it must be rooted in a deeply and honestly felt emotional experience in the present moment.

Else, the idea is only an intellectual entity that doesn’t touch anything at the core of us, even if it may provide us the gratification of exercising our cognitive functions and engaging in debates. Often, we are willing to exchange this gratification for the quieter movements of the heart.

Let us, therefore, so that we avoid doing this, start this communication between us with an experiential exercise.

Bring to your mind an image of your mother. Do not think of your mother as she actually is, but think of her, or any other figure in your life, in whose presence you feel a maternal experience – a sense of tenderness, quietness, a gentle smudging of a feeling of ‘I and the other’ giving way to a feeling of ‘us’, a feeling that we are together in what we are experiencing, and that I am not alone. Let each of these words evoke an emotional ripple in you before you move on to the next paragraph. Only then will this communication be experiential.

For a child, this is the role that the mother is called upon to play, so that the foundation of the child’s life is built on an ability to feel safe and trust the other.

Now, imagine a child of about 5 years of age, who has gone out to play, and while playing, has fallen down and bruised his knee. He comes home with a bleeding knee. What would be a truly maternal response to such a situation? It would be to clean and dress the wound, and attend to the child’s inner states. Perhaps it is the first time he has been wounded to this degree. Perhaps he feels anxious at the site of blood. Perhaps he doubts if it is a good idea to go out to play. There is anxiety, and there is a struggle to understand this experience that he has just had.

The mother may sit down with him, put her arm around him, and ask him what he is thinking. Through touch and through the tone of her voice, primarily, and secondarily through the content of what she says, she may convey to the child that she is with him, she can feel how he feels, and in feeling together with him his anxiety, she can also convey some of her calmness to him.

A bit later, she may tell him of how, once, when she was a child, she got hurt similarly, but she was met with love and care, and it did not deter her from exploring the world. She may sit quietly with him and gently move her hand on his hair, simply affirming their presence together. After a while, she may hum a song.

***

However, in real life, there are also other kinds of mothers.

The mother may be shocked at the sight of the wound and rush to clean and dress it, but be unable to feel calm in the face of this incident. Worse, she may convey to the child that this wound is shocking, and make him feel scared about going out to play. Her demeanour may convey being unsettled, shaken, rather than stillness.

Other mothers may not have any explicit emotional reaction, and mechanically clean and dress the wound, as if cleaning a piece of furniture in the house, and then carry on with their day’s activities. At best such a mother may dispassionately tell the child that the incident is not a matter of concern, he need not worry, before she moves her attention to the chores at hand.

In either of these two cases, the child is left by himself to handle this new, unpleasant, scary experience.

We have had figures in our lives who may have shades of all the above kind of mothers.

***

In the depth psychotherapy process, the therapist’s foundational role is to create a space for the client where they feel that their inner anxiety – which they themselves may not always have a clear sense of – can be brought out, felt, acknowledged, and allowed to subsist, rather than offered solutions to.

There are other roles to be played by the therapist – such as confronting the client with his defences which keep his inner anxiety shut away in a dark corner of his psyche, or helping him reflect on his life choices and their implications – but these roles are always structures that can touch the client deeply only on the foundation of the maternal experience.

***

Coming to the title of this post, imagine being in the position of the child who returns home wounded, who does happen to have an empathic, engaging mother, such as the one described in the first example above.

What are the emotions this child is experiencing in the presence of this mother? He may feel anxiety about his wound, but he also feels that his anxiety is being heard. He may feel vulnerable in front of the big world and the many mishaps that can happen there, but he also feels that this vulnerability need not be shut down because it is terrifying. Rather, this vulnerability seems to be something the mother is interested in, and is tenderly engaging with, by asking about it, and by sharing her own stories of vulnerability. The honest sharing of this vulnerability can become the ground for deeper relationship between mother and son.

Immerse yourself in what living feels like to this child. Perhaps he feels that I am vulnerable, but that is OK, because I have hope that this vulnerability can be contained and healed. Perhaps he feels that there are difficulties in my life, but I trust that there are persons and forces who will be with me – and ultimately, that this universe is a friendly place to be in, despite the suffering it brings.

There is pain and apprehension, but there is openness to these, and there is a sense of relatedness to an other, rather than being isolated in one’s unsurmountable difficulties.

Imagine that the child got this wound because, apparently, he was made to trip by another child, because of which he fell and got wounded. This child, in this particular emotional space with the mother, is very unlikely to hate the playmate and plot revenge against him when he meets him the next day. This child feels safe, held, taken care of by the universe, and there is no need to act out of hate and revenge.

Now, imagine the child of the other kinds of mothers. If the mother has simply performed the function of giving first-aid to the child, and then continued cooking food, the child feels lost regarding the emotional experience that accompanies the wound. He is anxious about the sight of blood, and about the thought that the wound could have been much worse. He is disoriented about whether he should continue to go out to play or not.

He doesn’t know what to do about this anxiety. But he has seen his parents, or people on TV, or his friends employ their physical or verbal power to shut down others. He sees there is a way to feel strong and confident rather than anxious and disoriented – through the exercise of power over another. He may then tell himself – tomorrow I will throw a stone at that boy who made me fall.

If these maternal experiences are chronic, these two children will, when they grow up, become two different kind of political beings. They will vote for different kind of parties. They will be drawn to different kind of representatives. They will have a different relationship with the nation and with the idea of community.

The first will be drawn to politics where there is attention to the pain of the weakest people in our society. He will prefer representatives who listen, who try to understand. His sense of nation and community will not find much place for an enemy to be vanquished, but it will find priority for those who are left behind in the race of life.

The second will be drawn to politics where there is a clear enemy against who I must prepare, else I am in danger. He will resonate with leaders who exude a sense of power, pride, victory. His sense of nation and community will be one that is perpetually in opposition to other nations and communities.

If one is honestly in touch with one’s vulnerability, rather than resorting to blaming others and being in a fight or flight response to them, it is not possible to hate.

***

Across the world, we see that political positions can be placed on a spectrum between these two ends. The first is a politics of compassion, the second the politics of hate.

The first was most palpable in the first half and middle of the 20th century, inspiring non-violent movements of decolonisation and racial equality.

The second has also been part of human life for long. It is emergent today, and has been for many decades. Hindu versus Muslim. Muslim versus others. Meitei versus Kuki. Sinhala versus Tamil. Native versus immigrant, and more.

The biggest crisis of all, climate change, seems to emerge from such a politics of us versus the other, in which us is the human species and nature the other.

***

There are many reasons for the rise of the politics of hate. These are historical, economic, sociological. However, there is, foundationally, another reason. The politics of hate arises from a crisis of consciousness.

It arises from the fact that too few of us have had mothers of the first kind. Too few of us, in our most formative years, have experienced spaces where pain that may be too much for us can be shared by another, where the overwhelming nature of this pain is lessened because we have a friend who is able to feel this pain along with us, so that we do not have to strive to feel powerful by finding someone to vanquish.

Even today, as adults, too few of us have friends, who, if we say that we feel a sorrow since this morning about the death of a loved one who died a few months ago, will respond by saying, “come, let’s talk about it.” Who will want to listen to this sorrow, to what precisely feels lost by this death, to what it is in us that the deceased touched deeply.

We have more friends who will not know what to say, because their own unprocessed pains are triggered. Or, who will say, “it’s alright, you will feel better in some time,” or “be strong, try to keep busy”, or “think of your responsibilities for x, y or z”, or will offer to take us out for a nice drive so that we can stop feeling our pain temporarily.

Hence, we look for positions that make us feel powerful, rather than positions that touch our hearts into vulnerability and sharing. In this lookout, we are drawn to the politics of power, victory, pride, which is a relief from an inner helplessness.

Such psychological attitudes exist across the spectrum of parties and ideologies, rather than being neatly deposited in one party, although they may be more common in one party than another. A person can believe in the most democratic principles, but assert them with hate and violence towards those who don’t.

Psychotherapy, then, when practiced in a certain way, addresses the crisis of consciousness from which the politics of power, victory and pride emerges.

Real change, in this sense, can only take place in the consciousness of the individual, from who it may radiate outward to family, community, nation, and the human species. Intellectual and moral debates often create echo chambers of their own, if not rooted in, and continuously going back to, this aspect of personal change, which is a change in emotional states before it is a change in ideas.

At every moment, each of us is sending into the collective consciousness of human beings emotions related to hate and violence, or emotions of peace, human connection, kindness. Each moment, our emotional states, and how we work with them, are shaping the collective emotional state of humankind.

Therefore, the impact of one human being trying to radically change his own self, even though small, is larger than what is palpable on a material level. Every time I let go of my tendency to hate someone, to think of someone as an ‘other’, an adversary, who I must be afraid of and prepare to fight or flee – every time I do this, I am making a transition away from the space of hate. I am doing this not just for myself but for all human beings. This other, who I move away from disliking, may be an ordinary person in my office rather than a politician, but the effect of my transition on collective consciousness is one of taking us all one step back from hate in all its forms.

This inner work is not limited to psychotherapy. In fact, many forms of therapy tend to do quite the opposite. This work is a possibility everywhere there is human interaction, or even inter-species interaction – parenting, teaching, friendship, art, and more.

***

The corollary of this line of thought is that healing and hope lie in circles of people who come together to listen and share. It is this, rather than existing social institutions of family, school, religious community, political party or nation, that holds most potential to bring a change in consciousness. The existing institutions are valuable, on this dimension of life, to the extent that they are formed like listening circles, rather than us-versus-them groups.

The art of listening


Unlike what some may consider a quality of effective writing, the purpose of this post is not to grab your attention.

Often what our attention is offered exists on a spectrum from boring to grabbing, and the more it veers to the latter, the better it is considered. This applies to the gripping film, the grabbing social media post, the ‘unputdownable’ book, and to much else.

What is implicit here is a sense of self that is divided. It wants to be free, but the film grips it. It wants to scroll down, but the Facebook post grabs it. It wants to put down that book and sleep for the night, but it’s arm doesn’t work. This is seen as normative.

Let us shift from the implicit imagination of the self as divided, and of its attention as being like a mosquito, perpetually moving from one place to another, taking something for itself, and in need of being grabbed, if not eliminated.

We can, alternatively, imagine attention more as a tree that is simply present to all there is around it, including the mosquitoes around, and the self as the earth from which the tree grows – vast, deep, layered, part of an infinite cosmos.

Therefore, perhaps, as you read, you could be aware of the non-attention grabbing aspects of what you read. And you could be aware of all that is in your vast self, pleasant or unpleasant.

***

In Hindustani classical music, the relationship between the musician – let’s say the sarod player – and the piece of music to be played – the raaga – is that the musician is simply present, in all her joy and sorrow, to the raaga as it exists in her consciousness. Without trying to suppress her emotions, or grasp at them, she allows this sense of the raaga to manifest in the way her fingers move on the strings of her instrument, so that the raaga is audible outwardly.

In doing so, two things may happen.

One, the musician’s own emotions start to flow, rather than be frozen. They may reach stronger intensities, or lesser ones, and deeper emotions, so far hidden beneath, may emerge. Anger may give way to sorrow, sorrow may give way to longing, longing to quietness.

Two, the particular effect of the raaga itself may make the musician feel new emotions. While she may have been feeling a heavy sorrow when she started, the raaga may introduce a tenderness into the inner atmosphere.

Eventually, every raaga, in lesser or greater degree, carries a sense of peace, or as some classical musicians would say, shanta rasa – the ’emotion’ for the lack of a better word, of peace – which is the last of the emotions, and the goal of all other emotions that play out in a work of art.

In essence, as in every art form, the musician’s work here is to listen deeply to the subliminal form of the piece of art in her own consciousness and translate it to an outward reality, in this case the sounds on the strings of her instrument.

In therapy, the therapist does the same. In place of the raaga, here, it is the consciousness of the person in front of him that he listens to, and in place of playing strings, he is translating what he is listening to into the words, facial expressions and gestures he uses to express what he hears.

To the extent that this happens, both therapist and client experience what the classical musician is meant to experience. There is a flow of emotions, certain emotions become amplified, others emerge from beneath the emotions that were initially prominent, and by the time listening has been practised in a sustained enough way, there is a sense of peace.

How long it takes to reach this peace – in every session and over the longer duration of the musical and therapeutic journeys – depends on how out of tune the persons on the journeys have been to the ground of consciousness, from which both sound and emotions emerge.

Being out of tune with the ground of one’s consciousness is to be a self at war with itself, and the life of war is a life of anxiety alternating with attempts at the control of anxiety – also known in clinical language as symptoms, particularly when they reach particularly intense and socially unconventional forms.

There may be many conventional forms of control which never get recognised as symptoms by the medicalised word of psychotherapy, just as shared illusions don’t, until the times change.

***

There are other forms of music, such as those that distract you enough to not have to feel the agitation and suffocation of driving on a crowded road in a city.

And there are other forms of therapy – that attach you in a sustained enough way to emotions and behaviours that take you away from your original anguish.

These forms of music are different from classical music, just as therapies using affirmations, rewards, punishments, rational talk, encouragement, deliberated re-channeling of energies are different from depth psychotherapy.

***

Having said this, let us practice some listening now.

Bring your attention to the room you are in. What is the light like there, in its colour, texture, temperature. Your eyes absorb the light and help you know the answer. Your skin senses the temperature of the air in this space. Within your body, the breath makes your chest rise and fall.

In addition to these sensations, there are emotions. You may feel a sense of calm. Or you may be feeling bored, restless. You may feel sorrow, or a quiet joy.

You may feel anxious and note an impulse to control that anxiety by thinking about something else, or by forming an intellectual opinion about what you are reading, rather than staying with the emotionally felt reality of it.

If you are simply listening, you will note this impulse but not get blown away by it.

In addressing these queries and responding to these statements above, you are bringing your attention to both what is outside the self and within it.

The more this attention is simple, unhurried, uninterested in grabbing a particular aspect of the field of your consciousness, the more it is effecting a listening process.

As this is practised over a few minutes, emotions and sensations will get into a flow, you will become more intimately aware of them, their intensities will rise and fall, new emotions and sensations will emerge.

When you have stayed here for, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, you will be in touch with a deeper sense of peace, having listened to yourself intimately.

Listening is the verb for that, for which, the noun is intimate presence.

***

Listening, therefore, is very simple.

Simple, however, may not mean easy if we are habituated to complexities. If we are habituated to using our attention in a way that suppresses certain emotions and grabs others, and does the same with physical sensations, then this complexity will make the simplest thing in the world – listening – feel like the most arduous task.

If we find ourselves in such a position – and many of us, perhaps the majority, are born into a world where the dominant culture in family, society, media is such – we may need another person to listen to us, week after week, month after month, until we can undo some of our complicated habits of attention and be able to simply listen.

On this journey, we may also pick up our own practices of listening, depending on our skills and interests – such as playing music, painting, writing, going for a walk, yoga, sitting with our baby in our lap, stroking our cat, caressing our lover’s body and dozens of other things that, when practised as listening, invite us to be an alive, awake human being, as we were all meant to be.

***

If you have read this post so far and therefore, listened to its message, thank you for that, and I hope it has been valuable to you in some way.

The mystery of human relationship

This article was originally posted on this blog on 25 October 2021. It was lost because of a technical error, and hence I am posting it again.

Kirti is a 51-year old woman. She sits on the sofa, looking forward, towards you.

She is fair, thin, with curly hair. Her eyes and face reveal a tenseness, as if they are perpetually in motion, jittery, unsettled. As if she doesn’t experience, perhaps has rarely experienced, the quiet warmth of a mother’s embrace that makes the child feel, “all is fine, the universe is a friendly place.” The shaken-ness rarely gives way to stillness and peace.  

Kirti is also remarkably transparent. Even when quiet, she cannot hide her anxiety. She cannot hide her deep wish that someone would love her, someone would make her feel safe and protect her from the threatening anxiety that subliminally never leaves her. In her guileless, mask-less being, Kirti has preserved the innocent wish of the child to trust and be taken in the refuge of the other.

While Kirti looks at your face, searching for signs of safety and trustworthiness, you also see that she is a woman with some convictions about life. As she speaks, you see that she has thought about society, politics, culture. Her education and work have facilitated thinking through and giving words to these matters. Despite her fragility, and her hope for a protective warmth, here is a woman with strong convictions, aware of the dynamics of the world around her.

Those convictions perhaps do not provide her with a personal sense of security and peace, even if they give her social being an anchor, a compass, to navigate the world with. Their intellectuality cannot be a replacement for the warmth of human touch, and the intimacy of a human voice truly voicing your own feelings.

All of this – her basic anxiety, her childlike transparence, her wish to live by what is good and what is right – continually flow through Kirti as she sits there, talking, being silent. The eyes are a vehicle for this, the face is a vehicle for this, the voice, the body, the words chosen, all convey these qualities, incessantly, as if a stream is flowing outwards from a covered source. ‘This’, is the ever-alive, perennially pulsating set of impressions that reach out to us that we call another human being.

***

When I sit in front of Kirti and listen to her, there are various possibilities that can become actual. I may listen in for that which I can make sense of, that which fits into my knowledge of psychological disorders and defences, that which can allow me to say something that will make both of us feel secure and productive. But all of ‘that’, is simply in my mind, a remnant of past reading, thinking, experiencing.

I can also make a simple, full act of attention. In a full act of attention to the other, the knowledge of the past is peripheral, if at all present.

Behind all this knowledge of disorders and defences, there is a witnessing self that looks not only at the person in front of me, but at my own thoughts, emotions, sensations. It is possible to respond from this witnessing self, to convey its stillness, its intimacy, its vastness, in one’s words and expressions.  

The Jewish mystic and philosopher Martin Buber, in his book I and You, writes of his relationship with the moon. He steps out in the quietness of the night, and looks at the moon, in stillness and silence. This still, silent looking, uncrowded by knowledge from the past, brings the moon alive. All his life, he says, he has looked at the moon. But tonight, as he looks with a full act of attention, uncrowded by thoughts and implicit beliefs about the moon, the moon seems to look back. The moon comes alive, as a living, pulsating reality with which the seer is in relationship. It is a You to an I, rather than simply a thing that is looked at and used for one’s benefit. It allows the universe to be an alive, magical space, an unfoldment, rather than merely a continuing explosion of gases and rocks, on one of which we coincidentally happen to have been born.

In a simple, yet full, act of attention, a human being truly becomes a You to us. What they offer – whether it gives us something we seek or not – is irrelevant at this layer of relatedness. What is truly significant is who they are. It is not relevant whether Kirti has moderate depression, or she suffers from generalised anxiety, or she shows glimpses of bordelinity of psychic structure. These are simply vestiges of knowledge from the therapist’s past.

What matters is the personhood of Kirti. Her personhood is the fact that she is an expression of life, an emergence from silence, of streams of living that include fear, hope, and faith. These living streams, in a simple act of attention, can be felt together with her. One can experience, emotionally, what it is like to be Kirti.

For Martin Buber, this is the mystery at the heart of human existence, which comes alive in a relationship where one brings a full act of attention to another being.

This is a mystery, because beneath all these layers of the human presence is a simple silence, a pure witness from which these streams of emotion and thought are emerging. To attend to the layered emergence of the other human being is to fully participate in the relationship and allow the mystery of life to unfold. To fix one’s attention upon one part of this layered emergence is to allow the knowledge of the past to take over the unfolding of this mystery.

***

Martin Buber’s writings have been studied by psychotherapists of the humanistic, existential and gestalt orientations to deeply understand what a human encounter means. In this perspective, the experiences that are more conventionally called ‘mental illness’, are the result of a person’s sustained inability to experience this full encounter with one’s own self, and with the other.

For Kirti, who is now in middle-age, human intimacy has been a dream, only intermittently fulfilled. Relationships have become chores and role plays. Difficult partners have left her feeling incapable of being loved in body and soul. Her whole life, on hindsight, feels like a hole runs through it, an absence of a voice that could voice her own emotions, and of a touch whose warmth could reach through the porosity of her being and bring her to communion and peace.

As she grows older and her body changes, she feels that it might be too late now, that she cannot hope for love in the future as optimistically as she did when she was fifteen years younger. Years and decades of loneliness emerge as waves of warmth welling up in the chest and moistness in the eyes, in response to which she only wants to curl up, withdraw from the world, and remain in bed, and never get up.

In this withdrawal and dimming of her consciousness, the enormity of her sorrow becomes less, for to be half asleep, dull, means to feel less of the devastating sorrow that pulsates in one when one is going about the everyday business of life. Hence, in her attempt to dim the intensity of her sorrow, Kirti becomes depressed – lacking energy, lacking hope and desire, not wishing to get out of bed, not taking care of her needs but letting herself whither away.

It is not sorrow that causes depression, but the attempt of the person, often encouraged by society, to not meet the sorrow in its fullness, to regard it as something less than an organic expression of life, an essential aspect of what it means to be a human being.  

Kirti does not wish that life unfolds in her, that she feels all emotions to their fullest. It is too much. Kirti has stepped into a freeze.

***

The therapist can bring a simple act of attention into his interaction with Kirti. This means a bare presence, where he is not using past knowledge to label, dissect, and micro-label Kirti’s words, life, behaviour. Rather, he is simply attentive, not only to the words spoken – if any are spoken – but to the eyes, the face, the energy of the person. To the quality of energy between us. To the emotions that colour the contours of this space. There is no impulse to label or to change, but a simple observation coupled with a caring presence that is careful to not stretch too far the boundaries of how much emotion the other is willing to feel.

It is not always possible to make a full act of attention. But one can always come back to the simple awareness in oneself, and try again. The practices of self-inquiry, meditation, therapy and similar processes can allow this to happen more.

The analytical gaze arising from past knowledge reveals a fixed person, with particular characteristics that can be labelled and manipulated for purposes deemed productive and useful. In contrast, the act of simple attention reveals a perpetual unfoldment of layers and layers of being, starting from a deep, vast silence to the most explicitly conveyed anxieties and concerns, to an underlying, subliminal desire hinted at, barely.

This simple act of attention allows for the unfoldment which has frozen to resume. It allows Kirti to re-experience her sorrow, and slowly, conversation after conversation, accept it, integrate it into who she allows herself to be, and then transmute it into hope, longing and constructive action.

The philosopher J. Krishnamurti often spoke of the enormity of sorrow. Sorrow, whenever it brings its presence to the threshold of our lives, brings with it an enormity. To allow this sorrow to come into our lives, to not block it away and fall into dysfunction, but slowly, gently, embrace it as the unfolding of existence in us, is to enlarge our being. It is to realise that we are far vaster than we have so far felt, and beneath all the power of painful emotions, is a vast peace from which we can act, in sensitivity and beauty.

A relationship that attends to this unfolding of sorrow in us, and of other forms of pain, helps us expand our capacity to live in this way.

Living in the mystery of life is a choice one can make, every moment. To be alienated from this mystery brings disorder and loss of meaning.

Everyday life

As you begin to read this post, let us start with a small exercise.

Bring your attention to the quality of light on the screen, which is generated by an electrical process.

Now, bring your attention to the quality of light in the room you are in. This may also be created by electricity, or it may be light from outdoors. Notice the difference. Is one of them warmer, more still, than the other?

Allow your thoughts to now go to the light outdoors.

If it is daytime, what is your relationship with the sun and its light, with its yellow and orange colours? Do these colours evoke an emotional resonance in you. Perhaps the warmth of this light, its ability to penetrate deeply into the nooks and crevices of matter, illuminating and warming it, resonates with something in you.

If it is night, what is your relationship with the silent darkness of the sky, which extends infinitely outwards, without end. Do you share the calmness, the receptive emptiness of this space, where even the slightest of lights can glow and be seen in their fullness.

From early in our life, we are trained to recognise, categorise, then reject or accept what we experience – that is, to subject our bare perceptions to these cognitive processes that become second nature to us. Is it, in contrast, possible to un-entangle from these processes and bring a bare, simple attention to what physical reality truly is – an attention that is not overpowered by recognising, categorising, judging?

Can you read the words in this post in this way?

***

Depth psychotherapists consider the self as the factor that determines the meaningfulness of one’s life and the health of one’s emotions.

If my sense of self is narrow and isolated – that is, if it allows only a few experiences in the flow of life to be felt and accepted; and if its general sense of other people is that one needs to be wary of them until proven otherwise – then both my mental health and my sense of meaning would be very limited.

With a sense of self that is broad, receptive of the other, and capable of opening to further vastness, my inner life will be a more healthy and meaningful one.

The process of depth psychotherapy is a journey of the slow expansion of the self, by unfolding its various layers and creating space in it for painful emotional experiences which have been pushed away from consciousness since the time we were small, until now.

While the therapist and the client walk on this journey together, there is another journey that the client is called to walk on by himself. This is the journey of how he spends his time outside therapy.

Do the old defences gather strength, coagulate and bring back the narrow self? Or is there a way to continue to live from an expanded sense of self.

In this post I try to sketch a portrait of what it means to live in harmony with life around us, and how this harmony is both the effect of and further facilitative of the expansion of the self that one experiences in therapy.

***

In the ordinariness of everyday life, there is a rhythm. It is not a rhythm made by human beings and their minds, but by realities far vaster than us.

Light is the most immediate expression of this rhythm. Every day, at a certain time, the darkness of the night gives way to light, as the sky transitions from being black to dark blue, and gradually light blue, with spaces of white. In the evenings, the light follows the same journey of transition in the other direction.

Light is not simply colour, but also mood.

Every morning, I stand in the balcony of my house and take in the light. It is soft, joyous, full of hope. It illuminates the green of the grass and the trees as if bringing them to life after deep rest. The squirrels have been awake for a little while, and are now moving into action. They scratch their heads and necks with their hindlegs, grooming themselves, and looking around for seeds to eat or new spaces to leap into and chase each other in.

As the day proceeds, the bright yellow of the sun radiates to us. It touches us, inviting us to radiate to the things we touch and the people we meet with our particular talents. For me, this means the work of listening and creating spaces of reflection upon emotions. For others, it may mean writing, teaching, making music, or building a computer programme that will help others.

The cosmos, thus, speaks to us in the language of light. It is for us to respond, or to be exclusively preoccupied with the human-made world – with the things and people in one’s particular corner of the universe.

***

In the evenings I walk in the forest, slowly absorbing the golden light before sunset, light which is like the gentle embrace of someone who loves you. The light feels like a beautiful blessing for all creatures on earth, blessing us equally and fully, reminding us of our companionship in the journey of life, as children of the same earth. The birds are taking their last flight for the day, and settling into their high branches to rest for the night.

Filmmakers call this time the ‘golden hour’, and some beautiful sequences of love, nature, tenderness in cinema have been shot at this time of the day.

By the time I am home from the walk, it is dark. The silence of the dark night is intensely present, despite the sights and sounds of the city.

As the night deepens, this silence becomes more profoundly vast, as if the quietening down of the human world is inviting the entire cosmos, which is a sea of silences, to come and touch us. This is time to be still, to receive the expanses of the universe rather than to be lost in activity. It is time to receive all that is beautiful, in human beings and in their creations in music, literature, film.

Living like this, we see that time is simply the movement of the cosmos, which is most present to us through the sky above us. And time has moods which we can be in harmony with, or out of harmony with. These moods can be expansive, like the sunlight, or receptive, like the silences of the night, or contemplative of deeper realities, like the light in the evening and at dawn.

***

The classical music of India is based on transitioning from our narrow, self-occupied selves into a communion with the mood of a particular time. The bhairav is a raga for early morning, and recreates that time of the day, as bihag, the raga for late night does for that time. There are ragas of afternoons, early evenings, and late evenings.

There is a raga for the mood of the time when the rains are about to arrive but haven’t yet, another one for when it rains heavily. There are ragas for spring, for the scorching summer, and for autumn.

Sound, thus, becomes a bridge to the moods of the cosmos, as expressed in time, and the practice of music becomes a practice of letting go of the narrow self, towards a self that resonates with the vastness of the realities being sung of.

The craft of singing, thus, like all authentic crafts, becomes, essentially, an increasingly refined practice of self-surrender – very different from other, more popular forms of music.

***

When I was a child, as for most of us, the rhythms of life were determined by human-made structures. My parents woke me up early in the morning and hurriedly got me ready to catch the school bus.

One woke up because one had to go to school, and didn’t want to be scolded by parents or teachers. One did not wake up because light was spreading across our part of the earth and we felt called to a similar awakeness and activity on our part.

One learnt to live as an isolated human being, out of touch with the cosmos, someone who controls time for his own security, rather than lives harmoniously with time as the simple movement of nature.

Such a life is a life of anxiety and struggle. It is a relationship with time where one is mastering time, using it as much as possible for one’s benefit, rather than living in harmony with time.

***

To transition from a life of isolation to a life that is in harmony with the rhythms of the cosmos is an act of listening. Listening, not just with the ears, but with mind, heart, body, to what the sky unfolds this moment.

There aren’t any formulas for how to do this, just as one cannot reduce to a formula love for another human being.

However, when pointed out, one can see a fact that one may not be seeing before. Once seen deeply – that is, without the automatic processes of recognition, categorisation and judging – one can go back to it through remembrance, until it becomes part of one’s nature.

In the beginning of this post, we worked with our attention to attend to the light outside. Let us do that a bit more now.

If it is daytime, take a look through your window. Light always carries a stillness with it, the plants move a little bit more in the breeze, the little squirrels and birds even more.

Human beings are usually the most restless, having created a civilisation where they physically move much faster than what their body is meant for, and at other times, where their minds are scarcely still in the flood of images, messages and tasks in their life. Are you aware of this spectrum of stillness and movement that encompasses the whole of the natural world?

If it is dark, it is time to be quiet. Darkness is not simply an absence of light, but a colour in itself, with its own mood of silence and receptivity. Are you with the silence of the night, or does the mind have a world of its own that does not engage with the universe out there?

***

To pause, to ask oneself who one is, and where one stands in the vastness of reality, and to answer, not from the intellect but from the heart and the body, is the way of harmony.

To live in harmony, one needs to see the small things of life in the perspective of the larger ones. Our work, our relationships, our banter and play, our stillness find deep roots in our way of life when experienced within the larger sense of the moods of time.

When experienced through an expanded self, emotional and physical pain are meaningful and carry the possibility of personal change.

Emotions of sorrow, anxiety, anger are ripples in the lake that emerge and die, rather than events which shake up the self.

From a narrow self, we rarely allow ourselves to be soaked in the enormity of sorrow. When we live from an expansive self, sorrow can be sat with, felt, and released, through tears and without them, leaving behind a calm appreciation of what is lost, and a flame of desire to guide us forward towards a life of meaning.

Anxiety can be courageously felt in its fullness, and in its fire, allowed to transform the self into a sense of being alive and vast, rather than contracted and small.

Anger can be fully felt, and the energy it blesses us with conserved and harnessed towards meaningful, sustained changes in life, rather than impulsively blowing up in a fight.

***

The practical implication of such a relationship with nature is an organisation of one’s daily activities.

The brightness of the sun in the day encourages the life of work, commitment to certain goals.

The silences of the night, its infinite darkness, call for a life of rest and leisure.

The two times of intense transition – when night gives way to day and when day gives way to night – are particularly powerful in their moods, and lend themselves to coming home to meaning, introspection, and contemplation. These are times when the transience of material phenomena can be deeply felt.

At the same time, for each of us, there is a different relationship to these colours and moods of nature. It matters less what the precise activities are that we do at certain times of the day, and more that we do them with a sense of communion with nature.

Many of us know of nights when a particular mood, idea, task took over us and made us work passionately for it. Often, the silence of the night is a fertile place for new thoughts to emerge, for the stagnation of the conscious mind to give way to the churning up of the unconscious.

***

In more practical terms, it may help to make an approximation of how many hours a day one spends on work that expresses one’s commitments, gifts, energies.

And how many hours a day one spends in true leisure, enriching ourselves by deeply receiving another human being, or a work of music, literature, or nature. Too often, we are unable to do justice to our leisure time, whiling it away in superficially moving from one video to another, one forward to the next, one social media post to the one after it. The deep enrichment of leisure gets replaced by the thrills of entertainment.

Is one’s life like a land where the sun shines for 14 or 16 hours a day and it is harshly hot and parched? Or is one’s life like a land where there is little light and activity, but things remain dark and inert for the most part?

The capacity for real, meaningful work and the capacity for leisure are, usually, deeply interconnected. Work where one selflessly offers one’s energies to a craft is possible only for a self that also has the capacity to be still, open, and receptive at other times. A self that is anxious and narrow can easily turn work to unending drudgery, and leisure to a meaningless, inattentive floating from one thing to another.

The harmony of intense, selfless work and receptive, enriching leisure thus descends into boredom in work, waiting for the day to end, and a flippant engagement with things of leisure.

Unlike animals and birds, most of us in the modern work spend the majority of our waking hours on work, professional or domestic, hence tilting this balance in favour of activity rather than leisure and rest. That concomitant to this is a pervasive sense of anxiety, therefore, is understandable.

What are the priorities in your work time? As a therapist, most of my work is about listening to other people, but there are secondary engagements like the discussion of one’s work with colleagues, and sharing, in writing, the nature of one’s work.

A homemaker may spend much of his time in honing the art of cooking, but some time may also be spent on both the aesthetics of the home, and the basic organisation of things.

It may help to note down what one’s work time and leisure are being spent on, and consciously reflect on whether this is the most meaningful way of spending one’s time, or if some things are better let go of, and others included more.

It also helps to learn a practice through which you can consciously cultivate a relationship with your self.

Go for a walk in nature and see if you would like to attend to the light and its moods in the way described here. As you walk, allow your emotions and thoughts to flow through your mind, like scenery on a train journey. Do not walk in order to complete a distance or reach a certain pulse rate, but walk as a spontaneous expression of the body you are blessed with, just as the birds and animals you see on your walk express their bodies – flying, sitting, singing, scampering, playing with each other.

Or learn to sit by yourself and gently observe your breathing, while allowing all thoughts and emotions to be present. This video, a guided meditation on the breath, can be a helpful starting point.

Such a practice gives one a sense of what the self is really like for us. Is it narrow, struggling, alert? Or is it in an absorbing contact with things around it, allow them to come in, be seen, responded to in fullness. The observation itself slowly allows for an expansion of the self.

Such practices are, at times, best done when the light is transitioning, that is, at dawn and dusk, but they may also be done at any other time that one finds suitable.

These practices may also be helpful when one is overwhelmed by emotions, thus creating little ‘holidays’ in the day where one steps back from what one is doing and rests in the self, with all its thoughts and emotions.

***

In these ways and similar ones, we can bring a seemingly amorphous sense of light and its moods into a very practical presence in our lives, linking it to various hours of the day and the activities we do there, observing any excesses and imbalances that may exist, and consciously choosing what is to be meaningfully included and what is better left out.

Only in this consciousness of one’s relationship with time can a true sense of individuality come alive, because one is no longer floating with the momentum of a wheel set into motion by others, such as the child made to go to school.

In this way, harmony is not an abstract idea or evanescent state of mind but a real, practical, living way of life.

***

The Taoist way of life is based on a perception of harmony with the cosmos, like all religious traditions that have their roots in a pre-historic, nature-oriented experience. In contrast, the construction of a self that is isolated from the rhythms of life within and outside oneself is the way of disharmony with the Tao, whose only results, the teachings say, will be alienation and suffering.

The Tao holds within it contrasting energies, of rising and falling, of activity and rest, and in the simple yet subtle balance of these, one is not carried away by one set of experiences, but can see them in a larger perspective of reality.

Those who live in the Tao, rather than in one of its limited expressions, live with truth, and are not afraid of death. They are rooted in an inner reality that is connected to life beyond their immediate concerns, which will end when they die.

To our modern, rational, non-intuitive minds, such language is often un-relatable, or idealised into something far from our ordinary lives. When listened to from the simplicity of the heart, however, it speaks of a daily experience, something which is in reach of all of us.

Space

Let us undertake an inquiry into the spaces we inhabit.

Take a look at the space you are sitting in. Look at the walls, if you are indoors. Look at their adamantine quality – how strong, impermeable they are. See how they enclose you from the space outside.

See the light that comes in from the window, how different it is from the light that comes into your space from the screen on which you read this article.

Pause, let the mind rest, and absorb the nuances of the space that you are in.

The more still you feel inside, the more deeply you can perceive the qualities of this space.

The more your mind is racing with thoughts, the more you will feel that these descriptions are simply information, not particularly useful.

When we feel still inside, our perception of space, in all its sensations and emotions, is layered. We are always absorbing more and more.

When we are not still, our perception of space is of its most surface layer, and the mind wants to use it like an object.

***

The walls and the light create our space.

Space is not something in itself, it is created by that which exists in it.

Thus, even an empty room has deep qualities, for it is always formed by light, and by the structures that enclose it and exist within it.

What is the space in your room like?

Does the room have empty space, so it can draw in stillness and peace. Or is it filled up, with objects, colours, all of which lay a claim on that space?

Are the objects in the room in a harmony with each other, in the way they are placed, in their colours, shapes and sizes?

***


The space we are in shapes our consciousness, and our consciousness shapes that space.

Crowded spaces and chattering minds go together. Space consciously kept sparse can have a calming effect, it can bring us back to ourselves.

Over the millennia, the space that is our earth has become excessively crowded by man and his activities, which is perhaps a reflection of the inner states of human beings.

The sky is calm and gentle, while on earth, in an ordinary neighbourhood in a city, or a bustling market, there is the cramped chaos of activity.

***

We create space through our body.


How do you sit, and how do you move in your space? Are you hurried and tense, or are you in touch with yourself, with the desires, vulnerabilities of your body as you move about?

The quality of the space in our cities depends on the way those moving through it on foot, and on vehicles traverse through the city.

In turn, the quality of this space shapes the consciousness of us all who live here.

Every moment, the contours of the space we live in are being chiselled by our movements.


***

In my mid-20s, I spent a week in the monastery of a Christian order where the monks deeply valued silence.

Certain number of hours in the day were devoted to silent living, while working, resting, meditating, or doing whatever one was to do at that time. If the monks needed to communicate to each other, they would use sign language, or go quietly into a corner to speak a few words. At other hours, they could speak freely, but still preferred the quietness of the contemplative life.

People from all over the country would visit the monastery to nourish themselves in its peaceful atmosphere and carry back some of that peace to their everyday lives.

The spaces of that monastery were deeply calm.

Farmland was spread out around the buildings. In the centre of the monastery was the chapel, where the monks would gather every few hours, leaving their work, for a quiet prayer, before dispersing again.

The design of the monastery, therefore, was one of the buildings and land radiating outwards from the chapel. The movement of the human beings living there was similar, the chapel being the centre of their lives, to which they would return every few hours, and then spread out again to complete their tasks – working on the farm, working in the kitchen, studying in the library, resting.   


The chapel had white walls, which were largely bare. It was sparsely furnished. At one end, there was a large, simple cross. Ample sunlight poured in, in the shape of beams, through the walls on the sides. There was no ornamentation in colour, sculpture, or paintings that is so commonly associated with the churches of the middle ages.

The chapel was simplicity embodied.

***

Our mental health is intricately linked to the space we live in.

Often, therapy is about talking and analysing our thoughts. But we are not merely bundles of thoughts, even if at times it may feel so.

When we are small children, we need a maternal presence with who we can feel a sense of union; who can absorb all the difficult emotions that accompany growing up, and offer us a space to experience them, share them, and who can respond to them with tenderness. When the mother is healthy, she is a quietly absorbing, soothing, life-giving presence.

Then, the atmosphere of the home becomes an extended mother. We long to go back to those walls, those chairs and beds, those smells, because they carry the soothing quality of the mother.

Unfortunately, all too often, the mother and the atmosphere of the home are unable to carry these qualities, and carry other, isolating, fear-giving qualities.

***

In the 1920s in Japan, a form of therapy called Morita Therapy emerged, which emphasised living close to nature, doing simple tasks like watering the plants, feeding the birds, sweeping the garden, rising and sleeping with the changes in the shades of natural light outside. The patients would be encouraged to observe the quietness of nature, to harmonise their lives with it.

Unlike talk therapy, here, the patient was being introduced to a new way of being, an antidote to the excessively mental lives that modern human beings live.

***

Unlike us, plants and animals are deeply present to the space they are in, and they are not caught in thought patterns. They cannot be, even if they wished to.

The capacity for language, and the capacity for complex thought which is concomitant with language, is both a gift and a curse.

As a gift, it allows us to express intricacies of human experience in our words and creations, thus creating ‘civilisation’.

As a curse, it traps us in our own minds, out of touch with the space around.

Morita and other such therapeutic approaches encourage us to reach mental health through a harmony in the ways in which we sense and respond to the physical world around us. When our movements are like the movements of nature, flowing with the nature of light as it changes through day and night, the presence of trees, the activities of animals, the deep qualities of the sun and the moon, then we come to a sense of peace, because we are not intruders in the space in which life has brought us.

When we are oblivious to these, we become centres of disharmony, within and outside ourselves.

***

Thank you for reading till the end.

I hope you leave this page with an attuned sensitivity to how the space around you shapes you, and how you shape it.

How we relate to space is also how we relate to others in our lives, whether they are physically present, or whether they are present in our hearts, even if far away.

Because space is everywhere, within and outside us.




Presence and absence in the body

Dear reader,

As you sit and read this article, let us practice a few things with our bodies. Let us not be looking, for a bit, for a meaning, or an idea, that this article will propose.

Feel deeply into your body. Be aware of how your lungs fill up when they take in fresh air, and then contract when they release air.

You are aware of the tactile sensation of the lungs expanding and contracting. This awareness is not of a visual image of the lungs, or a smell or taste or sound of the lungs, but of the sense of touch, as it is experienced in the lungs. The expansion and contraction of the lungs is felt in the same, tactile way, as you may feel the expansion and contraction of your fingers when you close your hand and then release it.

When the lungs release the breath and contract, finally, there is a pause, until the intelligence of the body makes them expand again to inhale. This pause may be short, or long, and that usually depends on how relaxed you feel at the moment.

Now become aware of the sensation on the surface of your eyes. It is moist and soft, which allows your eyelids to slide down and slide up smoothly. Once again, the tactile sensation of the body is what our awareness is on.

The world opens up to us through these eyes, and we not only take in the universe but also give ourselves to it, in the softness of our eyes, or their hardness, their alertness.

***

As we practice the above two activities, we are anchoring ourselves in a bodily awareness of life as we experience it.

We are not creating anything in our minds. We are not imagining a divine figure on who to meditate, we are not trying to execute a spiritual idea that we have been told about, we are not analysing our behaviour and needling the reasons for it. We are simply dipping our attention into what is already there – this body, these eyes, this pair of lungs.

This is presence.

***

Absence, conversely, requires us to forget about what is here – our body, our eyes, our lungs – and grasp at what has been made by the mind.

When I was a child, I would have to sit all day in my class in school and focus on what the teacher wrote on the black board. If I didn’t, I risked being noticed by the teacher and scolded. Sometimes, punished. So I became afraid of feeling into the sleepiness in my eyes from the boredom of school, the tension in my lungs from inhaling indoor air in a crowded classroom, the contraction in my spine from sitting for long periods rather than playing outside. As long as these sensations were not intense and unbearable, life was a matter of living away from them, focusing on what would help me stay safe in the class.

We often are still like that. From presence, we go into absence, when trying to do our work, when walking in the crowded marketplace, perhaps even when making love.

In the forest I walk in, many walkers seem to be focused on the idea in their mind that they must complete a certain distance, rather than being present to themselves and to the trees and birds and animals around.

Presence, then, is presence to the body, to its very tactile experience as a physical entity from which we live in this world. It is a presence to our face and the way it is held by our muscles, to our eyes, to our spine as the centre of the whole body, and more.

It is also presence to the sound the squirrel makes in the balcony as one reads this article on the screen, as it is presence to the colour of the leaves on the trees, and the curious gaze in the eyes of the dog who sits by the path you walk on. It is presence to the shifting shades of light as afternoon passes, evening sets in, and the golden light of the setting sun falls on our bodies, as on the bodies of the nature around us.

***

Once again, let us practice more. Bring your attention to your eyes, to their moistness, softness, their depth – as they emerge out from a deep space in you. Do the eyes feel fixed, wired, hard; or do they feel fluid, moving, tender? Do they fixate on a particular spot, or are they gently, openly aware of the entire field of vision from which light reaches them?

Our relationship to our emotions changes when we are present in the body. We can experience what life is making us experience, even if it is painful. Anxiety can be stayed with, as can be restlessness and frustration. Slowly, these give way to a compassionate, open way of being towards both self and other.

But when the child has to focus on the black board and keep track of the teacher’s writing, his inner anxiety cannot be stayed with. His fear that last week’s scolding may repeat itself has to be acted on, by going away from the fear and the body, to the black board. There will never be, in that state, a compassion that the child feels towards his own fatigue at having to concentrate all day rather than play, relax, love.

Over time, the tendency of moving away from presence into absence, from soft openness to anxious avoidance, from receptivity to a chronic goal-directedness, create a false personality structure that is built on anxiety and defences against it. It can only be undone slowly, bit by bit, by the practice of presence.

There is no deep presence that is not a presence in the body.

***

The simplicity of presence can be elusive.

When couched in analysis, or in philosophical ideas about consciousness, the idea of presence leads to absence, for it gives us something to grasp and chase. When all such ideas are dropped, presence is here, and it is bodily.

A body in which we are present is sensitive to the bodies of other human and non-human beings around us, including what we may consider inanimate things. It acts in harmony with all these forms of life, in appreciation of their beauty and the life that oozes out through them.

It is perhaps not capable of cruelty.

Connecting in an over-connected world

As you look at these words, you have probably scrolled down here from somewhere else, and may be on your way to scroll further ahead to another set of words. Or perhaps a click has opened up this window for you, and the mind is partly edging towards where to go next.

I request you to pause for a few moments and imagine.

Imagine holding a baby in your arms.

Imagine how you look at his face, his eyes. Feel the touch of his hands. This new being has come into this world. Life, as it begins, in its most primary stage, yet to take full form, invites us to attend powerfully. To be present.

There probably isn’t a line of babies to scroll from into this baby, and another line after this baby waiting. There is just you and him.

Perhaps in your imagination, you can also see if the baby’s being conveys an emotion. Is he calm and happy, or is he uncomfortable and anxious.

Now come back to this screen, these words. In a world where so much of our communication is through screens, and through words on screens, it can be difficult to be deeply present to the other, as they convey themselves to us through their face and voice, or through their words.

We are more connected than ever, we have an unending list of posts, e-mails, messages to read and reply to. Yet, it is difficult to be deeply present to any of them.

Often, the options offered for a response – like, love, ‘emojis’, along with a count of the number of people who have responded – all diminish our presence to the other rather than amplify it.

Yet, we itch to connect, and thus go back to this virtual world, scroll, read, respond, perhaps never to satisfaction.

Technology, often, has us, rather than us having it.

***

Coming back to the baby – when you pay attention, you see his eyes and take in his gaze.

You hear the sounds he makes.

You feel his soft touch.

You feel his body, you know if he is still, or restless.

Perhaps along with these sensations, as if riding them, is an emotional state the baby conveys to you. Perhaps he is feeling just alright, or perhaps he is a bit unsettled.

Thus, you absorb his presence.

Attention, therefore, is simply the act of being present to what is here, in you and outside you.

There are mothers and fathers who are scarcely present. The moment the baby makes a little sound of discomfort, they find the bottle and put it in his mouth. The sound goes away, the responsibility is discharged.

Connecting in an overconnected world, then, is a matter of being present in a world of absence.

When we are present to another, a world of vivid sensations opens up to our vision, hearing, touch. With them, an emotional state unfolds to us, from that person, and from ourselves.

As we are completely with this universe that is unfolding between the self and other, we are present. Because we are present, we are connected.


***

The baby whose parents were not deeply present, will not have his vulnerability attended to. In the absence of an other who is deeply present, he will need to learn to deal with his anxiety at being a small creature in a vast world by himself. Inevitably, he will deal with it by suppression, to begin with.

The degree to which we suppress our pain chronically is the degree to which our mental health suffers.

***

Now, attend to how your lungs take in the air around you.

Attend to the colour of the page on which you read this text.

Attend to the light in your room, light that comes in from the sky, and how it feels different on the surface of your eyes than the light from your screen.

Attend to your emotional state.

Perhaps you are more present now than you were when you began to read this post.

Perhaps we have made a connection.

If so, I am happy that you read the post and found it valuable.

If not, thank you still for reading, and I hope to reach you more deeply next time.

Progress in therapy, and similar journeys

The meaning of progress 

Therapy is a journey of continually expanding self-awareness – in relation to one’s own psyche, and also in relation to who one is with other persons. By practising being with emotions and sensations that emerge in us in the therapy session, we nourish our capacity to stay with uncomfortable emotions and sensations generally in life, both in our solitude and in relationships. Slowly, our ways of changing the flow of our consciousness – constituted largely by emotions and sensations – become softer, more flexible, and more responsive to the needs of the outer situation, and less determined by trauma from the past. 

To understand one’s progress in therapy would thus mean to bring quantification to what is at its heart, the most qualitative of experiences – simply being with life as it flows into us. One can take a step aside from one’s emotions and sensations and observe what one’s relationship to them is on the following dimensions, among others:

1. Openness to life experience – openness here means the capacity to simply let the raw experience of life be, rather than feel compelled change it. 

Am I open to what I experience when I wake up in the morning – what takes place in my body, and mind, or do I begin to manage it in some way? Am I open to what I see at work, and in my relationships? Am I open to experiences that come from within, perhaps from both present and past – experiences of sorrow, anxiety, anger, as much as experiences of joy, calmness, courage? 

When I go to sleep at night, am I open to my sense of who I am, the life I have lived today, or is something in me busy wishing it were otherwise, how I wish I would have less of this or more of that, planning how to change it the next day, the next year. 

A basic openness to the ground of our being gives us a sense of stability and calmness, like the roots of a plant that invisibly go deep into the earth and give the plant the ability to face storms, rather than get blown away.

At its most intense, openness to life experience brings us to a sense of wonder at life. In its deepest absence, one experiences a jittery, unsettled relationship to moment-to-moment experience. The flood of feelings that life has brought to us is felt as far too painful, and a wish to die emerges as a final solution to our pain. More often than not, one may exercise this wish to die only partially – by turning away from people and spaces outside and within that are uncomfortable, and thus ending a part of us that could have reached out and grown through those experiences. In the depths of pain, however, this wish may result in the act of suicide.  

2. Organismic trust – it is possible to live with a visceral, very basic sense of what one is called to do in life. This is not an idea, but a natural movement of the whole mind-body organism, in a particular direction, as the roots of a plant move into the earth to find water and nutrients, and its branches move to the sun, effecting an expansion of the being of the plant. One day, the plant offers flowers and fruit, as also seeds for further life. There is no analysis involved here. 

One can have a broad sense of meaning about what is meant to be the work of one’s life, and a minute sense of meaning about what one is meant to do in a particular hour in a particular conversation with a loved one, where one is a caregiver, for example. 

Do I experience my life as guided by such a basic sense of meaning, or do I find myself often lost, troubled about my uncertainty, and grappling with how I am meant to respond to life, frequently analysing my situation? 

Does meaning flow into me and through me to others, or do I struggle to figure out what is happening to me? 

At its most intense, organismic trust is experienced as a sense of calling. In its deepest absence, one feels thrown about by the forces of life, in angst and anguish. To quote from Macbeth, life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. One is marked by a sense of being tied up in knots of anxiety, anger, and sorrow. 

3. Authenticity – authenticity is the capacity to feel one’s desire in an intense and sustained way, and express it in words and actions. 

How much genuineness do I bring to how I express myself in relationships and in work? 

Do I say to people what I truly wish to say to them, or do I say what they wish to hear, or what will save the relationship from collapse? 

Am I able to express my inner world in my work, or does my work tie me into ways of being that feel unnatural to me and that I wish to break out of as early as I can? 

Does my life feel like a cage, or can my energy soar and expand in daily acts of work and love? 

At its most intense, authenticity is experienced as deep aliveness. In its greatest absence, one feels without life, without the dynamic movement of energy that living is, and thus, marked by lack of drive, an absence of sustained courage and passion to actualise our potentials in the outer world. 

4. Empathy – in my relationships, do I experience the emotions that the other experiences, as my relational partner at the moment, as much, or nearly as much as I experience my own emotions? Or do I experience the other more as a thought in my mind, while I am very aware of my own emotions? 

Are they a planet that revolves around my star, or do I see both of us as stars with light of their own that meets the other’s light? 

Am I able to stay with the emotions of the other, or do I quickly return to what I feel about the other’s emotions and wish to do about them? 

Empathy is distinct from, although at times coinciding with sympathy, which is the capacity to take the side of the other, in emotion or act, rather than actually feeling – in a full and sustained way – what the other feels, without a compulsion to change it. Empathy often leads to sympathy. However, if one prioritises sympathy over empathy, such an act may effect an end of the latter. 

At its most intense, empathy is experienced as communion, a sense of oneness with the other – be it a person, another being, or a beautiful piece of art, or nature. In its deepest absence, empathy is the fraught, anguished sense of isolation

Sympathy, without empathy, can foster a deep isolation under the appearance of togetherness. 

These are some of the indicators of psychological health, described in the work of Carl Rogers, Victor Frankl, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and others. 

There is a continuity between these qualities. 

The first relates to one’s experience of the self, the second to one’s experience of the self as a self acting in time, in the world. The third relates to the actual depth and intensity of that action when it takes place, and the fourth to the capacity of the self to see what it is that the self is touching and impacting in the world when it acts. 

The first relates essentially to the self, the fourth relates essentially to the other. The second and third exist in the in-between space between self and other, that the two create together. 

A balance between the four allows for the emergence of an actualised personality. An excessive inclination towards one usually makes its expression distorted and self-centred.

The deeper one experiences these in a sustained way, the more one is usually free of constrictions that we often place upon ourselves and others. To use a medical term if we must, the deeper one experiences these in a sustained way, the more one is free of symptoms of psychological illness. 

 

Measuring progress

If you wish to measure your progress in a process of psychological work, such as therapy, or another such process, you could consider each of the above qualities on a scale of 1 to 5, and mark where you were when you started out, and where you are at certain intervals – every three months is usually a good time to make this assessment. Most people will experience a particular quality on different points of the scale at different times, so where you put yourself on the scale is a function of which point you find yourself at most of the time. The scale can be understood as follows, when applied, for example, to openness to life experience.  

1 – most of the time, there is an absence of the quality of openness and wonder in the person’s life, and they are usually jittery, uncomfortable, with little wish to live. 

2 – more often than not, the person is unable to be open to experience, but at times, they are. 

3 – the openness is present in about half their waking time

4 – the person is usually open to experience but there are frequent phases of being closed. 

5 – by and large, the person is open to experience, with only occasional absences – this is a very unusual state for a human being at this juncture in human history. 

Secondly, if possible, find someone you trust and who has empathy, rather than either hostility or strong attachment towards you, and ask them to make this assessment for you over the last three months, or another period. 

Having made this assessment, share with your therapist or the person who is your companion in this journey, what it is that has enabled any forward movement that you see – the words, tones, and actions that create an atmosphere where this movement can take place, just as the right amount of light and moisture, and not more and not less, allow the seed to grow into a plant, the particular plant it is meant to be. 

The journey from point 1 to point 5 on the scale is the journey all of us are called to make, and the pain we experience at the bottom of the scale is, in essence, a pointer to us to find such an atmosphere that will allow it to be fully experienced and transmuted to new experiences. 

This atmosphere is usually constituted of someone bringing a genuine interest in us, a caring attention to who we are rather than a wish to change us, and an honest, humble presence of the listener, rather than striving to be what they are not. Having identified this atmosphere, seek it where you can find it, be willing to pay its cost, emotional and material.

A person who is around point 3 on these qualities should be relatively free of psychological symptoms. Unfortunately, the psychological crisis of our times is that a large proportion of us remain in the space of points 1 and 2 regarding most of these qualities. To seek therapy or another such process is a sign of health, an innate urge of the inner plant seeking light and nourishment, experiencing discontent with how things are in the world within and without.

Deep, sustained discontent is always the first step towards radical change. Momentary discontent, even if repeatedly experienced, usually finds quick solutions, and thus fails to bring light and catalysis to life. 

Growth is not easy. Apart from changing our ways, it always involves shedding off some of the chains that our environment has put on us. Else, we are merely adjusting to our chains, not growing.

 

The pace of growth

Every human being has a different starting point and a unique journey to become who they are meant to be. The pace of growth, therefore, is different for each one of us. 

There is a substantial proportion of the population that does not wish to come to therapy. This scale, therefore, is relevant only to that portion of human beings who do wish to engage with therapy, of their own initiative. 

Among them, one can see a continuum. A large number of them have experienced their early life in such a way that it has left wounds that make it extremely difficult for them, as compared to others, to stay with pain, and not suppress it. Hence, they find it much more difficult to find a moment of acceptance, catharsis and release of painful emotion that lies at the core of what it means for a human being to actually change the structure of their consciousness.   

Keeping this in mind, we can make some careful, tentative and necessarily imprecise statements about the pace of growth in therapy. 

Usually, therapy lasting less than six months does not make a deep change at the level of consciousness being addressed here. It may bring some immediate, practical changes, though, such as in the form of important insights that can make a person re-consider their choices in life, or tools that can help them manage difficult inner states to some degree. 

Short-term therapy, that is, six months to a year, should be able to bring most persons, though not all, to a stable space between numbers 2 and 3. It should also leave the person with the capacity to sustain that state and a capacity to grow slowly on one’s own, through insights one has reached about the self and through tools to practice. It can also offer them repeated glimpses of what a life in points 4 and 5 is like, through experiences of the qualities discussed above, during and after the therapy sessions. 

Long-term therapy, extending over several years, in my experience, can bring the majority of people among those who do seek therapy to a sustained space around point 3. Of these, many – perhaps half or more – can experience further growth, although the path would be much slower and with more obstacles for some than for others, given their early experiences in life and their basic psychological make-up. 

For a few, a deep interest in healing and in the contemplative life can be evoked in the heart, thus making the journey, with its varied sights that lie at different points on the scale, more valuable than the destination itself.

***

A few points to conclude. 

The psyche is as fluid and polymorphous as water. Therefore, these quantifications are innately limited in their capacity to portray a human being, even if temporarily useful for a discussion meant to bring some precision to one’s understanding of oneself over time. 

Two, these qualities can be seen in individual human beings, but they are also characteristics of a relationship between two or more human or non-human beings. The relational space in itself can be understood deeply when seen as an alive, dynamic being – an ‘us’ that comes alive when two or more persons meet, an us that is permeated by or devoid of these qualities, and also observed on a scale, similarly. This applies to all relationships, including the therapy relationship and thus, can be an indicator of the quality of that relationship. 

If you find a relationship in your life closer to the second half of the scale, that is points 3 to 5, than your individual life, engage with more depth and time with that relationship. Your relational partner there is a guide on the journey of life.

If you find a relationship in your life further from those points than you, see if you are able to engage in a soft exploration of how things can improve in the relationship. If this is not possible, you may wish to reconsider how much time and depth you wish to offer there. If your commitment to those persons is profound and meaningful, yet the relationship is unhealthy, you may wish to cultivate some detachment to them while sustaining the relationship in its depths. You may often be a caregiver in such a relationship.

Finally, let us not forget that the above qualities are not prescriptions for what one should try to be. They are simply descriptions of the direction in which one changes when one practices being with painful emotions and sensations. Usually, holding these qualities as ideals, and striving to achieve them only makes one’s inner peace worse. It also requires certain emotional violence upon one’s very valid and valuable feelings of pain and sorrow. 

Having read all this, you may like to sit with a felt sense of the four qualities, how they feel in your life, what they mean to you and your relationships. Let them dip into your consciousness, and if you have any thoughts you would like to share, I would love to hear from you.

Images of awareness

On a walk today morning, some images offered by various psychologists, spiritual teachers and artists came to mind.

Coming to awareness is like taking a walk in the forest, where two friends walk together and talk of what matters the most in their lives. The aliveness and fullness of the forest offers them a space of infinite possibility – anything new can peek out from behind the tree. It may be a sweet kitten, it may be a fiercer animal. A fresh scent may waft into one’s face as one walks along, a little body of water may provide a contrast to the green, rising trees. The infinite possibility of the forest is a mirror to the infinite possibilities in our consciousness for all kinds of emotions – joy, sorrow, peace, fear, and much more.

The image is from the writings of the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, who took many people on such walks in the forest. It emphasises the undending depths, the beauty of the inner world, as well as the spaces of fear that it is home to.

For others, the self is an island, and consciousness, the vast ocean in which this island subsists, from which it emerges, and into which, one day, it will submerge. The life span of the ocean is immeasurably large, as compared to that of this island. While the island is afloat, waves crash on its shores, sometimes softly and gently, and sometimes harshly. They bring things from the depths of the ocean – strange, beautiful creatures; plants; pebbles; debris of wrecked objects and lives; waste that has been thrown away from the island itself.

Awareness means widening the shore of the island, so that more and more things from the depths of the ocean, the source from which both the waves and the island arise, can be brought ashore, picked up, understood, appreciated. When we are unaware, we build walls on our shores, and there is a constant battle in the inner world between the waves that come to us and the walls that we hold to keep them away.

This image is from the psychoanalyst Barbara Stevens Sullivan. It deeply portrays the interplay between finitude and infinity that our lives are, and the struggles we experience as we are called upon to open up to infinity.

Barbara Sullivan works in the tradition of Carl Jung, whose autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, begins with the line – “My life is the story of the self-realisation of the unconscious.” Further in this book, Jung writes of his first impressions of Africa, where he journeyed in 1920. He writes of walking into the deep desert, and stopping at a point to rest, with a vast expanse of desert ahead of him, the wind blowing in his face. After a long while, as he rests, Jung sees a herd of black oxen, perhaps hundred or more, walking past at a distance. He is struck by this movement in a space that so far was in absolute silence and stillness. The movement seems to amplify the silence and stillness.

The oxen walk up a small sand hill, slowly, with a mature confidence and strength, looking down on the ground as they walk. Jung observes them walking for several minutes. As the herd reaches the top of the hill and is about to descend to the other side and disappear from the view, Jung sees a man sitting on top of that hill. Jung gets up and walks a little closer, to see him more clearly. It is an African man, bare chested, sitting on his haunches, silently watching the herd.

Jung writes that in that moment, he felt that the whole purpose of the landscape was fulfilled. A being who had emerged from the same earth was present. He was not merely making movements on it, but being still and looking with wonder at the earth, the animals, the sky. It was an outer symbol of the self-realisation of the unconscious, or in other words, nature becoming aware of itself, looking at itself with wonder, and learning what it is.

The image emphasises the capacity of the human being to not just think, feel, sense, but to truly realise the meaning of his experience on earth, to look with wonder and ask why he is here, and find that life offers an answer.

Jung’s contemporary, Sigmund Freud, was less contemplative, and more scientific. He spoke of self-awareness as an archaeological endeavour, where we dig deeper into the structure of the self, and unravel layers and layers that we did not know exist, and that have been there from very long ago in our lives. There may be strange artifacts we uncover, there may be times we may slip into a ditch and hurt ourselves, or get stuck, but if we continue diligently, we will find deeper understanding of who we are, how our life has reached the point it has, and what life was at earlier times, which we have partly forgotten and partly misunderstood. Unlike Jung, Freud did not travel to other civilisations, but, as if embodying this imagery, he kept scattered on his desk numerous little statuettes from ancient civilizations – Vishnu from India, Isis from Egypt, Athena from Rome, and many others.

Some days ago, a client offered me a similar image. She said therapy is like paleontology, where you find objects that you thought didn’t exist on earth, that have been here for eons, and that you slowly brush and chip at, to understand their meaning and their significance in your life.

While archaeology works with objects that can often be correlated with other objects and give us a vivid picture of ancient civilizations, paleontologists unearth fossils, which are more remote, unknown remnants of our pre-history, which remains shrouded in mystery and silence. The distinction is similar to our memories from the time our brain was capable of recording incidents in memory; and the imprint of words, actions, incidents on our psyche that occurred before this time, which we perhaps cannot put into words, but embody in how we live, love and work in the world. Sometimes, even in our current lives, these two layers exist together. In moments of deep pain and in moments of deep meaning, words elude, but our being, our face and our eyes convey what words don’t.

Another image that Freud offered was of a man riding a wild horse. The horse needs to be reined in. It is dangerous if let loose, yet it is the source of energy and strength that will allow the man to travel the journey of life and reach his chosen destination. Deepening awareness is all about understanding the impulses of the horse, controlling them, and harnessing them in in the right direction. At times, Freud would perhaps characteristically add, one needs to resign humbly to the power of the wild horse and the powerlessness of man and his rational self. The modern endeavour to control and utilise nature is exemplified in this image, as are perhaps many of our elders’ exhortations to discipline ourselves, work hard and rise beyond the obstacles life puts to us.

Almost a century later, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar suggests that perhaps it is truer, and wiser, to realise that the animal is not a wild horse but a wise elephant. The elephant knows his way, he has a long, profound memory, and he has endless strength like the horse, but is not wild. The rider is powerless, and can at best nudge the elephant slightly, and the elephant may listen if the rider has been kind and caring to it.

At times, the elephant will tear through gardens and destroy things one has built with care. Such is its nature, but for the most part, it has a deeper knowing that the rider is better off trusting, and confining himself to caring for the elephant rather than fighting a battle with it, for there he does not stand a chance. Such a battle for control will simply be an exhausting waste of the rider’s life, who has mistaken an elephant for a horse.

The image we may end with is a simple couplet from an ancient text:

Two birds, twins, sit on a tree.
One eats the fruit, the other watches.

Beyond all our eating of the fruit, the bitter tastes, the joy of eating, the hunger for more, the anguish of starvation – there is simply an observer, barely witnessing all there is. The human being is both, the actor on the stage of life, and the witness. To allow the full expression of both, to not inhibit the seeds of action, and to not forget the vast, invincible observer behind all action, who will live on, irrespective of what fruit the actions bring – that is a life lived in full awareness of the order of existence, dharma.

The couplet was written in the Rig Veda, 4000 years ago. Over the centuries, the imagery would be elaborated in the Samkhya Karika, and the philosophy in the Bhagavad Gita.

Perhaps all these images tell us that the vast, powerful world of nature is not only outside us, but also within.

The ocean, at times calm and at others, tumultous; the infinite forest; the silent desert – these are living realities in the undending expanses of our consciousness, waiting for us to discover them.

The slow, strong oxen; the wild horse; the wise elephant; the silent bird and her vibrant twin – all live within us, hoping to be embodied.

The images, often dream-like and visionary, suggest that human existence and the cosmos are inextricably interwoven, and to know deeply about oneself is to know the texture of this weave, and live in harmony with it.