LIVING WITH LIFE IAN STRATHCARRON www.ianstrathcarron.com UNICORN PRESS LTD. 66, Charlotte Street, London, W1T 4QE ISBN 978 -1-906509-20-0 A multimedia version of this e-book is available at the iBookstore Living with Life Copyright 2012 F&J Productions Smashwords Edition © F&J Productions Ltd, POB 108, Tortola, BVI TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. WHY WE ARE THE WAY WE ARE 2. AND WHY WE’RE JUST FINE, JUST AS WE ARE 3. AND WHY THAT'S ALL WE NEED TO KNOW 4. HANDHELD AWARENESS WHY WE ARE THE WAY WE ARE The miracle that is your experience of consciousness starts with the miracle that is your life. If your parents were at least biologically typical, your mother would have been born with well over a million eggs in her ovaries and would have released about four hundred of them during her fertile years. Once a month, as the moon above waxes and wanes, down below her hormones would have combined to release a particularly ripe one of these eggs. This leisurely egg, minuscule beyond belief yet boasting twenty three of her chromosomes, had a life expectancy of a day during which time it needed to be fertilised if it was to fulfil its ultimate aim, the reproduction of her genes. Your father on the other hand would have approached the opportunity that became you from an entirely different perspective. Born without the male counterpart to the female egg, sperm, he would have spent – and may well still be spending – his longer fertile years constantly producing them by the billion. The moment you were conceived forty million of them – each one in itself a miracle of ingenuity and perseverance, carrying his twenty three chromosomes with admirable single- mindedness - would have rushed headlong towards that one waiting egg, an incredible journey – a biological steeplechase - of 18 cm that the fittest reached in under an hour. In scenes resembling a queue at an Italian ski lift the strongest sperm pushed its way to the front and burrowed into the egg, its few remaining rivals vying for position close behind. The perseverance was worthwhile; with the fittest sperm cell inside it, the egg closed its doors and devoted all its attention to nurturing the winner, egg and sperm by now a combined set of forty six chromosomes…in short time about to begin to resemble what one day will become your good self. For the next nine months the miracle continued and through a process that need not detain us here, one fine day out you pop. Those forty six chromosomes have determined your sex, your features, your shape and size, your bodily destiny, your intelligence, your intuition, your characteristics and later your ability to access two features new to you, personal and universal consciousness. Even more remarkable is that not only will you able to access this consciousness but you will be able do so knowingly – and in doing so knowingly, will realise that personal and universal consciousness are one. This knowing of the experience of consciousness brings bliss, or the famous Sanskrit formulation sat, chit, Ananda – a subject to which we will return. You are of course in these very early days absolutely helpless, totally dependent on the unconditional love of others for your very survival - and this desire for unconditional love is something that will never leave you; more than that, subconsciously it will be your guiding light throughout your life. For most of us, most of the time, in our early days this unconditional love is given freely but as the days become weeks and the weeks become months and the excitement of us wears off and the tediousness of our practicalities becomes less joyful and the responsibility of caring for us becomes more taskful, the unconditional part of the love we need dissolves – not with ill intentions – into coping love. Unconditional love would hear a baby cry and meet the baby’s needs by attending to it with a smile and as we say now tender, loving care. Coping love would hear the same cry and meet the adult’s need by attending to it with the pursed lips of resignation. The baby will have noticed and registered: love for me is now conditional, to some extent and at certain times, on me not crying. The merest hint of repression has planted its first seed; whether the seed grows or withers on the vine depends entirely on how the unwitting adult treats you thereon as she or he tries to cope with you and a demanding world at the same time. Meanwhile you have had your first inkling of what the rest of us already know: that this world ain’t perfect, that the love you crave is nearly always compromised, conditional. As the early years pass you remain helpless, dependent on love, unconditional or coping, for your very survival. You grow, you learn to toddle, you learn to read and write, you learn to mix socially. Most importantly, for your future happiness or otherwise, your ego - your sense of self – develops. Not until your body tells you years later in puberty that you are capable of survival and reproduction yourself, will you be free of dependency from those older than you and capable of giving it to those younger than you. Now this ego, that most influencing aspect of our conscious mind, that sense of self that places us at the centre of the universe and sees everything else in the universe as separate from it; how is it formed? How does it develop, benignly or otherwise? The past is the past, but can we as sentient parents do anything to stop repeating the mistakes of the past in relation to our own children or, to a lesser extent, our grandchildren? The ego is formed from two aspects, feedback from the direct experience of interacting with the world as experienced and the presumed, distorted attitudes held by others, normally parents, towards the child. The first aspect is simple enough, what gives pleasure and what doesn't, often associated with the most simple forms of behaviour, bodily or otherwise. Praise, cuddles and laughter are all of course particularly fruitful. This is all fine, the child feels loved while behaving in such a way that he or she experiences their world as love. It is the second aspect, the introjections - and more on these later - of others as they comment on the child’s behaviour that can damage this infantile and therefore highly pliable sense of self. The parents are doing this quite unknowingly and probably with the best of intentions but this criticism of the child's behaviour is taken on board by the child as a distortion. So the child bangs his tray – in that annoying way that they do. The parent wishes the child would stop but doesn’t represent their own reality by saying ‘When you bang your tray like that I feel annoyed,’ but instead pass ownership of the annoyance onto the child by saying something like, ‘Stop banging that tray you little horror!’. The child then takes on board the parent’s distortion of their position and a tiny part of the child feels he or she is not only unloved but in some sense a little horror. This can of course bring on maladjustments, a separation between the reality of what we really are and the appearance of what we were supposed to be later on in adult life. And it doesn't have to come from the ‘little horror’ side of the camp; insincere or false praise can have a similar effect. I was told by my father that although I was generally useless I was particularly good with my hands. As I grew up I clung to this introjection until it became completely obvious that I was actually worse than useless with my hands. For a while therefore I felt not only useless in general as advised, but even useless with the one thing I was supposed to not to be useless at…the sum total being 100% uselessness! This is a trivial example of no real importance but it does show how when reality clashes with the ego's view of itself that was taken on in a distorted fashion, the gap between reality and ego, self- worth and so self-love, can take a bruising. As a child that was and a parent that is, I think here I should put in a good word for parents in general. If any damage has been done I believe it is very rare that is it is done intentionally. Yes, you could say you went from being a tiny baby in a state of perfection to being the person you are now with its various discombobulations and therefore somebody must be to blame! But consider that your parents simply didn't know any better and so in a way you could say we are all victims of victims. ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad, they do not mean to - but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you,’ as Philip Larkin so famously put it. But how could they have taught you anything that they had been taught themselves? If your grandmother did not know how to love herself, let alone your mother, how could your mother possibly know how to love herself, and therefore yourself, unconditionally? Likewise, if your father was stern or unapproachable, it is safe to assume that your grandfather was equally or more stern or unapproachable. Your father too was a victim of a victim. Larkin continues: ‘But they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one another's throats.’ At least now we have a chance to start again and to do so with fresh insight into the human condition. We have at our backs the fair winds of the open love that flows naturally from this insight as well as the full tide of the good intentions that were always there. It is worth bearing in mind, with all this talk of parents and children, that we adults all have our five-year-old child still walking around inside us. In the same way that when our bodies were five years old we as good little children obediently accepted that those older than us were always telling us the truth it is important that they only hear the truth now, but this time for real. Might as well give them some love, time and respect too. As five year olds we then went on to base our life script on these early messages. There is a good chance that the way we look at life now - and as a result the way life looks back at us - will have been directly influenced by all the programming, both positive and negative which we accepted as that five-year- old child. The way we were treated then is probably - probably -pretty much the same way we treat ourselves now. If our parents were unintentionally disobliging to our inner child back then we at least have no excuse to be other than obliging to it now. ~~~ It is from now on, somewhere between the ages of five and fifteen, that the major aspects of your personality develops – or more accurately your personalities develop. The word is derived from the Latin persona, meaning mask, and our personalities are these different masks that we have learned to wear to compensate for the lack of unconditional love; or to put it another way, the masks the ego wears in order to hide its true nature from the world at large, our public face which we may have assumed either deliberately or unconsciously. You become influenced, subtly for some, grossly for others, by all these wishes other people have of you, making you the sum of other people's visions of how they want you to be in order that they may love you. If you have what society deems to be a successful personality you know how to conform to other people's visions of you and you will appear outwardly compliant; if you are judged to have an unsuccessful personality you will fail to conform to these visions and appear outwardly objectionable. Whichever prevails, the root cause of both types is the reaction to the lack of love and the corresponding attitudes and resulting behaviour to compensate for this lack. Our attitudes and behaviour are after all just the way we try to satisfy our personalities’ needs in what seems to be in front of us at an given time. Furthermore, this reality always occurs in the present and our behaviour at that moment always reflects what is in front of us now. Behaviour is not “caused" by something that happened in the past, although clearly past events will have influenced how we see the reality to which we are reacting, in other words how we are behaving. It is important to remember that we always maintain the ability to snatch the present back from the past by understanding just where our personalities came from…but we are jumping ahead of ourselves. So back to the early days of long ago: you probably had influential, older people having all these expectations of you - many of which were literally impossible to live up to - hoping that you would reveal something of themselves in you, something that in all probability you were naturally not. The inevitable failure to meet these demands created wounds, making us all to some extent what we might call the walking wounded. We may then hide the wounds under a bandage, a metaphor for the ego shoving the pain off into the id, somewhere down deep (For Freud, the id was the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. For Jung it was similar to the ‘shadow’, a depository for aspects of our psyche that the ego found unsavoury. I'm using id more in the Jungian sense. However as what we are trying to describe is, literally, indescribable any word-sound that conjures up an antithetic symbol to the ego will do.) But the wounds don’t heal, they fester and from time to time the id has its moments of sweet revenge and out they pop – probably in public and at the worst possible time. The results of our being on the receiving end of this emotional compromise or these distorted judgements are entirely unpredictable, as varied, mysterious and magical as the human psyche, but what is predictable is that you will be behaving in a way that isn't the authentic true you as against how you would have behaved had you received the unconditional love that you craved in the first place. In this way our attitudes towards life and our general behaviour become ingrained without us realising that we have somehow, mysteriously, subconsciously ingrained ourselves with these false attributes. It is not even as if we can ever discuss or even acknowledge these repressions because, naturally enough, we don't even know that they are there in the first place, being tucked away as they are in the nether regions of the id. If there is a chink of light, it is this: that the idealised, unconditional yearning with which the child is born never dies as we grow into adulthood and there will always be those for whom this yearning evolves into seeking some kind of individual or cosmic awakening. In fact it is an inborn characteristic of the human condition that this unrequited yearning for love always seeks loves and its soulmates peace and happiness - and happiness is just peace in motion. In fact underneath that, more than this; the individual psyche has a natural tendency to seek balance as well as completeness or wholeness, even if sometimes in direct contradiction to the needs of the body. In this way a conscious attitude is always balanced by an unconscious attitude, no matter what its strength, always seeking equilibrium. The unconscious has its own voice, that of the slip of the tongue, dreams and spontaneous imagery. If this unconscious is attacked or ignored it will fight back – to maintain balance - through neurosis in the mind and disease in the body. ~~~ But I digress, somewhat. Take two friends, both with “pushy parents". Every evening and weekend their two fathers will take their sons to, say, soccer training or a match and the child will soon learn that in order to receive love from the parent he has to not only participate in training but when the games come along to win them as well. Slackness in training or losing in matches brings on disapproval; keen training and match winning brings on approval. Later, when they are able to think and feel and fend for themselves, the friends may react in any number of ways; possibly one friend, seeking the never-ending road of approval, will be a compulsive winner affecting every thing that he or she touches as his subconscious seeks to satisfy the unsatisfiable father figure, while the other friend may become a sports phobic who can't even bear to watch the racing on television in case it reminds his subconscious of the father figure’s disapproval. Or it that may be that two other friends have particularly brilliant and well- respected parents. The world at large is constantly telling the children, directly or subliminally, how brilliant the parent is and each child immediately feels the pressure to live up to this expectation even if, and especially if, it leads the child into totally inauthentic behaviour. The children notice that love is forthcoming if he or she seems to behave in some way like the brilliant parent; and love is withdrawn if they behave in a way counter to the parents’ example. Again, the reaction is completely unpredictable; only the fact that there will be a reaction is predictable. [...]... of electric vehicles In this way we can say that a general instinct leads to a specific intuition and this surely is the relationship between the two: instinct refers to the most basic tools in our survival kit, flight or fight etc., whereas intuition adds a level of instantly available finesse on top of instinct and wisdom on top of finesse I saw something of this universal intuition with fish the... interact with life right now directly affects how life interacts with us in the future, and so withdrawing love from life can only mean that life will later withdraw love from us An inevitable and totally positive offshoot of the client being seen as they really are, with compassion and without judgment, is that they too will come to see themselves in the same way To love yourself is to love the world and... Intuition naturally encourages awareness of universal consciousness which underpins everything Intuition is that intangible part of ourselves which, like nature, is too profound to be described in words, which can only point towards what it might be It is a self-contained, non-contained entity, a thing-in-itself, beyond description Its own lingua franca doesn't contain words but emotions and images, ancient... year in a very remote and protected anchorage in the western Atlantic the same thing happened, this time with an accidental squirt of the bilge pump and my wife instead of mother feeding the fishes This time they circled below the slick and old bread and waited for the bread to sink before chowing down Intuition, in and of itself, has no characteristics or preferences; like the awareness in which in... what it is: the transfer of an emotionalised attitude which existed in a previous relationship which has been inappropriately, and unknowingly, transferred to me but which really has nothing to do with me and especially nothing to do with any merit I might attach to the new found affection! There is a further development on the transferring scene which I call transference plus This happens when the client... much as our fingers and toes It can be thought of as an enormous filing cabinet full of every situation, especially dangerous situation, that the human race has faced before It can be accessed immediately, instantly, in reaction to any new situation We are all, all the time, adding to this enormous database and unbeknownst sharing it with future generations Thinking in these circumstances is useless,... growing and maturing along with your other capabilities It is not normally until full adulthood that this power within us asserts itself fully and if we are open to it, it leads us not merely to survival, as is its original prime function, but also to wisdom and self-knowledge Intuition can be thought of as the personal aspect within each one of us of the universal consciousness that we all share Intuition... might lead to anti-social behaviour, if they are seen objectively and not hidden by the ego in the id or displayed with pride by the ego, then intuition will tell you that you live in a civilised world and by letting the imperfections rule your world you are spoiling the world and therefore yourself as part of it It may be unavoidable to be the walking wounded, but it’s quite another thing to knowingly... One side of the conflict will often be wistful and emotional, the other dogmatic and intellectual, an anima/animus conflict But that’s all fine, that’s just how it is; no blame, no fault During the session I will try to avoid asking any specific questions, especially leading questions, as these might prompt the client into formulating a response that they think I want to hear, a natural subconscious... people who love their bodies - imperfections and all! - find it impossible to abuse their bodies with excessive consumption And I would include criticism as part of abuse; criticising our self or others cements disgruntlement by promoting the lack of selfworth and by seeing the criticized - including yourself - as being separate from the love we should all share It's hard to imagine the number of ways . survival kit, flight or fight etc., whereas intuition adds a level of instantly available finesse on top of instinct and wisdom on top of finesse. I saw something of this universal intuition with. helping mask and spend her life helping others and being loved in return; the other girl will avoid helping others and spend her life hiding behind a mask of seclusion. It is quite possible. into seeking some kind of individual or cosmic awakening. In fact it is an inborn characteristic of the human condition that this unrequited yearning for love always seeks loves and its soulmates