Not This, Not That

February 2017

Not This, Not That   by  Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     Some years ago I was at a dance party when the night became increasingly wild and the dancers all around me were going crazy, faster and faster. I stopped. And then I began gently swaying picking the shape of phrases, not the hammer of notes.

     In recent times, with the lunacy of American politics and our own, with the growing nuttiness of conspiracy theories, with the frantic anxieties of every day living, I stop and start to reflect, apophatically, on the silences, the absences, the cracks in the pavement.

     So what is this this? Death, perhaps, perhaps not.

     I am drawn to the spaces between, to the bardos of life and death, and to a creative presence that is being present in neither this, nor that.

     I am trying to approach something that by its nature cannot be finally approached, at least, perhaps, not yet. It is an intangible something. The 13^th century mystic, Meister Eckhart was intrigued by this “not this, not that” something. He saw it as a problem of encountering the intangibility of God, for as he said, “…therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God”. In other words, he wanted to strip away from an encounter with the divine that was without preconception, without idolatry. In some ways, he wanted to dance to the essence, or suchness, of God, without giving way to some definition that obscures the nature of the divine, including the very idea of a divinity.

     Hinduism has a similar idea. In Sanskrit, the “not this, not that” is netti netti. There is a Vedic meditation around this and it is an analytical one that is meant to set aside, and set aside, and set aside ideas of Brahman, by beginning to understand what is not Brahman. Such an approach is like Eckhart’s apophatic theology.

     It is interesting that the via negativa (the negative way) is an approach sometimes employed in research in the sciences and humanities. When we intuit the presence of something that is, as yet, intangible; something we feel the existence of, it is useful to examine what is going on around the general area of that presence. Astronomers use the technique often. They’ll theorize a presence, even an absence, like a black hole, from the behaviour of heavenly bodies around it.

     I am aware of my inner conversations regarding what seems to be a sort of madness going around in our days. I seek the way of knowledge, logic and rationality because this is how I have been trained as a thinker. I am, however, intuiting some community shift, some groundswell that isn’t identified. I hold at arms length short circuited explanations for things. I do not buy into Nostradamus’ predictions, nor that of Mayan thought, nor new world orders, nor anything that smacks of lizard minds. I am a skeptic and anyway I rather like the tension of not knowing, for herein lies my creative spirit.

     Interspersed with these thoughts is what is arising in my psychotherapeutic work. A dominant theme is coming up among my various clients and that is the subject of death: death as a vector for change.

     As I’m listening to what my clients tell me of their experiences with death, I am reminded of that 1999 movie, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It’s about an assassin who studies in depth a book called Hagakure, or The Book of the Samurai. He seeks to live as though he is already dead, for the way of the warrior is death. What comes with this is fearlessness and detachment, but not a lack of compassion. And thus the way of netti netti, as I see it, is standing in the spaces of not this, not that, staying present with what is. This situated presence is what my job requires of me. Psychotherapy is a therapy of the apophatic (not this, not that); it is the holding of the space between and such a holding gives rise to deep and fundamental change.

“… all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, “Emptiness is form.” One should not think that these are two separate things.” From Hagakure.

 

Critiquing and Sorting

 January 2017

     It’s the time of  the year when old beliefs, old paint, old everything, and some new things, needs to be reassessed.  Some are still good, but some just have to go.  In the midst of this sorting activity I am mulling over the practice of NLP that is used by some hypnotists, therapists, police interviewers, and salespeople, because it sounds like it has substance. But does it?

     I feel waves of irritation and I wonder why. At the heart is the realization that NLP is a technique that resists critiquing itself and its trainers seem happy promoting it and collecting good money doing so.  Putting aside the ethics of this, that fact that it does not examine its fundamental philosophies, core beliefs, and presuppositions is, to me,  unconscionable. Everything, I think, should be examined and critiqued.

     I am aware that there is a popular anti-critique movement afoot; a movement that resists examination; thinking that “if it feels good, that’s sufficient”.  We have, though, both a heart and a mind and should use both. The “feel good” crowd often draw on an aspect of Phenomenology, the “lived experience” bit to support this uncritical thinking, but Phenomenology, on the contrary, has a very rigorous side to it. It is in fact a tool for deep critique and as such is a really good place to begin the examinations of ideas. Thus feeling irritated by something is useful.

     Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), sounds decent enough. I mean there’s the classy words of “neuro” and “programming” (we’re like computers, aren’t we), with “linguistic” thrown in to make an apparently convincing package. But take it apart, aided by what its founders Bandler and Grinder say of it, and one can discover that it lacks substance. They describe  the triad of neurology, language and programming as its basis and very broadly note the following: neurology regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we communicate with one another and our programming describes the models we have of the world and which we work by; models which can easily be changed. The programming bit suggests that we model ourselves on successful people to change how we are (a problematic subject I may explore in another article).

     Many NLP practitioners rather arrogantly suggest that everything, from Parkinsons Disease to Depression, can be treated with NLP, that is, with changing the story of a person’s perceptions, but this is wrong. Not merely wrong, but logically upside down: human conditions are not caused by the stories we tell ourselves, there is a more complex physiology involved.

     The stories we tell of our particular problems do not have the power to make us ill (they can exacerbate things), and so the stories we change are unlikely, in themselves, to make us well again. A staphylococcus infection isn’t the result of negative self-talk; it’s an invasion of  bacteria.   Further, the stories we tell are a bit after the event of  problems, or recovery, not because of the stories themselves. Our capacity for story telling is strong, but it is, after all, a meaning making process, an explanation.

     I’m reminded again of the work of  Zaporozhets and Leont’ev in their book Rehabilitation of Hand Function  (1960) which is based on their research in Russia during WWII. What these neurophysiologists found was that the stories their patients told themselves aided their recovery, but the need to recover preceded the stories they told of their recovery.  In other words, non-conscious processes  plus desire were at work before an explanation for their recovery was manifested.

     Good therapy, whatever form it takes, needs to take a more holistic account of the problems at hand and this is why I recommend to my clients that they get themselves checked for physical problems (blood, hormone levels, etc) if their psychological issues are affecting their lives in more ways than self talk would suggest.

     The critical eye is paramount. A simplistic explanation for a problem is often  not enough and I am critical of NLP for this reason. Good counselling requires a deeper examination of things than merely the stories we tell ourselves.