Both are concerned at their core with how to live more and more, un-encumbered, in the here and now and with gaining self knowledge. For Gestalt it is through becoming aware of how we avoid contact, how to complete our unfinished business, how through the process of “Organismic Self-Regulation” we can grow. The self functions through the process of figure and ground formation. (Perls et al. 1994) For the Gurdjieff it is through the use of “attention” that the integration of the heart, head & body can take place, using “‘self-remembering” and “self-observation”. (Gurdjieff 1973)

It has been my search for freedom from my own difficulties, together with experiences of more than ordinary presence, which have been the driving forces for these explorations. So, while this is a personal review I hope to be able to distil some ideas that others will find interesting and relevant. First I’ll give a brief summary of Gurdjieff’s theory of man’s possible development, then my experience of the Gurdjieff “Work”, review my experiences of Gestalt Psychotherapy and then look at how they relate and how Gestalt might be enhanced in the light of these experiences.

Gurdjieff always used “man” as meaning mankind, and where referring to his ideas I have followed this to retain his style. He did not discriminate against women, indeed his “heirs” were mostly women.

Brief Summary of Gurdjieff’s life.

Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol near the Persian (Iranian) and Russia border in 1877. His second book “Meetings with Remarkable Men” (1973) was made into a film by Peter Brook) is an autobiographical account of his early life and his search through Asia for the meaning of life. He started his “teaching” in Russian in about 1915, leaving at the time of the revolution in 1917 and going South through many countries and many extraordinary adventures and journeys with a group his followers. Finally he ended up in France in 1922 where he set his “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” in a large house and grounds in Fontainebleau. The institute had to eventually close in 1933 for financial reasons; it had started well but the pressure of keeping it going, his accident in 1924, visiting America, raising funds and copious writing, all seemed to take their toll. His dreams for his beloved institute had failed. After this he spent two years in America before returning to live and teach from his flat in Paris until he died on the 29th October 1949.

My understanding is that it was in this last period of his life that he mellowed from someone who “knew” and could be arrogant and brutal into someone with huge humanity. This can be seen from Kathryn Hulme’s account of her time with Gurdjieff before and after World War Two. (1997) From all accounts he was a “remarkable” man, the amount he did in his life, the depth and breadth of his knowledge were extraordinary, and his presence immensely powerful.

During his life and after his death, centres trying to follow his work were set up all over the world and continue to this day.

Very brief summary of his teaching

For brevity and relevance I have largely restricted this summary to those areas of his teaching which are more relevant to this essay. It covers very briefly only a part of his ideas.

Gurdjieff said that people are asleep, that they are automatic and mechanical with no conscience, consciousness, attention and especially no “will”, he was fond of absolute statements like, “Man, such as we know him, is a machine.” (Gurdjieff, 1973. p.72) He often used the analogy of a horse, carriage and driver. The driver is our mind, the horse our feelings and the carriage our body. The driver might know where to go but he can’t communicate with the horse and he doesn’t know the carriage. Only the horse and carriage can do anything, but they have their own wishes and preferences and don’t take any notice of the driver, so the driver can’t “do” anything. Let alone the possibilities that a passenger might represent. (Gurdjieff 1973, p.229)

To Gurdjieff the task of man was to become an “objective being”. The starting point for this is the struggle to be independent from the level of personal like and dislike, free from the tyranny of the body and neurotic needs. “Attention” is the main tool for gaining this self-knowledge. Attention is the focusing of self’s power, to quote from the O.E.D. “earnest direction on the mind”. With attention “self-remembering” becomes possible which in turn enables “self-observation”, which leads of self knowledge and the building of an “I”, an independent will. (Gurdjieff 1973)

Self-Remembering is a deliberate and particular form of self-consciousness, it is an awareness of ourselves, alive and present in the moment, with head, heart and body connected. He says about this that, “It is impossible to remember oneself. And people do not remember because they wish to live by mind alone. Yet the store of attention in the mind (like the electric charge of a battery) is very small. And other parts of the body have no wish to remember.” (Gurdjieff 1973, p.229) He stated that the way to start this process is to connect our head and body with the use of our attention. This effort is deliberate: it is the start of “will”, the start of awakening from sleep, the start of becoming an “objective man”.

To become this “objective man” he must first become a “three brained being”. Gurdjieff called our different parts “brains” or “centres” or “machines” and he talked about five in total, heart, head, body, instinctive and sex centre. (Ouspensky 1950, p.55) He however repeatedly referred to, and stressed that the integration of head, heart and body was the primary task of man. He talked about how this accorded with the universal “Law of Three” (active, passive and neutralising) through which all things proceeded. It was through integrating these parts of us that man can become “consciousness” and could develop his will and not just be automatically driven by his associations and reactions. (Gurdjieff 1973)

Self observation is needed to see how partial we are, caught up in one part of ourselves (“one brain”, i.e. neurotic functioning) and how this one part can take charge at any time in an accidental and random way. This shows how we have no centre to our being. Gurdjieff says, “In each of those present here one of his inner machines is more developed than the others. There is no connection between them. Only he can be called a man without quotation marks in whom all three machines are developed. A one sided development is only harmful.” (1973, p.82)

He talked about five different states of consciousness, “Ordinary sleep, ordinary waking state in which man is completely passive and at the mercy of accident, the third state in which he is a “three brained being”, which is the best that is ordinarily possible for man. In the fourth state he has “objective consciousness” and can see himself and the world as it is, objectively; he has “will” and can say fully, “I AM”. (Vaysse, 1980)

To reach this forth state there needs to be a qualitative change in a person, this requires extra and finer energy which can only be accumulated by the special work of attention and self-remembering to generate it and by preventing its loss, through ceasing to be partial (i.e. neurotic).

Gurdjieff talks about how everything in the universe is material, matter of different finenesses in the process of involution and evolution. (Scientifically we now know that matter and energy are the same thing, e=mc2). He talks about how it is possible to make our soul through building and refining matter in us, which can then be crystallised to permanently establish the changes in a level of being. (Gurdjieff 1973, p.209)

The fifth state is the Buddhist nirvana, the cosmic mind of Zen, the unity with God of the Sufis, the oneness of the Tao.

My Experience of the Gurdjieff Work

I experienced something like the fourth state above when I was seventeen, I was away from home in a rented room in London while at a college studying for my ‘O’ levels. I was working hard with a lot of support from an older friend; I was reading Gurdjieff, Alan Watts and Krishnamurti. It was a disciplined existence, with meditation, studying, college, reading; all with very few distractions. I was in effect living as a “three brained being” and towards the end of that year I experienced a most extraordinary two weeks.

I remember most finding myself walking down towards the Aldwich on a different level of consciousness, I was free, I was aware of the wonderful interrelatedness of everything, from ideas to the lampposts in the street. I was aware that I could “see” the world differently from anyone else around me; it was a joyful, beautiful place where the world could only be the way it was, now.

About five years later I joined the Gurdjieff work in London. The best of this experience was around, being helped, through the presence of the various “teachers”, to experience “being alive and present now” in a profound and liberating way. The sharing of that experience with others gave that special experience of community which took away some of life’s existential aloneness. I joined weekly group meetings and weekends of “work”, attempting to train my attention, trying to “remember myself” in the moment whatever we were doing. The first step was always to return to sensation in the body and to work towards maintaining that awareness as long as possible. There was also meditation through exploring and deepening sensation throughout the body.

A number of times I again had a sense of my energy building, when I was able to hold my attention on being here and now for longer periods and feel increasingly energised in being present and alive. This was especially so during one residential week, but there was always the sense of dissipation, I didn’t know what to do with the energy generated in myself. I had a sense of having to waste it.

My experience of “liberation” was partly due I’m sure, to a release from the pain of my underlying insecurity and sense of unacceptability. I struggled to work hard on the exercises as suggested, the extraordinarily difficult exercise of self-remembering, which gradually became a little easier over the years. But I increasingly became aware that I was just using my head to bring myself back into the here and now and couldn’t move on to including my feelings in the process as Gurdjieff said was necessary. (Gurdjieff 1973) Even the head connection has a power to it though, which I ended up using to bolster my insecurity, becoming somewhat arrogant and superior, my insecurity had found a suitably compensation.

Towards the end I began to feel like an injured animal, only able to go around it circles. I could not stop painful periods of depression repeatedly dominating my life, as they had done since my teenage years. I felt I was going nowhere. Gurdjieff warns in “In search of the Miraculous” that,” …if the line of knowledge gets too far ahead of the line of being…… man’s development goes wrong,..” (Ouspensky 1969 p.64), this is what happened to me; my ‘being’ was stuck, no amount of knowledge could make any difference.

Brief outline of my experience of Gestalt Psychotherapy

With therapy I started a very different sort of awareness work. Instead of working with my attention to connect my body and head together and find some limited presence, I was being asked to say how I felt. It took a while before I trusted my therapist enough through the dialogic process, (Yontef 1993) to open up, I let myself become aware of my insecurity and vulnerability which was such a relief. Yontef summed up my experience, “Awareness without systematic exploration is not ordinarily sufficient to develop insight. Therefore, Gestalt therapy uses focused awareness and experimentation to achieve insight.” (1993, p.129) This was a new type of insight to me, very different from the slow process of self-observation and insight in the “work”, Gestalt was dynamic in contrast.

Perls, Hefferline & Goodman make clear, “the achievement of a strong gestalt is itself the cure, for the figure of contact is not a sign of, but is itself the creative integration of experience. (1994, p.8). After this initial phase of therapy I was changed, yes, but not “cured”. Freed from at least some of the effort of maintaining my neurotic defence to the world and I found it astonishing to discover my feelings and to start to understand the reasons for me being the way I was.

One of things I’ve come to really appreciate about Gestalt is its phenomenology, the task of just trying to see what’s there. Des Kennedy describes it, “It is the chastening beauty of phenomenology that it requires me to return constantly to the phenomena …” (BGJ 2003). Starting to look inside to see what was there and allowing it to be, has been wonderfully liberating, as was being understood. I had been so accustomed in the Gurdjieff work to look for what I ought to find. Becoming aware of feeling vulnerable was a real pleasure. At some level though, I was still using my habits with attention to give me the power of head and body together, to defend myself, to maintain some sense of superiority and control.

Starting my Gestalt psychotherapy training, meant that I had to look at myself again, I became part of a training group and a new area of challenge emerged for me. All my interpersonal difficulties from my early life came to the fore and brought up more unavoidable insecurities. I had to attend to deepening levels of the un-addressed pain of unacceptability I had introjected as a child with its attendant shame (BGJ Vol. 4, No2). I soon saw that retroflection was one my chief modification to contact and I’m still working through this, but feeling stronger as I move into being more fluent and “aggressive” in getting the contact I need. (Perls et al, 1994) I’ve still much to learn about my boundaries, especially, “… enough non-permeability to maintain autonomy and keep out the toxic.” (Yontef 1993 p.207)

So I feel now that I am arriving at a place where I can start to be more myself. After years of slowly facing many of my introjects, imperatives about how I should and ought to be, facing the pain attached to seeing each of them, (Perls et. al 1994) I am much closer to being able to look inside myself and see and accept what’s there. I no longer feel so caught by the need to adjust myself to be acceptable. As Perls et al. put it “In its trial and conflicts the self is coming to be in a way that did not exist before. In contactful experience the “I”, alienating its safe structures, risks this leap and identifies with the growing self…” (1994 p.246)

Making sense of these experiences

I think that for many of us the intensity of the religious or transpersonal experiences is a projective expression of neurotic need. There is the real experience of something which intimates at, or gives the promise of, freedom from long held personal nightmares. This then gets identified with, in a confluent way, with a resulting preciousness and defensiveness, such as “this is the only way” or “the true way”, which if held onto restricts the possibilities for further psychological growth. I don’t think that the Gurdjieff work is an exception to this and I sure that my experience was not an isolated case.

Gurdjieff talked about the special “subjective work” that each person needed to do to make the connections between his centres, saying, “…it cannot be arrived at once, not until a man is thoroughly analysed and pulled to pieces, not until one has probed “as far as grandmother”….. There are certain subjective and there are general methods.” (Gurdjieff 1973, p.231) In my experience of the Gurdjieff work there is no one doing this sort of “work”, only the “general methods” are being used.

I think in this way Gestalt offers a modern and practical way to reach the “third state” of man. It deals directly with our fixed neurotic structures, is able to explore the structure of the person, the physical, emotional and intellectual and their interconnectedness. It makes conscious the unaware needs and motivations, provides knowledge of how we hold ourselves fixed and defended, is able to resolve the conflicts that hold these repetitive patterns that Gurdjieff was so aware of needing to change. It knows how to bring into awareness our interruptions to contact, how to help the person explore these through the appropriate support or challenge and thus facilitate change. (Perls et al. 1994) Greater freedom from having attended to inner contradictions makes possible a more cohesive and directed person, more able to do.

Gestalt is a beautifully practical way to do the work needed on the emotional centre. When done the driver can understand and communicate with the horse, as well as opening up some of the mysteries of the carriage, although there are plenty of other therapies specialising in bodywork.

Thoughts on what Gestalt might gain by incorporating these experiences

Perls et al. and much of the Gestalt literature has implicit in it the relationship between heart and head and body and how they make up the whole person but I couldn’t find anywhere where that is made explicit. Doing so may open a number of possibilities, both theoretical and clinical.

The clinical possibility of being clearer about how people’s interruptions to contact are related to the dominance of either the head or heart would be useful. In my experience it is possible to see clients as falling into these two groups. Those who use their heads to control the repressed parts of themselves, weaving stories and explanations around their difficulties; and how they need help to look inside to accept their feelings. Those dominated by their heart who seem hardly be able to contain their feelings with the resulting anxiety and distress. For them to explore their repressions they may need to develop a stronger cognitive structure to hold them.

The theoretical possibilities leads me to the question of what Gestalt sees about life after therapy, Perls et al. say, continuing from the quote above “… the self…identifies with the growing self, gives it its service and knowledge, and at the moment of achievement stands out of the way.” (Perls et al. 1994 p246) I understand this as referring to the Taoist idea of standing out of the way of our usual dualism into just being.

This dualism which represents the un-integrated person comes from the “splits” in the self that Perls et al. discuss, “The introject may have two fates: either it is a painful foreign matter in the body and is vomited forth (a kind of annihilation); or the self partly identifies with the introject, represses the pain, seeks to annihilate part of the self – but since the rejection is ineradicable, there is a permanent clinch, a neurotic splitting.” (1994 p.121) With integration comes presence, which makes possible contact in a fuller, more complete way. Instead of contact between parts, it is these “splits” which cause the “centres” to be maintained as separate, there is the possibility of a fuller more meaningful contact. This is the heart of Gestalt therapy and I feel that after going through much exploration of my own repressed pain I am starting to “deal” with the whole of me again, however tentatively.

Gestalt seems to me to provide such a wonderful base for living and understanding ourselves; its elegant and simple emphasis on what is, its objectivity (in the phenomenological sense), its insistence on here and now awareness; its insight into life as process and field perspective of “being of the field” (Yontef 1993 p303), being inextricably part of and interrelated with, the world. Opening to the process of “organismic self regulation” and how our self forms our figures and grounds, and how the resulting contact is what we need for growth. (Perls et al. 1994) This leads onto the Paradoxical Theory of Change which shows how change occurs by contacting who and what we are in the present, rather than by any attempt to change ourselves directly. (Beisser 1970)

This aspect of Gestalt I love, that we are an ongoing process with real wisdom inside us as our guide, who knows how and what the end of this “process” might be? I agree with John Wheway says in his article on Spirituality and Selfhood, “…- that change occurs when what is present is fully lived. That, if taken on, is another way to enlightenment”. (BGJ Vol8 No2, p.123) I was very much taken by what he was saying in this article, in many ways his experiences had been similar to mine. For him the direction he finally comes to seems to be a Taoist one of stepping aside, “… that we are breathed, and that is the most fundamental thing.” (BGJ p.128)

I agree with John Wheway and Naranjo and others that the basic awareness of oneself is at the start of a continuum of transpersonal experience that goes through insight, understanding, awareness of being to being a meaningful part of the universe. Again as John Wheway describes, “In this way, I see the process of transpersonal development as continuous with the ordinary work of therapy, in that throughout, what is sought is integration of splitting and fragmentation brought about by primal wounding.” (BGJ p.123)

But what if there are other levels of existence or states of being that are achievable, as Gurdjieff states and as myriads of other people’s transpersonal experiences point towards? Then surely it would be responsible of Gestalt to acknowledge that and investigate and present some sort of map(s) for these further possibilities. If not then to make clear how it understands these experiences. An awareness of these transpersonal experiences and possibilities would be very useful in illuminating those experiences which people have and which much of Gestalt ignores at present. Acknowledging, and helping some people to contact a different quality of presence could also be very useful support for the difficult therapeutic work that may need doing.

Gurdjieff’s system understands and clarifies the different levels of being that are possible for man. Some rare people demonstrate these different qualities of presence that are the hallmark of psychological freedom. We respond to these people in a universal way, with awe, love and respect. Gestalt knows about the power and importance of the here & now and yet doesn’t seem to be clear how this exists on different levels. The experience of presence that comes from the end of a contactful period of therapy group work, say over a weekend is special. There can be a depth to the contact between people, and an openness which points to these possibilities.

This leads me back thinking about Gurdjieff’s “five states”. Jean Vaysse describes the third one as, “Three qualities also belong to this state: permanent self-consciousness, free attention and independent will. From these three together there results a permanent presence to oneself which confers on man in this state an individuality which he did not possess until then, and a personal sense of responsibility…” (J.Vaysse 1980 p.63)

Vaysse goes on to describe the fourth state possible for man, “We have no idea at all of what this state actually is. We may know that it is connected with the functioning of the higher intellectual centre and with the growth of a third body, the spiritual body. We may know that it includes a state of universal presence, objective Knowledge, and a feeling of universal being – and the powers for their manifestation, a level of consciousness, attention and creative will – of which ordinary man can have no conception. Only one who has reached the state of self-consciousness (third state) can have flashes of the sate of objective consciousness…” (J.Vaysse 1980 p.64)

Gurdjieff says that the “fourth state” needs a different type of energy. This work can only be done in “schools” (Gurdjieff 1973), the generation of this energy / matter, the development of the necessary being, needs particular types of self-aware work on oneself, with much environmental support and meditation. I think Gurdjieff talks about this in his third book;

“And so, if you really wish to have in yourself that which alone can distinguish a man from an ordinary animal, that is to say, if you wish to be really such a one to whom Great Nature has given the possibility with the desire, that is, with a desire issuing from all the three separate spiritualised parts (heart, head and body) and with the conscious striving to transform yourself into so to say “cultivated soil” for the germination and growth of that upon which lay the hopes and expectations of the CREATOR OF EVERYTHING EXISTING, then you must always and in everything, struggling with the weaknesses that are in you according to law, attain at any cost, first of all, an all-round understanding, and then the practical realization in your presence, of this just elucidated by me, in order to have the chance for a conscious crystallizing in yourself of the data still engendering the three mentioned impulses which must be present obligatorily in the common presence of every man who has the right to call himself a GODLIKE CREATURE.” (Gurdjieff 1981, p.115)

I quoted this in length to give a flavour of how he writes.

So, with the end of therapy in sight I think it’s possible to get a tantalising glimpse of the distant hills of the human psyche. This makes it exciting and motivating to explore further.

To summarise -

Perls and Gurdjieff were surprising similar personalities. Perls said we are full of shit, Gurdjieff that we are machines. Both loved to arrogantly spell out what the problems with man were, and take the position that they “knew” and those around them didn’t, both were at times ruthless and humiliating to those near them in the “service of growth”. As I understanding it Perls’ vision for Gestalt was in the direction of seeing how it could be the new Zen, a real way for our modern age to find the whole of ourselves, in a direct, grounded and practical way. Within Gurdjieff’s ideas this the essential first stage of the extraordinary possibilities that man is capable of reaching.

I think that Gestalt would benefit from making more explicit how the process of healing and the development of presence has to do with integrating our heart, head and body. Understanding more clearly how making conscious connections between these parts of us can change our experience of being and how this can lead to the further possibilities of growth. To me Gestalt would benefit from incorporating an acceptance of these more presence orientated experiences more into its mainstream for both theoretical and clinical reasons.

Writing this essay has been a journey for me. When I started I was aware that I was writing about things I was not really in touch with and over the couple of months of working on it I’ve gone through a process of re-finding my presence anew. It feels like a journey I needed to make at this time.

References

Beisser, A. (1970) – The Paradoxical Theory of Change – In Fagan, J. & Shepherd, I.L. (Eds). Gestalt Therapy Now, Science & Behaviour Books, Inc., Palo Alto California.

Gurdjieff, G.I. (1973) – Views from the Real World, Early Talks of Gurdjieff as Recollected by his Pupils – Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Gurdjieff, G.I. (1973) – Life is real only then when “I am” – Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Gurdjieff, G.I. (1979) – Meetings with Remarkable Men – Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Hulme, K.C. (1997) – Undiscovered Country – Natural Bridge Editions, Lexington, Kentucky. (First published Little, Brown & Co. 1966)

Kennedy, D. (2003) – The Phenomenal Field, British Gestalt Journal, Vol 12, No.2 pp 76 – 87.

Ouspensky, P.D. (1969) – In Search of the Miraculous – Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.F. and Goodman, P. (1994) – Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality – Gestalt Journal Press, Highland, NY. (First published Julian Press, NY, 1951)

Vaysse, J. (1980) – Toward Awakening, An Approach to the Teaching Left by Gurdjieff – Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Wheway, J.K. (1999) – Spirituality and Selfhood, British Gestalt Journal, Vol 8, No.2 pp118 – 129.

Yontef, G.M., (1993) – Awareness Dialogue & Process – Gestalt Journal Press, Highland, New York.

Well, what a trip! Quite an undertaking in every sense. The flights certainly took it out of me; on the way there I left Heathrow @ 10.30 and arrived in San Francisco @ about 2p.m. local time after an 11 hr flight feeling very stressed. It took 1+1/2 hrs to get out and collect my hire car, by which time I was even more tired and stressed. I had decided to drive down to Monterey and spend the night there, and it was something of a miracle that I made it. I found myself almost totally by chance, on the right road at least twice, when I could have easily ended in the middle of nowhere, totally exhausted. That did not feel like an attractive prospect. I eventually arrive in Monterey into a wonderful sunset and exciting glimpses on the Pacific ocean, found a motel after three attempts and slept through (mostly) a nose bleed and night sweets, to awake refreshed, but still struggling to get my head around being where I was. I had breakfast in a dinner on the pier, a very fishing fleet orientated pier with sea lions barking in the sea around it and taking refuge on the structure underneath.

On the drive along the coast around Monterey (which is quite a touristy place) I watched the huge pacific waves coming up out of seemingly nowhere and crashing onto the shore and in the less exposed places surfers having great fun. (Wow you have to be fit to do that!)

I finished the drive down to Esalen, arrived early so had time for a walk up one of the parks. The large hills that come down to the ocean around the area of Big Sur, are covered in scrub and there are only trees, mostly redwoods, in the valleys betweens the hills as they descend towards the ocean, so I spent a hour walking up and down one of these small steep wooded valleys. The smell was a wonderful rich piny scent, many of the huge trees going straight up to small spiky cones on top. I drank from the clear stream, saw a dear and a Blue Jay and started to relax. After lunch I looked around Esalen and found my four bunk bed cabin with a wonderful view from on top of the cliff looking over the pacific. It is a very beautiful place, a couple of hundred acres in all including a farm area I never got around to seeing, The hills come down to the road and below the road the slope is gentler down a small cliff to the sea, so the central office, kitchen, dining and main meeting room are all on flattish ground overlooking the ocean, with the huts and other meeting rooms dotted around the site.

The conference sessions started that evening at eight after supper at six. The routine was first session of the day at 9.30 to 1.00 then lunch, then afternoon workshops (four to choose from each day) from 3.30 – 6.00 then supper then an evening session from 8 – 10.00 p.m., so a busy schedule. Some were quite intellectual and some were very experiential; in one we starting working with bodily sensation and after some experiments moved into meeting someone unknown to us without words and afterwards talking over the experience with them – very powerful and I expect the connection I made with who I met then, will last a long time. They referred to this way of working as ‘embodied’; meeting and being met in such a deep way is very healing for the soul. I saw clearly how people favour one or two centres, some were strong in the heads and bodies, some in their hearts and bodies, and a few seemed to be just in their head or heart (a definition of neurosis). I found it fascinating how it took the openness of contact for me and others to start to be three brained beings with presence, and the work on ‘embodying’ certainly helped with that. There also were conversations with people who had spent time with Fritz Perls during his five years at Esalen between 1965-9 which were fascinating. The historical connection was delightful, adding a special dimension to it all.

The most difficult thing in the world for me is to deal with being in a large group of people (a courtesy of St.J’s – where I grew up), there were about 75 of us attending the conference, with I believe another eighty or so other guests / staff on the site as well. At times I would fail in my own eyes to say, or elaborate, or state what I wanted to say and then beat myself up for my failure, and fear withdrawing more and more from the whole event. But gradually with meeting more and more people in such a contactful way I felt more able to relax and feel affirmed and allow my heart to open and really enjoy myself. On Thursday (the last full day), I went to an afternoon workshop on Gestalt and Spirituality run by someone I had got to know and like. For one of the experiments we asked to pair up with someone and share some of our wishes and hopes around the subject. I remember my father talking of finding “Eros” in Indian, through contact with a woman at an ashram – this felt just such an experience. By chance I paired up with a Mexican woman, a psychotherapist, who spoke little English. We had also by chance also sat next to each in an exercise within the whole group that morning. I thought that this was going to be one of those occasions where little would be possible, but how wrong I was. After half an hour or so of struggling to communicate, it was like magic, there was love between us, it was wonderful. Nothing more happened, but it was such a heart opening and affirming experience, affirming of life and myself, unforgettable.

Out of the support of contact with people I was / am able to see that the fear which is such a part of me, is deeper that the “not being good enough” feelings I had interpreted until now, and is something more like a real belly fear of not having the right to exist. As with Skyros and some Gurdjieff work weeks I’ve experienced in the past, it was this fear that I was able to be let go of, more and more during these five days. My existence felt valued and appreciated. Through the contact and opening up of people I could see that their fear was similar to mine, that for most there was, in some form or another, the struggle with the fear around being accepted or rejected. I think more and more that at depth this is a spiritual process, I guess I mean by this, that when it involves heart, head and body, all present, it becomes a spiritual process. Contact is towards God.

The intellectual material of the conference was about the evolution of Gestalt and was largely concerned with promoting the relational and intersubjective view of Gestalt. It reminded me of Buddhism really, everything depends on and relates to everything else, we are not isolated individuals. People talked about recovering from individualism (as if from drugs), absorbed from our societies’ distorted Cartesian world view. There was talk of the idea of cultural trauma (our reaction to trauma is often to isolate and remove ourselves from contactful relationship to avoid facing the pain) which I found very interesting. The trauma our society has been through since before the Black Death and on through many wars and incredible hardships, are I think deeply embedded.

Many talks were about how the habit of individualism permeates our lives and how opening to, increasing our contact to, and become more aware of our relational nature was the way forward. This is in contrast to the more existential orientated version of Gestalt promulgated by the New York institute. There were talks about how the latest cognitive scientific discoveries supported this relational view of people and how evolution supports it as well. Talks about how, and what is needed for communities to form, how to work with and influences companies and even how start having an effect on the wider community. All interesting stuff, but after the first session I’d understood that the main focus was on this being a “conference” on Gestalt. The notion itself is something of a contradiction in terms.

Some of the most abiding memories are of watching the sun go down over the pacific, relaxing in the natural spring baths in the open on the edge of the cliff, (they smell a little sulphurous) looking up at the sky, moon and stars. Most people used them naked, which added to the sense of freedom. They are a famous part of Esalen. The water comes out of the ground at very hot bath temperature and is channelled into a trough from which about six baths, big enough for about six to eight people, are fed. The baths are now housed in an excitingly designed new concrete structure that echoes to the sound of the waves, it has decks for massage, changing rooms etc., all situated on the edge of the cliff with magnificent view of sea and sky. The shower room must be the best shower in the world, you can stand right on the edge of cliff looking at sea and sky.

The conference finished on the Friday lunchtime, and I had a lovely time saying goodbye to most people (there were some I had never met). I had mistakenly thought it finished in the evening so had booked my return flight on the following Saturday afternoon, which meant that I had time to look around San Francisco on Saturday. It was quite fun; it’s a pleasant and compact city with water on three sides, but I ended up driving around a bit too much. In the maritime museum that were fascinating pictures of the tiny settlement in 1820 and by the Gold rush in 1860 there were hundreds on tall ships in the bay in front of a small town, by 1920 there were seven story office blocks etc., what a transformation over so short a time. There was also an excellent surfing beach on the Pacific edge of the city.

So another gruelling (more relaxed, so not as gruelling) flight I’m home. I finished reading Marian Milner’s “A life of my own” of the way home. She became a psychoanalyst after the war and it’s a wonderful account of her investigation into how to live her life, over a seven year period from 26 to 32 and is full of ideas which seem to tie attention, psychotherapy and spirituality together in very Gurdjieffian way.

In all an unforgettable experience! It’s certainly wetted my appetite for more travel and making contact with more people, but then there is the reality of life to deal with again, which feels mundane and hard. Still, I hope that I can bring to this something of my increased understanding of our interrelatedness and the knowledge of how we need support to deepen contact for the growth of our being.

Where relevant, I will introduce the Gestalt writers under the headings of the spiritual traditions they have used to support their understanding, and in a loose chronology of their writings. These writers describe a range of experience which they refer to as ‘spiritual’, this includes; awareness, presence, being, “aha moments”, “I-Thou” dialogic encounter, being a witness, integration, “full-contact”, humility, acceptance, openness, “creative indifference”, “stepping out of the way”, love, connectedness, truth, the divine, wholeness, consciousness, freedom, “the fertile void”.

I will look at how these experiences seem to have a structure which reflects the structure of the self and how, in turn, the self exists both as a here and now process as well as a developmental one, over time. Both are relevant to seeing how spiritual experience is connected to ‘contact’, integration and repair of the self, with its integration of head, heart and body. I then look at some of the problems that occur when we attempt to ‘bypass’ this hard work through spiritual identification.

I then attempt to explore what all this means, to look at how meaning emerges from our needs and how the aims and purpose Gestalt and the spiritual relate to each other. How the paradox of choice and the differences between the here and now and developmental perspectives relate to the clinical challenges around support and challenge we face as therapists.

Wolfert (2001) refers to Huxley’s (1946) “Perennial Philosophy” in which he shows how all the established religions have a similar inner, esoteric meaning that is “… based on transcendence and unity. At certain moments, the time-and-space of ordinary reality is transcended and the unity of the spiritual ground emerges” (Wolfert 2001) James (1902) emphasised how the spiritual is the personal subjective experience, the phenomenological dimension of religion. He concludes, as Huxley does, that spiritual experience, across many different traditions and cultures, shares much in common.

In the last decade, spiritual writers such as, Wilber (2001 & 2006), Tolle (1999 & 2005) Kornfield (2000), Gangaji (2005), amongst others, have also emphasized these points. As Tolle says, “religion is not the truth but a story woven around the truth.”(2005 p.xii)

These recent spiritual writers discuss how the ‘stories’ sometimes obscure the experiential ‘truth’ altogether and how the differences between the stories can seem irreconcilable. But I think they are again showing, like James (1902) and Huxley (1946), the convergence at the heart of spiritual experience. As are, I think, the Gestalt writers above, who are combining an emphasis on direct experience, awareness, dialogue and holism. I hope to show something of how they are all moving towards a new synergy which contributes to the expanding understanding of psychotherapy’s relationship to spirituality.

I am excited by the possibilities, as well as the hope that I sense can emerge from this new understanding, I think that Gestalt psychotherapy and many spiritual approaches are deeply optimistic. But first …

The difficulties of writing about the spiritual

Ingersoll (2005) discusses the problems that he and many writers have in defining spirituality, especially with the “yang” “objectifying language” of an academic essay. That it is by its nature un-definable, being an experience “which transcends words” (p.135). However this is true to an extent of all experience and it is in the search for clarity, rather than monism, that I am attempting this essay.

Sharp (2006) argues that the postmodern task (he quotes Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Bevir amongst others) of understanding the relativity of meaning, language and experience and its social construction has been a necessary one. But how they have, in exposing “the historically contingent nature of epistemology” (p.77), thrown the ‘baby’ of (Husserl’s) phenomenological direct experience out with the ‘bathwater’ of preconception and prejudice. Wheeler (2006), Evans (2007) and Wilber (2006) all strongly emphasise this point.

PHG expressed it like this, in 1951, “But if the criteria of correct language are so chosen that the feelingful and creative aspects of speech do not lend to the “meaning”, and are “merely subjective”, then no such ethics is possible in principle, for no evaluation invites assent on logical grounds. On the other hand, if it is once understood, as should be obvious, that feelings are not isolated impulses but structured evidence of reality, namely of the interaction of the organism / environment field, for which there is no other direct evidence except feeling;” (1994 p.111)

Sharp (2006) suggests that being close to direct experience is a hallmark of spiritual experience, which corresponds to Naranjo’s (1995) assertion that “… awareness is transpersonal. Or to use the earlier term spiritual” (p.185). Sharp, in discussing the difference between perceptual and conceptual experience and the difficulty in writing and talking about the spiritual, says, “… the fact that once the perceptual is reconstituted as conceptual by its articulation, the possibility of a one-to-one correspondence with the experience itself is lost.” (2006 p.77)

In looking at Husserl’s phenomenological method, Sharp (2006) argues that Husserl’s idea of the “eidetic level of perception” (p.74) is the direct perception he is talking about. He calls this “holotropic (moving towards wholeness) consciousness”, “a state of consciousness which … (is) mystical; a moment of awareness that is felt as a profound sense of totality and connectedness.”(p.68)

Ingersoll (2005) defers to Wilber’s (2006) resolution to the problem of how spiritual experience is so hard to communicate and verify. Wilber argues that spiritual experience is confirmed through the process of “communal confirmation”, i.e. others (including across cultures) have the same or similar experiences. He also argues that it is scientific, experimental and experiential, in that, if anyone deeply explores the territory they will have experiences that relate to those that spiritual writers have been describing for millennia.

Naranjo (1993) says, “Spirituality is not a matter of ideology, however, and the transpersonal nature of an approach is a fact that overrides statements about it.” (p.187) It is this “transpersonal” quality that I think helps define the spiritual, it is about our experience of connecting to something larger than our selves.

Crocker (2001) discusses how there are two “overarching methods” in Gestalt; phenomenology (“which is fundamental”) and dialogue. She looks at how the phenomenological method can allow the client to open up to the mystery that being a human being is. “…spirituality is our capacity to interact with a significant mystery” which “can be known only by its effects”

So, what is the spiritual, what are the phenomena? The Spiritual perspectives in Gestalt

Taoism

According to the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tsu 6th Century B.C., trans Feng & English 1973), “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao” (No. 1) it is the emptiness before form, it is “an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.” (No. 4) In modern cosmology it is the nothingness before the ‘big bang’, the “unfathomable source of ten thousand things!” (No. 4) It is the “fertile void” which holds the unity and resolution of the opposites and paradoxes of the manifest world.

The closest that PHG (1994) comes to talking about the spiritual is in its references to the Tao. “In ideal circumstances the self does not have much personality. It is the sage of Tao that is “like water”, … it sees it(self) again as part of a vast field.” (p.206 my brackets). And in talking about the resolution to human suffering PHG say, “By finally “standing out of the way”, to quote the great formula of the Tao. … into the “fertile void” thus formed, the solution comes flooding.” (p.138)

In PHG (1994) “standing out of the way” is associated with what they call “middle mode”, spontaneous living, where “deliberateness, factuality, non-commitment, and excessive responsibility” (p.82) is replaced by “spontaneity, imagination, earnestness and playfulness, and direct expression of feeling” (ibid) According to PHG (1994) this difference is between the personality with its relative freedom of knowledge and choice, and that of “middle mode spontaneity” in where the self is taken “beyond oneself” (p.161), in contact, into the unknown creativity of the ‘fertile void’ of the here and now.

Wolfert (2001) said, “As in Taoist teachings, people can thus enter the “fertile void,” the creativity of the self in which all exists in a ceaseless motion of formless form.” PHG also speak about Friedlander’s “creative indifference”, or “zero point” which Wulf (1996) describes as, “… the split that man creates in the world through his consciousness, which he experiences as inevitable and painful, i.e., the separation between me and the world, between subject and object, is merely an illusion. This can only be abolished by understanding the world from a zero point, the no-thing of the world, the absolute, the creator, the origin.” This conveys the ‘non-duality’ at the heart of Taoism. (Lao Tsu, 1973)

The Taoist perspective is also a strong part of Barber’s (2006) “Holistic Inquiry” approach, “Taoism extends and moves Gestalt notions of ‘field’, ‘interrelatedness’ and the ‘fertile void’, into transpersonal territory. It also cautions us to consider the ‘unknown’ and ‘unknowable’, and to be alive to metaphor and paradox, while raising our awareness to a kind of knowing which extends beyond the intellect and our senses” (p.16)

Zen

The process of Satori in Zen is seen as a sudden profound ‘aha’ understanding into the nature of ‘reality’. Suzuki (1949/1973) describes many Zen stories of ‘masters’ frustrating or challenging their disciples into this awakening. He goes on to say, “The ultimate standpoint of Zen, therefore, is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our being, that there was from the very beginning no need to struggle between the infinite and finite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after, has been there all the time.” (p.24)

Perls’ (1975) emphasis in using Zen was more focused on what he was concerned for people to ‘awaken’ from, “… the aim is called enlightenment or Satori. It means the waking up from the trance of Maya, of the unreality of our thinking. We are not generally aware of living completely and eternally in a trance, mostly in a verbal trance, in prejudices, inhibitions and so on. When we wake up from this trance, we call this in therapy the little awakening, a mini-satori. The great Satori, the final waking up, the final enlightenment, is rare.” (p.180)

There is much in PHG (1994) about how we exist in this “trance”, perpetually in a state of “chronic low-grade emergency” (p.40), restricting our awareness, distracted in “hyperactivity” with bodies full of tension and out of touch with our needs. How we have lost the sense of “the body-as-part-of-the-self” and how our ‘fight or flight’ responses are permanently engaged without resolution. (p.41) “To sum up, we have here the typical picture of neurosis: under-aware proprioception and finally perception, and hypertonia of deliberateness and muscularity.” (1994 p.41) PHG (1994) discuss how our “creative adjustments” to a hostile environment involves us in splitting and repressing and desensitising ourselves, the more “neurotic” we are the more we avoid contact. They go on to say that there is an important difference between being neurotic and being ‘normal’, but how, “The normal person either keeps himself unaware of his raging war … keeps it dormant … or he is aware of it and has concluded an uneasy truce … In the neurotic person , the conflicts rage to the point of exhaustion” (p.87) Perls (1976) later says, “Modern Man lives in a state of low-grade vitality. Though generally he does not suffer deeply, he also knows little of true creative living. Instead of it, he has become an anxious automaton.” (p.xi)

A client of Philippson’s (2001) writes about her experience, “At this time of writing I am no longer a robot who responds automatically to every situation she encounters.” (p.235) This expresses the “automaton” like trance of neurosis well.

Perls’ (1975, 1992) aim and approach was to frustrate and challenge his clients around their compulsive manipulation of the environment for support. Through this he would hopefully lead them towards an impasse, with the possibility of exploding through their neurotic trance into an ‘aha’ moment or ‘satori’. In that they could own their underlying feelings, their splits were integrated and fantasy replaced by the reality of ‘what is’, here and now. (1992 p.59-60)

Watts (1969) describes his understanding of the deeper ‘reality’ that Zen is pointing to; how the universe is comprised of opposites which dialectically define each other and how it is possible to experience this unity through expanding our awareness to include our embodied consciousness itself. How, through this we can touch the void, or emptiness where duality is reconciled. Here we are not isolated separate selves and there is the freedom that comes with letting go of the ego, “… it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is something happening on its own … you realise that you are both the leaf and the wind. … Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up … Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs… All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present.”(p.113)

Buddhism

Wolfert (2000) discusses the relationship between Gestalt psychotherapy and Buddhism in some detail. She first articulates the view of the self that emerges from PHG very clearly; how the self is the product of contact in the ‘organism / environmental field’, a “contactful field effect that produces us in the moment.” (p.77) How, “selfing is a dynamic activity” (p.77) strong at times of action, weaker at rest, it is not an entity in itself. “There “is no ‘self-rock’ to stand on in Gestalt therapy theory, much less to hide behind.” (p.77)

She then compares this with the Buddhist view that the self is an illusion, a “false belief”, and how all desires and reactions in life are illusory expressions of the sense of a separate self. Behind this illusion of separateness is the “pregnant void”, Nirvana, where everything is connected and interdependent, as in the Tao.

This difference is further explored in how, for Gestalt therapy, “wanting” is a legitimate expression of the organism; the task is to allow the free flow of ‘figure formation and destruction’ (PHG 1994). But, Wolfert (2000) says, “Buddhism offers a more radical approach: a deconstruction of all aspects of the field, even the individualistic wanting that Gestalt therapy maintains.” (p.83) Wolfert describes how in Buddhism the aim is to de-construct all wanting and all “self-views” that are expressions of this wanting, until ultimately even our ‘I AM’” (p.82) is let go of so that there is no self left.

Wolfert (2000) reconciles Gestalt and Buddhism through suggesting that it is in “final-contact” and “post-contact” where Gestalt, “contains the seeds of spiritual awakening” (p.82) “I would like to propose being for the self as the final, fully-lived stage of contact. Being signifies dwelling in moments of unity, where the splits of mind, body and the external world are healed, and reality is given in the integration of awareness, motor response and feeling.” (p.82) She says further on “… the more we extend full contact, the emptier the space and the longer the time between contact sequences, the more totally we are suspended in the fertile void”(p.84)

Kolodny (2004) describes his first experience of an “altered sate” of “sustained presence” in a “T-group”. He explores how Gestalt’s focus on here and now, being with our experience, is very close to the Buddhist practice of staying with ‘what is’ in meditation, including accepting whatever suffering is there. He describes how his experiences of different levels of consciousness are well understood in Buddhism and how, “… the ultimate realisations of sustained presence of mind is that the practitioner’s sense of a separate self falls away, replaced by the sense of being one with the experience.” (p.96)

In full-contact, as PHG describe so well, there is no avoidance or resistance left to the here and now. When we really experience this level of contact there is by definition openness to the “fertile void”, to the unknown, to the creativity that emerges from that “fertility”. This connects with what Wolfert (2000) says about how the more “fundamental level” of Buddhist challenge can support our exploration of the “deeper grounds” of ‘what is’. (p.82)

Naranjo (1993) discusses how Gestalt therapy can learn from the Eastern spiritual traditions how the experience of awareness can be so much more than awareness about the content of our selves. How there is an openness and connection with the transpersonal beyond content which is, “… an awareness of awareness, a pure presence or pure wakefulness (bodhi in Buddhism).” (p262)

Earlier he talks about, “Perls’ personal experience of satori (described in his autobiography) and his experience with meditation … undoubtedly served as a background to his shaping of Gestalt therapy – perhaps without knowing it – into a modern equivalent of Buddhist practice.” (p.187 my brackets) He reflects that Perls embodied the integration between the psychological and the spiritual towards the end of his life (p.186).

Consciousness is defined in some Buddhist traditions as “openness or emptiness” (Wilber 2006 p.66), and this connects with the Taoist understanding of how there is unity in the nothingness “prior to form”.

Finally, compassion is understood as an essential aspect of Buddhism. Kornfield (2000) says that compassion for the suffering of others and ourselves is essential is we are going to allow and transcend all the various sufferings that come with attachment to form and separateness from unity, in other words the suffering of our everyday lives.

Hinduism

Wheway (1999) talks about his experience of a retreat at the Rajneesh ashram in India that enabled something to shift in him, “identification with the story, with the description of who I was could give way. I was now the witness” (p.127). This is very close to Gangaji’s (2005) description of her experience with Ramana Maharshi, one of India’s most famous recent teachers. She describes how he asked her to ‘Stop’ and from that, she let go of her story of herself, into pure being, stillness and openness, free from the ‘trance’ of the mind caught in everyday life. She goes on to say about consciousness, “Consciousness is not an object. It is hereness itself. Our minds are usually involved with an object that appears and disappears in the hereness, and because of that, we overlook the nature of hereness. Pure consciousness is what these words appear in, what all bodies appear in. It infuses all words and bodies, and it is conscious of itself, and it is you. In your recognition of yourself as pure consciousness, you awaken yourself.” (p.68-69)

This is the great theme of the Upanishads (Mascaro 1965), which are the foundation of Hinduism, that the formless universal spirit ‘Brahman’ brought the universe into existence so that it could see itself through people becoming ‘self-conscious’. As Watts (1969) puts it “… self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are poles of a single process, THAT is my true existence. As the Upanishads say, “That is self, That is real, That art thou!”” (p.135)

This is connected to the ‘presence’ that Tolle (1999) has articulated as the “The Power of Now”, moving the attention into this present moment with the awareness of being here, alive, witnessing the fact of our existence in whatever situation we are in. Watts (1969) was articulating just this approach in Esalen in the sixties and seventies. (Anderson 1983)

Tolle (2005a) describes how the process of moving into being ‘aware of awareness’ is a profound and an, “… extraordinarily simple knowing, in which the knower and the known merge into one. Now the egoic split is healed and you are made whole again. We could describe the nature of this knowing thus: suddenly consciousness becomes conscious of itself. … And even if your life has been full of mistakes, it takes only this knowing to redeem it and…endow the seemingly meaningless with profound meaning. … I am not what happens, but the space in which it happens. … Consciousness prior to form.” (2005a p. xi/xii)

This is the same as Naranjo’s “awareness of awareness” (above) and as Deikman (1996) puts it, “I equals awareness … this other ‘I’ that is basic, that underlies desires, activities and physical characteristics … ‘I’ is the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content.” (p.350) He goes on to say, “The failure of Western psychology to discriminate awareness from contents, and the resulting confusion of ‘I’ with mental contents, may be due to a cultural limitation: the lack of experience of most Western scientists with Eastern meditation disciplines.”(p.354). and, “Knowing by being the identity of ‘I’ and awareness, is ontologically different from perceptual knowledge..” (p.354)

Williams (2006) definition of the spiritual includes the transformation that comes with this movement into “being both the observer and the observed.” (p.9)

Wheway (1999) says, “Being, I think, is another word for spirit.” (p.124) He goes on to say how he sees therapy as a spiritual process, “… it is a Karmic Yoga, a path of action that leads to enlightenment … It enables us … to be both immanent … and transcendent – that is less and less attached to these selves as they emerge from storytelling. To be fully in the world, yet not of it.” (p124)

Perl’s in his chapter on “Resolution” (Stevens ed. 1975) says, “We are awareness rather than have awareness.” (p.69). He talks about how “gestalt formation” is the process through which the world functions on so many levels. How the arising of needs and the force towards their resolution, exist together with all the subsequent tensions and difficulties that arise in the attempts to get them met. How this process is endemic for everything living on the planet and how it operates through the play of opposites. He concludes, “There is nothing but awareness endlessly coming forth. Beyond awareness there is nothing. At all points of discomfort it seeks to make itself comfortable. This one awareness appears to split into self / other so that in the trouble of search and finding, it can recall its parts and find itself intensely. Unquestioned, in peace it finds itself as one.” (p.73) This is as a clear re-statement of the Hindu perspective, where the force of Consciousness that created the universe, created our human self-consciousness, so that it could realise its own creation.

Presence and Spirituality

Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) in discussing presence say how this, “… integration and synthesis of self is rarely achieved, but does carry an inherent value as being an optimal, vivid, and integrated point of self-functioning.” (p.13) Mostly we live in the “trance” of everyday life (as above) with ‘presence’ being a state of consciousness that is “rarely achieved” (p.13) in most people’s experience of daily life, which is why it is highly prized. The highlights of ordinary life give a glimpse of living with presence; for example when we ‘taken beyond ourselves’ by a work of art, moments of intimacy, awe at nature, special moments in sport or movement, music, literature, etc. These are Maslow’s (1968) “peak experiences”.

Presence is what Denham-Vaughan (2005) describes in her article “Will and Grace”, when she says, “However we define the creative synthesis of Will and Grace … It is the self-organisation that, on a good day, gives me a life that flows and buzzes with impassioned vitality. It is the self-function that permits me fully to contact and connect with life, … at those times I have used my Will and all I have consciously learnt to get me to the place where I can let go.” In this context she quotes Ramakrishna’s saying, “… the winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.” (p.11)

Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) describe presence as, “Alert yet calm. Attentive to, and connecting with, others.”(p.11). They agree with Wolfert (2000) saying that presence “can also be called ‘full contact’” (p.13). This corresponds to what PHG (1994) say about “final contact”, where, “… one is aware of the unity. That is, the self (which is nothing but contact) comes to feel itself. What it is feeling is the interacting of the organism and the environment.” (p.196) Wolfert (2000) calls this “… “being”, the self as the final, fully-lived stage of contact. Being signifies dwelling in moments of unity …” (p.82) “Being”, here corresponds, I think to what Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan are calling ‘presence. The sense of self is changed in presence; I am present to my existence within, and as part of the world.

Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) in discussing “the process of presence” describes how there is an “oscillation between inner and outer”, between now and not-now, which continues until, “the two become truly unified and the separation disappears.” (p.17) This is a good description of what can happen in meditation (also Wilber 2006). PHG (1994) give a fascinating technical description of the process of finding presence, “Fortunately, the true underlying unity can be demonstrated by a simple experiment: introspecting, try to include as objects of the acting “I” more and more pieces of the larger passive body-self; gradually, then all at once, the mind and body will coalesce, “I” and self will merge, the distinction of subject and object will disappear, and the aware self will touch the reality as perception … That is the self, aware in middle mode, bursts the compartmenting of mind, body, and the external world.” (p.169)

So, subject and object come together in a unity that is presence. This corresponds with my experience of presence and contacting the spiritual. How occasionally, through being supported by my attention, or “will” and the environment, I have experienced the process of returning to now, again and again against the forces of distraction until there is this shift into the experience of unity, into a deeper connection with ‘now’, of silence, peace, integration, as in these quotes. I am also aware that there are all degrees of connection to presence, even a touch can have a significant impact on the quality of a day.

Perls (1976) describes a particular aspect of this experience of holding the attention on the here and now in this way, “… staying with the experience of the fertile void – experiencing his confusion to the utmost … What happens … is a schizophrenic experience in miniature.” (p.100) “Confusion is transformed into clarity … The fertile void increases self-support by making it apparent … that he has much more available than he believed he had. (p.101)

Something of this “oscillating” / “schizophrenic” process of confusion also applies to the other way I have experienced moving into presence, through the “aha” of therapy. The movement towards “impasse” is full of confusion (as above). Then there is the relief of the awareness of what I was avoiding, with the “aha” comes the understanding of the pain, hurt, shame, distress and ‘badness’. As this happens I become aware of my breathing, which gradually returns to the belly, I become more aware of my body and the tension it has been carrying and afterwards my heart is more open and my thinking clearer. With this presence there is relative stillness and space that comes from stopping the busy “verbalising mind” (PHG 1994).

Contact with here and now, with the void, as the writers here argue, brings presence and profoundly changes our relationship the world – and yet it can also very vulnerable and fragile. It is so easily disrupted by our defensive fight or flight reactions in response to “emergencies” (PHG 1994). Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) mention; tiredness, stress, illness, medication, alcohol, distraction, preoccupation and being too task orientated (p.15) as factors inhibiting presence. My experience is certainly that my presence can ‘switch off’ and become inaccessible to me when I’m caught in a reaction that relates to some unresolved / un-integrated aspect of myself, as PHG (1994) describe so well.

Kolodny (2004) and Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) describe how the increase in our ability to be “mindful” or present can develop over time, which I will look at below.

The spiritual in the Dialogic I-Thou

Schoen (1994) describes how, in the Hasidic tradition that Buber was part of, there is the concept of the Void, with its “divine wisdom” and how they, “celebrated a cosmos divided, so that its members can have the joy of meeting” (p.114), mirroring the Hindu tradition above.

In describing his concept of “I-Thou”, Buber (1937/2003) says, “To man the world is twofold … The primary world is the combination of I-Thou, the other primary world the combination of I-It; … the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It. … The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.”(p.15)

“I-It” is our relationship to objects, to ‘ordinary life’ and “I-Thou”, to “meeting a presence … the realm of wholeheartedness, of love, of Thou.” (Schoen 1994 p.92). Buber continues, “The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking. But… it is an act of my being … I step into direct relation with it … as any action of my whole being … Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou as I become I, I say Thou. … All real living is meeting.” (1937 p.24/25)

This seems to me a description of presence, it is where through being ‘aware of my awareness’, there is more of a whole ‘I’ able to participate in “Thou”. According to Schoen (1994) Buber wrote “I and Thou” while teaching a course titled “Religion as Presence.” (p.97) This connects the esoteric heart of religion directly to the experience of ‘presence’, which is a common theme amongst these writers. The quote above also shows Buber’s awareness of the paradox of action and non-action, how connection with “I-Thou” is with something beyond the self but can’t happen without the active ‘I’ of the self.

For Buber (2003) I-Thou is our connection to God. Harris (2000) quotes Buber, “God dwells wherever man lets him in.” (p.50) Which points to our existential choice in the matter, like the Ramakrishna quote above.

Schoen (2008) talks about his understanding of how Buber’s I-Thou “… is a system … it isn’t relativistic. It is absolute. It is a spiritual ultimate thing.” (p.31) He says that beyond the intellectual understanding of therapy and its techniques, “I-Thou comes first and last, and goes beyond all thought.” “I-Thou is a depth of inner and of outer contact which the heart always longs for.” (p.32)

Hycner (1995) discusses how for him the dialogical approach leads him to the spiritual, to a reality greater than the world of objects, of “I-It”, how “I-Thou” is a “spiritual or transpersonal dimension.” (p.93), and “I feel more and more that in my best moments, I am present to, and sometimes the instrument of, some spiritual reality.“ (p.93)

Jacobs (1995) describes “I-Thou” as, “… a moment in which we are totally absorbed with another, which paradoxically puts us profoundly in contact with our humanity, with the knowledge of being; in this moment the meaning of human existence is revealed.“ (p.58) This is very close to Wolfert’s “full-contact” as well as Tolle’s statement above, about how in finding presence, we find the meaning in our lives.

Hycner (1995) sees the dialogic as a “new paradigm” in which “I-It” and “I-Thou” are figure and ground to each other. How the dialogical is, “a rhythmic alternation of I-Thou and I-It connectedness.” (p.92) He goes on to define psychopathology “as the result of an early aborted dialogue” (p.94), a breaking of our most “primordial orientation”. (p.94) From this he argues that we need to place, “… less emphasis on the individual as an entity and more emphasis on the relationship, and the relational ability of the client.” (p.94) that we need to move away from the individually focused “self-actualisation” of humanistic psychology towards a “… “relational actualisation”, which encompasses self-actualisation. Self-actualisation arises as a by product of enhanced relational connectedness.” (p.94)

Hycner (1995) also acknowledges how this difference is “a statement of the inherent paradoxical nature of our existence.” (p.94) We exist as a “perduring self” and at the same time are not separate. Wheeler (2006) also makes this point, which is explore below.

The Spiritual in Intersubjectivity

Wheeler (2006) relates Gestalt therapy to the spiritual by saying, “If we were not fundamentally one with the unified field, there would be no such thing as contact, interaction, relationship, communication, communion. And if we were not individuals, we would never register the world or contact.” (p.17) Through being able to hold this complexity of both “the one and the many”, is to him a spiritual perspective were we can find a profound acceptance, and the source of love, “I am me and I am you, and you are you and you are me, the one and the many – is the actual experience of love. We all know it, we all want more of it.” (p.17) How “In the end the gestalt paradigm of radical participation, radical belonging is a spiritual perspective; and the practice of living and healing under that paradigm is itself a spiritual practice.” (p.37)

This corresponds very closely to the Hindu, Taoism and Zen views above. How we are attached to the polarities of life, of self and other, good and bad, right and wrong, light and dark. We don’t see how one cannot exist without the other. If we can really see that, we can be free of attachment and then participate in “the game of life”, without identification and attachment, knowing that we are not separate isolated beings. (Watts 1969)

Williams (2006) also discusses the ‘intersubjective’ emphasis on the relational aspects of experience and how it, “… makes human connection and relationship the basis for an embodied type of spiritual experience.” (p.10-11) This corresponds to Wheeler’s view, and that of I-Thou, above, that we reach the spiritual through engaging in relationship. What is clear from above is that presence is an essential aspect of this process.

Another aspect of the intersubjective approach which connects it with the spiritual is that of acceptance, intimacy and the concern with shame. Wheeler’s emphasis is on the “structure of ground” (1991, 2000, 2006), and how he sees the field as strongly biased towards the individualistic paradigm. From this he sees the urgent task as being to support and allow our needs, to combat the introjections around self-sufficiency and the denial of needs and vulnerability. How we have a deep need for acceptability in terms of, “… affirmation of my membership, my belonging to a world of common identification” (2002 p.46) And how this support has, “… more to do with resonance and belonging than with ‘soft’ supports of agreement or affirmation.” (ibid)

The spiritual nature of this is confirmed by Lee & Wheeler (1996) who describe how the sense of acceptance, in I-Thou, is the same as the spiritual experience of “deep union, or grace” (p.48) and that this experience is so “effective at transforming … shame” (p.49). They describe how “Maya”, which is the illusion of the experience of separateness and isolation in Hindu spirituality, is their “field definition of shame” (p.49). How it is ultimately connection and acceptance that supports us to be available for intimacy and support. Naranjo (1993) describes how the spiritual “constitutes the deepest self-support” (p.261).

Christian approach to spirituality and Gestalt

I wanted to include a section on the connection between Gestalt psychotherapy and spiritual experience from a Christian perspective but was unable to find any suitable material. Christianity is fundamental to our Western spiritual tradition and yet all the spiritual connections that are made in the Gestalt literature are with the Eastern traditions. It seems that there is gap here, which needs further investigation.

Wheeler (2006), Wheway (1999), Kennedy (2008) all talk about the connection between Gestalt therapy, the spiritual and love. It is this aspect of spirituality which seems to connect most strongly with the Judaeo / Christian / Islamic traditions.

God’s Love is at the heart of these religions, both learning to love God and experiencing the unconditional ‘Love of God’. To me the meaning of this is the same as the experiences of presence, contact, embodiment, the “fertile void”, discussed above, but interpreted in different ways. For example, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear” (Bible, John 4:18) which describes the integrative experience of spiritual connection with the sense of fundamental support (as above) where fear can be let go of, at least temporarily, and love can be ‘let in’.

Love is an essential part of this connection to the “fertile void”, of our “Ground of Being”, something that Kolodny (2004) expressed it like this, “Consciousness cures and heals not in virtue simply of its being perception or a movement of the body towards the world, but because it is informed by love. This is the love that precedes knowledge, that is given with primordial contact and which is awakened in the heart of the client by a therapist who brings her own open-heartedness to the session.” (p.24-25)

Another connection between Christianity and therapy is around the nature of forgiveness and confession. In therapy there is no judgement and the attempt is to help the client get past their introjections around being ‘bad’ and ‘good’. Taking responsibility for ourselves, our behaviour, thoughts and feelings, ‘owning up to’ how and what we are has a confessional quality. It is a step towards letting go of our introjected self-judgements and finding forgiveness for ourselves.

Jesus’ acceptance of his ultimate suffering is an example of what we need to do in order to face the avoided suffering that keeps us avoiding contact and punishing ourselves and others. How it is only through facing our fear, hurt or distress that we can start to integrate, grow and understand ourselves, and how with this seeing and understanding comes forgiveness of self and other, i.e. “love”, as Kolodny says above.

Pagels (2003) argues that, Jesus’ saying, “for the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 12:21) or “the Kingdom is within you” (Thomas 3, p.54) points towards a personal process of finding God within us, which seems to equate well the experience of integration and love as above.

It also seems to me that the experience of gaining some freedom, from the prison of being caught in unaware “automaton” living, can generate ‘Faith’, which can be seen as trust in the knowledge that ‘underneath’ the “trance” of ordinary or “neurotic” living, there is Goodness.

The Body in Presence and Spirituality

Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007), as part of their description of presence say, “In particular, when we experienced ourselves as ‘most present’, we were paying attention to bodily sensations and focusing on these in order to increase awareness.”(p.16) This connects with the way that the body and breath are also basic to many forms of meditation (Wolfert 2000, Wilber 2006) and is something that Tolle (1999) also supports, “If you keep your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now. … Instead of mentally projecting yourself away from Now, go more deeply into the Now by going more deeply into the body. … When you focus within and feel the inner body, you immediately become still and present as you are withdrawing consciousness from the mind.” (p. 97-98)

Kolodny talks about “remembering to remember to be present” (2004 p.97) and this also corresponds to Laura Perls’ famous play on words, “when you are a body you are somebody”. Kepner (1996) emphasises how restoring, “… body sensation through the work on the desensitisation of the body goes a long way to recovering one’s sense of actuality.” (p.109)

PHG (1994) describe so well (above) how neuroses curtails our awareness, we become ‘over intellectual’, in a “trance” and unable to feel, or we become anxious and unable to think. How these processes all occur in our bodies, which reflect every psychic disturbance through tension, de-sensitisation or sickness.

Kennedy (2003, 2005, 2008) discusses his investigations into the work of Merleau-Ponty with his concerns for how perception and consciousness are deeply connected to our embodied experience of ourselves in the world. “The world that emerges is built upon this underlay of self-presence which we call consciousness.” (2008 p.19) “For Merleau-Ponty that direction is increasingly to move towards meaning. And what is that meaning? It is precisely that coherent self-presence that I spoke about earlier. It is where the parts cohere and are in harmony with my experience of the world.” (p.23)

Wheeler (2002) put it this way, “To me, what is true is that we are all one being, deeply located and participating in a shared energetic field, of which we are each a unique expression, a unique point of view. Our existence is permeated by this shimmering energy, which is consciousness …” (p.47)

All humanistic approaches (Moss 1999) emphasise the need to re-connect head, heart and body back together. As above, for ‘presence’ we need heart, head and body integrated to experience “full contact”, presence is, as Smuts (1926) put it, a transformative whole, “Creative Evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole.” (p.340)

The above quotes show I think how this connection to sensation and awareness of the energy of our bodies is essential for presence, that it makes our connection to the world visceral and is a vital part of our sense of meaning.

Wilber’s “Three Faces of God”

Wilber’s (2006) “Integral model” divides everything existing up into three dimensions; that of the “first person” or “I”, our personal experience; that of the “second person” or “ We”, our relational experience; and lastly that of the “third person” or “It”, the objective world. He applies this to the spiritual dimension of life as well, referring to them as “the three faces of God”. I think this is interesting for this essay because the above review can usefully be seen in these terms, from these three perspectives.

“First person” spirituality is reflected more in the Eastern traditions and presence, as above, it is Naranjo’s (1993) “awareness of awareness”, the “I AM” recognition that my consciousness here and now, it is the recognition of being a part of the Consciousness that created the universe, the experience of unity.

The “second person” spirituality the emphasis is on “I-Thou” on our relationship to the other or to God. This is where the Judeo Christian / Islamic approaches are centred, on the love of God, on our relationship to God, on surrender, worship, devotion and faith.

Wilber (2006) sees the “third person”, “It” aspect of spirituality as being the observable scientific nature of the universe, with our knowledge and understanding of the world. This is an aspect that gets lost in fundamentalism of any kind. As new information emerges we need more sophisticated and re-configured wholes, to include it.

Another perspective which fits this idea of “three faces of God” is to see the spiritual experiences and understandings presented above through the lens of our basic humanistic structure of head, heart and body. Wilber (2006) refers to these as “lines of development”. The Eastern traditions do seem to focus on the “mind” in terms of developing “awareness”. They also developed the ‘physical’ paths of for example of Yoga or Tai Chi. The Western traditions focused more on the heart in terms of the unconditional “Love of God”.

In many ways it seems impossible to separate the spiritual into these different aspects, they all intermingle inseparably, with any spiritual connection influencing the whole field. But I do think these structures provide some clarity in terms of reducing the confusion that can arise from how the spiritual manifests differently from each of these “faces”. Self as contact process / self as process of integration Another confusion that arises in looking at the relationship between Gestalt and the spiritual is one that comes from how the self is understood. Gestalt therapy theory has two ways of looking at the self. One say says that our self, at any moment, is formed through the process of contact with environment (e.g. PHG 1994); how the self is “of the field, not in it” (Yontef 1993), how it is defined through its “relationship” (Philippson 2001) to the world. The self is not a fixed “thing”, but a process continually re-forming in response to the ever changing environment. Wolfert (2000) and Kolodny (2004) argue that the Buddhist perspective largely agrees with this view of the self, that fixity is an illusion.

The other way of looking at the self, is a developmental one (also PHG 1994) where, over time, the self either grows, integrates finds ever greater freedom to “contact” life ‘as it is’ in the most satisfying way it can, or it ossifies, becoming ever more fixed and rigid.

But there is something of a contradiction between these two views. If the self is not a ‘thing’ how can ‘it’ develop? Many Gestalt writers concede that the self is a separate ‘thing’ to some extent, e.g. Wheeler (as above, “the one and the many”) “ … and if we were not individuals, we would never register the world or contact.”, Hycner (1995) “our perduring self” and Wolfert (2000) “It is after all, our experiencing.”(p. 84). Wolfert goes on to say that this difference is about, “Whether we wish to emphasise continuity or change depends on our purpose.”(p.84).

This difference is one that Maslow (1968) articulated as “Being and Becoming”. “Being” is our here and now experience which is process. We shift in response to every small change in our environment. Also as we enter the here and now, more and more deeply through “full-contact” the self changes dramatically (as above). However, when looking at the self over time ‘it’ has consistency and “continuity”. In Maslow’s (ibid) terms this is “Becoming” and is about “self-actualisation”. This difference in perspectives on the self also reminds me of how matter can be observed as both waves and particles at a quantum level, a process or a thing. (Goswami 1995)

In the developmental view of the self in PHG (1994), the “neurotic” self with its, “active ego”, is seen as “false” or “inauthentic”, (this can be seen as the ‘illusory’ self of Buddhism above) with maturity being seen as the movement from environmental support to self-support (Perls 1975). This is the journey of increasing integration, away from being at the mercy of our “automaton” like compulsively reactive way of living, where much of our experience happens around the ways we “interrupt contact” and avoid ‘what is’ (PHG 1994). This reflects how, with every introject, or repression the self is “split”, and a “should” or “ought” established. Every split creates the reaction to maintain the separation between head, heart and body and therefore unawareness (PHG 1994).

Through facing the ‘trauma’, the hurt, distress or pain, that caused us to ‘split’ we can heal the wounds and integrate, we can put ‘ourselves back together’ and become more present (as above), developing a clearer sense of what we want and need. Contact is then simpler and easier, there is a more “coherent self” (Kennedy 2008) to make contact with clearer figures and greater satisfaction. Through “repairing our ego-functioning” we have more choice over our motivations and behaviour (PHG 1994, Philippson 2001) and an “an ever-growing sense of ownership of experience” (McConville & Wheeler 2001 p.41) As the self integrates and heals it becomes stronger, less defensive and more able to be self-supportive, choiceful, responsible and able to be “relational” (Philippson 2001).

As Kolodny (2004) says in talking about the power that awareness has to transform us, “… enlightenment can be understood as the incremental or spontaneous eradication of these hindrances so that the mind and heart (and body) are unimpeded in their ability to rest in present awareness – full contact in Gestalt terms.” (p.96 – my brackets)

From here, and after this integration of the self, PHG (1994) describe how the self is able to let go into the unknown of the fertile void where, “… the self does not have much personality. It is the sage of Tao that is “like water”, … it sees it(self) again as part of a vast field.” (PHG 1994 p.206).

There is less ego and personality, the id fills the space. From the spiritual perspective this development is towards the healing of the final object / subject split, seeing through the illusion of our separateness from the “vast field”.

This developmental view sees the self moving closer to presence over time, through integration and psychological freedom. But, as above, especially within “Buddhism” and “Presence” we saw how the spiritual emerged through “full-contact” in the here and now. This difference between “wave and particle” fits with what Wilber (2006) refers to as “states” of consciousness and “stages” in the development of consciousness, and is, I think, another useful conceptualisation that brings some clarity.

“States” are the here and now experience of our lives, from “automaton” to “ordinary life” to “presence”. The essential nature of states is that they are always changing, as the self is always changing. We can experience moments of profound spiritual connection which can have a profound influence on our sense of self, lasting from moments to weeks. But as Wilber (2006) says, they don’t last; they leave a mark but we cannot necessarily integrate them into ourselves permanently and cannot, at will, re-make the connection.

“Stages” are the development of our consciousness over time. This is the maturation of the structure of the self as above, with its more permanent achievements, especially in terms of the ability to embody ever greater wholes of complexity and degrees of awareness. This is the gradual ‘staged’ process of gaining psychological freedom which lets our hearts and our heads and our bodies expand, embodying a new whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Kolodny (2004) describes the Buddhist, “Abhidhamma” as a, “periodic table of the states of consciousness”, in which he found “delighted surprise” in how it described some of his most “powerful experiences” (p.96). Wilber (2006) argues that “states” can be glimpses of “stages” of consciousness beyond our own, but that we cannot really know the experience of more integrated “stages” before we achieve them.

Holding both these perspectives makes the self, and the field, multi-dimensional rather than flat, with the self moving through different “states” moment to moment and through “stages” over months and years. For a long time I found the statement, “the self is formed in contact” confusing. What was missing was this understanding of how ‘contact’ and ‘self’ are relative terms. The degree of contact depends on the degree of integration of the self (and of course the availability of the ‘environment’).

PHG (1994) make clear that living closer to the Tao comes after the self is healed of its splits and needs to avoid contact. This is what many of the world’s spiritual teachers (Wilber 2006, Kornfield 2000) have said, that we have to develop a “strong ego” before we can start to let go of it. Without healing the self and “repairing our ego-functions” we are “building on sand” and there are all sorts of problems that can emerge from moving into the spiritual as a way of avoiding this work.

These ‘problems’ occur when we try to “let go” prematurely, trying to reach the spiritual or transpersonal connection as a way of trying to ‘bypass’ the painful and hard work of healing the ego, of healing the splits in the self.

Some difficulties that arise in approaching spirituality

There are many problems that arise when the spiritual is ‘aimed at’ or pursued as a way of avoiding the painful work involved in finding psychological freedom.

History is full of stories of people indentifying evangelically with ‘God’. Symington (2002) has argued powerfully that this process is narcissistic at its heart, that for these people the experience of finding their narcissistic wounds apparently ‘healed’ by connecting to the ‘power of God’, is very seductive. It is a giving up of personal responsibility for unbearable conflict and pain. The spiritual connection may start by being a real opening, but it is partial, built on an unbalanced feeling dominated compensatory process, which is hung onto like a “self-rock” (Wolfert 2000). People so identified are blind to reason as they fiercely maintain the splits between head, heart and body. History tells us time and again about how this ‘fierceness’ has so often turned profoundly negative. This is the psychology of cults, the “them and us” of fundamentalism.

Elements of this process are discussed by all the spiritual writers here, the “catch 22” of spirituality is that as soon as there is some projective attachment and identification with it as a goal, we are taken away from here and now and thus away from the spiritual. Having a “goal” is one of Philippson’s objections to the spiritual / humanistic approach (2001 p.9). But I think that he ‘throws the baby out with the bathwater’ by not taking onboard the spiritual experiences discussed above.

Herrigel (1978) in “Zen and the Art of Archery” describes how (to his initial horror) he spent his first years training only a few feet from the target. He then wonderfully describes how he came to understand that ‘aiming’ was irrelevant and that attending to the process was everything.

This was the theme of Krishnamurti’s (1969) teaching, that searching for enlightenment in the future is a contradiction in terms, and that the movement can only be into the here and now. All the spiritual writers here caution against becoming identified with spiritual searching. Kornfield (2000) describes how spiritual ideas and experiences especially, can become “just another thing to let go of” (p96). Gangaji says trying to develop “consciousness is a huge mistake” (p.70) because it is, anyway, always present. As Herrigel found, “aiming” just takes us away from where we need to be.

Frankl (1946 / 1992) articulated this when he said, “What is called self-actualisation is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualisation is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence” (p.115) There are echoes of “The Paradoxical theory of Change” (Beisser 1970) here.

Many people have pointed out the psychological difficulties that surround those who take on the spiritual perspective and become identified with it. Both Yontef (1993), Wolfert (2000), Philippson (2001) all argue that people look to metaphysical “rocks” in order to alleviate anxieties.

Hayes (2007) describes the process (which I recognises from my own past) of how focusing on the here and now in an attempt to be ‘spiritual’, but can also turn into avoidance on an emotional level. He warns that, “The recent enthusiasm for mindfulness … risks creating just another form of Western self-indulgence.” (p.17)

Welwood (1994) and Cashwell, Myers & Shurts (2004) describe the psychological process which they call “spiritual bypass” as being where people use, “… spiritual experience, beliefs, or practices to avoid (or bypass) psychological wounds.” (p.403). Wink, Dillion & Fay (2005) also discuss the limitations of those chasing spiritual experience, “Hypersensitive narcissists also display the despair, fragility, and the search for deliverance from self-pain portrayed as characterizing spiritual seekers.” (p.145).

Again, Gangaji (2005) expresses this, “One of the dangers I have seen of the so-called “spir¬itual life” is the ego’s attempt to use spiritual life to escape heartbreak, difficulty, and continued patterns of hatred, revenge, and war—to escape the idea of a hell. The desire for transcendence becomes bigger than the willingness to let the heart open to it all, the totality of human beauty as well as the total¬ity of human catastrophe. When you are willing to fully experience the hopelessness and the horror of being human, the eternal poten¬tial for living life in truth is freed.” (p231) This is to me the “Paradoxical Theory of Change” (ibid) in profound action. It is only by facing our held pain and distress, our “catastrophe”, that we can undo our splits, let go of our fears and become more open and trusting.

The other side of this paradox however is that, when we find presence, (and because of our partial/split nature), the un-integrated neurotic aspect of ego, or “character”, is also strengthened in a narcissistic process. So contact with the transpersonal can lead to being grandiose (even evangelical as above), as Symington (1996) describes. This process is surely inevitable as our insecurities produce an ‘active ego’ rather than an “otiose” one (PHG 1994).

So, the ego cannot help but take for itself some of the power and freedom that presence brings. I think this is why Symington (2002) makes clear that narcissism is a lifetime’s process to work through. This is I think why many people talk about growth in terms of a spiral (Wilber 2006, Beck & Cowan 1996) in which we revisit the same issues again and again, but from places slightly changed by our increased awareness, and why change is largely slow and incremental.

Gestalt, the spiritual and meaning

So what does all this mean? Yontef (1993) says “Meaning is the configuration of a figure against a ground.” (p.10). The figures here, are, I think, our needs, as Perls (1975) discussed above; how needs arise from the fabric of life itself and how meaning comes from the arising and meeting of needs. I eat because I am hungry, earn money to survive, choose life over death, these are meaningful activities. This is Maslow’s (1968) “hierarchy of needs”. Wheeler (2006) says that one of our deepest needs is to make meaning, “… the constructivist, meaning-making nature of the human mind and human self … our ceaseless activity of making a whole picture” (p14) We go mad from not being able to make sense of ourselves and our lives, as Bateson (1999) showed in his understanding of the “double bind” behind schizophrenia.

More pointedly Frankl (1959/1992) says, “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalisation” of instinctive drives” (p.105) He goes on to say that we discover meaning in life through three different ways. Firstly through by our actions, secondly through our relationships and thirdly “by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.” (p.115).

This third “way”, the struggle to accept unavoidable suffering, is as I understand it the work of integration or therapy. Meaning gets lost in the confusion and conflict of all our compensatory processes around our avoidance of suffering; the avoidance of contact through introjection, projections, deflections, retroflections and egoism, (PHG 1994, Polster & Polster 1974). When we have split our ‘self’’, through trauma of whatever type, we attempt to maintain the unawareness of our underlying “organismic” needs, because to allow them would necessarily connect us with what we fear, as well as to the loss of what we have needed whilst maintaining the unawareness (PHG 1994). Maslow (1968) also makes this point, “Neurosis is very often a deficiency disease.” (p.178), Wheway (1999) talks about this in terms of “primal wounding”, “… transpersonal development as continuous with the ordinary work of therapy, in that throughout, what is sought is integration of splitting and fragmentation brought about by primal wounding.” (p.124)

PHG (1994) make clear that our “neurotically” directed attempted ‘solutions’ can never satisfy or resolve the underlying conflict. But as we face our fear and pain, integration occurs, life starts to makes more sense and we are able to increasingly meet our real “organismic” needs, as opposed to our “neurotic”, wishes. When we understand ‘what is’, the “structure of our situation” (PHG 1994), we become more aware of, and understand what our “organismic” needs are, the suffering starts to make sense and meaning emerges. Even if those needs cannot be met, the awareness of them transforms our sense of self because we then understand and can see that we are not ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ and can face the hurt and grieve the loss without the feared destruction of our self happening.

The task then is to know ourselves well enough to know what our more “organismic” needs are as it is these that provide us with meaning and purpose. The writers here are saying that the deepest and most meaningful needs and satisfaction comes from the spiritual dimensions of life. As above, this can be seen in terms of a whole which comprises our; heads, with our need for awareness and understanding; our hearts with the need for relationship, for love and intimacy, for openness, to know and be known; and our bodies in terms of attention and knowledge, towards an energised embodiedness.

PHG (1994) describe the self, “But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life … it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by. (p.11) Our ‘self’ sorts out the priorities of our needs, it has the wisdom to know when to choose what to attend to next, in every situation. The self is enormously wise if we can listen to it rather than to our ego. The process of growth can be seen as how, through undoing our splits, we become increasingly able, firstly, to know what our “organismic” needs are, and then to meet them; as the self becomes less confused and lost. Its creativity increases, becoming freer, more powerful and spontaneous and able to make meaning, as above. (PHG 1994). Again, as Merleau-Ponty said above, meaning is “self-coherence” (Kennedy 2008).

As we ‘integrate’, either through a moment of full-contact, or through development, the sum of the parts of head, heart and body become something greater and presence becomes possible. There is a ‘magic’ here; contacting the here and now demands the integration of heart, head and body in presence. We can’t fully meet the here and now without becoming a transformed whole to some degree. (as PHG 1994 above)

It is in this context that Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) say, there is nothing as deeply satisfying as presence. This is why the spiritual is so powerful, through connecting to presence, love, understanding and relaxation we find our deepest satisfaction, our “deepest self-support”. This is what Tolle describes in the quote above, how a moment’s awareness can make sense of the whole of our life up to this moment.

Kepner (1996) confirms this view in discussing the spiritual in terms of “the transcendent”. He argues that “transcendence” is an “essential part of the process of therapy with survivors of early trauma.” And an essential part of the “reconsolidation phase” of healing, where there is the need for something that can provide meaning in a larger frame than their experience to date. This can then “encompass and hold the aberrant quality of the trauma.” (p.136) With the progress of therapy and the client’s ownership of their feelings the “transcendental” can support them in letting go of their ‘victimhood’ and give them something, “… that imbues past, present, and future with significance and direction. … “The transcendent perspective … is different dimensionally. It imbues the field as a whole. … The transcendent frame is a context that holds us, rather than what we hold or even can hold as individuals.” (p.136-136) The success of AA style support groups can be understood in this context.

As we integrate we become more and more attuned to the essential value that comes from fulfilling our needs at ever more profound levels. The experience and satisfaction of our deepest needs provides us with our aim and purpose. This brings us to …

The aim or purpose of Gestalt and Spirituality

The Tao Te Ching (1973) expresses the idea that everything is only as it can be, at this moment and that that there is a natural flow to the unfolding manifestation of the “ten thousand things”. Forcing anything is seen as counter-productive with negative consequences.

This corresponds very well to the inherent directionality of the Paradoxical Theory of Change (Beisser 1970) which says that change occurs, not through trying to change, but through becoming more fully ourselves. Trying, or doing, can be seen as coming from ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ of our “introjections” (Polster & Polster 1974).

The concept of “Organismic Self-Regulation” (PHG 1994) also supports this Taoist view in that it says that change follows its own lawful journey through the process of figure formation and destruction, one that is worked out between the self and the environment at every moment through the “contact process”, and that there is a deep wisdom in this process.

The wisdom inherent in organismic self-regulation and the Paradoxical Theory of Change demonstrates the force towards increased awareness or Consciousness in our lives. Bates (2001) explores this in looking at the wisdom of our “shadow” in “The Three Little Pigs” myth, “All these wolves are life pushing us into more life” (p.99 my emphasis)

This force is also there, by definition, in Holism’s “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Smuts 1926) and Field Theory’s “Phenomena are determined by the whole field … The field is a unitary whole” (Yontef 1993 p.297). This “unitary whole” from the spiritual perspectives above can be seen as the Tao, the “fertile void” or God. From this universal perspective, Lewin’s, “the need organises the field of experience” (quoted in Wheeler 2008 p.216), can be seen as, “the fertile void” or “Consciousness” organising the field. The same applies to Gestalt Psychology’s principle of “Pragnanz” which “states that the field will form itself into the best possible gestalt that global conditions will allow.”(Yontef 1993 p.147)

It seems to me, logically and intuitively, that all these phenomena point to a teleological force, which fits well with the view above, of how Consciousness or the Tao created the universe in order to express and see itself. We embody this ‘need’ or desire. It also fits with many of the world’s creation myths (Campbell & Moyers 1988), including, (if you strip out the ‘Christian’ morality) the story of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge and having to leave Eden. By eating the apple they embody the subject / object split, become aware of themselves as separate and are thus stuck with journeying back towards wholeness or God.

From this, our purpose is to follow our “organismic” nature towards developing ever more awareness and thus participate more and more fully in this cosmic game of hide and seek. The end of the game, and our purpose, according to the spiritual perspectives explored here, is to transcend our “object / subject” split so that we can rest in ‘being’, in the self-consciousness of the universe.

The genius of Gestalt therapy is to see how our “illusion of separateness” is entirely functional. It keeps the held or repressed pain and distress that we have not been able to cope with, out of awareness. There is no ”right” and “wrong”; through therapy we attend to the pain, face the suffering and free ourselves from the need to perpetuate the illusion. This enables us to engage increasingly in the here and now embodying our connectedness to life, to ‘reality rather than fantasy’ (Perls 1976), with the potential of eventually seeing through the illusion of our separateness.

This is where Gestalt therapy’s holism is so powerful. Instead of exhorting us to ‘get past’ our ‘desires’ or ‘sins’ as many spiritual / religious traditions seem to end up doing; Gestalt theory says that there is the wisdom of organismic self-regulation, in all of them. Every “resistance” or “hindrance” has its meaning and learning to give. Wheeler (2008) celebrates Goodman’s radical achievement in understanding this. “But the centrepiece of the vision, the relocation of Eros to the centre of our natural selves … as key not to our doom but our salvation – was pure Goodman.” (p.221) All our needs, wants and desires, however distorted by trauma into “neurotic” expressions, are still reflections of Consciousness (Eros) trying to see itself.

Moore (1992) makes clear how that all our ‘negative’ responses and behaviour, our dislike of others, our anger, hatred or jealousy, our self destructive behaviour, our narcissism, are all expressions of our “soul’s” needs. How facing these “shadow” aspects of ourselves through increased awareness and self-knowledge, means coming to terms with what we have split off or disowned. What we split off are, in the end, aspects of our “soul”, our underlying fundamental needs, for love, acceptance, understanding, awareness or ‘being’.

It seems that it does not so much matter what we do (apart from not damaging others) if we can bring some self-awareness and presence to our ‘here and now’ it means we become part of the unfolding deepening of our consciousness and therefore part of the intentionality of Consciousness. There can be a deep recognition of participating in “Truth, Goodness and Beauty”

So, I am not sure that we need to “fundamentally de-construct our wants” (Wolfert 2000). Kolodny (2004), (amongst others here), argues, that we do not need to ‘to do’ anything, other than attend to ‘what is’, our phenomenology, to allow and trust the power of awareness and attend to its unfolding, and the understanding that comes with it.

But while the process of integration is going on, and until we transcend the subject / object split in ‘enlightenment’, we are stuck with the paradox of trying for what cannot be tried for. The “paradoxical theory of change” in action; working to integrate, searching for freedom, on the one hand; on the other, staying with ‘what is’, with ‘being’, here and now. The Paradox of Action / Non-Action and Support and Challenge This is the subject of the most famous of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita (Mascaro 1965) where Arjuna and Krishna have an epic debate over the merits of action versus non-action. This is what I think Greaves (1977 Ed. Smith) meant in saying that, “Choice is the only mystery of life as great as being.” (p197) It reflects this impossible paradox. On the one hand our destiny is mapped out and if we could just drop our attachment to our ego, as Gangaji (above) describes, we would become instantly enlightened. If we could only let go and be, now, we would be free of having to face the dilemmas of choice and action. We could rest in non-action, be the Zen or Tao of ‘non-doing’, simply living out the direction and demands of Consciousness and Love.

But for the vast majority of us life is not like that and Kornfield (2000) made clear that even those with a high degree of ‘enlightenment’ still need to continue working on themselves. We are stuck with choice and responsibility and its struggle as part of our lives. We can experience movements of relative freedom in terms of ‘states’ of presence, but until separateness is no longer there, we are stuck with the dissonance inherent in our experience of separateness, as it ‘tugs’ at our consciousness with its deep desire for resolution, Consciousness wanting to become conscious.

This reflects directly the issue of support and challenge and how Gestalt therapy is a dance around this theme. The difference between support on the one hand, being with what is, accepting and embodying our experience with whatever difficulties are there, supporting our client’s beingness. On the other side the need to challenge the choices and unawareness and all the necessary struggles involved in developing new awareness. The grief, loss and depression involved in gradually letting go of our ego attachments.

This is, in turn, reflected in the different approaches within Gestalt therapy. Perls (1975) challenged his clients’ attempts to manipulate their environment for support, and today Philippson’s (2001) focus is on our need to accept our existential responsibility and how, “… the central act in human psychological functioning is choosing:” (2001 p.32) He emphasises the importance of being a “strong other” against which our clients can know themselves and that we can only know ourselves through our “relationship” to the world.

The risks here, it seems to me, are around how our ego inevitability identifies with the idea of choice, we so easily move into the world of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’, blame and guilt. Also, we naturally adjust to demanding environments by hiding our shame and therefore ourselves; when we do not feel accepted enough we cannot / do not, risk the contact that we need to grow.

On the other side of the paradox is Wheeler’s (2006),Hycner’s (1995) and Jacobs’ (2005) “intersubjective” approach with their emphasise on attending to the ground on which we stand and the co-created nature of our dialogic encounter, and concern to try to get past the dynamics of shame. The attempt is to provide acceptance at a deep level, to diminish the power inequalities and recognise, with humility, that we are part of field and jointly responsible for what is being co-created at any moment.

This intersubjective view seems to be very close to the humility, love and acceptance at the heart of spiritual connection described above, as in Wheeler’s (2006) “the one and the many”. The risks here though, it seems to me, are that in seeing the self as being so deeply co-created and field defined, the existential nature of choice and responsibility gets somewhat lost. It is as though the intersubjective view risks saying, “if only we can get the conditions right, then awareness / growth will happen”. Yet we cannot surely take choice out of the equation.

Choice and responsibility for our choices, (in terms of ownership, rather than “response-ability”) that we have an existential responsibility as human beings to choose truth rather than fantasy, to choose awareness rather than un-awareness. That this corresponds to our deep nature as argued above, does not take away the necessity for choice to be a central aspect of our lives. Otherwise the cosmic game of hide and seek that Consciousness is engaged in, would make no sense. There would be total determinism or total meaninglessness.

It seems to me that the really hard task in this game is to get past our introjected morality, so that we are left with our more “organic” choices at this existential level. Perls’ (1969) wonderfully demonstrated this with his fiercely determination not to be dictated to by his “top-dog”.

But this is also what makes psychotherapy such a difficult, dangerous, and life and death process. Where there is much pain, we don’t want to face it, and may have spent our whole lives struggling to keep it at bay. So the forces involved can be very strong. Even in the most severe difficulties the process of awareness has to be chosen at an existential level. Going ‘through the fire’ and staying with the process is very tough, but profoundly growthful. In the end we have the choice to face the pain or not. When I am depressed, do I carry on suppressing my awareness or can I perhaps, with patience, allow the meaning of what is happening to emerge? This shows how choice and responsibility operate fundamentally at the level of awareness more than anything else. This is obvious in one way, as without awareness, there is no choice or responsibility.

All the arguments about the need for empathy and attunement and support, about co-creation and being “of the field”, are all necessary and important. As Yontef (1993) argues there is no going back to the arrogance of the “boom-boom” style of the sixties and seventies. Also there can be no judgement, a person cannot be wrong for not choosing awareness. This is part of the mystery and paradox, that there is choice, but there is also no judgement. At the level of presence the world is only as it can be, here and now, unfolding the way it is.

In the end we face the impossibility of deciding whether we choose awareness and presence or whether it chooses us. As Buber says above, “The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking. But… it is an act of my being … I step into direct relation with it … as any action of my whole being … Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou as I become I … All real living is meeting.” (1937 p.24/25)

When we are able to “meet”, to enter the here and now more deeply, to embody an integrated “I”, to find presence or “Thou”, our relationship to our environment changes dramatically. The environment does not change, but we do. So presence gives us some relative independence from our environment.

It is this paradox between choice and no-choice that makes Gestalt such a ongoing challenge, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer, no formula, and this is why Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) say, “… becoming a Gestalt therapist is such a demanding and challenging path.” (p.18)

At any moment it may be that support would enable a client to feel heard and allow them to open their defences and become more aware of how they are structured. At the same moment a challenge might or might not provoke a similar insight, and perhaps even an understanding of their responsibility for their situation.

Life is much too complex and ‘chaotic’ for any right and wrong answers. What Chidiac & Denham-Vaughan (2007) discuss is how it is only through the depth of our own presence or ‘being’, that we can trust our creativity to find a satisfying way through. Presence reconciles the paradox and dissolves the difference between support and challenge because both can be held fluidly and creatively. We can challenge the ‘status quo’ without it being a reaction or projection, with it being a movement towards openness and expansion. We can support without there being counter-transferential or confluential undercurrents. Presence reconciles the paradox because it is, albeit temporarily, a moment of ‘enlightenment’ and freedom. Also, presence itself can be very challenging for clients.

As an example, in my own therapy I have repeatedly experienced becoming aware of how I am caught not accepting life as it is, here and now. The movement is from defensiveness, a struggle with introjects, disconnection, a lack of meaning and trust. From a glimpse of opening my awareness to the truth of the situation, a process can start of allowing ‘what is’. As I start to recognise my fear, avoidance or defensiveness I can begin to face what I am avoiding, then as meaning emerges and I can start to let go and sense my body again. With this integration I can trust enough to move into ‘being’, into opening my heart again, opening my thoughts and body. I can taste again the possibility of living with sufficient self-support to meet the world with openness and love and what this could be like.

I think the experience of presence is essentially the same as finding ‘enlightenment’. The only difference is in the scale of meaning, and the sustainability of the transformation.

From the above we can see how anything that we, or our clients, say or do, has its meaning in relationship to our needs. How every twist and turn of our struggles in life are necessary and there for us to learn from, how all our needs can be seen as being part of the force moving us towards meeting our ultimate needs around awareness, ‘being’ and love. As therapists, holding the awareness of this ground, allows us to connect to our own presence, to accept and have compassion for ourselves and our clients. It seems to me like a ‘golden thread’ that can run through the relationship between therapist and client. Connecting to it, re-awakens us to our presence and the meaning of our and our clients’ lives, to Buber’s “I-Thou”.

Phenomenology, Gestalt and Presence

Bloom (2009) in investigating Husserl’s Phenomenology and its relationship to Gestalt therapy say that Gestalt does not simply take the phenomenological stance of trying to return to and stay with the experiential data and attend to figure/ground emergence, it goes further.

He says that, Gestalt therapy is achieved by the self using an “as if” …. by “doubling back” (p.281) onto itself with its “natural attitude”, which is our “default” way of living with its focus on the world as we find it, “naive” and “ordinary”. He describes Husserl’s question of, “how can science – or psychotherapy – reliably get beyond naive experience if it is embedded within the very world it is studying?” (p. 283)

He describes Husserl’s method as, “a series of reductions (Bracketing or Epoche) to extract consciousness from the naive, mundane world, and achieve a transcendental consciousness (and intentionality) … in order to discover universal essences.” (p.283 my first brackets) That how, after this “Epoche”, our relationship to the world is very different, “We can now know the constitutive nature of consciousness. Consciousness now functions transcendentally, composed of both the object … and the object as intended within consciousness. … a person can be … conscious of being conscious” (p.284)

He goes on to say how Husserl says, “consciousness unifies sensation and perception: “The lived-body is constantly there … an entire system of compatibly harmonising organs of perception, the lived body is in itself … the perceiving-lived body” Consciousness is embodied consciousness.” (p. 284)

All this fits very well with the exploration of consciousness and presence above. Bloom also discusses the “intentionality” in Husserl’s understanding of consciousness, which corresponds well with the ideas above of consciousness wanting to become conscious and how our choices at the level of awareness are a part of this.

Bloom (ibid) describes how after “epoche”, (or achieving “presence” in terms of this essay) the therapist and client then “double-back” to give attention to current experience of the clients’ “natural attitude” in order to enable the seeing and understanding of the emergent figure/ground phenomena.

His review illustrates I think, my thesis here, how Gestalt therapy is dependent on the process of integration into presence, of consciousness becoming conscious of itself.

Conclusion

Smuts (1926) said that each whole was part of a greater whole and that each whole is more than the sum of its parts. Our current knowledge of the universe today confirms this even more than when he was writing. We now glimpse how unimaginably vast the universe is and how it leads back to the absolute of the “singularity” at the Big Bang. How there must be something of this mystery in “black holes”, as well as the quantum level where form is energy and space with miraculous and un-definable properties. (Goswami 1995)

So perhaps, absolute mysteries, rather than absolutes, but it is nonetheless clear that so many conceptual mistakes are around claims to know an ‘absolute’, when really the conceptualisation is just another whole or perspective. This is where I appreciate Gestalt’s and Wilber’s understanding of the importance and value of Postmodernism in destroying our absolutes and exposing them as prejudices and “self-rocks”.

It is easy to argue that the spiritual is a “self rock” and see that countless people down the centuries have grasped these ‘rocks’ to avoid the “uncertainties of life” (Staemmler 2006). Obviously the spiritual can be used as this, but so can anything, even existentialism and post-modernism as Wheeler (2006, 2008) and Evans (2007) have argued. But “self rocks” are, after all, just another defensive ego structure that awareness has not yet had time to dissolve.

I return to Naranjo’s (1993) statement that “awareness is transpersonal … or spiritual”, I hope I have been able to shed a little more light on this statement. To show something of how awareness is about our choice to connect, through opening, to the meaning of our lives and how through this we can open to the spiritual experiences described by the different writers here. How awareness comes through different aspects of our functioning, head, heart and body or from different perspectives, “I”, “We” or “It”, which colours the different experiences of the spiritual.

The writers here have shown how the spiritual can support the difficult scary work of becoming more aware. That the spiritual supports at a deep level, affirming the value and meaning of our existence, mostly beyond the reaches of our narcissism, where ‘being’ and love meet. I agree with Kepner (1996), the spiritual can, through allowing our being to expand, support further awareness of our existential anxieties. Thereby allowing them to be seen and accepted at a deeper level than would otherwise be possible and enabling the unknowable ‘void of now’, to be an increasing a part of our lives.

Wheeler (2006), Wilber (2006), Wolfert (2000) and Kornfield (2000) all make clear that we need both approaches. Therapy, to help heal our need for ‘illusion’, to work through the onion layers of protection that make up our “character”; and the spiritual, to let go of the self, to heal our subject / object split and connect to the ‘void of now’ with its quantum nature, presence, consciousness, love and compassion.

My aim was to explore the relationship between Gestalt therapy theory and spiritual experience and understanding. I hope I have contributed to the debate around these issues. Writing this essay and finding the clarity I have, has given me a greater sense of hope. Meaning has emerged more clearly, as well as a trust in the way that the process of developing awareness through therapy is part of the creative and loving directionality inherent in the self, and in the Universe.

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So from a holistic point of view, this is our basic structure, head, heart and body, it is these three basic aspects of ourselves that we need to be aware of in order to be present, fully here and now in this moment, aware of being alive here in this room, right now.

We all are inclined to favour one part over the others by preference – Who here is usually in their heads, trusts their heads more than the rest of them? Who would say that they mainly rely on their feelings to relate to life, they don’t trust their thinking, or assume they can’t think? Who here is primarily a physical person, one who trusts doing things to make sense of life?

O.K. – firstly what has therapy to do with this? When something happens that is too much to bear we adjust ourselves to enable us to cope and survive, whether this was from a specific trauma that happened in our past, or years of being told that you were not good enough, of being put down and being rejected, or being “spoilt” materially whilst being emotionally starved, or by being involved in a car crash yesterday.

All these ‘traumas’, sometimes in a wider rather than narrow sense, cause us to adjust in what Gestalt calls a “creative solution”. Our self’s first imperative is to survive, so we instinctively restrict our awareness and push aside, block out, keep at bay or hold in the background aspects of our reactions that are too much to bear so as to protect our ‘self’. PTSD is an obvious example of this.

But in order to make these adjustments, and to maintain them, sometimes for a lifetime, we have to sacrifice some of the connections between our head, heart and body.

The consequence is that we “split” ourselves into separate parts which then do relate to each other. So that we lose touch with our ability to feel our feelings, or we give up thinking, saying to ourselves that we are not “bright enough” or can’t be bothered. Then there is the inevitable desensitisation of our bodies through tension and illness. The result is that we can feel alienated from ourselves, always in conflict with ourselves at some level.

Almost all of us have splits of some type. We all have the experience of doing, or thinking or feeling things that another part of us doesn’t like.

Eating too much, drinking too much, buying something we don’t need, being lazy, watching too much tele, getting angry, getting upset, not going to sleep, feeling guilty, avoiding difficult aspects of life, being addicted to wanting more than I have, etc. etc. – and these are just a few of mine … !

So perhaps you could give a show of hands, of those who have had the experience of getting caught doing things that another part of you didn’t want to do, or that you feel you shouldn’t have done??? …. ….

Well as I understand it, every “should” or “ought” we have, is the expression of a split in us. Each “should” or “ought” or judgement of another has a bit of unaware pain, hurt or loss hidden behind it. Every time you judge someone, or yourself, saying, “you shouldn’t do that” or “I ought to be like this” it is an expression of a split inside you. This can easily be seen in how we do to our children what was done to us, “you will eat up your food”, “you mustn’t do that”, etc. If we can look at the force with which such judgements are sometimes expressed its clear that they are disproportionate and come from our own conditioning, our own split off and buried pain from having been punished ourselves.

This is profoundly expressed in the truism, “What we reject in the other is what we can’t stand in ourselves”. It is the pain behind the split that we hold out of awareness that we can’t stand and therefore reject. Also, this is why it’s so difficult for us to live by the classic maxim “do unto others as you would be done by”. So much of our behaviour happens without the awareness of what drives it.

This is also why therapy is such a radical and revolutionary process – it profoundly challenges many of our accepted norms, on many levels.

Many of us, it seems to me, are still suffering from the generational trauma’s of the first and second World Wars echoing down the decades, which in turn were echoes of the terrible crippling brutality of life down the centuries. In the West this has, apart from the extreme physical harshness of life, come from the distorted religious dogma of the medieval Christian belief that we were born evil and had to be made “good” by discipline and punishment, which in turn can be seen as the expression of the struggle for power and greed in the early church.

Child rearing manuals from the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, are enough to make your blood run cold. All spontaneity and enjoyment had to be squashed. As Alice Miller made clear, it is no wonder that the Germans had to fight the world (through a massive cultural projection) and went onto create the horrors of the Nazis. The famous British “stiff upper lip” which “must not tremble at any cost or the Empire will fall”, also has its roots deep in this history.

As John Lennon put it

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small

By giving you no time instead of it all

Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

Cultural trauma seems to be worldwide and an integral part of our history, apart from maybe in a few fortunate primitive tribes – so, many of us suffer from trauma in this widest sense of the word and many of us from a narrower meaning of the word, as well.

On the positive side in a recent BBC series on the history of the family since WW11, I found it fascinating to see how far we have come from that stifling emotional straightjacket that permeated our culture after WW11.

It seems to me that as our standard of living has improved over the twentieth century and our psychological understanding has increased, so the general level of trauma in western societies has diminished. The effect of this is that children today are much freer than ever before – this has many associated problems, but as a whole it must surely be welcomed.

Even so we still live with many splits in ourselves and these create corresponding gaps and barriers between our head, heart and bodies which prevents awareness and maintains unawareness,, with the result that we are condemned to live so much of our lives as relative automatons, relatively unaware in our fixed reactive patterns, more than participating in our destiny, of growth towards being and consciousness, which as I understand it is our spiritual destiny.

But before exploring the spiritual dimension I want to look in more detail at the psychology of being split.

As I’ve argued, we split ourselves as a defence from being overwhelmed by whatever form of trauma we suffered. Whether it is from a drip, drip, drip of negative put downs, or dramatic suffering caused by accident or abusive behaviour. We are then condemned to maintain these splits through avoidance or repression throughout our lives and this results in all the compensatory processes we live with. These can all be seen in terms of how we are clumsily and blindly struggling to survive by maintaining our avoidance of the hurt, pain or distress in the background of our selves. These processes that we call depression, anxiety, anger, addiction, neurosis etc., etc., all have their side effects, which unfortunately also cause us much conflict and distress.

Part of the process of starting therapy is often recognising that our method of avoidance and its consequences are in the end unacceptable and that maybe it would be better to face the trauma, or “catastrophe”, at the centre of these processes. Otherwise, why would we bother facing such difficult feelings?

Our split structure restricts and narrows our living, we are unaware of the needs of our bodies, of our feelings, we have given up thinking or we over rely on it. This means that we can get very little satisfaction, enjoyment and freedom in our lives. The point here is that therapy, in whatever form it takes … helps us to reduce these splits through helping us to attend to the hurt, loss or pain that we pushed aside. Keeping it pushed aside forced us to constantly maintain these splits – so through allowing the painful feelings back into our awareness we start to re-make the connections between our head, heart and body. It’s important to understand that we often need the support of our body and our understanding, to face the painful feelings we are keeping at bay.

When we live with pain, hurt or distress, kept unaware in the background, we are bound to live with fear and insecurity, we fear anything that will upset our fragile balance, but life does that anyway, all the time of course. We try to shut our hearts down, our bodies down and our thinking down to restrict our awareness. We then often over emphasis one part of ourselves in order to find some satisfaction – through physical exercise, or intellectual over control, or perfectionism, or over alert feelings in anxiety or panic or hyper activity (as with workaholics).

When we are hurt, frightened or overwhelmed we naturally adjust by withdrawing our needs in some way and become self-sufficient and then pretend we didn’t need it anyway. But we get stuck there feeling defeated and resigned to the impossibility of getting what we need, but the real loss, the giving up of what we needed does not go away and we were then condemned to spend a lot of energy keeping the awareness of it at bay, together with its needs and loss or grief, all of which results in lots of internal conflict.

Our need to eat too much can be seen as compensation for the lack of satisfaction in our lives, the lack of satisfying contact which what really nourishes our self.

Watching tele can be straightforwardly an anaesthetic, but also avoidance

Getting angry is often self-defence. If our self is vulnerable then we will be over sensitive to threats to ourselves and our anger may be inappropriate, but it still reflects our deficit need for love and support which led to our vulnerability in the first place. Aggression or Defensiveness is our attempt to maintain our fragile sense of self, an attempt to prevent sore wounds from being poked yet again.

We judge others in order to pass the hurt we have experienced in being judged, onto others – it makes us feel better for second or two, but also again the deficit need for respect and acceptance is there in the background.

Being addicted to anything, is more obviously a way of distracting and covering over some trauma, maybe some pain of rejection at some level; so again the pain of the lack of love and acceptance is avoided.

Anxiety is fear, fear that has become generalised and self-generating – the risks of facing our hurt and distress, makes us lose ourselves in an avalanche of panic with many resulting physical symptoms.

Depression is a shutting down, or desensitising of our system, it is a straightforward avoidance of too much pain with the shutting down process getting deeply into the structure of our bodies, which then becomes self-perpetuating.

Arrogance – is a process of over compensating for a sense of insecurity and not feeling good enough, inferiority and superiority are ends of the same stick, when there is one there is automatically the other as well.

Insecurity is perhaps due to lack of support childhood. So through accepting the pain of the insecurity and the loss with its sense of deficit in terms of love and support and the need for it – more and more deeply, over as much time as it takes – the heart can heal and again become a more integrated part of the self. Again facing the pain allows the awareness of the need, which it may well not be possible to meet, but allowing ourselves to feel it, to acknowledge it anyway can be enormously liberating.

“Self-indulgence” reflects our lack of self-support and need for comfort in the face of our own and the world’s criticisms falling on existing wounds. Self-pity has much too much of bad press (from our stiff upper lip conditioning) – in many ways it is simply grieving.

Vanity, Pride, Selfishness etc., are all attempts to cope with a deficient sense of self. Lying, and all those small white lies / half truths that we use, are so often, simply our protection of our sense of inadequacy.

Facing the hurt, pain or loss that caused us to split, is the same thing as facing the unmet or deficit need within us. For example – Grieving is an organic need, if we refuse it, we then further split ourselves which causes many resulting negative processes to start working in us, anxiety or depression for example. As we face the pain we can allow the grieving and its healing process to naturally occur.

In order to survive trauma without adequate resources, i.e. when the self is overwhelmed, often the only strategy the self can adopt is to blame itself. “I must be bad for this to have happened”. Especially when young, if we have been abused or neglected all we can do is to turn it against ourselves so as to make some sense of the situation and save ourselves from going mad. “I must be not good enough in some way”, we internalise this message at a very deep level within ourselves because we don’t have the resources to put the blame where it belongs, outside ourselves.

We are then faced with living with the resulting insecurity and splits between our heart head and body constantly undermining our confidence and ability to live life to the full. But the heart of the problem is that this “badness” or “not good enoughness” is always being re-stimulated by life’s “slings and arrows” so there is a constant struggle to find some equilibrium. Also the world is seen through fearful eyes as a negative place.

This insecurity is the same for ‘Introverts’ and ‘extroverts’, but each often reacts to the same “slings and arrows” in very different ways –

Introverts version of the process As a generalisation, introverts turn the pain of the loss more directly onto themselves, and are more likely to get “depression”, which is a process of withdrawal and shutting down. The inevitable reverse of this process of “inferiority” is “superiority” with its grandiosity and narcissism.

Extroverts version of the process Extroverts often try and turn the blame outwards, to punish the other and move into anger. On investigation, what emerges is that they are blaming someone else because it is much easier to do that than face the pain of what is within them – a process we call projection. They are more likely to find that their compensatory process involves anxiety rather than depression; there is a constant state of high alert, which can lead to panic attacks and also OCD.

Maybe another generalisation is that those people who commit suicide are introverted and those who commit murder are extroverts?

The insecurity and sense of deficit in both cases is very similar, a lack of love, support and attention, which when it is faced and owned, enables the heart to open and start to heal – when guilt, anger and blame are re-owned and re-allocated love can return. In practice we are all a mixture of both, just with one tending to predominate. With either “style” the process of allowing, facing and healing our wounds means that we become less fearful and more secure. Fear and anxiety so often comes from the sense that we will be overwhelmed by those forces in us we don’t trust or understand. Pushing them out of awareness, into the dark, makes monsters of them. Where there is un-faced hurt or pain there is bound to be fear.

My nervousness at giving this talk now, is a case in point – I don’t like it or want it, it connects to my insecurity which has its painful roots deep in my past – but if I refuse and try to pretend it’s not there I deny a part of myself and I become a lie.

But lying is something that we all do, all the time — and we then often go and harshly judge anyone who lies.

To forgive those who commit crimes means that we have to accept that we all have parts of ourselves that are capable of doing the same – they exist in us all. But the point is that through accepting our pain, hurt, insecurity etc., we change our relationship to it – it doesn’t disappear, but its power diminishes – I no longer have to live with a part of me denied and split off from my awareness, it doesn’t mean that I’m not yet free of my insecurity.

This is about the movement to understanding the needs behind negative behaviour, to seeing how the harsh self judgements are part of the fixed prison like structure we constructed to avoid the pain, fear, distress and suffering that felt too much to bear. I think that all our negative behaviour is the distorted compensatory expression of our genuine needs which have been kept pushed aside.

But the really important thing here is that our “problems”, whatever they are, can become the very gateway through which we start our journey towards integration, wholeness, presence, and indeed, even to re-find the ability to love and be loved that we all so dearly want. Without the need to address our problems we would not need to understand ourselves and therefore become aware of the possibilities that growth and developing maturity present.

Therapy supports us to face the pain that we have been avoiding. Often the first part of this process is anger and rejection of what “apparently caused” it, but then comes understanding and finally acceptance – these are the classic stages of grief. When we can accept our pain it can, as it were, break our hearts open again, this process it can break the armour with which we encased our hearts. Through allowing ourselves to feel the distress, hurt, grief, rejection, insecurity, vulnerability or whatever it is that we have been defending ourselves against, we become more open, and less defensive. This process of integration can take a long time, but it works!

Through this increased awareness we can see and accept those “shadow” aspects of ourselves, those aspects of us that are mean or narrow or ugly or bad. Awareness helps us to make an object out of our compensatory processes, we are then not totally subject to their influence. We can name them and work to know them better, allowing our bodies and our feelings to incorporate the grief and loss at their centre, expanding our understanding of our self as process and therefore understanding the meaning of the developmental path we are all on, whether we know it or not.

As a therapist it is a wonderful privilege to see this process unfolding, allowing the pain, the tears, the vulnerability and then seeing the heart opening, being renewed, so the person can face the world afresh. It is a magical process, in many ways straight out of a fairy-tale.

Sometimes I have the image of a distressed young child coming for support, if the needs can be brought into awareness, the upset is accepted, then they can bounce back into exploring and engaging in the world again.

When children repeatedly can’t get what they need, they withdraw into a much less alive, self-sufficient place. Therapy is about reversing the process of that damage, through building self-support in order to be able to accept what is and take responsibility for ourselves, towards self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.

So, what has therapy and our holistic nature to do with the spiritual

The process of healing our splits, of knowing ever more deeply what is in our hearts, our bodies and our sense making, helps us towards more awareness, towards what can also be called presence, (i.e. the product of integration) or ‘being’.

What I want to put forward is the idea that spiritual experience is an experience of heart, head and body coming together in the here and now self-awareness that in ordinary language we call presence. Here there is a self-awareness of our being, of our perceiving selves together with what is perceived, there is awareness of the input from our senses, silence, sound, light, smell, taste, sensation, energy, etc.

We all find something of this presence in the “peak” moments in our lives, as Maslow argued. The sense of wholeness or inspiration that comes from, for example exercise, or in the relaxation afterwards, or after a church service, or from singing, from being in nature, or experiencing a special piece of art, or maybe in the resolution of an argument, or being in love, or hitting a tennis or golf ball beautifully, or suddenly understanding something.

Often these experiences are around an awareness of two parts coming together, head and heart, head and body, heart and body. Sometimes they also come from all three aspects of ourselves being connected in a full awareness, which is quite rare and special I think; then there is an alive sense of the energy in our bodies, our hearts are open and resolved and our minds are clear in knowing the truth of the situation.

The crucial part of this is that of moving into now, which necessitates “waking up” and moving out of being caught in dreamland, with all its unaware reactions, its top-dog / under-dog battles, its playing out of scripts and games, projections, introjections, confluences, retroflections and narcissism, all the ways in which we avoid our what is, here and now.

I’m arguing that here and now experience is “holistic”, or “spiritual”, whether it is labelled that way or not. It is this connection to “reality” (now is the only reality, the past is memory and the future fantasy) that connects us to a sense of the energy of life, of the miraculous and the mysterious in life, to the sense that there is something greater than our usual “narrow selves”, to the sense that we are an integral part of life with a special role in this universe.

The degree of spiritual connection depends on the degree of integration between head, heart and body. The other variable that determines our state of being is the stage of our development; more of which in part 2.

The style of spiritual experience however – when it is partial, which it inevitable is – is influenced by which of the head, heart or body is more developed.

If the head is dominant then it can be more of an “I am” consciousness – that Eastern Religions, meditation etc., emphasise. If you now become aware now of your body, your head and your feelings – your aliveness now – here in this room – this is presence – we can become aware that “I am” – that I” am alive right now, present to myself.

If the heart is dominant – then the spiritual is more about feeling – more the sense of a direct relationship to the divine – if you imagine that God in some form came into this room now – what would you feel – Western religious rituals were designed to engage us on this feeling level.

If the body is emphasised – then a full and sensitive aliveness to our energy and physical presence is what is arrived at, as in Yoga, Tai Chi etc.

What characterises all these different emphases is a sense of becoming aware of ourselves as an object to ourselves, we are brought to a place where we are not totally caught in reaction of some sort. I am present to myself and there is a sense of being present to that which is greater than myself. There is a sense of relative silence and stillness where the awareness of our existence and its consciousness can be felt and in the end these three aspects cannot be split, each is intimately connected to the other.

I next want to look at how these three aspects of ourselves ‘flavour’ our relationship to the spiritual in more detail

First – The Head The intellectual aspect of this is our understanding of what is happening to us, seeing how it happens, what we are doing, what’s happening in our relationships, and the effects of all the internal and external influences that we live with. We need to know and understand ourselves, and the world we live in, if our “non-integration” is be faced and worked through. We can’t face what we don’t understand.

For this to happen we need to be able to look at ourselves relatively objectively, to gain insight and see what is going on inside us. This is really difficult and itself needs some degree of integration which is why in Gestalt we emphasise the holistic approach to support our ability to look at our “what is”, which can only ever be a here and now act.

I was deeply struck by this doing my MA; time and again my understanding was stuck, because my psychology / emotions were stuck. It was through working on myself and my fears and pains in therapy and working out my ideas in writing that enabled me to move my understanding; it was a two way process, my understanding helped me to face what I needed to and my processing help my understanding. Heart and head being able to connect together.

Making sense of the past and understanding the influences of the future are important, but this can still only happen from a place of relative integration that comes from engaging in the here and now with head, heart and body. If we are totally caught in reaction, whether it takes the form of “talking about” with its defensive intellectualisation, emotional reactions, or some physical activity, there is no space in which reflection and insight can take place. This can only happen through the movement into now and the integration that this brings.

As we find greater freedom we are more able to able to be present to ourselves, rather than being wholly caught in reaction. With more integration comes more presence, which is this state of being aware of my being, of being aware of observing what is going on inside me, i.e. self-consciousness.

This is what many Eastern religions are attempting to support people to understand, that consciousness itself exists beyond us as individuals, it is the “Breath of God”. The consciousness in me is in the end the same consciousness that is in you. The Eastern view is about how our consciousness is the expression of God’s need to find itself embodied through form, to make its essence manifest. Enlightenment from this perspective is the process of letting go of all our deficit needs and sense of separation, (or attachment, viewed from the other end of the telescope), into participating more and more in being now, in consciousness itself.

This is the cerebral aspect of the spiritual. The self-consciousness that comes from an open, connected, awareness which is head orientated. Presence is in terms of “I am” consciousness, it needs the connection with the body to exist, but can still easily remain split from our deeper emotional reality.

2nd the heart The process of facing our pain is what the religious traditions have talked about in terms of suffering. For Christians and many of the world’s religions it is through accepting our suffering that we find God. The recent TV programme “The Big Silence” about five people experiencing a silent retreat, was a wonderfully illustration of this process. The silence brought each of them face to face with something painful in their psychology which they had to work through in order to find their presence, from which they could then embrace the silence. Therapeutically we know that people heal themselves and make themselves whole again by facing their hurt and insecurity, thereby enabling the deepening of their connection to the wonder and love of life.

Jesus made himself an example of accepting suffering, not turning away from it, (as much as a part of him wanted to). It never made sense to me that he “suffered so that we don’t have to”; it seems to me that he presented an example of accepting suffering, indeed the ultimate suffering, of an excruciating death.

Gurdjieff called this facing of our pain “conscious suffering”. It is the acceptance of the pain of grief, hurt, loss, or whatever it may be, simply because it is there, within us waiting to be attended to.

But by allowing the hurt, it means we can allow feelings more generally back into our lives, and we can allow love to return. Trying to work this the other way around, i.e. focusing on love first, often can’t work because it’s too painful, we refuse it because it provokes our experience of the pain of having lived without it, threatening to reveal how unbearably hurt we actually are before we can face it. Sometimes focusing on love can also become a method of avoiding the underlying feelings (as in evangelism).

We can’t take on board all the horrific pain there is in the world, but the more open we can be, the more we are also free to love. Integration means being connected up inside, so that we don’t cut ourselves off from the sorrow as well as the joy there is in life. From war, to child sex slavery, to hunger and poverty, to disease and natural disasters, to our friend’s daughter very slowly and very painfully dying from ME, to facing our own death and that of our loved one’s – there is so much pain in the world that it is not surprising we find ourselves overloaded at times, especially if we have not yet managed to face our own pain.

This is why so many people refuse the idea of God, “how could all this suffering be allowed?” But I think that most suffering in the world can be seen as having been created by us and our “mad” behaviour motivated by fear and the avoidance of pain. Also I don’t see God in terms of being “out there”, but that it is only through bearing our suffering that we can learn to open our hearts enough to let the spiritual dimension of life in at the emotional level. This seems to me why many impoverished communities often have such a deep sense of emotional spirituality.

So healing our splits is not an easy process, it makes us more vulnerable, but also paradoxically stronger, and with it also comes love and joy and freedom and aliveness and meaning. This movement to finding freedom in our hearts inevitable enables us to be more whole and open and therefore closer to the spiritual dimension of life on an emotional level, whether we interpret it this way or not.

Being able to open ourselves to love brings compassion for ourselves and others. There is freedom and non-attachment in this love; it can be experienced as a force running through oneself, a force which can be called “God’s Love” or “Eros” or “Agape” or whatever name a particular tradition calls it.

Contact with Love brings with a profound sense of acceptance, which is another emotional characteristic of spirituality. With this our internal conflicts are healed, if only temporarily, we have permission to “be”, to be ourselves without being haunted by our usual insecurity with its qualifications and justifications. It is this that makes spirituality so attractive at times.

This is the emotional aspect of the spiritual – Love coming from an open, connected, fear free heart.

3rd the Body When we give attention to the body it goes through a magical process, it responds instantly and profoundly with appreciation and energy and vibrancy. Whether the attention is through relaxation, exercise, massage or meditation; our bodies respond like something dry and shrivelled being given water and transforming back into life.

I know more about yoga and meditation than the other physical spiritual paths. I’ve experienced yoga as a simple physical exercise which had a big impact on my body. I’ve also experienced yoga when it combines the body and the heart in a more devotional way, when it was wonderfully powerful for both aspects of my being.

When we contact our bodies our minds cannot be as busy, if we can be with our sensation and our breath it changes our state instantly. If we can stay long enough and deeply enough with our sensation we can break through to silence. At this depth of meditation it is possible to contact a very different quality of being than that of everyday life; a place of reconciliation, silence and pure ‘being’.

So, in summary, the spiritual is presence, it is the here and now, and for a full expression of our spiritual possibilities we need all three dimensions, head, heart and body to be fully integrated and working freely together, each bringing their own special resource to the overall quality of our being. When there is integration there is space to just ‘be’, we can enter silence, we can enter this moment at a much deeper level.

The spiritual journey is towards being able to let go of our separate sense of self, towards living more permanently connected to Being, the Void, Silence, God or whatever name you prefer for this unknowable possibility that is the universe.

Problems From looking at these three aspects of spirituality we can see how each can also be a double edged sword with its own pattern of misuse, avoidance and defensiveness.

The arrogant head orientated “know it all” (that I used to be) who has some “I am” awareness supported by a connection to the body, which can use this “beingness” to avoid facing their insecurity.

The evangelical person, can easily be led into cults – they desperately want to be loved and accepted, and can then use a somewhat narrow opening of the heart to bypasses their insecurity.

The physical “junkie” that is satisfied with the “high” that exercise and lots of attention on the body brings, also enables them to avoid their insecurity.

Each brings some connection, which can support a sense of “specialness” which strengthens the ego without addressing the underlying insecure structure of the self.

Then there is the “age old” self-contradictory trap of trying for the spiritual or God or enlightenment in terms of the future, which is hopeless – because it is always, and can only be simply under our very noses, in this moment now.

There is another important aspect to this; as soon as we manage to connect to now, or God, or whichever term you favour, our ego is boosted. We naturally feel better and some of that is inevitably taken by our compensatory needs around our insecurities, to support our inevitably unbalanced sense of specialness and value. The degree of this process obviously reflects the degree of our insecurity and as we gradually reduce the power of that insecurity, through knowing ourselves better, the clearer our contact can be.

Choice

From both the therapeutic and spiritual perspectives there is no morality in all this. Apart from not damaging others there is no right and wrong, only process, awareness and love and energy. As I understand it all the negatives in our lives and society emerge directly and mechanically from trauma and the unawareness it generates, with all the blind attempts to get unaware needs met in all the crazy compensatory ways we can invent.

Criminal behaviour can be understood in this light – although it obviously crosses the real boundary of damaging others. Theft is compensatory for a sense of worthlessness. Violence is a reflection of not being able to contain the violence that has been done to us, our brains don’t distinguish between physical or emotional and verbal abuse (the sticks and stones story is not true). The held pain from trauma causes the desire to traumatise others or ourselves, even if only in fantasy. There can be a force in us, which, in the extreme would destroy the world, or ourselves, rather than face the pain there is inside.

When we perpetuate the trauma in some way or other, by being driven (or choosing??) to ignore our conscience (which I understand as our innate knowledge of what is true) we act from our pathology. We can then find ourselves moving towards the dangerous psychological cliff of acting out our insecurities in ways that further split us up and deepen the inner conflicts we are trying to run away from. This way, addiction, criminal behaviour, hurting others and madness lies. This is what many call “evil”, where there is an apparently conscienceless commitment to deeply negative behaviour which destroys others lives. But I think that when we look more closely at the people involved, it becomes clear that they are just extreme versions of ourselves and that “evil” is not some fundamental negative force in nature, but simply a projection of split off shadows.

Conscience is I think fascinating here, because even in our apparently ordinary everyday lives where we are caught in reaction, caught in the “top-dog’s” shoulds and oughts and “underdog’s” resistance and compulsions, something in us knows that this conflict is madness. If the “top-dog” gets the upper hand we feel superior or arrogant or over-confident, if the “underdog” gets the upper hand we go with our compulsions and feel bad and guilty and inadequate. The structure of this conflict revolves around our conflicted pathology emerging from our unaware trauma and insecurity.

It is from this that all the world’s epic myths of good and evil emerge. Usually in these myths there is a “magic” ingredient that tips the power in favour of Good. This magic ingredient is as I understand it, “now”. By moving into “now” and looking at ourselves, being with what is going on, we integrate ourselves again and can then hear our conscience, or the truth of our situation more clearly. Gurdjieff referred to this connection with ‘now’, as the “third force”. The other two are the active and passive forces, the automatic ones which take up the opposite stances of “shoulds” and “resistance”, in constant reactive conflict, as above. It is only when this third force comes in that we can re-find our energy, aliveness and the clarity of our needs and wants that enables creative and balanced action.

Conscience, in this sense of knowing what is true, also supports our relationship to the spiritual and its call ‘to be’. It supports our glimpse of the spiritual truth that there is a wider more meaningful frame that can contain our fears and pain. This frame affirms that there is something greater and more meaningful than our caught reactive selves. This can be really supportive in helping us to face the unbearable pain in our lives; AA was founded on the truth of this.

But we have to be careful because conscience can be so easily falsely conscripted by our “top-dog’s” “shoulds and oughts” into punishing ourselves even harder for our indulgencies or inadequacies. This is one of the reasons why working hard to confront and undo our introjects, all the “shoulds and oughts” that pollute our lives, is so valuable and liberating. It leaves our conscience free of clutter and confusion about how we “should be”. But again it is only in the here and now that we can hear our conscience and its clarity about what is true for us.

Often we can get caught into a cycle of addiction of some sort, whether it is substance misuse, depression, anxiety, gambling or any other compensatory process. This cycle flows from our inability to contact the healing power of the here and now, conscience, relationship, God, meaning, or any other aspect of this “third force”. Here we locked into a losing battle between our “top-dog” and “under-dog” (the underdog nearly always wins in the end – e.g. the evangelist caught having sex with his congregation). The downwards phase of the cycle then goes on until the negative consequences become sufficiently dire that something within us chooses to stop it.

Such cycles obviously range from the extreme to the almost unnoticeable, but they are the inevitable consequence of unresolved trauma. But it is the nature of this choice that I think is a profound mystery. How do we make this movement back into the here and now? How do we choose this? What is the nature of our responsibility for the choices we are always making?

Morality is so hard to pin down – where is the line to be drawn between right and wrong? Even if we restrict morality to the imperative of not hurting others, it is impossible to define any dividing line; we are always damaging others to some degree.

This seems to me to be one of the main differences between religious perspectives and the therapeutic one. Historically, religions did not have access to our current understanding of our psychology and so had no other way of understanding “negative behaviour” but in terms of “sin”, that the person is bad. This seems especially so, but by no means exclusively, true of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. But I don’t think ‘sin’ exists in terms of morality. If we take the original meaning of the word sin – which is to “miss the mark” – then we nearly all miss the perfect “mark” of “Love” and “Being”, nearly all the time, because our awareness is relative and we are caught up in compensatory processes – not because we are bad.

For people who had a traumatic childhood and who did not get their basic needs met, (more of us than you might believe!) life is difficult. There is so much pain that has to be kept at bay, which in turn means that the awareness of needs has to be kept un-aware, which in turn means we are driven by strong forces which we blind to, which are not even dreamt of, let alone understood. What amount of choice is there in this picture? Those stories we hear of people coming good from appalling backgrounds have often had, I suspect, some however small, redeeming touch of light or goodness from someone in their lives that touched their soul. Those people in the news who do horrific crimes were, I assume, stuck with unremitting negativity!

As we know ourselves better, we are more able to choose, rather than simply react. If we have been blessed with a “good enough” upbringing which provided us with at some sense of being valued and respected then life is more straight forward, we more naturally choose life enhancing options as opposed to ones that are destructive of self or other. But even for these lucky people, life can’t be all perfect all the time, there is still the struggle to face the difficulties of growing up, still choices to be made, and we all have to, in the end, face the ultimate suffering of the self, namely death.

I do think that the story of Adam and Eve has a real truth in it, by eating the apple of knowledge, they became aware of themselves as separate from God and were evicted from the Garden of Eden (or pre-consciousness) and thus humankind was embarked on the journey and the struggle, to find our way back to God or Consciousness. This ties in with many creation stories from around the world, which talk in terms of God creating the world in order to become conscious of itself.

So choice is a profound paradox. The question is about its role in the overall picture. Is the force of life / consciousness or God enough for us to grow, integrate, develop, find our freedom and love? How do we take responsibility for ourselves other than by opening to and following and being part of this force? Or do we have take responsibility for ourselves and actively choose to enter the ‘now’? Do we have to choose, or the process more one of following? Or both?

On the one hand there is the wisdom of the Tao with its knowledge that “non doing” is the way to live our life, and how this ties in with the understanding above of how allowing and seeing “what is” is a profoundly therapeutic process.

On the other hand there is the obvious ongoing need for us to take responsibility for ourselves, for our being and our actions; which is ‘doing’. On the other the more we are driven by our un-aware needs the less choice we have. The more we know ourselves the more choice we have. The process of growth is about being able to take more and more responsibility for ourselves.

Both are surely true and yet they seem to contradict each other. Choice and action – versus – awareness and non-action, these are surely the great themes of humanity which have played out through the centuries, from the Upanishads (the Bhagavad Gita) to Buddha and Christ to Shakespeare and even into the present day political tension between the left and right in politics; between liberalism that knows about the important of support and understanding and helping the less well off, and conservatism which knows about the necessity of people taking responsibility for themselves.

Needing both is what Gurdjieff referred to by his repeated insistence on “conscious labours and intentional suffering”. We can’t find our way “back to God” without paradoxically struggling for it in some way, without the struggle to take increasing responsibility for ourselves by becoming more aware. Logically, from this perspective choice remains central for us right up until the moment before our ultimate enlightenment, or our merger with God, when we become totally reconciled and no longer need our separate ego.

The spiritual, the profound, the sacred is always here waiting for us to contact it. The ground of being is always here in now, always ready to reward our effort in contacting it a thousand fold. Touching ‘now’ opens us to the possibilities in being, of incorporating and moving closer to presence, to our ultimate creativity of participating in this amazing cosmic experiment that the word “consciousness” represents.

Part of the paradox here, is because as many spiritual paths have emphasised, enlightenment is only ever a process of waking up now. But then it also true that we develop over time, which is something that Wilber has clarified, making it clear that awakening at the stage we are at now, is different from awakening when we are at a more developed and integrated stage.

So choice and taking responsibility for ourselves is about ‘now’, about our awareness in the moment. Growth and development emerge from this fundamental ground, which perhaps is not so much about choice as “doing”, much more it is about opening, seeing, becoming more aware. The “Paradoxical Theory of Change” states that change happens (in accordance with the laws of nature, or the Tao) through our becoming what we are, rather than any direct efforts to change. Yet there has to be our will, our choice, our wish as part of this process. This I think is the further and more profound paradox.

Embracing this psychological understanding, together with its developmental perspective, enables us to understand ourselves and our needs and provides a practical way to work through what gets in the way of our living closer to God. It moves us away from cultural and religious determined morality, with all its shoulds and oughts to leave simply our process, our truth and our destiny, with the wish to choose opening over closing.

Both therapy and connection to the spiritual support the integration of the self and helps us heal our splits, allowing our presence, or God’s presence, (not sure which it is?) to be. I don’t see therapy as a substitute for the spiritual; I see therapy as a practical aid to finding our way to living closer and closer to the spiritual dimension of life. The TV programme about silence was such a clear demonstration of this process.

We are a process of growth – we all get stuck at various times – but if we do choose to un-stick ourselves now – the creative force of life itself naturally moves us down the river towards growth and integration, towards more freedom and the expansion of our awareness, of our consciousness, our love and our connection with the energy of our bodies.

As Ramakrishna put it, “ The winds of grace are always blowing, it is up to us to put up the sails”. In the end choice is a profound paradox and mystery.

The fact of human development and our self-responsibility makes no sense without choice being an essential element in our lives. Adam and Eve had to bite into the apple of knowledge to engage in this process of self-consciousness in the first place, to become human beings. It seems to me that the meaning and purpose of our lives is about engaging in the creative force of the universe that wants to free itself from form, from cause and effect to find itself, to become self-conscious through our developing consciousness.

As many have argued down the centuries, there is no separation between God and ourselves, at the level of awareness / consciousness, love and energy, we are the same. Here there is no choice, life is as it is, if we wake up we have to accept that our meaning and our destiny is this journey that we are engaged in. It is here, whether we like it or not. We can and often do (indeed daily and minute by minute) turn our back on this, but it doesn’t go away, it is always there patiently waiting for us to return and re-engage in its meaning. For some people it remains too risky, too painful and too difficult to touch, for others there is contact and withdrawal until there is enough self-support to more fully face our existential reality, yet others seem to come to understand and embody this truth in the process of dying,

The point is that all the spiritual traditions are talking about essentially the same process, just interpreted differently, from different perspectives. This process, as I understand it, is our experience of the here and now, at holistic depth, and the spiritual aspect of all the religious traditions at an experiential level; the experience of moving into connection with something greater and more meaningful than oneself. There is always newness and expansion to the experience of engaging in now, of being connected to energy, silence, love, self-awareness, in a direct way.

The ‘magic trick’ is to enter ‘now’; it is a ‘portal’ into the spiritual, as amazing as any “Star Gate”. It is only through this ‘portal’ that we can gain the insights that can help us integrate head, heart and body, and go onto more directly experience the miracle that is Consciousness.