The Experiencing Self
Systems theory provides us with “tools for thought.” How can we use those tools to achieve a better understanding of who we are as human beings? How do we decide what aspects of humanness are essential? How can we know the manner in which all the parts are arranged to make up a whole unique person?
Next, I know there is a person, a self, that is experiencing — and that person is me. There is consciousness and awareness of that consciousness — a way that I can be both fully in an experience and witness myself experiencing. My experience has different qualities that emanate from or within certain aspects of my self. My body is full of sensation – I am seeing, hearing, sensing. My mind, that seems closely connected to my head, is full of thoughts and ideas, sometimes coming in a flood, other times slowing to a trickle. And in relation to each thought, to each sensation, to all of it, I am having different feelings (centered in the chest area) that provide a ‘tone’, an aliveness, that activates each experience and provides an impetus for my actions.
Everything is in motion and keeps changing from one moment to the next; experience never rests. Yet it is all coordinated and purposeful, so that I experience it as My experience, inherent to me. And it is whole, not a jumble of pieces or impressions. It all makes sense perfectly and naturally in the most taken-for-granted way.
So here is my data, my information of what constitutes humanness. I will make a partial list:
Experience
Self – identity
Consciousness, awareness, self-awareness
Body – sensation, vitality
Heart – emotion, feeling, motivation
Mind – thinking, noticing
Action – movement, purposeful motion, change.
These are the pieces of the puzzle which I will expand on below. In the diagram, fig 1, I connect some of these aspects together. This is a model of experience. It describes the manner in which the processes of body, heart and mind coordinate and integrate to create our sense of self. We can use it as a map to direct our attention to particular aspects of experience.
Experience
For psychotherapists, experience is more than of academic interest. When a client comes for therapy, what is it they are looking for? It is a change in the quality and form of their experience. If a person says that are depressed or insecure, that they have low self-esteem or a creative block, that they wish to expand their creative potential or attempt to heal from cancer, each is saying that they want to modify some aspects of experience. The purpose of therapy is to change the quality of experience. As experience alters, so the person transforms. Correspondingly, as the person changes, so does their experience.
Experience is not something that we have. It is all that we can know and do not know about ourselves and the world. We tend to identify experience with those aspects that reach our consciousness. Yet every neglected sensation, vibrating somewhere in the body, is experience; every dream forgotten, is experience. Every fleeting thought or subtle inarticulate feeling is experience. It is our hopes, fears, aspirations and distractions. Experience is everything that happens to us that registers somewhere in our being.
The raw material of our humanness is experience. Experience is all relationship with the universe that impacts the person. It is never a thing – it is a transactional process that creates difference or change in the person. Gregory Bateson says that the foundation of mind, or what I call experience, is “difference which make a difference”.[1] Differences, the bits of information that create experience, are non-physical events. For anything to register on a living being, it must hold an energetic charge great enough to produce a change. It is not the energetic charge that is the experience, it is the difference that it makes in the receiving system.
Experience can never be extracted away from the ways in which a living being makes sense of itself and the world. We are dependent on the organization of our system to create difference out of external and internal stimuli. We envision what and how we see because of the particular organization of our eyes and brain. The way we are constituted, determines our experience as least as much as the external energy that impacts us. Our total human system constantly creates experience and meaning out of whatever differences are perceived about the universe and ourselves.
Experience is reflexive and systemically organized. Out of differences, the basic input, a whole network of levels of meaning are created that constantly connect and reconnect in patterns of association. As with all systems, multiple feedback loops maintain stability and form, congruent with previous experience. At each level of organization new attributes emerges – meanings, aesthetics, knowledge, beliefs, ideologies – that reflect particular patterns of organized experience.
Experience is organized according to schemas, patterns of patterns. These mold our way of being and understanding in familiar and congruent ways. The germ of these schemas is inherent, but they continue to evolve and amplify with each new experience. It is the end result of multiple layers of patterned raw information that makes up the sense of self in the world. So, our conscious experience emerges whole, into the light of our awareness. It has been worked and reworked until it bears little resemblance to the original differences that gave it birth.
Experience is the nourishment of our humanity; it is the joy of life, the food for our souls. It is also, in it darker aspects, the hell of living – the disasters, traumas and cruelty – that kills the desire to survive. Because it is formed in relationship between ourselves and events, it is infinitely modifiable. Experience is never immutable; it is not given to us as an unchangeable lump by the world. We accept it, take it in and do with it what we will. Therapy helps mold the rich clay of events into delightful and serviceable containers of experience.
The self and the Self
“Awareness of the environment … is a property of cognition at all levels of life. Self-awareness, as far as we know, is manifest only in the higher animals and fully unfolds in the human mind. As humans we are not only aware of our environment, but we are also aware of ourselves and our inner world. In other words, we are aware that we are aware. We not only know; we also know that we know.”[2]
If we imagine that the base of our experiential pyramid is information – news of difference – near the top of the that pyramid will be experiences of self. You could say that the sense of self emerges from the integration and patterning of all past and current experiences. It is the result of a high level of connection of experiential processing. It is an example of the “pattern that connects” all the subsidiary patterns of more discrete experiencing.
It is important to distinguish what can be called the “working self” from the whole of a person. In Jungian language, this is similar to the Ego and the Self. Here I will distinguish self with a small “s”, from Self (with a capital “S”) which reflects the totality. In fig 1, the small self is identified with the ‘skin’ or outer boundary of experience; the greater Self is the total picture. The Self includes the connectivity of all aspects of experience both within and outside of consciousness; it is the entirety of our being. We can be aware of it in potential rather than reality, as the process of connection and integration occurs throughout our lives. Awareness of the greater Self happens in numinous or spiritual experiences; awareness of the smaller self is our shifting everyday experience.
The working self or ego, is a corner of that whole, constructed moment by moment from our ongoing experiences. It functions to further our everyday needs. It is the coordinator, administrator and executor. It ebbs and flows in terms of content and connectivity. Because it is always dependent on the experiential context, it constantly changes and adapts. If the pattern for the construction of our working ego is disrupted through shock or trauma, we lose consciousness, become disoriented or confused. Each morning as we wake, the basic pattern reasserts itself to administer the tasks of our day. Each social or environmental context will link into a particular subset of schema that will pattern our experiential connections.
The self of the moment, as it patterns the particular processes that are relevant and needed, becomes the container for our identity. The sense of identity is different from the sense of self and belongs to more fundamental processes of the Self or the soul. Identity is that field of awareness that provides continuity and connection of the changing aspects of self over time. Identity exists in the coherence of the whole. It continues while we sleep, when we are unconscious, when we are delirious and “not ourselves”. Identity is awareness of “me-ness”, the experience of being the same person I was last week. It is the thread that connects all the different pearls of self into a complete necklace. Small self is the expression of that me-ness in the present moment; it depends on internal and external contexts for its particular pattern.
The self is both transient and enduring. Because it is not a thing or object but a pattern of integrated experiential processes, it is constantly in flux just as the Buddhist explain. This is the great truth of impermanence and “not self”. At the same time there is a large amount of coherence and stability in those patterns that give the self a quality of sameness and predictability. Because the self-pattern is a higher level integration of our experiences over time, there is redundancy that allows the pattern to remain constant even as parts of the self change. This also gives the self inertia — self change is more difficult and disrupting than change of behavior or thinking.
The working self is like the growing tip of a plant. It is acutely sensitive to the requirements of the environment. It is tough as it forces through the soil. It softens as it moves toward light and warmth. As development proceeds, it opens up into leaves and flower and fruit. At all times it is dependent on the nourishment provided by roots far below, and the support of the stem as it grows. The working self is an outpost for the total Self. At all times, it depends on the whole for its nourishment and form.
Self-boundaries
We are aware of self as a bounded whole. Yet self-awareness is not constant but shifts and changes both in content and quality. Self-boundaries are permeable and fluid. They move with different experiences, flexibly extending beyond the physical skin to encompass valued aspects of our environment. Connection with someone or something we love, draws out the self into communion or symbiosis with the object of affection. We invite a beloved person to enter into our being. If they abandon us or are lost, our self is damaged, the boundary is breached.
This is never more destructive than when we are children and the self-boundary has not yet formed. Then betrayal by a parent, who stands in for the greater Self, is devastating. Integration is compromised and an effective working self may never emerge fully. Without an effective boundary, a person is never certain what belongs or is foreign to the self. Confusion reigns and that person’s relationships with themselves, the world and particularly other people, are chaotic and disturbed.
At the other extreme when the self-boundaries become closed and defensive, the self stagnates and new information has little impact – not enough to make a difference. As the self-boundary becomes more impermeable, relationship and feeling recede. That person loses contact with themself, and thus with others, sometimes to the extent that they are at constant war with their own inner world.
When the self-boundary works, it not only lets in those aspects of the environment that we need to survive and grow – nourishment, information, loving relationship, stimulation – but keeps out what is harmful. Our bodies actively eject what is poisonous through the feeling of disgust and the act of vomiting. Foreign or harmful invaders – viruses, germs, splinters – are battled, isolated and rejected. Our immune system ferociously safeguards our health and wholeness. Beyond the physical, we avoid or get angry with those who threaten our emotional wellbeing. Our anger is there to push them away, keep them out. (In the example above, this obsessive-compulsive man was eaten up with repressed rage against himself and his parents.) When information gets too much or we are overstimulated, we get exhausted, close our ears and eyes, need to rest. We reinforce our fragile physical self with clothing and shelter — maintain a home in which we can be safe from uninvited intrusion. And each night we retreat into ourselves, close the doors to our soul and journey inside.
As increased integration takes place the self-boundaries expand and open, without losing integrity. Then we can feel into the suffering of all humanity, we can sense our place in the universe. The more formless and symbolic realms of the inner world become friendly and familiar. No longer is there a need to create walls and drawbridges to protect our fragile self; we can move beyond the sense of threat from ourselves, others and the world. The little self can begin to connect with and realize the greater potential of the Self. For some extraordinary individuals, the self merges into the greater whole that is the universe. These are our prophets and saints; they attempt to guide our footsteps in the right direction. For most of us the journey continues, step by step, toward a greater, but still incomplete, sense of our wholeness.
Consciousness and Awareness
Consciousness is the fundamental mystery of being human.[3] I cannot, here, do justice to this mystery. However, I would like to make a few necessary distinctions. Consciousness is a continuum and not a simple on or off. We are more or less conscious at any one time. Current experiences are highlighted in awareness. These form the content of our conscious waking experience. But we know that just because we are awake, it does not mean that we are particularly aware. Often, when we are distracted, sleepy, bored, emotional, we just do not pay attention or notice our ongoing experience. We lose our keys or trip over an obvious obstacle; we do not answer when spoken to, or lose the train of our thoughts. We are conscious and awake, but not aware. Awareness, particularly self-awareness, arises when sufficient conscious activation is available; but it also requires that we pay attention.
Awareness and Attention
This distinction is important. Consciousness is the level of activation of our awareness system. Awareness is the result of both consciousness and the directing of attention. Awareness is at a higher level of integration than consciousness.
Consciousness and awareness are the limited end results of a whole range of processes. Just as with a TV we see the image on the screen and not the electronic components that produce it, we cannot know what creates our conscious experience. Our limited capacity for consciousness easily becomes overburdened. At any instant we can only be aware of approximately seven chunks of information. Telephone numbers are a perfect example. Similarly, the temporal limits of our conscious experience of now is only approximately three seconds.[4] Any information that falls beyond these boundaries of time and content, is neglected or confused.
In order to get around these limitations, our attention tends to skip over information that may be irrelevant or un-needed. Attention is directed by inherent and learned schemas towards anything that is deemed important – the unexpected and threatening, the new and interesting, those things necessary for our survival and wellbeing. Attention is the gatekeeper of awareness. We have only a certain amount of influence over it — as you would immediately realize if there were a sudden loud noise close by. Our attentional system is first and foremost protective. It is only when we are relatively safe that we have the luxury of noticing our internal states, the beauty of a sunset or interesting ideas.
We are what we attend to, according to the great philosopher and psychologist, William James. Certainly, many clients have learned to attend to only those aspects of experience that restrict freedom, cause pain or have negative consequences. These fills the whole of their awareness. One definition of psychotherapy is the reworking and redirecting of attention in order to expand and increase awareness. Clients often do not feel safe enough in the world to notice much outside the needs for survival. Early negative experience creates a constant vigilance directed outward to the external environment — you never know when you will be hit next. Naturally, the wonders of expanded awareness are undeveloped. With renewed experience, a person begins to realize that attention and awareness sustain wholeness and integration of the total Self. It is not just a matter of survival; it is a matter of growth.
Unconsciousness and Subconsciousness
When we are less integrated – when our experiential parts are not coordinated, when the energy gets low – awareness diminishes. You might say that unconsciousness is the resting state that always continues as long as we are alive; it is the background hum of our system processes. Consciousness emerges out of this state only when particular conditions are fulfilled. Unconsciousness is ordinary, consciousness is extraordinary.
The more articulated and discriminated an experience becomes, the more conscious. Consciousness differentiates and highlights—unconsciousness merges and flows. Linguistic process that requires a literal, linear and differentiated processing of information about self and the world, activate more consciousness. Imaginal, analog, diffuse, symbolic processes tend to require less consciousness. At bottom, unconscious process are metaphoric in which all experience is undifferentiated and share identity.
Between consciousness and unconsciousness is a middle ground. I will call this subconsciouness. Most experiences, both past and present, are not currently in awareness but are potentially available. These include all retrievable memory and any sensation, feeling, thought that is not being attended to. Mostly these are neglected because they are not currently relevant or are out of context. Sometimes they are submerged in order to protect the system – we do not want to embarrass ourselves in public. All this information is accessible with some effort and the moving of attention in that direction. For example, if we need to remember a name, we may struggle to find it before it eventually pops into memory. Or, in a therapy session, we may notice that a person looks sad and when we ask them about it, they begin to cry. Once an experience crosses the threshold of consciousness it collects a charge of awareness, becomes activated and connected to the working self.
Other experiences never cross this threshold; they remain forever immersed in unconsciousness. Beneath our sense of self are other processes that we can only know through dreams, alternative states of awareness and odd intrusions into our “normal” conscious patterns. This is the realm of the symbolic, the metaphoric where logic shifts and the imaginal prevails. The unconscious is not one thing. It is a country of different terrain, multiple processes that are undifferentiated and amorphous.
When we sleep, and enter into the unconscious world, our system moves rhythmically through different states and levels approximately every ninety minutes. We know there are at least five distinct patterns of brain activity. One of them, REM or paradoxical sleep, clearly relates to dreaming, an activity absolutely necessary to maintain our consciousness and sanity. Without dreams, the self dis-integrates. Another level of sleep, delta (long slow waves), corresponds to a deep state of physiological recuperation without which we would fall apart physically. It is obvious that there are other unconscious processes that occur; the unconscious creates the optimum situation to maintain health and integration.
This cycle continues while we are awake, in the form of ultradian rhythms.[5] Every ninety minutes there is a gradual shift of awareness and body functioning as our unconscious processes continue to maintain integration. What we notice experientially is a slight decrease in consciousness, a need to rest and relax. Then it is that we take a break or meal. Alternatively, if we are driven by work expectations, we take artificial stimulants to increase our activation during the day – and crash in the evening! Many physical and psychological ills are created through intrusion into, and colonization of, natural unconscious functions by conscious willful processes.
Unconscious processes are the underpinnings of the working self – of conscious awareness, health and wholeness. Because these processes are deeper and more fundamental, they are closer to the greater Self. The unconscious is unrestricted by commonplace expectations and limitations; rationality and physical laws do not touch it. Everything is larger, more intense, with unlimited possibilities. Abilities and potentials, foreign to our normal awareness, are commonplace. Nothing is impossible for the dreamer within.
Deeper inward, the unconscious connects and merges all thinking, feeling and sensing into a commingled form. Dreams do not differentiate; they incorporate all experiences into a flow of experience that often has the shape of a story. Feelings and thoughts mix and meld. One person stands in for another or for some part of our self. Anything is possible. We can fly, die, be born, become the opposite sex, be part of something that has no possible realization in the physical world.
I remember a dream from many years ago of a multilayered coffin composed of levels of geometrical shapes and crosses. When I awoke and attempted to draw it, it was clear that there were too many dimensions for it to exist out here. Yet in the dream it had a reality that was totally convincing. Many clients dream of seeing themselves in a dream. They are both singular and multiple without any sense of paradox.
So while the realms of the unconscious are a flux of undifferentiated processes, the subconsciousness is that level of integration of more conscious process that somewhat defy articulation. the more conscious and differentiated our experience, the more we are able to describe those experiences in words. The conscious self is typically a linguistic or even verbal self.[6] Although the unconscious is undifferentiated it is not necessarily integrated. It is a mistake to believe that the unconscious is the container of all wisdom and wholeness, or that it is the source of all darkness. It has all of these in potential, just as a child does before it grows up. Jung began to map aspects of the unconscious within his own framework. He argued convincingly for a number of distinctions — between the personal and the collective aspects of the unconscious, between shadow and persona, animus and anima. These and more seem to be encompassed by the myriads of processes that are more like a flux of energies than any particular structures. I address this in a later chapter.
Body, Heart, Mind
How do we make sense of our everyday experience? What is its composition and form? From the simple example of my experience, we see that it consists of three generally differentiated aspects: sensation and vitality related to the body; emotions (affect) and motivations associated with the psychological heart; thinking and cognition associated with the mind. As in fig 1, I will call these the three subsystems of experience: body, heart and mind. These are not the strict categories of academic psychology, but rather loosely bounded groupings of similar functions that correspond to our natural experience.
As described in fig 1, these subsystems are separate and differentiated at the conscious self-level. But as we travel inward there is considerable overlap and merging. We know that as we explore our inner world, experience becomes fuzzier and more ill-defined. For example, imagination is like thought but carrying a stronger emotional impact. This emerges from the area where mind and heart overlap. Sexual sensations are also highly emotionally charged. Here body and heart are closer together. Similarly, where body and mind merge, we have intuitions, gut feelings, apperceptions in which we know something in a somatic manner.
The boundary of the body is the skin. However, the limits of our hearts include other people and things to which we are related – our hearts extend as far as we can feel and be in relationship. Our minds are even less limited. They can extend into the past and projected future – into the real and imagined – into the concrete and the formless. Our minds are limited by our knowledge and understanding and our sense of possibility.
Body, heart, mind and development
Although I treat these subsystems of experience as functionally at the same level, in reality they are themselves somewhat hierarchically organized, at least developmentally. We are born, first and foremost, into our bodies. The original ground of experience is physical – sensations, physical states and needs.
An infant’s experience is all of a piece; they partake of the unconscious milieu. As development proceeds, there is an increasing differentiation of the experiences from the physical through the emotional to the mental. Although the infant immediately expresses and feels affect (emotional arousal), these responses are essentially identical with physiological states. Only as the baby begins to know separateness from others and the environment can it be said that emotions proper arise. Emotional expression requires relationship – relationship to self, to others or to a possible different state. The baby develops a sense that a response is possible for expression to become emotion.
Later with the development of communication and then language, the conceptual mind develops. At first, the infant knows through participation in the feeling state of an experience. Babies are their experience. Thinking, planning, conceptualizing and finally abstracting only become part of our repertoire over a long period of differentiation. Cognitive development follows a predictable pattern of stages up into adolescents according to the renowned psychologist Jean Piaget.
Later still, as young adults we begin to differentiate and connect sensation, thinking and feeling into a more comprehensive whole. The adolescent cannot hold the awareness that their emotional experience is driven by hormones and physiology. There is not enough differentiation. Similarly, they cannot, as yet, separate a thought from a feeling, an idea from their reaction to that idea. Part of the task of adolescence is the naming of feelings. With language we achieve a modicum of conscious control over our experience and reactions. Such is the foundation of self-awareness.
In later life the developmental task reverses. Once we have pulled our experience into pieces, we must seek to find a greater integration. The law of development and transformation is ‘differentiation precedes integration’, separation before connection. Jung terms these processes, separatio and conjunctio, the mysterious elements of growth of the soul.
Body: the ground of experience
“Of what is the body made? It is made of emptyness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again there is only the dance.”[7]
Body as ground of experience – presence in the world, being alive – developmental aspects of sensation/perception – movement and perception of movement in physical activity – body experience is primary
body as source of life and vitality
Input – Process – Output always circular and interacting – impossible to separate the levels of processing as every output is a further input
Vital system – Nourishment – food drink air – creation and preservation of life and vitality – energy for movement and acting on world – feedback from physical activity closely connected to perceptual system (The intelligent eye Gregory) – we cannot know without activity – maintainance of integration and adaptation through healing and immune system – reproduction of babies as transcendence in the body – connection to the material world
Sensory system – stimulation – Sensory apparatus as transducers of band of energy into coherent patterns – sensation becomes perception through the knowing of the body – sexual experience related to identity and the possible of transcendence of self through orgasm
Self-image system – Body and self-image – recognition of our physical self in the world – relation of self to body and its facilities and experiences
Psychotherapy Applications
body memory – energy patterns – tensions and illnesses
Deadening of sensation, energy and connection in trauma
withdrawal of connection from parts create illness of body
symbolic aspect of illness – psychosomatic and psycho-neuro-immunology
To be in this world is to be in a body. Presence in the world is grounded in the physical; our bodies are the vehicle for existence in space and time. Yet being in the body is tenuous. Not only can we at any moment die and relinquish this body, but our consciousness and identity can become disconnected from the physical. Without a clear sense of being in the world and the body, there is little chance for health, growth or the joy of living.
Body experience is in the concrete details. There is nothing abstract about the warmth of the sun, the bright whiteness of snow, the itch of a mosquito bite. Our bodies suck up physical experience; they are vibrant energy receptors, reaching outwards from our inner being towards the universe. We are tuned to particular energy differentials – light, sound, pressure, vibration, movement, chemical smell and taste. Even without awareness, we are always taking in sensation, the building blocks of experiencing. Often, we neglect the actuality of our basic sensations and jump to our thoughts or feelings about them. Then we are in danger of losing touch with raw vitality.
We enter the world through sensation and our first sensations are those of contact with our mother’s body; we naturally resonate to the rhythms of her body. From that primary contact we learn to enter into synchrony with the bodies and feelings of others. This is what George Leonard calls “rhythmic entrainment”, the silent pulse of life (Leonard, 1978). It is through our body and its acute sensory apparatus that we first encounter, and know, the quality of presence of others. It is through therapeutic resonance that we can really sense the client’s inner experience.
When we are present in our bodies the client knows at the deepest level that we are with them. Awareness of the body-self requires that we know and experience the constant shifting and flow of sensation and needs and states. We cannot ignore the fuzziness in our head when we are sick. We cannot pretend to be all there, if our body contradicts us. It demands that we engage with that experience and work to move through those sensations towards a fuller presence. Always the body reminds us of its power to draw us toward unconsciousness. We must respect that power. To be fully present in the body is to accept the reality of our physical vulnerability.
The essence of body experience is vitality — the energy of aliveness. Without this energetic charge, we cannot function. Presence requires a certain vitality that integrates the sensations of the body with that of mind and heart to create a sense of the wholeness of the self. Without this charge we sleep, either literally or figuratively. Bodily awareness requires us to take care of ourselves physically and to know what the body needs in order to be present.
Being present is to be involved with tangible reality — in contact with the physicality of our experience. When we are truly embodied, fully engaged with the world, then we have the quality of being grounded. To be grounded is to be of the earth, to sense the universe around as a living and impactful presence. When we accept the true materiality and organicity of our bodies, then no function is disgusting or rejected. Everything has its part and place. Everything has a necessity and fittingness that connects us with the whole. To be alive requires recognition of aliveness and the proximity of our death. Presence in the moment implies the ever present possibility of deterioration of the physical substrate of our mind and personality.
Vivid experiencing is in the details of our perceptions. We cannot be present in the abstraction of experience. We have to be immersed in the actuality of what we see and hear and feel. When we imbue our perceptions and sensations with vitality, then we are curious, interested, fascinated by the aliveness of those perceptions. The world becomes immediate and those around us stand out as presences that demand attention. When we withdraw that energy, or it is unavailable, the world and those in it lose meaning and immediacy. This is a state of depression in which nothing is really present for us – the universe becomes an apathetic wasteland.
Boredom is the intermediate state between aliveness and depression. To find someone or something boring is to lose the sense of our own ability to create vividness in all experience. When our clients bore us, then either we or they or both are not present. Often, the resonance of the client’s escape from the present, away from themselves, facilitates our own slipping out of presence. Many fear to be present in their experience so much that their being is attenuated in the world. They may be fearful of the demands and expectations of relationship and engagement so much that they are never really there with you. They may find their body so unacceptable that they cannot live within it.
Like all living things we are subject to the rhythms and cycles of the life force. We accept the ebb and flow of wakefulness and sleep, energy and depletion, holding on and letting go, taking in and expulsion, discomfort and comfort. We also accept that we cannot force ourselves to be fully present at all times. There must be withdrawal as well as engagement; times of low energy when our ability to maintain awareness lessens. Acceptance of what is, and not what should be, allows us to stay present with our bodies and ourselves. That inner presence provides a catalyst for overcoming our limitations and restrictions. Presence of the body is the foundation for achieving a greater presence in all our facilities. This energy we receive and transform into our sensory experience: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, sensing pressure and movement. Our sensations and perceptions are energetic neurochemical processes translated and abstracted into experience. To remain alive and aware and engaged with life we have to receive and digest and metabolize many different forms of energies: air, food and drink; light, sound, chemical tastes and smells, physical contact. In order to find and integrate those energies, we need to move and sleep and relax, explore and seek and make contact. All these and more are the sphere of the body whose primary experiential aspect is sensing.
Even at the receptor level, the raw energy is filtered and processed according to very patterned schema (patterns of patterning). At the point of awareness of sensory experience that initial energy has been totally transformed. This is transduction, where one form of energy triggers or switches another form that is parallel but of a different nature. A simple example is the energy you use to switch on a light; the light is of a different nature from the movement of your finger, which is in turn different from the energy of your intention to have more light. A closer example is the page you are reading. Light is being reflected unevenly from the surface in a series of tiny, patterned dots. You experience printed letters that make up words, that have sense and meaning. It takes effort to get back to the raw experience of patterned light, and even that is not an exact correspondence with the initial energy.
Always our human system organizes and filters and creates as much coherence as possible. Our bodies are closest to the raw energies of the universe. Yet even the body creates meaning from this energy.
Heart: the connecting principle
If the body is the receptor for physical energies, what energy does the heart listen to? Our feelings and motivations are about something. All emotional responses are in relation to persons, things, events, attributes that have meaning for us. The heart is the value processor. It is sensitive to the energy of relationship in its widest sense. Only when there is at least the possibility of a meaningful connection with something do we feel about that thing. Feelings also move us in that relationship – closer with attraction, further away with threat, up against with frustration, merging with joy. This goes for inner parts of ourselves as well as external things. Emotional experiences are the inner nature of relationship.
Our hearts thrive on feelings and emotions. These are our experiences of the energy inputs from the world of Relationships. We are driven towards relationship, and we map the experience in this sphere on the good-bad continuum; it is the sphere of judgment and evaluation. Relationship is primarily with other humans – babies seek out the distinguishing qualities of humanness in their parents. However, we also become related to valued things, activities and qualities in our life. If we lose contact with a valued object we experience that loss in similar form to any loss. We have extended our relationship heart boundary to include that object and we feel less because it is unavailable.
Karen Horney expressed this succinctly. Emotions are movements towards (as in love), away from (as in fear), and against (as in anger). These movements are relational and always presuppose that the object of our feeling has meaning and salience for us. Just as sensory experience is a transform of physical energy, so emotional experience or affect is a transform of relational energy. An emotion is the inner experience of relationship whether it is with others, things or our selves. We only feel, towards, against or away from those aspects of our experiential world that we are connected to in some way. The sphere of the heart is that of emotions, motivational states and relationship.
Mind: the information processor
The heart pulls things together in feeling connections. The thinking mind puts things into their place. Our minds receive information in all its forms and creates meaningful patterns of ideas. Thinking is the experience of the process of sorting, categorizing, associating ideas towards a purpose of order and control. Bateson says that information is “the difference which makes a difference”. Our minds takes this news of a difference as a building block to make sense of our experience. Ideas and thoughts differentiate and separate. Our cognitive mind is an analytic tool to create order out of experience.
Words are fundamental to thought. Through words, categories achieve clarity and a distinct shape. Our thinking may not be in the form of words, but language provides the categories and descriptions of our mental world. Because therapy is largely language based, there is a tendency for the therapeutic process to engage the mind of the client at first.
Our minds crave Information; curiosity is a driving force for humans from birth. Information is the energy ‘food’ of our thinking. Unlike the body, the mind is not satisfied with raw energy. It demands more complex and “interesting” perceptions, knowledge and experience. Our minds are constantly processing this information and creating new and different forms. We are born with and develop increasingly complex structures or SCHEMAS to understand, co-ordinate and create meaning out of our experiences. All information that is relevant to our person is Assimilated to these schemas so that our conscious awareness of the world is highly structured. New and unusual information forces these structures to Accommodate and adjust. This is the experience of change and growth which can be both exciting and disturbing.
Action: output to the world
While in a conscious state, we are always moving and interacting with ourselves, other humans and all sorts of aspects of the natural and created world. We experience ourselves as the center or initiator of these actions, but also know that we are not always in charge of what we do or are. Our actions remain coherent and coordinated because we are finely tuned to the results of what we do. In simple terms, information about the world’s response to our actions are high priority; we have to pay attention if we wish to survive and function.
The output from the self is in the form of purposeful or intentional action. This action is always directed towards some desired outcome for the human system, whether that person is aware of it or not. There is no such thing as any action that is not meaningful or functional for the system at some level, although there may be waste or redundancy in the execution of the action. The body, heart and mind each has its own agenda. The body acts to create or find nourishment and stimulation. The heart acts to find relationship. The mind acts to find information. Action is the outer aspect of the inner processes of the system.
[1] Bateson, 1972, p. 272.
[2] Capra, 1996, p. 287
[3] See Dennett, 1991, p. 25.
[4] See Poppel, 1985, for a full discussion of the limits of consciousness.
[5] Rossi, 1980.
[6] I am not identifying language with verbal communication here, though culturally, the spoken word is paramount. However, I would argue that without formal and culturally shared linguistic forms, there would not be a conscious sense of self as we know it. The self, in a non-linguistic person, would retain some of the preoperational aspects of childhood; it would be undifferentiated, un-selfconscious, non-reflexive, etc.
[7] Leonard, 1978, p34.