Interviewing Conflictual Relationships
(From Integral Deep Listening, Love, and Romance)
Conflicts with others are always conflicts with those parts of ourselves that they represent. Making peace with others is a matter of making peace with ourselves. Fighting with others is to fight with ourselves. While some internal conflicts are not only legitimate but necessary, the great majority are not. The existence of widespread human conflict is testimony to the inability for most people to grasp this concept. One of the fundamental purposes of Integral Deep Listening is to give people vivid and immediate personal experience in the reality of this principle, in the hope that they will stop fighting with others out of their own clearly perceived self-interest.
Humans have two basic addictions. The first is ontological and involves being, or who you think you are. The other involves doing, or what actions you believe are real and meaningful. Your “being addiction” is centered on your attachment to your waking identity, whether it appears in a dream, enlightened state, or even in dreamless sleep. Long ago the Buddha recognized that there is no such thing as an awake waking identity or an enlightened self-sense. These terms are contradictory. You are asleep, dreaming, and delusional when you experience your self sense as a separate whole as you are doing right now and as you do when you are dreaming. Even if you become lucid in a dream you are merely trading your dream delusion for your current waking one, as if that is somehow superior. The truth is that your self sense is actually empty of both separateness and permanence. It is in the business of creating mental representations that validate its existence, similar to the way a movie maker is committed to the art of convincing you that a series of contrived roles in fantasy environments reduced to digital information is real. Like a movie, your self-sense cannot be meaningfully separated from the rest of reality and has no permanence. Believing that your waking identity is awake and real is a manifestation of your core addiction to who you think you are. While it is a pragmatic delusion that we all need, it is a delusion nonetheless. Ken Wilber has written extensively about this core addiction in his second book, The Atman Project. Wilber’s integral psychology and spirituality set the context for meaningful discussions about the future of the human species. An understanding of his AQAL model is a necessary precondition for intelligent discussion of healing, balancing, and transformation.
You also have a core addiction to actions you consider to be real or meaningful. The most central of these, from which all other addictions arise, is your delusional belief in the correspondence between your mental representations of things, events, and people, on the one hand, and actual, externally existing things, events, and people, on the other. A mental representation may be a dream character or the personification of a life issue as an image. An example would be the personification of anger as a thunderstorm. It may be a word that stands for a thing, such as “flower,” or a word or group of words that stand for a concept, such as “politics.” The stories that we tell ourselves about why we hurt, how we should feel, how to succeed and what failure is are all mental representations. They are thoughts, feelings, images, stories, scripts, dramas, and schemas. Everything that you experience is categorized into one or more mental representation. Your mental representations of events in turn determine what you think, how you feel, and what you do. They control your life. They determine your happiness. To the extent that predestination and karma exist, they are created by your mental representations about what happens to you, not by what actually happens. The Tibetan Book of the Dead makes this point by illustrating how consciousness takes the self-creations of the various bardos as literal and objective, reacts to them, and methodically descend into a hell of their own making.
I got shocked into deep consideration of the power of our mental representations by a dream I had in early December, 2008, only a month after I turned 59 and Obama was elected president. In it, one of my two sisters, Andra, was enthusiastically talking to me. She was exuberant, bubbly, and very friendly toward me, as I have seen her from time to time in her life when she has been in top form. It felt good! When I woke up I was surprised and happy that she was so happy and animated but puzzled and questioning it. This is because while we had previously been close, she had not spoken to me in almost a year. This dream was disturbing. I felt like I was being deceived, coaxed into believing something is real that is not – Andra being enthusiastic, happy, and animated toward me when I know she doesn’t respect me, trust me, or even like me, since she has taken my wife’s side in our separation and divorce. So I decided that I needed to interview “her” to get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction.
So Andra, why are you talking to me like this when the physical Andra you personify can’t stand to talk to me?
Andra: Why throw out the gift of the part of yourself that is like those qualities in your sister that you admire just because she doesn’t want to talk to you and now you are thoroughly disillusioned with her?
I don’t think that I am. In fact I either don’t believe you or don’t understand you – I’m not sure which. Just how do you think I throw out those qualities within myself that you personify?
Andra: First, you aren’t awake enough to discriminate between those characteristics within yourself and the real Andra. Secondly, those qualities are alive and well within you and are bubbling up and are more expressive than ever. Welcome those and be thankful that you have them! You don’t have to distrust them through guilt by association!
Again, I didn’t think I was doing that. I am basically good-natured, trusting, and positive. So I don’t get it. So I’ll back up and start at the beginning: Andra, what do you most like about yourself?
Andra: I like that I am capable, determined, generous, patient, a great grandmother and teacher who is a hard worker and very independent. I’m also an optimist and very supportive of the downtrodden without being a rescuer. Also I like to laugh and I have a good sense of humor.
So what do you not like about yourself?
Andra: I like myself pretty well. I really can’t think of anything.
Hmmm…I can think of a number of things about you that I dislike and things I’d change about you: your taking sides, your unwillingness to talk things through with me, you interjecting yourself into my life in a way that doesn’t concern you, and you obviously taking personally something that doesn’t concern you whatsoever. I have only shown you kindness in my life.
Andra: Again, you have me confused with Andra. I’m NOT Andra! I’m the part of you that personifies her!
Jeez! Well then, you personify the negative parts of her as well as the positive!!!!
Andra: Not to me I don’t. Maybe to you. Whose interview is this, anyway???
Hmmmmm….Damn. I guess you’re right. Scheisse. So you say I’m being intolerant to you, a part of myself, that doesn’t deserve it?
Andra: Exactly!
Well just how do you expect me to discriminate between you and Andra in a dream?
Andra: That’s not my problem. It’s yours. You obviously need to wake up!
Ok. So let’s say I DID wake up in the dream and started saying to you, “Andra, you’re not really Andra. You’re the part of me that is like Andra. And while I don’t trust her, I have no reason to not trust you.”
Andra: Exactly!
So what exactly would THAT accomplish?
Andra: You might then listen to what I would have to say to you and you might be open to it!
And what would that be?
Andra: That I love you very, very much and that I care about you a lot and that the reason the waking Andra is so distant from you is because she has allowed herself to be so deeply hurt by what she sees as your betrayal of Mary Jane’s trust.
I know all that. But that’s her problem. If she wants to see it that way, what can I do about that? I don’t see it that way but anything that I say to her will just be seen as me defending myself.
Andra: Just because she is hurt doesn’t mean you can’t be open to my love of you, to take it and appreciate it and be thankful.
No. I guess not. So I guess what you’re saying is that I should just have said “thank you for being you” at that moment in the dream and not question the gift of your presence.
Andra: Yes! To do otherwise is just to deprive yourself of a gift you’re giving yourself in your dream, is it not?
Hmmm…I guess you’re right! Why would I want to do that????
OK. I think I’ve got it now. I need to think about Andra the way she appeared in the dream because that’s the healthy part of myself that she personifies and I want to amplify that within myself. Because otherwise I’m just bringing myself down thinking about a part of myself in a way that makes me feel bad! And why would I want to do that???
Andra: Exactly!
Hmmmm….That makes a lot of sense. Why didn’t I think of that??? Thanks!
You’re welcome!
Notice that I am unable to get out of internal conflict with my mental representation of my sister until I decouple that representation from who she actually is. When I do so I am then free to develop as healthy a relationship with that part of myself that my mental representation personifies regardless of who my sister actually is or what she does or doesn’t do in my waking life. If I do this I reduce internal conflict and am more likely to deal with my actual sister more effectively. If I do not, I will not only stay in conflict with my sister but with myself as well. Now, I already have one problem: my sister not liking me and her not talking to me. Do I need to create a second problem by confusing her actions and feelings with my internal representation of her?
There are other things about the above dialogue that are worth mentioning. If I have such a hard time dissociating my internal, personal and subjective image of my sister from my waking sister, in spite of the fact that I have worked with differentiating between dream and waking images and experiences for years, how much more confused and enmeshed are inner mental representations and actual waking life experiences for most people? If I resist giving up my belief in the correspondence between my internal mental image and my actual sister, how much more resistance does the average person have? If I am afraid that by having a healthy, positive, and loving relationship with my self-created mental image that I will be gullible, letting my guard down and setting myself up to be hurt by my sister, how much more likely is the average person to think it is foolish and naive to do so? These are important questions, because they need to be resolved if people are going to reduce internal conflicts that create unnecessary conflicts with others.
It is impossible to over-emphasize how fundamental and important your ability to create mental representations is to who you are, what you do, how you interact with others, and how your life will turn out. Your mental representations are adaptive survival strategies that give you a huge advantage in planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Therefore, there can be no question about the underlying necessity of these interpretive schemas that “stand in for” external “facts.” The correspondence between your mental representations and actual people and external life events is essential to your development. All of us have, since we were toddlers, formed internal mental representations of the external world, first as images, then as symbols, and then as words and the combinations of words we call concepts. For instance you have a sense of who your mother is – what she looks like, how she talks, what makes her happy, and what you can say to get on her bad side. Beyond this, you believe that your mental representations of your mother are pretty accurate. If you did not, you would change them. Why? Because you use your mental representations to make decisions about how your mother is going to treat you and therefore how you should act toward her. You use your mental representation to determine how you are going to think and feel about your mother. These thoughts and feelings guide what you say and do regarding your mother in your dreams, your thoughts, and in your waking life. If this is true for your mother, is it not also true for your father? For God, Jesus and other religious figures? Is it not also true for those you distrust or hate? Is it not also true for your experience of Hitler or of mass murder? Because you have never met Hitler or participated in mass murder, your thoughts on these subjects are purely your own: you have a relationship with a mental representation called “Hitler” and another called “mass murder.” If the associated thoughts and feelings cause you stress or internal conflict, then you are causing yourself stress and internal conflict. Neither Hitler or the experience of mass murder are personally present for you at this moment. Only your mental representations are here, regardless of how real they may seem.
Language is a series of mental representations that stand for external realities. The mental representation “mother” stands for a real, external reality as does the word “tree” or the command, “catch the ball.” For practical purposes, our mental representations are our external life events. When I say, “Please pass the salt” I do not think I am expressing a mental representation. I think I am describing an actual, physical, external reality, and if you don’t respond then I think there is something wrong with you, because I do not question my mental representation. When I say, “I love God,” I do not think that I am expressing a mental representation. I think I am describing an actual, objective reality, God, even if it is a subjective experience. If I do not get the response to my love that I expect from God, if I am naive I assume there is something wrong with God, because I do not question my mental representation. God must not like me. As we get older, our mental representations become ever more sophisticated, moving from concrete correspondences to abstract correspondences, such as theories of economic forces and equations describing relationships between energy and mass. We may end up questioning our mental representation of God, changing it or throwing it out and replacing it with scientific humanism, energy medicine, Buddhism, or egalitarianism.
Of course, your mental representations generally seem very real. If you imagine yourself biting into a lemon right now you will probably salivate. When you have a nightmare you are scared because you are convinced that your self-created delusion is real. When you like someone you really believe they are likable. When you fall in love with someone you really believe that they are someone who is good for you to love. Likewise, when you hate someone or something, like eating dog food, you have good reasons why you should. That’s because your mental representations are generally reliable and you trust them to help you make good decisions as to what to do and not do. Most of the time these mental representations are accurate enough, even if they are self-created delusions. Your thoughts about how others think, feel, and act in different situations are extremely useful, in that they either get you what you need or validate your world view or your feelings. As a result, you have become so habitually dependent on your mental representations that you think that they are always pretty much accurate. This is a huge mistake. Unfortunately, your mental representations are not always trustworthy. They are in fact a terrible foundation for decision making and most non-organic mental disorders can be traced back to an unwavering belief in the accuracy of faulty mental representations.
At any point, we rely on these mental representations to tell us factual, reliable information about the external world. Because we do, we habitually mistake our mental representations for the external realities that they stand for. This is so necessary for prepersonal and personal levels of development that most people live their entire lives oblivious to this confusion. They have so much of their identity tied up in the correctness of the correspondence of their mental representations to external reality that to question the reliability of those correspondences is threatening. As a result, most people unconsciously block their growth beyond the personal level of development by allowing their mental representations to define what is real and therefore determine what potentials they will even recognize, much less become.
As useful as the correspondence of mental representations and external events is for prepersonal and personal development, it is basically a delusion to which you are addicted, and learning to detach from it is essential for transpersonal development. Those who confuse their mental representations with external events and think that the former are real or accurate may have experienced profound transpersonal states, but they are not stabilized on a transpersonal level of development, regardless of what they believe or tell you. A classic example of this delusion involves Saul on the Road to Damascus. Lacking the ability to distinguish his mental representations from external events, Saul assumed that the light that he saw was actually Jesus asking Saul why he was persecuting him. In fact Saul did more than assume; he was absolutely convinced that he was being visited by Jesus himself. This unquestioned assumption, not the teachings or the person of Peter, was the rock upon which Christianity was then built. Saul’s pivotal experience was a late prepersonal to early personal Bronze age revelation of a transpersonal state rather than a manifestation of a transpersonal level of development by Saul, who up to that time had been busy creating meaning in his life by murdering followers of Jesus.
If Saul had been able to differentiate his mental representations from external events he would have ruled out the former before assuming the latter when he was convinced he heard Jesus. This he did not do because he lacked the distinctions necessary to do so. He was operating at a pre-personal level of development. Saul also lacked the conceptual tools to distinguish between his mental representations (his conception of Jesus) and external events (hearing Jesus’ voice and seeing a blinding light). Like Saul’s, the meaning and purpose of your life is created and powered by your belief in your self-created delusions. For example, if Saul had been able to make this core distinction between what he experienced as real and external and his mental representation of what he saw, it would have occurred to him that what he saw might have been a self-created mental representation, regardless of the depth of his conviction that it was an external reality. He then could have imagined that he was that representation and simply asked it, “Jesus, are you externally real, or a self-created mental representation, or some combination of objective reality and my subjective experience?” While the answer that he would have gotten to this question may not have been truthful, the ability to ask this question is more important than the accuracy of the answer that is received, because it implies the existence of possibilities that not only Saul but most human beings never consider before they make critical and fundamental life decisions. Those decisions determine, to a great extent, success, happiness, and peace of mind. Now, almost two thousand years after Saul became Paul, almost no “normal” people and very few spiritual adepts have learned to make the distinctions Saul missed. Far fewer use it to support their spiritual development. What is the price for not doing so?
Most people would probably agree that there is a correlation between peace of mind and the absence of internal conflict. Generally speaking, the more internal conflict you have, the less inner peace you will experience in your life. Therefore, if you desire inner peace it makes sense that you will do what you can to reduce internal conflict. Of course, this cannot be done in any absolute sense, since life as homeostasis is the balancing of conflicting cellular, neural, emotional, and mental interests. It is therefore more accurate to say that the creation and maintenance of homeostasis is experienced as inner peace. When your mental representations of people, events, and physical symptoms do not accurately represent those external realities you experience internal conflict as I did in my dream of my sister Andra. When your mental representations do accurately represent external realities but create fear, selfishness, confusion and poor decision making, personalization, inner turmoil, and immersion in life drama, they undermine your success, happiness, peace of mind, and relationships. If you think that people are out to get you and someone is out to get you, then you are in both internal and external conflict.
Chronic and unresolved internal conflict interferes with the establishment and expansion of other core qualities of transpersonal consciousness besides inner peace. It destroys confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, and the ability to witness oneself. Internal conflict creates confusion and therefore anxiety and fear, which retard the expansion of fearlessness and confidence. To the extent that it is a manifestation of self-criticism, judgment, and self-abuse, internal conflict is a manifestation of a lack of compassion toward yourself. Mentally fighting with yourself is also not wise, if wisdom is defined as learning from the mistakes of others. How is a wise person likely to deal with internal conflict? They will probably listen to different points of view, do what they can to clarify each position, and then make the best decision that they can. They will then focus on its implementation instead of perpetually second-guessing the wisdom of their decision. Internal conflict is also an expression of a lack of self-acceptance and attachment to your waking agenda. You do not accept the perspective of some other aspect of yourself or you would not be in conflict with it. You are attached to the outcome of the conflict or you would not be in conflict; instead, you would merely be holding a discussion between various internal perspectives or viewpoints. Internal conflict is also a manifestation of dysfunctional subjectivity. At those times when you are in internal conflict you lack the objectivity to become the sky and experience the conflict as just another form of weather, like a tornado or a thunderstorm.
Because of all these factors, there exists a correlation between the quality and quantity of internal conflict and your own level of development on a number of developmental lines, such as those for empathy, interpersonal communication, and intrapersonal communication. While empathy is generally thought of as an interpersonal skill, is it not likely that your internal conflict will be reduced if you are able to empathize with the various perspectives that are in conflict within you? Interpersonal communication is a major developmental line, and its internal correlate is intrapersonal communication. If you are unable to listen to, respect, and support a variety of divergent internal perspectives are you not more likely to experience internal conflict? It is not just that you are at war with yourself; you are at war with specific aspects of yourself, many of which can and do objectify themselves as your dream characters or as the embodiment of your unresolved life issues. These different self aspects are spontaneous mental representations of both your external as well as your internal relationships, potentials, and conflicts. We can relate them to the two internal quadrants of Wilber’s four quadrants of the human holon. Your mental representations are internal individual aspects of the human holon in that they are thoughts associated with feelings and evoke associated states of consciousness. However, they have internal collective aspects in that they are interpretive schemas that provide meaning and stability to your activities and relationships. They create your internal culture of values, reasons, justifications, and rationalizations.
Confusing your mental representations with external reality guarantees that you will stay stuck in the drama triangle, with its three life roles of rescuer, persecutor, and victim, and which is a major source of intrapsychic conflict. For example, I felt victimized by my dream sister because I saw her happy attitude as a deceit and therefore as a form of persecution. Normally, I would conclude the dream was untruthful or unrealistic rather than modifying my mental representation of my sister. Similarly, you will generally choose to stay stuck in the drama triangle because a function of your mental representations is to rescue you from the discomfort of having to adjust them to a reality you either do not grasp or trust. It is much easier and more comfortable to deny the dissonance you feel or to demand that the world change than it is to give up cherished fundamental biases. Isn’t this what happens in young love? Don’t we fall in love with an idealized image that we have of the other and then get mad when they refuse to conform to our wonderful mental representation of them? Don’t we waste energy and years attempting to get them to conform to our unrealistic expectations rather than admitting to ourselves that our mental representation is a delusion? This confusion of mind with reality also places you in the role of persecutor of others and yourself. You persecute others, particularly those you love the most, when you insist that they conform to your mental representation of them. You refuse to allow them to be themselves. Instead, you force their reality to conform to your expectations. This is abusive and discounting. At the same time you persecute yourself because you keep yourself in a state of delusion, believing your mental representations are real when they are not. As a result of playing both rescuer and persecutor to yourself you inevitably fall victim to your delusions when your mental representations fail to get you what you want and need. All of this creates inner conflict, retards your development beyond personal levels, and suppresses the development of core transpersonal qualities in your consciousness.
When your mental representations are wrong they will cause you to make poor decisions. As a result you either fail to get your needs met or are embarrassed in your attempts to do so. You will engage in self-destructive behaviors like impulsive shopping or making investments that are disastrous. You will assume people are trustworthy who are not and assume people are not trustworthy who are. A great example is gambling, an industry that goes to great lengths to support your delusional mental representation that you are a winner when its sole purpose is to keep you losing. So how do we explain what makes people gamble? While there are many reasons, basically they prefer their delusional mental representation to their money or their time. In addition, you harm others when you confuse them with your distorted mental representations. For example, imagine you assume your lover will be late because he or she almost always has been in the past. As a result you are not ready on time. What happens when she shows up on time and you are not ready? You have at least made a poor decision. Moreover, you have probably embarrassed yourself and you may have made your lover late. Such an example of the difficulties that accompany the confusion of a mental representation with an actual person is rather innocuous, but what if you have a mental representation of your lover as not being computer savvy and therefore do not protect personal information that could damage them or your relationship? Then the consequences of having a wrong mental representation can be enormous. On a national level, how many leaders have had mental representations of their enemy that was just plain wrong, as Napoleon’s was of Czarist Russia, Hitler’s was of the Soviets, and Presidents Johnson and Nixon’s were of the North Vietnamese? How about the global economy’s mental representation of capitalism from the 1950’s until September, 2008? That mental representation was self-validating and supported by Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, environmentalists and spiritual seekers alike. Why? Because everyone benefitted from the economic candy that was rotting the global community from the inside out. As Roosevelt pointed out in his Second Inaugural Address, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
Most of the time you get away with this erroneous assumption: that your internal mental schemas accurately depict the outside, external world. When you are mistaken you either manipulate others to change their behavior to match your internal representation, ignore the dissonance, or slightly adjust your mental representations. Which course you take is dependent on how much of your sense of self is wrapped up in your present representations, not only of others but of yourself. This is because when you adjust your mental representations of others you often are forced to adjust your mental representations of yourself. This is much more difficult than changing your expectations about the behavior of others because your representations of yourself are so subjective, habitual, and comfortable. Therefore, the changing of self-representations is strenuously resisted by most of us most of the time. For example if you think that you are loving and people are always hurting you, you have a strong investment in maintaining this mental representation because it supports your self-image and your sense of self identity. If you stop thinking that people are hurting you but you still feel hurt, maybe you will be forced to consider the possibility that you are not as loving as you thought you were, and this can be very, very threatening to your sense of self.
When you manipulate your lovers, children, friends, and customers to change their behavior to match your internal representations you are basically doing what kids do when they throw a tantrum on the floor at the supermarket. You are not only denying the legitimacy of any perspective other than your own; you are demanding that your needs come first. The result is immediate and intense internal conflict. Unfortunately, most of the time your manipulations are not so overt and obvious. The universe of psychological games such as “Rapo,” “Why Don’t You – Yes But,” “Alcoholic,” and “NIGYSOB” (“Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch”) has been explored with great caustic thoroughness by Eric Berne in the 1950’s and 60’s. Such manipulations allow you to keep your mental representations intact, but at the cost of intimacy and authenticity. When you ignore the dissonance between your mental representations and the behavior of others, things can be stable and even blissful – for a while. This is the typical course of romantic love, when we project our representations onto our beloved regardless of how obvious and flagrant are the multitude of indicators that they are bad news. Then, when the truth is finally no longer possible to deny, we blame our lover rather than undergo the painful process of examining the validity of our own mental representations. The same is typically the case with war: my country is in the right, theirs is in the wrong. The strength of this mental representation creates a feeding frenzy of blood lust. Even in defeat people rarely let go to their irrational and compulsive devotion to their incorrect and harmful mental representations. Many people live their entire lives doing whatever they can to blame others, so fundamental is their certainty in the infallibility of their mental representations of the world. They would rather live in the comfort of their delusional mental representations than have authentic relationships with real people and real events in the here and now.
When you choose to change your mental representations you make room for healing, life balance, and transformation because you are generally broadening and deepening the interpretive framework by which you make sense out of your life. For example, by allowing my mental representation of my sister to be one in which she scores very high in the transpersonal qualities of confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing, I not only heal internal conflict but take away a major psychic fuel for external conflict with my actual sister. Most of the time we only change our mental representations as little as we can get away with. The changes we make in them are designed to be as incremental, superficial, and as cosmetic as possible so that we do not have to examine our underlying assumptions about ourselves and our world. If the President pre-emptively attacks another country few people change their opinion of their country, themselves, or, according to most polls, even their leader. If we make a mistake we are “forgetful” or “partially correct” rather than “wrong.” Even if we are wrong we probably won’t change, like a drunk that admits they are an alcoholic.
We create internal conflict when our mental representations are negative, even if they are accurate. This is because our mental representations are aspects of ourselves. If we have a negative mental representation we have a conflictual relationship with ourselves. This doesn’t mean you can’t hate beets or Vodka. It means that while hating your mental representation of beets or Vodka is understandable, it is dangerous. It is better to hate beets or Vodka and love your mental representations of them. But we are not used to thinking this way. We are not motivated to think this way. We have resistance to learning to think this way! For example, whether you like your mother or not, if you have a mental representation of her that creates fear, doubt, anger, sadness, or confusion within you, you put yourself in conflict with yourself whenever you think about her. Let’s say you’re worried about your mother’s health. What are you doing? Basically, if you’re just worried, you are having an internal dialogue with the part of yourself that your mother represents. You are not talking to your mother. At that moment you are worried about a part of yourself. Think about that for a moment. Can you see how you are in conflict with yourself and not with your actual mother? Can you see that basically you are creating internal conflict that only drains time, energy, and effort away from meaningful problem solving? If you worry enough about your mother’s health you may eventually create enough internal conflict that you make yourself sick. Can you improve your mother’s health by also making yourself sick?
Negative mental representations are a form of self-abuse that are so culturally pervasive as to be considered normal, the way slavery was throughout the world until the mid-1800’s. We do not question the nature of such self-representations because they match our perceived reality: some people are nasty and brutish and so our mental representations, to be accurate, must also be nasty and brutish. But then we are stuck with dealing with parts of ourselves that we regard as nasty and brutish, meaning that we must be on guard not just for nasty and brutish people out there but for nasty and brutish aspects of ourselves. Is this smart? If it isn’t, is it necessary? If it’s not necessary, should it be changed? If it should be changed, can it be changed? Of course it can, but first you have to wake up not only to the problem but to the resistances and self-talk that you use to keep yourself stuck.
Thinking happy thoughts, the solution to internal conflict served up by New Thought religions and much of the self-help community, does not make conflicts go away. Instead, it merely anesthetizes you to those conflicts. Indeed, most coping strategies boil down to one or another form of self-medication. The belief is that if you just anesthetize yourself to the problem with optimism, thought substitution, or the distraction of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, exercise, whining, sleeping, changing the subject or threatening, your problem will get smaller even if it doesn’t go away entirely. Using cognitive-behavioral therapy, the most effective form of therapy on the scene today, will help reduce your internal conflict by neutralizing your negative self-talk and the feelings associated with it. But is the absence of internal conflict the same as inner peace? Neutralizing negative self-talk is necessary but not sufficient to the acquisition of highly beneficial internal qualities. Neutralizing negative self-talk will help you become well-adjusted at personal levels of development but it will not move you intro transpersonal levels of development. That is because the elimination of negative mental representations is not the same as the cultivation of transformational and transpersonal mental representations.
What can you do when you wake up and realize that you are thinking yourself into a mental ditch? While almost all mental representations are partial and misleading we can compensate for them by consulting other mental representations that provide a broader, clearer picture. The first thing you must do is remember that your mental representation of your relationship, work, or lifestyle problems is not the same as the person or circumstance itself. Your mental representation of your lover is not your lover, just as a dream about you jumping off a cliff is not the same as you actually jumping off a cliff. As Steven LaBerge points out, waking is experience with physical constraints while dreaming is experience without physical constraints. When you jump off a dream cliff you are much more likely to wake up or change dream scenes or transform than you are to die. In contrast, waking events do not change to conform to your mental representations. For example, if you believe that if you are nice to others they will be nice to you, you may be setting yourself up to feel betrayed when others hurt you. The solution is to learn to consciously decouple your mental representations and the expectations that you associate with them from the external people and events of your life. To be able to move to this critical realization faster when you need it, make a habit of reminding yourself as you go through your day that your thoughts about people are not the same as the people that they represent.
Once you have learned to decouple your thoughts about others from who they actually are, you have access to a new freedom to change your mental representation of them in any way that you wish. This is a form of lucid living, and it bears important parallels to lucid dreaming. You see this awakening happening spontaneously on a fairly regular basis in dreams. Someone you know will show up in a dream acting in a way that does not at all fit your expectations for them, as it does in my dream of my sister. Is such a dream a lie? Are your expectations about the person mistaken? Is the dream saying something that doesn’t have much at all to do with the actual person? The dream is functioning to jar you out of assuming that your mental representations are real. The main thing to remember about your mental representations of others, whether in waking life or in dreams, is that they are yours – you created them. Any mental image of someone is approximate and a clever artifice rather than an accurate or objective fact. This is true of all language-based names and descriptions of reality. Once you have fully grasped this awareness it follows that you have the freedom to change your mental representation of others in any way you wish.
If you have the freedom to change your mental representation of others in any way you wish, why wouldn’t you want to make it as transpersonal and transformational as you possibly can? This would not only neutralize internal conflict but turn your thoughts and feelings about those you don’t trust into expressions of your highest potentials. A concern that comes up for many people is that they will be letting their guard down. After all, if you cultivate an extraordinarily positive mental representation of Hitler, as scoring tens in all six core transpersonal qualities, won’t that cause you to let your guard down to Hitler-like people? Won’t you just be writing a comfortable, warm, fuzzy apocryphal history of who he was? Won’t you be doing damage to the memory of who you have determined Hitler to be by replacing it with an obviously self-serving distortion? Won’t you be dishonoring the lives of those he murdered while opening yourself up for more of the same? This understandable fear creates resistance to changing your mental image. However, what you will find if you will put this exercise to the test is that you will be able to create and maintain a highly transformational mental representation of Hitler and still know the reality of who Hitler actually was. You will be able to maintain your guard toward abusive people better because you have reduced internal conflict and delusional perceptions that drain energy and create confusion that get in the way of you accurately assessing others and responding to them in appropriate ways.
The more that you are identified with your mental representations the more resistance you are likely to have. This is less true for positive representations because changing them to be even more positive is not a threat to you. If you love someone and experience them as even more lovable there is no cognitive dissonance. However, if you reject someone or are afraid of some situation or physical symptom and reframe it as positive, then you are actively creating cognitive dissonance within yourself, and this creates serious resistance. You must expect this and develop a strategy for neutralizing it if you are to be successful with reducing the internal conflict that your mental representations create within you.
If you have a pain or illness in your body you have the same option. First, you must differentiate your physical pain from your mental representation of it. Recognize they are two different things. Then, regardless of how it shows up in your life – as painful or fearful, for instance – determine that you can and will score it as tens in all six core transpersonal qualities (confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing) whenever you think of it. There are other core qualities, but these six are emphasized because they are correlated with the six parts of the round of breath (abdominal inhalation, chest inhalation, pause at the top of the breath, chest exhalation, abdominal exhalation, and longer pause at the bottom of the breath), the round of each day (awakening, work, integration, detachment, withdrawal into sleep, and the objectivity of deep sleep), and the round of life (birth, growth, accomplishment, acceptance, death, and post-death experience.) Again, you are not dealing with the physical symptom itself and therefore you are not denying its nature or its pain or its effect on your health. You are simply reframing your perception of your mental representation of it.
As you consider the possibility that your mental representation is not only different from your waking experience of your pain but should be altered, you will probably notice resistance rising up within you. How come? You have an investment in keeping your representation of your physical symptom, say a headache or cancer, pretty much the way you are used to experiencing it. This resistance does not exist because it is accurate; we know that it is not. It exists because it is comfortable. You may also tell yourself that if you so radically change your thinking about your headache that you will be lying to yourself, because it is painful! This would be true if your mental representation were the same as the physical reality of your headache. But since it only a mental representation of your pain or physical symptom rather than the nerves or the tissues themselves, you can change the way you experience any symptom and still relate to your body itself in the way you always have.
Let’s look at an example of separating out a mental representation of a physical symptom from the body itself. I am 59 and I have enjoyed running for years. Now my knees are beginning to talk to me when I run. It’s probably the onset of arthritis and I can imagine a time when it will get bad enough that I won’t be able to run any more. So how much of that story is about the reality of my knees and how much of it is merely my mental representation about my knees, something that I have confused with my knees? I don’t know, so I will ask my knees about it to see if I can find out:
Knees, what do you like best about yourselves?
Knees: We are strong, flexible, and supportive! We like doing what we were created to do!
Knees, what do you dislike about yourselves?
Knees: We don’t like that we are getting older and starting to wear out!
Yeah, I don’t like that either. Do you have any recommendations about what I can do about that?
Knees: You are enjoying alternative forms of exercise to lighten up on us, like swimming. You eat well. You are listening to us.
Knees, how would you score yourself, 0-10 in the six core qualities?
Knees:
Confidence: 8 We aren’t afraid of much of anything! We have very good self-esteem!
Compassion: ? We don’t think about it. We just do our job!
Wisdom: ? It’s hard for us to relate to wisdom. We don’t have intuitive knowing, but we aren’t ignorant, either!
Acceptance: 8 We accept almost everything! However, it is difficult for us to accept degeneration and not complain about it!
Inner Peace: 8 Our basic nature is to be at peace! But this degeneration is disturbing it!
Witnessing: 2 Most of the time we are subjectively immersed in our reality. This is the first time we have become objective and considered our nature from a witnessing perspective!
Knees, if you were to score tens in all six of these areas, would you be different? If so, how?
Knees: We would be different! We would be confident in the face of whatever degeneration or pain life brings us! We would experience compassion for ourselves, for Joseph, and for others! This is a new and freeing experience for us! We are feeling like we matter, and that we are giving something important to Joseph in an entirely different dimension than we ever have! He has never experienced his knees as compassionate, just as we have never experienced ourselves in that way! When we become ten in wisdom we know how to heal ourselves! WOW! We are no longer victims of the drama of life or of aging! We creatively evolve our own reality as autopoesis! When we experience ourselves as completely accepting of both ourselves and others we no longer experience pain or degeneration as something to reject. We accept them as part of a broader definition of who we are. As a result, we are no longer in conflict with these experiences. When we are ten in inner peace we experience ourselves as healthy regardless of what is going on. When we are ten in witnessing nothing that happens to us defines our reality, because our sense of self transcends events, time, and space. This is very new for us as knees and will take some practice and some getting used to!
So knees, now that you are tens in all six of these core transpersonal qualities, if you were in charge of Joseph’s life how would you live it differently?
Knees: First, we would have him experience us as we now experience ourselves: tens in all six of these qualities. We like how we feel when we think of ourselves in this way! Nothing bothers us! Nothing concerns us! When Joseph is walking and running and he notices pain in us we would recommend that he become us and experience us as tens in all six of these qualities! Also before running and before sleep are good times to read over what we have to say!
Knees, are you Joseph’s actual physical knees or are you his mental representations of them, his ideas about his knees, how he experiences his knees?
Knees: Definitely the latter! We are his mental creations, but since that is all he can know and all that he can relate to, we might as well be his real knees!
OK, Knees! Thank you!
Knees: Thank you for listening to us and for allowing us to come alive within you!
Notice that a case could be made that in the first part of the interview my physical knees themselves were being heard from rather than my mental representation of them, although this is not the case. We were clearly hearing from my mental representation of my knees and not my knees themselves, because knees don’t talk. The meaning and significance of my knees for me and to me changed through the process of our dialogue. Things changed when Knees were asked to imagine that they scored tens in all six core qualities. Knees woke up and “evolved” in their consciousness through the act of being valued, respected, and listened to. The dialogue created new possibilities and potentials as a result of re-framing mental representations in a way that take into account the perspectives of Knees.
In addition to resolving internal conflicts with others and supporting physical healing, there is yet another more basic reason why a deeper understanding of the power of our mental representations is critical to healing, balancing, and transforming our lives. Our life potentials are largely constrained by our mental representations of divinity. Not only do our conceptions and experiences of divinity unleash huge life-changing potentials; at the same time they limit and distort the expression of them. Ken Wilber talks about our mental representations of divinity in terms of the four quadrants. The states of consciousness that our experience of divinity evokes within us is an upper left, internal individual, “I” quadrant approach to experiencing the divine. This is because it is mediated by our sense of self, our thoughts and feelings, our own state of consciousness, and is experienced through internal states like meditation, dreams, and various altered states. For example, a mystical experience is an “I” quadrant, internal individual, upper left encounter with divinity. The external forms that our experience of divinity takes are all external behavioral manifestations of our relationship with the divine. These include the particular type of meditation or dreamwork that we do, our sacred ritual practices and ceremonies, and what we say or write about the divine, whether individually or as a society, Wilber calls this God the sacred “It” or “Its,” meaning objective, exterior, demonstrated, and shared. Anything that we do to make the secular sacred and the mundane spiritual in our daily life and external relationships is a right quadrant, exterior experience of the divine. The third broad category of mental representation of the divine is our interior, sacred, and personal relationship with the divine. This is the realm of values and meanings that we associate with the divine and that are therefore fundamental at framing not only our meaning in life and giving purpose for each and every thought, feeling, action, and interaction with others, but for all spiritual and religious expression. Wilber believes that our ego can “hide out” in an “I” or an “Its” relationship with the divine but cannot do so in a “Thou,” or interior sacred relationship, with the divine. This is because Thou relationships are intrinsically humbling, shrinking the self by placing it in the context of potentials so sacred, so awe-inspiring, so transformative, so transcendent, that its relative insignificance is undeniable.
Traditional ways of accessing and amplifying the “I-Thou” relationship with the divine center on cultivating a personal relationship with the divine that is focused on devotion, adoration, rapture, and bliss. In this sense, the via affirmativa, in which we say what the divine is (“God”) and the injunctive path, in which we say what we need to do in order to achieve oneness with the divine (“meditate”), are emphasized over the via negativa, which tends to produce a trans-subtle, causal, formless, and non-personal experience of the divine.
Building a personal relationship to the divine is absolutely essential to having a balanced, healthy understanding of the sacred. It is also a building block to the non-dual, and those who attempt to skip over it simply slow down their own development. However, there are problems with this approach. Most people who have a personal relationship with God end up falling in love with a parent surrogate. If they had a bad relationship with their parents then God is split between an abusive and an idealized other. If they had a wonderful relationship with their parents then God is limited to the context of that beautiful relationship. What can be done to separate our sense of the divine as Thou from our childhood parental experiences and therefore from prepersonal levels of development?
Integral Deep Listening has a fundamental and significant contribution to the amplification of an “I-Thou” relationship with the divine within. It broadens our sense of the divine to create spectacular Thou relationships with any conceivable “It,” including garbage cans, potted plants, giant cocks, and nothingness in addition to the typical avatar, Bodhisattva, totem spirit guide and our concept of God itself. It internalizes our relationship with the divine by creating transpersonal mental representations. It identifies the divine with our highest potentials, framed in terms of six core transpersonal qualities. It evokes, maintains, deepens, and applies multiple dialogues with the divine. It requires no belief system or adherence to any religion, being as easily accessible to young children as to practitioners of crazy wisdom. It can be used by alcoholics, couples, prisoners, the dying, secular humanists, and true believers. Anyone who dreams or has a life issue can use Integral Deep Listening to create and expand their relationship with the divine. You can see this transformation in the above example interviews. “Andra” is turned from a mental representation of a real person who I am in conflict with to an embodiment of the divine, as she is reframed as a part of me that scores tens in all six core transpersonal qualities. I now have a “Thou” relationship with an aspect of myself that was previously not meeting my expectations and therefore a source of internal conflict. The same can be said about the interview with “Knees.” Instead of having an adversarial relationship with my knees, which are normally not experienced as “Thou,” particularly when they are in pain, I now have the option of doing so, since they certainly view themselves that way in the interview. This creates an experience of the divine that is immediate, that transforms the secular into the sacred, and that heals mundane, real world pain without ignoring or minimizing it.
What would the recommended response be when you are plagued with thoughts of a person that you have a conflict with? First, recognize that because they are not present, either physically or via phone or internet, that you are in conflict at that moment with your mental representation of that person, not with the person themselves. This should remind you that you are only hurting yourself by being in conflict with a part of yourself. Because you think this person hurt you or is a threat, does that mean that you now need to hurt yourself? You then need to think, “What sort of relationship to I want to have with this aspect of myself?” The healthy answer is, “Regardless of how I feel about this actual person, I want to have a healthy relationship with all aspects of myself. Think, “Regardless of how I feel about this person themselves, I choose to experience my mental representation of them now as:
awake
alive
balanced
detached
free
clear
confident
compassion
wise
accepting
at peace
witnessing
Notice that you will probably experience resistance to thinking about the person in such positive terms. That is because you have a persistent habit of confusing your mental representation of that person with who they actually are. This exercise will help you to decouple this delusional and self-destructive assumption.
Interviewing Persons:
Pick a person in your life that you are in conflict with
(Or have your client do so.)
Assuming that they have not transformed into another shape, before you ask them how they score in the six core qualities, score them yourself. This is to get your biases out of the way.
There are at least three outcomes of an interview with a person:
The “person” can transform, say into a golden butterfly or a tiger. In this case the assignment is to become that Sangha member whenever you think of them. You may be aided in doing this by imagining that they transform into that character as well, but that is secondary. What is most important is that you transform into that self-aspect.
The “person” stays the person, but gives itself high scores, insisting that it is different than the actual person in waking life. This is not you giving them high scores. You know this because you have already scored them on the six qualities based on how YOU would rank them. The homework then would be to think of the high scoring Sangha member whenever you think of the person.
The “person” refuses to change. Again, give them your scores and compare their own. They may rank themselves higher than you rank them or they may score themselves lower. In either case, the message is to accept that aspect of yourself as genuinely stuck. When you fully accept it for where it is, you don’t have to take their stuckness personally or be in conflict with it. You choose not to, because you know that to do so is to be in conflict with yourself.
In summary, here are some points to remember. Making mental representations are unavoidable. Most of them are useful and necessary or just harmless. Problems arise when they are unrealistically positive, as they commonly are in romantic love and for True Believers, or are negative. In either case they create conflict with the external world, within you, or both. Be on the lookout for unrealistic and negative mental images. Interview them using the Integral Deep Listening questionnaire. When you have thoughts about that person or situation in the future, become the highly scoring self-aspect that was generated through the facilitation of your questionnaire. Watch what happens! Let me know at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com or post your experience for others to comment and learn at IntegralDeepListening.Com.