When Descartes counts to three contd ...
Perhaps the best thing psychology, that mutant child of science, can do, is to point out that our reality is constructed. And thus, that any contrasting descriptions of reality create dialectic possibilities, not oppositions, leaving us free to dance between constructions, like Heisenberg waltzing through a ballroom full of indeterminate electrons, ghosts he can but notice in the corner of his eye but which ever evade his predatory forward-facing gaze.
Schroedinger's cat never dies, until we look with a rational eye - while the mind's away, the cat still plays, hidden in the box where only poetry can go. If psychology does not inspire this kind of freedom, and instead remains a Minister of Materialism, then we may indeed say "that millennium was wasted". For again, we will see a millennium of progress, dominance, exploitation, greed, poverty, violence, and bloody death. For while we see ourselves as mere pointless experiments in survival, what will hold us back? Here, outside the Garden, what will give us any wisdom, while our souls see like deprived, greedy children, with all the manipulative power of untempered rationality, and the rage of abandonment?
One, two, three, four - we count four pilgrims in this true story. Figures moving as slowly as flamingos through the grasslands. Deep, deep in liquid, living air, our travellers journey through the shield of a shimmering, luminous world revealed by the plant god San Pedro, the "keeper of the gates of heaven".
Like shamans of all ages, they have prepared well for this ceremony. They have fasted and prayed in the wilderness, where they have sought seclusion for this sacred communion. They have imbibed the sacred drink made from the body of the god, who has in turn blessed them with sight - not of another realm, but of where they are...
A stranger approaches them from across the open field. And he stops, pulls up some thirty metres short of them. First puzzlement and then concern cross his face. He hesitates, perplexed, and squinting, peers at the four pilgrims ahead of him, like a man trying to test the reality of a mirage. Then he turns, walks off in another direction, relief flooding his features.
Now, he walks around the still, silent dome of blue light surrounding the travellers, that he touched the instant before he stopped so abruptly. He saw it. But he did not know he had seen it. He was not in the temple, the world of San Pedro, where the gates of perception had been cleansed. We, however, saw it. And we know we have seen it, afterwards, when we discuss it for the first time. San Pedro awakened us.
Far beyond the limits of psychology, experience still exists, to which psychology could slowly accommodate, if Descartes would but count to three...
Just now and then the pupils' noiseless shutter Is lifted.
Then an image will indart,
Down through the limbs' intensive stillness flutter,
and end its being in the heart.
- "The Panther", Rainer Maria Rilke.
New Therapist
Indispensable survival guide for the thinking therapist