Tag: connection

The web of life

 

Many of us I guess are used to the idea that we are interconnected with all life here on the planet, and that what affects one ecosystem, even seemingly far away, affects us all. It may, however, seem a little abstract, even pious for some.

In fact, this interpenetration is way more basic than we realize. This was brought home to me by listening to Dr Mark Davis on Chris Ryan’s podcast recently talking about the gut microbiome. We do not only consume other organisms, rely on them for regulating atmospheric CO2 levels or depend on  them in some other metaphysical way. They are inside us – in excess of 90% of the DNA in our bodies is non-human (mostly bacterial) DNA. A whole new order of life was recently found living in our guts. Bacterial cells (because they are much smaller and simpler) outnumber human cells in our bodies by orders of magnitude. Bacteria and other microbes perform essential functions in human physiology: we have “outsourced” many jobs to them. The mitochondria in our own human cells, and many other cellular bodies, were once bacteria or viruses.

So the web of life penetrates our own bodies very deeply. But more than this: it actually IS our bodies. It would be perfectly artificial and not make much sense to define a human body as consisting only of human cells containing human DNA. Those cells are only part of a  much greater whole. The consciousness we possess does not reign over an exclusively human organism, but a massive ecosystem predominantly composed of organisms which are genetically unrelated to the human brain cells which supposedly run the show. And just as endogenous neurotransmitters began evolutionary life as exohormes, communicating between rather than within organisms, so mechanisms we have developed – thought, speech, behavior and probably other communicative functions – link the entity we call ourselves into the wider whole. I am not, of course, saying that the skin is not a relevant boundary, but it is not an absolute one.

So it is not really that we are connected to the web of life or dependent on it. In fact we are the web of life, one manifestation of it; and when we disturb it, as becomes increasingly clear, we do not have to wait generations to see the consequences because they are indirect. They are right there inside us.

 

The Repression of Empathy

Empathy is a natural human faculty that is repressed by powerful social forces.

Flickr image by Josep Ma. Rosell

I have written in a previous post about the conjecture that the human mirror neuron system forms the biological basis for empathy, and also alluded, in discussing pornography, to the role of empathy in sexual experience.

There are utterly compelling reasons to consider that empathy is a fundamental constituent of the experience of being human, a sixth sense without which our species would have failed miserably in its evolutionary struggle. Nevertheless, we repress and deny huge parts of this faculty, and relegate what is left to the paranormal or the unexplained. Even despite this, episodes of empathy characterize the life experience of all of us.

This repression takes place as much on the side of the person whose sensations are experienced by another through empathy as on that of the person experiencing those sensations vicariously. Why is this? We know, in fact, that we cannot hide our fears, sadness, anger, or other emotions from those close to us. But we can pretend to. We can enter into a Faustian bargain with the other, and this happens very often. I will pretend not to know what I know about how you are feeling, provided you do the same. I don’t press your buttons and you don’t press mine. Probably we all know many couples whose domestic life is characterized by silent cohabitation, with no conflicts apparent on the surface, but where you can cut the tension underneath with a knife.

Such a conspiracy of silence leads to a very deep alienation. The basic goal of connection that people strive towards in relationships is undermined. In fact we are still connected to the other. The human animal is always connected to its environment. But we must pretend not to be. Thus in the place where we most wish to realize union, we are most required to deny it. This is easily a recipe for spiritual death.

Responsibilities for this state of affairs are equally divided. On the one hand, people are of course afraid to let down their masks and show what they are feeling. On the other, people are also inhibited from showing empathy by the idea that feelings are private and that it is inappropriate and impolite to mirror these feelings, enquire after the person’s emotional state, offer support, or act on the mirrored impulses in order to alleviate the source of pain.

This is entirely misconceived, because emotions have a fundamentally social dimension. Human connection and sharing in emotions are part and parcel of the same thing.

When it is put to the person whose emotion is sensed that they are in a particular emotional state, they frequently also respond by denying this is the case. This again is most unfortunate. Not only does the person concerned miss an opportunity for connection and healing, but also we are all taught to mistrust our instincts to the point where we lose all alignment to them and forego, in fact, the basic drivers of our natural social behavior. The end of this process of reinterpretation is to relegate to the realm of the paranormal an essential aspect of being human.

We all need to recognize that we never interact with people without eliciting in them some flicker of perception of our emotional state. And really we want this state to be perceived. We should not lie to ourselves and, especially, not to our interlocutor, for whose own cultivation of this sixth sense we should have a great deal more respect. It is also a learning process and it relies on feedback and observation to be refined. If we have the slightest regard for our collective human potential, we should stop hiding behind our masks and provide that feedback as honestly as we can, by acknowledging our inner state, at least to those persons worthy of trust and who care for us.

Resistance

I’m reading Olaf Jacobsen’s book Ich stehe nicht mehr zur Verfuegung (literally “I’m no longer available” – not a good translation though; the book seems to be available in French, Spanish and Italian, but I haven’t found it in English). I will review it separately (this is not intended as a recommendation), but I just wanted to quote and translate this passage, which makes a really good point, affirmed by my recent experience:

When someone makes a dogmatic assertion, the perception by others of his or her position in the social pecking order changes. The person making the claims becomes a “repository of truth” and puts him- or herself above the others. The relationship of equality with the others is lost. In order to recreate this situation of equality, the others need to express resistance to the claim and perhaps make a contrary or different claim or distance themselves from it.

Behind the feeling of resistance is often the desire to be treated as an equal, whereby both people have the same rank and the same value and their realities and convictions are equally valid.

In the feeling of resistance, I see the message that “something wants to be recognized, valued and integrated”, whether we are talking of children, adults – or me myself. If I am aware of the fact that my resistance derives from my wish for recognition or inclusion, then I can also reflect on whether or not I might be willing to forego this wish. Florence Scoval Shinn [a pioneer of the New Thought movement] explains impressively in her book The Game of Life and How to Play It that struggling against something tends rather to keep the situation in place than to resolve it. Bert Hellinger [the founder of constellation theory] also says, “What we struggle against we will never get rid of. Only what we love sets us free.” Shinn proposes the perspective that “every person is a golden link in the chain which ultimately serves my wellbeing”. [Stephen] Wolinsky [founder of so-called quantum psychology] recommends to stop struggling against the person who has generated resistance in us, but rather to concentrate on the energy within us, the feeling of resistance itself. In this way the feeling may gradually disappear or be transformed into something more pleasant. When we tell someone that we are no longer available for his or her assertion, we achieve the same result. We look less at him or her and more at ourselves. The feeling of resistance starts to dissolve. The origin of this feeling was our attention to the other person, linked to our desire for recognition or change. That is why we first made ourselves available to him or her and experienced the resulting feelings. When our desire and our attention shift, so does our feeling.

This account skips all too glibly over the conditioning inherent in the reaction of resistance, seeming to imply that contemporary factors explain everything and not delving into where the desire for attachment, to this particular person at this particular moment, comes from and to what extent, if at all, I can exert conscious control over it. It also fails to acknowledge the pain in my repeated experience of rejection as an unnatural, toxic state of being engendered by the contemporary world.

Still I like it because it often happens to me that therapists (who may mean well) wade in with offhand interpretations of my personal story to which I cannot relate. It chimes with the constant declarations my mother would make as to how I was feeling, which apparently she thought she knew better than me. I am happy to be challenged, but only from a position of vulnerability and compassion where I feel a common bond with the person in the therapeutic role. Doubtless there is such a thing as a natural authority of which I could be accepting, but in practice it is often the case that therapists (and would-be therapists) are more like “therapests” – they derive pleasure from sitting in a position of power over others. And this never works at all – it immediately neutralizes the power in the encounter. Sure, I may be oversensitive, I may be unable to see certain truths – but fundamentally I am just refusing to be manipulated and expressing faith in the ability of my own organism to regulate its problems. Only people who work with this drive for emancipation can help me and befriend me. The others are just making the problem worse and isolating themselves. I can, indeed, withdraw and not suffer needless pain. This, however, does not alter the profound tragedy of disconnection.