Wisdom Notes on Psychology

The Journey of Self on the Path of Sorrow

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The other period was during the years of my psycho-analysis, which began in my mid-40s and continued, on and off, to my 70s. In my 30s I had done the rounds of spiritual groups, seeing if any had the answers to my inner problems. But none had. Then psycho-analysis became my starting point for the pursuit of inner truth. The pursuit of truth became my unique spiritual journey as I began to know myself. What I wanted was intellectual companionship, to meet with people who knew what I was going through. I just wanted to talk to people who understood the spiritual journey, but I never found anyone. I was not following any traditional path of spirituality: my pursuit of truth enabled me to see the flaws and limitations within traditions. I knew that I was going into uncharted territory and it was unlikely that anyone would understand why I rejected much of traditional spiritual ideas. Traditional spirituality has a great deal to offer about the makeup of reality, but it fails in its attempts to understand human consciousness. This was a time of intellectual loneliness as I followed the way of truth.

Loneliness is basically caused by the awareness that the individuality of the person is not sufficiently developed to stand alone on its own feet. In my view, only people who lack adequate self-confidence ever turn to the pursuit of inner truth. A person who is fully confident almost never feels the yearning for truth; he may feel the yearning to unite with his inner self, but this is not the same as the desire to know oneself. So the person following truth will often feel that he needs psychological support, and will try and turn to other people in order to get that support. But he rarely gets it. Loneliness is his only companion. Following inner truth is an isolating experience: a person travels on a path that can only be travelled alone. Only individuals find wisdom, not groups. Groups only find knowledge.

Loss of Happiness

In my early life I tried to base happiness on aspects of life outside myself, such as family, friends, a good job, etc. Family, friends and a good job usually give meaning to one’s life. However, for a sensitive individual, sooner or later external sources of happiness no longer fulfil him. Happiness gradually disappears until he learns to seek happiness within himself. The loss of happiness means that the person has lost his past orientation to meaning in life. Now he feels that something is wrong with him. He doesn’t know what is wrong, and only time will reveal that all it means is that he has yet to find meaning within himself. He may even feel that he is going to die. Such a feeling should not to be taken literally; instead it needs to be interpreted existentially. It means that his old beliefs about himself and his sense of identity are dying. As the old beliefs lose their potency, so he becomes confused until such time as he can formulate more relevant and more harmonious beliefs about himself and his place in reality.

What I was to discover is that to seek happiness within oneself indicates that the person is beginning a long journey of self-discovery. This is a very daunting idea, since it means journeying into the unknown. Hence everyone gets frightened at first. Self-discovery is a process of exploring our strengths and weaknesses, especially our weaknesses. We embark on a course that involves changing our character in various ways, and learning to handle our weaknesses better. At the end of the process, we will be a much stronger person psychologically and better balanced, with inner strengths that we previously did not know we had.

Feeling Lost

As unhappiness intensifies, the person feels lost and empty. He is now empty of all motivation. He has lost most, perhaps all, his high ideals. He has found that his ideals no longer seem to work in modern society: his ideals are no longer adequate for handling the complex issues of the modern world. All he can focus on is survival. If he can survive the sorrows of today, there is the faint hope that something better may come tomorrow. This is not a passing mood, but one that he now learns to live with for months and years on end. This is how I felt during the 1990s and early 2000s.

I tried to relax whenever I could: a quiet walk in the woods or by a stream or on the hills; watching and listening to the rain; anywhere where there is plenty of space away from other people; plus the usual ways of soft music, art, etc. I tend to be very receptive to nature: once, when I was feeling depressed and was exploring a small local wood, an unfamiliar bird alighted on a nearby branch and sang to me – I appreciated its support.

Often my thoughts were too elusive to put on paper. So the strategy I adhered to for years was just to put my experiences on paper; only a long time afterwards was I able to make sense of those experiences. The experiences come first, and then the ability to interpret them comes afterwards. Hence I always carried a notebook and pen with me wherever I went. I recorded my experiences whilst they happened; if I tried to write them down afterwards, relying on memory, I lost the freshness and vitality of those experiences.

Additionally, during times of intense stress, memory cannot be relied on. Long periods of high stress fog the mind, and prevent us from remembering accurately what happened to us. The fog within the mind is like trying to find your way around town when it is enshrouded in dense fog or mist. The mind fog is just a picturesque way of describing a state of very-intense anxiety. In such a state of mind, we can remember only what we make an effort to deliberately observe; otherwise we bob up and down in a sea of emotion. This is when the notebook and pen routine becomes invaluable, enabling me to remember details that were important.

At times our loneliness and unhappiness may become very acute. For a time we may even lose hope. When we lose hope, we reach rock bottom in our life. This seems to be a feature of the way of truth. Before we can understand the heights of reality, we have to experience the dreary depths of it.
When I lost hope, I relied on a tactic I invented during the loneliness of my 20s: during the episodes when life felt hopeless to me, my tactic was to put off till the future the solution of an apparently insoluble problem. The reasoning here was that in the future I might know more about how to face such problems and overcome them. The tactic has worked for me on many occasions when life was very bad for me. In order to survive such bad times, my practice was to just work and sleep, and work and sleep, and to study a little when I was not feeling so bad. The work and sleep routine was just a way of avoiding mental analysis.

As unhappiness increases, we feel desperate to find a way out of our dilemmas. We become familiar with desperation. What we find is that times of great distress and mental conflict often bring significant beliefs out of our subconscious mind into normal consciousness. We become aware of beliefs that we never knew we had.

Extreme distress can bring extreme awareness.

Extreme Awareness

Extreme awareness enables us to discover new ideas about the mind and how it works. We become aware of those aspects of mind that we have repressed for most of our life. Why does extreme distress have this effect?  It seems to be that in our desperation we no longer have the energy to keep subconscious beliefs repressed. The difficulty we face in ordinary times is that we are not aware that we have repressed various beliefs and so we cannot deliberately set out to un-repress them. Using the ideas of psycho-analysis we can now begin to understand why we believe what we believe, whether consciously or subconsciously. Once our subconscious beliefs are visible in the light of day, we can begin to change those we don’t feel are suitable for us.

This is an optimistic view. Distress does not make us aware of all our subconscious beliefs, but only those we need to work with in our current difficulties. Another way to look at this view is that we only become aware of subconscious beliefs that we can face at the time. This is a survival mechanism. If we become aware of beliefs that are currently too distressful to work with, then we will be plunged into extreme mental turmoil.
Desperation and loneliness produce the great themes of spiritual adventure: spiritual darkness, trials and challenges, enlightenments, the rollercoaster of finding heaven one day and hell the next, etc. The higher the states of mind that you can experience, the lower the depths you can sink to. This brings to mind a traditional saying: the greater the sinner, the greater the saint.

Eventually I understood what was happening to me. I was in the midst of a change-over in my sense of identity. Feeling lost meant that I had lost my old spiritual “anchors” and psychological supports, and was in a no-mans land of ruined hopes and ideals. The process that I was going through was one of re-orientation. I could not set new realistic ideals until I understood more about myself. By developing greater self-awareness I was able gradually to discover why things had gone wrong with my life.

My psychological problems were only insoluble whilst they remained vague and undefined. Once I began to identify and distinguish them much more clearly, then they started to change.

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