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AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE MIND |
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Personal Myths as Fields of
Information
David Feinstein From The Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
1998, 38(3), 71-109. |
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Summary |
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The concept that personal myths shape individual
behavior in a manner analogous to the way cultural myths influence
social behavior has been gaining increasing attention over the past
two decades. A personal mythology is an internalized model of
reality comprised of postulates about oneself, one’s world, and
the relationship between the two. These postulates, which address
immediate as well as eternal concerns, are both descriptive,
furnishing explanations, and instructive, generating motivation. A
comprehensive theory of human development based on the individual’s
evolving mythology integrates the biological, psychodynamic, cultural,
and spiritual dimensions of experience. This paper expands the
personal mythology construct, suggesting that personal myths function
not only as biochemically-coded models of reality, but also as
fields of information—natural though non-visible elements of the
physical universe—that impact consciousness and behavior. Just as some
neurologists have proposed that "mental fields" complement brain
activity in unifying experience and some biologists have proposed that
"morphic fields" complement the action of the gene in giving form to
an organism, the current work proposes that mythic fields complement
the physiological bases of consciousness in storing symbolic content
and maintaining psychological habits. Implications of this formulation
for personal and social change are considered.
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Myth is grounded in the quintessential human
ability to address the large questions of existence using symbolism,
metaphor, and narrative. While a myth—to be plausible for contemporary
individuals—must be aligned with our capacity for rational thought,
myth-making is as much with us today as it was thousands of years ago.
The symbolism of an individual’s guiding mythology can, in fact, be
discerned using established psychological techniques for uncovering
unconscious processes, including interviews, dream analysis, free
association, structured fantasy, and projective instruments (Feinstein &
Krippner, 1997; McAdams, 1993).
Personal myths are organizing models that shape
perception, understanding, and behavior (Feinstein, 1979; Larsen, 1976,
1990; Lukoff, 1977; McAdams, 1993). . They emerge from four sources:
biology, personal history, culture, and transcendent experiences
(Feinstein, Krippner, & Granger, 1988). Comprised of postulates about
oneself, one’s world, and the relationship between the two, personal
myths explain the external world, guide individual development, provide
social direction, and address spiritual questions in a manner that is
analogous to the way cultural myths carry out those functions for entire
societies.
As organizing models, personal myths are
continually being compared with experience. When a mismatch is detected
between an inner model and an experience, perceptions may be changed to
match the model (Piaget’s [1977] assimilation) or the model may be
changed to match the experience (Piaget’s accommodation). The evolution
of internal models, a process that occurs largely outside the
individual’s awareness, is a primary focus of psychotherapeutic
intervention. By framing internal models as personal myths, the
dynamic, "storied nature" (Sarbin, 1986) of human cognition comes to the
foreground. Paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought
(Bruner, 1990) are integrated in a manner that corresponds with the
territory of human experience. In addition, recognizing the essential
mythological nature of the psyche extends the boundaries of scientific
language, allowing it to more readily incorporate the larger cultural
and spiritual dimensions of human conduct (Feinstein, 1997).
Like beliefs and attitudes, personal myths are
rooted in the individual’s biochemistry. They are biochemically-coded
models of reality. This paper considers evidence that biochemical
theories of information storage and retrieval are not sufficient in
themselves for explaining the way personal myths function, and it
develops the hypothesis that personal myths, in addition to their
biochemical infrastructure, are also embedded in fields that
store information and maintain habits. |
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FIELDS OF INFORMATION |
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A field is a domain of influence, presumed
to exist in physical reality, that cannot be observed directly, but
which is inferred through its effects. Although they elude direct
inspection, the four established fields of physics—gravitational fields,
electromagnetic fields, and the strong and weak quantum matter
fields--are known to exist because of phenomena that can be
observed. They are understood as natural if non-visible forces in the
physical universe.
Findings from several areas of science are
converging to cause some investigators to postulate a variety of fields,
different in nature from the four established fields of physics, but
similar to one another in that each is conceived of as carrying
information that influences consciousness and behavior. Neurologists,
for instance, are proposing that previously undetected fields may be
involved in brain function. The ability of neurons to broadcast signals
to one another has been identified by Schuman and Madison (1994) at
Stanford Medical School. Their "neural broadcasting" theory suggests
that information can be transmitted from a single neuron to neighboring
neurons that are not electrochemically connected via axon and dendrite:
"The formation of synaptic changes previously thought to be restricted
to synapses onto a single cell can also result in synaptic changes at
nearby synapses" (p. 535). The investigators speculate that "the
presence of synaptic activity may work in concert with other factors"
(p. 535), and it is too early to rule out the possibility of neural
fields as one of those factors. Another prominent neurologist, Libet
(1994), has, in fact, proposed a "testable field theory of mind-brain
interaction," hypothesizing a mental field "which is produced by,
but is biologically distinct from, brain activity" (p. 119). Libet’s
mental fields "cannot be observed directly by external physical means"
(p. 121), and their properties differ significantly from those of any
currently known physical field in such dimensions as their ability to
alter neuron function and to unify subjective experience.
Physicists, meanwhile, have been discussing
correspondences between consciousness and quantum fields for well over
half a century (Bohm, 1951; Edington, 1929). Penrose (1994), for
instance, holds that many of the brain’s capacities can best be
explained by postulating that consciousness operates according to the
principles of quantum mechanics. While quantum theories of consciousness
might place many difficult questions about the brain and the mind into a
compelling new context (e.g., Friedman, 1994; Wolf, 1994; Zohar &
Marshall, 1994), the question remained unanswered whether parts of the
brain small enough to be governed by the laws of quantum mechanics could
be complex enough to exert a discrete influence on consciousness.
Hameroff (1994), an anesthesiologist, has recently
suggested that microtubules could by the presumed brain mechanism that
operates at the quantum level while affecting consciousness. A
microtubule is composed of long, thin hollow tubes of protein about a
ten-millionth of an inch in diameter that form meshlike networks
throughout each cell. A single electron sliding back and forth along the
microtubule’s length determines the microtubule’s configuration and
function. Significantly, the action of anesthetics such as ether and
halothane is that they temporarily incapacitate the microtubules,
turning off consciousness with minimal disruption to other brain
functions. Since microtubules are small enough to operate according to
quantum principles and are directly involved with consciousness,
Hameroff believes they are the link between consciousness and quantum
mechanics. He notes that if this is so (for a rebuttal that highlights
existing controversies, see Grush & Churchland, 1995), "free will" may
correspond with quantum indeterminacy; "pre-, sub-, and
non-conscious processes" may correspond with collapse of the wave
function; and the "binding problem" and the "unitary sense of self"
may correspond with the quantum property of non-locality, "which
implies that all objects that have once interacted are in some sense
still connected . . . the non-local connection (quantum coherence) is
not only instantaneous and independent of distance but impervious to
shielding" (Hameroff, 1994, p. 101).
According to Hameroff (1994), "quantum field
theory describes the underlying reality of everything in the universe
(including consciousness) as consisting of three components: the
vacuum, space and time. A ‘field of fields’ which contains no
particles, the vacuum gives rise to quantum wave/particles as
excitations or energy fluctuations within it" (p. 103). Tiller (1993), a
physicist in the Department Materials Science and Engineering at
Stanford University, after surveying a set of anomalous phenomena such
as remote viewing experiments and the feats of remarkable strength
sometimes exhibited by hypnosis subjects, also postulates a domain of
subtle energy emerging from the quantum vacuum state. The quantum vacuum
is likewise the basis of a fifth physical field as formulated by Laszlo
(1995), a systems theorist, to account for the transmission of
information beyond the limits of space and time as understood in
electromagnetic and gravitational fields and beyond the microprocesses
governed by strong and weak quantum matter fields. Laszlo argues that
the quantum vacuum functions as an "information-rich" (p. 28)
holographic field that would allow a thought to be simultaneously
available at distant locations.
In addition to these complementary theories
emerging from neurology, physics, anesthesiology, and systems theory,
engineers (Jahn & Dunne, 1987), biologists (Sheldrake, 1988; Weiss,
1939), physiologists (Hunt, 1995), neuroanatomists (Burr, 1972),
physicians (Gerber, 1996), psychologists (Callahan & Callahan, 1996;
Larson, 1987), and non-traditional healers (Eden, in press), have
postulated the existence of information fields that might influence
consciousness and behavior, based on findings from within their
respective disciplines. Beyond such scientific speculation, a number of
time-honored traditions in both the East and the West refer to a more
subtle counterpart to the material body, referred to variously as the
"aura," "subtle body," "pranic body," or "etheric body." We turn here to
consider the empirical evidence that has bearing on the question of
whether these ancient, as well as the more contemporary terms and
concepts might refer to fields of information that influence
consciousness and behavior. |
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SIX ANOMALIES IN SEARCH OF A THEORY |
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Since fields cannot be directly measured
via existing physical instrumentation, they are inferred by their
apparent effects on what can be observed. The inference that a field is
operating must meet the basic criterion that there is no more
parsimonious, non-reductionistic explanation for a set of empirically
observed phenomena
A range of anomalies about consciousness and
behavior would be parsimoniously and non-reductionistically explained if
a field of information is inferred. For instance, it is now documented,
under experimental conditions, that focused visualization by one person
about a second person, any distance away and unaware of the first
person, may measurably influence the second person’s electrodermal (GSR)
activity (Braud, 1992). Anomalies are the points in the natural world
where observations do not match conventional scientific understanding,
where empirical data contradict the culture’s dominating mythology.
Following is a survey of anomalies that have a substantial empirical
basis and which would no longer be considered anomalies if previously
undetected fields that affect consciousness were shown to carry
information over distance.
Effects of Human Activity on Distant Mechanical
Devices. An enduring enigma in quantum mechanics is that if
two paired photons are separated, regardless of the distance that may
come between them, a change in one appears to create a simultaneous
change in the other (quantum coherence). These distant effects at the
nuclear level are difficult to explain, but they are no more mysterious
than the accumulation of evidence that human thought and activity can,
from a distance, influence mechanical devices.
Numerous anecdotes describing how an old clock
stopped at the moment its owner died, for instance, have been documented
(Cano, 1996). Several meticulously designed studies have demonstrated
that by focusing their attention, certain individuals can reliably
influence mechanical systems, such as random number generators (Jahn &
Dunne, 1987). Researchers at the School of Engineering at Princeton
University found that the output of random-event generators was also
affected when the devices were simply placed in the presence of
organized groups of people. The effect was strongest during periods when
the group’s attention was focused, when the group’s cohesion was high,
or when the group’s members were sharing a common emotional experience.
In experiments at ten separate gatherings, ranging from business
meetings to scientific research conferences to ritual religious events,
the effect of a group’s collective behavior, while slight, was so
consistent that the probability against its having occurred by chance
was about 5,000 to 1. The researchers conclude: "If sustained over more
extensive experiments, such effects could add credence to the concept of
a consciousness ‘field’ as an agency for creating order in random
physical processes" (Nelson, Bradish, Dobyns, Dunne, & Jahn, 1996, p.
111). At least a dozen other studies of interactions between fields and
consciousness lend support to these findings (cited in Radin, 1997).
Distant Effects of Visualization, Prayer, and
Meditation. Numerous laboratory experiments have demonstrated
that some people can mentally influence the growth of plants, fungi, and
bacteria (Benor, 1993). Experimental subjects, after being instructed in
how to use visualization to inhibit the breakdown of red blood cells in
a test tube located in a different room, achieved statistically
significant results in their efforts to slow the rate of cell
deterioration (Braud, 1990). Well-controlled studies have also
demonstrated at an extraordinarily high significance level (2.6 x 10-14)
that some people can, through the use of calming or activating imagery,
influence the relaxation or anxiety level of targeted individuals,
unawares, in other locations, as gauged by spontaneous changes in their
electrodermal activity (Braud, 1992).
In a frequently cited double-blind study with 393
coronary care patients at San Francisco General Hospital, 192 patients
were randomly assigned to a "prayed-for" group and the others to a
control group (Byrd, 1988). Between five and seven people in home prayer
groups prayed on the behalf of each person in the "prayed-for" group
without the person’s knowledge. The prayed-for patients were five times
less likely to require antibiotics (three patients compared to sixteen
in the control group); three times less likely to develop pulmonary
edema (six patients compared to eighteen); and no one in the prayed-for
group, compared to twelve in the control group, required mechanical
ventilatory support. Fewer patients in the prayed-for group died,
although that difference did not reach statistical significance. While
various explanations have been offered to account for these rather
startling findings, such as the religious biases of the investigator,
the lack of uniformity in the way people prayed, and the fact that there
was no way of controlling for whether people in the control group were
also being prayed for by themselves or their loved ones (Dossey, 1993),
a variety of related investigations support the efficacy of prayer in
physical recovery. Of 131 studies that calculated probability values of
the effects of prayer on healing published up to 1993, 77 reported
statistical significance — 56 at the .01 level, another 21 at the .05
level (Benor, 1993).
In several empirical investigations, groups of
people meditating together appear to have positively affected nearby
non-meditators with whom they have no physical contact. For instance, a
series of well-designed and replicated, though still controversial,
large scale studies showed that crime rates decreased significantly in
cities where Transcendental Meditation was being practiced by an
infusion of meditators, as compared with matched control cities (Dillbeck,
Cavanaugh, Glenn, Orme-Johson, & Mittlefehldt, 1987), and that other
quality of life indicators improved as well (Assimakis & Dillbeck,
1995).
Prodigies and Savants. Prodigies such
as Mozart, who composed elegant symphonies while a child, and instances
of the idio-savant, as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in "The Rain Man,"
are also among the psychological anomalies that could be explained by
the existence of information fields. At least 100 savants with
prodigious mental abilities have been documented in the past century (Treffert,
1989). A boy diagnosed as illiterate, ineducable, and with a
conversational vocabulary of some 58 words could accurately answer
inquiries as to the population of every major city and town in the
United States; its distance from the largest city in its state; the
names, number of rooms, and locations of its leading hotels; and
statistics on thousands of mountains and rivers (Treffert, 1989). A
well-known blind musical savant could "repeat, on the piano, a complex
piece heard only once, in a perfect mirroring, including every emotional
nuance of expression" (Pearce, 1992, p. 4). During World War II, the
British government employed two mathematical savants to serve,
essentially, as computers (Pearce, 1992, p. 4).
While attempts exist to explain the special
abilities of the prodigy and the savant within conventional frameworks
have been offered—such as favorable genetic quirks, highly specialized
neurological pathways, and unusually efficient information processing
strategies—these explanations raise more questions than they answer (Treffert,
1989). Some investigators have speculated that prodigies, savants, and
others with exceptional abilities are tuning into existing fields of
information (e.g., Laszlo, 1995; Moss, 1974; Pearce, 1993). Pearce
(1993) tells a story about his son at a time that Pearce, in his early
thirties, was reading extensively about theological questions, his mind
occupied "to the point of obsession": |
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One morning as I prepared for an early class, my
five-year-old son came into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, and
launched into a twenty-minute discourse on the nature of God and man.
He spoke in perfect, publishable sentences, without pause or haste,
and in a flat monotone. He used complex theological terminology and
told me, it seemed, everything there was to know. As I listened,
astonished, the hair rose on the back of my neck, I felt goose-bumps,
and, finally, tears streamed down my face. I was in the midst of the
uncanny, the inexplicable . . .
Here a bright, normal child underwent a kind of
"savant experience" as he responded to a field of information he could
not have acquired. Terms such as telepathy are misleading; he wasn’t
picking up his materials from me. I hadn’t acquired anything like what
he described and would, in fact, be in my mid-fifties and involved in
meditation before I did. (pp. 8 - 9)
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Inspiration that seems to be derived from beyond
oneself is well recognized in the study of creativity. Writers are
notorious for devising the most eccentric and varied of rituals for the
purpose of evoking the "muses." The German word Einfal refers to
a sudden and spontaneous intuition leading to a conceptual or aesthetic
breakthrough (Laszlo, 1995, p. 130). Individuals such as Mozart,
Michelangelo, and Shakespeare were distinguished for remarkable creative
perceptions apparently "falling" into their awareness. Laszlo reflects
that in addition to such giants, "sometimes otherwise entirely
unremarkable individuals display astonishing, seemingly inborn,
capacities in specific fields, especially in music and in mathematics.
To call such individuals ‘gifted’ and their achievements ‘works of
genius’ is not to explain their abilities, but only to label them. An
explanation involves answering questions regarding the origins of their
unusual accomplishments. Are they possessors of a specially fortunate
combination of genes? Or did they receive their gifts from a higher
source?" (p. 130).
Systematic Investigations of Telepathy.
Many stories exist that purport spontaneous telepathic communication
between people with emotional or genetic ties, particularly under
conditions of crisis or trauma. How can a twin know her sister is in
danger a thousand miles away? Why would a woman wake up with a shock in
the middle of the night at the moment her husband has just died in a
plane crash? What causes a father to dream about his daughter’s terror
while at that very moment she is fending off an attacker? While an
abundance of anecdotal reports, observations by anthropologists studying
indigenous cultures, and sophisticated laboratory studies provide
substantial evidence for the existence of telepathy (Laszlo, 1995, pp.
88 - 90), a physical basis for it has not been established. Still the
evidence is compelling.
Here is a single, dramatic example. In 1970, Jerry
Garcia asked Stanley Krippner, a personal friend and a leading
parapsychology researcher, if Krippner thought the Grateful Dead’s music
could boost the transmission of telepathic messages. At 11:30 p.m. on
February 19, 1971, some two thousand concert fans, in various music and
otherwise-induced nonordinary states of consciousness, at the Capitol
Theater in Port Chester, New York, participated in a pilot study. They
attempted to transmit an image to Malcolm Bessent, a sensitive who was
sleeping in a dream research laboratory 45 minutes away. The randomly
selected image of Scralian’s painting, The Seven Spinal Chakras,
was projected from a slide onto the theater screen while the band played
on. The audience was told they were taking part in an ESP experiment and
was instructed to "Try using your ESP to ‘send’ this picture to Malcolm
Bessent" who is now sleeping "at the Maimonides Medical Center in
Brooklyn" (where Krippner was the Director of the Dream Research
Laboratory). The painting, which was shown for about 15 minutes, depicts
a man in a lotus position with all seven chakras—the energy centers
along the spine and head—illuminated. The ground the man is sitting upon
is not depicted in the painting. Bessent’s dream report that night
included an image of a man "suspended in mid-air," thoughts about "a
spinal column," and an interest in "using natural energy" (Krippner,
1975, pp. 90 - 93).
Although rigorous experimental procedures were
observed, most psychologists are not impressed with such stories. Only
34% of the psychologists responding to a survey of 1,100 college
professors believed that ESP is an established fact or a likely
possibility as contrasted with: 55% of those in the natural sciences,
66% of other social scientists, and 77% of those in the humanities, art,
and education. On the other side of the spectrum, an equal proportion of
psychologists, 34%, declared ESP an impossibility, as contrasted with 3%
of the natural scientists and not one of the 166 professors in the other
social sciences (Wagner & Monnet, 1979). An American Psychologist
article used the Maimonides Medical Center’s 10-year research program
demonstrating dream telepathy as the case study in tracing the
systematic bias, in professional psychological organs, against anomalous
observations such as ESP (Child, 1985). Child concludes that, although
the Maimonides research is "widely known and greatly respected" among
scientists active in parapsychology, the experiments have received no
mention in reviews to which they are clearly pertinent or have been
condemned based on entirely erroneous assertions. "Insofar as
psychologists are guided by these reviews," Child observes, "they are
prevented from gaining accurate information about research" that
might significantly impact their worldview (p. 1219). Although this
trend may be changing, discussions of parapsychological research are
still being de facto excluded from most mainstream psychological
journals and textbooks.
Nonetheless, research in parapsychology, partially
because it is so exposed to attack, is often conducted with more
meticulous experimental standards than research on less controversial
topics, and evidence supporting parapsychological phenomena continues to
mount (Bem & Honorton, 1994; Radin, 1997: Targ & Katra, 1998). But
findings that do not conform to established paradigms (Kuhn, 1970)—that
buck the prevailing mythology—are systematically relegated to the
purgatory of scientific investigation. In short, if the evidence
supporting the enigmatic "information transfer" produced by the
Maimonides research and in other well-designed parapsychology
experiments fell within a conventional area of investigation, the burden
of proof would be on those wanting to discredit the reality of the
phenomenon.
Similarities in Myths and Symbols across Cultures.
A debate persists among archaeologists regarding whether curious
similarities in sculpture, painting, and architecture (Schuster &
Carpenter, 1996) are "transmitted" by travelers or, because of shared
genetic coding within the human nervous system, are independently
generated by different societies. In addition to the similar figures and
symbols found by archaeologists across cultures, parallel myths in
societies that had no knowledge of one another are well documented in
the works of comparative mythologists such as Campbell, Cassirer, Eliade,
Frazer, Graves, and Lévi-Strauss (Bierlein, 1994). Symbols such as the
"Great Earth Mother," the "Eternal Child," the "Hero’s Journey," the "Mandala,"
and the "Shadow" frequently appear in classical myths and artwork as
well as in contemporary literature, drama, and screen productions. Jung
(1934/1968), who spoke of these universal symbols as archetypes,
believed they represent structures within the psyche that unfold
according to an inborn maturational plan, determining the essential form
and developmental path of consciousness.
Although the role of archetypes in human
experience has generally been discounted in mainstream scientific
circles, the idea has prevailed, in part because researchers in such
disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, ethology, and linguistics keep
rediscovering the concept and renaming it in their own terms (Stevens,
1993). Most recently, some evolutionary psychologists have been making a
credible case for the "evolved deep structure of the psyche" (Slavin &
Kriegman, 1992, p. 68). Beyond the well established innate structures
underlying linguistic abilities, a "complex, preexisting psychic
architecture . . . regulates many of our key interactions with the world
and guides the process of organizing experience" (Slavin & Kreigman, p.
69). The human mind, from this perspective, "consists of a set of
evolved information-processing mechanisms instantiated in the human
nervous system [that are] functionally specialized to produce behavior
that solves particular adaptive problems such as mate selection,
language acquisition, family relations, and cooperation" (Tooby &
Cosmides, 1992, p. 24). Some anthropologists, in fact, take the position
that, across cultures, "once one gets behind the surface
manifestations, the uniformity of human social arrangements is
remarkable" (Fox, 1989, p. 34).
While the expression of any innate behavior
in humans varies so greatly from one person to the next and one culture
to another that the existence of universals is still debatable (Brown,
1991), prototypes of the archetype are common in the animal kingdom and
may shed light on underlying mechanisms. When, for instance, a wooden
model of a flying hawk is pulled over the head of a newly hatched chick,
the chick will crouch down and emit cries of alarm. Even if the next 10
generations are never exposed to a hawk, the moment a real or wooden
hawk comes into view, the chick’s descendants will still cringe
(Stevens, 1982). When 30 finches were trapped in 1939 by the British
ornithologist David Lack on the Galapagos Islands, where there are no
large birds of prey, caged, and sent to his colleague, Robert Orr, in
California, they all cringed and emitted alarm calls when a predatory
bird came into sight. Neither they, nor their ancestors for hundreds of
thousands of years, had exhibited that response when a predator flew
overhead since they had never seen a predatory bird. Using these
observations to illustrate the concept of the archetype, Stevens
concludes: "The ‘predator archetype’ had lain dormant in the ‘collective
unconscious’ of these birds for something approaching a million years"
(p. 48).
The counter-argument to the position that the
appearance of similar archetypal symbolism across cultures is inherited
from past ages is summarized by Wilber (1995). Archetypes can be seen as
"secondary by-products of cognitive structures which themselves are
similar wherever they appear and which in interpreting a common physical
world, generate common motifs" (p. 220). Thus the commonalties found in
disparate cultures, such as the "Hero’s Journey," "The Great Mother,"
and parallel representations of birth, death, and rebirth, can be
explained not as inherited imagery but as products of similar
neurological structures spontaneously encoding common features of human
experience—such as the cycles of the seasons, the infant’s extended
dependence on the mother, mating, and food procurement.
While this spontaneous generation of imagery and
adaptational strategies no doubt accounts for some of the thematic
parallels across cultures, the more specific and complex
the parallel images, the more likely that other influences are involved.
The finch’s response to a highly specific shape it has never
encountered, or the honeybee’s complex communication dance, clearly
invite explanations that presuppose an inherited rather than
spontaneously generated response set. For humans, the immense number of
variables that must be tracked in trying to settle the controversy
obscures the underlying processes, but people who have been observed in
clinical settings or while in nonordinary states of consciousness
provide a natural laboratory for further considering the question.
Parallel Symbolism found in
Psychotherapy and in Nonordinary States of Consciousness. Jung was
not the only psychiatrist of his era to speculate about inherited
imagery. Freud was also impressed by his observation that individuals in
therapy kept reproducing essentially similar themes. "How is it to be
explained," he wondered, "that the same phantasies are always formed
with the same content? I have an answer to this which I know will seem
to you very daring. I believe that these primal phantasies . . .
are a phylogenetic possession. In them the individual . . . stretches
out to the experiences of the ages" (Freud, 1924/1953, p. 380). Joseph
Campbell, who examined the hero’s journey in depth, also notes his
"amazement" upon reading of psychiatrist John Weir Perry’s (1976) work
with psychosis and discovering that sometimes "the imagery of
schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological hero
journey" (Campbell, 1972, p. 208) as Campbell had outlined it over two
decades earlier.
Contemporary consciousness research corroborates
these impressions. Consider, for instance, the following extraordinary
but carefully documented observations by Grof (1992) based on his
extensive clinical research using psychedelic substances and
breath-oriented psychotherapeutic techniques: |
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It has been remarkable to find that people
raised in one culture, or belonging to a particular race, are not
limited to the archetypes of that culture or race. In our research we
have seen, for example, that white, urban, middle class Americans can
have meaningful encounters while in non-ordinary states of
consciousness with such legendary heroes as the Polynesian Maui or
Shango, the Bantu god of sex and war. Over the years I have, on many
occasions, witnessed European and American women who became the Hindu
Goddess Kali, taking on the traditional facial expressions of that
figure, with the tongue stretched far out of their mouth, even though
they had no previous knowledge about that figure. Conversely, during
workshops in Japan and India, we witnessed several participants, born
and raised in those traditions, who had powerful identifications with
Christ. . . .
It is particularly interesting to note that in
many cases, where people had no previous knowledge of certain
mythological figures, they were not only able to experience
them accurately and with great detail but they were able to draw
pictures with details that perfectly matched ancient descriptions of
those figures. (p. 161)
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Repetitive symbols and themes have also been
identified in large-scale (Hall & Norby, 1972) as well as cross-cultural
(Griffith, Miyagi, & Tago, 1958) dream studies. Hall and Norby (1972),
for instance, in a content analysis of more than 50,000 dreams,
identified "typical dreams" that "express the shared concerns,
preoccupations, and interests of all dreamers. They may be said to
constitute the universal constants of the human psyche" (p. 35). Stevens
(1993) concludes from such findings that dreams are "the means by which
the entire behavioral repertoire of the species is integrated with the
recent experience of the individual, thus promoting its capacity to
survive the demands and exigencies of the following day" (p. 24). This
hypothesis, he notes, is in close accord with the "ethological view that
dreaming sleep is necessary for an animal to update its strategies for
survival by integrating the ethogram (the total behavior repertoire of
the species encoded in the brain) with the recent experience of the
individual" (p. 37).
Are the common images and themes found among
cultures widely separated by time and space, as well as in the fantasies
and dreams of individuals, precoded genetic proclivities? Evolutionary
psychologists believe that "content-specific information-processing
mechanisms," produced by natural selection, "generate some of the
particular content of human culture, including certain behaviors,
artifacts, and linguistically transmitted representations" (Tooby &
Cosmides, 1992, p. 24). However, the manner by which genes might govern
such content-specific symbolism is unmapped and unknown. According to
some biologists, in fact, attributing to genes the instinctive
cooperative behavior of honeybees, no less the parallel symbolism found
in human cultures, is still more a matter of faith than fact. Sheldrake
(1988), for instance, has argued that "the role of genes is inevitably
overrated, and properties are projected onto them that go far beyond
their known chemical roles" (p. 158).
The Hypothesis to Which the Six Anomalies Lead.
This line of reasoning suggests that genes are supplemented by other
mechanisms in organizing certain inherited psychological characteristics
and behavioral patterns. The debate distills down to the tension between
parsimony and reductionism. Parallel symbolism has been documented
across diverse psyches as well as unrelated societies. Some (e.g., Neher,
1996) believe that, to the extent that parallel symbolism is
conclusively documented, a parsimonious explanation for it will be found
in genetics. Others (e.g., Sheldrake, 1988) believe it is blatantly
reductionistic to suggest that DNA can actually encode the immense folio
of specific, complex mythological figures and motifs that spontaneously
appear in dreams, nonordinary states, and artistic and other cultural
expressions. Jung, who initially believed that archetypes are
genetically coded, later came to the conclusion that genes alone cannot
explain the range of parallel symbolism he had observed in his lifetime
(Jung, 1952/1968). But if not genetic coding, what mechanisms might
account for such parallels? A number of investigators have proposed a
"field of information" explanation for the archetype (Feinstein, in
press; Laszlo, 1995; Laughlin, 1996). Could informational
fields—repositories of images independent of the central nervous
system—influence an individual’s "spontaneously generated" thought and
behavior?
Several features are shared by reports of 1) human
activity influencing mechanical devices from a distance, 2) distant
effects of visualization, prayer, and meditation on consciousness,
healing, and even the activity of blood cells in test tubes, 3) the
extraordinary mental abilities of prodigies and savants, 4) systematic
investigations of telepathy, 5) similarities in myths and symbols across
cultures, and 6) the parallel symbolism observed in clinical situations
and in nonordinary states of consciousness: |
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evidence suggesting the existence of each of
these phenomena, while not always unequivocal, has been
accumulating;
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each seems to involve the procurement of
information in a manner whose mechanisms are difficult to explain in
terms of known physiological structures; and
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the effects observed are consistent with a
"field of information" hypothesis.
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SHELDRAKE’S MORPHIC FIELD HYPOTHESIS |
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Various field theories and related models have
intrigued modern consciousness researchers, from neuropsychologist Karl
Pribram’s (1971) holographic brain to nuclear physicist David Bohm’s
(1980) holographic universe. The one that seems formulated in a manner
that offers the greatest explanatory power relative to my own
observations about a structure/field complementarity in the personal
myth is Sheldrake’s (1981, 1988) controversial hypothesis of the "morphic
field." I will go to some length here to present a synopsis of his
theory.
Sheldrake, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry
from Cambridge and was a Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society
and a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard, believes that every natural
system—atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, societies, customs,
habits of mind—is associated with a field of information, a "morphic
field" that interacts with observable matter. Morphic fields organize
the structure of natural systems as well as their patterns of activity.
Sheldrake (1988) believes that morphic fields "are physically real, in
the sense that gravitational, electro-magnetic, and quantum matter
fields are physically real" (pp. 107 - 108). His formulations have
earned his work both favorable comparisons with Darwin and the
suggestion in an editorial of the prominent journal Nature that
by being so facile in presenting such a misleading theory, this may be
"a book for burning" (Editorial, 1981, p. 245).
For Sheldrake, every living system, every unit of
the physical world—from the molecule to the mind—has its own unique
field, an inherent vibration that holds information about the system’s
potential form and behavior, analogous to genetic information. Such
fields store and transmit information from one generation to the next.
Each field attracts the system with which it is associated toward
its mature form, and it arouses behavior in that system. The morphic
field of the tadpole encodes the physical form and instinctive behavior
of the mature frog. Sheldrake argues that it is the field, as
well as the gene, that stores at least some of the information
for the complex patterns that comprise a system’s form.
The concept of the "morphogenetic field" (from the
Latin morphe, "form," and genesis, "coming into being")
was introduced into biology in the early 1920s to describe the notion
that the form of a living organism is organized by a field
(Weiss, 1939). While everyone agrees that the chicken emerges from the
egg, some biologists speculated that its larger organization into the
form of a mature chicken could not be explained by genetic coding alone,
and they proposed that the egg carries a form-generating field.
The hypothesis that "morphogenetic fields" provide form as organisms
come into being seemed necessary in the 1920s as a supplement to genetic
programming. It was not understood how the genetic material in
the acorn stores all the information required to transform itself into
the towering form of an oak, no less how the genetic material in a
honeybee encodes the instinctive behavior and social organization that
result in the intricate complexity of its hive. Despite tremendous
advances in our understanding of DNA, amino acids, peptides, and
proteins, Sheldrake argues, these basic questions of genetics remain
unanswered.
Experimental evidence does, in fact, suggest that
genes do not completely account for the development of an organism into
maturity. For instance, by severing in half the egg of a sea urchin,
"the egg regenerated and produced not two pathological or partial sea
urchins, as one might expect, but two full-grown animals that differed
from a normal sea urchin only in that they were somewhat smaller.
Conversely, when two young embryos were fused together they produced not
a double sea urchin but a normal single one" (Whitmont, 1994, p. 11).
While genes have been shown to code such information as the sequence of
the chemical building blocks in RNA and protein molecules, Sheldrake
(1988) notes that there is no known mechanism giving genes the ability
"to organize the whole organism" (p. 90). If genes hold all the
information for transforming the acorn into an oak, the feat is
accomplished through agents yet undiscovered.
Sheldrake (1988) uses the term morphic
field to distinguish the earlier conception of the morphogenetic field
from his broader usage, where in addition to governing the form of
living systems, morphic fields, with their inherent memory, are also
"the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and
cultural systems, and of mental activity" (p. 113). He explains that "morphic
resonance takes place on the basis of similarity (p. 108) . . . the most
specific morphic resonance acting on a given organism will be that from
its own past states, because it is more similar to itself in the
past, especially in the immediate past, than to any other organism" (p.
132). Information, however, is exchanged not only between a system and
its field. Similar fields, by resonance, also influence similar systems.
Thus, according to the morphic field hypothesis, living organisms
"inherit not only genes but also habits of development from past members
of their own species" (p. 71).
Sheldrake describes morphic fields as purposive,
goal-directed "attractors" (his use of the term is akin to its use in
dynamic systems theory) that guide "the systems under their influence
toward characteristic patterns of organization" (p. 101). Sheldrake’s
hypothesis is also consistent with the view emerging from modern physics
(Sheldrake & Bohm, 1982). In quantum theory, every subatomic particle
has its own field, and Sheldrake (1988) believes that "morphic fields
may indeed be comparable in status to quantum matter fields" (p. 119),
while postulating that morphic fields also influence larger systems than
the microsystems governed by quantum fields. Sheldrake’s notion of a
parallel between morphic fields and quantum fields—which is consistent
with Hameroff’s (1994), Laszlo’s (1995), and Tiller’s (1993) hypotheses
that nature’s "fifth field" emerges from the quantum vacuum—could
account for several properties that Sheldrake attributes to the morphic
field. For instance, morphic fields appear to be "non-local," the
quantum property where an effect is instantaneous and
unaffected by distance. Morphic fields, like quantum fields, also
act as "probability structures": of the many possible forms that could
occur in the system the morphic field affects, some become more probable
because of the order imposed by the field. The morphic field
influences but does not determine the path that will be
taken. No two clover plants, even if they share twinned genes, are
exactly the same, "nor indeed are any two leaves on the same clover
plant" (Sheldrake, 1988, p. 120).
Preliminary attempts to empirically verify the
existence of morphic fields have been reported by investigators in
different parts of the world (Ertel, 1994; Stokes, 1995). For instance,
crossword and hidden figure puzzles have been shown to be more easily
solved by experimental subjects after the puzzle has been printed and
many people have worked it. The hypothesis in these experiments is that
the subjects are tuning into an information field that has been
strengthened as more people solved the puzzles. Some attempts to
experimentally confirm the morphic field hypothesis have yielded
statistically significant results, others have not. The statistically
significant findings have been criticized for flaws in experimental
design, and the empirical evidence is still inconclusive. Some advocates
of the morphic field hypothesis maintain that using available research
strategies is tantamount to squeezing morphic fields into a Procrustean
bed, force-fitting them into limiting, preconceived concepts. When
morphic fields operate in nature, they are believed to serve a purpose
associated with the survival or enhancement of a species, a critical
feature that is not easily built into laboratory, crossword puzzle, or
other contrived experiments.
Recognizing this dilemma, Sheldrake (1994) has
identified naturally occurring phenomena that lend themselves to "field
ofinformation" explanations. He has suggested, for instance, that the
answer to mysteries such as phantom limb pain, pets who roam hundreds of
miles to find an owner who has moved, and the ability of a termite
colony to build a 30 foot nest may be found in imperceptible fields that
carry information and habits.
Morphic fields purportedly provide information
that is transmitted through resonance, through attunement rather than an
exchange of energy where one entity gains what the other expends. Not
only does Sheldrake (1988) believe that morphic fields guide the
development of a member of a species toward its mature form, he suggests
that morphic fields themselves evolve in the process. Since the
"laws of nature" operate independently from what they govern, Sheldrake
challenges the Platonic notion that nature’s laws are fixed and eternal,
pointing out that this assumption presumes that the laws governing the
formation of sugar crystals, for instance, existed before "the first
sugar molecules arose anywhere in the universe. Indeed they existed
before there was a universe at all" (p. 11). Sheldrake asserts, instead,
that the morphic fields which hold the organizing principles of the
physical universe themselves evolve: "Not only does the world
evolve in space and time, but these immanent organizing principles
themselves evolve (p. 313) . . . . We find ourselves in an evolving
universe whose organizing principles are evolving with it" (p. 316). If,
for instance, a species is "prevented from following the usual, habitual
path, it may find a more or less novel means of reaching the same goal"
(Sheldrake, 1988, p. 319), as when changes in an environmental resource
lead to new adaptational strategies.
In the 1930s and 1940s, several bird species, for
example, learned to open milk bottles delivered to homes throughout the
British Isles, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland (Hinde & Fisher, 1951).
Because this behavior constituted a nuisance, the patterns by which it
spread were carefully mapped over an 18-year period. Once the behavior
occurred in a given location, it spread locally, presumably through
imitation. However, because some of these species rarely travel more
than a few miles from their place of breeding, the transmission of the
behavior to more distant sites, as revealed by the records, simply
cannot be explained in terms of established mechanisms of learning,
imitation, or communication. While an obvious explanation is that many
birds independently discovered how to open the bottles in the various
locales, the records show that the spread of the habit accelerated
over time, suggesting a transmission of learning through mechanisms
yet unknown. Again, the morphic field hypothesis offers a plausible
explanation. Since the members of a species and the species’ morphic
field are in resonance with one another, if an adaptation occurs often
enough, it will become embedded in the species’ field. This process may
be the undiscovered mechanism governing a range of anomalies, from
complex "instinctive" behaviors in animals to "phylogenetic memories" in
humans. |
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MYTHIC FIELDS |
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Adults in nonordinary states of consciousness
(induced, for instance, by abreaction, hypnosis, or psychedelics)
sometimes have the sense of reliving their own birth, or even prenatal
events, including details about which they had never been informed (such
as an attempted abortion). In some instances, idiosyncratic details have
subsequently been verified with a parent or by other means, suggesting
that the memories were accurate (Chamberlain, 1986; 1990; Cheek, 1980).
When such experiences occur in clinical settings, striking parallels
have on occasion been observed between the circumstances of the birth
and patterns in the person’s life (Grof, 1985). The cerebral cortex of
the newborn, however, lacking the needed myelin sheaths on its neurons,
is not well enough developed to code such experiences (Grof, 1985).
Thus, memories of one’s birth or of prenatal events—if their accuracy is
confirmed in cases where the details recalled had not previously been
available to the person—would be another anomaly that could be explained
by the existence of information fields that code experience.
I am suggesting that mythic fields, which are a
subset of Sheldrake’s morphic fields," become established when new
patterns of understanding and motivation are initiated and repeated.
Once established, they tend to maintain the psychological habits that
typify the individual—the person’s characteristic forms of
emotion, thought, and behavior. The influence is bi-directional: field
follows form and form follows field. Psychophysiological forms
and mythic fields are linked by resonance. Sheldrake (1988) explains
that "characteristic rhythmic patterns of activity within the nervous
system" (p. 151) may enter into resonance with a morphic field.
Interestingly, when a group of neurons becomes linked through mental
activity, the neurons themselves behave like a "field" (Pearce, 1992, p.
16), with all the cells vibrating as a single frequency or
"phase-coherent oscillation" (Edelman, 1992, p. 95). The individual’s
mythic field presumably resonates with these neurons in a process of
mutual influence.
In my own formulation, I first conceived of the
mythic field as a subtle form of energy that exists within the
dimensions of Newtonian space-time. More recently, in trying to account
for the anomalies described earlier, I have come to believe that mythic
fields must sometimes embody properties that are associated with quantum
fields, such as nonlocality.
A "Sensitive’s" View of the Mythic Field.
Even without visual or auditory cues, a sensitive individual can often
detect changes in another person’s mythic field, experienced as an
altered "energy" or "vibration" ("before I even pulled into the
driveway, I could feel that he was angry"). People who work in the "new"
discipline of energy medicine are particularly attuned to this realm.
The following is excerpted from an interview I conducted with my
partner, Donna Eden, a mind-body healer known for her ability to see and
feel the body’s energies and, based upon what she sees and feels, to
identify physical problems in a manner that reliably corresponds with
medical diagnoses. She described the way she experiences what I refer to
as personal myths and personal fields of information: |
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In shifting from one myth into another, the
vibration of the person’s field changes and the field’s colors change.
When a person is under emotional stress, the energy tends to take on
the stamp of an old myth that is oriented toward emotional or physical
survival, usually some version of fight or flight. When one of these
survival-oriented myths is activated, I see its energy originating in
the root chakra. The old myth sits like a fountain in the root chakra,
with the field that comes out from this fountain surrounding the
person’s body.
At other times the old myth quiets down. While I
can still see its energy, I can also see the energy of other myths
come in. When a new myth has become more than an idea and has begun to
take a stable physical form, it begins to infiltrate the auric bands,
changing some of their colors. Its energy will be less dense and move
more quickly than the energy of the old myth. As a new myth begins to
take hold, at first it looks faint to me, but with time it becomes
more distinct.
What you call the conflict between an old myth
and an emerging myth often isn’t so much that the two fight one
another but that the old myth is simply fighting for its survival.
When a myth doesn’t work anymore, a point is reached where its energy
gets very murky. I can see the energy of an old myth doing all it can
to hold on, like hot tar. If it gets stuck that way for a long period,
physical illness often follows. (personal communication, February 28,
1995)
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A small body of evidence suggesting a relationship
between subtle vibrational patterns in the body and disease states is,
in fact, accumulating (e.g., Hunt, 1995), and the worldview underlying
"energy medicine" (Eden, in press; Gerber, 1996) complements the line of
reasoning presented here.
The Units of a Mythic Field. In the
sense that a personality is comprised of a set of interdependent
subpersonalities (Assagioli, 1985), a personal mythology
contains numerous complementary as well as contradictory personal
myths. A subpersonality may, in fact, be defined as an ego state
that is governed by a specific personal myth. A competent and powerful
woman, for instance, might suddenly become insecure and accommodating
whenever her amiable husband walks into the room. The personal myth
governing a subpersonality that is strong and independent—she might call
it her "woman who runs with wolves" self—is displaced by a personal myth
that evokes a "1950’s housewife" subpersonality. Each subpersonality is
characterized by a distinct set of neural pathways, and each
subpersonality carries its own mythic field. People who are attuned to
their internal states may acutely experience shifts in the field that is
dominant at a given moment of time.
Sheldrake (1988) explains that a morphic field
"brings about material effects while the system is tuned in to it. But
if the tuning is changed, then other fields come into play: the original
field ‘disappears.’ It appears again when the body in relation to its
environment re-enters a state similar to that in which the field was
expressed before; the field once again becomes present by resonance" (p.
199). The woman’s "1950s housewife" mythic field and her "woman who runs
with wolves" mythic field may each be evoked in specific contexts, and
she may learn to recognize which field is operating at a given moment,
how to evoke the other field, and she may also initiate a process of
integrating into a single field the more desirable qualities of these
seemingly incompatible fields.
While relatively stable, personal myths evolve
over time, influenced by interactions with the environment and
presumably also with fields of information that exist in the
environment, such as those Sheldrake (1988) refers to as family, group,
and cultural morphic fields. If a mythic field influences neurological,
psychological, and behavioral processes and evolves as the person
matures, its operation would be of substantial clinical relevance.
Attempting to directly catalyze desirable shifts in a mythic field that
maintains dysfunctional patterns of thought or behavior could reveal new
avenues for facilitating psychological development.
Sheldrake uses Koestler’s (1967) concept of the
holon in describing the "units" of a morphic field (Sheldrake,
1988, p. 96). A holon is a unit that is complete within itself while
simultaneously being a part of larger wholes. Competing personal myths
(e.g., "1950s housewife" vs. "woman who runs with wolves"), each with
its own integrity and, from the perspective of its own level of
organization, irreconcilable with the other, are also part of the
person’s larger mythology. Just as the individual’s mythology is a holon
within the larger holon of the culture’s mythology, a given personal
myth is a holon within the person’s larger mythology.
The Birth of a New Field. A new holon
may be formed by differentiating itself out of a more complex holon or
through the integration of two less complex holons. A new personal myth
may be formed by differentiating itself out of a more complex personal
myth or through the integration of two less comprehensive guiding myths.
The complementary tides of differentiation
and integration are, in fact, recognized as primary mechanisms in
diverse models of psychological development (e.g., Epstein, 1994; Kegan,
1982; McAdams, 1993; Wilber, 1995). As the woman is able to recognize
and appreciate how each guiding myth operates within her, one pushing
for personal autonomy and the other toward relatedness at all costs,
each becomes better differentiated, and the possibility opens of
integrating the most functional qualities of each within a larger
mythology that transcends their limitations. Our approach with an
individual’s guiding mythology (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997) involves
establishing a dialectic between apparently irreconcilable guiding myths
that is based on this "evolutionary motion"(Kegan, 1982, p. 39) of
differentiation and reintegration.
Sheldrake (1988) describes this evolutionary
motion as involving an "ascending process" (a new field based on the
integration of existing fields into a higher level of
organization) and a "descending process" (a new field differentiating
from a higher-level field). Reflecting on how new fields promote the
transmission of learning within a species, Sheldrake refers to the
records, discussed earlier, that tracked the unexplained patterns by
which milk-bottle opening behavior spread within several species of
birds. He proposes that the transmission of the behavior involved the
appearance of a new morphic field. Discussing the ascending and
descending processes in the establishment of this morphic field, he
notes:
From the "bottom up" point of view, this must have
emerged by the synthesis of pre-existing behavioural patterns, such as
the tearing of strips of bark from twigs, in a new, higher-level whole
[integration]. From the "top down" point of view, this new field arose
in the higher-level, more inclusive morphic field that organizes the
search for food and all activities involved in feeding. This
higher-level field may somehow have formed within itself a new
lower-level field, that of milk-bottle opening [differentiation]. (p.
322)
At the level of the individual’s construction of
reality—myth-making—both the integration of existing myths into a
higher-order guiding myth and the differentiation of specific guiding
myths from a more general, higher-order myth occur. The woman may
learn to integrate her dependency needs and her desire for
autonomy into a mythology that supports a robust interdependence, and
she may learn ways of differentiating this hard-earned new
mythology into a guiding myth that is more appropriate in her work
setting and another that is more appropriate for her personal
relationships. |
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CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: SHIFT THE FIELD, CHANGE THE MYTH |
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More than half a century ago, May (1939/1989)
observed that "both the counselor and the counselee are taken out of
themselves and become merged in a common psychic entity. The emotions
and will of each become part of this new psychic entity" (p. 67). One of
May’s students, Larson (1987), a psychologist who has studied this "new
psychic entity," describes a striking incident from her own clinical
work: |
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A new client entered my office for the first
appointment. I spontaneously began experiencing very subtle, unusual
sensations in my own lower torso. Prior to this appointment I had
completed a deep relaxation exercise, so I was quite aware when the
subtle, tingly sensations began. I first reflected inwardly trying to
discover the source of the mysterious sensations. I asked myself if
the new client reminded me of someone I had previously known. I
searched myself to ascertain if my own personal memories were related
to the tingly sensations. Then I bracketed the experience noting it,
watching it, and reflecting further upon it. Finally, my curiosity was
overpowering. At a seemingly appropriate point, I described my
experience to the young woman client, and asked if my experience had
some meaning for her. The young woman immediately replied, "Oh yes, I
have cancer of the cervix, and I’ve been having chemotherapy there."
(p. 323).
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Investigating this phenomenon, which she terms
"psychotherapeutic resonance," Larson found that many therapists report
a momentary merging of the boundary between themselves and a client that
in its intensity exceeds empathy and rapport (see also Sterling &
Bugental, 1993, on the "meld" experience of therapist with client). In
psychotherapeutic resonance, the therapist evidences immediate
non-verbal understanding of feelings the client has not acknowledged,
may directly experience physical sensations the client is experiencing,
and the therapist and client become synchronized in even tiny movement
patterns. Is the therapist unconsciously tuning into a subtle field of
information carried by the client?
Early in my career, I had the good fortune of
observing first hand the therapeutic mastery of Milton Erickson,
Alexander Lowen, Peg Mayo, Carl Rogers, and Virginia Satir. I was many
times present when one of these gifted clinicians would provide a
demonstration for trainees. Their skills sometimes seemed uncanny. How
did they know what this person needed? I would study
transcriptions of their clinical work, hoping to discern their secrets.
The most interesting pattern I could detect was their ability to offer a
creative and unexpected intervention at the moment of therapeutic
opportunity, impossible to acquire by studying transcripts, and often
quite different from their trademark techniques, yet strikingly attuned,
plausibly through resonance, to the client’s unique needs. I have
witnessed Carl Rogers being decidedly directive ("Steven, I don’t think
you should marry her"); Virginia Satir cut to the core of a
psychodynamic conflict with no reference to the person’s family or
family of origin; and Alexander Lowen get to the heart of a problem with
no mention of the person’s posture or bodily tensions. If their
interventions were not based on their established clinical approach, to
what, I wondered, were they attuning themselves? I have come to think of
this elusive "what" as the client’s mythic field. I believe, in fact,
that many effective therapists are high in "psychotherapeutic
resonance," able to spontaneously attune themselves to the client’s
"field," accurately obtaining information that is not transmitted
through even the most subtle sensory cues.
Many phenomena that are difficult to account for
in psychotherapy, such as the enormous power of projective
identification (e.g., a seasoned child psychiatrist observed that she
knows she is dealing with a victim of child abuse when she experiences
an irrational "impulse to abuse the child"—cited in Gabbard, 1994, p.
71), have been attributed to "subtle sensory cues." I would reverse the
argument—wherever subliminal sensory cues are the explanation of last
resort, consider the possibility that a field of information is also
involved. I myself have learned, when in a clinical situation and unsure
about what I should do next, to quiet my inner chatter, shift my
attention to the "field" the client brings into the room, and allow it
to inform my responses. This often results in the subjective experience
that I am tuning into a normally imperceptible atmosphere carried by the
client. After consciously shifting my attention to the client’s
hypothetical "field," new understanding and interventions may come in a
flash. Such moments of insight sometimes seem to tap into information
about the client to which I do not have any apparent access but that is
subsequently confirmed. Whether shifting my attention to the client’s
"field" is a way of actually attuning myself to a dimension of the
clinical situation that transcends sensory cues or is just a helpful bit
of self-deception, I believe the maneuver makes me a better therapist.
By thinking of a personal myth as involving a
field, the field can be treated as a focal point for changing the myth.
The woman discussed earlier can be shown how to visualize and sense the
intrusive field, say, of the "1950s housewife." I might ask: "Where does
the field impact your body the most strongly? Does it have a color? A
temperature? A rate of vibration? What is its texture?" She can learn to
recognize that sometimes this field is active, that at other times it is
not. "How old do you feel when this field is engaged?" She can learn to
attune her awareness, and in the process, her nervous system, to
influence whether or not the field is active. She can also envision a
new field, perhaps one that integrates relatedness and autonomy,
"housewife" and "woman who runs." The same questions apply: "Where does
this new field impact your body the most strongly? Does it have a color?
A temperature? A rate of vibration? What is its texture? Allow the color
and temperature and vibration and texture to flow into an image that
symbolizes this new myth." Because repetition, according to Sheldrake
(1988), increases the strength of a field, by frequently evoking in her
imagination the sensations and images associated with her new myth, the
woman can presumably increase the habit strength of this fledgling myth
until it becomes readily accessible.
Focused imagery that brings a person into the past
to rework early emotional distress and trauma can be designed to mimic
some of the healing functions of dreams and to help transform the
psychodynamic bedrock of a dysfunctional myth. A man was able to trace
his abusive impulses toward his son back to his own experiences of
abuse. He was guided to visualize himself as a child in his primal drama
with his own father. In this rendition, however, his adult self was also
there. The adult self persuaded the father to shower his son with the
love and emotional support that the father at some level—buried beneath
his own conflicts—held but did not express (in extreme cases, the
person’s fantasy may have to eliminate the parent altogether and have
the adult self provide the parenting directly; in any case, coming to a
productive scenario is a significant piece of the therapeutic work). In
the presence of that imagined emotional support, he could sense a shift,
the genesis of the field that might have existed had he actually
received the love being fantasized. This is a procedure for deep
transformation that I call "Rewriting History through the Emotionally
Corrective Daydream." A daily ritual to strengthen his new personal
myth, and the field associated with it, might project him into an
imagined future where he is living from a guiding myth that supports
constructive responses to his son at the moments of greatest stress.
Based on preliminary clinical observations,
therapeutic rituals for directly embedding a new mythology can be
designed around the presumed influence on the mythic field of: |
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setting an intention
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imagery journeys to the past that
psychodynamically rework dysfunctional myths
-
imagery journeys that seed the future with a
more constructive guiding mythology
-
visualizing the qualities of this new myth
-
shifting internal speech to support the new
myth
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behavioral rehearsal to anchor the new myth
|
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RITUALS THAT SHIFT THE FIELD |
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Ritual and myth have always gone hand in hand.
Myth is carried by ritual; ritual is shaped by myth. At the microscopic
level, rituals leave an imprint on the human nervous system; in their
most expansive sense, rituals open a conduit between personal awareness
and the larger energies that effect human destiny. Rituals are capable
of both transforming the personal mythic fields that shape our future
and of attuning us to the external fields that surround us—vibrations of
nature, echoes of our ancestors, realms of the gods.
Thinking of mythic fields as targets for
psychological change, while at the same time being conversant with
therapeutic ritual (Achterberg, Dossey, & Kolkmeier, 1994; Imber-Black,
Roberts, & Whiting, 1988; van der Hart, 1983), can result in some
interesting clinical innovations. Bob was in his mid-forties when he was
diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral scleosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s
disease). He was two years into the illness when he was referred to me
by his physical therapist. The deterioration of his muscles was
accelerating, and the adjustments being required of him were immense.
I was struck that Bob had been at the height of
success when he received his diagnosis. An attorney who was bitter about
his profession, he had been appointed as magistrate in a juvenile court
and felt for the first time that his work was having a significant
positive impact. He had suffered through two difficult marriages and,
about a year before his diagnosis, had married a third time. He found
himself entering new dimensions of love, and he was enjoying a
relationship that exceeded his hopes. Where Bob had been highly driven
and overly serious, he had begun to study with a Tibetan master, was
meditating regularly, and finding much greater peace and joy in his
life. Just prior to his diagnosis, he had purchased a sailboat, arranged
a year-long sabbatical, and planned to fulfill a lifelong dream by
sailing with his wife around the world.
In ALS, the muscles deteriorate over a period of
years until the physical structure can no longer support life. All the
while, the mind is crystal clear, witnessing the body’s slow demise. Bob
was a wonderful client with a terrible disease. He was extremely bright,
curious, creative, motivated, was asking large questions, and, confined
by his illness, he had a great deal of time to think about the
challenges facing him. He often brought fascinating questions and inner
adventures into the sessions. I’ll relate one example. He lived in
Oregon in a home that overlooked a wooded area. Towards the end of his
life, he had very little control of his muscles. He would sit in his
chair, just staring into the woods. He couldn’t scratch himself if he
itched. He’d just stare. He could still talk, though his speech was
labored. One day he said to me, "You know, the strangest thing happened.
I was looking at the trees, and all of a sudden I was out there, flying
through the trees, like Superman or Peter Pan. I could will myself
upward and get the panorama, or come close to the ground and examine any
detail that caught my attention. Then, as soon as I would get a little
scared or a little self-conscious, I’d be right back in my body." He
didn’t make a particularly big deal out of these curious experiences; he
was just puzzled. The out-of-body journeys happened every few days for
about six weeks. Then one day he said to me, "You know, I think I know
why I am leaving my body to go out into the trees. It’s like I am being
shown that it is okay to die, that it is safe to leave my body." After
he came to this recognition, his spontaneous "visits" into the trees
ceased.
Several months prior to his forest visitations,
Bob had developed and—with the aid of a ritual was able to work
through—a bonafide neurotic, irrational, self-destructive symptom. He
started to hate his wife, who was doing everything for him. This hatred
appeared abruptly, at about the time she quit her job so they wouldn’t
have to bring in outside help to care for him. Suddenly, she could do no
right. If she would go to the bank, she had abandoned him. If she stayed
home all the time, she was suffocating him. He became vehement in his
animosity. It was not mere anger or resentment, it was a fierce,
unreasonable hatred toward her and everything about her.
I recommended a couples session. I used a standard
conflict resolution model in which he stated his grievances to her and
she paraphrased them back, until he was satisfied that he had been
understood. Then she would respond to a grievance and he would
paraphrase her statements until she felt understood. At some point,
fairly early in this process, it seemed that Bob came to a recognition
of the irrationality and malevolence in his treatment toward her. He
shifted his demeanor, looked at her intensely, with his eyes tearing,
and said, "I love you!" It was particularly poignant because his speech
was already quite impaired by then, and each word required considerable
effort. She sat there looking at him, not knowing whether to believe the
data of the past five minutes or the data of the past five weeks. He
became poetic, expressing his sorrow, his appreciation, his love. She
eventually softened. By the end of the session, she was passionately
hugging his receptive body, and the session appeared to have been
successful beyond my most optimistic expectations. Two days later,
however, it was as if the session had never occurred. Bob was again
scornful and vindictive. A second couples session was nearly a duplicate
of the first, and its impact dissolved just as quickly. The three of us
repeated some version of this scenario six times over six weeks—the
routine was rapidly losing its charm. In the sessions, Bob was able to
open in deep appreciation to the ways his wife was loving him, and he
would recognize that her treatment of him was irreproachable. But, he
couldn’t hold this awareness outside the sessions.
The psychodynamics seemed fairly straightforward
to me. Bob had experienced his mother as not only withholding affection,
but as being badly out of tune with his needs. He one-upped her by
becoming invulnerable and spiteful toward her. Now that his wife was
increasingly having to fulfill maternal duties for him, he was
projecting onto her his unresolved feelings toward his mother. While I
understand that many therapists consider projecting unresolved parental
feelings onto one’s spouse to be a fair definition of marriage, this was
excessive. And nothing I did in our sessions to urge him to meet this
hatred with greater awareness—from cognitive and behavioral to
experiential approaches—seemed to have any staying power. I was stumped.
I consulted a colleague, Tiziana De Rovere, a
psychodynamically-oriented therapist who also has strong psychic
abilities. This gives her an interesting vantage point in a counseling
setting. She can often see levels of an issue that are not apparent to
me. I asked her if she would tune into my confusion about this case. She
said: |
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You are right that part of the difficulty is
that as his wife is having to take on more and more mothering roles,
Bob is projecting his unresolved feelings for his mother onto her. But
what is feeding the fire, and keeping Bob so impervious to all your
interventions, is that as he gets closer to dying, his body is
returning to Mother Earth. So the Great Mother archetype is invoked
here in a large way, and Bob, at a basic level, rejected everything
about the Great Mother archetype. While dying is in the rhythm of
nature and of the Great Mother, he is experiencing his dying as a
final betrayal. Rather than to allow the Great Mother to support him
as his life is coming into its cycle of closure, he is fighting it
with all he’s got. The closer he is coming to being pulled back into
the Great Mother, the more intense his panic, and the more vehemently
he projects his antipathy toward the Great Mother onto his wife.
(personal communication, April 7, 1996)
|
The problem, she felt, was more fundamental than I
had recognized, and focusing only on Bob’s relationship with his
biological mother was not likely to resolve it. This explanation felt
plausible to me, but I didn’t know how to use it for therapeutic gain.
It was as if, in the presence of his wife, Bob’s mythic field vibrated
with hate, and this hatred was overwhelming and beyond his control. It
conceivably tied into his having as a boy rejected so fiercely the set
of qualities De Rovere was referring to as the Great Mother archetype.
Now that he was being forcefully pulled back to the earth, forced to
surrender to mother nature, he was fighting furiously, and he
unconsciously made his marriage the outward metaphor of his inner
struggle.
As we talked about a next step, De Rovere
conceived a ritual that was to apparently shift the configuration of
Bob’s mythic field potently and permanently. Since his field seemed to
have a magnetic repulsion to the qualities of the Great Mother
archetype, particularly those embodied by his wife’s attending to his
every physical need, De Rovere designed the ritual to realign his field
so it would be able to embrace the qualities from which he was
estranged. When the ritual was carried out two weeks later, after
preparation on my part with both Bob and his wife, De Rovere brought
five plants from the land on which she lived. To each plant, she
assigned a quality she associated with the Great Mother archetype. A
pink rose symbolized the tender love of the Great Mother archetype; blue
forget-me-nots, like the blue sky, symbolized the tranquility and
serenity of the Great Mother; violet pansies represented forgiveness
toward others, as well as in relation to his own self-blame; a red rose
symbolized the passion of the Great Mother archetype; and green moss a
safety and surrender into the Great Mother.
One plant at a time, De Rovere visualized the
vibrational link between the plant and the quality, and then she moved
the plant over her skin, "impregnating" it with the quality it was to
symbolize. She took the pink rose, for instance, put it against her own
skin, and mindfully infused it with the tender compassion of the Mother.
Then she took its petals and moved them all over Bob’s body, talking to
him about the tender compassion of the Great Mother: "Feel the softness
on your body. It represents the soft love of the compassionate Mother."
She encouraged him to breathe slowly, deeply accepting this quality.
Then, using her psychic abilities, she could see where he was having
difficulty embracing the quality—that is, where the energy of his mythic
field was opposing the energy of the quality embodied by the plant—and
she would talk him through his resistance to the quality until she could
see in his field that he had accepted it. At that point, she moved on to
the next quality, until Bob had, to her satisfaction, accepted and
embraced all five qualities. Then she asked if she could hold him, not
as Tiziana De Rovere, but as an embodiment of the Great Mother
archetype. He showed his willingness with his eyes. In this embrace, he
began to sob and shake, melting into her, experiencing in his body the
tender love of the Great Mother, as De Rovere spoke to him of
surrendering into this love, tranquility, forgiveness, passion, and
safety. Never again did Bob treat his wife unkindly. And, as nearly as I
can judge, he died a good death.
The ritual certainly seemed to change Bob’s
personal mythology in relation to the Great Mother archetype, at least
as measured by his ability to accept the enormous amount of physical and
emotional care his wife was providing. Is it also necessary to think in
terms of a mythic field that was maintaining his dysfunctional
behavior? There is no question that Bob’s distortions about his wife
could be described in the language of established psychodynamic
processes. I had to notice, however, that this framework did not seem to
be helping to solve the problem, while someone whose framework was
attuned to Bob’s mythic field was able to pull off a one-session "cure." |
|
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CONCLUSION |
|
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The evidence for telepathy, the distant effects of
visualization, and the other "anomalies" summarized in this paper
suggests that consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon emerging from
biochemical events any more than the evening news originates only in the
radio set. The news is produced by both the radio (a "bottom-up"
influence) and the radio signal (a "top-down" influence). Personal myths
are also produced by "bottom-up" and "top-down" influences. Neurons,
like the components of a radio, exert a bottom-up influence, from the
brain up to the developing story. Fields of information, like the
radio signals, exert their influence from the top, down to the
developing story. Neurons and fields seem to operate in tandem, like the
radio tuner and the signal. Personal myths reflect both the brain and
the field, just like the radio program is a reflection of both the radio
and the signal. Personal myths, as biochemically coded organizing
models, exert a "bottom up" influence on consciousness and behavior;
personal myths, as fields of information, exert a "top down"
influence.
The hypothesis that mythic fields influence
feelings, thoughts, and behavior, if supported, would hold far-reaching
implications. An understanding of the way mythic fields act upon the
psyche would make it possible to more proficiently tailor, for desired
change, techniques that utilize ritual, visualization, focused
intention, and behavioral enactments. More dramatically, the idea that
fields of information affect consciousness would augment our
understanding of collective myth-making, suggesting in fact a physical
infrastructure for the fashionable idea that a "global brain" (Russell,
1995) is now emerging.
Since experimental evidence has linked mental
activity with "non-local" fields of information, it is not a huge leap
to postulate that—just as two aligned magnets form a shared field—an
idea that is held by many people would exist in concert with a
collective field of information. Such a collective field would
presumably intensify if the numbers holding the idea increased, as when
an image is multiplied via satellite (Feinstein, Mortifee, & Krippner,
in press). With electronic communications media, we are, in fact, able
to interact more consciously than ever before with the fields that
underlie our collective thoughts, to recognize them as tangible if
subtle entities, and to open novel approaches for participating in their
evolution. |
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NOTES |
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Comments by Stanley Krippner, Donna Eden, and Richard
Alexander on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.
David Feinstein, Ph.D., co-author of Personal
Mythology, The Mythic Path, and Rituals for Living and Dying,
is a clinical/community psychologist who brings a mythological
perspective to personal, organizational, and community change. He has
served on the faculties of The Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine and Antioch College.
A revised version of this article appears as a
chapter in The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology (Edited by Kirk
Schneider, James F.T. Bugental, and Fraser Pierson, Sage Publications,
2001) |
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