LIVING WITH LIFE I AN STRATHCARRON pptx

LIVING WITH LIFE
IAN STRATHCARRON
www.ianstrathcarron.com
UNICORN PRESS LTD.
66, Charlotte Street, London, W1T 4QE
ISBN 978 -1-906509-20-0
A multimedia version of this e-book is available at the iBookstore
Living with Life
Copyright 2012 F&J Productions
Smashwords Edition
© F&J Productions Ltd, POB 108, Tortola, BVI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. WHY WE ARE THE WAY WE ARE
2. AND WHY WE’RE JUST FINE, JUST AS WE ARE
3. AND WHY THAT'S ALL WE NEED TO KNOW
4. HANDHELD AWARENESS
WHY WE ARE THE WAY WE ARE
The miracle that is your experience of consciousness starts with the miracle that is
your life. If your parents were at least biologically typical, your mother would have
been born with well over a million eggs in her ovaries and would have released
about four hundred of them during her fertile years. Once a month, as the moon
above waxes and wanes, down below her hormones would have combined to release
a particularly ripe one of these eggs. This leisurely egg, minuscule beyond belief yet
boasting twenty three of her chromosomes, had a life expectancy of a day during
which time it needed to be fertilised if it was to fulfil its ultimate aim, the
reproduction of her genes.
Your father on the other hand would have approached the opportunity that became
you from an entirely different perspective. Born without the male counterpart to
the female egg, sperm, he would have spent – and may well still be spending – his
longer fertile years constantly producing them by the billion. The moment you were
conceived forty million of them – each one in itself a miracle of ingenuity and

perseverance, carrying his twenty three chromosomes with admirable single-
mindedness - would have rushed headlong towards that one waiting egg, an
incredible journey – a biological steeplechase - of 18 cm that the fittest reached in
under an hour. In scenes resembling a queue at an Italian ski lift the strongest sperm
pushed its way to the front and burrowed into the egg, its few remaining rivals vying
for position close behind. The perseverance was worthwhile; with the fittest sperm
cell inside it, the egg closed its doors and devoted all its attention to nurturing the
winner, egg and sperm by now a combined set of forty six chromosomes…in short
time about to begin to resemble what one day will become your good self.
For the next nine months the miracle continued and through a process that need not
detain us here, one fine day out you pop. Those forty six chromosomes have
determined your sex, your features, your shape and size, your bodily destiny, your
intelligence, your intuition, your characteristics and later your ability to access two
features new to you, personal and universal consciousness. Even more remarkable is
that not only will you able to access this consciousness but you will be able do so
knowingly – and in doing so knowingly, will realise that personal and universal
consciousness are one. This knowing of the experience of consciousness brings bliss,
or the famous Sanskrit formulation sat, chit, Ananda – a subject to which we will
return.
You are of course in these very early days absolutely helpless, totally dependent on
the unconditional love of others for your very survival - and this desire for
unconditional love is something that will never leave you; more than that,
subconsciously it will be your guiding light throughout your life. For most of us, most
of the time, in our early days this unconditional love is given freely but as the days
become weeks and the weeks become months and the excitement of us wears off
and the tediousness of our practicalities becomes less joyful and the responsibility
of caring for us becomes more taskful, the unconditional part of the love we need
dissolves – not with ill intentions – into coping love. Unconditional love would hear a
baby cry and meet the baby’s needs by attending to it with a smile and as we say
now tender, loving care. Coping love would hear the same cry and meet the adult’s

need by attending to it with the pursed lips of resignation. The baby will have
noticed and registered: love for me is now conditional, to some extent and at
certain times, on me not crying. The merest hint of repression has planted its first
seed; whether the seed grows or withers on the vine depends entirely on how the
unwitting adult treats you thereon as she or he tries to cope with you and a
demanding world at the same time. Meanwhile you have had your first inkling of
what the rest of us already know: that this world ain’t perfect, that the love you
crave is nearly always compromised, conditional.
As the early years pass you remain helpless, dependent on love, unconditional or
coping, for your very survival. You grow, you learn to toddle, you learn to read and
write, you learn to mix socially. Most importantly, for your future happiness or
otherwise, your ego - your sense of self – develops. Not until your body tells you
years later in puberty that you are capable of survival and reproduction yourself,
will you be free of dependency from those older than you and capable of giving it to
those younger than you.
Now this ego, that most influencing aspect of our conscious mind, that sense of self
that places us at the centre of the universe and sees everything else in the universe
as separate from it; how is it formed? How does it develop, benignly or otherwise?
The past is the past, but can we as sentient parents do anything to stop repeating
the mistakes of the past in relation to our own children or, to a lesser extent, our
grandchildren?
The ego is formed from two aspects, feedback from the direct experience of
interacting with the world as experienced and the presumed, distorted attitudes
held by others, normally parents, towards the child. The first aspect is simple
enough, what gives pleasure and what doesn't, often associated with the most
simple forms of behaviour, bodily or otherwise. Praise, cuddles and laughter are all
of course particularly fruitful. This is all fine, the child feels loved while behaving in
such a way that he or she experiences their world as love.
It is the second aspect, the introjections - and more on these later - of others as
they comment on the child’s behaviour that can damage this infantile and therefore

highly pliable sense of self. The parents are doing this quite unknowingly and
probably with the best of intentions but this criticism of the child's behaviour is
taken on board by the child as a distortion. So the child bangs his tray – in that
annoying way that they do. The parent wishes the child would stop but doesn’t
represent their own reality by saying ‘When you bang your tray like that I feel
annoyed,’ but instead pass ownership of the annoyance onto the child by saying
something like, ‘Stop banging that tray you little horror!’. The child then takes on
board the parent’s distortion of their position and a tiny part of the child feels he or
she is not only unloved but in some sense a little horror.
This can of course bring on maladjustments, a separation between the reality of
what we really are and the appearance of what we were supposed to be later on in
adult life. And it doesn't have to come from the ‘little horror’ side of the camp;
insincere or false praise can have a similar effect. I was told by my father that
although I was generally useless I was particularly good with my hands. As I grew up
I clung to this introjection until it became completely obvious that I was actually
worse than useless with my hands. For a while therefore I felt not only useless in
general as advised, but even useless with the one thing I was supposed to not to be
useless at…the sum total being 100% uselessness! This is a trivial example of no real
importance but it does show how when reality clashes with the ego's view of itself
that was taken on in a distorted fashion, the gap between reality and ego, self-
worth and so self-love, can take a bruising.
As a child that was and a parent that is, I think here I should put in a good word for
parents in general. If any damage has been done I believe it is very rare that is it is
done intentionally. Yes, you could say you went from being a tiny baby in a state of
perfection to being the person you are now with its various discombobulations and
therefore somebody must be to blame! But consider that your parents simply didn't
know any better and so in a way you could say we are all victims of victims. ‘They
fuck you up your mum and dad, they do not mean to - but they do. They fill you
with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you,’ as Philip Larkin so
famously put it.

But how could they have taught you anything that they had been taught themselves?
If your grandmother did not know how to love herself, let alone your mother, how
could your mother possibly know how to love herself, and therefore yourself,
unconditionally? Likewise, if your father was stern or unapproachable, it is safe to
assume that your grandfather was equally or more stern or unapproachable. Your
father too was a victim of a victim. Larkin continues: ‘But they were fucked up in
their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy-stern
and half at one another's throats.’

At least now we have a chance to start again and to do so with fresh insight into the
human condition. We have at our backs the fair winds of the open love that flows
naturally from this insight as well as the full tide of the good intentions that were
always there.
It is worth bearing in mind, with all this talk of parents and children, that we adults
all have our five-year-old child still walking around inside us. In the same way that
when our bodies were five years old we as good little children obediently accepted
that those older than us were always telling us the truth it is important that they
only hear the truth now, but this time for real. Might as well give them some love,
time and respect too. As five year olds we then went on to base our life script on
these early messages. There is a good chance that the way we look at life now - and
as a result the way life looks back at us - will have been directly influenced by all
the programming, both positive and negative which we accepted as that five-year-
old child. The way we were treated then is probably - probably -pretty much the
same way we treat ourselves now. If our parents were unintentionally disobliging to
our inner child back then we at least have no excuse to be other than obliging to it
now.
~~~
It is from now on, somewhere between the ages of five and fifteen, that the major
aspects of your personality develops – or more accurately your personalities
develop. The word is derived from the Latin persona, meaning mask, and our

personalities are these different masks that we have learned to wear to compensate
for the lack of unconditional love; or to put it another way, the masks the ego wears
in order to hide its true nature from the world at large, our public face which we
may have assumed either deliberately or unconsciously. You become influenced,
subtly for some, grossly for others, by all these wishes other people have of you,
making you the sum of other people's visions of how they want you to be in order
that they may love you. If you have what society deems to be a successful
personality you know how to conform to other people's visions of you and you will
appear outwardly compliant; if you are judged to have an unsuccessful personality
you will fail to conform to these visions and appear outwardly objectionable.
Whichever prevails, the root cause of both types is the reaction to the lack of love
and the corresponding attitudes and resulting behaviour to compensate for this lack.
Our attitudes and behaviour are after all just the way we try to satisfy our
personalities’ needs in what seems to be in front of us at an given time.
Furthermore, this reality always occurs in the present and our behaviour at that
moment always reflects what is in front of us now. Behaviour is not “caused" by
something that happened in the past, although clearly past events will have
influenced how we see the reality to which we are reacting, in other words how we
are behaving. It is important to remember that we always maintain the ability to
snatch the present back from the past by understanding just where our personalities
came from…but we are jumping ahead of ourselves.
So back to the early days of long ago: you probably had influential, older people
having all these expectations of you - many of which were literally impossible to live
up to - hoping that you would reveal something of themselves in you, something that
in all probability you were naturally not. The inevitable failure to meet these
demands created wounds, making us all to some extent what we might call the
walking wounded. We may then hide the wounds under a bandage, a metaphor for
the ego shoving the pain off into the id, somewhere down deep (For Freud, the id
was the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. For Jung it was similar to the
‘shadow’, a depository for aspects of our psyche that the ego found unsavoury. I'm

using id more in the Jungian sense. However as what we are trying to describe is,
literally, indescribable any word-sound that conjures up an antithetic symbol to the
ego will do.) But the wounds don’t heal, they fester and from time to time the id
has its moments of sweet revenge and out they pop – probably in public and at the
worst possible time.
The results of our being on the receiving end of this emotional compromise or these
distorted judgements are entirely unpredictable, as varied, mysterious and magical
as the human psyche, but what is predictable is that you will be behaving in a way
that isn't the authentic true you as against how you would have behaved had you
received the unconditional love that you craved in the first place. In this way our
attitudes towards life and our general behaviour become ingrained without us
realising that we have somehow, mysteriously, subconsciously ingrained ourselves
with these false attributes. It is not even as if we can ever discuss or even
acknowledge these repressions because, naturally enough, we don't even know that
they are there in the first place, being tucked away as they are in the nether
regions of the id. If there is a chink of light, it is this: that the idealised,
unconditional yearning with which the child is born never dies as we grow into
adulthood and there will always be those for whom this yearning evolves into
seeking some kind of individual or cosmic awakening. In fact it is an inborn
characteristic of the human condition that this unrequited yearning for love always
seeks loves and its soulmates peace and happiness - and happiness is just peace in
motion.
In fact underneath that, more than this; the individual psyche has a natural
tendency to seek balance as well as completeness or wholeness, even if sometimes
in direct contradiction to the needs of the body. In this way a conscious attitude is
always balanced by an unconscious attitude, no matter what its strength, always
seeking equilibrium. The unconscious has its own voice, that of the slip of the
tongue, dreams and spontaneous imagery. If this unconscious is attacked or ignored
it will fight back – to maintain balance - through neurosis in the mind and disease in
the body.

~~~
But I digress, somewhat. Take two friends, both with “pushy parents". Every evening
and weekend their two fathers will take their sons to, say, soccer training or a
match and the child will soon learn that in order to receive love from the parent he
has to not only participate in training but when the games come along to win them
as well. Slackness in training or losing in matches brings on disapproval; keen
training and match winning brings on approval. Later, when they are able to think
and feel and fend for themselves, the friends may react in any number of ways;
possibly one friend, seeking the never-ending road of approval, will be a compulsive
winner affecting every thing that he or she touches as his subconscious seeks to
satisfy the unsatisfiable father figure, while the other friend may become a sports
phobic who can't even bear to watch the racing on television in case it reminds his
subconscious of the father figure’s disapproval.
Or it that may be that two other friends have particularly brilliant and well-
respected parents. The world at large is constantly telling the children, directly or
subliminally, how brilliant the parent is and each child immediately feels the
pressure to live up to this expectation even if, and especially if, it leads the child
into totally inauthentic behaviour. The children notice that love is forthcoming if he
or she seems to behave in some way like the brilliant parent; and love is withdrawn
if they behave in a way counter to the parents’ example. Again, the reaction is
completely unpredictable; only the fact that there will be a reaction is predictable.
In irony, one friend may learn to detest the worshipful parent while the other may
lead a life of unhappiness involving unfulfilled hero worship and feelings of
inadequacy.
Then you might have two girls brought up as neighbours. One likes to help her
mother around the house and the mother likes being helped and cuddles and loves
her daughter. Next door the mother hates doing housework and the daughter learns
to lay low when the washing up starts. One girl may grow up to wear a helping mask
and spend her life helping others and being loved in return; the other girl will avoid
helping others and spend her life hiding behind a mask of seclusion. It is quite

possible that neither are living as their authentic selves, albeit one suspects the
former will be happier than the latter.
Over our teenage years these layers of masks build up to become our identifies, how
we see ourselves and how we feel that others do, or should, see ourselves. There
are then layers on top of layers: we become our personalities, a sort of self fulfilling
prophecy that takes us away from what we really are to becoming our idea of what
other people expect us to be. What is left behind, what we really would have been
if treated as we really were rather than what we were expected to be, remains
alive but hides – and for some unfortunate souls festers - in our ids.
A further and highly significant factor in producing pressure to conform to a type
that you may not naturally be, in other words to put on those masks, is society’s
norms and peer group pressure. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it can protect
those with vulnerable egos who wouldn't otherwise be able to fit in to society’s
norms. But most of us feel obliged to put on a public face that the ego deems will
be acceptable, more than that - desirable, to whomsoever it is relating at any given
moment. In this way a doctor in public will put on a reassuring mask, a rally driver a
daring mask or a professor an otherworldly mask. In many cases we are all just
playing a role and no harm is done but it's equally easy to identify deeply with that
role and then the role playing becomes rigid, the person fearful of dropping the
mask and so our lives can become tied up in knots of our own making. It’s an irony
of our age that society’s pressure to conform comes not in encouraging us to act as
one homogenous societal unit but as a collection of individuals, the more individual
the better, thereby encouraging our egos to seek out personalities we may not
possess – fantasies – and so we can find ourselves in a triple bind!
This urge to comply with the norm by being un-norm is manna to the ego and leads
us all to consider ourselves separate from everyone else – and once the concept of
separation is introduced, the mind, as a measuring device, immediately introduces
sub-concepts of better and worse, bigger and smaller, leaving our psyche with
inferiority and superiority complexes, ego-driven negative emotions such as pride,
envy, fear and greed, not to mention self-perpetuating conflicts with the world at

large. As we shall see later it is the idea – and it is just an idea, a concept dreamt
up by the mind – that we are separate selves living in the mind’s domain of time and
space that is at the root of all the psyche's – not to mention the world’s -
disgruntlement.
This false urge to be separate is all very mask-promoting. It is also activity-
promoting as it urges us to take action to become more productive, thinner, richer,
more confident, more assertive, fitter – and any number of things we may not
naturally be - and, ye gods of irony, happier. In our rush to conform by constant
doing we have forgotten how to simply be. If we are not listening to the radio or
watching television or reading the paper or internetting we may be drinking wine,
taking uppers or downers or smoking this or overeating that, overconsuming;
anything to avoid the perceived horror of just simply sitting quietly, at peace with
the world, being ourselves, unseperated from the whole. Missing out, in other
words, on the very peace and happiness for which all this activity is supposed to be
in pursuit.
~~~
A further disadvantage to wearing these unnatural masks is that they lead to
conditioning by constantly prompting us into comfort zones, safe havens away from
hurt or reminders of hurt. Take a random incident that might have happened to you
at, say, ten years old – let's say you were bullied at school – and you adopted an
aggressive or submissive mask to get you through that unpleasantness. This mask
will stay with you long past its actual useful need – which may have been as short as
five minutes at a time all those years ago. The result of this is that you can have a
tendency to respond to certain threatening new situations by whisking out the mask
of view of the 10-year-old who is being bullied rather than the adult who is no
longer being bullied. This conditioning is so deep-rooted and so subtle that most of
us, most of the time, simply don't know that we are reacting to events in the
present with the coping tools from events in the past. In this way we are destined to
see the world not as it is in reality but as we perceive it in unreality.
And we all see it differently and in different ways all the time; the theory of

gestalt. Take the most practical example: a walk down your nearest high street. If
you are hungry you will be noticing the restaurants, if you are lost you will be
seeking out a guide and not seeing the street at all, if you need to pee you will be
looking for a public lavatory; one high street living and breathing in reality, seen in
three completely different ways.
We do this all the time – not just in the high street. We select the foreground from
the background according to our needs at the time, so we see only what we need to
see when we see it. These images are constantly forming and reforming, arising as
they do in the conscious from what the subconscious needs at the time. In this way
that which we perceive as reality is only that which we need to perceive to be
reality at that precise moment before the perception arises. Apart from being highly
selective in our view of what is before us, we are also destined not to view the
world as it is in the present moment, but from our selective views of the past. In
this way how we look at the world is all highly influenced by our past experiences
and conditioning and subsequent unsatisfied needs, or unfinished business. And as I
keep observing with clients over and over again how we look at the world now is a
mirror of how the world will looks at us any time soon. Our attitudes, behaviour and
expectations are all indeed self-fulfilling prophecies.
Working with clients, watching the human condition it is very easy to forget a
fundamental point: that we all view reality from our own standpoints and that no
two standpoints and therefore no two realities are the same. Furthermore each one
of these realities is changing all the time. That is to say, the only reality I can
possibly know is the world as I see it and experience it at this very precise moment.
Likewise, the only reality that any of us can possibly know is the world as we see it
and experience it at a particularly precise moment. The common certainty between
these realities is that they will all be different. The juxtaposition would suggest that
there are as many realities as there are people.
(This is a new and fascinating acceptance, from a historical point of view. Up to
fairly recently society deemed that we all had to subscribe to its view, which was
normally a religious or superstitious view of reality: dissenters like Copernicus,

Galileo, and Bruno come to mind immediately, not to mention countless witches and
heretics and members of differing sects. It is only recently that the Western world
has accepted, even encouraged, this multiplicity of realities. None less than the
great physicist and astronomer, Sir James Jeans could speculate that ‘the stream of
human knowledge is impartially heading toward a non-mechanical reality: the
Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine’. A look into
the nether regions of Islam shows vividly how a conforming reality based on
superstition and ignorance still operates - and how Europe and the young America
used to operate.)
Sorry, digressing again…So, in this way we don't react to reality as such but to our
own perceptions of reality and we react to it in such a way that we feel will be of
most benefit to our own version of ourselves. In other words, each one of us is
predetermined to react to what we perceive of as the realty in front of us in a way
that we imagine will move us towards wholeness and happiness and the way we
each react to it will inevitably reflect the way we each see what for us, each in
turn, passes for reality. Even the most basic human functions such as eating and
reproduction are done in such ways that carry as much happiness with them as is
possible.
Ultimately, happiness can only come from the absence of ignorance, and this
absence can only come from the knowing of our own being. Unfortunately in the
meantime we've been persuaded that love, peace and happiness can be acquired
through relationships with others, circumstances outside or material objects; the joy
they bring is only ever that of temporary relief. This is the dominant cultural
imperative in which we live.
But no matter how misguided or misplaced our seeking, underneath it all we can see
the constant search for happiness. Even the worst warmonger, the most corrupt
politician or the most venal bully are only acting in that way because they think it
will make them happy; the fact that it makes everyone else unhappy doesn't
concern them, which is why they are such unlovable people.
This move towards happiness is surely part of a greater evolutionary trend towards

completeness, witnessed as greater complexity, more complex structures and the
realisation of interrelatedness. We ourselves have gone from being a single-cell blob
to being an extremely complicated functioning organism capable of not just knowing
that we exist but actually experiencing with consciousness that existence. It is
completely in line with this trend towards completeness that we will always choose
the path of happiness when we set off on a task.
If reality is quite simply that which is in front of us at any given time and we choose
to see it not as it is but as it appears to us through our conditioning we enter into
the world of resistance. When we talk about conflict later on this is the conflict to
which we are referring, the lack of acceptance, this resistance, to what is actually
happening compared to how we perceive what is actually happening. As we have
seen, this perception has been clouded by events in the past which in an ideal world
should have no relevance at all to what is happening right in front of us now but
which does actually determine our attitudes and therefore our behaviour, our
emotional well-being and perhaps most significantly of all lays down a marker now
for how our future will unfold, often doomed to be a repetition of past conditioned
events. After all, if you enter a situation with a potentially irrelevant attitude from
the past it will hardly be surprising if you leave that situation with a potentially
useless outcome from the past.
Clients often tell me that their fate or destiny is in some way predetermined; they
accept their circumstances as their fate. But their fate isn't determined by what
happened to them in the past, it is determined by how they react now to what has
arisen from the past. In other words, we have the ability to control our lives by
controlling our fate and we can do this by reacting positively or creatively to
whatever lands in front of us. Whatever happens as a result of that positive or
creative reaction from that point on will be part of our fate from now on, fresh
fate, and of course so on ad infinitum. This only requires that we become aware and
that we become present - but more on all this later.
Until that moment of awakening we will remain stuck in our old familiar world, the
world of resistance, resistance to what is really happening rather than our

conditioned perception of what is happening. Change is inescapable and yet we
resist it to the point of denying it exists. When confronted by a new situation the
most naturally thing in the world seems to be to whisk out an old mask and deal
with it using that personality which served us well – or of course otherwise - in the
past. In a sense we can say our resistance becomes our personality, further tying the
knot of the ego to the past. The temptation to remain in the comfort zone of the
past can often be overwhelming but the inevitable consequence is to resist, not to
really see, not to really live, in the present and it is only in the present, right here
and right now, that we can find the love, the lack of separation, that we have been
missing, the lack of which got us onto this roundabout in the first place.
~~~
Now our natural reaction to not seeing the world as it is but seeing it as we are is
for our minds to try to change what it is we see in front of us. This is of course
empirically impossible, the world just is, life just is, it really couldn't care less what
we think about it and is no doubt surprised that we think it does! What we can do is
change ourselves and we can do this by shining the light of awareness onto our
conflicting elements, onto our conditioning that has made us into something we are
not, onto our masks and the causes of our masks and onto the id where the ego has
dumped all that unpleasantness it would rather live without. It's enlightening to
realise, for the first time, that like a vampire, these problems and niggles that we
have within ourselves cannot stand the light, in this case the light of awareness.
They operate in the dark, in a nether world of secrecy and duplicity and once faced
honestly and openly and without judgement or comment but just seen as they really
are, they expose themselves to their owners’ ridicule. There is no greater cure for
anything in this world than laughing at yourself.
Rather than setting our egos more self-help goals or targets or trying to make
ourselves into yet something else that we are really not, a much more natural
solution to internal conflicts is simply to look at them objectively in this light of
awareness, explore them, tease them, to see clearly that problems don't exist in the
real world, in the present moment, but only in the way that we've been conditioned

to see the world, living as we do in the past and the future.
~~~
But back to growing up: all the while you have been acquiring your coping masks to
deal with this coping love during late childhood and early adulthood, the great
power within you, intuition, the gateway to universal consciousness, has been
growing and maturing along with your other capabilities. It is not normally until full
adulthood that this power within us asserts itself fully and if we are open to it, it
leads us not merely to survival, as is its original prime function, but also to wisdom
and self-knowledge.
Intuition can be thought of as the personal aspect within each one of us of the
universal consciousness that we all share. Intuition naturally encourages awareness
of universal consciousness which underpins everything. Intuition is that intangible
part of ourselves which, like nature, is too profound to be described in words, which
can only point towards what it might be. It is a self-contained, non-contained
entity, a thing-in-itself, beyond description. Its own lingua franca doesn't contain
words but emotions and images, ancient images, good and bad that have been
passed down from countless generations, images often referred to as archetypes. To
be in touch with these images is to be in touch with the wisdom of the ages and the
source of the human psyche. (I'm using the word psyche here to mean the totality of
our individual consciousness, whether above or below the water mark, rather than
in the Hellenic sense of it personifying the human soul as being female. It is the
psyche’s inherent desire to be balanced and to move towards wholeness through
growth. Love, peace and happiness await.
Emotion is a far better way of uploading and downloading advise from intuition than
intellect, in fact we could say that emotion is intuition’s semaphore, the bridge
between universal consciousness and individual consciousness – or more accurately
the individual’s accessing of that consciousness. In the same way that emotions
don't lie, intuition doesn't lie either. As events unwind it may not always give you
the best advice but it doesn't set out to deliberately mislead you as the occasionally
delusional, or duplicitous, intellect can.

Intuition acts as a survival mechanism passed down through countless generations
and thus built into the human DNA as much as our fingers and toes. It can be
thought of as an enormous filing cabinet full of every situation, especially dangerous
situation, that the human race has faced before. It can be accessed immediately,
instantly, in reaction to any new situation. We are all, all the time, adding to this
enormous database and unbeknownst sharing it with future generations. Thinking in
these circumstances is useless, as by the time the thoughts have formed words the
situation has changed, thereby making the thoughts, let alone the words,
redundant.
Even the most mundane example serves its purpose. You are walking down the
street and about to cross the road and hearing no traffic, step off the pavement.
Just then an electric vehicle blows its horn to warn you it is about to run you over.
It is now registered, triggered by instinct and through the emotion of fear in this
instance, that you need to look as well as listen in this new era of electric vehicles.
On our individual level this awareness is passed into your intuition and will
automatically be passed onto your children's intuition so that when they cross the
road they will automatically be looking as well as listening. On a universal level the
same applies to those exposed to the new menace of electric vehicles. In this way
we can say that a general instinct leads to a specific intuition and this surely is the
relationship between the two: instinct refers to the most basic tools in our survival
kit, flight or fight etc., whereas intuition adds a level of instantly available finesse
on top of instinct and wisdom on top of finesse.
I saw something of this universal intuition with fish the other day. One day many
years ago when I started messing about in boats I spilled a little outboard fuel in the
river; the surface of river turned that rainbow hue of a slick near the boat. Just
then my mother threw some food overboard for the fishes and to my horror they
ignored the sight and smell of the slick and popped up to eat the bread…only to pop
down again pretty squiggly and sharpish to I know not what fate. Last year in a very
remote and protected anchorage in the western Atlantic the same thing happened,
this time with an accidental squirt of the bilge pump and my wife instead of mother

feeding the fishes. This time they circled below the slick and old bread and waited
for the bread to sink before chowing down.
Intuition, in and of itself, has no characteristics or preferences; like the awareness
in which in all this can seen, it just is. I like to think of it as the coal face of
Darwinism, the first part of us to react to the new, leading the way for the rest of
the organism to catch up in its own time. As such, it can be active or passive and it
is up to us to make it either by choosing to access or ignore it. Intuition couldn't
care less which path we choose, it is just there evolving way in the background, but
if we choose to access it will respond with wisdom and kindness, qualities which of
course we bestow upon it as by itself it is neither kind nor unkind, wise or foolish.
~~~
Having seen the world - and myself and my clients in the world - up close, it's a
miracle we are not all a lot less happy than we actually are. The fact is that in spite
of all the pitfalls and prejudices our childhoods have been subjected to, the vast
majority of us lead lives that are passable and tolerable. There are moments of
happiness, stretches of peace; the experience of love is not unknown.
For some others though there is a nagging feeling that life should be more than
passable and tolerable. The natural inclination for these people is to try to change
something within themselves to make life more than passable and tolerable. They
go on courses, they go on diets, they attend retreats, they read self-help books, all
in the endless pursuit of changing their view of themselves, which actually means
changing the ego. Even the pursuit of losing or reducing the ego is just the ego
playing with itself, ‘have you noticed how egoless I am?’.
Instead I'd like to propose that all this seeking is not only unnecessary but counter-
productive. The reality is we don't have to go chasing after new goals, to follow new
directions. We find ourselves where we stand. The only problem is we don't love
ourselves, which of course is why so many of us rush off to improve ourselves. If we
loved ourselves we would realise that we are already perfect and that those bits of
us that bits of us feel are not perfect will soon become perfect when bathed in the
love of the self – and the absolute inevitability that this will lead to the love of all

other selves too.
Self-love doesn't mean looking in the mirror and telling yourself how wonderful you
are. It has nothing to do with vanity, vainglory or pride; rather the opposite. Loving
yourself means to accept yourself exactly as you are now, first by looking
objectively, dispassionately at any hiccoughs from the past, then to forgive the past
and all those in it. You see that right now you are a tiny article of perfection and
experience; you see that the best way to make this experience of perfection realise
itself is not to set it off on a tangent of seeking elsewhere something that it already
has within. You let it become aware of itself and being aware of itself, it and the
world will love each other, laugh at each other, enjoy each other, behold each
other. It's really very simple, so transcendentally simple that the complicating mind
can't quite get to grips with it; verily the three hardest words in the English
language are the those in the plea from our god within to the ego: ‘Just Let Go’.
AND WHY WE’RE JUST FINE, JUST AS WE ARE
Before looking at how you can heal yourself it will be worthwhile seeing how clients
who come to see me heal themselves. I am choosing my words carefully, for that is
exactly what the process is: I am not healing them of anything but creating the
conditions in which they can heal themselves. I cannot find the authentic other for
the authentic other, cannot make a journey of self-discovery for another self, but I
can surreptitiously suggest to them where to look and without overtly directing
them anywhere, nudge them gently towards the door which opens to reveal
themselves as they really are. If they are willing to push on the open door the result
is even more liberating than if the healing had been imposed from outside – even if
such a thing were possible on anything other than a temporary basis. This is why all
those methods imposed from outside, all these life coaching solutions and ego
massaging treatments, all those step-by-step goal driven systems and ego-aspirant
personal development programmes are doomed to at best temporary success, partly
by suggesting you look for ‘answers’ in the wrong place – outside and not inside your
self – and partly by only tackling the effects of the conflicts and not the causes.
By way of example for this book, I'm going to try to the distil this process into a

single session, although in reality there will be several sessions and many clients like
to keep coming back on a regular basis for months if not years, even if only for the
unifying aspects of good, listening company.
Firstly, I should explain that the people who come to see me have what I call divine
disgruntlement. They’re not bonkers, let alone axe murderers or child molesters,
neither do they have any rampant addictions nor disastrous phobias. They can pass
themselves off as member of the human race in the pub, they can hold their own in
a meeting, they can chit-chat away at dinner parties with the best of them. But
when the lights go out something is not quite right, something is missing, there is a
loose connection between what passes for reality and what really is reality,
unanswered questions, including the big one: ‘I know whom I'm supposed to be but
who, in reality, am I? Not my name or number, not my circumstances, not my
relationship to anyone else, but underneath all the conditioning and personalities,
who is the authentic me, that person capable of universal love, and limitless peace
and happiness?’ That person, in other words, who love, peace and happiness has
passed by, not necessarily disastrously, but disgruntedly.
Before we start the session I take a few quiet moments alone to remind myself what
it is all about: to work with the clients until they see through all of their
conditioning, the compensations they have brokered with themselves for all those
expectations that have been thrust upon them by other people’s, especially
parents’, unfulfilled desires. I suspect, but am open – hoping! - to being mistaken,
that initially the clients will not love themselves because they see themselves
through all these unmet expectations. We will be hoping to visit any negative
unfinished business hiding away in the id by bringing it out into the open and let the
ego see what it has been hiding there, objectively, dispassionately.
I further remind myself that the best way of doing this is to assume, as far as I am
able, the internal frame of reference of the client; to try to see the world as he or
she sees it and to put to one side, again as far as possible, my own perceptions and
preconceptions. Although the object of the exercise is not to try to ingratiate myself
in any way with the client, I know that if I have managed to leave my own frame of

reference behind there is a sporting chance that we will build up some kind of
empathic understanding during the session. Into the warmth of this understanding
the client will begin to experience, possibly for the first time, that it is safe to go to
those darker areas of the id which the ego had previously put out of bounds. He or
she will enter, in other words, an area where there is no guilt, there is no shame,
there are no judgements, no internal or external tickings off, no running nor hiding,
only the broad acceptance that such and such exists and, and while we are there…
let's have a look at it. And later, after awareness has had a look at it, let’s laugh at
it…and the hold it has had over them.
For myself, and for most counsellors, this will be quite a challenge, harder than it
would first appear. It is a very natural tendency for us to look for some sort of
diagnosis - and worse diagnostic shrewdness -, to seek professional evaluations, to
try to guide the client, subtly or otherwise, towards what from my frame of
reference would seem to be an obvious way forward. I remind myself to put all that
aside and concentrate only on understanding and accepting the attitudes consciously
held by the clients as we will be delving deeply into what may well be dangerous
waters which up to now have been denied to consciousness. I will try to throw
caution to the wind and trust completely in the client's ability to heal themselves if
they are only given the reflective circumstances in which to do so.
It will be worthwhile at this pre-session stage to introduce the reader to the concept
of projection. Projecting is something we all do all of the time without realising it.
We project onto other people qualities we have openly or covertly assumed for
ourselves, in the assumption that others must have these same qualities that we
have assumed for ourselves, for themselves. It happens particularly when we come
across a person or situation that remind our id of some unfinished business from our
past. Instantly all our repressed fears, resentments and opinions that we had so
conveniently hidden away there make a mad dash for freedom but because the ego
conveniently forgot they were there in the first place it accepts them – as projected
onto the other person – as being part of that other person.
They can be qualities we have or, as often as not, qualities we wish we didn't have.

In this way we can offload onto others the burden of, for example, unfulfilled
ambition; more than that, we can offload the stress that facing up to this burden of
unfulfilled ambition would bring upon ourselves if we did face up to it. The result is
of course one step forwards and two steps backwards: although the projected
outpouring might make us temporarily feel better within ourselves –without quite
knowing why-, we have completely failed to see the other person on whom we are
projecting as they really are - but only see in them what we wish or fear we were in
them.
We know from when we are on the receiving end of an encounter with an unhappy
person that the results of that encounter are often less that satisfactory. When the
person says ‘You are really late!’ rather than ‘When you arrive late I feel annoyed,’
or ‘You shouldn’t eat so fast!’ rather than ‘When you eat so fast I feel concerned,’
you know they are trying to offload their own negative attitudes on to you rather
than accept responsibility for them themselves.
A version of projection was taking place in the expectations I wrote about in Why
We Are The Way We Are, where parents in particular have unfulfilled expectations
of themselves which they project onto the child, thereby causing the masks or
personalities to develop as compensation for being unable to live up to those
expectations or projections. The child takes these on board as introjections, which
we will come onto in a moment.
The easiest way to see projection at work is to observe people and their pets. We
are constantly projecting our own idea of what the pet wants or needs onto it. We
have of course no way of knowing what the pet actually wants or needs but we
assume that it must want to chase that rabbit or it must be hungry or it must be
tired or it must be dreaming or any number of ‘must be’s. In fact whenever you hear
the words ‘must be’ a projection is almost certainly taking place.
So we've considered projections and now it's time to take a look at the opposite,
introjections. Instead of projecting onto other people our own hidden needs, we
absorb from other, more powerful, figures their unmet needs and in this case rather
than project them onto others as we will do later, we turn them back onto

ourselves. So it might arise that in childhood an adult voice has said, in effect, “I
will accept you, but only if you do what I want you to do". This would have set up a
conflict within the child between what the child really needed and what he had to
do to be accepted. Naturally enough, in the interests of survival, the child would
have chosen the latter – and the seed of a certain disgruntlement may, or may not,
have been planted. The sequencing is obvious; as a child we introject, later as an
adult we project. Welcome to the merry-go-round.
It will be revealing to find out when the session starts where these introjections lie.
It's an easy search, for whenever I hears the words “could", “would”, “should",
“ought to" – in other words talking in the conditional sense – I will know that love, or
even acceptance, was once conditional too. Quite often there is a double
conditionality, so instead of saying ‘I ought to have helped my neighbour, we might
hear “I hate myself for not helping my neighbour " - in other words the subject is
mentioned twice in the same sentence. This naturally begs the question: who is the
authentic voice, the I that hates myself or the me that didn't help the neighbour?
Another easy way to see projection and introjection at work is in religion. Since
time immemorial we have transferred our yearning for perfection onto gods or
prophets or virgins or absorbed these same yearnings from them, directly or from
their earthly representatives. In more recent times, as this yearning has become
more secular, we have projected and introjected onto other people, particularly the
celebrities we have created, these god-like properties we wish we had for ourselves
or which we assume they must want for us. The countless celebrity magazines
merely reflect a modern day equivalent of holy tracts; the same process is at work
with the added complication of life style envy to go with quality envy.
Talking of counsellor’s landmines for the session ahead, all of this is closely allied to
the concept of transference. Transference is when we unwittingly project onto
another person ideals of perfection that we wish them to have, quite possibly in
loco parentis. You might for example go to see your accountant with a particularly
knotty tax problem and transfer onto him or her the expectation that they will be
able to sort out the problem. In this instance, dealing with a professional person

with concrete knowledge of a particular subject, this could be thought of as a
calculated risk of wishful thinking. When transference occurs in more nebulous
areas, for example in a counsellor/client relationship, the ideals of perfection
transferred from the client to the counsellor are not in themselves dangerous in any
way as long as the counsellor realises exactly what's going on and doesn't start to
believe in these transferred visions of perfection. In this case I must see the
transference for exactly what it is: the transfer of an emotionalised attitude which
existed in a previous relationship which has been inappropriately, and unknowingly,
transferred to me but which really has nothing to do with me and especially nothing
to do with any merit I might attach to the new found affection!
There is a further development on the transferring scene which I call transference
plus. This happens when the client perceives that the counsellor has a more
profound understanding of the client’s self than the client himself. In the inevitable
way that the client, like the rest of us will yearn to love himself he will instead turn
his love towards the counsellor as an effective - and one hopes temporary –
intermediary.