“I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, novelist
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How might you see a color you can’t see, or describe to another person a color they can’t see? This question comes up from time to time when we talk about things we cannot find the words for. It’s a reference to blind spots and how we move into new territory.
The question is central to understanding consciousness and mental health but, naturally, we don’t have the words to talk about what we cannot see. Instead, we talk about the methods we use: methods to see, think, and act better or differently; methods of mental health, performance, and power. We talk about leaders, workers, students, and teachers, but these are all diversions from the real question, which is how we achieve something new.
Dichotomies help us understand differences using contrast and distinction. When we’re trying to understand conflicts, we look for some measure of difference. Without differences, there can’t be change.
Everyone, including myself, struggles with growth and change. The alternative is stasis. We normally avoid stasis by living in a changing world, and this makes us appear responsive and alive. But we deceive ourselves because being responsive does not mean that we’re alive. Everything is responsive, whether it’s alive or not.
When we get old and our world slows down and stops changing, most old people stop changing too. They become inert, and we recognize this as an early form of dementia. You don’t have to be old to create a static world, and you don’t have to have dementia to cease growing.
Most of my clients, to their credit, are working to grow faster than their environment is changing. They’re trying to guide the changes in their environment and control how they’re changing in it. They’re trying to find words for things they cannot see.
Life and Learning
At root, learning is close to life. All things change, but living things learn. We could say that to be alive is to learn, but we no better understand learning than we understand life. Defining one in terms of the other is a tautology, by which I mean we understand neither.
One of my great annoyances is teaching. If you see learning as the process of life and change, then what is teaching? At best, teaching is facilitating. It is the provision of what sustains change. At worst, teaching limits by constricting change. Our most familiar form of teaching happens in schools, which is teaching’s worst form. Its best form comes through “life lessons” and other natural processes, which are distinguished by their authentic complexity. These are the best teachings.
The reason we have schooling is that it’s easy and works toward greater integration. School integrates people in exchange for their insight, autonomy, and human potential. This is the social contract: society will help provide for you if you work to sustain society. You do that by exchanging your life’s potential in the service of conformity in thought, action, and social stability.
There is an unrecognized, negative side effect to learning, thinking, and acting according to expectations. When you act according to expectations, you don’t learn who you are, and you don’t learn how to think. You don’t develop a good sense of things that exist outside of the container you’ve been taught to see.
This all happens before you’re old enough to know what’s going on. Your ability to think and see, as well as your ability to imagine, develop before and during your adolescence. Your mind is most pliable before you can see yourself separately from your parents, and clearly enough to develop your own worldview. At this stage, your family is your primary learning environment, although society desires to control what you think.
Schools focus our thinking, and they do this by posing problems that limit our thoughts. The situations that foster our growth and insight come from our social and natural environments. The larger our social and natural environments, the more we’ll learn. These environments are different from school because they don’t ask simple questions, don’t offer clear answers, and always show us things we have neither the words nor thoughts to understand.
Schools show us things we can see and point out their details. That’s how teaching works. The social and natural worlds show us things we cannot see in all their detail, and that’s how learning works. You don’t learn in school; you are trained. You learn in environments that change and respond to you in ways that go beyond what you can see.
Relationships
All things are relationships. We only know anything in terms of the interactions between things. This is so fundamental as not to mean anything, so it’s more useful to say that our most important learning situations are our personal relationships. Everything else is skills acquisition.
Learning skills is a process that changes us, but it’s not a particularly intelligent process. Certainly, skills take brain power and attention, but learning skills is within the power of anyone who can maintain focus.
Relationships require more than focus. You are dragged forward in a relationship with another person and, if you can’t keep up, you must escape or be dragged under. Ideally, relationships prosper, but that’s not the norm. In a world of change, growth, and conflict, relationships present these dynamic elements all mashed together.
I’ve come to look at my counseling work as relationship work. In some cases, the relationship between partners is the focus of our work, but mostly I’m working with one person’s relationships.
Where there’s support, there’s mutual understanding, and where there is conflict, there’s a lack of understanding. Which brings me back to the question of how do you truly “see” another?
The sight people need, which would more accurately be called insight, is the understanding of what gives them purpose, meaning, and nurturance. We might call this love, since that word plays a key role and remains undefined.
On the other hand, bundling everything you need to understand about purpose, meaning, and nurturance into a single word makes it incomprehensible. The question is, how to break this concept down into understandable parts without it collapsing into conceptual rubble?
Meaning
Meaning is based on value. You find your meaning by identifying what’s meaningful to you and recognizing your role in these things, people, or issues. For me, what’s meaningful is family and my authentic relationships.
Unfortunately, most of my family members don’t recognize me as one of their most meaningful relationships. This is typical in families, especially in Western culture, where families are weak.
This weakness can provide a safe separation. Many of the family traumas I deal with result from family relationships that should have remained separate. In those cases, I tell my clients they must separate from these relationships.
Family relationships can rarely be fixed. They might be moderated or tolerated, but fixing a relationship can only be done with the consent of all involved, and others are rarely at the same point that you are. I struggle to follow this advice myself. The trouble is that family brings commitments, and these commitments play a large role in one’s purpose.
I have come to find meaning in the relationships I have with the people I work with. That’s mostly my clients, but also the ghosts of people in my field. I feel meaningfully involved with issues that were important to people who came before me and who I may have never met. I know them vicariously through our shared goals in science.
I think of Paul Dirac, who said, “My life has been a failure.” This despite all he accomplished. I keep this in mind as I work on topics that are important to him. I never met Dirac, but he was the brother-in-law of my mentor Eugene Wigner.
Purpose
You assign purpose to your meaningful goals. If being a responsible parent gives you meaning, then being successful in this role is your purpose. I also find meaning in providing value to my clients. If they didn’t value me, I wouldn’t work with them, but then they probably wouldn’t hire me.
Two other purposes are developing for me. One is what I can achieve in science, the other is what I can achieve in personal relationships. These are ideas that are still developing.
I find scientific questions interesting, and I’ve lately felt something like a spiritual obligation to pursue this work. If I understand something important that others don’t, then I feel obliged to present what I see for our general benefit. I feel I’m providing support to other people who, like myself, struggle with false teachings.
I sometimes tell my clients that their struggles will benefit many, mostly those with whom they’re enmeshed. A person who regains a sense of clarity despite past trauma is setting an example for everyone who’s been similarly traumatized. They’re also clearing, cleansing, or removing the power used against them.
The 16th century poet George Herbert said, “Living well is the best revenge.” But it’s much more than revenge. It’s both a redemption from your role in the ill fates you suffered, and an act that disperses such clouds of ill fate that could plague others in the future. Your life’s work is always bigger than you.
Nurturance
We deserve support. It is not weak to want to be connected to others. At the same time, it’s not weak to refuse connection with people who do not respect or nurture you. It is possible that you are the only person who can fully understand and accept yourself. Even so, we can find purpose in nurturing others and being in relationships that nurture us.
There are co-dependent and co-creative relationships. There are negative and positive needs for nurturance. It’s hard for most people to see the difference between their negative and positive needs, because doing so requires recognizing your weaknesses.
A negative form of nurturance is parasitic. You are getting what you need at another person’s expense. This is negative even if the other person willingly sacrifices themselves to meet your needs. The key is whether your nurturance is helping or harming another.
Negative nurturance is easy to recognize, but it can be hard to avoid. If what another person needs is to reject or demean you, then the positive thing to do is to separate yourself from them. This is difficult if you’re in love or attached to them.
To let yourself be parasitized in order to feel nurtured is co-dependent. It does not serve you, nor them, nor is it a positive role model for anyone else. Co-dependent relationships set negative role models for everyone.
Positive nurturance begins as something you have for yourself. Once you know how to provide meaning and purpose for yourself, then this is the standard to judge what another is offering you. We are often told to love ourselves, and this is what it means.
It does not mean we should provide for ourselves all the love we need. Rather, it means that by having love for ourselves, we recognize a positive relationship with another. If you cannot recognize, support, or achieve a co-creative relationship, then you do not know what it means to love yourself.
Love
The most important things we need to learn are the things we cannot see. How do we learn about such things?
If we’re truly and irremediably blind to something, then we cannot understand it in a straightforward way. We either need to find a crack in our wall of blindness, or discover a new kind of learning.
Blind people have learned to “see” with their ears by developing something like sonar. Sighted people don’t do this and, possibly, cannot. It may require a rewiring of our optical cortex. They don’t learn to see, but they learn to navigate and spatially orient themselves. Their “sound sight” does not give them colors and it cannot discern what is too far away to hear, but it can discern objects in their immediate surroundings almost as well as sighted people.
If you have a troubled relationship, it probably involves a lack of insight. Where do you find the sight for something you cannot see?
I suspect the first thing you must do, as my psychic healer friend Wendy tells me, is to grow larger in order to see more. For Wendy, this expansion is in the heart space, her words for a realm of psychic insight. Referring to “psychic insight” isn’t going to tell most people where to look. Telling people to look where they cannot see doesn’t help.
We don’t know what a color would look like that we cannot see, but we do know the limits of the colors we can see. To see a larger heart space, or any space you cannot see, start by recognizing the limits of what you can see. Then, recognize that there is more.
You cannot know what this more is in the same way you’re accustomed to knowing things. You have to adopt a different way of knowing. Then, try to adapt it to the area where your sight ends.
This, incidentally, brings me back to physics because, while we live in a world of three spatial dimensions, there are subatomic objects that have one-dimensional properties. That is, they exist in only one dimension and do not exist in three.
This is an interesting inversion of the problem of learning to see more. It’s especially interesting because all subatomic particles have this property. Like it or not, the world is not three-dimensional!
In the realm of relationships, to understand how a relationship could be deeper, consider how other relationships could be stronger. This could mean your relationship with yourself, or with nature, God, or silence. For me, it also means my relationship with reality.
When I work with clients, I like to take them on hypnotic journeys to new places. When we reach a place they can no longer recognize, or in which they can no longer see, I tell them, “Good, that’s the place to start.”
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