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3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:
Five Featured Reviews of Paul Watzlawick's Books:
1. Paul Watzlawick's 
Pragmatics of Human Communication with coauthors Janet Beavin Bavelas and Donald D. Jackson.
In the year of 1977, I began in earnest reading about psychotherapy and this was one of the
first books that I read during that time. Prior to then I had read some of Eric Berne's books
[Layman's Guide, Games People Play], a little Freud, a little managerial psychology, and not much
else. Nothing prepared me for the vista of insights that Watzlawick and his colleagues had laid out
for me in their books. There were tricks and traps set for us by the very nature of our language
structures and other means of human communications. When one became aware of those tricks and
traps [interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes], one was better able to understand those
who seem inextricably caught up in those counter-productive activities that lead them into seeking
therapeutic help to escape from them. Here was my first exposure to meta-communication, or
communication about communication. As you read on, I caution you that you are entering a "Meta-Zone" which, not unlike the "Twilight Zone," may leave your head swimming at times and the rest
of your body trying to catch up. Enjoy the swim you may just come out better able to handle the
dizzying array of everyday communication by those unconsciously competent experts in meta-communication, those who are or should be seeking counseling for their problems.
If one examines the fox population in northern Canada, one finds a four-year cycle of peaks
and valleys, a situation that is unexplainable by just examining the fox population. When one
expands one's purview to include the local rabbit population, one finds an inverse relationship of
population between the two species, which suddenly becomes explainable since the fox population
lives off of the rabbit population. Next the authors tell of a man who collapses and is rushed to a
hospital. They find basically nothing wrong with the man and no reason for the collapse. Then
someone informs them that the man had just returned from mining copper for two years in the
Andes at 15,000 feet. In the final anecdote a bearded man is observed crawling around an open
meadow in circles on his hands and knees and quacking like a duck a totally crazy behavior in
anybody's book. Well, anybody but Konrad Lorentz's book, (page 43),
where he described how he went about imprinting ducklings to take him for their mother.
[paraphrased from pages 19 and 20]
[page 43 of King Solomon's Ring ] Inside one frame, a behavior is meaningless or seemingly crazy, inside another frame, the
behavior makes imminently good sense. No amount of studying the physiology of the foxes who
were dying out every four years would have helped explained the cause. No amount of studying
the Andes miner's physiology would have explained the cause of his collapse. No amount of
studying Lorentz's mind would have explained his curious behavior in the meadow (except asking
him what he was doing and why). Studying the mental structures of mental patients will often
come to the same end: no answer because there is basically no difference in their mental structures
from a normal person.
The three examples cover the subtitles triad of interactional patterns (fox-rabbit),
pathologies (man's collapse), and paradoxes (Lorentz's crawling in the meadow). On page 26 the
authors invoke the concept of memory by including a story by Ross Ashby in which he was at a
friend's house when a car went by. His friend's dog rushed to a corner and cringed there. The
friend explained the strange behavior by saying, "He was run over by a car six months ago." The car incident was unobservable to Ashby, but the dog's behavior was. We might say the
dog has a memory of the car accident, but Ashby says that memory "is a concept that the observer
invokes to fill in the gap caused when part of the system is unobservable."
Next topic covered is feedback and the authors give this brief description of positive and
negative feedback:
[page 31] Feedback is known to be either positive or negative; the latter will
be mentioned more frequently in this book since it characterizes homeostasis
(steady state) and therefore plays an important role in achieving and
maintaining the stability of relationships. Positive feedback, on the other
hand, leads to change, i.e., the loss of stability or change.
Both types of feedback involve re-introducing the output back into the system. In positive
feedback, an amplification occurs as a positive signal results in a positive increase of the signal.
In negative feedback, a positive deviation from the system norm results in a negative signal or
decrease and results in the system moving to back to the system norm. An electric motor heating
up is an example of positive feedback: as the motor ages, insulation breaks down, increased current
heats up the windings, more insulation breaks down, causing greater current flow and more heat
eventually the motor burns up. A home thermostat is an example of negative feedback: as the
room heats up, the thermostat reduces the heat applied to the room so that the room cools down
once more.
In addition the authors cover the black box concept, the consciousness and
unconsciousness, present vs. past, effect vs. cause, the circularity of communication patterns and
the relativity of normal and abnormal. All this material in Chapter 1 is but prologue to what
follows.
Chapter 2 contains "Some Tentative Axioms of Communication" and I will cover a few
of these to give you, dear Reader, a flavor of the book
Axiom: One Can Not Not Communicate. "Behavior has no opposite; one cannot not behave,"
the authors say, "if it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value,
i. e., is communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate."
(from page 48) One need only watch the police psychiatrist on the tv program Law & Order
interview reluctant suspects as to their state of mind during a criminal act to confirm that one
cannot not communicate. Whatever the suspects do or say during the interview, the psychiatrist
develops a diagnosis of their state of mind during the act in question.
[page 50,51] The impossibility of not communicating is a phenomenon of more
than theoretical interest. It is, for instance, part and parcel of the
schizophrenic "dilemma." If the schizophrenic behavior is observed with
etiological considerations in abeyance, it appears that the schizophrenic tries
to not communicate. But since even nonsense, silence, withdrawal, immobility
(postural silence), or any other form of denial is itself a communication, the
schizophrenic is faced with the impossible task of denying that he is
communicating and at the same time denying that his denial is a
communication.
Meta-communication is something that I was quite familiar with in my early career as a
computer programer and system analyst. It was like computer code which could be described as
meta-communication about what to do with the computer data. Computer code during execution
by the computer is a process and computer data at any time is a content. If you allow the computer
to confuse its code with its data, the result will be a computer crash or meaningless results. The
authors give the example of a sign in a restaurant that illustrates a con-fusion of the content of how
the manager acts to the process of talking to the manager about a problem:
[page 53] "CUSTOMERS WHO THINK OUR WAITERS ARE RUDE
SHOULD SEE THE MANAGER"
[page 54] As we shall see in the chapter on paradoxical communications,
confusions or contaminations between these levels communication and meta-communication may lead to impasses identical in structure to those of the
famous paradoxes in logic.
About the time I was reading this book, I started drawing cartoons that illustrated many of
the paradoxical communications or confusions or contaminations that I encountered in my life.
These cartoons can be viewed on the Violet-n-Joey Cartoon Page.
Axiom: Sequence of Events Can Be Punctuated Differently. This axiom is a real beauty as it
explains otherwise unexplainable communication deadlocks. I recall this process of understanding
the punctuation of events from Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind where he illustrated that the
simple description of a lumberjack chopping down a tree may be described two ways:
1) Man swings axe into tree, then chips fly away from the tree.
2) Chips fly away from tree, then Man swings his axe into the tree.
Both descriptions are equally valid, only the punctuation is different. The problem arises when one
uses the followed-by-therefore-caused-by fallacy. Thus to say, "chips fly away from tree causing
the man to swing his axe into the tree" is clearly a fallacy, but based on one valid punctuation of
the sequence of events. Now let us move into less clear interactional sequences.
[page 56] Disagreement about how to punctuate the sequence of events is at
the root of countless relationship struggles. Suppose a couple have a marital
problem to which he contributes passive withdrawal, while her 50 per cent is
nagging criticism. In explaining their frustrations, the husband will state that
withdrawal is his only defense against her nagging, while she will label this
explanation a gross and willful distortion of what "really" happens in their
marriage: namely, that she is critical of him because of his passivity. Stripped
of all ephemeral and fortuitous elements, their fights consist in a monotonous
exchange of the messages "I withdraw because you nag" and "I nag because
you withdraw."
Sequences can be punctuated differently and the nature of the relationship will be
determined by the chosen punctuation of each party.
Axiom: Human Beings Communicate Both Digitally and Analogically. This next axiom is
laughable or rather leads to an understanding of the origin of what laughter is all about.
[page 60] In the central nervous system the functional units (neurons) receive
so-called quantal packages of information through connecting elements
(synapses). Upon arrival at the synapses these "packages" produce excitatory
or inhibitory postsynaptic potentials that are summed up by the neuron and
either cause or inhibit its firing. This specific part of neural activity, consisting
in the occurrence or nonoccurrence of its firing, therefore conveys binary
digital information. The humoral system, on the other hand, is not based on
digitalization of information. This system communicates by releasing discrete
quantities of specific substances into the bloodstream. It is further known that
the neural and the humoral modes of intraorganismic communication exist
not only side by side, but that they complement and are contingent upon each
other, often in highly complex ways.
Consider my following thoughts as a brief summary or beginning of an aetiology of
laughter. If I may re-state simply what the authors have said above: the nervous system is digital
and the humoral system is analog. One deals with discrete on-off signals and the other with
continuously varying signals.
We know from split brain experiments that the nervous system on the left side of the body
receives its digital signals from the right side of the brain and vice versa. However, the humoral
system has no such left-right polarization. As such the analog chemical signals generated by the
humoral system are spread across areas of the body, whereas the digital signals generated by the
brain converge at the midline of the body, the signals from either side of the brain meeting or
slightly overlapping along that midline. Not surprisingly, most of the interesting and fun things in
life happen along the midline: nursing at one's mother's breast, kissing one's sweetheart, and
sexual intercourse.
What happens if the signals from the left brain and right brain are incongruous? Suppose
the signal from the left brain tells the right side of the body to relax and the signals from the
opposite side tells the left side of the body to tense up? Right at the midline, there appears a signal
to both tense up and relax! How does one deal with mutually contradictory commands? One
natural way is to follow both commands sequentially: first follow one command and then another.
When your body's midline follows that procedure, your abdominal muscles first clench and then
release in quick succession. Does this seem like an operational or procedural description of what
we otherwise know simply as "laughter" to you? It does to me.
Another process would involve the humoral system. It can only flood the body's torso with
the continuous analog signals of chemicals or neuro-transmitters triggered by either the right or
left side of the brain. The humoral signal will match the digital neural signals on one side of the
body, but, if the other side of the body receives a digital neural signal that is different from the
analog chemical signal, then laughter is the likely result. One side of the body tries to
accommodate itself to two mutually incompatible signals, which results in the paroxysms of
delight we know as laughter. In this process, the side of the body with the incompatible signals will
experience the sequential spasms and the repetitive muscle clenching and releasing could lead to
muscles cramps or pain. This is commonly called, "side-splitting laughter."
Back in 1978 I had been living with a woman for about a year and asked if she would marry
me. "Why get married and ruin a good thing?" she said. I gave serious consideration to her
question. I knew couples that had been good friends such as we were who got married and then
came to hate each other. What was it about marriage that could lead to good friends hating each
other? The authors point to an interesting paradox of marriage in Jay Haley's book:
[page 119, The Strategies of Psychotherapy] "When a man a woman decide
their association should be legalized with a marriage ceremony, they pose
themselves a problem which will continue throughout the marriage: now that
they are married are they staying together because they wish to or because
they must?"
[page 66] In the light of the foregoing, we would say that when to the mostly
analogic part of their relationship (courtship behavior) is added a
digitalization (the marriage contract) an unambiguous definition of their
relationship becomes problematic.
How did my wife of 24 years and I avoid that problem of why we were staying together?
We decided that we were not going to stay together for any specified length of time nor treat each
other differently. "The next two or three weeks" is enough was our motto. We basically
deconstructed the usual marriage vows, promises, and expectations. We saw them as a box that
people defined and then jumped into and wondered why they felt trapped. We decided to create
the usual box, but to define our relationship as existing outside of that box. The clauses of our
agreement were written up in what I called the 21st Century Marriage Contract and is posted at:
http://www.doyletics.com/21stcmc.htm Check Clause 4: We do not promise to stay together for
any specified period of time. And Clause 7: We do not agree to treat the other differently just
because we're married.
Axiom: Communications are either symmetrical or complementary. This is an interesting
axiom. Relationships between equals are symmetrical and relationships between non-equals are
complementary. I remember hearing once that "marriage is like having two department heads for
the same department." A department head has a complementary relationship to the other members
of the department. If both partners in a marriage are department heads, then by definition, they are
equals, and thus have a symmetrical relationship. But since each one is a department head, the
other one is a member of the department and by definition, they each have a complementary
relationship to each other. Given all these strikes against marriage, it is a wonder that marriages
survive at all.
[page 81] He and his wife had experienced many violent symmetrical
escalations, usually based on the question of who was right regarding some
trivial matter. One day she was able to prove to him conclusively that he was
factually wrong, and he replied, "Well, you may be right, but you are wrong
because you are arguing with me."
Double Bind: A Definition in Three Parts. Everyone knows what it's like to be in a bind you
must do something and are prevented from doing it. Many think that "double bind" is just a doubly
hard bind, and that is not the case. A "double bind" must have three specific components [quoted
from page 212]:
1. Two or more persons are involved in an intense relationship that has a high
degree of physical and/or psychological survival value for one, several, or all
of them.
2. In such a context, a message is given which is so structured that
(a) it asserts something
(b) it asserts something about its own assertion and
(c) these two assertions are mutually exclusive.
3. The recipient of the message is prevented from stepping outside of the
frame set by this message, either by metacommunicating (commenting) about
it or by withdrawing.
A person in a double bind situation will be punished for correct perceptions and defined
as bad for even insinuating that there be a discrepancy between what he does see and what he
"should" see. The old joke about the Jewish mother illustrates this dilemma. She gives her son two
new shirts for his birthday. When he goes to his mother's for dinner the next time, he wears one
of the shirts she gave him. "What?" she says insulted, "you didn't like the other one?" Typically
the son will be speechless, unable to metacomment and yet forced to comment by the structure of
the question from his mother. A more detailed example is given from Johnson et al. in a footnote:
[page 213] When these children perceived the anger and hostility of a parent,
as they did on many occasions, immediately the parent would deny that he was
angry and would insist that the child deny it too, so that the child was faced
with a dilemma of whether to believe the parent or his own senses. If he
believed his senses he maintained a firm grasp on reality; if he believed the
parent, he maintained the necessary relationship, but distorted his perception
of reality.
Luckily for people who get stuck in double binds, there are therapeutic double binds and
therapists who know how and when to implement them to extract a patient from a stuck situation.
These are mirror images of the pathogenic ones. Let's examine the three components of a
therapeutic double bind [quoted from page 241]:
1. It presupposes an intense relationship, in this case, the psychotherapeutic
situation, which has a high degree of survival value and of expectation for the
patient.
2. In this context, an injunction is given which is so structured that it
(a) reinforces the behavior the patient expects to be changed
(b) implies that this reinforcement is the vehicle of change
(c) thereby creates paradox because the patient is told to change
by remaining unchanged.
3. The therapeutic situation prevents the patient from withdrawing or
otherwise dissolving the paradox by commenting on it. Therefore, even though
the injunction is logically absurd, it is a pragmatic reality: the patient cannot
not react to it, but neither can he react to it in his usual, symptomatic way.
One technique using this process was pioneered by Mara Selivini Palazzoli in what she
called "paradoxical prescription" or "prescribing the symptom." The authors give an example of
a patient who was concerned about a hidden microphone in the therapist's office. Rather than
trying to talk him out of his notion, the therapist insisted on searching every square inch of the
office for a hidden microphone. This led the patient to be increasingly unsure about his suspicion
till finally the patient "plunged into a meaningful description of his marriage, and it turned out that
in this area he had good reasons to be suspicious." (page 243)
When I worked on the Crisis Line many years ago, I would occasionally get phone calls
from people who would ask for help with a problem and when you offered them a solution, they
would slough off the suggestion with such comments as, "That wouldn't work for me." "I already
tried that." and so on. No matter what the suggestion or how many suggestions one offered, they
countered with a good reason why that wouldn't work. Finally I took to using the following
process. After identifying that this person was one of those types for whom no suggestion would
work, I would stop suddenly and say, "I've listened carefully to your problem and all the reasons
you've given me why none of the suggestions I offered will work for you, and I must tell you
that in my professional opinion your situation is hopeless." This advice was offered as a suggestion
similar to the other ones that they had refused and they would invariably just as strongly refuse that
suggestion. They might bring up a suggestion I made earlier and say, "What if I do x?" I'd recant
for them the reason they had previously told me why x would not work and that would force them
to overcome their objection. Suddenly the roles were reversed, they were working to find solutions
for themselves and I was the one casting doubt on every suggestion they came up with.
The authors describe a similar case with a woman with persistent, severe headaches.
Medical test showed no organic damage and yet the headaches persisted. The psychiatrist realized
that the mere implication that psychiatry might help would doom his efforts to failure with her.
Here's what he did:
[page 246, 247] He therefore began by informing the patient that from the
results of all the previous examinations and in view of the fact that no
treatment had given her the slightest relief, there could be no doubt that her
condition was irreversible.
The woman refused to believe this and asked what use was psychiatry if it could do nothing
about her case. The doctor simply held her case history in the air and explained that she would
have to resign herself to the facts. She kept coming back for more of this, but each time she came
she was more and more free of the pain from her headaches. Finally she left treatment, greatly
improved, and convinced that the psychiatrist was unable to help her.
The pragmatics of human communication are stranger than I ever conceived them to be
before I encountered this book. If you will read and assimilate the contents of this book, you may
also reach the point where human communication seems manageable even in the midst of its
wonderful strangeness.
2. Paul Watzlawick's Change with co-authors John Weakland and Richard Fisch
The Preface begins with a famous story about relationships. An army in Tyrol had
surrounded the impregnable castle Hochosterwitz and had it under siege. The army was getting
restless and the commander had other pressing things to do. Inside, the fortress commandant
was faced with the fact that they were down to their last ox and last barrel of barley. What he
decided to do was the stuff of which myths are made: he had the ox slaughtered, had its guts
filled with barley, and had the ox thrown over the side of the castle. The army became so
discouraged at seeing this message of disdain for their siege that they pulled up their tent stakes
and went away. This example shows the theme of this book dramatically.
[page xiii] It deals with the age-old questions of persistence and change in
human affairs. More particularly, it is concerned with how problems arise,
and how they are perpetuated in some instances and resolved in others.
Most of all, it examines how, paradoxically, common sense and "logical"
behavior often fail, while actions as "illogical" and unreasonable as those
taken by the defenders of Hochosterwitz succeed in producing a desired
change.
From the authors' work at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, they were
accustomed to looking at things in the present rather than the past, in terms of the here and now
process instead of the reified content that constituted the past. They also had considerable
experience with the "startling and innovative techniques of Milton Erickson" - a master of
hypnotherapy, who often got results in the most counter intuitive manner. Infusing all of their
approaches and techniques was communication and change.
[page xv] It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another
person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of
one's relationship with that person and how it can, therefore, fail to influence
that person.
To introduce the concept of change, look at those parts of one's experience that is
constant first. As I read the passage below some twenty years ago, I drew a cartoon of two
fishes talking. One fish is responding to the other, "Water? What's that?" When one is in a
constant environment, one without change, it's difficult to notice those things that are constant,
much less to talk about them or discuss them. As Rudolf Steiner said almost a century ago,
"discussion begins when the thing discussed is not known." To perceive the invariant parts of
one's experience as something to be discussed means to make some part of it unknown.
Making the known into the unknown is something that an artist does in the process of
producing an art work. The artist takes known colors, mixes them and applies them in some
unique combination and the result is something previously unknown to the world, a new art
work.
[page 1] In the Western world the philosophers of science seem to agree
that change is such a pervasive and immediate element of our experience
that it could become the subject of thought [RJM: i.e., discussion] only
after the early Greek philosophers had been able to conceptualize the
antithetical concept of invariance or persistence. Until then there was
nothing that change could be conceptually contrasted with (this is a matter
of conceptualizing experience, not of finding "reality"), and the situation
must have been like one proposed by Whorf: that in a universe in which
everything is blue, the concept of blueness cannot be developed for lack of
contrasting colors.
Another important process for understanding change is the theory of logical types that
explains how the words used to describe a member of a class are often used to describe the
class itself, which exists at a higher level or logical type. An item on a menu and the menu
itself are two logical types and Bateson like to point out that "only a schizophrenic is likely to
eat the menu card instead of the meal (and complain of its bad taste, we would add)." (page 9)
Another example Bateson gives is the word wave which can be applied both to the class of
movements and a single member of a class. "Under friction, this meta movement will not lose
velocity as would the movement of a particle." A change within a class or a system in which
the system remains unchanged is called a first order change. The individual movement of a
water molecule in a water wave or local currents due to a fish passing by would be an example
of first order change in the wave. A change, such as the appearance of a thunderstorm that
increases the height of the wave would be a second order change. In a dream, to move from
one scene to another is a first order change, but to wake up is a second order change. As
becomes clearer, the further one reads into this book, the authors are focused on second order
change, a "change of change", so to speak, a change that makes a difference.
What about change that makes no difference? The authors give several examples. The
wife who divorces a weak man to marry a strong one and finds that the source of her discontent
remains. During WWII, the Nazis posted a sign giving the choice "National Socialism or
Bolshevik chaos?" This meant to imply that the Nazi choice was obvious over the Bolshevik
one. The underground pasted a sign under the poster that said, "Erdäpfel oder Kartoffel?"
which translates to "Spuds or Potatoes?" in English. A similar case could be today made for the
choice in the USA between many Republican or Democrat policies. When people in a
relationship are in hurting circumstances, their common choice is for change that makes no
change at all, namely, first order change, up until now.
There is a connection of opposites that drives one irrepressibly into the other. Jung
called the process by which this happens "enantiodrama." It is as if one cannot discover a way
to affect real change, second-order change, by staying within the system. The authors, writing
at the close of the 1960s predict the following enantiodrama which seem to have been played
out in society today:
[page 21] And, to cast a brief glance into the future, it is a fairly safe bet
that the offspring of our contemporary hippie generation will want to
become bank managers and will despise communes, leaving their well-meaning but bewildered parents with the nagging question: Where did we
fail our children?
"Beware the Enantiodrome, my friend," and "Be aware of its working in your life,"
would be good advice to all. Why is it so easy for the Enantiodrome to hide from us? It hides in
the shadows; in Jung's terms, it is the Shadow, that discounted and pushed away part of
ourselves that sneaks back when we're not looking.
Everyone has heard of the nine dots problem and how the solution to it involves
"thinking outside of the box." Here's a summary of the problem as the authors laid it out a
quarter of a century ago. "The nine dots shown in Figure 1 are to be connected by four straight
lines without lifting the pencil from the paper."
[page 25] Almost everybody who first tries to solve this problem introduces
as part of his problem-solving an assumption which makes the solution
impossible. The assumption is that the dots compose a square and that the
solution must be found within that square, a self-imposed condition which
the instructions do not contain. His failure, therefore, does not lie in the
impossibility of the task, but in his attempted solution. Having now created
the problem, it does not matter in the least which combination of four lines
he now tries, and in what order, he always finishes with at least one
unconnected dot. This means that he can run through the totality of the
first-order change possibilities existing within the square but will never
solve the task. The solution is a second-order change which consists in
leaving the field . . .
Consider now that the unsolved problems in our personal life remain unsolvable for a
similar reason: we have adopted and self-imposed conditions that were not in the original
instructions and we cannot find a way out of the problem so long as we remain within our self-imposed limits. Those limits are like water is to fishes: a pervasive and unconscious part of
their milieu. We cannot see our eyes except in a mirror because they are part of our seeing
apparatus. Likewise we cannot see our problem because it is part of the way we see the world.
In that case, a counselor, who exists outside our self-imposed limits and can see our problem in
its totality, can offer suggestions that we would have never considered from within the
problem.
What happens if we choose as a counselor a close friend or neighbor? Usually the
friend sees our problem through the same filter of limitations as we do and cannot come up
with any better solution that we can on our own. Their solutions are better than doing nothing,
so we apply them, one by one, but no matter how many we apply, nothing gets better. We may
even begin to think, "This problem is impossible - look at how many things I've tried." More
of the same in personal problems, just like trying more combinations of four lines in the nine-dot problem, will not result in a solution, but only a feeling of hopelessness.
What about such pernicious social evils as pornography or drugs? Will more of the
same repressive laws ever solve the problem? Read what the authors say about it. If I may
summarize their observation: "the problem is the solution."
[page 33] But the Danish example has shown that the complete
liberalization of pornography has not only not opened the floodgates of sin
and general depravity, but has actually made people ridicule and ignore it.
In the case of pornography, then, the "more of the same" solution (legal
repression) is not just the greater of two problems, it is the problem, for
without the "solution" there would be no problem.
But, I can hear at least one of my readers saying, what about the effects on our children?
Won't that lead them to become godless, evil, and lazy? My answer to that question would be,
"How would we tell the difference from the way they are now?" And is that really any different
from the attitude that adults have had of their children and teenagers for all of written history?
If you doubt this statement, read what was impressed into cuneiform clay tablets:
[page 33] A Babylonian clay tablet whose age has been estimated to be at
least three thousands years reads: "Today's youth is rotten to the core, it is
evil, godless, and lazy. It will never be what youth used to be, and it will
never be able to preserve our culture."
On page 35 is where I first encountered the phenomenon of the "Be Spontaneous
Paradox" which was later given the name by the authors in Chapter 6, Paradoxes. "Sleep is by
its very nature a phenomenon which can occur only spontaneously. It cannot occur
spontaneously when it is willed." The willing of any spontaneous act makes it impossible for
the act to proceed due to the paradoxical nature of the command. "Smile!" when said to the
subjects of an imminent snapshot will produce a dutiful faked smile, not a genuine smile. "Tell
me you love me." will produce the opposite effect of what one intends and is disastrous to any
relationship, if continued over long enough period of time. Experts in the BSP abound once one
becomes aware of this harmful process which claims to produce wanted results, but instead
tends to undermine the very reality it claims to create. Once again we have an example of
relationship interactions in which the problem is the solution.
In Paradoxes I found the following passage which may well have become the original
inspiration for my creation of the 21st Century Marriage Contract. The nine dots problem was
the box that we know as the usual marriage vows. In creating the contract, I built the box and
defined my wife-to-be and myself as outside the box by inverting the logic or sense of every
spoken marriage vow or unspoken expectation that I could conjure up at the time, and she and I
undertook an overt negotiation over the clauses of the contract.
[page 73] In general, the problems encountered in marriage therapy more
often than not have to do with the almost insurmountable difficulty of
changing the quid pro quo on which the relationship was originally based.
Of course, this quid pro quo is never the outcome of overt negotiation, but is
rather in the nature of a tacit contract whose conditions the partners may
be quite unable to verbalize, even though they are extremely sensitive to
any violations of these unwritten clauses. If conflict arises, the partners
typically attempt to solve it within the framework of the contract, and they
thus get caught in a nine-dot problem of their own making. For whatever
they do within the frame is being done on the basis of group property a,
and therefore leaves their overall pattern of relationship (the group of their
relationship behaviors) unchanged. Tacit interpersonal contracts of the
kind we are examining here are bound to become obsolete, if only as the
result of the passage of time, and the necessary change then has to be a
change of the contract itself (i.e., a second-order change) and not merely a
first-order change within the bounds of the contract.
Confucius quote on page 77 says, "The way out is through the door. Why is it no one
will use this exit?" Is it perhaps because the door is not visible against the background of the
invariance of first order change? Or perhaps because we fear to step outside the comfortable
box filled with problems we already know about?
Another form of paradoxical injunction is when a parole officer tells the newly released
convict, "Trust me." The officer is an agent of the state and has to enforce the rules and thus is
not really worthy of the trust of the convicts. The authors, in training parole officers, found it
useful to suggest that they tell their parolees, "You should never fully trust me or tell me
everything." This has the sound of truth more than the "Trust me" statement and leads to the
necessary development of trust for a successful interaction between parole officer and parolee.
The Gentle Art of Reframing chapter begins with the classic fence painting story of
Tom Sawyer. Simply by a subtle reframing of painting as fun rather than work, Tom acquires a
bevy of volunteer helpers. Tom's skills would apply well to that of being a psychotherapist, as
it is usually fruitless to merely point to a doorway out of a client's problem, they must be led to
consider that walking through the doorway is preferable to remaining inside the security of
their all too familiar problem space.
We must ever be aware of what motivates anyone that we would wish to understand or
motivate. This quote from Francis Bacon goes back to 1577 and is still much applicable today:
[page 105] "If you would work any man, you must either know his nature
or fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him, or his
weakness and disadvantages, and so awe him; or those that have interest in
him, and so govern him. In dealing with cunning persons, we must ever
consider their ends to interpret their speeches; and it is good to say little to
them, and that which they least look for."
The setting of goals for a therapeutic contract is one of the things covered in the
Practice of Change chapter. If one approaches the presenting problem as the tip of the iceberg,
the "way toward the solution will be long, tortuous, and even dangerous." On the contrary the
authors set up a positive Rosenthal Effect by setting concrete, reachable goals. The power of
expectation in achieving results was shown experimentally by Rosenthal in 1966. EAT-O-TWIST means Everything Allways Turns Out The Way It's Supposed To, and this
epigrammatic acronym that I crafted some twenty plus years ago was based in part on my
understanding of Rosenthal's work.
[page 112] Robert Rosenthal has presented experimental evidence that the
opinions, outlooks, expectations, and theoretical as well as practical biases
of the experimenter, interviewer, or we would add, therapist, even if never
made explicit, have a definite effect on the performance of his subjects,
whether they are rats or humans.
There is a potpourri of therapeutic approaches in the penultimate chapter
Exemplifications. Dealing with the "Why Don't You, Yes But" game players is one of them.
My approach to such people on the Crisis Line was to listen to their problem, offer half a dozen
solutions, to which the predictable response would come, "Yes, but I tried that, etc." And then I
would pause, take a deep breath and say in the most authoritative voice I could muster, "I have
listened carefully to your responses as I offered you solutions, and now I must tell that in light
of my years of experience and professional knowledge I think that your situation is hopeless."
Then I would wait -- I could almost hear their resisting muscles flexing on the other end of
the phone line. Soon, they would say, "But, what if I ..." and would offer a slight modification
of something that I had suggested earlier. I would say, "Yes, but remember that ..." and I would
repeat one of the many objections to change that they had offered me earlier. All the while this
interchange went on, a remarkable thing had happened: they were on their own side! They were
offering suggestions to be tried, any one of which might get them through the door of solution
to their problem, if they chose to actually apply it. The hopelessness was now gone, and life
seemed manageable again.
People say they want change when what they want is for things to stay the same while
their problem is invisibly lifted from them without any effort on their part. Or perhaps they
want change, but change is so scary to them that they reject every change out of hand for some
spurious reason. An oyster has very strong muscles that prevent it from being opened against its
will. When an oyster shucker opens an oyster, the oyster's muscle is severed and the oyster
dies. Many people in hurting situations are like the oyster, they would die rather than allow
their shell to opened against their will and their problem removed from within. This book has
ample suggestions about how to go about the paradoxical task of getting the oyster to willingly
open its shell. Will all of these suggestions work? One can only say with the authors, "The only
reliable basis for judging the value of a method remains the result achieved by its application."
3. Paul Watzlawick's The Invented Reality
In the inside of the front of this book I pasted a Jim Davis Garfield comic strip from the
Times-Picayune of Feb 8, 1985. It shows Garfield on a fence getting hit by a thrown shoe and
the word SPLUT! marks the sound of the shoe's impact. Garfield turns, raises his index finger
and objects to the cartoonist, "Hey, wait a minute! Shoes don't go 'SPLUT'!" In the next panel,
a pie hits him in the face with a SPLUT! and he says, "That's more like it."
Here was Garfield helping to invent his reality or rather shape it to his expectations as
the rest of us do unconsciously all the time. The process of creating our reality hardly ever
appears in the cartoon panels that we call "life" unlike this Garfield cartoon. Garfield was
breaking the frame of the cartoon to interact with the cartoonist, a process not unlike what we
do in therapy with our therapists. We explain how we have invented our reality, and we expect
them to take out the rough edges that we forgot that we had put inside our cartoon of life. Jim
Davis was inadvertently making a "contribution to constructivism" as befits the subtitle of
this book, which is full of such contributions carefully selected and edited by Paul Watzlawick.
Watzlawick writes in his Foreword of a "growing awareness that any so-called reality is
in the most immediate and concrete sense the construction of those who believe they
have discovered and investigated it."
[page 10] In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose
inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something
that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his
world view and actions.
Does a ship's captain, who without charts sails his ship through a strait at night, add to
the knowledge of the world? No, he does not. He does not even know that the strait existed
because he experienced none of the constraints that the strait imposed. A captain whose ship
foundered on the rocks that line the strait does add knowledge of the existence of that particular
constraint to be avoided. Thus Ernst von Glasersfeld is led to say, "The only aspect of that
'real' world that actually enters into the realm of experience is its constraints. . ."
[page 24] Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with
convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does
not reflect an "objective" ontological reality, but exclusively an ordering
and organization of a world constituted by our experience. The radical
constructivist has relinquished "metaphysical realism" once and for all and
finds himself in full agreement with Piaget, who says, "Intelligence
organizes the world by organizing itself."
This seems silly, some of you may be thinking, can we not know something by seeing
it? Consider that the thing you see exists in a past some milliseconds before the light signal
reaches your eyes and is transmitted by your nervous system to your brain. Thus our knowing
that we saw something is not immediate knowledge but is a construction of what happened
after the fact. "It allways happens before you know it" is one of Matherne's Rules. In fact,
Glasersfeld points out that "factum and fact both come from the Latin facere, to make!". Even
facts are constructed from our experience, an experience that Thomas Kuhn warns us has been
formed into a set of stable perceptual filters he called paradigms and these paradigms lead us
to see what we expect to see. Thus when the Trobiander islanders saw Darwin's ship the Beagle
sitting in the waters off their island, it was so much bigger than their tiny canoes, that they
could not see a ship, and reported seeing only a big bird floating in the water. What one sees
out there in the world today is constrained because one's trained to it. One might say because
one is con-ned and trained to it. [See Goebbels advice to his propaganda managers below.]
Epistemology, that mellifluous mouthful of a meaning, is the science, simply put, of how we come to
know something. It "becomes the study of how intelligence operates, of the ways and means it
employs to construct a relatively regular world out of the flow of its experience." (Page 32)
In Heinz von Foerster's chapter he proposes "to interpret cognitive processes as never-ending recursive processes of computation." (Page 48) The more recent application of this
insight can be found in the Edelman's "Theory of Neuronal Group Selection" in which
recursive loops of neuronal groups are postulated as the unit of selection in the construction of
brain function. Such a view is reminiscent of Rupert Riedl's statement on page 73 that,
"Evolutionary epistemology generally regards the evolution of organisms as a process of
accumulating knowledge."
In Watzlawick's chapter, he attacks the "followed by, therefore caused by" fallacy in
which it is assumed to be the case that the cause always precedes the effect so that if an event
occurs after another event, the prior event is deemed to be the cause of the latter one. In a
recursive loop, there is a blurring of cause and effect that makes it difficult to discuss either one
in isolation. Much of psychotherapy is such a recursive loop where the therapist attacks
problems that didn't seem to exist before the therapist attacked it. The most memorable
example in recent years has been the discovery that "recovered memories" of childhood sexual
abuse were often fabricated. In addition one need only watch the tv show "Law & Order" to
discover a plethora of psychiatric diagnoses that "unlike the diagnoses in all other medical
specialties do not so much define as create a pathological condition." A pathological
condition whose main purpose, it seems to me, is to get a criminal defined as a victim of the
pathological condition created for that very purpose.
[page 66] Half a century ago the Viennese writer and critic Karl Kraus
hinted at this possibility in his bitter aphorism according to which
psychoanalysis is the illness whose cure it considers itself to be.
In Watzlawick's chapter on "Self-Fulfilling Prophecies" he gives the following
definition of the process that is too often used and too little understood, up until now.
[page 95] A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that,
purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted
event to occur and thus confirms its own "accuracy."
Thus "prophecy" is too strong a word for the process, but I also hold that "prediction" is
also too strong a word, whereas "assumption" or "expectation" is closer to what happens. Our
construction of our reality so often entails an assumption, an idea, expectation or supposition in
our mind about how something is going to turn out, and it makes little difference whether the
outcome is supposed to be good or bad. Everything Allways Turns Out The Way It's Supposed
To (EAT-O-TWIST) is how I describe this process, and I will often say or think the short
acronym EAT-O-TWIST to remind myself that, whenever something negative happens, it was
my supposing somewhere back in time, usually unbeknownst to me, that led to this outcome.
With that reminder to myself, I proceed to update my suppositions with more positive outcomes
for the future from now on.
One application of EAT-O-TWIST is in the rule that the first time is always the hardest
after all, the first time is not preceded by any confirmed supposition. Scientists trying to
grow a never-before grown crystal will work in a laboratory for months or years to get the first
one grown. Afterwards growing the same crystal is much easier.
"So what everything's easier
the second time." you may be thinking. And you would be right if it only applied to those same
scientists who did the first crystal, but it is a well-known phenomenon that once a crystal has
been grown for the first time, even scientists halfway around the world have an easier time of
growing one like it, even if they do not change their method of growing the crystal. I first
encountered this in Rupert Sheldrake's "A New Science of Life." One pernicious effect of
EAT-O-TWIST is in the area of psychiatric diagnoses as Watzlawick points out:
[page 105] Suffice it to say that an essential part of the self-fulfilling effect
of psychiatric diagnoses is based on our unshakable conviction that
everything that has a name must therefore actually exist. The
materializations and actualizations of psychiatric diagnoses probably
originate largely from this conviction.
Propaganda has the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy if we read the words of Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist of World War II. As I read this I thought of the recent
book "Media Bias" in which it is pointed out how the major broadcast media use the label
"Conservative" to refer to those to the right of mainstream thought but omit the label of
"Liberal" to those left of mainstream, as if by omission to saturate the American public with the
idea that Liberal ideas and their proponents are in mainstream of public thought. Perhaps they
have studied Goebbels carefully.
[page 112] This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person,
whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the
propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated.
Propaganda has of course a purpose, but this purpose must be disguised
with such shrewdness and virtuosity that he who is supposed to be filled
with this purpose never even knows what is happening.
One would imagine that the sane can easily be distinguished from the insane in an
institutionalized setting, but the very nature of the setting is such that all behaviors exhibited by
inmates are interpreted as resulting from a presupposed insanity. EAT-O-TWIST! A study was made by placing eight normal persons into such an institution and instructing them to
behave normally. None of the inmates were discovered to be sane by any of the staff of the
institution (although it was reported that few of the inmates were fooled). One of the normals
who took copious notes during his internment was diagnosed as having a "writing compulsion."
The complete results of the test case is reported by David L. Rosenhan in his chapter titled, "On
Being Sane in Insane Places."
The Garfield cartoon mentioned at the start of this review was an example of the topic
of the chapter by Rolf Breuer on "Self-Reflexivity in Literature", if I may stretch literature to
include the comic strip, my first acquaintance with literature as a youth. As I read the following
passage I was reminded of Woody Allen in a movie queue having a disagreement over what
Marshall McLuhan said and having Marshall McLuhan step into the discussion to straighten
them out on what he said.
[page 147] Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times,
passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by
references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play.
One of the problems of modern society is the prevalence of suicide among our young
people. In this passage from his Epilogue, Watzlawick tells us that both the suicide and the
seeker are both looking for something, but the slight difference in their approach makes the
difference between life and death.
[page 326] The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference
between them is slight.
The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is
seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that he has not yet looked
in the right place.
There may be only a slight difference between our normal of reality as something out
there and the view of the constructivist that reality out there is constructed within us, but that
slight difference can make an enormous difference in one's life.
"How do we know what we believe we know?" In the words of the song from the
musical "South Pacific", we have to be carefully taught. Watzlawick returns the favor to those
who taught him by teaching us in turn to discover the roots of the unconscious thinking
processes called reality construction which are the basic building blocks of our lives in so many
ways, up until now.
4. Paul Watzlawick's The Language of Change
This book was written in the mid 1970s when interest swelled in Milton Erickson's
hypnotherapeutic work. Watzlawick dedicated the book as follows:
To Dr. Milton H. Erickson, Who Heals With Words
Around the same time interest in split brain studies began and Right Brain-Left
Brain studies were written up in many journals and books, especially in the field of
psychotherapy. The reductionists even claimed to be able to explain Erickson's techniques in
terms of left-right brain communication. In this book, Watzlawick explains the two languages
of the brain, the left brain mode of the scientist and the right brain mode of the artist. The
studies of the sides of the brain used the standard tool of medicine: examine how a human with
a defect in a certain area acts in order to determine what function missing in one who has a
defect or lesion in that area compared to one without a similar defect in the same area. A
normal person without lesions is like a fish swimming in water who is unable to understand
what water is until it flops out of the water and is unable to breathe. Once a lesion is present
studies of functions are compared to normal persons and pertinent functions are identified for
the area with the lesion.
[page 26] In his book The Double Brain, Diamond mentions several studies
which show that lesions of the right half of the brain can also impair the
execution of sequential processes (for example, dressing), which I
assume have become quite automatic as a result of numerous
stereotypical repetitions and were probably stored as right-hemispheric
subroutines, recallable at will before the lesion.
It is normally understood that the left brain controls sequential functions and the right
brain more holistic or global functions. Diamond's studies showed that the global repetition of
certain sequences are stored by the right brain even though they comprise sequences of left
brain functions. Watzlawick goes into details about the split brain experiments with patients
who had their corpus callosum cut, a commissurotomy, as it is called. Severe epileptic seizures
were eliminated by this surgical procedure and only specially constructed experiments could
discern a difference in the patients. They acted as though they had two different brains. Their
visual field and hands acted as a channel of communication to replace the plenum previously
provided by their corpus callosum which connected the two sides of the brain. Thus, the
experiment required that the visual fields be separated and objects placed in the visual field of
one side of the brain be handled by the hand connected to the other side of the brain. Under
those conditions very interesting and insightful results were obtained.
[page 30, 31] In the series of neutral geometrical figures being presented at
random to the right and left fields, a nude pin-up was included and flashed
to the right (nonverbal) hemisphere. The girl blushes and giggles. Sperry
asks, "What did you see?" She answers, "Nothing, just a flash of light,"
and giggles again, covering her mouth with her hand. "Why are you
laughing then?" asks Sperry, and she laughs again and says, "Oh, Dr.
Sperry, you have some machine!"
The experimenters noted how similar her response was to someone who might be
repressing some inappropriate sexual material. It is almost as if someone suffering from
repression had achieved a functional commissurotomy such that communication between their
left brain and right brain were blocked for certain subjects even with an otherwise intact corpus
callosum.
[page 31] The minor hemisphere also commonly triggers emotional
reactions of displeasure in the course of ordinary testing. This is evidenced
in the frowning, wincing, and negative head shaking in test situations
where the minor hemisphere, knowing the correct answer but unable to
speak, hears the major hemisphere making obvious verbal mistakes.
The authors are "led to the assumption that we have two conscious minds which,
ideally, are capable of harmonious, complementary integration for the purpose of grasping and
mastering our outer and inner reality, but which, if and when conflict arises, may be unable to
communicate with each other for lack of a common language." (page 38) How does all this
knowledge of left-right brain function become useful in therapy? The author list these three ways and deal with them in separate chapters:
[page 47]
1. The use of right-hemisphere language patterns
2. Blocking the left hemisphere
3. Specific behavior prescriptions
These three chapters 6, 7, and 8 comprise the bulk of the useful part of the book. There
are many examples given in the three chapters, all of them worth reading directly, but I'll share
one in the behavior prescriptions chapter. It involves Milton Erickson, world-renown
hypnotherapist in his time, who paradoxically did his best work without doing anything
identifiable as hypnotic trance. This was one of those cases. A couple who owned a restaurant
came to Milton for help. The wife insisted the husband should manage the restaurant, but the
husband insisted he'd like to manage it, but she won't let him. What did Milton do? He
arranged for the husband to get to the restaurant a half hour before the wife did! That's it. And
here's what happened:
[page 134] When the husband arrived a half hour before his wife, he
carried the key. He opened the door. He unlocked everything. He set up the
restaurant for the day. When his wife arrived, she was completely out of
step and way behind. So many things had been set in motion by him and he
was managing them.
Within a week or two the wife was staying longer at home, finding things to do there,
while her husband showed her that he could run the restaurant. Both parties were happy. All it
took was a little action no interpretation. Master at work.
Just in case you may think that this example makes it sound all too easy to create deep
pervasive change in a person, let me demonstrate a technique for anticipating resistance offered by
the ancient Greek therapist Aristotle. This is bound to sound a bit ridiculous, but you preempt
the resistance by bringing forth reasons to show that you are justified in offering advice. If you
still don't understand what I'm getting it, let me say that there exists a relatively simple
solution, but I'm almost sure you're not going to understand it or like it at first, especially if
you feel that I'm doing something a little sneaky. This will be difficult for you, because on the
surface this approach is likely to look quite absurd.
The previous paragraph was a summary and a demonstration of the methods the authors give of
"preempting" the resistance (Pages 150-151). If you weren't reading this right now, I would
explain to you a close derivative of preempting which is pretending that you're not saying
something while you actually say it. In fact, when you use the word "not" you are likely using
this very process. "Do not think of a pink elephant." was the example I heard Bandler and
Grinder use a lot in their early seminars in the pre-NLP days. What was the color of the
elephant? Everyone knew it: pink. Try this: as you listen to people talk, drop the not's from
their words. You'll have immediate access to the images or realities that they are living within.
I would not want you to think that you can always re-phrase a sentence containing a not so as to
create a positive image of what you want. I know that as of now most people do not look at
communication that way. Cut that out!
Sorry 'bout that, Chief, got carried away. It will not happen again.
Okay, I'm incorrigible, but if you do not think that this book contains lots of great ideas
about how to achieve deep pervasive change in people's lives, then perhaps you should meet
my friend Tony who told me the other day, "You know, Bobby, there is no such thing as piano
playing; I have myself tried it several times and nothing came of it."
5. Paul Watzlawick's How Real is Real? Communication, Disinformation, Confusion
This was a landmark book when I first read it back in the late seventies, and the chance to
re-read it in my own hardback copy in the nineties reminded me of the new concepts I first
encountered in Watzlawick's work. (Note: This book contains the harpoon story that led me to my idea of how dolpins communicate. You can read about it in my novel, The Spizznet File.) The idea of confusion as a creative point of change came from
this book. (I had a sign on my counseling office: "I don't avoid confusion, I create it." I got it after
reading this book.) Next is the concept of the Be Spontaneous Paradox. This is the only written
reference I've found to it. This paradox occurs when someone attempts to do consciously what can
only be done effectively unconsciously. Examples are: sneezing, going to sleep, and enjoying
oneself. Recognizing the source of a problem as this paradox tells one how to undo the problem. For
example, telling the amnesiac to try staying awake an extra hour every night past her normal
bedtime. The unconscious effort, the switch from "making oneself fall asleep" to "trying to stay
awake" will usually allow the natural sleep process to prevail. Whereas the body stays awake when
"trying to fall asleep," it will drift into sleep while "trying to stay awake." Another example is the
following cure for sneezing: offer the sneezer $20 for the production of another sneeze. This
immediately changes the sneezer from an unconscious victim of a natural process into a
manufacturer of one. The resulting change of process turns off the sneeze reflex as if a switch had
been thrown to deactivate it.
Watzlawick's insights into communication and reality are valuable additions to the field of
human interaction. He brings the mind of a scientist and the heart of a psychotherapist to his work
and has produced a book that is as accessible to the layman as it is useful to the professional. After
reading this book one is left with the impression that reality is rather un-real after all.
And for my Good Readers, heres the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Readers Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Readers Treasury. NOTE: these Blurbs are condensations of the Full Reviews sans footnotes and many quoted passages.
1.) ARJ2:
The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, GA#177 by Rudolf Steiner
Awake! That's the theme of this book, these series of lectures given in 1917, near the end of World War
I and the time of the Russian revolution. "I am awake," you may be thinking, and the fact that you're reading this
review indicates that you are awake to the physical world, plus the fact that you're reading about Rudolf Steiner's
lectures indicates you are able to develop ideas about the spirit and are thus awake to the spiritual world.
[page 16, 17] We need to be awake and alive for the sake of humanity. If anthroposophy
is to fulfil its purpose, its prime task must be to rouse people and make them really
wake up. Merely knowing what is going on in the physical world, and knowing the laws
that human minds are able to perceive as operative in this world is no more than being
asleep in a higher sense. Humanity is only full awake when people are able to develop
notions and ideas of the world of the spirit. This is all around us, just as air and water,
the stars, the sun and the moon are all around us. when we are physically asleep we are
wholly given up to the internal processes that go on in the body during the night and
have no idea of anything in the physical world around us. We are asleep in exactly the
same way when we are wholly given up to the physical environment, and to the world and
the laws of the intellect, and have no idea of the world of the spirit that is all around us.
How can people mature into old age and not know about the world of the spirit which is all around us?
Certainly the people in ancient India knew of the world of spirit and each of them grew wise as they grew old and
were revered. Think of an elderly person you know. Do you consider them wise? Would you seek their advice
about some problem which is troubling you today? Likely you answered, No, immediately without much thought.
Why is this? Are people today sleep-walking through life by their monomaniacal focus on the physical world?
Yes, one might say that. But there is a deeper reason which involves the evolution of consciousness over the
millennia since the time of Old India, an evolution which had the curious effect that each century there was a
decrement in the age in the age of maturity. What was 50 for Old India has been reduced to the age of 27 today.
This is the age at which our automatic maturity ends, if we do nothing on our own accord to further our wisdom.
Since few people take such measures, the majority of people in our world remain at the age of maturity they were
when they were 27. The graybeard judge sitting on the bench a year from retirement is likely no wiser than he was
at 27, or the hospital administrator after 30 years experience in her field who is no wiser than she was at 27.
Someone once said that a high school graduate today is fit at 18 only to flip hamburgers and at 27 is running
a company. One cannot at age 27, without an extraordinary childhood, be expected to understand the spiritual
world, since our educational systems teach primarily how to maneuver and succeed in the physical world. Anyone
who succeeds dramatically in life in the physical world will have little inducement to learn about the spiritual world,
until perhaps it is too late. In an interesting synchrony, the Mystery of Golgotha took place at age of maturity for
its time, 33. The upshot is this, "People who do not take up anything spiritual remain 27 years old even if they live
to be 100." Our world today is ruled and governed by such people, no matter what country or culture, whether
in a town council, the White House, or the United Nations, at whatever level, our so-called leaders are only as
mature as any 27-year-old. In our physical prowess, we head downhill after twenty-seven, but as far as maturity
in soul and spirit, we have around us a level playing field. Anyone who rises from that level field is deemed as
remarkable, even though if pressed, few could express why the person is exceptional. The reason is that one must
possess maturity in soul and spirit to recognize it in others, but one can recognize its importance even if one is on
that level playing field of 27!
Steiner in 1917 recognized David Lloyd George who was Prime Minister of England from 1916 to 1922
as the epitome of the 27-year-old man pressed into high office. George was in fact elected as a Member of
Parliament at age 27 in 1890. One can see the 27-year-old naivete in the older Lloyd George's laissez-faire
attitude towards Hitler in the 1930s as he moved into power, saying such things as "Germany is our friend", and
even after Hitler moved armed forces into the Rhineland, he called Hitler the "George Washington" of Germany.
Steiner had equally condemning remarks about the youthful naivete of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson with his
famous 14 Points which helped sow the seeds of German resentment which led to World War II.
We live in an age of increasing knowledge of the physical world and increasingly amazing technology. Few
people stop to think where all these amazing new ideas come from. If I asked the typical 27-year-old (anyone over
27) I would get the answer, "Somebody thought it up."
Few study the intense work which went into the "thinking up" of
an invention. It is a process which like Edison said, is "98% perspiration and 2% inspiration". But where does
that vital 2% come from, Edison never mentioned, because he was one of the most clever 27-year-olds of the
20th Century, but only clever about physical things, how to make intricate machines from ideas, usually ideas from
other people. He did it with his phonograph, motion pictures, and light bulbs, and many other inventions. So
where does that 2% inspiration come from? Not from a machine, not from a human being, certainly. Ask any
inventor where the original idea came from and if you dig deeply, you'll get, "It just came to me." Or "out of the
blue". Both of which are ways of saying it came from the spiritual world, but inventors are part of that level playing
field of 27-year-olds what else could they think to say?
There is a basic law which governs evolution and it is one that all humans should be aware of because it will
help us to understand the direction of evolution and how we are prepared for each next step in evolution.
[page 62] . . . the law of world history of which I have spoken is that as evolution
proceeds, the gods always rule for a time within a particular sphere of elemental spirits
and then human beings enter into this same sphere and use the elemental spirits.
It is important that we discover that these elemental spirits are the "same kind as those used by the gods to
bring about birth and death."
[page 62] In earlier times, the elemental spirits of birth and death essentially served the
divine spirits who guided the world; since our day and this has been going on for some
time now the elemental spirits of birth and death are serving technology, industry and
human commerce. It is important to let this disturbing truth enter into our souls with all
its power and intensity.
Is it possible, you may be thinking, that when human beings take over some job of the gods, they mess up
badly? One need only look to the sinking of the entire primordial continent of Atlantis for one example of a
catastrophe resulting after humans failed in taking over the processes of the gods.
[page 63] This led to serious mischief in the Atlantean age, so that over the last four or
three periods of civilization the whole of Atlantean civilization had to be guided towards
its own destruction. Our own civilization was saved and brought across from Atlantis, as
I have described elsewhere. . .
Humans do not learn without making mistakes and those mistakes can lead to catastrophes which arise to
correct those mistakes, wipe the slate clean, so we can proceed in a better direction on the next cycle.
"Civilization cannot continue in an unbroken upward trend; it has to go through a succession of rising and falling
waves." (Page 64) How many times have you seen in history that humankind worked toward something good
which turned out very badly? "We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again."
(Page 66)
What is philistinism except trying to solve the problems of today with the solutions of yesterday? It is well
to stick to norms, to follow established rules, but each evolution of consciousness, of humanity brings with it new
norms which the philistines among us will detest and try to subvert.
[page 83] In some respects, philistinism is the opposite of a true understanding of human
nature, for philistines always like to stick to the norm. Anything which does not fit in
with this is considered abnormal.
To overcome the increasingly materialistic and philistine tendencies requires that humans seek spiritual
understandings and ideas which meet the new and changing situations. Unless humans rise to this challenge, the
last remaining portion of our original body, soul, and spirit which is non-physical, that is, the soul will be taken
away from us by definition. Can this happen today? Recall that in an early Ecumenical Council, the spirit nature
of man was declared non-existent by fiat by the authorities of the world at the time.
PLANET WITHOUT LAUGHTER
This reminds me of a story written by Raymond Smullyan in his amazing book,"This Book Needs No Title".
There existed a planet without laughter in which the few people who laughed were put into mental hospitals by
psychiatrists to cure them, suspecting their irrational laughing behavior was clearly of psychogenic origin. They
found a drug which cured them of laughing, called "laughazone", but the drug had the side-affect of causing the
patients to scream. Some doctors thought that the laughing people were happier than the screaming ones, but the
argument was made, "What use is it to be merely happy, when the happiness is based purely on psychotic
delusions?"
One might think that Professor Smullyan was joking with this story, but his carefully crafted story gives us
a serious look at how various behaviors can be deemed undesirable by the use of abstract logical reasoning and
lead to incarceration in a mental hospital until the person is cured by some drug or vaccine. Believe or not, having
a soul may be deemed a pathological behavior in the future by the authorities of the world in our time, the
materialistic scientific establishment. Those who blithely call themselves "humanists" will attempt to do the most
inhumane thing of all: remove the soul from the human being. This will be done by a vaccine, Steiner intimates.
Recall that he was speaking of this in 1917.
Ever think about what the elemental world consists of? Ever think that it's some airy-fairy, non-existent
world? If you have thought about such things and other things, then you have lived in the reality of the elemental
world and helped create substances in the elemental world with your thoughts. How could materialistic physicians
be so dense as to have thoughts about driving the soul out of human beings? What is the relationship between the
physicians' thoughts and the elemental thought-space? The elemental thought-space has living thoughts and these
physicians have dead or corpse-thoughts. Abstract thoughts based on the sensory data around us are corpse-thoughts. All of us utilize corpse-thoughts when we use abstract logical concepts.
After science and medicine, the other field which is filled with corpse-thoughts to day is education. Steiner
says, "There is no other field where humanity has entered as deeply into materialism as it has in education." (Page
100) Clearly if you wish to pass an examination to be a teacher, you must respect and hold these corpse-thoughts
but once you become a teacher, you will have to learn to deal with living thoughts to receive the intuitions and
inspirations necessary to reach your students.
[page 101] Examinations for prospective teachers must therefore be organized in such
a way that candidates with intuitive and prophetic gifts do particularly well. Candidates
who do not have such gifts must be made to fail their exams, however great their
knowledge.
Do we search for and recognize that our teachers of our youth today must be prophets? Likely, we do not,
but the time is coming when this will be necessary.
[page 101] The last thing we do today is to consider the prophetic gifts of people who are
to become teachers. We still have a long way to go with regard to many thing that will
have to be done. Yet the course of human evolution will eventually force people to
accept such principles. Many of the materialists of our age would, of course, consider
it a crazy notion to say that teachers should be prophets. But it will not be for ever.
Humanity will be forced to recognize these things.
There is another aspect of teaching which is not taken into account today: karma. Surrounding us everywhere
we go are people with whom we have connections from a previous lifetime, some of them will be family and
associates, some will be teachers, and others will be students.
[page 112] Something else, however, which relates to something much more subtle, will
be important. It will be important that the question of karma, or destiny, is taken into
account, especially with regard to education and teaching methods. The people with
whom my karma brought me together in childhood and youth certainly are important.
And a tremendous amount depends on it that in our teaching we are aware that we and
our pupils have been brought together. You see, much depends on a particular quality
of mind and attitude.
Children are imitators, especially during their seventh through fourteenth years. They need authority figures,
parents and teachers, who will speak the truth to them as they will believe everything they hear during this crucial
seven year learning period. How good the teacher is that's less important than how the teacher is connected
with the soul of the child, but the teacher needs to be aware of the possibility of karmic connections. The child
may seem to be a blank slate, but the child's soul likely had a personal relationship to the teacher in a previous
lifetime from which both child and teacher can benefit in this lifetime.
There is one attitude that both capable and inept teachers must avoid, one which can poison their relationship
with a student, it is to demand that each child learn everything they teach. This is simply not possible this
deleterious attitude stems from the bank metaphor of pedagogy where the student is like a piggy bank into which
the teacher inserts learning which can later be drawn out again when needed.
[page 114] It is poison to demand that children should understand everything, as it is
often demanded today. I have frequently pointed out that children cannot understand
everything. From their first to their seventh year they do not understand at all; they
imitate everything. And if they do not imitate sufficiently they will not have enough in
them later which they can use. From the seventh to the fourteenth year they must
believe, they must be under the influence of authority, if they are to develop in a healthy
way. These things are to be made part of human life.
Here is where the corpse-thoughts enter education as a poison which will inflict mental paralysis upon our
children in guise of early intelligence! "People must realize that dead truths cannot govern life, only living truths
can do so."
[page 114, 115] The following is a dead truth.
We are supposed to train human beings to be intelligent human beings.
Therefore as dead truth says we must cultivate the intellect as early as possible,
for this will produce intelligent people. This is arrant nonsense, however.
Did I choose a college professor for my father so I might be intelligent? No, not that I recall the decision
consciously, but the fact is my father was a working man who was very authoritative in his parenting of me.
Frankly, I did not like it, but I accepted his authority and followed his commands as a necessity. It was literally
his way or the highway.
[page 115] People will, in fact, be intelligent only if they are not given intellectual
training too early. It is often necessary to do the opposite of what we want to achieve in
life. . . . You cannot make people intelligent by cultivating the intellect as early as
possible, but only by cultivating in them when very young the faculties which will later
have them prepared to be intelligent. The abstract truth is: the intellect is cultivated via
the intellect. The living truth is: the intellect is cultivated by healthy belief in authority.
Both parts of the statement have quite a different content in the living truth compared
to the dead, abstract truth. This is something humanity will have to come to realize more
and more as time goes on.
In my Final Paper for a Ph. D.-level graduate class in College Teaching, I wrote about the importance of the
"Live Lecturer" in the classroom. My thesis was that teaching moves from the professor to the student via live
thoughts and concepts and the lesson plan of the professor acts as an outline to ensure that the live thoughts and
concepts are active during the lecture and available for transmission and reception. In a world in which so much
education is done over the Internet, the presence of a live lecturer in a classroom is becoming less common, and
few voices of reason have been raised in opposition to the lack of a live lecturer. Steiner raises another important
issue about the need for a live lecturer. Teachers needs to dream about their students as a very real way of
opening up a clairvoyant channel to facilitate teaching and learning.
In one place Steiner says that we dress dreams of the future in the garments of the past! This is important
to understanding the revelations of the future in our dreams, because we can easily mistake the recognized
garments for dreams of past events and ignore the important future events they portend. Here is a poem I wrote
to help me remember this revelation:
Dream of the Future
When we dream of the future,
we dress it in the garments
of the past
Because the garments
of the future
have yet to be designed.
When we arrive in the future
we don't recognize it
we don't recognize having
been there before
Because it is wearing different clothes.
When a time wave from the future
arrives
We recognize the feeling
in the present
And remember our dream of the future,
Not from its garments,
but from the feelings
We had as we wore those garments
in our dream.
If we feel that the world ought to be different, we can learn to accept that judgment as a projection we
want to be different and feel that if the world were different, we could be different. What psychology teaches us
is that if we become different, the world will seem to have become different. We frown, e. g., because we live
in a world of frowners, then we decide to begin smiling and suddenly we find that the world has changed around
us and everyone else is smiling.
Yes, we can discover the world ought to be different and what we do can make the world different. We can
hold wrong ideas about the physical world and that world will ignore our wrong ideas, no matter how many times
and ways we try to apply them. But the world of human society is shaped by our ideas, wrong or right, and we
suffer from the wrong ones until we learn of our error and correct them. Sometimes we learn of our errors only
from the misfortunes which beset us because of them. WWI was such a misfortune.
Philosophers can hide the brutality of war behind beautiful words and sprinkle concepts like eternity and
temporality calculate the toll of war in so many tons of organic matter, "but he ignores the fact that eternity, infinity,
lives in every human being, and that every single human being is worth as much as the whole inorganic world taken
together!" (Page 123)
Steiner talks in Lecture 6 about how when prophesy comes true, modern science says "Chance willed it."
(Page 94) We can see how medical experts often ignore the spiritual aspects of their patients recovery, attributing
the recovery to chance. In the 1994 movie,"The Madness of King George" one sees a splendid example of such
behavior on the part of 18th Century physicians. The mad King's doctors administered all kinds of materialistic
cures such as blistering his back to extrude the bad humors, all to no avail. A royal relative suggested a Dr. Willis
who had cured her mother of the same illness. What's the chance that one doctor could cure two people of the
same disease? This doctor restored the King to sanity by the expediency of looking him in the eyes, something
usually forbidden. Dr. Willis activated his strong "I" and stared into the King's eyes, restraining the King when
he showed any errant behavior. Soon the King was forced to behave or be constrained, and he gradually
acquiesced and became normal again. At the end of the movie, the medical science of today placed the following
statement, "The King had an illness was called porphyria, an inherited disease which comes and goes at random."
Proving that yet today, science calls any remission not from some recognizable medical cure as due to chance.
Our materialistic science including medicine has come to love the fallen spirits of darkness which fell to Earth
after the victory of Michael over them in 1879. He effectively cast them out of the spiritual world from which they
fell into human hearts. We gained human freedom in the process, but unless we understand the deleterious effects
of these ahrimanic spirits, our spiritual progress will be greatly hampered.
[page 140] It is because the ahrimanic powers entered into us when Michael won his
victory that we are gaining in human freedom. Everything is connected with this, for the
crowd of ahrimanic spirits has entered into all of us. We gain in human freedom, but we
must be aware of this. We should not allow the ahrimanic power to gain the upper hand,
as it were, and we should not fall in love with them.
How did Darwin's idea that humans descended from animals first take form? Curiously, it was from a book
in the 18th Century which claimed Ahriman (called the devil) comes to expression in animal species. (Page 152)
The Press joked about this possibility, but the joking gave the idea widespread notoriety, setting the stage for
Darwin. Today we have secular humanists who are striving to remove every trace of spirituality from the world.
They virulently attack the works of anyone writing about spiritual science, using skepticism as a weapon to
destroy knowledge rather than to foster knowledge. They fight what they do not understand, what they choose
not to study or master, and they help the ahrimanic powers in doing so. They strive to replace religion based on
spiritual concepts with a purely secular religion based on doubt and sensory experience.
[page 154] One way to help the ahrimanic powers, therefore, is to establish an entirely
naturalistic religion. If David Friedrich Strauss had fully achieved his ideal, which was
to establish the narrow-minded religion which prompted Nietzsche to write an essay
about him, the ahrimanic powers would feel even more at ease today than they do
already. This is only one way, however. The ahrimanic powers will also thrive if people
nurture the elements which they desire to spread among people today: prejudice,
ignorance and fear of the life of the spirit. There is no better way of encouraging them.
Just think how many people there are today who actually make it their business
to foster prejudice, ignorance and fear of the spiritual powers.
If some prediction is made which not based on their secular science, these humanists will call the prediction's
coming true, pure chance. And yet, they do not have any idea of how the predictions are made, so their own
response to the prediction coming true is unscientific. Science requires investigation before judgment, and the
humanists violate this principle lasciviously when they demean anyone who is the least bit spiritual. They call them
superstitious as if that were saying enough. In a world filled with ahrimanically-tutored minds, that is often enough.
The materialistic science of the secular humanists is the science of the past! It studies things which have already
happened and strives to predict the future from them. The very same secular humanists who look down upon the
people of the Greco-Roman age who predicted the future from examining the entrails of animals have rather
strange superstitions themselves, at least that is the way they will be judged by those far in the future.
[page 157] Clever people will say today that the priests of ancient Greece and Rome
were either scoundrels and swindlers or that they were superstitious, for no one in their
right mind can believe it is possible to discover anything about the future from the flight
of birds and the entrails of animals. In time to come, people will be able to look down on
the ideas of which people are so proud today; they will feel just as clever then as the
present generation does now in looking down on the Roman priests conducting their
sacrifices. Speaking of Laplace's theory and of Dewar they will say: Those were strange
superstitions. People in the past observed a few millennia in earth evolution and drew
conclusions from this as to the initial and final states of the earth. How foolish those
superstitions were! Imagine the way in which those peculiar, superstitious people spoke
of the sun and the planets separating out from a nebula and everything beginning to
rotate. The things they will be saying about Laplace's theory and Dewar's ideas
concerning the end of the world will be much worse than anything people are saying
today about finding out about the future from sacrificial animals, the flight of birds and
so on.
Since Rudolf Steiner's time, we have progressed to where we have predictions of how the universe began
as a Big Bang in a universe which is constantly expanding. In the future perhaps it will be said, speaking of our
time, that "the dumbest man in the world sat in a wheelchair and talked about the Big Bang superstition". (Note:
Stephen Hawking, wheelchair- bound physicist is widely known as the smartest man on Earth, and he is
responsible for much of the cosmology of the Big Bang.) Steiner stated it clearly, though this will fall on deaf years
today, "Everything connected with modern science has grown from myth; myth is its root." (Page 158) It pleases
Ahriman enormously that so many people accept the current superstitions of materialistic science as if it were the
God's truth, instead of merely statements about the past using a process which grew out of myth.
Once I was introduced to an audience as having a double-Ph. D. in Rudolf Steiner. The emcee said that he
had heard that "If someone had studied over 75 books in a single subject, that qualified as a Ph. D. and Bobby
Matherne has studied over 150 of Rudolf Steiner's books." He was gracious, but most other people would be
incredulous and ask me questions in the vein of, "What are you doing reading that many books by one person?"
Which left me with an unanswered question, a big one, for many years, up until now. After reading this next
passage, I have begun to see my self as a bridge builder from material science to spiritual science. My degree in
physics provides me a generalist view of all the sciences and my degrees in Steiner gives me a detailed view of
spiritual science, two foundations, one on the physical side and one on the spiritual side, upon which to build a
bridge from one side to other.
If we are awake to spiritual realities, we will understand that the study of spiritual science allows us to keep
a lid on the ahrimanic spirits which will otherwise run rampant. Steiner says the result for these dark spirits is like
a consuming sacrificial fire for the salvation of the world.
Steiner says that parents and teachers should providing the souls in their care with ideas not yet understood
do you, dear Reader, understand what this means in your own life? Do you immediately answer questions
which arise with a sleepy, "I know that." or "That's nothing new." or "Can't understand it it must be silly.
Forget it." Do you? If so, you have not yet understood the awakening power of the unanswered question. I
consider this aspect of life so important that I formed it into Matherne's Rule #25 and created an explanation of
it on the Internet for anyone to read and discover the unanswered question asked by this Rule, namely, "What
is the power of an unanswered question?" The answer to this question will not come immediately or easily even
if you read all the material describing it. The real answer will only come when one day you find yourself
confronted with a difficult question and, instead to tossing it aside like a coffeeshop receipt, you hold it
unanswered in your mind and days or weeks later, you are rewarded one day by the answer appearing in your
mind, right out of the blue. An answer, which would not have come to you ever if you had not held the question
as an unanswered question, likely a useful and important answer, brings you brightly awake and invigorated.
Teachers who do not understand the importance of what is happening in the soul of the children spend their
days in one form or another dinning knowledge into their pupils minds as if they were piggy banks which must be
filled in school so that they can be cracked open after graduation to provide the funds of knowledge in the
workplace. Surely such teachers could be enlightened by the comic strip which ran in our local Times-Picayune
newspaper one morning. Two teenagers were lying on a bed talking and one announced, "The real school
vacation has begun! I have just forgotten everything I learned last year!" The piggy bank does not even last
through the summer vacation, much less till graduation!
Unfortunately, most teachers surrender their children's life to ahrimanic powers by jamming knowledge into
their heads with excessive repetition, treating them more like a target on a machine gun firing range than a human
being. One of my pet peeves is parents who explain everything to their children before they can make a decision
and then allow the child to make the decision instead of the parent doing their crucial job of providing authority
to children between the ages of 7 and 14 instead of information! The child is not ready to grasp most of the issues
these parents try to explain to them and the parents would serve them better by allowing the child to hold most
of the mysteries they ask questions about, to hold them as unanswered questions, which will be a soul-strengthening exercise for them, rather than providing answers above their child's "pay-grade" which is a sure-fire
soul-deadening exercise, a recipe for disaster, and a worst waste of a parent's time cannot be conjured up, and
an activity that more enlivens ahrimanic spirits does not exist.
[page 166] The way people feel they must behave towards growing children and young
people in education and training has entirely come out of this stream of rationality:
always do everything in such a way that the child can immediately understand; children
should never experience anything deeper than they are able to understand.
Enlightened parents are exactly what we call such parents today, as if it were a badge of honor instead of
infamy!
[page 166] It will have to be realized that this is the worst possible way of providing for
the life of a human being, for it takes us to a truly disastrous extreme in human life. Just
consider this: if we make every effort to give children only such things as are in accord
with their level of understanding, things they can grasp, we do not give them anything
for later life when they are supposed to have deeper understanding.
We rob them of the treasure that would otherwise be stored up in their souls as unanswered questions. The
type of adults this produces are running the world today, the large corporations, the newspapers, and most
unfortunately of all, the school and college systems at every level of education. Something else must be done and
it must begin with education at the earliest levels. It was this task of doing something which led Steiner to give the
lectures on education in Stuttgart which resulted in the formation of the Waldorf Schools world-wide.
The rise of suicides in our nascent 21st Century is a sure sign of the prevalence of the psychological
phenomenon of anomie, described in the Webster's Medical dictionary as: social instability resulting from a
breakdown of standards and values; also: personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of
purpose or ideals. It is the "lack of purpose or ideals" type of anomie which seems to result in suicide.
Can such
lack of purpose or ideas exist in someone who has a healthy inner life? Probably not. What can one do to prevent
this emptiness? The one word answer is education, education of the kind which Steiner is discussing in this
lecture.
In a recent movie, "Surrogates", one of the robotic surrogates refers to human beings as "meatbags" and that
phrase struck me as an apt way of understanding how materialistic science has created a demeaning view of
human beings as simply chunks of meat evolved from dumb animals.
We cannot permit a school teacher to just list items and drum them into our children's heads, such as who
was Plato's teacher, Aristotle's teacher, Alexander the Great's teacher, etc. These lists are deadly and dreadfully
dull to students their minds will grow barren if that is all the kind of learning they are exposed to. (Del was
exposed to this kind of teaching in her chemistry class, and she told me how the class jocks and athletes had the
same response to every question asked by the teacher, "Copper Sulfate, Prof!" Clearly, they escaped the
dreadful lists of chemicals by remembering just one and spending the rest of their required time in class thinking
of other things in order to survive. Their cheerful response to every question indicated that they were happily
surviving, probably thinking of the next football game they would play. ) If teacher merely drum lists into children's
heads, these children will strive to remember them for the final exam and about two weeks into summer vacation
they will dump the lists from their memory banks, likely, forever. We need teachers, on the contrary, who can
liven up history, make the events come alive to students at every level today. If it is a task worth doing, we can
always find someone who will do it.
Christ Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me." And also, "You must become as little children to enter
the kingdom of Heaven." We, you and I, each of us, are heading as human beings to a point where after many
deaths of our physical body upon the Earth (and subsequent re-incarnations), the Earth itself will undergo a
physical death, and we need to begin now to prepare for our transit into spiritual beings when that happens. It
will be a global catastrophe, such as those populating the imagination of science fiction writers and movie-makers
in our time. Only those who have nurtured themselves and have maintained themselves as little children, growing
younger each year, each lifetime, will make the transition through the gate of death into spiritual evolution after
our mother Earth disappears from the physical plane of existence. This is difficult to imagine or contemplate, but
it is nonetheless true.
Now we are ready for Steiner to reveal to us why the "fall of the Spirits of Darkness" was a necessary part
of our evolution as human beings.
[page 198] The kind of spiritual experience which is utilized in the spiritual science of
anthroposophy would have been impossible if the spirits of darkness had been
victorious, for they would then have kept this life and activity in the spiritual regions. It
is only because of their fall that instead of merely critical, physical intelligence and the
mediumistic approach, it has been and will increasingly be possible to gain direct
experiences in the spiritual world. It is not for nothing that I recently told you how the
present age is dependent on spiritual influences to a far greater extent than people
believe. Our age may be materialistic and want to become even more materialistic, but
the spiritual worlds reveal themselves to human beings in many more places than one
would think. Spiritual influences can be felt everywhere, though at the present time they
are not always good ones.
Steiner warns us of a vaccine, an anti-religious vaccine, which will innoculate us against having a soul, an
anti-spiritual vaccine which will ensure the success of the dark spirits in completely materializing many as human
beings. This warning came almost a hundred years ago perhaps that vaccine already exists and is affecting our
children and young adults today. Suppose such a vaccine existed today which inoculated children at a young age
to keep them from having a soul what signs of this might we find?
There would seem to be some epidemic of
children being born who do not maturate like children, they would be unable to store feelings of their early
childhood, they would have trouble acclimating themselves to other human beings, they will seem extremely
intelligent with sharp calculating skills, almost machine-like precision of drawing and copying skills. Does this not
sound familiar to the recent concerns of the sudden rise in the incidence of autism and its possible connection to
certain vaccination processes? Have the anti-soul vaccinations already begun?
History is not what it used to be. That's a phrase which is often spoken in jest, but the joke will be on us if
we do not acknowledge its truth in the sense which Steiner explains it in the next passage.
[page 220] The term 'history' will only have real meaning when spiritual impulses are
taken into account. There we can speak of what really has come to pass and, within
limits, of what. happens behind the scenes. Limits are set in so far as we compare this
with what can be predicted to apply in the physical world in future the position of the
sun next summer, for example, and so on, but not every detail of the weather. The world
of the spirit also has elements which are like the weather of the future in relation to the
future position of the sun. Generally speaking, however, the course of human evolution
can only be known on the basis. of its spiritual impulses. History is therefore embryonic
and not what it is supposed to be; it will only finally be something when it makes the
transition from its 100 years of existence to consideration of the spiritual life which is
behind the scenes of what comes to pass at the surface level for humanity.
It means that people must really wake up in many respects.
There is that phrase again: Wake up! Surely this phrase must sound a Wake Up call to us or just as surely
it will sound our death knoll. Listen, learn, hold real, live unanswered questions and perhaps the wake call will
toll inside of you.
This Blurb comprises about half of the review. Read the Full Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/falldark.htm
= == == == == == == == == == ==
I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews.
Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these
books, buy and read the books for less information, read the reviews.
In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to coverse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.
1. Padre Filius Gains a Little Weight this Month:
Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of the Digest to share us on some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.
This month the good Padre Checks out a Weight-Watcher s Meeting.
2.Comments from Readers:
- EMAIL from John Bershak about Bad Effects of Leaving Kids's Lights on at Night:
Vision Tip of the Month: The Affects Of Night Lights
Most of us believe that leaving a night-light on for our kids is reassuring, but
a new study from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center suggests that, by
doing so, we may be inadvertently damaging our childrens vision. The study
found that kids under 2 who sleep with a night-light on are three times more
likely to develop shortsightedness than those who sleep in the dark.
The study also found that children who slept with high-powered bulbs, such as an
overhead light, are up to five times more likely to develop myopia, indicating
that the effect worsens with brighter ambient night-time light.
It appears that a daily period of darkness is needed for the postnatal
development of the eyes," says Richard Stone, professor of ophthalmology at
UPenn.
RJM NOTE: I have telling our offspring to turn off all lights at night, but as John says, most people think it reassures the kids, when reassuring should be done by parents, not by some baby-sitting light left on in the place of good parenting. This is the first inkling I've received that my intuitive hunch about the night lights and room lights left on for children is bad for them. Thanks, John!
- EMAIL from 3 friends re: Sergeant Truth and General Lies poem.
Note: you can read the poem Click Here. It has been recently added to this review from maginalia I made at the time of reading the book.
From Kristina in Australia:
That title is hysterical Bobby "Sergeant Truth and General Lies" Kan you
stand it?
From Kevin in New York City:
Oh boy Bobby, just barely that is, I kan just barely stand it! Touchι!
From Ed in Lubbock, Texas:
I got a right good kick out of it. Very clever imaginative expression of the situation.
- EMAIL from Chris Bryant in Texas about our 100,000 Visitors a Month:
Bobby,
100,000 a month that's fantastic. Maybe we'll both live to see doyletics taught to our children in school, then they will never
have to say "if only we had known about doyletics then". Carla and I say that often, but we quickly add that we know it now.
Taking off the training wheels in Texas,
Chris
- EMAIL from Kevin:
Bobby,
Thanks for the excerpt on karma and teaching, and the new Digest. Carole is keen to read the
review of the Agriculture course. Nice photos!
- EMAIL from George Parigian:
Hi Bobby,
Hope all is going well in your life. I am doing ok, but of course
always consumed with questions. In a previous email message you told me
of a way to "fix" eyesight using certain type of glasses. I am
interested in writing a web page similar to what I did with Doyletics to
help people who are coping with deteriorating eyesight.
Is there a resource you can point me to where I can find detailed
information on this technique? To date, I have held off writing about
eyesight even though it is significantly affected by the aging process.
I just don't know enough, and even though I can read up on it, what I
really want to create is a page that shows people what they can actually
do about it, not just regurgitate a bunch of theory.
Our medical system unfortunately seems filled with people who study
things incessantly but never seem to be able to come up with solutions
to problems, just more studies and more therapies that only treat
symptoms. I want to (with your help) offer some kind of solution, that
if it is followed, people can actually improve their eyesight.
I will of course link back to your site, or anywhere you would like. The
Doyletics page that I built with lots of help from you is one of my most
popular. I am not necessarily looking to make money with this idea. I do
so with other aspects of my site. I would be pleased to spread
information that will help people out there fix their vision problems.
Since my readership is international, it will be spread far and wide.
Best Regards,
George
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOTE from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Kaisu Viikari has graciously sent George a copy of her new book in English, Learn to Understand & Prevent Myopia and I have promised to help George as he builds this new webpage.
EMAIL from Ginger Thiele in Florida:
Good morning, Bobby,
Would you please so kind as to send me your news letter again? For the past few months, it has not arrived...I miss it and hope that you will
once again include me on your mailing list.
I am hoping that you, Del and your familes are well and enjoying your lives.
Thanks so much,
Ginge Thiele
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOTE from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We have now gotten Ginger instructions subscribed. Her email is a reminder to us that, when we went to a professional email list with topica.com, we lost many people who did not subscribe, and these former Good Readers have been lost from our Digest readership. If you know anyone personally or have had someone ask you why they were dropped, tell them to email me, and we'll get them properly subscribed poste haste.
EMAIL from Fernando in the Netherlands:
Please subscribe me, I'm a hypnotherapist and I know I could add some information to your
page.
Thanks and regards,
Fernando Flores
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOTE from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I just checked and by the end of the month Fernando has yet to subscribe. As much as I would like to subscribe him to my Digest, I am helpless to do that on my own. I can only send him an invite to subscribe as I sent all the Good Readers we lost, several hundred of them and then he must do the rest. I will send him another invite right now.
EMAIL from Christian:
Hello Bobby Matherne
I stumbled across your website the other day. The idea of muscle memory is
used often in massage therapy. Is this the same idea?
I tried to download the Panacea program. The link works but what is
downloaded is an empty zip folder. Is the program still available? Could
you email it to me if it is. I would be very interested in seeing how it
works, compared to the stand alone technique you have devised. I am not so
good at staying focused and I think if I had something helping me to do
the technique I might get a better result.
Is the book Panacea also still to be had somewhere? I looked all over the
net and could not find it or the program anywhere. The one website I found
where to buy it nolonger woorks properly and I cannot purchase it.
Is Doyle Henderson still around?
Thank you for all your work and putting this information on the internet.
Sincerely,
Christian
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOTE from Bobby and HELLO from Doyle ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just talked to Doyle on the cell phone August 31, 2010. He is on full-time oxygen, living in a 55+ apartment alone. He's unable to drive or walk. Just got his phone fixed, so I was able to reach him. He gets dizzy when he stands and runs out of oxygen if he walks more than twenty paces. But he does his groceries on a small sidewalk scooter which goes only 6 mph. His daughter Vicky lives nearby and his friend Norma (ex-wife) drives to visit him in Yorba Linda, every so often. I'm sure Doyle would want to tell all of his friends on the Internet a big Hello! He is, as always in great spirits. Says he has two oxygen generating machines and uses one of them to fill the small tanks he uses when he is away from home.
My REPLY to Christian, a couple of weeks ago:
No software, no book around. Last time I talked to Doyle he had a
serious auto accident, ramming his head thru a windshield. He was
recovering, but at 85 and in already frail condition before the
accident, the prognosis for full recovery is uncertain.
Thanks for writing. Watch my video on how to do the Speed Trace, read the Introduction if
you need more help, do a food dislike trace, practice your Time Marks,
and be ready to extirpate the first live doylic memory which grabs you.
3. Cooking
I was in J. C. Penny's this month looking for new frying pans for Bobby Jeaux's Cajun Stir Fry preparation. A man was also looking at the pans and mentioned how he loved to cook. Just as I was feeling good at having found a fellow cook, he went to explain that he hated chopping onions and wanted to find some device which take that chore away from him. I felt a huge chasm gape open between us and I no longer wished to converse with him.
I love chopping onions and I insist on doing it by my own hands, using only my Cutco Chef's knife. It is a form of meditation because if you do meditation right, you cannot fall asleep, and no one ever falls asleep while chopping with their fingers inches from a large sharp knife! When I chop the ingredients for my dishes, and no dish requires more chopping of more different ingredients than my Cajun Stir Fry, I think of the people who are going to eat and enjoy it.
To cook potatoes in the Stir Fry, the pieces must be very small or they will take too long to cook properly, that requires a lot of manual dexterity and I find it fun to do, not a chore to be eliminated if possible. In my Cajun Stir Fry all the various veggies, the leeks, the onions, the Portobello mushrooms, the garlic, the okra, the tomato, the Jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, the potato, the eggplant, basil, green onions, and parsley are chopped and placed into separate containers so they can be added to the pan at the appropriate for best cooking. There is not a single ingredient that has been shredded to smithereens and beyond recognition by some mechanized food chopper or processor.
4. Sea Sickness and Sea Exhilaration
In 1964 I worked for Schlumberger in the Gulf of Mexico running downhole equipment for off-shore oil rigs. In those days, helicopter transportation was reserved primarily for geologists, and we rode to our workplaces in various water taxis, from the Greyhound bus insides speedster which made about 30 knots per hour to the 300-ft-long pipe carrier which made about 6 knots. Divide 6 into 200 to find how long it took us once to get back from a rig deep in the Gulf out of Morgan City. Spent most of that long day and a half trip playing Bourre and after hours of losing every single game, I swore the game off for life.
I was plagued by sea sickness and that's not a good thing when you have to travel to and from work by boat. The sickest I got was on the speedster. It was my first trip, in February, a rather cold day, so I was wearing a lot of clothing, all of which I had to take off in the confines of a tiny bathroom when I got deathly sick, broke out in sweats, vomiting, and could barely stand up. Somehow I survived that ordeal. But every trip offshore brought some form of sickness or discomfort. It was sheer torture and I left that job at the first opportunity for a job where I could ride to work over hard, solid land. After that lesson I avoided any boat trips off-shore, even for fishing which I love to do.
But memory is short, and six years later, working in Los Angeles, I had a chance to go tuna fishing off San Diego with my programming buddies at Lockheed. We arrived in the evening and spent all night playing poker and drinking beer. The next morning my hangover was soon replaced by seasickness which stuck with me for the entire day. I remember leaning over the railing, not looking for a fish on my rod, but evacuating my stomach's contents from the previous night. I helped throw out the live anchovy chum at one point, but never felt steady enough to bait or throw out a fishing line with my rod and reel.
My next foray offshore was about six years later when I had a chance to help crew a 26 foot cutter from Fall River to Newport, Rhode Island, about 26 miles across the Atlantic, past Block Island, just barely out of sight of land. There it was again, seasickness instead of fun. Eleven foot seas could have been like an exciting and bracing roller coaster ride if I had been bent over feeling ill the whole time in the open sea. I remember the relief when at dusk, after tacking against the wind all day, we spotted land and entered the Sakonnet River for the final leg of our trip in nice flat water. I was beginning to despair of ever being rid of this plague of seasickness.
Naturally, after discovering the speed trace, seasickness was one of the first things I wanted to trace. I don't really exactly how or when I traced it, but if ever it hit me again, I would be ready, at the earliest sign of discomfort. Perhaps it was on the trip offshore with Capt. Andy fishing for speckled trout and redfish. The water was rough and his boat was buffet by waves, bouncing up and hitting hard as it came down on each wave, no seasickness. Or perhaps it was on Captain Rod's catamaran when we went to the Midnight Lumps, a hill in 3,000 feet water which rises to 600 feet below the surface. It is the prime destination for sports fishing for tuna, black fin and yellowfin tuna. We spent the entire day in sea rollers, rocking and rolling every way possible, and I was completely at ease, no illness, and I caught a 35 pound black fin tuna along with many other hard-fighting fish which we used as bait for the tuna. It was a fun day and a great test for the robustness of my speed trace, showing that I had removed all doyles of seasickness.
Del and I are cruising up the East Coast from New York harbor to Montreal in a month or so and I have just booked two shore excursions: an America's Cup Yacht cruise out of Newport and a Tall Ship cruise out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the masted sailing vessel trip, I will be part of the crew and we will fire off a cannon at sea. These are two exhilarating adventures which I dare say that I would have never attempted had it not been for the pioneering work of Doyle Philip Henderson upon which the speed trace is built. God Bless You, Doyle Henderson!
5. Fifth Anniversary of Katrina
In the 3 weeks mandatory vacation Del & I took after Katrina,
one of the places we visited was a memorial in Nashville
and I found an inscription which seemed pertinent to the
situation in my New Orleans at the time.
It was chiseled in granite on a monument to the
Battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862 with 25,000 casualities.
It was a time when women all over the city, all over the metropolitan area of New Orleans tied up their hair, exchanged their pretty dresses for work gloves and rubber gloves, and went to work cleaning up their city one house at a time. Five years later we can look around and say proudly that they and we "met the stern wants of that hour."
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Cucumber Dip by Guest Chef Carla Matherne
