Piggy-backing

During the summer of 1996, when I was fourteen, it was the time of the Olympic Games, and Mum took my brother and me to a Butlin’s holiday camp. I wasn’t having a particularly good time – couldn’t wait to get back to the apartment so that I could play my guitar.  My brother and I were in one room and Mum was in the other.  One night I couldn’t sleep.  We had been half-interestedly watching reports from Atlanta on the little TV that sat between our beds.  I remember the reporting of multiple gold medals secured by Irish swimmer Michelle Smith.  With the TV now off, lying in the dark, I began to get lost in my thoughts.  Thinking about things was a habit I inherited from my Grandfather – I remember him taking me off round the farm in a tractor, my teenage self and he asking one another unanswerable questions such as ‘What is colour of nothingness?’  and ‘If the universe is finite, then what’s beyond it?’.  That night in the holiday camp - I can’t remember how my thoughts got there - the question came about with some clarity: how is it that anything at all exists – how did something ever emerge out of nothing? It seemed in that moment totally impossible that I or anything at all could have come into existence.  Even if there was such a thing as God, how could He/She ever have come into being? It was the first time in my life that I really grasped the idea of nothingness – as though there was nothing really substantial about my life or the world out there at all.   In hindsight I wonder whether the ‘unreal’ environment of the Butlin’s holiday camp helped me to grasp this sense of nothing having a reliable substance to it.  But perhaps in that moment I realised the preciousness and the precariousness of being something; of having an existence as opposed to there being nothingness. The next thought that came into my mind was that when I die I will enter into that eternity of nothingness and will never, ever, ever come into consciousness again.   The thought was utterly terrifying. There was nothing I could do about it – it was, and is, going to happen.  My brother was fast asleep in the other bed.  I thought about going to my Mum, but something held me back.  For one thing I felt I was too grown up at fourteen to go to my Mum scared in the night, but for another I knew there was nothing she could say; nothing she could do about it.  Anyway the moment passed and I went to sleep.  I had had my first anxiety attack. 

Through the years that terror of nothingness struck again and again – usually in the nighttime, without any distractions, but often during the day when I just felt alone: on the bus or stood waiting for a lift for example.  However one day I did tell Dad, almost in passing, about these anxiety attacks and he told me about his own dread of death.  We could only describe the feeling as being the ‘infinity of nothingness’ – that phrase was understood by the both of us: it proved to each that the other was having the exact same experience.  I’ve spoken to people since who’ve had the same thing, such that it isn’t just a family quirk, and I’ve also tried to explain it to people who’ve never had it, and the concept is just inaccessible to them. 

There are lots of reasons to fear death – we might fear death because of the pain we imagine in death, or because there are things that we want to achieve in life that we might never do.  We might fear death from a religious perspective – a fear of what an afterlife, or life as a ghost, might be like.  Many of us fear death because of the prospect of eternal separation from the ones we love – that one of us will go first and then we’ll never see each other or hold one another again.  The terror of an ‘infinity of nothingness’ is a different kind of fear of death, centred on the permanent loss of consciousness.  In the months following that night in the holiday camp, I started to seek mental health services – I saw a psychiatrist who prescribed me medication which had little effect other than making my saliva taste metallic, and who insisted that when I was older I would think differently about it.  I didn’t believe him at the time – what I had made contact with was ‘true’, it wasn’t some illusion I would grow out of – and ensuing years didn’t soften my relationship to it.  However, writing these words almost 29 years later - fourteen of which I’ve been in practice as a psychotherapist myself - I think I do understand it, where it comes from, and the illusion that sits at its heart.

What follows is an account of what worked for me, and I want to share it with you in case it can be helpful for others too.  It may that your experience is fundamentally different and as such that the ideas shared here aren’t helpful or comforting, and in that case I hope you nonetheless find the blog interesting as an account of the journey of a fellow traveller.

What I think causes the illusion at its heart is an implicit and spontaneously occurring solipsism.  Solipsism is a philosophy which can be traced back to Ancient Greece, and the work of the sophist philosopher Gorgias, but which we see recurring throughout philosophical traditions in the millennia since.   At its heart solipsism is the idea that the only thing we can be sure exists in our own mind.  Solipsists believe that as the only thing of which we have direct experience is our own mind, we cannot know that the material world exists, but perhaps more specifically, we cannot know that other minds exist.  I believe many of us are oriented in this way without ever consciously reflecting on it – only my own mind is real, all other minds are hypothetical. 

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this blog, the psychotherapist in me thinks of mentalization – that capacity to appreciate oneself and others as having mental states – and how the failure to appreciate this is thought to have its origins in early attachment relationships which were not sufficiently attuned.  More particular to this blog are the implicit (i.e. never consciously appreciated) consequences of inhabiting such an orientation:

·        If only my own mind is real, then my mind is self-referential and generates itself.

·        If only my own mind is real, then I am inescapably alone in the world.

·        If only my own mind is real, then my death is the end of everything.

So far so bleak.  And bringing these statements into conscious consideration might invite some critical reflection but this reflection doesn’t in and of itself reframe what can be very deeply ingrained experiences of self.  Of course I know that my mind does not generate itself; I know it rationally, but it is not what I feel.

‘What I feel’, on an implicit, experiential level is crucial here.

In my twenties I learned and practised various approaches to meditation, belonging for a couple of years to a school.  And whilst I’m sure there are a great many benefits to meditation, I got stuck on the idea that I was attempting to train my mind.  That in and of itself felt somehow artificial, almost creating a ‘duty of the imagination’.  Later in my twenties I decided that I was a pantheist and as such attempted a form of prayer.  These prayerful moments felt very meaningful at times, but ultimately transient and swiftly followed by doubt.  For me prayer felt like pretending – pretending that there was a presence there, whom could in some way ‘receive’ or even respond to the prayer.  As an article of faith ultimately I couldn’t sit comfortably with it.

What I came to realise in my thirties was that I needed something empirical; something that didn’t depend on faith or any other duty of the imagination. 

What I’ve arrived upon is something I can best describe as ‘piggy-backing’.  It’s not the most romantic or profound phrase, and I’ve thought about whether a better word or phrase exists, but there’s none that captures the meaning so directly without becoming convoluted.  So if any other ideas come to mind as you read these words please do let me know in the comments.  The word piggyback, by the way, doesn’t trace back to our porcine friends but begins in the 16th century as ‘pick-pack’, meaning to carry a load on the back and shoulders and then evolves over generations of English language as ‘pick-back’, and into its contemporary form.  The word now literally refers to a person riding on another person’s back and shoulders with their legs around their waist.  I think of my children riding piggyback on me.  They’re getting big now and won’t ask for me to carry them much longer, which part of me feels a bit sad about.  However the word extends its meaning through metaphor in contemporary use.  To piggy-back means ‘to use something that someone else has made or done in order to get an advantage’ (see: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/piggyback).  It is this extended meaning of the term that I want to convey here.

Piggy-backing as a psychological phenomenon depends upon what is described in the literature as ‘distributed cognition’.   You could go down a rabbit hole – indeed I have – of attempting to make sense of distributed cognition and other related terms such as stigmergy, the infosphere, extended mind and extended phenotype.  However distributed cognition is the term that captures the meaning best.  What I understand by the term distributed cognition, for the purposes of this blog, is the idea that throughout the entire world, human and non-human beings alike are processing information about their local situations.  In human beings information is taken in via the sensory nervous system, integrated in the central nervous system, and then a response is made via the motor nervous system.  The process is as such open-ended – information taken in, information put back out.  A neighbouring person might receive such information, perform some further integration, then put it back out in a further motor response.  In this way, with information being passed on between neighbours, there is a network of information processing that spans at least across the surface of the planet.  You could imagine a layer of biological information processing, taking in basic information such as availability of sunlight, temperature, hydration, quality of the soil, space and proximity to others, position with respect to predators and prey etc. and seeing how these basic information streams might be converted into ever more sophisticated representations of reality.

What I’ve just written is very abstract, but provides a basis for challenging an unconscious assumption that: ‘my mind is self-referential and generates itself’.  This is where piggy-backing comes in. In every day in virtually every way we piggy-back off the information processing of others to achieve our local ends:

·        Harnessing ‘the wisdom of crowds’: Following the direction of the crowds at the end of a football game in trying to find the nearest exit, or in a city at rush hour trying to find a train station by following the motion of the crowds. 

·        Following restaurant reviews: Instead of trying every restaurant oneself, we rely on aggregated opinions listed online to guide our choice.

·        Using public transportation: We rely on the bus driver's knowledge of the route and traffic patterns. We don't need to navigate the city ourselves; we piggyback on their expertise and the established system.

·        Watching cooking videos: Rather than experimenting from scratch, we follow recipes and videos that guide us through tested methods.

·        Using maps or SatNav systems: We don’t have to navigate from first principles but  benefit from knowledge/technology created by others. 

·        Following news reporting: We rely on journalists and news organisations to gather and interpret information about current events which we then take in an integrate.

·        Using libraries and search engines: Instead of storing all knowledge in our heads, we rely on libraries, databases, and search engines to access information when needed.

·        Trusting medical advice: We rely on doctors, pharmacists, and medical research to diagnose and treat illnesses rather than trying to understand the complexities of human biology and medicine ourselves.

·        Relying on weather forecasts: We check weather apps or watch meteorologists to plan our days instead of interpreting atmospheric data ourselves.

·        A game of chess: It might at first glances seem ‘closed’ off to external information but is not just a measure of one tactical mind against another.  Rather the minds piggyback off the insights shared in various tips and tutorials, insights from experienced players, or from one’s own past experiences. 

·        And in non-human, migratory animals: Young birds don’t chart their own migration paths; they follow older, experienced birds.

·        When one bird in a flock detects danger and reflexively takes off, this sends a signal to the rest of the flock who also take off. 

·        Etc.

As one mind situated within a vast network of information processing, logically most of what takes form in the mind begins externally to one’s own cranium.  Seen in this way the mind is a cork floating on an ocean of consciousness.  When the mystics spoke about all of life being connected, or of a ‘cosmic consciousness’, I think this basic process is what they were grasping at, just in more poetic terms.  It might be argued that cosmic consciousness means something else – perhaps it means having extra-sensory perceptual or clairvoyant capacities.  To the extent that these perceptions are ‘true’ I think they could probably be traced back to the same amplificatory effect I’m describing here.  However, if I’m missing the point then do let me know.

Of course we know about this piggy-backing rationally, but sometimes, perhaps often, we don’t feel this.  My proposal here is that some of the core crises from an existential perspective – fear of death, perception of our ultimate aloneness, and the meaninglessness of our existence, could in some cases be traced back to a non-reflective assumption that the mind is self-referential and generates itself. 

So if this idea is meaningful to a person – that if I or you recognise that perhaps the mind is seen as self-referential and as generating itself, and that this might be considered logically to be the basis for some of the existential horror that we experience, then what can we do about it?

I can imagine three interrelated responses which could be helpful:

1)        Stay in Communication

The first is an empirical attitude but one that becomes experiential and might even have a transcendent feel to it.  The attitude is to look out across the landscape as in a state of perpetual Communication.  The world is in all places broadcasting information, and we must decide what information is useful to us.   If I don’t know something I can spend some time logically deducing my position, but I might also remain open to new information through observation and seeking.   One could purposefully seek out information through a conversation with someone, or trip to the library, or otherwise simply remaining in state of watchful or meditative openness.  Many of us might consider this in somewhat mystical terms to be ‘putting it out to the universe’.  The Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky once spoke of receiving his ‘answering call’ in this state of openness.  Through one’s own communications we might provide an answering call to others.  As a therapist my clients will often tell me about some comment I’d made in a previous session that I hadn’t myself placed much emphasis on at the time, but had really ‘landed’ for them and been useful. 

2)        Swallow your Pride (maintain a Beginner’s Mind)

This one’s a tough one.  I find there are certain areas of my life where it’s very difficult to admit I’m wrong or that I might be as knowledgeable or as skilled as I think or feel I ought to be.  There are all kinds of reasons for this but as a consequence I can find myself in a position of being closed off to the wisdom or insight of others.  It’s a defensive position, betraying what might be described of as vulnerable parts of my ego, but manifests behaviourally as a closedness – perhaps reinforcing the idea of the mind as self-generating.  So the advice is to practise openness at the edge of our tolerance – to notice ourselves where we are feeling defensive or closed off, and to be receptive to new information.  In Zen Buddhism this has been described of as maintaining a Beginner’s Mind .  It is a skill I am still working on!

3)        Strive for Mutuality

Mutuality I am increasingly of the opinion sits at the heart of the psychotherapy project.  Whilst it is beyond the scope of this blog, my belief increasingly is that much of the strife that brings us to psychotherapy originates in our failure to have empathy for ourselves as subjective beings, and as importantly, a failure to appreciate other people as subjective beings in their own right, rather than as objects onto which we project our own meanings and interpretations. This state of mutuality – an appreciation and knowing of oneself and of others in their fullness – is not a binary on-off state but an idealised state that we are ever moving further into.  We might catch ourselves at times as objectifying ourselves or objectifying others, and thus the challenge at those times is to restore a sense of openness – to learn from and be receptive to one another.  Whilst Mutuality begins in one-to-one relationships, I think it has the potential to blossom into a more transcendent relationship through what Martin Buber called – I-Thou – our personal relationship with a boundless subjectivity in the ‘universe’, which might be a more romanticised way of referring to distributed cognition. 

Why is this important? Because I think the problem described here at its heart is that in death, the view from the inside (of my cranium) is that all connection dies, whereas the view from the outside (of my cranium) is that hardly any connection dies.  There are other very real reasons to fear death; I think especially of the loss of those whom we love and who love us.  However I think that these practices offer a therapeutic response to the existential crises described above by promoting a decentring of mind. 

I’m pleased to be able to condense these thoughts down to an essay length blog.  Thanks for reading.   I hope you found the words interesting, and perhaps even useful.  Your questions and observations are welcome.