Page 37 - NAMAH-Jul-2018

Namah Notes on counselling

arises if we acknowledge that the outer What is left is this, ‘I Am’. This act of contact
being is not the sole Reality but there are and acceptance with ‘I am’, once gotten hold
deeper levels of the being behind the surface of, gave me (for the first time) the experience,
personality with shifting nuances of the ‘I’. ‘Since I am, I have the right to be.’

One may argue that this may be interesting “What is this experience like? It is a primary
for mystics and metaphysicians but would be feeling…It is the experience of my own
hardly of any relevance to psychology. But aliveness not caring whether it turns out to
psychology itself cannot remain tied down be an ion or just a wave. It is like when a
to the surface being but must proceed to the very young child I once reached the core of a
depths of existence if it has to serve a greater peach and cracked the pit, not knowing what
Reality. Besides, the counsellor may be faced I would find and then feeling the wonder of
with awkward situations where superficial finding the inner seed, good to eat in its bitter
explanations do not explain the relevance sweetness….It is like a sailboat in the harbor
of the ‘I’. being given an anchor so that, being made
out of earthly things, it can by means of its
The ‘I-Am’ dream-experience anchor get in touch again with the earth, the
ground from which its wood grew; it can lift
Rollo May narrates a fascinating ’I-am’dream- its anchor to sail but always at times it can
experience of a 28-year-old lady who pres- cast its anchor to weather the storm or rest
ented with severe anxiety spells in closed a little… It is my saying to Descartes, ‘I Am,
spaces, severe self-doubts and eruptions of therefore I think, I feel, I do.’
uncontrollable anger. That she was born an
illegitimate child was always a reason for “It is like an axiom in geometry — never
curses by her mother and relatives. In the experiencing it would be like going through a
fourth month of therapy, she had an unusual geometry course not knowing the first axiom.
dream-experience which she noted down It is like going into my very own Garden of
with remarkable clarity, parts of which are Eden where I am beyond good and evil and
excerpted here: all other human concepts. It is like the poets
of the intuitive world, the mystics, except
“I remember walking that day under the that instead of the pure feeling of and union
elevated tracks in a slum area, feeling the with God it is the finding of and union with
thought, ‘I am an illegitimate child.’ I recall my own being….It is a ‘Matter of Fact’ in the
the sweat poring forth in my anguish… Then etymological sense of the expression…. it is
I understood what it must feel like to accept, ‘I ceasing to feel like a theory towards one’s
am a Negro in the midst of privileged whites’, self (2).”
or ‘I am blind in the midst of people who see’.
Later on I woke up and it came to me this (It is very interesting that spontaneously this
way, ‘I accept the fact that I am an illegitimate subject refuted Descartes by identifying her
child. But ‘I am not a child anymore’. So it ‘I-Am’ experience with an axiom in geometry,
is, ‘I am illegitimate’. That is not so either. for Descartes himself was the inventor of co-
‘I was born illegitimate’. Then what is left? ordinate geometry that is still used!)

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