Inner Vision and Inner Hearing
The Lost Sense of Being
For over thirty years, more than fifty thousand hours, I have listened to men and women talk about what they want from life. Engineers, police officers, sex workers, lawyers, teachers, administrators, homemakers, secretaries, college students, nannies, doctors, nuns, taxi drivers, ministers and priests, mercenaries, laborers, professors, clerks, actors, and many others have invited me to be with them as they explored the depths of their souls to find what they most deeply desire; as they overcame pain and soared with the joy of these searches, as they faced fear and found the courage for this personal odyssey. From all this rich experience, I have drawn a conviction that grows ever stronger within me: the most important thing for a person is the simple fact that they are alive.
Each of us knows we are alive, and each of us tries to become more alive, because we know that too often we are not as alive as we could or would like to be. That is our reality. Sometimes we feel very alive, and sometimes we feel ourselves slipping lower, toward the edge of death, which inexorably ripens within us. The greatest tragedy of human experience is that, time and again, we are blind and deaf to the possibilities of a fuller life.
There are so many insurmountable external obstacles to our full life: chance, illness, death, the intrusion of social, political, and economic forces. We all face these losses and struggle with them as best we can. But the losses for which we are not responsible, because we do not know in time what is possible or what we most want—these are the most painful, the ones we regret the most.
It all comes down to trying to have more life and less death. The constantly shifting balance between life and death within us is the main barometer that determines the course of our lives. Too often, we are blind and deaf to our needs, our desires, to the sense of possibilities that open up before us in life. Our view of our own nature is too limited and partial, and we do not know how to achieve the life that is our natural state. Many of us do not have free access to our true center. In my work with people who are trying to demand more from their lives, the main focus is to help a person more fully and clearly hear their inner voice, to manage their own life more satisfactorily.
I have just spoken of being “blind and deaf” to our own needs and the need to learn to “listen” to ourselves more sensitively in order to become more alive. These metaphors refer to an awareness that is missing or only partially present in many of us. But it is more than just a metaphor. I am convinced that we are born with a sixth sense, which many of us have forgotten how to use.
The main thesis I will argue in this book—a thesis that is too often overlooked or undervalued—is that each of us is spiritually disabled. I mean this literally: each of us is a crippled person, damaged in our vitality and intuition (either acutely or chronically), and our nature carries unrealized potential.
This book is about our lost sixth sense. It is the key to a fuller, richer life. We are crippled by many influences; we are disabled in the same way as the blind and the deaf. We do not use our potential fully. Our lost sense is more important than sight and hearing or smell and taste; it is the sense of our being. This lost sense is an inner vision that allows us to constantly be aware of how our external experience matches our inner nature.
What Is Inner Awareness?
What does it mean when I say I “hear” my own experience? There is no ready-made set of words to describe this sixth sense. If a person is blind or nearly blind from birth, the only way to tell them about the sense of sight is to use imprecise analogies with hearing, touch, or other senses. Figuratively speaking, most of us are blind (or nearsighted) from an early age. We know very little about the sense of our inner being, and most often we are taught to ignore or devalue it. (“You don’t really feel that,” “You don’t really want that, do you?”, “Don’t be so emotional,” “It doesn’t matter what you want; you have to deal with the real world.”) So, when I talk about this sensory modality, which we sometimes don’t even realize we possess, my words are vague and do not resemble our usual experience.
Inner awareness is truly the expression of my whole being, just like the feeling of love, anger, hunger, or emotional involvement in an activity. In this sense, inner vision informs me how much what I am experiencing at the moment matches my inner nature. Since it is the basis of my knowledge—where I am and how things are in my subjective existence—it serves me much like my external vision. It gives me orientation and helps me choose the right direction within myself.
The organ of my inner awareness is not an eye that lets me look inside myself, nor an ear with which I listen to my inner experience. Rather, it is my whole being, a pattern or gestalt that contains the meaning of who I am. However, it is useful to talk about the inner awareness of my whole being as if there were a specific sense organ for it. In this way, I hope to reclaim what we have lost, the absence of which causes us so much suffering.
This existential sense, as far as we can tell, provides me with direct perception—just like the other senses. This point is often misunderstood. My eyes tell me that in front of me is a page of text, not just a white rectangle with black marks from which I must deduce that it is a page with words, sentences, and meanings. Similarly, when the inner sense functions naturally, it gives me direct awareness. It tells me, “I didn’t like the conversation with Greta,” not just raw data from which I must infer, for example, “I notice I feel physical discomfort… therefore, I must have been bored by this conversation.” But many of us can only observe ourselves in such a detached and indirect way, and so we have to think about the reasons for our discomfort.
The inner sense is open to an unimaginable number of signals—external sensations, memory, anticipation of the future, fantasy, intentions, and all other forms of inner life. We know how to use it when we fully focus our attention on the flow that is our being in the present moment. Unlike external vision, which we must focus to improve its function, the inner sense works best when we are relaxed and open to whatever happens naturally. Functionally, inner awareness is similar to the process of listening. For this reason, I sometimes think of the inner sense as a “listening eye”—it combines inner vision and inner hearing. This definition is appropriate, as it implies a broader essence than any existing sense organ. I mean that the “listening eye” is the “listening I” (a play on words in English: “listening eye” and “listening I” are homonyms). It is I who listens, I who is the process of listening, and implicitly, I who is also what is being listened to.
When discussing such things, the key is to turn inward. We must consider these ideas based on direct inner experience (not by trying to analyze each idea using ordinary external concepts). In other words, this idea of the listening I, or the inner sense that provides awareness of inner experience, may seem strange if we judge from an external point of view and are used to thinking about people in categorical terms. Similarly, when we try to judge ourselves in this external manner, viewing “ourselves” and “our I” as objects, we are unlikely to recognize this inner sense. But when we, on the contrary, relive the feeling of inner awareness at the moment when we are completely absorbed in some activity, the concept of this inner sense seems familiar.
The simplest truth is that I am the center of my life. We use the word “I” to refer to what is our unique experience, unique in the sense that I does not refer to an object that can be seen, but to the very process of perceiving objects. Just as my eye cannot see itself, so my I cannot see itself, cannot become an object to itself. It is the seeing itself, the true process of awareness.
If I want to experience my life fully, I must experience it at its center—I need to feel my “I.” That is what inner awareness is. It is the experience of my I.
I experience my I when I know exactly that I want something, and I want it because I want it, not because someone or something tells me I should want it, or because most people want it, or because four out of five doctors recommend it. My awareness that I want is direct, undeniable, and without cause. (Of course, I can look back and find reasons or ask questions and so on, but that is not the same as simply wanting.)
I want to emphasize that I am in no way downplaying the role of reason, critical faculties, awareness of others’ needs, concern for the future, or any other aspects of being as a whole that participate in the final action I may take. For example, I do not see reason and feelings as opponents fighting for dominance over my life—a view popular today in some circles. I share the ideal of wholeness, which, in my view, means following a path, not achieving a goal. My inner sense—if understood most fully—is one aspect of the potential wholeness that constitutes my true nature. Sometimes it takes time for me to turn to my inner sense. Maybe I feel a vague sense of hunger. If I don’t go to see what’s in the fridge, or study the menu, or think about what I might eat, I can do something else: simply open up to myself and let my stomach, mouth, and all my awareness tell me what I—only I—really want to eat or drink. Importantly, if I do this regularly and reasonably follow what I discover, I may not have problems with weight, diet, or maintaining the necessary balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, as described so well by the Pearsons.
I can experience my I in other ways than through desires I hear inside myself. I can achieve a sense of engagement with life if I allow myself to know and experience emotions that are truly mine… if I let my thoughts flow freely and do not try to limit them by criteria of logic, correctness, meaningfulness, or other accepted norms… if my body moves freely, joyfully, and spontaneously… if I am truly open to another person, and they are open to me… or if I am deeply immersed in my thoughts, feelings, memories, and drives in the process of so-called deep psychotherapy.
I feel most alive when I am open to the full diversity of my inner life—desires, emotions, the flow of thoughts, bodily sensations, relationships, reason, foresight, concern for others, values, and everything else inside me. I am most alive when I can allow myself to experience, truly realize all this diversity, and even genuinely feel and express my wholeness. This sounds almost like an impossible demand. In reality, it only seems impossible. A person is capable of perceiving an enormous amount of material from various sources and integrating it with incredible subtlety at an unconscious level in ways far beyond even the most advanced computers. Humanity’s inability to understand and appreciate the significance of such integration is one of the main sources of the many tragedies we have brought upon ourselves. Too often, we choose one thing—spiritual or sensual experience, intellect or emotion, calculation or spontaneity—instead of striving for the wholeness that is our potential.
If inner awareness is such a direct expression of our true nature, why don’t we use our inner sense constantly, throughout our lives? As I have suggested, for the most part, our early upbringing teaches us to ignore—partially or completely—the signals of our inner sense. Parents and teachers, with the best intentions, try to “socialize” the child so that their own desires, feelings, and inclinations do not come into conflict with the outside world.
A strong hidden influence that makes us less receptive to our inner life is the old love affair of Western society with objectivity. We are used to thinking that the subjective is synonymous with being too sentimental, unreliable, and impulsive. As a result, we try to rid ourselves of the obsession with being ourselves—internally experiencing beings—and start seeing ourselves as products of some Detroit assembly line, largely interchangeable and not valuing the remnants of uniqueness that have escaped the vigilant eye of the factory inspector. The value of objectivity is that it temporarily slows down part of our experience so we can better recognize the structure of the world around us. But its true meaning is nullified by those who do not believe in human wholeness and allow objectivity to claim all our existence. Behaviorists, in their extreme forms, are not satisfied with the idea that objectivity provides us with special lenses; on the contrary, they insist that all other views are illusory. Now, as could easily have been foreseen, there is a protest in the form of anti-intellectualism, which once again values subjectivity and discredits reason.
The inner sense I am talking about can be suppressed just as much by denying objectivity as by absolutizing it. I may decide to read a certain book because everyone is talking about it and force myself to finish it, even if I find it undeserving. If my only motive is the desire not to fall behind the trend or the illusion that my tastes do not differ from those who “know,” I should not be surprised that I find it hard to finish the book. But we are too often surprised. Too often, I may not dare to tune in to my inner awareness because I sense it may not match what my social environment expects of me. So I sit at a meeting, suppressing my inner impatient desire to leave—so others don’t think I’m worried or inattentive. Yet, in fact, I cannot focus my thoughts on what is happening. Sometimes, suppressing my inner sense is driven by fear of facing some major truth. If I try to keep myself busy with work, social events, and constant activity to avoid the growing realization that I am mortal, that I am aging, then inevitably neither work, nor friends, nor social life, nor anything else will bring me true satisfaction.
In short, the most important consequences of tuning in to the inner sense are: greater integration of various aspects of our being, increased sense of life, greater readiness for action, more conscious choices, and greater sincerity in relationships. Of course, I still make mistakes, have problems, bad moods, conflicts, but when these things happen—and when something good happens—I am truly involved in it. In this case, I have far more resources to face any situation than when I am out of touch with my inner sense.
What Does It Mean to Be Alive?
In the hospital described in “Catch-22,” a man-object is completely covered in bandages, fed through a tube from a bottle above his bed, and waste is removed through a tube into a bottle below. Is this a living person? Does he have any inner awareness?
At one time, I was a consultant at a hospital where there was a patient who had once been a boxer. For fourteen months, from his last fight until his death, the patient was in a coma. During that time, he never regained consciousness. Was he truly alive? Did he have an inner “I” before his heart finally stopped?
In a state psychiatric hospital, I saw another patient—a middle-aged woman in a catatonic state, lying in bed, fed intravenously, behaving like an infant. She did not respond to signals from her body or to external stimuli. Was she alive as a human being? Did she have even a vague sense of inner vision?
In the same hospital, there was a paranoid man who was convinced—and passionately tried to convince everyone else—that he was the “Holy Spirit.” He was quite accessible for contact as this mystical entity, but did not respond to the name David Morton, which was on his hospital chart. In some sense, he was more alive than the catatonic woman; certainly, he knew something about his own I. And yet, I wonder if he ever cared about the life he once lived.
George Bannerman was thirty-four when his parents, with whom he had lived all his life, brought him to me. He had never dated, had no real friends his age, worked odd jobs for sympathetic neighbors. He was not intellectually disabled or mentally ill, but was socially undeveloped and had no apparent motivation to change. Was George truly alive, living an existence more suited to a fourteen-year-old? Did he have any sense of his subjective life or the being of his “I”?
Donald Florence is married with two children. He works as a registrar in a large company. Every day is like the last. He gets up at 6:40 a.m., has breakfast, takes the bus to work, spends the day in routine activities, takes the bus home at 5:37, has dinner, watches TV, and then goes to bed at 11:15—just after the first part of the news. To what extent is he truly alive? His ability to listen to his inner experience must be minimal.
And then I look in the mirror: is this person really living? And to what extent? How much more intensely could he live? Can I hear and truly know my own inner sense?
I ask the old question: what does it really mean to be alive? I listen to my friends, teachers, and patients who struggle with the death within them and try to reach a level of more intense life, which is also within them. And, of course, I am not satisfied with the answer. But gradually I begin to understand that all of us—if we truly learn to see and hear—can feel the pulse of life within us. We can tell when it beats stronger and when it weakens—even if none of us can define in exact scientific terms what this deep intuition is. However, what we can do is understand, through our own inner awareness, how we can experience our existence differently.
Achieving reliable awareness through the inner sense and using it productively is the direct path to the most exciting and healing experiences that I and my patients share together. When someone I work with truly absorbs the spirit of these efforts, they become so attuned to the work that we both look forward to each session, are completely absorbed by the adventures and discoveries that become possible, and by the personal growth that results. We talk about “rebirth” and new, deeper hopes in our lives. And I feel that I draw a great deal for myself and learn a lot from our work together.
I am describing a completely different kind of psychotherapy than that practiced by orthodox psychoanalysts or behaviorally oriented therapists. Indeed, the very word “psychotherapy” takes on a new meaning when applied to such an endeavor. It is no longer based on a model of correction; rather, I think of this activity as awakening or calling forth the life hidden within us, the inner sensitivity we have been taught to suppress, the possibilities of being that are too rarely realized. Whenever a person comes to me, I try to determine the degree of their inner awareness—to what extent they understand the meaning of inner listening. I try to identify influences that may have blocked or limited this listening to their subjectivity, and encourage the patient to make every effort to restore or strengthen the role of the inner sense of life. This is the starting point for the most successful journeys that my patients and I have made together. When we can truly focus on inner awareness, everything else is incidental, and we understand that. Unfortunately, I cannot help every person find their lost sense, help them get in touch with the center of their being, but I constantly try to do so.
The Search for the Inner Sense
In searching for the inner sense, I am, of course, not asking any new questions that have not been asked before. Perhaps, ever since humans first became aware of this painful, unique, paradoxical gift of self-awareness, they have stared at their reflection in the waters of a forest lake and asked the reverent question: “Who am I?” And, of course, for many centuries, philosophers and prophets, kings and commoners, scientists and mystics, and everyone else have tried to discern in the mirror this shifting image.
On these pages, I am not presenting the wisdom of philosophy, religion, or even psychology. What I say about the nature of our being comes mainly from the many people who have entrusted me with their life experience. Of course, it may be that their colors have mixed with the colors of my own experience. I cannot say how accurate my portrait of our human physiognomy is. But I am warmed by the fact that quite a few have recognized themselves in the faces I have painted with my palette.
I will not attempt to trace the history of the many reflections on human nature. Suffice it to say that the question “Who am I?” remains open, and anyone who claims to have the answer underestimates both themselves and the question. In modern psychology, it is customary to avoid this question or to dismiss it with quasi-religious dogmas (which is common practice among positivists). However, the humanistic direction in psychology is beginning to recognize human subjectivity again.
Abraham Maslow, one of the pioneers of the modern revival of humanistic psychology, constantly draws attention to a person’s inner awareness of their unique being. Sometimes he calls it “listening to the voice of impulses.” Maslow also wrote:
Such an understanding [of neurosis as blocking personal growth] gave me at least one advantage: I paid special attention to what I first called “the voices of impulses,” but which in a broader sense can be called “inner signals” (or stimuli). I was not sufficiently aware that in most neuroses, as well as other disorders, the inner signals become weaker or disappear altogether (as in cases of strong obsessions), or they are not heard, or cannot be heard. In extreme cases, we have a person without experiences—a zombie, absolutely empty inside.
The restoration of personality must, by definition, include the restoration of the ability to have and perceive these inner signals, to know what and who a person likes and dislikes, what is pleasant and what is not, when to eat and when not, when to sleep, when to urinate, when to rest.
A person deprived of inner experience does not receive these signals from within, these voices of their true I; they are forced to seek external supports for guidance. For example, they eat when the clock tells them to, not when they are hungry (which they are not); they manage themselves with the help of clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, plans, and instructions from others.
Colin Wilson speaks of “spiritual vision” and his “true I,” which he distinguishes from his personality. Others have understood this lost sense in similar ways: a vivid example is “The Third Ear” by Theodor Reik. Alan Watts, in many of his works, probably pointed to the same inner knowledge.
Erich Fromm traces the way we lose the sharpness of the inner sense:
To begin with, most children develop some hostility and rebelliousness: the result of their conflicts with the outside world, which limits their expansiveness, since they—the weaker side—have to submit. One of the main tasks of the upbringing process is to eliminate such antagonistic reactions. The methods vary—from threats and punishments that intimidate the child, to bribes and “explanations” that confuse them and force them to give up their hostility. At first, the child gives up expressing their feelings, and ultimately, the feelings themselves. At the same time, they learn to suppress their awareness of the hostility and insincerity of others; sometimes this is not easy, because children have the ability to notice these qualities and are not as easily deceived by words as adults. They dislike someone “for no reason” (unless you count as a reason that the child feels hostility or insincerity coming from that person). This reaction soon dulls; it does not take long for a child to reach the “maturity” of the average adult and lose the ability to distinguish a worthy person from a scoundrel. Moreover, even at an early stage of upbringing, the child is taught to display feelings that are not their own. They are taught to love people (all of them, necessarily), to be uncritically friendly, to smile, etc. If in the process of upbringing the child is not “broken” completely, then later social pressure usually finishes the job. If you do not smile, people say you are “not a very pleasant person,” and you must be pleasant enough to sell your services as a waiter, salesperson, or doctor. Only those at the very top of the social pyramid, and those at the very bottom—who sell only their physical labor—can afford not to be especially “pleasant.” Friendliness, cheerfulness, and all other feelings expressed in a smile become automatic responses; they are turned on and off like a light bulb.
Rollo May speaks of “I-experience,” characterizing what it means for a person to be aware of their being. Although May mainly focuses on the intentional aspects of “I-experience” and therefore pays more attention to potential possibilities, he, of course, highlights the same inner process in a person that I call the inner, or existential, sense. May writes about “I-experience”:
“First, I-experience itself is not a solution to a person’s problems; rather, it is a prerequisite for their solution.” He goes on to say: “The therapist’s ability to help the patient know and experience their own experience is the main thing in the therapeutic process.”