94stranger
Rainring and Psychotherapy (2) - revised & extended
(This article is the continuation of the one posted as Rainring & Psychotherapy (1). This part (2) has now undergone major revision, deletion and extension.)
Two objections suggest themselves at once: first, if the cards are being interpreted by a reader, then the reader her/himself has a point of view, i.e. is not neutral. Second, the cards were created by a person, and that person too must have a point of view, which in turn will subjectivise the interpretations which the cards are able to make. Both these objections have some substance, but my contention is that they do not put Rainring on the same level of subjectivity as that of typical practitioners in the field of psychotherapy.
First, the personal interpretations of the reader: of course these are there. However, there is a very important difference between the card reader and the psychotherapist. The former must practice the discipline of following the cards – the cards are there on the table in full view of the querant, and the reader follows the discipline of working from what is on the table. The psychotherapist by contrast, although subject to some general supervision, does not have, as it were, a highly skilled practitioner, to whom they must constantly refer, sitting right there with them as they conduct the therapy session. In fact, the direction or ‘angle’ of the therapist may be largely hidden from the client in non-directive types of therapy. It may even be claimed that the therapist does not have an agenda, other than to follow that of the client. In a Rainring reading, the subject and scope of the work is set by the querant’s question and the response of the Unconscious, which they both have in front of them. In other words, if there is institutionalised bias in a Rainring reading, it must largely be there because of the Rainring system itself coming out of one particular school of psychotherapy, just as do Biodynamic, Jungian or whatever, exactly as will be the case with any individual therapist.
So where does Rainring come from? Does it come from a particular school, approach, method? Rainring was designed initially as a cosmology. I am convinced that the psyche predates the material expression of it, so that what happens on the material plane is a reflection of what has already come into effect in the psyche. For this reason, I refer to Rainring as a ‘psycho-cosmology.’ Nevertheless, it is the existence of the spectrum colours, and the hunch to form them into a ring formation, adding an extra colour between violet and red, which was the foundation stone of Rainring. Whatever explorations then took place into elements of psyche, they were required to conform to that schema.
I had a look at the Psycards for the first time yesterday. The impression I get from them is that of a pot-pourri of elements from the tarot and other sources, thrown together in a manner which does not derive from any fundamental structure imposing itself upon them. This lack of an imperative structure, it seems to me, is also true of the medicine cards, angel cards and so on. The tarot, for its part, appears to be two structures in tandem: a duality, rather than a unity. The minor and the major arcana have no inherent structural reason, as I see it, to be together. The one system of which I am aware which does possess real unity, and which is therefore perhaps the true precursor of Rainring, is the I Ching. I have not made any proper study of the I Ching, but I have used it a little, and I am conscious of it having provided at least one feature found in Rainring: that of the cyclical nature of psychic processes. (This is not very obvious to users of Rainring unless they have the hard copy pack and the accompanying instruction booklet, because the cycle spread is not available on the web, though its positions correspond to the nine cards of set 9 – Projection, Resistance, Balance etc).
Rainring is certainly full of psychological views – correct or otherwise. But this content has been shaped by a perception of the physical universe, although extended beyond its present limits (by the addition of a magenta vibration). Rainring was not produced as a therapeutic tool, but is the by-product of a personal exploration - my attempt to answer the question: How should one live?
During the decades which (unknown to me!) led up to Rainring, I was struck many times by the way in which I could be highly impressed by the views of a particular pundit, each with a significant name and following, only to discover, a year or two later, another one equally impressive, but saying something which contradicted the views of the first. As this went on, I felt more and more that in order to become an ‘-ist’ – or an ’-ian’, it was necessary to select one ‘guru’, shut ones eyes and ears to everyone and everything else, and believe. For many years, this was exactly what I wanted to do, but some inner restlessness kept pushing me forward to yet another book, person or experience, and always with the effect of undermining whatever allegiance I had been able to form to the most recent in my line of pundits.
It seems to me that you, the reader of this article, may react to the above in one of two ways. The first is to explain pityingly to me that everything I describe is normal for those who have not yet encountered the transcendental wisdom of Sri What’s-his-name-ananda. Others point out that people who have been clients of therapy system x and not been ‘cured’ by it are standard proof of the kind of neurotic response which is so typical of so many people in their reaction to Dr Ultimate Psycho-cure-all and his method. The second reaction is to say: ‘me too, I find that if you follow the guidance of guru or therapist as a believer in their Way, everything is fine: if you challenge them, you have a problem.’ Not they, you.
To answer the question: how should one live? it is necessary to understand how human beings function; what ‘makes us tick’. It’s no different than saying that if you want to learn how to drive a bus, it’s no use trying to treat it like a bicycle or a donkey. This pursuit obliges us to explore matters of psyche. This is how Rainring came to have the content which it does. Think of it this way: a believer needs only to know what God wants of him/her – what’s in the holy book, or what the priest says. A disciple needs only to know what the guru requires; a patient, what the therapist wants. A person who can’t (or won’t) believe, follow or conform has to discover what makes sense, and this must be based on what is.
The starting point is: what are people actually like? If we multiply the individual, we get the world, the psyche of humanity first and the universal psyche if we go wider. So the other branch of our enquiry will be: what is our planet, or even the universe, like? An astronomer, chemist or biologist asks these questions in a material context; a psychologist asks them in a psychific context. What, if any, relation is there between the individual and the universal? – our bodies are made of the same stuff as is found in the world outside us; is it similarly true that the behaviour of one person and of several billion, or a whole cosmos-full, contains the same ingredients? So Rainring is as much a cosmology as it is a psychology.
Does Rainring have the subjectivity, limitation and bias of any other description of the human – individual or collective? We are in a subjective area here, where nothing can be ‘proved’. I, like you, am inside all this, and cannot view it as an outsider. All I can do is to state my credentials, to which those of Rainring are related: that I spent about three decades shopping around the ‘meaning of life’ arcade. Rainring is not a ready-to-wear that comes straight off the peg in the first psy-shop I could find. Also, that once I had produced a first dummy pack of basic (one-mention) cards, the Unconscious itself played a part in the subsequent developments. Beyond that, what else can I possibly say of Rainring, other than: suck it and see?!
I think we could probably claim that a person’s life, psychologically speaking, is made up of three essential ingredients: first, the conditioning to which they have been subject; second, the extent to which they have managed to free themselves from the effects of that conditioning; third, their goals in life. The goals will be, at least to start with, a product of the conditioning. However, the direction in which someone’s life develops will, I feel, be influenced by what they are trying to achieve, which could involve, amongst other factors, the amount of insight they manage to gain into themselves and the psyche in general. The central intention of Rainring is to act as a catalyst in that process. It is not a matter of me teaching you, but of the Unconscious teaching all of us.
In the third and final part of this article, we will close in for a more detailed appraisal of our original question: what are the similarities and differences between a Rainring reading and a session of psychotherapy?
(This article is the continuation of the one posted as Rainring & Psychotherapy (1). This part (2) has now undergone major revision, deletion and extension.)
Two objections suggest themselves at once: first, if the cards are being interpreted by a reader, then the reader her/himself has a point of view, i.e. is not neutral. Second, the cards were created by a person, and that person too must have a point of view, which in turn will subjectivise the interpretations which the cards are able to make. Both these objections have some substance, but my contention is that they do not put Rainring on the same level of subjectivity as that of typical practitioners in the field of psychotherapy.
First, the personal interpretations of the reader: of course these are there. However, there is a very important difference between the card reader and the psychotherapist. The former must practice the discipline of following the cards – the cards are there on the table in full view of the querant, and the reader follows the discipline of working from what is on the table. The psychotherapist by contrast, although subject to some general supervision, does not have, as it were, a highly skilled practitioner, to whom they must constantly refer, sitting right there with them as they conduct the therapy session. In fact, the direction or ‘angle’ of the therapist may be largely hidden from the client in non-directive types of therapy. It may even be claimed that the therapist does not have an agenda, other than to follow that of the client. In a Rainring reading, the subject and scope of the work is set by the querant’s question and the response of the Unconscious, which they both have in front of them. In other words, if there is institutionalised bias in a Rainring reading, it must largely be there because of the Rainring system itself coming out of one particular school of psychotherapy, just as do Biodynamic, Jungian or whatever, exactly as will be the case with any individual therapist.
So where does Rainring come from? Does it come from a particular school, approach, method? Rainring was designed initially as a cosmology. I am convinced that the psyche predates the material expression of it, so that what happens on the material plane is a reflection of what has already come into effect in the psyche. For this reason, I refer to Rainring as a ‘psycho-cosmology.’ Nevertheless, it is the existence of the spectrum colours, and the hunch to form them into a ring formation, adding an extra colour between violet and red, which was the foundation stone of Rainring. Whatever explorations then took place into elements of psyche, they were required to conform to that schema.
I had a look at the Psycards for the first time yesterday. The impression I get from them is that of a pot-pourri of elements from the tarot and other sources, thrown together in a manner which does not derive from any fundamental structure imposing itself upon them. This lack of an imperative structure, it seems to me, is also true of the medicine cards, angel cards and so on. The tarot, for its part, appears to be two structures in tandem: a duality, rather than a unity. The minor and the major arcana have no inherent structural reason, as I see it, to be together. The one system of which I am aware which does possess real unity, and which is therefore perhaps the true precursor of Rainring, is the I Ching. I have not made any proper study of the I Ching, but I have used it a little, and I am conscious of it having provided at least one feature found in Rainring: that of the cyclical nature of psychic processes. (This is not very obvious to users of Rainring unless they have the hard copy pack and the accompanying instruction booklet, because the cycle spread is not available on the web, though its positions correspond to the nine cards of set 9 – Projection, Resistance, Balance etc).
Rainring is certainly full of psychological views – correct or otherwise. But this content has been shaped by a perception of the physical universe, although extended beyond its present limits (by the addition of a magenta vibration). Rainring was not produced as a therapeutic tool, but is the by-product of a personal exploration - my attempt to answer the question: How should one live?
During the decades which (unknown to me!) led up to Rainring, I was struck many times by the way in which I could be highly impressed by the views of a particular pundit, each with a significant name and following, only to discover, a year or two later, another one equally impressive, but saying something which contradicted the views of the first. As this went on, I felt more and more that in order to become an ‘-ist’ – or an ’-ian’, it was necessary to select one ‘guru’, shut ones eyes and ears to everyone and everything else, and believe. For many years, this was exactly what I wanted to do, but some inner restlessness kept pushing me forward to yet another book, person or experience, and always with the effect of undermining whatever allegiance I had been able to form to the most recent in my line of pundits.
It seems to me that you, the reader of this article, may react to the above in one of two ways. The first is to explain pityingly to me that everything I describe is normal for those who have not yet encountered the transcendental wisdom of Sri What’s-his-name-ananda. Others point out that people who have been clients of therapy system x and not been ‘cured’ by it are standard proof of the kind of neurotic response which is so typical of so many people in their reaction to Dr Ultimate Psycho-cure-all and his method. The second reaction is to say: ‘me too, I find that if you follow the guidance of guru or therapist as a believer in their Way, everything is fine: if you challenge them, you have a problem.’ Not they, you.
To answer the question: how should one live? it is necessary to understand how human beings function; what ‘makes us tick’. It’s no different than saying that if you want to learn how to drive a bus, it’s no use trying to treat it like a bicycle or a donkey. This pursuit obliges us to explore matters of psyche. This is how Rainring came to have the content which it does. Think of it this way: a believer needs only to know what God wants of him/her – what’s in the holy book, or what the priest says. A disciple needs only to know what the guru requires; a patient, what the therapist wants. A person who can’t (or won’t) believe, follow or conform has to discover what makes sense, and this must be based on what is.
The starting point is: what are people actually like? If we multiply the individual, we get the world, the psyche of humanity first and the universal psyche if we go wider. So the other branch of our enquiry will be: what is our planet, or even the universe, like? An astronomer, chemist or biologist asks these questions in a material context; a psychologist asks them in a psychific context. What, if any, relation is there between the individual and the universal? – our bodies are made of the same stuff as is found in the world outside us; is it similarly true that the behaviour of one person and of several billion, or a whole cosmos-full, contains the same ingredients? So Rainring is as much a cosmology as it is a psychology.
Does Rainring have the subjectivity, limitation and bias of any other description of the human – individual or collective? We are in a subjective area here, where nothing can be ‘proved’. I, like you, am inside all this, and cannot view it as an outsider. All I can do is to state my credentials, to which those of Rainring are related: that I spent about three decades shopping around the ‘meaning of life’ arcade. Rainring is not a ready-to-wear that comes straight off the peg in the first psy-shop I could find. Also, that once I had produced a first dummy pack of basic (one-mention) cards, the Unconscious itself played a part in the subsequent developments. Beyond that, what else can I possibly say of Rainring, other than: suck it and see?!
I think we could probably claim that a person’s life, psychologically speaking, is made up of three essential ingredients: first, the conditioning to which they have been subject; second, the extent to which they have managed to free themselves from the effects of that conditioning; third, their goals in life. The goals will be, at least to start with, a product of the conditioning. However, the direction in which someone’s life develops will, I feel, be influenced by what they are trying to achieve, which could involve, amongst other factors, the amount of insight they manage to gain into themselves and the psyche in general. The central intention of Rainring is to act as a catalyst in that process. It is not a matter of me teaching you, but of the Unconscious teaching all of us.
In the third and final part of this article, we will close in for a more detailed appraisal of our original question: what are the similarities and differences between a Rainring reading and a session of psychotherapy?
