IN some ways, the relentless electronic interconnectivity of our lives serves to highlight therapy’s singular virtues. We are more appreciative of the strange, private dialogue that is the heart of therapy. There are precious few times and spaces left in our society in which people quietly speak to one another in a sustained, intimate conversation. The therapist’s office is one of the last safe places.
.. In some ways therapy is, more than ever, the ultimate luxury: To be the focus of a thoughtful person who is listening, caring and helping to make sense of life’s chaos is something that the Internet can never provide.
The Science of Near-Death Experiences
the long-term effects of an NDE are as important an indicator of whether you’ve had one as the experience itself. Many people, she said, don’t realize for years that they’ve had an NDE, and piece it together only after they notice the effects. These include heightened sensitivity to light, sound, and certain chemicals; becoming more caring and generous, sometimes to a fault; having trouble with timekeeping and finances; feeling unconditional love for everyone, which can be taxing on relatives and friends; and having a strange influence on electrical equipment.
.. Alana Karran, an executive coach who led a guided meditation that retraced the steps of a typical NDE, helped me understand the significance of that sequence. It is, she pointed out, similar to the hero’s journey, or quest narrative, the structure that the American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell identified and named the “monomyth” in 1949. The quest underlies just about every form of storytelling, from religious myth to Greek epic to Hollywood blockbuster to personal memoir. In this structure, a protagonist is shaken out of his normal way of life by some disturbance and—often reluctantly at first, but at the urging of some kind of mentor or wise figure—strikes out on a journey to an unfamiliar realm. There he faces tests, battles enemies, questions the loyalty of friends and allies, withstands a climactic ordeal, teeters on the brink of failure or death, and ultimately returns to where he began, victorious but in some way transformed.
.. For all their differences in style and subject matter, Mays, Hugenot, and others are offering similar visions: large, all-encompassing explanations that link things people know to be true with things they would like to be true and that bring a sense of order to the universe.
.. He parried the question with sophistry: If you let the coffee cup go, you say it’ll fall down. But which way is down? If you change perspective and imagine the ground above us, maybe down is up. I moved to hold the cup up over his head and offered to test that theory. He laughed loudly and nervously.
Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives
According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them. For example, in a study published in January, a team led by psychologist Michael Dodd and political scientist John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives’ eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement—suggesting that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats.
Meanwhile examining the contents of 76 college students’ bedrooms, as one group did in a 2008 study, revealed that conservatives possessed more cleaning and organizational items, such as ironing boards and calendars, confirmation that they are orderly and self-disciplined. Liberals owned more books and travel-related memorabilia, which conforms with previous research suggesting that they are open and novelty-seeking.
.. Anxiety is an emotion that waxes and wanes in all of us, and as it swings up or down our political views can shift in its wake. When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative.
.. In an ingenious experiment, the psychologists reframed climate change not as a challenge to government and industry but as “a threat to the American way of life.” After reading a passage that couched environmental action as patriotic, study participants who displayed traits typical of conservatives were much more likely to sign petitions about preventing oil spills and protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
.. In a 2009 study Haidt and two of his colleagues presented more than 8,000 people with a series of hypothetical actions. Among them: kick a dog in the head; discard a box of ballots to help your candidate win; publicly bet against a favorite sports team; curse your parents to their faces; and receive a blood transfusion from a child molester. Participants had to say whether they would do these deeds for money and, if so, for how much—$10? $1,000? $100,000? More? Liberals were reluctant to harm a living thing or act unfairly, even for $1 million, but they were willing to betray group loyalty, disrespect authority or do something disgusting, such as eating their own dog after it dies, for cash. Conservatives said they were less willing to compromise on any of the moral categories.
..Yet he thinks that if people could see that those they disagree with are not immoral but simply emphasizing different moral principles, some of the antagonism would subside.
The Cost of Paying Attention
A notable feature of many formerly Communist countries is the apparent absence, or impotence, of any notion of a common good. Self-serving party apparatchiks have been replaced by (or become) quasi-free market gangsters. Many citizens of these countries live in the environmental degradation that results when economic development is left to such interests, with no countervailing force of public-spiritedness. We in the liberal societies of the West find ourselves headed toward a similar condition with regard to the resource of attention, because we do not yet understand it to be a resource.
Or do we? Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious.
.. The late, great Ted Riehle, Jr. of Vermont understood this many decades ago when he helped usher the no-billboard law through the state legislature. Some say they can feel their blood pressure drop upon crossing into Vermont from Massachusetts, as the commercial detritus and visual pollution of the billboards and neon disappear, allowing one to focus on the road and mountain vistas in the distance.