4 - Sunday, February 8, 1987 - North Shore News Bob Hunter @ strictly personal © eas of dee YEARS AGO — If mean spent two weeks over at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, visiting a ‘‘gestalt therapy commune” run by the late Fritz Perls. Well, ‘visiting’ is hardly the right word. Being torn apart. Emptied. Turned upside down. Eviscerated, Psychologically trashed. And, aha, rebuiit! Pers, after all, was a contem- porary of Freud and Jung. He was the last of the great living founding psychotherapists. The guy could size you up in a few seconds, throw a_ logical hammeriock on you, give your psyche a few swift ju-jitsu tosses, dribble your ego around the floor, then drop you through a net of eureka-style self-discovery. In the vernacular of the time, it was better than acid. I sensed it. Lake Cowichan was a Slightly historic place to be then, Here was the old master at what turned out to be his last gestalt hurrah. Dr. Perls few off from the commune a few days after I left. He reached Chicago, only to die in hospital. It was smoking that killed him, by the way. He certainly other- wise had enough will inside him to Jast a thousand years. He was probably the most powerful man I ever met, and there can be no doubt at a basic level — smoking — he commited suicide. All who do, are. My own experience with Fritz was about coming to grips with my own inner needs, although | ! was pretty much in touch with those anyway. After I had hopped into the chair reserved for people he was going to work on and immediate- ly babbled about a shopping list of items I wanted to do therapy about, the crafty old shrink told me that 1 was one of the most economical people he’d ever met. Alas, that meant I broke down under his brilliant goading in no time at all, It wasn’t hard for him to find out what was bugging me, that’s for sure. | was frothing to get on with getting cured. Since there wasn’t really anything wrong with me, other than that I was a frustrated ma- jor 20th century philosopher, like just about everybody else | knew, Fritz hardly had to strain to get me working, as he put it, on my amiable old ego-self. It was great stuff. Worked wonders, of course. But, it had an unexpected side-effect. The therapy proved to be a bit sowhatish. Oh, | learned a lot about myself, for sure. That was the up side. The down side was that, for the first time in my life, it began to dawn on me that there really wasn’t all that much to learn about myself, after all. What we had here was an essentially normal male ego, with only slightly worse tendencies toward megalomania than usual, and probably a bit more blurring along the line between the ocean- ic sense of oneness with the uni- verse and the ability to know what day it is. In short, 1 grew up a wee bit as a result of Fritz's mauling of my head. But with the burn-off of the outer layers of vanity, a disturbing distance began fo open between the apparent need to do anything in the world and the real need, if there was any. Instead of emerging from gestalt therapy with renewed energy to go out there and slay dragons, | wound up stepping back, | think. For one thing, my faith in the degree of consciousness that most people enjoy was severely shaken. To this day, [ still have trouble taking anything that anyone says at face value. Dr. Perls had worked out a system which enabled you to sec your real self in a psyc:.ological mirror, looking through the masks we all wear on the surface. It was a fleeting thing, this glimpse. It was good, no matter what you saw, because it did have the effect of assuring you that there was a self in there, something bigger and more determined than you migh. ever consciously manage to be. But there is also a danger, when you tinker with your psyche that way, of losing something in exchange for the assurance that § you do have an unshakeable identity, no matter how atomized your world. , I’m a lazier man, as a result. My panic levels, over the years, have slackened off. Not only am I more indifferent to the expecta- tions of others, as Fritz suggested we ought to be, I have fewer ex- pectations of my own. More philosophy. Yep. . I just hope the sky isn’t actual- ly falling, after all, while I groove along here. It’s like the Zen ques- Mellower. tion: ‘‘What do you do after enlightenment?”’ The Zen guys say: ‘‘The same thing as before.” But maybe the real answer is that you do less. © LECTURE SERIES Wed. February 11 Mon., February 16 Mon. February 23 Jewish Mysticism — Is it for me? Rabbi Y. Fellig Noemi Freeman Feminine Sexuality in Judaism Social Welfare in Jewish Law Rabbi T. Freeman. All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m. at Delbrook Community centre, Oak Room. 600 W. 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