Psychological healing through Rainring: approaches (2)
In the first of these articles, we suggested that Rainring might prove of value for people who were in emotional or psychological pain. We explained that we were thinking not so much in terms of Rainring as a remedy for a crisis, but more as a means of support for those suffering from a general, long-term sense of something missing from or unfulfilled in their lives. In this second article, I want to begin to look at what lies behind this assertion.
First, it is a generally observable phenomenon of human nature that people do not change unless they have to. Indeed, this makes perfect sense. To change means first of all to lose something – to become less then I now am. Perhaps, later, I will gain something new and more valuable in place of what I have given up, but there is no certainty about that, and if it happens it will come only through effort and pain. To change could easily turn out to be a very disturbing, distressing, destabilising and unpleasant prospect. Why would anyone in their right mind subject themselves to all that, if everything in their lives was going swimmingly?
By and large, I think that it takes a great deal for someone to reach the point at which they are prepared to say: ‘I really can’t go on like this.’ But, once that point is reached, there is a willingness to look towards something new.
We also claimed that the mainstream attitude to something like Rainring is probably still one of suspicion, because the world inside ourselves is, for most people, unfamiliar and not to be trusted. The methods of science cannot evaluate it. Mental health, for example, remains an area with which most are very uncomfortable.
Why suggest Rainring as any kind of support for those in emotional pain?
If you are like most people, you are probably going to use Rainring primarily to find out about yourself. So, you are going to set out a spread of cards (whether physical cards, or images on the screen if you use the web version) and then consider, reflect, meditate on them. In other words, you are going to focus your attention upon yourself. In order to demonstrate this process in action, I will undertake a short reading about myself.
What matters here is not the ins and outs of the meaning, but the process of reading. In this case, I am using five cards to summarise the state of my psyche at the present moment. They range in value from +2 to -2. The plus cards show positive aspects of my situation, the minus ones negative aspects – but I must be careful to be sure that I have worked out what I mean by positive and negative in any particular case, before drawing the cards. In this case, I am referring to increasing or reducing my general psychological well-being. The central card gives a kind of average of where things are at.
Two of these cards seem straightforward to me: Raindance and Interchange. Explosion I can also relate to, but the negative ones, particularly the minus 2 – Input reversed – I am far less confident about. I consult the laminate containing the directory of the summary of meanings:
INPUT: inward focus; reflective attitude; listening to your inner voice; attempt to re-evaluate your situation; retreat from frenzy of external activity; collapse of manic pursuit of goals; loss of euphoria, deflation, ceasing to be full of yourself; search for help, new willingness to listen; humility, admission of defeat, failure or impotence, recognition of own limitations; openness to new ideas, methods, sources of inspiration
And, being still far from clear what is involved in the reversal here, I am likely to take at least one further card, and possibly several, to explore this further.
In doing all this I am reflecting upon my own situation. I am sitting quietly, with no radio, TV or other distraction, focussing on these cards which are telling me what is going on in my life. Typically, their message is not totally unknown to me, but neither is it totally known; they are extending, if you like, the awareness that I have of where I am at, which I have derived from other sources: self-observation, feedback from others, dreams, synchronous events – whatever sources I may normally use to tell me what is going on in my life.
But at this point you may find yourself with a question which makes you very uncomfortable: surely these cards are put together by someone – how can they possibly claim to be some kind of disembodied, objective description of the psyche? Then perhaps they are no more than an expression of the psyche of Peter Ryley, their author, and should under no circumstances be used as a so-called objective guide to what is going on in the querant’s life.
This proposition can, I think, be challenged from two directions. First, no individual exists in isolation. I am a child of my times; I have been influenced, directly or indirectly by all those who have gone before. Rainring has been drawn from a number of sources, and each of these in turn has drawn from numerous others. So, for example, introversion and extroversion, which gives us the themes of sets one and two in Rainring, are terms originally coined by C.G. Jung. Jung in turn was profoundly influenced by Freud in his early years. Similarly, Freud himself has antecedents stretching still further back. In this way, each individual builds on his or her predecessors, adds one further stone to the edifice of the psyche. There is very little of Rainring that cannot be found elsewhere, though the mixture, at least, may be original.
Second, Rainring cannot be properly evaluated without some understanding of the influence of the Unconscious. Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the lives of writers, artists or innovators in science, for example, will know that there is a state of psyche in which things ‘just come’ to you from somewhere else. A minor character introduced into a book develops, as it were under their own impetus, into a central character. The artist’s sky becomes vivid green and his grass purple. The scientist gives up in despair after beating his brains to pulp for weeks, only to have the solution appear to him in a dream.
In the later stages of Rainring, the illustrators were reaching the end of their labours and demanding clarification. My psyche was seething with umpires, (a feature of the hard copy pack, one or two of which are illustrated on the web site, but which are not used in the web version of Rainring) so that I had no idea how many cards there would be in total, or how to draw up a final balance sheet. At this point, the digital clock on the railway station where I was waiting suddenly displayed the time 12.90. I instantly concluded that there should be 93 cards – 1+2+90. (This has since been extended to 94, by the way, by the addition of a ninth umpire, reversal). A later version of Rainring may even contain 99 cards: my main point is not the precise number involved, but the fact that, at a time when I could not get closure and finish the cards, the appearance of this singular electronic aberration felt, subjectively, like a message from ‘out there’ – like an opportunity to get out of the pit into which I had fallen – that of the conscious mind.
In fact, I completed Rainring by giving up. The 85 cards of the pack comprised a defensible structure. A further four umpires (5 with reversal) were required for practical purposes. The remainder – Bull / No Bull, Balance, Oracle and Seasons – were left and all other contenders eliminated only because I accepted at some point that I did not know, and indeed there was no way for me to know, how many there ‘should’ be. In fact, I realised that these umpires were my personal codex to Rainring: they represented my own subjectivity, the predilections of my own spirit. As such, they simply did not have to be defensible in any absolute sense.
I wanted a joker in the pack. After all, every pack of cards has a joker, doesn’t it? But all my attempts to get the cards themselves to agree to this proved vain: they just kept rejecting everything I could come up with. So, something more subtle, strange and intriguing than I could ever have thought up has eventually happened. The joker is there, at the very centre of Rainring’s ‘master card’, offering a bowl of food from a large pot labelled: relish? [This card also is part of the hard copy pack, but is not one of the 81 on the web site, nor is there an illustration of it anywhere on the web]. In other words, the joker is there at the centre, but he cannot be accessed – there are four mentions on the card on which he features, but none relate to him. He is there, but he can never be pinned down. He represents, as indeed he should and must, what is beyond the rational mind: you cannot explore your understanding of him, because he is not available.
This excursion into detail is intended to help me make the point that Rainring cards are very, very far from being the result of assiduously following a carefully thought-out plan. Indeed, when I began, I did not know that I was creating cards. I began with 27, which later morphed into 45, which I thought for a long time was the final number. I had no idea that they would eventually turn out to be four-sided. When I made the first homemade pack of 82, I never imagined that the eventual four-sided, nine-aspected nature of the individual cards [in the hard copy, not on the web] would take me into umpires and hence into yet more cards.
So Rainring as it exists represents a complex collision between on the one hand the psyche of our times, insofar as it has been filtered through my life and awareness, and on the other hand the complex and bizarre interplay of consciousness – the rational mind – and the Unconscious. Just as it would be wrong to claim that there is no personal presence of mine in the cards, so it would be entirely mistaken to think of them as the result of deliberately planned effort by a single individual.
To say that sitting with Rainring induces a calm and collected state of mind is all very well. We may even accept that it is not simply the word of Peter Ryley or whoever, but if we are to use this strange device with any degree of confidence, surely we need to look more deeply at what Rainring really is, and what role it may be capable of playing in our lives? Therefore, in the third and concluding article on approaching Rainring, we shall ask what reason there is to explore inside ourselves, and what place Rainring can play in such exploration.