In Life Lessons from Bergson, Michael Foley writes –
What happens when we fail to live in duration, no longer hear the inner melody and lose touch with the intuitive self? We become frozen, petrified – automatons, slaves of habit or convention or both.
“Living in duration” is living in the experience of life, being fully present, attentive and aware. The opposite is to live in our inner worlds of representations and labels. Iain McGilchrist describes this brilliantly in his The Emperor and His Emissary, showing how the right hemisphere of our cerebral cortex processes the raw information as we pick it up from the world, then hands off some of it to be re-presented and analysed in the left hemisphere. What should happen next is that the analyses and representations are fed back to the right side to be re-contextualised. McGilchrist makes the point that, sadly, we’ve created a world where we forget the importance of the activities of our right hemispheres, and give primacy to those of the left.
“Hearing our inner melody” is a beautiful phrase. When we experience music we don’t experience it as separate notes and pauses. We experience it as rhythm and melody.
And our “intuitive self”? That deep, natural, heart-focused knowing….
What happens when we lose touch with those things? We get rigid and stuck.
There is no doubt that the pressures to conform in our society are enormous. It seems to me we are becoming less and less tolerant of difference, fearing “others” and suppressing diversity.
Every day we need to freely choose what to do, what to say, and what to think. As Michael Foley says –
Our freedom, in the very movements that affirm it, creates the developing habits that will stifle if it fails to be renewed by constant effort: it is dogged by automatism.
This is the fundamental theme of this blog – we all tend to default into autopilot and in so doing we live in a more limited, and less fully human way – like zombies – with habits and routines and “norms” on loops. Our alternative is to wake up, become aware and consciously choose to become the author of the one unique story in which we are the hero, the protagonist, the main character.
William James, who shared many of the same views as Bergson said
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. (Psychology: The Briefer Course, 1892)
My only issue with that statement is I don’t accept we completely lose our “plastic state” – what he means by “plastic” is dynamic, malleable, capable of being changed. Sure, as we become constrained by our habits and automatisms, it becomes harder to change.
But with awareness and will, change is possible!
Heroes Not Zombies 
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