Continued from last entry:
R.D. Laing said attempts to awaken before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who awakens, or who, still asleep, realizes that what taken to be real is a dream, is going crazy.
“Western psychologists will enable us to see a rope where we formerly saw a snake, while eastern sages will show us a Brahman where we formerly saw a rope.
A philosopher named Gurdjeff maintained that consciousness can best be viewed as a multi-level continuum of different vibratory bands. He delineated the following spectrum:
1. Union with God.
2. Transpersonal. Astral travel – clairaudience.
3. Existential level. Being in love. High sensory awareness.
4. Pleasurable activities.
5. Ego level. Intellectual engagement.
6. Pain. Guilt, fear. Shadow.
A person may rebound from deep shadow to deep divine union. This is called the sling shot effect. Perennially, ego stands in opposition to mind.
Vital energy, preceding thought, Tao, God head, becomes the power through which reaction occurs.
The text defines a physics text book as a religious document scrubbed clean of words like intuition, eternity, and God head.
Another definition is organic consciousness as one with God, while intellectual consciousness is separate from God.
A thought. When I think I have knowledge of the world, I only have knowledge of the manifestations of self in contact with outside world. Through organic consciousness, whether aware of it or not, we are already free in God. Our life within does not recognize the primary dualism. Our primal God within is already infinite and eternal – thought we are slow to recognize this.
It appears as if I am serving a huge portion of concept salad, a succession of unrelated ideas. Bear with me. These ideas, though unrelated, are important.
The personality is not located within the body, inside a person’s head, behind the eyes – this is just symbolic.
It is described how energy disintegrates into consciousness. Images, concepts, the symbolic mode of knowing.
ENERGY is distinguished in thought, imagination, and emotion. This equates to Braham, which is dismembered into concepts, images, thoughts and distinctions.
Knowing now, one knows all time. Knowing here, you know all space. Just as by one piece of copper, all things of copper are known.
“Without looking through the window, one sees the ways of Heaven. The further you go, the less you know. Thus the sage knows without traveling”.
One need to understand understanding.
“ENERGY” exists as the foundation of mind, body, and social phenomena, as well as nature. ENERGY=MIND=GOD. Energy, free of conceptual elaboration, which eventually occurs, is without form, unknown as object, or concept, without duality, and is immediate. +
The experience of pure energy, without motion or emotion is the oblivion of eternal bliss. And continuing with the collection of ideas:” ignorance is identification with that which is perceived.”
Meditation is defined as supreme integration and identification with the All. One must identify with the material world, the body, as well as the ethereal non-structures.
Ignorance is the identification of the seer with the instruments of seeing. In other words, do not confuse self with the sensory organs.
Anger can be good, even divine, for it is the expression of God- Energy within. The moment of the eternal present is the unity of opposites.
Reality lives upstream of all conceptualization.
The Light of the Universe lies beyond all temporal and physical manifestation.
My soul is God. God is my soul.
Alchemy was the attempt to translate the universe into paradise.
Man must learn to integrate his shadow, to create a positive and accurate self image.
There are many seemingly contradictory schools of psychotherapy. Ken Wilber proposes the varied schools can be reconciled, and can be reconciled with the esoteric schools as well. Each of the different schools of psychotherapy simply address a different level of the spectrum.
Each level of the spectrum has its own pathology, and its own therapy.
At the shadow level, man attempts to divorce factors of his own psyche.
The therapies of each level share the common goal of healing.
Our shadow is defined as all of our ego potential, both good and evil, with which we have lost
contact. We tend to project our shadow nature on other people. We can end up clobbering ourselves with our own energies, for what we have projected onto others comes against us. Instead of drive, we feel driven.
We can actually give our potentials to others. We become worthless, and the world appears to be populated with people who are capable, important, and awesome in our eyes.
Anxiety is nothing but blocked and projected excitement and interest.
Pressure is externalized desire.
Egoic health and sanity demands we reown and integrate our evil tendencies.
Our evil balances with our goodness. It is alienated evil that is so horribly destructive. Some people believe evil is necessary for existence of good.
Hatred, owned and balanced, is a positive characteristic – taking on the form of cynicism and humor. Hatred, disowned, becomes a feeling of being hated and self hatred.
Projected aggression is felt as fear.
Projected anger is felt as depression.
It is important to treat ourselves with the same kindness and understanding we treat others.
Reintegrating shadow with persona requires one accept their emotional experience. Anxiety is an affair between me and me.
One should take personal responsibility for every thought, movement, and emotion, and place no expectations on the world.
Convert “the world hates me” into “ I hate the world”.
Shadow will always find a way in. Anxiety, guilt, fear, depression. The discussion of shadow is the climatic concept of this book. The author states that in owning and identifying our evil, negative, aspects, we harness these tendencies, and use them as a creative power. Wilber states “you will own them, or they will own you”. One needn’t act upon them, but be aware of them.
To make any decision, we must be aware of both our persona and our shadow. We must confront our opposites, and reown them.
The author suggests the problem is not to repress a symptom, but to increase the symptom, and experience it fully. One should consciously try to increase symptoms, rediscovering one’s shadow. The easiest way to untense a person is to challenge him to be as tense as possible.
To overcome guilt – force yourself to feel as guilty as possible. If you can make yourself guilty, tense, etc., you can make yourself untense, guilty, etc.
It is good to become the demons that haunt us. That they may be apprehended and cast away. Wilber suggests we completely act out each symptom, that our shadows lose their negative charge. Symptoms will then spontaneously depart.
What we love or despise is others is often just a facet of our own shadow nature.
Most psychotherapies are aimed at working with the ego level, integrating the persona with the shadow.
Chapter VIII
The bio-social bands define the relationship between personality and social structures. How we are structured by language, value systems, and unconscious rules of communication, logic, laws, popular ethics, religion, family structures etc.
Bio-social bands are a massive accumulation of maps and symbols. A person becomes a member of society when he has successfully internalized the maps and symbols of that society. A person is in society when society is in him. Socialization is learning to respond to the world as we believe other believe we should.
We separate ourselves from reality with language. The word water is not water, but a symbol thereof.
The meaning of the word tree is a tree itself. But what is the meaning of a tree?
The concern between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.
To establish meaning is to point, and to point is to split, thereby creating duality. Words create maps. Maps create boundaries. Again, Mind is not seen, but a world of objects through time. Maps and most human learning separate mind from soul. The bio-social bands are a set of rules to live by. + These rules often create double binds, showing society itself is insane. Human society has murdered 100,000,000 fellow men in the last fifty years. The bricks in the walls of our ego are cemented with the mortar of madness. This mortar is the insanity of normalcy.
We are taught self defeating thoughts and behaviors. Our society builds a set of rules that command and create confusion and defeat.
Our language, logic, and maps do not report reality, they edit it.
Psycho-therapy involves healing of the territory of dualism, the split of mind from body, psyche from soma. All therapy works to integrate mind and body into a single organism.
Body and mind blockages arise together, and can be cured by and an attack on either end, since body and mind are not two. Dr.Ida Rolf stated that the physical body is actually the personality. Hence, healing the body is healing the mind.
Joy has it’s realization in the body.
To be fully alive, one must live in body and mind fully, simultaneously, without segregating the two. This is existentialism.
We separate education from athletics, psychiatry from physical medicine. This is of the tertiary dualism of mind versus body.
Healing on the ego level unites shadow and persona. Healing on the existential level unites body and mind. “Lose your mind and come to your senses”.
Effective therapies must then facilitate both identifying and acting upon emotion.
Existentialism is being the total organism, recognizing and accepting all organic experience as its own. Owning feelings, urges, tingling, responses and vibrations. Both physical and emotional.
Meditation is identified as a way of integrating body and mind.
In meditation, survey the body. Allow self awareness to heal the body. The text prescribes an hour of meditation a day. A big commitment.
The impulses locked in the muscles must be thoroughly felt out, mobilized, exaggerated if necessary, and then discharged in the appropriate activity. Not “my heart is pumping blood”, but “I am pumping blood with my heart”.
We don’t exist in our body, but as our body. Some mental problems are so deeply and chronically anchored in the musculature that they simply must be approached through bodily techniques.
Existentialism combines the biological and physical, the social, and the psychic and egoic realms.
“If I cannot choose my fate, I can choose my attitudes towards it”. My first act of free will is to believe in free will.
By accepting and dealing with the anxiety generated by the secondary duality of being versus non-being, this anxiety is not pushed into creating the tertiary and quaternary dualities. +.
On the esoteric level all religions are said to have a transcendent unity. Religions diverge at the existential level, and converge at the level of Mind. “Many fundamentalist Christians gag in horror when there is any mention of the fact that all religions are identical in esoteric essence, for this implies that Christianity is not the only way.
According to the author, the following statement is the crux of this crux of this concept. That existence is graded into several levels. And that each level has its own mode of knowing. Modes that grade, shade, and range from pure non dual awareness, Mind, to disjointed pain, Shadow.
On the existential is exoteric religion. On the mind level is esoteric religion. Mysticism goes deep, to heal the primary, and all splits, giving the entire universe.
Healing a level makes it easier to descend to the next level, for then our energies are not bound up with the problems of that level. To go beyond the existential level one must beprepared to surrender the familiar.
The transpersonal bands are the realm of spiritual phenomenon. Both indescribable terror and great bliss. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, seeing the past or future, astral travel, are of the transpersonal bands.
This area has not been deeply studied. It scares people. Western medicine considers this to be the realm of sickness or pathology. And there are many deceptive illusions in this realm.
The realm of psychic phenomenon is considered by many to be like quicksand. Many who are mentally ill are lost in the transpersonal bands. Orthodox psychiatrists do not discover madness in these realms, they invent it, by defining it so. Mental illness is a political, not a medical, affair.
Carl Jung explored the transpersonal bands, in discovering the universal archetypes and collective unconsciousness. Jung’s insights explained what had previously been without explanation. Jung taught that inner vision, and its archetypes, hold the keys to the mysteries and powers of life. Archetypical symbols create meaning in and access to the subconscious. One learns to communicate with the primal universal forces through understanding the archetypes. Interpreting archetypes often brings a dynamic renewal of life. +.