The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness - Part 1

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Dear All,

 

Here is an article on " The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness " . i

will render it into a few parts, so the reading at one sitting is not so long.

Here is Part I.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness

 

(Part 1)

 

(p.28) We saw in chapter one how, in the process of the evolution of both mind

and matter, form is constantly ordering and structuring matter/energy and

building up the world as we know it until, at the level of the human person,

matter becomes conscious. Human knowledge is the knowledge of forms. On the one

hand form structures matter and on the other hand, in knowing anything, it is

the form of the thing which is received into the mind. That again was the

understanding of Aristotle. So, for example, when I look at a tree I receive the

form of the tree into my mind. My senses receive an impression which is

registered in the brain. The impression results in an image and my mind

conceives the form of the tree. The matter/energy, which is in the tree, remains

outside; the concept of the tree is the presence of the form within the mind.

That is how knowing proceeds. It is, of course, a gradual process. As our

science and philosophy develop we get ever deeper understanding and receive an

increasingly complete appreciation of the forms.

 

Beneath the conscious mind there are many levels of the unconscious. Although in

human persons the mind of the universe becomes conscious, our present conscious

mind is still very limited and beneath the conscious mind are all the manifold

levels of what is called the unconscious, or better, the subconscious mind. Here

the imagination functions; we form images of the world around us subconsciously

rather than consciously. We sense things around us, our feelings and appetites

awaken and we form an image of the physical (p.29) world. All this is the

product of the subconscious mind deep within ourselves.

 

The world as we see it is the world as it is mirrored in our psyche. The psyche,

or soul, is a complex organic structure of which the conscious mind is one

aspect. All the other levels of the mind exist within the psyche and together

they embrace the whole world of consciousness. It is known now that a person can

go back through the different levels of consciousness and experience each level.

There is no problem about going back to the dream level of consciousness, and we

can get back fairly easy to life in childhood and particularly to the emotional

aspects of it. Recently it has been discovered in the West that by trance or

hypnosis, or using some other technique to induce regression, it is possible to

get back to the level of perinatal experience where the whole trauma of the

birth process can be relived and worked with. Going even further, it is possible

to get back to the experience of intra-uterine life and then to the moment of

conception. In working with such experience it has become clear that the whole

period from conception to birth is of immense importance for the development of

the adult person. If, for instance, a child is conceived with great love and

mutual self-giving the developing embryo experiences that unity, but if the

child is conceived with feelings of violence and hatred, as for instance in the

case of rape, that adverse emotional environment seriously affects the embryo.

So the embryo, and later the child, is being affected emotionally from the very

beginning. All this is recorded in the subconscious mind and a great deal of

insight can be obtained by gaining access to these levels of early personal

experience. Where there are deep psychological hurts these can often be healed,

even when they were inflicted long before birth.

 

It is said that it is possible to go behind birth consciousness and conception

to an animal consciousness in such a way (p.30) as to become aware of the animal

life within. Further back still an awareness of plant life can be attained and

finally it is possible to get back, in principle at least, to the original

explosion of matter. The explosion of matter in the universe fifteen billion

years ago is present to all of us. Each one of us is part of the effect of that

one original explosion such that, in our unconscious, we are linked up with the

very beginning of the universe and with the matter of the universe from the

earliest stages of its formation. In that sense the universe is within us. We

habitually think of the universe as being outside and apart from us but that is

because we have become accustomed to projecting it outside.

 

In connection with this an interesting theory has been advanced by Karl Pribram,

the well-known neuro-scientist. Pribram has advanced evidence to show that the

brain may function in many ways like a hologram. Holography is a lensless

photographic process in which light scattered by an object is recorded on a

photographic plate in the form of an interference pattern which looks just like

swirls on the plate. When the plate is put in front of a coherent light source,

into a laser beam for instance, the original wave field is regenerated and a

three-dimensional image of the object appears. What is fascinating about the

hologram is that if the photographic plate on which the object is recorded is

cut into pieces, each piece when illuminated by coherent light will reconstruct

the whole image, perfect in every detail, although less sharply defined. The

hologram is a concrete example of the principle that the whole is present in

every part. Its discovery confirms the view that in the universe the whole is

also present in every part and that this is in fact the structure of the

physical world. It is of interest that Pribram is a friend of both Bohm and

Krishnamurti, and was a former associate of Einstein. Together with Bohm he

generated what is referred to as the holographic theory of reality.

 

(p.31) The suggestion is that we receive vibrations of light, sound and matter

into our brains simply as vibrations and then, as in the case of the hologram,

we project a three-dimensional world around us. On this understanding the world

is a projection of our minds; it does not exist as it appears to us. As we shall

see in examining the evolution of consciousness, it becomes clear that we do in

fact construct the world around us. The world is there of course; the energy and

the form exist, but the way in which we apprehend the world depends on our

consciousness and the level to which it has evolved. So we project this world

around us and think of it as outside, but in reality it is within. The world is

of course outside my body; but it is not outside my mind. Aristotle said that

the human mind is 'quodammodo omnia', in a certain sense is all things, because

we are capable of receiving the forms of the whole universe into ourselves. We

are this little universe, a microcosm, in whom the macrocosm is present as in a

hologram.

 

In Western analytical psychology the person who first opened up the level of the

unconscious mind was of course Sigmund Freud, and much credit goes to him for

his profound psychological insights. Even though the philosophy in terms of

which he explained his psychological discoveries was inadequate, since it was

totally materialistic, his work laid the foundations of modern psychology.

 

Freud did not go much below the level of the personal unconscious. He was

essentially concerned with repressed feelings, thoughts, images and desires.

These, when repressed into the unconscious, become explosive forces which can

break out into a person's life, causing disorder and serious mental illness, not

to say madness, if they are too violent. So Freud explored this whole level of

the repressed unconscious, in particular repressed sexuality which he termed the

libido, and he explained a great deal of the mechanism of the human unconscious.

We must be just (p.32) to Freud in that, by concentrating on this level of the

unconscious, he did discover much of which nobody had been aware before. In the

same way Karl Marx, by concentrating on the economic level, did reveal how far

the economics of life, the getting of one's daily bread, affects the whole

structure of society and of course the whole political organisation. These men,

Freud and Marx, undoubtedly made fundamental and far-reaching contributions. It

was when they tried to explain everything in terms of economics (Marx) or of the

personal unconscious mind (Freud) that serious mistakes arose.

 

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who had originally been a disciple of Freud,

went far beyond his pioneering predecessor. Jung realised that beyond the

personal unconscious is what he termed the collective unconscious. This is an

area which can be contacted, as we have seen, beyond childhood, infancy and

perinatal experiences. It is called " collective " because the contents of this

level of consciousness are common to the whole human race. The evidence for this

is partly in dreams and partly in mythology. Psychoanalysts have discovered that

in the dreams of modern people there frequently occur recreations of ancient

mythologies. The myths of Greece, Rome and India, for instance, recur in the

dreams of twentieth-century people. Jung concluded that the whole mythological

world is present in the collective unconscious. We have inherited from the past

archetypes which are structured forms or patterns of organic energy, in which

the unconscious reflects its experiences. Working with this and related issues

Jung opened up knowledge of the unconscious to a far greater depth than Freud.

He also made a serious mistake however which Ken Wilber has correctly diagnosed,

in that in his interpretation he tended to confuse aspects of the personal

subconscious with superconsciousness. Many Jungian analysts still do this,

failing to distinguish prepersonal from transpersonal consciousness.

 

(p.33) We will see in what follows that there is the level of mental

consciousness which is our normal rational consciousness, but below that is a

series of subconscious levels, while above it is another whole range of levels

of consciousness up to the supreme consciousness to which we are aspiring. The

mental consciousness with which we normally identify is in the mid-range of the

development of consciousness.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs. 28-33