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..:: The Mind ::..
By
Alan Schneider
The Mind is the sum total of all Consciousness.
This is true whether we refer to the individual mind apparently
circumscribed by the physical organism, or the cosmic Mind of God. On
the personal level, this mind exhibits what is essentially a bicameral
structure, having a foreground of expressed perceptual events,
and a background of repressed perceptual events. The foreground
is customarily referred to as the conscious mind, while the background
is referred to as the unconscious mind.
The foreground of the mind is composed of the great flood of
waking impressions of the senses provided by the central nervous system
– an enormous inundation of electrochemical signals that is
fundamentally chaotic in character. This mass of sensation is
resolved into the much less chaotic world that we actually experience
through the senses by the action of primarily one mental structure – the
ego. This ego is the result of acculturation – a socialized,
indoctrinated entity that noted author and consciousness researcher
Deepak Chopra has described as “a social fiction.” It is nonetheless a
perceptible aspect of consciousness that I experience as my personal
sense of self – my sentient self-awareness. The ego learns through the
ongoing process of cultural exposure what to accept as significant
information, and what to reject as inconsequential “nonsense”. The ego
constructs the impression of the world that we accept as “reality”. This
world has physical, social, personal, and moral features, among others.
And it is implicitly composed of what is not rejected by the ego
far more than what is accepted!
We owe our ascendance as a species to the social
aspect of the ego’s information processing. Although human beings
certainly have the largest, most complex brains of all land animals,
brains that support tool use, analytical thought, binocular vision, and
upright movement, it is our ability to coordinate our activities that is
the supreme human achievement. Most people, including many
intellectuals and academicians, simply take this capability for granted,
not questioning its psychological origins in the mind. It is precisely
at the juncture of this socialization issue with perceptual psychology
that we begin to venture into the background of consciousness, into the
vast un-sensed region that, in fact, forms the foundation of
waking consciousness and the origin of all consciousness.
To a certain extent, the ego is aware of the background. It
senses the instinctual drives of the Freudian Id, and the
occasionally-felt impressions of the frequently traumatic acculturation
process that created it. Because these impressions are generally quite
disturbing to the ego, the tendency is not to explore this region too
extensively. So we can say that the ego is surrounded, and
psychologically defined, by a boundary region of personal unconscious
impressions. It is not surprising that the social foundations of culture
are not noticed under these conditions – they lay beyond the boundary!
Only psychological specialists, philosophers, and social explorers
venture into the lands beyond our inhibitions.
If a given individual is willing and able to pay the price
of traversing the “inhibition zone” (and this price can be a personally
and professionally high one) surrounding the ego and conscious mind, a
fascinating landscape of symbolism and symbolic expression emerges in
the now-extended mental background. Although some of these symbolic
expressions are still primarily personal, as one travels father away
from the personal unconscious region, they become more universal
in character. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called these universal
expressions archetypal symbols, and postulated that they were
generated by certain preexisting instinctual modes that then emerged
into perception as culturally recognizable forms. To Jung, the
cultural differentiation that has been the hallmark of human achievement
results from another layer of instinctual expression that exists apart
from the physical drives, yet determines how we comply with them to
satisfy our needs through social organization. And just as the ego
tends to inevitably emerge in consciousness as a consequence of brain
neurology, so the archetypal symbols also emerge on a more subtle level
of expression, frequently beyond conscious perception, but on a much
more influential basis.
As one travels ever more deeply into the background of the
mind, or Psyche, in Freudian terminology, the archetypal symbols become
progressively more fundamental in nature, culminating in what still
stands today as the theoretical origin of consciousness – the Primal
Self – or simply Self. This structure is so esoteric that its
very existence is a matter of hot debate in academic circles. It
certainly can only be accessed in deep meditation, and (presumably) in
certain near-death experiences. It is a state of consciousness existing
in non-dual expression – the usual polar conditions that allow us
to conceptualize reality are absent at this level. It is a Unified Field
of experience that is frequently equated with Deific Manifestation –
God. This is the structure that lies at the base of consciousness,
and generates everything else, including the ego that generally knows
nothing of the Self, or its existence. It is at this level that the
personal mind
becomes the Universal Mind.
The interface region between the foreground and background
of the total Mind has assortedly been characterized as “preconscious”,
“semiconscious”, and “transitionally conscious” by various different
authorities over the years. This author prefers the admittedly
non-scientific term “Astrally conscious” or “Astral state”, because it
conveys more information about the region in more specific theoretical
terms.
The Astral state is accessed by turning attention away from
the ongoing flow of the senses and ego activity related to the
foreground region. As soon as, and for as long as, we defocus in the
foreground, we begin to experience some essence of the background. The
Astral state includes several distinct types of experiences, including
dreams, fantasies, meditative perceptions, simple defocusing, visions,
various altered states of perception, emergent archetypes, and many
psychic modes of activity including remote viewing, Astral projection,
and general extrasensory perception. The Astral state is the supermarket
of consciousness from which the ego selects those “products” that it
considers appropriate to build our perception of what is “real” and
relevant in life. The preferred products will, of course, always
be those linked to an immediate and tangible positive outcome for the
organism in the material sense. Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong
with this, but there is nothing necessarily right with it either. The
problem with the ego is that it is only as reliable as the acculturation
which produces it, and materialistic acculturation produces an ego state
that tends to overlook and denigrate much useful Astral content as being
“unreal” or irrelevant in character. It may be true that Astral
information is generally intangible, but “intangible” does not equal
“irrelevant” or “useless” by any means. The key to working with the
often fantastic Astral images lies in understanding their meaning as
symbolic content.
The Astral state is referred to in the Mystery Theories as
the Astral Plane of conscious expression, and is conceived of as
immediately presupposing the obvious Physical Plane experienced in the
physical senses. It is held in the Mysteries that the images of the
Astral Plane “condense out” into the experience of the Physical Plane,
and so they do, with the further observation that the acculturated ego
is the selective medium of that condensation, determining what is “real”
through the use of cultural reinforcement schema. Some of those
schema are valid as survival mechanisms – others are most
questionable from any point of view. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic
Church fomented the belief that cats were Satanic creatures linked to
the Devil and witchcraft. The result was a prolonged period of cat
eradication throughout Europe. Without the cats to predate them, the
rats then proliferated, causing a succession of plagues on the
continent. Certainly, predators have a ferocious aspect, but eliminating
them from the ecosystem invariably causes ruin. The cat is an Astral
aspect often present, as are cat’s eyes, but these manifestations must
be viewed with a calm and deliberating gaze – not in a panic of fear and
irrational prejudice. The first rule of Astral exploration is: no matter
what appears to be manifesting, keep your courage and stand your
ground!
There are predominantly two modes of symbolic expression in
the Astral state – the personal and the collective. A given Astral
symbol will invariably have unique significance for the individual,
based upon that person’s background experiences. The same symbol will
have a collective, and more or less universal, significance that is
reflective of its archetypal origin. At some point, the personal
unconscious truly becomes the collective unconscious, as we dive deeper
into the Psyche. The basic rule of thumb here is that the personal
significance must be understood and accepted before the collective level
can be accessed and successfully worked with. If I have been traumatized
by being attacked by a dog, this must first be dealt with before the
archetype of Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of the Underworld, can be
understood and confronted in the Astral state. And, because we have
all been traumatized to some extent or other, the Astral experience
should be approached with respect for the archetypal potencies therein,
and any investigations conducted carried forth with caution and
patience!
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2007, Alan Schneider)
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