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Transforming the MindChapter Two: Background Psychology10Secondly, the systems which study man from the point of view of what he may become,i.e., his possible evolution. These last systems are in reality the original ones or in anycase the oldest and only they can explain the forgotten origin and meaning ofpsychology: the study of the principles, laws and facts of man’s possible evolution.The ‘evolution’ of man in this sense means the development of certain inner qualitiesand features which usually remain undeveloped, and cannot develop by themselves. Ifman does not want it, or does not want it strongly enough and does not make thenecessary efforts, and get the necessary help, he will never develop.The irony is, that before acquiring any new faculties that man does not now possess, hemust first acquire qualities that he thinks he already possesses but about which hedeceives himself.The following experiment will show how consciousness may be studied. Take a watchand look at the second hand, trying to be aware of yourself and concentrating on thethought, ‘I am (your name)’ and ‘I am now here’. Try not to think about anything else,simply follow the movement of the second hand and be aware of yourself, your name,your existence and the place where you are.Most people soon find themselves drifting into imagination and thought associations,demonstrating that man is not conscious of himself for most of the time. The illusion ofhis being conscious is created by memory. We actually remember only moments ofconsciousness, although we do not realize that this is so. In retrospect we rememberthose moments and assume we were fully awake the whole time.If we want to have more prolonged periods of awake consciousness and not merelyglimpses, we must understand that this will depend upon the command we have overourselves, and that this requires long and hard work.Man does not know himself. He does not know his own limitations and possibilities. Hedoes not even know to how great an extent he does not know himself. So he assumeshis mental state to be ‘conscious’, fully aware and self-determined, when in fact he isacting to a very great extent on automatic responses and continuously dramatizing allthe influences of his past.Transpersonal psychologyMost psychologies and psychotherapies are interested just in the personality. It is onlyin recent years that a variety known as ‘transpersonal psychology’ has emerged, whichcombines, or perhaps re-integrates, psychology and the personality, with theology andthe soul - two disciplines and two concepts that have been firmly separated in ourmaterialistic Western world, but which used to go hand in hand. For instance in earlyChristianity there was a collection of books by different authors under the general nameof Philokalia, describing the psychology of mystical enlightenment, and this knowledge

Transforming the MindChapter Two: Background Psychology11was the basis of Gnosis, itself the source of many of Gurdjieff’s ideas. (Freud himselfactually wrote about the psyche in terms of the ‘soul’, but his German was misguidedlytranslated into medical ‘scientific’ terms for the Anglo-American audience).In psychosynthesis, which Assagioli developed in the 1930s, it is said that a person hasa personality and is a soul. However, personalities in the world are obvious to us all;souls are only present for those with eyes to see. Assagioli's view of synthesis is ofbecoming more and more aware of soul, not only in oneself but also in others. Hisview, and the view of most spiritual disciplines, is that soul is basic and enduring, andthat personality, though necessary for being in the world , is relatively superficial andchangeable.The soul is the context, the home, the ‘unmoved mover’, the uncreated source of life;the personality is full of content, learned responses, and is dynamic. The soul may inmany people never be recognized in any explicit way, and the nature of this barrier andhow to remove it, to become ‘enlightened or to ‘awaken’, is an area we will beexamining later in this book.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before Freud, and with the values of theEnlightenment and the idea of progress, it was assumed that the human being wasbecoming more and more rational and fully civilized. It was this assumption that Freudquestioned, with his ability to discern the unconscious processes in people. He saw thesignificance of dreams as a communication of the unconscious to the conscious; slips ofthe tongue, mistakes, irrational emotion, inappropriate behavior and illnessesmanifested in ordinary living began to be acknowledged as effects of processes goingon beyond our consciousness. Many hitherto unexplained phenomena came to be seenas symptoms of the conflict between the strong ‘libido’ (sexual) forces of the ‘id’ (thedrive or life force of the core Self) and the ‘super-ego’ (the acquired conscience), asperceived by the ‘ego’ (that part of the id that detaches early in development to form anindependent personality - the ‘face to the world’).There are five main parts of our total psyche: Higher consciousness - that which isaware of being aware; Normal consciousness - awareness in the everyday world being, perceiving, relating; and of the inner world - of thoughts, concepts, attitudes,decisions, images, memories emotions, sensations and feelings. And the domains whichlie below normal consciousness: the Pre-conscious - an interface of the conscious mindwhich, when it is evoked by interest and emotional commitment, goes searching forrelevant data in the sub-conscious; the Sub-conscious - contains the powerful drives oflove and fear, and the programs by which motives are decided and actions are carriedout; and the Unconscious - the core Self which contains a record of everything one hasfelt and sensed since conception and of the evolutionary genetic-line before that. It alsoconsists of genetic programming, which empowers the deepest drives for survival,attachment and expression common to mankind, which transmits the energy ofemotions, which controls the stream of libido energies and the efforts involved inmoving and perceiving with the physical body.

Transforming the MindChapter Two: Background Psychology12Higher consciousness is the essential self, the Higher Self. It is our personal center ofawareness, which is developed through self-knowledge. The Higher Self is the‘awareness of awareness’ of which the mental (ego) ‘I’ is a pale reflection. There hasbeen an acknowledgement throughout human history that a higher awareness, beyondthe normal conscious experience, is possible for the individual, recognized throughdreams, religious and psychic experience, insights and creativity of every kind. It isusually frustratingly brief and infrequent but it is clear that with appropriate efforts andstudy, people can change and grow in awareness, whereby the field of consciousnessbecomes more and more observed by the Higher Self who is no longer asleep; thenbehavior is no longer determined only by conditioning. The Being is aware of thedifference between his own motivation and that which is learned, acquired or installedin him, genetically or by conditioning; he knows what he is doing as he does it. Theenergy and attention tied up in the knots of unconsciousness becomes conscious andfreely available, as truth is validated and the false discarded.This second aspect of the psyche, Normal consciousness, is our everyday reality,internally and externally - the incessant flow of sensations, images, thoughts, feelings,desires and impulses which we can observe, analyze and judge. The less aware aperson is, the smaller this field of awareness will be and the more automatic hisfunctioning. The majority of people drift on the surface of this ‘mind stream’ andidentify themselves with its successive waves, with the changing contents of theirconsciousness. So consciousness is often unreflective, not consciously noticed,determined by the many personal and social forces which have formed us, the culturalprogramming that moulds us into a ‘consensus trance’ of automatic, robotized behavior.In this hypnotized, half-asleep state, possessed by the conditioning of our background,we seem almost entirely the product of our genetic heritage, our personal environmentand the society we live in - in the grip of forces stronger than ourselves and which wedon’t understand, be they biological, psychological or social.The conscious mind contains all that one knows that is readily accessible. Thisinformation is well organized and interconnected on a logical basis. The characteristicsof this ‘analytical’ mind are invaluable for learning, putting things in order and testingideas. On the other hand the conscious mind tends to be inhibited by the very qualitythat make it so powerfully useful: it seeks to be right.This part of the personality, the subject of cognitive and behavioral psychology, couldeasily, without reflection, be regarded as the whole, but the development of depthpsychology and the rediscovery of transpersonal psychology in this century has made itclear that this level of consciousness is only a part of the whole.The third part, the Pre-conscious, is the ante-room of consciousness, where our variousexperiences are assimilated, our mental and imaginative activities are elaborated anddeveloped in a sort of psychological gestation and interaction, before their birth into thelight of consciousness. If consciousness is likened to a spotlight, the pre-conscious iseverything within its range, but not illuminated at this moment. It is real to the person

Transforming the MindChapter Two: Background Psychology13and accessible. It includes material from the sub-conscious that has been reactivated(stimulated and made active due to a similarity or relevance of present circumstances orthoughts). The pre-conscious mind is like a problem-oriented and independent fileclerk. It looks over the shoulder of the conscious mind: when a problem is beingconsidered, it conducts a search into the sub-conscious mind for clues that it considersrelevant.Its criteria for relevance do not always seem logical to the conscious mind, andtherefore the ‘file-clerk’ learns to censor certain kinds of information from the subconscious, preventing them from rising higher into full consciousness. This ‘censor’ isbelow consciousness; consequently you cannot open-up your mind to the sub-conscioussimply by resolving not to block its signals; the defenses have first to be recognized, thereasons for them discovered and the pre-conscious censor re-programmed, before this ispossible. This requires a procedure

Transforming the Mind 9 Chapter Two: BACKGROUND PSYCHOLOGY Before beginning practical work on self-development, an overview of the human personality will help to provide a context. The evolution of man Psychology, the study of the mind and how it works, is sometimes considered a new science, but this is quite mistaken.Author: Peter Shepherd