Suddenly, without any warning, at any time or place, with no apparent cause, it can happen.
All at once I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, and immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. (R. M. Bucke)
What a magnificent awareness! We would surely be making a grave error if we hastily concluded such experiences to be hallucinations or products of a mental aberration, for, in their final disclosure, they share none of the tortured anguish of psychotic visions.
The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold, the gates were at first the ends of the world. The green trees when I saw them first, through one of the gates, transported and ravished me. . . . Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of day. . . . (Traherne)
William James, America’s foremost psychologist, repeatedly stressed that “our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” It is as if our everyday awareness were but an insignificant island, surrounded by a vast ocean of unsuspected and uncharted consciousness, whose waves beat continuously upon the barrier reefs of our normal awareness, until, quite spontaneously, they may break through, flooding our island awareness with knowledge of a vast, largely unexplored, but intensely real domain of new-world consciousness.
Now came a period of rapture so intense that the universe stood still, as if amazed at the unutterable majesty of the spectacle. Only one in all the infinite universe! The All-loving, the Perfect One. . . . In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss, came illumination. I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed—I know not whether material or spiritual—rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain—not a link left out—everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended into one harmonious whole. (R. M. Bucke)
The most fascinating aspect of such awesome and illuminating experiences—and the aspect to which we will be devoting much attention—is that the individual comes to feel, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he or she is fundamentally one with the entire universe, with all worlds, high or low, sacred or profane. The sense of identity expands far beyond the narrow confines of the mind and body and embraces the entire cosmos. For just this reason R. M. Bucke referred to this state of awareness as “cosmic consciousness.” The Muslim calls it the “Supreme Identity,” supreme because it is an identity with the All. We will generally refer to it as “unity consciousness”—a loving embrace with the universe as a whole.
The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine; all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the kingdom of God. (Traherne)
So widespread is this experience of the supreme identity that it has, along with the doctrines that purport to explain it, earned the name “The Perennial Philosophy.” There is much evidence that this type of experience or knowledge is central to every major religion—Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—so that we can justifiably speak of the “transcendent unity of religions” and the unanimity of primordial truth.
The theme of this book is that this type of awareness, this unity consciousness or supreme identity, is the nature and condition of all sentient beings; but that we progressively limit our world and turn from our true nature in order to embrace boundaries. Our originally pure and nondual consciousness then functions on varied levels, with different identities and different boundaries. These different levels are basically the many ways we can and do answer the question, “Who am I?”
“Who am I?” The query has probably tormented humankind since the dawn of civilization, and remains today one of the most vexing of all human questions. Answers have been offered which range from the sacred to the profane, the complex to the simple, the scientific to the romantic, the political to the individual. But instead of examining the multitude of answers to this question, let’s look instead at a very specific and basic process which occurs when a person asks, and then answers, the question “Who am I? What is my real self? What is my fundamental identity?”
When someone asks, “Who are you?” and you proceed to give a reasonable, honest, and more or less detailed answer, what, in fact, are you doing? What goes on in your head as you do this? In one sense you are describing your self as you have come to know it, including in your description most of the pertinent facts, both good and bad, worthy and worthless, scientific and poetic, philosophic and religious, that you understand as fundamental to your identity. You might, for example, think that “I am a unique person, a being endowed with certain potentials; I am kind but sometimes cruel, loving but sometimes hostile; I am a father and lawyer, I enjoy fishing and basketball. . . . ” And so your list of feelings and thoughts might proceed.
Yet there is an even more basic process underlying the whole procedure of establishing an identity. Something very simple happens when you answer the question, “Who are you?” When you are describing or explaining or even just inwardly feeling your “self,” what you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of your experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling your “self,” while everything outside that boundary you feel to be “not-self.” Your self-identity, in other words, depends entirely upon where you draw that boundary line.
You are a human and not a chair, and you know that because you consciously or unconsciously draw a boundary line between humans and chairs, and are able to recognize your identity with the former. You may be a very tall human instead of a short one, and so you draw a mental line between tallness and shortness, and thus identify yourself as “tall.” You come to feel that “I am this and not that” by drawing a boundary line between “this” and “that” and then recognizing your identity with “this” and your nonidentity with “that.”
So when you say “my self,” you draw a boundary line between what is you and what is not you. When you answer the question, “Who are you?,” you simply describe what’s on the inside of that line. The so-called identity crisis occurs when you can’t decide how or where to draw the line. In short, “Who are you?” means “Where do you draw the boundary?”
All answers to that question, “Who am I?,” stem precisely from this basic procedure of drawing a boundary line between self and not-self. Once the general boundary lines have been drawn up, the answers to that question may become very complex—scientific, theological, economic—or they may remain most simple and unarticulated. But any possible answer depends on first drawing the boundary line.
The most interesting thing about this boundary line is that it can and frequently does shift. It can be redrawn. In a sense, the person can remap her soul and find in it territories she never thought possible, attainable, or even desirable. As we have seen, the most radical re-mapping or shifting of the boundary line occurs in experiences of the supreme identity, for here the person expands her self-identity boundary to include the entire universe. We might even say that she loses the boundary line altogether, for when she is identified with the “one harmonious whole” there is no longer any outside or inside, and so nowhere to draw the line.
Throughout this book we will return to and examine the no-boundary awareness known as the supreme identity; but at this point it would be worthwhile to investigate some of the other, more familiar ways in which one can define the boundaries of the soul. There are as many different types of boundary lines as there are individuals who draw them, but all of them fall into a handful of easily recognized classes.
The most common boundary line that individuals draw up or accept as valid is that of the skin-boundary surrounding the total organism. This seems to be a universally accepted self/not-self boundary line. Everything on the inside of that skin-boundary is in some sense “me,” while everything outside that boundary is “not-me.” Something outside the skin-boundary may be “mine,” but it’s not “me.” For example, I recognize “my” car, “my” job, “my” house, “my” family, but they are definitely not directly “me” in the same way all the things inside my skin are “me.” The skin-boundary, then, is one of the most fundamentally accepted self/not-self boundaries.
We might think that this skin-boundary is so obvious, so real, and so common that there wouldn’t be any other types of boundaries really possible for an individual, save perhaps for those rare occurrences of unity of consciousness on the one hand or the hopelessly psychotic on the other. But in fact there is another extremely common, well-established type of boundary-line drawn by a vast number of individuals. For most people, while they recognize and accept as a matter of course the skin as a self/not-self boundary, draw another and, for them, more significant boundary within the total organism itself.
If a boundary line within the organism seems strange to you then let me ask, “Do you feel you are a body, or do you feel you have a body?” Most individuals feel that they have a body, as if they owned or possessed it much as they would a car, a house, or any other object. Under these circumstances, the body seems not so much “me” as “mine,” and what is “mine,” by definition, lies outside the self/not-self boundary. The person identifies more basically and intimately with just a facet of his total organism, and this facet, which he feels to be his real self, is known variously as the mind, the psyche, the ego, the personality.
Biologically there is not the least foundation for this dissociation or radical split between the mind and the body, the psyche and the soma, the ego and the flesh, but psychologically it is epidemic. Indeed, the mind-body split and attendant dualism is a fundamental perspective of Western civilization. Notice even here that I must use the word “psychology” for the study of overall human behavior. The word itself reflects the prejudice that the human being is basically a mind and not a body. Even St. Francis referred to his body as “poor brother ass,” and most of us do indeed feel that we just sort of ride around on our bodies like we would on a donkey or an ass.
This boundary line between the mind and the body is certainly a strange one, not at all present at birth. But as an individual begins to grow in years, and begins to draw up and fortify his self/not-self boundary, he looks upon the body with mixed emotions. Should he directly include it within the boundary of his self, or is it to be viewed as foreign territory? Where is he to draw the line? On the one hand, the body is the source of much pleasure throughout life, from the ecstasies of erotic love to the subtleties of fine foods and mellowness of sunsets taken in by the body’s senses. But on the other hand, the body houses the specter of crippling pain, debilitating diseases, and the tortures of cancer. For a child, the body is the only source of pleasure, and yet it is the first source of pain and conflict with the parents. And on top of that, the body seems to be manufacturing waste products that, for reasons totally mystifying to the child, are a constant source of alarm and anxiety for the parents. Bed-wetting, bowel movements, nose-blowing—what an incredible fuss! And it’s all tied up with this—the body. Where to draw the line is going to be tough.
But by the time the individual has matured, he has generally kissed poor brother ass good-bye. As the self/not-self boundary is finalized, brother ass is definitely on the other side of the fence. The body becomes foreign territory, almost (but never quite) as foreign as the external world itself. The boundary is drawn between the mind and the body, and the person identifies squarely with the former. He even comes to feel that he lives in his head, as if he were a miniature person in his skull, giving directions and commands to his body, which may or may not obey.
In short, what the individual feels to be his self-identity does not directly encompass the organism-as-a-whole, but only a facet of that organism, namely, his ego. That is to say, he identifies with a more or less accurate mental self-image, along with the intellectual and emotional processes associated with that self-image. Since he won’t concretely identify with the total organism, the most he will allow is a picture or image of the total organism. Thus he feels he is an “ego,” and that his body just dangles along under him. So we see here another major type of boundary line, one which establishes the person’s identity as being primarily with the ego, the self-image.
As we can see, this self/not-self boundary line can be quite a flexible item. So it won’t surprise us to find that even within the ego or mind—I am using these terms very loosely for the moment—yet another type of boundary line can be erected. For various reasons, some of which we will discuss later, the individual can even refuse to admit that some of the facets of her own psyche are hers. In psychological jargon, she alienates them, or represses them, or splits them off, or projects them. The point is that she narrows her self/not-self boundary to only certain parts of her egoic tendencies. This narrowed self-image we will be calling the persona, and its meaning will become more obvious as we proceed. But as the individual identifies with only facets of her psyche (the persona), the rest of her psyche is then actually felt to be “not-self,” foreign territory, alien, scary. She re-maps her soul so as to deny and try to exclude from consciousness the unwanted aspects of herself (these unwanted aspects we call “shadow”). To a greater or lesser extent, the person becomes “out of her mind.” This, quite obviously, is another major and general type of boundary line.
At this point we are not trying to decide which of these types of self-maps is “right,” “correct,” or “true.” We are simply noting, in an impartial fashion, that there are indeed several major types of the self/not-self boundary line. And since we are approaching this topic in a non-judgmental way, we can at least mention one other type of boundary line that is today receiving much attention, namely, the boundary associated with so-called transpersonal phenomena.
“Transpersonal” means that some sort of process is occurring in the individual that, in a sense, goes beyond the individual. The simplest instance of this is extrasensory perception, or ESP. Parapsychologists recognize several forms of ESP: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition. We might also include out-of-body experiences, experiences of a transpersonal self or witness, peak experiences, and so on. What all of these events have in common is an expansion of the self/not-self boundary beyond the skin-boundary of the organism. Although the transpersonal experiences are somewhat similar to unity consciousness, the two should not be confused. In unity consciousness the person’s identity is with the All, with absolutely everything. In transpersonal experiences, the person’s identity doesn’t quite expand to the Whole, but it does expand or at least extend beyond the skin-boundary of the organism. He’s not identified with the All, but neither is his identity confined solely to the organism. Whatever one may think of transpersonal experiences (we will discuss many of them in detail later in this book), the evidence that at least some forms of them do exist is overwhelming. Thus, we can safely conclude that these phenomena represent yet another class of self-boundary lines.
The point of this discussion of self/not-self boundaries is that there are not just one but many levels of identity available to an individual. These levels of identity are not theoretical postulates but observable realities—you can verify them in and for yourself. As regards these different levels, it’s almost as if that familiar yet ultimately mysterious phenomenon we call consciousness were a spectrum, a rainbow-like affair composed of numerous bands or levels of self-identity. Notice that we have briefly outlined five classes or levels of identity. There are certainly variations on these five major levels, and the levels themselves can be extensively subdivided, but these five levels appear to be basic aspects of human consciousness.
Let us take these major levels of identity and arrange them in some sort of order. This spectrum-like arrangement is represented in figure 1, which shows the self/not-self boundary line and the major levels of identity we discussed. Each different level results from the different “places” people can and do draw this boundary. Notice that the boundary line starts to break up toward the bottom of the spectrum (fig. 1), in the area we are calling transpersonal, and that it disappears entirely at the level of unity consciousness, because at that ultimate level self and not-self become “one harmonious whole.”
It’s obvious that each successive level of the spectrum represents a type of narrowing or restricting of what the individual feels to be his “self,” his true identity, his answer to the question, “Who are you?” At the base of the spectrum, the person feels that he is one with the universe, that his real self is not just his organism but all of creation. At the next level of the spectrum (or “moving up” the spectrum), the individual feels that he is not one with the All but rather one with just his total organism. His sense of identity has shifted and narrowed from the universe as a whole to a facet of the universe, namely, his own organism. At the next level, his self-identity is narrowed once again, for now he identifies mainly with his mind or ego, which is only a facet of his total organism. And on the final level of the spectrum, he can even narrow his identity to facets of his mind, alienating and repressing the shadow or unwanted aspects of his psyche. He identifies with only a part of his psyche, a part we are calling the persona.
FIGURE 1. The Spectrum of Consciousness
Thus, from the universe to a facet of the universe called “the organism”; from the organism to a facet of the organism called “the ego”; from the ego to a facet of the ego called “the persona”—such are some of the major bands of the spectrum of consciousness. With each successive level of the spectrum, there are more and more aspects of the universe which appear to be external to the person’s “self.” Thus, at the level of the total organism, the environment appears outside the self-boundary, foreign, external, not-self. But on the level of the persona, the individual’s environment and his body and aspects of his own psyche appear external, foreign, not-self.
The different levels of the spectrum represent differences not only in self-identity, important as that is, but also in those characteristics which are directly or indirectly bound up with self-identity. Think, for example, of the common problem of “self-conflict.” Obviously, since there are different levels of self, there are different levels of self-conflict as well. The reason is that at each level of the spectrum, the boundary line of a person’s self is drawn up in a different fashion. But a boundary line, as any military expert will tell you, is also a potential battle line, for a boundary line marks off the territory of two opposed and potentially warring camps. Thus, for example, a person on the level of the total organism will find the potential enemy is her environment—for it appears foreign, external, and therefore threatening to her life and well-being. But a person on the ego level finds that not only her environment but also her own body are foreign territory, the same foreign territory, and thus the nature of her conflicts and upsets is dramatically different. She has shifted the boundary line of her self, and therefore shifted the battle line of her conflicts and personal wars. And in this case, her body has gone over to the enemy.
This battle line can become acutely prominent on the persona level, for here the individual has drawn the boundary line between facets of her own psyche, and thus the battle line is now between the individual as persona versus her environment and her body and aspects of her own mind.
The point is that as an individual draws up the boundaries of her soul, she establishes at the same time the battles of her soul. The boundaries of an individual’s identity mark off what aspects are to be considered “not-self.” So at each level of the spectrum, different aspects of the world appear to be not-self, alien, and foreign. Each level sees different processes of the universe as strangers to it. And since, as Freud once remarked, every stranger seems an enemy, every level is potentially engaged in different conflicts with various enemies. Every boundary line, remember, is also a battle line—and the enemy on each level is different. In psychological jargon, different “symptoms” originate from different levels.
The fact that different levels of the spectrum possess different characteristics, symptoms, and potentials, brings us to one of the most interesting points of this view. There is today an incredibly vast and growing interest in all sorts of schools and techniques dealing with various aspects of consciousness. People are flocking to psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, mysticism, Psychosynthesis, Zen, Transactional Analysis, Rolfing, Hinduism, Bioenergetics, psychoanalysis, yoga, and Gestalt. What these schools have in common is that, in one way or another, they are all trying to effect changes in a person’s consciousness. But there the similarity ends.
The individual sincerely interested in increasing his self-knowledge is faced with such a bewildering variety of psychological and religious systems that he hardly knows where to begin, whom to believe. Even if he carefully studies all the major schools of psychology and religion, he is apt to come out just as confused as when he went in, for these various schools, taken as a whole, definitely contradict one another. For example, in Zen Buddhism one is told to forget, or transcend, or see through one’s ego; but in psychoanalysis, one is helped to strengthen, fortify, and entrench one’s ego. Which is right? This is a very real problem, for the interested layperson as well as for the professional therapist. So many different and conflicting schools, all aimed at understanding the very same person. Or are they?
That is, are they all aimed at the same level of a person’s consciousness? Or is it rather that these different approaches are actually approaches to different levels of a person’s self? Could it be that these different approaches, far from being conflicting or contradictory, actually reflect the very real differences in the various levels of the spectrum of consciousness? And could it be that these different approaches are all more or less correct when working with their own major level?
If this is true, it allows us to introduce a great deal of order and coherence into this otherwise maddeningly complex field. It would become apparent that all these different schools of psychology and religion do not so much represent contradictory approaches to individuals and their problems, but rather complementary approaches to different levels of the individual. With this understanding, the vast field of psychology and religion breaks down into five or six manageable groups, and it becomes obvious that each of these groups is aiming predominantly at one of the major bands of the spectrum.
Thus, to give just a few very brief and general examples, the aim of psychoanalysis and most forms of conventional psychotherapy is to heal the radical split between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche so that a person is put in touch with “all of his mind.” These therapies aim at reuniting the persona and shadow so as to create a strong and healthy ego, which is to say, an accurate and acceptable self-image. In other words, they are all oriented toward the ego level. They seek to help an individual living as persona to re-map the self as ego.
Beyond this, however, the aim of most so-called humanistic therapies is to heal the split between the ego itself and the body, to reunite the psyche and soma so as to reveal the total organism. This is why humanistic psychology—called the Third Force (the other two major forces in psychology being psychoanalysis and behaviorism)—is also referred to as the human potential movement. In extending the person’s identity from just the mind or ego to the entire organism-as-a-whole, the vast potentials of the total organism are liberated and put at the individual’s disposal.
Going deeper still, we find the aim of such disciplines as Zen Buddhism or Vedanta Hinduism is to heal the split between the total organism and the environment to reveal an identity, a supreme identity, with the entire universe. They are aiming, in other words, for the level of unity consciousness. But let us not forget that between the level of unity consciousness and the level of the total organism there are the transpersonal bands of the spectrum. The therapies addressing this level are deeply concerned with those processes in the person which are actually “supra-individual,” or “collective,” or “transpersonal.” Some of them even refer to a “transpersonal self,” and while this transpersonal self is not identical with the All (that would be unity consciousness), it nevertheless transcends the boundaries of the individual organism. Among the therapies aiming at this level are Psychosynthesis, Jungian analysis, various preliminary yoga practices, Transcendental Meditation techniques, and so on.
All of this is of course a very simplified version of things, but it does point out the general fashion in which most of the major schools of psychology, psychotherapy, and religion are simply addressing the different major levels of the spectrum. Some of these correspondences are shown in figure 2, where the major schools of “therapy” are listed beside the level of the spectrum toward which they fundamentally aim. I should mention that because, like any spectrum, these levels shade into one another quite a bit, no absolutely distinct and separate classification of the levels or the therapies addressing those levels is possible. Further, when I “classify” a therapy on the basis of the level of the spectrum it addresses, that means the deepest level which that therapy recognizes, either explicitly or implicitly. Generally speaking, you will find that a therapy of any given level will recognize and accept the potential existence of all of the levels above its own, but deny the existence of all those beneath it.
As a person (layperson or therapist) gains familiarity with the spectrum—its various levels with their different potentials and different problems—she will be better able to orient herself (or her client) in the journey for self-understanding and self-growth. She may be able to recognize more readily from which levels the present problems or conflicts stem, and thus apply to any given conflict the appropriate “therapeutic” process for that level. She may also come to recognize which potentials and levels she wishes to contact, as well as the procedures best suited to facilitate this growth.
Growth fundamentally means an enlarging and expanding of one’s horizons, a growth of one’s boundaries, outwardly in perspective and inwardly in depth. But that is precisely the definition of descending the spectrum. (Or “ascending” it, depending upon which angle you prefer. I will in this book use “descending” simply because it better matches fig. 1.) When a person descends a level of the spectrum he has in effect remapped his soul to enlarge its territory. Growth is reapportionment; rezoning; re-mapping; an acknowledgement, and then enrichment, of ever deeper and more encompassing levels of one’s own self.
In the next three chapters we will be exploring some of the facets of the ultimate mystery called unity consciousness, feeling our way into it, edging about it; sneaking up on it, only to have it sneak up on us from behind. Besides giving us some sort of feel for unity consciousness, this exploration will equip us with many of the necessary tools to understand the whole field of what is today called “transpersonal psychology,” “noetics,” or “consciousness research.” We will explore the world as it appears without limits and boundaries; the present moment as it appears without the boundaries of past and future; and awareness as it appears without the limits of inside and outside.
FIGURE 2. Therapies and Levels of the Spectrum
We will then devote a chapter to explaining the growth of all the other levels of the spectrum: the level of the total organism, the level of ego, and the level of persona. Then, with this basic understanding behind us, we will begin the descent of the spectrum of consciousness; an experiential exploration of the various levels and the major “therapies” used to contact them; ending up, where we began, with the level of unity consciousness. This is only appropriate, for—as we will see—this is the only level that in all truth we have never been without.
